Franchot Tone: the complete package

Joan Crawford had pleasant memories of "Today We Live", chiefly because of her costars and director. The man who made the biggest impression on her, of course, was her future husband, Franchot Tone. Franchot Tone, as of 1933, represented everything positive to Joan, everything she aspired to, everything she felt would give her life ultimate meaning and purpose: fulfillment and a kind of peace she had never known. And here was Franchot, handsome, sexy, accomplished, cultivated and a far finer actor than she. She loved Tone’s theatrical bona fides, his impeccable manners, and his distinguished collegiate background. And, of course, that she found his famous voice romantic and sexy and masculine was the proverbial icing on the cake.

Deep down, Joan knew that her wild fling with Gable would lose its raw, tempestuous quality if they were to get married. Marriage had seemed to dampen her feelings for Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and she was afraid that it would happen again if she were to marry Gable. Hawks had conceived of 'Today We Live' as a “man’s movie,” but the two agreed to make the best of it and got along very well.

Tone was a completely different type than either Doug Jr. or Gable. Doug had tried to be a mentor to Joan, but he was too young to carry that off, and he was certainly not as sophisticated as she was. Joan loved Gable, but she couldn’t look up to him because he came from a background similar to hers and was too rough-hewn and uncultured. Franchot Tone was the mentor/father figure she had been seeking in Doug Jr., but at the same time he was the experienced lover and adult that Gable was. In other words, the complete package. Two years passed; they did well together before the cameras, and the chemistry was right. They became lovers, and the chemistry was eminently right there as well. Finally she decided to take the plunge. On October 11, 1935, they were married.

Later there was speculation that she had stepped up the marriage plans because she feared competition from Bette Davis, who costarred with Tone when he was on loan to Warner Brothers for a picture aptly titled 'Dangerous.' She was not blind to the chemistry between them that raged during the Dangerous shoot —in spite of Davis’s marriage to Ham Nelson— nor was she (or anyone else) unaware of the great crush Davis had on Tone. She and Tone tied the knot before Dangerous was released.

In Dancing Lady (1933), she was teamed with Gable and Tone. She plays Janie Barlow, a burlesque performer who is torn between wealthy paramour Tod Newton (Tone), who starts a romance with her after he bails her out when her club is raided, and Broadway dance director Patch Gallagher (Gable), who, as expected, can’t stand rich, entitled fellows like Newton. Joan gave a snappy, mostly excellent performance, vividly conveying Janie’s vulnerability, her resentment over her lot in life, and her anger at Newton’s condescension.

Newton’s fascination with Janie reflected Tone’s true feelings toward Joan at the time. Franchot never got past supporting-actor status, at least in Joan’s films. On loanout he did slightly better, even qualifying as leading man at times, as in the 1936 The King Steps Out. Louis B. Mayer simply did not consider him to be major star material. He was not conventionally handsome in the Robert Montgomery style, or sexily charismatic in the raffish Gable mold.

Tone became acutely aware that his Hollywood career would always have certain built-in limitations. This dawning frustration eventually grew into resentment. She made excuses for Tone. He hit her because he drank, she rationalized, and he drank because he felt like “Mr. Joan Crawford,” a role he detested. Even many years later, she continued to defend Tone, writing in her memoirs, “I don’t believe Franchot ever for a moment resented the fact that I was a star. Possibly he resented Hollywood’s refusal to let him forget it.” Unlike her feelings for Doug Fairbanks Jr., Joan still felt at this time that Franchot was the one and only man for her, her true soul mate.

Tone did his best to smooth things over, he said it was only hurt male pride that made him lash out at her and have affairs, but Joan wasn’t having any of it. The physical blows, the tongue-lashings, the
drunken beratings, and the infidelities had finally combined to make Joan fall completely and irrevocably out of love with Tone. Joan was becoming convinced that she and marriage just didn’t mix. Through no fault of his own, [Joan's third husband] Phillip Terry lacked Fairbanks Jr.’s outgoing, gregarious, showoffy nature, couldn’t hold a candle to Gable’s charisma, and was absolutely no good in a fight the way Tone was. “I think it got to a point where Joan would have welcomed those knock-down, drag-out fights with Franchot Tone over Phillip’s bovine-like nature,” said Jerry Asher. Franchot may have beaten her, but he never bored her. About Phillip Terry, Joan would later write, “I realized I had never loved him.”

