Happy New Year!

[Leslie and Ronald Howard at Marion Davies’ circus party 1937
(from LeslieHowardForever.tumbler.com)]

Hello, everyone!

I hope you have all had a very happy holiday season and are looking forward to ringing in a new year we all hope will bring peace and prosperity to everyone. I have been absent for the last two months but will be back in the new year with new posts and pages on my blog.

Well, I'm not sure if this Marion Davies' circus party where Leslie and his son, Ronald, were celebrating was held on New Year's Eve, but I am going to use it to wish you all a very Happy New Year!


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Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind (1939)]

Gone With The Wind to air on SundanceTV Thursday, November 24, at 10:00 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

Leslie Howard, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Olivia de Havilland star in the top grossing movie of all time, Gone With The Wind. Produced by David O. Selznick, Directed by Victor Fleming and Screenplay by Sidney Howard, this film was delayed for two years while Selznick negotiated with MGM for Clark Gable and conducted an extensive "American Idol" type search for Scarlett O'Hara.

Top Awards:

Best Picture - Selznick International Pictures
Best Director - Victor Fleming
Best Actress - Vivien Leigh
Best Adapted Screenplay - Sidney Howard
Best Supporting Actress - Hattie McDaniel

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Remembering Jack Elam On His Birthday

[Jack Elam]

I just love character actors. And today would have been the 96th birthday (if I did the math right, and his year of birth is disputed) of one of my favorite character actors, Jack Elam (13 November 1920 - 20 October 2003).

Born William Scott Elam in Miami, Arizona, Elam appeared in 73 movies and 41 television series. Elam played the scheming, no-account, dastardly bad guy better than anyone. It is no coincidence that one of his best performances was in one of my favorite films, Rawhide, starring Tyrone Power. But Elam could also play the funny man which he did with greater frequency in the later years of his career.

Happy Birthday, Jack Elam.

Jack Elam's Obituary, The Guardian, 28 October 2003

Remembering Martin Balsam On His Birthday

[Martin Balsam in Psycho, 1960]

Martin Balsam (4 November 1919 - 13 February 1996) was one of those great character actors I loved watching. You know the kind. They seem to appear in all your favorite films, the ones you have on DVD and have watched so many times you know the dialogue word for word.

Balsam was the ardent detective, Milton Arbogast, in Psycho (1960) whose agonizing fall down those stairs went on forever. He was the calm and controlled Juror #1 in 12 Angry Men (1957). The way Balsam stood up after the jury had taken one more of those secret votes, you just knew Henry Fonda had finally turned the jury. His portrayal of O.J. Berman in Breakfast at Tiffany's always sticks in my mind, "She's a phoney. But she's a real phoney." Balsam played the sympathetic but ineffectual cop, Police Chief Mark Dutton, in Cape Fear (1962). And when he sneezed that last time in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and Walter Matthau realized he had gotten his man...well, what can I say?

Happy Birthday, Martin Balsam.

Martin Balsam's Obituary, The New York Times, 14 February 1996

Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Kay Francis in British Agent, 1934]

British Agent (1934) to air on TCM Friday, October 28, 10:45 AM EST, 7:45 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

British Agent is a film based on the autobiography of R. H. Bruce Lockhart, a member of the British Secret Service. Lockhart's book, Memoirs of a British Agent, was also said to have inspired one of the

A Very Surprising Man

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish in Berkeley Square, 1933]

When I first decided to start my Leslie Howard Fan Page on Facebook I had only intended to post some pictures. But in my search for new photos my natural curiosity was piqued and I wanted to know the stories behind the images. This launched me on an almost compulsive search for information about Leslie Howard—The Man. I soon realized that I needed a blog to contain all the information I was discovering and that is how LeslieHowardSteiner.blogspot.com came into being.

Murray Hill

[Leslie Howard pictured in Film Weekly, September 30, 1932]

Most people remember Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes from Gone With The Wind (1939) or as Sir Percy Blakeney from The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935). What most people don't know is that Howard was also a writer and had many articles and stories published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and many trade magazines. Howard's first published story appeared in The Penny Weekly when he was in his early teens. But Howard didn't limit himself to stories for magazines. He was also a playwright. Two of the first plays he produced, staged and appeared in were of his own composition: The True Artist—of which little is known—and Deception—the story of a private detective on his quest to track down stolen jewels.

