The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (233 page)

But by the end of the 1940s Ladd was slipping: he was not happy in
The Great Gatsby
(49, Elliott Nugent), and his action films were no longer major attractions:
Whispering Smith
(48, Fenton);
Chicago Deadline
(49, Lewis Allen);
Branded
(50, Rudolph Maté); and
Red Mountain
(51, William Dieterle). His single most successful part—as
Shane
(53, George Stevens)—came when Paramount had already lost interest in him, and was a nostalgic reference to his violent past.
Shane
has endured, no matter the mystery of the slender Ladd beating bigger men. It is both his gentlest film, and the one in which his lethal grace is most paternal. He seems like a ghost in the picture.

He remained a leading man in less important adventure films at Warners and Universal:
The Iron Mistress
(52, Gordon Douglas);
Botany Bay
(53, Farrow);
The Black Knight
(54, Garnett);
Saskatchewan
(54, Walsh);
Hell on Frisco Bay
(55, Tuttle);
The Big Land
(57, Douglas);
The Proud Rebel
(58, Michael Curtiz); and
The Badlanders
(58, Delmer Daves).

But he missed better parts and refused Stevens’s offer of the James Dean role in
Giant
. As he grew older, his face puffed up, there were frequent stories about him having to stand on a box during love scenes—which once would have been irrelevant—and he developed an alcohol problem. In 1962, he tried to kill himself and after a last memorable performance—as the cowboy movie star in
The Carpetbaggers
(64, Edward Dmytryk)—he died as a result of alcohol and sedative poisoning.

His son from a first marriage—Alan Ladd Jr.—would come to be a leading executive at many studios.

Carl Laemmle
(1867–1939), b. Laupheim, Germany
As I write about Laemmle I have lit a cigar. My mouth is clamped around it in a theatrical sneer that signals a robust mogul’s scorn of nicety. Laemmle is the authentic Cuddles Sakall mobster, a founding father of this great art, and a sweet mixture of idiot, rogue, and lucky. If you sometimes retreat in amazement and exhaustion from Michael Snow and Christian Metz, think of Uncle Carl. For it was in his outfit that one scrambling huckster noted that the movie business “takes less brains than anything else in the world.” Big puff on fat cigar: the uncomplicated smoke of commercial mayhem may yet make rings round theoretical arguments.

Laemmle was born before every other American movie mogul. He was nearly forty before he thought of the picture business, yet he was the quickest dealer you could ask for. At this distance, it is hard to believe that he didn’t regard the movies as a lot of fun. To this day, his studio, Universal, maintains a no-nonsense line in entertaining goods.

Carl was Jewish, the son of a poor property agent. He came to America when he was seventeen and settled in the Chicago area, working as a store clerk and in the stockyards. His prospects brightened when he joined a clothing store, married the owner’s niece in 1898, and was promoted to manager. Eight years later, he got restless and took a notion to open a nickelodeon in Chicago. That was 1906, and the site was the Whitefront Theatre.

He expanded rapidly and started his own film service to provide for the Midwest chain that grew up around him. Thus he came into conflict with the Motion Picture Patents Company, and became one of the leading and most enterprising “independents” in the struggle against their monopoly. That crusade was a blithe alliance of outraged ethics and provoked envy: the pursuit of happiness is a race for the strongest. Laemmle never felt shy of using Justice as a business weapon.

There were hundreds of legal actions, protection and assault, scurrilous press campaigns, operations in, through, and under the law. Amid all the row, Laemmle started producing his own pictures. In 1909, he formed the Independent Motion Picture Company and that soon built up an empire as great as the Patents Company’s. In 1912, the IMP itself split, and as Harry Aitken went his way so Laemmle defied retrenchment by naming himself Universal. Laemmle won the battle against monopoly, which was a key stage in the development of the industry. But in winning, he appropriated the gravy, the coarseness, and the methods fashioned by monopoly for the powers that would become the Hollywood majors. Laemmle himself moved to the Los Angeles area and in 1915 Universal City was opened as the first substantial picture factory in California.

