by Stephen Vagg
Do people ever think about Robert Cummings anymore? Even film buffs? Did they ever think much about him in his heyday? Maybe in the 1950s, when he was one of the biggest stars in television. But apart from that? He always seemed overshadowed by something else – his co-stars, directors, other stars.
Robert Cummings never seemed to reach true iconic status as an actor. I say his name to film fans and they usually have to be prompted into any sort of recall by mentioning one of his well-known achievements. And he had a few. King’s Row. It Started with Eve. Saboteur. The Carpetbaggers. The original TV production of Twelve Angry Men. The first Beach Party movie. Abbott and Costello’s debut feature. A landmark employment contract lawsuit against Universal Pictures. Several cult noirs. One of the great “breaking in” stories in Hollywood. A charming personality, brilliant man, good actor, great light comedian, and personal mess. Cummings never quite made the top grade as a star, but he had an amazing life and career that is worthy of further examination.
He was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1910, the son of a local surgeon. Cummings learned to fly aeroplanes at a young age – his godfather was supposedly Orville Wright – and he became the first official licensed flight instructor in the US. Cummings studied engineering at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, where he became interested in acting; he dropped out of college (it was The Depression) and instead elected to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
Cummings looked for work on Broadway, but struggled. British plays were in great vogue at the time – it was the era of Journey’s End – so Cummings came up with one of the most audacious “breaking in as an actor” plans of all time. He raised money to buy a round ticket to England, practiced his English accent, invented the stage name “Blade Stanhope Conway”, and had photos taken of himself in England in front of a marquee with that name; he sent off letters to various New York agents and producers introducing himself as the actor-manager-director “Blade Stanhope Conway of Harrogate Repertory Theatre”, then arrived in New York under that name to take meetings. And the trick worked! Well, at first, at least… “Blade” was cast in in plays such as The Roof (1931) by John Galsworthy and in the revue Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1932). (Cummings later claimed he encouraged an old drama school classmate, Margaret Kies of Iowa, to try this method and she had some success as “British” Margaret Lindsay).
Then English accents became unfashionable (or the jobs slacked off), so Cummings thought he would try his luck again with a different identity – this time as an American, “Bryce Hutchens”. “Bryce” was cast in a Broadway revue, Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, which toured, taking Bryce aka Blade aka Cummings to Los Angeles.
Cummings tried the “change my identity” dodge a third time when he heard director King Vidor was looking for a Texan to appear in the film So Red the Rose (1935). Cummings pretended to be a Texan (after all, Missouri is just next door to the Lone Star state), but this time he was busted. Vidor gave him the part anyway, and from then on Cummings acted under his own name.
So Red the Rose was made at Paramount, who signed Cummings to a long-term contract. They gave him second leads in “B” pictures, usually playing callow young men: Millions in the Air (1935), Arizona Mahoney (1936), Forgotten Faces (1936), Border Flight (1936) (with Frances Farmer), Desert Gold (1936), Hollywood Boulevard (1936), The Accusing Finger (1936), Three Cheers for Love (1936), Hideaway Girl (1936), Arizona Mahoney (1936), Sophie Lang Goes West (1937), and Touchdown Army (1938. He had minor roles in “A”s like The Last Train from Madrid (1937), Souls at Sea (1937), Wells Fargo (1937), College Swing (1938), You and Me (1938) and The Texans (1938).
Paramount eventually lost their enthusiasm for Cummings and dropped him in September 1938. “I was poison,” he said later. “No agent would look at me”. Things must have seemed grim for the young actor – Paramount had given him a few chances (Cummings made a lot of movies there) but he hadn’t broken through.
Cummings managed to get the lead in a low budget programmer at Republic, I Stand Accused (1939), which became, in his words “a fluke hit – so at least I could get inside the casting agents again”. Then came the big break of Cummings’ career: producer Joe Pasternak was searching for a handsome young man to romance Deanna Durbin’s sister (played by Helen Parrish) in Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939) at Universal. With his boyish good looks and charm, Cummings fitted in perfectly into to the Pasternak world of song, dance and romance. The film was directed by Henry Koster who called Cummings “brilliant, wonderful… the best leading man I ever worked with. He had that marvellous comedy talent and also a romantic quality”.
