Eadie Adams

In the second film in the Thin Man series, After the Thin Man (1937), Nick and Nora Charles, those loveable, crime-solving, high-functioning alcoholics, return to San Francisco from a long trip to find a wild party being thrown in their house. It’s a welcome home party for them, but it’s grown so large in their absence that none of the guests recognise them when they come in. Nick and Nora take it in their stride -- that sort of thing happens to them all the time, and, frankly, is nothing that a bucket of martinis can’t fix.

In one corner of the room, there’s an entire jazz band:

They’re playing “Sing, Sing, Sing”, and they’re pretty good. The singer is excellent. In fact, she’s having such a great time, performing there in some strangers’ living room, that she earns herself a brief close-up:

“Sing, sing, sing, sing! Everybody’s got to sing! Wa-ho! Nyah-ha! Now you’re singing with a swing!”

She’s Eadie Adams, and she sung her heart out in nightclubs around Los Angeles for most of the 1930s while trying to get into movies and was rewarded with two years of bit parts, usually cast as nightclub singers.

Her career in movies can be followed in the old columns of Louella O Parsons, who was Hollywood’s gossip supremo from the 1930s to the 1960s. Louella wielded a lot of influence in the industry, and agents worked hard to get the names of their talent into her column, even if it was just in the strange filler paragraph headed “Chatter from Hollywood” or “Snapshots of Hollywood collected at random”, which was made up of peculiarly pointless tittle tattle, delivered in short, unconnected sentences, like “Charles Chaplin patronising The Queen, the new English bar, with friends” and “Edmund Lowe entertaining with a small breakfast party”. Even back then, did anyone care?

I suppose most of the “snapshots” were included by Louella as payment towards future scoops or as favours to publicists, because a lot of them seem to be about people no one ever heard of outside her column. Like Eadie Adams.

The first time Eadie appeared in the column, however, she got a paragraph to herself. It was 1935, and Louella was announcing the start of Eadie’s contract with MGM, after she had been discovered by Ida Koverman, who was Louis B Mayer’s secretary and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood. Eadie seems to have been something of a pet project for Koverman and I assume it was Koverman’s influence that accounts for the surprising frequency with which Eadie cropped up in Louella’s column -- it certainly wasn’t her newsworthiness. Anyway, here’s the big announcement:

“For the better part of two years Eadie Adams has been singing to the film colony’s stars and producers in Hollywood's swank night spots. They liked Eadie’s singing but never thought of her as a picture possibility -- until Eadie left town for a five weeks tour, then it dawned upon producers that a pretty face, attractive figure and intriguing voice might be worth keeping here. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer finally convinced Eadie to return and sign a long-term contract.”(1)

Her first job for MGM seems to have been as an extra in Restless Knights (1937), a Three Stooges short. It’s nearly impossible to spot her, but, after close scrutiny of all the extras in the key scenes, I think I’ve done it. I reckon she’s visible in only one shot:

She’s the one on the left, walking away from the camera. I’m pretty confident. I’m almost certain. I know it might seem unlikely, but you may as well take my word for it. In any case, whichever one of those gown-draped figures is Eadie, it was hardly a promising start to a movie career, and certainly wasn’t enough to enable her to give up the day job (in her case, of course, her day job was a night job). Sure enough, the month after Louella first mentioned Eadie, she wrote:

“Two jobs are no trouble when one is young, ambitious and rarin’ to reach the top. Eadie Adams, blonde, twenty-two and talented, will divide her time the next few months between the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and the new cinema grill at the Roosevelt hotel. Eadie is under contract to MGM who have granted her permission to sing each night at the new Roosevelt roof”.(2)

Twenty-two? More like 28, actually, but who can blame her? You know what Hollywood’s like.

And that’s how it went for the next two years, with Eadie working as an extra during the day, singing at night and taking acting classes in between.(3) Every time she got a bit part, Louella noted dutifully, if optimistically, that the role was Eadie’s “first real chance”(4) or “the break of her career”(5). But the breaks lead only to more nightclub-singer roles.

Eadie must have been pleased in June 1937, therefore, when Louella could finally print a sentence about a role that didn’t involve singing. Forgetting all the other times she had announced Eadie’s first big break, Louella wrote:

“Eadie Adams gets her first big break … with an important role in Big City, with Spencer Tracy and Luise Rainer”(6)

And here she is:

Not a nightclub or a jazz band in sight! Not one song in the entire film! Finally, a chance to prove her acting ability, even if she has no dialogue and hardly any screen time and has to play the wife of a minor character in an under-cooked, low-budget B-picture that is destined to be poorly reviewed and pretty much forgotten forever!

How’d it go? Well, after her few scenes in this movie, she never acted again, so you can decide for yourself.

She turned 30 that year (although her publicity material probably said different), and, presumably, took a long, hard look at her options. What to do? She could spend the next 30 years in increasingly less glamorous bit parts until, eventually, she’d be stuck playing ancient spinsters who run seedy boarding houses (each role, no doubt, still being hailed by Louella Parsons as her big break) or, alternatively, she could sing. She was good at singing; everyone thought so! Acting? Well, that’s another story, obviously.

She had to face the facts: she was a singer, not an actress. So, she sang. And when she’d finished singing, in the early 1960s, she went to Palm Springs and opened the Eadie Adams Realty Company, using her excellent connections to help her sell high-end residential real estate to “the stars of the entertainment world”(7). And then, in 1969, she and her partner, Pat McGrath, opened a hotel, which is still around today:

It’s called the Queen of Hearts these days, but, back then, it was the Desert Knight, and it was Palm Springs’ first hotel for lesbians. Apparently, Avenida Olancha, where it was situated, is “a quiet culdesac that is home to several permanent lesbian residents”, and is known as “lesbian lane”.(8)

I’m guessing Eadie’s partner’s first name wasn’t short for Patrick.

Eadie died in Palm Springs in 1983, at the age of 75.

Sources -- imdb.com; newspaperarchive.com ((1)The Charleston Gazette, Aug 23, 1935, (2)The Charleston Gazette, September 11, 1935, (3)The Charleston Gazette, March 6, 1936, (4)Charleston Gazette, March 6, 1936, (5)The Fresno Bee, October 2, 1937, (6)Waterloo Daily Courier, June 25, 1937); (7)palmspringscommercial.com; (8)qtmagazine.com, "Palm Springs for Women", May 27 2005

Comments

[johnny]

great story...makes you wonder a bit about louella parson's support over the years.

[Diarmid]

It does, doesn't it? Naturally, as my mind is in the gutter, I checked to see if Louella shared Eadie's sexual preferences, but it appears she didn't. Would've been a much better story if she had, though...