The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century

A staff writer with the New Yorker, the author remembers her father, the actor Lyle Talbot (1902–1996), with much fondness in this combination biography and autobiography. As she traces his life and career, a huge tapestry of American mass entertainment and popular culture is unfurled as a backdrop: “Zelig-like, he’d been present at so many of its transformative moments.” Thus, she detours into such areas as sideshows, dance marathons, tent shows in Tornado Alley, the hypnotism craze of the 1890s to the early 1920s, the 1939 World’s Fair, Production Code censorship, and the “vinegary put-downs” of the “brassily vulgar” pre-Code movies. Lyle left smalltown Nebraska in 1918 to join a carnival, was a magician’s assistant, traveled with a theater troupe, and launched his own theater company, the Talbot Players, in Memphis before his 1932 arrival in Hollywood. He rarely turned down a job, so he did everything: romantic leads, elegant gangsters, and cowboys, appearing on Broadway (Separate Rooms) and in movie serials (Atom Man vs. Superman), exploitation films (Glen or Glenda), radio (Hollywood Footlights), TV (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), and Lincoln Center (South Pacific). Talbot’s life provides a springboard for an evocative “magic lantern of memory” by his daughter: “Stories were the soft golden net that enmeshed us. My father’s stories.” In the end, Talbot has created a fluid time-travel flight on the wings of cinema. (Nov.)