The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  “You couldn’t buy a drink in the place. It was all free.” Capone wanted actors served in the house. “Tell an actor that—and well, you’re going to be seeing him a lot.”

  In Hollywood, the regulars in the all-male Irish crowd included Lyle, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney (though he didn’t drink), and Pat O’Brien; an ex–theater actor they called Bill Stage Boyd (to distinguish him from the Hopalong Cassidy actor whose name was also Bill Boyd); an actor named William Gargan, who usually played Irish cops, priests, and reporters; and Walter Catlett, a bespectacled character actor who made a specialty of playing meddlesome, bombastic little men. “We had Sundays off, so on Saturday nights we’d go to Bill Gargan’s house at the end of Fairfax across Hollywood Boulevard,” my father recalled. “You’d run into his garage and he had a bar in there. The Irish crowd would all gather there. Sometimes there’d be fights. There was a midget known as Little Billy who’d get drunk and want to fight. So you’d set him up on a chair and go over to him, and he’d take a poke at you. One time Walter Catlett was leaning against the bar and he gave me his false teeth to hold so he wouldn’t get them broken by Little Billy. ‘Here, kid, hold these.’”

  Catlett lived with a beautiful former showgirl in an apartment nearby. On occasion Lyle and some of the Irish crowd would end up there after they left Gargan’s garage. Though Catlett worked steadily all his life, he was fearful, like a lot of actors, that no next job would materialize. So periodically he’d take all his money and stock up on groceries and booze, which he’d stash in hiding places around his apartment. “He called them his wolf chests; he was keeping the wolf from the door, you see,” my father said. Often, though, Catlett couldn’t find the booze he’d stashed, and once they had to resort to some he’d stored in coconuts into which he had drilled holes he then plugged up. “It was nasty stuff. It’d knock you cold,” said my father, who evidently drank it anyway.

  • • •

  IF YOU WERE A CONTRACT PLAYER in the thirties, you didn’t get out of town much. Your work schedule didn’t allow it, and location shooting—especially at any real distance from L.A.—was an unusual occurrence. Like a lot of actors in those days, my father used to quote the motto attributed to the penny-pinching producer Sam Goldwyn: “A rock’s a rock; a tree’s a tree; shoot it in Griffith Park.” Sure enough, Griffith Park—a swath of eucalyptus groves and scrub-covered hills in the heart of L.A.—came to stand in for all kinds of exotic locations.

  Once, while shooting a film called Mandalay in 1933, Lyle did get farther afield, to the Sacramento River Delta. Mandalay was a steamy pre-Coder directed by Michael Curtiz. Warners was banking on its being a successful women’s picture, and had decided to invest in a location shoot to re-create a tropical atmosphere. The movie starred Kay Francis as a fabulously dressed prostitute named Spot White who plies her trade in a Rangoon nightclub, Ricardo Cortez as the gambler boyfriend she ends up killing, and Lyle as the doctor kicking a drinking habit with whom she goes off in the end, seeking a redemption for two. In Sacramento, my father recalled, “We lived on a boat called the Delta Queen. It was all mahogany, and very beautiful. There were Chinese people living all along the river there at that time. The film crew didn’t have to do much to make it look like a port in the Orient. The actors all slept on the Delta Queen and ate there. But at night the crew would go off and eat in the Chinese places and gamble, and the Chinese would take them for everything they had.”

  But mostly, when Lyle went out of town, it was to the Hearst Ranch at San Simeon. Visits to the Shangri-La overlooking the Pacific were kind of a standard perk for Hollywood stars in those days. The actress Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s longtime mistress, was one of the most sociable of stars, and the newspaper magnate himself was one of those fundamentally shy people who love to be around extroverts, especially performers. “Together,” writes Hearst’s biographer David Nasaw, “he and Marion were assembling a new California aristocracy of the amusing, witty, beautiful and accomplished that included Marion’s old friends from the Follies and her new friends from MGM, prominent studio executives, established and on-the-make stars and starlets, reporters, publishing tycoons, politicians, bankers and writers.”

