CALIFORNIA
The Central Casting Couch
What was the secret crime that brought down a sexually exploitative Hollywood mogul?
June De Long arrived in Hollywood in 1931 with the usual dreams of stardom. She styled her blond hair in pin curls and accentuated her eyebrows. Friends back east had warned about the Hollywood casting couch, ‟but I wouldn’t believe it,” she said.
De Long attained some success as a hand model, doubling for famous actresses in close-up shots. Her hands were called the most beautiful in Hollywood. Mostly, though, she worked at a beauty parlor. After a few years in Hollywood, De Long, then 29, was asked whether having affairs with men was necessary to get acting work. “Oh, yes, that is about the only way,” she responded.
One day, a coworker arranged for De Long to meet Dave Allen, the 48-year-old head of Central Casting, the agency that hired extras for films. Allen was a coil-haired former New York piano player who wore flashy clothes. Twelve thousand unemployed actors sought work daily; only 1500 extras were needed. That left over ten thousand angry with him on any given day.
Allen, though married, developed a reputation for promising women work if they had sex with him. De Long accommodated him several times and twice at his request recruited other actresses to join them at her apartment. Many would not acquiesce until they received a movie assignment. “They were wiser than I was,” De Long said grimly. “They always got work first.”
Despite the ongoing demands from Allen, De Long got only one part. When she challenged him, he responded, ‟The studios don’t want _________.” Newspapers said he ended his sentence with ‟a word descriptive of a type of woman possessed of abnormal impulses.” De Long responded by chastising Allen for sullying her reputation.
I first encountered De Long while working on a book about 1930s Los Angeles. Sexual harassment and misogyny were two elements of the corruption matrix I explored. De Long’s story was interesting because she tried to fight the system. It took me a while to piece together the shards of the ensuing explosion; newspapers had found the scandal’s details unprintable.
In January 1934, De Long decided she’d had enough. Her friend Pearl Owings took her to the extras’ union to file a grievance. Owings, 34, had a sharp jawline and a sharp tongue. The union told the pair they weren’t interested in anyone’s morals, and if they had a complaint, they should talk to the district attorney. On April 19, De Long again visited Allen at Central Casting and demanded work, but he was dismissive.
The following week, De Long had dinner with Owings and her married boyfriend, Pat Harmon, at Owings’ Hollywood Hills home. Harmon, 48, was a former prizefighter with a barrel-shaped body and a constant grimace. He’d played bit parts in silent movies, always as a bully. With talkies taking over, Harmon needed work as an extra, but Allen wouldn’t cast him.
Owings concocted a scheme to get work for De Long and Harmon. She told De Long to invite Allen back to her apartment. Owings would arrive unexpectedly and catch them having sex. She would confront Allen and threaten to inform his wife. It was a blackmail plan. The trio felt confident that the threat of exposure would result in steady work for both De Long and Harmon. De Long had no other option; the studio system was hardly set up to remedy the abuse she’d sustained. In many respects, it was designed for exploitation.
The following morning, De Long attended Ladies’ Day at Central Casting. Women had one day a week to apply for roles; men apparently got all the others. Allen asked De Long to find another woman to join them that afternoon — redheaded, please.
De Long returned to her apartment on Western Avenue. When Allen arrived, she told him she’d been unable to reach any of her friends. After Allen insisted, De Long called around some more, and finally her best friend, 26-year-old Gloria Marsh, agreed to join them.
Once in bed with the two women, Allen said, “I think this is a beautiful thing.” The beauty, which was only in the groin of the beholder, was interrupted by the arrival of Owings. Marsh immediately left. Allen told Owings, “Everybody knows what I do, the kinds of parties I like. Let’s you and Miss De Long and I have a party and forget the whole thing.” Owings declined. Allen offered De Long and Owings $200 each to keep quiet. That offer was also refused.
Allen contacted the LAPD and demanded an investigation. He claimed De Long had lured him to the apartment by saying Marsh had information on a plot to frame him. When Marsh arrived, the two women went into the dressing area. De Long reappeared wearing a kimono with nothing underneath. Allen smelled trouble. Then Owings entered the apartment. He recognized her and realized he’d been framed. According to Allen, Owings exclaimed, “Well, I know two people who are going to get steady work now. Isn’t that nice?”
“This looks like Pat Harmon’s work,” Allen replied. He denied offering the women any money. He said neither he nor Marsh had removed any clothing, and no sex had occurred.
Two detectives visited De Long at her apartment that night. Knowing that Allen often arranged for police officers to date young women listed with Central Casting, she was uncooperative. The detectives found no evidence of a crime, illegal sex, or a shakedown.
Fearing that the LAPD and district attorney were beholden to the movie studios, Owings contacted the grand jury foreman. After talking to Owings and De Long, the panel subpoenaed Allen and Marsh, who refused to testify. The grand jury then indicted Allen and Marsh on a morals charge.
Visiting Los Angeles, I wanted to see the apartment building where the alleged sex crime occurred. I drove down Western Avenue, one of the city’s longest streets, so named because it once marked the municipality’s western border. De Long’s building, the Western Arms, was a caramel-colored structure in the shape of a “U” with a landscaped entryway down the center. The building had opened as a hotel eight years before the episode with Allen but struggled during the Depression and began offering $25-a-month studios.
Buildings like these sheltered striving actors all over the outskirts of Hollywood. Newcomers were slow to decipher L.A., and cheap rents drew them to less desirable neighborhoods along the extensive streetcar lines. The aspirants expected to upgrade to grander quarters in a better area once they got work. Many never left.
