Quick question: What movies did Lyle Talbot appear in? If you don't know (or even if you do), you'll want to read his daughter Margaret's lovely and affectionate biography of her dad, The Entertainer. Talbot, a staff writer at the New Yorker, was born when her dad was 59, the "lagniappe of a late-in-life fourth child." She remembers him telling stories about his "long-running picaresque adventures in entertainment," and now she wants to tell his story. It's not a memoir, but an "idiosyncratic history of how entertainment evolved in the twentieth century."
Lyle Talbot was a hypnotist's assistant, a magician in traveling tent shows, a star in the making in 1930s Hollywood who nearly became a B-movie has-been and then a regular on television from the 1940s to the early '80s. Drinking, along with his union activism (he was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild), sometimes made it hard for him to get work, but he acted with Bogart, Davis, Tracy, Lombard, Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple and the Three Stooges; he was Commissioner Gordon in the early Batman and Robin serials and starred in three Ed Wood pictures. He was a regular on the Ozzie and Harriet Show and appeared in Leave It to Beaver along with his son, Stephen (who played Gilbert). The Entertainer is a terrific pean to Margaret's dad and an even better history of American popular entertainment. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher