It was during the movie, “Counsellor at Law” that a fast-talking telephone operator caught the attention of big-time Hollywood producers.
The scene featured the character, Bessie Green, in a swanky lawyer’s office. Answering the phone, she said, “Sure I missed you, like Booth missed Lincoln.”
It was the 1930s and a petite blonde actress had captivated America audiences. Everyone fully expected her to make the big time. Born in Shoshoni, Isabel Jewell had made the journey to Hollywood and was in the movies. Wyoming newspapers followed her diligently, dubbing her “Wyoming’s Actress.
Jewell was usually typecast as a hard-boiled, tough-talking broad, gangster's moll, dumb blonde, prostitute, and is known for her poor "white trash" role as Emmy Slattery in “Gone with the Wind.” She also played ordinary “nice” next-door girl types and was praised for making these roles shine.
George Johnstone, a feature writer for MGM, wrote, “The moment she breezes into a scene, the action accelerates to mile-a-minute momentum and very neatly and swiftly she folds up that bit of play with the prettiest of dispatch and tucks it into her pocket.”
Shoshoni Girl
Axel Nissen highlighted Jewell in his book, “Accustomed to Her Face: Thirty-Five Character Actresses of Golden Age Hollywood” as an actress who almost made it to the big time.
“To this day, Isabel Jewell remains the most famous movie actress to come out of Shoshone,” Nissen wrote. “Jewell, who would typify the rootless, aimless, and characterless urban woman on the big screen, was in her beginnings a small-town girl.”
Isabel Jewell was born in 1907 in the small Wyoming town of Shoshoni. Her father was the town doctor and her mother was a well-liked matron of town. Their family home was in the center of Shoshoni, on 3rd Street between California Street and Idaho Street.
With the help of his brother, Sam, her father, “Doc Jewell,” also did pioneering research on Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Her family was considered well-off and could afford to give her a good education.
Isabel attended the local school until the eighth grade when she was sent away. She first went to St. Mary’s Hall, an Episcopal preparatory school in Fairbault in her father’s native state of Minnesota and then, in the fall of 1925, Jewell was sent to Hamilton Female College in Lexington in her mother’s home state of Kentucky.
Marriages & Hollywood Don’t Mix
“Jewell appears to have had no better luck with men in real life than she had on the screen,” Nissen wrote. “She was involved in at least four important romantic relationships before she was 35 and apparently none after that.”
Her first husband was Lovell “Cowboy” Underwood, a senior at the University of Kentucky and a local basketball star. She was only 19 and the marriage was never publicized, silently dying without the benefit of the press.
After acting in stock companies since she was a teenager, including an 87-week stint in Lincoln, Nebraska, Jewell hit the big time. She had gotten a part on Broadway in the 1930 "Up Pops the Devil." Her performance earned her rave reviews and a talent scout eventually brought her to Hollywood.
Jewell had met the greatest love of her life, fellow actor Lee Tracy, in Broadway on the set of “Blessed Event,” a play by Manuel Seff and Forrest Wilson that ran from February to May 1932 at the Longacre Theatre in New York.
Jewell arrived in Hollywood that same year and reunited with Tracy on the Warner Bros. set where she had been asked to reprise her role in the movie version of “Blessed Event.”
Tracy was cast as the lead, the ruthless gossip columnist Alvin Roberts. Jewell made her film debut as the small-time singer Dorothy Lane whose pregnancy “without benefit of clergy” was announced in Alvin Roberts’s column “Spilling the Dirt.”
Jewell told a reporter that, even though many people had congratulated her on her performance, she couldn’t get another film role for eight months and was told she “wouldn’t photograph.”
“Nobody thought of the role I played or remembered that I was made up with gray paint to make me look haggard and dissipated,” she said.
In 1933, Jewell was given roles in four films, the most memorable, Nissen said, was “Beauty For Sale,” her first movie for MGM. He wrote that it is a vivid example of what she could do with a small role.
Jewell played Hortense, a superficial receptionist at Madame Sonia’s beauty salon. She bossed the employees around in a voice that cut like a steel blade and then instantly shifted into a mock genteel, honeyed tone to schmooze with the customers.
George Johnstone wrote that MGM “was deluged with inquiries regarding the identity of the black-clad girl who greeted patrons in the beauty parlor sequence of that film. She was so snappy, so pert and so spirited that she immediately intrigued audiences the country over.”
