If I were to call my local police station and explain that a run-down old vaudeville mind reader called Triton the Mental Wizard had told me I was going to die at 11 o'clock that night, I wouldn't have high hopes of seeing a great deal of cop action any time soon. However, according to Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), I'd be wrong, because, when Gail Russell makes that very call, the LAPD gets peculiarly over-excited and floods her mansion with dozens of flatfoots, who quickly secure the place against any possible threat.
Just goes to show.
As the lead detective is shown into the drawing room, a maid passes by, carrying an empty silver tray:
She's played by Dorothy Abbott, who is about 20 minutes away from speaking her first line in a motion picture. The police have thrown a cordon around the house, and are allowing no one in or out. The hours pass by, 11 o'clock draws nearer, and everyone grows increasingly tense. Halfway through the evening, a couple of cops bring in someone they found trying to creep out through the garden. It's Dorothy:
They ask her why she was running away, and she answers timidly, with a foreign accent that's unplaceable but is presumably supposed to be generally evocative of the superstitious old world: "When a person's fated, others go with them."
That's the line! Dorothy talks!
The heiress lets the maid go, and that's the end of Dorothy's part in the film. It's not a huge or pivotal role, but it helps with the atmosphere of melodramatic dread, which is pretty important in a film that doesn't have a great deal going on in terms of story after the initial set-up. Also, it means that Dorothy's no longer a mere extra -- two years after leaving her secretary's job in Missouri and coming to Hollywood, she's got a speaking role! She's an actress!
It wasn't too bad a start, but it didn't come to much. She'd been getting steady work as a pretty extra for the two years she'd been in the business, being cast regularly as show girls, models, nurses and girls at parties, and things don't seem to have changed much after she delivered her one line. The small parts kept coming, but none of them involved much in the way of speaking. She couldn't work it out. Why didn't they want her to speak? Naturally, she assumed the problem was something to do with her voice, in which she detected an unattractive huskiness. She spent her first three years in Hollywood trying to develop a smoother tone, until one day in 1950, when her drama coach told her that her husky voice was the only thing that made her different from any other pretty girl. That was better than nothing, she figured, and, from then on, she spent a good deal of time screaming at trees in her back yard whenever she got worried that her voice might not be quite husky enough.(1)
All that screaming doesn't seem to have helped with the speaking roles, though. Here she is in His Kind of Woman (1951), released the year after she discovered her unique selling point:
She's on the right, obviously.
It must have been thrilling to sit and play cards at a table with Robert Mitchum, but she doesn't get to say anything to him, or anyone else in the scene.
She spent a few years under contract to Paramount as a stock player, dutifully showing up to silently beautify whatever scenes she was assigned. A syndicated column covering the colourful fringes of life in the film colony, James Padgitt's "In Hollywood", once dedicated a few paragraphs to her, saying, "Dorothy is one of the legion of girls who tried to crash into the big time at the studios, but finally became content with small parts, walk-ons and the cutie second from the left in the chorus line." She told Padgitt that she worked days at the studio and nights in little theatre productions. She also did promotional modelling work: "They'll make me queen of something or other or Miss This or Miss That for a little extra cash." When the article appeared, she'd recently gloried in the roles of Miss Los Angeles Transit and Miss Oil Cans. "I make a pretty good living," she said. "At least it keeps the wolf from the door."(2)
That took care of money, but what about the glamour and excitement that she'd dreamed of back when she was a secretary in Kansas City? Well, she got that, too, but not in the way she might have expected. While other hopeful starlets were chasing actors and producers in the Cocoanut Grove and the Brown Derby, Dorothy met a man from the other Los Angeles, a Mescalero Apache cop in the narcotics squad called Rudy Diaz. He was much more exciting than all those movie people. Dorothy might have thought it was pretty thrilling to play cards with Robert Mitchum on a film set, but how much more thrilling would it have been to have taken part in the undercover drugs bust that ended up with Mitchum going to jail after the cops, including Rudy, crashed the little marijuana party that he was enjoying in a small apartment in Laurel Canyon?(3)
Rudy got up to all kinds of dramatic stuff. In 1949, a couple of years before Dorothy met him, he got in the papers when an undercover operation went wrong in a bad way. As Rudy was handcuffing a dope peddler who'd just sold him seven reefers, a man with a deputy sheriff's badge walked up and said, "I'm from the sheriff's department. Can I help you?" The news reports explained what happened next:
"Instead of help, the phony deputy hit Diaz over the head with a gun butt. Diaz fell and the 'deputy' aimed his gun at the officer and pulled the trigger five times. It never went off.
"Diaz got up and collared the 'deputy'. The peddler fled in the scuffle.
"The narcotics officer then drove the other prisoner toward Central police station. En route, two cars hemmed the police car to the curb. The 'deputy' leaped into one of them.
The narcotics officer then went to a hospital to have some head and hand cuts treated."(4)
So he's a cop disguised as a drug addict who's almost killed by a drug dealer disguised as a cop? That's Dorothy's man! Maybe it would have been better for her career if she'd hooked up with someone with a bit more pull in the film world, but that's not the way it worked out. She fell in love with Rudy, and that was all there was to it.
Rudy was crazy about her, too -- so crazy that, even though he knew it was a terrible idea, she was able to talk him into letting her tag along on an undercover job. His instincts were proved right when, much to his regret, this move ended up giving the papers another embarrassing story:
"Dorothy's husband is dashing Rudy Diaz, narcotics squad officer and the terror of the local 'hypes.' The two have only been married two weeks so Rudy's in a frame of mind to do just about anything this little blonde girl should ask. You'd think being an actress was glamorous enough. But not for Dorothy, an adventuress at heart.
