In October 1947, Robert Taylor stood in an ornate hearing room on Capitol Hill, raising his right hand before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Flash bulbs popped, and hundreds of mostly female spectators crowded in to glimpse the man dubbed the man with the perfect profile. Taylor, one of Hollywood’s most beloved leading men, had been summoned to testify about communist influence in the film industry. His voice steady, he obliged, denouncing signs of communist activity and naming colleagues he believed were subversive agitators, knowing full well he was putting their careers at risk.
It was a surreal tableau: a matinee idol caught in the heart of America’s Red Scare. Taylor was not always destined for Hollywood. Born Spangler Arlington Brugh on August 5, 1911, in the tiny Nebraska village of Philly, he grew up in a wholesome Midwestern world. His father, a farmer turned osteopath, and his mother, often housebound by illness, raised him with a strong work ethic and traditional values.
Young Arlington was a natural athlete but found his first passion in music, taking up the cello and winning statewide competitions. He imagined a future on the concert stage or perhaps in medicine, not on the silver screen. But in 1931, he followed his cello mentor to Pomona College in California, and there his path shifted. At Pomona, Arlington joined the campus theater group almost on a lark.
When the drama club staged the World War I play Journeys End, he auditioned and won a role. In the audience sat a talent scout from MGM, and by 1934 the young Nebraskan was signed to a studio contract. Louis B. Mayer decreed that Spangler Arlington Brugh would never fit on a marquee, so the actor became Robert Taylor.
At first, he was just another contract player, earning a record-low $35 a week and working screen tests, earning the unglamorous nickname the test boy. His early acting was rough, and critics joked he was as wooden as the cello he once played. Then, in late 1934, a lead actor fell ill on a short film, and Taylor stepped in with an intense performance that startled everyone. MGM realized they had a leading man in the making.
In 1935, Taylor got his big break when Irene Dunne requested him as her co-star in Magnificent Obsession. The same year, he was paired with Greta Garbo in Camille, holding his own opposite the studio’s greatest star. Within two years, he had gone from a nobody to one of Hollywood’s most talked-about men. By the late 1930s, his face was on magazine covers worldwide, and a 1937 poll of 20 million filmgoers voted him the second most important male star in America, just behind Clark Gable.
MGM’s publicity machine christened him the man with the perfect profile. Yet Taylor remained modest to a fault. When asked to explain his appeal, he shrugged: Darned if I know. Acting is the easiest job in the world, and I’m the luckiest guy.
In 1939, Taylor married Barbara Stanwyck, a top actress four years his senior, known for her toughness and independence. They courted for three years, bonded over a shared love of horseback riding, the outdoors, and a shared aversion to pretense. Both leaned conservative in politics, a rarity in left-leaning Hollywood. Their wedding was a small, carefully managed affair in San Diego.
For a while, the marriage was one of Hollywood’s most admired. Stanwyck helped guide Taylor’s career, nudging him toward more challenging masculine roles. Under her influence, he took on gritty characters in Billy the Kid and Johnny Eager. They appeared to be that rare thing in Hollywood: a stable, scandal-free couple.
But fault lines were quietly forming. During the filming of Johnny Eager in 1941, Taylor began an affair with his co-star Lana Turner. Stanwyck, deeply wounded, chose to ignore it for the sake of the marriage. When World War II erupted, Taylor, an outspoken patriot, enlisted in the U.
S. Naval Air Force in 1943, earning a commission as a lieutenant and training as a pilot. He was assigned stateside as a flight instructor and starred in and directed dozens of Navy training films, bringing Hollywood polish to military pedagogy. The war years were not easy on the marriage, and Taylor’s long absences put distance between them.
When he emerged from the war in 1945, the boyishness of the 1930s was gone, replaced by a more hardened, mature persona. In the late 1940s, Taylor’s career entered a darker, more interesting second act. He played against type in the psychological thriller Undercurrent and the gritty film noir High Wall. In 1944, he had become a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a fervently anti-communist group that included John Wayne, Walt Disney, and his good friend Ronald Reagan.
