It’s a Great Feeling: Ronald Reagan & Jane Wyman, Dick Powell & June Allyson

"Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him." —French novelist and filmmaker Romain Gary

During her filming of Stage Struck, Jane Wyman told Joan Blondell, “I’ve stood in the chorus line watching women of lesser talent get ahead. Everybody says I’m taking over the ‘Resident Tough Gal Blonde’ roles at Warners from you and Glenda Farrell. Hell, I’ve been living that Tough Gal role for the past decade.” When Jane saw her latest part, she complained to her agent, William Demarest, “I think I’ll be typecast as a gum-chewing chorine until I’m thirty-eight.” Her complaints to Demarest continued. “I don’t like being billed as ‘The Hey-Hey Girl.’” “That’s because you’re so lively,” he said. “You continue dancing in night clubs until dawn breaks.” In her one scene with Dick Powell in Stage Struck, he was impressed with her, telling Busby Berkeley, “Jane can sing, she can dance, and she can act. You should give her more to do. We have a budding Ginger Rogers here.” When he saw the rushes of their scene, Powell was amused. POWELL: “What’s your name? WYMAN: “My name is Bessie Fufnick. I swim, I dive, I imitate wild birds, and play the trombone.”

Jane Wyman even had thought to make a play for Dick Powell, although she was hesitant. She told her friend Frank McHugh, who had fourth billing in Stage Struck, “Blondell’s already got him. They’re going to get married.” In Stage Struck, Joan Blondell was interpreting her role in an outrageous “camp” style, years before the word was coined. Her character seemed to be based on Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who drew attention for a $1 million shopping spree over the course of a week. With a pencil-thin mustache, Dick Powell was not cast in Stage Struck as a singer but as the show manager. Jane Wyman had wanted the role of the ingénue, but Busby Berkeley had cast newcomer Jeanne Madden in that part instead. “Her role should have gone to me,” Jane complained to Berkeley. “Jeanne can’t act, but I needed a singer, a Ruby Keeler type, and I thought she’d do well,” Berkeley said. “But after directing her in her first two scenes with Powell, I think I’ve made a horrible mistake.” When he saw the rushes, Berkeley said, “Warner has put me in a financial strait-jacket on this movie. 

Powell is solid in his role, but Madden delivers her lines with such flatness, she makes Ruby Keeler sound like Bette Davis. As for Blondell, she flashes her pearly whites, bats her eyelashes, and flaps about like an over-the-top Carole Lombard.” Jane need not have worried that Madden would be much competition for her. “I ceased to be jealous of her when her star flickered out so fast, she wouldn’t even merit a footnote in the history of Tinseltown. As for me, I was going places, except it would take a few more years to climb up that ladder.” Jack Warner had decided to give Joan Blondell the ultimate star treatment, and as such, Jane was awed by Blondell’s dressing room. It incorporated a large living room, a fireplace, two bedrooms, a fully stocked kitchen, and a separate room for wardrobe and makeup. Once Dick Powell emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Giving Jane a quick hello, he dressed hurriedly and left to shoot a scene, still complaining of his sore throat. Dick Powell would in time become one of Ronald Reagan’s best friends, and the two married couples—Powell and Blondell, Reagan and Wyman—became a social fixture on the Hollywood scene until 1944, when the Powells divorced. 

Jane received a copy of the script of Gold Diggers of 1937, wondering what was in it for her. Character actor Victor Moore was cast in it as an aging hypochondriac who thinks he’s dying. He plans to back a Broadway show, but finds that his partners have lost his capital in bad stock market investments. Cast as one of the chorus girls, Jane soon discovered that the script granted her only one line of dialogue: “Girls, we’re saved!” shouted to her fellow chorines when the money for the show is finally raised. One of the movie’s best theme songs was “With Plenty of Money and You,” sung by Dick Powell. The film’s finale, an elaborate chorus-line-dance-number, quickly evolved into a major-league Busby Berkeley spectacular number. Jane appeared in it as one of 104 women wearing white military uniforms, tapping in military formations and geometric patterns, singing “All’s Fair in Love and War.” Jane Wyman was anxious for her next assignment. “I got you a part in Mervyn LeRoy's The King and the Chorus Girl,” her agent William Demarest told her. “I hope I get to play the chorus girl,” Jane said. “No such luck,” he said. “That role goes to Joan Blondell.” 

In her next picture, The Singing Marine (1937), Jane Wyman was cast once again in a movie starring Dick Powell. The film marked the third movie in a row in which she’d been directed by Ray Enright. Powell played a marine from Arkansas who becomes a popular radio singer. Jane had a small role playing a “cutie” called Joan. The Singing Marine was intended to make another showcase for Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, with Warners hoping to repeat the success of 42nd Street. But Keeler was not available to play in The Singing Marine. Jane Wyman hoped to be summoned to take the role intended for Keeler. Jane reminded Enright, “I sing and dance, too, and rather well, if I must say so myself.” Enright rejected her in favor of Doris Weston, a Chicago-born actress, radio performer, and nightclub singer. 

Jane, at one point, chatted briefly with Doris Weston, who told her, “I was chosen because of my physical resemblance to Ruby Keeler. Frankly, I’m a much better singer than Miss Ruby.” Blondell invited Jane to join Powell and herself for a weekend at her “love nest,” on North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. Powell was away at the studio when Jane arrived. Blondell told her that she’d been considered to star in The Singing Marine when Keeler became unavailable. Over Sunday dinner, Powell complained to Jane that at the age of thirty-two, “I’m still playing a juvenile. I can’t keep this up much longer. I hear Jack Warner is grooming my replacement, Kenny Baker. You’ve worked with him before. I’ve just heard that you are going to star with him in Mr. Dodd Takes the Air.” Director Alfred E. Green welcomed Jane to the set of Mr. Dodd Takes the Air (1937). She had been told that her latest movie was a remake of the 1932 release of The Crooner, a cautionary tale about the dangers of stardom, a vehicle for the message that fame can be a terrible curse. Kenny Baker, in a similar fashion than Jeanne Madden, was referred to as a third-rate pale imitation of Dick Powell, with none of Powell's talent or sex appeal. 

On April 17, 1938, Bogart signed with the Lux Radio Theater to broadcast a one-hour radio play of Bullets or Ballots (1936). Both Bogie and Edward G Robinson reprised their roles, but Mary Astor stood in for Joan Blondell. With Bogart's second wife Mary Philips still in New York, Bogie resumed his on-again, off-again affair with Blondell. She told him she was tired of her wise-cracking roles and wanted to make more drama. Bogart had worked closely with her and helped her through her scenes in Bullets or Ballots. She'd played a shady Harlem nightclub owner and gave an admirable performance when stacked against Bogie and Robinson. “Joan was at the peak of her beauty, during the making of this film,” Bogie recalled. “I liked her very much, in spite of Dick Powell always beating down her door.” In later years, perhaps to cover her affair, Blondell claimed in her memoir that, “I did not warm to Mr. Bogart. He wasn’t a man one ever felt close to—nobody did. But I really liked him.” In many scenes from Stand-In (1937), Blondell stole the picture from Bogart and Leslie Howard, especially when she performed a savage travesty of Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Blondell had snappy dialogue, as when she told Howard, cast as a visitor to the studio, that the star must never be “fatigued or mussed and above all she must never be so vulgar as to perspire. Her stand-in does her sweating for her.”

