When Lucille Ball met June Allyson

When June Allyson flew to New York in the winter of 1960, the last person anyone expected her to look up was Lucille Ball. And yet now it seemed that this was the very reason June had come three thousand miles—to see Lucy. Why? What was going on? In a matter of weeks, the answer was obvious. Right after her meeting with Lucy, June suddenly stopped squashing the rumors that all was not well with her marriage to Dick Powell. And early in January 1961, when an openly weeping June told reporters outright that she and Dick had separated and she would seek a divorce, the mystery seemed to be solved. 

June Allyson was faced with the breakup of her marriage. There was only one other woman in the world who had ever been faced with just her unique and difficult position-and that was Lucille Ball. Lucy seemed to be the only person June could turn to for the understanding and advice she needed. Neither woman was willing to comment on what they talked about. But there were no denials either. After their meeting, people were quick to point out that Lucy, having been through the division of Desilu Studios, might well give June some financial advice. After all, June and Dick also shared an entertainment empire, Four Star Productions. June Allyson and Lucille Ball were born, a few years apart, in New York. As children they dreamed of show business careers. Each girl underwent a tragic experience that almost crippled her for life. For June it was an accident. Her spine had been injured. 

For Lucille, it was an illness; she contracted pneumonia. Whether through improper treatment, or simply because of the violence of the attack, it left her paralyzed. For eight months she lay in bed, struggling to move a toe, an ankle, a knee. She had planned to begin her show business career as a chorus girl. Now she was told she might never walk again. Yet neither girl would consider giving up. Shy, delicate-boned, tiny June Allyson, and raucous, wide-mouthed, tall Lucille Ball—they shared an incredible determination. By effort, by sheer will power, they set about restoring themselves to health. For June there were long hours in a swimming pool, to help move her stiff and aching legs. And then there were the movies to help forget. She loved Fred Astaire’s “The Gay Divorcee,” which she watched eighteen times. She knew every step of the dance routines. 

For Lucille, there were exercises that were much the same—and scars that were very different. For three long years she struggled to regain control of her legs. She spent hours listening to the radio, studying the great comedians, their tricks, their timing. The one thing she wanted was to make people laugh. At one point, some relative brought a drama coach to see her, to encourage her gallant fight. At the end of the session the man rose, bit his lip, and told her that she did not have a chance. Sick or well, the man said with pity she simply had no talent. As stubbornly as June Allyson kept her eyes from her face in the mirror, so Lucille Ball kept her thoughts from that man, his condescension and his judgment. Despite him, despite her unwilling legs, she would be a dancer and a famous comedienne. Both women went to the West, to Hollywood, where they would meet each other for the first time during the production of Best Foot Forward. 

Best Foot Forward was a 1943 American musical film adapted from the 1941 Broadway musical comedy of the same title, based on an unpublished play by John Cecil Holm. The film was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and starred Lucille Ball, William Gaxton, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, and Nancy Walker. Produced by George Abbott, the production opened on Broadway on October 1, 1941 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it ran for 326 performances. It was directed by Abbott, with choreography by Gene Kelly, and starred Rosemary Lane. The show was Nancy Walker's Broadway debut and also launched June Allyson to fame. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times liked the "good humored" show, especially praising the score and choreography, singling out June Allyson and Nancy Walker. Maureen Cannon (Best Foot Forward) was friendly with Rosemary Lane and June Allyson, and she witnessed in the summer of 1942 the introduction of June Allyson to Dick Powell by mutual friend Rosemary Lane. This clearly would contradict Joan Blondell's madcap account of the meeting in her memoir Center Door Fancy. 

While shooting Meet the People (1944), co-starring Dick Powell, Lucille Ball helped her friend June Allyson to hide her and Dick Powell from the press. Lucille also observed Joan Blondell's erratic conduct and her tendency to spread false rumors about Allyson. Blondell's official divorce from Powell would happen in July 1945. In August, 19, 1945, Dick Powell would marry her third and last wife, June Allyson. After getting nervous in her first wedding night with Powell, Allyson felt more on ease the next day, explaining: "The next morning he took me to the Santana, and there we had our second wedding night in broad daylight. What had I been afraid of? This was truly the gold at the end of the rainbow. I didn't want to get off the boat, ever." This would also contradict Powell's bedroom customs that Joan Blondell mentioned in Center Door Fancy, complaining of a prudish Powell wanting to make love only in the darkness. 

Joan Blondell alleges, in the most libelous passage of Center Door Fancy, that Allyson's reputation was in the public domain and she had been a call-girl in NYC, according to Mike Todd. Blondell mustn't have figured that future biographers of Allyson would confirm or debunk these awful allegations. And multiples sources deny these off-base accusations. First, Mike Todd was a shady, sexist fabulist who only could know about Allyson through third-party sources. As a youngster, June Allyson lived on 3rd Avenue Elevated, also known as Bronx El, on a clanking street of tenements, bars, and hock shops. To help her family, at 16 she was working as a nightclub singer and dancer. It was typical of the era tongue wagging about a young woman in such an environment. Whilst, Lucille Ball studied dance under Martha Graham Dance Company  before Graham asked her to drop the class. “You’re hopeless as a dancer,” Graham told her. “You’re like a quarterback taking up ballet. Perhaps you could find work as a soda jerk.” Reportedly, at 14, Ball wound up in a relationship with 23-year-old Johnny DaVita, who, some authors speculated, ran illegal booze from Canada. In 1928, Lucy began working for Hattie Carnegie as an in-house model. Later Lucy Ball was hired by theatre impresario Earl Carroll for his Vanities Broadway revue, and by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. for the Rio Rita stage musical. After a stint in Roman Scandals (1933), Lucille Ball moved to Hollywood as a contract player for RKO. 

