The Unsung Joe

Lynn Baggett

Of the dozens of waitresses employed in the busy little restaurant in Mildred Pierce (1945), there’s one who shines out from the rest -- a tall, elegant young woman who flits gracefully back and forth across the screen once or twice every few shots. She’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe no one notices her, but they don’t -- Wally Fay has eyes only for Mildred herself, and Monte Beragon’s too busy pitching woo at Mildred’s awful daughter, Veda, so they fail to notice the waitress, who is left to toil in obscurity, gracefully balancing her tray as she weaves her way around the lead characters:

When the scene was filmed, the actress, Lynn Baggett, was nearing the end of a three-year contract with Warner Brothers, which had commenced when she’d been spotted at the age of 19 by a talent scout on her way to her job in a department store in Texas. Since coming to Hollywood, she had appeared in a dozen or so films as a background chorus girl, nurse or shop girl. The production wing at Warners might not have had much use for her, but the publicity department did, and she diligently appeared in bathing suits and glamorous gowns whenever called on to do so.

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She had a more martial aspect to her publicity stunts than most starlets, which suggests that whichever publicist she’d been given had an address book full of military contacts from a previous career: the air force boys at Kelly Field voted her “the Serpentine Lady”; the recruits at Camp Haan named her “the Triple-A girl” (the As stood for “adorable, amicable and amorous”); and she was once given the job of touring night spots with “the loneliest GI” -- a soldier whose girl hadn’t written to him since he’d joined the army.⁽²⁾

When her three years were up, Warner Brothers didn’t renew her contract. The edge might have been taken up this disappointment by the fact that around that time -- the end of 1945 -- she'd become romantically involved with the movie producer, Sam Spiegel, whom she married three years later. At the time, Spiegel -- 20 years her senior -- was more famous for his A-list parties than for the films he made (this was long before he produced pictures like The African Queen (1951) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962)), but that was probably just what Lynn felt she needed. Budd Schulberg described the parties as “very high class mosh-pits” that could give young actresses looking for work a chance to get on the ladder.⁽³⁾ However, it didn’t work quite that way for Lynn. It’s true that, after she hooked up with Spiegel, she started to get speaking roles, but there were only a handful of them and none were large. One, in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), amounted to little more than a cameo -- two brief scenes as the woman who is jilted by George Sanders in favour of Lucille Ball:

Her biggest role was as the wife of the murdered Mr Phillips in DOA (1950). She had more to do in this movie, but, again, she appears in only two short scenes. When we first meet her, she’s a tragically bereaved wife who’s bearing up as well as can be expected, and the next time we see her, she’s terrified that the desperate and demented Edmund O’Brien might throw her off her balcony:

In these small roles where she's able to do some acting, she does a perfectly adequate job -- true, she has no great presence or screen charisma, but she’s not at all bad. So why did she get nowhere? An early problem appears to have been that she just wasn’t too bright. Arthur Laurents, the playwright, said of her: “She was very sweet, and very dumb,” and one producer’s wife described her as “foolish, with no brains at all”. Not only that, but “she also drank and took dope --in those days [the late 1940s] it was cocaine.”⁽⁴⁾ But that shouldn't have been an insurmountable handicap -- it’s not as if Hollywood has ever had such a big problem with sweet, dumb, beautiful girls with addiction problems. A bigger problem was that Spiegel's interest in her didn't survive long into their marriage. Their messy separation in 1952 ended any hope that Lynn's career might benefit from his influence.

However, the real reason why her career crashed to a halt is that, in 1954, she killed a nine-year-old boy called Joel Watnick:

One night in July, 1954, A Nash Rambler smashed into the rear of a station wagon that was ferrying a group of young boys back from a day at the beach. The woman who’d been driving the car stood by the station wagon and looked at the mess of glass, metal and blood that she’d created, then jumped back in her car and drove away.

Little Joel Watnick was killed in the crash -- he'd been thrown from the car onto the pavement -- and a five-year-old boy called Anthony Fell was seriously injured. The police checked nearby repair shops and came up with a car that fitted the description of the one in the crash. The woman who had brought it in would be back on Tuesday -- it looks like what everyone said about Lynn was right: she really wasn’t too smart.

When Lynn arrived to collect the car, she was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Her attorney advised her to make no statement, but the police told the press what she’d told them: “I wish I’d been killed instead of the boy … I’m so confused … I wish I were dead.” ⁽⁵⁾

Like any trial with a beautiful young defendant who is in the orbit of the movies, to whatever degree, the trial was well reported, with Lynn being referred to throughout as “the estranged Mrs Sam Spiegel”. It might have finished her even if she hadn’t been found guilty. As it was, in December 1954, at the age of 30, she was given a 60-day sentence for fleeing the scene of the accident. The judge said that Lynn's actions showed that she “lacked a feeling of human kindness and was concerned only with herself.” ⁽⁶⁾

The coda to the trial came in a humiliating wire story published in Hollywood gossip columns on new years’ eve, half way through Lynn’s sentence. After a description of the fabulous new year’s eve parties that used to be thrown at the Spiegel mansion, with Lynn, as Mrs Spiegel, glittering in jewels and satins, entertaining stars like Errol Flynn and Rita Hayworth, the article remarked that Lynn faced a very different new year’s eve that night. The journalist had travelled to the county jail to interview Lynn, and reported that she still looked poised and beautiful, despite being dressed in prison denims. While inmates marched through the huge prison dining room on their way to lunch, Lynn spoke about her old parties with their six bartenders, orchestra, bouncers to check invitations and detectives to watch the jewels, and then she reflected on the new year’s eve to come. “I doubt if we’ll stay up late, because we’ll have to get up just as early the next morning – 5.30.” She would spend new year’s day in the sewing room, patching convicts’ uniforms.

“I still don’t feel I belong here,” she said. “But in a way the judge did me a favour. This is the end of a cycle of bad luck for me. The past three years have been filled with anxiety because of my marital problems. When I get out I will divorce Sam, try to re-establish my personal life, and try to work again. I’ve been in another jail of sorts the past three years.”⁽⁷⁾

One month later, Lynn was released from jail; three months after that, she was divorced from Sam Spiegel. Aside from reports of one half-hearted publicity stunt that year, when she was photographed cycling around Beverley Hills to highlight her promise never to drive a car again, there was no sign of her for years. On her release from prison in January, she’d told the press that she wanted to return to the movies, “if anyone will take me.”⁽⁸⁾ But it looks like nobody did.

The next time anyone in the press noticed Lynn was also the last time -- 22 March, 1960, when she killed herself:

The AP story ran: “Death climaxed a long series of personal misfortunes for actress Lynne Baggett. The 32-year-old blonde was found dead in her bed, clad only in a pink shorty nightgown and white panties. There was a quantity of pills nearby.”⁽⁹⁾

Of course, her name was Lynn, not Lynne; she was 34, not 32; and she was dark haired, not blonde. Perhaps the journalist was too interested in the corpse’s underwear to get any of the details right.

The previous summer, she’d taken an overdose, but had survived. Later that year, a folding bed in her apartment had somehow collapsed on her, and she was pinned under it for nearly a week. When she was found, she was dehydrated, malnourished and partially paralysed, and had to spend half a year in hospital. She’d only just been released when she tried to commit suicide for the second time, and succeeded.

By that time, Sam Spiegel had a new wife, Betty Benson -- 30 years his junior, compared to Lynn’s 20. Years later, she talked about how Spiegel reacted to the news of Lynn's suicide: “Sam seemed to shrug it off and get on his merry way … He didn’t like things that were unpleasant or depressing -- illness or hospitals -- and he didn’t like Lynn.”⁽¹⁰⁾ Spiegel paid for Lynn's funeral, but didn't attend it.

Sources -- (1)Daily News (Nuntingdon, PA) Feb 6, 1945 (2)San Antonio Light, July 2 1944 (3)Fraser-Cavassoni, Natasha; "Sam Spiegel"; Little, Brown 2003; p87 (4)Fraser-Cavassoni; ibid; p102 (5)Traverse City Record-Eagle (MI), July 10, 1954 (6)Long Beach Press-Telegram, Dec 1, 1954 (7)Statesville Record and Landmark, May 14, 1955 (8)The Lima News, Jan 21, 1955 (9)Long Beach Press-Tel;egram, March 23, 1960 (10)Fraser-Cavassoni; ibid; p239
 

Al Hill

Al Hill was never cast for his acting ability -- not to be too uncharitable, but there wasn't much of it. Nor was he cast for his looks -- again, without being too unkind, he was on the short side and had a rather unremarkable, nondescript face with narrow, inexpressive eyes. What he was cast for was verisimilitude. Whenever a script called for a line or two from a small-time crook of practically any variety, the chances were that Al could bring some sort of real-life experience to the role.

Al appeared as a minor crook or henchman more than 100 times in the 1930s alone. He's on the left in this still from Little Caesar (1931), a back-up guy for the main muscle:

And, in this still from Bullets or Ballots (1936), he's the one leaning on the counter while he and another mobster menace a drugstore owner:

Burglar, stick-up man, bootlegger, con artist -- Al could play anything in that line, because he’d been all those things, and more besides.

Almost everything we know about Al comes from "Easy Pickings", his criminal memoir, which is either a literary achievement that is "among the most amazing human documents of the twentieth century", if you believe his press agent, or "a crudely written autobiography of a former professional crook", if you listen to contemporary reviewers. He published it in 1931, four years after he'd gone to Hollywood to become a full-time movie extra.

Al was born Alexander Marks in 1892 in Manhattan's lower east side. He embarked on his life of crime when, as a kid not yet out of junior school, he figured out how to dangle by a rope from a railway bridge and steal coal from passing trains. In his early teens, a guy called Pipefiend Ryan taught him how to lift cash from women's handbags and another guy called Street-Car Moe taught him how to dip a wallet out of a man's jacket. On his first day as a pickpocket, he scored more than $100 in cash, plus a diamond ring -- "God, I was tickled!" he wrote.⁽¹⁾

He moved on to bigger crimes, keeping company with opium addicts, thieves and prostitutes, little knowing that he was picking up an invaluable biography and a set of skills that would help compensate for his lack of screen presence when he pitched for bit-parts in his later life. In 1939, when Al was just another movie extra without a contract, a Hollywood gossip column told how he had managed to salvage an unsuccessful audition for a job as a pickpocket in a gangster film. The casting director told him, "Sorry, but you're not the type." Al shook his hand and said, "Okay, but keep me in mind, will you." At the door, he paused and walked back to the desk. "By the way," he said. "Here's your watch."⁽²⁾

He got the job, of course.

Sometimes, Al had to try out for a role that required less finesse, like this goon in the middle of this still from Junior G-Men (1940):

When going for such tough-guy roles, perhaps he won over casting directors by regaling them with the story of how, when a crooked cop threw Al's prostitute girlfriend in jail when she wouldn't pay him his protection money, Al had waited for him in a dark street and beaten him so brutally with a cosh that he'd ended up in a coma and Al had to flee New York and couldn't go home for well over a year, by which time his rotten girlfriend had got back together with her ex-boyfriend who pimped her out for cash to buy drugs.

It's the kind of story most people might want to keep quiet about when they were going for a job, but Al never hid his past from anyone in Hollywood. Why should he? It was all he had going for him.

Once, he'd had a great deal more than that, back when he was married to a young Manhattan socialite who had just inherited three-quarters of a million dollars. She was Renee Boucicault, heir to the fortune that had been built up by her grandfather, Dion Boucicault, the Victorian playwright. How Al managed to get her to marry him is a mystery that he doesn't fully explain in his book (he's not big on mushy stuff), but it must have rated as his greatest ever confidence trick.

Al went through tens of thousands of dollars of her inheritance, spending an increasing amount of it on heroin, to which he'd become addicted. Eventually, she got wise to him and kicked him out, but not before she'd started on a downward slope that led her to a solitary, penniless death from pneumonia in a New York flophouse in 1935.⁽³⁾

Al expresses little remorse in his book, but he seems to feel genuinely bad about the way he treated Renee.

One reason why he wasn't ashamed of the other terrible things he'd done was that he saw himself as a reformed character -- he'd been to jail, where his misery was so profound that he figured it wiped his slate clean. In the mid-1920s, when he was broke and financing his heroin habit through shoplifting, he was caught leaving an antique store with a solid gold clock worth $1,200 stuffed under his coat. Of the many things he might have been busted for -- his confidence scams, bootlegging, jewel thefts, department store heists -- it was pretty minor league, but it was enough to get him six months to three years in jail.

