At the American Film Institute's 1974 testimonial, Life Achievement award-winner James Cagney recalled how much the movies used "types" -- "We had them, oh, how we did have them!" They certainly had them at Cagney's main studio, Warner Bros., where an entire fleet of familiar faces sacrificed repertorial challenges for weekly paychecks. There was George Brent, invariably successful and level-headed, zesty "oomph" girl Ann Sheridan, John Garfield, always sporting a chip on his shoulder, Olivia de Havilland, always in healthy and productive possession of her needs, and so forth.

A favorite Warner Bros. starlet of the 1940s was Joan Leslie, whose beauty was so fresh and wholesome that her name was a virtual synonym for the work ingenue. Reaching her popularity peak during the war years, she was a perfect symbol of the wide-eyed, good girl next door, even though few people were fortunate enough to have such gorgeous neighbors. The tens of thousands of G.I.s who sent for her studio photograph did not want or expect the heavy-panting of Sex Goddess Rita Hayworth, or even the pure but sassy charm of a Betty Grable, but rather a girl who would be the ideal girl to bring home to mother.

Joan's face was radiant with a soft beauty that, with appropriate makeup, could be transformed into absolute glamour (though it rarely was). Her figure was slender but well enough endowed to please even the most red-blooded male. Her acting was quiet enough never to interfere with the gentle ambiance of her looks, and since her Warners' chores were frequently more lightly decorative than thespianic, it was rarely tested. In fact, wherever Joan did supply some histrionics, as in The Hard Way, critics and audiences were so awed by this bonus that the actress received more accolades than she actually deserved.

She was born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 26, 1925, and christened Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel[1]. The third of three sisters in a family kept close by a deep love of music, she made her stage debut at age two and a half, singing "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella." The three sisters performed for local socials and events, accompanied on piano by their mother. When Joan was nine, the girls, billed as "The Three Brodels," went on the road professionally, appearing in stage shows up and down the east coast. By this time, Joan had added movie star impersonations to her singing and dancing repertoire. When Mr. Brodel lost his job with a Detroit bank in the Depression, he joined the family on the road.

Joan recalls of those days: "We were a very unorthodox group. We weren't a family with any theatrical tradition. To the contrary, we were just a close clan that sang and danced together for sheer enjoyment, and we were thrilled when someone paid us to perform. It was a crazy-quilt kind of childhood, but thank goodness my parents were along to help keep us on an even keel."

The young lady's exceptional looks reaped dividends early in her career, and in 1935, she became a model for John Robert Powers, earning the attractive fee on five dollars and hour. Eventually, the Brodels landed a Broadway engagement at the Paradise Club, where the eleven-year-old's juvenile sparkle won her a screen test for MGM.

Of that long-ago test, Joan remembers: "It was a family affair. My mother wrote the script and my dog appeared in the scene with me. On the strength of the test, MGM signed me. We went to Hollywood and I was given a small role in Camille as Robert Taylor's little sister [2]. I went to the studio school with Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, and Deanna Durbin -- that was right before she went to Universal."

Joan's bit in Greta Garbo's Camille (1936) was hardly a showcase. Metro really did not have plans to launch any new child prodigies, and dropped Joan at the end of her first option. She returned to the family act in the East, but was barely back on the circuit before her sister Mary was signed by Universal. This event prompted the family to return to Hollywood again, where Joan also tried to land a Universal contract, but to no avail. Nevertheless, Joan managed to make the rounds of the casting offices and won bits in features for various studios, including three near walk-ons at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1940 and a part that year in Warner Bros.' short subject, Alice in Movieland.

It was Warners' who ultimately took note of her, signed her to a contract, and changed her name to Joan Leslie.

Looking quite mature for a girl of fifteen, Joan made her feature debut at Warners' in High Sierra (1941). She played the crippled daughter of migrating Henry Travers, and had the unique screen name of Velma Goodshoe [3]. In the course of the Raoul Walsh-directed feature, Humphrey Bogart, as a hood freshly released from prison, meets her and is so impressed by her innocent beauty that he pays for an operation to correct her clubfoot. His fantasies of beginning life anew with this lovely, fresh creature are shattered when she takes up with a sharpie and rejects her benefactor. High Sierra was endoresed by most critics and by much of the film-going public.

