The Unsung Joe

Blackjack Ward

In the early 1930s, the corner of Gower street and Sunset boulevard became the gathering place for a Hollywood subculture that kept itself almost entirely separate from the rest of the movie colony: the cowboy extras. The corner was near the poverty row studios that produced western B-movies and serials, and the Columbia drugstore there let the men use its payphone as a point of contact for Central Casting. At any time of day, between 25 and 50 characters in Stetsons and checked shirts could be seen on the sidewalk, killing time and -- because all these men had once been genuine cowboys, unlike the cowboy stars like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry -- reminiscing about the old days before the great ranches of the west had been broken up into farms and homesteads, when they’d been able to get real work driving cattle across the open range.

By the 1940s, the corner was known as Gower Gulch. This is the story of the killing that earned it that name.

From the early days of Hollywood, dispossessed and disillusioned cowboys had drifted into Hollywood, looking for work. A studio backlot was a long way from the prairies and plains that they were used to, but at least working as an extra in westerns kept them in the saddle and allowed them to dress as they’d always dressed and associate with other men who knew a lariat from a branding iron.

Blackjack Ward was one such man. He’d been a range rider most of his life, and claimed to have served as Pancho Villa’s right-hand man in the Mexican revolution of 1910⁽¹⁾ but, by 1927, when he was in his late 30s, the scarcity of work on the range had brought him to Hollywood. His skill on horseback kept him busy in the hundreds upon hundreds of westerns that required competent riders, and his villainous scowl and expressive eyes secured him plenty of work as background henchmen such as the one on the left of this still from The Ghost Rider (1935):

(Still courtesy of Les Adams, via The Old Corral)

However, like most of the Hollywood cowboys, Blackjack never took to city ways, and the same urge to keep the ways of the open range alive that lay behind affairs such as the exclusive round-ups that were held in the desolate flatlands beyond Los Angeles, at which only men who had worked on chuck wagons before 1910 would gather to share their old staples of sow belly, beans and sourdough biscuits, doubtless led to Blackjack’s involvement in the story that lay behind this headline:

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On the morning of February 23, 1940, around 50 cowboy extras were standing around outside the drugstore on the corner of Gower and Sunset. Blackjack was there, and so was Johnny Tyke, another western bit-part player who had an impressive criminal record and was currently wanted by the police in connection with a string of hold-ups. Here’s his mug shot:

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What happened next is probably best told in what purport to be Blackjack’s own words, pieced together from newspaper reports that appeared in subsequent days:

“I had known Tyke for quite a while -- I fed and helped that varmint for years. A few months ago, he was in jail for drunk driving, but I didn’t go to see him and, when he got out, he kept pestering me because of it. We had arguments and he threatened me. One day he said he was going to beat me to death or else use his Bowie knife on me.

“Well, we met in the drugstore where the boys hang out, and Tyke started in again. He got real abusive and called me names no man worth the powder to blow him to hell will take back where I come from in old Arizona, but I says, ‘Look here, you’re bigger than me and you probably could whip me. There ain’t no sense to this anyway, and I don’t want no trouble.’

“I got in my car and started to drive away. Tyke jumped in front of the car and yelled, ‘No you don’t. Let’s settle this right now.’

“Well, I usually carry my old gun with me; just a sort of habit a man gets into when he spends a lot of time riding the range. When Tyke tried to get in the car, I shot at him once through the windshield and drove off.” ⁽⁴⁾

According to witnesses among the cowboy extras on the corner, however, Blackjack’s story is incomplete. The papers reported that a wrestler known as Yukon Jake Jackson picked up the tale. “I heard the glass fly and the gravel kick up and I knew it was a bullet that just went by my kisser,” he said. He hadn’t been sure whether he was watching some sort of movie stunt or a dress rehearsal until the bullet smacked into the wall beside him. “Then I says, ‘This is no picture. This is real.’” He called out, “Get for cover, men! Them’s not blanks he’s a-shootin’! Them’s bullets!”

“I saw some feller run east on Gower. I seen a man coming from an auto with a rod and he was right behind the man runnin’ like he was goin’ right down Hollywood. I heard a shot and Tyke done a little wobblin’.”

