August 5, 1918– He was born as Alfred Sinclair Alderdice in Brooklyn. At some point in his stage career & after several other name changes, he landed on Tom Drake as his professional moniker. He made films beginning in 1940 & continuing in to the mid-1970s. He also had many a guest shot on TV series.
Drake was a deeply closeted gay guy & easily given to despair. He was never known to have had a serious romance, although he bedded Rock Hudson & James Dean. He lived with a profound drinking problem & he lived a life of fear of being found out. Sound familiar?
1942 & 1943 were years of tremendous change at MGM. Most of the great Golden Age stars groomed by Head Of Production Irving Thalberg during the 1930s had left the studio. Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Robert Montgomery, & James Stewart had joined the US Army, Air Force or Navy & were absent from Hollywood during WW2. Greta Garbo & Norma Shearer walked away from the business. Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Eleanor Powell, Myrna Loy, & Margaret Sullivan fulfilled their contracts & signed with other studios, worked as independents or moved to Broadway.
The greatest of stars were being replaced by young, fresh, wholesome “boy & girl next door” types: June Allyson, Van Johnson, Robert Walker, Esther Williams, & Tom Drake. Drake was enormously popular with teenage filmgoers for a couple of years, but he was eventually overshadowed by the smoother Van Johnson.
He appeared in more than 40 films, doing good work in Mrs. Parkington (1944) & The Green Years (1946). He was put in to Words & Music, the most expensive MGM production of 1948. Ironically, Drake was cast as the very heterosexual composer Richard Rodgers opposite Mickey Rooney’s Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who was gay in real life. He is actually good in the role, but the film is overproduced & purports to tell the life stories of the famous songwriting partners with a screenplay that is 100% fictional.
Words & Music, Drake seated, with Mickey Rooney, Betty Garrett & Janet Leigh
Words & Music does contain some of Rodgers & Hart’s great songs: My Heart Stood Still, The Lady Is A Tramp, & Where Or When taken from their best Broadway shows: Babes In Arms, Pal Joey, & On Your Toes. Guest stars perform the various musical numbers: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Lena Horne, & Cyd Charisse. The great stars’ take on the songs make this film worth viewing, but the story is all wrong.
Drake had his best role as John Truett, the boy next door, in Vincente Minnelli’s classic musical Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) opposite his friend Judy Garland.
Drake returned to the stage in 1952, appearing briefly on Broadway & touring in Stalag 17. Elizabeth Taylor, always helping out her gay friends, used her clout with MGM & had him cast as her brother in Raintree County (1957).
Later that year Drake went to England for a starring part in a film Dare With Disaster (also the title of a chapter in my memoirs). He remained in Europe, living most of the time in Rome. Drake returned to California with his alcohol problem totally out of control & smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Yet by the mid-1960s, a determined Drake somehow kicked both habits. He continued his career on TV, with the occasional film role: The Sandpiper (1965) with his pal Elizabeth Taylor, The Singing Nun (1966) & 1967’s The Red Tomahawk (by coincidence, my screen-name on Grindr).
Drake never seemed to live up to his early potential, but he continued into the 1970s doing small roles in prestige pictures, the occasional lead in a low-budget film, along with guest spots in TV series in almost every year from 1950 until 1980.
A classic example of how a talented actor could fall between the cracks of the studio contract system, Drake spent a few of his final years with a job as a used car salesman, but as his health slipped & he had to to give up working altogether. He was taken by pneumonia, alone & mostly forgotten in a tiny apartment in Torrence, California in 1982.
An anecdote: Drake loved garlic. The garlic caused a problem while making a film with Donna Reed. Drake had consumed a dinner heavy with garlic the previous night & the first shot of the morning called for him to be romantic with Reed, dancing & singing softly in her ear. Reed strenuously objected to the strong odor that seemed to exude from Drake’s every pore. It made her physically ill. Production was suspended for the day & Drake was ordered not to ever eat garlic until the film wrapped. Reed forgave Drake, joking about the incident & they remained friends the rest of their lives, even dining out on occasion.
The post #BornThisDay: Actor, Tom Drake appeared first on World of Wonder.