Sally Yarnell

There are all kinds of reasons why ending up as an extra isn't the worst thing that can happen to an actor. For instance, in the space of a couple of minutes in His Kind of Woman (1951), a 35-year-old extra called Sally Yarnell gets to share the screen with two legends of American cinema. First, she plays piano while Jane Russell sings, and raises a glass to her at the end of the song:

And, in the next shot, she exits the scene, a blur of motion who merits a quick appreciative glance from a hound-dogging Robert Mitchum at the bar:

Of course, for an extra, the downside of getting to do a scene with massive stars like those two is that the audience is even less likely than usual to notice you at all. Especially if those stars have the advantage of actually facing the camera while all anyone can see of you is the back of your head.

It's not the kind of role that an actress can pretend might lead to bigger things, but, by this stage in her career, it must have been many years since Sally had given up hoping that that might happen. We're not usually happy with the idea of someone giving up their dream -- in the context of the movies, especially, it strikes us as terribly sad -- but, given what happened to Sally before the end of the '50s, it was probably just as well that she did. In fact, it might have saved her life, or, at least, made sure that her life was worth living.

Sally had come comparatively late to the movies, starting off as a dancer extra in her late 20s. By the time she made His Kind of Woman, she'd been working for almost 10 years, getting nothing but bit parts.

If she hadn't broken through, it wasn't for lack of trying. She'd spent the war years doing exactly what an aspiring starlet was supposed to do: getting ink by any means necessary. She'd done plenty of modelling work for the war effort -- patriotically removing her stockings to encourage women to donate theirs to be made into parachutes for the air force⁽¹⁾, or donning revealing red-white-and-blue swimwear to convince women that they needn't selfishly squander precious material on full-torso bathing suits:

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She also made sure that gossip columnists were able to print regular snippets about her being seen with eligible movie talent. Mostly, her name would be linked to minor celebrities like John Howard or Peverell Marley (people who would benefit from being seen with a beautiful companion almost as much as Sally would benefit from being seen with them), but one clipping shows that she was smart enough to once get herself spotted helping Mickey Rooney get over his divorce from Ava Gardner by spending time with him in a secluded spot, where they were seen "sighing into each other's eyes."⁽³⁾ It's impossible to tell how many of those romantic rendezvous actually took place, of course, but each mention signifies an attempt by Sally to keep her name in the papers, to construct a profile as an actress who shouldn't look out of place in that sort of company

However, in 1945, the gossip-column coverage suddenly came to an end. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that Sally turned 30 that year. The question is, did the papers drop Sally (possibly because they felt, perhaps uncharitably, that behaviour that is charming in a young ingenue is hard to pass off as anything but vulgar in someone a little older) or did Sally simply stop making the effort to get publicity? Might it be that she had given herself until she was 30 to try to become a proper actress, and that once it was clear that that was never going to happen, she quit wasting money on whoever she was paying to plant stories in the press? The idea has a certain appeal, if only because it at least makes her out to be less of a victim.

Whatever the case, the fact that she was out of the papers didn't mean that she was out of work. Right after His Kind of Woman, she got a job in another Robert Mitchum picture, The Racket (1951). This time, though, her part was even smaller (although she was in the foreground of the shot, it lasted only a few seconds), and she didn't even get to share a set with any stars:

 

It's hard to think of a role that would have been further removed from the glamour of Hollywood than playing one of a roomful of police dispatchers. Could there have been more dispiriting work for an extra? Not only would there have been no famous actors around, but the chances are that you wouldn't even have caught a glimpse of the director, as this kind of scene would have been palmed off on some assistant or other. An extra playing a police dispatcher could justifiably reflect on the bleak possibility that they only got the work that day because the crew couldn't be bothered to find a decent bit of stock footage.

Still, these were Sally's roles: party guests, people in the street and -- increasingly -- secretaries. Her 40th birthday came and went, and the bit parts kept coming.

In 1956, however, she somehow managed to snag a featured role in a low-budget shocker called The Black Sleep. Sadly, the film is absolutely terrible (not that its producers intended it to be anything but). One of the few contemporary reviews noted that "little imagination was used on the script", which "uses the oldest plot ever employed for such pictures: a mad doctor experiments on human beings, turns them into monsters and then watches them run wild."⁽⁴⁾ The lead monster was played by the king of B-movie monster men, Tor Johnson, and Sally got to play one of the supporting monsters. She has no lines, but her part is memorable, at least:

Evidently, whatever bizarre experiment was performed on her character by the evil surgeon, it left her with little in the way of visible damage other than a touch of baldness and a couple of odd tufts of hair here and there on her body, but that seems to have been enough to meet the film's low threshold for monstrosity.

