Despite the fact that he was an actor, and a damned good one, for four decades, he never became a big star. Those times when he was top-billed in a film, the film was a B offer or sometimes worse. It always made him kind of cranky. It certainly wasn't helped when he married an actress who had a brighter spot in the Hollywood hierarchy.
Born in 1913 in Bremerton, Washington, his father was a grocer who loved his family but turned over much of the child-raising to his stay-at-home wife. She taught her kids to come alive, be forthright, to know they were as good as anybody. She may have worked a little harder on Howard because he was reserved. Her training seemed to work... maybe a little too much so.
Two things happened to him in high school that would change his life. One was that he tried out for school plays and discovered a love of performing. And while he was always a good-looking kid, by high school he'd blossomed into quite the striking young man and girls flocked to him. In addition to a great face he had an even better speaking voice which would put him in good positions for employment.
He became magnetic to the opposite sex and he learned to pursue them with a vengeance... for the rest of his life. He was a take-charge kind of guy, was obsessed with letting people know he was an M-A-N and if he wanted to, he could charm a vulture off a corpse. Throughout his life, however, many of his relationships were fraught with turmoil. He was not always the easiest person to get along with.
After graduation he joined the Repertory Playhouse in Seattle but soon Uncle Sam came calling. He served with the Army-Air Force radio service from 1941-45. Upon discharge he hightailed it for Los Angeles in the hopes of getting that acting career back on the burner. NBC Radio hired him (and that dreamy voice) to play detective Sam Spade which he did for several years.
He also joined L.A.'s Actor's Lab. Director Jules Dassin remembered him from there when Dassin was about to direct the hard-core prison film noir Brute Force (1947), he recommended Duff to the film's producer, Mark Hellinger. The producer was so impressed that he put Duff under contract but when Hellinger suddenly died, Universal-International bought the contract.
At its core, Brute Force is about the troublesome relationship between prisoner Burt Lancaster and warden Hume Cronyn. Cronyn plays the cruelest warden I think I've ever seen in a film and the public was stirred by the film's violence. Duff plays a fellow inmate.
He met Yvonne De Carlo on the Brute Force shoot and they became instant lovers. They would go on to make two more films together and cause tongues to wag around Universal. But Duff stashed De Carlo away when he gave his attention to Piper Laurie, German actress Marta Toren, singer-dancer Gloria De Haven, Lori Nelson and others. He once said that in his bachelor quarters he needed just a bed because all he liked to do was sleep and... and... oh, you know.
At Universal where she was making One Touch of Venus, Duff met Ava Gardner and began a two-year relationship that centered around wild sex, drinking, arguing and having their pictures taken by Hollywood photographers for as much publicity as they could muster. He was crazed after she left him. As I read the tea leaves, I think the beautiful Ava was the one who got away, his great love.
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| With Ava he felt like king of the mountain |
He portrayed a murder suspect in the documentary-like film noir The Naked City (1948). There was something about his looks and that voice that drove the ladies crazy. One of them was leading lady Dorothy Hart. Sorry Ava.
Another noir was fashioned out of playwright Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1948) starring Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson. The latter gets his business partner to take the rap for Robinson causing untold problems in a small town and two families. It all comes back to haunt everyone when the business partner's son (Duff) is about to marry Robinson's daughter. I was completely intrigued.
Despite a good beginning in three films, Duff fell into the same old trap that affected so many at Universal... handsome man (or pretty woman) comes to studio, trained well, seen in mainly B films, leaves studio and tries to live down the experience. Of course he made the standard colorful westerns, Red Canyon and Sam Bass and Calamity Jane, both 1949, The Lady from Texas (1951) and appeared in a few more noirs, two of which, Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949) and Shakedown (1950), were exciting yarns.
Around this time Duff was accused by the pamphlet Red Channels as being a communist subversive. He was a noisy Democrat who foolishly lent his name to some document. He was suddenly fired from his radio show and shunned by some of Hollywood's Republican movers and shakers.
He was in a bad way and his tempestuous relationship with Gardner wasn't helping. Then in 1950 he got a chance to star alongside Ida Lupino and Ronald Reagan in the noir Woman in Hiding where he would play her husband who tries to murder her on their honeymoon. Then Reagan injured himself and had to drop out and Lupino and others thought Duff would be better in Reagan's role, that of a man who helps her when she's on the run from the husband, now played with great flourish by Stephen McNally.
Duff may not have known the impression he'd made on Lupino before he signed for the movie. She thought he was a dreamboat when seen at a party and she was a devoted listener to Sam Spade. Nonetheless at the time he was hired he and Lupino got into some kerfuffle and decided they didn't like one another. That was soon to change.
More than likely, Lupino, who was about to divorce her second husband, producer Collier Young, soon liked the idea of Duff changing roles because she would spend more screen time with him than had he remained in the husband role.
He and Gardner somehow parted as friends and a romance between Duff and Lupino began. She fell in a big way... not so much him. Soon she was constantly after him about marriage and it scared him off. He would disappear for long stretches of time as well.
Lupino liked a take-charge guy and Duff more than filled the bill on that one. She likely changed her mind as their long relationship endured. Duff found her to be a perfectionist and a go-getter which concerned him because he was largely a lazy good-time Charley. She had a vitality and energy which unnerved him. She could be possessive and sullen if she didn't get her way. He was frequently distant but demanding and could be downright mean when drinking.
Nonetheless, with the Red-baiters breathing down his neck and his career looking shaky, he married Lupino. He knew it would please her but he wasn't so sure for himself. Of course her being pregnant might have moved the dial some. Then after 14 months of marriage and without any quarrels at the time or any issues between them, per se, Duff walked out the door. He said he simply needed to be free. It didn't last but it would be the first of many, many separations.
Professionally Lupino had moved into areas beyond her exquisite acting. She and Young had been co-producers and she helped a great deal on some of the writing. But what she really wanted to do was direct and while her productions were low-key B affairs, she succeeded very well. One might think a husband would be proud of his wife's accomplishments but perhaps because they were in the same profession, Duff became insanely jealous. He knew they were not on an even keel as far as the industry was concerned. She was a mega-wattage insider and he screwed around in B westerns and film noirs. (I never told Ida that's what I liked about him.)
As she had been with Young and first mate, actor Louis Hayward, Lupino liked to work with her husbands. But certainly with Duff it was a dual-edged sword. He hated asking if there was a part for him. It didn't always work out for her because she lost out on some good films when she insisted Duff be hired for the male lead and producers declined.
The least successful of their five films together was Jennifer (1953), with Lupino starring as the frightened caretaker of an estate where the owner has vanished and Duff in a small role as a grocer.
During production they both made the papers because Duff (and to a smaller degree) Lupino got into a brawl with another man at their favorite eatery. The headlines read Sunset Strip Brawl at Dawn Features Ida Lupino's Mate. Bummer. He couldn't even beat the crap out of someone and be mentioned by his own name. Nothing, however, could hold a candle to the fury he unleashed when called Mr. Lupino.
I judge Private Hell 36 (1954) to be their best film together. Interestingly in this and their final two movies together, they were not a romantic duo and in none of the five films were they married to one another. This yummy noir features Duff and hunky Steve Cochran as two cops who steal $80,000 from a dead robber. Duff, married to Dorothy Malone, has second thoughts and wants to go straight but Cochran, involved with singer Lupino, is considering something more sinister.
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| With Steve Cochran in Private Hell 36 |
Even though Cochran and Duff's parts were fairly equal with screen time, Cochran was billed over Duff which likely didn't set too well. I must highlight this film in a posting one day.
The Duffs didn't have the best year as a couple around the time she made The Big Knife in 1955 because her starring role opposite Jack Palance brought her good notices. I have said in these pages it was a glorious performance but Duff turned morose and argumentative and there were more separations.
Earlier we reviewed Women's Prison (1955) in which Lupino plays a maniacal warden and Duff a prison doctor. His part was fairly small although important. Most of the acting plaudits went to Lupino, Jan Sterling and Audrey Totter.
The same year Duff got the male lead in a potboiler at lowly Republic Studios called Flame of the Islands. It was his third and final pairing with old girlfriend Yvonne De Carlo. They likely studied their lines together in her dressing room. Duff was never faithful from the first day of his marriage.
The final Duff-Lupino film was another noir and a good one, While the City Sleeps (1956). With a glittering cast it concerns the hunt for a serial killer and focuses on a newspaper where various reporters gouge, push and outmaneuver one another for the big headlines. Lupino plays one of those hard-boiled reporters and Duff plays a cop. They had no scenes together.
Around this time, having obviously seen the light, Duff began doing a great deal of television. He still made the occasional B flick and would have a slight film insurgence in the 70s and 80s but for the remainder of his life he would always work more in television than in film.
The Duffs, by anyone's standards, had a helluva marriage. They had raised verbal carnage to an art form but a lot of it was also physical. She slapped him and he belted her. Mutual heavy drinking, of course, bubbled over but not playing fair and wanting to be right all the time was right there at the starting gate. One was as obnoxious as the other. They were oil and water. She always knew the leverage she held over him... to attack his M-A-Nliness. He would tell her she was ugly, not feminine, a bossy shrew and anything else he could manage in his frequently cloudy brain.
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| Mr. Adams and Eve |
Just as their friends were wondering how they could possibly stay together much longer, what did they do? Why they signed up for their first television series playing essentially themselves. The 1957 sitcom, Mr. Adams and Eve, was a certifiable hit. The fictional couple was a lot more fun than the Duffs really were but the fighting, while toned down, was still there. It provided both of them with new shot of fame... with him the most he'd ever have in one sustained period (a year).
Interestingly the series was produced by Lupino's last husband, Collier Young, and oddly it all worked out rather well. In fact, Young and his present wife, Joan Fontaine, got together with the Duffs often. Of course, they did.
It was also the couple's best year of marriage... they were both riding high together. He thought she was very funny and she still thought he was the great seducer. But after the series ended and the flashbulbs stopped popping, it was back to spewing their mutual hatred. In 1966 Duff and Lupino would separate for good although their divorce would not be final until 1985.
Over the years he starred in several television series. His second one, Felony Squad (1966-69), was the most successful. The cop-themed drama costarred Dragnet veteran Ben Alexander and handsome blond hunk Dennis Cole who actually made the series as popular as it was. From the mid 60s to the mid 70s, Duff appeared in virtually every major television series.
He was always an asset. No longer the young guy who made westerns and noirs at Universal, he was now upper middle-aged, with a noticeable belly, those forlorn-looking eyebrows and always displaying his immense charm. I thought he was an engaging villain because he didn't look like one and I loved that contrast.
In 1978 he was tucked away in another big cast (a very big one) in Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978), about the gathering of two clans of fairly dysfunctional people. Duff plays a randy doctor. I loved the movie but the director's free-flowing style and allowing his actor's to ad lib and experiment to their hearts' content didn't appeal to everyone.
Duff gave a knockout performance as Dustin Hoffman's sleazy attorney in the popular divorce drama, Kramer v.s. Kramer (1979). How could anyone forget how steely and hateful he was to Meryl Streep?
He had a large role in TV's Flamingo Road (1980) playing a dishonest sheriff in a steamy southern town where everyone did things they shouldn't be doing. It was a remake of an old Joan Crawford flick and lasted just two years. People spoke of his looks, his bloated face, his black eyes... ravages of years of boozing.
In 1986 Duff married for the second time. It wouldn't last long.
He got another shot at being in a popular movie, No Way Out (1987), where he had a small role as a senator. It was his penultimate big-screen appearance. His last TV appearance was in a 1990 Golden Girls appearing as an old flame of Sophia's. Oddly enough, in the middle of writing this, I happened to see it.
Duff had lived for a number of years in Santa Barbara and he died at home from a massive heart attack at age 76 in 1990. He never gave up his heavy drinking. He was survived by his wife and his daughter with Lupino.
As a footnote, Lupino would live another five years. She had not been doing well for some time. She lived as a serious recluse and apparently had mental issues. She would be devastated by Duff's death, the love of her life and the man with whom she could never get along.
Next posting:
A fifties' film
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