"Dorothy talked her husband into letting her come along when he was out on a case. She posed as his 'pickup' date.
"Rudy slicked down his hair and dressed himself in a loose fitting bright blue suit with heavily padded shoulders. He was like any of those characters wandering about Temple and Figueroa streets.
"Dorothy smeared on the grease paint so she'd look like a girl who'd do 'anything' for the stuff.
"The couple met their 'contact' outside a Los Angeles movie theater. The contact was going to lead them to where they could buy some narcotics. Rudy was posing as a guy named Jack. It had taken him several months to get in with the gang. Things were going swimmingly.
"Then Dorothy blurted out, 'Rudy, I've got to make a phone call.'
"Rudy, keeping in character as Jack, another junko, ignored her. But determined Dorothy, out of character, tugged at his sleeve, 'Rudy, Rudy,' she insisted."
The suspect suddenly realised what was going on and ran off. Rudy let him go, because you can't abandon your wife in a bad neighbourhood while she's dressed as a prostitute, and the news story attributed to him a laconic, and fittingly Mitchum-like, closing line: "Baby, your kind of acting's strictly for movies."(5)
You don't get that sort of story if you marry a movie producer. And, in fact, it turned out that marrying Rudy wasn't as bad for Dorothy's career as it might have seemed at first.
The television show, Dragnet, prided itself on its realism, and would often use actual cases as the basis for Joe Friday's investigations. In the early 50s, the show picked a couple of Rudy's cases to dramatise, and took Rudy on as a technical adviser. Not only that, it also took on Dorothy as a regular character: she got to play Friday's girlfriend, Ann Baker:
The role of the main character's girlfriend might be a pretty big deal in most TV series, but Dragnet really wasn't the kind of show that spent a lot of time on its heroes' personal lives -- Just the facts, Ma'am -- and Dorothy wasn't given too much to do in the six episodes (out of 300) that she appeared in. Still, Dragnet was massive for a while, and she was Joe Friday's girl. That's the kind of exposure every young actress dreams of. It's the kind of break that can take you places.
But it didn't take her anywhere. Her credits following her spell on Dragnet include the usual dancing girls and nurses that someone had obviously decided were all she was fit for.
For Rudy, though, the Dragnet experience panned out differently. While Dorothy had found her way, through Rudy, to an exciting Los Angeles that was far from the one she'd been expecting, Rudy found a way, through Dragnet, to the Los Angeles that Dorothy had moved west to be a part of: a Los Angeles that was filled with glamorous, charismatic men and beautiful, sophisticated women, where creative people valued your opinions and trusted your advice and, crucially, nobody tried to shoot you in the face at point blank range.
It set Rudy thinking. There was more to life, maybe, than chasing drug pushers and living in a cramped little place with the wife's mother and your daughter always hanging around.(6) He stayed in the police, moving from narcotics to homicide, but it seems that his eyes had been opened, and he was looking for new possibilities.
I've no idea when exactly things went wrong between Dorothy and Rudy, but, by the 1960s, they weren't living together, and Rudy was following his hunch that Hollywood had more to offer than dope busts and murders. In 1964, a gossip columnist noted: "Ann Sothern's been doing the everynight pheasant en cocotte bit (with a split or two of Chateau Cheval Blanc on the side) with handsome Sergeant Rudy Diaz of the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Division -- and believe me, they ain't discussing homicide."(7) Rudy and Sothern were still together the following year, when they were photographed together at a Hollywood party:
(8)
Then, a few years later, after serving for 21 years, Rudy left the LAPD and became an actor. He said, "I've been on the force for 21 years. I didn't know it, but I guess I must have been practicing for acting all those years I was posing as an undercover man."(9) One of his first roles, as the guy Clint Eastwood arrests in the first scenes of Coogan's Bluff (1968) seems pretty typical of his career:
Dorothy had stopped acting the same year Rudy was spotted with Ann Sothern. Perhaps that's not a coincidence. After a few years of separation, Dorothy and Rudy got a divorce. It was 1968, the same year Coogan's Bluff came out.
At the end of the year, just before Christmas, Dorothy killed herself. There's no record of how she did it, or who found her, or whether she left a note to explain why she'd done it. She was 46.
Rudy outlived her by almost 40 years, spending the rest of his career as a character actor specialising in various tough cops, native Americans and Mexican bandits. He retired in 1983, and died just before Christmas in 2006 at the age of 88.
Sources: imdb.com; (1)Ogden Standard-Examiner Aug 15 1950; (2)The Doylestown Intelligencer, (Pa), June 5, 1951; (3)Starks, Michael "Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness", By Michael Starks, Cornwall Books, 1982, p129; (4)San Mateo Times, Nov 14, 1949; (5)Pacific Stars & Stripes, Sep 4, 1952; (6)Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, July 16, 1955; (7)Pasadena Star-News, Nov 27, 1964; (8)The Daily Review (Cal), Jan 26, 1965 (9)San Antonio Light, Oct 20, 1967.
These little stories you dig up really give a lot of colour and depth to how we see Hollywood in it's heyday. Thank you.
Posted by: Simon Fraser | January 12, 2009 at 03:23 AM
You're welcome, Simon. Thanks for dropping by.
Posted by: Diarmid | January 12, 2009 at 09:34 AM