Adolphe Menjou

• 1. Introduction

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  Adolphe Menjou was voted Best Dressed Man in America nine times. That statistic tells you something important about how the world saw him - not just as an actor, but as an ideal. His career stretched across five decades, from silent comedies to Cold War dramas, and the man behind the immaculate suits turns out to be far more complicated than his image suggested.

  Born on the 18th of February 1890 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Menjou came from a French father named Albert and an Irish mother named Nora. His brother Henry, a year younger, also went into acting. The family was Roman Catholic, and Menjou's early path looked nothing like Hollywood. He attended the Culver Military Academy, then graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering.

  What pulled him away from a respectable professional life was the pull of the stage. He made his film debut in 1916, and when World War I arrived, he served as a captain in the United States Army Ambulance Service. By the time he came back from overseas, the movies were waiting. The questions that follow are these: how does an engineer from Pittsburgh become a symbol of Parisian elegance? And what lurks beneath the surface of a man who spent decades playing the suave romantic lead?

• 2. The Man About Town

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  Charlie Chaplin gave Menjou his breakthrough. The 1923 film A Woman of Paris, directed by Chaplin, cast Menjou as a man-about-town named Pierre Revel, and the role locked in his public persona for good. Critics and audiences recognized something authentic in his portrayal of worldly sophistication, and the nine consecutive Best Dressed Man in America titles followed naturally.

  Before that landmark role, Menjou had spent several years working his way upward through the studio system. After returning from the war, he landed small parts in The Faith Healer and supporting roles in The Sheik and The Three Musketeers, all released in 1921. By 1922 he was receiving top or near-top billing, working with Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount Pictures starting with Pink Gods.

  Menjou was noted as a performer who could credibly play either lover or villain, a range that kept him employed across very different kinds of productions. He personally reassured Maurice Chevalier, ahead of Chevalier's first Hollywood film Innocents of Paris in 1929, that success awaited him despite what Menjou considered a mediocre screenplay. That act of collegial generosity offers a glimpse of the man beneath the tailored exterior. His knowledge of French and Spanish would prove useful later, when talkies arrived and studios needed actors who could handle foreign-language versions of their pictures.

• 3. Transition to Sound

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  The 1929 stock market crash erased Menjou's contract with Paramount almost overnight. Many silent-era stars found themselves stranded by the shift to sound, but Menjou's language skills gave him a real advantage. He moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and kept working steadily through the new era of talkies.

  Morocco, his 1930 film opposite Marlene Dietrich, showed he could hold his own against one of cinema's most magnetic presences. The following year brought his only Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor in The Front Page in 1931. The nomination came with an unusual footnote: Menjou received the role only after the death of Louis Wolheim during rehearsals.

  Through the first half of the 1930s, Menjou remained a romantic lead. He starred opposite Irene Dunne in The Great Lover in 1931, with Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden in 1932, and opposite Elissa Landi in The Great Flirtation in 1934. Supporting turns in A Farewell to Arms in 1932, Morning Glory in 1933, and A Star Is Born in 1937 rounded out a decade in which he never stopped appearing on screen. His range of collaborators was remarkable, extending from Charlie Chaplin through Frank Borzage, Frank Capra, and eventually Stanley Kubrick.

• 4. Politics and Conviction

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  In 1947, Menjou appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and delivered testimony that defied easy categorization. He told the committee he had studied communism and other ideological movements extensively, but he declined to name specific individuals as Communists. He told the panel: "I know a lot of people who act an awful lot like Communists." When asked whether studios should refuse to renew the contracts of known Communist writers and actors, he pushed back: "Many Communist writers are splendid writers," he said. "They just have to be watched, that's all."

  His self-description at that hearing was precise: "I am not here to smear. I am here to defend the industry in which I have spent the greatest part of my life." He insisted he was both anti-Fascist and anti-Communist, and argued that making anti-Fascist pictures obligated Hollywood to make anti-Communist pictures as well.

  Menjou was a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which counted John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, and her husband Robert Taylor among its membership. He was also, briefly, a member of the John Birch Society. Even after leaving that organization, he claimed to believe in its principles until his death. His political conservatism brought him into direct conflict with Katharine Hepburn, with whom he appeared in Morning Glory, Stage Door, and State of the Union. According to biographer William Mann, during the filming of State of the Union, Hepburn and Menjou spoke to each other only while the cameras were rolling.

• 5. Final Acts

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  Menjou's output thinned in the 1950s to just eleven roles across the entire decade. He still found meaningful work. In 1952 he played Police Lieutenant Frank Kafka in the film noir The Sniper, his last leading role. Television brought him to Science Fiction Theatre in 1955, where he played Dr. Elliott Harcourt in an episode called "Barrier of Silence." In 1956, he appeared in the Thanksgiving episode of NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, which aired on the 22nd of November.

  Stanley Kubrick cast him in Paths of Glory in 1957, in the role of French General Georges Broulard, the film's antagonist. Kubrick's film about the moral corruption of military command gave Menjou one of his most durable late-career credits. His final film role, in 1960, was a deliberate contrast: the town curmudgeon in Disney's Pollyanna.

  That same year, the Hollywood Walk of Fame awarded him a star at 6826 Hollywood Boulevard, recognizing his contributions to the motion picture industry. In 1948, he had published his autobiography, titled It Took Nine Tailors, the title being a wry expansion of the old proverb. He was an avid golfer who regularly played with Clark Gable. He died on the 29th of October 1963, of hepatitis, in Beverly Hills, California, and was interred beside his wife Verree at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

• 6. Off-Screen Life and Legacy

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  Menjou married three times. His first marriage, in 1920 to Kathryn Conn Tinsley, ended in divorce; he had adopted her son Harold Lawton Tinsley during that union. He married Kathryn Carver in 1928 and they divorced in 1934. His third marriage, to actress Verree Teasdale, lasted from 1934 until his death, and together they had one adopted son, Peter Menjou. His will named only Peter as his heir, a detail that emerged after his death and cast a shadow over his earlier adoption of Harold Tinsley.

  Salvador Dali counted himself among Menjou's admirers. Dali declared "la moustache d'Adolphe Menjou est surréaliste" - Adolphe Menjou's mustache is surrealist - and took to offering fake mustaches from a silver cigarette case to strangers, asking "Moustache? Moustache? Moustache?" The avant-garde photographer known as Umbo produced one of his most celebrated images around 1928, titled "Menjou En Gros," suggesting the actor's face had become something beyond celebrity - a kind of visual cultural reference.

  What the source record shows is a man who accumulated contradictions without resolving them: the Cornell-trained engineer who became Hollywood's ideal Frenchman; the HUAC witness who refused to name names while still endorsing the John Birch Society's principles; the three-time husband whose final will quietly erased a son. His star remains at 6826 Hollywood Boulevard, a fixed address for a career that proved surprisingly hard to classify.