Cummings ‘found himself’ as an actor in Three Smart Girls Grow Up. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t play all sorts of roles, but he could do light comedy almost better than anyone else – he was a younger version of, say, a Herbert Marshall, or Cary Grant. It helped that Cummings had grown into his looks a little more by now and had a beautiful speaking voice. Reviewing the film, The New York Times said Cummings “displays a really astonishing talent for light comedy — we never should have suspected it from his other pictures”. Universal signed him to a seven year contract starting at $750 a week going up to $3,000 a week.
Pasternak promptly used Cummings in support of their back-up Deanna Durbin, Gloria Jean, in The Under Pup (1939) (based on a story by Australian I. A. R. Wylie). After playing a juvenile lead in Rio (1939) – a less typical role, as a seedy drunk who finds redemption – Cummings was borrowed by Fox to fight with Ray Milland over Sonja Henie in the enjoyable Everything Happens at Night (1939). He then played a series of romantic leads: Charlie McCarthy Detective (1939) (an attempt to turn the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy into film stars), And One Was Beautiful (1940) (at MGM), and Private Affairs (1940). Cummings was reunited with Durbin, Koster and Pasternak in Spring Parade (1940) – by now Durbin was old enough to romance Cummings on screen without too much ick factor, and the resulting film is a sweet love letter to old time Austria (Durbin even wears a milk maid outfit in one scene). Cummings played a comic second lead in One Night in The Tropics (1940) in support of singer-actor Allan Jones – but the film is remembered today, if at all, for launching Abbott and Costello, who made their movie debut as a team in support parts. (It’s actually a really fun movie, albeit with a silly plot.)
Other studios were consistently requesting Cummings’ services to romance their leading ladies. MGM borrowed him for Free and Easy (1941) with Ruth Hussey (a brief post-Philadelphia Story attempt to turn her into a star, and George Sidney’s first movie as director), RKO for The Devil in Miss Jones (1941) with Jean Arthur, and Fox for Moon Over Miami (1941) with Betty Grable and Carole Landis. No one much remembers Free and Easy, which lost money, but Devil in Miss Jones is an utterly brilliant social comedy written by Norman Krasna, a rare pro-union movie from Hollywood: Charles Coburn plays a rich man who goes undercover at his own store to bust the union (led by Cummings) only to soften when he sees everyone looking out for him. Moon Over Miami is splendid fun, one of a string of Technicolor musicals that turned Grable into a huge star.
Norman Krasna also wrote It Started with Eve (1941) [left], a delightful romantic comedy which starred Cummings as a nepo baby who passes off Deanna Durbin as his fiancee in order to make his dying dad (Charles Laughton) happy… only for dad to recover. Cummings and Durbin don’t have enough screen time together, but the movie is magical – all three leads are perfect (to really see how good it is, compare it with the 1964 remake, I’d Rather Be Rich). Then Warner Bros – at the request of director Sam Wood, who had made Devil in Miss Jones – borrowed Cummings to play one of the juiciest roles available at the studio: Paris in King’s Row (1942). He and Ann Sheridan have the least showy roles in the movie – everyone else gets to go insane, commit murder, lose legs – but they anchor the piece, which remains as powerful and moving today as it ever was.
By now, Cummings was probably Universal’s top romantic male lead. As such, they gave him the star role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), playing one of the director’s innocent men on the run, with Priscilla Lane co-starring. It’s a terrific suspense tale, with splendid sequences and Hall-of-Fame Hitchcock villains, although it’s clear Cummings didn’t command the screen as well as a Gary Cooper or Joel McCrea (who Hitchcock wanted); nonetheless he and Lane bring a fresh-faced young enthusiasm to their performances. Few male actors had a hot streak like Robert Cummings from 1941 to 1942: The Devil and Miss Jones, It Started with Eve, King’s Row and Saboteur are all stone-cold classics, and he made crucial contributions to all.
