Glamour, Glitz, & Gossip at Historic Magnolia House: Joan Blondell, Dick Powell

“Joan Blondell was the screen’s sexiest female, and I’ve bedded Ava Gardner” —George C. Scott

At the end of her national tour in the play Crazy October (1959) Joan Blondell had bonded with its author, James Leo Herlihy, American novelist and playwright, who would commit suicide at the age of 66, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles. Herlihy also directed actress Tallulah Bankhead in the touring production of his play Crazy October. Three of his one-act plays, titled collectively Stop, You're Killing Me were presented by the Theater Company of Boston in 1969. According to author Sean Egan in his biography of Broadway playwright James Kirkwood, Ponies & Rainbows, Herlihy co-wrote the play UTBU (Unhealthy To Be Unpleasant) with Kirkwood but demanded his name be taken off the credits. Herlihy reportedly said to Kirkwood he'd bonded with the legendary Joan Blondell. “Of all the movie stars I’ve interviewed or known, she was that special someone,” he said, “a great lady who’d seen and done it all. I adored her, especially when she came with me to the Magnolia House during her stopovers in New York. In Hollywood, I became her guest. She even cooked for me her favorite vegetables, rutabagas mashed with potatoes.” 

“The reason I agreed to take the second lead in Crazy October was that it gave me the chance to work with the great Tallulah Bankhead,” she said. “But after I joined the cast, I was terribly disappointed in her. She appeared on stage drunk most of the time—one of the most unprofessional and foul-mouthed actresses I’ve ever starred with. After our first tryout, she realized I had the better part, and was getting the most laughs, and she resented me for it. I’d been cast in the play as an over-the-hill actress, remembering the loves of yesterday that seemed to have been blown away by the summer wind. And as the tour moved on, I became more sympathetic to Tallulah. She was a lonely and depressed woman, staging a kind of last hurrah.” “Crazy October was anything but a masterpiece, but we soldiered on,” Joan added, “playing to packed houses. We found our most receptive audience in San Francisco. Tallulah was virtually a gay icon there.” 

“We toured everywhere,” Blondell said about her nomadic childhood. “My father even took us to China. My big number was called ‘In a Rosebud Garden of Girls.’” With her itinerant family, Blondell had spent six years in Australia before moving to Texas, where in 1926, she became “Miss Dallas.” “A year later, I almost became Miss Universe,” Joan bragged, “and I was fourth runner-up representing the Lone Star State in the Miss America competition.” James Cagney was one of Joan's fervent admirers. “She looked like a tootsie, so I called her Grandma. It was a joke, of course. She might have gotten better roles than the stuff that Warners dished out. I don’t mean she could have played Lady Macbeth but she might have made a fine dramatic actress. Jack Warner cast her as a floozie, a gun moll, a gold digger, or as the sister of the leading lady.” Blondell was cast with Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse (1931), playing the star’s insolent, gum-chewing sidekick. In Night Nurse, Clark Gable, in one of his first films, was cast as an amoral chauffeur. “I swooned when he came on the set,” Blondell said. 

“Gable had such animal magnetism. We shacked up one night. And although he went on to other seductions, he was not gone from my life completely,” she said. After Gable returned from World War II, Joan played the third lead in his comeback picture, Adventure (1945), co-starring Greer Garson. As an airplane pilot, Gable had flown dangerous missions over Germany. He told Joan, “Hitler wanted me to be captured alive. As I was told, he planned to exhibit me nude like a caged animal, mocking my image as King of Hollywood.” “On the screen, Greer Garson was his lover, but she and Clark had no chemistry at all,” Joan said. “Offscreen, he made love to me, not Greer.” 

“Clark adored women but not in a lechy way. He worshipped beauty. His eyes would sparkle when he saw a beautiful woman, and he’d set out to get her. Usually, he succeeded. When he grinned, you melted. He had the hormones of any gal working overtime unless she was dead, and then I’m sure he could have revived her with a kiss.” In the late 1940s, during her marriage to the movie producer Mike Todd, Gable phoned Joan and set up a private dinner with her. He’d heard how awful Todd was, and he urged her to divorce him. “Even though she’d died in an airplane crash in 1942, Clark was still mourning the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard.” “I found that he was very lonely, so I kept inviting him over when Mike was away. I still remember those juicy steaks he brought from his ranch and even fresh milk for me.” “On occasion, he said I was the only woman in Hollywood who reminded him of Carole. One night, he even proposed marriage, but I turned him down—imagine, me turning down the great Clark Gable. 

