by Ray Hagen
A number of projects were promptly proposed: Upper World, British Agent, Merry Wives of Reno, Twenty Million Sweethearts and the never-filmed Broadway and Back.
Any one of them would have been better than the one she was finally assigned: College Coach (1933), as Pat O’Brien’s neglected wife. Her only other role that year was with Maurice Chevalier in The Way to Love, a loan-out to Paramount; she was replacing Sylvia Sidney, who had fled to New York in the midst of production. Ann, as a mistreated knife thrower’s assistant, looked quite striking and elicited much sympathy.
In December 1933, Ann made a public plea seeking her father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a small child. He was finally located in 1934 living in Philadelphia, supposedly unaware she was a star. After some publicity regarding their reunion, nothing more was heard of him.
The year 1934 would be her busiest and most uneven, with nine Warner features hitting theaters. They couldn’t decide whether they wanted to bury her (Side Streets, Midnight Alibi, I Sell Anything, Gentlemen Are Born), give her standard parts (Massacre, Heat Lightning, Friends of Mr. Sweeney, Murder in the Clouds) or reward her (Housewife).
“A point often ignored in cinema history studies of [Bette] Davis,” wrote Jim Parish and Don Stanke years later of Housewife, “is that Ann Dvorak, who plays the film’s title role, was established as a strong dramatic actress long before Bette, and it was she who set the standard for battling with the studio for better roles. In her quiet performance as Nan Wilson Reynolds, it is Miss Dvorak and not the already mannered Bette, who woos the audience’s attention and affection. It is Dvorak who provides the proper artistic control for the feature…”
The big difference between the two actresses was maturity. Bette, in these early movies, was very rough around the gills; she became polished, but always tended to slip into campy tirades. Dvorak was a natural; she was intense, but always in control, even in highly emotional situations.
Case in point is their confrontational scene in Housewife. While Bette, clearly struggling to steal the moment, bounces around the room with flailing arms and mannerisms galore, much like a top ricocheting from one object to the other, Ann steadily stands her ground. She is quiet, thoughtful and direct, effectively underplaying—and in the process, the scene is hers. Bette, frustrated at the lack of attention she received, later referred to the picture as “a horror.” She was, after all, upstaged.
It is puzzling that Warners never took advantage of Ann’s musical abilities until 1935, what with her melodic, husky singing voice and her dancing skills. Her only full-blown musical at Warners was Sweet Music (1935), co-starring an obnoxious Rudy Vallee, who sings most of the score. Ann shares a duet with Vallee on “Fare Thee Well, Annabelle,” which is notable for her dynamic moment of waving a baton and exuberantly leading a girl chorus into a swinging dance.
The film also shows her rarely displayed quippy side; her constant verbal jabs directed toward Vallee are done with expert comic timing. Ann has a marvelously antagonistic attitude that, considering Rudy’s wooden acting, is totally justified: “There ought to be a law against guys like that breathing in the first place.” Sweet Music was one of her better studio assignments, and when she asks in the film, “What am I supposed to be—a singer, a dancer or an actress?,” the satisfying answer is that Warners allowed her to be all three in the same movie.
The same went for the punchy G-Men with James Cagney. Ann’s memorable part was small, but she gets to sing and dance to the playful “You Bother Me an Awful Lot,” act cute, and finally do some fantastic emoting that leads to her being shot to death in a phone booth.
Bright Lights (1935) earmarked just a few moments for her singing and dancing (“Toddlin’ Along with You”), but she was fine as the wife of vaudevillian-turned-Broadway star Joe E. Brown. Even better was a loanout to Fox for Thanks a Million (1935). It was typical leading lady stuff, but she and Patsy Kelly stole the show singing and energetically tapping to “Sugarplum.”
It looked like she was at last gaining lost ground. Better parts seemed inevitable. Then it came crashing down.
Assigned to Howard Hawks’ Ceiling Zero in September of ’35, she rejected the minor role because of illness. Ann acknowledged that she was also sick of the roles being offered her. In a letter dated September 30, she wrote to Jack Warner: “I must insist that you place me in productions of dramatic merit, in which my artistry, personality, intelligence and experience may be displayed. Failure to do so will be considered as a breach of contract on your part.”
