Franchot Tone (Three Comrades), Tom Neal & Barbara Payton (Downward Slope)

"Three Comrades" (1938) directed by Frank Borzage, starring Margaret Sullavan, Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young.

The cast is distinguished. Playing Patricia is Margaret Sullavan; a radiant screen actress who made far too few films and yet made a strong impact in those that she did appear in such as The Moon’s Our Home, The Shop Around the Corner and The Mortal Storm. In Three Comrades we can understand why these three men are captivated by her vivacious beauty —inside and out. Robert Taylor enjoyed working with Sullavan, describing her as “enchanting. Her talent warranted a much bigger career than Hollywood ever allowed her.”

Appearing with Bob, as his fellow Comrades, are Franchot Tone, a superb actor who never became the huge star in pictures he should have, and Robert Young, who had been toiling in films since 1930, and despite some good performances over the years would find his greatest success on television as the patriarch of Father Knows Best.

Joseph Mankiewicz, was frustrated by Fitzgerald’s overanalytical and talky script and ended up hiring an MGM contract writer named Edward Paramoure to collaborate with him on a rewrite. Despite having written some superb films, like The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Trouble for Two and the 1936 version of Three Godfathers, Mankiewicz thought of Paramore as “a Hollywood hack,” but someone he felt might be able to rein Fitzgerald in. Mankiewicz became known as “the man who rewrote Fitzgerald.” Sullavan told Frank Borzage that the “dialogue is beautiful, but there is too much of it.” She felt that the “camera, rather than the dialogue,” should tell the story.

According to author Lawrence Quirk, Franchot Tone also objected to the wordiness, but he came to rue it. “I could have kicked myself because I had cut off my nose to spite my face—half my footage was cut, and I had only myself to blame.” Fitzgerald called Mankiewicz an “ignorant and vulgar gent.” He did acknowledge that about 1/3 of the picture was his script, but with “all shadows and rhythm removed.” However, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was more enthusiastic. She lauded the love scene on the beach between Taylor and Sullavan, calling it “superb.”

The resulting film was right up Borzage’s ally as he had a reputation for being a director who could bring out the romantic quality in almost all of his films. Robert Young, who worked with Borzage more than once, would recall him as a “sentimental slob but... a lovely, lovely man.” It is a film beautifully played by each of its four lead actors, despite the drawback of not being more relevant to the events then occurring in Nazi Germany. Commonweal was mixed. It felt the film was “too sentimental,” but tossed a bouquet to Sullavan and Tone by calling their performances “entirely convincing.” Much to Metro’s chagrin the picture didn’t perform well at the box office. Despite this it did turn up on several critic’s best ten lists. -"Robert Taylor: A Biography" (2013) by Charles Tranberg,

After leaving him on the Fourth of July, Vicky Lane filed for divorce from Tom Neal, citing his “unreasoning jealousy.” During the divorce proceedings in 1949 —which were dutifully reported by the Los Angles Times— she told the court that “I couldn’t go down to the corner to get a package of cigarettes without being accused.” In August, Lane won her decree on the grounds of mental cruelty.

After the divorce, Neal spent most of his time chasing starlets and cocktail waitresses in between notching screen credits as a grade-Z Errol Flynn in dreck like Amazon Quest (1949) and Radar Secret Service (1950). Then in 1951, at a pool party at the Sunset Plaza Apartments, he met the woman who would drive the final nail into the coffin of his Hollywood career.

Due to a tabloid nightlife that included copious amounts of booze, dope, and shady underworld characters, Barbara Payton had blacklisted herself with the major studios in little more than a year and a half. When they met, she was still seeing actor Franchot Tone (himself on the downward slope of a classy A-list career), but when she saw Neal at the pool, “It was,” she said “love at first sight.” He felt the same, later telling reporters. “Four minutes after we met, we decided to get married.” Neal blamed Tone for throwing the first punch, but in an unintentional slip of honesty, he blamed the ferocity of his attack on a deeper need to impress Payton. Claiming that she kept egging him on, he said, “She digs that blood and guts stuff.” Neal had nearly killed Tone. With a cerebral concussion, and a broken nose and cheekbone, Tone was rushed to California Lutheran Hospital.

