F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some beautiful prose, but he was far from flawless in his insights. One of
his observations that has been happily proven wrong on more than one
occasion is that “there are no second acts in American lives.”
By 1950, tall, distinguished men with velvety voices, hawk-like profiles, a genial world-weariness, and decades of theatrical and cinematic experience were beginning to seem like an endangered species.

Louis Calhern (1895-1956) might have stopped being a viable actor around the time that they ceased production of those limos with a crystal bud vase next to the passenger door and stopped making movies in which the virtue of ingénues was threatened by roués like John Barrymore. About 7 years younger than Barrymore, he’d shared a self-destructive streak with The Great Profile, though mercifully Louis never had the publicity of the youngest member of those acting siblings. Calhern did his tippling and romantic pursuits on a quieter scale.

Beginning in films
in 1921 in a prophetically named movie called What’s Worth While?, directed by the
pioneering Lois Weber, Calhern
had been an actor since his teens. Born Carl Vogt in New York City to middle class parents, he grew
up in St. Louis. While playing high school football, (a sport that
earned him that distinctive beak), he was spotted by a member of a
touring theater company who asked the strapping 6′ 4″ youngster
to join the troupe. After serving in the American Expeditionary Forces
in France during the First World War, the young actor decided to ditch
the Germanic name in favor of the more aristocratic sounding Louis Calhern. Cutting a wide swath
artistically and socially in booming Rochester, N.Y. in theater
companies guided by such budding talents as George Cukor and Rouben
Mamoulian, Calhern made his first big success among these upstate
audiences (especially the girls). He also showed that he had a generous
and pragmatic streak in his nature. When an insecure George Cukor struggled to find a place
in the regional theater world as a director, Calhern, already regarded as a dazzling success by his
slightly younger contemporary, encouraged George to make his way by
being himself. Rather than call a planned theater company “The
Rochester Theatre Guild” (aping the artistically high-minded NYC
Theatre Guild), Louis suggested gently that “Back to Methuselah…may be too heavy for
Rochesteries in search of summer entertainment.” Calhern went further, encouraging the
tyro director to call any company he created “The Cukor Company–or
the Cukor Comedy Company…Keep on your toes–you can cut it, young
feller.” The 25 year old Cukor would never forget the actor’s
kindness. Making a Broadway splash in 1924 in George M. Cohan‘s The
Song and Dance Man, (the first big show for Mayo Methot as well), he went on to appear in
plays with such players as Ann Harding, Dudley Digges, and Wallace Ford.
Some of the better plays were written by Ibsen, Philip Barry
and Maxwell Anderson during the
heady years of the Broadway theater in the ’20s.

Lured to Hollywood by the Talkies Revolution, he began the sound era
by lusting after Nancy Carroll in
an interesting pre-code, Stolen
Heaven (1931), directed by theatrical legend, George Abbott. In the James Cagney-Joan
Blondell picture Blonde
Crazy, made at Warner Brothers, Calhern gave a delightfully sinuous
performance as Dapper Dan Barker, one of the few characters who ever got
the better of Cagney, at least
for a time. Calhern did begin to
seem typecast as an smooth miscreant in many of these early films,
though his appearance in Diplomaniacs (1933) the Bert Wheeler and Robert
Woolsey comedy about international relations as a form of
organized insanity. While Wheeler & Woolsy may be an acquired taste,
(I think), the straight man style that Calhern brought to the Joseph Mankiewicz movie may have led to his being cast as
the Ambassador from Sylvania in an absurdist masterpiece starring The
Marx Brothers. Duck Soup (1933),
directed by Leo McCarey required
very little of Louis’ classical training, but his role as the
conniving diplomat who thinks he’s in league with Harpo and Chico calls on all his powers of conveying exasperation.
Watching Calhern again recently in this film, I
began to think that he and Raquel
Torres may be the only actors sticking to the script. At times
looking a bit puzzled but game throughout the briskly paced satire on
war, national pride and most other human endeavors, Calhern must have wondered what
he’d gotten himself into in Hollywood.

Despite the
steady work provided by the studios, by the end of the ’30s
Louis Calhern was reduced to
appearing in tripe like Charlie
McCarthy, Detective (1939) sixth-billed under dummies Mortimer
Snerd and the “star” of the show, Charlie.Work was regular,
but the need for money by Louis was chronic for alimony
and to support his hectic lifestyle. Married four times, all unions
ended in divorce. In between trips to the altar, he was, in the words of
one of his lady friends, considered “catnip”. His first wife,
the actress Ilka Chase, married
him in 1926 after a whirlwind courtship. Finding him seriously lacking
as a life partner (his drinking and dallying didn’t help things),
Chase divorced him inside of a
year. Within a few months, Louis was taking the plunge again, marrying
socialite actress Julia Hoyt by
the Fall. When Ilka found a box
of her old calling cards engraved “Mrs. Louis Calhern” she
decided that the expensive cards were too good to throw away. No longer
needing them, she immediately sent them to Calhern’s new wife. Knowing her former husband’s
short marital attention span, Chase wrote to her
successor: “Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.”
After divorcing Miss Hoyt in 1932, Mr.
Calhern‘s serial monogamy began another chapter
when he married actress Natalie
Schafer in 1932. Ms.
Schafer, (seen at left with her husband sometime in the
1930s) is perhaps best remembered as ditsy society lady “Mrs.
Howell” on tv’s Gilligan’s
Island, though she
appeared in dozens of movies as well, including one with
her by then former husband, when she and Calhern were both cast in a comedy. Since the pair were
divorced in 1942, it was ironic that the film they appeared in was
entitled Forever Darling (1956).
Mr. Calhern’s final dip into the marital pool took place in 1942
with Marianne Stewart, an actress who was the daughter
of noted German actor Reinhold
Schünzel. Stewart and Louis divorced in
1955.

Pursuing some reported dalliances with such
diverse ladies as Dorothy Gish
(the fun Gish sister, according to many) and, perhaps most improbably,
Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Calhern lived, off and on, at the fabled Garden
of Allah in Hollywood, not a spot recommended for anyone
seeking to practice the virtues of temperance or fidelity. Yet, unlike
some of the denizens of those apartments, Hayward surprised everyone, including himself. After nearly
ruining his reputation for good in Hollywood and in the theater, he
sobered up, went back to Broadway, and had a third act of his career in
films that deserves a closer look.

In 1949, director Lewis Milestone made a film from John
Steinbeck’s The Red Pony,
casting Myrna Loy as
a quiet ranch wife and mother and Louis
Calhern as her garrulous father, a former wagon train guide who
spends his days reliving the past and finding fault with the present.
He finds
himself a stranger in his own house, restless and dissatisfied, troubled
to find himself no longer young and resentful of those who are.
Repeating the same stories endlessly about the old days, Calhern is both touching and annoying,
using his voice to beguile and needle according to his character’s
sometimes childish whims. His frontiersman is ultimately a touching
figure, and, in a moment of self-awareness in the film, comments that he
and his kind “are old men, standing on the shore of an
ocean, and there is no more west for us.”

There were,
however, new frontiers for Calhern to explore on film, especially in 1950. One of them
may have seemed to be his role recreating his post-war stage hit about
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on screen. The only film in
which Louis is clearly the star, The
Magnificent Yankee (1950) shines when it focuses on the domestic
side of his life. When Ann
Harding as Holmes’ wife Fanny lay dying, there is a beautiful
scene in which Calhern quietly
speaks to her but the public side of Holmes’ life is undeveloped.
I really wanted to
like this movie, but found it disappointing overall. Emphasizing the
warmth of Holmes’ humanity and his friendships with his many law
clerks and fellow Supreme Court Justices, (particularly effective in
outlining the friendship that formed between the Brahmin and the first
Jewish Justice, played by Eduard
Franz as Louis Brandeis), it’s fun to see Calhern do his lovable codger bit, but
where are the history making cases that involved “clear and present
danger” to public safety, his controversial decision supporting
forced sterilization for “feeble-minded” women under the
state’s care, or his conflicts with the executive branch? Though it
may have been in part a matter of affection for Louis Calhern (and studio block voting
at MGM), the actor received his only Oscar nomination for this star
turn. Frankly, I don’t think that Calhern stood much of a chance of winning. He was competing
against Spencer Tracy’s greatest comic role in Father of the Bride, James
Stewart’s excellent playing in Harvey and William Holden’s brilliant cynicism
in Sunset Boulevard. The
Academy, swooning over the cultural élan
of Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac, threw in the
towel when faced with such an embarrassment of riches by such a range of
fine actors, and awarded Ferrer the Oscar.

In a
career that had its fair share of dark villains, one of Calhern‘s best may be in director
Anthony Mann’s little known
Devil’s Doorway (1950). The film, relatively early in
Mann’s career, tackles some very big issues that we still struggle
with today from the environment to racial and sexual equality to the
treatment of veterans. While I think that the film may
have been toned down due to the chilly political atmosphere of the
period, that gives a movie trying to deal with many deeply human
problems more focus on the flawed characters rather than allowing
abstract ideas to overwhelm the story. Calhern is all too human, playing a Mephistopheles-like
lawyer whose contempt for the Shoshone Indian well played by Robert Taylor (wearing some truly unfortunate make-up) is
introduced as a looming, iconic presence shot from below by the
excellent John Alton, a
cinematographer best known for his film noir work. The fascinating
quality about Louis Calhern‘s
character that caught me was his seeming lack of rational motivation for
the destruction he relishes setting in motion in the rural community
where he sets neighbor against neighbor. Calhern also imbues his character with a slimy charm that
makes him truly intriguing, despite some of the timidity of the script.