On March 3, 1960, (one day after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), Lucille Ball filed papers in Santa Monica Superior Court, claiming married life with Desi Arnaz was "a nightmare" and nothing at all as it appeared on I Love Lucy. On May 4, 1960, they were officially divorced. Both the show and the couple’s marriage ended in 1960. However, until his death in 1986, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke fondly of each other. Lucille’s marriage had taken place in 1940. June’s in 1945. Lucille chose a temperamental Cuban bandleader, Desi Arnaz, five years younger. June had married a respected, long-established movie star, Dick Powell—thirteen years her senior. At the beginning, there was the strain of being apart.

For June and Dick, enforced separations were not really long or frequent. They were apart only when location shooting was required for either of them, and this seldom meant more than a few weeks. But for Lucy and Desi Arnaz, enforced separations were far more severe. Lucy once estimated that in the early years of their marriage they spent far less than half their time together. In each marriage, the result was one of increased tension. Lucy and Desi’s broke down first in 1944. For June and Dick the first serious split came in 1957, when Dick moved out of their Mandeville Canyon home. In both cases the decision was made by the woman. And in both cases the women changed their minds and decided to reconcile. Both men had a shrewd business sense. Four Star Productions and Desilu became names to be reckoned within the world of TV. But just as strains had emerged from the success of the two women, new tensions appeared born of their husbands’ triumphs. Lucille Ball sold Desilu's stock for 17 million dollars in 1967, which amounts to $130 millions today. 

When Lucille was a young actress, she was known as a wild and rough woman, very unpolished and scrappy and willing to brawl, and she wasn't liked by everyone because she was sassy. Again, like her Stage Door character, she admitted: 'I'm a bitch in the boardroom, a bore in the bedroom and a bear on the toilet, so watch your back!' Lucille Ball clashed with Joan Crawford during the filming of "Lucy & The Lost Star." Not being used to the sitcom format, Crawford was filled with trepidation and turned to alcohol to calm her nerves, which greatly displeased the demanding and perfectionistic Ball. After Crawford failed to perform a Charleston dance routine to Ball's satisfaction, Ball loudly threatened to fire her in front of the entire cast and crew, causing Crawford to flee to her dressing room in tears. There, she uttered the infamous quote: "And they call me a bitch!" It is said that Desi Arnaz and Vanda Barra gave Crawford pep talks which helped get her through the shoot, and the episode became a big hit. 

Lucille Ball could be a comic wisecracker, but Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, and Eve Arden did it better. She's very good in The Big Street, but dramas were never going to be her bread and butter. She couldn't sing, she could move well but wasn't a dancer. Once the hair went red and she developed and was allowed to showcase her amazing talent for physical comedy she became a huge star in an emerging new medium. From a respectable but middling career to #1 at age 40. “On the set of The Lucy Show she could be a holy terror,” said one of the technicians who watched Lucy in action. Joan Blondell, who had known Lucy since their starlet days in the 1930s, had become a stage comedienne in middle age. Lucy booked her on the show, then expressed dissatisfaction with the way Blondell read her lines. After one take, her friend Herb Kenwith reported, the director yelled “Cut” and “Lucille pulled an imaginary chain. . . as if flushing an old-fashioned toilet.” Blondell turned away but caught the tailend of the gesture.“ ‘What does that mean,’ she demanded. Lucille said, ‘It means that stunk!’ Joan looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you, Lucille Ball!’ and left. The studio audience was stunned. You didn’t hear words like that in those days.” Blondell never came back.

Lucille Ball was very conservative and didn't invest in land properties, like a lot of other celebrities. Fred MacMurray made a fortune off of early Hollywood land valued over 60 millions at the end of his life, the same amount that Lucille Ball was worth: $60 million dollars at the time of her death in 1989. Dick Powell had been shrewd with property as well and was one of the founding investment developers of a big leisure complex at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue that included an ice hockey arena, a bowling alley, stores, and restaurants. Although his workaholic ethic might have given the impression he would have amassed near an equal fortune as MacMurray's, Powell's estate was just valued around 5 million. After their tumultuous honeymoon, Joan Blondell and Dick Powell left New York by train on 17 October, 1936, stopping at the tony South Shore Country Club in Chicago.

Some fans had difficulty separating reality from the movies. Joan Blondell complained bitterly: "People took all that love stuff so literally with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, who were always playing opposite each other, that several times the fans were actually furious that I took him away from Ruby. When we got married, they thought she should marry him. It didn't bother them one bit that she was married to Al Jolson." Vivian Vance fondly remembered that during the days of the "I Love Lucy", she would regularly go over to Lucille's house at night to henna and perm Lucy's hair. Ann Sothern and Ethel Merman attended these hair sessions too. Merman, Vance and Ball were having a party at Chez Roxbury and getting pretty drunk in the process. Merman announced she had slept with Desi Arnaz when he was appearing in Too Many Girls (1940), before he went to Hollywood and met Lucy. Merman was also having an affair with Sherman Billingsley, owner of the Stork Club, and married William Smith in 1940.

The story took place on the evening after Lucille Ball threw a wedding shower at Desilu studios for Ethel Merman prior to her marriage to Ernest Borgnine, which would put the time in June 1964. "Lucille threw a party for Merman at her Beverly Hills house. Her husband, Gary Morton, and her children Lucie and Desi Jr. were sent away while Lucille Ball, Ethel Merman, and Vivian Vance spent the evening with bottles of scotch. The three ladies reminisced about being young together in Broadway and Hollywood. Ethel Merman had known Vivian Vance for twenty nine years and Lucille a little longer. They had done movies and Broadway together and had just finished filming a two part "Lucy Show" for airing on CBS. The more they drank, the freer everyone's tongues got. Merman admitted to her one night stand with Desi in 1939, which Vivian found hysterical. Lucille was not amused and wondered out loud that Ernest Borgnine "must be great in bed at night because he is nothing to look at in the daylight." Finally, the three dames dissolved into laughter and made coffee." 