The still shows her just after the monsters have escaped from their dungeon prison and are rampaging through the house. They're supposed to be enraged and terrifying, but Sally just looks like she's having an enormous amount of fun, which I'm sure she was; after more than a decade of dutifully taking the most mundane roles in Hollywood, she seems to have decided that she may as well make the most of the opportunity to run around in her underclothes wearing a peculiarly shaved wig, shrieking and snarling like a wild little girl.

The role even brought her to the attention of the newspapers again, with the syndicated columnist Jimmie Fiddler writing a decent-sized paragraph about her (although he got the name of the film wrong):

"Sally Yarnell, featured as a lady monster in 'The Black Sheep,' spends three hours in the makeup department before reporting to the set. She has to have tufts of hair glued to her arms and chest, one hair at a time. Then she spends three more hours having it removed before she goes home at night. The actress, who is a pretty girl under the makeup, tells me she's enjoying the change of pace from goody-goody roles."⁽⁵⁾

When she was in her 20s, she used to get in the papers for more glamorous reasons, but this must have been better than no coverage at all.

However, if 1956 was the high point of her career, the next year was the low point of her life. She made the papers again, but not in a good way:

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Sally had been a passenger in a car that slammed into the back of a street-sweeping truck one night in February, 1957. The people she was with -- a couple in the front seat (the husband was driving) and another man, presumably Sally's date -- were hurt badly, but Sally came off worst of all. The news story said she had "suffered critical scalp injuries". The skin had been torn right off her skull. She'd been almost totally scalped.

It's a small mercy that the reporter didn't happen to realise that the horribly injured woman missing most of her hair had appeared in a film the year before as a half-bald monster. It would have made for a juicy follow-up piece, but I imagine that Sally could have done without being reminded of the macabre irony. Things were surely awful enough without having her life turned into material for a strange-but-true filler item.

That wasn't the end of Sally, though. Unsurprisingly, her list of film credits thins out around this point but, in time, she went back to work and, in 1959, she celebrated an important milestone of sorts: "Nothing like making a career of one kind of role ... Sally Yarnell landed her 60th assignment as secretary for her featured appearance in Round the Flag ... This time, she is a WAC-secretary at the Pentagon in Washington."⁽⁷⁾

In the 1960s, Sally moved into television work, turning up in a small role as a passenger of a UFO in a Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" (1962):

She looks good! Indeed, she looks so good that it's hard to believe that this woman queuing up excitedly to board an alien spaceship is the same woman who, only a few years before, had been scalped in a car wreck. But it is, and she was, as becomes clear when she raises her eyebrows in response to something the woman beside her says and a strange, unnatural crease wrinkles that flawless forehead, like a fold appearing in a sheet of thick rubber:

No one seeing her on television would notice it if they weren't looking for it, but anyone who met Sally in person would been well aware that something pretty bad must have happened to her. It's the kind of thing that you can't help but notice but, on reflection, think better of asking about.

It's also the kind of thing that can ruin someone's life, particularly in Hollywood. It would surely have ruined Sally's life if it had happened, say, 10 years earlier, when she had reason to hope that, if she kept being seen in the right places with the right people and managed to keep her name in the papers, she might yet become a movie star.

But it didn't ruin her life. She coped and perhaps even thrived after her accident. Maybe that's because, long before that night in 1957, she'd already given up on the hope that she might dazzle her way into a glamorous Hollywood life and had allowed herself to settle for a career in the shadows. Perhaps, as a steady, unambitious extra, she simply lost far less than she would have lost if she'd hit that truck before she'd given up on the idea of herself as a starlet on the cusp of stardom, and that's why it wasn't impossible for her to build it all up again and carry on living the life she had, even if it wasn't the life she might have wanted.

Sally retired in the mid-70s, when she was 60. She died in Denver, Colorado in 1995.