In the end, he only served a year, but that was more than enough for him. He spent the early part of his sentence in the lonely hell of heroin withdrawal. That soon passed, but he still had to deal with the New York county penitentiary's "rotten food, clammy cells, spying keepers ... filth and vice". He took very badly to the loss of his freedom, and ever after viewed his year inside as the most degrading and unbearable thing that had ever happened to him.

Still, not only did the memory of how much he'd hated it cause him to go straight when he was released, it helped him get decent bit-parts in prison movies throughout his career, including one in The Last Mile (1932), which gave him one of his few screen credits:

In this movie, he played one of several prisoners on death row, but his delivery of his few lines confirms the suspicion that he was cast not because of his thespian skills but because someone hoped that his presence might bring an authentic jailbird feel to the set. A similar logic might be behind his appearance with Humphrey Bogart in San Quentin (1937), in which he's given little to do but stand around and look authentic in his prison denims:

But Al couldn't trade on his criminal history forever and, as the years went by, he began to get a broader variety of bit-parts, away from his familiar gangland and prison sets. Towards the end of the 1940s, he started to appear as cab drivers, reporters and barmen -- he even played a few cops. His carnival game proprietor in Strangers on a Train (1951) is typical of this stage in his career:

His face had become less bland, gaining character with the heaviness and the wrinkles, and his on-screen manner had grown more natural and relaxed, as if he was becoming comfortable with what he was doing and, perhaps, who he was.

Every so often, an old associate would bob up in Al’s new life. They’d be amazed that Al, who’d been a great thief, could have ended up scraping by as an extra, working six long days to earn as much as he used to tip waiters after a meal. They couldn’t believe he was on the up and up, and, sometimes, neither could Al. Occasionally, they'd tell him about a scheme they were cooking up, and would ask if he wanted in on it. It wasn't always easy to say no, but, apparently, that was what he did.

Looking back, he’d admit that he’d been much happier in the old days, but he knew that that was only because he hadn’t bothered to think about what a louse he really was. His old colleagues were hopeless grifters and thugs like the ones he was earning tiny amounts of money playing in the movies -- like he'd been himself. At the start of his career, he wrote of them, "I know the gulf between us is widening. The time is coming when we'll have nothing in common."

I don't know if that ever happened, but it looks like Al thought it had, which is probably good enough.

Sources: (1)Everything about Al's criminal endeavours comes from his book, "Easy Pickings", 1931, Brentano's, New York;  (2)The Frederick (MD) Post, Sep 14, 1939; (3)The Daily Inter Lake (MT), July 4, 1935; The stills from Little Caesar and Junior G-Men were sent to me by Fabian Cepeda, of Holywood Clasico.

Boots Morphy

Two tragic love stories -- one made up for the movies and one true; both involving guns.

Bart Tare, the troubled hero of Gun Crazy (1950), didn't care much about anything in the world apart from guns -- that is, not until today, when he set eyes on this carnival sharpshooter, Annie Laurie Starr. He's never seen a woman do the things with a pistol that she can do. He’s a crack shot himself, with a “dangerous mania” for guns that has already cost him a spell in reform school, and, watching her amazing display of trick shots, he falls instantly in love. He’s called from the audience to match his skill with a gun against Laurie's in a contest in which each of them must face death, allowing the other to shoot at targets that are attached to their heads. It's an insane thing for either of them to do, but, somehow, their attraction is so immediate, so strong and so deep that they barely need to have spoken before each is willing to give the other the power to end their life. In the aftermath, the smoke from their pistols fills the space between them, cloaking them in a dangerous glamour that neither is capable of resisting. They're hooked. 

Later, in a desperate moment, after everything's gone horribly wrong and they're fleeing a murder rap, Laurie offers to save Bart by going off on her own and never seeing him again, but Bart won't let her. “We go together, Laurie," he says. "I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together."  

They are, of course, doomed; neither will get out of the film alive.

