Alan Mowbray: Hollywood Butler and FBI Asset
American houses rarely have butlers. The robber barons of the late 1800s and early 1900s had butlers, but it would be really unusual to run into a butler today in any normal American house, even the upscale ones.
Strangely, though, butlers have always been common in Hollywood movies and shows. Batman had a butler, and there is a recent show starring the butler himself. The Addams family had a butler, Lurch. And many of the butlers are English, such as Geoffrey from the Fresh Prince, or, Jeeves.
The prototypical Golden Age English actor who set the stage for later butlers was Alan Mowbray, who started as a butler in 1931 in “God’s Gift to Women.” Like others in the part, Mowbray was tall, distinguished, perhaps a little stuffy, but has an accent that sounds classy to Americans.
Topper Takes a Trip trailer, Public Domain
Mowbray played the role so well that he was asked to play a butler at least a dozen times, and he became rather sick of the part. Eventually, he did break out, with notable roles after the war including “Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff,” “The King and I,” and "Around the World in 80 Days.”
Mowbray had an unusual streak of modesty for an actor, partly accentuated by his dislike of many of his roles. Therefore, he turned to two of his other interests, partying, and working behind the scenes.
Upscale partying came more naturally to Mowbray than playing a butler. His group of friends, the Bundy Boys, included famous actors such as John Barrymore, WC Fields, Errol Flynn. To stay away from prying eyes, most of their partying was private clubs and yachts. All of these men were hard drinkers, but Mowbray’s charm led him to adventures that left his friends amazed. For example, one day he was driving drunk in Beverly Hills in the middle of the day, rear ended a woman’s car, and after apologizing, he asked for and got her phone number.
"''I Wake Up Screaming'' 1941 - L-R; Alan Mowbray, Carole Landis, Allyn Joslyn, Victor Mature" by Movie-Fan is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Mowbray’s other passion was organizing behind the scenes. In the early 1930s, pay for Hollywood actors was low and working conditions were bad. The actors blamed the situation on the actors’ union, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was “in cahoots” with the studio owners. Boris Karloff was particularly incensed about work conditions after a twenty-five-hour-long shoot on the set of Frankenstein. Mowbray, Karloff, and several others decided to create a new actors’ union, called the Screen Actors Guild. Mowbray personally wrote a check to the lawyer to do the initial incorporation of SAG.
Boris Karloff in Frankenstein in 1931, soon before he, Mowbray and others started the Screen Actors Guild. licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Mowbray had a hand in the creation of several other organizations. In 1935, he co founded the British United Services Club (BUSC), which is an organization for the numerous British military veterans in Hollywood. The many British actors in Hollywood during the Golden Age, such as Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Boris Karloff gravitated to the privacy of the all male clubhouse smack in the middle of Hollywood.
Their fellow Briton, Charlie Chaplin, was famously “not a joiner,” but was able to drop in easily, since his club was just a few blocks from his studio. Chaplin typically headlined the club’s glamorous formal balls at the Ambassador Hotel, where the members brought dates, and were mostly dressed in British military formal attire. The non military attendees were in black tie, with the Scots in kilts.
Mowbray’s British friends Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in The Scarlet Claw (1944)
"The Scarlet Claw (1944)" by twm1340 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
The actors in the club had typically served in the British military during World War I, or at least, they said they did. Mowbray, for example, told everyone he had one the Croix de Guerre from his service in France. But there was one legitimate military VIP in the club. Frederick Rutland, DSC, was famous as “Rutland of Jutland,” was the first person to ever fly a plane from a ship in battle, as he solo flew about the German fleet at the Battle of Jutland. Later, as a squadron leader, he pioneered flying planes off of platforms on British battleships and cruisers, and helped with the technical specs of the first true aircraft carriers.
Rutland was also a Japanese Spy. Bitter from his treatment at the hands of the Royal Air Force postwar, he had been initially hired by the Japanese navy as a consultant, helping with the redesign of the Japanese carriers Akagi and Kaga, and redesigning Mitsubishi planes to help the land safely on those ships.
In the 1930s, Rutland had been sent to Hollywood by the Japanese navy to establish a sleeper network of spies that could be activated in the case of a war between Japan and the United States. He had told his handlers that, “what could be better than a network of Britons, the historical allies of Japan, in Hollywood, observing the activities of the US Navy on the West Coast?”
There is no evidence that Mowbray or any of the other Britons in the club willingly helped Rutland in his espionage, but they did later tell the FBI that they initially had absolutely no idea he was a Japanese spy. In fact, many of them, noting his slightly mysterious and highly upscale lifestyle, had suspected he was actually working for British intelligence.
Mowbray, as president of the club, was the person the FBI went to for help in figuring out Rutland had been doing. At one of the BUSC dinners, he invited an undercover FBI agent, who posed as a screenwriter. Club members were working on movies such as “The Dawn Patrol” (1938) and “British Intelligence” (1939) and it was easy for the FBI agent to pull Rutland into conversation on these movies.
In 1941, the FBI arrested several other Japanese spies, including Chaplin’s ex-butler, but the US Government didn’t want the embarrassment of a public arrest and trial of a British war hero. They arranged to have him sent back to England where he spent World War II in prison.
Mowbray himself never talked about his help to the FBI on this case. He must have thought about it, though, as he played a spy of the original Man from U.N.C.L.E, in an episode called “My Friend the Gorilla Affair.”
This article is adapted from a chapter in the author's newly published book, "Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent Flying Ace Who Infiltrated Hollywood and Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor."