The Quest for Louvette Corbeau

‘Wild as any forest animal, she was, and lovely as a running doe.’ That’s how the newspaper serialization of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1940 Paramount epic North West Mounted Police describes Louvette Corbeau, the movie’s half-French, half-native-American wildcat:

She was ultimately played by Paulette Goddard, as you can see there, and in her key scene (which, strangely, is omitted from the newspaper serial version), she goes for Lynne Overman with a sickle,

gets spanked,

but is saved from the full force of his retribution by the intervention of a Mountie:

But what you see there was far from a foregone conclusion: DeMille knew that Paulette wanted to play Louvette, but he was absolutely certain she was wrong for the part, and there were a lot of other actresses in the running for the honor of ending up upended over Overman’s knee. The role of Louvette was, in fact, the subject of the same kind of big casting search that was previously undertaken, with more publicity, for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind the year before.

One actress who was seriously suggested, but was also never a serious contender, was Marlene Dietrich, who was by now in her late 30s:

You might think the glamorous, sensual Dietrich an odd idea for an earthy character like Louvette, and DeMille certainly thought her too sophisticated and indeed too old. But the proposal makes at lot more sense when you consider that she had recently played a saloon dancer in Destry Rides Again (1939), and excelled in one particular type of scene:

In short, the notion of Dietrich as a potential Louvette stemmed from the fact that Louvette too has a spectacular fight – which means that part of what they had in mind was, specifically, Marlene Dietrich being spanked!

What it also means, more broadly, was that the fight scene, and therefore the spanking that concludes it, was one of the elements that defined the casting requirements: all the actresses under consideration were up, in part, for the spanking scene in particular. The non-starter Dietrich idea also illustrates one other consideration: ethnicity. The character of Louvette is explicitly a ‘half-breed’, so they looked mainly at actresses with European heritage, including, as well as the German Dietrich, the Hungarian Steffi Duna,

and the Russian Anna Sten,

whose career was in the doldrums by the end of the 1930s and never really came out of them. And since Louvette’s non-Indian half is specifically French-Canadian, obviously they looked at some French actresses, including 19-year-old Olympe Bradna, the youngest person to be considered:

Another potential Louvette was sultry Simone Simon, who had acted in Hollywood in the mid-1930s, then went back to Paris in 1938 to make Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine.

She left vowing never to return to America, but changed her mind the following year when Hollywood understandably became a preferable alternative to la belle France under Nazi occupation.

If we are to believe a newspaper report of 1941, Paramount’s Louvette scouts weren’t the only ones who had a certain fate in mind for her:

Ever since Simone Simon came to America in 1936, a great many persons have said that she needed a spanking. Producers, directors, even co-workers on stage and screen objected to her temperaments, whims, lofty disregard for the rules. Movie audiences objected to her pout. ‘Spoiled brat!’ was the consensus.

The report told how she finally met her nemesis that June during the a vaudeville run at Loew’s State Theater, New York. Also on the bill was pianist Al Trahan, who not only shared the general objection to her behavior, but also decided to take matters into his own hands – and take Simone across his own lap. What followed was a vigorous backstage slippering in front of the theater staff, an event that briefly became the talk of the town – and perhaps also, again if the newspaper is to be believed, the toast of New York.

So Simone Simon did eventually get spanked, but not in the role of Louvette Corbeau. Also under consideration was an actress who was more Canadian than French, Katherine DeMille,

who happened to be the director’s adoptive daughter. But the star who came closest to winning the role was British:

Vivien Leigh, fresh from playing Scarlett O’Hara and, as we have seen, quite possibly not entirely unfamiliar with being spanked.

And then the determined Paulette Goddard thrust herself forward, perhaps spurred on by the disappointment of losing out to Leigh in the Gone with the Wind casting search. While Paramount negotiated for Leigh’s services, Paulette taught herself the Canuck accent and got some friends in the wardrobe and make-up department to kit her out.

She presented herself at DeMille’s office, in costume and in character, introduced herself to the secretary as Louvette, then burst in to see the director. ‘She was Louvette,’ said DeMille, ‘so I had to give her the role.’

Paulette obviously knew much of what she was letting herself in for, including the spanking. But for some reason she also thought it was going to be a glamorous role, and she later expressed disappointment that DeMille had gone for realism instead: ‘I didn’t have a clean face in a single scene. My clothes were mostly mackinaws and buckskins.’ She also got more than she bargained for on the first day’s shooting.

When he heard she’d been cast, her husband Charlie Chaplin warned DeMille, ‘She’s marvelous, but you’ll never get a full day’s work out of her.’ DeMillle’s response was to schedule the fight scene for Paulette’s first day on set, starting at 9 a.m.

Paulette worked hard that morning, kicking and biting and scratching at Lynne Overman,

but there was no way the whole scene was going to be finished before lunch, which was perhaps DeMille’s plan all along. The afternoon was going to be devoted to the end of the fight – and the spanking!

When I wrote about this scene a couple years ago, there was no available eye-witness account of what happened on set that afternoon. There is one now:

‘Over and over they rolled, she tearing at his red thatch, he trying to get her in a position to spank her. Finally, he did, delivering whack after whack with what looked like genuine gusto, while Paulette kicked and scratched from a disadvantageous position.’

And that’s interesting, not least because what it describes doesn’t match what we see in the finished film, where the spanking is largely a creation of the film editor. But before we dismiss the report as the work of an over-imaginative, under-truthful publicity department, it’s worth noticing how much circumstantial detail it gives about the business of shooting the spanking.

There was, we are told, a great deal of demonstration before the camera finally rolled. Paulette was first spanked by DeMille’s assistant, the former actor Cullen Tate. Then a second member of the crew got a turn, and it wasn’t someone you might expect: Edwin Maxwell, who was on set to supervise the French-Canadian accents – so presumably he was giving Paulette instructions on how she should sound when being spanked. Then, as we know, DeMille himself spanked her:

And finally it was time for Lynne Overman to do the take. DeMille told them both, ‘It’s got to be the real thing’ – perhaps not the most welcome piece of direction ever given to an actress who had already been spanked three times that afternoon!

But before we condemn this as an improbable fiction, we might consider an alternative possibility. Cecil B. DeMille once described Paulette Goddard as a ‘little devil’, and she had certainly snatched the part from Vivien Leigh in an outrageously unconventional way. If Simone Simon was widely felt to ‘need a spanking’ for the way she flouted the rules, then what about Paulette? Could it be that, never mind how the scene was going to be shot and edited, DeMille was making absolutely sure she got what was coming to her?

What we do know for sure is that, contrary to Chaplin’s prediction, Paulette did a full day’s work that day. To his surprise, she arrived home around 6.30 that evening, exhausted and quite possibly very thoroughly spanked. And so he wired DeMille: ‘What is this strange power you have over women? My hat is off to you.’