Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  Portrait of Claire Trevor, 1945.

  In the summer of 1930 she shipped off to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to make her professional debut with Robert Henderson’s Repertory Players at the annual Ann Arbor Theatre Festival as a member of the Greek Chorus in Antigone. She also appeared in Lady Windermere’s Fan as the girl who said only “Yes, mama,” and had a larger part in The Sea Gull, which was completely beyond her grasp. The star of the company was veteran actress Margaret Anglin.

  She returned to New York, did some modeling for photographers and impressed a Warner Bros. scout, who put her in a series of Vitaphone short subjects at their Flatbush studios. At that time, Warners was starting a stock company in St. Louis, intending, if the idea proved successful, to scatter similar companies around the country. It would also serve as a training school for future Warner stars. They sent Claire to St. Louis, where she played (with, among others, Lyle Talbot and Wallace Ford) in a new show each week for ten weeks. At $85 per week, it proved a grueling experience. She spent the summer of ’31 as the leading ingenue with the Hampton Players, a little theater group in Southhampton, New York, for $5 a week plus room and board. While there she was spotted by producer Alexander McKaig, who offered Claire her first Broadway role, leading lady in Whistling in the Dark opposite Ernest Truex and Edward Arnold. It opened January 19, 1932. In his review for the Herald-Tribune, Percy Hammond wrote: “Claire Trevor, a shiny debutante, plays the pretty heroine casually.”

  The comedy was a hit. Claire stayed with the show in New York for nine months and subsequently toured with it. While the company was in Los Angeles, a number of film studio executives offered her screen tests. “Irving Thalberg had wanted me to sign at MGM,” Claire later said, “But at the time I was all theater-conscious. I told him that I would wait until some studio brought me to Hollywood from a hit play and give me a starring role in a picture. I’ve often wondered if I was foolish not to sign with Mr. Thalberg then. My career might have been much more successful.”

  She went back to New York and got a part as a waitress in a Depression comedy called The Party’s Over, which opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on March 27, 1933. The critics were casually kind but the play was not doing very well, so when the New York office of Fox Films (renamed 20th Century-Fox in 1935) tested her and offered her a contract she readily accepted. She left the show at the end of April and arrived in Hollywood on May 7, 1933, a contract player with a major studio at $350 a week, a fortune to her.

  Two days later Claire was sent out on location, a sandy waste, for her first movie, Life in the Raw, a run-of-the-mill Western in which she was George O’Brien’s leading lady. After making a second Western with O’Brien, Fox decided to bring her indoors to play opposite Spencer Tracy in The Mad Game, a newspaper drama. She got excellent notices for her work as a cigarette-rolling reporter. At that point Sally Blane, who was frequently teamed with James Dunn, refused to play opposite him in Jimmy and Sally. Trevor got the part. After Hold That Girl, another fluffy item with Dunn, she was off on her treadmill. By the end of 1933 she had starred in half-a-dozen Fox quickies. Early in ’34 her personal rave notices began piling up, but in minor films earning little or no attention. The pattern was set; Claire Trevor became Hollywood’s (or at least Fox’s) Queen of the B’s.

  She said in the April, I934 Picture Play: “The studios usually artificialize women. I vowed I wouldn’t be beautified, but it’s a routine you have to go through every morning out here…. Pictures seem to me like the stock market, a magnificent gamble. My wish is that I’ll go to the top and then have sense enough to get out before I crash.”

  From 1933 to ’37, Trevor starred in over two dozen low-budget Fox sausages, each one more trivial than the last. She played runaway heiresses, unhappy wives, showgirls, society belles, secretaries, colorful and colorless heroines and the sort of girl reporter addicted to hopping on running boards. She had to be as merry as Carole Lombard, as long-suffering as Ruth Chatterton, and dance as gracefully as Ginger Rogers. Only twice was she cast in A films, To Mary—With Love (1936) and Second Honeymoon (‘37), but her billing was considerably lower and she merely had roles subservient to leading ladies Myrna Loy and Loretta Young.