In an ironic twist, Louis
Calhern, who had done some light singing and dancing in earlier
films, (remember Duck Soup?), would next be handed a plum
role as Buffalo Bill in Irving
Berlin’s delightful musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950), although under tragic
circumstances. Judy Garland,
whose considerable acting and singing talent might have endowed her
Annie Oakley with a lovable vulnerability, was overwhelmed by personal
troubles, which led to her being fired from the expensive MGM
production. She was replaced by the energetic Betty Hutton. Male lead Howard
Keel, cast as the boastful Frank Butler, broke his ankle during
production, further delaying filming. In a further irony, the role that
Calhern was asked to play had
originally been intended for the great comic supporting player, Frank Morgan, who died suddenly after
filming had begun. Under the circumstances, it’s a wonder that the
film is as entertaining as it is, even though it has what may be
Berlin’s best score. I was particularly taken with J. Carroll Naish‘s Sitting Bull and
Keenan Wynn‘s hustler
promoter. Yet, it is not the sometimes listless musical numbers or the
Wild West show that remains in my memory after seeing this movie, but
instead Louis Calhern‘s old
frontiersman turned showman. Calhern‘s reflective moods at the end of the film that
give the film some depth since they are particularly well done, even as
his character realizes that he represents an illusion of an Old West
that never was.
The film from Calhern‘s personal annus mirabilis
that I believe should have won
him more acknowledgment was his portrait of Alonzo D. Emmerich in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston. Calhern plays Emmerich as
a pillar of the legal community, a sharp cookie who’s made a career
out of defending the guilty, an impatient yet guilty husband to neurotic
May Emmerich (Dorothy Tree), a
sugar daddy to Angela Phinlay (Marilyn
Monroe, who is excellent), and, in an unfamiliar role for the
shyster, a financier for the criminals, led by Sam Jaffe, who has planned this one “perfect
heist” while serving a very long stretch in prison. Providing $50k
to finance the job, Emmerich, who is nearly bankrupt, tries to
manipulate events and people continuously, until faced with unplanned
events that threaten to reveal the hollow nature of his life. Calhern plays him as a bit of an
exhausted dandy, not averse to the sight of his mistress, but a bit
tired of her calling him “Uncle Lon,” and, despite his faults,
still too fastidious a man to leave a mess behind.

Like
all the characters in The Asphalt Jungle
(1950), which is only superficially a caper film, Calhern yearns for the big score that
will…what? Restore his youth, self-respect, provide him with a way out
of his high maintenance marriage and mistress, or allow him to escape
from the deep, velvet-lined rut he’s dug for himself? Money may be
the obvious motive for what Calhern as Emmerich does. It’s something more elusive
that he’s seeking: release from the effort it has taken to keep
juggling all the elements of his life.

As his career
continued, Calhern would go on to
perform a less lethal but no less manipulative version of his Asphalt Jungle character in Executive Suite(1954), a good film that never seemed
to come entirely to life, despite a great cast and Robert
Wise‘s direction. In Joseph
Mankiewicz‘ version of Julius
Caesar (1953) he would enact the title role as a slightly
dyspeptic, jittery Caesar whose theatrical training and Roman profile
both helped him with the part. He formed an unlikely friendship
on the set as well. If anecdotal reports are to be believed, Marlon Brando, the exemplar of the then
new Method Acting, and Calhern found each other quite amusing. When, as required
for a crucial scene in the film, a strapping young Brando had to carry 250 pound Louis (as a recently assassinated
Caesar) across the soundstage just before asking those mercurial Romans
to lend him their ears, the director made him do it repeatedly, the
actor finally got mad. Spitting out the famous lines of March
Antony’s eulogy with agitated disgust, he was never better, though
it is said that Calhern spoiled
several takes when Caesar’s cadaver got the giggles.

Calhern‘s rigorously cynical
high school teacher in Blackboard
Jungle (1955) and his warmly philosophical Uncle Willie in the
fitfully sublime musical adaptation of The Philadelphia Story, High Society (1956) rounded out his career, (though in the
guilty pleasure category, he’s the only reason I’d watch the
laughable, pseudo-biblical all poppycock extravaganza The Prodigal). Sadly, Louis
Calhern died just as he was getting ready to appear in another
film with his young friend, Marlon
Brando. While preparing for Teahouse of the August Moon in Tokyo, Calhern died of a heart attack in May,
1956. He was replaced by comic actor Paul Ford. As Louis
Calhern understood well from his own experience as an old pro,
the show must go on.

Sources:
Dauth, Brian, editor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz Interviews,
University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Houseman, John, Front
& Center 1942/1955, Simon & Schuster, 1979.
McGilligan, Patrick, George Cukor: A Double Life, Harper
Perennial, 1992.
Studlar, Gayln, editor, Reflections in a Male Eye:
John Huston and the American Experience, Smithsonian Press, 1993.