Jackson followed Blackjack and Tyke down an alley and saw them grappling with each other. “I tried to edge into where I could make them listen to reason. I heard Blackjack say, ‘You been botherin’ me for the last time.’ But Tyke was goin’ for a weapon. At least, it sure looked like it, because he passed up a lot of doors.”

Before Tyke was able to find whatever weapon he was going for -- if that was indeed what he was doing -- Blackjack shot him again, this time in the head.

Blackjack took off in his car as the police arrived, but he only got a few blocks before he was cornered. According to the officers, Blackjack jumped from his car and turned on them, holding down the trigger of his pistol while he “fanned the hammer in true frontier style.”⁽⁵⁾ The gun was empty, however, and the officers overpowered him and took him into custody, where he was charged with murder.

The killing divided the cowboy extras. One camp believed Blackjack had deliberately set out to murder Tyke -- Jack Montgomery, a sometime cattleman and ranch-owner who rode as an extra in countless films, stated simply, “Blackjack dry-gulched Johnny Tyke” -- while the other camp claimed that Blackjack had every reason to believe that Tyke, who was bigger than him by far and was known to carry a knife, really was about to cut his heart out, as he’d once threatened to do.⁽⁶⁾ Blackjack’s partisans turned out to support him at his arraignment hearing:

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A statement released by a group of Gower Gulch extras read: "Tyke has been a nuisance and a menace to us all for several years. He has always been mean and ornery. He was a good stunt man but was always working himself out of jobs because he was so mean. He has made a practice of annoying motion picture extras and cowboys. He has forced his way into our homes and forced us to feed him and made a practice of slapping us around on the street. Somebody had to do something about it and it turned out to be Ward. He had been pestering and annoying Ward and making his life miserable for months. Blackjack is a tough old cowboy, but we're all for him."⁽⁸⁾

But the trial, which took place in July that year, was concerned not with how ornery Tyke might have been, but with the issue of whether the killing had been in self-defence, and that all depended on the question of whether Tyke was armed or not. Things looked bleak for Blackjack, as no weapon had been found on Tyke’s body.

Finally, the question was resolved by the intervention of Yukon Jake Jackson, who inserted himself into the story for a second time when he produced a pearl-handled knife in court, saying, “This here knife was Johnny Tyke’s. I heard Blackjack testify that Tyke had said he was going to cut Ward’s heart out with his shiv. That started me to thinkin’.” Jackson said he had suddenly recalled something that had happened just after the day of the killing, when he had taken his Doberman out into the parking lot where Tyke had died. “My mutt started prowling round in some bushes. He dug up this knife. I didn’t think nothing of it at the time and stuck it in my pocket and tossed it in with my fishing tackle. I forgot all about it until I heard what Blackjack said.”⁽⁹⁾

When a shoemaker called Joseph Hebec, who made the steep-heel boots that the cowboy extras wore, identified the knife as the one that he had previously testified to having seen Tyke carrying shortly before he was killed, the prosecutor moved that the case be dismissed. Blackjack was free to go home and resume his career, which he did, although his previously steady flow of work slowed to a trickle after the trial, never to regain its former level.

As he celebrated his release, Blackjack was asked for a comment by a reporter. Strapping on the gun that he’d used to kill Johnny Tyke, he said, “From now on, I’ll carry her unloaded.”⁽¹⁰⁾

That resolution might have saved the life of another Gower Gulch extra, in a postscript to the affair that occurred two years later. In April, 1942, Blackjack was drinking in the Roundup Café with a cowboy extra called Henry Isabell when an argument started, apparently concerning the trial. When Blackjack called Isabell a stool pigeon, Isabell threw a punch that knocked him to the floor. Blackjack got up, and Isabell knocked him down again. At that, Blackjack pulled out his gun and would no doubt have shot Isabell dead, if only he’d had any bullets. Instead, he proceeded to pistol-whip him, which earned him a year in jail for assault with a deadly weapon.⁽¹¹⁾

Blackjack died in 1954, at the age of 63, three years after he was fined $50 for chasing a stall owner through a market with a meat cleaver after the man refused to loan him $1:

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Perhaps surprisingly, Blackjack died peacefully in bed. According to the stories that the retired extras of Gower Gulch would tell when they met up in later years to kick back and recall past glories, Blackjack’s last words, whispered in the ear of an old friend from his range-riding days, were, “Bobby, you tell my friends adios, and my enemies I’ll see them in hell."⁽¹³⁾