Of course, in his own horrible way, Neal had helped the "Detour" myth take shape by living his life like a noir antihero. Over time, Tom Neal and Al Roberts simply merged—actor and role folding into one dusty, broken man wandering the desert at night, cursing his fate. -"Tom Neal: The Broken Man" by Jake Hinkson (Noir City, 2012)

Jean Wallace had married Franchot Tone in Yuma (Arizona) in 1941. In August of 1948, she sued Tone for divorce, asserting that he was "extremely jealous" and had frequent violent fits of temper. On December 8, Jean testified in Santa Monica Superior Court that she “had warned Franchot against association with Barbara Payton, because Barbara was mixed up with narcotics.” Jean then pointed to Barbara in the courtroom as the main reason why Franchot should not be granted custody of their children. Jean's attorney mentioned a dozen glamour girls involved with Tone (while still occasionally sleeping with Jean). Tone, under questioning, admits he had seen Barbara Payton unclothed "frequently."

Alternating between civil and contentious, the custody battle between Franchot Tone and Jean Wallace would continue into the following year. On May 21, 1952, Wallace obtains custody of her two children in Santa Monica, reminding the court about Tone’s love brawl with Tom Neal about Barbara Payton. [...] “I feel the deepest sympathy for her and retain the most lovely memories of the time we spent together,” with his characteristic formality intact, Franchot Tone issued this statement upon hearing of Barbara’s re-emergence in the news, arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in 1962. -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

Barbara’s button nose, pert and bunnylike as any Midwestern cheerleader’s, curved into the baby spot and above it her incomparable white-lashed black eyes batted. “Life’s for the living,” she said, downing her gimlet and running her delicious pulpy tongue across her Minnesota-farm-girl teeth, thick and white as a bar of Ivory soap. “So what’s the bottom line, then, pretty boy? For the ruckus? What did my wayward boyfriends cost me?” He flicked his finger along the sheen of sweat on her glass. “It’s simple. You clean it up for a little while, close those lilywhite gams on set and everything’s apples and ice cream again.” He forced himself to meet her eyes and gave her his jolliest smile. “Making a late-night date, Hop? I do all the warming up and some other girl gets the hot payoff?”, Barbara grinned widely. She’s not interested in me, he reminded himself. Barbara Payton had two tastes: dull-eyed muscle men and flush, faux-ivy debonairs. He was a long way from either. “A girl like you,” he began, moving right past her sarcasm, “she’s not meant for the bruising ride through the darker corners of the Hollywood Hills.” “I’ve done the sugar-daddy gig, hon. Maybe you heard.”

“I don’t mean a sugar daddy, sugar lips. I mean a man who will do right by you. Bells and whistles and rice and the bouquet. And I think Franchot is the fella to do it.”

The girl, she had it all, but her legs went only one way—out. But the stories never stopped. Divorce from Franchot Tone. Divorce from wife-beating drunk Tom Neal. Paying a two-hundred-dollar bar tab with two fur coats. Rumors of heroin and picking up bellboys at the Garden of Allah on Sunset... He knew this was coming. Were there no surprises? -"The Song Is You" (2009) by Megan Abbott


Franchot Tone ("Bewildered") video

A fall from grace: Franchot Tone & Barbara Payton (She wasn't Ashamed)

Franchot Video ("My love for you") video.

Barbara Stanwyck saw what was happening with Joan Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone, and though Joan had been changed by Franchot (Joan had hoped their marriage would be like that of the Lunts, joined onstage and off—longtime, loving friends and actors), she was already wearying of him and their endless arguments, in which Tone occasionally, in a drunken rage, beat her, and she would go to work wearing dark glasses to hide the bruises on her face.

Joan and Franchot had finished making The Bride Wore Red, and Joan was working on a picture with Spencer Tracy. Barbara [Stanwyck] knew that Joan was mixed up with Tracy. What Joan was doing with her marriage infuriated Barbara. It was only a flurry with Tracy, but Joan would come home after being with him and call people at two or three in the morning asking if Franchot was there. “Well, I don’t know where he is. He’s out... and I can’t find him. And I’m desperate.” Franchot was out drinking and, said Barbara [Stanwyck], “wearing his heart on his sleeve and staying in some lousy bar” because he’d found out “about Joan and Tracy.”

