Authors: Donald Spoto
BY DECEMBER 1922, BILLIE
and her mother were back in Kansas City. But she refused to return to work in a laundry; instead, for most of the next year, she held down jobs wrapping packages and selling women’s clothing at local emporia. “'At that time, I weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds of baby fat. I was self-conscious, unsure, and my ‘style’ was strictly dreadful. I hated my round face, I hated my freckles, my big mouth and eyes. I tried to stretch [myself] as tall as possible, tossed my head in the air, poked my chin out, and dared people to notice me.” The challenge worked, and Billie became a popular girl in her neighborhood.
The freewheeling life of the Roaring Twenties characterized young people everywhere, and Kansas was no exception. Young men pursued their dateswith sweet talk and stolen caresses—and, in that Prohibition Era, with homemade moonshine and “iced tea,” which sounded innocent but packed a wallop. By law, alcohol could not be manufactured, sold or purchased in the United States from 1920 through 1933, but legislators did not take into account American ingenuity: spirits could be obtained almost anywhere without much difficulty, and the consumption of alcohol actually increased during Prohibition. Traveling musicians had bountiful supplies of liquor (and drugs like cocaine) to distract them and to attract pretty girls. And with the proliferation of roadsters and jalopies after the Great War, nothing more than the backseat of a car was required for a romantic evening.
Of Billie’s habits and social life at that time, almost no details have survived, and she provided no clues. A few imaginative writers have asserted that, for money, she frequently danced nude at private clubs and even appeared in short loops of pornographic “flickers.” But there are neither witnesses nor material evidence to support these claims; still, the absence of facts has not deterred people from concocting tales. It is certain, however, that she was a champion Charleston dancer.
One summer evening, Ray Sterling took her to a dance competition at the Ivanhoe Masonic Temple. After her number, Billie was introduced to the booking agent for a singer named Katherine Emerine, who made the rounds of country theaters and needed a dozen local chorus girls as her “backup,” to high-step and croon in unison while Emerine sang and told theater stories. She was about to open in Springfield, Missouri, but her act needed three or four more chorines.
Billie was on a bus the next morning and made a sufficient impression during the two-week engagement that she was invited to contact Kate Emerine again if ever she traveled to Chicago, the singer’s home base. Having worked in the show as Lucille Le Sueur, not Billie Cassin, she returned to Kansas City with hopes renewed and forty dollars in her pocketbook, her wages for performing.
Convinced that her aspirations were neither naive nor ill founded, Lucille could not tolerate much longer the tasks of wrapping packages and answering department store telephones for twelve dollars a week. She headed north in search of Kate Emerine before the end of 1923, apparently to her mother’s indifference.
Whereas Kansas City in the 1920s had occasional police roundups of petty crooks, the city’s newspapers rarely featured headlines announcing riots or murders. The situation was far different in Chicago, where dozens were killed and many hundreds injured in the race riots of 1919, and things worsened in the years following. As labor and economic problems increased after the war, so did the volume of major crime. No one was quite sure whether there were more shotguns than barrels of bootleg whiskey coming into Chicago every day. Al Capone had little difficulty establishing a foothold in the Windy City, where the municipal government seemed to learn much from his strong-arm tactics. Con artists and swindlers like “Yellow Kid” Weil found Chicago a virtual university where complicated systems of theft and exploitation could be learned and perfected. On many streets downtown, there were houses bearing signs that warned “Venereal Disease—Keep Out!” You had to be (in the language of the day) “a tough dame” to survive on your own in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties.
To her dismay, Lucille could not track down the elusive Miss Emerine. Instead, she was referred to a booking agent named Ernie Young, who, during the winter of 1924, placed her as an “entertainment dancer” in some of Chicago’s more disreputable strip clubs, for a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. This kind of employment paid for her rent in a tumbledown boardinghouse and kept food on the table, but it might soon have led to disaster if Young had not, after a few days, transferred her to the Oriole Terrace, a Detroit nightclub at East Grand Boulevard and Woodward Street.