Through her husband, the well-connected Dick Powell, Joan Blondell was alerted early to what films Warners planned to produce and who would star in them. In a call to Ronald Reagan, Joan announced, “Bryan Foy is giving you the lead role in your next picture, Accidents Will Happen (1938)” “I hope that film won’t be just another accident,” he said. “I’m sure it will be a big hit,” she said. “I have a personal interest in it. The female role will be played by none other than my sister, Gloria.” When director Lloyd Bacon called Reagan with his next film assignment, Cowboy from Brooklyn (1938), the actor was disappointed when he learned of his small role. After starring parts, he’d been demoted to seventh billing. “You wouldn’t exactly call this climbing the ladder to success, now would you?” Reagan asked Bacon, who answered him saying that stardom isn’t achieved overnight. 

The stars of Cowboy from Brooklyn were Dick Powell, Priscilla Lane, Pat O’Brien, and Dick Foran, with Ann Sheridan and Johnnie Davis in supporting roles. Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan bonded so well that Reagan was invited to become a member of the main clique in the commissary. “If you got invited to their table, you’d arrived,” Reagan said. “On any given day, you could dine with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Dick Powell, and Frank McHugh. Edward G. Robinson wanted to join us, but Pat O’Brien rejected him for being ‘too Jewish.’” 

Dick Powell was instrumental in securing Ronald Reagan a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). During the course of filming Cowboy from Brooklyn, Reagan resumed his liaison with Priscilla Lane. Once, Reagan noticed Priscilla Lane emerging from Dick Powell’s dressing room after a long visit. Reagan was pleased to be working with Powell but worried about his standing with Priscilla. Powell assured Reagan they only were rehearsing their scenes. Allegedly, Powell's romantic interest had focused on Priscilla's older sister Rosemary Lane, his co-star in Hollywood Hotel. Ronald Reagan later wote in his memoirs about Dick Powell, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without either of us seeing the other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick Powell ever saying an unkind word about anyone.”

In Naughty But Nice (1939), Reagan also played a distant second fiddle to his friend Dick Powell. As the woman who falls for John Payne in Kid Nightingale (1939), Jane Wyman was cast as Judy Craig, a lounge singer. Wyman and Payne get to perform a musical duet. In the film Payne sings operatic arias and Tin Pan Alley songs. Because of his studly physique, he attracts hordes of screaming females to his boxing matches. His manager even hires an orchestra to accompany him, musically, after each of his knockouts. “I got the role only because your friend, Dick Powell, turned it down as he was making his exit from Warners,” John Payne told Jane Wyman. Before their marriage, Joan Blondell and her husband, Dick Powell, took the Reagans to the Cocoanut Grove where Powell was invited to sing a song for the guests. One day, after Reagan had angered co-star Howard Da Silva, he struck back. “When I made Bad Men of Missouri with your wife, she spent more time with Dennis Morgan than before the camera. You’d better check what’s going on. Sometimes, a husband is the last to know.” 

Coming so soon after the rumors about Jane Wyman and John Payne, Reagan became deeply depressed, trying to convince himself that Da Silva was a liar. Alleged communist Da Silva kept needling Reagan: “I’m worried for you. Payne is a tough act to follow.” In the middle of the shoot of Kid Nightingale, Jane had invited Joan Blondell and Dick Powell for dinner. They were obviously having their own marital difficulties. Back from her War Bond tour of the Southeast, Jane Wyman welcomed Reagan home, but he later expressed concern about her dark mood. “She was polite and loving on the surface, but seemed strangely distant as if her interests were elsewhere,” he recalled. “Something was on her mind, and I didn’t know what. It seemed that without my presence, she had done just fine on her own. On the train back to San Francisco, I was left feeling rather empty about my homecoming.” Reagan confided these concerns to his agents Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, and to Dick Powell, who may or may not have known that Jane had fallen deeply in love with John Payne. 

Adele Jergens and Ronald Reagan, 1948.

Composer Fred Karger (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny) had dated Marilyn Monroe in 1948. Monroe would soon find out that Karger had another woman competing for him: Jane Wyman. Actually, Karger married Wyman in 1952. Marilyn Monroe also met Ronald Reagan in 1948 when she was filming Ladies of the Chorus in Columbia with Adele Jergens (who had dated Reagan occasionally). During her chats with Reagan, Marilyn hid some details of her life, such as her lesbian affair with Natasha Lytess, her drama coach at Columbia. As Michael John Sullivan wrote in his book Presidential Passions: The Love Affairs of America's Presidents (1991): “Reagan’s understanding of sexuality was exceedingly simplistic. For him, sex was either black or white so that sexual feelings of a highly complex nature were threatening and incomprehensible. The inflexibility of his narrow sexual sensibilities is perhaps best seen in his unchanging attitude toward homosexuality. Reagan remained intimidated by the prospect of sexual diversity.” It was through Reagan that Marilyn met William Holden, who was scheduled to appear in Born Yesterday at Columbia.

After his marital reshuffling, instead of showing up at the Reagans home for dinner with Joan Blondell, Dick Powell appeared there with his new wife June Allyson on his arm. Jane Wyman remembered her first meeting with the perky MGM star. As she later told Blondell, “Right in front of Dick and me, June flirted outrageously with Ronnie.” “I’m not surprised,” Blondell said to Jane. “I think she’s a nympho, in spite of that syrupy personality of hers. June lived for a time at one apartment in New York near mine when she was trying to break into show business. I know all about her. She was known as ‘Miss Hot to Trot.’” An older, more mature man, Dick Powell had begun to look out for his wife’s indiscretions, including her love affair with Alan Ladd and her off-the-record weekends in Las Vegas with Dean Martin. On her part, June Allyson predicted that the Wyman/Reagan marriage would end in the divorce courts: “Her career is on the rise. His is going to hell.” A special election awarded Ronald Reagan with the SAG's organization’s presidency. Later, he was formally elected as SAG’s full-time president, serving terms from 1947 to 1952, and again in 1959 to 1960, eventually serving an unprecedented six terms.

Director John Huston delivered a harsh appraisal of Reagan’s presidency of SAG. “I think he hooked up with SAG for purely selfish reasons. He used it as a road to power and political influence. He only went into politics because he was washed up as an actor, appearing in horrible B pictures.” Reagan paid special attention to members Edward Arnold, Walter Pidgeon, Pat O’Brien, and Dick Powell. “They made a lot of sense, but James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and John Garfield were leaning too far to the left,” Reagan wrote. “Of course, I always listened to old friends, Robert Taylor and George Murphy, who were very conservative Republicans, as was Dick Powell.” 

As her biographer, Michael Hodgson, noted in Patricia Roc: the Goddess of the Odeons (2010): “In real life, Patricia Roc’s effect on men was to prove devastating. Had things gone differently, Nancy Davis might never have become Reagan’s wife, and he might not have survived to enter the White House.” Reagan had told Dick Powell, “I don’t know what it is with Patricia Roc. This stunning, blue-eyed brunette has put a spell over me. At least she can make me forget about Jane for a while.” “The whole studio fell in love with Patricia Roc when she was working at Universal Studios,” said David Niven. It was during his affair with Roc that Reagan suffered a nervous breakdown, which led to thoughts of suicide. Reagan conveyed to Roc that at times in the middle of the night, he thought about killing himself, leaving Jane Wyman and his mother Nelle Wilson Reagan to take care of Maureen and Michael. “I found him just wretched and miserable,” Roc claimed. 