Sources: (1)'The Hollywood Posse', Diana Serra Cary, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996, p.138; (2)Morning Avalanche (Lubbock, Texas), Feb 24, 1940; (3)El Paso Herald-Post, Feb 24, 1940; (4)Blackjack's quotes come from The San Antonio Light, Feb 24, 1940, Zanesville Signal, Feb 24, 1940, The Hammond Times, Feb 25, 1940; (5), (6) and (8)Waterloo Daily Courier, Feb 25, 1940; (7)Hayward Daily Review, March 5, 1940; (9)Reno Evening Gazette, July 19, 1940; (10)Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 24, 1940; (11)Lima News, April 11, 1942; (12)Wisconsin State Journal, Sep 27 1951; (13)'The Hollywood Posse', Diana Serra Cary, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996, p.142.

Jody Gilbert

Through Nick, her detective husband, Nora Charles gets a chaperoned glimpse of the vivid, exciting and romantic underworld of thieves, racketeers and lowlifes. Through Nora, Nick gets access to a massive pile of inherited cash. They judge this to be a fair swap.

In Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), Nick takes Nora to a wresting match, where they run into Spider Webb, an acquaintance of Nick’s who’s just got out of jail. He introduces his girl, Lana, incongruously hefty beside his scrawny frame:

 

“Any friend of Spider’s is a friend of mine,” she declares, following it up with a vulgar, high-pitched giggle. Nora, of course, is thrilled -- she’s been accepted!

Lana is played by Jody Gilbert, one of the many physically remarkable bit-part actors who were grateful to the Thin Man films’ need for a constant supply of colourful grotesques to entertain Nora.

Jody grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where she had her own musical show on local radio while she was still in high school. In her later teens, she toured the south in musical comedies, performed in summer stock across America and discovered that she would never get any good roles on the New York stage because of her strong Texas accent and ever-increasing size.⁽¹⁾ By the time she was 20, she was finished with theatre. Broadway didn’t want her, but it turned out that Hollywood did.

“There’s one girl in Hollywood who worries neither over her weight nor waistline,” wrote the gossip columnist May Mann in 1940, a few years after Jody arrived on the west coast. “She is Jody Gilbert, who eats heartily, takes only enough exercise to get her where she’s going and does all right in the movies. Still in her early 20s, she already weighs an imposing 197 pounds and hopes to do even better. ‘I’m a girl of parts,’ she says, ‘and the more parts the merrier’ … ‘Why,’ she asks chuckling, ‘should I worry over my avoirdupois? It’s done all right for me so far. If I lost any one of these chins I might be just another actress. As it is, I’m a person of some weight around here.’”⁽²⁾

Sure enough, her avoirdupois did just fine for her, bringing her close to 100 roles in movies throughout the 1940s, ranging mostly from comic fat-girl parts with one line to comic fat-girl bit parts with no lines, like her role in Ninotchka (1939), in which she appears for a few seconds as Greta Garbo's roommate, who comes home to their cramped apartment and gets into her bed in the middle of a party:

Then, in 1948, she landed the role of Rosa, “the spectacularly fat and unattractive daughter of Pasquale”, a supporting character on the radio programme, Life With Luigi.⁽³⁾ The show was popular enough to make the jump to television, where it ran for a couple of seasons. However, both the radio show and the television show came to an end in 1953, the year in which when an unsuccessful writer called Harvey Narcisenfield identified Jody to the House Committee on Un-American Activities as having been a member of the Communist party.

It was the height of the blacklist. Dozens of well-known actors, directors and producers had seen their careers destroyed following an appearance before the committee, regardless of whether any pro-Communist activity could be proved, so Jody would have been quite aware of what was almost certain to happen to her -- a small-time comedy actress -- when she received the subpoena requiring her to testify. And perhaps that’s why she decided to make a mockery of the proceedings.

The committee’s official report records that, just after lunch on 26 May, 1953, Jody sat down at the witness table. She was accompanied by two lawyers, but, as she pointed out with a self-deprecating reference to her considerable size, there was room for only one of them to sit beside her.⁽⁴⁾

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Jody testifying at the HUAC

Frank Tavenner, the HUAC counsel, started off by asking Jody to give the committee a general description of her career.