Hospitalized in October with extreme exhaustion, she was told by her doctors to rest a couple of months, but she reported back to work on November 1. The studio put her on suspension.
In early February 1936, Dvorak took Warners to court to “construe the terms of her contract.” She said that the studio refused to give her work when she was well in November, suspended her salary, but “still claimed the right to her exclusive services.” Ann alleged that the studio had breached her contract when they had suspended payment on her salary. She asked for damages and the cancellation of her contract. Ann said in court, “I told Mr. Warner if I was not worth my salary, for him to release me.”
Warners countered, charging her with temperament, with refusing roles, and that she was “growing thinner and thinner from ill health” and was “unfit to work in pictures.” Ann denied these allegations, stating that Warners put her on suspension in “an asserted effort” to cut her salary.
Ann’s motion that her contract be terminated was rejected by the court, who claimed Warners was justified in their actions. But that wasn’t the end of it.
In August she was still fighting, this time privately. Part of the suspension period, she said, was incorrect: February 27 to July 2, 1936. Early in March, Ann offered to work, but was dismissed. “From that time until July,” she wrote, “Warner Bros. did not accept my tender of service and did not request me to report for service and did not utilize my services. That was the choice of Warner Bros. and was not my choice. I am not responsible for actions and decisions of your managers; and I do not believe that I could fairly be penalized because your representative did not choose to permit me to work.” She also declined to accept that the 126-day period was to be added to her present contract, which was originally set to run until September of ’38.
Through all this squabbling, Warners’ solution was to loan Ann to RKO for back-to-back B pictures, We Who Are About to Die (1936) and Racing Lady (1937).
If her strike in 1932 caused hard feelings, this new (and very public) rift was the final straw. In 1937 other Warner contract actresses were getting Dvorak-perfect material like Confession, Marked Woman, It’s Love I’m After, They Won’t Forget and Tovarich, but Ann was being hauled over to Bryan Foy’s B unit. She was cast as Della Street (to Donald Woods’ Perry Mason) in The Case of the Stuttering Bishop and played John Litel’s ex-wife in Midnight Court. She looked and acted elegant in both, her final films for Warners. Her contract was terminated by mutual consent on February 26, 1937.
How much say did Fenton, her co-plaintiff in the ’36 suit, have in her Warners trouble? Fenton was seen as a controlling force, transferring his disdain for studio politics to his wife. Dvorak’s mother told a reporter, “She’s always liked people, been a friendly approachable girl. Now, in the short time they’ve been married, I can notice the change in her personality. She talks with Leslie’s tongue and sees things through Leslie’s eyes. There was a time when her work and career were the most important things in her life. Now there isn’t anything important but Leslie, who has never cared anything about the things that matter to most people.”
She had a terrific chance when Goldwyn sought her for Dead End (1937), but she was suddenly, without explanation, replaced by Sylvia Sidney. Had Ann’s fights with Warner Bros. frightened producers? Or, as has been hinted, did Warners indulge in a little sabotage?
Her output slowed drastically, not helped by frequent trips overseas with her husband. Ann got
leads in some B pictures (Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, She’s No Lady, Gangs of New York), and had a minor but attractive part in Merrily We Live (1938)—but these productions had short shooting schedules.
Thanks to her husband, who was directing, she secured a role in Stronger Than Desire (1939), a remake of Evelyn Prentice (1934). Ann painted a powerful portrait of a mentally abused wife, giving the film its most vivid moments, especially in her concluding courtroom scene confessing to her husband’s murder. All the desperation, suffering and anguish bursts forth in a deeply affecting, two-and-a-half-minute tour de force. Holding back her sobs until the end, Ann’s contained intensity is easily the movie’s best acting.
Ann obtained a three-picture deal from Columbia, starting with the psychological thriller Blind Alley (1939). Dvorak played Chester Morris’ moll forcefully, but with a soft edge, humanizing her character to show her deep devotion. Her low-key intensity overshadowed a snarling Nina Foch in the 1948 remake The Dark Past.