Throughout their romance, Tracy and Jewell were regular features in the gossip columns of Louella Parsons who wrote that the very blonde, very naive Isabel Jewell and her bad boy Lee Tracy would marry soon. However, after four and a half years, the couple parted ways.
After the breakup, Parsens wrote, “The little Jewell girl is really headed for big things on the screen.”
Movies Over Love
After nearly four years in Hollywood and 21 feature film releases, 28-year-old Jewell began to fear that a full-fledged stardom was going to elude her. She called herself "the most unsuccessful successful actress in Hollywood."
She told Hollywood columnist Hubbard Keavy she had three pictures coming out soon and if they didn’t help her “get over the hurdle,” she said, it was “Good-bye, Hollywood. I’ll leave here so fast, for New York and the stage, that there won’t even be time for farewell parties.”
“It’s awfully discouraging to be in Hollywood and getting the occasional good role and a few so-so roles,” she said.
She was also dealing with family tragedy. Her father had gone completely blind and could no longer practice. She was now supporting both her parents.
Even after her days as a contract player at MGM were over, Hollywood continued to promise stardom to Jewell.
In August 1936 an article titled “A New Hollywood Triumph (on the Wreck of a Shattered Love)” touted Jewell’s revived career as a direct result of her breakup with Lee Tracey. They stated she was building her fame upon the ashes of dead love.
“She has suddenly become a sought-after leading woman with stardom just around the corner,” the reporter wrote, “Hollywood is seeing her as a person, a gifted actress.”
Jewell had embarked on a new romance in 1936 with artist turned radio executive Owen Crump. Their on-again off-again relationship lasted roughly three years. The engagement was called off because Jewell wanted to keep working after she got married and Crump wanted her to stay at home.
“I did not feel I could make such a sacrifice at this time,” Jewell told the Raleigh Register in 1936.
During her years with Crump, stardom continued to elude Jewell. She was given good yet secondary roles, competing for screen time with more famous actresses such as Mae West.
She played Emmy Slattery in “Gone with the Wind” in 1939 but by then, her career was slowly coming to a halt and she would never be more than a supporting player.
In 1940, journalist Bob Musel wrote, “She is the girl tossed into a picture to make the rhinestone stars sparkle. A few minutes before the camera, an explosion of emotion.”
Tragic Ending
After evading marriage all through the 1930s, Jewell was married just two months before Pearl Harbor. On October 10, 1941, she flew to Atlanta, Georgia, and married Private Paul Marion of Company C, 30th Battalion. They separated two years later.
“The last 30 years of Jewell’s life were an increasingly melancholy and even tragic spectacle,” Nissen wrote.
Her father died in his home in Shoshoni, on October 21, 1949, with Isabel at his side. Her mother and grandfather both followed her to California.
In 1959, Jewell was arrested in Las Vegas on charges of passing a bad check for $37.50 to a cab driver after a night of casino-hopping. She pleaded guilty and paid a $25 fine.
The next year, Jewell was recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to motion pictures. The star is located at 1560 Vine Street.
In January 1961, she was arrested for drunk driving after she struck another car. Jewell denied that she was intoxicated and insisted that she had taken nothing but medication for an illness. Later that year, she was found guilty. Two years later she was convicted of another drunk driving charge. This time, she was sentenced to five days in jail and two years’ probation.
William D. Eppes, a biographer, said that after Jewell’s father died and her mother joined her in Los Angeles, the home was vandalized and ultimately torn down. Jewell visited the sad remains of her childhood home for the last time in 1967, five years before her death.
Her mother died in 1971 in Los Angeles, far from the home in Shoshoni where she had spent most of her life.
Despite Jewell’s personal problems, she never gave up on her acting career. She made a guest appearance on “Gunsmoke” and had a small role in the 1972 horror film “Sweet Kill.”
While waiting for two films that she had roles in to be released, Jewell was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in her apartment in Hollywood in 1972.
At the time of death Isabel had no family so most of her belongings were given to a friend. Her memory, however, lives on not only in Shoshoni where she was born and raised, but also in Hollywood where she made her mark as an actress of high caliber.
“She certainly is not beautiful but she possesses the spark of a genuine dramatic genius,” a journalist once wrote. “Which is rarer than beauty in Hollywood.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com