“My first appearance, or my first movie, or my first radio show or my first television show?” asked Jody, innocently.

“What the record of your profession has been. If you were entitled to screen credits and received them in moving pictures or in radio, or any other matter,” replied Tavenner, his emphasis on credits revealing that he had no idea of the insignificance of Jody’s output before Life With Luigi. She’d had only a handful of screen credits, and they’d all been within the past few years.

Jody explained: “I was a little bit surprised myself, when I sat down to count up the score the other night, because I didn’t realise that I had such a fine career, because I was such an unimportant person, you see; the person that the Hollywood trade papers refer to as a good -- ”

“Will you answer the question, please!” Tavenner was already frustrated with Jody, and he didn’t yet know that she planned to continue to pretend to answer his simple question for as long as he could bear it without giving him any helpful information whatsoever.

Jody rambled on, as if pleased to find herself unexpectedly in the company of an eager fan who wished to find out everything that there was to know about her wonderful life as a Hollywood extra, and Tavenner grew more and more annoyed. “I didn’t ask you for a detailed statement,” he pointed out with exasperation, “If you would just confine yourself to answering my questions.”

Jody replied mischievously, “The Long Beach papers said that I would be a talkative witness, and I don’t want to disprove anything that is printed in the press.”

Tavenner persevered, asking Jody to tell the committee the names of some films for which she’d received screen credits, and Jody had to repeat that she rarely received screen credits, although she always received very good notices. “All right, then,” said Tavenner, “I will change the question and ask you what were some of the major pictures in which you took part?”

Jody explained that that was really a matter of semantics -- who can say what makes a picture truly major, after all?

The committee had been sitting for 10 minutes already, and the counsel hadn’t yet got past his first introductory question. A further 10 minutes later, while appearing to try honestly to answer all of Tavenner’s questions as helpfully as possible, Jody had somehow conceded only that she had first appeared on stage when she was four, but not what year that was, and that she lived on North Bronson Avenue in Hollywood.

Tavenner tried to get the questioning back on course by informing Jody that she had been mentioned in testimony that they had received, whereupon Jody asked if she would be allowed to confer with her counsel for about two minutes -- she acknowledged that that might cause an awkward pause, saying sympathetically, “Nobody is more aware of dead air than I am.”

Tavenner exclaimed, “I am willing for you to consult with counsel, of course, but I haven’t asked you a question yet!”

Jody had to turn around and ask the audience in the public gallery to be quiet. Evidently, she couldn’t hear Tavenner over their laughter.

Jody continued to play to the crowd until the committee chairman reprimanded her, saying, “This is a serious matter.” At that, Jody dropped her clown routine for the first time in the meeting. “It certainly is,” she replied, “I lost my job.”

Tavenner seized his chance and pressed on: “I say you have been identified by Mr Harvey Narcisenfeld as having been a member of the Communist party, and I want to ask you about that. Have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”

“Do you really expect me to answer that?” asked Jody.

“Yes, Miss Gilbert, please.”

If Tavenner expected the meeting to proceed according to the by-now well-established script whereby an actor would avoid answering the question by simply pleading the fifth amendment before being dismissed in disgrace, he was to be disappointed.

Yes, Jody plead the fifth – but it was the fifth commandment, not the fifth amendment. “Honour thy father and mother that thy days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord thy God has given thee,” Jody quoted, before explaining: “I choose to interpret that to mean forefathers.” She didn’t want to dishonour her forefathers by doing anything other than protecting the rights that they had given her, which meant that she could do no other than decline to answer Tavenner’s impertinent question.

She tried to explain her reasoning further, but Tavenner had had enough, and kept asking, “Do you decline to answer the question?” and “Do you rely on the fifth amendment?”

“I actually rely on the constitution of the United States and the 10 commandments,” Jody retorted. “I am aware that the fifth amendment was written for the protection of the innocent, and I rely on the fifth amendment.” Then, just before the committee threw her out, she managed to squeeze in one more fat joke: “I am not hiding behind the fifth amendment” -- an impossibility, given her size -- “I am standing right in front of it!”

The committee refused to allow her to make a final statement or ask a question, and, as she left the room, she pledged to do so elsewhere.