This was no sleazy venue. Detroit was, in fact, the home of some of the most important jazz orchestras and influential nightclub acts in American musical history. Beginning in 1922, for example, the Danny Russo–Ted Fio Rito Orchestra (led by the latter, who considered Fio Rito more exotic than Fiorito) established its legendary status through a long engagement at the Oriole Terrace.
Lucille was at once made a frontliner in the dancing chorus of every show at this nightclub, and it was no surprise to the management (or to her) when the Broadway impresario J. J. Shubert regularly took his seat in the audience. He and his brothers owned eighty-six theaters across the United States and took in over $1 million in ticket sales every week. J.J. regularly scouted the country for talent, and Detroit’s Oriole Terrace was always a stop on his travels. The new Shubert musical revue,
Innocent Eyes,
was about to open on Broadway, and a lineup of energetic chorines was needed. Not actresses. Not singers. Just pretty background glamour. Off to New York went Lucille Le Sueur.
The previous Christmas, she had been home in Kansas City, with no idea if she really had a future as a dancer. Now, just eight weeks later, she was in New York, ready to begin rehearsals for a Broadway show starring Mis-tinguett, one of the best-known entertainers in the world.
LUCILLE CAME TO NEW YORK
at a time when the theatre was enjoying an astonishing postwar explosion. That year, there were 196 new productions in New York—88 dramas, 67 comedies, 26 musicals and 15 revues. Among the notable productions were new works by George Kelly
(The Show-Off
), Eugene O’Neill
(Desire Under the Elms),
George Gershwin
(Lady, Be Good
), Sigmund Romberg
(The Student Prince),
Rudolf Friml
(Rose-Marie)
and George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly
(Beggar on Horseback).
Katharine Cornell, as Shaw’s
Candida,
appealed to sophisticated theatregoers, as did Helen Hayes (in a revival of Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer)
and Ethel Barrymore (in Pinero’s
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray).
In addition, the Marx Brothers drew packed audiences, and there were extravagant new versions of Florenz Ziegfeld’s
Follies,
George White’s
Scandals
and Earl Carroll’s
Vanities
—some of them featuring nude models, who were legal so long as they remained motionless onstage. Those who fancied the New York theatre were kept very busy queuing for tickets.
On May 20, 1924,
Innocent Eyes
opened at the Winter Garden Theater, with music by Sigmund Romberg and Jean Schwartz, and a cast of ninety-four performing dozens of numbers. The show ran for eighteen weeks and 126 performances before closing on August 30. Because she was not a headliner but merely among the chorus, Lucille was not mentioned in any news or reviews of the show.
Then and later, neither she nor anyone else provided details of her offstage life in Manhattan. As she said, “Dancing was the main thing. And I dated. I’d learned, by then, that you couldn’t take those dates seriously, because the men were just out of college or married or engaged, and having a fling with a chorus girl was the ‘in’ thing. But those ‘Johnnies’ treated us to some damned good times.”
INSTEAD OF TRAVELING TO
other Shubert theaters with the national touring company of
Innocent Eyes,
she accepted an offer to remain in New York, where, four days after the final performance, she appeared in the next Shubert and Romberg musical revue—
The Passing Show of 1924,
also presented at the Winter Garden; her salary was thirty-five dollars a week ($440 in 2010 valuation). “I was never good enough to be in the first line of the chorus on Broadway,” she admitted. “I was in the second line.” The critics found the production mildly diverting but not much more, and the show passed into history on November 22, without benefiting the career of anybody in the company—except one.
