Dick Powell & June Allyson: A Marriage on the Rocks (Modern Screen magazine)

The Powell marriage is in bad trouble. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—not that they’re likely to. Around Hollywood everyone is talking about it. The people who, a few years ago, were claiming that the Powell home was Paradise and Junie the Angel-in-residence, are now the first to voice the gossip and the rumors—in private and in print. But the real story of this marriage-gone-awry is not a vicious one. It is instead one of Hollywood’s real tragedies—the story of a girl who has had to learn how to live with fame and wealth and servants—and somewhere along the way lost the ability to mature as a wife. Go back a ways. Ten years ago, in August, 1945, June and Dick were married—to the accompaniment of the usual dire predictions. June’s too young for Dick, they were saying. Not only is there an age difference, hut she’s immature even for her years. Certainly she won’t be able to adjust to a man of forty, set in his ways. They have no interests in common. 

And there’ll be clashes in their careers. At first it looked as if they were wrong. It was just these disparities that kept the marriage happy. June, young and desperately insecure, clung to Dick as she might have to a father. He made the decisions, she followed his lead. The more his famous friends frightened June, the more she relied on Dick. He in turn seemed content with the arrangement. It may not have been the best, but somehow June and Dick gave each other what they needed. As for careers, June was heading hard for stardom with no detours. Dick, whose career had been in something of a slump, couldn’t help but profit from the publicity that followed his marriage, even though he said—and meant—that he hated every word of it. He’s always hated publicity while he established himself as an actor and became as successful as he had been as a singer. Their first home, small though it was, frightened June—it was the first real house she had lived in. Although no one talked about it then, she fell into frequent black moods. The only real success she knew was on screen, playing to perfection the bubbly, tender, bright-eyed youngsters. Off-screen she felt gauche, inefficient. Gradually—how could she help it?—she began to carry her roles over into real life, looking for the same admiration and confidence that they brought her in the movies. 

For a while it worked. But only recently one of Dick’s friends felt forced to say, “I’ve never seen anything like Dick’s patience. June is like a kitten, adorable when she wants to be. But when a husband has to keep getting his wife out of scrapes and defend her idiosyncrasies and repair broken friendships, the kitten act isn’t so charming any more. At parties she’d insist on going her own way, and many’s the time I’ve seen Dick patiently waiting for her to stop captivating everybody and get in the mood to go home.” So that was an effort that not only did it hurt, rather than help her marriage, but it left June inconsistent and unreliable in most of her social contacts. A photographer who has known her for years says frankly, “You can’t help liking her little character, but neither can you help the feeling that she’s insincere. She really doesn’t like attention in public or to be bothered about pictures, and it’s as though she liked the fact of fame, but was bored by the work that goes with it. She can always put on an act when she wants to, though. I’ve seen her greet people I know she can’t stand as though they were her long-lost sisters, when it didn’t even seem necessary. On the other hand, when she’s in one of those steely moods of hers, she can freeze people who matter to her, for hours on end. I guess she thinks there will always be people to drool over her.”

Those are harsh words. Her great failing has been that she did not—or could not—know when to stop. Mothers have always told their children, “Don’t make faces. You might freeze that way.” Perhaps someone should have told June that, ten years ago. They said instead, “It’ll never work. They have no interests in common.” It was true enough that their hobbies were different. But again, they tried. Dick had long since settled on sailing and flying and Junie took a crack at both. But you can’t manufacture a passion out of thin air, and eventually Dick sold his boat and stopped insisting that June fly with him. June hunted diligently for something they could do together. In rapid succession she tried golf, painting, skiing, music, tennis. She bought mountains of the best equipment and propelled Richard into one fad after another. But June is and always was flighty and changeable. Her interest never lasted long enough to take root. She picked up one novelty after the next, played with each for a while, devoted the whole of her amazing energy to it, then discarded it for something new. Dick’s friends felt that he couldn’t share her interests—there was nothing really there to share. “Junie’s easy to love,” they said, “but hard to live with. Bubbles are pretty and enchanting, but no one ever caught a bubble.”

By the time the Powells moved to their second house, in Bel-Air, June had learned a lot. Dick had taught her to dress and entertain, to run a house and handle servants. Pamela and Ricky arrived while they lived there and the marriage was at its happiest. June made quite sincere statements to the press about the joys of marriage. “I wanted a career and a husband,” she said, “and when I got Richard as a husband the career suddenly seemed unimportant.” She gave a successful dinner party, all by herself, and was as pleased as if she’d won an Oscar. No one, certainly not June, suspected that she was only in another of her phases, that in a matter of months the role of Happy Housewife would have palled. It did. By the time they moved to Mandeville Canyon, their current home, things had changed for the worse. “Mrs. Powell,” one of her ex-servants reported about the subsequent progress of her mistress, “wasn’t what you’d call a homemaker. I remember reading about how she went up to St. George in Utah when Mr. Powell was making The Conqueror, and how Mrs. Powell made such a home for him at the motel. I guess that was one of her spells. Most of the time Mr. Powell did every thing that had to be done around the house. He made all the decisions and maybe she resented it, but if she did all she had to do was pay some attention to running the house. I’m sure it would have been all right with him. There was something, too, about her redecorating the house recently. That’s probably all publicity, because they have a decorator do most of that sort of thing. Mrs. Powell never did do much about the house.”

Yes, things had changed, in more ways than one. For the growing-up that June had done, although perhaps inadequate for the needs of her marriage, was enough to change her attitude toward Dick. She still let him run things—but not because she couldn’t handle them herself. She just didn’t want to be bothered. At the same time, she resented Dick’s decisions, but refused to make them instead. Dick Powell is one of the best-liked men in Hollywood. No one has ever said a word against him as a husband. But he is also a successful businessman, now firmly established in his third career—as a fine director and producer. He works late hours and spends much of his time at home conducting business on the telephone. He’s busy and often tired. But June's youthful dream of marriage as a perpetual romance does not quite fit the facts. Perhaps this is as much the fault of Dick Powell as of June. What Dick should have taught June is how to use the strength he gave her with wisdom. The crowning blow came recently: the rumors about June and Alan Ladd weren't as easy to dismiss as those stories that had circulated in the past about June and Peter Lawford or June and Dean Martin. The greatest significance of these latest tales is that people believe them—and discuss them aloud. 

Dick has always advised June about her career. Under his influence June became the number one box-office star in the country—and stayed there. One of the greatest stabilizing forces in their marriage has been her acknowledgement of his help and her real gratitude for it. When, with considerable self-confidence, she left MGM, she proved that she had a business head of her own and was capable of using it. But Dick was still beside her, offering reassurance and advice. But over The Shrike they disagreed. “I think when June made The Shrike it was a real turning point in her attitude,” a close friend says. “Dick didn’t want her to do it, said she wasn’t ready for such a subtle acting chore. But she went ahead and did it, and when the kudos came pouring in for the job she did, June figured Dick’s advice wasn’t any good to her any more. You can bet there was a lot of ‘I-told-you-so’ around the house after the reviews came out. This kind of thing happens a lot around town. I can name a dozen actresses who figured their husbands weren’t worth much to them once there’d been talk of an Oscar. When they’re really career-conscious, they’d rather have an Oscar on the mantel than a husband in the house.” Around town everyone knew that something was brewing—long before the Alan Ladd stories started. 

Friends noticed that June’s moody periods, the tantrums that had almost disappeared, returned. At Universal-International, where she made The Glenn Miller Story and later The Shrike, they said, “We didn’t know what to expect. She’s so darned cute on the screen that you can’t believe reports that she’s hard to get along with. But we found out. It depends on Junie’s mood, you see. Sometimes she’s a doll, and then one day she’ll walk in and the fur will fly. And you wish you’d stayed in bed.” At Paramount, where she made Strategic Air Command, they said, “This kid is a show all by herself. It’s amazing the way she can get what she wants. She seems to sense right away the best way to get around a person. If she has to be nice, she’s nice, if she has to be cute, she’s cute, and if she has to be nasty, she’s nasty. The result’s always the same, though—what Junie wants, Junie gets. In a way, you have to admire her for it, but I’ll tell you this. I’d never want to get on the wrong side of that one. Br-r-r-r!” And at MGM, when she returned to make Executive Suite: “Long before she left here she was starting to be difficult, but she’s so damned cute that it’s hard to hold anything against her for long. And then when she came back, well, I can’t say that her working at other studios has improved her disposition. Let’s just say that she’s a moody character, and the guys on the set sort of hold their breaths to see what frame of mind Allyson is in that day.”

Around town, many are saying it’s only a matter of time until Dick Powell agrees with that final sentiment. By the time this is printed, they say, he may have echoed those words in a divorce court. Others say that the marriage will last—but only until the completion of It Happened One Night, which Dick plans to produce—with June as the star. But there are those who say that this marriage deserves—and will get—another chance. When two people have tried as long and as hard as June and Dick to overcome the obstacles in their way, there must be a reason, a great real love and need for each other that causes them to keep trying. If they have failed it is not for lack of love, but because they have gone about it clumsily. If June can learn to use her new maturity and confidence as efficiently and wisely in her marriage as in her career, she and Dick may yet make a go of it. They have two children and a long life together to make it worthwhile. We wish them all the luck in the world. —Article by William Barbour for Modern Screen Magazine (September 1955)