Laemmle was a businessman at a stage of movie history when some of the most creative acts were commercial. He was a little man in a fancy suit, lovable and a buffoon when he chose, a little Caesar when he had to be. One story alleges that Lewis Selznick simply infiltrated Laemmle’s intrigue-filled office, set up an executive desk with his name on it, and got to be general manager before anyone realized he’d never been hired. Which makes Laemmle out to be a classic bumbler. But it was the same Laemmle who, in 1909, stole “The Biograph Girl” away from Biograph, billed her as Florence Lawrence, and crystallized the phenomenon of identifiable stars. He won over Mary Pickford with the same insight. And, more significantly, he gave a kid called Irving Thalberg a job as a secretary and then put him in charge of the studio when he went to Germany on war-relief expeditions.

Laemmle’s later years were only half spent at the studio that would cast him adrift in 1936. He was distressed at Germany’s plight after the war, and just as moved by the thought that his charity might get a Nobel Peace Prize. Universal was often left to Thalberg and Laemmle’s own son. Nevertheless, it is the studio that launched von Stroheim, Lon Chaney, the American horror film, and the woman’s picture—as opposed to the lady’s picture offered by MGM. Universal was often on the cheap side: horror is a spectacle in which darkness saves money and creates menace. It was neither pretentious nor pompous. It was a place where mavericks like James Whale could work, and it was in Carl Laemmle’s day that the studio made
Blind Husbands
(19, von Stroheim);
Foolish Wives
(21, von Stroheim);
White Tiger
(23, Tod Browning);
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(23, Wallace Worsley);
The Phantom of the Opera
(25, Rupert Julian);
The Goose Woman
(25, Clarence Brown);
The Cat and the Canary
(27, Paul Leni);
The Man Who Laughs
(28, Leni);
All Quiet on the Western Front
(30, Lewis Milestone);
Frankenstein
(31, James Whale);
Dracula
(31, Browning);
The Mummy
(32, Karl Freund);
Back Street
(32, John M. Stahl);
The Old Dark House
(32, Whale);
Imitation of Life
(34, Stahl);
Bride of Frankenstein
(35, Whale);
The Good Fairy
(35, William Wyler); and
My Man Godfrey
(36, Gregory La Cava).

Veronica Lake
(Constance Frances Marie Ockelman) (1919–73), b. Brooklyn, New York
Lake was the daughter of a German-Danish seaman. After beauty contests and drama school, she was taken on by RKO—as Constance Keane—made her debut in John Farrow’s
Sorority House
(39), and struggled against mass femininity in
All Women Have Secrets
(39, Kurt Neumann) and
Forty Little Mothers
(40, Busby Berkeley). Her name changed, she was put under contract by Paramount after Mitchell Leisen’s
I Wanted Wings
(41), and then established herself in four striking films:
Sullivan’s Travels
(41, Preston Sturges);
This Gun for Hire
(42, Frank Tuttle) and
The Glass Key
(42, Stuart Heisler), both opposite Alan Ladd; and
I Married a Witch
(42, René Clair).

Petite, silky, and lurking behind the half curtain of her own blonde hair, she was a face in the dreams of American soldiers. But her hairstyle was so imitated by their girlfriends bending over factory machines that the government asked for her hair to be pulled back for the part of a military nurse in Mark Sandrich’s
So Proudly We Hail
(43). She next played a Nazi spy in
The Hour Before the Dawn
(44, Tuttle)—a hint perhaps that her star was waning, made explicit when Paramount put her opposite the declining Eddie Bracken in three movies.

She made more films with Ladd—
Duffy’s Tavern
(45, Hal Walker),
The Blue Dahlia
(46, George Marshall), and
Saigon
(48, Lesley Fenton)—but her fame did not really survive the war and the prohibition on her looks. She made
Miss Susie Slagle’s
(46, John Berry) and two films for her second husband, André de Toth
—Ramrod
(47) and
Slattery’s Hurricane
(49)—but after
Stronghold
(51, Steve Sekely) she filed for bankruptcy. She went first into the theatre and was rediscovered by the press as a waitress in Manhattan. Her comebacks never took, least of all two more movies,
Footsteps in the Snow
(66, Martin Green) and
Flesh Feast
(70, B. F. Grinter), partly because she was hardly recognizable as the dry, satin, delectable moll on Ladd’s arm—two tiny people in their own world.

Hedy Lamarr
(Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) (1913–2000), b. Vienna
She deserted school for the stage and the film studios and made her debut in
Stürm in Wasserglas
(31, Georg Jacoby). After
Die Koffer des Hernn O.F
. (31, Alexis Granowsky) and
Man Braucht Kein Geld
(31, Carl Boese), she won notoriety by appearing nude in a woodland idyll in the Czech film
Extase
(32) directed by Gustav Machaty.