Remembering James Whitmore On His Birthday

[The Next Voice You Hear Trailer, 1950]

James Whitmore's (1 October 1921 - 6 February 2009) career spanned radio, stage, film and television. He is one of only a handful of performers to have won three of the four EGOT honors. His 1999 Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor - Drama Series came for his appearance as Raymond Oz in The Practice. Whitmore won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Battleground in 1949, probably my favorite WWII movie. He was also nominated in the same category by the Academy Awards but lost out to Walter Huston for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). And Whitmore won a Tony for Best Newcomer in 1948's Command Decision.

But my absolute favorite James Whitmore performance was as Joe Smith, average man, in The Next Voice You Hear (1950) co-starring Nancy Davis, soon to be Nancy Reagan. In it, Whitmore hears a voice on the radio claiming to be God who speaks to humanity for several wonderful but terrifying days. I watch the movie at least once a year.

Happy Birthday, James Whitmore.

James Whitmore's Obituary, The New York Times, 7 February 2009

Berkeley Square

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish in
Berkeley Square, Lyric Theatre, London]

After years of disappointments on Broadway, Leslie Howard finally had a string of successes. It had been ten years since Howard made the decision to "try" acting and he was finally seeing the rewards. Howard had received rave reviews for The Green Hat and Her Cardboard Lover and was now an actor in demand. He got his first chance to star in a purely dramatic role in Escape, touted (due to a misunderstanding) as the last play John Galsworthy would ever write.

Captured!

[Leslie Howard in Captured! 1933]

In March 1933 Leslie Howard was filming Captured! for Warner Brothers. The film co-starred Howard's friend, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Howard had met Fairbanks during the summer of 1925 when the two happened to be crossing the Atlantic aboard the RMS Majestic at the same time. Fairbanks was just fifteen years old and hadn't yet made his first film.

Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage, 1934]

Of Human Bondage (1934), directed by John Cromwell and produced by Pandro S. Berman and RKO Radio Pictures, stars Leslie Howard in the finest screen performance of his career up to that time and Bette Davis in her breakout role. Of Human Bondage is based on the 1915 novel of W. Somerset Maugham, a novel which has never been out of print since

Vague Leslie

[Leslie Howard in John Galsworthy's Escape, Booth Theatre,
New York, 26 October 1927 - March 1928, 173 Performances]

By 1927 Leslie Howard had become very well known as one of Broadway's best comedic actors. But it wasn't until his appearance as Matt Denant in John Galsworthy's Escape that he was fully accepted as a dramatic actor. And his reviews were the best of his ten-year career:

"One of the fine performances of our day in the theatre is

Leslie Howard's Rules of Theatre Etiquette

[Leslie Howard as Oliver Blayds-Conway in The Truth About Blayds
by A. A. Milne, Booth Theatre, New York, March 14 to June 1922,
108 Performances]

Leslie Howard's Rules of Theatre Etiquette:

1. Don't ask the box office man if it's a good play.
2. Don't have any faith in dramatic critics, the star system, press agents, photographs in the newspapers, or articles by actors.
3. Don't try to buy tickets for a play an hour before the performance.

Real or Imagined?

[Leslie Howard with Archie Mayo
on the set of It's Love I'm After, 1937]

Leslie Howard's son, Ronald "Wink" Howard, talks about his father's shyness:

"As far as living in Hollywood was concerned Leslie had always kept a pretty low profile, not from any innate hostility to the place, but simply because he was not a very social animal. He was rarely seen 'around and

My Chronology of Leslie Howard's Life

[Leslie Howard with his children, Doodie and Wink,
at their home Stowe Maries, at Dorking in Surrey c. 1939]

I have now been working on my "Chronology of Leslie Howard's Life" for months and have just made it halfway through his professional life—to 1930, where his movie career now begins. This is monumental for me. I cannot tell you how difficult it has been to put the pieces of Howard's life together in a meaningful sequence. I have outlined the reasons this is so arduous in a note which can only be viewed by clicking the link in the Chronology, or by clicking here. I am not going to rehash all those reasons in this post, but I will talk about the most primary among them.