Cummings then did leading man duties for an actress who Universal were expecting to become a big star, Diana Barrymore, in Between Us Girls (1942) (a role originally developed for Deanna Durbin). This movie is agonising to watch, mostly because Barrymore is called upon to do so much acting and she’s simply not capable of it; you feel sorry for Cummings, who is as professional as ever, and tries desperately to salvage the movie. A more successful effort was Princess O’Rourke (1943), written and directed by Norman Krasna at Warner Bros, where Cummings romanced a princess played by Olivia de Havilland. Princess O’Rourke features the quintessential “Robert Cummings part” – he plays a flyer, an amiable guy, up against a big female star in a romantic comedy, with strong support players around him. It was the last time Cummings made a movie with Krasna, which was a great shame as the actor was perfect for the latter’s work – many subsequent films from Krasna would cry out for a romantic male lead with the Cummings touch (John Loves Mary, Behave Yourself, The Ambassador’s Daughter).
The war was on and Cummings, with his extensive flying experience, found himself very busy, first in the Civil Air Patrol and then (from November 1942) the Air Force. He served in America, meaning that Cummings was still available to make movies, and he played small roles in two all-star efforts, Forever and a Day (1943) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943).
However, Cummings’ relationship with Universal had grown increasingly fractious over the years – the overall quality of the studio’s output was not high; while Universal had put Cummings in good movies, most of them were made by Joe Pasternak and Henry Koster, who had both left the studio to join MGM (Deanna Durbin’s career never recovered from their departure). Matters came to a head when Universal assigned Cummings to star in a comedy, Fired Wife; he was promised a cast including Teresa Wright, Charles Coburn and a director “comparable” to Leo McCarey – instead he wound up with Diana Barrymore, Walter Abel and Charles Lamont. Cummings refused to make the movie (Robert Paige replaced him), the issue wound up in court, and Cummings won. This was a notable victory in the fight to break the powers of the studios in enforcing restrictive employee contracts. Cummings’ achievement was overshadowed by a far better-known court case around the same time where Olivia de Havilland took on Warner Bros and won (I assume both actors bitched about their contracts during production of Princess O’Rourke). But his contribution should not be overlooked either.
Cummings signed a non-exclusive deal with Hal Wallis, who had just left Warner Bros to become an independent producer, releasing through Paramount. Wallis put him in You Came Along (1945) [above], a guy cry movie where Cummings plays (superbly) a terminally ill pilot; it was directed by Australia’s own John Farrow from a script co-written by Ayn Rand. Cummings then romanced Barbara Stanwyck in The Bride Wore Boots (1946), a non-Wallis film for Paramount. He made two films for an independent outfit, New Films: The Chase (1946), a hugely enjoyable noir from a story by Cornell Woolrich, and a Western, Heaven Only Knows (1947). The one you’re most likely to have seen is The Chase, which was not a hit at the time but has since earned a devoted cult following.
Producer Walter Wagner used Cummings in two films, both really interesting: The Lost Moment (1947) (from a Henry James novel) and Reign of Terror (1949) (a film noir set in the French Revolution directed by Anthony Mann). In between these, Cummings was in Sleep My Love (1948) a gaslighting thriller directed by Douglas Sirk (in his pre-women’s pictures at Universal phase). Box office for none of these was that strong: The Lost Moment was a big flop and Reign of Terror, amazingly, lost money. However, all films had a long life on television and Cummings had a great deal of fondness for Reign of Terror.
