Other Takes on the Stuff That Dreams are Made of

     

The movie version we all remember and treasure.

More than a decade ago ago, I was getting ready for bed.  It was late.  I was idly flipping through channels while finishing a late-night snack.  Then there it was.  On Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—The Maltese Falcon.  And I caught it only minutes after the opening credits rolled.  I was hooked.  John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut is one of those films you can watch over and over and it is fresh every time.  So, I watched.  Who needs sleep?

Then in the wee small hours, after Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade delivers the classic closing line to Ward Bond’s befuddled detective, “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” before I can finally pack it in I discover that next up was the odd Warner Bros. 1936 remake of a still earlier version, Satan Met a Lady.  I had never seen it.  Well, I wanted to see the sun rise anyway.

The Maltese Falcon originated as a serial in the pulp pages of a lurid magazine—The Black Mask.  It was penned by their most noted writer, Dashiell Hammett, a hard drinking former Pinkerton agent who had made a name for himself creating a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.  In the process he was re-inventing the mystery story into something much grittier.  Eventually it would be called the hard-boiled detective genre.  Out with the drawing rooms and genteel murders and in with the gritty streets, betrayal, flawed heroes, and brassy dames.

                                       

                                                        The pulp serial was issued as a novel in 1930.

In 1930 the serial was issued as a stand-alone novel.  It immediately elevated Hammett to the topflight of popular novelists, even though he would be moldering in his gin-soaked grave before it would be acknowledged as an American literary classic.

His character, Sam Spade, was a departure from the faceless operative of a giant corporation.  He was, like Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective.  But unlike Holmes his motives were purely pecuniary, his ethics iffy, and his methods by turns trading in betrayal and brutality.  In an uneasy partnership with Miles Archer, he operates a shady agency in a seedy part of town specializing in divorce, scandal, and perhaps a tad of strong-arm enforcement on the side.  His relationship with the police and authorities is  strained at best, although he has allies—most likely drinking buddies or former associates from an implied past.  Despite his general amorality Spade does have a rough personal and professional code which compels him to solve the murder of a feckless partner who he mistrusted and whose wife he was poking on the side despite any risks or temptations

The character and the lurid story, swirling madly around a McGuffin—in this case a fabulous gold and jeweled statuette known as the Maltese Falcon—were a natural for the new sound movies which could make the most out of tough, snappy dialog which Hammett delivered in, you should pardon the expression, spades.  Warner Bros., which was already distinguishing itself from other studios by its willingness to exploit crime and a little sex, gobbled up the rights.

By the way, there really was a Maltese Falcon, as described in the book and ’41 movie.  There really was an annual tribute of “one falcon” paid by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V for bestowing the fiefdoms of Malta, Tripoli, and Gozo on them.  Known as the Maltese Tribute it was paid annually to Charles and his heirs for centuries—always as an actual bird, however.  No golden, jewel encrusted bird was ever sent and then lost to antiquity.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Danniels  as Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley in in the 1931 Warner Bros. version.  The pre-code film was racy and a scene where Spade strip searches Wonderley made the Production Code Hayes office block a re-release.

Warners’s first stab at a movie looks like a dud when viewed today.  The camera work, dictated by the cumbersome and noisy Vidaphone process camera which had to be encased in a booth, is static.  The pacing drags.  The acting will win no awards.  Bebe Danniels as the temptress Ruth Wonderly gets top billing.  But the action and most of the dialog revolve around Ricardo Cortez as Spade.  Despite the Latin name, Cortez was a handsome, fast-talking New York Jew who was a hold-over silent leading man.  After early success in talkies, his career faded and he was relegated to playing mostly heavies in B movies.  The ubiquitous Una Merkel enlivened the proceedings as Spades loyal secretary and implied plaything.

Whatever its deficiencies to modern viewers, the film was a hit with audiences.  A few years later when Hammet was even a bigger name and rival MGM began producing the Thin Man movies, Warner’s tried to re-release The Maltese Falcon.  But the Motion Picture Code had come into play since the earlier release.  Code authorities refused to allow the release citing several sexually suggestive sequences—including a strip search of Wonderly by Spade and an acknowledgement of a homosexual relationship between villain Casper Gutman and his youthful stooge Wilmer Cook.

Instead, the studio settled on a remake.  But they felt that they had to even change the title to avoid a preemptive block by the Code Authority.  Thus, Satan Met a Lady was born.

