Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes

Chapter 2. Starlight

25 CHAPTER 2 Starlight Her effectiveness in movies comes from her ability to be herself in front of a camera, to allow her personality to operate as freely as it does when she is taking a stranger into her home. —Don Bachardy, Stars in My Eyes When the Blondells arrived in New York for an indefinite stay, they were close to destitute. Twenty-year-old Joan and eleven-year-old Gloria took odd jobs, hating every one of them. Junie had a paper route. Father Ed did a solo routine as the live act before picture shows, but he never brought in more than ten dollars for a day’s work. The reduced conditions of vaudeville necessitated his absence for weeks. Joan waitressed a bit, but didn’t keep up with the practical skills she learned at the North Texas State Teachers College. Her tenure as purse salesgirl at one of New York’s swankier department stores didn’t last long either. She loathed the posturing formality of standing at attention waiting for customers to approach. Joan secured a job in a circulating library at Broadway and Eightyninth for eight dollars a week. Her shift was typically 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., then again from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., which was perfect for attending midday auditions. Her boss, kindly Esther Wright, recalled that Joan “was a good clerk on account of she would not let boys have dates with her unless they joined [Esther’s] circulating library. One night there were seventeen boys lined up to join.” Joan wrote their numbers on the wall near the telephone behind the circulation desk, which eventually looked like a directory of Manhattan’s available young men. Because of cramped accommodations and fevered emotions at home, Joan often slept in the back of the library on a small cot provided by Wright. One night at closing time, a police officer came in. He engaged her in friendly conversation and said he had noticed her ever since she started working for Wright. As Joan began the closing ritual for the store, he urged her downstairs where packing boxes and business supplies were kept. The two were there alone, the light was faint, and the front door was already locked upstairs. His assault was fierce and sudden. He knocked her legs out from under her and she fell on the concrete floor. He went down with her, forcing a hand up her dress and tearing at her panties. From underneath him, Joan did everything she could to resist, first kicking and punching, then screaming for help. No one heard. When he was finished, he reassembled his uniform, warning Joan that he would kill her if she ever told anyone what happened. It was nearly midnight and the street was empty. Joan wandered in bewilderment, her wobbly legs barely able to support her. Eventually, she reentered the library to spend the night on her cot in the back. Sleep was impossible; she was taut from the shock and a jabbing pain in her lower back. There were precious few resources for a rape victim in 1927, and Joan was ignorant of options, so she honored his demand of silence for decades. Only much later did she tell her grown daughter, and later still she went public in her thinly disguised memoirs, Center Door Fancy. But one detail is missing from the book: about the policeman using his big, blunt hands to bend her feet back until she writhed in agony. It would be months before Joan saw a doctor for ongoing lower back pains she suffered from falling on the rock hard floor, telling him that she slipped on icy pavement. X-rays revealed a fractured coccyx, and he recommended no heavy lifting, plenty of hot baths, and no motherhood. When Joan returned to the theater, she was cast in a touring production of the courtroom drama The Trial of Mary Dugan, produced by the 26 STARLIGHT estimable cigar-chomping Al Woods. During the seven months she was on the road as a lisping chorus girl and understudy to the lead, she sent most of her paycheck to her family in New York. When the tour was over, she was back at the library, but she made sure never to be there alone. She secured a raise to eighteen dollars a week, the same salary she had made...