Barbara Pepper — She Dares to be Herself (1939) 🇺🇸
Barbara is as Broadway as Times Square, and no amount of movie-making will change the lady.
by Jean Sowers
The class consciousness of Great Britain of its former king, has nothing on the caste system of ye Hollywood. Movietown etiquette rules are strange and devious, based on “rank” at the box office or in Uncle Sam’s income tax reports. An ambitious young contract player gets her first lesson when her agent, who is also supposed to be her mentor and social guide, yells, “Who was that guy you were with last night? Is he important? Is he rich? Well, then, why should you be wasting your time? You should go to the Trocadero with something better so that Manny Cohen or Sammy Goldwyn will see you and wonder who you are!”
Some of the youngsters pay no attention. Eleanor Powell who like as not will plant a kiss on the beak of the studio gateman when she rushes through, the front entrance of a morning, or lunch with a fourth assistant cameraman at noon, is one. Olivia De Havilland who does exactly what she pleases about whom she sees and when, is another.
Then there’s Barbara Pepper, who was one of New York’s best known show girls before she signed for pictures, who was brought up in a Broadway atmosphere redolent with crooners, stars, directors, vaudevillians and agents.
La Pepper, blonde, cute, roly-poly who loves to set forth dripping fox furs and with a slick black evening gown hitched tightly over her hips, has long been the despair of her bosses, because she completely ignores the caste system.
Come five-thirty o’clock of an afternoon and Miss Pepper is probably holding forth in the Grotto, favorite eating joint of the studio hoi polloi, where a cup of coffee is a nickel and the best old-fashioned on tap costs but a quarter.
Barbara was born in the Astor Hotel, in the heart of New York’s theatrical section, late one spring evening. The Wrigley sign was winking like mad across the street, a bunch of Gus Edward cuties were rehearsing in a room above and some film star was in the act of signing the hotel register pushed across the counter by a suave Mr. Pepper, clerk, when word came Barbara was arriving.
She was brought up in this atmosphere. As a child, she watched D. W. Griffith stroll leisurely through the lobby. “Kid” Sullivan of Boston gang repute used to bring her boxes of candy. She thought “Owney” Madden, chief of New York gangdom, one of the handsomest men she ever met — “he always wore tweeds, spoke quietly and respectfully,” she says. Rudy Vallee was an early idol.
She watched her father cope with stars who had the swell -head and demanded suites and service de luxe. She watched him stake broken down troupers to the price of a meal, let them stay on and on in unpaid for rooms because of the job that was always around the corner.
When she was fifteen, Daddy and Mama Pepper packed her away to Fairfax Hall, Virginia. Having been thoroughly exposed for many years to the precarious manner of living, the idiosyncracies and the plain foolishness of show people, they decided that their golden-haired little darling should lead a different and more substantial life and know about people who moved in a different sphere.
But it was too late. Environment had done its work. At home for her first weekend, Barbara sneaked her dancing slippers into her bag and instead of returning to Virginia went around the corner to where Lee Shubert was trying out chorus girls. Shubert didn’t recognize the daughter of his old friend, Dave Pepper. He saw a cute kid who could dance and signed her.
Mama Pepper went to bed with a sick headache when she heard the news. Dave Pepper set his jaw grimly and went to see Lee Shubert, who was surprisingly on the side of Barbara.
“I tell you, Dave, I didn’t know who she was. I’d never have hired her if I knew the way you felt about it. But I did and I think the kid’s got somethin’. Why don’t you let her alone? If you put her back in school, she’ll break out again. We’ll look after her.”
The Peppers capitulated, but not until after a good deal of argument. On the tryout of the show out of town, Mama went along as chaperone.
When finally, after a Broadway run, the show went on tour, Harry Richman, one of its stars, and an old family friend, was enlisted and promised to look after Barbara.
In Detroit, tiring of constant surveillance, she slipped out one night and “dated” with a slick looking fellow who had been hanging around the stage door. He smelled vividly of eau de cologne and took her dancing to one of the smartest spots in town and tried to buy her champagne. Barbara did decline that. She was scared of Harry.
When she got home, Mr. Richman was waiting for her. He took the flat side of a hairbrush and, while her yells echoed through the hotel, applied it vigorously. Then he called long distance to New York and told the Peppers what he’d done.
There was no more dating. Furthermore, word went out from the “proper” sources to leave that Pepper kid alone. She was a nice kid — she was Dave Pepper’s daughter, Dave of the Astor in New York.
All of this was Barbara’s initiation, at the age of fifteen, into show business which, every trouper worth his salt knows, contains more phonies, more real guys, more honest-to-gosh people of every brand and variety than, you’d meet in a million years at Fairfax Hall.
She became one of the White Way’s best known show girls. She worked in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1932 and in two of George White’s Scandals. While with White, she was teamed with Harry Richman, played straight to Bert Lahr and Eugene and Willie Howard. When Eddie Cantor went to the West Coast for Roman Scandals with Sam Goldwyn [Samuel Goldwyn], he suggested Barbara be included in the list of “most beautiful show girls in the world” to be used in the picture. She landed in Hollywood thus as a Goldwyn girl, but she was not destined to keep on in this capacity.
King Vidor saw her, decided she could do much more than merely decorate a picture, cast her in the second lead of “Our Daily Bread.” Since then, she has had many roles.
When she went to the studio, she said, “I’ll do anything you want me to do, because I want experience. I want to learn about pictures and acting.”
In black satin and fox furs, she played Marge, the moll, in “Wanted Jane Turner.” In “The Big Game” she was a predatory dumb co-ed in a slinky evening dress which kept slipping off one shoulder. In “Coast Patrol” she was a girl of sixteen who kept trying to be sophisticated. “Winterset” saw her as a poor girl of the New York slums with an awful brown coat, run-over high-heeled shoes and an antelope hat, all of which she wore as if she were Mae West swishing up the red velvet carpet of Grand Central Station.
She was once Wheeler and Woolsey’s leading woman. She’s been in some pictures you’ve never heard of — in all, about twenty releases. She takes anything that comes along, never squawks, always gets her contract renewed and has a whale of a swell time just being Barbara Pepper.
When she made her first trip in four years to New York recently, she came to be the godmother to the newly born daughter of her dearest girl chum, who lives in the Bronx.
There’s a story there, too. Barbara decked herself out in a backless satin crepe, pert hat with veils and a couple of fox furs and boarded the subway for the Bronx. When she started home, it was late at night and her décolleté appearance attracted more attention than Barbara enjoyed from a bleary-eyed rowdy who sat across an empty car from her. She got off at the first station and was vainly trying to hail a taxi to take her back to the St. Moritz when a police car drove up. She climbed right in. The cops were so delighted they took her with them on a round of radio calls, all through the Bronx. All of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Barbara told them about Hollywood and Broadway. They told her about police work. After several hours of this, they drove her all the way in from the Bronx and deposited her at the door of her hotel to the great amazement of the doorman.
Back in Hollywood, she met the “gang” at the Grotto and regaled them with tales of her fine trip. They appreciated them. I doubt very much if she broke down and told all to her agent.
What steps they’ll take to get Miss Pepper to conform and be a lofty success, if she ever hits stardom, is something again. It will undoubtedly be a tough job to get her to be anything but herself — Barbara Pepper from 42nd street and Broadway. If they do get her to conform, it is my wager that the Wrigley sign will, out of shock, stop winking.
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Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, August 1939