  My father recalled that the Hearst hospitality worked this way: “Marion’s secretary would call you and say Miss Davies and Mr. Hearst would like to have you as a guest at the ranch in a week’s time. A limousine would pick you up at your house and you’d usually go up on a train called the Midnight Lark. You’d have a compartment, a sleeping car, and then a limo would pick you up in San Luis Obispo and drive you to San Simeon.” The roads there were rough, dirt for part of the way, and often shrouded in fog. But when you got there, it was breathtaking: coastal plains tumbling down to the vast blue Pacific. “You went through three gates, and as you drove in, along the way, there were animals grazing: llamas, buffalo, and deer. Hearst had the largest private zoo in the world at that time, and some of the animals roamed free, though there were others—like a panther—that were enclosed, of course. There were several guesthouses they called cottages, but really they were two- and three-story Mediterranean-style houses, filled with antiques. I stayed in one called the Del Monte. Only the real VIPs, those very close to Hearst himself, slept in the castle. Outside of the castle, and the guesthouses, you’d always see these big wooden packing cases. He was constantly acquiring new bric-a-brac from Europe.

  “The wonderful thing about being a guest there was that you could wander around all day on your own”—swim in a mosaic-lined pool overlooked by slender marble statues, go for a long, rambling horseback ride, or maybe even an overnight camping trip led by one of the in-house wranglers, play billiards, read in the library, visit the zoo. Lyle, a foodie avant la lettre, loved the kitchen—a vast place with copper pots and pans hanging everywhere and walk-in refrigerators. “The only time you were expected was at dinner, which was served at eight. Men never wore dinner jackets, because Hearst didn’t. But Marion would send out word to the women that she was going to dress formally or casually. And all the other women would dress accordingly. You’d sit at his long refectory-style table that would seat maybe fifty people. It was like something out of a medieval banquet, except one thing that I always remember is that there were bottles of ketchup set out. It was so formal and old-world, but Hearst liked his ketchup.”

  At Hearst Castle. Lyle is seated on the ground next to William Randolph Hearst. Joan Blondell is in slacks, Mary Astor is in the middle of the back row, and Marion Davies wears the hat.

  Some of the Hollywood visitors found conversation with their host to be heavy-sledding. Compared with the warm and vivacious Davies, Hearst was stiff, reserved, and imposing, with, as Nasaw notes, “a life-long habit of staring unblinkingly at his interlocutor.” But Lyle, not being of judgmental temperament or psychological bent of mind, was prepared to like him without puzzling over him. Hearst was certainly hospitable, and that was enough to earn him an unexamined regard from Lyle. On a couple of occasions, Hearst recruited Lyle to play doubles tennis. Lyle’s tennis game had nothing to recommend it, but he could hardly say no. The first time, Lyle was on Hearst’s team. “The old man was a big guy, not really fat but big, with long arms. Still, he was pretty agile. Of course we won.” Remembering Lyle’s skills no doubt, Hearst placed him on the opposing team the next time they played. Left alone with the tycoon a few times during the cocktail hour, Lyle gamely tried to get a conversation going. He knew nothing about decorating or architecture, but he did love newspapers, after all. “Gee, Mr. Hearst, my people in Omaha sure were happy to know that you had bought the Omaha Bee.” Lyle rattled on happily a bit about the columnists and cartoonists in the Bee. Hearst nodded once, gravely, then walked away without saying anything. “Hey Talbot, you put your foot in it,” said an actor acquaintance of Lyle’s who was standing nearby. “That Omaha paper’s a money loser; the old man’s trying to unload it.” Lyle was touched by Hearst’s fondness for ani
mals and did sometimes find common ground there. “Before dinner, Hearst would go out and feed this one deer he’d sort of tamed. He loved dogs and he had these long-haired dachshunds—I’d never seen them before, but gee, were they cute! Anyway, the old man was crazy about them, and he’d let them sit beside him at the dinner table.”

  Of course, Lyle liked his hostess, Marion Davies, better. She had a winsome personality, blond curls, and a blue-eyed, china-doll prettiness. “She was really kind of a simple, little Irish girl from Brooklyn, very down-to-earth, and such a dear lady” and seemed to Lyle to “respect and admire Hearst,” whom she had met when she was a teenage chorus girl and he a very rich and long-married stage-door Johnny in his late fifties. He never did get a divorce, but his relationship with Marion would last till his death. He was crazy about her; she was devoted to him, even bailing out his business with a no-questions-asked gift of a million dollars at one point. Alas, for Davies, the image many people have of her is that of the talentless—not to mention shrill and unpleasant—Susan Alexander, the character that was supposedly based on her in Citizen Kane. Alexander cannot sing, but Orson Welles as the arrogant newspaper tycoon pokes and prods his mistress into becoming a singer anyway.

