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Joan Blondell likes to say, in these days of media-promoted “women’s liberation,” that the only time she “was liberated was when some man loved me.” And last Christmas she wrote, by hand, on all her cards: “Let’s love everybody this year.”

Such sentiments, plus one more (“I’m not, and never have been, a career dame”), are the basic reasons for the public’s acceptance, for almost half a century, of the “good Joe” image she has projected from stage, screen and tube. Her own conception of this image: “I just showed my big boobs and tiny waist and acted glib and flirty – I was the fizz on the soda.”

She was born on August 9, ’09, on NYC’s 91st Street just off Central Park West. Her father, a middle-aged vaudeville actor, and her much younger mother (nee Kathryn Cain) toured comedy sketches, sprinkled with song-n-dance, under the billing of “Ed Blondell and Company.” tl the age of three Joan became part of that “and Company”. So did her brother and sister when they came along.*

Miss Blondell says she made he her stage debut in Sydney, Australia, while her parents were touring their act on that continent. She was five when they got back to the US and for the next 15 years she traveled to-n-fro across the US with “Ed Blondell and Company.” She liked her father and respects his memory.

When she was 17 she won a beauty contest in Dallas TX and the prize ($2000) was useful to the Blondell family in the lean years that followed (the movies were putting vaudeville out of business). They lived – existed is a more accurate word – in NYC and Joan worked at odd jobs during the day (Macy’s; a circulating library) and acted for free at night at the Provincetown Theatre in Greenwich Village. One result was the offer of a scholarship at the John Murray Anderson Drama School. “I couldn’t take it,” Miss Blondell says, “the family needed whatever I could earn and the scholarship was for tuition only.”

“My ambition at that time,” she adds, “was to make a buck so we could get the act together again and go again.” She didn’t achieve this ambition, and was forced to launch out on her own. She obtained a small part on Broadway in Tarnish; was in the Chicago company of The Trial of Mary Dugan; and on the subway circuit played in such things as My Girl Friday and This Thing Called Love. Then, in ’29, she landed a job in the cast of George Kelly’s comedy drama Maggie the Magnificent. She was the gum-chewing, brazen wife of a bootlegger and the part of her husband was taken by a cocky youngster named James Cagney. They played so outstandingly together they were mentioned in the reviews and when Maggie the Magnificent closed – it had opened the week of the ’29 stock crash – they were cast in Penny Arcade, a melodrama about the seedy side of Coney Island, with Cagney as an underworld loser and Miss Blondell as a photographer’s flip assistant.

Al Jolson took an option on the movie rights to Penny Arcade and when he sold them to Warners he suggested that Warners use Cagney and Blondell. Warners brought the two young players to Hollywood but thought them too inexperienced and cast Grant Withers and Evelyn Knapp in the parts Cagney and Blondell had done on Broadway. To assuage their disappointment Warners gave them two minor roles. They also changed the title of Penny Arcade to SINNERS HOLIDAY.

“Jimmie and I did our scene together,” Miss Blondell says, “and I when the brass saw the rushes, saw how fast we talked and what we could do, they sent word to the back lot where we were shooting for us to come to the front office and they offered us five-year contracts.”

Miss Blondell says Warners wanted to change her name – “to, hold everything, Inez Holmes” – but that she refused even though “I was scared almost out of my wits they wouldn’t give me that five-year contract.”

In ’31-33 – the depth of the Depression – she was a workhorse in the Warner stock company and appeared in some 20 films. “They’d even pan me going to the ladies’ room,” she says with a smile, and adds: “I just sailed through things, took the scripts I was given, did what I was told. I couldn’t afford to go on suspension – my family needed what I could make. For five people you gotta make money even though it’s small money. I was most grateful to be making it.

“But economic need aside, I guess I was what they call a studio dame. The brilliant thing – making the front office aware that you’re the one in front of the camera, you’re the one who makes what people pay to see – I didn’t think that way. I never fought for better roles, and became known as ‘one-take Blondell’. But I admire Bette Davis for fighting. She fought every inch of the way.”

Miss Blondell says she enjoyed her work in the Warner stock company and that a warm camaraderie existed among the players, directors and crews. “Guys like Lloyd Bacon, John Adolfi and Ray Enright were terrific directors,” she says, “even though their budgets didn’t let them do things they wanted to do. Even though they were saddled with us, just as we actors were saddled with them, the all-important compulsion was to finish on schedule and under budget.”

