In Defense of June Allyson

Honey. That word describes the tenor of both her voice and her roles. In 12 years as a star at the lion of studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and for decades afterward, June Allyson purred sweet reason to the prime men of her era: Jimmy Stewart (in three movies), Humphrey Bogart (in Battle Circus), William Holden (Executive Suite) and her husband, Dick Powell. Other women might get the showy parts, and the Oscars. Allyson, in her movies, got the wedding ring. And from her fans, she received the Photoplay Magazine citation as 1954’s Most Popular Female Star.

Yesterday, when I learned of her death, at 88, from pulmonary respiratory failure, I was sad to think that sweet voice had been stilled. Then I heard it, whispering reassurance in my ear, as she had to so many of her screen husbands, saying, “It’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”

Maybe I hear, and feel, something different in Allyson. The Internet Movie Database Obit describes her as having a “raspy voice,” and David Thomson, that most gifted of biographical sketch artists, refers to “her petite, sore-throated charm.” To my ear, Allyson was a crooner, her voice a salve to her male co-stars’ belligerence, grudges or indecision. Those nectarine vocals suited her sweet looks, and the roles assigned her by MGM, when that studio was still America’s arbiter of middle-class propriety.

You’ll just have to take my word, children, that once upon a time a movie company could set moral and behavioral standards — just as you’ll have to believe there was a time when anybody could become a hot property by playing it warm-to-tepid, and could achieve prominence in the Hollywood cosmology inhabiting roles of sweetheart, wife and mom — when “nice” could be taken for star quality.

But that was Allyson’s persona. Playing characters named Connie, Patsy, Annie, Kathy, Nancy, Penny, Sallie, Ellie — names that might have adorned any high-school yearbook, with hearts dotting the I’s — Allyson held on to that amiable freshness for most of her career. She was the girl most likely to be hugged; the one who’d be nice to come home to; the postwar dream wife, if your dreams were domestic reveries that didn’t get too lurid or extravagant.

From Ella to Cinderella

One of the few jolts June Allyson could provide is the knowledge that this Heartland heart was born (on Oct. 7, 1917) in the Bronx, not a borough renowned for gentility. And that little Ella Geisman endured a rough childhood. She was raised in poverty by her divorced mother. Then, as she related it on her website , “I had a very bad accident at age eight which killed my dog and totaled my bike, not to mention me! The doctors said I might never walk again. Because of the respect I gained for my doctors, I aspired for a time to become one myself. But after seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee 17 times, those thoughts were then replaced with dreams of someday filling Ginger’s shoes. A girl can dream!”

At 20, she hit both Broadway and the movies — not that either medium took much notice. From 1937 to 1939 she appeared in nine two-reel musicals, made in New York for 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. And she hoofed in the chorus of shows with scores by some pretty sharp tunesmiths: Harold Rome (Sing Out the News), Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein (Very Warm for May ), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Higher and Higher) and Cole Porter (Panama Hattie). In three of those shows she shared stage space with Vera Ellen, who would join Allyson in MGM musicals; in another she played with Eve Arden, who’d supply comic vinegar to Allyson’s sugar in ’40s Hollywood.

As Betty Hutton’s understudy in Panama Hattie she got to fill in a few times. The show’s director, George Abbott, was pleased, and gave Allyson a lead role in his next musical, Best Foot Forward. When MGM did the movie version, Allyson went west, and stayed there. So did Stanley Donen, who would soon graduate from chorus boy to choreographer and director, and Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, whom the studio signed to write the score for Meet Me in St. Louis, starring the MGM princess Judy Garland. The diva and the ingenue would become lifelong friends.

The Sweetheart of Culver City

Allyson’s first starring role was as Navy man Robert Walker’s bride in The Sailor Takes a Wife. Walker had been all dewy moonlight as a soldier courting Garland the year before in The Clock, to which this film is an uneasy sequel, but now he learns the price of romantic impulse. The newlyweds, holed up in an improbably palatial Greenwich Village apartment (at MGM, even squalor was laid out on the grand scale), are so ill-matched, the happy ending is either a reversal or a strenuous act of Hollywood’s wishful thinking. Presenting the hard facts of postwar accommodation, then glossing over them, was MGM’s way of offering a panacea, or placebo, to millions of men back from the war, wondering if they were returning to the best years of their lives.