In addition to Robert Montgomery, the negotiating committee for the Screen Actors Guild consisted of Kenneth Thomson, the guild’s executive secretary and veteran actor from the mid-1920s who appeared in more than sixty pictures; and Franchot Tone, scion of an industrialist fortune, who’d fled his privileged upbringing for the stage to become the handsome, genteel leading man of the Group Theatre. Tone decided to leave the stage for a year when an offer came from Hollywood; the other Group Theatre founders were heartbroken to see him go; they believed Tone had the makings of a great stage actor. Twenty pictures later and with a long-term contract with Metro, Tone was married to one of the studio’s most glamorous stars and had himself become the ultimate of urbane movie idols. Tone, ever ambivalent in his choices, saw his defection from the stage as a fall from grace.

Barbara Payton: "I was engaged to the actor with the most class in Hollywood-Franchot Tone. In other words I was the queen bee, the nuts and boiling hot. The odds were a million to one I'd grow old with twenty servants, three swimming pools and a personal masseuse plus an adoring husband. I try to think of what was my biggest moment-my biggest thrill. I think it was 1950 on St. Valentine's Day. I was going to start a big movie with Jimmy Cagney the next day and I went with Franchot Tone to the opera. I wore a mink stole he had given me and I was dripping ice (diamonds). We marched into the Opera House and it was like everyone had suddenly been struck silent. People stopped whatever they were doing and just stared at us. We were the most glamorous thing since Lily St. Cyr's pasties. Franchot and me, we just stood there and let them gape for a moment. It was heaven."

"Franchot Tone, suave, likeable, quiet, unexciting Franchot asked me to do a play with him in New York. He was hooked on me. He spelled it out for me and I read him... 'Kiss me and your troubles are over.' I may not look like I used to but, not very long ago Franchot Tone asked me again if I'd marry him. You know what he said? 'If you'll marry me, I'll become young for you again. I'll become a boy again.' After living a full life he wanted me back again."

"I was good to Franchot. He was good to me, too. You'd think that combo would strike oil-but it was a dry well." Tom kept zinging Franchot with, 'What the hell, you're twenty years older than Barbara. She's a passionate broad. What happens ten years from now? Are you going to be able to satisfy her?' Franchot kept debating the subject politely but I know he was getting madder and madder and madder. ------A next-door neighbor of Barbara’s named Judson O’Donnell claimed to have witnessed the fight, he said that Tom Neal pummeled Franchot over thirty times, adding, “It was like watching a butcher slaughtering a steer. At first, I thought my refrigerator was on the fritz. It sounded like a prizefighter in a gym beating the bag. It was one of the bloodiest fights I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty — on that very lawn!” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner staff writer James Bacon reported that he visited Franchot the morning after his plastic surgery. “He was wrapped in enough bandages to fill a Johnson and Johnson warehouse,” said Bacon. “I was told that his face underneath looked like a piece of beefsteak that had been run over by a truck.”------

Barbara Payton: "I loved Tom. I liked and respected Franchot. In May of 1951, I married Franchot Tone, a millionaire success who loved me more than any girl in the world. Sounds like a happy ending to a fairy tale, doesn't it? Sorry - it was just the beginning. Franchot is a lovable, honest, irascible, masochistic man who loves beauty for beauty's sake. Some core of insecurity makes him insanely jealous. He tortured himself. I was only somebody for his doubts, fears, recriminations to bounce off. I resolved to let him spend himself of the torture. It was endless. It built and there was no end in sight. After days of wrangling and reconciliations our attorneys agreed on a settlement."

One of Tom’s more understated (and ludicrous) quotes to the press during this time alluded to his and Barbara’s wedding plans, now canceled. “I’m not paying for her Wassermann if she’s going to continue to see Tone,” he declared with an almost laughable sincerity. With very little effort, Tom’s artless offerings became fodder for a ravenous press intent on crucifying him. Barbara’s friend Tina Ballard offers, “I think Barbara wished she could combine Franchot’s qualities of wealth, intelligence and class with Tom’s down-and-dirty, raw sexuality, and make a whole other person out of them!"

In an example of Hollywood’s growing vendetta against Barbara for the humiliation she had brought to the well-liked Franchot Tone, as well as to the film community in general, Dore Schary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Chief of Production, and Darryl F. Zanuck, Vice President of 20th Century-Fox, both of whom had once publicly expressed an interest in buying Barbara’s contract from WB, quickly changed their minds.