But I did. I told him that no other woman, not even me, could replace Carole Lombard in his life.” In Adventure (1945), a romantic drama made a few months after World War II, Blondell played a slightly giddy blonde who goes for sailors, particularly Gable. Motion Picture Herald called her “a sheer delight.” Bogie escorted Joan to the premiere of Night Nurse and later spoke about her to his best friend, actor Kenneth McKenna. “She’s my kind of broad. I like her tremendously, but I’m not in love with her. Besides, Dick Powell is always knocking on her door.” Joan's father was one of the original “Katzenjammer Kids,” based on the popular comic strip. Both of her parents, Ed and Katie, were eccentric vaudevillians, hitting the stage in elaborate costumes with a carefully rehearsed schtick. The four of them, including sister Gloria, toured Honolulu, Australia, and New Zealand. Joan remembered the white sand beaches of Hawaii, running through a rice field wearing only a bra and a “shredded wheat skirt.” In Australia, she briefly fell in love with the son of a hotel manager, but the family kept on moving. 

In Three on a Match (1932), Joan was pleased that Bogie was also in the cast, which otherwise starred Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak. In the late 1920s, Davis had been her classmate when they attended the Robert Milton/John Murray Anderson Theatre School in Manhattan. On the set of Three on a Match, Davis approached her. “I’m miffed. Your part is better than mine.” The balance eventually swung in Davis’ favor. In 1934, Davis, not Joan, was selected as Cagney’s co-star in Jimmy the Gent. Adding to the perception that Davis was supplanting Joan in box office appeal, Bogie, too, would make several pictures with Davis, notably The Petrified Forest in 1936. On the set of Big City Blues (1932), Bogie told his co-star Joan: “I’m pissed off that Mervyn LeRoy has given me such a small part. I’m a leading man, not a bit player.” Bogart later told LeRoy, “The only good thing about working on this turkey is that I can resume my affair with Blondell.” 

In Big City Blues, Joan was cast as Vida, a street-wise Manhattan gold digger who’s tangled with too many Stage Door Johnnies through her day. Her fourth appearance with Bogie—or fifth if you count that 1930 short Broadway's Like That, also featuring Bogie's second wife Mary Phillips—was the romantic comedy Stand-In (1937). Joan played a character called Lester Plum, a cheerful former child star cast in the film as a stand-in for the actual star. Born in Pasadena in 1892, George Barnes had been nominated for an Oscar at the dawn of the Academy Awards for his work on The Devil Dancer (1927), costarring Clive Brook and Gilda Gray, before the movies had learned to talk. Over the course of his professional life, Barnes would be nominated for his cinematic skill a total of eight times, but he won only once for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), co-starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Joan recalled: “At last, George started to notice me. One day, he told me he was working diligently to capture my beauty on camera. What actress wouldn’t love a man who told her that? We began to date. Was I impressed! Hollywood was a small town in those days, and an important guy like George knew all the Hollywood elite.”

“During our second date, he took me to a dinner party at the home of Ronald Colman, one of my screen idols. A suave, English gentleman with that seductive voice and those impeccable manners. One by one, Miss Nobody from Dallas was hanging out with all these big stars. No one was a bigger name than ‘The Great Profile’ himself, John Barrymore. He invited me for a walk in the garden. Over the next few weeks, as George and I dated, I also met George Arliss, Wallace Beery, Ruth Chatterton (a big snob who insisted she be billed as Miss Ruth Chatterton), Adolphe Menjou, and even Slim Summerville—that ugly former Keystone Cop was the least likely movie star ever to hit Hollywood! My favorite times with George were private dinners alone with him.” After his divorce came through, Barnes and Joan were married in January of 1933 in Phoenix, Arizona. In a bizarre fit of indiscretion, Joan’s father, Ed Blondell, told Barnes that Joan, at the age of eight, had lost her virginity backstage in an accident involving the jagged edge of a costume trunk. It kind of sounded suspicious in my book. A month after their wedding, Barnes stridently insisted that he did not want to have any kids with Joan. 

Joan sighed: "I refused to have another abortion, and our son, Norman, was born. But George was indifferent to him. Later I had a daughter with Dick Powell. We named her Ellen, and she took after her father. Dick adopted Norman and we changed his name to Norman Powell. George never got over the resentment of my giving birth to our son,” she said. “He often fought with me, insisting that I loved Norman more than I loved him. It was dreadful.” Suffering mental troubles, the great cinematographer fought with directors whenever he insisted on filming Blondell “only from the neck up.” Joan was strolling toward the Warner commissary when she encountered her future second husband Dick Powell. Both of them were new to the Warner Brothers’ lot. They struck up a conversation, and Powell invited her to lunch. She found him “amiable, boyish, and bursting with energy.” Born in Arkansas in 1904, he had dark, wavy hair and cute dimples. He’d been an adroit crooner and a band-leader before landing a contract at Warner Brothers. 

As one critic had claimed, “Dick Powell’s most lasting image is still that of the wide-eyed hoofer, face alight with joy, tunneling through the splayed legs of Busby Berkeley’s chorines in 42nd Street (1933).” Another critic referred to him as “Warners’ crooner-in-residence glowing with a kind of gosh-and-golly ebullience.” Joan didn’t know at the time of their inaugural meeting that she’d costar with him in so many movies. After an unsuccessful first marriage to Mildred Maund, a childhood friend, Dick Powell would eventually become a fixture in the bedroom of legendary comedienne Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. Powell would go from there to seduce Ginger Rogers, his co-star in 20 Million Sweethearts (1934). Mary Martin and Evelyn Keyes will each lay in his future conquests. Gold Diggers of 1933 became the most famous Depression-era musical. In it, Busby Berkeley directed a swirling kaleidoscope of all-girl dancers who was reviewed as “intoxicating.” Joan rendered her most stirring song, “Remember the Forgotten Man,” with 150 male extras cast as hobos unfairly thrown out of work. It was later defined as "the most socially compelling of any song to emerge from the Great Depression." 

Dick Powell appeared with Joan again in Footlight Parade (1933), featuring James Cagney as the hoofer star. Some critics have hailed this movie as “the best of the Depression-era musicals.” The romantic leads were played by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Along with Adolphe Menjou, Joan was given top billing in Convention City (1933). Dick Powell, along with Mary Astor, was a supporting player. Joan didn’t want to make the picture, but Jack Warner threatened her with suspension. Back on the lot, she was grateful to be reunited with Powell in yet another movie. “He was looking better and better every time I saw him,” she said. “I kept wondering if he and I might hit some high notes.” Convention City ran into trouble with the newly formed Production Code, its board members interpreting the characters as “amoral.” Joan fought with Warners until the studio raised her salary to $1,600 per week. In Colleen (1936) Joan was cast as Minnie, “an adenoidal, chocolate-dipping swindler,” as the script defined her character. By September of 1935, Joan and Powell were dating steadily, and her divorce from Barnes came through on 4th September, 1936. 

The press took notice of the odd pairing, giving echo to some insiders who maliciously called them "Floozie and Dopey". But Powell was no dope, as his career as a producer, director and as a tough guy star would prove later. “We rushed through the shoot because we were to get married in a yatch wedding on September 11, 1936.” During filming of Stage Struck, she fell and “nearly broke my ankle,” Joan claimed. “And my darling crooner came down with a case of laryngitis.” Hundreds of their fans showed up for their wedding. But after five years of marriage, and finding that they had vastly opposite personalities and tastes, Powell and Blondell began to drift apart. “We were married for seven years, but he was more like a friend to me in the end. Eventually, Dick and I slept in separate bedrooms. He spent more and more time in his study, working in his real estate business and listening to Bing Crosby, my former co-star when we’d made East Side of Heaven [in 1939 for Universal]. I suspected that Dick was having a fling on the side, that's the reason I fell into the arms of Mike Todd.” 