The closest Ann ever came to a Joan Blondell role was in Cafe Hostess (1939), as a hard luck gal trying to make a living in a dive. “I’m fed-up playing glamour girl to a lot of poor saps sneaking out on their wives for a cheap thrill,” she tells shady Club 46 owner Douglas Fowley. It is Fowley who taught her “to play up to 20 different men every night … 30 on Sunday.” She doesn’t think she’s good enough to reform, warning the man she loves (Preston Foster) how “I was born in a room while a jazz band was playing, raised in an alley where kids graduated to the hot seat. That I never knew who my mother was. I’ve been around. I know how men are.” It was a cheapie, but well worth it to see a jaded Dvorak wisecrack, have a brawl with another girl, act sincere and be the center of attention.
The same goes for the surprisingly thoughtful Girls of the Road (1940). What promised to be a tawdry exploitation feature was elevated, thanks to Robert D. Andrews’ empathetic script and the straightforward playing of Dvorak and Helen Mack, into a sincere social indictment. Ann is a governor’s daughter who takes to the road to learn first-hand the conditions of runaway “road girls” in an effort to help them. Ann’s subdued, sensitive performance was one of her best.
Fenton, who was born in Liverpool, had gone back to enlist in the British Navy, and Ann felt it only natural that she join her spouse during wartime. On December 14, 1940, she left the U.S. for England.
Again she was dropping her career. Her absence from Hollywood this time would be almost four years.
Those years were hardly idle or unimportant. She enlisted in the British Women’s Land Army and drove an ambulance under heavy bombing during the Nazi blitz. Ann wrote articles for the London Daily Illustrated and the London Herald, did commentary on the BBC, while also participating in U.S.O. shows in England and Ireland. She added to this busy schedule four patriotic British films: This Was Paris, Squadron Leader X, Escape to Danger and There’s a Future in It. She made her stage debut in London in a GI production of The Eve of St. Mark.
Fenton served as a PT boat commander, and was seriously wounded in the commando raid on the port of St. Nazaire; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
They returned to America in late May of 1944.
By July, Ann was filming Flame of Barbary Coast. All seemed fine until September 5, 1944, when Ann announced her separation from Fenton. “Put it down to a war casualty,” she told Louella Parsons. “We just couldn’t get along and our unhappiness started in England while we were working on the war effort there.” It is entirely probable, with Fenton off fighting, that Ann, independently alone for the first time in her life, took a step back and reassessed their relationship. They attempted to reconcile, but their divorce was granted on August 2, 1946.
Meanwhile, Flame of Barbary Coast (1945), set in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1906, reintroduced film audiences to Dvorak in a big way. It was one of Republic’s most lavish films of the year, costing $600,000. John Wayne co-starred, but Ann’s the focus here, playing Flaxen Terry, the fiery star singer at the El Dorado. In addition to Ann’s “totally unexpected quips in many scenes” (Hollywood Citizen News), it would be her finest musical role: “Love, Here Is My Heart” (in French and English), “Carrie,” “On Moonlight Bay” and “That Man (Is Always on My Mind).” Ann, looking gorgeous in her period costumes, seems to be enjoying herself immensely. She’s at turns sly, self-possessed, spirited and poignant—in short, dominating the whole production.
She was irresistibly bitchy in Masquerade in Mexico (1945), director Mitchell Leisen’s remake of his classic Midnight (1939), as Patric Knowles’ amused, glamorous and very amoral wife. Ann is foolin’ around with bullfighter Arturo de Cordova, so Knowles hires Dorothy Lamour to pose as a contessa to distract Arturo. Then Ann’s claws come out: “Join us downstairs when you’ve fixed your face, will you?” she purrs to the newly-arrived Lamour. “But don’t do a complete job, because here in the country we usually go to bed by one o’clock.” Before the film is through she gets to dance, slap people, bounce digs about with her partner-in-crime Natalie Schafer, and show how deliciously nasty she could be.
Post–Civil War Kansas is the setting for another of Dvorak’s best, Abilene Town (1946). In it, Marshall Randolph Scott must choose between two women: scrappy barroom singer Dvorak and church-going Rhonda Fleming. Ann is tangy, vigorous and feisty, knocking soft-spoken Scott for a loop when she isn’t kicking his shins. Dvorak the firecracker also gets to sing three songs: “Snap Your Fingers,” “I Love It Out Here in the West” and “Everytime I Give My Heart.”
As another singer in The Bachelor’s Daughters (1946), Ann was, for the first and only time, voice-doubled. It was an enjoyable, if little-seen, movie, and Ann handled her slight part pleasantly.