She might have done, but the press didn’t report it. The newspapers that mentioned her appearance before the committee portrayed it as a confusing farce, rather than as the corrosive indictment of a vicious and unfair witch hunt that Jody was presumably aiming for. The Billings Gazette’s headline is typical of the tone of the coverage:

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It was an astonishingly brave performance, and it might even have been the first time that anyone had ever dared to treat the committee with the contempt that most of the movie-making community privately agreed it deserved, but, for Jody, the outcome was that she didn’t have a day’s work in the next 12 years. It was 1965 before she started to get even the smallest roles on television shows, and 1969 before she appeared in a film again, when she was an extra in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

A decade later, during which time she averaged only one television appearance a year, Jody was in a car accident. She suffered massive injuries, which killed her a few months later. She was 63, the year was 1979, and it really didn’t matter whether she’d been a Communist or not.

Sources: (1)and(3)Syracuse Herald-Journal, Dec 6, 1949; (2)Ogden Standard-Examiner, Feb 1, 1940; (4)HUAC Official Report, 26 March, 1953; (5)Long Beach Press-Telegram, March 27, 1953 (6)Billings Gazette, March 27, 1953.

Bert Stevens

Helen Ferguson is eight months pregnant and penniless. She’s on a train crowded with people heading home from New York for the 4th of July, but she doesn’t have a home to go to; she’s simply using the one thing her cheating boyfriend left her with when he suddenly dumped her, which is practically the only thing of value she possesses -- a one-way ticket out of town. 

She’s in a distracted daze as she hauls her suitcase down the carriage, still in shock. She doesn’t notice anyone around her. She doesn’t see the skinny guy in the bowtie and braces who’s trying to find somewhere to hang his jacket; the old woman mopping her face with a handkerchief as if she’d run all the way to the station; the weasel-faced man who rudely squats down in front of her to talk to his friend. 

And she doesn’t see the tall, silver-haired man in the light suit who she walks past as he reaches up to place his wife’s hat box in the luggage rack: 

Helen Ferguson didn’t notice him, but Barbara Stanwyck -- playing her in this scene from No Man of Her Own (1950) -- would have. He’s Bert Stevens, a board member of the Screen Extras Guild who spent most of his career milling around in scenes set in train stations, nightclubs, courtrooms and so on. 

He was born in 1905 to working-class parents with a decade-long mania for the letter M -- they named him Malcolm, to go with his older sisters Maud, Mabel and Mildred. The appeal of that letter might have worn off around then, though, because they always called him Byron, which was his middle name. By the time the next child came along three years later, they appear to have finished with M entirely, as they called her Ruby. 

When Bert was six and Ruby was three, their mother cracked her skull open on a kerbstone when she tripped while stepping out of a Brooklyn streetcar. Not long after she died, their father abandoned them when he got work on a construction team digging the Panama canal, and that was the last the five children saw of him. 

The older girls could just about take care of themselves, but Bert and Ruby found themselves shunted between various homes, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Whenever Ruby ran away from one of the homes, Bert would go to the old tenement in Brooklyn, where he’d find her sitting on the stoop, hoping that her mother or father would come home. 

Like a lot of orphaned siblings, Bert and Ruby clung to each other and Bert, as the older of the two, naturally became his sister’s protector. The youngest of their older sisters, Mildred, had become a showgirl, and Ruby would go backstage to watch her and would learn all her routines by heart. Bert disapproved of Ruby hanging around with all these show people, but she was hooked -- one day she’d be a famous dancer and Bert would be proud of her! She chalked her name in huge letters all over the sidewalk to show him how it would look when it was up in lights. Ruby Stevens! Ruby Stevens! 

Ruby was always in trouble at school and had no friends. Bert tried to help by forcing his friends to let her join in their games, but it was no use: there was no way she was going to stick around in Brooklyn, and if Bert was trying to keep her away from show business, he was bound to lose. Ruby dropped out of school at fourteen and, within a year, was working as a chorus girl in Manhattan nightclubs and on the touring circuit. This picture was taken a couple of years later, when she became a Ziegfeld girl: 

Not long after that picture was taken, Ruby moved to Hollywood, and Bert, at the age of 18, was all on his own. 

He was quiet, a bit of a daydreamer and seemingly without ambition -- his one driving force seems to have been his attachment to his sister. Naturally, therefore, he followed her out west. When she started working in movies, he soon followed. And when she ditched her childhood dream of seeing Ruby Stevens up in lights and changed her name, he changed his name, too, although not as radically as she did. He simply swapped the “Malcolm Byron” part of his name for plain old “Bert”, whereas Ruby opted for an entirely new name altogether: Barbara Stanwyck -- which is why she would have been very well aware of who she was shoving past in that train carriage in No Man of Her Own. 

That wasn’t the only film Bert and Ruby worked on together. The year before, they'd shared a scene in The File on Thelma Jordon (1949), with Bert appearing in a few shots as one of her defence lawyers (seated on the right): 

By this point in their lives, the once inseparable siblings rarely saw each other except for the few occasions when they happened to be on the same set. They were still close, however, and Stanwyck would help Byron out whenever he needed her to. That might have happened fairly often because, although he appeared in dozens of films in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the roles were strictly low-earning atmosphere parts with no dialogue, such as his urbane, white-suited nightclub patron in this still from Song of the Thin Man (1947): 

It’s hard to say whether being the brother of one of the biggest stars of his time affected Bert’s career one way or the other, particularly as there’s no evidence that he desired to be anything other than what he was: a steady, reliable background player. 

Of course, Ruby Stevens wasn’t the only New York dancer to make it in Hollywood. However, what is surprising is that she wasn’t even the only one who had an older brother who worked as an extra in a Thin Man film. 

On Ruby’s chorus line in the Shubert Theater in Manhattan back in the 1920s was a dancer called Lucille LeSueur. She went to Hollywood around the same time as Ruby did and, like Ruby’s brother Bert, her brother Hal tagged along. Like Ruby, Lucille changed her name -- we know her better as Joan Crawford -- and became a major star, and, like Bert, Hal became a dress extra, appearing as reporters, chauffeurs and nightclub patrons like the one in the centre of this still from After the Thin Man (1936): 

Bert and Hal must have known each other and would have bumped into each other on nightclub sets and so on from time to time. It's possible that they passed the time by swapping gossip about Barbara and Joan but it's far more likely that they avoided the subject altogether, each taking pleasure in the company of the only other guy in Hollywood who knew what it was like to be absolutely dwarfed by his little sister.

Bert had a heart attack in 1959, which he survived, and a second one in 1964, which he didn’t. He was 60. His career had been so obscure that even many Hollywood insiders were surprised to learn that Barbara Stanwyck had ever had a brother.

Sources: Madsen, Alex, "Stanwyck--A Biography", HarperPaperbacks 1995; Picture of Ruby Stevens from the US Library of Congress, public domain; Fabian Cepeda of Hollywood Clasico tipped me off about Hal LeSueur.

John Deering

As far as Hollywood was concerned, John Deering wasn't an actor; he was a voice. He'd performed in dozens of successful radio programmes in the 1930s, but he didn't act; he spoke. He'd fleetingly achieved a certain glamourous notoriety in 1938, when he'd eloped with a young actress called Irene Mattock -- "The elopement followed by less than two weeks a casual meeting in a Hollywood restaurant, where they renewed an acquaintanceship that started in Chicago four years ago"⁽¹⁾ -- but movie producers only really wanted him to narrate documentary shorts or provide a few helpful lines of voiceover in melodramas. Therefore, when he got the chance to physically appear on celluloid in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), it was only natural that he had to do so in silhouette:

 

He appears in a short introductory scene. Speaking with the efficient, urgent but measured tone of the 1930s news announcer, he sets out the background to the events that are about to unfold, reminding the audience of a recent spy scandal involving Nazi infiltrators in America -- "The story ... is stranger than fiction, revealing the existence of a vast spy ring operating against the naval, military and air forces of the United States" -- before fading out of the movie and leaving the action to genuine actors like Edward G Robinson and George Sanders.

Warner Brothers designed the film to be a piece of propaganda that would help to convince the public to back American involvement in the war that had just broken out in Europe. Of course, it took a further two years (and Japan's bombing of Pearl harbour) before that happened, but films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy played a crucial part in securing popular support for military action against Germany, and Jack Warner, Edward G Robinson and George Sanders would have had every reason to congratulate themselves. 

John Deering would no doubt also have been pleased with his small part in the preparations for the rescue of Europe, but, by then, he had other things on his mind. The most pressing question he faced was, if all you are is a voice, what do you do when you can't speak? 