Sources: "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd, "I Am Not Ashamed" (1962) by Barbara Payton, and "A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940" by Victoria Wilson

Barbara Payton, nominated 'the girl most of men would like to be trapped with in an ice-manufacturing plant' about to star in her first major production "Trapped" (1949)

"The Song is You" (2007) by Megan Abbott (Excerpts):

Hop felt funny. She was lonely and he was willing to spare a
minute. “Barbara?”
“Yeah?”
“Let me ask you: you’ve been around this dirty town a few years. You’ve never been afraid to dig your heels in.”
“Hell no.”
“You ever run into Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel out on the town?”
“Yeah.” She paused, which she’d never done once since Hop met her.
“What’s their story?”
“Fuck if I know, Hop.”
“C’mon, Barbara. Between you and me. You don’t need to pussyfoot with me.”
There was another pause. Then, “Look, I don’t like repeating what I ain’t seen firsthand.”
“I’m a clam, Barbara. It’s my one and only virtue.”
“Well, that Marv’s cuddled up to me a few times, but there was something about both of them that rubbed me the wrong way. A girl gets a kind of radar.”

Barbara Payton, circa 1950

So he said now, pointedly, to Barbara Payton, bleached-brittle hair and toreador pants, smell of bar vibrating off her, “You’re the last person, Barbara, that I’d expect to take stock in rumors.” “Hey, I got nothing to hide,” she said, crossing her legs, lipstick-red mule hanging from her twitching foot. “They’re probably all true, every last one. Did you see the photos Mr. Franchot Tone spread all over town a few years back? Those private dick shots of me on my knees, all black garters and beads, before my beloved boxing partner, Tom Neal? How many girls get out of that?”

Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton outside the Mocambo nightclub on July 8, 1951 in Los Angeles, California

Hop nodded his signature knowing, understanding nod. She sighed, rubbing her arm wistfully. “What was I supposed to do? Play the blessed virgin or Betty Crocker? I was having a ball. And I wasn’t about to pull the brakes for Louella Parsons or Daryl Zanuck. I know it’s hurt me. I’ve paid. You don’t see me on-screen with Gregory Peck or Jimmy Cagney these days. The money ran out. There were some bad men. I hit the sauce. A bottle of Seconal a hotel doctor had to suck back out of me with a tube. Then I took the route, as the junkies say. It started sticking to me. You know the song. You could sing it to me.” -"The Song is You" (2008) by Megan Abbott

Happy Anniversary, Marilyn Monroe! (new biography by Carl Rollyson)

When Marilyn remained focused, she created an extraordinary range of performances: from the introvert in Bus Stop to the extrovert in The Prince and the Showgirl. Watch just those two films, and you will see why she is a great actress. Each performance is a de novo creation built through a vocabulary of gesture and movement that is inimitable. In her major roles, Marilyn Monroe did not repeat herself.

Primarily because of the skirt-blowing scene, she was treated as having shown more of herself than ever before. The filming of this celebrated scene at 2:30 a.m. on September 10, 1954, in New York City, attracted a crowd variously estimated to have been between one thousand and four thousand people, who watched Monroe’s skirt fly up fifteen times as the scene was rehearsed. DiMaggio had arrived two days earlier and drew the attention of some fans and the press. Amid shouts of “higher” and “hurrah” as the wind-blowing machine puffed his wife’s skirt over her head, DiMaggio retreated in silent anger.

Monroe herself seemed taken aback at the spectacle Billy Wilder had made of her. She is reported to have asked him if he was going to show the more lurid shots to his male cronies. Around 4:00 a.m., Monroe returned to her hotel room. DiMaggio arrived somewhat later. Evidently they quarreled over her night’s work, for “some shouting and scuffling was overheard by other hotel residents nearby, followed by hysterical weeping.” The next day DiMaggio departed for California, and Monroe remained heavily sedated.

When she arrived on the set of The Seven Year Itch, her bruises had to be covered with makeup. Given Monroe’s superb command of Hollywood publicity, it came as a shock a few months later when she announced that she was leaving Twentieth Century-Fox and moving to New York. Almost immediately, however, her move was suspected to be a publicity ploy, and few people seemed to appreciate that she had become so saturated with her own stardom that she felt stymied. Although Monroe would indulge in various kinds of publicity maneuvers for the rest of her career, never again would her life be quite as public as it has been during The Seven Year Itch and her divorce from DiMaggio.

