Amigo Gigolo: Gilbert Roland
In 1905, in Ciudad Juáraz, Chihuahua, Mexico, a bullfighter and his wife gave birth to a son, Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso. Young Luis intended to become a bullfighter just like his father, but when the family moved to California, he fell into acting after being cast as an extra in the Lon Chaney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Two years later, Ben Schulberg at Paramount studios cast the 20-year old Luis opposite Clara Bow in a college comedy, The Plastic Age, where he was first billed as Gilbert Roland. He had the sort of looks that seemed different from different angles: romantic in profile, but somewhat shifty when he was seen full face with his eyes narrowed. When he opened his eyes wide, however, their greenness had a heart-stopping effect, even in black and white films. Many of his leading ladies took notice.
During filming of The Plastic Age, the macho but sensitive Roland only knew a little English, and he was nervous about acting: he would ask his fellow players, “Am I doing alright?” But the camera took to his steady presence right away, and so did Bow, who reacted with her patented reckless enthusiasm to his shy initial wooing (he affectionately called her Clarita). They were a hit in The Plastic Age, but off-screen, Bow was running wild and couldn’t be tied down to one man, and Roland displayed some recklessness of his own when he moved on to another, very different movie star, Norma Talmadge, with whom he played Armand in a film of Camille (1927) and with whom he had a years-long affair. Talmadge had made her name in sweet romances, and she was married to the powerful producer Joseph Schenck, who managed her career. Roland appeared in three more films with Talmadge, and he faced down Schenck’s wrath like the bullfighter he had hoped to be as a boy (a story has long circulated that Roland at one point proudly walked naked around the pool at the Hollywood Athletic Club to prove that Schenck had not had him castrated.)
In front of the camera, Roland always commanded attention, especially as a lover boy who kisses ladies’ hands so that he might get his own hands on their bankroll. In The Passionate Plumber (1932), a bedroom farce, Roland actually gets more laughs as the supposed studly straight man than Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante do as the star comics. “Oh, leave your guitar of a heart!” cries one of his women (Irene Purcell), as he tries to pitch some woo; later, we find out that where women are concerned, he prefers to “find, fondle and forget” them. His old girlfriend Bow called Roland back to her side for her penultimate movie, Call Her Savage (1932), where he plays Moonglow, a loyal friend who stands as still as a post when Bow gets in a temper and violently whips him. “I love to see your head bandaged,” she tells him after she’s tended to his wounds. “It looks so romantic!”
Roland instantly kisses Mae West’s hand in maybe her best movie, She Done Him Wrong (1932), and she takes kindly to his attentions. He plays Serge Stanieff, who is said to be the “new assistant” of the shady Rita (Rafaella Ottiano). “Day or night work, Rita?” asks Mae, who then sweeps up the stairs as the film cuts to a close-up of Roland, wondering just when he should come up and see her. After he enters her boudoir, Roland’s Serge can’t seem to decide whether to look at her bosom or the diamonds that cover it, which leads to brief confusion behind his deadpan face until we can see him thinking, “I will have both!” The great Mae looks him up and down and pronounces him “warm, dark and handsome,” and he takes her innuendoes with his steely, bullfighter calm. “A boy with a gift like that should be workin’ at it!” says Mae before he goes, and she might have been speaking about Roland himself and the shadowy, two-faced presence he brings to all of his roles.
The following year, Roland was cleverly used by George Cukor as a straight-up gigolo to an older woman in a film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s play Our Betters (1933). Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble Cooper) calls Roland’s Pepi “a gambler, a spendthrift and an idler,” but she cannot give up the sexual satisfaction she gets from him, even when he refuses to make any pretence of loving her. Roland lasciviously eats a cake as he looks at Minnie’s friend Lady Pearl Grayston (Constance Bennett), which signals that he’s decided to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants Lady Pearl, right under Minnie’s nose, just as Roland romanced Talmadge right under the nose of her tycoon husband and still lived to tell about it, and even work on in Hollywood. You can hear Roland’s Mexican accent here more than in his other early films because he’s given arch things to say like “hang it,” but he’s able to get a big laugh by emphasizing the disconnect between Pepi’s words and his feelings: “After all, I have some pride,” he says, then stares ahead of himself and takes a drink so that we can see that he obviously has none and doesn’t care a damn that he doesn’t.
Roland then took up with Bennett, appropriately enough, and even married her, from 1941 to 1946. He served in World War II and did some westerns as The Cisco Kid, then made a major comeback in John Huston’s We Were Strangers (1949), digging a tunnel with John Garfield. After that, his range of roles expanded. He played the saintly Juan opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies (1950), he was Gaucho, the star who tempts Gloria Grahame’s reckless Southern wife in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and he began to star in westerns where he spoke his own language and offered his beautifully weathered face and body to the camera as he had offered it to so many happy-to-indulge women off-screen and on.
He semi-specialized at this point in the Male Love Death, expiring in the arms of Cary Grant in Crisis (1950), and in the arms of Kirk Douglas in The Racers (1955), where he quips, “Baby, you can spit in my crankcase any time!” Roland headlined some spaghetti westerns and worked all the way up to 1982, when he made the Fred Schepisi western Barbarosa. He had gone from silent lover to early talkie gigolo to middle-aged manly grace, until he remained as a Grand Old Man of the cinema, mainly uncelebrated, but recalled with fondness by his friends, who called him “Amigo,” and by the many women he tempted, off screen and on, to the most devil-may-care of pleasures.
by Dan Callahan