Phillips Holmes: Too Beautiful
“Phil I loved dearly, but he was too beautiful to be in love with. You’d really get hurt. I knew that.“
— Mae Clarke, Featured Player
“I know that quite sincerely/ Houseman really/ Wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy.”
— The Schoolgirl in Noel Coward’s “Mad about the Boy”
“Young Phillips Holmes, on the Paramount roster of juveniles, has had his hair bleached and curled for a forthcoming production. Now he is a perfect blond. Whenever Jack Oakie sees him on the lot he pauses, and a puzzled expression crosses his face. ’Oh,’ he always says with mock surprise, ‘I thought you were Carole Lombard.’”
— Motion Picture News, April 26, 1930
Anyone beachcombing through the tide wrack of pre-Code Hollywood is tempted to ask, at one time or another: what happened?
But first: who he? His bizarrely plural name derived from the last names of his mother (Edna Phillips) and father (Taylor Holmes), both distinguished actors on Broadway and in films. They were comfortable enough to send him to the Newman School, where he rubbed elbows with the sons of ambassadors and plutocrats and crossed paths with his French teacher on the threshold of the local brothel. (“Well, Mr. Holmes, I suppose I shall have to report you.” “Likewise, I’m sure.”).[1] Thence, Grenoble, a year in England as a Cambridge undergraduate, and Princeton, where Frank Tuttle, shooting exteriors on a gridiron drama, scooped him up for Paramount in 1928.
Having joined the studio’s deep bench of chiseled masculine profiles, Holmes managed to stand out. His patrician willowiness tended to be matched, in a slight trylon and perisphere effect, with more plebian dollfaces: Nancy Carroll, Helen Twelvetrees, Sylvia Sidney. He moved away quickly from the obvious undergraduate and scion roles. Only a year after canoodling with Clara Bow in The Wild Party, he made his mark in The Devil’s Holiday as a country innocent fallen agonizingly in love. Picture Play Magazine noted “… he plays it naturally, sincerely, sympathetically. He makes masculine innocence not laughable but tenderly moving and credible.” Paramount continued casting him for innocence and sensitivity in Stolen Heaven (a first-time robber makes a pact with a first-time streetwalker: spend the money on beauty and happiness, then end it all); Broken Lullaby (Lubitsch’s adaptation of Rostand’s play, in which a French musician, guilt-wracked for killing a German musician in the trenches of WWI, becomes part of the lives of the German’s parents and sweetheart); and von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy. In the latter, his innocence curdles into unearthliness, a seemingly unmotivated wavering between hypersensitivity and numbness, abetted by the Machinal-like grotesquerie of his rich relations’ conversational rhythms and the mysterious busywork of the stamping room he supervises. From the rear we see him make a sudden (boisterous? exasperated?) lunge at Sylvia Sidney—she reacts with such shock we don’t know whether he kissed her or, perhaps, licked her nose. Preparing for the party to which his dream girl has invited him, he practices introductions and handshakes in front of a mirror with rapt Martian application.
He was well received by fans and critics; one wonders how he stood with his peers. A fawning interview in 1930[2] gave him rope to hang himself as a dizzy blond and a preening, sneering snob.
“… the day I met him he was sitting up in a hospital bed with a black eye, a swollen jaw, souvenirs of a motor accident, and with his hair dyed—at a director’s insistence, I assure you—that hideous hue known as Hollywood blond. … [T]here was a steady procession of what Phil termed ‘the Greeks bearing gifts.’ … ‘I’m not getting any rest,’ he wailed. …
“[W]hen he first came out [to Hollywood] he despised the place…. The town’s well-known provincialism irked him considerably…. ‘I was the most desolate and despondent person in this sad suburb.’ …
“’I haven’t really been presented sympathetically to the fans. In Only the Brave I had the role of a heavy, in Pointed Heels a snob, and in The Devil’s Holiday a weakling.’ …
“There are many players whom he doesn’t particularly fancy. He doesn’t indulge in gossip or verbal criticism of them, however. He impersonates them. He is a clever mimic and if his victims could see him imitating them they would get a rude shock.
“If Phil possesses any of the duller virtues like chastity or modesty, he keeps the fact to himself. He thinks a declaration of idealism, or a protestation of ‘purity,’ the most absurd gesture a man could make.”
In 1932 Thalberg beckoned and Holmes left Paramount for MGM, perhaps hoping for more “sympathetic presentation,” perhaps wanting to escape his reputation and start over. There, nothing seemed to go right either for him or for those close to him. Thalberg collapsed at the 1932 Christmas party and left on sabbatical; Selznick was a new broom and apparently unenchanted with his predecessor’s trouvaille. With few exceptions, Holmes was stuck in the aspic of the studio’s style.
And one foggy night in 1933 he drove Mae Clarke home from a party. She ended up in the hospital with a wired jaw, losing the prestigious part she had just begun shooting. The fan magazines viewed Phil’s latest motor accident—one of many—much less airily than they would have a few years earlier. “Little Mae Clarke” was a brave working girl whose career had been damaged, perhaps destroyed, by a careless wastrel. “The picture couldn’t wait—and that picture would, undoubtedly, have meant stardom! What a terrible break!”[3] (That picture was Made on Broadway; she was replaced by Sally Eilers.) Clarke excused and forgave him, but did Hollywood? His MGM contract came to an end in 1934 and was not renewed. It’s interesting to contrast his 1930 interview with the immensely more conciliatory 1934 “The Strange Case of Phillips Holmes” (“determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his fans”).[4]
In 1936, Phillips Holmes fell under the spell of Libby Holman, a torch singer with a predilection for beautiful, fragile younger men (her most famous liaison was Montgomery Clift). Holmes moved in with her, but was unable to hold her fully; when they were separated by the demands of their careers, he drank himself into a daze. Holman ended their affair in 1938 and married Holmes’ younger brother, Ralph.
Holmes continued working, in the US and abroad, in film and theater: in stock, he played opposite Frances Farmer in Petrified Forest; in Chicago, more startlingly, Odet’s titular Golden Boy. (Yes, the role taken by William Holden in the film version—William Holden, who played the boy toy to a Holmanesque star in Sunset Boulevard, the very part that Montgomery Clift turned down as too close to the bone.)
Both Phillips and Ralph Holmes enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the summer of 1941. In the summer of 1942, the military transport on which Phillips Holmes was a passenger collided with another plane. There were no survivors. He was Hollywood’s first “star” casualty of WWII.
by Phoebe Green
[1] Jon Bradshaw, Dreams That Money Can Buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman, New York, W. Morris, 1985, p. 199.
[2] Edward Nagle, “Out of an English Novel,” Picture Play Magazine, November 1930.
[3] Photoplay, May 1933, p. 82.
[4] Laura Benham, “The Strange Case of Phillips Holmes,” Picture Play Magazine, May 1934.