Reminiscing about the young Barbara Payton, legendary film producer A.C. Lyles remembers meeting her for the first time at Ciro’s. “When I first saw her, I was naturally struck by how lovely Barbara was,” he says. “I thought she had the most beautiful eyes. The best way I can describe them is that they were both sexy and innocent.”

A.C. recalls dining with Joan Crawford one night at Ciro’s, just a few weeks after he met Barbara. He says that Crawford, who didn’t know Barbara at the time, seemed spellbound by her beauty when Barbara came over to their table to say hello to them. “After I introduced them and Barbara left, Joan turned to me and said, ‘That is a very lovely, very sweet girl. Who is she? Where is she from? If her acting is as good as her looks, she is going to be big in this town!’”

Although he lost out on his bid for an Oscar as best supporting actor, Franchot’s performance in Mutiny on the Bounty brought him a ton of film work, and insured his place as one of Hollywood’s most popular and promising actors of the day. As a result, he temporarily put his theater objectives on hold and dove into his movie career.

Tone was an architect hopelessly in love with Bette Davis in 1935’s Dangerous, and appeared as a wealthy industrialist who commits suicide over Jean Harlow in Reckless. After a staggering 29 motion pictures in six years, Franchot left MGM after Fast and Furious (1939), a Busby Berkeley directed mystery/comedy, costarring Ann Sothern.

He returned to the New York stage, and to the Group Theater, to co-star with Sylvia Sidney in The Gentle People, a fine production that nonetheless flopped. The following year, he received excellent notices in New York City for his role in Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, and continued his Hollywood career in 1940, freelancing in a string of moderately enjoyable comedies and dramatic efforts for Universal, Columbia, Warner Brothers and Paramount Studios, the best of these being the war-themed Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and The Hour Before the Dawn (1944), and the moody film noir Phantom Lady (1944).

Publicity-wise, Barbara Payton scored a major accolade when The Foreign Press Association deemed her “The Most Beautiful Girl in Pictures” and ran her photo in dozens of newspapers around the world. Franchot’s associates, including ex-wife Crawford (who had been so impressed with Barbara at their initial meeting, but had changed her mind about her once she had learned of her lifestyle), did their best to dissuade the actor from consorting with the vampy starlet. Tom Neal later told Newsweek, “Barbara asked me to marry her. She was engaged to Tone when I met her, but she told me she wanted me because he was too dull. She said I was exciting."

Lisa says that Franchot’s sons, Pascal (a.k.a. Pat) and the late Thomas Jefferson (a.k.a. Jeff) did have vague recollections of the house on Foothill Drive, and of seeing Barbara there, but that it was difficult for them to be sure as they were both very young at the time and were officially living with their mother, Jean Wallace, and her new husband Cornel Wilde, at their home on Hillcrest Drive.

Franchot's biographer Lisa Burks, says, “Whether Franchot ever forgave Barbara or not remains a mystery because he rarely, if ever, spoke of her after their divorce. Because of this, I’m led to believe that he did forgive her, in his own quiet way. I do know that he felt sorry for her and was saddened by the way her life had turned out, but he also knew from experience that there was nothing he could do to help her, because she seemed unwilling or unable to help herself."

Sources: "Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography" (2002) by Lawrence J. Quirk & William Schoell and "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

Franchot Tone: Group Theatre and other loves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siodmak's Phantom Lady: Dark Psychosis

Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain pull you in with pitch-perfect dialogue and a way of describing the world that makes readers smile and aspiring writers cry. So with the summer reading season upon us, there’s no better time to take a walk down rain-dampened city streets with lovers, killers, sharp private detectives, shadowy figures in fedoras and smart dames with plenty of ulterior motives. Source: www.concordmonitor.com

Produced by Joan Harrison for Universal, Siodmak’s 'Phantom Lady' premiered at Loew’s State Theater in New York City on February 17, 1944. The film’s plot was based on a 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich, but it changed both the novel’s original story line and character motivation in significant ways. With the figure of the psychotic artist Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a fascist modernist in thin disguise, Siodmak’s Phantom Lady added a dimension to Woolrich’s original conception that not only permitted new narrative possibilities but also struck the political nerve of the time. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward praise Phantom Lady for Siodmak’s exquisite manipulation of mise-en-scène. The film’s atmospheric images of New York streets and jazz clubs, of jails and apartment interiors, of desire and excess, they argue, recall the iconography of Weimar cinema.

