June Havoc (born Ellen Evangeline Hovick; November 8, 1912 – March 28, 2010) was a Canadian-born American actress, dancer, stage director and memoirist.
Havoc was a child vaudeville performer under the tutelage of her mother Rose Thompson Hovick, born Rose Evangeline Thompson. June later acted on Broadway and in Hollywood, and stage-directed, both on and off-Broadway. She last acted on television in 1990 in a story arc on the soap opera General Hospital, and she last appeared on television as herself in interviews in the "Vaudeville" episode of American Masters in 1997 and in "The Rodgers & Hart: Thou Swell, Thou Witty" episode of Great Performances in 1999. Her elder sister Louise gravitated to burlesque and became the well-known striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee.
Ellen Evangeline Hovick was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on November 8, 1912. For many years 1916 was cited as her year of birth. Havoc acknowledged in her later years that 1912 was likely the correct year. She was reportedly uncertain of the year. Her mother forged various birth certificates for both her daughters to evade child labor laws. Her life-long career in show business began when she was a child, billed as "Baby June."
Her sister, entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee (born as Rose Louise Hovick), was called "Louise" by her family members. Their parents were Rose Thompson Hovick, of German descent, and John ("Jack") Olaf Hovick, the son of Norwegian immigrants, who worked as an advertising agent and reporter for the Seattle Times newspaper.
Following their parents' divorce, the two sisters earned the family's income by appearing in vaudeville, where June's talent often overshadowed Louise's. Baby June got an audition with Alexander Pantages, who had come to Seattle, Washington in 1902 to build theaters up and down the west coast of the United States. Soon, she was launched in vaudeville and also appeared in Hollywood movies. She could not speak until the age of three, but the films were all silent. She would cry for the cameras when her mother told her that the family's dog had died.
In December 1928, Havoc, in an effort to escape her overbearing mother, eloped with Bobby Reed, a young boy dancer in the vaudeville act. Weeks later after they performed at the Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, Kansas, on December 29, 1928, June's mother, Rose, reported Reed to the Topeka Police, and he was arrested. Rose pulled out a concealed gun when she met Bobby at the police station, intending to shoot him, but the gun did not fire because the safety was on. She then physically attacked her son-in-law, and the police had to pry her off the hapless Reed. June subsequently left both her family and the act. Though the marriage didn't last long, the two remained friends.
She adopted the surname Havoc, a variant of her birth name. In 1936, Havoc got her first part on Broadway in the Sigmund Romberg operetta Forbidden Melody. In 1940, she gave a show-stopping performance as Gladys Bumps in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey, with Gene Kelly in the lead role and Van Johnson, who was in the chorus, along with future film director Stanley Donen. Based on their success, Havoc, Johnson and Kelly were beckoned by Hollywood. Havoc made her first film in 1942 and began to alternate film roles with returns to the Broadway stage. From 1942 to 1944, Havoc appeared in 11 films, including My Sister Eileen with Rosalind Russell, and No Time for Love with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. She then returned to Broadway in the 1943–44 season, co-starring with Bobby Clark in the Cole Porter musical Mexican Hayride (musical), for which she received the Donaldson Award for best performance by an actress in a supporting role in a musical.
In 1944, Ethel Merman was tapped to star as the title character in the musical play Sadie Thompson, with a score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz, directed and produced by Rouben Mamoulian. The musical play was based on the short story Rain by W. Somerset Maugham. The serious production was a departure from Merman’s string of successful musical comedies. Moreover, during rehearsals, Merman had difficulties memorizing the lyrics, and she blamed Dietz for his use of sophisticated and foreign words. She had her husband, newspaper promotion director Bob Levitt, tone down some of the lyrics. Dietz took exception to Merman’s singing the altered lyrics and gave her an ultimatum to sing his original lyrics or leave the show. In response, Merman withdrew from the production. (Some have since speculated that Merman's departure was probably due to her reluctance to assume such a serious role in her first dramatic musical.)
