June MacCloy, who died May 5 at age 95, was a statuesque blond showgirl who displayed her dusky contralto and lithe good looks in equal measure while proceeding to Hollywood from vaudeville, via Broadway.

“Few talkie Cinderella stories are as devoid of hardships and hard work and other handicaps as June’s is,” a Washington Post gossip column said in 1931.

Cast from age 17 in glamorous roles on stage and screen, MacCloy played in “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” and George White’s “Scandals.” In 1932, MacCloy had a featured role in Florenz Ziegfeld’s last production, “Hot-Cha!”

In Hollywood, MacCloy made a splash singing Irving Berlin’s “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low Down” with Bing Crosby and Bebe Daniels in “Reaching for the Moon” (1930). “With a little encouragement, she would have stolen the picture,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.

Soon MacCloy was being featured on international magazine covers, and gossip columns were peppered with tales of her romantic intrigues. After a few more films, her career stumbled, and she rounded out the 1930s as a touring band singer. In 1940, she made a comeback in the Marx Brothers’ “Go West,” as the blond saloonkeeper Lulubelle (“Red’s Girl”), who is chased by, or chases, Groucho.

“Let’s go someplace where we can be alone,” Groucho says in one of the film’s few memorable moments. “Ah, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on the couch.”

MacCloy grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and got started in vaudeville in the late 1920s in a singing act with a high school friend. She was hired for “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” in 1928, but was forced to resign, the Washington Post gossiped, because her mother found her dress too revealing. Within days she was hired by “George White’s Scandals,” doing an impression of the Broadway star Harry Richman.

In 1930, MacCloy was hired by Paramount to make a series of short films at its studio in Astoria, and one of these ended up serving as the screen test that got her a movie role, in “Reaching for the Moon,” starring Douglas Fairbanks and set aboard a “high deco” transatlantic liner. Her next Hollywood role was in “June Moon” (1931), based on a play by Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman. She went on to make several more indifferently received films, as well as shorts directed under an alias by the scandal-tainted Roscoe Arbuckle. “Fatty Arbuckle was a peach of a guy,” she recently told a friend, Peter Mintun.

MacCloy was no stranger to spicy headlines herself. Newspapers recorded the breakup of her first marriage (“Absence Fails To Make Heart Fonder”); her elopement to Yuma, Ariz., with a former nightclub owner (“California’s New Gretna Green” – Los Angeles Times had spotted a trend), and that marriage’s breakup via a quickie Mexican divorce.

In 1932, she went on the road in “Hot-Cha!” and a Washington Post critic singled her out as “one of the most eye-filling platinum blondes.” It said she sang her number, “Little Old New York,” “to devastating effect.” After 119 performances in New York, “Hot-Cha!” closed and MacCloy took a job singing aboard the cruise ship S.S. Transylvania. For the rest of the 1930s, she sang with the orchestras of Johnny Hamp, Henry King, Ben Pollock, Jimmie Grier, and Griff Williams, with whom she recorded for Decca. She married for the third time, to Chicago jazz trumpeter Otts Whiteman. Things reached a low ebb when she declared bankruptcy in 1937; the marriage was dissolved.

In 1940, MacCloy returned to Hollywood in “Glamour for Sale,” in which she played the owner of an escort service, and “Go West.” Soon after, she re tired from show business and married for the fourth and final time, to Sonoma, Calif., architect Neal Wendell Butler. She was widowed in 1985.

Two of her films can be seen at Film Forum: “Reaching for the Moon” on May 23 and “June Moon” on June 30.

June Mary MacCloy Butler

Born June 2, 1909, in Sturgis, Mich., died May 5 of natural causes at a nursing home in Sonoma, Calif.; survived by her children, Newton and Neala.