by Ray Hagen
Jean’s daughter Christine remembers that “after she was diagnosed with cancer, my mom never had another cigarette again, just as after she awoke from the coma she never had another drink. She’d been an alcoholic and a smoker, and that’s what it took for her to quit. A year or so before she died, she went to Germany by herself to get laetrile, got it, came back, and the Motion Picture Hospital took it away from her because it wasn’t an approved treatment in the U.S. So she went to all that trouble and didn’t get to keep it. She had a pretty miserable middle-age and it was such a sad end, but she always had a really incredible attitude. She was such a great lady.”
Tom Seidel died of a stroke at 75 on December 7, 1992. “He married and divorced again twice before his death,” says Aric Seidel. “During the last year or two of his life he had found an old picture of my mother. He framed it and kept it on his desk. Although he never said so, it was obvious he realized Mom was the only one he was ever truly in love with.”
(Neither of Jean’s children went into the family profession. Christine, formerly a tennis instructor, now shows and breeds dogs and trains them for work with the ill and elderly. Aric was a representative with American Tobacco and Hyatt Hotels and is now a wine distributor. “What I am mostly is a father and a husband,” he says, “the two jobs that are most important to me. My 15-year-old daughter Ariel, a sometimes aspiring actress, heaven forbid, is like my mother; beautiful, has a great voice, and is way too much fun to be around.”)
Her lifelong Northwestern friends all paid tribute to Jean:
HELEN THOMSON: “Jean was extremely courageous. Twenty-five years later we all still think about her and talk about her and miss her. And I’m delighted that you’re writing about her.”
MIMI TELLIS: “Jean had higher aspirations for her acting career and she could have expanded more but she was always typecast. The other thing she wanted was one real love in her life before she died. But she always kept an absolutely marvelous humor and was always great fun to be with. Always.”
NATHALIE THOMPSON: “We got to really know one another over the years and had many reunions together. I used to wonder what the Hollywood big shots did with their garbage, so I once called Jean from Connecticut and asked her. She said, ‘Oh, we wrap it up in a mink coat and throw it over a cliff.’ She was so pretty and so much fun, even during the bad times. A very funny, wonderful girl.”
NANCY SALISBURY: “She was a trusted and loving friend. My daughter was very fond of Jean, there was always a lovely bond between Jean and all our children. They had such good times being with her, as the rest of us did. Such a great sense of humor, so much fun to be around. I remember her with great warmth and joy. She lives vividly in my memory and always will. She had a great spirit.”
PATRICIA NEAL: “Jean was clear at the end of her life. She was a good woman. I understand your loving her, I loved her too. I adored her.”
1949: Side Street (MGM), Adam’s Rib (MGM). 1950: Ambush (MGM), The Asphalt Jungle (MGM). 1951: A Life of Her Own (MGM), Night Into Morning (MGM), No Questions Asked (MGM). 1952: Singin’ in the Rain (MGM), Shadow in the Sky (MGM), Carbine Williams (MGM). 1953: Latin Lovers (MGM), Arena (MGM), Half a Hero (MGM). 1955: The Big Knife (UA). 1957: Spring Reunion (UA). 1959: The Shaggy Dog (Buena Vista). 1960: Sunrise at Campobello (WB). 1962: Panic in Year Zero! (AIP). 1964: Dead Ringer (WB). 1977: Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn.
Adele Jergens: A Lot of Woman
by LAURA WAGNER
Adele Jergens’ brief part in Somebody Loves Me typifies her hard-edged screen persona. Playing Nola Beech, a singing star with plenty of attitude, she heads the vaudeville bill that newcomer Betty Hutton, as Blossom Seeley, starts out with. She steals Betty’s best song, and despite pathetic pleas to give it back, Adele is more than a little annoyed as she turns to a stagehand for assistance with this nuisance.
ADELE: Hey, tell this stage struck brat she’s in vaudeville, not Sunday school.
STAGEHAND (to Hutton): You’re wasting your breath, kid. She’d murder her own mother for an extra bow.
ADELE: I did. But I gave the old lady a real stylish funeral.
The tramp, the haughty star, the two-timer, the dance hall queen, the crook—Adele Jergens played them all. She was an absolutely gorgeous blonde but her height (varying sources say between 5'7" and 5'10"), strong aura and Brooklyn accent invariably placed her in the company of thugs and gamblers. It’s a typecasting people have responded to; today Jergens is considered hot stuff among film noir and crime movie fans. She played her sexy roles with an edginess that could make many a femme fatale blush. She seemed to be the real thing on screen, especially in the ’50s when her voice lowered, and she made it quite clear: Don’t mess with this gal.