  Marion Davies, on the other hand, was talented, particularly as a comedienne. She was the sort of actress who doesn’t mind making herself look goofy and even unattractive on screen, and she was an excellent mimic of her fellow actors—a flair that is put to particularly good use in the charming silent comedies The Patsy and Show People, both directed by King Vidor. The film historian Jeanine Basinger makes a persuasive case that Hearst did his mistress a disservice out of love for her and a need to see her treated in the movies with the dignity that their own unconventional relationship sometimes denied her in society. He was always getting Davies to do costume dramas and sentimental romances, when her real talent was for comedy. Once, Vidor and his screenwriter drove up to San Simeon to tell Hearst and Marion about a new script that called upon her to do “comic imitations and get hit with a custard pie in the face. Marion said, ‘I like it,’ but Hearst was silent. He finally gave consent, but only if Marion did not get hit with the custard pie.” The truth was that Davies herself was also self-deprecating about her acting skills, almost as though she bought the Susan Alexander version, hurt as she must have been by it. In any case, at San Simeon among her friends, her mimicry and her self-mockery were all given free rein.

  As if staying at San Simeon weren’t one big party enough, Hearst and Davies were always whipping up actual parties—picnics on the beach and costume parties, frequently with a western theme. If a guest happened to have a birthday while at San Simeon, Davies would summon musicians and throw a party. Like a mother trying to ensure her children’s fondness for one another, she would get presents for the other guests to give.

  There was one patch of darkness in the Hearst–Davies idyll, and that was Marion’s drinking. But at the time, Lyle, like many of her guests, was not inclined to see it as a shadow. Marion drank too much and that was naughty and had to be concealed from W.R., but the concealing was fun! There was a lot of giggling involved. They were like kids sneaking candy at a slumber party under the nose of the paterfamilias. In time, Lyle’s own drinking would become a disaster, but in the 1930s, and especially amid the splendor of San Simeon, he was far from seeing it that way. Still, even he was aware that Hearst worried about Marion and liquor. “You could see that he tried, somewhat, to limit everybody’s drinking.” That was how he tried to limit Marion’s. “Before dinner,” my father recalled, “cocktails were set out: two big silver decanters, one was a gin drink and the other was whiskey sours and little glasses. You had one drink and then they were cleared away. In the silent era they’d had a bar. It was Prohibition, but they had every kind of booze you could think of. Lew Cody, a fabulous silent-era actor and big drinker, and his friends got into a fight one night and the old man heard about it and took the bar out.

  “At night there was always a movie, usually one we hadn’t seen yet because it was just out, and you’d watch it in a beautiful little theater. But before that Marion always managed to get somebody to sneak in booze for her in a thick water glass, an old-fashioned tumbler. She would gather her drinking friends—I happened to be one of them—and we’d assemble in a little nook behind some columns off the dining room. She had a butler who was her ally, and he would often be the one to bring in these tumblers that were supposed to be inconspicuous. Other times it’d be one of her guests. I remember one time Chaplin was there with the drinkers. He was married to Paulette Goddard at the time, and she was the only one of his wives who could tell him off. She called him on a house phone and you could hear her through the receiver from her quarters yelling, Get your ass over here! We would wind up, some of us, feeling no pain.”

  The longest visit Lyle ever made to the Hearst ranch was with the Countess di Frasso, the time she persuaded him to tell Warner Brothers off when the studio wanted him to come back earlier. It was Christmas, and it would have been especially disappointing to cut the visit short. “Hearst would never cut down a tree on his own property, though he had about twenty-five thousand acres. The tree came from Arrowhead, and it was huge, like the Rockefeller Center tree,” standing right at the entrance to the main hall and lavishly decorated.

  “Gosh,” said Lyle to the countess as they were dressing one night, “what do you give these guys for a Christmas present?” And she said, “Oh, nothing, darling. You’re not expected to.” But the guests all received presents—for Lyle, it was a Sulka silk tie.