I Know What It's Like to Be in Human Bondage, Continued

[Leslie Howard with his daughter Leslie Ruth "Doodie," c. 1926]

"He was not a great party-lover, which also endeared him to his children, and most parties, when I was small, found him sneaking up to my room like a conspirator and again dozing off on my bed. He was usually found out; someone would miss him, and my poor mother then had to play the villain and come searching for him. Suddenly, her voice would be heard

I Know What It's Like to Be in Human Bondage, Continued

[Leslie Howard with his children, Ronald and Leslie Ruth, c. 1930]

In August 1934, Gladys Hall interviewed Leslie Howard for Motion Picture Magazine. I do not know if Ms Hall realized before the interview began that Howard was at that moment so preoccupied with thoughts of his children, but she definitely knew it afterward. In one of the longest interviews Howard ever gave, he talks exclusively about his feelings on

I Know What It's Like to Be in Human Bondage

[Leslie Howard with his son and daughter, Ronald "Wink"
and Leslie Ruth "Doodie," in one of the last pictures they
took together before the start of WWII]

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Gladys Hall for Motion Picture Magazine printed in the August, 1934, issue:

I was reminded, as he talked, of a little incident Bette Davis told me about him when they were working on Of Human Bondage together. She said that Leslie was standing just off

Leslie Howard In Sing-Sing

[Leslie Howard, New York Public Library,
Billy Rose Collection, c. 1924]

On 1 January 1924 Leslie Howard began to keep a diary. Whether it was because he received a leather-bound journal for Christmas, or he had made a New Year's Resolution, or he merely wanted to keep a record of his life and the people he met, we don't know. Howard and his family were living just a block away from Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Great Neck, New York, at the time.

Ronald "Wink" Howard included the first six months of entries in Trivial Fond Records (1982), the book of Leslie Howard's own writings with

Not Leaving Anything to Chance

[Leslie Howard, 1924]

Excerpt from my Leslie Howard Biography:

Weeks passed, with the job at Cox's still being held open(3), when Howard finally visited the office of Ackerman May, Theatrical Agent. May, who liked the sound of Howard's voice, referred Howard to the fifth touring company of Peg O' My Heart. Howard managed to secure an audition but he wasn't taking any chances on his performance. While waiting for the day of his audition to arrive he and Ruth saw the show every night until he had every word, every move, every inflection memorized. The producer was amazed and convinced he had found a star. But in the words of Leslie Ruth Howard(6), all he really had was a "well-trained monkey." Howard was offered the part of "Jerry" at a salary of £4.4.0 per week. Fortunately, his wife, Ruth, was also hired as understudy to the ladies of the company which meant that she could also go on tour and be paid as well.(3)


(3) Fletcher, Adele Whitely. "Love In The Life Of Leslie Howard." Modern Screen, October, 1933. Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated, New Jersey.
(6) Howard, Leslie Ruth. A Quite Remarkable Father: A Biography of Leslie Howard. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1959.

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Leslie Howard - His Own Man

[Leslie Howard, c. 1920s]

Roland Pertwee remembers Leslie Howard after his death in a letter to Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard's son:

"I have very tender, soft-edged memories of Leslie who, untouched by success, moved gently through life and always contrived to appear just a scrap out of focus. Unlike the majority of stars in that particular

Leslie Howard Clairvoyant, Or Just Good Businessman?

[Leslie Howard, c. 1920]

Excerpt from my Leslie Howard Biography:

Based on Leslie Howard's later success in managing his career, he would have made a fine businessman. Howard had the foresight to give up lucrative salaries as actor and instead take minimum wage to become co-producer in many of the plays in which he appeared—co-producer with half the profits and movie rights for any play that sold, and in those days, most of the talking pictures were just transplanted plays from Broadway.(3) But the idea of life as a businessman stuck at a desk in a dreary office seemed tedious and dull to Howard, and he still held firm to his dream of becoming a writer.


(3) Fletcher, Adele Whitely. "Love In The Life Of Leslie Howard." Modern Screen, October, 1933. Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated, New Jersey.

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Programming Note

[Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland in It's Love I'm After, 1937]

It's Love I'm After to air on TCM this Sunday, August 21, 7:30 AM EST, 4:30 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

If you missed the chance last month to see Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in this 1937 "rippling farce, brightly written and deftly directed," you have another chance this Sunday. It's Bette Davis Day on TCM.

Says Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times review of 11 November 1937: "Mr. Howard's Basil Underwood is a gem of conceit, self-delusion and calculated posturing, but he shyly confesses in every bit of character shading that there is a very human chap beneath the veneer." "This [farce] spins delightfully." "Mr. Howard and Miss Davis must give us other farces and Archie Mayo must direct them again. It's good to find a comedy with people in it instead of whimsies."