She was born Adele Louisa Jurgens on November 26, 1917, in the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn, New York, the youngest (and only girl) of four children. She was a self-professed tomboy, playing baseball and dreaming of being a newspaper reporter. Dancing lessons at seven years old changed all that. The stage was her new ambition. At 14 she won a scholarship to Manhattan’s Albertina Rasch Dance School and became, she would say later, “all wrapped up in my dancing.” Despite later reports from studio bios and other articles devoted to her, Adele never studied singing in her youth; she always utilized a voice double when she was called on to sing in movies.
Adele would also claim in interviews that she first appeared in a Broadway show when she was 15 during summer vacation. If so, there is no record of its name. Three years later, at almost 18, she racked up her first known Broadway credit as a chorus girl: Jubilee, which opened on October 12, 1935.
Her beauty didn’t go unnoticed. She signed with the John Robert Powers Agency in New York, becoming a top model. She also became known as “New York’s No. 1 Showgirl,” appearing in successful shows like Leave It to Me! (1938) and DuBarry was a Lady (1939), as well as dancing in local clubs. She traveled abroad in cabaret and, when she returned to the U.S., garnered some publicity by being named “Miss World’s Fairest” at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair. It was during this period that she also briefly became a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. Adele continued on as a showgirl in Louisiana Purchase (1940) and Banjo Eyes (1941), and, a big break, understudying Gypsy Rose Lee in Star and Garter (1942), going on just once.
That’s all it took and Hollywood was plenty interested.
Adele’s time spent under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox is always misjudged, sources citing it somewhere before Star and Garter, yet failing to turn up any credits. The problem is that she and Virginia Mayo, friends since Banjo Eyes, are often mistaken for each other, a striking resemblance both actresses admit to. However, checking the Fox movies attributed to Mayo (1943-44), the actress in question is clearly Adele in either large groups or choral dance numbers: Hello, Frisco, Hello, The Gang’s All Here, Sweet Rosie O’Grady and Pin-Up Girl. The only Fox movie ever officially credited to Adele is Jane Eyre (1944), but if she is indeed in that film, she’s not easily discernible. It’s possible that she made other Fox films during this period.
Portrait of Adele Jergens, 1946.
After Fox failed to pick up her option, Columbia promptly signed her to a seven-year contract, starting with Together Again (1944), as a stripper. From this small part she snared the sweet, well-mannered female lead—where’s the fun in that?—in the serial Black Arrow (1944). After being seen as chorines in Dancing in Manhattan and Tonight and Every Night (both 1945), Adele was given her first starring part in a feature, A Thousand and One Nights (1945), an underrated spoof of Arabian Night pictures, as the Princess of Baghdad.
She got reams of publicity (labeled “The Eyeful”), everyone marveling at this new, gorgeous find. But despite this success in a popular movie, Columbia was slow to act. No further films were released with Adele in 1945, and in 1946 just one made it to the screen. Luckily, it was in an amusing comedy starring Rosalind Russell.
In She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1946), Adele displayed a comedic gift never fully
exploited on screen. She’s the temperamental Allura, aptly named author of Biography of a Blonde, a racy 300-page autobiography with “a different romance on every page.” She consults psychologist Russell after a series of beaux die: “I kiss dem, dat’s all, and dey die,” Adele intones in an exaggerated Bolivian accent. Jergens briefly complicates Roz’s relationship with Lee Bowman, but in the end she is cured to romance another day. Aggressive Allura is described as “quite a terrifying young woman” by butler Harry Davenport, who marvels to Bowman, “She’s so blonde, isn’t she?”
In the fantasy Down to Earth (1947), Adele is the actress portraying Terpsichore, the Goddess of Dance, in Larry Parks’ Broadway musical Swinging the Muses, until competition arrives in the form of Terpsichore herself (Rita Hayworth). Adele’s in her glory as the tough-talking star who isn’t about to lose her part to some nervy upstart. Parks has to separate the two. “Sister,” Adele growls forcibly, fists clenched, “you’re about to lose some teeth.” Well, this being Columbia and not the real world, Adele is fired and Hayworth takes over, thus ending Jergens’ seventh-billed role. But, while she’s on screen, Adele does a little tap dancing and sings (with the bluesy voice of dubber Kay Starr) “The Nine Muses.”
