Margaret Talbot

“Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.”

Warner Brothers, the pioneering studio when it came to sound, had started producing short movies using a system called Vitaphone, in which records were made to accompany the films, then played on phonographs hooked up to movie projectors in the theaters. There were plenty of skeptics, including the father of motion pictures himself, Thomas Edison: “No, I don’t think the talking moving picture will ever be successful in the United States,” he declared in 1927. “Americans prefer silent drama. They are accustomed to the moving picture as it is and they will never get enthusiastic over any voices being mingled in. Yes, there will be a novelty to it for a little while, but the glitter will soon wear off and the movie fans will cry for silence or a little orchestra music.”

Lyle’s own life after the war had begun to seem like something out of one of the B noirs—a stumble down a long, dark alley. He was drinking a lot. His favored drinking companion was a man named Philip Van Zandt, a mustachioed Dutch-born character actor who was often cast as a Nazi, though he also turned up in Citizen Kane and a clutch of Three Stooges shorts. Van Zandt had a compulsion for gambling and a tendency to depression, but like Lyle, he loved to work, and he, too, managed to pull himself together when he had an acting job. Lyle was not a depressive. But he was vulnerable, on occasion, to a certain vaporous despair. In my experience—I saw it a few times later—this fleeting melancholy did not express itself as a disappointment with himself or his life, professional or personal, though perhaps that was the well-hidden trigger. It was more like an existential sadness: about mortality, the state of the world, human limits. He treated that feeling successfully by working—hence the willingness, the eagerness, to take any role that came along.