The plot and much of the dialog remain, but the names of all of the characters are changed and the McGuffin this time is the supposedly jewel filled Horn of Roland based on a reference in the Medieval French epic the Song of Roland.  But for those of us steeped in the Bogart classic this is Bizzaro World.  To begin with, it’s a comedy.  Let that sink in.

Bette Davis got top billing but Warren William did most of the heavy lifting in a thinly veiled re-make.  To cash in on the popularity of MGM's Thin Man series, also based on work by Dashiell Hammet, the oddly cast film was played for comedy.

Warner’s reigning queen Bette Davis gets top billing.  But she has remarkably little to do but bat those famous eyes and play the temptress.  She is on screen for less than a quarter of the film.  This was just the kind of throwaway role that had her at constant odds with Jack Warner.  The real star is Warren William as detective Ted Shane. 

William was another Warner’s pre-code leading man.  Tall, handsome, glib and middle aged, he specialized in playing amoral businessmen and bosses in films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King, and Employees Entrance.  He played the sort of a cad that women adored anyway.  His most memorable turn for modern audiences was as the prudish older brother of Dick Powell in Golddiggers of 1933.  By the time this movie was made he had carved out a reliable niche as the fast talking, close-to-the-line super-lawyer Perry Mason in a series of Warner’s programmers.  By the way, for those who grew up on Raymond Burr’s sort of stuffy and stodgy TV version, William is a revelation.

William’s Shane is basically Mason on steroids.  Glib and without an apparent ethical bone in his body, William plays it to the hilt while wearing, for some unknown reason, a black Stetson cowboy hat instead of a private eye snap-brim fedora.

But what really gives the film a house of mirrors feeling is the casting of supporting characters.  Villain #1, Joel Cairo as played by diminutive Peter Lorre five years later, here is lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher of all people as Anthony Travers.  Villain #2 vividly remembered for the film debut of Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman is here grandmotherly Alison Skipworth as Madame Barabas.  And the teenage gunsel played by Elijah Cook Jr.  here is an over-sized oaf in a beret played by Maynard Holmes.  A very young Marie Wilson doing her best Gracie Allen cum Jean Harlow ditzy blonde is a delight as Miss Murgatroyd, Shane’s semi-loyal secretary.

Lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher took time off from playing butlers to play a heavy, the film's equivalent of Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo three years later.  William sported a black Stetson for reason's never made clear.

Yes, this remake was an odd film.  It makes nobody’s list of classics and Davis considered it the nadir of her career at Warners.  But I have to admit, it was kind of fun.  I bet if I had watched it with the aid of a little pot, like I used to watch late-late movies on my little black-and-white portable TV years ago, I bet it would have been hilarious.

But it won’t make me forget the delicious perfection of watching Bogie tell Mary Astor that he is “sending her over” because he “won’t play sap for you like those other guys did.”

Edith Head Collected Oscars Like Nobody Else

Never one to hide her light under a bushel, Edith Head frequently allowed herself to be photographed with her Oscar Collection. 

Quick quiz.  What woman won more Academy Awards than any other?  Meryl Streep your say?  Wrong.  Katherine Hepburn.  Nope.  Sally Field.  Don’t be ridiculous.  The woman with eight, count ‘em eight Oscars was not an actress at all but a diminutive woman turned out for decades in enormous round glasses, black Moe Howard bangs, tasteful two piece suites, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Who else but costume designer to the stars, Edith Head.

Edith Claire Posener was born on October 28, 1897—although she would later claim 1902, a date which still shows up in articles based on her Hollywood press clippings—in San Bernardino, California.  It was not a place she called home.  Indeed she never had a real hometown.  Her father, Max Posener, was a Russian Jewish emigrant and her mother, Anna E. Levy, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of German/Austrian Jews.  In the pecking order of Jewish society in America, they were mismatched.  It is likely Anna’s parents disapproved of the match and the couple eloped, or simply ran away since there is no evidence they ever married.

Max disappeared when Edith was small after a haberdashery he managed to open in San Bernardino failed.  A year later, in 1905 Anna married Frank Spare, a young Catholic engineer.  They were soon passing Edith off as their mutual daughter and she was raised a Catholic.   Her stepfather’s profession made the family virtual nomads has he found work in mining camps around the West.  The family stayed longer in Searchlight, Nevada than most towns.