The fleeting, dappled nakedness of that film sustained her misleading reputation, just as her euphonious new name, on Bob Hope’s lips, say, was enough to get a laugh.
Extase
won her a millionaire husband, Fritz Mandl, who supported Hitler, and made enough munitions to become an Honorary Aryan. He also tried to buy up or ban all prints of
Extase
. Hedwig left him and went to London, where she met Louis B. Mayer. He signed her up, but warned her she could make only decent films in America. And so she came west, perhaps as beautiful as any woman ever filmed, but nearly stunned by all the things being said about her, and by her extensive limits as an actress. It became her lot to be cast as exotic, sultry women—and she did her best; but conscientiousness is not quite what we expect in our femmes fatales. Too often, she had a worried look.

Her American debut was on loan to Walter Wanger in John Cromwell’s
Algiers
(38). Mayer tried to exploit this initial success by putting her in
Lady of the Tropics
(39, Jack Conway) and
I Take This Woman
(40, W. S. Van Dyke), and Lamarr had a short period of stardom, aping Garbo in
Comrade X
(40, King Vidor), seducing Gable in Conway’s
Boom Town
(40), in
Ziegfeld Girl
(41, Robert Z. Leonard) where, incredibly, she saves herself for her husband, and very good in
H. M. Pulham Esq
. (41, Vidor). Her career declined into lightweight seductress roles:
Tortilla Flat
(42, Victor Fleming);
Crossroads
(42, Conway); saying “I am Tondelayo” in
White Cargo
(42, Richard Thorpe);
The Heavenly Body
(43, Walter Reisch);
Experiment Perilous
(44, Jacques Tourneur)—which is very like
Gaslight
in story, and makes great play on her enchanting eyes; and
Her Highness and the Bellboy
(45, Thorpe).

Difficult to please, she rejected the Bergman parts in
Casablanca
and
Gaslight
and, at the end of the war, her contract with MGM lapsed. She rehashed sultriness in Edgar G. Ulmer’s
The Strange Woman
(46) and
Dishonored Lady
(47, Robert Stevenson) and was close to neglect when in 1949 De Mille cast her as Delilah to Victor Mature’s Samson. The result was nonsense redeemed by sheer conviction and the only evidence that Lamarr could convey the promise of sex on the screen. There are glimpses of sentimental wantonness and silly depravity in that film far more entertaining than publicity, or even the subsequent insistence on it in her autobiography,
Ecstasy and Me
(66).

Samson and Delilah
barely slowed her decline. After John Farrow’s
Copper Canyon
(50),
A Lady Without Passport
(50, Joseph H. Lewis), and an uneasy partnership with Bob Hope in
My Favorite Spy
(51, Norman Z. McLeod), she went to Italy and played Helen of Troy in
L’Amante di Paridi
(54, Marc Allégret). She returned to America for
The Female Animal
(57, Harry Keller), but then sank back on hard times. A few years later she was broke, with more divorces than funds. Her autobiography was a deliberate attempt to revive her own notoriety, in such bad taste that she later sued her own ghostwriters for the imaginative sum of $21 million. But the temple stayed intact.

In more recent years, her name has been kept alive by the possibility that she and the composer George Antheil combined to make modest discoveries in the field of radar. Is that story really any stranger than her other career?

Dorothy Lamour
(Mary Leta Dorothy Kaumeyer) (1914–96), b. New Orleans
In the years when Pacific beaches were the scorched sites of hand-to-hand fighting between Japanese and Americans, Paramount concocted its own South Sea island on which only a sarong separated Dorothy Lamour from the imaginings of any G.I. And as the filling, Lamour was good value—whether the smooth contents of decent undress or the amused goody squabbled over by Hope and Crosby in the
Road
films. She was a Gauguin girl taught to use lipstick and eye shadow and raised to ride on the subway. In that pose she is recalled with affection, and it was a gross misunderstanding of public taste when the ill-advised
The Road to Hong Kong
(62, Norman Panama) chose to have Joan Collins, instead of Lamour, as its female lead. The proper rebuke was her relaxed, good-natured appearance in
Donovan’s Reef
(63, John Ford), still queen in the land of barroom Crusoes.