“He adored Jane Wyman and his family, and just couldn’t understand why or how she had completely lost interest in him. She was bored with his political interests and his intense involvement in the Screen Actors Guild. She resented what she called ‘his obsession with the threat of communism.’ If I had been older and more experienced, I would have realized how deeply he was suffering and would have urged him to seek psychiatric help. He told me, ‘Life just isn’t worth living anymore. I don’t see the point of going on.’ Night after night, I tried to talk him out of suicide. His depression affected our love life. On many a night, he was unable to perform like a man should.” Roc also told her biographer: “I hate to say this, but when Ronnie is in love, he looks like a sick parrot. Sometimes, after he left my place, Ronnie would drive over to Lew Ayres’ home, park his car across the street from his doorway, and just sit there until three or four o’clock in the morning. Just waiting and looking, either watching the lights go on or off in the house, or Jane and Lew Ayres returning home late from some nightclub. When I left him in Hollywood, he seemed heartbroken.” 

“He begged me to stay. He had taken up heavy drinking, often in the company of his friend William Holden. I don’t know how good a friend Bill was. He was very charming, very sexy. Once, when Ronnie was called away for a night shoot, he asked Bill to pick me up and escort me to a premiere. Behind Ronnie’s back, he propositioned me after taking me to dinner and the show. Did I go to bed with Bill Holden? I’ll never tell!” For the premiere of the British film Scott of the Antarctic (1948), Reagan had a reunion with Patricia Roc at the film’s Royal Command Film Performance at the Odeon on London’s Leicester Square in November of 1948. Both he and Roc appeared on the stage. Reagan was in London at the time filming The Hasty Heart (1949) with Patricia Neal, whom he was informally dating. Even though he apparently never made his intentions known to Doris Day, Reagan talked about the possibility of proposing marriage to Doris to such good friends as George Murphy, Dick Powell and June Allyson.

Reagan even went so far as to discuss with George Murphy the business angle of such a liaison. “I didn’t want to become Mr. Jane Wyman, but I’m thinking over being Mr. Doris Day. That might be a career goal, as I move into middle age. The roles are already drying up. I could be very aggressive, get the best movie deals for her, the best recording contracts. I’d make a great manager for her.” On the set of It’s a Great Feeling (1949), Reagan shook the hand of the director, David Butler, who welcomed him. Butler had been a former actor himself on the stage, and later in the Silents, but he became better known for second-rate musicals. Reagan soon learned that Butler had developed an unreciprocated crush on Doris Day. Reagan learned that he and Jane Wyman were not alone in making a cameo appearance in Butler’s film. They were joined by Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Sydney Greenstreet, Danny Kaye, Patricia Neal, Eleanor Parker, and Edward G. Robinson, along with directors Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, and King Vidor. Butler even had cast himself in a cameo. Reagan had only one scene, set in a barbershop, not with Jane, but with Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson. There was an undercurrent of sexual rivalry in that scene. 

Either known or unknown to Reagan, Jane had continued her long affair with Dennis Morgan. Complicating matters, Doris Day had broken off with Jack Carson before landing in Reagan’s arms. As Reagan entered the 1950s, he faced the dilemma of many actors confronting the middle age. He had long talks with Jimmy Stewart, Robert Taylor, Dick Powell, and George Murphy. Hollywood was a great burial ground for young romantic leads turning middle-aged. Some of them, including James Stewart, Henry Fonda and Cary Grant, could thrive in the right roles, but most of the others were cast aside in favor of new stars. Reagan’s actual relationship with Rhonda Fleming has been one of the most misunderstood in his repertoire. George Murphy claimed Reagan “fell in love with Rhonda during the making of The Last Outpost.” June Allyson said that one night, when she invited Reagan to dine with her husband Dick Powell, and herself, “All he did was talk about Rhonda. He may have been the first guy who called her the ‘Queen of Technicolor.’ He went on and on, praising how ‘incredibly beautiful’ she appeared before the color cameras with that porcelain skin and flaming red hair.’” In Reagan’s tell-nothing memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me? (1981) he merely mentions Rhonda Fleming. 

Irving Kupcinet, a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, in his autobiography Kup: A Man, an Era (1988), included a curious passage claiming that Reagan, “the handsome bachelor, was mad about the girl” (Rhonda Fleming). Years later, Fleming called Kupcinet’s story “awful” and “crazy,” as she claimed: “Reagan and I weren’t social on or off the set. We certainly didn’t have a romance.” In Edmund Morris’ book, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (2000), he wrote: “My research cards show Reagan stepping out with at least sixteen young and beautiful actresses from Doris Day and Rhonda Fleming to the peachy and not-yet-legal Piper Laurie. He was always shy about speaking of such matters when I interviewed him as an old man.” When Reagan became Governor of California  in 1967, he said once, “Perhaps the only place in government that can employ homosexuals is the Department of Parks and Recreation.” In the media, that remark was widely denounced and defined as “vulgar, crude, ignorant, and tasteless.” There were calls for “impeachment of the bigot.” 

In Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan (1983), biographer Laurence Leamer wrote: “For a woman who sought a courtly Spenserian romance like Nancy Davis, Ronald Reagan might seem a strange choice indeed. He was a man too scared by past romantic failures to fall easily into an impassioned union typical of youthful first love. But Ronnie was the first man Nancy had ever met who measured up to Dr. Loyal Davis. Nancy loved Ronnie, a man whom she could admire uncompromisingly, the way she'd admired Dr. Davis. Nancy listened to Ronnie's endless political talk, as Jane Wyman had not. Nancy thought his most banal political remarks rang with profound meaning. She looked at Ronnie with pure adoration.” Near the conclusion of his first autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan was in a nostalgic mood. He remembered many of the people he had known, specifically acknowledging “May Robson, Alan Hale, Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, Zasu Pitts, Eddy Arnold of the booming laugh, kindly Paul Harvey, roistering Wallace Beery, Charles Coburn, Adolphe Menjou, and the great Walter Huston.” 

Demurely, Reagan went on to label some of his favorite actors he had known, specifically defining Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Wayne Morris, Tyrone Power, and Jack Carson, as members of “a special breed.” Reagan ended his opaque first memoir on a reassuring, feel-good note, citing the usually rather blunt Clark Gable as saying, “The most important thing a man can know is, as he approaches his own door, that someone on the other side is listening for the sound of his footsteps.” Referencing the happiness he’d found in married life with Nancy Davis, and the wisdom he had found after the termination of his film career in Hollywood, he concluded, “At last, I have found the rest of me.” —Love Triangle: Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, and Nancy Davis  (Blood Moon's Babylon Series, 2015)

Noir Performances: Acting Degree-Zero

In his Introduction to "More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts", James Naremore recalls watching noir as an adolescent. Singling out Lizabeth Scott’s “unreal blondeness and husky voice in Dark City” (William Dieterle, 1950). For Marc Vernet, film noir is defined by the familiarity the spectator has with the actors, noting that our attachment is in large part due to the actors and actresses who serve as a “central point of reference,” becoming “a sort of tribe, an extended family all of whose members we know and in the midst of which we are pleased to find ourselves from time to time.”

While one of the least discussed elements, such statements present actors and acting as one of the most memorable, most captivating factors in reading film noir. For Foster Hirsch, the noir actor is significant for what he refers to as his or her “aromatic presence,” for bringing an aroma, a flavor, to the noir landscape that has the ability to both enhance and to taint. Populating the noir universe but rarely taking center stage, the performer is deemed to be supplementary, yet without the noir actor, the noirscape is bland, unscented, and uninteresting. Writing in 1986, Richard de Cordova noted that “the problem of performance in film noir has not been dealt with by anyone in any detail.” More than twenty years later, the topic of acting and performance is still largely absent from noir studies, with only a handful of essays and chapters published on the topic.