  It wasn’t a total loss. Claire Trevor had become a known name and she was learning, absorbing, becoming thoroughly accustomed to delivering high-level performances under all but impossible conditions. As her income grew, so did her impatience for bigger and certainly better things. Later, in a 1946 Motion Picture interview, she said, “Producers decided I was older than I claimed to be and gave me snappy, severe business women, gal reporter types of roles. I played them all. I didn’t know that to make a real career in Hollywood you have to become a ‘personality.’ You have to cultivate publicity departments and become known as ‘The Ear’ or ‘The Toe.’”

  Her patience and persistence finally seemed to pay off. She fought for, and won, the part of Francey in Dead End, a major production for United Artists, released in 1937. She had only one scene, as gangster Humphrey Bogart’s innocent one-time girlfriend who had turned into a hardened, diseased prostitute. (Claire and Bogart became fast friends for life.) No one could understand why on earth she wanted to play such a part, until they saw the film. Her contribution lasted less than two minutes, but she made every second count. The press and public finally took notice and she was nominated for a 1937 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. She didn’t win, Alice Brady did for In Old Chicago, but Claire felt this was a definite step up.

  Claire (left) second fiddling to Loretta Young and Tyrone Power in Second Honeymoon (Fox, 1937).

  Upon returning to Fox, however, she was sent right back to the B unit. She finished out her contract and left, preferring to work freelance. As she told Modern Screen in 1939: “You see, Mr. Zanuck never had faith in me. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps he may even have been justified. The point is, however, that if he hasn’t confidence in a player, said player might just as well up and leave at the outset. And that’s what I did.”

  In 1937 she began a three-year run on the hit CBS radio series Big Town, co-starring Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was “crusading reporter” Steve Wilson and Claire was his “society editor and sidekick” Loreli Kilbourne. When Claire realized that Robinson was spending more air time expounding on weighty issues of the day and less time with Loreli, she decided she’d had enough. As she later said, her lines had now been whittled down to “I’ll wait for you in the car, Steve” and “How’d it go, Steve?”

  Free of her Fox contract in I937, she gave an unusually candid interview in the June 1938 Modern Screen: “I owe pictures a lot. I’ve made an unbelievable amount of money in the last four years. But it’s given me no artistic satisfaction to be in movies. I’ve done nothing I can point to with pride. At first I accepted anything I was handed. When the scripts turned out to be crummy and inconsistent I just did the best I could. I thought Dead End was going to mean everything—a beautiful script, good director [William Wyler], topflight cast—but I was disappointed in my performance when I saw the picture. I hadn’t given what I thought I had … I don’t want to be just another leading lady. And I’m going to do something about it! For years I took B pictures without a murmur. Good training, I told my mother. Sound basis for a screen career, yes indeed. But they’ve kept me buzzing in the B-hive for four years and no relief in sight. So one of these days I’m going to surprise everybody and say, ‘No, this part is not for me, this picture is not for me, I won’t do another B!’”

  “Perhaps I’ve been amiable too long,” she said in the May, 1938 Motion Picture. “Perhaps it’s time for me to put on the temperamental act and scream for better parts in better pictures. Next year I hope some really good roles in important productions will come my way. Naturally I would prefer to make three or four pictures a year which are important, rather than twice that number of the run-of-the-mill variety.” The title of the interview said it all: The Star Who Isn’t a Star.

  She married Big Town producer Clark Andre
ws in July 1938. By then the last of her Fox follies were in release, and she was seen in two top-line Warner Bros. efforts: The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, an excellent gangster comedy with Claire playing a gang leader with silken ease, and Valley of the Giants, her first Technicolor picture and the first of many films to exploit her as a lady with a past in Western surroundings.

  She was offered a Warners contract but, still smarting from her bondage at Fox, she refused. She told William M. Drew in his 1999 book At the Center of the Frame, “Warner Bros. had a promotional thing going at the time and they wanted me to be ‘the Oomph Girl.’ They wanted to sign me for five years but I turned them down … That may have been foolish too, because I would have been ‘the Oomph Girl’ rather than Ann Sheridan and also Warners did more of the kind of thing that was suitable to me.”