The outrageous Out of the Blue (1947) more than made up for it. Ann is the brandy-swilling, weak-hearted eccentric picked up by lonely George Brent in a bar. Once at his apartment, the fun begins.
DVORAK: You know, brandy is very good for my heart. My doctor says that it’s a vascular dilator. And my heart is liable to stop like that if I don’t have brandy periodically.
BRENT: You don’t think you had too much?
DVORAK: Not too much—or I couldn’t say “periodically.”
His wife due home, Brent, trying to get rid of her, attempts to sober her up with coffee. “Caffeine,” Ann deadpans, “is very bad for my heart.” After a struggle, Ann passes out cold, with Brent dumping her presumably dead body on neighbor Turhan Bey’s patio. It starts a merry-go-round of body-swapping, with the constantly fainting Dvorak getting jostled from room to room. When another neighbor, Elizabeth Patterson, takes pity and wants to call the police, Ann stresses weepily, “Oh no, think of my family… my reputation …”
PATTERSON: Are you a debutante, dear?
DVORAK: Yes. I came out in ’38 and I haven’t been home since.
Dvorak gave a hysterical film-stealing portrayal as a brandy-swilling oddball in the black comedy Out of the Blue (Eagle-Lion, 1947). Left to right: Dvorak, Virginia Mayo, Turhan Bey.
A socko comedy performance that drew raves all around, it was unlike anything she had ever done. However, it was made by Eagle-Lion, not a major studio, and the rest of the cast just wasn’t on par with Dvorak’s off-center, inebriated antics; she was the whole damn show.
This was followed, and contrasted, by her lovely performance in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). As John Carradine’s (then George Sanders’) “keen, clever and intriguing” wife, Ann gives a classy, elegantly stylish portrayal, but it’s debatable if the movie even deserved her. The Long Night (1947) was more interesting, telling, via flashbacks, the circumstances leading to Henry Fonda murdering Vincent Price. Ann was formidable as magician Price’s tough, seen-it-all assistant, tempering her characterization with vulnerability.
It really looked like Ann was at last serious about her career, with seven movies completed in three years. With perhaps a touch of bitterness and regret in her voice, she insisted, “I’m going to give my career
a chance this time. No pulling out across the world again. I’m going to pull all the stops and give it everything!”
Easier said than done. A few days after Ann’s divorce from Fenton became final, on August 7, 1947, she wed Igor Dega, a young, attractive Russian dancer, who was seen briefly dancing with her in The Bachelor’s Daughters.
The Long Night (RKO, 1947) featured Ann as magician Vincent Price’s jaded assistant and ex-lover.
It became the same old story. Dega took priority. Ann’s “complete absorption” with his dancing was understandable, but it didn’t help her own career.
A couple of months after the wedding, she did The Walls of Jericho (1948). Her role, that of country lawyer Cornel Wilde’s insecure wife, was small and underwritten, so Ann effectively conveyed her emotions silently. Unlike her amiable drunk in Out of the Blue, here her alcoholism is pathetically heartbreaking, as her inability to fit into Wilde’s “social circle” leads to deadly resentment. Late for a party, Wilde goes upstairs, where she is locked in the bathroom. Suddenly, an intoxicated, mean-eyed and quietly determined Dvorak comes out and ferociously rips her party gown to pieces. It was a brilliantly played scene, fully capturing her intense frustration.
In September of ’48 she made her Broadway debut, taking over for Meg Mundy in the controversial play The Respectful Prostitute. Ann got raves for the high-profile part, and stayed with the show until it closed on December 18. One of the few other jobs she took during her marriage was another controversial play headed for Broadway, People Like Us. It opened on October 4, 1949, in Toronto, Canada, and collapsed on the road on October 15 in Detroit.
Also collapsing was her marriage. She had enthused to Louella Parsons, “He’s very sweet, and sunny tempered,” but when they separated in December 1949, Ann told reporters that, far from sunny, Dega was “sullen and morose.” To columnist Harrison Carroll she said, “We just couldn’t live each others’ lives … I have come back to Hollywood to resume my screen career. I tried but I just can’t go on night after night sitting in these cafes.” She was finally awarded a divorce on August 7, 1951.