That was one of the few times when Allyson’s prim allure as a movie wife was questioned. (The Shrike, 10 years later, was the other big critique.) Mostly, her job was to talk sense into her men. Football star Peter Lawford, say, in Good News — she wanted him to hit the books so he’d be eligible to win the big game. Her only severe competition came not from the script but on the screen. Her sweetness might get upstaged by a flashier femme, as she was by Joan McCracken in Good News. Sometimes Allyson lost to a rival from deepest movie memory. In Little Women she played Jo Marsh, the role a much nervier young thing from Broadway, Katharine Hepburn, had taken in the 1933 version.

Still, back when wife roles were solid ones, Allyson was The Wife. But the movies weren’t always glaringly sunny. Her three films with James Stewart tested Allyson’s innate chipperness. In Strategic Air Command, a hymn to ’50s flyboys, her co-respondent is a bomber, which almost takes Stewart to his death. She perseveres and sees to it that he does too. In The Stratton Story Stewart loses a leg; in The Glenn Miller Story he loses his life. She must support him, literally and emotionally, in the first; and in the second, she shows, with great delicacy and understated power, that grief is the inevitable last act for a wife’s devotion.

The unspoken message of these films was that a woman, especially a good woman, has to settle. Compromise was the minor key in a movie’s final fanfare. Allyson lost out on a few good roles: Royal Wedding with her idol Astaire (because she was pregnant with her and Powell’s child Ricky), Johnny Belinda and All About Eve (because MGM wouldn’t loan her out to other studios).

Her meatiest role, and the meat was deliciously rancid, was opposite Jose Ferrer in The Shrike, where she’s the harridan who nearly drives her husband to suicide. Her performance was both stark and nicely judged — “good (and nasty),” Thomson says, approvingly — but it didn’t vault Allyson into the realm of Serious Actress. It didn’t set her on a new, thornier path, paving the way for her to play roles suitable for the decades to come, when the Wife role would be replaced by the Woman With a Past. Casting directors thought only of Allyson’s past, as the sonorous voice of responsibility, and they decided, in effect, that her past was passe.

After MGM

Allyson gradually retreated from films, to the mellower, more congenial medium of TV, where she occasionally appeared on her husband’s anthology series and starred, for the 1961 season, in her own show. She also spent time caring for the ailing Powell — who, like his co-stars John Wayne and Susan Hayward, and reported scores of other crew members, had contracted cancer after shooting The Conqueror on location near a nuclear test site. He died in 1963.

She returned to Broadway as an autumnal star, headlining the French comedy Forty Carats (in a role that had been played by Julie Harris and Joan Fontaine). She signed up for a couple of stints in those employment agencies for geriatric actors, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. (What, no Fantasy Island ?) According to IMDb, her last role was a Lady in Hotel in the Carrie Fisher TV movie, These Old Broads, which is famous in Hollywood gossip history as the production that brought Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds back within spitting distance of each other, nearly a half century after Liz stole Eddie Fisher from Debbie. IMDb says Allyson’s appearance was “uncredited.” Ouch!

If Allyson is known to the later Baby Boomers, it’s as the spokeswoman for Depends, the undergarment for control of aging bladders. That could get a giggle, I suppose, but Allyson doesn’t deserve one. With her last husband, Dr. David Ashrow, D.D.S., she established the June Allyson Foundation with the goal of “Supporting medical research of incontinence to better understand its causes and impact, improve education, and develop improved treatment options.” She also, Wikipedia says, raised money for the Judy Garland and James Stewart museums.

So the actress who had been the soldiers’ sweetheart, them wife to the stars, became the care-giving granny, attending to the memories of her famous friends, cooing cautious advice to the fans who grew up cherishing her. Dependable: that’s not a bad word to chisel on June Allyson’s tombstone. And next to it: Honey.