Two Great Talents: June Allyson, Betty Hutton

Miriam Nelson (1919—2018), was a prestigious choreographer who debuted on Broadway in Sing Out the News (1938). Miriam went to Hollywood and choreographed many musical numbers for his husband Gene Nelson, once he had a contract with Warner Bros. Miriam Nelson was a contract performer with Paramount. She worked in films such as Double Indemnity, Tea for Two and Breakfast at Tiffany's. She worked with people such as June Allyson, Judy Garland and Doris Day. Miriam taught Ingrid Bergman her dance scene in Cactus Flower (1969), the film that earned Goldie Hawn her only Oscar. Miriam Nelson's autobiography My Life Dancing with the Stars, with a forward written by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, was published in 2009. Source: imdb.com

"In Panama Hattie, a Cole Porter musical, Jane Ball and I were in a musical number with Betty Hutton. One night Jane got an eye infection and couldn't go on, so I had to quickly teach June Allyson the whole number. The only place to rehearse was in the basement where we were unable to hear the show. We were hard at it when we one of the dancers walked by and said: "What are you two doing? The show is over, You missed it." We both raced up to the stage anyway, just to be sure. You can bet we stayed out of Betty Hutton's way the rest of the night. For years after that, I had nightmares I missed my cue. Shortly after we opened in New York, Buddy DeSylva, the show's producer, held understudy auditions for Betty. I didn't audition because I didn't see myself as the Betty Hutton type. I told June she should audition. I knew Buddy liked June, Jane Ball and me because he called us "Vassar, Smith & Brown" or his "college girls." Even so, June didn't think she sang well. I knew she could do it, so I pushed her down the aisle to the audition. Buddy asked her to sing and she got the part of Betty Hutton's understudy. Betty came down with chicken pox and and June went on in her place. Someone from George Abbott's office saw June in Panama Hattie and recommended her for Best Foot Forward. The rest is June Allyson history! Ethel Merman let June share the star dressing room since otherwise she would have been running up and down three flights of spiral stairs to the chorus dressing rooms. Merman also had a bouquet of spring flowers delivered to June's dressing room."

"I finally got a terrific opportunity to dance in a movie called Duffy’s Tavern. It seemed as though every star on the lot was in this movie, including Betty Hutton, Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake and Joan Caulfield; however, most of them were not dancers per se, so the featured number I was going to do would supply the dancing. Billy Daniel, my friend who helped get me into Paramount, was also the choreographer. It was widely rumored that Joan and Bing had grown close after their meeting on Duffy’s Tavern. She later told the press she had an affair with a movie star. Although she didn’t name him, it was easy to put two and two together. By now, I had a little bit of money saved up, so June Allyson and I pooled our money and rented a nice apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Living with June was so much fun because she had a lot of friends, like Lucille Ball and Judy Garland, and was always going to this party or that one. This was before she married Dick Powell, so she was still a popular “bachelorette.” My mother came out to Los Angeles for a visit. June and I asked my mother to move in with us." 

"We all lived together until June’s career skyrocketed. We all sat down and talked it over. June decided to hire a housekeeper and keep the place on her own. My mother and I decided to get our own apartment within walking distance of Paramount. It was a cute building where all the apartments faced into a central courtyard. June Allyson was my maid of honor in 1941 when I became Mrs Gene Berg Nelson. It was not much of a honeymoon, because we didn't have enough money or time. Once Busby Berkeley wrote me: "You're a darling girl, Miriam, and I love you for all that you did. God bless you always, your dear friend." —My Life Dancing With The Stars (2009) by Miriam Nelson. 

As Gene Arceri recounts in Rocking Horse: A Personal Biography of Betty Hutton (2017), a different, somehow paranoid version of June Allyson's promotion in Panama Hattie was given by Betty Hutton. One of the chorus girls in Panama Hattie was June Allyson, who also became Betty’s understudy when she proved she could do a good Hutton imitation. When DeSylva took Betty to Hollywood a year later for a picture he was to produce, Allyson got her chance to go from understudy to featured performer. Eventually, she scored in Hollywood, as did a few others in the chorus: Vera-Ellen, Lucille Bremer and Betsy Blair. Americans, shattered by the news out of Europe, reacted to the RAF struggling with the Luftwaffe over England. Over 32,000 British children had been evacuated to the United States. Tin Pan Alley was turning out “The White Cliffs of Dover” and Cole Porter composed “Make It Another Old Fashioned, Please,” “Let’s Be Buddies” and a host of other songs for Panama Hattie. Among the principals were Arthur Treacher, Rags Ragland and Betty Hutton, who had three numbers in the show: “Fresh As a Daisy,” “They Ain’t Doin’ Right by Our Nell,” and “All I Gotta Get Is My Man.” 

Betty Hutton and the show’s star, Ethel Merman, got along well enough except for one incident with conflicting versions. Betty said, regretfully, “When I got in the show, Ethel took out my best number, ‘Plant Your Own Tree.’” Yet, according to Merman, “Betty Hutton had three numbers when we opened in New Haven and the same three numbers when she withdrew from the cast to go into films. So why, years later, she tells everyone that I insisted upon her best number being cut, I’ll never know.” In Panama Hattie, Allyson took over for Hutton, who developed the measles. There was a famous director in the audience, George Abbott, who later signed Allyson for his next play Best Foot Forward. With some bitterness, Betty said, “When I left the show, June got her chance and I taught her everything she knew. She got this part in Best Foot Forward and I flew back from the coast to see her. I had a front row seat and I thought she would be thrilled. I brought her flowers. She didn’t want to see me and she would never speak to me.

I was hurt because I loved her. I thought she was so lovely. I don’t know why she was ashamed to say I taught her. When [June Allyson] came to Hollywood, she didn’t want to remember all that. I can’t understand it to this day.” MGM was about to launch 23-year-old June Allyson, who arrived in Hollywood for the movie version of Best Foot Forward (1943). Lucille Ball would be its star instead of Rosemary Lane. In her second picture at MGM, June Allyson gave Mickey Rooney the “Betty Hutton treatment” in Girl Crazy (1943), rapidly on her way to enormous popularity. According to Betty Hutton, “Johnny Mercer was the greatest songwriter of all time, wrote the score of The Fleet's In. And my role in that film was funny.” —Rocking Horse: A Personal Biography of Betty Hutton (2017) by Gene Arceri

"June Allyson was thought to be the embodiment of niceness—pretty, unassuming and uncomplicated. But the truth is that she was not average, apparent in the way Allyson was posed as a rival to Judy Garland in the 1940s. Garland was four years younger and had come to MGM seven years prior but Allyson’s rise was in counterpoint to Garland’s fall. Allyson had enough talent for the studio bosses to think this new girl could step right into Garland’s shoes if Garland didn’t behave. She began her career in a series of film shorts in Hollywood in late 1930s, alternating with chorus work in Broadway. It was one of those fateful theatrical opportunities that brought attention to Allyson: Betty Hutton contracted measles and Allyson was promoted from understudy to star in Panama Hattie in 1940. This led to a featured part in Best Foot Forward, and the Hollywood version made in 1943. Allyson had a rocky start in Tinsel Town and, after playing supporting roles, was nearly dropped by MGM. But wise counsel from her future husband Dick Powell led to her taking the “plain Jane” sister lead in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), which was a big hit and made her a star." —June Allyson: Her Life and Career (2022) by Peter Shelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adele Jergens and Ronald Reagan, 1948.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noir Performances: Acting Degree-Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Salute to Dick Powell & Ruby Keeler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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