June MacCloy

June Mary MacCloy (June 2, 1909 – May 5, 2005) was an American actress and singer whose career spanned stage, film, and band work primarily during the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Sturgis, Michigan, to Mr. and Mrs. Louis V. MacCloy, she was raised in Toledo, Ohio.

MacCloy's earliest stage experience came in 1928 when she joined Earl Carroll's Vanities, though her mother compelled her to leave the production because of its revealing costumes. That same year, as a teenager, she performed in George White's Scandals, where she impersonated Broadway star Harry Richman. Before her film career began, she worked at New York City clubs including the Abbey and the Chateau Madrid, and she toured with a Parkington Vaudeville Unit that drew on the design work of a young Vincente Minnelli. Her Broadway career continued into the early 1930s, culminating in her appearance in the 1932 musical Hot-Cha.

Paramount Pictures signed MacCloy in 1930, and she made her feature film debut on loan to United Artists in Reaching for the Moon (1931), directed by Edmund Goulding, in which she played Kitty, the flirtatious best friend of Bebe Daniels' character. Goulding had been casting a separate Fairbanks production when he learned of MacCloy and contacted her to audition. Her first film under Paramount was June Moon (1931), adapted from the play by George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner. She subsequently appeared in a range of shorts and features alongside performers including Jack Oakie, Frances Dee, and ZaSu Pitts. For RKO-Pathé she made a series of shorts called The Gay Girls with co-stars Gertrude Short and Marion Shilling, with one installment directed by Fatty Arbuckle. She co-starred with Leon Errol in Good Morning, Eve! (1934), the second full Technicolor film, released shortly after another Errol short, Service With a Smile (1934). MacCloy's most recognized film role came in Go West (1940), starring the Marx Brothers, in which she played Lulubelle, a saloon girl.

Following her film work, MacCloy sang with several dance orchestras, among them those led by Johnny Hamp, Henry King, Jimmie Grier, and Ben Pollack. In San Francisco she was featured with the Williams-Walsh Orchestra, led by Griff Williams and Jimmy Walsh, at the Hotel Mark Hopkins, and her band engagements brought her to Chicago and other cities across the country.

In her personal life, MacCloy was sued for divorce by Wilbur Guthlein in Cincinnati, Ohio, in March 1931. She married Schuyler Schenck in 1931 and divorced him in 1933. In December 1941 she married architect and jazz enthusiast Neal Wendell Butler; together they raised two children and remained married until Butler's death in 1985. MacCloy died on May 5, 2005, of natural causes at a nursing home in Sonoma, California.