Marilyn celebrating her birthday, 1962 1st June, on the set of Something’s Gotta Give

By the time Something’s Got to Give went into full production on April 23, 1962, the actress was facing a lifetime of failed enthusiasms. Although both Dr. Greenson and Mrs. Murray (acting now as the actress’s housekeeper) believed she was making significant progress, she felt profoundly ambivalent about going back to work. She had not been able to cope well with her buried paranoia, feelings of persecution, frustration, and rage. Before the shooting date, she consulted Nunnally Johnson, who was writing the script, a remake of a 1940 comedy, My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Johnson had worked on How to Marry a Millionaire and We’re Not Married. Her first words to him, “Have you been trapped into this too?” were a fair indication of her distrust of the studio and of her suspicion of any project it might propose. When Cukor began to revise the script, his actions were tantamount to challenging Monroe’s hard won convictions, for this was a script she could believe in.

The revisions were an attack upon her—especially since, according to Johnson, Cukor had similarly sabotaged her performance in Let’s Make Love. And the studio wanted to get a picture out of Monroe as soon as possible, figuring that her reign as sex symbol was about to expire. Walter Bernstein, the last of six writers to work on Something’s Got To Give, recalls that the studio catered to Monroe’s every whim. Once her artistic vision of the film was violated, she reacted like a politician or a general, making sure her power remained intact. “Sometimes she would refer to herself in the third person, like Caesar. ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe,’ she said to Bernstein when she wanted to wear a bikini in one scene. Such comments reveal how difficult it was for the actress to jettison her screen personality. -"Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (Revised and Updated)" (2014) by Carl Rollyson

Happy Anniversary, Howard Hawks! Marilyn Monroe: Another World's Blonde

Marilyn Monroe - 'Monkey Business' Premiere (Rare footage). "Monkey Business" (1952) is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey Business.

Marilyn seemed at ease on screen in the comedy 'Monkey Business,' her third movie of 1952, but did not get on with the director, Howard Hawks. Physically impressive (like Huston) Hawks was “six-feet-three, broad shouldered, slim-hipped, soft-spoken, confident in manner, conservative in dress, and utterly distinguished overall.” Born in Indiana, the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Hawks was educated at Exeter and graduated from Cornell in 1917 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in World War I, and after the war built airplanes and a racing car that won the Indianapolis 500.

In 1922 he came to Hollywood, where screenwriter Niven Busch found him impressively distant and formidably frigid: “He gave me his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners. He was like that with everyone – women, men, whatever. He was remote; he came from outer space. He wore beautiful clothes. He spoke slowly in a deep voice. He looked at you with these frozen eyes.” Marilyn has the decorative but unrewarding role of Charles Coburn’s secretary. In one scene the seventy-five-year-old Coburn “had to chase and squirt Marilyn with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained,was only his indecision about where on Marilyn’s... um... ample proportions to squirt the soda.”

Despite her small part, Marilyn also caused trouble on this picture and forced Hawks to shoot around her when she failed to show up. The problem, as everyone later discovered, was her infected appendix, which she had removed, in late April 1952, as soon as her work was completed. No doctor performing an appendectomy would excise her reproductive organs. The formidable Hawks, mistaking her pain and fear for stupidity, was even more critical than Fritz Lang. Hawks considered Marilyn ‘so goddamn dumb’ that she was wary and afraid of him.

Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that ‘the camera liked her.’ Cary Grant, like Celeste Holm and many other colleagues, was surprised by her meteoric rise to fame the following year: “I had no idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her.” To the other actors Marilyn could seem ordinary, unresponsive and apparently “dumb,” but on camera she seemed to glow.

By 1953, against almost impossible odds, Marilyn had achieved the stardom she longed for. Yet her celebrity intensified her insecurity and unhappiness. The novelist Daphne Merkin wrote that Marilyn’s “desperation was implacable in the face of fame, fortune and the love of celebrated men. . . There is never sufficient explanation for the commotion of her soul” – though the reasons can, in fact, be found. Her wretched background, together with the pressures of life as a movie star, created her mental and emotional chaos. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff described it as “an aura of blank remoteness, of being in another world.”

