#ClassicFilmReading: June Allyson by June Allyson

I decided to kick off this summer's Classic Film Reading Challenge in June with the woman who shares the name, but oh boy was this hard to read. 

I have to say, I thought June Allyson was a little more independent? But after reading this, that perception must be a result of the tireless work MGM put in to make her seem more like Jo March than Meg March, because honestly...she seemed to have been very, very passive in her own life. 

A lot of the details of her life are glossed over. The brief bits we get of her early life are hard to put in context with linear facts; her mother comes up maybe once, and then is never heard from again (she didn't even go to June's wedding!). She has a brother, but if that came up before the final pages of the book, I glossed over it. She auditioned for Broadway as a bet, but almost immediately Hollywood came knocking, so there's no time spent on the rags-to-riches story of her life. 

And then Dick Powell comes along. So let's talk about the Dick in the room. 

Once June gets to their meeting, he takes over the book (much like it feels, reading this, that he took over her life). They were married from 1945 to 1963, which is eons in Hollywood time, but if she set out to tell a story about how they were soulmates, well, it failed. 

I like to leave tabs in my books as I'm reading—mainly to capture any juicy gossip bits—but for June's book, I used at least half of them to mark every time Dick Powell was a jerk. Here are all the examples: 

• Dick wrote in his diary about meeting June for the first time that her singing routine was hilarious, though he didn't think the producers were intending it to be a comedy routine. 
• He advised so many people and they all owe their careers to him (for some reason they were mostly younger women), and he even gave Jane Powell the permission to use Powell as a surname. "I was happy to advise her," he said.
• June wanted his advice (for some reason) before she made Two Girls and a Sailor, and he insisted that she go to Mayer to switch roles so she could be the plain sister, because "nobody is going to believe" that she was the prettier sister next to Gloria DeHaven. 
• Dick wouldn't commit to marrying her, but he'd tag along on dates and hide in the corner and give her a thumbs up or down depending on whether he thought the date was suitable. 
• Dick was obsessed with his boat. 
• Dick would make fun of June's rasp, telling people, "Junie's my son, you know. She gets mistaken for a boy on the telephone all the time." He was relaying this to Bogie, who was also teasing Betty Bacall about her deep voice. 
• Dick made her return an Adrian suit because she didn't ask how much it cost first (which, fair, I guess, but they were rich movie stars for Chrissake!) and he told her not to come back with one that was more than $250.
• Dick would tease her that they were going to have to move into the palatial Motion Picture Relief Home if she kept spending money.
• Dick kept buying houses for them without consulting June on if she'd even like to move, and then wouldn't let her decorate. She tried to buy décor for one house but he sent it all back and said, "No, no, child. Early American furniture does not fit in an English Tudor home." 
• The Powells were friends with Ronald Reagan (who was still a Democrat at the time). When he later switched over to the Republican party, Dick took full credit, because of course he did. 
• Dick wouldn't let her stay home with their children, which she wanted to do, because once she lost her acting momentum, he felt she'd never recover.
• Dick added a helipad to their large ranch because he hated that he had too long of a commute to the studio. A commute he gave himself by up and moving the whole family out to the middle of nowhere.
• Dick didn't like it when Hollywood actors would show up at their ranch dressed like California cowboys. June then outlines how despite him wearing old clothes around the ranch, the man owned 50 suits. 
• Dick didn't like how Judy, in the throes of addiction and depression, would call up June at all hours to talk or ask her to come over. In fact, he straight up forbid June from going over there (he apparently said that she couldn't go "running to Judy") and she said she always felt like she let Judy down in her time of need.
• When Howard Hughes was meeting with Dick to discuss taking over production at RKO, he refused to let June meet him and even insisted that she "go to your room" until after he'd gone. June stood her ground, stayed out, met him, touched him when she wasn't supposed to, then went to bed after defying him.
• Dick decided he wanted to direct a movie before he took over RKO. The movie? The much-derided The Conqueror. 
• Dick predicted that Debbie Reynolds would be a star and even told the gossip rags that "If this keeps up, June will begin to look too old to me." 
• Dick felt that nobody else was a better Genghis Khan than John Wayne, so you have him to blame for that poor, racist casting job.
• There's some kind of crap about Dick trying to stop a stage production of The Caine Mutiny that he wanted to direct but had to step back from because of The Conqueror but it's so convoluted and honestly, I was rooting for the other guy.
• It's all thanks to Dick Powell that we got Peter Falk and Steve McQueen.
• Oh, and he discovered Mary Tyler Moore. Though he only used her voice and legs for an uncredited role, guys, it was Dick Powell we have to thank for Mary Tyler Moore's career.
• Also Kim Novak. He's the one who connected her with Harry Cohn. 
• Dick signed her up for The June Allyson Show without telling her and practically goaded her into it by saying "I've wanted this for you." 
• He was always trying to sell their ranch house, which June admitted was her dream home, because he loved money too much. 
• When he later insisted on selling it, he told her that they couldn't get rid of all the ranch aspects because it's a tax problem "you wouldn't understand."
• He then bought a new house and wouldn't let her keep any of her décor because her braided rugs wouldn't go in a contemporary home.
• He became such a workaholic that he ignored June. He once went to Mexico 'on business' and left her behind despite her wanting to go. When she threatened that she wouldn't be at the house when he got back, he told her to be a good girl. 
• He installed a telephone at the dining room table and when June complained, made it sound like it was her fault because she wanted to see him more. 
• When she insisted on a divorce, he called her bluff and she actually filed. He went along with all of her requests though, because he controlled the money. Apparently a newspaper cartoon at the time (1961, which I had to Google because June Allyson was allergic to telling us what year everything takes place in) had the caption "I don't know why you're worrying about the national debt. Dick Powell just settled four million dollars on his wife, June Allyson." 
• When the divorce came through he was like "Did you get what you wanted?" Then smugly pointed out that if they continued to live together it would violate the interlocutory decree and would mean that their year would need to start over before a divorce was finalized.

via hellostarrynightblr

Someone has to have said that to him at one point, right?