Frank did earn a nice living an indulged his daughter in a first rate education.  Edith graduated with a B.A. and honors in French from the University of California at Berkley in 1919 and earned her Master’s in Romance Languages from Stanford a year later.

Then she was on her own in the world.  She started as a French teacher, first in a parochial school in La Jolla and then at the Hollywood School for Girls, a prestigious finishing school catering to the daughters of the booming movie business. In order to qualify for higher pay, she volunteered to teach art as well as French despite having no lessons in the subject since high school. 

Edith’s drawing skills were extremely limited so she enrolled for night classes at the Chouinard Art College.  While there she met Charles Head, the brother of a classmate.  They were married in the summer of 1923.  It was not a particularly happy marriage and the couple separated after a few years.  They did not divorce, however until 1934, presumably because of Edith’s Catholicism.  They had no children, but she gained the name she used throughout her professional life.

In 1924, bored with the life of a housewife in search of a good income, Edith naturally turned to the main local industry for work.  Despite absolutely no experience in fashion or design and still limited in drafting skills, she applied to Paramount Pictures for work as a costume sketch artist under the direction of studio designers.  To get the job she submitted a portfolio "borrowed" from another student.  Not the last time she would finesse her career by cutting corners here and there.

                                                            A rare shot of a young Edith Head sans glasses from her early days at Paramount.

Head, however, was a quick study.  Her drawing improved, and she began making suggestions.  Within a year she was designing for her first picture, The Wanderer, a Raoul Walsh film starring German actress Greta Nissen and Wallace Berry.  She soon became a Walsh favorite, the first of several directors who championed her career.

She toiled in the shadows of Paramount’s head designers, first Howard Greer, then Travis Banton both of who, as was the custom, would often claim her work as their own for screen credits.  It was a “tradition” Head continued after she got the top job long after it was both out of fashion and professionally frowned on, for which she would get a lot of criticism from fellow designers.

But within the studio, Heads work was championed not only by directors, but by leading ladies who appreciated her habit of consulting with them on her design to accommodate  when possible their taste and to accentuate their best features.  Most designers took a take-it-or-leave it attitude with actresses except for the handful of stars with real clout within the studio system.

Although she had enjoyed some studio publicity over the years, Head did not attract wide spread public attention until she put Dorothy Lamour in that famous sarong in 1937’s John Ford epic The Hurricane.  The dress made Lamour a star—Head kept her in versions of it in the subsequent Bring Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures—and Edith a celebrity. 

Dorothy Lamour's sarong was a break-out look.

She would keep an iron grip on the job for 29 more years.

Paramount was toward the rear of the pack of Hollywood Major Studios, much smaller than the relentless factory at MGM which produced as many as 200 pictures a year at its peak, or Warner Bros.  home of gritty urban dramas, women’s movies, and prestige bio-flicks.  In either of those she would have had to compete with rafts of designers to get the top assignments.  Paramount, on the other hand, made 20 or 30 features a year with a relatively thin stable of stars.  Head got her hand on any project she desired, and had time to frequently go on loan to other studios at the bequest of stars or directors she had cultivated.  By the 1940’s “Costumes by Edith Head” seemed a ubiquitous credit.

In that decade she left her impression on many stars and memorable films including Paulette Goddard in Cat and the Canary; Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels and I Married a Witch; Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Double Indemnity; Ginger Rodgers in Lady in the Dark; Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, Loretta Young in The Farmer’s Daughter; and Bette Davis in June Bride.

Head’s star was rising, but she was not about to let studio publicity departments bury her contributions while hyping stars.  She made herself available for interviews to key entertainment reporters and kept gossip columnists in her debt by occasionally feeding them juicy—but never career damaging—studio gossip and usually flattering bits on the stars she cultivated.  She contributed fashion articles to magazines and staged costume shows for newsreels.  She even got Paramount to film a short documentary on her and her department.

Not that she was without critics, particularly among her fellow designers and those who toiled in studio wardrobe departments.  She had been an outspoken opponent of unionization by costume designers.  Always obsequious to authority, especially studio bosses, producers, and name directors, she could be a tyrant and taskmistress over the employees under her, quick to shift blame for failures and to claim credit for their work.  She defended the later by saying that their designs were always only executed at her guidance, direction, and inspiration. 

Others were critical of her style, particularly in modern dress pictures calling her the Shirtwaist Queen for her frequent use of that basic style.  But shirtwaists are flattering on most women’s bodies.  Moreover studio bosses were explicit that designs be a timeless as possible, shunning passing fashion trends, so that pictures could easily be re-released, a big money maker.  The result was a classic clean but elegant Edith Head style.