The noir actor has been described as “emotionally tight” and “ominously still,” employing an acting style that is “largely beneath-the-surface,” “minimalist, pared down,” and characterized by “immobility and silent invasion.” Hirsch observes the “mask-like faces” of actors commonly associated with noir with their “features frozen not in mid- but pre-expression.” In particular, he describes the “somnambulistic masks” of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, whom he classifies as “one step up from pure zombie,” referring to their “post-trauma, dead-end style” as “ideally noir.” Hirsch goes on to argue that Ladd and Lake, along with other key noir performers such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Grahame, etc., emote within a tense range and thus “remain within noir’s zonal acting restrictions,” suggesting that a constrained or congested performance is part of noir’s generic specificity.

Robert Mitchum, for example, has been described by Mitchell Cohen as “the quintessence of catatonic acting,” and by Hirsch as a “noir sleepwalker... the ultimate somnambulist... frozen-faced, frozen-voiced.” When it has been discussed in any detail, acting in noir has been considered according to lighting contrasts. Foster Hirsch has gone so far as to situate the “acting degree-zero” of the noir actor at one end of a screen performance spectrum with the “spontaneity” of the Method Acting at the opposite end.

Bogart is widely regarded as the prototypical noir actor and quintessential “tough guy,” yet the stone-faced rigidity displayed in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep that many critics have considered as typically noir is a long way from his physical and verbal eruptions in In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), and The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson, 1956). In these later films, Bogart’s performance moves between vulnerability, sentimentality and psychosis, a clear departure from the confident private dick he portrayed in the two 1940s’ films.

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), for example, John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband, portraying his Average American via sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, a monotone voice, stiff face and lips. In "Pitfall" (1948) directed by André De Toth Powell recreates his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. 

“Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too, you know. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody born here lately who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life. So why do you hide it? Truth, honesty, that’s was my key to filmmaking.” -André de Toth, quoted in "A Personal Journey through American Movies with Martin Scorsese" (1995)

In Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957), Barbara Stanwyck’s performance moves from lively and animated to fixed and anxious as a result of her metamorphosis from energized career woman to bored housewife. The institutionalization of film noir as a cultural form, as opposed to modernism, already underwrites the ambivalent location of noir as both inside and outside modernism. Naremore notes, “like film noir, modernism is an idea constructed ex post facto by critics, and it refers to a great many artists of different styles, sexes, nationalities, religious persuasions, and political inclinations.”

This enables Paula Rabinowitz to discover unexpected connections between film noir and previous forms of popular art, for instance the photographs of Esther Bubley, made in the early 1940s, which set the tone for a noir sensitivity by depicting the changing situation of lonely but self-sufficient women in World War II America: “This dangerous autonomy, visualized in the snarl that comes invariably at the moment when the female takes control of the man and the situation, indexes the changing position of women accelerated by the Second World War.” -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer 

A Salute to Dick Powell & Ruby Keeler

“My idea of a vacation is to rest quietly in the shade of a blonde,” Dick Powell said (sounding like something out of Raymond Chandler) to Photoplay magazine. Over their cocktails, Dick had proclaimed to June: “I love you with all my heart. And besides, when you are not around, I have no one to do things for.” June was glad and receptive to hear his words, and asked him to go back together. Dick expounded on his plight: “I've missed laughing with her. I never had any other feeling than we would get back together. I don't think she really wanted the separation in the first place.”—Dick Powell for Photoplay magazine (article "The Three Weeks We'd Like to Forget", July 1957)

The private detective and the police detective have acquired the stature of phlegmatic heroes because of their ability to move in all circles of urban society: institutional and criminal, “respectable” (of seemingly unimpeachable social status) and disreputable (often by implication, as through nightclubs and casinos, the numbers racket, horse racing, organized crime in its various forms, and other illicit personal enterprises). The symbiosis between them and their adversaries—the racketeers, club owners, grifters, and extortionists—contains the basic dramatic tensions in intimidation, submission and betrayal, fear and violence. And the supporting types include petty chiselers, cops on the take, boxing promoters, lounge singers, stoolies, gunsels, molls, and an assortment of down-and-outers. The detective’s mobility exposes him to such characters, and it has hardened his vision in the cynical, all-knowing sense that he accepts how little human behavior can be trusted, how easily betrayal occurs, and how illusory the truth is. All this indeed sounds enrapt in the romantic nihilism that the patina of time has given the noir genre. It is perhaps its most compelling legacy that these movies have shown features of the human condition with a seductive, modern allure, a tawdry glamour at once mesmerizing and disturbing. The handiest representatives of the filmic noir hunters and the hunted—Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Dan Duryea, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd, Sterling Hayden, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Grahame, Claire Trevor, Veronica Lake, Ida Lupino, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Bennett, among many others—all invested their roles with the existential idiom of the noir city.

Four of Chandler’s novels were adapted for the screen within a few years of their writing, in the early period—the pre-1947 period—of noir cinema. Edward Dmytryk’s 1944 Murder, My Sweet (based on Farewell, My Lovely), starring Dick Powell, showed us the most abused Philip Marlowe, beaten, tied down, drugged, and left hurt and hallucinating; Powell's Marlowe details in voice-over and to sardonic effect the sensation felt with each blow he takes. “Philip Marlowe,” Mrs. Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor) ridicules him at first. “A nice name for a duke. You’re just a nice mug.” Dick Powell quite convincingly evokes the cynical weariness of the private eye as a literary entity translated to the screen. André Bazin opined that “Marlowe is a man defined by fate, absurdly victorious from the macabre combat with the dark angel, his face marked by what he has seen and his bearing with all he knows.”

Pitfall (1948), adapted for the screen by Jay Dratler (Laura) from his novel The Pitfall (1947), is lighted so brightly that one can argue effectively about its ironic tone, echoing the ambiguous Garden-of-Eden lure of the unknown, of every impulse that rebels against the safe, placid domesticity. The film's seemingly intended effect was to neuter our more dangerous responses, making us see they can command a huge price. Yet what must be said of what remains? The landscape of John Forbes’s suburbia rarely appears in noir cinema, and to infect it with the darker appeals of human behavior allows us to view it uncomfortably. John’s wife Sue and their little boy are likable, but for John the malaise of achieving only the ordinary leaves a psychic void no doubt felt by many returning vets, who, under the GI Bill, found “paradise in Shady Glen.” Here, “one wrong step taken” exacts a jolting response from a family man who almost loses his safety net to experience the exhilaration of desire. It is a conservative moral on the surface but a subversive message narratively, for John Forbes hungers for the very energy made so palatable in the vulnerability and enigma of an attractive young woman. Mona (Lizabeth Scott) is not wicked, yet she's trouble, and her disruption of John’s life—through his encounters with Mona’s boyfriend in prison and as he helps her with her debts—counterpoint his orderly life. —Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir (2002) by Andrew Dickos

Christmas in July (1940) was based on Preston Sturges's A Cup of Coffe play (1931); his screenplay version was successively titled Ants in Their Pants and The New Yorkers. A Cup of Coffee finally became Christmas in July, the second movie Sturges wrote and directed. After some bargaining, he got his old theatre friend, Alexander Carr, to play the department store owner, Mr. Schindel. And for Schindel's Department Store, Sturges invented the wonderful "Davenola," an all-service davenport-sleeper-Iounger-bar-and cabinet unit. After many casting possibilities, including a young William Holden, Dick Powell was chosen for the part of the lead Jimmy MacDonald. Sturges appreciated the Eagle Scout quality that Powell could bring to the character. His role was a far more demanding and complex variation of Powell's boy-next-door parts of his 1930s musicals. As much as The Great McGinty satirized the flaws and self-serving opportunities for unscrupulous behavior in the American political machinery, so did Christmas in July cast a skeptical look at the pursuit of recognition and fortune in an all-out consumerist society. 