It’s easy to see why Bart was impressed by Laurie's act. She effortlessly shoots targets on the far side of the stage, nailing them every time. She shoots right-handed and left-handed, she grips the pistol upside-down, she bends over and shoots between her legs. Then her assistant enters the act, with a balloon held between her teeth. When Laurie nonchalantly bursts it with a bullet, the assistant produces a stick of chalk, which Laurie shoots right out of her hand:

 
The assistant then holds a second stick of chalk only a few inches above her head:

 
Finally, the assistant holds a stick of chalk in her mouth, so the bullet must hit just a couple of inches away from her face:

 
It’s incredibly skilful, of course. But, for all the undoubted talent of the shooter, isn’t the really remarkable person the one who is brave enough to perform at the other end of the gun barrel? Laurie's pistol is only a .22, but even a small calibre bullet would make a mess of the delicate meat and bone of someone’s head, a fact that must occupy the assistant's mind as she waits for the trigger to be pulled. Apparently, the mafia favoured .22s for hits because, when fired into someone’s head, the bullet wouldn’t come out the other side but would ricochet around inside the skull, shredding the brain. It must take a lot of guts to stand there knowing you might be just a second away from something like that.

Naturally, you’d expect that the actress playing the assistant was in no such danger, but you’d be wrong -- those were real bullets⁽¹⁾. The woman is Boots Morphy, one half of a trick sharpshooting team, and the person shooting at her -- standing off camera, to the left of Annie Laurie Starr in the wide shots -- is Lew Morphy, her partner and husband.

Lew had been a trick sharpshooter for more than 20 years⁽²⁾. He'd been making a living with his guns since long before he and Boots had met: he was 16 years older than her, and seems to have entered show business young. He'd started out in vaudeville, calling himself the Cheyenne Sharpshooter and appearing on bills that included singing cowboy troupes like Jack Pierce and his Oklahomans. He was obsessed with guns, just like Bart Tare. Over the years, he developed an act that involved shooting "chalk, cigarettes and candles from the mouths of pretty girls", one of whom, eventually, was a very pretty girl who went by the tough-sounding nickname of Boots. They married, and together they toured rodeos, fairs and carnivals performing, presumably, the exact display that so impresses Bart in Gun Crazy.

Did Boots get together with Lew before she became his assistant, or did they meet through the sharpshooting act? Whatever the case, it's tempting to imagine that their first meeting was as thrillingly charged with danger and passion as the first scene between Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr. Who knows? Maybe it was; that might be just how it goes if, the first time you meet someone you're attracted to, you're looking at them down the barrel of a gun. (Although it's not like Lew married every girl he aimed his pistol at.)

Boots and Lew also performed stunts in movies⁽³⁾. There’s no record of Boots’s stunt parts, but her small stature -- she was less than 5 ft tall -- would have got her work as a stand-in for child actors as well as actresses. We know that Lew stood in for people like Pat Buttram in Gene Autry's pictures, and that he also got a lot of work as an extra in western movies, usually as one of a crowd of townsmen. Here he is in Stagecoach Buckaroo (1942), holding Johnny Mack Brown's left arm:

And in this still from Mystery Man (1944), he's the one standing up:

Lew seems to have been serious about his film work, if the amount of roles he took is anything to go by. But for Boots, risking her life on stage and in the movies was just a sideline, something she did when she wasn’t pursuing her real passion, which was risking her life at sea. Here she is behind the wheel of the hydroplane, Miss Shooting Star, which carried her to victory in racing tournaments up and down the west coast:

Boots was perhaps the most successful female outboard racer in the 1940s and 1950s, winning dozens of championship titles in her long career⁽⁴⁾. Lew raced and won titles too, but he used a more conventional speedboat, which meant that he and Boots never had to compete against each other. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine them doing so when, in every aspect of their lives, they seem to have been such a complementary pair, one of those couples that operates as a tight, exclusive team. For instance, rather touchingly, when naming their children, it seems that they could think of no finer names than each other’s. (The girl was given Boots’s real name, Valerie, but that still means that there would have been a pair of juniors in the house. What would they have done if they’d had a third child?) 

All of which makes this headline pretty depressing:     

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Boots and Lew might have appeared to be an ideal couple, and everyone certainly seems to have assumed that they were, but, by 1958, when she was 37 and he was 54, things hadn't been going well for some time. They’d had trouble with money, and Lew had been depressed over the death of his mother. Moreover, Boots had arranged for her share of the couple’s property in Tennessee to be made over to her alone, and she didn't plan to return to California with Lew after their next annual trip to Dayton, where they owned a holiday resort. She'd talked things over with neighbours and her family, but she hadn't told her husband. Everyone knew Lew had a tremendous temper.  

In the early hours of November 7, 1958, Boots was in her kitchen with her parents, Martin and Sophia Rosinski. I imagine that she'd called them to the house because she was scared of Lew. We know that Lew and Boots were fighting, but it isn’t clear how it all started. It's possible that she'd told Lew that she was planning to leave and he'd lost that temper of his, but we can't be sure. Had they been discussing their problems all evening, with Lew slowly growing angrier and angrier until he boiled over, or did Lew perhaps arrive home late and fly into a rage when he stumbled upon Boots and her parents apparently conspiring to end his marriage and break up his home?

Lew couldn't imagine a life without Boots. Just like Bart and Laurie, they went together like guns and ammunition; each would be useless without the other, as far as he was concerned. When it became clear that Boots didn't agree and was going to leave him, Lew muttered "I'll put a stop to this," and went to get a gun.

Boots ran to the bedroom, and Mrs Rosinski grappled with Lew in the living room. He had a gun in his hand, but he didn't use it on her. He didn't want to kill her; she died by accident when he shoved her out of his way and she fell and split her skull open on a coffee table. Lew probably didn't even notice what he'd done.

He went to the bedroom, where he shot Boots in the head. The gun, incidentally, was a .22, the same calibre as they used on stage; Boots would have died instantly, her brain torn to shreds by the bullet. 

As Mr Rosinski picked up his dead wife and placed her on the sofa, Lew called his friend, an assistant director and producer called Raoul Pagel. “I’ve lost everything,” he said. Pagel said that that wasn’t true, but Lew told him, “Yes I have. I killed Boots, in front of mom’s picture.” Pagel tried to keep his friend talking on the phone, but Lew hung up, went back into the bedroom and put a bullet in his own head.

What Lew did isn't unique, or even that uncommon. That year alone, at least 17 other American husbands had the same idea, from a magazine publisher in the first week of January, who shot his wife and himself in the back of a New York taxi, to a man in Florida on Christmas eve, who killed his wife while she was wrapping presents by the tree and then shot himself in front of their teenage children.⁽⁶⁾ All of the men had in common with Lew not only the fact that their wives wanted to leave them but also the tragically stupid notion that the best way to stop that happening would be to end both their lives. 

If that isn't gun crazy, I don't know what is. 

Sources: Lew Morphy was mentioned to me by Fabián Cepeda, of the Spanish-language website Hollywood Clasico, who described him as "a bit western player and a serious troubledoer who had a sad ending". Fabián also supplied the two pictures of Lew.

(1)The Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 5, 1949; (2)All biographical information on Lew is from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Nov 7, 1958; (3)Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach), Jul 24, 1955; (4)Picture from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, June 13, 1953, information on Boots's racing career from same paper, Aug 7, 1950 and Sep 9. 1956; (5)Long Beach Press-Telegram, Nov 7, 1958; (6)On January 3rd, former Confidential Magazine editor Howard Rushmore shot his wife and himself - see The Coshocton Tribune, Jan 4, 1958. On Dec 24, Ed Harris shot his wife and himself - see The Star-News (Pasadena), 25 Dec 1958. The other murder-suicide reports can be found in the following papers from 1958, on the front page, unless otherwise noted: The Hammond Times (IN), Jan 2 - page B-3; The Derrick (Oil City, PA) Feb 4; Indiana Evening Gazette, Jan 13; The Ada Evening News (OK), April 7; The Morning Herald (Hagerstown), April 16; Titusville Herald, April 18; Journal-Tribute (Marysville), April 30 - p2; The Odessa American, June 13 - p21; Long Beach Press-Telegram, July 7; The Terre-Haute Star, Sep 20 - p23; The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, IN) Nov 19 - p9; The Daily Messenger, (Canandaigua, NY) Nov 4 - p5;  Logansport Press, Oct 13; Globe-Gazette (Mason City) Nov 5 - p2. 