I had a similar experience myself. Upon moving to Los Angeles in 1987 — without a job or car — I rented a studio apartment half a mile from where De Long had lived. Five decades after she’d arrived, it was still the wrong neighborhood. I broke my lease after six months and waved goodbye to the cockroaches. A decade after that, vibrancy came to the area when it blossomed into Koreatown.
News coverage of Allen’s and Marsh’s indictments said that Pearl Owings saw something unconscionable in June De Long’s apartment, but no newspaper identified the crime. When the trial came, the papers refused to report the key testimony, though some indicated Owings had encountered a “sex party.” Others used the term orgy. To this day, there is no published description of the charge.
Though unwilling to print the crime’s name, a few papers did provide the Penal Code section number, 288a. A longtime friend, an attorney with access to the historic penal code, helped me decipher the charge. In 1934, section 288a said, “Any person participating in the act of copulating the mouth of one person with the sexual organ of another is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for not exceeding fifteen years.” What Owings saw was Gloria Marsh giving Dave Allen a blowjob.
At the trial, Owings insisted she’d come across the wild scene by accident, stopping by De Long’s apartment to pick up some photographs. She denied any attempt to frame Allen. When De Long testified similarly, Allen’s attorney asked whether she herself had ever been arrested on a morals charge. No, she replied.
On Friday afternoon, the court recessed for the weekend. Because De Long’s testimony was central to the prosecution’s case, a female investigator from the district attorney’s office guarded her at all times. The day I visited the Hollywood apartment where they stayed, the city was preparing for the Oscars, and much of Hollywood Boulevard was shut down. After pushing through the congealed traffic, I encountered a stalwart brick box from 1925, notable mainly for the giant neon sign on its rooftop advertising the Mayfair Apartments.
Around noon on Saturday, the investigator ran out to get more cream for their coffee. She returned 15 minutes later to find De Long gone. A slip of paper said: “When you read this, I will be dead.” The suicide note described De Long’s despair over her failed career. It asked that her possessions be given to Gloria Marsh, against whom she’d just testified. The lengthy missive expressed her desire to ‟tell girls throughout the world not to try to get into pictures. Men will try to make a toy out of you, but when you won’t play anymore, then they will put you in jail like Dave Allen did me.” De Long had only avoided imprisonment by agreeing to testify against Allen and Marsh.
Police officers fanned out across Hollywood and the beaches but could not find De Long or a body. That night, however, a mystery writer recognized De Long walking along Western Avenue, between 8th and 9th Streets, almost five miles from the Hollywood flat but close to her own apartment. Somewhere in her wanderings, De Long had lost the sleeping pills she’d planned to ingest. She explained her disappearance by saying, “It just seemed as though I could not go back into that courtroom and face Gloria — I was putting her in a terrible position. I was hurting her, and I still love her.”
In court on Monday, De Long admitted perjuring herself. She had been arrested on a morals charge three years earlier. Its exact nature was never described, but she acknowledged spending five days in jail and paying a $25 fine. Asked why she testified falsely, De Long said, ‟I figured I had already disgraced myself, and I could not see where the question had anything to do with the case.” The defense attorney asked whether she’d realized he would present evidence about the arrest.
‟Yes, that’s why I wanted to commit suicide. I have nothing to live for.” The response was stricken from the record, but it startled the jurors. De Long then fainted on the witness stand.
Allen testified that Owings, Harmon, and De Long had set him up. His claim was backed up by the LAPD chief of detectives, who confirmed Allen had received blackmail attempts and death threats before the incident. Marsh, another friend, and the detective who visited De Long testified that she’d admitted the shakedown scheme to them. Marsh denied anything wild happened in De Long’s apartment and said she never undressed.
Several reliable witnesses testified to hearing Harmon complain about Allen’s unwillingness to give him work. They said he celebrated after the indictment, telling a fellow actor, ‟I’ve tried for three years to get that ____- ____ Allen, and now that I’ve got him, he’s going up for a long time.” Newspapers redacted his cursing, but it’s easy to imagine a colorful two-word adjective.
An attorney testified that when Harmon bragged about the indictment, Owings jumped into the conversation, saying, ‟Don’t try to take all the credit for this yourself, Pat. I’m entitled to some of the credit.”
Given the testimony, Allen and Marsh were sure they would be exonerated.
After 53 hours of deliberations, the jury deadlocked eight-to-four for conviction. During the Depression, the public was increasingly sensitive to issues of power and privilege. But it remained ambivalent about sexual matters and the sovereignty of studios. A retrial was scheduled for the following year.
In January 1935, as Pat Harmon left Fox Studios, two men punched him and struck his head with a pipe, cutting and bruising his face. Harmon asserted that Dave Allen sent the men to dissuade him from testifying at the retrial. Soon, in an unrelated matter, Owings and Harmon were convicted of stealing a horse after refusing to pay for or return the animal. Because their testimony was critical to the sex case, prosecutors then dropped the charges against Allen and Marsh.
In the end, the scheme destroyed almost everyone’s lives. De Long got no more film work. The horse theft sent Harmon to Folsom Prison and put Owings on probation. When Harmon finally did divorce his wife in the late 1930s, he did not marry Owings; he wed another woman and died in 1958.
Allen lost his job at Central Casting, and his wife divorced him. However, as often happens in situations like these, Allen returned to power, working at Columbia Pictures for 18 years.
The Hollywood machine suctioned in potential talent from all over the country and spat out what it couldn’t use or had used up. De Long, Marsh, and Owings vanished into undocumented lives. No other details about their fates are available.
The justice system didn’t protect De Long, or other actresses, from sexual harassment. Alone and vulnerable, De Long was exploited not only by Allen but also by Owings and Harmon to further their own aspirations. Everyone involved treated her as expendable.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
