Here's a piece of film that blew me away, just discovered on youtube. It's a clip from Mervyn LeRoy's 1930 talkie "Showgirl In Hollywood" starring the always strange Alice White. (Shamefully, I've yet to see this film--though it's happily extant and reputed to be quite good). It shows the making of an early musical number--complete with views of the cameras in booths, reverse shots of the crew, overhead angles that include glimpses of the on-set orchestra (playback had not yet been developed and musical numbers were recorded live, on camera, with the accompanying musicians standing off to the side and playing out of camera range). There are even shots taken from inside the booths that were then required to hold the cameramen and their cameras--the whirring sound of the cameras, which you will hear, necessitated the airless, sound-proof booths which commonly caused the cameramen to pass out from lack of oxygen. All in all, this is an invaluble, not to be missed piece of film history lore...one that I somehow managed to miss for thirty-some years despite my long obsession with the early sound years.
Who was Alice White? Ubiquitous for a few years during the early talkie transition, White was a local girl--she went to Hollywood High and began working in the industry as a secretary for Josef Von Sternberg. Despite having no real talent--her good looks aside she has the acting abilities of your cousin's pre-teenager--she wound up clawing her way up the First National ladder as a leading lady. And despite not being able to sing, she became one of the early talkie era's most employed singing stars. The role she played in "Showgirl In Hollywood", a chorine named Dixie Dugan, was further developed by the writer J.P McEvoy into a popular comic strip which used White as its model. From secretary to movie starlet to lead dancing and singing star to comic strip inspiration, you would have thought she had it made..and yet there was something about Alice White that seemed to seriously piss people off. Was it the talent-free perfomances? The blithe, devil-may-care persona? The boring name? Or was it something more sinister? For it seems that, in the mid-thirties, White was involved in a career-ending scandal involving her romances with two separate men--one of whom she later married. Does this modest entanglement sound lurid enough to end a career? In Hollywood? Doesn't to me either. Something about this story is missing and I'll be damned if I've been able to unearth what that something is. Her Wikipedia entry makes references to "further sex scandals" as well, but the internet is oddly mum on all of this. What were the whispers in the "Stop Alice White" whispering campaign REALLY getting at? Something deeply kinky--a la the Jean Harlow early death rumors? And why didn't Kenneth Anger write about her multiple, career-ending sexual debacles in either of the Hollywood Babylon books? Let's hope that somebody out there (but not Irving Shulman) is writing the definitive Alice White tell-all biography which will elucidate what remains mere speculation. Meanwhile, Jeff Cohen's excellent blog "Vitaphone Varieties" had an Alice White entry late last year that is well worth reading. From it, I'll quote Mr. Cohen's very funny and quite generous assessment of the Alice White phenomenon:
"From this vantage point --- so distant to 1929, perhaps the most enjoyment that can be had in watching Alice White in her surviving early talkies is that she's so utterly unlike the vast majority of her peers. There's neither forced raucous demeanor, nor transparent attempts to appear cultured and refined that just come across as creepy --- no, she's simply herself: good, bad or indifferent. Mostly indifferent. Never seeming to quite connect with her surroundings or co-stars, or even fully understanding the lines she's speaking for that matter, Alice White defies the odds and manages to charm rather than repulse or dismay, and that's no small feat."
