Gloria DeHaven, 91; sang, danced her way into movie roles . By Adam
Bernstein Washington Post . WASHINGTON - Gloria DeHaven, a pert actress
who debuted at 11 in Charlie Chaplin's silent-movie masterpiece "Modern
Times," sang and danced her way through musicals starring Gene Kelly
and Fred Astaire, and bestowed on Frank Sinatra his first onscreen
kiss, died Saturday in Las Vegas. She was 91. The cause was
complications from a stroke, said a daughter, Faith
Fincher-Finkelstein. Ms. DeHaven had moved to Las Vegas in 2003 after
years in Beverly Hills, Calif., and New York. Ms. DeHaven was the
daughter of vaudevillians and enjoyed a long career propelled by her
warm singing voice and fetching looks. Her forte was romantic musical
comedy - Technicolor fare in which her golden red hair glistened for
the camera - but she seldom had dazzling solo showcase numbers that
might have boosted her to higher echelons of stardom. She remained a
solid journeyman performer who held her own opposite charismatic
entertainers such as Judy Garland, Van Johnson, Mickey Rooney, Red
Skelton, Donald O'Connor, and Lucille Ball. Ms. DeHaven was still in
her teens when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood's most prestigious
studio, began grooming her for featured roles in lavishly produced
musicals such as "Thousands Cheer" starring Kelly and "Best Foot
Forward" with Ball and June Allyson. She subsequently worked on MGM
pictures such as "Two Girls and a Sailor" with Johnson and Allyson and
"Broadway Rhythm" with George Murphy, and she bussed Sinatra in 1944 in
"Step Lively," loosely based on the Marx Brothers romp "Room Service.
Ms. DeHaven was relegated to secondary roles in finer MGM fare,
including "Summer Stock," in which she played Garland's stagestruck
sister. Ms. DeHaven earned higher billing at rival studios - 20th
Century Fox and Universal International - but in increasingly
undistinguished pictures, among them "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" with
O'Connor, "I'll Get By" with June Haver and William Lundigan, "Down
Among the Sheltering Palms" with Lundigan and Mitzi Gaynor, and "So
This Is Paris," the last a misguided attempt to plant Tony Curtis in a
musical. Ms. DeHaven's career dwindled as the musical faded in
popularity. She transitioned to stage and television work, proving
adaptable to dramatic anthology shows ("Robert Montgomery Presents"),
westerns ("The Rifleman" and "Wagon Train") and series including
"Quincy M.E.," "Fantasy Island," "B.J. and the Bear," and "Murder, She
Wrote. Ms. DeHaven played a rotten-to-the-core schemer in the soap
opera "As the World Turns" in the late 1960s and years later popped up
as a trailer-park denizen in another soap, "Ryan's Hope. She gamely
sent up the genre on the Norman Lear-produced "Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman" as a bisexual CB radio aficionado named Annie "Tippytoes"
Wylie. Her final movie role was as Jack Lemmon's love interest in "Out
to Sea," a tepid 1997 cruise ship comedy co-starring Walter Matthau.
"If you don't stretch yourself in this business, you're dead," Ms.
DeHaven told the Los Angeles Times in 1984. She quipped of her sheer
endurance in an unforgiving profession such as show business, "As
Ingrid Bergman once said, 'There are only two things you need in life
to be successful: good health and a bad memory.' Gloria Mildred DeHaven
was born in Los Angeles, the youngest of three children of Carter
DeHaven and the former Flora Parker. Her parents divorced, and she was
raised by her mother, whom she portrayed in the 1950 MGM musical "Three
Little Words. In that biopic of Tin Pan Alley songwriters Bert Kalmar
(Astaire) and Harry Ruby (Skelton), Ms. DeHaven sang the standard
"Who's Sorry Now? Ms. DeHaven's father was working as an assistant
director on "Modern Times," Chaplin's final silent comedy feature film,
when she made an auspicious visit to the set one day. Chaplin
unexpectedly needed two girls to play the young, waterfront urchin
sisters of star Paulette Goddard. "All we had to do was wear tattered
clothes, eat bananas, and do big takes," Ms. DeHaven later told the
Toronto Star. "I thought, 'If this is show business, count me in! " In
her teens, she sang with the Bob Crosby and Jan Savitt big bands before
signing an MGM contract. Her nonmusical MGM films included "The Thin
Man Goes Home," an entry in the popular William Powell-Myrna Loy
detective series, and "The Doctor and the Girl" as the desperate sister
of physician Glenn Ford. Her marriages to actor John Payne, Martin
Kimmell, and Richard Fincher - whom she twice wed - ended in divorce.
She leaves two children from her first husband, Kathleen Payne of
Marina del Rey, Calif., and Tom Payne of Daly City, Calif.; two
children from her third husband, Faith Fincher-Finkelstein of
Summerlin, Nev., and Harry Fincher of North Las Vegas; and three
grandchildren. Her brother, Carter DeHaven Jr., a noted figure in film
production, died in 1979. In addition to her television work, she
appeared in the short-lived Broadway musical "Seventh Heaven" opposite
Ricardo Montalban, and long toured in a nightclub act, at times sharing
a bill with Sammy Davis Jr. She once quipped that she had "two chances
not to be in this business: slim and none. I was born in a stage trunk
and that's all I really knew.
