June Bixler [?] (1917-2007) lived for ninety years, and spent just three of them as a Hollywood chorus girl.
Her first screen appearance, when she would have been just sixteen, was in MGM’s Dancing Lady. Surviving materials suggest that she might have featured in the robot wedding dance, which was filmed but then cut from the final film.
After four more appearances, including Al Jolson’s Wonder Bar (1934), her career would seem to have been over. She was married to songwriter Mack Gordon from 1939 to 1948, but the remainder of her life is, for now, a mystery.
Shirley Chambers (1913-2011) was nineteen when she played an assistant in a dress shop in the Warner’s comedy Gentleman for a Day (1932). In the same year she had credited roles in a Clark and McCullough comedy short, The Iceman’s Ball (1932), and in the Lupe Velez vehicle, The Half-Naked Truth (1932), which was directed by Gregory La Cava.
Chambers’s film career fluctuated between uncredited bit parts and down-the-bill credits in films such as Calm Yourself (1935), a comedy-mystery starring Robert Young. Her best role was probably Vera in Melody Cruise (1933), a Charles Ruggles comedy.
Some of her uncredited appearances were in quality pictures such as Nothing Sacred (1937, as Lady Godiva) and The Women (1939).
Chambers sustained film career ended after she played one of Belle’s girls in Gone with the Wind (1939), though she continued to act on the stage and was in 1947’s Home Stretch and one episode of the television series My Mother the Car in 1966.
Shirley Chambers’s connections with the MGM musical are Dancing Lady, as one of the scores of chorus girls, and the 1934 The Merry Widow, as a Maxim’s girl.
Laura Emma Clark (1911-64) made her film debut aged seventeen, in a Poverty Row comedy short called Sunshine’s Dark Moment (1929).
Many of her subsequent twenty or so appearances were as chorus girls, including one of the almost fifty used in MGM Dancing Lady. But she also had non-musical roles, such as the reception desk nurse in Laurel and Hardy’s classic County Hospital (1932).
She also had the occasional credited role, in films such as the Poverty Row western Law of the Rio (1931).
Esther Brodelet (1906-89) started working as a dancer while in her twenties. She obtained a contract with Fox in 1932 and appeared in around 30 pictures, mostly musicals, over the next fifteen years.
After brief appearances in a couple of Fox films, Brodelet was loaned to MGM for Dancing Lady.
Brodelet’s only credited role was in one of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Jones Family pictures, Young As You Feel (1940). Her last film was Mother Wore Tights (1947), again playing a chorus girl. She was a little old for this, but apparently always took ten years off her age in Hollywood.
Roles had always been sparse, and Brodelet apparently had a sideline as a chicken farmer, selling eggs to the stars.
After leaving the film industry, Brodelet settled down for forty years of married life.
Bonita Beryl Barker (1916-2006) started dance training as a young child and by her teen was appearing in amateur productions. She travelled to Hollywood when she was just out of school.
Barker appeared as a chorus girl in eight pictures, one of which was MGM’s Dancing Lady. As a change of pace, she was credited in a singing role in Outlaw’s Highway (1934), starring Kazan the Wonder Dog. She also seems to have been in a 1934 comedy short called Back to the Soil.
Bonita Barker went out on something of a high, as a chorus girl in Lewis Milestone’s version of Anything Goes (1936). She then retired from show business, settling into domesticity and a long life.
Thanks to Those Obscure Objects of Desire for much of this information.
Scores of young women appeared in the chorus lines of mid-30s’ musicals, but Marjorie Schuyler Fisher (1919-89) was one of the few who went on to have a career. Not a glorious career, but she made over 170 pictures, and starred in some of them.
Bari was given training and a six-month contract with newly-formed Twentieth Century Fox when she was just 16, though she had already been playing bit parts for several years. In 1935, she appeared in at least 26 releases, always in small, uncredited roles.
The first role with any substance given to Bari was Klari the maid in The Baroness and the Butler (1938), acting with William Powell. Thereafter, she was mostly restricted to featured parts in ‘B’ pictures, though frequently with top billing. Typical films included Kit Carson (1940) and Sleepers West (1941), and she played opposite George Sanders in The Falcon Takes Over (1942). Bari’s occasional ‘A’ pictures included Margie (1946) and Has Anyone Seen My Gal (1952).
Bari carried on working, predominantly in television, until 1968.
Two of Lynn Bari’s early chorus girl roles were in Metro musicals: Dancing Lady and The Great Ziegfeld.
Lee Bailey (1908-2001) was one of the hundreds of young women who made a handful of appearances in the chorus lines of Hollywood musicals during the 1930s, then spent the rest of their lives in, it is to be hoped, happy obscurity.
Bailey made six appearances over a twelve-year period, which suggests she might have been performing in some other medium alongside this work. She debuted in It’s Great to Be Alive (1933) and played her last role in State Fair (1945).
The only MGM musical featuring Lee Bailey is Dancing Lady.
Florine Crawford Bale (1910-90) trained in tap and ballet as a child, equipping her for her film debut under the command of Busby Berkeley in Footlight Parade (1933).
Bale only appeared uncredited, in ten pictures, but apparently became well known in Hollywood as a commander in the women’s section Victor McLaglen’s California Light Horse Regiment, established by the actor to fight communism and play polo.
Florine Bale appeared in four Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow and The Night is Young.
After leaving show business, Bale worked in the real estate business.
Marion Esther Roddan (1911-77) had a short career in Hollywood, appearing in just eleven films in seven years. All her appearances were uncredited, and were generally as dancers or saloon/harem girls.
As Gail Arnold, she made her screen debut as one of the many chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady. In her final role, she was a dancer for Michael Curtiz in Warner’s Virginia City (1940). More of the same came in between.