After some assembly-line fare in Thieves Fall Out (1941), The Great Mr. Nobody (1941), and The Wagons Roll at Night (1941) -- the latter a dismal reworking of the studio's 1937 Kid Galahad -- Joan Leslie suddenly began receiving top treatment from Warner Bros. On her sixteenth birthday, Jack L. Warner, head of the studio, not only gave her a new Buick, but announced that she would play the role of Gary Cooper's bride in the upcoming Sergeant York (1942) [4]. The feature, with the real-life Alvin York supplying technical supervision, was Warners' epic of the year. It emerged as an intelligent movie, gradually and sensitively presenting its argument for the necessity of pacifism to sometimes give way to fighting. Cooper's Oscar-winning performance kept both the hillbilly antics and military heroics from ever getting out of hand. The front office requested Howard Hawks to showcase Joan's role as much as possible. The result was stardom for her. Her comeliness, however, was far more impressive than her acting here and the New York Times was forced to note, "Joan Leslie plays a mountain beauty with little more than a bright smile, a phony accent, and a tight dress."

The studio followed up on Joan's newly won status by casting her in some of their more prestigious upcoming projects. In The Male Animal (1942) she played Olivia de Havilland's sister who has her own modern ideas. (The role played on broadway by Gene Tierney.) The film was a big hit, despite, as Ted Sennett observes in his book, Warner Bros. Presents (Arlington House, 1971), being "flattened by Warners' pile-driver approach to comedy and a cast that included such dubious farceurs as Joan Leslie and Don DeFore." Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) cast Joan as Mary, the prompter who finally weds James Cagney's George M. Cohan. She was fetching in the role and charming in the film's extravaganza numbers, and, like everyone else connected with that film, she found her professional status boosted by it. A chance came to display some histrionics in The Hard Way. Although it was basically Ida Lupino's picture -- she won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her expert bitchiness as the she pushed talented sister Joan to the heights of show business -- it was Joan who was being pushed, and she got plenty of screen notice.

Whatever her degree of acting inadequacies, they washed away in the light of the response she received from wartime audiences. Her hazel-eyed, freckle-faced loveliness not only appealed to the boys, but to mothers too, and her film following grew rapidly. She began making a formidable showing in exhibitors' popularity polls.

Offscreen, she lived in Beverly Hills with her parents and sisters. Much of her time was unselfishly donated not only to the Hollywood Canteen but also to personal appearances at Army bases and defense plants. Columnists at the time were continually surprised to discover, upon meeting Joan, that she was not the mature young lady she appeared to be onscreen. She wore braces on her slightly portruding teeth, talked about her school days on the Warners' lot, and was liable to gush unabashedly about her success, "Oh, it's all like a wonderful dream!" This lack of sophistication was very refreshing, if somewhat jarring, to some members of the forth estate. As one fan magazine wrote of Joan's naturalness, "This shocks Hollywood, for Hollywood is accustomed to 17-year-olds who act like 25-year-olds."

Warners kept careful gauge of their contractee's appeal. They saw her as a talisman of another inspiration that made G.I.s want to win and get home, and this image was reflected in a number of Joan's wartime releases. In This Is the Army (1943), an unabashed ode to the fighting man, she appeared prominently, and sang "No You, No Me" [5]; in Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), she was a song writer involved in producing a Calvacade of Stars benefit and dueted "I'm Riding for a Fall" with Dennis Morgan. And in Hollywood Canteen (1944), which found Joan at the height of her career, she not only received top billing in the all-star production and the accolade of playing herself, but her presence also inspired the plot: Soldier Robert Hutton's adventures in getting to meet his favorite star -- Joan Leslie. Said the New York Times, "Miss Leslie plays herself with elaborate sweetness."

In the midst of this good cheer for the fighting men, Warners agreed to loan Joan out to RKO in 1943. The temporary sacrifice of her services seemed worthwhile, for RKO wanted her to be Fred Astaire's newest dance partner in The Sky's the Limit. It was an honor indeed to be so selected, and much fuss was made when she celebrated her eighteenth birthday on the set, becoming Fred Astaire's youngest leading lady. However, the film itself, directed by Edward H. Griffith, was no earth-shaking affair, casting Fred Astaire as a service man who, for some inane reason, would rather allow his new acquaintance, Joan Leslie, think of him as a bum rather than as a flyer. Joan was simply not up to the par of her predecessors, even the more sophisticated but less agile Joan Fontaine of A Damsel in Distress (1937). The New York Times wrote: "Apparently they are having trouble finding dancing partners for Mr. Astaire. They are also having trouble finding stories. He has neither in this. The simple fact is that Miss Leslie, while a gracious and neatly attractive miss, is not a Ginger Rogers when she tries to make with her feet." Neither of the two dance numbers Joan performs with Astaire in the picture are remembered as favorites by his admirers [6].