Taylor saw no contradiction in opposing both Nazi fascism and Soviet communism. I speak out against communism now for the same reason I spoke out against Nazism a decade ago, because I am pro-freedom and pro-decency, he declared in 1951. The trigger for his Congressional testimony came with Song of Russia, a 1944 film Taylor starred in that was produced as pro-Soviet propaganda during the war, when the U. S.
and USSR were allies. By 1947, with the Cold War underway, the film looked very different to anti-communist hawks in Washington. That year, HUAC turned its attention to Hollywood. In May, Taylor was quietly invited to testify in a closed-door session in Los Angeles.
Believing the meeting confidential, he spoke candidly, venting that he’d been forced to make Song of Russia and complaining about certain colleagues. But HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas leaked Taylor’s testimony to the press, spinning it as proof that Washington had coerced stars into making pro-communist films. The headlines blared that Taylor had blown the whistle on Hollywood Reds.
Taylor felt betrayed by the committee and by his own naivete. He wrote in September 1947: These investigations remind me more of a three-ring circus than a sincere effort to rid the country of a real threat. Still, when Taylor received a subpoena ordering him to Washington, he had no choice but to comply. On October 22, 1947, he found himself on the stand in a packed hearing room, the committee having announced his appearance in advance for maximum publicity.
Taylor kept his testimony brief and relatively measured. He affirmed his staunch anti-communism and stated he had seen indications of communist activity in Hollywood. When pressed for names, he again mentioned actor Howard Da Silva and actress Karen Morley, both of whom were later blacklisted and acknowledged Communist Party members. Then, after barely 25 minutes, he exited to cheers of Hooray for Robert Taylor from admiring fans.
The fallout was mixed. HUAC supporters hailed Taylor as a patriotic witness, though he privately bristled at the label, insisting he’d been dragged there against his will. Many in Hollywood’s liberal community regarded him with scorn, and the left-leaning press never quite forgave him. Friends sensed the experience deeply embittered him, leaving him feeling isolated.
By the early 1950s, his personal life was also unraveling. In 1951, Barbara Stanwyck filed for divorce, ending their 12-year marriage, after years of his infidelities finally broke her patience. She never remarried, and those close to her claimed she loved him until the day she died. Professionally, Taylor was reaching the end of one epoch.
After 25 years under contract at MGM, a Hollywood record, he was the last of the studio’s golden-era leading men still on contract by the late 1950s. In 1953, he scored one of his biggest triumphs with Quo Vadis, a lavish epic that reaffirmed his bankability, followed by Ivanhoe and Knights of the Round Table. In 1954, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association named him the world’s most popular male film star. But Taylor increasingly turned to westerns, a genre he loved since boyhood, and where he finally proved his acting chops.
In his personal life, the 1950s brought renewal. In 1954, he married the German actress Ursula Thiess, and this time it was the conventional family life he’d craved. They had a son, Terrence, in 1955, and a daughter, Tessa, in 1959. Taylor reveled in fatherhood, happier puttering on his ranch than chasing roles.
When his MGM contract expired in 1958, he segued to television, producing and starring in the crime series The Detectives from 1959 to 1962. In 1966, he took over hosting duties from his friend Ronald Reagan on the western anthology Death Valley Days, a semi-retired gig that kept him in the public eye. In early 1968, Taylor received a devastating diagnosis: lung cancer, the result of a lifelong heavy smoking habit encouraged by the studio and public relations companies. He underwent surgery to remove one lung, but the disease had spread.
He kept his illness largely private, continuing to work as long as he could. On May 26, 1969, too weak to continue, he filmed a brief farewell message for Death Valley Days. Less than two weeks later, on June 8, 1969, Robert Taylor died at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.
He was 57 years old. His funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park drew a who’s who of Hollywood’s golden age. Barbara Stanwyck attended in somber silence, said to be distraught by his passing. The eulogy was delivered by his close friend, California Governor Ronald Reagan, who spoke warmly of Taylor’s integrity and Midwestern virtues.
He noted that moviegoers could always count on Robert Taylor’s wholesomeness. In the darkened theater, he’d never embarrassed them in front of their children. Through over 80 films and two decades of stardom, Taylor had never once played a scene that could shame conservative America.
He began as the face that launched a thousand sighs and ended as a steady figure of integrity in an industry often short on it.