  “When you worked with Marion you got presents, too. If you were on the crew, an actor, whatever. She’d hear that a cameraman’s wife was going to have a baby or one of the grips totaled his car, and she’d give the most lavish presents. She was a very generous person.” By the time Lyle worked with her, Davies had moved from MGM to Warner Brothers, and had moved her dressing room—really a fourteen-room villa—along with her, broken up and placed on ten flatbed trucks, to the lot in Burbank. When Lyle did a movie called Page Miss Glory, a light, mildly amusing Cinderella story with Davies, Dick Powell, and Mary Astor, Davies gave him a Patek Philippe watch. “Platinum with diamonds and rubies. I wouldn’t even wear it. I put it in a vault.”

  The thing was, there were times when Lyle would have been happy to put a lot of the fanciest trappings of his new life into a vault for a while. He was still a guy, would always be a guy, who loved getting the blue plate special at a decent diner, reading the newspaper on his own couch while he smoked a pipe, listening to the ball game on the radio while he folded his handkerchiefs and matched his socks. He could get a little of that cozy feeling from certain Hollywood establishments—the places where he went several times a week and ordered the same comfort foods from the same waiters and waitresses whose names he quickly learned and used. By the time I was growing up, he was the sort of person who read the name tags of waitresses and salesclerks and then called them by name throughout the transaction. Not constantly, but just enough. And he did it without sounding smarmy—something I’ve tried and failed at. The trick, I think, is doing it without air-quotey self-consciousness, and that’s the part I can’t get. He just figured that most of us like to be called by our own names—especially by a handsome actor—and it turns out he was right. He wouldn’t have put it this way, but it makes us feel seen.

  The Brown Derby restaurants were the main places like that, especially the original one, shaped like a big hat set down on Wilshire Boulevard with its neon sign on top entreating people to “EAT IN THE HAT.” Inside, it was rather plain-looking, with booths set flush against cream-colored walls, but from the time it first opened in 1926, the Derby was chockablock with picture people, who appreciated it in part because it was open till four a.m. for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and the kitchen would make you anything you wanted—sponge cake soaked with ketchup for Wallace Beery, a supposedly low-calorie grapefruit cake invented f
or the dieting Hedda Hopper. Lyle liked to order the corned beef hash; it was a specialty of the house and would become a specialty of our house. One of the owners of the Brown Derby was Wilson Mizner, the wag who had just switched from real estate swindling in Boca Raton to desultory screenwriting for Warner Brothers. Lyle often found Mizner holding court from his usual booth, in his own acerbic style and reedy voice. It was hard to keep a straight face around Mizner. To producers he’d say anything: “I’ve seen your picture,” he told one, “and the heroes aren’t on the screen. They’re in the audience.” But for moochers, and characters like himself, he was a soft touch—always willing to empty his pockets.

  Sometimes Lyle missed home—not the one he’d grown up in, but the home that was life on the road and nights on the stage. That was not an uncommon longing for people like Lyle who’d come from the theater, especially perhaps for those from the repertory companies that became so much like family for many of them. It was a relief to be paid a weekly salary and not have to worry about a company leaving you stranded somewhere. But for theater actors it could be hard to get used to the choppy discontinuity of moviemaking, performing scenes out of order and sometimes shooting more than one movie at once. At times, you might not even meet most of the actors who were in a film with you, and there was much less feeling of solidarity. “There was a class system—a caste system, you might call it—that existed in Hollywood in the silent days, before we even got there,” my father would recall later in an interview. “There was the star, and the featured player, and so on. We didn’t have that in the theater. If you were in the play, maybe there was a guy who had only two lines, but he wasn’t ever looked down upon. He could be your best friend, your pal. All actors, generally speaking, cooperated. It was an ensemble and you felt that. You were together all at once in the theater, for rehearsals, for performances. In a picture that wasn’t necessarily so. You might have scenes in a picture with someone you hardly knew. There was less of that ensemble feeling. The star—now, I’m exaggerating a little here, but still—might not speak to the featured player, the featured player might not speak to the bit player, and the bit player had nothing to do with the extras. Even among the extras, there was a hierarchy: there were the dress extras, the ones who wore the tuxedos and evening clothes, and maybe they didn’t speak to the next class, the cowboy types, or whatever they were.”