  The following year gave her probably her most memorable film, John Ford’s classic Stagecoach. She played Dallas, a town trollop who the “good” women forced to leave on the title vehicle. Her growing romance with the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) during the course of the stagecoach’s journey was played by both Trevor and Wayne with tenderness and subtlety. It established definitively her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold image and was, of course, an enormously successful film. Claire loved every moment on the picture, adored working with Wayne and Ford, and until the end of her life she considered it her favorite of all her films.

  Her two follow-up pictures, however, were letdowns. As Claire told Jack Holland in 1948: “After I left Fox, some months later, I got a good part in Stagecoach. In fact, I even got top billing, but the picture made a star of John Wayne and I didn’t work for six months. Then I did another picture with John, a super-epic, one of the biggest RKO had ever made [Allegheny Uprising]. I thought I was on my way, but the film was a sensational flop. So afterwards I did a picture with George Raft [I Stole a Million], who was very hot at the time. That also was a charming failure.”

  From 1940 to ’43 she fell into a pattern nearly as frustrating as the early years at Fox. She played leads in a few Westerns and B melodramas and supports in occasional A efforts, serving as second fiddle to the likes of Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr.

  Clark Gable gets under Claire’s chapeau in Honky Tonk (MGM, 1941).

  In 1940 she was seen in only one film, Dark Command. Another Western, it had sheriff John Wayne vying with guerrilla chief Walter Pidgeon for Claire’s aristocratic hand. Texas (1941) was a funny, bouncy western, this time with buddies Glenn Ford and William Holden vying for Claire’s favors. In The Adventures of Martin Eden (’41) Claire was star Ford’s colorless true love.

  Honky Tonk (194l) was an MGM Clark Gable-Lana Turner vehicle typical of her luck. Trevor was featured as Gable’s old flame, an easy going saloon hustler. She started out with a good, gutsy part, but, as she told writer Charles Samuels eight years later, “By that time I was playing second leads. I had great scenes in Honky Tonk. At least I thought I had them ’til I went to the press preview of the picture. My scenes had been scissored out. ‘Where am I?,’ I kept asking myself. ‘What happened to me?’ I cried all the way home and swore I’d never make another picture. There were a lot of nights when I felt like that. Other girls were flying past me becoming big stars. I was still just another actress, competent but not a top-notcher. Still, I didn’t care too much.”

  Crossroads (1942) starred William Powell and Hedy Lamarr in an amnesia drama with Claire as a treacherous chanteuse (dubbed by Connie Russell). A string of unimportant B’s followed. Street of Chance (’42) was another amnesia drama with Claire starting out sweet and ending up sour. She was back in saloon drag in The Desperadoes (’43), and in Good Luck, Mr. Yates she’s a nice girl to whom Army reject Jess Barker has to prove himself. The Woman of the Town (’43) was another Western, a rather well done tale of Bat Masterson’s ill-fated love for Dora Hand.

  In 1942 she and Andrews were divorced. She married Navy Lt. Cylos William Dunsmoore in 1944, and the following year their son, Charles Cylos, was born.

  Claire co-starred on radio in 1944 with her old Fox cohort Lloyd Nolan in Results, Incorporated. It was a light-hearted (and headed) mystery series on Mutual, lasting from October 7th to December 30th. She loved radio—no lines to learn, no hours wasted on wardrobe, makeup and hairdos—and appeared in dozens of dramas and variety shows.

  After the birth of her son, Claire was a hyper-glam temptress with greed in her eyes and a gun in her upsweep in Murder, My Sweet (1945). It was a classic film noir mystery which did wonders for former boy crooner Dick Powell in his first hard-guy role as detective Philip Marlowe, and consequently all the attention was focused on his surprisingly gritty performance. Claire had a good bit of grit herself. “You shouldn’t kiss a girl when you’re wearing that gun,” she tells Powell. “It leaves a bruise.” Powell got the girl (Anne Shirley) and the publicity. Trevor got a bullet.

  She did more of the same opposite George Raft in Johnny Angel (’45), but though she was Pat O’Brien’s nice girlfriend in yet another amnesia plot, Crack-Up, (’46), the ads pictured her as a fancily gowned vixen. Her final ’46 opus was The Bachelor’s Daughters, about four salesgirls who move in with a rich old bachelor with Claire as the nastiest (until the fadeout). She shared screen time with “sisters” Ann Dvorak, Gail Russell and Jane Wyatt. Not much star power in any of them, and once again her career was in the doldrums.