Joan’s final co-starring roles with Powell were at Paramount in the aptly named I Want a Divorce (1940) and Model Wife (1941). “I think Paramount was trying to tell me something,” Joan laughed. “They didn’t invite me back for the next twenty-five years.” As the war-torn 1940s rolled in, many of Joan’s rivals from the 30s had evolved into big stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and the Warner Brothers' queen Bette Davis. “During my marriage to Dick, our best friends were Ronald Reagan and his wife, Jane Wyman. We dined with them either at their home or at our house once a week,” Joan said. “Dick and Ronnie always talked politics, while Jane and I caught up on Hollywood gossip.” As her marriage continued to unravel, Joan saw less and less of her husband. She learned that he was slipping around and seeing June Allyson, being billed at the time as the “America’s Sweetheart,” usually opposite the gay/bisexual actor Van Johnson. Soon, Powell and Allyson’s affair became more visible, in part to their many appearances as a loving couple at the Mocambo, Ciro’s, Chasen’s, and Romanoff’s. Joan’s divorce from Powell followed her appearance in court on July 15, 1944. “Actually, as the years went by, I began to feel sorry for Dick for having married that Whimsy-Pooh woman, Allyson.  

And I felt sorry for her, too, because Dick was too controlling and scheduled. I kept up on the gossip. Allyson even had an affair with John F. Kennedy.” During their marriage to Powell, Allyson seemed to have flirted with some of her leading men, notably Peter Lawford when they made Good News in 1947 and James Stewart when they shot The Glenn Miller Story in 1954. Allyson fell in love with Alan Ladd (one of her life's most important affairs) and supposedly carried on with Dean Martin during a wild weekend in Las Vegas, according to Confidential magazine. Probably Blondell was prone to imagine that Powell and Allyson would maintain affairs on both sides in their marriage, since Joan's marriage to Powell had been affected by mutual infidelity, but Allyson insinuated that Powell could never have accepted infidelity on her behalf. And Allyson said she never found evidence of Powell's infidelity, either. Actually, Powell was an old-fashioned man and Allyson had to learn to rein in her impulsive nature. In fact, their marriage would be very different from that of Powell and Blondell, where there had been reports of mutual infidelity, Blondell supposedly having affairs with co-stars Bogart, Clark Gable, and John Wayne. 

Powell had been romantically linked to Rosemary Lane (his co-star in Hollywood Hotel and Varsity Show). There was always bad blood between Blondell and Allyson. But, as so often happens in Hollywood, rivals get cast in the same picture. Such was the case when Joan & June starred together in The Opposite Sex (1956). In spite of their failed marriage, and despite the forceful objections of June Allyson, Joan eventually attended Powell’s funeral on January 2, 1963. Mourners reported that Joan was teary-eyed at the services, and that she was greeted by Richard and Patricia Nixon, James Stewart, Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Some eight hundred mourners, including part of the elite of Hollywood. 

“I’ll never marry an actress,” Mike Todd, the theater and film producer, had once claimed. “To live with an actress, you gotta be able to worry about her hair. When her bosom starts to drop, she gets panicky. You gotta pay all those bills from the headshrinker.” Obviously, Joan Blondell and Elizabeth Taylor changed his mind about marrying actresses. In film history, Todd was known mainly for the 1956 release of Around the World in 80 Days. Its all-star cast included, among others, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, David Niven, Cantinflas, and a cameo by Evelyn Keyes. Joan Blondell also talked at Magnolia House about the unhappy trajectory of her marriage to Mike Todd. In 1943, Joan—married at the time to Dick Powell—began to know Todd more intimately. She thought that Damon Runyon’s description of him was accurate: “A short, chunky and dark kind of guy, a human dynamo with a big cigar hanging out of the corner of his fast-moving lips, spitting out orders to his flunkies.” —Glamour, Glitz, & Gossip at Historic Magnolia House: From the Silver Screens of Hollywood to the Lights of Broadway (2019) by Danforth Prince