Havoc left her starring role in Mexican Hayride, and assumed the role written for Merman. The production of Sadie Thompson had a difficult out-of-town tryout with songs being deleted and other songs added. Indeed, even after the Broadway opening, musical numbers continued to be cut and other numbers added. Sadie Thompson opened on Broadway on November 16, 1944, to mixed reviews. Havoc received almost uniformly favorable reviews. She was called the “most enjoyable asset” of the show and praised for the “consummate skill of her artistry.” Her performance was described as “surprisingly effective“ and “truly touching,” and she was deemed a “worthy successor” to Jeanne Eagels, who had famously first portrayed the role on Broadway in the play Rain. The score and the book received mixed reviews, with the score called “undistinguished.” However, one reviewer compared the show favorably to Oklahoma!, which Mamoulian had also directed. Nonetheless, the show lasted only 60 performances and closed on January 6, 1945. In 1945, Havoc was featured in the film Brewster's Millions, and starred in The Ryan Girl on Broadway.
In Hollywood, Havoc played the second female lead for three of the most popular musical movie stars in the 1940s and early 1950s: Alice Faye in Hello, Frisco, Hello with John Payne
(1943); Betty Grable in When My Baby Smiles at Me with Dan Dailey (1948); and Betty Hutton in Red, Hot, and Blue with Victor Mature (1949).
She also played leading roles in several films noir: Intrigue with George Raft (1947), Chicago Deadline with Alan Ladd (1949), The Story of Molly X with John Russell (1949), and Once A Thief with Cesar Romero (1950). Havoc's best-remembered film role was probably as the Jewish, yet closeted about her identity, secretary in the Elia Kazan Oscar-winning best film Gentleman's Agreement.
In the late 1950s, Havoc decided that she wanted to act in classic plays. In 1956, she worked with the Phoenix Theatre Company, first starring as Queen Jocasta opposite John Kerr in The Infernal Machine, playwright Jean Cocteau’s retelling of the Oedipus myth. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson opined that her performance brought “a gravity and force that become the tragic situation.” Next Havoc played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater & Academy. Atkinson called her Titania “conspicuously delightful” and found her performance, along with those of Barbara Barrie and Inga Swenson, “a fine Shakespeare revel.” She then returned to the Phoenix Theatre company for the production of The Beaux' Stratagem. Atkinson observed Havoc played Mrs. Sullen “as a lovely lady with an infectious sense of humor.”
Havoc and her sister continued to get demands for money and gifts from their mother until her death in 1954. After their mother's death, the sisters then were free to write about her without risking a lawsuit. Lee's memoir, Gypsy, published in 1957, inspired the Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents Broadway musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable. Havoc did not like the way she or her mother were portrayed in the piece, which became a source of disagreement between the sisters, but did nothing to obstruct the production. Havoc and Lee were estranged for many years, but reconciled shortly before Lee's death in 1970.
In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the creation of the President’s Special International Program, under the United States Department of State and its agent, the International Cultural Exchange Service of America. The Program, with the American National Theatre and Academy, established the Theatre Guild American Repertory Theatre to perform a program of plays abroad. Havoc, as well as Helen Hayes, Leif Erickson and others, made six-month commitments to participate in the repertory company. Three plays were selected to be performed in repertory: The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Havoc played Sabina and Hayes portrayed Mrs. Antrobus; The Miracle Worker, in which Havoc portrayed Mrs. Keller; and The Glass Menagerie, in which Hayes played the mother. The playwrights, Thornton Wilder, William Gibson and Tennessee Williams, all personally supervised the productions of their plays. In February and early March 1960, the repertory company performed the plays at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. Commencing later in March, the company toured in Europe and the Middle East, performing the plays in major cities in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Switzerland and France. Later in the year, the repertory company toured Latin America, performing the same plays, and was the first American repertory theater company to perform in Latin America.