After her death, more of Lucille Ball's life story surfaced: her reputation back in Jamestown, NY, the rumors about Lucy being a call girl in NYC, like June Allyson, being both stories by all accounts patently false, byproduct of jealousy. In another girl night, June talked about Lucy having an affair with Pandro Berman, head of RKO. Lucy said she had dated Berman but she fended off Harry Cohn's advances in Columbia. Lucy seemed curious about June and Dick's intimate life, asking if was June satisfied? "I cannot have enough of it," laughed June. 

Lucy just seemed bluntly cranky. She advised June not to "mess with the Rat guys" (Sinatra, Lawford, Dino). Allyson shaked her head in disgust. Changing subject, Lucy said: "No matter how I get dressed up, I always look like the cigarette girl at the Trocadero." She added she wanted to redecorate her Roxbury Drive house. She seemed to dominate her second husband Gary Morton. Only Vivian Vance, Ann Sothern and June Allyson could stand up to Lucy's formidable character. Her friends sometimes heard Lucy snicker: "Goddammit Gary, I said no ice! I can't drink this. Make me another one and remember no ice! It's useless. Oh, and can you get me another pack of Pall Malls from the cupboard? Can you manage to do that? Jesus Christ!" —"If Lucy Ball saw June Allyson, what would she tell her now?" article by Charlotte Dinter for Photoplay magazine (April 1961), "Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz: They Weren’t Lucy & Ricky" (2020),  and "Affairs, Romances, Feuds" (2023) by Allan Royle

Glamour and Heartbreak in the Golden Age

"In perhaps no other decade did the Hollywood film industry and its product look so different at its conclusion as compared to its beginning" (Ina Hark, American Cinema of the 1930s). At the beginning of 1933, with box office receipts 40 percent of what they had been in 1931 and both RKO and Paramount in receivership, the studios agreed, as they had in the 1920s under Will Hays, to police their films and the onscreen as well as offscreen behavior of their stars. Thus was ushered in the "Age of Order" or the "New Deal," as the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" of the Hays Code of the 1920s gave way to the "uniform interpretation" of the Production Code in 1934 under the administration of Joseph Breen. If sexuality and violence did not disappear from the American movie screen, both were considerably tamed by the Code. By the summer of 1936, "all of the major studios were running in the black for the first time since 1931", and it was estimated that 80 million people went to the movies every week.' 

But there was a recession in 1937 for Hollywood as for the rest of the country, and the net earnings of the studios fell off 41.6 percent from 1937 to 1938, and another 11.4 percent from 1938 to 1939 - this despite the hyperbolic claims of Will Hays, in the foreword to a 1937 book by Barrett Kiesling called Talking Pictures: How They Are Made, How to Appreciate Them, that on a "strip of film are caught and held the best in art, the best in music, the best in acting, the best in drama, and the best in literature." Leo Rosten wrote in 1941: "Hollywood means movies and movies mean stars. No group in Hollywood receives as much attention as the men and women whose personalities are featured in films and around whom entire movie organizations have been geared." About 80 percent of all actors were the studios' property, thanks to the nonreciprocal "option contract" - complete with a "morality clause" designed to exempt a studio from damage caused by irrecuperably profligate behavior - that gave a studio exclusive rights to command their players "to act, sing, pose, speak or perform in such roles as the producer may designate," if stardom was achieved seven years and more (Kiesling 129; Klaprat 375).

According to Margaret Thorp, there were 17,000 motion picture theaters in the United States in the 1930s; even the smallest towns, "numbering their citizens by the hundreds," had movie theaters. Moreover, "it is in the small town that tastes are most definitely marked," she writes. Foreign stars, like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich (whose popularity abroad was of considerable value until the war shut down overseas markets), fared particularly badly in small-town America. Warner Bros. had Al Jolson, George Arliss, Joan Blondell, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Barbara Stanwyck (until 1935), Bette Davis, Kay Francis, Paul Muni, Humphrey Bogart, Pat O'Brien, Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, and Ann Sheridan. 

Like screwball comedy, musicals, too, linked stars, especially dancing stars, to competence and entertainment values that were dependent upon beauty and sexual attractiveness. Backstage musicals were popular from 1933 on, when Ruby Keeler's wide-eyed innocence and earnest tap-dancing, supported by crooner Dick Powell and assorted other wisecracking personnel (including Ginger Rogers, whose best was yet to come) and surrounded by Busby Berkeley's extravagant numbers, made 42nd Street truly the "New Deal in Entertainment" that its promotion promised. Margaret Thorp wrote: "No capitalist civilization, measuring success by material possessions, can afford to abandon completely the refreshment of release by identification with an ideal personality, the necessity for escape by dreams." Analogous to its male stars, Warners' women tended to he either tough-talking dames or shrinking violets; on the one hand were Joan Blondell, Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly, and later Ann Sheridan, on the other Ruby Keeler, Kay Francis, Anita Louise, and the Lane sisters. 

Dick Powell was considered one of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors after his memorable performance in "Blessed Event." "He always seemed to be in good humor. He gave the impression of always enjoying what he was doing," said his short-time fiancé Mary Brian. Out of the blue, Powell quit his commitment to Brian and fell by the spell of his habitual co-star Joan Blondell. By the time they made Broadway Gondolier, they had already appeared in four movies together. They were first spotted dating in late September of 1935, less than one month after Joan’s divorce from cinematographer George Barnes. On 17 September, they announced that they would be married in two days on the yacht Santa Paula at San Pedro to sail through the Panama Canal. Blondell wrote veiledly about her three husbands in the last chapters of Center Door Fancy. She critizices George Barnes (who started as a still photographer for Thomas H. Ince, the man who died on Hearst' yatch) for being remote and not wanting children. Later, after divorcing him, she finds out he suffered a terrible childhood. The most baffling reproachments against the collected crooner are quite contradictory. For example it's clear she was looking for security with Dick Powell, who was a practical family man. In fact, she leads Jim (Powell) to break up with May Gould (Mary Brian) making him doubt of his feelings. Blondell also expresses doubts to Sally (Glenda Farrell) about her true feelings towards Powell, saying "he's too nice to hurt."