Perhaps Warners was disappointed in the reception afforded Joan's RKO foray, for upon her return to the home lot she was used mainly in program-type fare. There were exceptions: She was very presentable in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the biography of George Gershwin (Robert Alda), in which she played one of the women in his life. The other woman was Alexis Smith, and it was clever of the studio to condense the wide range of Gershwin's romances. On loan to Twentieth Century-Fox, she was in Where Do We Go From Here? (1945), along with Fred MacMurray and June Haver, encased in an offbeat musical about a man (MacMurray), who has 4-F draft status. He shuttles back and forth in time from Valley Forge to the Santa Maria to Manhattan Island before eventually landing in the Marine Corps in 1945. However, Too Young to Know (1945) was a maudlin story of a veteran who, on returning home, finds his wife has given up their baby. Cinderella Jones (1946) again teamed her up with Robert Alda in a silly mess in which she plays a dumb girl who has to marry a bright man in order to inherit an estate. Janie Gets Married (1946) reunited her with Robert Hutton in a perpetuation of Janie (1944) that hardly merited a sequel. Finally, Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946) was memorable only for its closing scene featuring surprise appearances by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Miss Leslie then made the mistake of her career. She decided to break away from Warners, and succeeded only after a lengthy court battle. It was a big error, for she never again received the loving care that the studio originally had provided her or had continued to give her in admittedly smaller doses.

Joan fared poorly on the freelance market. Repeat Performance (1947) at Eagle-Lion used as a plot device the fantasy that a woman, who has murdered her husband, could wish so hard for a chance to relive the past year that it actually happens. The actual presentation did nothing to help the insecure premise. Northwest Stampede, the next year for the same studio, was not much better; it was standard western material handicapped by a particularly unfunny Jack Oakie. Ater a two-year absence, Joan returned to the screen in decorative assignments, such as playing straight lady to Robert Walker in MGM's The Skipper Surprised His Wife (1950), and then settled into a series of westerns for Republic Pictures. The most interesting of these, none of which was that bad, was Jubilee Trail (1954), a Trucolor epic decked out for the benefit of Vera Ralston (as a flashy New Orleans gal), in which Joan was a lovely, quiet widow. Joan's last picture to date was Twentieth Century-Fox's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), a mecca for Jane Russell worshippers, in which subordinated Miss Leslie plays a very patient Honolulu heiress involved with egoistic writer Richard Egan.

Joan was active in television in the early 1950S -- she appeared as early as December, 1951 on the "Bigelow-Sanford Theatre" -- but she gradually tapered off her career as the decade progressed. The main reason was her family. On St. Patrick's Day of 1950, she had married Dr. William Caldwell, then about to enter private practice as an obstetrician and gynecologist. On January 5, 1951, Joan gave birth to identical twin girls, Patrice and Ellen. She explained her departure from filmmaking after the mid-1950s by saying: "My daughters were five years old. I felt that they had reached the age when they needed me, but I never retired officially. I didn't close any doors behind me. Bill has always said that as long as it wasn't too hard for me, and that it was something I enjoyed, I should work if and when I wanted to."

When her moviemaking days ended, Joan did feel a need for other activity and became involved in dress designing. Today, the Joan Leslie line of fashions is a well-established brand-name in the industry. Presently, Joan resides in the Los Feliz area of Hollywood, and is very active in charity work for the St. Anne Home for Unwed Mothers.

As for her past, a now matronly Joan reminisces: "I have wonderful memories of my years in Hollywood. But honestly, it's a really hard life. There are many pitfalls, particularly for young girls. You tend to become so self-centered, accustomed to being the center of things. It's difficult to retain your equilibrium." Recently, Joan, whose last acting credit was a 1965 episode of TV's "Branded," said, "I think it would be exciting to return to performing now. The world has never been in greater need of people reaching out to others -- in whatever way their talent allows -- so perhaps one of these days, I'll be back onscreen again." Thus in January, 1975 she made a cameo appearance in a segment of "Police Story" as Howard Duff's matronly wife.

Notes

[1] The actress's real name was often given as "Brodell" in magazine and newspaper articles of the 1940s. In Quigley's 1937-8 Motion Picture Almanac, it is spelled Brodel, the correct spelling.

[2] Joan had two lines in the original shooting script, neither of which is preserved in the print of Camille available on videotape. Her character, Marie Jeanette, celebrates her first communion in the movie, and is kissed on the forehead by Lionel Barrymore.

[3] Actually, she is Traver's daughter's daughter.

[4] Jack Warner presented Joan Leslie with a new car on her seventeenth birthday, while photographers clicked away. As soon as the photographers left, the car was wheeled off: "I never saw it any more," she told author Michael Freedland. "But I suppose that was just part of the business" (The Warner Bros., p. 148).

[5] Author's note:"Sally Sweetland (nee Mueller) often dubbed for Joan's vocalizing."