Christmas in July came out in September of 1940 and, like The Great McGinty, enjoyed a tremendous popular and critical success. After directing Christmas in July, Paramount, flabbergasted, noticed that Sturges had been working without a contract and finally gave him one. The Players Club on the Sunset Strip became, like Michael Romanoff's restaurant and lounge, a popular meeting place for the Hollywood film community; and Sturges luxuriated in the role of host to a number of emigré film artists from occupied Europe, offering a congenial haven for Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Billy Wilder, and others. His hospitality became legendary and limitless, and tabs were run up only to be graciously and trivially forgotten by Sturges. Christmas in July's editor Ellsworth Hoagland saw once the lead stars Dick Powell and Ellen Drew engaging playfully at the Players' pantry. Frank Lloyd Wright, fast becoming an ardent fan, began requesting private screenings of Sturges' films at his Taliesin Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Spring Green, Wisconsin. 

Sturges said once: "My friend [filmmaker] Rouben Mamoulian told me he could make the audience be interested in whatever he showed them, and I told him he was mistaken. It's true that he can bend my ear down and force me to look at a doorknob when my reflex wants to see the face of the girl saying goodbye, but it is also true that it stops my comprehension of the scene, destroys my interest and gives me a pain in the neck." Sturges (tinkerer, inventor, filmmaker) had a real fondness for Dick Powell's Jimmy MacDonald ("If you can't sleep at night, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk. It's a pun! Get it?"), and Christmas in July counterbalances the bitterness of The Great McGinty to an extent that the films function as the former's companion presenting two sides of Preston Sturges. Both Christmas in July and McGinty reveal conflicting ideas and feelings about the American society, structured at the expense and enervation of a success ethic. Unlike McGinty, Christmas in July has more energy and mania that Sturges captured so brilliantly in Hail the Conquering Hero. The reception for Jimmy as he tells his neighbors, laden with presents for everyone, about winning the Maxford House Coffee Contest, anticipates the crowd scenes in Sturges' later Paramount films. 

Christmas in July presents an ambivalent view of America as a place that challenges the ambitious but offers a dubious reward for such expended energy. Jimmy innocently wants to offer Betty (Ellen Drew) and his mother (Georgia Caine) the comforts and security they do not have, but he emerges as a victim of a disloyal society. He wants to prove himself as an advertising talent, ironically according to those standards fashioned to appease and vindicate the rich at the expense of the poor. Here Sturges implies an acceptance of this success ethic, with some reservation: the ambitious who feed on this energy resent the moneyed class. Jimmy and Betty listen to "Penthouse Serenade" as they talk of their dreams. There is also a sweet and innocent moment of them in leisurely stroll, captured in medium-long tracking shot. And another terribly vulnerable moment, as well, for their hopes and Jimmy's aspirations are precarious at best, and we see at the end of the story that hope prevails only at Betty's imploring. The hoax has been exposed, a dejected Jimmy confesses to Mr. Baxter (Ernest Truex), and she interrupts: "it's one thing to muff a chance when you get it... but it's another thing never to have had a chance." Mr. Waterbury defensively protests earlier in the story that he "is not a failure." "You see," he goes on, "ambition is all right, if it works, but no system could be right where only one half of one per cent were successes and all the rest were failures." The virtues of a capitalist system can be easily dislodged. 

Success in Christmas in July is far more than winning the prize money of a slogan contest; it is the using up of creative ambition, of having the opportunity actively to test one's imagination in a society designed as a competitive marketplace. When Jimmy and Betty are dreaming their dreams together up on the roof, their dialogue is soft and relaxed, the natural banter of two young people in love. The camera follows them as Jimmy talks about accomplishing his goals, and we understand the need to feel the promise of unlimited possibilities. Hence, humor erupts from bitterness as well as sentimentality, from sarcasm and gentleness, and from subtle wryness as much as a pun, a play on words. —Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies (2013) by Andrew Dickos 

What Ruby Keeler did have was a girlish charm and down-to-earth manner that audiences responded to. Playing the chorus girl who gets her big break when the star conveniently breaks her leg in 42nd Street (1933), Ruby, in her own way, served as a symbol of hope for poverty stricken moviegoers. She was the nice innocent triumphing over Bebe Daniels’ bitchy diva. When Warner Baxter tells Ruby, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!” she does, and she remained so through her next eight films at Warners. Ruby’s own rags-to-riches story seems like it could easily be crafted into a Warner Bros. musical. “42nd Street is a film which reveals the forward strides made in this medium since the first screen musical features came to Broadway,” raved The New York Times. The reviewer found that Ruby’s “ingratiating personality, coupled with her dances and songs, adds to the zest of this offering.” 42nd Street received the ultimate honor when it received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

Dick Powell was assigned to work with Al Jolson (Ruby Keeler's husband) when he was presented with the script for Wonder Bar (1934), but his optimist attitude soon changed when the film went into production. "Jolson took the good song that was assigned to me and gave me in exchange the eight bars he didn't like," Powell told the press. Jolson was married to Ruby Keeler at the time, and since Keeler and Powell were a team, Powell expected to be built up, not whittled down. The issue in question was that Jolson was insanely jealous of Powell's romantic scenes with his wife onscreen. Often, he'd complain to Ruby: "Why is that guy always kissing you?", referring to her co-star Dick Powell. Fortunately, in spite of Jolson, Powell is memorable in Wonder Bar because of one great song. "Don't Say Goodnight" gets the star treatment with a dance number that unfolds into a dazzling Berkeley production. Powell was sometimes baffled by choreographer Busby Berkeley's abilities. In "Don't Say Goodnight," mirrors are used to reflect a few dancers to seem like hundreds.

Powell said, "I could never figure out how Buzz could photograph this complicated routine from inside the octagon of mirrors and not have his camera reflected in the mirrors. But he had it all figured out and he explained it to Sol Polito, who was the director of photography. I think Sol was as baffled as the rest of us. Buzz was a genius, a madman, and after a while we accepted that he could do anything." In the 1920s and ‘30s, Ruby Keeler perfected the part of the ingenue, the fairy princess. Her fancy footwork—energetic more than stylish—her lithe figure and dominating eyes gained her featured roles around New York, and an offer to play opposite Eddie Cantor in Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Whoopee.” Keeler met the celebrated Jolson while dancing at raconteur Texas Guinan’s Hollywood club where she dwelled while awaiting rehearsals of “Whoopee.” Jolson, probably Broadway’s biggest star at the time, followed Miss Keeler back to New York, where they were married in 1928. Jolson helped Keeler get a contract with his studio, Warner Bros., where she appeared in nearly a dozen movie musicals, among them “42nd Street” (1933), “Footlight Parade” (1933) and “Gold Diggers of 1933,” now considered genre classics. “I could do a few dance routines but I didn’t have a voice,” she said in 1973. “I always dreaded the part when I had to sing back to Dick Powell.”

Columnist Hedda Hopper reported that at the height of her career, Ruby Keeler made the then-monumental sum of nearly $5,000 a week and received carloads of fan mail. Miss Keeler, in real life, never quite realized Baxter’s chorus-girl-to-star admonition. While her colleagues in the chorus—Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford—ascended to the heights of fame, she continued to be more a celebrity than a star. But she became the perfect foil for such sharpies as tough guy James Cagney (“Footlight Parade”) and such hard-boiled dames as Joan Blondell (“Gold Diggers of 1933”). Ruby Keeler's characters often were entangled in love triangles or backstage brawls, not because they were bad—just good to a fault. Ruby Keeler and her beau, usually boyish Dick Powell, always depended on love to conquer the world, whether the backdrop was the back alleys of Broadway, the hallowed halls of West Point (“Flirtation Walk,” 1934) or the Ivy League (“Sweetheart of the Campus” with Ozzie Nelson, 1941). Dick Powell considered Ruby "a wonderful co-star" and the admiration was mutual. Ruby usually relied on Powell's advice to enhance their musical scenes. 