Harry Rapf, who worked with Louis B. Mayer, was a producer at Metro and one of the original organizers of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a clever designation for an institution designed to resist the unionization of every craft working in the industry. In the summer and autumn of 1924, Rapf was in New York, attending shows every night and scouting for young men and women with potential for the movies. Metro had to grind out “product,” to supply all of Marcus Loew’s 110 East Coast theaters with new pictures every week. Hence the studio was committed to churning out a picture a week, and in fact, they did so. By the summer of 1925, they wrote down a net profit of almost $5 million.
At the end of November, Rapf invited a few chorus girls from the nowdefunct
Passing Show
to a Manhattan studio for brief screen tests, and Lucille Le Sueur was among them. She was indifferent to the prospect of movie acting, for her sights were firmly set on a dancing career in New York. With almost somnolent indifference, she stood, walked, glanced, smiled and turned this way and that for a screen test that apparently has not survived.
With no promises made by Metro and no immediate prospect of further work in New York, Lucille headed to Kansas City for the Christmas holidays; there, at least, she could count on the encouragement of her old friend Ray Sterling and some former dates only too eager to squire her to parties and dances.
But at Christmastime, a telegram arrived at her mother’s apartment, which Lucille had given to Rapf as a temporary address:
Studio offers you a contract starting at seventy-five dollars a week. Leave immediately for Culver City, California. Contact MGM office for travel expenses and details.
“When Miss Le Sueur came into my office,” Rapf told a magazine editor while she was still packing her clothes in Kansas, “I knew that she had that rare thing—personality. She is beautiful, but more essential than beauty is that quality known as screen magnetism. Even before we made camera tests of her, I felt that she possessed this great asset. Her tests proved it.”
And so, on Saturday, January 3, 1925, Lucille Le Sueur arrived in Los Angeles, unaware of a detail that was clarified some weeks later. The “contract starting at seventy-five dollars a week"—which she signed before the end of that month—gave Metro the right not to renew her employment after six months if they found her unsuitable; but if the company did choose to renew the deal, her salary would rise to one hundred dollars a week for the second half year. That was a respectable income (equal to over $1,200 weekly in 2010), but there were no assurances of job security and there were many fine-print demands. Very quickly, snowy Kansas melted away in her memory.
1
Depending on which public and family records are consulted, the surname is variously spelled Le Sueur or LeSueur (or even Le Seur). Lucille and her family used the first form, with the space.
2
Later, Metro added dozens more to its long list of contract players, among them Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Grace Kelly, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor.
3
Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina always insisted that Lucille Le Sueur was born in 1904, but that cannot be. Lucille’s brother, Harold Hayes Le Sueur, was born on September 3, 1903—hence March 1904 would have been impossible as the birth date of the next baby. (The oldest Le Sueur offspring, named Daisy, was born and died before 1903)
4
This dance hall was still operating in 2009, as the Jack-o'-Lantern Ballroom, at Westport Road and Main Street, Kansas City.
CHAPTER TWO
The Flapper, Flapping
| 1925|
L
UCILLE FIRST CAME
to Metro’s offices on Monday, January 12, 1925, with two pair of sturdy dancing shoes for the day’s assignment. But that week the studio had a surplus of dancers and plenty of what was called “background glamour.” Producers were looking for new actors, new
faces
for new pictures. “I got panicky—I’d never thought about acting, but I realized, as I watched pictures being made, that I’d have to do more than dance if I ever got in front of a camera.” Nevertheless, there she was, and she signed her contract on Friday, January 16—"as a member of our stock company,” as casting director R. B. McIntyre confirmed in a memo to Mayer, Thalberg, Rapf and the payroll clerks.
To compensate for the gaps in her professional preparation, Lucille spent many hours wandering around the Metro lot, wherever scenes were being rehearsed or filmed. She watched actors and spoke to those who gave her a moment of their time, and with her hundred-watt smile and Southern-accented charm, she put questions to cameramen, directors and every technician she could beguile into conversation. In the process, she established some lifelongfriendships with, for example, the actors William Haines, Eleanor Boardman and Marion Davies, and another newcomer named Myrna Loy.