The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  It was also Sarah who brought me together with Riverhead, a very happy match-up from my point of view. Sarah McGrath’s editorial guidance was always spot-on, and delivered with grace, patience, and a natural confidence that gave me confidence. It’s great to be in the hands of a book editor whose instincts are so steadily right. Sarah Stein has been an anchor—ever knowledgeable and professional. I’m grateful for the lovely and intuitive book design by Amanda Dewey, the smart and thorough copyediting by Sharon Gonzalez and the extraordinary Anna Jardine, which saved me from many errors, and the creativity, enthusiasm, and know-how of Lydia Hirt, Elizabeth Hohenadel, Jynne Martin, and Kate Stark.

  Though this is a book that relies to a great extent on personal and family memories and memorabilia, I also benefited from research and interviews done by others. Sarah Yager helped at the end with some swift and efficient fact-checking. Carolyn Dvorak and Sharon Bruner were friendly and informative hosts in Brainard, Nebraska, and shared research they had done about Lyle, as well as their correspondence with him. Valentine Miller replied to my inquiries about Eve McClure Miller with vivid recollections. Jeff Bruner took the trouble to track down my siblings and me to give us a photo album that had belonged to Lyle’s parents, which he bought at a garage sale.

  Don Peri had the forethought to sit down with Lyle and record many hours of interviews during his last years, interviews that were nicely illumined by Don’s knowledge of film history, and which he kindly shared with me. David Prindle, who interviewed Lyle for his book about the Screen Actors Guild, The Politics of Glamour, courteously responded to my out-of-the-blue request, and dug out his old cassette tapes. Terry Sanders conducted a long interview with Lyle in 1989 for the Screen Actors Guild Foundation; Edward Guthmann, Bob Stephens, and Jan Wahl did memorable pieces on him for San Francisco newspapers and radio, which I was very happy to have. Articles or interviews by David Del Valle, Laura Wagner, and an unnamed interviewer for American Classic Screen magazine jogged my memory and led me to new insights. Martha Vestecka Miller found some tidbits for me in the archives of the Nebraska State Historical Society, where the staff was very helpful to me when I visited as well.

  A big thanks to the librarians and archivists at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Anybody who loves old films is deeply grateful to Turner Classic Movies and to the fine repertory houses that feed that love and introduce those films to new generations of cinephiles. The Castro in San Francisco, the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Film Forum in New York are especially wonderful theaters where I was able to watch, on a big screen, some of the movies discussed in this book.

  Writing is, of course, a solitary endeavor, so it’s particularly nice, when you emerge from the attic, or equivalent, to have friends for whom you are eager to change out of your ratty T-shirt who will go out to dinner with you and remind you of the pleasures of conversation. In Washington, D.C., where I live, I am lucky to have close women friends who are very fine writers and truly understand: Ann Hulbert, Liza Mundy, Hanna Rosin, and Mary Kay Zuravleff. Special thanks to Ann for a close reading of the manuscript, and for the sustenance of our morning walks; to Liza for always having my back; to Hanna for picking up the phone; and to Mary Kay for making the discipline of writing feel like fun. Maureen Corrigan came into my life toward the end of this project, and brought a welcome boost of wit and writerly/parental solidarity.

  Over the period of time I’ve been working on The Entertainer, Vered and Nathan Guttman and their sons, Shauli, Evyatar, and Uri, have enriched my family’s life immeasurably with their warmth, their knack for bringing people together, and their multifarious talents.

  Kelly Goode, my oldest friend, is a delightful tie to L.A. and to my childhood, and I am grateful to Kelly and her parents, Fritz and Sheila, for introducing me to cool places in my native city—starting with Beachwood Canyon, where they lived in a mid-century modern house they designed themselves.

  A project like this one—family history as history—doesn’t go so well if your family isn’t on board. I am grateful that mine was. My in-laws, Barbara and Richard Allen, have taken a generous interest in my work since we first met, almost twenty-five years ago. They are also my models of engaged and voracious readers. Nick Allen, Martha Kowalick, Emily Allen, Susie Allen, and Richard DiCarlo have built a solid tradition of annual family get-togethers and have been bighearted in opening their homes, from Palo Alto to Barcelona, to my husband, my kids, and me. My cousins Robert and Ojeni Sammis gave me a home base in L.A. during my research trips there, fed me and schlepped me around with their usual good humor and loyal family spirit. My uncle and aunt Robert and Ann Epple offered helpful memories and observations.