Although there were rumors about a possible liaison, it doesn't seem too likely, due to Jolson's controlling nature and Powell being married to vampy co-star Joan Blondell. The sound technicians said Powell sounded like a bashful lover in her scenes with Ruby: '[Powell] kisses softly, without making much sound. The microphone must be held just six inches away." Richard Williams, one of the sound technician noticed that Dick and Ruby looked and sounded sweet and soft. Despite their eventual divorce, Jolson maintained that their 11 years together had been “the happiest of my life.” Jolson had to give Keeler a settlement of $500 a week and a $50,000 lump sum when she remarriaged. She also received custody of their adopted son, Albert. After her second marriage in 1941, Ruby Keeler retired to devote herself to home life and became what the Associated Press once called “the nation’s happiest exponent of motherhood, housewifery, and golf.” In the early 1940s, producer Mike Todd became fixated on Joan Blondell. His obsessive courtship doomed her marriage to Dick Powell, who was already smitten with future wife June Allyson, whom he met in Broadway in 1942. —The Women of Warner Brothers (2002) by Daniel Bubbeo

A salute to Dick Powell: He's a decent sort of chap and one deserving of our admiration. Dick Powell, who is disliked only by people who don't know him, has done some of the nicest things of any person in Hollywood. But no one ever hears of that side of Dick. One of the most generous gestures I've ever heard of anyone making in a town where it is normally a case of "dog eat dog," Dick made it without fanfare. When crooner Phil Regan (who had performed with Guy Lombardo and his orchestra) wasn't getting the breaks Dick thought his voice merited, Dick went into the front office and spent half a day there begging various officials to give Phil the lead in a picture, We're in the Money, that had been intended for Dick. And people talk of professional jealousy! —Screenland magazine (May 1936)

June Allyson: "the best part is the plain girl"

Too many houses give impression that all their owners really want is a bar with an attached three-car garage. The warmly lived-in residence of June Allyson and Dick Powell is another story. Here, truly, is a dwelling intended for comfort and happiness. Its charm shines from each and every room. It is solid without ever being stuffy, luxurious without being oppressively opulent and everything about it radiates contentment with the promise of more happiness to come. The Powells already have one small daughter. Dick’s two children by his former marriage visit him frequently. This is the sort of establishment that can hold them all, when and if. For those of you who want to have the warm, friendly atmosphere of permanence and refinement in your home, here is a delightful example to copy. Oh, I know what you are thinking, and you are thinking correctly. A small fortune has been spent at the Powells’. But you can copy their overall effect on a much smaller scale and still make it very effective. The Powell antiques are genuine, whether they are hunt tables, Welsh dressers or pewter plates. Two of the lamps in their living room have bases of sterling silver. One of their hunt tables is so priceless that it is a virtual museum piece. Their student lamps are masterpieces of their kind and Dick’s collection of ships’ models, scattered throughout the house, is not the sort you pick up for nickels and dimes.

There are so many clever points to this house: The way the Powells have planned their dining room to adapt itself to either large or small parties; the manner in which Dick’s bedroom adapts itself just as well to being an office; the rose-colored luxury, yet practicality of June’s bedroom; the fascinating use they have made of their furniture “leftovers.” My point is this. Just as to a teen-ager, adults of thirty or sixty seem equally old, so to altogether too many people “antiques” mean only a piece of furniture that dates back to Queen Victoria. Well, let me point out a thrift trick, which the Powells used, by which you can have modern charm and comfort in your furnishings without too much expense. Dick’s bedroom-office strikes a masculine note with its huge window desk and cork-coyered floor. The long coffee table in their living room which sits in front of the quilted couch opposite the fireplace is a good example. When Dick found it at an antique shop it was nearly twice as high as it now appears and it had extension drop-leaves on either end. So he had it cut down. But he didn’t just have the tall legs that were left thrown away. Instead, he had those topped with the extension drop-leaves and the result was the two lamp tables you see on either side of the fireplace. Very clever. Now this was a fine antique table, actually English Eighteenth Century. You can get yourself a much “younger” antique. It may be a table no more than twenty years old, languishing in an auction store. Yet, the wood and the cabinet work are infinitely superior to what you could get for the same small sum in new furniture. So, go look at it with an imaginative eye and see what you can do with it.

Another thing to copy in the Powell living room is the happy blending of today’s comfort with yesterday’s old woods and “conversation pieces.” The plaster walls are painted dark green to contrast with the wood-paneled walls at either end of the room. Beige cottage curtains banded in green are used in every room on the lower floor. This not only gives an air of serenity, but buying such a quantity of material, originally, is a boon to the budget. The pink-red of the glazed chintz used for the long “entertaining” couch opposite the fireplace blends cheerily into the turkey red of the cushions on the antique chairs, and the dark green wing chairs, matching the wall color, give the wood-paneled ends of the room a fine color balance. Sharp color accents, too, are the brass lamps combined with the silver ones, their beige shades untrimmed save for a tiny touch of green. June’s bedroom is full of ideas for the normal housewife or the career girl. Paneled doors hide her clothes, a desk fits in neatly with the rest of room. At the same time, the “before the fireplace” arrangement is so intimate that when the Powells are alone there will be none of that vacant feeling in the room that a more formal room this size might give. 

A room should be able to expand or contract, as company demands, without losing its essential character. Just as the curtains are similar throughout all the lower floor, so too are the wall colorings and the wood trim. Going from the living room to the dining room, you pass through a dark green hallway, with a braided rug on the floor, similar to the one in the living room, and then you come into what June calls “Richard’s tavern.” They have three round tables, rather than one huge square or rectangular affair. Each table easily accommodates four and can be expanded to six. They are pedestal-legged so that there is never “a leg in the way” where anyone sits. Here, again, you have antiques cut down, and if you can’t find a neglected round dining table, much too high, in some antique dealer’s in your town, you aren’t as good a shopper as I want you to be. You, personally, may not have a dining room large enough to hold more than one table, or perhaps you do not entertain more than half-a-dozen people at a time for a sit-down dinner, but if you do on both scores, you’ll be very up-to-date on Hollywood style to serve in this fashion. 

I highly approve of Dick’s bedroom-office. Since he became his own producer, this desk in front of the windows could just as well be turned into the workbench of a hobby center. Here, as in the living room, you will find Dick’s fencing foils, his ship models, his airplane models. Yet nothing is cluttered. The cork-covered floor looks masculine. So, too, does the simple studio-couch bed. Step through the inner doorway, however, and June is bustin’ out all over. The room is done in a rosy pink, but it is the pink of the flowers of that name, or perhaps you call them carnations, and a lively pattern of them makes the headboard and the petticoat on June’s big, wide bed, and the “shadow-box” frame above it. The design is picked up again on the windowseat across from the bed, the window itself being gay with white organdy curtains, and it gets a further accent on one small slipper chair. There is rose-colored carpeting, baseboard to baseboard, and only the “step” tables beside the bed, on either side, and the fine, round antique desk, piled high with books and scripts, betray the news that the lady of this house is more than glamorous. I think a desk in a bedroom is more desirable for any woman who wants to run her house well, but in this particular household, with scripts to be studied, fan mail to be answered, it is the height of wisdom for both husband and wife to have a desk.