In The Dark Past (Columbia, 1948), Adele is an unfaithful wife dallying with Stephen Dunne. Left to right: Lee J. Cobb, Jergens, Dunne, Lois Maxwell.
With four more movies on her schedule, 1947 turned out to be a very productive, if less than inspiring, year. She played a chiseling secretary in Blondie’s Anniversary, but was better served as the musical lead in the obscure When a Girl’s Beautiful, her singing courtesy of Suzanne Ellers. She exuded toughness in I Love Trouble, but was limited to one scene with star Franchot Tone, pulling out a revolver and coolly remarking, “This was for when I got bored with you.” Her best movie that year was The Corpse Came C.O.D., an airy murder mystery, portraying a glamourous Hollywood star implicated in homicide and diamond smuggling. This self-assured performance alone should have alerted Columbia to her possibilities.
But, again, she was stuck in only one scene in The Fuller Brush Man (1948) with Red Skelton, and had a limited part in the intriguing The Dark Past (1948), a well-played remake of Blind Alley (1939). She’s an unfaithful wife who, in her best scene, confronts gun moll Nina Foch. Looking Adele over, Foch cracks, “You don’t look like any angel to me.” Truer words were never spat out.
Crazy casting 101: Jergens plays Marilyn Monroe’s mother in Ladies of the Chorus (Columbia, 1948).
Many thought her role as Marilyn Monroe’s burlesque dancer mother in Ladies of the Chorus (1948) a mistake at this point in her career (Adele was 31 to Monroe’s 22). Wearing a blonde wig over gray hair, she’s referred to more than once as “an old hag,” which doesn’t ring true. Yet despite the slight age gap, Adele ably projects the right amount of life experience and motherly instinct to make her role believable. She’s also allowed a great youthful flashback from her days as a headliner. Looking sensational, a brunette Adele socks over “Crazy for You,” dubbed by Virginia Rees. Showing infinitely more charisma than newcomer Monroe, Adele really sizzles. Yet, for all the fuss about Marilyn later, and Adele’s crazy casting as her mother, Nana Bryant stole Ladies of the Chorus out from under them both.
The “Crazy for You” number in Ladies took excellent advantage of Adele’s dancing skills, something Columbia played down probably due to Rita Hayworth. In fact, some say Harry Cohn had originally put Adele under contract to keep his top star Hayworth in line. Her roles at the studio reflected this backhanded interest. She had supporting parts in Prince of Thieves (1948), Law of the Barbary Coast (1949), Slightly French (1949, a funny bit as a temperamental French star) and Make Believe Ballroom (1949), but headed the casts of The Woman from Tangier (1949), The Crime Doctor’s Diary (1949) and The Mutineers (1949), certainly not a distinguished group. The latter film featured Adele as the seductive secretary-nurse (uh-huh) of counterfeiter George Reeves. When Reeves takes over a freighter, Jergens plays up to first mate Jon Hall to keep him preoccupied. “I hate rules,” she coos to the befuddled Hall. “Isn’t it strange that the best things in life are either a sin or make you fat?” Variety, who disliked the film, complained, “The actors perform with a singular lack of enthusiasm. All, that is, save Miss Jergens, who comes out quite well as a loose wench who frankly likes men.”
The Treasure of Monte Cristo (1949), a loan-out to Lippert, was notable solely for introducing her to handsome ex–Fox contract player Glenn Langan; the couple, who exhibited a few sparks on camera, would have an on-again, off-again personal relationship for a couple of years. Adele would first get seriously involved with then-actor Ronald Reagan in December of 1949, which, according to Adele’s friend Virginia Mayo, almost led to the altar. “He was crazy about her,” Mayo says. “He gave her a lot of jewelry.” Adele as First Lady of our country?
If her personal life was smooth, her career surely wasn’t. The contract at Columbia failed to turn her into an important name in A features. Despite this, Adele was seemingly content. “I liked working there very much,” she told Dan Van Neste shortly before her death in 2002. “It was my home studio and I knew everyone and they knew me. Everybody was very nice, but they worked us hard. I only recall one film in which we were able to rehearse. They would put me in three pictures at one time but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it; and besides it was a steady income. Columbia was really a learning experience for me. I had been on the stage but never acted in films before. I was learning with each movie I made even though many were B pictures.”