Joan always conceded that Dick made a wonderful father. Such acknowledgment did not stop her from arming herself with lawyers and filing for divorce on 9 June 1944. Joan announced publicly her separation from Dick: “I am going to file against Dick as soon as he returns from the East. . . and after I have talked the matter over with him. The matter of a divorce is final, however.” Norman Powell said in 1996: “My mother said she was taken with the kindness and gentleness that he exhibited toward her, and the fact that he really seemed to love me. I think that’s what attracted her to him more than any other thing.” Once Joan sets her sights on Mike Todd, she proceeds to depicts Powell as "corny, unsure of himself, a cold fish, a cold-assed Don Juan, and surprisingly prudish", adding that "He will make love only in the dark, furtively. I’ve got a new guy, and Jim [Powell] would die of envy if he knew how we feel." Blondell tells her mother: "Mom. It doesn’t matter about the little crumb [June Allyson] who’s after him. I heard their voices on the detectives’ recording, and she’s so corny—pleading with him to marry her, guide her career. It’s like a cheesy B-picture. Doesn’t he know about his Amy? Everybody else does. Her reputation is in the public domain. She’s a tramp dressed like a little kid. She was a call girl in New York—exhibitions her specialty. Flynn, and even a New York doctor, told me they knew some of the guys she ‘entertained.’ She’s using Jim—can’t he see? It would be a giant step for her to get the Star Husband of the Year. You know something crazy? He thinks I don’t know about her. And he doesn’t mention Jeff. We’re both silent.” 

Dick Powell yells after Blondell announces her petition of divorce: “I, Jim Wilson, did not marry a bum!” Blondells writes: "Jim slammed the door shut and was gone. I was sitting up in bed, my lawyer standing by the window. He had been talking to me for over an hour about the division of property and finances. By law, everything we had should be divided, and the lawyer was urging me to use the proof I had against Amy O’Brien to get what was coming to me. I told him I couldn't prove anything. “I’ll sign it, whatever it is—let’s get it over with. I can’t stand the sight of Jim around the house any longer.” Blondell writes that Powell moved to a rented house in Beverly Hills, and Mike Todd many times a day talked to her from New York. Also, Blondell has Frances Marion suggesting that June Allyson slept her way to the top. 

June Allyson wrote in her 1983 memoirs: "Joan's account of this meeting in 'Center Door Fancy', a fictionalized autobiography, is loaded against me. Most of the names have been changed, but the true identities are obvious. Joan is Nora, David is first husband George Barnes, Jim is Dick Powell, Amy is me, Teresa is Marion Davies, and Jeff is Mike Todd. She wrote that I simpered and came down the steps pigeon-toed and cooed that I slept with his letter under my pillow every night. I had no letter. I never wrote a fan letter. I had no picture or letter from him or any star. It was ridiculous, but then, so was her charge that I had stolen her husband away, starting that night. In fact, Richard recorded his own account of our first meeting in his diary, and it differs substantially from Joan's: "Why I bother to put this down I don't know except that she certainly is the cutest thing anybody ever saw. Last night, I went to catch 'Best Foot Forward' and there was this little blonde character named June Allyson who sang so loud that the veins stood out on her neck like garden hose. I sat and guffawed through the whole routine. Really a funny act although I don't know if the producer meant it that way. Anyway, this afternoon I had to attend a formal luncheon and I got stuck with the most stubborn hunk of chicken I've ever had the displeasure of eating. It took all my attention and I was struggling with it until I guess my face turned red. Then, suddenly, I felt someone's eyes on me and I looked up. And there was this same cute little character from the show last night and she was convulsed with laughter. Laughing at me! I don't know whether or not I particularly like that girl, but she sure is cute." Once I called Richard's home, Joan did not seem interested and irritably called his husband to the phone. Then she came back on and said, with biting sarcasm:

"You want my husband? Well, you can have him." Richard was on the phone and I tried to hide my embarrassment as I said, "I've got a script from MGM and they want me to do this picture called 'Two Girls and a Sailor.' Joan Blondell was convinced that I was after her husband. I wasn't, even though Dick Powell gave me palpitations and shortness of breath just to look at him. I tried not to think of him, except as my mentor. Every major actress gets whispered about. With me it was the nymphomaniac thing. "She's not Goody Two Shoes, she's Goody Round Heels," said the malicious rumors.  But the only man who really made my heart flutter was, of course, Dick Powell. And he was determined to protect my reputation." Another time, June writes "Richard was taking me to Ciro's and I was ready. But when he saw me, he was speechless with my new sophisticated look. He slumped on a couch in the living room. He pulled me down on his lap. Richard grabbed me and started smooching. "Whew, you scared me this time," he said. "I'm here because being around you is like being in a fresh breeze. So don't go dramatic on me, right?" "Yes, sir," I said. "Goody Two Shoes reporting for duty." "Let's go," he said. "No, wait a minute." He kissed me again. "Monkeyface, I love you." In 'Center Door Fancy', Joan gave me the name of Amy, possibly after the selfish sister in 'Little Women' who steals Jo's boyfriend and marries him. How bitter she must have been to have written about me: "Doesn't he know about his Amy? Everybody else does. Her reputation is in the public domain. She's a tramp dressed like a little kid. She was a call girl in New York, exhibitions her specialty." I could not believe it. How untrue, and how cruel.