 

                                       Head's design for Bette Davis's cocktail party gown in All About Eve was among her most celebrated work.

In 1949 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the costume design to its annual Oscar Awards.  Beginning that year with The Emperor Waltz, a Bing Crosby musical co-starring Joan Fontaine, Head would be nominated for the next 19 consecutive years—sometimes  for multiple pictures in a year—and five more times after that with a total of 35 nominations.  Her eight trips home with the trophy were for The Heiress with Julie Harris, 1950; Samson and Delilah with Heddy Lamarr (color), 1951; All About Eve with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (black and white), 1951; A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters, 1952; Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn, 1954; Sabrina, again with Hepburn, 1954; The Facts of Life with Lucile Ball, 1960; and The Sting in 1974.

Of those films, the award for Sabrina was the most controversial.  For the key sequences when Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter blossoms into a Paris model, the star personally picked sketches by designer Hubert de Givenchy.  The outfits were constructed in Head’s wardrobe department and she did design most of the American clothes.  She refused to give de Givenchy screen credit with her for design.   Although the award was obviously mostly for his contributions, Head accepted it anyway.

Head was now a major celebrity in her own right.  There were not yet famous American fashion houses, and outside of New York society hardly anyone knew the name of a haute couture American designer.  Only the great Paris fashion houses were known to the public.  For many ordinary American women, the highly visible Head was high fashion, not just costume design.  Knock-off manufacturers kept Main Street dress shops across the country stocked with dresses and suits inspired by Head movies.

Even I, a pre-teen yahoo in Cheyenne, Wyoming knew who Edith Head was.  In those days we had a full hour for lunch at school and those who could, walked home to eat.  I did.  And everyday Mom had Art Linkletter’s House Party, a kind of stone age talk/variety program, on the TV.  Head made frequent, sometimes weekly, appearances on the show, on the show, often dishing out fashion advice to members of the audience.  At home, Mom paid strict attention.

She had now added Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock to her list of director champions and a galaxy of stars including Hepburn, Taylor, Baxter, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood as her devoted fans. 

Among her other screen triumphs in the ‘50s and ‘60s were Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson; Rear Window and It Takes a Thief with Kelly; White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Crosby, and Danny Kaye; The Man Who Knew too Much with Doris Day; the DeMille epic Ten Commandments; Witness for the Prosecution with Marlene Dietrich; Separate Tables with Rita Hayworth; Vertigo with Kim Novak; and That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren.

Starting in 1963 with Love With a Proper Stranger through The Last Married Couple in America in 1980 Head made seven films with Natalie Wood.

Her last film for Paramount was the gaudy melodrama The Oscar, for which she naturally received another nomination for the statuette in 1967.  Then Head left her longtime home at Paramount and jumped to Universal, a studio on the rise since its days as the home of classic monster movies.  She followed Alfred Hitchcock there, the director with whom she worked most often. 

Head surrounded by sketches reflecting her long career in 1967.

Age and increasingly fragile health slowed her up some, but she could still pull out some claims to glory.  There were five more Oscar nominations including nods for the musical Sweet Charity,  the costume epic The Man Who Would Be King, and the disaster movies Airport and Airport ’77.  After years of gaining glory for designing for beautiful Hollywood clothes horses, her final years were marked by films centering on men, including her final Oscar win, The Sting.

She designed for Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn.  She also did work that evoked earlier years of Hollywood glory and her own screen work—Gable and Lombard with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, W.C. Fields and Me with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine, and Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  The latter, released in 1981, captured the look of ‘40’s film noir.  Released after her death, Martin dedicated the film to her.

Head’s husband since 1940, set designer Wiard Ihnen died in 1979 of prostate cancer.  The couple had no children.  Although Head continued to work until the end, her health was bad.  She suffered from myelofibrosis, an incurable bone marrow disease.  She died on October 24, 1981 four days shy of her 84th birthday.  She was buried unostentatiously under a simple bronze plaque in a Catholic section of Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens removed from the flashy graves and mausoleums of the stars she had decorated. 

Kay Francis Went from Warner Bros. Queen to Rejection

 

                        Kay Francis, a long, tall, elegant drink of water in an early Warner Bros./First National outing.

