Monroe Owsley: No Good
An early 1930s fan magazine letter about Monroe Owsley reads like this: “He’s a slimy toad, a no-good rat up to trouble—and you feel he’s like that off-camera too!” The jury is likely permanently out on any off-camera sliminess, but Owsley was the center of many sordid rumors before his premature death in 1937 at age 36, when he supposedly had a heart attack after an automobile accident.
It was said around Hollywood that he was beset by drink, drugs, and gambling and that he had gay leanings and acted on them, though MGM starlet Anita Page said near the end of her life that he was in love with her in the mid-1930s. He was intensely in love with a lot of people, it seems, and furtive, and maybe a little wicked.
Whatever the cause of his messy private life, Owsley was a memorably odious man in Pre-Code cinema, and Bette Davis, who sparred with him in Ex-Lady (1933), called him “marvelously corrupt” in her memoirs. With his high forehead and large ears, his long nose and narrow eyes, and his tendency to bear down on others to shout and sneer, Owsley is as resolutely unappealing as anyone has ever been in movies.
Owsley was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and his mother was an actress, Gertrude Owsley. He took acting classes as a teenager and started appearing on Broadway in the 1920s before his film debut in The First Kiss (1928), where he was “the other suitor” to Fay Wray. Owsley got typecast after playing the part of the alcoholic brother Ned in the first film version of Philip Barry’s play Holiday (1930). In the better-known 1938 remake of Holiday starring Katharine Hepburn, Ned is played by Lew Ayres as dissolute but still very beautiful and poetic, whereas Owsley is a sour, nasty character barely able to contain his disgust with himself and his life. “We don’t need any saints in this family,” he tells his sister Julia (Mary Astor) when she is talking up her fiancé Johnny Case (Robert Ames). He has a real flair for ratty maliciousness here, for vitriol, and for heavy self-pity.
Owsley was a weak and caddish boyfriend and then husband to Barbara Stanwyck in Ten Cents a Dance (1931), confirming everything Stanwyck seemed to know about men whenever she looked them over. He throws a really pitiful little punch when trying to defend Stanwyck at her dime-a-dance job, so that she has to step in and give the guy who’s bothering them a real smack herself.
Owsley reveals his rodent-like little smile for the first time in Ten Cents a Dance, flashing his small teeth in a way to set your own teeth on edge. A gambler and a sponger, a snob and a complainer and a thief, he torments Stanwyck with his meanness and lack of quality until she finally shouts at him, “I don’t love you! I don’t even think enough of you now to hate you!” and then, “You’re not a man….you’re not even a good sample.”
Owsley pursued Claudette Colbert in his first scenes in Honor Among Lovers (1931), and he couldn’t stop his face from sending weird, resentful signals. Colbert marries him, and wouldn’t you know, it turns out he’s a worthless no-good cad, a drunk, a skirt-chaser, and a thief, nearly making Fredric March’s sexual harasser boss to Colbert look somewhat better if only by comparison.
“You haven’t even got sense enough to stay sober!” Colbert cries as their troubles mount in Honor Among Lovers, which makes Owsley get maudlin; he is particularly gross in his movies when he descends to contrite boyhood and expects his women to mother him. He winds up shooting March and snivels that he didn’t mean to do it right afterward, and then he tries to pin the blame on Colbert. A real winner!
In Indiscreet (1931), Owsley wore a mustache, as if he needed to look even more villainous. Gloria Swanson breaks up with him in the first scene because of his philandering, and so naturally he takes up with her sister, and this is supposed to be a comedy, so Owsley plays in a more comic key here, but not by much. “You’re not bad,” Swanson finally tells him. “You’re just not very bright.” Owsley was a drunken playboy pursuing a blond Joan Crawford in This Modern Age (1931), a Robert Montgomery role that he makes as unattractive as possible.
In the Clara Bow vehicle Call Her Savage (1932), Owsley was Larry Crosby, “one of the worst characters in Chicago.” He knocks girlfriend Thelma Todd down after breaking up with her, but she tells him, “You’ll come back…I understand your little…peculiarities.” Does she mean S&M? Homosexual proclivities? “I doubt there’s any sin in the calendar I haven’t been guilty of,” he tells Bow, who responds to his creepiness with peppy non-sequiturs. He spends their wedding night out on the town and abandons Bow, tossing some money at her. She visits him down in New Orleans, where he seems to be suffering from syphilis, and he physically attacks her, trying to strangle her, before she hits him over the head with a small wooden stepstool.
Owsley wore a mustache again to blackmail Kay Francis in The Keyhole (1933), and then he pursued Davis in Ex-Lady, where she told him, “Don’t be so persistent…it’s annoying,” and then, “Man… I’m souring on the lot of you!” Resentful of her boyfriend (Gene Raymond) seeing another women, Davis briefly succumbs to Owsley’s advances, flinging herself down on the floor to be kissed by him while drums beat from a bandstand nearby, a sure signal of a self-destructive impulse.
“Ya look pretty good to me,” Mae West tells Owsley in Goin’ to Town (1935), and this shows the great Mae’s imagination and generosity, for Owsley here is a sweaty, drunken, suicidal gambler with lines under his eyes set to marry her for her money (he will provide his family name). He was right at home with all the drinking in James Whale’s Remember Last Night? (1935), but the Production Code had by then put a cramp in his caddish style.
Owsley wound up making a movie with Martha Raye called Hideaway Girl (1936) and a last film at Republic Pictures, a musical called The Hit Parade (1937), before his death, which was a bit mysterious and had people in town talking. “Where does everybody finish?” Owsley asks Ann Harding in Holiday. “You die…And that’s all right, too.”
by Dan Callahan