In 1941, at the age of 35, John had a part opposite Marlene Dietrich in the first episode of gossip columnist Louella Parsons' new radio show, Hollywood Premiere. Halfway through the performance, he handed his script to another actor, walked offstage and collapsed. He was taken to hospital, where doctors discovered he'd had a cerebral haemorrhage. They opened up his skull and found a tumour, which they removed. However, the operation damaged his brain and, when he came round, he was unable to form words -- while saving his life, the doctors had destroyed his voice.⁽²⁾

The motion picture relief fund offered immediate help as he recuperated but, although his physical condition improved, his voice didn't return. After two years, the fund gave up his case. His wife left him and he was taken in by his sister, who was already supporting two children on her own. For the next eight years, John "did little more than exist,"⁽³⁾ and relied on his sister entirely. Faced with medical bills that she had no means of paying, she started selling batches of her own recipe salad dressing to grocery stores, and the little money that that brought in kept the household going. 

It must have been hard for John to imagine how things could get much worse for him, but they did. In 1951, John's doctor prescribed radical treatment, telling John's sister, "Your brother has come to rely on you too much. If he doesn't get out on his own, he may never recover. You must turn him out of your house." Reluctantly, she did what the doctor said, and John found himself reduced to wandering around Hollywood, getting occasional bits and pieces of menial work.

At one point, when he was employed as a doorman at the CBS Radio theatre for a few months, a reporter on the Valley Times published a story about him. It wasn't a large piece, and it wouldn't normally have led to anything, but Dinah Shore read it and sent it to a columnist on the Hollywood Reporter, who wrote another article on John and talked to television producers about his plight. Memories were jogged, consciences pricked, favours called in and, soon, John started to get work as a background extra in TV shows like "China Smith", "My Friend Irma" and "Big Town". 

In 1955, he even got a speaking role, of sorts, in "Dragnet". The audience wouldn't have thought anything of it, but anyone who knew John must have watched that week's episode with a strange mix of emotions.

John appears in one scene at the start of the show, as a man who has been shot in the chest and is minutes from death:

The detectives ask the dying man if he can tell them what happened. His eyes flutter open, his mouth flaps uselessly as he struggles to make a sound and his voice, when it comes, is a thin, barely audible rasp, intelligible only to the cop who leans down right next to him. (It turns out that all he said was, "Don't shoot me again," which is of no use to the case.) The effort of trying to speak proves too much for him, and he dies. 

It must have been terribly sad for people who remembered the old John to watch him in that scene, knowing how close to home the performance was. On the other hand, although the role might be a long way from narrating a hit Warner Brothers movie, it's also a long way from the years when he could no more than "exist" in a bed in his sister's spare room. 

By this time, around the age of 50, he could get out a few hesitating sentences and was once again earning his own living. A vocal teacher named Paul Thomsen had become interested in him and told reporters that John could be taught to speak perfectly within six months. That wasn't true, but he made much better progress than he had in the whole of the 1940s. 

"Even when everyone else despaired," said John's sister, "I never gave up the hope that John would be able to talk again. Now he's doing well and my salad dressing business is coming along fine. It just seems like a miracle."⁽⁴⁾

In May, 1955, John telephoned Louella Parsons. He had good news, and wanted her to announce it in her column. That week, she wrote:

“John Deering, who I have occasion to remember well, telephoned to tell me that he marries Vivian Larson at the Embassy chapel tonight. She was his nurse and he met her six months ago. John is the most courageous young man I know. He was on my radio show, Hollywood Premiere, about seven [actually 14] years ago when right in the midst of the program he had a brain hemorrage and collapsed. Up to that time he had been a top radio actor ... only through sheer will did he bring back his voice little by little. He is still hopeful of complete recovery.”⁽⁵⁾

That didn't happen. Not long after John and Vivian were married, another tumour was discovered growing in his head and he once again became too sick to work. On 28 January 1959, when he was 54, he suffered another cerebral haemorrhage, and died.

Sources: (1)Corpus Christi Times, June 14, 1938; (2)Lowell Sun, June 8, 1945; (3) and (4) San Mateo Times, August 22, 1952; (5)Daily Review, Hayward, CA, May 23, 1955

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