In 1943 Joan Blondell had began going solo to the exclusive Cub Room of the Stork Club, that see-and-be-seen nightclub on East Fifty-third frequented by the café society of Broadway, Hollywood, and Washington. Mike Todd frequented the Stork Club as well. The man was singularly charismatic. He could walk into a room and suck up all the available oxygen with his bear-trap mouth, ubiquitous cigar, and rattling voice. Beat the Band was an incidental moment in an outsized life, except that it offered him an introduction to Dick Powell’s wife. A sort of weariness had settled into Powell and Blondell's marriage as soon as 1941. No longer were they on the town arm in arm. Now they were stepping out separately, offering excuses of family duties or the flu to account for the oft-absent spouse. Dick went alone to see "Best Foot Forward" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and was taken with sprightly young cast member June Allyson, who sang the praises of the barrelhouse, blues, and boogie-woogie in the “Three B’s” showstopper. Dick went with Joan a second time, and backstage Dick asked Rosemary Lane to be introduced to June Allyson, who was agape that a star of his rank would single her out. In 1961, Allyson and Powell reconciled, went home and made love, after which he said that he would never leave her because "there is a lot of lovemaking but real love like ours is rare." --Sources: "Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s" (2010) by Adrienne L. McLean, "Center Door Fancy" (1972) by Joan Blondell and "June Allyson" (1983) by June Allyson

June Allyson (Truth without Consequences)

The rumor that there was a new June Allyson running around Hollywood brought us face to face with June—Mrs. Richard Powell. June’s kingdom—her kids Pam and Ricky, and the man she loves, Dick Powell. And when she’s not busy rough-housing with her energetic bundles of joy, she looks back and remembers some of-the dreams she used to wish for . . . and the funny way dreams have of coming true sometimes when you’re not even looking. June agreed to play a new game with us. It’s called truth without consequences, looking for the truth about June Allyson 1958 style. . . and a smiling, pert mother of two who happens to be a movie star. 

Q: Is it true that there’s a new June? A girl who insists on leading her own life?

June Allyson: Maybe it just shows more now, but I’ve always been June Allyson, girl-individual. Even though Richard plays the boss, I make my own decisions about most things. I played in The Shrike, even though Richard was against it.

Q: Do you think you can be a real wife and a real help to your husband without sacrificing your independence?

June: Absolutely. I lead my own life, but here I am like a hen hovering over my brood. So of course, I think independence and family life can go together.

Q: How about the eternally ticklish problem of separate interests?

June: I think just about everybody has separate interests. It depends on how you handle the problem. I believe in not forcing your interests on your loving spouse. And I think, by now, Richard agrees with me. We tried to force our pet projects on each other once. Wow! Like that time I asked Richard to go skiing with me to Sun Valley. P.S.—he broke his shoulder. And one time, he took me on the boat he’d bought. Naturally I got terribly sick. P.S.—we sold the boat.

Q: Who are your best friends?

June: Pam and Ricky. I feel if you can’t be friends with your kids, what good is anything? Oh, I’m strict with them. But I’m strict only because I want them to be liked. Many times I’ll chastise one of them and then go to my room and cry. But sometimes it’s got to be done. Like one time when Ricky was planning to have lunch with the carpenter who works for us. It’s a big treat for him. But he was a bad boy that morning and I had to forbid him to go. Well, he sobbed and sobbed. It took all the strength I have to stop myself from wiping the tears from his eyes and sending him off to his lunch treat. But I didn’t. And the next day—well, it would make a better story to tell you he was bad the next day. But he was as good as gold. And he even forgave me.

Q: How about you, June? Are you sentimental?

June: Are you kidding? Everything makes me melt. I’m soft-hearted Sally, a sitting duck. Richard claims that I cry at the commercials on television. But that hasn’t been proved yet. Richard is sentimental too. But you’ll never get him to admit it.

Q: Do you think marriage to Dick has changed you in any important ways?

June: Yes. In at least one very important way. I’m not so selfish any more. In marriage you’ve just got to think of the other person. You give up things that you wanted very much, by adjusting to your husband. And then, suddenly, you find you didn’t really want those things at all. What you really want is a happy marriage. Last Monday was our anniversary and Richard gave me my heart’s desire: a big, large, gigantic, new refrigerator!

Q: That’s a nice small dream to have come true. Have you had any big dreams come true lately?

June: When I was a little girl I wanted more than anything else to be—not a nurse, like most girls, but a doctor. But we never had enough money. And, do you know what? My brother lives with us now, in a cottage near the house and he’s going to medical school. So, in a way, it’s my old dream coming true. Not for me, but for my brother.

Q: Is there a big dream hidden away somewhere right now?

June: The answer to that is emphatically yes! Except it’s not hidden very well. I want more than anything else to be able to sing, really sing! And with more lessons and some patience from my family while I practice, I’ll do it! I want to fulfill all the talents I neglected when I was a kid. I started out as a singer-dancer. People forget that and are so surprised when I’m mentioned for a musical picture. I know it sounds funny but Mrs. June Powell was a chorus girl in New York years ago.

Q: What was the most awful day of your life?

June: Hmmm. I won’t say it was the most awful, but the day I have in mind was the saddest. It was Christmas Eve and I had just gotten a job in a Broadway show. And on Christmas, I lost the job. I went down to the bus stop the next day and saw the company off with real tears in my eyes. It was like an unhappy ending to a fairy tale. It was even snowing as I waved good-bye to the company.

Q: Doesn’t that make Christmas a pretty sad memory?