I mean... the man just sounds exhausting. Who'd put up with that kind of treatment? I guess she started to see the light because she did get a divorce and an interlocutory decree, but like Dick reminded her, if they co-habited, the year had to start over and would only begin once one of them moved out. This was 1961. Dick was dead in January 1963. 

I think it's fair to say that Dick Powell sucked up most of the air in June's life, and I'm sure that he wasn't always the way he's painted here, but it was such a hard read knowing that she considered him one of the great loves of her life. You just want to take her to lunch and be like "you deserve better." 

The timeline after Dick's death is even more screwy than the years they spent together. Take, for example, that she married her second husband the same year Dick died. She doesn't even name him in this book. It's just referred to as one big mistake she made in the throes of grief and alcohol dependency. Her third husband gets a few more pages, and a name (David), and you can feel that their relationship is more balanced. 

I mean, ultimately this is the story of June's life as she wanted to tell it, and I guess you can't fault her for it. Doesn't make it easy to digest when you read it all in context and come away with the realization that she deserved much better. I'd love to read a biography about her that sticks to facts, dates and data and doesn't try to paint the dark parts with bright brushes. Surely there's some form of a happy story in there? 

Before I end this, if you've read any of my past reviews, you know I love it when there's backstage gossip and drama in these tell-alls, so of course I'm going to share the best of June's unfiltered thoughts: 

• Judy Garland seems to have been her first Hollywood friend. Her limo slowed down to pick up June and when she was hesitant to get in the car, Judy said, "What did you think I was going to do, kidnap you?" 
• The rumours of romance between Van and June were so great that during the Second World War, the gossip was that nobody knew how many missions Van flew over June's dressing room (they were always platonic friends). 
• Kathryn Grayson had "the patience of Job," and would smile against angry temperaments and carry on. 
• Lana Turner would console her at the studio when she was heartsick over Dick Powell by saying that you couldn't believe everything you read because if she was actually having "the twentieth romance I'm supposed to be having this month, all I can say is I only wish I had the time." 
• In Joan Blondell's memoirs (Dick Powell's ex-wife), she refers to June as Amy (after Amy March in Little Women) and largely blamed her for the divorce.
• Joan Crawford once invited her to lunch at Brentwood and talked the entire time about herself. She also punished Christina Crawford in front of June, making June say, at the time the memoir was published in 1982, that she believed what Christina'd written in Mommy Dearest. 
• She once lost a round of charades when no one could guess that her tilting her head and pounding on her ears meant that she was impersonating Esther Williams. 
• Another dinner guest started thanking everyone around them at the dinner party, and they all immediately guessed that they were impersonating Greer Garson winning the Oscar for Mrs. Miniver.
• June said that Joan Fontaine would come to dinner parties and talk business the entire time with Dick. 
• Claudette Colbert taught June everything she needed to know about fashion.
• Before Jimmy Stewart married, he lived two doors down from Greta Garbo and talked about digging a tunnel to her backyard and popping out and saying, "This is so unexpected."
• On the set of Little Women, Elizabeth Taylor allegedly lamented that she didn't look like June Allyson. 
• Claudette Colbert was the godmother of June's daughter, and bought her christening gown in Paris, which the baby promptly threw up on. They rushed home to change her and clean it, and then when they got to the church, the baby grabbed Claudette's pearl necklace and ripped them off the strand.
• Fred Astaire was the first person June told about her pregnancy (she collapsed during rehearsals for Royal Wedding, which she later had to drop out of) and he replied, "Who is this?" She hadn't told him it was her calling, so he thought it was some random woman. 
• At a dinner party after the whole Liz-Eddie-Debbie saga, June kept calling Liz Taylor Debbie, and she was understanding for the first few times but by the end, snapped and said, "Why don't you just call me George? Just call me George." 
• June helped decorate Judy Garland's hospital room in 1955 when she was nominated for the Oscar. She was depressed when Grace Kelly won instead. 
• June fell in love with Alan Ladd because Dick was too focused on work and Sue Ladd was too possessive. It hit the gossip columns though they apparently never consummated the relationship. They stayed apart until Alan died. 
• When Dick was sick and dying of cancer in the early '60s, his ex-wife Joan Blondell came to visit and cried that she should've never divorced him. "The words cut like a knife," June writes. 
• When he was really, really sick, he once hallucinated that Bette Davis had been over and had put her clothes at the foot of the bed. June dutifully 'cleaned them up.'
• The telegram Betty Bacall sent June after Dick's death read "Terrible. Terrible. Terrible." 
• June called up Hedda Hopper after Dick's will was publicised and didn't include any charitable donations and gave her a piece of her mind. Hedda's reply was "You're a bitch." 
• Her third husband met Cary Grant one night and was starstruck. "You know, you really do look like Cary Grant!" he said.

Anyways, let me know in the comments if you have any other reading material on June Allyson's life. I need a reliable narrator!