Authors: Marc Eliot
When Ziegfeld offered Archie the romantic lead in the prestigious touring company of one of his biggest hits, Ziegfeld thought he would have no problem signing him. Although Archie's contract with the Hammersteins still had a few months left on it, he was sure his appearance in two consecutive flops would, if anything, give them the excuse they needed to get out of their
deal with him before it officially ended. What neither Ziegfeld nor Archie counted on was the emergence into the mix of the Shubert Organization, headed by J.J. and his brother Lee. Having heard of Ziegfeld's interest in Archie, they quietly bought out the remainder of his contract from the cash- hungry Hammersteins, who were willing to sell it to the Shuberts to prevent the hated Ziegfeld from getting him.
All this back-door dealing infuriated Archie, who resented being the pawn in a power game in which he held no financial advantage and that, to his way of thinking, cost him his chance to break into the big time as the star of the already hugely successful
Rosalie.
The Shuberts immediately cast Archie opposite Jeanette MacDonald in their new musical farce,
Boom Boom,
scheduled to open at their wondrous new Broadway Casino Theater on January 28, 1929. Archie's role was a small but important one that included a little singing and a lot of what he did best—looking good.
Boom Boom
opened to so-so reviews, with most of the praise going to Jeanette MacDonald, whose costumes happened to have been designed by Orry-Kelly. During the run of the show, Archie and Orry-Kelly briefly rekin- dled their romantic friendship, but if Archie had any hope of making a per- manent go of it, it ended when Orry-Kelly took a permanent job in St. Louis to design costumes for that city's Municipal Opera Company.
Boom Boom
closed after seventy-two performances, another instantly for- gettable star vehicle. It did, however, bring both MacDonald and Archie overtures from the Paramount Publix film studios. Oscar Serlin, Paramount's leading New York–based talent scout, had caught a performance of
Boom Boom
and thought MacDonald might do well in films opposite Paramount's newly signed French cabaret star, Maurice Chevalier. He also liked Archie's stage presence and decided to invite them both to take a screen test in the studio's Astoria headquarters. Paramount was among the last of the majors to keep a working base on the East Coast, at the insistence of Adolph Zukor, who believed that Broadway was a fertile pool for new talent and an impor- tant cultural base from which to maintain his film studio's level of sophisti- cation.
Archie and Jeanette each spent an afternoon before the cameras in Queens, but neither was offered a Hollywood contract, although MacDonald
did receive the more favorable grading. The unanimous verdict on Archie was that his seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck was too thick, his long legs too bowed, and his handsome face too pudgy.
*
Nowhere in Archie's evaluation is there any mention of his acting ability.
THE STOCK MARKET CRASH
of '29 hit the New York theater industry par- ticularly hard, sending almost every working actor to the unemployment lines. Suddenly Archie's contract with the Shuberts, which he had at first so resented, became his lifeline. For the next three years he dutifully appeared in a number of their cookie-cutter shows, grateful for the steady employment. He spent as little as possible and saved whatever and wherever he could. Apparently, nowhere during this period is there evidence of his involvement in any personal relationship with either a man or a woman. He was young, single, well-to-do, extremely popular, and, apparently, utterly alone. Years later, reflecting on these times, Grant noted, “Without the ability to fully love or be fully loved, so many of us [used] the acquisition of money [to] provide self-esteem and happiness.” In other words, money had become the only tan- gible measurement Archie had to assess his self-worth; and performing was the way to attain both. Whenever he received less than a rave notice or a show closed early, his fears of a return to poverty quickly resurfaced, along with an acknowledged dip in his self-esteem.
One time during a particularly difficult period he happened to run into Fred Allen, who had befriended him when they'd appeared together in
Polly.
Archie poured his heart out to Allen, who by way of response invited Archie to accompany him to the observation tower atop the Woolworth building in Lower Manhattan. It was a rainy day, and the city was blanketed with a thick gray fog. Allen told Archie to look out as far as he could see, which was not very far. Nevertheless, Allen said, there surely was a whole wide world out there. Just because they couldn't see it at the moment didn't mean it didn't exist. Faith, he told Archie, was the belief in the existence of the world and of one's place in that world. The individual may be small and relatively
unimportant by comparison, but nevertheless he existed, and his importance was not always measurable by immediate circumstances or surroundings. Archie, who was not much of a spiritual or intellectual contemplator, put a great deal of value on Allen's words and thanked him profusely for taking the time to try to explain his way of looking at life. Allen's philosophy was the most sensible thing he had ever heard; he was living in a fog, and fogs sooner or later lifted.
