The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Partly, though, what Lyle and other stage-bred actors got nostalgic for was the adrenaline rush of live theater, when whatever went wrong had to be fixed on the fly, and their youth, when the little successes often mean so much more than bigger ones do later. When you’re just starting out as a performer, applause is a drug that works even at low doses; inevitably, you need more of it in order to produce the same charge. As Marion Davies recalled late in life, “My happiest days had been on the stage. I had had more fun onstage than in the movies. Not fun, exactly, but the exhilaration and excitement and the music and the glamour. Of all the things I did, that was what I liked most. That was when I was most insignificant. And that was why I liked it the best. I had no responsibility. I just held up the backdrops.”

  For Lyle, a visit from those old troupers, his father and stepmother, was often the best cure for incipient homesickness. In June 1933, when Lyle got his first vacation from the studio, he had chosen to spend it in Brainard and Omaha, with short side trips to Sioux City, Iowa, and Wayne, Nebraska, where he’d traveled with the Walter Savidge Amusement Co. and where, the local paper reported, he now “drove down a sunbaked Main Street in his slender, California type sports car.” In Brainard, he attended a Saturday-night dance and stayed with his grandmother, enjoying her cooking once again. But one of the Nebraska papers said he was “warm in his defense of the movie-city and resents the Midwestern conception of it as the modern city of sin. It’s a place for hard workers, he affirms.” Lyle must have felt betwixt and between, tied irrevocably to Nebraska but also alienated by the anti-cinema sentiments he was likely hearing. This was, after all, just a few months before the Legion of Decency launched its boycott of racy Hollywood films. Lyle did not go back to Nebraska for many years. Instead, he brought his grandmother, and even more often, Ed and Anna, out to Hollywood.

  The Hendersons were now more or less retired from the stage and living in Omaha, in the apartment building they had bought, renting mostly to fellow performers. They came to California several times during the 1930s. Ed got a big kick out of seeing Lyle in Hollywood, and Lyle got a big kick out of his indefatigably cheerful, puckish dad. To Anna, they always seemed like overgrown boys when they were together, teasing and trying to outdo each other with ridiculous puns. Ed was a down-to-earth, long-married midwesterner, but he was also a showman who appreciated Hollywood’s quirks and excesses. He and Anna knit the two halves of Lyle’s life together for him. When Lyle was filming the movie Mandalay, he took his father and Anna up to the Sacramento River with him and got them bit parts in the movie. Many years later, when he was an elderly man and a widower living in an old folks’ home in Omaha, Ed was interviewed by a local reporter. “They once gave me a dressing room between Lyle’s and Kay Francis’s,” he said wistfully. “It was just as luxurious as theirs. You’d have thought I was Jack Warner himself. I’ve had a wonderful life.”

  But at a younger age, Ed sounded less reverent, noting wryly, as parents of newly grown-up children often do, how very much more our children apparently know than we do. “We mixed very smoothly with the film folks,” Ed told an Omaha paper when he returned from one of the trips he made to Hollywood in the 1930s. “I guess it was because of the lesson of ‘don’ts’ that our boy gave us when we first arrived. Now folks, don’t stare at the stars, don’t ask for autographs, don’t act thrilled at the sight of them, don’t tamper with movie equipment, don’t bother anyone on the lot.” Ed disregarded some of the don’ts. Once, when he was watching Dick Powell and Lyle in a fight scene during the filming of College Coach, he started shouting, “My gosh, that’s a dandy. Let her go! Wheeh!” William Wellman, who was directing the picture, turned to him in consternation: “Don’t you know you’ve just ruined thirty feet of film?”