In the vernacular of today—It's funny! It's a delight! Watch it!

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Have You Missed Me?

[Leslie Howard, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library, c. 1920]

Hopefully, you all have missed my posts over the last several days. I have been diligently working on the "Leslie Howard Biography" section of my blog and haven't taken the time to write any daily posts.

It is a painstaking process of taking the pieces of various books, newspaper and magazine articles, and online sources, and figuring out how they fit together. For some reason, writers don't always put dates in their pieces. I have never been able to figure out why. Also, a story may appear in one source and not in another, which requires me to find a verification source. This, too, can be difficult if the second source got their information from the first source. And some of the stories, or episodes, of Leslie Howard's life vary. I assume this is because the author has a particular point of view they want to put across. Separating fact from opinion takes time as well. I hope at the end to have one coherent biography and also a chronology of Leslie Howard's life.

I would like to solidly complete "The London Theatre Years - 1916 to 1920" before I continue my daily posts. This should be within a day or two. Please bear with me.

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Holy Hollywood

[Leslie Howard by Vandamm Studio, 1932]

By 1927 Leslie Howard had been working in New York on the Broadway stage for seven years. He had appeared in seventeen plays there and many others in his native England going back to the start of his professional career in 1916. Howard had even authored and directed some of his own productions. He was well-known in New York.

A Most Unappreciated Man

[Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind, 1939]

Leslie Howard definitely did not want the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (1939). Howard thought Ashley to be "a dreadful milk-sop, totally spineless and negative." He found the character "unsure and vacillating, uncertain as a moth fluttering between lamps—the done-to instead of the doing man, torn between the opposing polarities of two

William Gargan - This post is dedicated to Leslie Gargan

[Leslie Howard with good friend Bill Gargan, along
with Fred MacMurray, W. C. Fields and George Arliss]

In William Gargan's book, Why Me? An Autobiography, Gargan enjoys recounting his memories of times spent with his good friend, Leslie Howard. One of the traits Gargan found amusing about Howard was his "frugality." This trait in Howard was also noted by Howard's daughter, Leslie Ruth, in her book, A Quite Remarkable Father. Leslie Ruth tells a

Love Wins In The End

[Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer taking a stroll in between takes
on the MGM lot where they were filming Smilin' Through, 1932]

Smilin' Through is the story of Sir John Carteret (Leslie Howard), a man who suffers a life-long feeling of loss and loneliness after losing his bride, Moonyeen Clare (Norma Shearer), at the very moment they are to share their wedding vows. Their mutual friend, Jeremy Wayne (Fredric March), shows up at the church to kill Carteret out of jealousy because

Leslie Howard Begins His Love of Horses

[Leslie Howard]

Leslie Howard had a very active imagination and used it to begin writing plays and stories at a young age. He wrote his first play, in Latin, by the time he was 13 years old. Young Leslie's drama was presented at the Christmas pageant at his school. His mother encouraged her son, but his

Progamming Note

[Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland and
Bette Davis in It's Love I'm After, 1937]

It's Love I'm After to air on TCM on Sunday, August 21, at 4:30 AM PST [Please check your local listings]

Produced by Warner Brothers and directed by Archie Mayo, It's Love I'm After is a comedy which brings together Leslie Howard and Bette Davis for the third time. They appeared together previously in Of Human Bondage (1934) and The Petrified Forest (1936).

The film is about a pair of egotistical actors (Howard and Davis) who are in love but who have delayed their marriage over and over again throughout the years, mainly due to their heated arguments off stage. But the two finally agree that tonight is the night, until a young heiress (Olivia de Havilland) shows up and becomes totally infatuated with Leslie Howard. (I know that feeling.) Her fiancé (Henry Grant) pleads with Howard to discourage de Havilland and the wedding is delayed once again as Howard barges in at de Havilland's country home to show her just how obnoxious he can be.

The movie received good reviews and classic movie reviewers have come to recognize the film as undervalued and neglected.