  Stephen, David, and Cindy Talbot share our father’s story, of course, and have been great about ceding to me this telling of it. Cindy and Steve undertook family photo searches, and Cindy went online to find a bottle of our mother’s old brand of perfume, so I could have a transporting whiff of it while I was writing the last chapter. Steve and David, both excellent journalists and natural storytellers, carefully read the manuscript, correcting and elaborating where it was needed; they are always so fun to compare notes with. My sisters-in-law Pippa Gordon and Camille Peri, who brought so much to my father’s last years, listened to me talk about the book, and asked good questions. David, Camille, Joe, and Nat have made San Francisco, and especially Chez Perbot, a nourishing second home for me and my family. My brother-in-law Dave Davis, whose grandfather was Clifford Clinton, the founder of Clifton’s cafeterias, has an old L.A. lineage as well; anecdotes he told about his eccentric grandfather are woven into my childhood memories, and one or two turn up in this book.

  And finally, I get to thank my own immediate family: Ike, Lucy, and Art, the heart and soul of my life. Ike’s refined and interesting aesthetic sensibilities—his fascination with old films, beautiful music, and the history they are embedded in—both overlaps with and transcends my own. His sunny good nature is a constant joy. Lucy’s high standards, independent vision, and creative productivity inspire me daily. Her quirky sense of humor makes me laugh just as often. I wish my parents could have known them, but at least I have the pleasure of seeing facets of Lyle and Paula in both of them.

  My husband, Arthur Allen, is my companion in everything that matters. I rely on his moral compass, his journalistic ethics, and his editorial judgment, and I love his company. There’s nobody I’d rather sit in a darkened theater with, sharing popcorn, or talk about a movie with afterward—I can think of no higher compliment.

  Washington, D.C.

  June 2012

  A Note on Sources

  Above all, this book depends on my father’s memories and stories, shared with my siblings and me, and the scrapbooks he kept and left to us, which contain photographs, theatrical programs and advertising, restaurant menus, hotel receipts and train schedules, reviews and many other clippings from newspapers and fan magazines, studio promotional material for individual movies, The Talbot Tabloids, publications of the Screen Actors Guild, contracts, letters, postcards, and telegrams, covering the period from 1919 till his death in 1996, with a few documents from his early childhood as well.

  In addition, my father did several long interviews, the tapes or transcripts of which were especially helpful. One was conducted by Terry Sanders in 1989 for a history project of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, another by Cliff Ashby in 1976 for Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection, another by David Prindle in 1985 for his book on the Screen Actors Guild, The Politics of Glamour, and yet another, a quite comprehensive interview, by Don Peri in San Francisco in 1993. I also drew on articles about or interviews with my father that appeared in the following publications in the 1980s and 1990s
: Scarlet Street, Films of the Golden Age, American Classic Screen, The TV Collector, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

  I benefited from time spent with files and films at the following archives: The Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; the Brainard, Nebraska, City Hall; the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana, Mount Pleasant, Iowa; the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles; the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California; the UCLA Film & Television Archive; and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

  I took advantage of the online availability of historical newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, Harper’s, The Nation, and Time.

  I also relied on a number of books of history, criticism, fiction, and memoir. The chapter-by-chapter account below is not a comprehensive bibliography, but a précis of books, scholarly articles, and documentaries that I found particularly informative or inspiring or both, and that a reader might consult to learn more about these subjects.

  Chapter 1. Learning to Cry

  For additional insights into small-town Nebraska, and Brainard specifically, at the turn of the century, I turned to the novels of Willa Cather, especially My Ántonia, as well as Thomas Capek’s The Cechs (Bohemians) in America (1920), and two books produced by the town of Brainard: Brainard, Nebraska: From Then to Now, the First 125 Years (2003) and Brainard’s First Hundred Years, 1878–1978 (1978).

  For context relating to the history of sexuality and childbearing in the United States, I drew on Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997); Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Child-Bearing in America, 1750–1850 (1986); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1988); and Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-in: A History of Childbirth in America (1979). The diary of Rolf Johnson was published as Happy as a Big Sunflower: Adventures in the West, 1876–1880 (2000), edited by Richard E. Jensen. For the story of Rosa Petrusky, see Joan M. Jensen, “The Death of Rosa: Sexuality in Rural America,” Agricultural History, vol. 67, no. 4 (Autumn 1993).

  For the history of typhoid fever, I turned to Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (1996). For more general cultural context that informed the chapter, I appreciated Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996); Tom Lutz, American Nervousness 1903: An Anecdotal History (1991); and Megan J. Elias, Food in the United States, 1890–1945 (2009).

  I was able to learn more about the life and milieu of Jack Hollywood from John W. Davis, Goodbye, Judge Lynch: The End of a Lawless Era in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin (2005).

  For more about the image and history of the traveling salesman, see Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (1995).

