Dorothy Lamour

Dorothy Lamour
in Road to Bali (1952)
Born	Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton December 10, 1914(1914-12-10) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Died	September 22, 1996(1996-09-22) (aged 81) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1933—94
Spouse	Herbie Kay (1935–39) William Ross Howard III (1943–78) 2 children
Website
http://dorothylamour.com/

Dorothy Lamour (December 10, 1914 – September 22, 1996) was an American film actress. She is best remembered for appearing in the Road to... movies, a series of successful comedies starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (see Timeline of major beauty pageants) .^[1]

Early life

Lamour was born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Carmen Louise (née LaPorte) and John Watson Slaton, both of whom were waiters.^[2] Lamour was of French Louisianan, Spanish and Irish descent.^[3] Her parents' marriage lasted only a few years, with her mother re-marrying to Clarence Lambour, and Dorothy took his last name. That marriage also ended in divorce when Dorothy was a teenager.

In 1935, she had her own fifteen-minute weekly musical program on NBC Radio. She also sang on the popular Rudy Vallee radio show and the Chase and Sanborn Hour.

Early in her career, Lamour met J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Hoover's biographer Richard Hack,^[4] Hoover pursued Lamour romantically, but she was initially interested only in friendship with him. Hoover and Lamour remained close friends to the end of Hoover's life, and after his 1972 death, Lamour did not deny rumors that she'd had an affair with him in the years after she divorced Kay. However, this appears nowhere in her memoirs "My Side of the Road" (Prentice-Hall ISBN 0-13-218594-6).

Career

In 1936, she moved to Hollywood and began appearing regularly in films for Paramount Pictures. The role that made her a star was Ulah (a sort of female Tarzan) in The Jungle Princess (1936). She wore a sarong, which would become associated with her. While she first achieved stardom as a sex symbol, Lamour also showed talent as both a comic and dramatic actress. She was among the most popular actresses in motion pictures from 1936 to 1952.

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour

She starred in the "Road to..." movie series with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the 1940s and 1950s. The movies were enormously popular during the 1940s, and they regularly placed among the top moneymaking films each year. While the films centered more on Hope and Crosby, Lamour held her own as their "straight man", looked beautiful, and sang some of her most popular songs. Her contribution to the films was considered by the public and theater owners of equal importance to that of Crosby and Hope during the series' golden era, 1940-1952. The series essentially ended with the release of Road to Bali in 1952, with her career declining while co-stars Hope and Crosby remained major show business figures.

During the World War II years, Lamour was among the most popular pinup girls among American servicemen, along with Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and Veronica Lake. Lamour was also largely responsible for starting up the war bond tours in which movie stars would travel the country selling U.S. government bonds to the public. Lamour alone promoted the sale of over $21 million dollars worth of war bonds, and other stars promoted the sale of a billion more.

Some of Lamour's other notable films include John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Spawn of the North (1938; with George Raft, Henry Fonda, and John Barrymore), Disputed Passage (1939), Johnny Apollo (1940; with Tyrone Power), Aloma of the South Seas (1941), Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), Dixie (1943; with Bing Crosby), A Medal for Benny (1945), My Favorite Brunette (1947; with Bob Hope), On Our Merry Way (1948) and the best picture Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952; with Charlton Heston). Her other leading men included William Holden, Ray Milland, James Stewart, Jack Benny, and Fred MacMurray.

Dorothy Lamour starred in a number of movie musicals and sang in many of her comedies and dramatic films as well. She introduced a number of standards, including "The Moon of Manakoora", "I Remember You", "It Could Happen to You", "Personality", and "But Beautiful".

Lamour's film career petered out in the early 1950s, and she began a new career as a nightclub entertainer and occasional stage actress. In the 1960s, she returned to the screen for secondary roles in three films and became more active in the legitimate theater, headlining a road company of Hello Dolly! for over a year near the end of the decade.

Later career

Lamour's good humor and lack of pretension allowed her to have a remarkably long career in show business for someone best known as a glamour girl. She was a popular draw on the dinner theatre circuit of the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, she lived with her longtime husband William Ross Howard III (whom she married in 1943), in the Baltimore suburb of Sudbrook Park.^[5] He died in 1978. Lamour published her autobiography My Side of the Road in 1980, revived her nightclub act, and performed in plays and television shows such as Hart to Hart, Crazy Like a Fox, Remington Steele and Murder, She Wrote.

During the 1990s, she made only a handful of professional appearances but she remained a popular interview subject for publications and TV talk and news programs. In 1995, the musical Swinging on a Star, a revue of songs written by Johnny Burke opened on Broadway and ran for three months; Lamour was credited as a "special advisor". Burke wrote many of the most famous "Road to..." movie songs as well as the score to Lamour's And the Angels Sing. The musical was nominated for the Best Musical Tony Award and the actress playing "Dorothy Lamour" in the Road movie segment, Kathy Fitzgerald, was also nominated.

Death

Lamour died at her home in North Hollywood, California at the age of 81 from a heart attack. She was interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Filmography

Features

• Footlight Parade (1933)
• College Holiday (1936)
• The Jungle Princess (1936)
• Swing High, Swing Low (1937)
• The Last Train from Madrid (1937)
• High, Wide, and Handsome (1937)
• The Hurricane (1937)
• Thrill of a Lifetime (1937)
• The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938)
• Her Jungle Love (1938)
• Tropic Holiday (1938)
• Spawn of the North (1938)
• St. Louis Blues (1939)
• Man About Town (1939)
• Disputed Passage (1939)
• Road to Singapore (1940)
• Johnny Apollo (1940)
• Typhoon (1940)
• Moon Over Burma (1940)
• Chad Hanna (1940)
• Road to Zanzibar (1941)
• Caught in the Draft (1941)
• Aloma of the South Seas (1941)
• The Fleet's In (1942)
• Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942)
• Road to Morocco (1942)
• Star Spangled Rhythm (1942)
• They Got Me Covered (1943)
• Dixie (1943)
• Riding High (1943)
• And the Angels Sing (1944)
• Rainbow Island (1944)
• A Medal for Benny (1945)
• Duffy's Tavern (1945)
• Masquerade in Mexico (1945)
• Road to Utopia (1946)
• My Favorite Brunette (1947)
• Variety Girl (1947)
• Wild Harvest (1947)
• Road to Rio (1947)
• On Our Merry Way (1948)
• Lulu Belle (film) (1948)
• The Girl from Manhattan (1948)
• The Lucky Stiff (1949)
• Slightly French (1949)
• Manhandled (1949)
• Here Comes the Groom (1951) (Cameo)
• The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
• Road to Bali (1952)
• The Road to Hong Kong (1962) (cameo)
• Donovan's Reef (1963)
• Pajama Party (1964)
• The Phynx (1970)
• Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976) (cameo)
• Creepshow 2 (1987)

Short subjects

• The Stars Can't Be Wrong (1936)
• Hollywood Handicap (1938)
• Meet the Stars #1: Chinese Garden Festival (1940)
• Show Business at War (1943)
• Unusual Occupations: Film Tot Holiday (1947)
• Screen Snapshots: Hollywood Shower of Stars (1955)

Books

Lamour was the heroine of a novel, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse (1947, by Matilda Bailey), where "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." The story was written for a young teenage audience and is reminiscent of the adventures of Nancy Drew. It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941-1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.^[6]

The real Lamour's autobiography, My Side of the Road, was published by Prentice-Hall in 1980.^[7]

She also had a brief print run of 2-3 issues during the 1950s in "Dorothy Lamour Jungle Princess Comics" - A series of comic books dedicated to her movie Jungle Princess persona. (featuring screen shots from past movies as the covers.)

Notes

1. ^ Severo, Richard (September 23, 1996). "Dorothy Lamour, 81, Sultry Sidekick in Road Films, Dies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/23/us/dorothy-lamour-81-sultry-sidekick-in-road-films-dies.html?scp=66&sq=murder%20she%20wrote&st=cse. Retrieved 2010-08-20. 
2. ^ Dorothy Lamour: 1914-1996 By RICHARD SEVERO
3. ^ Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton Google Book search
4. ^ Hack, Richard Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. (2007). Phoenix Books. ISBN 1597775126
5. ^ http://sudbrookpark.com/docs/1984_Baltimore_Magazine.pdf
6. ^ Whitman Authorized Editions for Girls, accessed September 10, 2009
7. ^ My Side of the Road by Dorothy Lamour on Goodreads.com, accessed April 17, 2010

External links

Biography portal

• Dorothy Lamour at Find a Grave
• Dorothy Lamour at the Internet Broadway Database
• Dorothy Lamour at the Internet Movie Database
• Dorothy Lamour at the TCM Movie Database
• Post-Blitz Clydebank — a documentary about Clydebank, Scotland from 1947 to 1952, featuring Dorothy Lamour
• Photographs of Dorothy Lamour

Persondata
Name	Lamour, Dorothy
Alternative names	Slaton, Mary Leta Dorothy
Short description	Actress, singer
Date of birth	December 10, 1914
Place of birth	New Orleans, Louisian U.S.
Date of death	September 22, 1996
Place of death	Los Angeles, California, U.S.