Assisted by his cinematographer, Woody Bredell, Siodmak, in particular in the jazz club sequence, “brilliantly interweaves expressionistic decor with American idiom. If watched without sound, the scene could be from one of the classic German films of the 1920s.” Whether one considers the film’s use of canted angles, disjointed continuity, expressive close-ups, visual allegory or synecdoche, spotlights, or chiaroscuro effects; whether one brings into focus the film’s iconography of schizophrenia, hysteria, paranoia, or sexual stimulation —all might be understood as part of a performative recollection of Weimar expressionism authored by a non-expressionist exile-stranded in Hollywood.

Thomas Gomez, Ella Raines and Franchot Tone in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

For Jack Marlow, modern technology signifies the root of all evil. Insisting on the authority of the original, the here and now of the genius work, Marlow considers modern machines of reproduction to be catalysts of aesthetic banality; they enable an ominous dominance of Zivilisation over Kultur. Nazi cinema privileged conductors of explicitly “masculine” music such as Bach and Beethoven. Excessive masculinity, driven to the point of murderous paranoia, is also at the core of Marlow’s aesthetic project. Marlow’s New York studio, brightly lit and hygienically cleansed of all traces of modern civilization, is populated by a variety of sculptures that clearly recall the monumental work of Nazi artists such as Arno Breker and Joseph Thorak. For Marlow authentic art, just like politics, expresses the will to power and form. Liberalism’s valorization of justice, equality, and freedom thwart the political calling of authentic art. It causes Marlow to launch a double attack on modern life, one against the postaesthetic rule of mass art and diversion and one against liberal democracy and the equalizing rationality of social engineering.

As if temporarily slipping into the role of the film’s director, Marlow seems to manipulate for his own purposes what the film at other moments employed in order to unmask Marlow’s jargon of authenticity. After Marlow and Kansas finally discover the phantom lady, Marlow—panicked by the unraveling of the case—pretends to call Inspector Burgess and inform him about Henderson’s innocence. To do so, he positions himself behind the windowpane of a gas station, tinkering with a public telephone without properly dialing. The camera alternates between Kansas’s point of view, who is situated in the car outside and observes Marlow’s gestures as if projected onto a big screen.

Siodmak’s Phantom Lady recognizes lack and fragmentation as the modern hallmark of subjectivity and human reciprocity. Instead of signifying an ominous intrusion of the uncanny, the splitting of sounds and sights can offer antidotes to Marlow’s deadly aesthetics of closure, uniqueness, and total presence. The gas station sequence, in this sense, testifies to the contradictory ways in which Marlow—like his fascist predecessors in 1930s and 1940s Europe—seeks to incorporate modern tools and experiences into a vitalistic rejection of civil society and modern liberalism. Switching back and forth between Kansas’s space of viewership and Marlow’s cinema of simulated speech, camera and editing expose Marlow as a dexterous forger of authenticity and existential resolution. Marlow’s mise-en-scène, as seen by Kansas, is a counterfeit in multiple ways. What in Kansas’s perspective appears to be a silent cinema generating powerful sounds of redemption is revealed by the film’s alternating shots as a sound cinema producing vicious silence.

Film noir thus projects male lack and paranoia —that which he cannot tolerate in himself— onto the female other as deformation, fragmentation, and impediment. As Silverman summarizes: “The female voice, like the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration.” -"The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood" (2002) by Lutz Koepnick

Carol confers with the condemned Scott in silhouette shots in a dark prison room that seems like nothing from real life. An unadorned set for a lonely elevated rail station becomes as threatening as a haunted house. What makes 'Phantom Lady' noir is the unhappy, unhinged underworld that Carol's investigations uncover. Characters suffer from depression or are psychotic. Otherwise decent citizens are easily bribed to condemn an innocent man. Only Carol's refusal to give up stands in the way of Scott's execution. Joan Harrison built on this early success to continue producing with and without Alfred Hitchcock, eventually working on over two hundred TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Source: www.dvdtalk.com