Today’s homily (an occasional one here) concerns the truth that Hollywood is not necessarily the be-all and end-all for all performers. Case in point: singer-actor George Houston (1896-1944).
New Jersey native Houston had been a high school track star and an ambulance driver in World War One so he certainly had his plausibly rugged side. But he had also studied opera at the Institute of Musical Arts (which became Juilliard) and the Eastman School of Music, and toured with the Eastman supported American Opera Company. During the ’20s, he’d sung in Boris Gudunov, Carmen, and Faust; appeared opposite Mary Garden; and performed for President Coolidge.
In 1928 he brought his talents to Broadway, debuting in the Herbert Fields–Lorenz Hart show Chee-hee. This was followed by numerous other short-lived shows, including Fioretta (1929), The Venetian Glass Nephew (1931), A Modern Virgin (1931), Melody (1933), Shooting Star (1933), Caviar (1934), and The O’Flynn (1934). Meantime, in 1933 he married Ziegfeld Girl Leone Sousa, and made his screen debut in the Vitaphone comedy short Masks and Memories (1934) with Lillian Roth and Queenie Smith, shot in Astoria, Queens.
With this screen performance as his calling card Houston took the opportunity to try his luck on the west coast. For the balance of the decade, he had a pretty good run of it, alternating between live theatre, starring roles for smaller studios, and smaller roles in major movies. He was in two Max Reinhardt stage productions, Everyman (1936) and Faust (1938), he played the title characters in the movies Captain Calamity (1935) and Wallaby Jim of the Island (1938). He seemed particularly in demand to play historical characters: the Marquis de St. Priest in Marie Antoinette (1938), Wild Bill Hickok in Frontier Scout (1938), Fritz Schiller in the Strauss bio-pic The Great Waltz (1938) and George Washington in The Howards of Virginia (1940).
In 1939 Grand National Pictures, with which Houston was contracted, went belly up. The following year, Sousa divorced him. The new decade proved a time of transition. The wrong turn came when when Houston signed with the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) to star in a series of singing cowboy westerns. Starring in his own series (as opposed to bit parts in A list features) probably sounded pretty good. Like Bob Custer, he also had a name that implied a relation to a real-life western hero (Sam Houston). Coincidentally, he shares a birthday with two other B movie western stars: Jack Hoxie and Red Barry! Initially it was announced that he would star in a Billy the Kid series, but that part ultimately went to Bob Steele. He was instead cast as a character called “The Lone Rider”, starring in a dozen features from 1941 to 1942. Al “Fuzzy” St. John was his sidekick. The similarity of the name to The Lone Ranger was no doubt not lost on audiences. It didn’t set the world on fire. Nor did Houston. At the end of 1942 PR replaced him in the series with Bob Livingston.
In 1943 he married Virginia Card, who had appeared in one of Houston’s Lone Rider films. Like Houston, Card was operatically trained and had appeared on Broadway and in local L.A. stage productions of musicals. In his down time he also worked as a vocal coach to future stars like Howard Keel. By 1944 he had formed an opera company and was preparing to take it on tour. It was following a rehearsal late that year that Houston suddenly died of a heart attack at age 48. Unfortunately, the attack had come in the midst of a drinking bout. His collapse was incorrectly interpreted by strangers as his having “passed out” from intoxication, so police brought him to the drunk tank, which is where he expired.
For more on show business history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.