Blood Relations and My Brush With Obscurity

This blog gets personal … in the original context of the term.
   
My fractured career arc took me through newspapers into radio, over-the-air television, film and video production with side trips including rock-n-roll tours, lighting direction, facility design and even university professor. Starting in high school with live event theatre, I always favored the shadows backstage more than the spotlight out front. I tried both sides of the curtain but always found myself most comfortable as one of the uncredited backstage workers, part of the crew behind the scenes. Most often earning little acknowledgment and even less program credit.  We were a loose family of craft persons, stagehands, grips and carnies all toiling in obscurity, driven by love of the business more than rather meager paychecks.

Of course, along the way we’d work with actors, toiling within pretty much the same “don’t know your name, but hey there again” status.  Aspiring performers in supporting roles, bit players, dancers, uncredited extras and stand-ins.  Artists making a career working without becoming famous.  Cast or crew, I could relate. 

That’s why it was a mind warp to recently discover a blood relation kin who’d spent the 1930s through the 1950s in Hollywood, scratching out a living as an actress, extra and bit player. With a click she appeared, right there in my family tree as my second-cousin, a couple generations removed.  Her name was Yvonne Bowman.

I uncovered Yvonne’s existence while working on genealogy and building out my family history using that big subscription research service, that “A-word" company you see advertising on holiday television commercials.  My genealogy hobby started back about five years ago, so I already had the family members of my father’s maternal grandmother, my great grandmother Mary Anna Jensen (1869-1937).  One of her contemporaries was her brother Albert Jensen, whose own family included three sons and four daughters, one of which was Della Grace Jensen (1893-1973).  I’d researched that Della married one Lee Bowman in 1911 near Tulsa, Oklahoma and the couple gave birth to two daughters – Bessie Ann, born in 1913 and Yvonne Della, borne in 1915.  Unfortunately, mom and dad divorced around 1923, with Yvonne and her father moving out to Hollywood.

By the 1930's Yvonne Della Bowman was living in Los Angeles and finding small, uncredited screen appearances as a dancer or crowd extra. Thanks to the American Film Institute Online Database, I unearthed one very brief credit for Yvonne in 1936's 20th Century Fox musical “Under Your Spell” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Wendy Barrie, marking the first effort by German immigrant Otto Preminger directing an American film.

At some point in promoting her career, Yvonne posed for a portrait -- known in the trade as a “head shot” – and spent hard-earned coin going straight to Hollywood master photographer Max Munn Autrey.  Autrey was the real deal, becoming famous with his images of stars Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow.  Working primarily for 20th Century Fox, he later joined Witzel Photography in downtown L.A. before opening his own studio in 1932, Hollywood Filmograph at Sunset and La Brea Avenue:

And did any copies of his long-forgotten portrait of one obscure Hollywood bit player actually survive?  Yes!  And thank you, internet:

Yvonne Della Bowman, 1915 - 1996

Most motion picture studio production files from the era are long lost, although other clues popped up, including a couple of production stills from the 1939 Paramount release “Honeymoon in Bali” starring Fred MacMurray, Madeleine Carrol and Allan Jones. I’d searched Google for any reference to “Yvonne Bowman” and an original studio press release was on eBay, with identifying caption: “Those Honeymoon In Bali UUUUUMFFF Girls… They’ve got what it takes!”  Of course, this was late 1930s when scandalous costumes meant full-length sarongs and off-the-shoulder shawls. Yet there was cousin Yvonne, second from left. The movie was now over 70 years old, I wondered if the studio bothered to renew the film copyright, and guess what … Paramount dropped the ball. “Honeymoon in Bali” had entered public domain which of course meant someone, somewhere, had uploaded the entire flick to YouTube.  

And I was right.  I pulled down the YouTube file, and scrubbed through every scene.  Then at one hour and twenty minutes, as Madeleine Carrol’s character returned to the island to confront Fred MacMurray, her character’s march to the grass shack is interrupted by three “native” Bali islanders crossing the road. The second woman, balancing basket on head exactly like in the studio press photo is my second cousin, twice removed, Yvonne Bowman:

Percy Lazelle, 1907 - 2000

She briefly made the newspapers when she sued a California horse stable following a riding accident, only to have the defendant die just as her case came to trial... all this thanks to my subscription to Newspapers.com.  Yvonne married a Hollywood dancer and talent agent named Percy Lazelle (real surname "Muehling") in 1941. “Perk” achieved minor notoriety as an extra with non-speaking bit parts, including a small role as the attorney’s clerk in the 1945 Oscar winner “Mildred Pierce.” TV work included "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Red Skelton Show." The couple eventually retired from La-La Land, splitting time between Arizona and California, where Yvonne passed on May 26, 1996.

There’s awesome impact that comes with sitting here at my iMac, well into the 21st century, and using the internet to discover and connect with a distant relative who, two generations before me, had also struggled to survive in the entertainment industry. Then as now, it was a life of just showing up and doing the job, making a living but never getting famous. My computer feels kinda like a cyber time travel machine.  In one brief moment, sitting in my home office, I connect across three-quarters of a century and identify with a late fellow traveler and blood relation in this crazy business.

Here’s to you, second-cousin Yvonne. 

Please reply by clicking on the blue "NO COMMENTS:" link below