  In 1947 she played one of the bitchiest of her screen witches, a totally amoral schemer who teams up with killer Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill. Now considered a noir classic, it was then passed by as just another RKO melodrama. She was the very spirit of evil as she hatched one sleazy scheme after another with not a trace of conscience while wearing some of the funniest ’40s millenary ever constructed. As always, the high quality of her work was overlooked. By now this was exactly what people expected of Claire Trevor, and exactly the genre in which they expected to find her.

  During all her years in Hollywood she had been longing to return to the stage. Each disenchantment seemed to strengthen that urge, and now seemed a pretty good time. In 1946 she did Dark Victory with Onslow Stevens at the Laguna Beach playhouse, following that with Tonight at 8:30 opposite Joan Fontaine and Philip Merivale, and the leading role in Noël Coward’s Family Album in August at the El Capitan Theatre.

  Hilariously hatted but seriously scheming by phone in Born to Kill (RKO, 1947).

  She got a chance to return east in Sam and Bella Spewack’s comedy Out West It’s Different, co-starring Keenan Wynn. Something of a shambles, it opened in Princeton, New Jersey, and died before reaching New York.

  But she did make it back to Broadway. On January 8, 1947, she opened at the Booth Theatre in The Big Two. Howard Barnes said in his Herald-Tribune review: “Claire Trevor and Philip Dorn play the leading roles with a good deal more vitality than they deserved. The former, as a woman correspondent who tries to find a traitorous American broadcaster behind the Iron Curtain of a Russian-occupied zone, brings a brittle skepticism to the part which is very right indeed.” Elliott Nugent directed and Robert Montgomery produced. The critics were unanimously unimpressed. On January 25, after 21 performances, it folded.

  Her legit longings squelched, Trevor returned to Hollywood. She hadn’t made a film in 18 months and now decided to do anything and everything she could, and to do it as well as possible. Rosalind Russell offered her a supporting role in The Velvet Touch, the first of five films she turned out in breakneck procession. All were released within a few months of each other and suddenly Claire Trevor was the surprise re-discovery of 1948.

  That year she discussed her career ambivalence: “Certainly I’d like to be a star,” she told Jack Holland, “because the opportunity for a variety of roles is so very good. I didn’t feel that way once. I thought only of all the worries the stars had; the lack of privacy, the grief and strain of worrying if each succeeding picture would be a failure. But when I see the excellent roles that Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Ing
rid Bergman and others have had, I find myself wanting the same chance…. At the beginning I accepted every part that was handed to me. I was too meek. I never acted as though I was eating my heart out for a certain part. For example, I made a test for the mother in The Yearling and I was told I had made the best test. Then the picture was postponed, and I failed to keep my irons hot. When the production was announced again I was called to the studio for an interview, but I guess I seemed too indifferent, because I wasn’t given another chance. The same meekness didn’t help my chances when I wanted to play Sophie in The Razor’s Edge.”

  But 1948 turned out to be a very good year for Claire Trevor. She had particularly good exposure as an acid-tongued, ill-fated actress in The Velvet Touch, was in unrequited love with a faithless gangster in Raw Deal, and had a rare non-neurotic role as Mrs. Ruth in the maladroit The Babe Ruth Story in which she got to do some light hoofing in her pre-marriage scenes.

  Edward G. Robinson helps Claire win her Oscar in Key Largo (WB, 1948).

  It was John Huston’s Key Largo that cinched her umpteenth comeback, this time for keeps. It was a high-profile, star-filled drama (Bogart, Bacall, Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, all close friends), but Claire’s performance as a gangster’s broken-down floozie was so powerful she walked off not only with all the notices but an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress of 1948. She played Gaye Dawn, a former singer who was now Robinson’s alcoholic mistress. In the film’s best remembered sequence, Robinson forced her to sing her long-ago hit song, “Moanin’ Low,” before giving her the drink she’d been begging for, and then refused when she finished because “You were rotten.” It was a wrenching scene and one of her most impressive screen achievements.