As Howard Hawks remarked, “there wasn’t a real thing about her. Everything was completely unreal.” In Marilyn’s last two films of 1953 she played her typical and most popular incarnation: the gold-digger with a heart of gold. In 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' – based on the book and musical comedy by Anita Loos and directed by Howard Hawks – a dumb blonde and a showgirl, both well endowed, sail to Paris to find rich husbands.

In one scene of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' Marilyn wears a top hat, long black gloves, transparent black stockings, high heels and a gaudy sequined costume cut like a bathing suit. In another, wearing a strapless, floor-length, pink satin gown, with long-sleeved gloves, she steals the show by singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The best lines in the film – “Those girls couldn’t drown. Something about them tells me they couldn’t sink” – were cut by the censor.

'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' had been a 1925 book by the fabulous Anita Loos, which spawned a long-running Broadway adaptation. Hawks was ostensibly making a film version of the play, but the play didn’t have much of a workable plot, so he was rewriting it extensively with Charles Lederer, and the rewrite entailed discarding a fair number of the famous songs from the stage version—a decision which somewhat calls into question the logic of making a movie version of the show in the first place. And if the whole point of the thing seemed to be a justification for 90 minutes worth of breast jokes, Hawks seemed blithely unaware of the sex appeal of his two stars. In one of the strangest things anyone has ever said, Hawks said of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell “I never thought of either of them as having any sex.” They just weren’t his type.

Marilyn made a freeflowing tape for her psychiatrist, with “extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm – in very blunt language.” Emphasizing the crucial paradox in her life, she bitterly said, “I just don’t get out of sex what I hear other women do. Maybe I’m a sexless sex goddess.” It’s sadly ironic that Marilyn herself did not live to see the sexual revolution and suffered greatly for being its symbol. She’d experienced intense sexual pleasure with Jim Dougherty and with Fred Karger in the mid-1940s; but by the 1950s, under the stress of promiscuous sex and stardom, she’d become frigid.

The photographer André de Dienes said that “Marilyn is not sexy at all. She has very little feeling toward sex. She is not sensuous.” The make-up man George Masters frankly called her “an ice-cold cookie, as frigid as forty below zero, and about as passionate as a calculating machine.” The costume designer Billy Travilla, who knew her in the early 1950s, was more sympathetic and felt the need to protect her, but was also disappointed by her inability to respond: “Her lips would tremble. Those lips! And a man can’t fight it. You don’t want that baby to cry. I think she wanted to love, but she could only love herself. She was totally narcissistic.” -"The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller & Marilyn Monroe" (2009) by Jeffrey Meyers

Splitsville: Franchot Tone & Barbara Payton, Mad Men 'Waterloo' (Don & Megan)

Born February 27, 1905, in Niagara Falls, New York, Franchot Tone excelled in playing the debonair, tuxedo-suited aristocrat in his many film roles, which included an Academy Award-nominated performance in the classic 1935 picture 'Mutiny on the Bounty.' By 1950, he had nearly 60 films to his credit and was one of the town’s wealthiest and most respected stars. Los Angeles Magazine writer Tom Johnson offers a description of the actor: “Franchot Tone: a dapper man-about-town, the kind of guy who could make lighting a cigarette look like mankind’s highest calling. He was safe, secure, successful, dignified, and everything a woman could ask for.”

In 1933 Tone had completed seven motion pictures for MGM, co-starring with his future wife, Joan Crawford, for the first time, in Howard Hawks’ popular World War I drama, 'Today We Live'. One of his finest enactments of his near patented, rich playboy characterization was in 'Dancing Lady,' in which he and Clark Gable were rivals for Crawford’s affections. He was paired with Crawford for a third time in 'Sadie McKee' (1934), before being loaned to Paramount for 'The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.'

Bob Thomas writes (about Tone's courtship of Joan Crawford): “He was charmingly insistent, lavishing on her not only flowers but also rare books and works of art. At night he built a fire in her den and read Ibsen, Shaw and Shakespeare to her while she hooked a rug.” Rumors of Franchot’s intense professional jealousy and alleged heavy drinking, physical arguments, and rampant unfaithfulness on both their parts culminated with the couple’s divorce in April 1939.

