Another Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Associated Press

June Allyson

July 11, 2006
June Allyson, Adoring Wife in MGM Films, Is Dead at 88
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
June Allyson, whose perky wholesomeness made her the perfect girlfriend in a series of MGM musicals during the 1940’s and the perfect screen wife during the 1950’s, died on Saturday at her home in Ojai, Calif. She was 88.
Her death was announced yesterday by her daughter, Pamela Allyson Powell. The cause was pulmonary respiratory failure and acute bronchitis, she told The Associated Press.
Cheerful, blonde and petite but with a husky voice, Miss Allyson turned from chorus girl into movie star when she melted into the arms of Van Johnson in “Two Girls and a Sailor” in 1944. For the next decade, Miss Allyson and Mr. Johnson were a romantic team, co-starring in “High Barbaree” (1947), “The Bride Goes Wild” (1948), “Too Young to Kiss” (1951), and “Remains to Be Seen” (1953).
She also starred twice opposite Robert Walker — in “Her Highness and the Bellboy” (1945) and “The Sailor Takes a Wife” (1946) — and played a bouncy Jo March in MGM’s glossy 1949 remake of “Little Women.”
By 1950, Miss Allyson had made the segue from adoring girlfriend to devoted wife. She was happy to leave musicals behind. Although she had started in the chorus on Broadway, she told an interviewer in 1951: “I couldn’t dance, and, Lord knows, I couldn’t sing, but I got by somehow. Richard Rodgers was always keeping them from firing me.”
She was the steadfast wife of James Stewart’s one-legged baseball player in “The Stratton Story” (1949); the widow left behind by Mr. Stewart’s bandleader in “The Glenn Miller Story” (1953); the worried wife of Mr. Stewart’s baseball player recalled to active duty in “Strategic Air Command” (1955); and the understanding wife who loses Alan Ladd’s jet pilot to honor and duty in “The McConnell Story ( 1955).
In “Executive Suite” (1954), she assured her husband, played by William Holden, who was vying for president of the Tredway Corporation, “Darling, if it’s something you really want, that’s all that’s important to either of us.”
Ms. Allyson was always modest about her star power. “Women identify with me,” she said in a 1986 intervew, “and while men desire Cyd Charisse, they’d take me home to meet Mom.”
When Miss Allyson tried to move beyond Peter Pan collars and sugary characters as the harsh and nasty woman who pushes her husband (José Ferrer) into a nervous breakdown in “The Shrike“ (1955), her acting was praised but audiences refused to accept her, and the movie was a box-office failure.
June Allyson was born Ella Geisman on Oct. 7, 1917, in the Bronx. Her alcoholic father skipped out when she was 6 months old. When she was 8, she was crushed by a falling tree limb while riding a bicycle. After four years in a back brace, she taught herself to dance by watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies.
The expensive therapy the injuries required tumbled the Geisman family out of genteel poverty into desperation. In her 1982 autobiography, “June Allyson,” written with Frances Spatz Leighton, Miss Allyson said she and her mother were forced to move countless times. The best months were when her mother had a job in a restaurant, she wrote, “because sometimes she could bring home food.”
Recovering from her injuries, she tried out for and won a chorus job in a 1938 Broadway revue, “Sing Out the News,” taking the name June (for the month) Allyson. Between 1938 and 1941, Miss Allyson sang and danced in several Broadway shows, including “Very Warm for May,” “Higher and Higher” and “Panama Hattie.” As understudy to Betty Hutton, who played the comedy lead in “Panama Hattie,” Miss Allyson took over the part for five performances when Miss Hutton came down with measles. In a plot development worthy of an MGM musical, the producer George Abbott saw her performance and offered her a small featured role in his next musical, “Best Foot Forward.” MGM bought the movie rights to the musical, and Miss Allyson was invited to Hollywood to play her role on screen. She stayed at MGM for 11 years and 25 movies.
“The only parental authority I had was the studio,” Miss Allyson said in 1972. “When I was a star, there was always somebody with me, to guard me. I was not allowed to be photographed with a cigarette, a drink, a cup of coffee or even a glass of water because someone might think it was liquor. When I left the studio I was already married and had two children, but I felt as sad as a child leaving home for the first time.”
A second-tier star at a studio that prided itself on owning “more stars than there are in heaven,“ Miss Allyson defied the studio boss Louis B. Mayer in only one thing. She fell in love with the married movie star Dick Powell. Mr. Powell divorced his wife, the actress Joan Blondell, and married Miss Allyson in 1945, despite Mr. Mayer’s opposition. Although the marriage was rocky at times — Miss Allyson once filed for divorce — it lasted until Mr. Powell’s death from cancer in 1963 at age 58. In her autobiography she touched on her struggle with alcoholism after Mr. Powell’s death.
Miss Allyson and Mr. Powell co-starred in two mediocre movies in 1950, “The Reformer and the Redhead” and “Right Cross.” Miss Allyson recalled being told that because of her childhood accident, she would never be able to have children, so she and Mr. Powell adopted a baby girl, Pamela, in 1948. Two years later, she gave birth to a son, Richard.
Pamela Allyson Powell now lives in Santa Monica, Calif. Richard, of Los Angeles, also survives Miss Allyson, as does her husband, David Ashrow, a dentist whom she married in 1976. A previous marriage, to Mr. Powell’s hairdresser, Glenn Maxwell, in 1963, the year Mr. Powell died, ended in divorce.
Miss Allyson’s film career had petered out in the late 1950’s with a remake of “My Man Godfrey “ (1957) opposite David Niven, and a sudsy Ross Hunter melodrama “A Stranger in My Arms” (1959). From 1959 to 1961, she was host of and occasionally starred in “The DuPont Show With June Allyson,” a dramatic anthology on CBS. After replacing Julie Harris as the star of “40 Carats” on Broadway and touring for a year in a revival of “No, No Nanette,” she returned to the screen and to MGM in 1972 as a lesbian murderess in “They Only Kill Their Masters.” She also appeared on “Love Boat,” “Murder, She Wrote” and other television shows.
In 1985 she became the national spokeswoman for Depend, a diaper for adults with incontinence. Still wearing her trademark pageboy hairdo, she broke one of the last taboos by bringing this uncomfortable subject into the nation’s living rooms by way of television commercials.
Writing about Miss Allyson’s autobiography in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: “Miss Allyson presents herself as the same sunny, tomboyish figure she played on screen. Even the tough parts of her life — the death of her husband Dick Powell and her subsequent bout with alcoholism — are described in a relatively blithe manner.” Ms. Maslin added that Miss Allyson sounded “like someone who has come to inhabit the very myths she helped to create on the screen.”