  But irrepressible Ed and his sweet-natured wife charmed many of the people they met in Hollywood. After Pickford invited them to tea, at the Countess di Frasso’s request, she was so taken with them she had them back for dinner. On a train trip to New York that Ed and Lyle made together, they were surprised, when the train stopped in Chicago, to see a swarm of reporters and photographers on the station platform. “I had no idea they knew I was on the train,” Lyle told his father. But when he stepped out to greet them, Lyle realized it wasn’t him they were looking for. The press boys had been tipped off that Greta Garbo was on the train. Still, since they had Talbot there and no Garbo in sight, they started interviewing him. Lyle was just reaching the punch line of what he thought was a pretty delightful story when somebody shouted, “There she goes!” and the reporters dashed off in a mob, leaving Lyle “as alone as if I’d been on a desert island,” he told his dad. He was mortified at first. Then one of Garbo’s assistants took him aside and told him how grateful the privacy-craving star was: Lyle had created enough of a diversion that she had successfully eluded the press pack. Could he do it again at the next stop? Lyle was a little dubious, but Ed reminded him that he would be coming to the aid of a lady. Why, Ed would be happy to help out, too; he had a few jokes up his sleeve, after all. Father and son rose to the occasion, keeping the reporters at bay twice more. Before they got off the train in New York, Garbo summoned them to her compartment to thank them.

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1933, Lyle got so lonesome for the stage that he persuaded Warner Brothers to let him act in a play at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, even though it meant reporting to the theater every night after a long day on the set. The play was One Sunday Afternoon, a nostalgic Gay Nineties piece with a small-town setting, and in it, Lyle got to dress in natty period clothing—striped vests and straw boaters—and act opposite pretty, blond Lola Lane. He got excellent reviews. The Los Angeles Examiner said his performance as Biff Grimes, “the village bully, with a fist of iron and a heart of wax,” was “delightful,” and won him “vociferous applause after his every scene.” The Los Angeles Times declared him “splendid” and praised the play for its “haunting overtones of yesterday’s life, simple natural incidents that might be anybody’s experience” and that were “not disturbed by vulgarity or suggestiveness.”

  For an L.A. Times article in late July headlined “Lyle Talbot Simply Had to Do Stage Role at Any Cost,” Lyle explained why. Actors in the movies faced “so many obstacles when it comes to sustaining a certain mood or feeling throughout,” he told the reporter. “One works oneself into a marvelous emotional fervor and then the order comes to stop work. You know, it’s almost impossible to recapture the thing, that is, the same degree of intensity. And then there’s the cutting room! The ogre of the actor. One’s best moments are usually cut out.”

  Even when it wasn’t practical for them to be acting in plays, Lyle and some of his Hollywood friends made a point of going to the theater often. It was their way of showing they still felt loyal to the stage, while getting a look at plays that might turn up as screenplays, checking out new talent in town, and cheering on movie colleagues who found the time and energy to do stage work. On occasion, a particular play might acquire a following, and groups of actors would go back to see it night after night. One of the odder such cases was that of a play called The Drunkard, which opened July 6, 1933, at the Theatre Mart near Vermont Avenue. The Drunkard was a temperance melodrama that had first been performed in 1844 in Boston, and that would become a mainstay of the blood-and-thunder circuit in the nineteenth century. One of around a hundred plays about the evils of drink that audiences flocked to in the nineteenth century, it was probably the most popular until it was eclipsed, in the 1860s, by Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. P. T. Barnum featured it at his American Museum in New York in the 1850s. The Drunkard resurrected stock characters such as the beautiful orphaned girl, the deep-dyed villain who lusts after her, the well-bred, weak-willed man she marries, who succumbs to demon rum, and their saintly, sickly little daughter. It was the kind of play in which characters speak in loudly whispered asides to the audience, and the eponymous drunkard addresses the bottle this w
ay: “You! Rum! Eternal curses on you! Had it not been for your infernal poison shop in our village, I had been still a man—the foul den where you plunder the pockets of your fellow, where you deal forth death in tumblers, and from whence goes forth the blast of ruin over the land to mildew the bright hope of youth, to fill the widow’s heart with agony, to curse the orphan, to steal the glorious mind of man, to cast them from their high state of honest pride and make them—such as I.”

