Siodmak's "Phantom Lady": 70th Anniversary

"When she appeared at the dining room entrance presently, she was hatless, and he was surprised at how much the hat had been able to do for her. There was something flat about her. The light had gone out; the impact of her personality was soggy, limp. She was just some woman in black, with dark brown hair; something that blocked the background, that was all. Not homely, not pretty, not tall, not small, not chic, not dowdy... just colorless, just a common denominator of all feminine figures everywhere. A cipher. A composite. It was only in the foyer that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again." -Phantom Lady (1942) by Cornell Woolrich

Siodmak's breakthrough in Hollywood, Phantom Lady (1944) would also represent one of Cornell Woolrich's most identifying and defining writings in his homonymous novel (penned in 1942 under the pseudonym "William Irish"). Translated through an uneven screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld (co-writer of The Dark Corner and Caged), Woolrich's story revolved around a beautiful and loyal secretary (Carol 'Kansas' Richman, played by Ella Raines) trying to absolve her boss of the charge of his wife's murder brought against him. The first part of the film narrates how Scott Henderson (an engineer played by Alan Curtis) fails to reconnect with his only alibi: a mysterious lady (Ann Terry, played by Fay Helm) with whom he had spent the night after a bitter argument with his wife. The film's explicit working title was Condemned to Hang and was released in USA on January 28, 1944 (just two months before another noir masterpiece sourced in crime fiction: Double Indemnity).

The most impressive similarity with Woolrich's novel was the emphasis on Carol (encouraged by producer Joan Harrison, a former assistant of Hitchcock who defined herself as a 'twarthed writer'), and her multiple transformations throughout the tense and turbulent plot. She oscillates between the dutiful stenographer (secretly in love with her boss), a vengeaful Gorgoneia and a 'hep kitten' floozie. Ella Raines becomes the absolute moral center, mesmerizing us and the rest of the characters with her resplendent orbs and sharp sleuthing skills. Despite not having received great appraisal at the time, Ella Raines renders the most interesting portrayal of her underrated career by becoming an unassailable noir heroine.

A remarkable departure from the novel is the dandified figure of the villain, Jack Marlow (played by Franchot Tone), who wouldn't appear for the first 45 minutes. Tone approached this "psychopatic intellectual" by documenting his role attending sessions with a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. His is one of the most memorable maniacs on film, due to the exquisitely amoral performance elicited by Tone, specially harrowing during his last scene with Raines. Tone's character feels that the sense of stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted in the Big City, without clear rules to abide by.

This polluted urban honeycomb and their inhabitants' scattered emotions lead Marlow to suffer migraines, nervous tics and eventually rabid madness, although he will deny suffering from any mental disorder, since he is utterly incapable of recognizing a madman when he's looking at his reflection in the mirror. Henderson's wife "was not in love with anyone but herself. She was the type that likes to flirt and string people along. She let him arrange his whole future around her, knowing darn well she wasn't going to be there to share it with him. She let him sign on for five years with this oil company in South America."

Marlow discloses to Carol his clandestine love affair with his best friend's wife : "I never liked cities. The noise, confusion, the dirt. They hate me because I'm different from them. I don't belong here. Neither do you. You should have never come to New York. Never met Scott. The world's full of men like him! You can buy nice stupid people a dime a dozen! Never allowed myself to love anybody before. I was always naïve about women."

The filthy aspects from the city's underground are faithfully captured in the drum solo scene, brillianty delivered by Elisha Cook Jr. (Cliff), his syncopated lust for Carol/Jeannie projecting a radical antagonism to Marlow's brainy sublimity. In the novel, Carol briefly escapes the intoxicating jazz dive: "the open air made her almost light-headed, it was so cool and rare and crystal clear after that fever chamber. She thought she'd never breathed anything so sweet and pure before. She leaned there against the side of the building, drinking it in, her cheek pressed to the wall like someone prostrated."

Woolrich's poetic lines ("An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed") were matched or even surpassed by Siodmak's translucent lighting and spectral atmosphere.

The coveted orange hat featuring a sequined double bird appliqué (an exclusive design which is copied by the titular Phantom Lady) is equally transfixing in the film context as it was conjured on page, symbolizing a vain attempt to control our vagrant fates. Siodmak, who came from the Weimar cinema and had been censored in Germany for his occasionally racy mise en scène, wisely juxtaposed his masterly angled compositions (helped by cinematographer Woody Bredell) to Nietzschean paranoid ideas permeating Marlow's speech, creating a disconcertingly frightening effect in the viewer as a result.

This is one of the most delightfully perturbing entries from Siodmak's genial ouvre, available in DVD since last year. Highly recommended, not only for the fans of the noir genre, also for those admirers of German expressionism and inspired literary adaptations.

Article first published as 'Phantom Lady's’ Sixtieth Anniversary on Blogcritics.

Restoration of "Detour" (The Film Chest) - Tom Neal's fall from grace

Detour Is The Latest Film Restoration From The Film Chest As It Heads To DVD On July 22: The latest film restoration project from the Film Chest was announced this past week and it is none other than director Edgar G. Ulmer’s perfectly-pitched 1945 film noir masterpiece, Detour. It will be available for collectors to savor on July 22.

Although a “poverty row” production, Detour magically rose above its humble roots over the years to be revered as one of the great film noirs… with Ann Savage gaining cult status as the predatory Vera. Tom Neal, well, his star burned brightly during this period until the famous altercation with Franchot Tone over their mutual love affairs with actress Barbara Payton. Source: dvdandblu-rayreleasereport.blogspot.com

"Detour": haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it. Most critics of “Detour” have taken Al's story at face value: He was unlucky in love, he lost the good girl and was savaged by the bad girl, he was an innocent bystander who looked guilty even to himself. But the critic Andrew Britton argues a more intriguing theory in Ian Cameron's Book of Film Noir. He emphasizes that the narration is addressed directly to us: We're not hearing what happened, but what Al Roberts wants us to believe happened. It's a “spurious but flattering account,” he writes, pointing out that Sue the singer hardly fits Al's description of her, that Al is less in love than in need of her paycheck, and that his cover-up of Haskell's death is a rationalization for an easy theft. For Britton, Al's version illustrates Freud's theory that traumatic experiences can be reworked into fantasies that are easier to live with. Maybe that's why “Detour” insinuates itself so well -why audiences respond so strongly. The jumps and inconsistencies of the narrative are nightmare psychology; Al's not telling a story, but scurrying through the raw materials, assembling an alibi. Source: www.rogerebert.com

Actor Tom Neal wanted to be a star in Hollywood. He hardly came close. Although he was featured in at least 180 Hollywood productions, starting with Out West With the Hardys in 1938, he never really emerged from B-movies. Indeed, he spent virtually all of his career playing macho character roles in films such as Flying Tigers, Behind the Rising Sun and First Yank Into Tokyo.

The closest he got to bigtime fame was his role as the unlucky, star-crossed piano player Al Roberts in the cheapie 1945 noir classic Detour. In that film Neal's character hitches a ride to California to be with his girlfriend, accidentally kills two people and ends up destitute and on the lam. In the last reel, as he is being shoveled into the back of a police car, he intones the classic line: "Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me for no reason at all." He had no idea at the time how prophetic that line would be. Or that he would be replaying that very same scene 19 years later.

Tom Neal's film career arc began its abrupt slide in 1951. That's when he got into a fist fight with actor Franchot Tone over the affections of sexy, upcoming star Barbara Payton on the front lawn of Payton's Hollywood home. After this scandal Neal and Payton found they couldn't buy a job in Hollywood, which at that time was much more sensitive to the public's opinions about the stars than today. (Ironically, in one of the last pictures either of them made, the 1953 Robert I. Lippert epic The Great Jesse James Raid, Neal and Payton starred together.)

Cathedral City auto dealer Glenn Austin kicked things off by taking out an ad in a local paper soliciting contributions for the Neal defense fund. Local friends of Neal began to send in checks and soon Hollywood, the town that had turned its back on him years before, responded, with celebrities like Mickey Rooney and Blake Edwards, columnist Dorothy Manners and Harrison Carroll, and, ironically, Franchot Tone, the man responsible for Neal's fall from grace, all contributing to the fund. Throughout the trial Barbara Payton had been in the gallery and she and Neal waved to each other. That was the last time they would ever see each other again. Neal was paroled from prison on December 6, 1971, after serving seven years. He moved to Hollywood, the scene of his rise and fall, and died there of natural causes a year later at the age of 59. The famous line from Detour resonates: Fate or some mysterious force had put the finger on Tom Neal for no good reason at all. Source: www.palmspringslife.com

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

Franchot Tone: Group Theatre and other loves

Franchot Tone's mother Gertrude Franchot was one of the four children of Stanislas Pascal Franchot II and his wife Annie Powers Eells of Richwood, KY. In 1895, Franchot Tone's grandfather moved to Niagara Falls, New York, where he organized The National Electrolytic Company, a producer of industrial chemicals. In 1906 he was elected to the New York state government as a Republican Senator representing Niagara and Orleans Counties. His daughter Gertrude married Frank Jerome Tone: they had two sons, Frank Jerome Tone Jr. and Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone (Franchot Tone). Franchot was also a distant relative of Wolfe Tone: the "father of Irish Republicanism". Franchot was of French Canadian, Irish, English and Basque ancestry.

Tall, handsome, always well dressed, this affluent young Cornell graduate seemed out of place in a company founded to present radical plays. But Tone had a serious side not evident to those who saw him squiring beautiful women around New York nightclubs. His lively interest in social and economic issues had steered him toward New Playwrights and made him receptive to Clurman’s ardent formulations.

Harold Clurman had spotted Franchot Tone in a New Playwrights production of John Howard Lawson’s The International in January 1928. Morris Carnovsky shared Tone’s intellectual nature, though his background was more akin to Clurman’s and Strasberg’s. After Strasberg’s return, they finally settled on twenty seven actors, including Stella Adler, Margaret Barker, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Bill Challee, Bobby Lewis, Sandy Meisner, Ruth Nelson, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Patten, Eunice Stoddard, and Franchot Tone.

Franchot and Stella Adler were the actors most openly and agonizingly conflicted about their relationship with the Group. Like her, Tone was not a mixer. The convivial discussions that kept Morris Carnovsky, Joe Bromberg, and Lewis Leverett up late at night in the living room were not for him.

In the years since he’d first worked with Strasberg and Clurman on New Year’s Eve, he’d become a sought-after leading man; conventional Broadway stardom still tempted him. He found fault with Strasberg and the rehearsals, as if looking for flaws in the Group ideal that might justify his abandoning it. He staged minor rebellions against Group discipline. He went out of his way to provoke people, infuriating Carnovsky on the Fourth of July by setting off batches of firecrackers outside the main building and drowning out the tranquil strains of Mozart within.

When Carnovsky protested the noise, Tone shouted, “I can’t stand your noise!” and slammed into his car for a visit to New York and less elevated entertainments. Possibly their new social consciousness encouraged a confrontational manner toward the bourgeois world, and none more so than Franchot Tone. His manner was aloof and his behavior disruptive. After a few sessions he refused to attend Tamiris’ classes, and he took no part in the experimental work. He drove onto the lawn after late-night drinking sessions and destroyed the garden furniture; he went hunting and shot off guns dangerously close to the rehearsal rooms.

Tone left camp for days on end to see his current flame, the film actress Lilyan Tashman, who had not been made welcome by the Group. Strasberg gave an angry speech saying that Tone might be one of the finest actors in America, but he lacked the dedication the Group demanded; several actresses wept as the director said he no longer wanted Tone in the company.

Bud Bohnen read his part in 'Success Story,' and it seemed Tone’s association with the Group was over. It was a painful moment for the Group. Only one other member had ever resigned, and Mary Morris hadn’t been as integral a part of the collective. Tone was one of the earliest Group believers, a participant in the 1928 sessions on Riverside Drive, and their principal leading man. If his difficult temperament made him less than the most popular member of the company, everyone respected his acting ability and was shocked that he’d decided to squander his talents in the movies. Tone’s departure wounded the Group’s confidence. It would heal, but the scar remained.

In Group mythology Tone’s defection became the original sin, the shocking deed that forced them to face the fact that idealism could fade and worldly success mean more than artistic integrity. He stayed with 'Success Story' two months longer than initially planned, raising the hope that he might have a change of heart and rededicate himself to the Group. Finally, he left for the West Coast to fulfill his MGM contract. Tone wept over his farewell drink with Clurman in a 52nd Street speakeasy.

[When] in dire need of funds to commission more plays, Clurman appealed to Franchot Tone, who had written that he missed the Group but intended to stay in Hollywood because he’d fallen in love with Joan Crawford. Tone promptly sent a check to tide them over. Group moral indignation against the actors who had deserted to the movies earlier lapsed, and they had friendly dinners with Joe Bromberg and Alan Baxter. Sundays with Franchot Tone and his wife, Joan Crawford, became a weekly Group get-together.

Sylvia Sidney, who was romantically involved with Luther Adler, had been a stage actress before she came to Hollywood; she was an ardent admirer of the Group’s ensemble acting. Franchot Tone would be rejoining the Group for the 1938–1939 season. In his nearly six years in Hollywood, Tone had made more than thirty pictures, most of them thoroughly undistinguished; he looked east to the achievements of his old friends with nostalgia and an increasing desire to be part of their work.

His marriage to Joan Crawford was on the rocks, his contract with MGM would be up soon, there seemed no reason to stay. Just how strong an attachment the Group could prompt was evident in the words of Franchot Tone shortly after he arrived in New York on December 11, 1939 to begin rehearsals of The Gentle People. “I’d better not get started on the Group Theatre,” he told an audience at a Town Hall Club lunch, “because I know I’ll get too emotional about it and then I won’t be able to talk at all.”

The Gentle People as a play was cause for concern. Tone played the gangster who shakes the people down for protection money, then seduces the lens grinder’s daughter (Sidney) and demands their life’s savings, which he intends to use to take the daughter to Havana. Sidney angrily concluded that the Group cared about her and Tone only as box-office draws, whereas she had come to them sincerely as an artist wanting to grow. Tone himself was disappointed in Clurman’s direction, although he didn’t say so until after the production opened; he wanted very much to believe in the Group.

Reviewers weren’t quite as impressed as the fans. They liked the acting well enough: many thought Sidney gave her best stage performance ever; Tone’s return to the theatre was hailed; It was increasingly obvious that he was disillusioned with the Group and shared Sidney’s suspicion that they were using him for his drawing power as a star. Irwin Shaw warned Clurman that the Group had treated Tone tactlessly; although Tone had invested $22,000 in The Gentle People, he hadn’t been invited to Council meetings during rehearsals to discuss its progress.

Tone might not have been so annoyed by the Group’s ineptitude in business matters had he been more satisfied artistically, but he’d convinced himself that he was miscast as a gangster, that Clurman hadn’t given him enough guidance, that he’d really wanted to act in the Odets play with his old Group friends Carnovsky, Adler, and Smith —in short, that he’d been mistreated and exploited. -"Real life drama: the Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940" (2013) by Wendy Smith

Jean Wallace was a gorgeous, blonde California number -tall, slim, but voluptuous like Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall. Howard Hughes was one of her many torrid liaisons. Legend has it that when Franchot Tone first saw Jean at the Cocoanut Grove, he asked her over his table, he proposed to her, and tied the knot two days later. One of the shortest courtships in history. It sounds implausible, but Jean could bring out that kind of mating urge in most any man. Jean, unfortunately, started drinking and having produced two lovely sons with Franchot Tone, they divorced. She then married Cornel Wilde and they traveled the world. Jean was a tortured soul who carried herself well.

Barbara Payton had grown with alcoholic parents in Odessa (Texas), where her father's motel failed despite the influx of workers to the oil boom town. Barbara's brief marriage to Franchot Tone was a nightmare. She explained they came from different worlds: "Franchot Tone had more class in his baby finger than anyone I know. I am not a great actress, Franchot was. You had to be 'real' with Franchot." Tom Neal offered a different kind of reality. She returned to Tom because "he made me feel like a real whore." Neal would slap her around while having sex. -"Hollywood Gomorrah" (2014) by Skip E. Lowe

The crime film They All Came Out, lensed in 1939 by the masterful horror and film noir director Jacques Tourneur, cast Tom Neal in a lead role as a tough gang member rehabilitated by both his stay in federal prison and the love of a gun moll (Rita Johnson).

As a result of his fine work in this film, Tom was handed the male lead in another crime drama, Within the Law, co-starring Ruth Hussey. “During this time, Tom was carrying on with both Joan Crawford and a studio executive’s wife,” claims Walter Burr, “and when Crawford learned he was two-timing her, she did her own complaining to Mayer, who wound up blasting Tom.” Angered by both the lackluster film roles being handed to him, as well as Mayer’s lecturing him on behalf of a jilted Joan Crawford, Neal reportedly ranted at the tyrannical executive in front of several studio employees. An irate Mayer immediately retaliated by banishing Tom from the lot and releasing him from his contract after just one year.

One night in mid-1950, Barbara Payton entered a Charleston contest on the Sunset Strip, and not only walked away with first prize, but with Franchot Tone (one of the judges) as a new admirer. An International News Service story reported: "Barbara Payton, the girl in green with the chandelier earrings hanging to her shoulders, had everyone screaming for her to win the Charleston contest at the Mocambo, and she did. Many people did not recognize her except to say that she looks 'like a cross between Jean Harlow and Carol Channing'." Franchot apparently was impressed that night with a lot more than Barbara’s dancing. It was later said that their eyes locked across the nightclub’s dance floor, and that with one glance at the flaxen-haired temptress, the stylish sophisticate, and inveterate connoisseur of female beauty, was instantly hooked. Lisa Burks: "Franchot had the desire to help young Hollywood hopefuls with his experience and his flair for mentoring, and Barbara was an ambitious and willing student. He encouraged her, as he encouraged all the women in his life."

Also in 1956, Franchot married his fourth wife, former Warner Bros. starlet Dolores Dorn (Phantom of the Rue Morgue), a beautiful, 22-year-old woman whose blonde and blue-eyed countenance was, not surprisingly, highly reminiscent of both Barbara Payton and Jean Wallace.

"Although Dolores Dorn-Heft is blonde, lissome and worthy of all this attention, she is no mere posturing pea-hen. She makes real her confession that her marriage to her aged spouse was well-meant at first but is now a boring mockery. Miss Dorn-Heft (Mrs. Tone in private life) is guilty of some lapses but her delivery is, in most cases, genuine and forceful.

Franchot Tone in Chekhov Drama 'Uncle Vanya' (1958): Mr. Tone, as the middle-aged country doctor torn by the discovery of his love for the beauteous young wife of the garrulous and pompous aged professor and his hate of the wastefulness of his compatriots, contributes a thoughtful, sensitive and wholly striking portrayal. Although he knows it is the fate of intelligent men to be called 'odd,' he is lucid and straight about his approach to truth. It is a subdued but shining performance that registers just as clearly as Chekhov's words. Franchot Tone and his fellow players and associates have contributed a solid and genuine legacy to the arts and devotees of theatre everywhere." Source: www.nytimes.com

A lifelong smoker, Franchot was living at the time in a magnificent townhouse on Manhattan’s East 62nd Street, where his ex-wife, Joan Crawford, frequently visited him during his illness. “They had remained close friends after their divorce,” reveals Lisa Burks. “Franchot and Joan Crawford enjoyed an affectionate friendship until the day he died, and the same can be said for his relationships with Jean Wallace and Dolores Dorn.”

After a torturous three-year battle with cancer, Franchot finally succumbed to the illness on September 18, 1968, at the age of 63.  Lisa Burks reports that all three of his surviving ex-wives attended his funeral. “Franchot left his family well provided for,” she says, “in light of the fact that this was money he had earned over his lifetime and not reflective of any family wealth he had inherited.” -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd