Joan Shawlee

A lot about Some Like It Hot fell into place for me when I learned that it was released without a Code seal. Now, most of that is the goings on of the men—Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Joe E. Brown in particular. But at least some of it comes from dialogue spoken by Sweet Sue, as played by Joan Shawlee. Shawlee gets at least one or two of the lines that meant the movie would’ve had problems with the Code even without the ending; it is she who suggests cautiously that perhaps there’s something “funny” about Josephine and Daphne, by which she probably means they might be lesbians. She also gets the “virtuoso” double entendre.

Now, if that were all there is to Shawlee’s career, we’d have a hard time getting five paragraphs even though it’s deserving of recognition. But her career stretched from some truly bizarre-sounding 1945 melodramas all the way to a series I saw in its initial airing forty years later on CBS, one of the post-Murder, She Wrote shows that made quite a success from people not changing the channel. On the way, she made a handful of other movies with Jack Lemmon, mostly because they both repeatedly worked with Billy Wilder, as well as a lot of forgotten TV shows and a handful of not-Wilder classics.

In her early years, she was credited as Joan Fulton, which was her birth name; Shawlee was the surname of her first husband. She did a couple of Rodgers and Hart musicals on Broadway as Joyce Ring, too. This is unusual for a performer. You sometimes get someone who has a different name in their early bit player days and is then given a stage name prior to hitting it big, but most performers who get a stage name stick to it, and few women in entertainment flat-out change their last names after already having over a dozen credits under their maiden names, even if they’re obscure ones.

Shawlee is one of those people who was over the years credited with all sorts of astoundingly famous people while never quite being a household name herself. In her early years, it was more likely to be Abbott and Costello, the Bowery Boys, and Francis the Talking Mule. Even then, however, you’d sneak in the odd Charles Laughton or Mickey Rooney. She was actually in movies with both Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and not the same movie. It doesn’t take an uncredited role in From Here to Eternity in that era to point to stars she worked with, though goodness knows it helps.

With the exception of the Wilders, she mostly transitioned to television in about the early ‘60s, though her career in it started with two episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1953. If I didn’t know her from Some Like It Hot, I’d know her from her role as a barmaid on two episodes of Zorro. She also did Maverick, Columbo, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and on and on. And if she did Live a Little, Love a Little and Farewell, My Lovely, you were more likely to see her on Emergency! or Highway to Heaven than on the big screen. The only reason she didn’t do Murder, She Wrote is likely that she died before Angela Lansbury got to her.