June MacCloy, 95; Actress Epitomized Golden Era’s Glamour

June MacCloy, a statuesque actress whose glamorous looks typified the Golden Age of Hollywood and whose mannish voice set her apart, has died. She was 95.

MacCloy died May 5 of natural causes in a nursing home in Sonoma, Calif., a town she long called home, said Peter Mintun, a family friend.

“She didn’t even volunteer to tell people she’d been in the movies. She was of the old frame of mind that movie people were looked down upon by certain people in society,” Mintun, a New York pianist and singer who befriended the actress a decade ago, told The Times.

By age 21, MacCloy had left New York and a role in a vaudeville production designed by a young Vincente Minnelli for a film career that ran for 10 years. Paramount Pictures signed her to appear in film shorts in 1930 and immediately lent her to United Artists, for which she made her first feature, “Reaching for the Moon,” with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

Her singing in that film of Irving Berlin’s “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low Down,” following renditions by a young Bing Crosby -- who had last billing -- caused The Times to write, “With a little encouragement, she would have stolen the picture.”

She stole a few hearts along the way, marrying four times, Other romances were documented in gossip and news columns.

Her second motion picture was “June Moon” (1931) with Frances Dee and Jack Oakie, a film “Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide” calls “an odd but generally amusing mix of naivete and sophistication.”

Most of MacCloy’s films were less well received.

She also made at least nine film shorts, including three directed by the scandal-tainted Fatty Arbuckle, working under the alias William Goodrich. (“Fatty Arbuckle was a peach of a guy,” she told Mintun.)

Her last screen role was as the saloonkeeper Lulubelle in “Go West” (1940); the film is remembered for its climactic train ride and the pickup line Groucho Marx used on MacCloy’s character: “Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone. Ah, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this couch.”

Born in Sturgis, Mich., on June 2, 1909, MacCloy grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and started out in vaudeville in the late 1920s, singing with a high school friend. Hired for the Broadway revue Earl Carroll’s “Vanities” in 1928, she resigned, the Washington Post reported, because her mother found her costume too revealing.

With her deep contralto voice, she was quickly hired to do an impersonation of Broadway star Harry Richman in George White’s “Scandals” stage revue at the Apollo Theater.

She returned to Broadway in 1932 to sing in Florenz Ziegfeld’s last production, “Hot-Cha!”, and spent much of the 1930s as a touring band singer.

Soon after making her last film, MacCloy married her final husband, architect Neal Wendell Butler, and retired from performing. She was widowed in 1985.

The actress is survived by a son, Newton, and a daughter, Neala.