Sources: imdb.com; (1)Casa Grande Dispatch, June 29, 1944; (2)Edwardsville Intelligencer, July 14, 1943; (3)San Antonio Light, July 8, 1943; (4)Syracuse Herald-Journal, Sept 10, 1956; (5)Nevada State Journal, March 16, 1956; (6)Long Beach Press-Telegram, Feb 11, 1957; (7)Winnipeg Free Press, Jan 14, 1959.

Comments

[D Cairns]

Great piece! Very moving, and I like your take on the story.

[Diarmid]

Thanks very much -- there'll be a less depressing one along next, I think...

[maxwelton]

Thanks for the story. I always wonder, when reading about these bit players, whether this sort of acting is like "community theater"--something you do because you enjoy it--or whether these folks actually made a living doing this without doing something more mundane during the day. I suspect the latter.

I didn't find the story depressing, nice to see Sally kept bouncing back. Besides, all of those romantic liaisons with leading leading Hollywood men would make for some excellent stories later in life.

[maxwelton]

Rather, I suspect the former. Oops.

[diarmid mogg]

Isn't it annoying when you can't edit comments on a blog?

On whether extras do it for the money or the love of the movies, I'd have to say it seems to be different for different people, and that it varies from decade to decade. Most of the extras in the period I'm looking at -- the 30s to the mid-50s -- did it either because they had a background in the theater or vaudeville and were used to performing in a workmanlike fashion, or because they hoped to become movie stars. (However, in the 30s there were as many as 8,000 extras competing for around 1,500 jobs, so the chances of even getting work, let alone being discovered, were tiny -- although they were still better than if you had a similarly badly paid minimum wage job outside Hollywood, in which case they'd be zero.)

As you suspect, though, a significant element of extras seem to do it as a sort of community theater, but one where you might get to hang out with famous folks from time to time. However, in the noir era --which covers those difficult years from the wall street crash, through the depression and world war 2 and ends around the start of the prosperous 50s -- that type seems to have been rarer than they might be these days.

[D Cairns]

http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/how-special-am-i/

I've awarded you a Premier Dardos. Don't expect you to send out five more and post about it here, because I know you're keeping the place pure. But I think you deserve it, and any excuse to point people here is worthwhile.

[Diarmid]

Excellent! My first internet award! I wonder if, like Jake LaMotta did with his boxing champion belt, I can tear the jewels out and pawn them for cash...

[Lance Moody]

Words fail me... this site is one of the most delightful I have ever seen here on the Internets. Many thanks!

[Diarmid]

Thanks very much, Lance!

[Bill Ennis]

I knew Sally as "Aunt Sally". She was probably one of my grandmother's closest friends, and she continued to be close to our family after Grandma passed away. Once every month or so, my father would take us over to her home, in the hills just south of Century City, for a Sunday visit. Her favorite ice cream was Pecan Praline, usually purchased from the Ralph's grocery store down the street.
Over time, that was one of the constants that remained accessible to her ailing mind. Alzheimer's began to take its toll, and we curiously (I'm referring to myself and three other kids) and sadly watched her drift away. She would forget that she had just asked the same question four or five times within fifteen minutes, but she would never forget to offer the kids some Pecan Praline ice cream.
I remember stopping by one weekend morning. She was reclining on the couch, watching Warner Bros. cartoons. "How are you feeling?", my dad asked.
"Oh, just fine, thank you. I was just waiting for The Studio to call."
Even I knew, at 11 years old, that The Studio would never call again.
A few years later, she was either admitted to a facility, or her sister took her to Denver; I don't recall the details. She was a sweet woman with a heart of gold, and that is unforgettable.
Every once in a while, I order a scoop of Pecan Praline. My kids aren't fans.

[Robennis]

Actually, Dad, I DO like pecan praline. It's good. I remember Aunt Sally from when I was a toddler, barely.

[Josh Betz]

I took care of Sally Yarnell at the end of her life in a nursing home in Thornton Colorado. I was just a teenager but remember her well, she could no longer hold a conversation, but sang or hummed old show tunes incessantly. I will never forget the 8 X 10 ultra glamorous photo of her looking like a 1940's pin-up girl on a Hawaiian beach. The photo sat on her dresser and was such a stark contrast to the shell of a woman in front of me that old age and Alzheimer had effected so strongly and unfairly- Thanks for this blog explaining her!

[diarmid mogg]

It only explains her up to a point -- there's a lot we'll never know. But thanks for contributing your reminiscence. That's a very interesting memory to have.