If that wasn't exactly what Allen had meant, for Archie it was close enough. He would remember Allen's words for years, and whenever he got depressed he would think of himself as being engulfed by a metaphorical fog; he would work his way out of it by having the faith that it would pass. Just because he wasn't happy at that moment didn't mean he never would be. That afternoon with Fred Allen became an important first step in Archie's journey of self-discovery, one that would take a lifetime to complete.
ARCHIE'S NEXT SHUBERT
show was
A Wonderful Night,
a reworking of Johann Strauss's
Die Fledermaus.
The show received mixed reviews and man- aged only 125 performances before it closed in February 1930. This latest failure forced the Shuberts to pare down their stable of contract players. They wanted to keep Archie, but only if he would agree to work that summer in their open-air Municipal Opera in, of all places, St. Louis. Archie was delighted. This was the excuse he needed to rejoin his former lover, Orry- Kelly. He was so happy he bought himself a brand-new bright yellow Packard to make the drive to the Midwest. Once there he and Orry-Kelly once again became physically involved, and while the Shuberts had arranged for Archie to have his own hotel room, he spent most evenings that summer with Orry- Kelly in his apartment.
When the season ended, Archie convinced Orry-Kelly to come back to New York City with him, where they moved into a new apartment and bought a nearby speakeasy. On nights when neither of them was working, they tended bar together.
That fall, Billy Grady, Archie's agent, got the Shuberts to agree to loan him to producer William Friedlander, who was looking for a male lead to star opposite Fay Wray in
Nikki,
a new play headed for Broadway written by
Wray's husband, Hollywood screenwriter John Monk Saunders. Friedlander had commissioned Saunders to write the show after he won an Academy Award for his work on the 1928 blockbuster film
Wings.
Saunders agreed on the condition that Friedlander cast Wray in the lead. He then took one of his own magazine serials,
The Last Flight,
and adapted it for the stage.
Nikki,
as it was retitled, told of the romantic adventures of three American soldiers in Paris during World War I. To custom-fit the vehicle for Wray, Saunders changed one of the three leading male characters to a woman and turned it into a love triangle. Friedlander then enlisted the services of Phil Charig, an up-and-coming Broadway composer (another client of Grady's), to turn it into a musical, complete with lavish production numbers and a chorus line of leggy dancing girls.
Archie was cast as Cary Lockwood, one of the two soldiers competing for the love of Nikki. The role paid him $375 a week, a seventy-five-dollar cut from his Shubert-guaranteed salary, the difference held back by the Shuberts as their fee for allowing the loan-out. If the show ran longer than five weeks, Archie's salary was to increase to $500 a week, with the Shuberts' cut to be made up by Friedlander.
Unfortunately,
Nikki
did not get that far, closing in November 1931 after only thirty-nine performances. At the final-night party, held at the Waldorf, Archie confided in Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of legendary Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer and a friend of Fay Wray and her husband, that he “loved” Wray and was seriously thinking of following her to Hollywood just to be near her. It was an odd comment to a friendly but total stranger that foreshadowed the chaste infatuations and bizarre confessionals the actor was to form with and make to women for the rest of his stage and film career.
As brief a run as it had,
Nikki
did provide the key review that changed the course of Archie Leach's life. In his influential
New York Daily News
show business column, Ed Sullivan singled out the actor's performance, predicting a big future in movies for the “young lad from England.” The mention was enough to get him a recall from one of Paramount's Astoria studio's casting directors for a brief appearance as a sailor in
Singapore Sue,
a ten-minute short the studio was making to introduce Anna Chang, their newest acquisition. Meanwhile, Orry-Kelly had received an invitation from Jack Warner to come to Hollywood and work as a contract costume designer for the studio.
It was the big break he had been waiting for. When he told Archie about it, Archie promised that as soon as he finished
Singapore Sue,
he would join him in L.A.
The timing couldn't have been better.
Nikki
completed Archie's con- tractual obligation to the Shuberts, whose bad run of flops had forced them into receivership and because of it were in no position to enforce their option to re-sign him or anybody else. Upon completing his one-day shoot on
Singapore Sue,
and just short of his twenty-eighth birthday, Archie packed up his belongings, arranged for the sale of the bar, and said good-bye to his few friends. One of them was composer Phil Charig, who also wanted to head west and volunteered to make the drive with him. Another was early mentor Jean Dalrymple, with whom he took one last lunch at the Algonquin. When she could not get him to change his mind and stay in New York to pursue what she believed was a promising stage career, she cautioned him not to get caught up in the false glamour of Hollywood and asked him to promise to sooner or later return to the “pure” world of the theater.
That made him laugh.
The next day Archie and Phil slipped into the front seats of the yellow Packard. Archie kicked over the engine, pressed down on the accelerator, and pointed the front wheels in the direction of his future.
ARCHIE AND PHIL ARRIVED
in Hollywood the first week of January 1932 and took up nominal residence together in a small courtyard apartment on Sweetzer, just north of Melrose Avenue, that Orry-Kelly had helped them secure, one of the so-called DeMille flats Paramount had built in the early 1920s to house its employees. Archie's next order of business was to make an appointment with the casting people at Paramount who, at Adolph Zukor's directive, were eagerly awaiting his arrival.
With good reason. The studio was in need of a new leading man to reju- venate its continuing box-office slump that had begun even before the Depression, with the unexpected departure followed by the sudden early death in 1926 of its biggest male silent movie star, Rudolph Valentino. Valentino's silent “Sheik” movies made him a sensation, and his loss left a gaping hole in Paramount's already slim roster of bankable leading men.
Zukor, nicknamed “Creepy” and “Creepy Jesus” by his employees for his self-described visionary abilities in picking future stars, had, besides discov- ering Valentino, taken all the credit for German sensation Marlene Dietrich—Paramount's answer to MGM's Greta Garbo—who had become an overnight star following her appearance in Josef von Sternberg's
The Blue Angel
(and he gave the director, who had actually discovered Dietrich, none). His only other big box-office male lead, Gary Cooper, had skyrocketed in pop- ularity following his appearance opposite Dietrich in Sternberg's follow-up to
The Blue Angel, Morocco
(1930), but was considered by Zukor to be too quirky and rebellious for the long run. Cooper, born of British immigrant parents, had been discovered by Clara Bow, who helped launch the tall, lanky, hand- some actor to the top ranks of Hollywood's leading men.
Morocco
had indeed catapulted him into the superstar stratosphere, but the experience of working with Sternberg, who was hopelessly in love with Dietrich and all but ignored him during shooting, left him angry and frustrated. He retaliated first by having an affair with his costar and then taking a year-long vacation in Africa, from where he sent word to the studio that he was considering permanently retiring from the movie business. Zukor needed to find another actor to chal- lenge Cooper's position as the studio top male, and he thought handsome Broadway actor Archibald Leach just might be the one to do it.
Although Paramount was making what many regarded at the time the best Hollywood movies, MGM was generally considered more glamorous because of its lustrous roster of players who so perfectly idealized and reflected the popular cultural icons of the time: the Teddy Roosevelt tough- ness of Clark Gable; the suaveness and Lost Generation sensitivity of John Gilbert; the Roaring Twenties sheen of Norma Shearer, the “First Lady of the Screen” (who also happened to be married to studio head Irving Thalberg); and the exotic old-world majesty and mystery of Greta Garbo, the woman the studio cannily referred to as “the European.” And, while MGM and Warner Bros. had survived the industry's shift from silent films to talkies with only minimal disruption, sound had plunged Paramount into financial disarray and eventual bankruptcy, primarily due to the reluctance of its founders Zukor and Jesse Lasky, general manager Benjamin Percival (B. P.) Schulberg, and head of production Walter Wanger to switch quickly enough to talkies. Worse, for the studio, the onset of sound movies happened at
approximately the same time as the 1929 stock market crash. Bank money quickly dried up, which made it more difficult for the lagging studio to bol- ster its inventory of expensive actors with those who not only looked right but sounded good as well.