‘Temptations’ and Warner Brothers (1930–1932)

Having made an unceremonious (and, if true, likely humiliating) exit from Paramount, Adrienne was given yet another chance to reunite with director-choreographer Larry Ceballos, who apparently liked her. Ceballos had graduated to organizing even larger dance routines on film, having lent his talents and chorines to Warner Brothers’ Show of Shows (1929)*. By early 1930, he was tasked with breathing life into Hello, Baby, one of the multitudinous musical Technicolor offerings of the year.

This two-reeler showcased petite, red-headed Ann Pennington, and a typical deluge of chorines to support her; only two of them were dignified with names, one of which was Adrienne, who retained her own name for the role. Hello, Baby is a tardy entry to the drearily long list of lost films, with only one of the sound discs remaining at UCLA. While Adrienne in early Technicolor would be this writer’s dream, a last accessible vestige does remain in the form of this catchy surviving audio snippet of “Believe Me”, one of the short’s four songs:

The actual plotline of Hello, Baby was of course scarce, and was little more than a so-called ‘nightclub romance’.

Adrienne’s output over the next several months would dwindle to be uncharacteristically scarce, which is to be forgiven with the cloud of Depression darkening overhead in 1930–if you didn’t already have a leg up, good luck. She was anything but idle, dividing her time between dance lessons with instructor Bud Murray and voice lessons with Mabel Hayes. Either way, Adrienne told Dan Thomas in 1931 that picture opportunities stopped popping up for her “about last February”. She appeared in only one more two-reeler in 1930, namely Johnny’s Week End, another Christie short produced over the late summer; it was silent star Johnny Hines’ talkie debut, and proved to be one of his last.

Adrienne’s charm was still evident enough that she didn’t stay out of work for long, though it was back on the stage. Her work in The Wild Party helped publicize the ‘major role’ she was given in Temptations of 1930, a ‘musical extravaganza’ of Broadway proportions meant to emulate Earl Carroll’s popular Vanities. Auditions held in August quickly gave way to the September premiere at San Diego High School’s Russ Auditorium, an oddly out-of-the-way but obviously cheaper choice for a Hollywood revue trying to outdo the Depression.

A group portrait of the Temptations themselves was published in The Los Angeles Times above the tearful claim that there were 500 down-on-their-luck chorines in the cinema capitol when LeRoy Prinz came to their rescue:

Temptations returned to the Mayan Theater, which Adrienne had opened three years earlier with Oh, Kay!, on September 25. The show proved so popular that it almost went on the road, sequels were talked of, and the chorines were invited to luncheons at the Biltmore. Adrienne, too, received plenty of publicity. Nothing else came on its heels, though, after the girls had their last vamp in early November–the producer who wanted to bankroll the sequel promptly fell ill and perhaps lost more than just his interest.
 

Adrienne spent the first half of 1931 honing her dancing chops, giving solos in artful programs overseen by Dorothy Lyndall alongside peers like Myra Kinch, and popping up in gossip columns. In February, she was noticed with a ‘new boyfriend’ at the Ambassador Hotel, and in August, she made the papers just by showing her face at the Biltmore. After years of picking up the ball and throwing it again, Adrienne had made a name for herself through perseverance.

September 1931 found more picture work for her, with a cute bit role in Under Eighteen. Though completely and utterly uncredited, Adrienne has more than a minute of flirtatious poolside dialogue with Warren William. This appearance led to another in Union Depot, where Adrienne hogs the camera from behind Joan Blondell’s profile, and culminated in a six month contract with options at Warner Brothers. Publicity releases would inflate her contract length to seven years. Adrienne, meanwhile, was doing subtraction by continuing to claim a youthful 21 instead of her real 24 years (a common career move that speaks to the quick expiration of starlets over 25 in early Hollywood).

Typical for Warner Brothers, the studio subjected their new find to a rigorous schedule of multiple overlapping productions, almost certainly ensuring none could be given more attention than what was absolutely necessary. The Expert, Alias the Doctor, Play Girl, The Famous Ferguson Case, and The Rich Are Always With Us were produced mostly simultaneously over the winter of 1931-2. Reporter and publicist “Scoop” Conlon accurately described Adrienne’s condition in his column, writing that she was ‘walking statuesquely through subordinate parts’ at the studio. Her plight was even exploited for publicity in Warners’ pressbook for The Famous Ferguson Case:

Some roles (like Play Girl and Alias the Doctor) were more ephemeral than others; in the second film, she appears in a party sequence as a Bavarian barmaid happily serving drinks to the crowd before being not-so-consensually seduced by one of her patrons. In the second of her two scenes, she is shown only briefly on her deathbed as Richard Barthelmess fails to keep her alive after an abortion–which, of course, is only obliquely referred to as an ‘operation’. 

Her bigger, more important parts were those of the meddling Allison Adair in the patrician drama The Rich Are Always With Us and the similarly catty Sadie in The Famous Ferguson Case. Both roles are pivotal to their film’s plot and are given ample screen time–Adrienne was so convincingly stuck-up that certain moviegoers remembered her with a little hostility.

As Allison, Adrienne goes toe-to-toe with stately Caroline (Ruth Chatterton) for the affections of her husband Greg (John Miljan) and wins. Ruth falls for Julian (George Brent), after their divorce, and doesn’t mope around about it, even when she discovers Greg and Allison are having a baby. The presence of Malbro (Bette Davis) proves troublesome when she tries to win Julian’s heart; the entire love rectangle culminates in a little brawl between Malbro and Allison, and eventually, the latter’s death.

“Adrienne Dore, after causing most of the trouble, has her head smashed against a tree,” wrote one contemporaneous reviewer. 

According to Whitney Stine’s Mother Goddam, the fight scene between Bette and Adrienne was shot seven times due to Davis’ height, which created an issue when attempting to tackle ‘tall, statuesque’ Adrienne, who was apparently twenty pounds heavier. Adrienne, at 5’4’’, was only an inch taller than Bette. Either way, Bette’s concentration during the seven takes was enough for director Alfred E. Green to take an early shine to her.

Adrienne’s efforts were not as handsomely rewarded; while inarguably effective in her typecasting of ‘snooty-gal-who-gets-what’s-coming-to-her’, Adrienne truly shined in comedy, and not once at Warner Brothers was she given the chance to make her audience laugh. Warners appeared wholly uninterested in tending to her talents; the studio was more concerned with Ann Dvorak, whose slated role in The Rich Are Always With Us was only given to Adrienne when Ann was given the lead in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. Adrienne’s beauty contest history made up the bulk of her publicity, lending credence to her repeated claims that looks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

“It isn’t the beauty, but the dumbness, that has brought failure to most contest winners,” Adrienne told interviewer Gardner Bradford in late 1931, “my ambition, or at least one of my ambitions, is to be different. It has taken me five years to overcome the handicap of having been ‘Miss Los Angeles’ in 1925.”

Adrienne brought her palpable humor to the interview, gladly declaring she’d leave films and retire to France as soon as she’d saved $10,000, and refuting the interviewer’s fear that she’d be forgotten if she did so.

“Maybe it’s the forgotten beauties that are the happy ones,” responded Adrienne, “newspapers don’t print happiness stories. There’s no drama in contentment. Perhaps most of the forgotten beauties are laughing at us because we’re sorry for them. It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?”

It was around this time that Adrienne met producer Burt Kelly. Kelly was the business partner of The Rich Are Always With Us producer Sam Bischoff; the thirty-two-year-old New York native came to the West Coast in 1931, and was Bischoff’s right-hand man in launching the Poverty Row label Kelly-Bischoff-Saal (K.B.S.) Productions. 

Adrienne would make her last film for Warner Brothers, Street of Women, over the spring of 1932; she speaks a few brief lines during a dance floor scene, where, as per usual, she is tasked with the thankless job of being the leading man’s other woman. (Though, in this film, she’s relegated from being the primary love pirate to the second-in-command.)

As in The Rich Are Always With Us, Adrienne is made a scapegoat, and it’s her arms Clarke Upton (Allen Vincent) runs from in order to reclaim his other other woman, Doris (Gloria Stuart).

Clarke Upton wouldn’t be the only one to run out on Adrienne; at the close of her six-month contract in April 1932, Warner Brothers left her behind on the dance floor, too, and decided not to renew her option. She was, again, out of work. Marian Marsh, Vivienne Osborne, and Mae Madison were all given the boot, as well, making plenty of room in the studio pasture for a new herd of hopeful beauties–Adrienne’s peers Gloria Stuart and Ann Dvorak were among those who went on to fight the next round. The press ironically echoed Adrienne’s sentiments on beauty in a harsh dig at Marian Marsh’s exit:

“Vivienne Osborne, Adrienne Dore, Evalyn Knapp and Marian Marsh are through at Warner Brothers. No one ever could understand all the publicity and prize roles that went to the innocuous Miss Marsh, who is after all just another pretty girl.”

Adrienne celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday the next month, and in August, she eloped with Burt Kelly to Chicago. She had previously expressed her hesitation to marry another actor or a ‘very rich man’ in a Warners publicity article, and she found her middle ground in a producer.

“[…] Actors–and actresses, too–have to be super-egotists if they are to amount to anything in the profession. They must think, and believe, that they are best in their line; otherwise, they cannot be convincing in the roles they portray. To keep the fires of vanity blazing they must be fed fuel, in the form of flattery, continually. One or the other–whichever has the strongest personality–must go to the top. […] So often men and women of the stage who marry are specialists in entirely different lines of work.”

Upon their return to Los Angeles, Burt and Adrienne rented a palatial hilltop residence at 8401 Queen’s Place (today 8401 Cresthill) that looked down over the Sunset Strip; they’d remain in the area for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t all peace and quiet, however, and Adrienne’s disinterest in sharing her love life with the press meant they waged war with it. In October, gossip columnists sniffed out her elopement, pointed fingers, and laughed:

Adrienne would spend another year away from the silver screen, but when she returned, she brought an updated hairstyle with her.

*As the productions of Paramount on Parade and Show of Shows overlapped, and a larger group of Larry Ceballos Girls have a ‘Black and White’ number in Show of Shows that builds on The Roof Garden Revue, it’s entirely plausible she’s there, albeit impossible to prove without surviving documentation. She is not, however, any of the chorines given face time in the front row.

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