After a staggering 29 motion pictures in six years, Franchot left MGM after 'Fast and Furious' (1939), a Busby Berkeley directed mystery/comedy, co-starring Ann Sothern. He returned to the New York stage, and to the Group Theater, to co-star with Sylvia Sidney in The Gentle People, a fine production that nonetheless flopped. Often relegated to second male leads for the remainder of his film career, Tone never quite managed to break out of the narrow mold Hollywood had cast him in. “Franchot Tone is a gentleman by breeding and inclination,” Burgess Meredith told TV Guide in January 1966. "He’s always been a man’s man, a hunter, a fisherman, and also a woman’s man. He’s an intellect, a man of charm, good looks, perception and enormous natural gifts as an actor."

In 1941, Franchot, 36, married 18-year-old, ex-Earl Carroll showgirl and Paramount starlet Jean Wallace (Blaze of Noon), and the couple eventually had two sons, Pascal Franchot and Thomas Jefferson Tone. However, this marriage, too, proved stormy and problematic, and would not endure. The blonde-haired Wallace, whose facial appearance and provocative figure bore striking similarities to Barbara Payton’s, would later go up against her lookalike nemesis in a highly-publicized court case. She also appeared to share Barbara’s propensity for trouble.

By 1948, Jean’s frequent domestic squabbles with Franchot led to an acrimonious breakup that found them wrangling over custody of their sons. During their divorce trial, Franchot accused his wife of committing adultery with several men, including Johnny Stompanato, who later would gain posthumous notoriety when he was stabbed to death by 14-year-old Cheryl Crane (the daughter of his lover, Lana Turner).

The suave, tuxedoed Franchot Tone twittered on Barbara's every word the night they met in Ciro's. "She was a sparkling liquid tipping at the brim," Tone recalled, "Radiating beauty like a phosphorous doll..." Carrying scars from a corrosive, second divorce -to actress Jean Wallace- Tone found the young Barbara "vampy and outrageously appealing".

Franchot was still walking around in a kind of daze over Barbara and continued to court her with almost daily gifts of champagne, flowers and expensive jewelry. Barbara responded by lovingly nicknaming him “Doc” and treated him to delicious, home-cooked meals at her Hollywood Boulevard apartment. “Franchot Tone was a very nice and extremely generous person,” adds Jan Redfield (Barbara's sister-in-law). “We saw him several times at Barbara’s apartment and he was a lovely man. Although I don’t think I ever saw him without a drink in his hand, he was never out of line nor did I ever hear him raise his voice at Barbara ever. His manners were always impeccable. I think Barbara saw him as someone who would love her unconditionally and take care of her and support her — things she didn’t always get from her father.”

According to Lisa Burks: "Franchot was extremely altruistic and I think he tried to give the relationship every chance, but he could not endure the humiliation of Tom’s constant presence in Barbara’s life before he gave up. Her continued infidelity with Tom Neal aside, I think Franchot finally gave up on Barbara when she, in a way, began to give up on herself." According to Barbara's autobiography "I'm Not Ashamed", Franchot offered to marry her again, attempting to rescue Barbara from her self-destruction, promising her "I'll be young for you again." Sadly, Barbara was too far gone by then. -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

Don clearly didn't see his split from Megan coming, but once he realizes the sad truth that Megan can't bring herself to say, he doesn't handle it with the bile he once spewed at Betty; instead, he promises Megan all of the resources he can offer and allows their marriage to come to a quiet end. Later, he makes a professional sacrifice when he tells Peggy to deliver the Burger Chef pitch, voluntarily giving up his last chance to make himself irreplaceable at Sterling Cooper so he can give his protégé the chance she earned. Source: theweek.com

Don makes a call to Megan and, by doing so, severs his own tie — to love, to California, to the promise of rebirth and manifest destiny. He confesses to her that he’s about to be fired, that he thought if he kept his head down and did his job, things would work out. He offers to go to Los Angeles, and Megan just doesn’t say anything, leaning on her beautiful green phone. She’s done. Maybe they’re done forever and ever and it’s time for a trip to Reno. Source: flavorwire.com

Franchot Tone: Smooth P.I. in "Love Trouble"

'I Love Trouble' (1948) is a film noir written by Roy Huggins from his first novel 'The Double Take,' directed by S. Sylvan Simon, and starring Franchot Tone as Stuart Bailey. Plot: A wealthy man hires a detective to investigate his wife's past. The detective (Franchot Tone) discovers that the wife had been a dancer and left her home town with an actor. The latter is killed before he can talk, but, with the help of a showgirl, the detective learns that the wife had used stolen papers from a girl friend to enter college after she had stolen $40,000 from the night club where she worked.