  In 1933, a couple of arty types from Carmel, Preston Shobe and Galt Bell, bought a theater in L.A. and got inspired to open it with a revival of The Drunkard. Given that Prohibition had been repealed just three months earlier, they figured it’d be funny—“campy” would have been the word except people didn’t say “campy” in the 1930s—to stage one of the old chestnuts of the temperance movement. Where Barnum had presented the play in utter earnestness, in a venue he called “The Moral Lecture Room,” Shobe and Bell would re-create the atmosphere of a music hall with tables for the patrons to sit around and beer for them to drink. They did figure, though, on a short run for this novelty. They had high hopes for staging the classics and a new Russian version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rewritten as an anticapitalist parable.

  But to their surprise, The Drunkard became an instant and persistent hit. It was still running and filling the house a year later. It would still be running ten years later. Indeed, The Drunkard would not close until October 1959. “As the years passed,” a retrospective item in the Los Angeles Times noted, “actors who had begun as children outgrew their roles and had to retire. By 1940, there had been 16 weddings among the cast members.” An actor named Neely Edwards, who was seventy-six when the show closed and had been acting in it since Christmas Eve, 1933, said, “I was getting kind of tired anyhow. I can stay home now and relax for a while. Something usually comes along.”

  In the 1930s, The Drunkard was especially popular among picture actors, including Lyle. A squib in the L.A. Times about the movie crowd that had been filling the tables at the Theatre Mart noted that “this week among the personages who added gayety were Lyle Talbot who was awarded a gold star for having seen the piece five times.” W. C. Fields was so taken with The Drunkard that he incorporated scenes from it and actors from the L.A. production into his 1934 movie about a moth-eaten acting troupe, The Old Fashioned Way. For Hollywood audiences, it must have felt liberating to smirk at this fusty tribute to temperance at the very moment when the temperance movement’s greatest accomplishment had been rolled back and looked, already, quite ridiculous.

  But if that knowingness was part of the enjoyment, nostalgia was probably another part. For someone like my father, who had acted in melodramas when he first started out, there were sweetly familiar sensations here: the histrionics and the flowery language onstage, the chummy hissing at the villains and cheering for the heroes from the audience, the elaborately if amateurishly painted scenery. And he wasn’t the only one to notice its yesteryearian charms. “The atmosphere of the auditorium, except for the absence of kerosene lamps, is much as it might have been ninety years ago,” Philip K. Scheuer wrote in the L.A. Times. “A collection of posters, illustrating Barnum exhibits of the period, and carefully reproduced from etchings (and in the single instance of Jenny Lind, from an existing original); ushers in the formal dress of provincial gentlemen; a curtain adorned with cupids and clouds, and falling, when it falls, with a weighted thud; scenery, actors and play—asides and all, conspire to preserve the great moral force of Mr. Barnum’s lesson, exactly as it was driven home to the stumbling sinners of his own wicked era.”

  And maybe one of the reasons Lyle saw The Drunkard at least five times was that somewhere in that creaky melodrama of how drink could bring a man low there was a message for him. If he heard it then, it was still very faint. It would be years before he realized that he himself was in danger of becoming a character in his own cautionary tale—the man with looks, talent, charm, and a real yearning for a happy home, who came very close to squandering it all.