June: No. Because some years later, after little June came to Hollywood, she married and lived happily ever after—she had a child. A boy named Ricky. And he was born on Christmas Eve. All during my pregnancy I used to joke with Richard saying, “I’ll give you a Christmas present no one can match.” And I wanted to give birth at Christmas time so very much that I really think I kind of willed it to happen just at the right time. My doctor doesn’t go along with this theory. I do.

Q: June, have you ever lost hope completely? Ever given in to despair?

June: There was one time. When Richard almost died. He was in the bedroom with me when he suddenly collapsed on the floor with a burst appendix. Somehow I’ll never know how, I managed to drag him to the bed and call the doctor. I lost twenty pounds in the first four days he was in the hospital. They’d given him up for dead. I stayed there day and night until finally one of the Sisters at the hospital sent me home to change my clothes. As soon as I got to the house the phone rang. It was the hospital. I was to come back right away. They’d given Richard the last rites. I tell you, I didn’t cry any more, or pray any more. I was drained of everything. There was nothing left inside of me. Four weeks later, thanks to God and Dick’s own good strength, they brought him home almost well. Then I cried, finally, and prayed in gratitude.

Q: People have said you’re a very temperamental star. Is that true?

June: Absolutely not; I do not go flouncing off sets and throwing dresses at people. I don’t know how that got started, but people used to write these things about me. Then when I showed up on the set of a new picture everybody expected me to be impossible to work with. I’ve had prop men and make-up people come to me and apologize for the ideas they’d had about me.

Q: How about the fact that some people (probably the same ones) have said that youre a—dare we repeat it?—scatterbrain?

June: That’s an easy one to answer. Once again I think that’s a fantasy based on a few parts I’ve played in movies. The same as the “Girl In The Peter Pan Collar” idea. I’m level-headed, not scrambled-brained, and next week I’m going to a party and I’ll wear a lovely dress.

Q: Do you have an ideal image of the kind of woman you admire, would want to be like?

June: My ideal has always been Ginger Rogers. And Ginger is now my very good friend.

Q: What do you think is a woman’s greatest need?

June: (WITH A BROAD GRIN) A great big large, gigantic, new. . . refrigerator.

Q: Every public figure, especially a movie star, is often the center of a lot of conjecture . . . some true, some false. What do you most wish people would stop thinking, saying and writing about you?

June: Most of all I wish that people would stop saying that Richard and I are breaking up again. It’s fantastic really. A while ago, Richard and I had a sort of second honeymoon. We went to Honolulu and had a sun-drenched, romantic holiday to end all sun-drenched romantic holidays. Then, in the middle of the night, suddenly the phone rang. Richard answered. It was my agent. “Listen,” he said to Dick, “I’m sorry to wake you, but there have been reports that you and June are in Honolulu together but that you’re living at separate hotels.” Richard scrubbed his eyes sleepily and answered, “Well, there’s a bed next to mine. And in that bed there’s a blonde. I think I recognize the hair. . . one minute while I check the face. Yep, it’s my wife June all right. So I guess somebody must be wrong.” And whoever’s wrong it’s not Richard and me. Because we’re right. We’re as right as two people can be. —MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE (MAY 1958)

Doris Day and June Allyson

Although few think of Doris Day or June Allyson as comediennes, both were comedy and musical movie stars. In their personal lives, they were very different. Doris Day had a dark side behind her vacuous façade. Day began suffering panic attacks with frequent episodes of palpitations; she had been prone to heartburn since the days when she wolfed down hamburgers and huge portions of raw onions in the front of Al Jorden’s car. She was convinced she was about to succumb to a heart attack. On at least two occasions she had an attack in a restaurant and almost choked to death. Her friendship with Allyson was only intermittent, but they were not close. Day was more around musical comedy star Charlotte Greenwood and Judy Garland. Judy was a law unto herself, and she did offer Doris some sound advice: ‘Ditch the religion bullshit!’–which she, in her Christian Science under-the-spell state, chose to ignore. A ‘cure’ was therefore effected by more readings from Mary Baker Eddy and benders with Judy, which, though just as detrimental to Doris’ health as her imaginary illnesses, certainly enabled her to forget all about them until the next morning’s hangover. Away from the studio Doris Day became edgy and antisocial.

Christopher Frayling on BBC broached the subject of Mamie Van Doren’s attitude towards Doris Day's alleged ‘temperamental’ episode while they were making Teacher’s Pet. Van Doren’s memoirs had recently been published so she was currently in the media spotlight. ‘She is not well,’ Doris says of her. ‘This lady is making it up… I feel sorry for her to say something like that. I don’t behave like that!’ Steve Cochran was a very handsome and virile actor who oozed sexuality and said more with his heavy-lidded eyes than other actors could put into words. A former cowpuncher, he appeared in Mae West’s scandalous Broadway revival of Diamond Lil and invariably played the cynical, hard-edged thug whereas away from the set he was regarded as one of the nicest, gentlest men in Hollywood. 

Cochran also had a fearless reputation as a womaniser: besides Joan Crawford and Mae West his scores of conquests included Jayne Mansfield, Sabrina, Merle Oberon, Ida Lupino–and Mamie Van Doren, in whose memoirs no details about their sex-life are spared especially when discussing his legendary appendage which had earned him the nickname ‘Mr King Size’. Cochran’s lovers and friends, Doris Day included, were devastated when, in June 1965, shortly after his forty-eighth birthday, this fun-loving man died aboard his yacht of an acute lung infection, a tragedy made even worse by the fact that his body lay aboard the craft for 10 days until it drifted into Guatemala.