Franchot Tone was a terrific actor. He could play a psycho as in "Phantom Lady" and "Man on the Eiffel Tower" or he could switch to a smooth, fast-thinking and highly intelligent private eye as in "I Love Trouble". The title is misleading. It suggests a comedy-mystery, which this is not. Tone is not sardonic, like a Dick Powell. He's not weary, like a Robert Mitchum, and he's not tough, like a Humphrey Bogart. He's smart and quick-witted and self-controlled.

Janet Blair pops up, as the sister of whom this wife had taken an identity before her marriage. And Janet's real sister, the possessor of that identity, has happily left it behind when she married. That's Janis Carter, affecting a terrible South American accent. Tone doesn't know if he can trust Blair, but he knows he's attracted to her. Meanwhile his detecting takes him all over LA and nearby places where he meets up with a bevy of well-known supporting players and complications.

This is noir, done Chandler-style in complexity, in which even the writer may not know who did what to whom, when, and why. I haven't grasped it all myself, but the ride is sure enjoyable, and I'll take it again. It's done in a lighter Dick Powell "Murder My Sweet" vein, but without any narration. Solid film noir.

A great turn by Franchot Tone as LA private eye Stuart ‘George’ Bailey, who out-Bogart’s and out-Powell’s Philip Marlowe in a deliciously convoluted story of deception, greed, frame-ups, murder, and sexy high jinks. Bit player Glenda Farrell is a comic delight as Bailey’s cute, loyal, eccentric, and sharp-as-nails secretary Hazel. Tom Powers delivers a solid performance as the aging suspicious husband who hires Bailey to tail his young wife, who is being blackmailed. Steven Geray delivers a nuanced low-key performance as mysterious crime-boss Keller, and John Ireland, Raymond Burr, and Eddie Marr are great as Keller’s heavies. Sid Tomack is in his element as a small-time chiseller who is out of his league. The dames are all delightfully buxom good-bad girls, with enough charm and innuendo for a dozen Marlowes: Janet Blair, Janis Carter, Adele Jergens, Lynn Merrick, and Claire Carleton. A weird waitress-from-hell played by uncredited bit-player Roseanne Murray, is a scream. Source: filmsnoir.net

One afternoon in the Formosa Café near Goldwyn Studios, the actor Franchot Tone approached Beth Short (The Black Dahlia). She was at the bar as the actor stepped from the inside telephone booth. He pretended to know her, dropping a few names, but Beth only smiled and shook her head. “She said she was waiting for someone,” Tone says, “and I said to her, ‘Of course you are, you’re waiting for me! And I have just arrived.”’ He says it was “a ridiculous line” he had used before. The actor insisted he remembered her “very well... and I think many girls were flattered by it, but this one seemed more concerned that I’d had too much to drink.”

He told her he had finished a film with director Robert Siodmak, 'Phantom Lady,' and convinced Beth that an associate interviewing young women with “your kind of looks” would be most interested in meeting her. He took her to the unoccupied office of the “associate” but she was not interested in cozying up on the sofa, which opened into a bed. Tone says, “I thought it was a pickup from the start but to her it wasn’t anything of the kind!” It was an extraordinary experience, Tone later recalled. Beth believed they had “hit it off” as people. She was disappointed that Tone had only “that” in mind. He tried to kiss her a couple of times and told her she had the most gorgeous eyes in the world, which he thought she did—dreamy eyes that he was almost seeing through grey smoke. He could imagine her as a siren luring sailors to their death. And then she turned ice cold. Always the gentleman, Tone turned the situation around and made it seem that he had made a mistake thinking that she was after romance. He did find her most refreshing to “talk” to, he said, but secretly the actor was flustered —a pathetic scene, and the girl seemed so sad that Tone had to hold back tears. “She told me she’d been ill,” he says, “something about an operation to her chest.” He gave her a phone number to reach him about “the part and the associate. I gave her whatever bills were in my wallet. It was a strange and unsettling experience. Even after I called a cab for her and she was gone, the feeling stayed with me. It was almost as though I had experienced being afraid of her.” -Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (2006) by by John Gilmore