Mae Clarke: An Honest Woman

There is a certain look of wary, contained bitterness that you see on women’s faces in movies from the early thirties. Their eyes become veiled; the women seem to retreat inside themselves defensively, tasting memories of hurt and humiliation, of men who made them feel dirty and how they had to keep on smiling and flirting so they could pay the rent on their drab hall rooms and buy their automat coffee. It’s the look of the chorus girl who has learned to protect herself by shutting down the gates, even while wiggling in her scanties. Barbara Stanwyck carried it throughout her long career, like an eternally livid scar; “bubbly” Joan Blondell wore it quietly; and in Waterloo Bridge (1931) it’s branded on the face of Stanwyck’s one-time roommate, Mae Clarke.

Waterloo Bridge opens with a shorthand summation of a chorus girl’s life. It’s the all-hands-on-deck finale of a fluffy musical revue on the last night of its run. The camera pans past the interchangeable faces of the chorines in their platinum wigs and sparkly tricorn hats, and comes to rest on Mae Clarke, as Myra Deauville. She throws up her arms and gives an open-mouthed laugh, then lapses into exhausted boredom, then switches on the faux exuberance again, then yawns. Throughout the film she keeps doing this: putting on her game “Hello, big boy” act and then flinging it aside with furious disgust. Director James Whale doesn’t bother with transitions, but conveys the whiplashing ups and downs of his heroine’s life through blunt cuts. We see her backstage in her bra, receiving a white fox stole from an admirer; in the next scene, out of work for two years, she’s wearing the stole low around her décolletage, standing outside the theater with a fellow hooker looking for pickups. (The setting is World War I, but when Myra says hopefully, “I’ll get a job soon,” 1931 audiences must have foreseen the worst.)

Spotting a prospective john, the friend primps and smiles flirtatiously, while Myra turns on him with a defiant yet seductive scowl; a sullen, defensive stance that she assumes throughout the film. She suffers from incurable decency, which becomes a scalding torment when she meets an innocent young doughboy who has no idea that she’s a prostitute. She brings Roy (Kent Douglass) to her flat, intending to pluck him for the back rent she needs to satisfy her sour-faced landlady. But it’s too easy: when the sweet, boyish soldier pleads with her to accept the money, she abruptly drops the good-natured frankness she’s been charming him with and turns hard and caustic, hating him because she hates herself for tricking him. She’s so stung with hurt pride that she has to lash out and hurt someone else. Preparing to go out on the streets after sending him away, she stares at her hard face in the mirror, dabbing make-up on the rigid mask that barely conceals the tired, angry sadness beneath.

Waterloo Bridge is the only film that reveals the breadth of Mae Clarke’s talent. In other movies she played nice, open-faced girls or mean, petulant golddiggers. As Myra she is a kaleidoscope of confused emotions. Her best scene comes when Roy tells her he loves her: she turns away, hunched as though against a cold rain, her eyes narrow and tense. This is the final insult from life: for her dream guy to come along too late, when she feels unworthy of him. Leaving, he kisses her hand, and reacting to this tribute she passes through exaltation, anxiety, and rage—growling as she forces herself to cast it aside. She’s too honest to grab the expedient of letting a man make “an honest woman” out of her. But we know she loves him, because in the next scene she’s trying to knit him a pair of socks, sitting at the breakfast table with her hair piled on her head, a cigarette planted in her mouth, mangling the stitches.

The worst is yet to come: well-meaning oblivious Roy tricks her into visiting his posh family in the country. They’re kind and welcoming in that self-satisfied upper-class way bound to cause excruciating discomfort in someone like Myra. Roy’s mother (Enid Bennett) is polite, complacent and deadly. Watching her sweetly confide to Myra that she doesn’t want her son to marry a chorus girl, but that she knows she has nothing to fear from such a “fine” person, is almost unbearably painful. Reduced to abject guilt, Myra confesses her true profession and pitifully sobs, “I just wantcha to know, I could’ve married him…”

Roy does, in the end, learn the truth about Myra. The ground has already been prepared for his announcement that he doesn’t care, that he knows it wasn’t her fault. Earlier, when Roy talks about how he joined the army out of “boyish enthusiasm,” and wryly admits it didn’t last, we can see that though he’s inexperienced, he can deal with the loss of illusions. His persistence finally steamrolls Myra’s increasingly frantic attempts to give him up. A rather histrionic scene of hysterics is the only point in the film at which Clarke puts a foot wrong, though she quickly recovers. The tearjerker ending seems a bit gratuitous, but it’s in line with Myra’s certainty all along that things can only end badly. Waterloo Bridge epitomizes the other side of the pre-Code era: not racy irreverence but humane, unsentimental honesty about human flaws and the pain of encounters between innocence and experience.  

Mae Clarke was born Violet Klotz in Philadelphia in 1910, which sounds like a mean joke from a W.C. Fields movie. She grew up in Atlantic City and was a young teenager when she started dancing professionally. In the 1920s she lived for a few years in Manhattan with another chorus girl, born Ruby Stevens, while both worked at midtown nightclubs. After appearing in the Broadway play The Noose they both went to Hollywood, and Clarke had arguably the better movie debut—a lead role in Big Time (1929), co-starring another newcomer, pre-Code fireball Lee Tracy. But while Ruby Stevens, as Barbara Stanwyck, would establish herself as—can we all just agree?—the greatest of Hollywood’s women stars, Mae Clarke had only a few years of good roles, followed by a long and painful decline, crowned by the ignominy of being remembered solely as the recipient of Cagney’s grapefruit in Public Enemy. (Her obituary in the Los Angeles Times was headlined, “Mae Clarke, Famed for Grapefruit Scene, Dies.” Shame on you, L.A. Times.) But in those few years, in the heady atmosphere of pre-Code Hollywood, she revealed an unusual versatility and strikingly direct, unmannered force.

From 1931 through 1933, she made around six films a year, starting 1931 with the small but dramatic role of Molly Malloy in The Front Page and ending it with Frankenstein, which gave her one of her best-known but blandest parts, as Dr. Frankenstein’s bride. The film reunited her with James Whale, to whom she owed her big break in Waterloo Bridge, and whom she found a sensitive and sympathetic director. With characteristic frankness, Clarke attributed the success of her best performance to “a basic confusion and insecurity that I didn’t mind projecting into my work.” Bette Davis, who had the small and thankless role of Roy’s sister in Waterloo Bridge, yearned to play the part of Myra and later said typically, “And I could have too!” Of course she could, but she wouldn’t have been as touching as Clarke: Davis never projected much vulnerability or self-doubt.

What set Mae Clarke apart from her peers was this willingness to let unease show in her performances, grounding them with a solid realism that often outweighed her movies. In an era of glamorous artifice, of platinum permanents and penciled-on eyebrows, her beauty was natural. Her acting style was plain and at times raw in its honesty. She could be vivacious, but undercurrents of moodiness and uncertainty were never far below the surface; she had none of Stanwyck’s steel, her laser focus. Like other actress who didn’t suggest pampered debutantes, Clarke got hard-luck roles: hoofers, hookers and gang molls. At the lowest point of the Depression, there was a lot of hard luck to go around.

She rarely looked as carefree as she does in her very first movie scene, dancing with Lee Tracy, both loose-limbed and light-footed. A pleasant back-stage story of vaudeville, Big Time doesn’t give her very much to do besides wait patiently for her cocky, immature husband to grow up (“Right now you could stage Ben-Hur in his hat,” another character says of Tracy’s big-headed character.) She had a much better dancing role in Night World (1932), a kind of brisk, down-and-dirty, nocturnal Grand Hotel, set in a club owned by none other than Boris Karloff, whose moniker is “Happy.” Mae is Ruth Taylor, one of the chorus girls who tap their way through tight, polished floor routines by Busby Berkeley and expertly fend off passes (in Ruth’s case, from a gangster played by George Raft.)

Ruth appoints herself guardian angel to Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), a miserable rich kid who sits alone every night, pickling himself in bad liquor because his mother shot his father in another woman’s apartment. Here Clarke achieves the tricky task of making a thoroughly nice person fun to watch, and she also makes the giddy debauchery of the hot spot look like shoddy tinsel. She ministers to Rand with wisecracks, street smarts (taking his wallet after he’s been knocked out so he won’t get rolled for it), and sex appeal—she’s encouraged when he revives sufficiently to notice how cute she looks in rehearsal shorts. In the context of this spectacularly compact 58-minute epic, the love that blossoms between Ruth and Michael doesn’t seem unrealistically sudden. A few hours after meeting, they decide to set sail for Bali, and after most of the other characters in the film have met violent deaths, it seems like a perfectly sane move. Life, like pre-Code movies, is short—both on running time and on narrative logic.

Clarke and Ayres starred in another James Whale film, Impatient Maiden (1932), which blasts off with ten minutes of biting cynicism, then slackens to become a tepid, offbeat romance-cum-medical drama, climaxing with an emergency appendectomy. Clarke plays the secretary to a divorce lawyer whose job has made her disenchanted about marriage. The movie backs her up with a breezy, shocking montage of everyday wedded misery, and though it eventually herds her back toward conventional domesticity, it can’t wash out the sour taste of those opening scenes.

In The Front Page, which kicked off and defined the newspaper movie genre, Clarke brought out raw hurt in her role as the kind-hearted prostitute who’s teased and insulted by callous newspapermen until she jumps out a window. A year later in The Final Edition she got to play a smart and plucky reporter on the trail of a killer, whom she captures partly by the expedient of donning a bathing suit and using herself as bait. Her love interest is Ralph Bellamy, who—in the days before he found his glorious niche as the opposite of Cary Grant—was a utility leading man with a loutish edge. He’s a real lout in Parole Girl (1933), a movie that awkwardly tries to cobble a love story onto a tale of revenge that ought to snap shut like a mouse-trap. It opens with Mae’s character, Sylvia Day, working a racket in which she and her partner extort money from department stores by getting her falsely arrested for shoplifting. At first we don’t know what she’s up to, and with another actress the slight phoniness of her outraged sobbing might be put down to bad acting. The second time she goes through the routine it’s definitely phony, and when she gets caught her desperation as she pleads not to be arrested is in an entirely different key. Only a very good actor can control degrees of realism so skillfully.

When the store manager refuses to give her a break, she vows to get even with him. She proves to be a brilliant schemer, earning her parole for battling a fire she actually started, then stalking her nemesis (Bellamy) and tricking him into a fake marriage while he’s blotto. She knows he’s already married and thus vulnerable to a bigamy charge, and also that being married to him will look good to her parole officer, but still it’s a weird plan: why would she want to shack up with the man she hates? She enjoys spending his money, casting marriage in a uniquely mercenary light when she announces she is “in the wife business.” But once she ties on an apron and condescends to make dinner for her husband’s boss—who takes a creepy interest in his employee’s domestic bliss—you know she’s going to fall for the guy, even though the film neglects to give him any appealing qualities. It’s always hard to watch an honest actor doing his or her best with dishonest material.

In her memoirs, Clarke spoke at length about playing prostitutes, starting with Molly Malloy. Her own years as a chorus girl (in fact, a specialty dancer) were happier and more sheltered than the sordid situations in her movies; she had to use her imagination to delve into the feelings of fallen women. Being religious and self-respecting, she refused to play the “happy hooker,” but she easily sympathized with women who had been forced or tricked into lives of sin. Most of her pre-Code roles could be summed up by the title of another of her 1931 films, The Good Bad Girl. But sometimes she was just a bad bad girl, as in three more films from 1933, Fast Workers, Lady Killer and Penthouse. In both guises she was trapped in the intersection of money and sex that defined the female experience in pre-Code movies.

Tod Browning’s Fast Workers (1933) is a tough, excitingly well-made, and wholly misogynistic film. Next to its acrid bile, the snappy cynicism of Warner Brothers’ pre-Code flicks feels light as cracker jacks. John Gilbert is excellent as an attractive heel, a cocky riveter nicknamed Gunner who has assigned himself the task of protecting his naïve buddy from conniving women—by seducing them himself to prove they’re no good. (The movie itself proves that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert’s voice, as my friend the Self-Styled Siren recently wrote in what should be a definitive rebuttal of the stale myth that he was ruined by a squeaky voice.) Mae Clarke plays a strangely split role: she’s Gunner’s girlfriend Mary, dog-like in her devotion despite his refusal to settle down with her; but she’s also a shameless chiseler who lives off men, the kind of gal who simpers, “I hate to take it,” as she stuffs money into her purse.

She enters slouching sullenly downstairs, her eyes lighting up only when she spots a man with a large bankroll. “Who’s the guy with all the lettuce?” she purrs, before pulling a spilled-beer-in-the-lap gag to lure the man (Gunner’s best friend Bucker) up to her room. There she goes into an extravagantly extended crying jag that finally convinces Bucker that she is just a poor, innocent, down-and-out waif. He falls for the routine even though he’s seen it all before. What’s going on between the sexes in this movie is not just a battle but a kind of arms race: the more cynical the men become, the more outrageous the women have to get in conning them out of their dough. The iron-workers with their good paying jobs are prey for golddiggers, but they are just as guilty of viewing women as prey, feeling entitled—with the arrogance instilled by their lofty perch on the high steel—to casual sex without consequences.

Much of the movie has an ambivalent, even-handed tone, but when Mary squeezes money out of the gullible Bucker to finance her grandmother’s operation (“Good thing your grandmother died when you were a kid,” Gunner says, “They’d have had the knife in her every week”), and then marries him for a meal ticket, you start to realize you’re not meant to spare her any sympathy. Mary and Gunner spend a ghastly weekend in Atlantic City—a potent depiction of love turned sour and the special awfulness of a bad vacation. Gunner has just found out that Mary is the latest tramp to get her hooks into his friend, and he stews in a bitter, drunken mixture of jealousy, contempt and self-loathing, putting his fist through a window, but still going ahead with his plan to expose her. Things just get uglier after that, and Mae Clarke had a special brand of ugliness that she brought out when she played nasty, money-grubbing women.