I Love My Husband, But—

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish
in Berkeley Square, 1933

Norma Shearer, in an article "I love my husband, but—" for Modern Screen, June 1935, describes Leslie Howard:

"There was Leslie Howard . . . Leslie, true spiritual, who can wear the lace frills and bend the knee with such grace and conviction. Leslie with those amazing blue eyes that so 

Her Cardboard Lover

[Leslie Howard and Jeanne Eagels
in Her Cardboard Lover]

In early 1927 Leslie Howard began rehearsals for Her Cardboard Lover which was to open at the Empire Theatre in NYC on 21 March 1927. Howard's part was André Sallicel, a "romantic and penniless young ass who falls desperately in love with a wealthy woman from Paris." Howard was not the star of the show, he didn't even receive billing. The star

BBC Report About Leslie Howard's Death

[BBC Report of Leslie Howard's Death]

On Saturday, July 30, I posted on Facebook the 2014 BBC report on Leslie Howard's Death in which Estel Eforgan (Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor) and Tom Hamilton (Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave A Damn) were interviewed.

I did not post on Monday or Tuesday so that I could devote all my time over the last week to an extensive update to my page: About the Ibis and Its Fateful Flight • Tuesday, June 1, 1943. The page is still not completely finished. I will be adding Estel Eforgan's and Ronald Howard's analyses as time permits. One of the advantages of a blog is that pages can be constantly updated with additional information as it is found and I will be updating the Ibis page until I have found every bit of info I can. I have found conflicting information and some new information that I had not seen before and will be investigating the sources of that information as well.

The page includes information about the plane itself, the shoot down and corresponding newspaper articles, the theories about why the plane was targeted, and the passengers and crew. It contains pictures of the plane, the airfield in Portela and the monument at Cadeira, Spain.

I hope that you will take the time to read it and draw your own conclusions.

• Eforgan, Estel. Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor. London: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2010. ISBN 978-0-85303-941-9.
• Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard. London: St. Martin's Press, 1984. ISBN 0-312-41161-8.
• Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave A Damn at the Internet Movie Database
• Leslie Howard The Man Who Gave A Damn Website

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The "Phoney" War

[Leslie Howard by Fred Daniels,
National Portrait Gallery, c. 1942]

In the early days of WWII, Leslie Howard didn't have much to do. Even though Great Britain had declared war on Germany in early September, 1939, no real fighting began for months. Hitler was too busy invading and vanquishing Poland. Howard had planned to begin filming The Man Who Lost Himself as soon as he arrived in England in August, but due to

The Fighting Democrat

[Leslie Howard and J.B. Priestly on Britain Speaks, 1940]

It was the end of January 1941. Leslie Howard had been at home in England since August 1939. Great Britain had been at war with Germany for approximately sixteen months. Howard had been appearing on J.B. Priestly's BBC radio program Britain Speaks, or "Britain Pleads" as some called it, since July 1940 pleading with America to enter WWII on the side of the Allies.

Within the previous week, Howard had heard what would come to be known as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "The Four Freedoms" speech

Trivial Fond Records, Concluded

[Leslie Howard and his son, Ronald, at
their home, Stowe Maries, c. 1938]

Over the last two days I have been sharing Ronald Howard's "Hamlet" letters to his father. Those letters were written when Ronald had come to believe that his father had been murdered by the Germans. Howard had also finally accepted the fact that he would never know who ordered the shoot down of his father's civilian plane. Ronald had tried so

Trivial Fond Records, Continued

[Leslie Howard with his son, Ronald, at
the Hotel Carlyle in New York, 1935]

Ronald Howard states in Trivial Fond Records, a book containing the writings of his father, Leslie Howard, that he wrote a series of poems in a "sense of protest" immediately after learning of his father's death. However, after the younger Howard understood what his father must have gone through in the minutes before his death, he wrote another

Trivial Fond Records

[Leslie Howard with his son Ronald
on one of their many crossings]

I have recently been reading transcripts of Leslie Howard's WWII radio broadcasts transmitted from England to the United States asking the U.S. to enter the war in support of the Allies. I will be sharing his thoughts this week.

But first I would like to give you this poem Howard's son, Ronald, wrote to his father on the occasion of his father's death. Ronald Howard was

Never The Twain Shall Meet

[Leslie Howard and Conchita Montenegro
in Never the Twain Shall Meet, 1931]

[For those following my blog by email, this is my only scheduled post for the week and will be posted to Facebook in sections.]

The next Leslie Howard film to be shown on TCM (Monday, July 25, 11:00am PST) will be the 1931 MGM remake of Never the Twain Shall Meet with Conchita Montenegro. The Peter B. Kyne novel of the same