June’s room is truly a dream room, but the good things for you to copy are its neatness and easy maintenance. The top of her bedspread is quilted cotton and it can be laundered. Her clothes are neatly hidden behind the paneled doors, with their pink chiffon curtains. Actually, June has a mirrored dressing room, at the far end of her room. But all her closets are separate, hats here, shoes there, coats in a third, furs in the fourth. It must have cost quite a sum to put on all those doors and partitions but the saving of woman-hours must more than make up for it. A good house like a good marriage takes planning, eternal vigilance, a love of what it stands for, and lively imagination. —Article by Hans Dreier for Photoplay magazine (May, 1950)

Dick Powell proved that he knew best when June was given the script of “Two Girls and a Sailor” to read. He saw immediately that it was wrong. She was to play a beautiful, giddy girl while gorgeous Gloria DeHaven, for whom all great things were being predicted, was to be her plain, quiet sister. Now, it must be admitted that June had had a secret hankering to be the beautiful siren type up to that point, but she was realistic enough to see that no movie audience was going to be convinced that she was glamorous and Gloria DeHaven was not. “The best part is the plain girl!” reassured that ever-loving man. “But Richard, what am I going to do? How can I make them see it?” She took heed of his advice, so she took up the scissors and whacked off her shoulder-length golden tresses. With her crowning glory gone, “I was the plainest girl that ever happened,” June recalls with relish. Then she presented herself at the studio where, before M-G-M executives could pick themselves up off the floor, she asked to be tested for the role for which she was now suited. June won—and the picture made her a star. 

Purely and simply, June left Metro because she wanted to choose her own story material, which she could do only if she became a free-lance actress. When her husband, upon whose judgment she relies, approved of the move, June’s mind was made up. And for once she stuck to her guns. But when her release was worked out, she cried for two days. It was not, after all, so easy to leave after all that time. The new arrangement has turned out beautifully. She had barely attained her new free status, had just signed with Universal to do “The Glenn Miller Story” when Metro offered her a real acting plum in its star-studded “Executive Suite.” June could only be more delighted if the director’s name were Dick Powell. This is one of the most important projects in June’s future: to work professionally with her husband, whose first directorial venture, “Split Second,” was such a smash success. There are plans afoot; Mr. Powell wants very much to do a picture based on the fabulous Gibson Girl of the early 1900’s. Now, more than ever, she encourages the quiet routine that they both prefer. 

Aside from the fact that they are too tired for giddy activities after a day at their respective studios, June has reason to see that her husband gets the rest he needs. After a “virus” was properly identified as a ruptured appendix almost too late to save his life, it was predicted that Dick would be sidelined for at least six months, possibly a year. Then the people who make predictions did a quick double-take because, the moment he could get around again, Dick was back in harness at the head of his independent production unit at RKO. His wife, who was not surprised, simply went on praying and taking care of him. 

Her Richard is, of course, a man of enormous intelligence and energy. It is safe to say that if he hadn’t entered the world of entertainment, he would have been equally successful in any other field—he has that much imagination, that kind of drive. June marvels at their different characters: “Richard will say, ‘In five years I want things to be like this,’ and then he starts working for it. You don’t have to wonder about it or worry. You can be as sure that it will happen as you can of the sun rising tomorrow. Instead, I am not so organized. I order a steady stream of coffee cups all day long on the set and I never drink any of them.” Happily Dick is a strong man as well as an intelligent and resourceful one; though the horror of that near-fatal illness is still fresh in his wife’s mind. He wears the pants in his family even though Mrs. Powell does cut a pretty cute figure in her own tailored slacks. He knows more about more things than anyone else in June’s experience, so she’s happy to let him take over. He’s the financial wizard with a sound head for figures, the fashion expert who selects her clothes with a lively and knowing eye. He listens to her problems and points her in the direction of the right solution. He’s a perfect father, a wonderful husband, and a delightful companion. In fact, you could write it in chalk on the fence and put a big heart around with “Junie loves Richard.” Make that two hearts—and viceversa. —Article by Sheilah Graham for Photoplay magazine (October, 1953)

Dick Powell and June Allyson (Photoplay article)

In the darkness of a downtown Los Angeles theater, June Allyson held onto her husband’s tweeded arm excitedly. It was that magic moment after the flash, “Major Studio Feature Preview,” when the crowds wait, hushed and expectant, to discover the star identities of their extra entree. At the words “June Allyson and Dick Powell” they fairly screamed their applause. “They like us!” said June happily. Behind them, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives who, in co-starring them, had stepped in where angels, particularly those of the box office, have feared to tread, began to breathe again. Only too well did they remember the past, when teaming husbands and wives had spelled mutual oblivion. But the public love the Powells’ camaraderie. And out of that first preview applause was born Hollywood’s happiest new star team. After “The Reformer and the Redhead,” sure that starring with her husband only enhances June’s romantic appeal, M-G-M lost no time in co-starring them again in “Right Cross.”

“How lucky can a girl be?” June asks. This is the “happily-ever-after” of a fabulous seven-year-cycle for a girl from the Bronx, born of poverty, whose daydreams and determination led her into a motion picture career. A girl who’d stood on the very same sound stage where “The Reformer and the Redhead” was made, watching wistfully in the background as cameras turned on the big musical number of Dick Powell. Hers was only a bit in “Meet the People,” but she met the man she was to marry two years later, and hoped someday to work with him. This was the dream, the wish her heart had made. She married him; they have a beautiful two-year-old adopted daughter, Pamela; another arrival is expected any day; and, at long last, she is co-starring with Dick. For June, anything else that happens is velvet. Working with June has its advantages, says Dick with a grin. Actually that happy combination of June and Dick working together is more like pink champagne. A laugh a minute, an atmosphere effervescent with gaiety. “It’s so wonderful working with your husband,” says June dreamily. “It’s so relaxing. You’re so much closer to him.”

“An advantage, too, working with your wife,” Dick says teasingly. “You can yell at your wife and you can’t at professional actresses. I'm joking here, June knows I love working with her anyway,” he adds. “She’s fun.” They had once hoped to co-star in a tender love story, “Mrs. Mike.” Their initial starrer, however, turned out to be a hilarious comedy and their love scenes were played with live lions stalking them. It was a picnic for the Powells from that first morning when Dick walked on the sound stage to find June, who’d preceded him, had rigged up an oversized star on the front of her portable abode with the sign, “No. 1 Dressing Room,” billboarded on it, and on Dick’s, in elite type, the words “supporting cast.” June’s husky laugh had ended in a sentimental tear when she found his flowers in her dressing room.

It was agreed between them that neither was to tell the other how to read a line. Both memorize their lines by studying them aloud, so they retire to separate rooms. Dick to the den, June to her bedroom, meeting later in the dining room to rehearse. “The Reformer and the Redhead” was filmed on the same stage where June, years ago, first saw Dick. Just when Dick began his line, June interrupted with, “Sweetheart, you’re very good. I hope you won’t misunderstand me, that was fine, but don’t you think this line would be a little funnier if you’d. . .” “No, I don't see your point!” said Dick emphatically. “Well, I do!” she said. “Then we got into a big hassle,” she grins now, recalling it, “that wound up with me admitting Richard was right. A fairly safe assumption, since he always is. “I know I was mistaken to suggest,” she apologized. To be met with Dick’s weakening, “That’s all right, doll. You may be right. Maybe I should read it more. . .” “That’s ridiculous!” objected June. “You know you’re right.” Then they were in another small hassle again. They are made for each other, you could say.