Besides of the rumors of being a nympho, Doris Day also seemed to suffer a compulsive eating disorder. Her first husband criticised her table manners; something that can be said to leave much to be desired in her formative years. Doris had a fondness for wolfing down hamburgers with huge portions of ketchup and raw onions (usually in Al Jorden’s car on their way home) and dropping chunks of food everywhere because of his reckless driving. She also had a habit of talking with her mouth full and spitting, which cannot have helped his mood swings. Whereas, June Allyson was not such a neurotic or hypochondriac personality. Legend has it that June was being tested by Hollywood and the best she could muster when asked if she considered herself a leading lady was, “Oh, I suppose”? It’s a scene that no screenwriter could possibly invent. It’s almost impossible to believe, and yet the clichéd Hollywood film image of a movieland wannabe eagerly putting her best foot forward does in fact morph into this very real-life picture of June Allyson’s ingenuity. This girl (Allyson, unlike Day) couldn’t pretend, and it’s a very big reason why she went on to become one the biggest female stars in post—World War II America. 

Another difference is whilst Allyson got along well with James Stewart in their romantic film trilogy, Doris did not want to work with James Stewart, a Hitchcock favourite. Such was her determination to have her way that she overrode Marty Melcher and provisionally agreed to do another film with Howard Keel–a remake of Clare Luce’s The Women, which George Cukor had directed in 1936. Doris was to have attempted the Shearer role–that of mild-mannered Mary Haines whose husband is having an affair with vampish Crystal Allen, formerly played by Joan Crawford and now assigned to Joan Collins. But Melcher would not hear of this. Taking a leaf out of Marty Snyder’s book, he forbade Doris to sign the contract (the part of Mary went to June Allyson, while Leslie Nielson took over from Howard Keel), and told her to accept Hitchcock’s offer and get along with James Stewart. 

To a certain extent their antagonism comes across on the screen and maybe Hitchcock planned this to get better performances out of his stars–the fact that they felt uneasy working together contributed to their on-screen tension. Angry over Hitchcock’s treatment of pets, Doris Day wandered around the pens and paddocks with a bottle of Jack Daniels, toasting each and every one and promising them a better life until she could scarcely stand on her feet, all the while ‘yelling more expletives than a legionnaire on dockside leave.’ Doris also made it clear that had there been another child, she would not have wanted Marty Melcher to be the father.

While she was incapacitated, Melcher was approached by director Rudolph Mare, who wanted Doris to star opposite diminutive actor Alan Ladd and William Bendix in The Deep Six. This centred round a Quaker naval officer (Ladd), who is reluctant to enlist to fight in World War II because of his religious beliefs. Mare was told that Doris would never appear in such a film owing to her religious beliefs and the part was given to the lesser-known Dianne Foster. Doris, who had always admired and wanted to work with Ladd, was said to have hit the roof. On the other hand, June Allyson not only would co-star with Ladd in The McConnell Story (1955), they would develop romantic feelings for each other. Doris renewed her recording contract with Columbia for a staggering $1 million per film. Her husband Marty Melcher negotiated an additional $50,000 for expenses that he promptly pocketed. Later they paid $150,000 for a ‘modest’ exclusive home in Beverly Hills on North Crescent Drive. When her estranged father passed away, Doris Day nonchalantly said to the press: ‘I never go to funerals,’ ‘I mourn the passing of someone dear to me in my own way. I don’t approve of public grief.’ But for her father, there would be no private grief either.  

Among the roles that she declined was that of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, a role that eventually went to Anne Bancroft. In her memoirs, Day said that she had rejected the part on moral grounds, finding the script "vulgar and offensive." She had a reputation for being difficult and wasn't especially well-liked in Hollywood. Even Audrey Hepburn thought Doris seemed self-absorbed and dumb after the studio arranged for the two to have lunch. If you watch some of her interviews, you can see that Doris was no walk in the park. She didnt really have a strong loving relationship with her son, Terry Melcher. She always looked to him as an advisor figure. When older, Doris had a scarce relationship with her only living relative, her grandson Ryan.

Even though he apparently never made his intentions known to Doris Day, Ronald Reagan talked about the possibility of proposing marriage to Doris to his friends 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, 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 met the film's director David Butler. Reagan soon learned that Butler also had developed an unreciprocated crush on Doris Day.

June Allyson's Thou Swell (Connecticut Yankee) number with the Blackburn Twins was one of the highlights of Word and Music (1948), although the high spot is reserved for “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” danced by Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen. Even grumpy New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his December 10, 1948 review: "To be sure, there is much that is appealing—specially to us reminiscent folks—about certain of the musical numbers that sit like islands in the swamp of the plot. It is pleasant to hear Betty Garrett, for a starter, sing “There’s a Small Hotel” or to watch little crinkle-faced June Allyson head a big production rendering of “Thou Swell.” 

Frank Sinatra had been given preferential treatment for a long time by MGM. Look at the finale of the Jerome Kern Juke-Box musical Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) when he sings Old Man River. No singer had gotten such a luxurious set-up in the history of movie musicals. Then Sinatra made an unfortunate remark about a former mistress of Louis B. Mayer (Ginny Simms) and Mayer was through with him. Mayer had fallen off a horse and sprained an ankle. Sinatra said Mayer had fallen off of Ginny Simms. That comment raced through MGM like a wildfire. No wonder LB Mayer kept casting Peter Lawford in musical leads when Sinatra was more talented. At one point Sinatra was pencilled in for Lawford’s part in Easter Parade (1948). Mayer thought there was no way Sinatra could have been cast as a football hero in Good News (1947), starring Peter Lawford and June Allyson. In The Good Old Summertime (1949) was also originally planned for Frank Sinatra and June Allyson, which starred instead Van Johnson and Judy Garland. When Sinatra co-starred with Doris Day in Young at Heart (1954), he said Doris was "the most remote person" he'd known.