Her face hardens into a heavy, sulky sneer or a taunting, malicious smile. Her voice gets sharp and relentless. But Clarke’s skill at playing rotten women doesn’t fully explain why she was so often a target for misogyny in her movies. A more depressing explanation is Hollywood’s habit of trying to repeat success: if audiences enjoyed seeing Mae Clarke smacked with a grapefruit, they would presumably enjoy seeing her dragged by the hair (Lady Killer), or gunned down with chilling indifference (Penthouse).

Given the fame of the grapefruit scene, it’s easy to forget how very brief Clarke’s role is in Public Enemy (1931). She has only two scenes, and no opportunity to establish a character. In the first, the camera pans across a nightclub to find her and Joan Blondell sitting gloomily at a table with their two escorts, who have both passed out cold. (“Couple-a lightweights,” Mae as Kitty sneers. “Yeah, flat tires,” Joan as Mamie agrees.) They switch on come-hither smiles when they spot Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, but while Mamie jumps up and makes a bee-line for Matt, the more retiring Kitty stays at the table, and looks genuinely shocked by whatever Tom whispers in her ear. The next time we see her is at the breakfast table. Though installed as his mistress she’s clearly nervous around Tom, not happy but doing her best to please him. Clarke insightfully described Kitty as “just an I-hope-this-turns-out-all-right dumbbell.” There’s no clue why Tom is so sick of her, which makes his assault all the more shocking. The camera lingers on Kitty as she buries her face in her hands, hurt and ashamed; that’s the last we see of her.

The scene itself is neither gratuitous nor misogynistic. It’s not about Kitty at all, it’s about Tom Powers: a revealing and realistic glimpse of the kind of man he is. What’s troubling is the kick people get out of it, and what seems to have been behind it. There are a number of conflicting stories about how and why it was filmed, but the most convincing is William Wellman’s explanation that he had fantasized about smashing a grapefruit into his wife’s face and satisfied the urge by staging the scene on film. Clarke’s ex-husband Lew Brice is also reported to have reveled in the scene, coming into the theater repeatedly just to watch it and gloat. These anecdotes make the popularity of the scene more disturbing. If Kitty were a lousy dame, like Mary in Fast Workers, we might be expected to enjoy seeing her humiliated, but because we know nothing about her, she’s just a woman.

In Lady Killer at least she earns her ill-treatment. She’s a grifter again, dropping her purse in public places as a way to lure men to card games where they’ll be fleeced. Her gang soon ascends to robberies, and when its newest member, Cagney, objects because they accidentally killed someone, Mae scoffs at his scruples: “Every time someone gets a tap on the head, you wanna play Red Cross Nurse.” When he winds up in jail, she runs out on him with his bail money, and later when he’s become a Hollywood star she re-appears lounging in his bed in satin pajamas, determined to muscle in on his success. That’s when he drags her across the room by the hair and sends her flying into the hallway with a kick in the rear.

Despite all this, there are moments of warmth and fun between Clarke and Cagney, friends in real life. He gives her one of his most lascivious greetings, sweeping his eyes up and down her with what appears, from his reaction, to be X-ray vision. In another scene, while the gang is busy arguing with a fence over some stolen jewels, Clarke stands while Cagney sits with his arms around her, nestling his head against her bosom, and the camera catches him kissing her breast—perhaps a small, mischievous apology for all the manhandling? Later, in a train station, they peruse travel brochures, and Clarke reads to Cagney about the wonders of California, with its “Sun-kissed oranges, lemons, grapefruit—” They both stop dead and look sharply at each other. Unethical though she may be (and she does in the end redeem herself, tipping Cagney off that he’s to be taken for a ride), she makes a much more convincing partner for him than the nondescript nice girl, Margaret Lindsay. They made one more film together, Great Guy (1936), in which they finally got to be on friendly terms.

Like a lot of pre-Code stars, Mae Clarke was somehow diminished when the Code came in, sliding into B movies. Off-screen, meanwhile, she had even more hard luck than she did on it. Her career was derailed in 1932 by a nervous breakdown (caused largely by overwork), resulting in stays in sanitariums where, by her own account, the “treatments” were more likely to kill than cure. She bounced back but then suffered a disfiguring car accident in 1933. By 1937 she’d had enough and decided to retire, moving to Rio de Janeiro with her second husband Stevens Bancroft. That marriage, like her other two, failed, and she returned to Hollywood in 1940. She may as well have been a ghost, and she scraped through the decades doing uncredited bit parts and some TV roles, making her final appearance in 1970. She spent her last years as the feisty grande dame of the Motion Picture Country House & Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, recording her memoirs (rather depressingly titled Featured Player) while dying of cancer. Though cantankerous, she wasn’t bitter about her disappointing career. At the end of the book, she says that she would like to be remembered by something she got from Jimmy Cagney—his respectful description of her as “a very professional actress, who knew what was required of her and did her job excellently.”

Well, it beats a grapefruit in the face.

by Imogen Sara Smith