  Chapter 2. The Hypnotist’s Boy

  There are some great books about the history of magic, carnivals, and sideshows in the United States. I am indebted to Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (2001); Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001); Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (2005); and American Popular Entertainments: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment (1977), edited by Myron Matlaw.

  Among contemporary accounts, I recommend “Hey Rube” (1933), Bert Chipman’s memoir of his circus and carnival days; the entertaining and revealing Secrets of Stage Hypnotism (1901) by Professor Leonidas; and back issues of The Sphinx, where I found the tribute to Mock Sad Alli by Dr. E. G. Ervin (vol. 32, no. 1, March 1933).

  For more on immigrant stock characters in repertory theater, see “Ole Olson and Companions as Others: Swedish Dialect Characters and the Question of Scandinavian Acculturation,” Theatre History Studies, vol. 28 (2008); and Carl Wittke, “The Immigrant Theme on the American Stage,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (September 1952).

  Chapter 3. Footlights on the Prairie

  For more on the history of tent rep and theatrical stock companies, and the lives of actors who worked in them, see Jere Mickel, Footlights on the Prairie (1974), from which I borrowed this chapter’s title; W. L. Slout, Theatre in a Tent (1972); Solomon Smith, Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years (1868); Don B. Wilmeth, Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements: A Reference Guide (1982); and Philip C. Lewis, Trouping: How the Show Came to Town (1973).

  For more general histories of acting and of audiences, see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (1984); Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (2000); David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (1968); and Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (1996). The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson (first published in 1897; 1964 reprint edited by Alan S. Downer), still makes for lively reading.

  For more on flappers, sexual norms, social habits, and changing expectations of personality and beauty in the 1920s, see Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920’s (1977); An Emotional History of the United States (1998), edited by Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (especially “The Problem of Modern Married Love for Middle-Class Women,” by John G. Spurlock); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998); David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States 1920–1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression (2002); Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931); Kathleen Drowner and Patrick Huber, The 1920s (2004); Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (2006); Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (2007), edited by Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvis, and Kathryn H. Fuller; and Beatrice Burton’s novel The Flapper Wife (1925).

  Chapter 4. Hooray for Hollywood

  For eyewitness impressions of Los Angeles, see Early Hollywood: Images of America (2007), edited by Marc Wannaker and Robert W. Nudelman; Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; a terrific book); Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs (1941; WPA American Guide Series); Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939); Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (1975) and The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (1980); The Grove Book of Hollywood (1998), edited by Christopher Silvester; Marilynn Conners, What Chance Have I in Hollywood? (1924); The WPA Guide to California (1934; new ed. 1984) by the Federal Writers’ Project, with a new introduction by Gwendolyn Wright; The Movies in Our Midst: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America (1981), edited by Gerald Mast; Morrow Mayo, Los Angeles (1933); and Basil Woon, Incredible Land: A Jaunty Baedeker to Hollywood and the Great Southwest (1933).

  For the atmosphere and history of Warner Brothers, see Rudy Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros. 1935–1951 (1985); Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (1992); Neal Gabler’s fascinating An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1989); and Andrew Sarris, “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927–1949 (1998).

  For more on the backgrounds of Warner Brothers screenwriters mentioned in this chapter, see Alvah Johnston, The Legendary Mizners (1953); John Bright’s memoir Worms in the Winecup (2002), written with Patrick McGilligan; and the chapter on Bright in Sylvia Shorris and Marion Abbott Bundy, Talking Pictures: With the People Who Made Them (1994).

  For more on William Wellman, see the interview with him by Richard Schick
el in The Men Who Made the Movies (1975), and the documentaries Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick and The Men Who Made the Movies: William A. Wellman, both included in the DVD collection Forbidden Hollywood, volume 3, from TCM. For Lyle’s screen test story, I relied on his tellings (and retellings) of it, but am also quoting from a Q&A with him that appeared in American Classic Screen, volume 8, number 2 (April 1984).

  Chapter 5. Gangsters, Grifters, and Gold Diggers

  A great deal of interesting scholarship has been published in recent years about the politics and history of the Code and about pre-Code films. See, for instance, Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal (2001), edited by Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (especially Sam Stoloff, “Fatty Arbuckle and the Black Sox: The Paranoid Style of American Popular Culture, 1919–1922”); Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930–1939 (1996); Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (1999); Mark A. Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (1999); Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (1995); Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (1990); Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (1994); Mick LaSalle, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000); and Geoffrey O’Brien, “When Hollywood Dared,” The New York Review of Books, July 2, 2009.

  For more general treatments of 1930s film, and especially films from Warner Brothers, see Tino Balio, Grand Design; Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (1992); Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (1993); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975); Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (1981); Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s (1983); and Kristine Brunovska Karnick, “Community of Unruly Women: Female Comedy Teams in the Early Sound Era,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (1999).