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)

Lunch with Lizabeth Scott: The Dark Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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