Like a lot of movie stars around this time, Cummings set up his own production company, United California, which announced a raft of productions. It resulted in just one, a terrible rom com with Hedy Lamarr, Let’s Live a Little (1948). Wallis used Cummings for The Accused (1949) with Loretta Young, who later said Wallis wanted to replace Cummings with Wendell Corey, but Young insisted on the better looking Cummings to play her love interest. Cummings made Free for All (1949) back at his old stomping ground, Universal; it’s a weak comedy, not helped by the fact that his co-star was Ann Blyth – Cummings couldn’t carry a film on his own shoulders if the material was weak, he needed someone strong to bounce off.
Cummings signed a three picture deal with Columbia for whom he made Tell it to the Judge (1949) with Rosalind Russell, The Petty Girl (1950) with Joan Caulfield (a really fun musical comedy) and The Barefoot Mailman (1950) (as a conman in 1895 Florida). He also supported Clifton Webb in For Heaven’s Sake (1950) at Fox and did another for Wallis, Paid in Full (1950) with Lizabeth Scott. None of these films were particularly successful at the box office – certainly nothing like his early ‘40s hits. The First Time (1952) was the first movie from director Frank Tashlin – made for Burt Lancaster’s company, through Columbia – but did not break Cummings’ run. This was a commercial cold streak that effectively ended his run as a top tier Hollywood star.
Male stars of Cummings’ generation generally had three options when their box office voltage faded – Westerns, Broadway, and/or television. Cummings never looked comfortable in a saddle, but he tried the other two. Broadway didn’t turn out too well – a comedy called Faithfully Yours only had a short run in 1951 – but television was far more stimulating, giving Cummings good roles in episodes of anthologies such as Lux Video Theatre and Somerset Maugham TV Theatre. His first TV series was a sitcom, My Hero (1952-53) where he played a real estate salesman who has fantasies and… that’s about it. It was not a success.
Cummings did another film with Tashlin, Marry Me Again (1953), then his luck started to turn. He played a support role for Hitchcock in Dial M For Murder (1954) (as Grace Kelly’s lover), which was a big hit. He was the leading man in two enjoyable, glossy musicals: Lucky Me (1954) with Doris Day and How to Be Very Very Popular (1955) with Betty Grable (her last movie). Even more impressively, Cummings played the lead part of Juror Number Eight in the television play Twelve Angry Men, winning an Emmy for his performance. (Henry Fonda played the role on film). It is terrific work and reminded everyone what Cummings could do with a strong script (from Reginald Rose) and first-rate director (Franklin J. Schaffner).
Cummings tried another television series, only this time he made sure he did it right. He produced and starred, got in Paul Hennings to create it and be the main writer, and surrounded himself with a strong support cast. The Bob Cummings Show (1955-59) featured Cummings as a bachelor photographer who was always trying to make dates with sexy models, only to find himself constantly cock-blocked through the efforts of his sister (Rosemary De Camp), nephew (Dwayne Hickman) and housekeeper (Ann B. Davis). The show was a huge hit, commercially and critically, winning Emmies and launching the television careers of Hickman (who went on to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), Davis (The Brady Bunch) and Hennings (who went on to dominate the TV sitcom landscape of the 1960s with The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres). In his memoirs, Hickman described Cummings as highly eccentric, but a brilliant master of light comedy technique.
“Hollywood’s never been really hot about me,” Cummings said around this time. “I was always second choice.” But on television, finally, he was a star. He continued to make guest appearances on anthology shows, notably Bomber’s Moon for Playhouse 90; this was from a Rod Serling script directed by John Frankenheimer, who said “Bobby’s a really fine dramatic actor, but people usually associate him only with comedy. Naturally enough I suppose. Directing an actor like this, who feels immediately what the script wants, and what the director wants, makes you love this business.” Cummings was also excellent playing the Robert Walker part in a radio adaptation of Strangers on a Train.
The Bob Cummings Show ended in 1959 after “we ran out of ideas” according to Cummings; it went into lucrative syndication under the title Love That Bob. Cummings continued to guest star on other shows – notably The Twilight Zone (“King Nine Will Not Return”, playing a pilot) – then made another TV series, The New Bob Cummings Show (1961-62).
There were high expectations for this, but it had the same flaws as My Hero – i.e. a weak concept (a pilot has adventures) and no sense of family – and only lasted one season.
Cummings moved back to features, appearing in My Geisha (1962), Beach Party (1963), The Carpetbaggers (1964) and What a Way to Go (1964). He had moved into playing sleazy villains, very well: in My Geisha he tries to rape Shirley MacLaine; in The Carpetbaggers he’s a magnificently slimy agent – slightly effeminate, aging, with a wicked glint in his eye: it’s a terrific performance. Cummings was the lead in Beach Party, carrying a lot of the plot, but all the attention (and songs) went to Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. He’s fun as a nutty shrink in What a Way to Go, again with MacLaine.
Cummings tried a fourth TV series with My Living Doll (1964-65), playing a scientist who lives with a beautiful robot (Julie Newmar). The concept pre-empted I Dream of Jeannie but there are key differences which sink it (it’s far more mean-spirited than Jeannie, and the female lead has far less agency). Cummings quit the show during filming, ostensibly because he was unhappy that Newmar was getting all the raves. The reality was more complex: Cummings had developed an addiction to methamphetamine.
Cummings had been one of the most health-conscious of Hollywood stars, promoting vitamins years before they were commonly accepted, and appearing far younger than his age, well into his forties. He even wrote a book called Stay Young and Vital (1960). Some time in the 1950s, however, Cummings began receiving injections of methamphetamine to help his energy levels – he was one of the many patients of the notorious Max Jacobson aka Dr Feelgood. Cummings developed an addiction, which helped wreck his looks, marriage, career, and finances (his tendency to consult astrologers and numerologists to make financial decisions probably did not help, neither did the fact that he had seven kids).
Cummings still had a lot of talent, as demonstrated by his performances in Promise Her Anything (1966) (Warren Beatty’s attempt to make up for rejecting What’s New Pussycat?, with Cummings hilarious as a Dr Spock style child rearing expert) and Stagecoach (1966) (far better than Barton Churchill in the 1939 original). But the disintegration in his appearance was now very noticeable – for instance, in Five Golden Dragons (1967), made for legendary producer Harry Alan Towers, he looks awful. A return to Broadway in The Wayward Story (1966) was unsuccessful and Cummings began guest starring on sitcoms like Bewitched, Here’s Lucy and Green Acres.
In the 1970s, Cummings starred in television movies like The Great American Beauty Contest (1973) and Partners in Crime (1973). He could still act, the voice remained melodious, but the work became harder to get and lower profile – dinner theatre, cameos, and so on.
Cummings was arrested a few times – once for a pyramid scheme involving vitamins, another time for defrauding the telephone company. He suffered from Parkinson’s, as you can see from this 1987 interview.
He moved into a home, and died in 1990 from kidney failure and complications of pneumonia. Still, it wasn’t all grim – there were a lot of laughs, as shown by this footage from his 80th birthday party, not long before his death.
This “last act” overshadowed what had been a pretty remarkable career. It’s true that Robert Cummings never quite had the charisma of the truly great film star – something about his personality, even at his peak, could never “hold” the audience via his presence alone without a name co-star. However, Cummings was a first-rate leading man; there were few better light comedians or more ideal foils for female co-stars. He was Deanna Durbin’s best romantic lead and matched beautifully with Jean Arthur. He was also adept at drama – not just King’s Row but films such as The Chase and Reign of Terror, not to mention his television appearances like Twelve Angry Men. On the small screen, Cummings was definitely a star – the charisma which wasn’t completely potent on the big screen was perfect on the little one. His three unsuccessful series were sunk by poor concepts rather than Cummings’ acting.
What lessons, if any, can be learned from the career of Robert Cummings? On the whole, I would say it was a triumphant success – he did it all: Broadway, Hollywood, Harry Alan Towers, Golden Years of Television, Hitchcock, Deanna Durbin… He just made one mistake – he got on drugs. Still, to some of us, he remains an icon, in the best way.