Rolfe Sedan

A small white terrier bursts into the hotel bar, pulling behind it an elegant woman in furs, laden with parcels and pursued by the doorman and other hotel employees. The waiters are unprepared for this sudden chaotic explosion of activity and react too slowly to stop the woman tripping and crashing to the floor. It doesn’t matter though, because this is The Thin Man (1934), and she’s Nora Charles, the beautiful alcoholic heiress, wife of Nick Charles, the famous alcoholic detective; you quickly get the impression that she’s quite used to falling flat on her face in bars.

One of the waiters who rush to help her does so in a remarkably graceful manner, skipping across the floor in a few quick, balletic steps:

No real waiter, no matter how efficient and polished, ever moved like that; it takes a certain sort of training. It should come as no surprise that he’s an ex-vaudeville performer. He’s Rolfe Sedan, and he spent his early 20s on stage as a song-and-dance man before moving to Hollywood where, like hundreds of other vaudevillians, he found that, for one reason or another, the skills that had earned cheers, applause and recognition in theatres across the country for decades turned out to be almost useless in Hollywood, and certainly far less valuable than the mere fact of owning a tuxedo, which would ensure a steady supply of background work.

Towards the end of his life, Rolfe told the show business historian Jordan R Young how he started out. “There was never a point where I decided to go on stage. Being surrounded by music and art and theater I just drifted into it as a natural thing; I saw it happening and I wanted to be a part of it. At first I was a dancer. But I was versatile -- I could do 16 dialects, sing if necessary. Nothing stopped me in my younger days; I did everything.”⁽¹⁾

In 1921, a talent scout for Universal caught Rolfe's act and put him under contract as a bit-part player. After four years, however, he'd failed to make a breakthrough into bigger roles, and his contract wasn’t renewed. He couldn’t get any better work at the other studios, either, and it didn’t take him long to work out what the problem was: he was simply too funny. His experience on a Harold Lloyd film at the Hal Roach studios was typical: “The entire time I just sat there -- he wouldn’t let me play the part. It was too much competition. Lloyd said, ‘I can’t allow anybody to top me.’” The same thing happened when he worked on a radio show with Ginger Rogers: “She wouldn’t come to the microphone with me; she said I drew too much attention.”

“You have to be careful with comedy,” he realised, eventually. “If you’re too funny, you don’t play again.”

Rolfe wanted to be in films what he’d been in the theatre: a light comic actor whose job was to get laughs by any means necessary, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he developed into a mustachioed dress extra, always ready to show up in a dinner jacket and bow tie to provide the background to someone else’s routine, as he did when he played a desk clerk in Laurel and Hardy’s 1929 short, Double Whoopee (he's the little guy behind Oliver Hardy):

 (2)

Throughout the 20s and 30s, like many extras, Rolfe turned up to work day after day with the vague hope somewhere in the back of his mind that some day he’d be given a chance to prove himself. Unlike most extras, however, he once got that chance. He’d been cast as a background sales clerk in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) but when Ernst Lubitsch, the director, was unhappy with the performance of the actor who was supposed to play a floorwalker who argues with Gary Cooper, Rolfe was given the role.

The next morning, after spending the night learning his few lines, Rolfe arrived on set with a horrible case of nerves -- he must have known what it would mean if he could hit this one out of the park. He and Cooper walked through the scene, but when the cameras started rolling, Rolfe went blank. They started the scene again but, again, Rolfe went blank. Eventually, Lubitsch had to clear the set -- removing around 100 people -- before Rolfe was able to find the confidence to complete the scene.

Needless to say, his performance didn’t lead to greater roles. Lubitsch couldn’t have been too unhappy with him, though, as he later gave him bit parts in Ninotchka (1939) and That Uncertain Feeling (1941).

In 1941, after 20 years as a bit-player, Rolfe quit Hollywood and headed for Broadway, where he could get some real acting roles, but he came back not long after the war ended. Perhaps he hoped that his refreshed theatrical experience would open doors upon his return. If so, he must have been disappointed to find that his movie career picked up where it left off as he went back to the familiar suit-wearing bit parts.

The most hopeful point in this period was when he found himself in a recurring role as a postman on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show in the 1950s. Rolfe had high hopes for the part, and for a while it looked like his postman character might also appear on Jack Benny’s show, bringing gossip from one show to the other. The idea was obviously exciting to Rolfe, but nothing came of it. “Burns couldn’t see it,” he explained. “He had me written out altogether.”