She was regally tall—at 5 foot 9 inches the lankiest female star Hollywood’s Golden Age—with an impeccable sense of style.  The critics called her a clothes horse.  With large, expressive hazel eyes and dramatic dark hair she was never an ingénue, playing sophisticated society women, sharp businesswomen, and scheming villainesses while barely out her teens.  Her somewhat husky voice lacked the almost British mid-Atlantic accent used by many actresses in similar roles.  But a slight speech defect—a lisp which made her letters r and l sound like w—seemed to audiences to be upper class. 

The voice, the height, the sense of style made her a definitively modern American leading lady seldom assigned to play Brits or to costume dramas—and one who had astonishingly few love scenes with her leading men, some of whom she towered over.  Yet for a good stretch of the 1930’s Kay Francis was one of the most popular female stars in Hollywood—and for a stretch the highest paid.  She was the Queen of Warner Bros. until Jack Warner soured on her and Bette Davis knocked the crown from her head.

Katharine Edwina Gibbs was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1905.  Her father was 6’ 5” tall wealthy businessman who abandoned the family before she was four years old.  Her Nova Scotia-born mother, Katharine Clinton was an actress who returned to the stage to support her daughter.  The girl usually accompanied her mother, but when her mother could afford it she was sent to Catholic Schools and even briefly to an Upstate New York finishing school.

When she was 15 she enrolled in the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City, the flagship of a then famous chain of business schools for young ladies.  Later she would not discourage a biographical confusion that the founder of the schools was her mother.

When she graduated she skipped the steno pool or even service as a private secretary.  Instead, the sophisticated teenager got highly respectable and well-paying positions selling real estate and arranging extravagant parties for wealthy socialites.  In this capacity she met James Dwight Francis, the scion of a rich New England family.  They got married when she was just 17.

The marriage was short lived.  In something that might have come straight out of the script for one of her later movies, Katherine sailed to Paris to obtain a divorce with a minimum of scandal.  While there she met former Harvard athlete and Boston Brahmin lawyer William Gaston who swept her off her feet.

When the pair returned to the United States, however, Gaston returned to his Boston law practice and she, liberated from having to work for a living, decided to follow her mother on the stage.  She had some connections and in 1925 premiered on Broadway billed Katherine Francis as the as the Queen of Players in a modern adaptation of Hamlet.  She later admitted to advancing her early career by “lying a lot, to the right people.”  Some suspect that this turn of a phrase was a pun on “laying a lot.”  One of those who she impressed by word or deed was producer Stuart Walker who hired her for his touring repertoire Portmanteau Theatre Company.  Making the rounds of Midwest cities in roles ranging from walk-ons to features, she quickly learned her craft.

Francis returned to Broadway and had success in 1927 as a second lead in the drama Crime starring an even younger Sylvia Sydney.  Sydney claimed Francis stole the show from her. 

Understandably her long-distance marriage to Gaston ended in divorce about this time.  But Francis never seemed to be short of wealthy suitors.  Next in line was playboy Alan Ryan, Jr.  Before their brief marriage she promised his family that she would give up the stage.  That proved to be a promise she could not keep.  Within months she was back on the boards playing an aviatrix in Rachel Crothers’ play, Venus.  

Kay Francis played straight woman to Harpo Marx in a scene from The Cocoanuts the second film she made at Paramount's Astoria studios and the first to be released.  She was on the fast track to stardom.

In 1928 she found her greatest success to date as the female lead in Ring Lardner’s baseball comedy Elmer the Great opposite Walter Huston produced by George M. Cohan.  Cohan helped her obtain a screen test at Paramount Pictures studio in Astoria, Queens.  She was cast in Gentleman of the Press once again opposite Huston, a star turn in her first film. That may be the first movie she shot, but the first to be seen by the public was the inaugural Marx Brothers film effort The Cocoanuts.  She had a relatively small part as a villainess plotting to steal a broken-down resort hotel for a real estate scheme.  She was billed as Katherine Francis below all the Marx brothers, Dumont, and even the insipid juvenile romantic leads who threatened to destroy the entertainment value of the film every time they ate celluloid. 

None-the-less, Paramount was impressed enough by these two outings, both released in 1929, to offer Francis a lucrative contract and invite her to work at the main studio in California.  Not yet 25 years old she was a movie star.

Shortly before leaving New York, Francis married for the fourth time to writer/director John Meehan.   Once again a long-distance relationship failed, especially after Francis took up with actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna who she married in 1931.  That marriage failed two years later.  Francis laid off matrimony for a while, having affairs with various men, including some co-stars, and occasionally with women.

Setting and rising stars--Clara Bow and Kay Francis in Dangerous Curves, 1931.

The studio certainly kept her busy, churning out more than 21 films featuring or starring her before the end of 1931.  In her first California-made film, Dangerous Curves, a circus drama in which Francis, billed as Kay for the first time, she played the vamp who tries to steal the pretty-boy acrobat from the virtuous but ordinary girl who truly loves him.  Interestingly the plain Jane was Clara Bow the sexiest of silent stars in one of the talkies that killed her career.  But it cemented Francis as the evil other woman, a part she would play with variations repeatedly.

Francis was often the second lead alternating between the temptress and the wronged woman.  In 1930 she teamed up for the first time with William Powell, her most regular Paramount co-star for Behind the Make Up in which Powell played, of all things, an Italian clown, brought down by a wicked temptress.  Guess who?

Later that year Francis stepped up to a full-fledged starring role as a romantic lead in an important picture—Raffles with Ronald Coleman as the Amateur Cracksman.  It was one of the relatively few films requiring her to pretend to be English.  It also left her with little to do but look adoringly at Coleman and be alarmed.

        

                                      Beef cake and babe--out of the evening gown and onto the boat with Joel McCrea in Girls About Town.

Some of her other noteworthy films from this period include the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet as the cheating wife of a tabloid editor, the pre-code shocker 24 Hours, Girls About Town which was a comedy opposite Joel McCrea in which she played a gold digger who falls for a poor guy, and The False Madonna as the grifter redeemed by the love of a child.

Despite her success there, Paramount was a studio in trouble.  It had a glut of actresses and a had a run of bad luck—and bad pictures.  The studio had financial woes.  In what would be recognized by any sports fan as a salary dump, at the end of 1932 it released Francis, Powell, and Ruth Chatterton to Warner Bros. where all got big raises and promises of better roles. 

In the short run it was a hell of a career move for Francis.  Warners was then the second biggest and most successful studio in Hollywood behind behemoth MGM.  It was feasting on a string of successful musicals and the tough, gritty urban dramas and crime stories for which it became famous.  It was well stocked with wise cracking dames fit for those pictures but needed a more elegant leading lady for films set among the posh for the diversion of Depression weary audiences.  Kay Francis was the key to winning that audience and the devotees of women’s movies—sudsy melodramas of marriage and betrayal in penthouse apartments, Park Avenue mansions, and country estates with lots of changes of elegant wardrobe.

In addition to a salary, Warners boosted Francis’s career by giving her more sympathetic roles, top billing with its biggest male stars, including Powell, better scripts, and lavish production values.  It worked spectacularly.  By 1935 Francis was the best paid actress in Hollywood taking down $115,000 a year or about $4,000 a week.  By contrast Bette Davis, Warner’s fast rising star, was making only $18,000 annually.  And don’t think Davis didn’t notice.  

                             Francis one of the most popular cover girls on American fan magazines and on publications around the world.

The same year she was the top grossing female star and the sixth biggest money maker among all stars.  She appeared on 38 national magazine covers, more than any other adult Hollywood actress and second only the astonishing 138 covers featuring the adorable Shirley Temple in the seven-year span from 1930 to ’37.  Kay Francis was as hot a commodity as there was.

Warners shifted her to playing long suffering, betrayed wives and women in peril by circumstances beyond her control.  Gone, for the most part were the temptresses, villains, and husband stealers she had specialized in at Paramount.

Even when she played the other woman, the wife turned out to bitch as in the weeper, Street of Women, one of her early Warners outings.  On top of that she played a brilliant fashion designer, all the better to show her off in gowns, business suits, and plenty of fur.

Warner was happy enough with their new star to loan her back to Paramount—or it may have been part of a back-room deal—to make the Ernst Lubitsch comedy Trouble in Paradise.  This time she was the fabulous owner of a Paris perfumery targeted by suave jewel thief Herbert Marshal—despite the fact that Marshal, one of the stiffest actors ever to don a tuxedo, failed utterly at being suave—who wormed his way into her employ and heart.  It turned out to be a good move for Warners because the film was such a hit that it raised interest in Francis’s films upcoming films for that studio.

Her biggest successes came in unabashed weepers like I Found Stella Parish the convoluted tale of a woman framed for murder by her jealous ex-husband who flees to Europe with their child when she is released from prison to start life as an actress under a new name only to be discovered and disgraced.  She and the child run back to the States hoping to disappear in New York but are discovered by a reporter who, naturally falls in love with her.  Reporter files story, regrets it.  Long suffering actress sends her daughter away from the scandal and returns to the stage to milk the publicity for money to support her.  End the end she makes a triumphant return to the London stage with the help of the gob smacked reporter and is reunited with the daughter.  No woman could jam enough hankies in her pocketbook for this kind of fare.

Francis played a doctor in at least three films, each time betrayed by the feckless love of a partner and usually threatened with false imprisonment or other doom.

Only occasionally at Warner was Francis allowed to let her considerable comedic charms loose as in First Lady as a Washington socialite hostess, mover and shaker who tries to promote her Secretary of State husband into the White House.  Instead, she almost accidently snares the nomination for a pompous dolt of a Supreme Court Justice and has to let fly another wild maneuver to save the day. 

But films like that were all too rare.   And when the plots of her weepers grew evermore convoluted and ridiculous, Francis rebelled.  She watched the spunky Bette Davis challenge Jack Warner for better parts and get them despite high drama and suspensions.  When she tried the same thing, the dictatorial Warner was not amused.

The failure of The White Angel, one of Warner Bros. prestige biopic projects, sealed Francis' fate at the studio.

He seemed to throw her a bone, one of Warners’ prestigious biopics produced as Oscar bait.  Francis was cast as Florence “Flo” Nightingale in 1936’s White Angel.  The expensive costume drama was a box office bust.  That turned Warner firmly against his leading lady.  He began to extract revenge, even if it was nearly as costly to the studio as it was to Francis’s career.

It began subtly.  Francis’s lisp had never been a problem, or much mentioned in the press.  Warner studio flacks began feeding gossip columnists and fan magazines supposed quotes from fellow cast and crew members mocking her impediment.  One joke went that behind her back they called her the “Wavishing Kay Fwancis.”  Then the script writers on her movies were instructed to load her dialog with as many words as possible with r’s and l’s, preferably strung together for greater affect. 

Francis’s employment documents were doctored and left where they could be “accidently discovered” by prying reporters to indicate that she was born as early as 1892, not as always previously reported, in 1905.  Since Francis had always played older than her years, this seemed plausible, especially when no Oklahoma City birth certificate could be found.  Eventually census records were found that proved she was 5 years old in 1910, but many in the public now believed she was more than 10 years older than the 32 years of age she really was in 1937.

Instead of improving, her scripts kept getting ever more ludicrous.  Finally, Francis announced that she would sue the studio to force them to give her better parts.  That enraged Jack Warner who vowed to destroy her career.  The studio sent out a press release announcing that Francis was being demoted to the B unit which churned out low budget programmers for the bottom half of double bills.  It was not unusual for a studio to demote aging or fading stars in this way, or even to temporarily punish top stars like Bette Davis.  But it was unheard of to make a public announcement of the humiliation.

Under this arrangement Francis’s scripts got worse, budgets shrank, and top-flight directors were replaced by factory hacks.  Naturally the pictures did not do as well as before.  In the midst of all this in 1938 the Independent Theatre Owners Association paid for an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter listing Francis along with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, and Dolores del Río as Box Office Poison.  It was a blow and set back to all the careers, but most of the stars, with studio support, were able to come roaring back on the strength of their next success.  But Francis was toiling at a studio that was actively trying to destroy her career.

She bitterly noted in her private journal that she would show up and “scrub floors” rather than give up and quit, as Warners hoped she would, to keep her $4,000 a week salary.  She also despairingly suggested that when her film career was finally over all of her films and their negatives would be burned so that the world would forget she ever existed.  

Francis with Jack Benny and Warner Bros. rival Bette Davis in 1938, the year the studio dumped her and anointed Davis the new Queen.  Despite their rivalry the two became friendly during World War II when both devoted themselves of moral building war efforts.

Warners had to fulfill its contract.  The studio put her in two more movies including the air race drama Women in the Wind and King of the Underworld with Francis as a doctor again forced to bring to justice gang boss Humphrey Bogart who murdered her husband and pinned the crime on her.  It was one of the last of Bogies B movie gangster flicks before his breakthrough to A list stardom the next year with High Sierra and then The Maltese Falcon.  To add insult to injury, Francis’s name was left off the lobby posters and ads despite dominating screen time and being the obvious protagonist.  Everyone involved knew these films were crap. Then the studio unceremoniously dumped her when her contract expired at the end of 1938.  Both films were released the following year and sank unnoticed.

During all the turmoil, Francis married for the fifth and final time to a guy named Eric Barnkow about whom almost nothing is known and who quickly vanished from her life.  It is unknown even if annulment or divorce papers were ever drawn up to officially end the marriage. 

Francis discovered that no other studio would pick her up.  She was forced into the role of an independent actor, available for work on a picture-by-picture basis for any studio that would hire her, at far less than she did at Warners.  Old friends rallied to her support.

With Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in RKO's In Name Only--billed third but a rebound from Warner Bros. purgatory.

Former co-star Carol Landis insisted on casting Francis as the vicious, vindictive wife of Cary Grant in RKO’s In Name Only.  She was billed third and on the surface it seemed like a throwback to the villain roles she played in the early Paramount pictures, but the script was subtle, the direction by John Cromwell intelligent and all the principles working at the top of their considerable skills.  The film was well received then and now is something of a cult classic beloved by fans of all three of the stars.

She returned to star billing in an independent production of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men in which she played the grown-up Jo March/Mrs. Bhaer, the operator of a progressive school for boys.  The film was released by RKO.

Francis was increasingly being cast as a mother figure, like the mom of Deanna Durbin in the lightweight Universal musical It’s a Date.  She even did a B western at Universal, When the Daltons Rode opposite Randolph Scott.   Most of her work was in supporting roles, when she could get them. 

In 1941 she got the small role of the real aunt in the 20th Century Fox production of Oscar Wilde’s Charley’s Aunt starring Jack Benny.  Most impressively, Francis went toe-to-toe with Rosalind Russell over Don Ameche as a clueless college professor and would-be author in the MGM screwball comedy The Feminine Touch.

The World War II hit Four Jills in a Jeep with Carole Landis, Martha Ray, Mitzi Mayfair, and Kay Francis was based on a real tour of English Air bases and the North African front--one of the first such over-seas moral building tours.

When America entered World War II Francis virtually put her career aside to dedicate herself to war work.  She organized one of the first tours of American performers to entertain Army Air Force crews in England and troops in North Africa.  This was before the USO was even organized and Francis had to make virtually all of the arrangements for her small troupe herself.  Her pal Carol Landis was along and in 1942 published a bestselling account of the trip, Four Jills in a Jeep.  20th Century Fox snatched up the film rights and Francis and Landis were playing themselves with Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair as the other Jills.  The action and romance were filled out with appearances of Fox stars like Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Carmen Miranda plus Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra.  The film was an unexpected hit in 1944.  Francis hoped that it would show her in a new light and lead to better post-war roles.

But peace came and there were no offers.  After being turned down everywhere, Francis swallowed her pride and inked a deal to produce and star in her own pictures for Monogram Pictures, one of the poorest of the Poverty Row studios.  She made three solid but shot-on-a-shoestring melodramas under the deal—Divorce, Allotment Wives, and Wife Wanted.  All three films are highly regarded by those few who have seen them.  Despite their quality Monogram did not have the distribution muscle to get them into wide release.  The company typically fed third and fourth rate movie houses and drive-ins which could not afford major studio releases.  Their audiences preferred westerns, detective yarns, and other low budget action movies.  There just wasn’t much of an audience for ambitious women’s movies featuring a fading actress, like the one she played in the final film, Wife Wanted.

Allotment Wives, a tough film noir, was one of three films Francis produced and starred in for Poverty Row Monogram Pictures.

That was the end of Kay Francis’s movie career.  She returned to the stage and had some success with regional touring companies and summer stock. In 1948 she was badly injured and scarred in a freak radiator accident.  After that she did some radio and made two television appearances in 1950 and ’51, both long lost.

She became something of a recluse, spending most of her time in virtual seclusion in her New York apartment and her estate near Falmouth on Cape Cod.  She had no children or living relatives.

In 1966 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died despite undergoing a mastectomy on August 28, 1966 in New York.  As requested her remains were cremated and scattered at an undisclosed location.  In the end she was nearly as obscure and forgotten as she once claimed that she wanted to be.

She left her estate, valued at well over a million dollars, to her favorite charity, Guide Dogs for the Blind.