They arise together every morning and they ride to work together, “Well, most of the way,” June amends. “I would leave before Richard did, I’d be three blocks down the street walking and he’d pick me up. I like to walk and he would always be on the telephone. Even at 7:30 he talks on the phone. Someday I’m going to tear that phone out. But then he’d be living in the corner pay station, so. . . ” There was scant danger of them stealing scenes from each other in “The Reformer and the Redhead,” in the presence of so many animals, but neither tried. “I was always trying to keep her face in the camera and she was always trying to keep mine in,” grins Dick. “I always wanted the scene to fade out on Richard on his line. And he was always fading it out on mine saying, ‘No, it doesn’t make sense, June.’ ” Then, too, he refused to take the top billing his contract always calls for, insisting June’s name must go first on their pictures. “That’s the only real hassle we’ve had, we both want second billing,” she says. “And he should have the star billing but he won’t, with me. Most uncooperative,’ she teases, then sighs, “but he’s such a smart man. I learned so much working with him, he almost gave me an inferiority complex.”

Dick isn’t only prompted by husbandly devotion but by some 20 years of wisdom and experience in the business when he speaks of his wife’s histrionic ability saying, “June’s a fine actress. I don’t think she’s even scratched the surface yet. I have yet to see anyone with as much talent. She hasn’t hit her best part yet, but someday that part will come along. They do for everyone. If they get a good script of ‘Forever,’ June would be fine for it. Or ‘Sister Carrie,’ she could do that, too.” He agrees enthusiastically with the producer who once said, “If June could look any age, there isn’t a part anywhere she couldn’t play.” “He loves me. He thinks anything I do is good,” remarks June, reentering at this point. “He cried all the way through ‘Little Women.’ It seemed so funny, a big man like Richard crying.” “Everybody cries at ‘Little Women,” Dick interposes drily.

When he made a flirting scene with a vivacious blonde charmer, Marilyn Monroe, in “Right Cross,” his wife insists she was highly objective about the whole thing. “I just took a front seat right by the cameras, gave him a sweet, understanding glare and said, ‘Honey, you go right ahead and make this romantic. I don’t care, show them how well you do it.’ Of course, I was on the set every minute.” Dick hadn’t encouraged June to take the part in “Right Cross,” because, “at the beginning, the girl’s part wasn’t big enough for her. I didn’t want her to do it.” But June wanted to do it because Dick was already cast for it. “Then I had to work to help build her part and get her into the picture,” he laughs. During the production of this film, when June was ill with virus and laryngitis and was so anxious not to hold up production, Dick would take her temperature every morning and say, “Now if you feel well enough, you might go to work.” But he softened completely when their little daughter came to the door sympathizing, “Oh ter-ble, ter-ble,” saying the important words twice. “What’s wrong, baby?” her mother asked. And Pamela said, “Oh, Mommy, bad cold, bad cold.” But what June hadn't heard were his husband's concerned consultations with the director, checking over the shooting schedule, trying to find some script loophole for her, worrying, “She just can’t keep on working with fever every day.” At eventide, when Dick and June come home together from the set, they rush to their rooms, put on their pajamas and robes, rehearse their lines, play with Pamela, and make plans for their expected new arrival. “I had a phone call this morning. I think we’re having a baby,” she announced one day to Dick. They don’t know when the new adopted baby will arrive. “We put in an order, a long time ago, saying we wanted another baby, and she’s two now. I want a boy. Richard wants another girl. So we just said, ‘Surprise us!’ ”

Every evening before rehearsing their scenes, June and Dick go up to the attic in pajamas to see how the new baby’s nursery, still in a state of plaster and loose boards, is coming along. Blue-printing the whole layout, Dick would tour her through saying, “The beds go there,” pointing in one direction. “Where? Oh!” June would attempt to follow. “Another bureau here in the alcove.” The tour to be eventually interrupted by June’s “Ouch!” as a loose board met her, head on. About that old temperament taboo of actors taking their roles home with them, June says readily, “If you mean the ‘Reformer,’ well, yes!” Intimating by her mischievous tone that one Richard Powell didn’t really have to take this role home with him, it sort of beats him there. “He’s always reminding me of things. ‘Please, doll, answer the phone when it rings.’ ‘Please don’t make an appointment and then forget about it and take Pamela for a pony ride instead. Please put gas in the car so you won’t be stalling in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. And if I say meet me at Romanoff’s for lunch, please, don’t sit in La Rue’s and wait.’ “But he’s very polite about it. It’s always, ‘Please,’ ” she grins, “except once in a while it’s ‘For the luva, June, please!” June laughs.

Pamela’s “Mommy” is prone to drift dreamily around the house from room to room carrying the new silver mink cape Dick gave her, and she hangs it over the knob on the desk drawer in the den and gives it an umpteenth loving caress. The silver mink came as a joyful surprise when Dick walked in with a big box and threw a line away, something about, “Honey, I bought myself some shirts, see if you like them.” It seems June, recently torn between the desire for a silver mink and having her engagement ring reset, decided on the engagement ring and Dick wound up by compromising, and giving her both. “He gave me the mink cape for nothing in particular. He’s so cute,” June grins. When they make another picture together June would like it to be “Too Young to Kiss.” “It’s a light comedy I’d love to do with him. He hasn’t seen the script yet, but I doubt it's written to his liking!” Then she calls, “Richard, wherefore art thou?” “Right here,” he says, having supervised her last lines and giving her his private-eyeful. “You know,” he says with a resigned look, “on second thought I may make another picture with her. This woman needs me.” And says his leading lady, “You’re so right.” —Article by Maxine Arnold for Photoplay magazine (July, 1950)

With age and time period controlled, those born in the 1930s (Silent generation) or before, had sex the most often, whereas those born in the 1990s (Millennials and iGen) had sex the least often. American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s in data from the nationally representative General Social Survey, N = 26,620, 1989-2014. This was partially due to the higher percentage of unpartnered individuals, who have sex less frequently on average. Americans in their 20s had sex an average of about 80 times per year, compared to about 20 times per year for those in their 60s. The results suggest that Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors: An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners. Also, there are registered 110 million infections among men and women nationwide. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

It wasn’t until I entered USC film school that I begin to realize just how good Dick Powell was as an actor, how versatile he truly was. Powell became a star as the male ingenue in movies and comedies at Warners, usually romancing Ruby Keeler or his second wife Joan Blondell all through the 1930s. He had a stunning voice and could handle comedy deftly. Very much the fresh-faced boy next door, Powell was not lacking in sex-appeal, though. And a lot of those early pre-Code musical comedies in which he appeared, such as 1933’s 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, are wonderful classics and often subversively surreal thanks to Busby Berkeley’s innovative production numbers. Powell's debut in Blessed Event (Roy Del Ruth, 1932) was kind of a strange film, featuring Lee Tracy as a gossip columnist who ends up in more trouble than he bargained for. Powell plays singer/bandleader Bunny Harmon, who has a feud with the gossip columnist. It wouldn’t be until the following year’s 42nd Street that Powell would break out as a star. 

Dick Powell was also quite the radio personality. He served as Master of Ceremonies on Hollywood Hotel for several years during the 1930s, voiced many of his movie characters on the Lux Radio Theater adaptations, and played witty private investigator Richard Diamond. Sadly, Powell died from lymphoma in 1963, aged 58. Who knows what he might have achieved in the film and television industry. While I love Dick Powell in many of his noirs (his Philip Marlowe is my favorite, ringing true to the character I imagine when I read Raymond Chandler), I choose to remember him in his musical roles. He had sweet boyish charm, a bright smile, and one of the most powerful and beautiful tenor voices I’ve heard. Let's not forget his wonderful talent. His film presence still makes me smile. —"The Crooner Who Turned Tough Guy" by Ernest Corneau in Classic Film Collector (Fall 1972)