Perhaps Rolfe’s greatest moment of fame came in the mid-60s, when he appeared as an old-time saloon entertainer in a series of advertisements for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer:

It wasn’t much of a capstone to a performing career, but it was what he’d have to make do with.

He was around 70 years old when those adverts came out. A few years later, he said, “I wouldn’t advise young people to go into the entertainment field… It’s a cruel business.” Looking back on his achievements, he reflected, “I’ve spent my whole life playing chefs, waiters, valets and clerks. I’ve had a whole career in pictures making something out of nothing, always hoping for a break. I lost out; I should have been on top of the heap.”

In 1979, he appeared in the horror comedy, Love at First Bite as a maitre d’ -- his final dress-extra role. He retired that year, and died in 1982, aged 86.

Sources: imdb.com, (1)All quotes come from: Reel Characters; Young, Jordan R; Moonstone Press, 1986; pp 153-167. (2)From The Silent Film Archive, silentfilmstillarchive.com.

Irving Cohen - Bonus stills

George Bailey and Clarence Oddbody don’t belong in Pottersville, and Nick the bartender knows it. He doesn’t like these hick types wasting his time and bothering his regulars. He tells them straight: “We serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere.”

Which is sort of amusing, given that this scene in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is stuffed with them. The transformation of Martini’s place in the Bedford Falls part of the film to Nick’s bar in the Pottersville segment seems mainly to have been achieved by removing the respectable-looking mom-and-pop types from the background of the scene and replacing them with a busload of hard-faced molls and mean-eyed goons -- extras like the heavyset thug casting an unfriendly glance at George and Clarence in this still:

You might recognise him if you read the piece I wrote about him in November. He’s Irving Cohen, a gangster who fled for his life when his bosses decided to have him killed and who supported himself while he was in hiding by working as an extra in Hollywood under the name Jack Gordon. I noticed his appearance in It’s a Wonderful Life the month after writing about him.

It’s great to see Irving there in Nick’s bar. People often observe that one of the problems with the film is that, to modern eyes, Pottersville doesn’t look too bad at all. Certainly, it looks a lot more fun than Bedford Falls. Pottersville’s main street is bright and full of life and frivolity, big-band jazz fills the air, there are burlesque clubs, pool halls, bowling alleys and dozens of busy bars. The main street in Bedford Falls, on the other hand, is square.

That's true, as far as it goes. But behind its alluring glamour, Pottersville is an awful, rotten place, and we're shown that it’s sucked the joy and kindness from every decent character who we met in the first part of the film. Ma Bailey is an embittered, lonely widow; old man Gower is an alcoholic vagrant; Bert the cop viciously shoots at an unarmed man in a crowded street. And if we needed any more evidence, we could take a trip to that hip little joint just outside town with the boogie-woogie piano player and the wise-cracking bartender, where we would find, sitting alone at the bar, the unsettling figure of Irving Cohen, formerly of Murder, Inc, a gang that spent the 1930s killing for money and ditching corpses in the dark, quiet roads and fields around dozens of little upstate New York towns just like Bedford Falls.

Not a lot of fun.

Anyway, I'm posting this now because, last week, I was contacted by Fabián Cepeda, who writes for the Spanish-language website Hollywood Clasico. He said he'd come across The Unsung Joe while looking for information on Irving Cohen, who he'd noticed in tiny parts in several films, and offered to send me the screen captures that he'd made of Irving's appearances. Here they are -- see if you can find him:

Prison Train (1938):

Another Thin Man (1938):

 

Full Confession (1939):

 

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943):

Margin for Error (1943):

Criminal Court (1946):

 

The Spanish Main (1946):

The Long Night (1947):

Note that the first three stills are from the period when Irving was still hiding from his old gang associates, who wanted him dead, and the police, who wanted to charge him with murder. He's quite hard to make out in Another Thin Man and Full Confession, but in Prison Train, he's quite hard to miss. What was he thinking?

It's also interesting that, in that scene, he's playing a gangster in a car full of gangsters who are driving along a country road on their way to murder another gangster, which is broadly the story of the night that ended up with him fleeing for his life through the woods and which led, indirectly, to his movie career.