  Chapter 8

  UNIONIZING ACTORS, UNITING FANS

  It wasn’t the money that propelled Lyle into uncharacteristic rebellion. He was earning $300 a week at Warner Brothers in the early 1930s, and that felt like plenty. He never had an interest in making money for the sake of making money. When he had cash, he liked to spend it—there were always lovely things in the world to buy or experience—but he never yearned for piles of it. And it wasn’t the job security, either, because he didn’t exactly expect that. For many years after he came to Hollywood, Lyle felt, moving lightly beneath the surface of his working life, a vertiginous sense of impermanence. On Fridays the paymaster at the studio would come around with an accordion folder and hand employees their checks, and Lyle would hurry down to the Bank of America on Highland and Hollywood to cash it, in the grip of a suspicion that the check might not be good by Monday. Some of this feeling was symptomatic of the Depression; some was the superstitiousness of actors. Some came from the sense that talking pictures were still a novelty, a little too gimmicky to last; some from the atmosphere of L.A. itself. Sure, Lyle and his actor friends always told each other, “Don’t buy anything you can’t put on the Santa Fe Chief,” but non-actors said it, too. Maybe it was the whimsy of the architecture, or the region’s vulnerability to earthquakes, or the too-good-to-be-true climate, but as the L.A. newspaperman Matt Weinstock put it, “Something about the city seemed psychologically unsound, even impossible.” People who moved there “liked the place well enough, but in the ephemeral sense that they liked a circus or a Fourth of July fireworks display. Nothing about it gave any confidence that it was here to stay.” The Depression upended that attitude, Weinstock wrote from the vantage point of the late 1940s. Regular people couldn’t pull up stakes as easily, and “the economic pressure taught them a great lesson: a person couldn’t have his malnutrition in a nicer place than Los Angeles.” For actors like Lyle, who were not experiencing economic pressure, it was more a matter of time’s passage reassuring them: by the end of the 1930s, they could feel confident that the picture industry was not going to evaporate in the next economic drought.

  What launched Lyle into risky and pioneering labor activism were the hours. They were grueling. When he came to Hollywood, there were no rules about how long an actor could work at a stretch or how much time he was allowed between shoots, and the regimen was exhausting. More than that, it signaled an attitude on the part of the studios that Lyle and many others objected to, a sense that actors were disposable, fungible material. In 1933, Lyle became a founder of the Screen Actors Guild, which would grow into one of the most successful and democratic unions in America. He was no firebrand, not even a Popular Front sympathizer. But he had a strong sense of camaraderie with his fellow actors and a fresh memory of a different way of doing things. In the theater, he was used to getting to work in time to dress and make up for the curtain at eight, and he’d usually be done by eleven. “You did the play and that was it,” he told David Prindle, a political scientist researching the Guild in the 1980s. “In Hollywood, hours meant nothing. It was a carryover from the silent era when hours had meant nothing and there were no unions at all to regulate anything in Hollywood.” (Los Angeles was the least organized big city in America as late as the 1940s.) “They just thought that was the norm. Our objection was we would work fourteen-, fifteen-hour days and then be called back the next morning. Saturday night they liked to work till midnight because you had Sunday off. The Catholic actors, Pat O’Brien and Bill Gargan and Spencer Tracy, would joke that they’d barely get home in time to make it to Mass.” The actress Fay Wray remembered working for twenty-two hours straight on King Kong. Claire Trevor recalled that with the hours the studios demanded, “you’d be half-awake during an important scene and you’d worry that the stress would take its toll on your career.”

  Some directors were worse than others when it came to keeping actors on the set: Michael Curtiz, for instance. “We
used to say,” my father recalled, “that Mike must have hated his wife, because he never wanted to go home.” (Or maybe he didn’t want to go home because he was happily obtaining sexual favors from bit players, a pursuit for which he was so well known that it inspired a prank. During the filming of Casablanca, Peter Lorre supposedly hid a microphone in one of the couches where Curtiz was known to bring his conquests; it broadcast his moans throughout the soundstage.)

  The studios were turning out, collectively, on the order of four hundred movies a year in the 1930s, and the pace was frenetic. Those were the years when Lyle took to bicycling around the Warner lot in Burbank, with two or three scripts for movies he was currently working on in the front basket and two or three more for upcoming films in the rear basket. Lyle’s friend Glenda Farrell remembered a relentless work schedule: “When I went out there to do Little Caesar in 1930, the talkies were still new. Not many actors could talk, so they shoved the ones who came from Broadway into everything. It all went so fast. I used to ask myself, What set am I on today? What script am I supposed to be doing—this one or that one? Up at five every morning, start work at six, work till seven or eight at night. By the time you got home it was nine. Then you had to study your lines, have your dinner and bath, and go to bed. You worked till midnight on Saturday. All I ever really wanted was a day off. Our contracts gave us six weeks’ vacation each year, but they got around that by loaning us out to other studios.”