Half of 1950 saw Jergens freelancing, with mixed results. Because of Columbia’s misuse, Adele was relegated to the second feature pile, except that odd occurrence (Edge of Doom, Show Boat, The Cobweb) when she cinched tiny roles at the major studios. “I still keep practicing,” she said of her neglected dancing, “but if someone doesn’t give me a good dancing part pretty soon I’ll stop and concentrate on being a champion screen home-wrecker.” Which is what would happen after her next film.
The actress was busy little crook in 1950, a year which saw her in ten films. In Armored Car Robbery she had the showy role of Yvonne LeDoux, a “strictly high-rent” burlesque queen. Her second-billed part was minimal, but very effective, seen mostly seductively dancing on stage, and playing around, of course, on her hubby. “That’s a lot of woman,” howls one interested male.
She dabbled in some blackmail in Side Street, but was dumped into the East River as thanks for her services rendered. Radar Secret Service, her best role that year, had Adele involved with radium thieves and two-timing Tom Neal with boss Tristram Coffin. When Neal finds out, he pulls a gun on the both of them. Ever resourceful, she aids Coffin by sneaking him a pistol. Walking in on the scene moments later, Myrna Dell looks down dumbfounded at Neal’s dead body. “When you’re through with a boyfriend, you’re really through,” she says to Jergens. She played another sexy broad, girlfriend of crook Lloyd Bridges, in The Sound of Fury.
A handy gal to have around, Adele passes a pistol to Tris Coffin in Radar Secret Service (Lippert, 1950). Won’t Tom Neal be surprised?
Where did she go wrong? Soon a whole new subgenre opened itself to Adele, seducing idiots in a string of pictures: Arthur Lake (Beware of Blondie), Andy Devine (Traveling Saleswoman), Lou Costello (Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man) and the Bowery Boys (Blues Busters and Blonde Dynamite). It was getting harder and harder for a gal to make a dishonest buck.
A slight change came with Warner Bros.’ Sugarfoot (1951), taking over from the originally scheduled Patricia Neal. She was again a dance hall gal (dubbed on the peculiar “Oh, He Looked Like He Might Buy Wine”), but with a difference. This time she was a respectable girl who just happens to be singing in a dive called The Diana. Showing flashes throughout of being a perfect candidate for anger-management classes, she blows her top during her first meeting with new-to-town Randolph Scott. He apologizes to the demure-looking Adele for staring because “you’re not what I pic
ture gambling hall girls to look like. It … it surprises me.” Speaking for all wronged women in her line of work, she snaps, with a rising furor that startles the nervous Scott, “It surprises you? It surprises you that I’m a human being? You’re the same as all the rest of them. Do you think I have no life or existence outside The Diana?” You go, girl.
It was a good, juicy role, with the twist of not having Adele act the standard floozy; she alternated between shyness to anger to bawdiness to intense love for Scott. It was perhaps her best role in a major movie.
Did it help secure better parts? Nope. Her uncredited part as a gambling lady named Cameo McQueen, in MGM’s Show Boat (1951) gave the impression of being cut to ribbons during the editing process. She was just barely in the picture.
Huntz Hall in Blues Busters (Monogram, 1950) is just one of a string of idiots that Adele seduced in films. What could handsome Craig Stevens (right) be thinking?
She and Glenn Langan were finally wed on October 6, 1951 in New York, where he was rehearsing George S. Kaufman’s new play Fancy Meeting You Again. A year earlier Adele had told columnist Darr Smith that “I don’t want to become cynical about it through being married and divorced five times. When I was 16 I had an ideal about marriage, and what I had at 16 I’m going to keep until the right guy comes along.” Apparently that was a sound outlook; they would stay together until Langan’s death 40 years later. Their son Tracy was born in 1953.
After the happy occasion of her marriage, it’s a shame she became involved with Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick (1952), singer Dinah Shore’s notorious flop. Dinah and Alan Young are neighboring farmers who sing about chores, Saturday nights in town and why Young can’t muster up the nerve to romance her without the aid of alcohol. Adele is an actress who’s on the lam with Robert Merrill for selling phony land lots. Hiding out in Punkin Crick, they try to swindle Dinah out of her farm. Along the way Adele is chased by a bull, becoming irritable, brittle and not too fond of farm life. Probably how audiences felt back in 1952 watching this turkey.