In the strong literary voice and narrative constructed or her by A. E. Hotchner, Doris Day recounted her marriage to Martin Melcher, a well-meaning but domineering former agent who "managed" his wife's career until he died in 1968 of heart failure at 52. Feminist author Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote that "an autobiographical subject's papers will often reveal a confident, hard-driving, ambitious woman of the type that is totally denied in the same woman's memoirs." Day herself saw Pillow Talk as the turning point toward a more grown-up, contemporary persona. The script, she recalled, offered "very sophisticated comedy, high chic, the leading lady an interior decorator, a lady very much tuned into the current New York scene. The plot, for 1959, was quite sexy.... clearly not the kind of part I had ever played before." Pillow Talk would win Doris Day her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the only one of her career. 

Doris Day never found her ideal romantic partner in real life and she even sounds a bit jealous when she pronounced in Photoplay magazine (August 1953): "Dick Powell is one of the most intelligent, nicest and richest men in Hollywood. Did a tall, beautiful, madly-dressed doll get him? No, Dick belongs to a wonderful gal with a sense of humor and a big heart, June Allyson." One of the most telling differences is that Doris Day didn't really love Marty Melcher; whereas June Allyson in her memoirs acknowledges the opposite, that Dick Powell was the love of her life, and she was certain his husband loved her.

Jonathan Rosenbaum (December, 2023): Christmas in July (1940) is an undervalued satire. For all the rising popularity of Preston Sturges as a master writer-director of screwy, satirical farces, his second feature continues to be one of his most neglected, even though its story about winning a contest to furnish a brand of coffee with the best advertising slogan is among his most memorable. In fact, the office clerk (Dick Powell) who believes he’s won the contest with his own slogan (”If you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk”) is actually the victim of a hoax concocted by his fellow workers. But after he runs off and spends a fortune purchasing gifts for himself, his fiancée (Ellen Drew), and his neighbors, believing that he’s struck the jackpot, his coworkers grow increasingly reluctant to inform him about their prank. This manic comedy has a great deal to do with the desperate fantasies of opulence developed during the Depression, with especially fragrant moments of eloquence and bluster. —Sources: "Doris Day: Reluctant Star" (2009) by David Bret and "June Allyson: Her Life and Career" (2023) by Peter Shelley

"European Perspectives" by Alexander Jacob

In European Perspectives: Essays (2020), Dr. Alexander Jacob seeks to differentiate Jewish-derived Marxist socialism from the German-derived spiritual socialism. Although “a professed anti-Semite,” Marx had a “Jewish mentality” that manifested itself in a “materialistic view of life”. This is in contrast to what might be called the communitarian ethos of Werner Sombart’s German socialism and Oswald Spengler’s Prussian socialism. One useful feature of European Perspectives is its assessment of a number of important European thinkers: Werner Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Erik von Kuehnelt–Leddihn, Julius Evola, Theodor Adorno, Hans–Jürgen Syberberg, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Herzl. Sombart, one of Jacob’s favorite scholars, believed “that the modern system of commercial capitalism was due not mainly to English Protestantism as Max Weber had proclaimed but to Judaism.” Jacob is an admirer of Spengler’s Prussian socialism which does not seek to destroy capitalism. Early on, Spengler saw that “democracy, in general, is an unholy alliance of urban masses, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and finance capitalists. 

The masses themselves are manipulated by the latter two elements through their specific agencies: the press and the parties.” Jacob’s ideology synthesizes Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Evola’s beliefs. He accepts Evola’s criticism of modern Jewry and the bourgeoisie, but appears to reject his disparagement of Catholicism. Jacob concludes that Syberberg wanted to use “art as a redemptive influence on society,” while Adorno used it “as an instrument of revenge.” In the fourth essay Jacob shifts gears to examine two books, both written in 2011, that analyze the success of Western civilization: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne and The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. Duchesne’s thesis is that the West has always been different, more creative, than other civilizations. The source of this creativity is the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of Indo-European societies. 

This unique aristocratic egalitarianism was made possible by a political arrangement that provided “relative freedom and autonomy from centralised authority”. For Ferguson, the West’s greatness can be found in: “science, competition, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic”. Like Duchesne, Ferguson sees a lack of centralized power as a Western asset as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of China. He believes property rights are closely associated with “the rule of law and representative government”. Ferguson is not, however, completely sanguine regarding the future of the Occident. He warns that the greatest threat to the West is “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors,” while Duchesne expresses similar concerns about the “nihilism, cultural relativism, and weariness” of the West.

To Jacob’s thinking, what Fukuyama considers 'the end of history' is Jewish “economic utopianism which manifested itself in the twentieth century as totalitarian Communism and was transformed in the new ‘promised land’ into totalitarian liberalism of the ‘American Dream.’” Jacob concludes that “Fukuyama’s neo-conservatism illustrates the incompatibility of the American system with genuinely European systems of political thought.” Jacob traces how the English, and later the Americans, deviated from traditional European values. In essence: the rise of Puritanism led to the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Puritans with their individualism and industry came to see “citizens as economic units of production not unlike those of the later Communist utopia of Marx.” Then, increasingly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews in America were able to transform the remnant of Puritanism into their own political/economic system, with the end results that we see today. There is a desperate need for a new aristocracy in Western societies. At present we are ruled by elites who are hostile to the interests of Western peoples. Before an aristocracy can develop, we need to create a revolutionary cadre from which a new elite will emerge. The historical peoples of the West are now slated to become minorities in their own homelands. We need new elites to propagate a new ideology and that is a monumental task. Nothing could be more difficult, yet nothing less will do. Alexander Jacob obtained his doctorate in Intellectual History at the Pennsylvania State University. His publications include Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the early Twentieth Century (2000), and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State (2019). Source: unz.com

Happy New Year 2024!

Rhonda Fleming.

Joan Crawford.

Mae West.

Joan Blondell.

June Allyson and Dick Powell.

Loretta Young.