Franchot Tone: the complete package

Joan Crawford had pleasant memories of "Today We Live", chiefly because of her costars and director. The man who made the biggest impression on her, of course, was her future husband, Franchot Tone. Franchot Tone, as of 1933, represented everything positive to Joan, everything she aspired to, everything she felt would give her life ultimate meaning and purpose: fulfillment and a kind of peace she had never known. And here was Franchot, handsome, sexy, accomplished, cultivated and a far finer actor than she. She loved Tone’s theatrical bona fides, his impeccable manners, and his distinguished collegiate background. And, of course, that she found his famous voice romantic and sexy and masculine was the proverbial icing on the cake.

Deep down, Joan knew that her wild fling with Gable would lose its raw, tempestuous quality if they were to get married. Marriage had seemed to dampen her feelings for Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and she was afraid that it would happen again if she were to marry Gable. Hawks had conceived of 'Today We Live' as a “man’s movie,” but the two agreed to make the best of it and got along very well.

Tone was a completely different type than either Doug Jr. or Gable. Doug had tried to be a mentor to Joan, but he was too young to carry that off, and he was certainly not as sophisticated as she was. Joan loved Gable, but she couldn’t look up to him because he came from a background similar to hers and was too rough-hewn and uncultured. Franchot Tone was the mentor/father figure she had been seeking in Doug Jr., but at the same time he was the experienced lover and adult that Gable was. In other words, the complete package. Two years passed; they did well together before the cameras, and the chemistry was right. They became lovers, and the chemistry was eminently right there as well. Finally she decided to take the plunge. On October 11, 1935, they were married.

Later there was speculation that she had stepped up the marriage plans because she feared competition from Bette Davis, who costarred with Tone when he was on loan to Warner Brothers for a picture aptly titled 'Dangerous.' She was not blind to the chemistry between them that raged during the Dangerous shoot —in spite of Davis’s marriage to Ham Nelson— nor was she (or anyone else) unaware of the great crush Davis had on Tone. She and Tone tied the knot before Dangerous was released.

In Dancing Lady (1933), she was teamed with Gable and Tone. She plays Janie Barlow, a burlesque performer who is torn between wealthy paramour Tod Newton (Tone), who starts a romance with her after he bails her out when her club is raided, and Broadway dance director Patch Gallagher (Gable), who, as expected, can’t stand rich, entitled fellows like Newton. Joan gave a snappy, mostly excellent performance, vividly conveying Janie’s vulnerability, her resentment over her lot in life, and her anger at Newton’s condescension.

Newton’s fascination with Janie reflected Tone’s true feelings toward Joan at the time. Franchot never got past supporting-actor status, at least in Joan’s films. On loanout he did slightly better, even qualifying as leading man at times, as in the 1936 The King Steps Out. Louis B. Mayer simply did not consider him to be major star material. He was not conventionally handsome in the Robert Montgomery style, or sexily charismatic in the raffish Gable mold.

Tone became acutely aware that his Hollywood career would always have certain built-in limitations. This dawning frustration eventually grew into resentment. She made excuses for Tone. He hit her because he drank, she rationalized, and he drank because he felt like “Mr. Joan Crawford,” a role he detested. Even many years later, she continued to defend Tone, writing in her memoirs, “I don’t believe Franchot ever for a moment resented the fact that I was a star. Possibly he resented Hollywood’s refusal to let him forget it.” Unlike her feelings for Doug Fairbanks Jr., Joan still felt at this time that Franchot was the one and only man for her, her true soul mate.

Tone did his best to smooth things over, he said it was only hurt male pride that made him lash out at her and have affairs, but Joan wasn’t having any of it. The physical blows, the tongue-lashings, the
drunken beratings, and the infidelities had finally combined to make Joan fall completely and irrevocably out of love with Tone. Joan was becoming convinced that she and marriage just didn’t mix. Through no fault of his own, [Joan's third husband] Phillip Terry lacked Fairbanks Jr.’s outgoing, gregarious, showoffy nature, couldn’t hold a candle to Gable’s charisma, and was absolutely no good in a fight the way Tone was. “I think it got to a point where Joan would have welcomed those knock-down, drag-out fights with Franchot Tone over Phillip’s bovine-like nature,” said Jerry Asher. Franchot may have beaten her, but he never bored her. About Phillip Terry, Joan would later write, “I realized I had never loved him.”

Reminiscing about the young Barbara Payton, legendary film producer A.C. Lyles remembers meeting her for the first time at Ciro’s. “When I first saw her, I was naturally struck by how lovely Barbara was,” he says. “I thought she had the most beautiful eyes. The best way I can describe them is that they were both sexy and innocent.”

A.C. recalls dining with Joan Crawford one night at Ciro’s, just a few weeks after he met Barbara. He says that Crawford, who didn’t know Barbara at the time, seemed spellbound by her beauty when Barbara came over to their table to say hello to them. “After I introduced them and Barbara left, Joan turned to me and said, ‘That is a very lovely, very sweet girl. Who is she? Where is she from? If her acting is as good as her looks, she is going to be big in this town!’”

Although he lost out on his bid for an Oscar as best supporting actor, Franchot’s performance in Mutiny on the Bounty brought him a ton of film work, and insured his place as one of Hollywood’s most popular and promising actors of the day. As a result, he temporarily put his theater objectives on hold and dove into his movie career.

Tone was an architect hopelessly in love with Bette Davis in 1935’s Dangerous, and appeared as a wealthy industrialist who commits suicide over Jean Harlow in Reckless. After a staggering 29 motion pictures in six years, Franchot left MGM after Fast and Furious (1939), a Busby Berkeley directed mystery/comedy, costarring Ann Sothern.

He returned to the New York stage, and to the Group Theater, to co-star with Sylvia Sidney in The Gentle People, a fine production that nonetheless flopped. The following year, he received excellent notices in New York City for his role in Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, and continued his Hollywood career in 1940, freelancing in a string of moderately enjoyable comedies and dramatic efforts for Universal, Columbia, Warner Brothers and Paramount Studios, the best of these being the war-themed Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and The Hour Before the Dawn (1944), and the moody film noir Phantom Lady (1944).

Publicity-wise, Barbara Payton scored a major accolade when The Foreign Press Association deemed her “The Most Beautiful Girl in Pictures” and ran her photo in dozens of newspapers around the world. Franchot’s associates, including ex-wife Crawford (who had been so impressed with Barbara at their initial meeting, but had changed her mind about her once she had learned of her lifestyle), did their best to dissuade the actor from consorting with the vampy starlet. Tom Neal later told Newsweek, “Barbara asked me to marry her. She was engaged to Tone when I met her, but she told me she wanted me because he was too dull. She said I was exciting."

Lisa says that Franchot’s sons, Pascal (a.k.a. Pat) and the late Thomas Jefferson (a.k.a. Jeff) did have vague recollections of the house on Foothill Drive, and of seeing Barbara there, but that it was difficult for them to be sure as they were both very young at the time and were officially living with their mother, Jean Wallace, and her new husband Cornel Wilde, at their home on Hillcrest Drive.

Franchot's biographer Lisa Burks, says, “Whether Franchot ever forgave Barbara or not remains a mystery because he rarely, if ever, spoke of her after their divorce. Because of this, I’m led to believe that he did forgive her, in his own quiet way. I do know that he felt sorry for her and was saddened by the way her life had turned out, but he also knew from experience that there was nothing he could do to help her, because she seemed unwilling or unable to help herself."

Sources: "Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography" (2002) by Lawrence J. Quirk & William Schoell and "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd