Lunch with Lizabeth Scott: The Dark Queen

The origins of the adage 'Never meet your idols' can be traced to 1865, when Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary: “You should never touch your idols: a little of the gold always rubs off.” Unlike our peers who were more concerned with sports, drugs and sex, we’d use our collective resources to drive to the neighboring Montclair Cinema or Fox Theater in Pomona for any double feature. At Claremont High School, we were coming of age and becoming increasingly interested in art, especially cinema, the seventh art, which we were taking seriously. Lauren Bacall was a true presence and had the carriage and bearing of a great lady. It was like seeing Mount Rushmore. So famous and so iconic. Her steely countenance revealed nothing, not even the hint of a smile at having just nailed a scene in one take. Her attitude and body language were clear, she wasn’t doing a second take. Everyone seemed fearful of her and kept telling her how great she was. Imperiously ignoring them, the scene was officially over when she crossed the lobby and left the building. Hitchcock, another American institution, was born English but had become a U.S. citizen in 1955. It was clear that foreign filmmakers agreed with him when he said, “I’ve always been American in my heart, ever since my mother took me to the movies.” 

To finally be able to see all of the Busby Berkeley movies I knew everything about but had never seen a frame of, up there on the big screen, was like finding the best drug in the universe. It took me days to come down from a Busby Berkeley film. I enrolled in more classes with Andrew Sarris as well as classes with erudite film scholars like Robert Belton and Richard Koszarski. It all introduced me to the broader scope of global cinema, it gave me a new respect for Hollywood, and introduced me to this magical genre called “film noir.” Film noir captivated me from the start. It was so American. So all or nothing, so black and white, so glamorous and depraved. Amazing movie stars, who had escaped me until then, began to appear in my collective Hollywood consciousness—luminaries of great beauty and complexity like Robert Mitchum and Gene Tierney. 

My first major star obsession was Veronica Lake. After seeing her in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941), a great film by Preston Sturges, I was hooked. I read everything I could about her, deducing that she was a film noir star when teamed with Alan Ladd in fantastic titles like THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942) or THE GLASS KEY (1942). Veronica’s noirs were elusive, but her photographs were pervasive. I started collecting them: her exquisite face framed by her platinum peek-a-boo hairdo captured by George Hurrell, the classic one-eye on a bear rug, a charming publicity still from I MARRIED A WITCH (1942). THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947), directed by Orson Welles, became what still might be my favorite movie of all time. I saw it three times in a row. I was watching DEAD RECKONING (1946) and she had not even appeared onscreen, but she had Bogart’s attention, and mine. And then, the greatest movie star introduction of all time. The camera begins on the manicured feet of open-toed shoes of the as-yet-unseen mystery woman. Acting as the eyes of Bogie’s character “Rip Murdock,” the camera looks up and gently admires a leg peeking from the slit of a black evening gown. It rests for a moment on her fingers extricating a cigarette from a silver case, and then follows the cigarette up to the lips of a face in profile surrounded by fluffy billows of platinum hair. This must be the dame. Bogart’s hand reaches in with a lit match for her smoke. She turns to the camera and for the first time I saw the face of Lizabeth Scott. The black and white print of the film was flawless, and except for the absence of color, it was as if I were there in the room with her. Her face was luminescent. Thick, darkly drawn eyebrows over profound crystalline-blue eyes. Cascading folds of blonde hair gently bounced around her unimpressed face. “Thanks,” she says as she takes a deep drag. “Very much.” With a husky voice.

Her voice was even lower than Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall combined. Her diction was pronounced and unique. Almost strange. Was it an accent? Bogie then impeccably sums her up. “Cinderella with a husky voice.” She shoots back, “Where have we met?” “In another man’s dream.” They don’t write them like that anymore. I helplessly stared at this specter and asked myself why I had never seen or even heard of this magnificent creature before? I mean, there she was co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in a big budget A-picture for Columbia. Lizabeth Scott’s character, Coral Chandler, sings a song called “Either It’s Love or It Isn’t.” It was love for me. This movie was to be Rita Hayworth’s follow up to the international success of GILDA. Instead, Rita had cut and bleached her hair to make LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Rita Hayworth was replaced by Lizabeth Scott, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures’ producer Hal Wallis. Scott was promoted as “The Threat,” and was often compared to Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, as both were former models and had deep, sultry voices. 

DEAD RECKONING was cinema at its best, complete illusion from fascinating actors with personal faces and voices, and exquisite cinematography by Leo Tover who later shot the gorgeous THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951); everything that has been lost in the digital revolution of perfect computer-generated images combined with the modern fondness for mumbling actors in lieu of true movie stars. I may have been stoned but my rapture was real. Some say men have the capacity to fall in love at first sight since they are smitten with the look of someone, whereas women need to fall in love while in a relationship. This is what it was for me. Love at first sight. The lights came up and a magnificent obsession was born. British film critic Leslie Halliwell’s description of Lizabeth Scott (A sultry American leading lady of the forties, a concoction of blonde hair, defiant expression and immobile upper lip) incensed me and immediately reminded me of his equally dismissive commentary about the remarkable actress Kim Novak.

I was feeling that rapture with Lizabeth Scott and couldn’t understand how Mr. Halliwell could be so cruel to these great stars of Hollywood’s golden era in his so-called film encyclopedia. Knowing this “authority” was just wrong and being subjectively cruel to Kim Novak, who was uniquely brilliant, made me positive he was wrong about Lizabeth Scott too. Let me get this straight. Lizabeth Scott co-starred with Bogart, Mitchum, Powell, Lancaster, Heston, even Elvis Presley... and still a movie geek like me had no inkling that this star had once burned bright in the galaxy of Hollywood. I felt incomplete. My inquiring mind wanted to know. Needed to know everything. An elaborate scavenger hunt of sorts thus commenced. Its treasure would change the course of my life. There was no better time or place to have an obsession than New York City in the 1980s. I don’t know how I discovered Movie Star News at 134 W. 18th Street, but walking in there was a major breadcrumb. Paula Klaw, daughter of photographer Irving Klaw (the man who discovered and made an icon out of Bettie Page), ran this enormous warehouse of memorabilia for sale, the bulk of it being 8x10 photographs that were indexed away in endless rows of filing cabinets. The cavernous space reeked of photo chemicals, and amidst a sea of glamorous male and female faces, there was Lizabeth Scott. 

I excitedly asked Paula if she knew her. She said not personally, but that Lizabeth had autographed that photo herself when she visited the store in the 70s. I couldn’t believe I was meeting someone who had actually met her. I couldn’t believe Lizabeth was a real person. I asked her what she was like. “She was very nice, they all are.” Paula had met many Hollywood actors and was as enthusiastic as I was. I asked if she had any more photos of Lizabeth. She asked how much time I had. I proceeded to spend the next several hours carefully examining Paula’s seemingly endless collection of photographs and negatives of Lizabeth. Her unmannered projection of the tough girl was direct and vibrant, elevating it from the confines of its times. Paula always cut me a deal and I would take away as many as I could. I was able to create a class load at Columbia that was completely contained on Tuesday and Thursday. That left me three days a week to work, which I gladly did to feed this growing habit. The second major breadcrumb was a book. 

The Paramount Pretties by James Robert Parish was first published in 1972. I discovered that, unlike her predecessors at Paramount, Lizabeth Scott was not contracted to the studio but to the company’s leading independent producer, Hal B. Wallis, who, like David O. Selznick before him, made a lucrative business of loaning his contractees to other producers with substantial profit. This breakdown of the omnipotent studio’s star system worked to Lizabeth’s disadvantage. Paramount was disinclined to promote a free-lance player who was so tenuous as part of its set-up. Compounding her plight was her rebellious individuality. Lizabeth had little use for the conventional homage movie stars usually paid to the establishment in the film industry, and she rarely kowtowed to the ranking institutions or powerful gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. 

With rare exceptions, Lizabeth was stereotyped on the screen as the temptress who had no desire or will to change and was doomed to find a worthwhile good guy to love her only when she had already passed the point of redemption. By the mid-1950s, Lizabeth’s screen career had tapered off altogether, not so much by an expose of her personal life in Confidential magazine as by poor professional management. I found out that Lizabeth got her start on Broadway in Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth with Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift. Lizabeth had been Bankhead’s understudy and James Robert Parish intimates that the plot of the classic film ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) was inspired by the relationship between Lizabeth and Tallulah. 

One evening, a random friend of a friend happened to be over and noticed my budding shrine. “Hey, that’s Lizabeth Scott!” My jaw dropped in disbelief that someone other than myself correctly identified her. Not only did he recognize her, but he knew her! He was a few years older than me and had just moved to New York from Los Angeles to be a Broadway dancer. He explained that he had been her aerobic teacher from 1983 to 1986, at a studio on La Cienega Boulevard. Lizabeth drove a green Jaguar, shopped at Quinn’s market (a health food emporium), and did aerobic dance three times a week. He had no personal information or contact for her, but it was enough information to set my brain spinning. If I were in Hollywood, could I locate her? Could I find her apartment on Hollywood Boulevard? “8277 Hollywood Boulevard.” By my calculations using FILM NOIR An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, I determined that Lizabeth had appeared in more noir films than any other actress, so publicly I declared her the “Queen of Film Noir.” Living in Silver Lake, our phone exchange was the now-defunct Normandie or 666 code. I hoped that wouldn’t freak her out. 

One day in February I came home from work and my phone answering machine was blinking. “This message is for Todd. This is Mrs. McCormick, Lizabeth Scott’s secretary. She would like to meet you this Friday for lunch at Musso & Frank.” Between 1946 and 1954, the prime years for the genre, Lizabeth Scott headlined in thirteen features that have been deemed film noir from the golden age of Hollywood. Her debut YOU CAME ALONG (1945) was one of her own favorites of all her 22 films. The screenplay was written by fellow Hal Wallis contractee, Ayn Rand, who had just scored a major success two years earlier with her novel The Fountainhead. Lizabeth was smitten with Ayn and her Objectivism theory which, aside from her devotion to Catholicism, intrigued and colored her own beliefs. They became lifelong friends. The character Rand wrote for Lizabeth in You Came Along, Ivy Hotchkiss, is very close to Lizabeth, the real person: full of life and wit, kind and supportive, always ready with a smile or a laugh to lighten the load. In the seminal 1973 essay The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Molly Haskell identifies Lizabeth Scott as “a kind of blonde Joan Crawford in the noir arena of female characters,” who wasn’t necessarily evil herself, but whose very presence seemed to invite evil. “Every time she appeared, the atmosphere became heavy, and we knew that trouble, big trouble, was ahead,” wrote Haskell.

In THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946), Lizabeth Scott goes head to head with Barbara Stanwyck, who had already staked her claim as a noir queen with her iconic Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). These two wonderful actresses have an exciting, slightly sensual stand-off in their only meeting on camera. Lizabeth has the last laugh in the end when she drives into the horizon with leading man Van Heflin. Across town, Stanwyck empties her gun into Kirk Douglas and then herself. Lizabeth told me the last time she saw Stanwyck at Chasen’s restaurant, they hugged each other. 

It only took until her third film and second noir, DEAD RECKONING (1947), for Lizabeth to develop a screen persona so jaded and disillusioned with post-war America, the whole raison d’être for film noir, that she emerges the quintessential noir queen—the impeccable ice blond sexual minx, rendering men useless with her poker-faced lies, and a warm gun in her purse. Lizabeth is the femme fatale who inhabits the dark city, although she's not always malevolent. Dead Reckoning was the film that made me fall in love with her, inevitably drawn to her character Coral Chandler who could kiss me or kill me at any moment. Her acting style has been recently described as “dreamwalking,” incorporating a numbness, a frozen quality necessary to move forward in a world filled with disappointment. As an actress, Lizabeth Scott was defining the noir archetypes that would mirror our own fears.

Her next film put her in a league of her own, both as an actress and as a noir icon, the exquisite PITFALL (1948). Lizabeth creates Mona Stevens as a character that resonates by not being a particularly good or bad girl. She’s adrift, taking the best deal she can cut. She accepts the advances of the attractive and bored married man John Forbes (Dick Powell), avoids the advances of a psychopathic stalker (Raymond Burr) while waiting for the advances of her boyfriend Bill Smiley (Byron Barr) who is in jail for stealing a boat he seduced Mona with. The dualism of Mona's morally ambiguous actions and her relationship with a married man is the yin and yang of American idealism and greed. PITFALL is probably Lizabeth’s greatest performance, and as such the film resonates as a morality tale. 

We both root for “marriage” and “goodness” to survive while we empathize with Mona’s uncertain future and lack of fair choices for herself. Her chemistry with Dick Powell is remarkable, yet with sad undertones, very different from her temptress with Bogart in DEAD RECKONING. Lizabeth seemed intrigued by Bogart and Powell and her personal fascination with both men translated to the screen. She'd comment about Powell: “I shall never forget his eyes, so beautiful, so trusting. I’d just stare into his blue eyes and completely lose myself.” 

TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949) emerged as a crowd-pleasing staple of noir festivals film and contains Lizabeth’s most popular performance. Director Guillermo del Toro said of Lizabeth Scott in Too Late For Tears, “She is perfect in this movie.” Her character Jane Palmer that Lizabeth creates is the ultimate “femme fatale” in the annals of cinema. A self-absorbed narcissist, her rage at her bourgeois existence bubbles over when she accidentally gets her hands on some easy money. With escape from the doldrums in her grasp, she loses her cool, sparing nothing and no one in her quest to keep the loot, always one step ahead of everyone else. Dan Duryea was one of film noir’s most dependable smarmy louts. However, in TOO LATE FOR TEARS his character cracks under Lizabeth’s unbridled evil. She eventually reduces this depressive tough guy to a quivering bowl of jelly before the big kiss off. Will women stop at nothing? you can almost hear the audience ask, as Lizabeth’s character takes everything she’s fought for down with her in her untimely demise. When she gets her inevitable comeuppance, you really feel bad for her even though she is rotten to the core. 

That was the magic of Lizabeth Scott. Lizabeth and Dan Duryea both won the prestigious Photoplay Award for best performance of the month in June of 1949. I was beginning to question how this woman could be a lesbian. She hadn’t given me anything but insight into her seemingly heterosexual libido. When she'd opened the glamorous carte of her Musso’s menu to make her luncheon selection, she looked up with a grin and proclaimed, “Fish!” We both laughed and I felt sure it was her way of tipping me off about that delicate subject. Working at the AFI I had personal interactions with film critics Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin, which meant so much to me. I would find out later Martin Scorsese was also a Lizabeth Scott fan. My confidence growing, and with her birthday approaching, I wrote to ask if I might take her to lunch at Musso & Frank again, to celebrate her birthday and show her The Lizabeth Scott Compendium on my laptop. She replied yes. 

She was ahead of the curve with her sex positive attitude and I loved her even more for it. She confessed: “I had a fantastic romance with Hal Wallis. He was like a father and mother and lover all in one. From the time I was twenty-three he sponsored my career and we stayed friends until he passed ten years ago, making me a richer woman than I already was, by the way.” In 1966, Lizabeth found a new love and was engaged to a glamorous Texas oil millionaire tycoon in a whirlwind romance worthy of Liz and Dick. William Lafayette Dugger swept Lizabeth off her feet with a promise of a jump start to her career producing dramatic films for her in Europe. Fate spoke, and her beloved fiancé died the night before the wedding in 1969 following complications from an abdominal surgery. She was inconsolable for years. Though Casablanca was the film of which Wallis was most proud, the films he watched repeatedly were those starring Lizabeth Scott. Even during his second marriage with Martha Hyer, Wallis continued to screen Scott's night after night, over and over, in his home theater. Wallis never got over her sheer physical beauty, her voice and her greatest grace, charm. Clearly, there was something about that dame. The phone rang. “Todd, it’s Lizabeth Scott. I’ll do the Cinematheque meeting as long as Eddie Muller is not in the building.” 

She associated me with her newly rising popularity. She had almost been mobbed at the Egyptian and the Cinematheque, that had instigated new policies. I was elated for the rare occasion that she did open up about her career. “Andre DeToth was my favorite director! That was an extraordinary film and a marvelous group of people. Up to this time Hal Wallis productions were very regimented, they knew exactly what they wanted—the script was ready, the director, everything was synchronized to perfection. Now, when I was borrowed to do that film, I worked for an independent company, not for Hal Wallis Productions. Dick Powell was my leading man, and he was delightful.” There is one scene in particular, right before she and Dick Powell make love, that captures that excitement of a first kiss so effortlessly, unlike the formal presentation you normally get from Hollywood. Her nuanced performance and the excellent script should have qualified Lizabeth Scott for an Oscar nomination. 

James Ellroy made a reference to Lizabeth Scott in "Crime Wave" (1999), a collection of short works of fiction. Danny Getchell, the reporter in Crime Wave, seems to have a boner over a hot lesbian actress (Liz Scott) who tells him with a sneer: "I wouldn't date you even if you had a sex change and you appeared as Rita Hayworth." In real life, Ellroy didn’t fact check or, more likely, didn’t care about hurting an actual person and made mincemeat out of Lizabeth Scott. “Loin-lapping Liz Scott” is discovered at a gay bar that is a “Mecca for mannish muff-munchers” and “rapacious diesel dykes.” Of course in late 1990s, Ellroy had developed a reputation as a notorious asshole. And I could always tell when people were fibbing about her if they called her Liz or Lizzie. She abhorred those names and only went by Lizabeth. Barbara Stanwyck once said that her dear bisexual friend Joan Crawford would be fine with her daughter Christina Crawford spilling the dirt, but the lesbian accusation in her tell-all book Mommie Dearest would have killed her and she was probably rolling over in her grave. I reached out and proposed that we take Lizabeth to dinner at the restaurant in the Sunset Tower, a classic Hollywood landmark, an art deco doozie built in 1929 that had the added allure of a film noir. 

Its first literary mention was in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940). The film version of that novel, MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) with Dick Powell, was its first screen reference. Not only did she take the bait, but she also invited us to have a drink at her house first. Ms. Scott did not complain about anything and even deemed the evening a smashing success. She refused an escort to drop her back at her house, although we watched until she was inside and the lights came on. I realized how far I had come. I used to think her world was something I could never be a part of. Yet somehow, I had become a part of it. I felt a part of Hollywood and it felt wonderful. One night I had phoned her and told her I loved her. She'd admonished me: "Todd, go to bed and hang up." I had worshiped her for the first time after having seen her in Dead Reckoning, while I was studying in Paris, and I believed she was just a black and white screen goddess. I had loved Lizabeth Scott so much that eventually I manifested her into my reality. Now I say "Forget the rules. Always meet your idols. And be nice." –"Lunch with Lizabeth Scott" (2022) by by Todd Hughes

Cry Danger (Dick Powell), Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Reality, Longing for Home

Rocky Mulloy (Dick Powell) is out of prison after serving five years of what should have been a longer sentence, thanks to a disabled marine who has appeared with an alibi. Rocky claims not only innocence, but insists that he was framed (though the police don’t think so), and he is determined to get to the bottom of everything – even at the risk of endangering his own identity or security. That’s his goal, but nothing out there awaiting him is what it seems to be on the surface. I was prepared to run out of patience with Richard Erdman as the soldier who provides the alibi and has his own motives for glomming onto Powell, but it turned out, due to sharp direction and one liners, that I ended up liking his character before the first act was even over. 

Regis Toomey as the unconvinced, relentless cop, makes a flesh-and-blood character out of a part that could easily have amounted to a mere trope. And Rhonda Fleming (‘The Queen of Technicolor,’ but this is in B&W, so no auburn hair on display) is rightly worried about Rocky’s obsessive quest, which very shortly turns him into a walking target. William Conrad (The Naked Jungle) plays Castro, the burly villain of the piece, and in his long career it’s the best I’ve ever seen him. And the sleaziest. I guess he’s meant to be a Raymond Burr noir-clone here, but it’s a stand-alone performance as a slimy noir villain. 

The lesser roles are also well cast and acquitted. Jean Porter, appearing in a few scenes, comes on hard and defensive when Powell interrogates her, then softens up when she senses there might be something amorous for her from Erdman. In the book “Film Noir – An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style,’ published in 1979, Alain Silver says: “Robert Parrish’s pacing in CRY DANGER is fast compared to the languorous tempos of his other films [THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY, DUFFY] and much more distinctive for that very reason, thoroughly consistent with the overall realization of the film.” However, time has revealed that Dick Powell was the primary director of the film, but he allowed Parrish to take the credit. Powell cannily navigated the Hollywood waters, a long way from the boyish tenor he played in the Busby Berkeley flicks, to the no-nonsense noir protagonist he's portraying in Cry Danger, and then went to the 50s TV as entrepreneur and feature director he next became. 

I don’t know much about Powell personally, given there is not a great deal of information available, but he certainly had a clear-headed business sense. As the centerpiece in CRY DANGER, Powell carries the film effortlessly all through. It's mentioned on the Cry Danger DVD that it was a restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, funded by Eddie Mueller’s Film Noir Foundation. Bravo on them. It looks really great, and it’s a wonderful surprise. Maybe the story is a bit familiar at times, but everything else is splendid: the rapid-fire and witty hard-boiled dialogue, the revved up pacing, the intense performances, the quick narrative twists, and Joe Biroc’s masterful cinematography. Dick Powell has essential moments and scenes that are stunningly acted and thanks to Biroc's unique angles, perfectly lit and framed. Source: https://filmsinreviewarchives.com

Fredric Jameson’s essay Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Reality is actually a monograph consisting of three chapters whose main thesis is that Chandler’s novels are all essentially the same story, and Marlowe travels from space to space, the spaces each defining different socio-economic realities. The ‘crimes’ are all incidental; the search/journey is the point. In the end, the search validates Heidegger’s distinction between the ‘world’ and the ‘earth’—our historical/cultural ethos and the material world in which it is set. Marlowe discovers that separation and thus offers an interesting example of modernism which reinforces the theories of such continental thinkers as Barthes, Benjamin, Jakobson, Althusser and Heidegger. When Chandler studied at Dulwich he came under the influence of A. H. Gilkes, who had a profound respect for the ‘common man’—a view that affected P. G. Wodehouse, C. S. Forester and other prominent writers. This, along with Chandler’s own painfully-won knowledge of British snobbery helped to shape his views of culture and society. Jameson argues that the real villains in Chandler’s crime novels are “societal” villains, e.g. police corruption; the Chandler villains are all “institutional”—big government, big unions, organized crime, big business, and so on and it is his ongoing argument that these structures are often in cahoots with one another and always at the expense of the lone, decent individual. Chandler makes this point at length in the peroration of “The Simple Art of Murder”. 

The isolated individual struggling to be heroic in the face of long odds and long guns is Chandler’s hero and he fits very nicely within the ethos of both film noir and existentialism. It is one of the truly interesting aspects of twentieth-century literature that there is not a long distance between Eliot’s Waste Land and Chandler’s Los Angeles. Jameson respects the “desperate sense of piety” of Marlowe, whilst labels the expectation of a light at the end of the tunnel an “ontological fallacy.” His final chapter is called ‘The Barrier at the End of the World’ – “world” here being the Heideggerian sense of human subjects (Dasein) projecting a metaphysical “world” outwards. Jameson expands this idea to suggest that both death and the urbane city are akin to “spatial concepts” in Chandler. In Farewell, My Lovely, this “barrier at the end of the world” is represented by a white fence, which Jameson finds “the most fascinating and enigmatic object in all of Chandler”. Finally, Jameson believes this “shill game” of distraction via the detective’s diverting procedures brings us up against “the reality of death itself”, the non-space which cannot be mapped, which escapes any imagined totality. To a correspondent who suggested that Marlowe was immature, Chandler replied sharply that if being in revolt against a corrupt society was immature, then Marlowe was extremely immature. Source: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu

To find solace without the yearning for meaning is to find stillness and to experience what it is to be fully human. The French philosopher Simone Weil develops the idea of acceptance in a particular direction. ‘At the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world,’ she writes in her ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ (1943). Rather than straining ourselves in a supreme effort to find answers, to achieve goals, to reach destinations, we should instead learn to wait. Waiting means making oneself receptive, and being ready to recognise a truth when it shows up. We must stop searching for meaning continually, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart, for such truths as there are to turn up. In her posthumously published Waiting for God (1950), Weil finds resolution in a new concept of attention, attention as ‘waiting’ not as ‘searching.’ In her book The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (1993), the US author Madeleine L’Engle longs for a garden of Eden that she is certain once existed. She writes: "We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes." In literature the longing for home is found in many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged. Source: aeon.co

Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, Gypsy Rose Lee, (Wheatley Institute Sex Report)

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that over half of married adults in the United States enter marriage today having had five or more previous sexual partners. A new report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University (April, 2023) reveals that a large number of sex partners a person has prior to marriage is one of the strongest predictors of eventual divorce. Among the report's findings, according to Brian J. Willoughby, Ph.D.: Married men and women are remarkably similar in their levels of sexual activity before marriage, with 1 in 5 reporting 1 or 2 lifetime sex partners (20% of men, 19% of women), about 1 in 3 reporting 2 to 4 sex partners (35% of men, 33% of women), about 1 in 4 reporting 5 to 9 sex partners (23% of men, 25% of women), and the remaining 1 in 5 reporting 10 or more sex partners (22% of men, and 23% of women). In analyzing the overall trendline, for every additional sexual partner reported, the probability of being highly satisfied with their marriage decreased by almost 4%. About 18% of 30–34 year olds have had 9 partners or more in the US. One reason that more previous partners could lead to lower marital quality is that more experience may increase one’s awareness of alternative partners. Roughly two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans say that when a man has an affair, it is always morally wrong. Fewer Americans (58 percent) say it is always morally wrong when a woman has an extramarital affair. 

Seventy percent of women say that a married man who has an affair is always morally wrong, while fewer (56 percent) say the same when married women have relationships outside their marriage. Fifty-three percent of men say it is always morally wrong for a woman to have an affair, while 61 percent say same for men. The extent to which women judge the behavior of married women and men varies significantly by race. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Hispanic women believe that a man having an affair is always wrong, while slightly more than half (53 percent) of Hispanic men agree. Conversely, black women assess the morality of marital infidelity about equally whether it is committed by a man or woman (65% vs. 63 %)  There is a notable age gap as well. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of young women say it is always morally wrong for a man to have an affair, while only about half (51 percent) say the same for a woman. The double standard among older women is not nearly as large. Sixty-nine percent of senior women say it always wrong for a married man to have an affair while sixty percent say it is always wrong when a woman does. Another survey concluded that “extremely liberal” women are more than twice as likely to have engaged in extramarital affairs as “highly conservative” women.  Similarly, “extremely liberal” men are nearly twice as likely to have engaged in extramarital affairs as “highly conservative” men. Source: www.americansurveycenter.org

TCMDB examines Ginger Rogers’ rise to stardom, the production of Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934), highlighting Ginger Rogers and Dick Powell’s previous history. The loan-out from Paramount to Warner Bros was hardly a problem for Rogers, who knew that screen exposure in a variety of films was the ticket to stardom. In addition, the film provided her a reunion with Dick Powell, whose talent and good looks had impressed her when he played banjo as part of the orchestra for a singing engagement she had in Indianapolis. At the time, Rogers had thought his good looks and youthful charm were a natural for the movies and was happy to find her prediction come true when Powell quickly hit the big time as the star of several lavish Busby Berkeley musicals at Warners. One columnist wrote at the time, "Dick wants all of Ginger's time. And he gets it... so that looks serious on Dick's part. As for how serious it is on Ginger's part - she's been obeying her new boyfriend implicitly, while ignoring Lew Ayres." 

June Allyson: "I borrowed a scrapbook from his dad and learned about Richard's early career; his romantic triumphs were also featured. Glamour and sophistication were obviously what he was used to. Richard had been linked romantically with his co-star in '20 Million Sweethearts', Ginger Rogers. Then there was his co-star in 'Dames', Ruby Keeler. When Ruby was separated from Al Jolson, she stirred up a minor scandal by moving to a house near Richard's bachelor pad. And then there was Rosemary Lane. They had been a continuing romantic saga in the press. Richard had snatched another beauty from the arms of Buddy Rogers, the actor who later married Mary Pickford. That was actress Mary Brian, whom he had started to date when he was master of ceremonies at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh and she had been booked as a visiting Hollywood star. Richard had certainly given Lew Ayres a run for his money when he was dating Ginger Rogers. One columnist wrote, "Dick, they say, wants all of Ginger's time. And he gets it. He doesn't even want Ginger to see Lew, so that looks serious on Dick's part." —"June Allyson" (1983) by June Allyson

Joan Blondell (about Warner Bros in the early 30s): "They wanted to change my name to, hold everything… Inez Holmes.” Reflecting about her career, she added: "I think I should have received some award, because I have given back more men to leading ladies than anybody else in the world," she laughed. "The toughest was handing Clark Gable back to Greer Garson," she told Hedda Hopper (Photoplay, November 1962). Joan Blondell and Mike Todd argued frequently, which prompted her to ask Dick Powell to let their kids Norman and Ellen live with him and his new wife, June Allyson, until the situation was ironed out. Blondell got a divorce in Las Vegas on June 8, 1950, charging Mike Todd with mental cruelty. Blondell never married again. Even though she once described living alone as a rather sad kind of life, none of her marriages gave her the fulfillment she'd expected. “George Barnes provided my first real home,” she said to Films in Review in 1972. “Dick Powell was my security man, and Mike Todd was my passion. Each one was totally different. If you could take a part of each one of them and put them into one man, you’d have one helluva husband.”

It wasn’t long after her divorce from Barnes when Joan Blondell began dating Dick Powell, and their romance intensified while they made Colleen (1936), although Ruby Keeler was the object of his affections on screen. Joan played a blonde cutie out to charm millionaire Hugh Herbert. Blondell and Powell were married on September 19, 1936, in a shipboard ceremony on the Santa Paula yatch in the harbor at San Pedro, California. For their honeymoon, the couple traveled through the Panama Canal. The timing was perfect as far as Warners was concerned, since their marriage gave Stage Struck (1936) a much-needed box-office lift. In this takeoff on 42nd Street, Joan gave one of her best performances as a temperamental star who makes life hell for her producer (Dick Powell). Joan and Dick worked together again in Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), a good entry in the series, which was highlighted by “All is Fair in Love and War.” The Berkeley spectacle had Dick and Joan leading opposing armies in the battle of the sexes. 

The Powells shared a large bungalow on the Warners lot. Visitors had no problem figuring out which half was Dick’s—corresponding clothes and shoes, shaving materials and toiletries were all neatly stored. Joan, by contrast, had shoes and undergarments scattered over chairs and on the floor, and cigarette butts thrown into the most readily accessible receptacles. Joan made The Perfect Specimen (1937), a comedy with Errol Flynn. “Oh, I loved Errol,” Joan told Leonard Maltin in 1971. “He was a dear friend of mine and quite unlike his publicity, he most of all was just a guy who liked to tell stories, have fun, have some drinks and be with his friends.” In general, Joan's films at Columbia seemed no more or less distinguished than her Warners entries, but Joan didn’t seem to mind. “I wasn’t that ambitious,” Joan admitted to Maltin. “I enjoyed a home life more than a theatrical career. I just took what they gave me because I wanted to get home quickly.” Joan and Dick rarely ventured out of the house, and instead spent the day reading the newspaper, playing with their children and grilling hamburgers. “That’s the way we live, like any other family,” Joan told a New York Times reporter in 1940. “You’d be surprised how easy it is in Hollywood. It’s not a complicated place to live.” 

One admirer who was bowled over by Joan’s burlesque routine in Cry Havoc was Broadway producer Mike Todd, who wanted her to play Ethel Merman’s role in the national company of Something for the Boys. Joan headed east to test for the part, but her inability to belt out a tune in Merman’s flashy style cost her the role. Instead, Todd developed a show especially for her: The Naked Genius, a comedy about a burlesque stripper who fancies herself as an author. The play was written by Gypsy Rose Lee and staged by George S. Kaufman. After the Pittsburgh premiere, a frustrated Gypsy Rose Lee began bad-mouthing the show to the press. She knocked the revisions, which she felt destroyed her plot and her dramatic cohesion. “Every time I see that show, I get a new fever blister on my upper lip,” she said. The Naked Genius opened at the Plymouth Theater on October 21, 1943, to critical pans, except from Lewis Nichols of The New York Times. “Joan Blondell, as the leading player, is okay for figure, manner and accent, and she seems to be having fun—all of which is proper.” Todd tried to outfox the critics but his ploy failed and the show closed after thirty-six performances. Gypsy Rose Lee was secretly glad the show had failed, since she disliked Joan Blondell for having separated Todd from her. 

Todd wisely sold the rights to the play for $350,000 to 20th Century Fox. It was eventually adapted as a screen musical, Doll Face (1945) by Lewis Seiler, featuring plenty of showbiz atmosphere and sharp backchat, with Vivian Blaine in Joan Blondell’s role. Dennis O'Keefe as Doll Face Carroll's manager and boyfriend Mike Hannegan is loosely based on Mike Todd. Gypsy Rose Lee was credited in the film with her real name Louise Hovick. Burlesque acts had been outlawed in New York in 1937. Yet Hovick's story features a pretty and intelligent stripper Elizabeth ('Doll Face') Carroll who learns a valuable lesson: the upper classes are inferior and less appealing than the common middle class. —The Women of Warner Brothers (2002) by Daniel Bubbeo

(Double Indemnity) From the Moment They Met: Dick Powell and Joan Blondell

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. From real crime to serial to novel to movie, the history of Double Indemnity is as complex as the plot of any to hit the screen during film noir’s classic period. Born of a true crime that inspired reporter and would-be crime writer James M. Cain’s novella, Hollywood bid on the rights but throughout the 1930s a strict code of censorship made certain that no studio could green-light a murder melodrama based on real events. Then World War II loosened some strictures, and director-writer Billy Wilder—before his prime as director of sparkling comedies—could hire hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler and revamp the story enough to pass the censors. Wilder then lined up a star cast led by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck in her unforgettable turn as the ultimate femme fatale, alongside Fred MacMurray, cast against type as her partner in crime. Wilder’s film became one of the earliest studio noirs to gain critical and commercial success (nominated for 7 Oscars!), to influence the entire noir movement, and to impact filmmakers to this day. Authors Alain Silver and James Ursini tell the complete history of Double Indemnity in their latest work on film noir: From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir (March 26, 2024) Source: www.amazon.com

“Okay Marlowe,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re a tough guy. You’ve been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you’re crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let’s see you do something really tough – like putting your pants on.’” Murder, My Sweet is the first of the film noirs, though The Maltese Falcon (1941) is considered by some film critics to be the first film noir, the visual and thematic sensibilities were not fully established till 1944, when this film, along with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Otto Preminger’s Laura were released (all of them in 1944). Among these three, it’s Murder, My Sweet that fully adheres to the low-budget, and a little unrefined, hard-on-the-edges aesthetics of a classic film Noir; both Laura and Double Indemnity were big budget, highly sophisticated, big studio films made by A list directors with glossy production values. There is a reason why the film Noir mainly originated, and remained the mainstay of RKO studios. 

Dick Powell’s background in romantic musicals gives him access to a far deeper emotional range, needed to play the complex, conflicted and a very vulnerable Marlowe; his cynicism, his humor, his loyalty to his code… it’s all there. Powell manages to give extra resonance to some of Chandler’s throw-away similes, thanks to his comedic talent, and he is particularly good at delivering those self-mocking, sardonic lines. No wonder Dick Powell claimed Philip Marlowe as his favorite role. Beyond that, this was a career-defining one, as after that, Powell would be known as the quintessential Noir hero, with further ventures into Noir territory, like the fantastic “Pitfall” and “Cornered”. On a tight budget, Dmytryk and Harry Wild (who'd worked on Citizen Kane) manage to infuse the film with all the seedy, chaotic topography that would become the hallmark of Noir thrillers. Dmytryk always insisted that Powell’s version was the closest to Chandler’s Marlowe, because Marlowe is not a savvy, super-sleuth like Sam Spade, which Bogart played very well; but Marlowe is more of an “eagle scout”, and that’s how Powell plays it. Then again, The Big Sleep was not exactly a Chandler movie; it was through and through a Howard Hawks movie, and Hawks always makes Hawks pictures, no matter what the genre and who the original author. Source: manksjoint.home.blog

I‘ve always thought Dick Powell, the first screen Philip Marlowe, was also the best. Director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter  John Paxton and producer Adrian Scott managed to captured the essence of  Chandler that proved so elusive in so many other adaptations. Powell was turned down by Billy Wilder for the lead in Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944) but Powell nabbed the role of Marlowe in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet, now considered a film noir classic, and never looked back. William K. Everson, in The Detective in Film, suggests that “Powell — because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it — became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart in The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946)], who had several other competing images working against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, and Rick from Casablanca. 

Dick Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks with superbly underplayed style.” By the time The Big Sleep was released, after numerous rewrites, Chandler’s dark existential stroll down the mean streets seen through the eyes of a world-weary detective had turned into a L.A. sexy romp, following a P.I. who spent much of his time flirting with man-hungry females. Even Bogart conceded in private: "You, sir, made a real good Marlowe."

Marlowe made his television debut in 1954, played by Dick Powell (who else?), in a live adaptation of The Long Goodbye that served as the premiere episode of the anthology series CLIMAX! Powell had, of course, played Marlowe ten years on the big screen, earlier in RKO’s Murder, My Sweet. By most accounts, it was generally a very good production, and was even featured on that week’s TV Guide cover, with a close-up of Powell as Marlowe in a clench with co-star Teresa Wright. But the live telecast is probably best known for the scene in which actor Tris Coffin, whose character had just died, gets up and walks away. Apparently Coffin thought he was out of camera range. He wasn’t. Unfortunately any recordings of the live episode have long since disappeared. Or been destroyed? Source: https://thrillingdetective.com

 

In West of Sunset (2014), novelist Stewart O' Nan imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years, which he spent in Hollywood. The book opens in 1937 in North Carolina, where Fitzgerald is "just eking out a living", deeply indebt to his agent Harold Ober, "but he sees a chance to get out of debt by going to Hollywood and he seizes it." Sometimes, Fitzgerald thought Hollywood was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. Grudgingly, he retraced his route to the studio and spent the afternoon restoring a scene that had been gutted. On the lot, before he punched clock, he stopped by the newsstand and scanned Sheilah's column. Among the casting rumors and studio press releases was a tidbit about Dick Powell and June Allyson getting cozy in a booth at the Victor Hugo restaurant, a Los Angeles landmark that had been relocated at 233 N. Beverly Hills Drive in 1934, designed by architect Claude Beelman in a Beaux-Arts Deco style. 

He told himself he had no right to be jealous, but Dick Powell seemed to have all the things Scott craved: self-confidence, all-American charm and a magnificent singing voice. Suddenly he went back to the past, thinking of his fascination with Lois Moran, already a star at seventeen, a sweet, clever kid whose mother traveled everywhere with her. Moran had starred in West of Broadway, a 1931 American pre-Code drama. Co-stars Lois Moran and Madge Evans said to Scott they swooned over Dick Powell too, much to his dismay. In 1934, Dick Powell was on the list of the top 10 movie stars of the year. Madge Evans and Fred MacMurray had starred in Men Without Names (1935), a crime film directed by Ralph Murphy at Paramount Pictures. In York Village, Maine, on July 25, 1939, Evans married playwright Sidney Kingsley, best known for his plays Dead End (with Bogart and Claire Trevor) and Detective Story. The couple owned a 250-acre estate in Oakland, New Jersey. Following her marriage to Kingsley, Evans left Hollywood and moved to this home in New Jersey, but before that she'd bid farewell to Scott, introducing him to Mary Brian. 

Scott and Lois Moran had double dates with Dick Powell and Mary Brian. However, Powell worked so many hours in company of Joan Blondell, it seemed inevitable for the Warners lot they would end up together. Sad fact is Mary Brian had even met and received approval from Powell's father for future nuptials. In 1935, despite still being married to George Barnes, Joan Blondell had insinuated into Powell's life, which led him to break up with Mary for good. Blondell, according to the jilted Mary, was "a man-eater, a dame in the worst sense." 

   

Excerpt from a Fox Movietone News newsreel from 1936. "The Hollywood Spotlight reports on the marriage of Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, and on Shirley Temple receiving a Shetland pony as a gift from 20th Century Fox chairman Joseph Schenck." Powell and Blondell first started dating in September 1935 and they got married on September 19, 1936. Their wedding took place on the yacht ‘Santa Paula’ at San Pedro. The docks were filled with fans. Joan's sister Gloria was maid of honor, actor Regis Toomey was the best man. An article published by Radio Stars magazine appeared in January, 1937 (by George T. Delacorte) recounting Dick Powell and Joan Blondell's not so successful honeymoon in September 1936, coinciding with the release of Stage Struck directed by Busby Berkeley: 

"They were, a mile up towards the sky, in the tower of one of New York's smartest hotels. It was their honeymoon and yet neither of them looked particularly happy. Joan Blondell looked almost defiant as she stood against the wall in the slim black satin dress that made a white camelia of her face and brought out the gold in the topsy-turvy halo of her hair. Her blue eyes, the color of the lupines that grow along the California countryside, looked steadily at the opposite wall in something that might have been resentment and something that might have been despair. And Dick Powell, laid low with a bad attack of the flu, watched her from the bed on which he was lying, his eyes seeming all the more gentle for the storm that was gathering in hers. Somehow you knew that he felt the things she was feeling, too, but had put them away from him in his concern for her. No doubt of Dick Powell's love for Joan when he looked at her like that, almost as if you could hear him saying: "Don't let it bother you, kid. Don't ever let anything bother you again." That was the feeling you had about the two of them. Suddenly and without warning, as people will when they have been thoroughly disillusioned. They must have met disillusion before. After all, they both had gone through an unsuccessful first marriage, they both had taken love and seen it turn to ashes in their hands. But there's another kind of disillusion that can warp and change a whole life, if a man or woman isn't equal to combatting it. A disillusion that knows neither dignity, nor pride, nor honor, that is made up of ridicule and unkind laughter. That's the kind Joan Blondell and Dick Powell were to know at a time that should have been the happiest in their lives. 

They were so happy, these two, back in Hollywood. This new love that had come to them was so different from anything they had known before. Joan was besotted with Dick when she'd heard about a boy who had failed in a radio audition because of technical flaws in his untrained voice and how Dick was paying for singing lessons for that boy, who might conceivably be his own rival some day. Giving him more than that, for Dick was coaching him himself, giving him all the pointers most professionals guard so jealously from others. But it was only after trouble came to Joan in her first marriage that they really became friends. Dick, always so vulnerable where other people's unhappiness is concerned, felt drawn to Joan. The joyous, carefree girl he had known was changing there before his eyes. He saw her creep into her dressing-room between scenes and, for all the lavish make-up she had on when she came to the set again, he saw the traces of the tears she could not wholly remove. He heard that ready tongue of hers stilled and missed the laughter that had always come so spontaneously before. And he decided that Joan would become happy again with him. They would have liked to have run down the gangplank, if they had been unimportant honeymooners, and get into a taxi and hold hands on the way to their hotel. But they knew they couldn't. After all, they weren't unimportant. People wanted to know all about them. 

So they met that crowd of newspapermen as cordially as two well-bred people will meet anyone. And Joan saw to it that long tables were set up in the drawing-room of their suite, with scrambled eggs and crisp bacon and tantalizing sausages and thin buttered toast and plenty of coffee for those who wanted breakfast, and with sandwiches and Scotch and soda and champagne for those that didn't. And she and Dick met their questions and tried not to mind their indiscreet attitudes. Later that evening they read the papers. The papers stunned them! Those newspapermen, whom they had treated as guests, had had a marvelous time with them! Joan and Dick were splashed all over the front pages of the New York papers like a three-ring circus. Paragraphs jeered at them in cutting ridicule. The love that had come to them, the sweetness they had known, was mocked at. They hadn't been human beings to those reporters. They had been just movie stars. They had been a movie crooner and his blonde bride. A strange couple to be torn into little pieces for the mirth of newspaper readers. Joan and Dick must have been so humiliated they couldn't even meet each other's eyes when they read those papers. Couldn't talk about it even to each other, in those first awful moments. After that, it wasn't fun to see those plays they had looked forward to so eagerly, with everybody craning their necks to see them and the memory of those ridiculing words still burning in their minds, so that they thought even friendly admiration was mockery. 

It wasn't fun to walk down Fifth Avenue, either, or to go into all the smart shops, feeling that the girl behind the counter was remembering those stories, too, and laughing at them. Dick became ill up there in that grand honeymoon suite of theirs and somehow all the bitterness Joan had managed to conceal before couldn't be concealed any longer. She was mad. Fighting mad. Ready to fight the whole world because she had been hurt. And she felt Dick couldn't console her enough. So she stood there defiantly beside his bed and said in a small tense voice: "What is there to say about our romance? We're married, aren't we? Why do people usually get married? Well, that's the reason for our getting married, too. We're no different from anybody else." And somehow in her hurt and bewilderment she couldn't bring herself to say the word "love." —Radio Stars magazine, January 1937

I said: “Well, let’s get on that boat. Soon you’ll have over two hundred intimates with Big Fancy Names waiting to inhale the reception champagne—not to mention Pathé News Reel, Fox Movietone News, Paramount Sound News, and the ever present Sheely Dawson.” On the deck Jim was checking our baggage while I was dressing to face the newsreel cameras and reporters who were meeting the ship an hour before docking time. Jim pushed open the door, slammed it, and stood there, apparently stunned. “The Captain has received word that close to one hundred tugboats are going to surround the Santa Paula as we enter the harbor, and airplanes will be overhead trailing banners!” “Jim? If those are putting out here to interview us, we ought to have coffee, toasts, pastries—and some drinks—to warm them.” “That costs good money,” Jim grumbled. “It’s freezing out, honey, and they must have gotten up at daybreak. We really should do it.” I smiled my Sunday best and won. When the buffet table was set up by the pleased steward and two waiters, Jim smiled and said: “You’re so extravagant,” looking at the laden table. Then Jim put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sure glad we didn’t do it the last few nights—your eyes would look glassy now.” “Glassy?” “From doing it too much.” He gave me a playful whack on the behind. “What did I get into?” I wondered. The fancy food, and particularly the drinks, gratified the frozen ladies and gentlemen of the press. Even so, I sensed a slight boredom with their “Movie Star” assignment, and a tinge of sarcasm in their questions. “You two thrilled with each other?” was one of their goodies. 

Jim smiled broadly and clasped his hands over his head like a fighter acknowledging the crowd. The reporters looked at me. “Yes, indeedy,” I said, feeling like a simpering idiot. What could I say? That Jim did not want me in any of my divine, custom-made bathing suits until the bruise on my upper thigh had disappeared completely? (I had bumped into a wrought-iron table while playing with Jamie.) “People will say I did some weird sex thing to you, and I can’t have that,” Jim told me. He wouldn’t let me go into the sunlight early “because people will think we don’t like doing what newlyweds are supposed to do.” On the Super Chief, Hollywood bound, I locked the door to our drawing room and hugged Jim. “Oh, honey, isn’t it great? Three days, four nights of quietness—just us. Get into your p.j.’s, and I’ll get into my nightie, and we’ll have dinner in here and recap the crazy...” He interrupted me. “What will the waiter think if we’re practically stripped when he takes our dinner order?” “He’ll steam with envy,” I smiled as I removed his shirt and tie and ruffled his hair. I think that night Jim had drunk more than usual, and maybe that was the reason he felt so ardent. 

I didn't recognize him. He jumped on bed withouth much ballyhoo and undressed me hastily. Then it was hours of "God, baby, come with me," with a hoarse, almost desperate tone, which was quite different from his typical soft tryst he considered more romantic and appropriate. I thought "you better keep this night etched in your mind, girl," certain about the odds of it happening again were zilch. When we finished this rare long session, his brain returned to schedule, and Jim reshowed, regargled, recombed his hair, rearranged his pajama collar, and continued studying the income-tax reports. Seven years later, when we were in our early process of separation, I saw Jim standing in front of a camera mee-moo-mauing while the makeup man tried to apply powder on his nose. “All right, everybody, we shoot,” called the director. It was a long dolly shot. As Jim sang, the camera pulled back, and then I saw a young girl with a pink babushka tied under her chin, perched on the camera stand below the lens. Her hands were clasped prayerfully as she gazed with worship at Jim. In all my years in pictures, through all the years of Busby Berkeley shoots, I never saw anyone sit there before. I turned to a member of the crew standing next to me. 

“Who’s that sitting on the camera, Bill?” “Amy O’Brien.” He paused. “She’s some kind of a nut.” After the take Jim called to me, “One still, and I’ll be right with you, Nora.” Then added: “Everyone knows my wife Nora, this is Amy O’Brien.” Halfway through my “How-do-ya-do,” Amy clapped both hands over her mouth as if terrified, and ran off the stage. “What was that bit with Amy O’Brien?” I asked after we had ordered our lunch. “She's a new actress,” Jim answered, saluting Joe Schenck as he passed our table. “Hey, Jim—who calls you ‘James?” I asked. He looked up from his dinner plate, startled. “I’ve gotten a dozen phone calls in the last couple of months. The voice is always the same, and so is the conversation—or lack of it. ‘James?’ it says hopefully when I answer. ‘James who?’ I ask. An ‘Oh-oh,’ or ’Sorry,’ is muttered, then she hangs up.” “I have no idea,” Jim answered, tackling his salad. “A crank or a fan.” “But you’re ‘Jim,’ not ‘James’—world-famous Jim—and we have a very unlisted phone number.” “I don’t know,” he snapped, visibly nervous. I sought the hotel cocktail lounge. I seated myself on a stool at the end of the empty bar. “You’re Nora Marten!” the bartender pointed his index finger at me. I nodded. “Please give me something that will settle a thumping stomach.”  

“You’re Nora Marten!” he crowed again. I nodded. “How about a sherry for what ails you?” he advised excitedly. “Sounds okay.” He poured me the sherry and leaned over the bar close to my face. “Don’t tell me a movie star’s got problems.” I grinned vacuously and picked up the glass. He showered me with questions as I sipped. I pantomimed my answers. “How does it feel to be a movie star?” Shrug. “You know Jimmy Cagney?” Nod. “Humphrey Bogart?” Nod. “Dick Powell?” Nod. “Errol Flynn?” Nod. “Edward G. Robinson?” Nod. “Clark Gable?” Nod. “Jesus Christ!” he said admiringly. I nodded for that, too. “I wanted to get in show business,” he informed me as I finished my drink, “but it’s tough.” I agreed with him. —Center Door Fancy (1972) by Joan Blondell

June Allyson, Miss Yonkers, and the Rat Pack Girl

Partnered sexual activity resulting in climax reduces the time required for both men and women to fall asleep and enhances sleep quality, as per recent findings published in the Journal of Sleep Research (16 June, 2023) by researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The authors stated, “These studies confirm and strongly support previous findings that suggest sexual activity and intimacy can enhance sleep and overall well-being for both genders, thereby providing a basis for future research. The heightened impact of partnered sex can be partially attributed to the increased neuroendocrine changes following orgasm, combined with the valuable effects of experiencing intimacy with a partner.” A previous study suggested that the ability to experience intense orgasms may be influenced by genetic factors. Unfortunately, a 2020 survey revealed that four out of ten Americans have difficulty in experiencing an orgasm. Source: https://globalpulsenews.com

Eve Meyer (born Evelyn Eugene Turner in 1928) was an American pin-up model, motion picture actress, and film producer. She was killed in the Tenerife airport disaster in 1977. Born Eve Turner in Atlanta, Georgia, Meyer was a high-profile pin-up model in the 1950s and was Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month in June 1955. Her film debut was in Artists and Models (1955) directed by Frank Tashlin, starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Eve Meyer served as producer or executive producer on Russ Meyer's 1960s and early 1970s films, including the camp classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is considered a roman à clef, with its characters based on famous figures such as Judy Garland, Carole Landis, Dean Martin, and Ethel Merman. Neely O'Hara, the up-and-coming singer played by Patty Duke, is based on pill-popping Judy Garland; Tony Polar (Tony Scotti), a conceited crooner and Jennifer's love interest who is later diagnosed with Huntington's disease, was thought to be loosely based on Dean Martin. The character Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) is based on actress Carole Landis, not on Marilyn Monroe as many suspected. Source: thecut.com

Marie McDonald (born Cora Marie Frye in 1923) had began as a pin model like Eve Meyer. Also, Marie McDonald and June Allyson both were graduates from Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York. McDonald began competing in beauty pageants and was named "The Queen of Coney Island", "Miss Yonkers" and "Miss Loew's Paradise". In 1939, McDonald was named "Miss New York State". In 1940 she landed a showgirl role in the Broadway production Earl Carroll's Vanities. In 1947, she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and co-starred with Gene Kelly in Living in a Big Way (1947). In 1958 she was cast as Lola Livingston in The Geisha Boy, a slapstick comedy, opposite Jerry Lewis. McDonald and Allyson kept in contact through the 1940s, and they had often "women talk", according to Jane Wilkie. In June 1945, McDonald asked Allyson: "June, when are you going to marry Dick Powell?" Allyson replied: "I couldn't tell you if I'll ever marry him. After all, he's not yet a free man." McDonald asked: "Does your heart go pitapat when you dance with him?" Allyson burst into laughter and said: "We have such wonderful times together. He's a man you can really talk to without pretense. I miss him, I admit it, but I must think in my career, and in my reputation." McDonald nodded in approval. 

While June Allyson was getting on a promising career on MGM, she started dating composer David Rose. Allyson would recall in her memoir: "David Rose had been taking me out. David was still technically married to Judy Garland but they were separated. I had checked with Judy because I would not hurt her for the world. She didn't mind my dating David and said he was a very nice man. David and I and Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair often double-dated. The one thing Judy and I could never agree about was L. B. Mayer. She hated him because he barely gave her a chance to relax between pictures. I feared and loved him because he had given me my big chance and he was the strong father-figure I had always yearned for. David Rose was a lovely, gentle person and a gifted composer. I was pleased to be singled out by the man who had composed "So in Love" and "Our Waltz." With Papa Mayer's blessing, I was also dating Peter Lawford, for whom I developed mild romantic feelings, but his accent was teddibly british. If I had married either Van Johnson or Peter Lawford, Papa Mayer would have made it a studio event. Dick Powell was taboo for him, though."

Jane McCormick wrote in her memoir Rat Pack Party Girl (2017) about her life in Las Vegas from 1960 to 1972. She met Frank Sinatra in 1960, when he was shooting Ocean’s Eleven. In her time in Las Vegas, McCormick made a half-million dollars a year for twelve years, as much as any big name in showbiz. She revealed her sexcapades with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Vic Damone, Jerry Lewis, and other celebrities. "There, seated at a table, were Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. “Would you like a drink?” Dean asked. “Yes,” I smiled, Pausing a moment, I replied, “I’d like scotch and water.” After a few minutes, Frank walked in and sat down next to me, looking dashing. I felt faint and giddy, just like some star-struck teenager. Frank kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. When I looked at him, he winked and flirted with me. “You are such a pretty girl. Where are you from?” “Fullerton, California. I’m just a hometown girl.” 

“Well, I’ll bet your hometown misses you,” he smiled. One afternoon George, Frank’s valet, called and told me to come down to the Regency Lounge at the Sands to meet Frank. I dressed in my beautiful Ship ‘n Shore designer dress and rushed to meet him. I spotted a marquee at the Sands and knew that Dean Martin was coming to town. I went to the Sands lounge and soon Dean walked in and he came over and whispered in my ear, “Why don’t you come up to my room, baby? I’ve been wondering what Frank’s been getting that I haven’t.” I went to his room, and shortly after he was smiling ear to ear. Afterwards we shared another drink together and I asked him if the rumors about June Allyson were true. "I thought she was crazy about me, but she only wanted to make his stuffy husband jealous." He sounded so irked, so I thought, "Maybe Dick Powell read him the riot act."

One morning Frank Sinatra and I were having coffee in his suite at the Sands and he ranted that he was done with Peter Lawford. Peter had lied about President Kennedy staying at Frank’s house in Palm Springs. After he settled down he said, “I care for you a lot, Janie. I think you have a lot of class. And some people who you think have class don’t have it at all.” I didn’t say a word but I could see his disappointment as he paced the floor." —"Rat Pack Party Girl" (2017) by Jane McCormick