Miss Blondell is right about the inconsequentiality of her ’31-33 pictures. Except for PUBLIC ENEMY, in which she is a gangster’s moll, and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933, in which she made a hit singing “Remember My Forgotten Man”, there is little to be said for them today.

In ’32, while working on a programmer called THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR THEM, for which she had been lent to Goldwyn, she met a cameraman named George Scott Barnes, who had had three wives and would have three more after Miss Blondell, whom he married on August 5, ’33. There was some doubt about the legality of this ceremony, deriving from legal technicalities about his divorce, and they remarried on January 4, ’34. Their son, Norman Scott Barnes, was born the following November, and they divorced in ’35. Later Barnes was to win an Academy Award for his cinematography on REBECCA (’40). He was also the cinematographer on DeMile’s THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (’53) and died soon after that picture finished. (His son by Blondell was adopted legally by Dick Powell when Powell and Blondell were husband and wife. This son is now the father of three boys and is a producer of Four Star Productions, which his adopting father, Powell, helped to found.)

Miss Blondell says she worked on the Warner lot until the seventh month of her pregnancy with her son (“they kept shooting me higher and higher and finally shot me standing behind furniture and things”). “We helped each other at Warners,” she adds. “We were always on time and there were no ‘star complexes’ or ‘temperament’. I enjoyed getting up at four-thirty I love that time of morning – so as to be at the studio by five-thirty and be made up for camera by nine.”

She met Dick Powell when they were making GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933, in which she played the tough showgirl who doesn’t have the heart to destroy a socialite who gets involved with her (Warren William). Said Busby Berkeley of her performance in GOLD DIGGERS: “I knew Joan couldn’t sing when I decided to use her in the ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ number. But I knew she could act the song, talk it, and put over its drama for me.”

She and Powell were married (July 19, ’36) on board the “Santa Paula,” which took them through the Panama Canal to NYC on a honeymoon. When they got back to Hollywood Powell began the process of legally adopting Miss Biondell’s son by Barnes and on June 30, ’38, their daughter, Ellen, was born. She now has a daughter and manages the three stereotape stores in California that Joan Blondell owns.

After the birth of their daughter, Miss Blondell says, she and Powell began to feel that if they stayed with Warners that studio would do less and less for their future. Dick’s contract was about to terminate and “So when he said ‘Let’s leave, we’ll do better,’ I agreed immediately and we left together.”

Her first ventures away from Warners were roles in a couple of Melvyn Douglas pictures at Columbia, and in a Lana Turner vehicle at MGM. Then, at Paramount, she played Dick Powell’s wife in I WANT A DIVORCE (’40). She had only a few comic-relief scenes, but the film led to a radio series which used the same title and was quite successful.

This radio work, and some entertaining she did for the USO, kept her off the screen in ’42. When she returned to Hollywood it was with the realization that her “glamour” days were over and that there would be only “character work” in her future. “I think I rushed things a bit,” she now says wanly. “I could have had some extra gauzes put on the camera instead of going from young girl to old girl roles in one leap.”

The ’43 picture in which she returned to the screen is the memorable tribute to army-nurses on Bataan titled CRY HAVOC, which starred Margaret Sullavan and Ann Sothern. She played a rough-n-ready ex-burlesque queen and her performance made Broadway producer Mike Todd think she should head the national company of Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys. The Broadway cast was headed by Ethel Merman whose fort was belting a song, something Miss Blondell could not do.

Todd had gotten her to journey to NYC to test for the part and he seemed to mean it when he told her he was sorry she wasn’t right for Something for the Boys and that he would find something else for her (He was already estranged from his wife. Todd’s real name was Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen and he had been born in Minneapolis on 6.22.09. By his first wife, nlee Bertha Freshman, who died in ’46, he had had a son Michael Todd Jr.) The “something’ he found was the vulgarity called The Naked Genius, which concerned a burlesque stripper who writes books (and was written by such a person, i.e., the so-called Gypsy Rose Lee). It was staged by George S. Kaufman and opened in NYC’s Plymouth Theatre in October ’43. Despite Todd’s publicity flair it closed after 36 performances.

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* Edward, the second child, didn’t continue as a performer and became a gaffer (a lighting technician on a movie set), and now does similar work in television. Gloria, the youngest, was in a few films (THE DAREDEVIL DRIVERS; ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN; FOUR’S A CROWD: DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK) ; worked in radio; played the character named Honeybee in the teleseries called “The Life of Ri1ey”; and is now a housewife.

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