Reed Howes

American silent-era leading man who became a familiar heavy in B-Westerns of the talkie period. Born Hermon (not Herman) Reed Howes in Washington, D.C., in 1900, he served as an apprentice seaman in the U.S. Navy during the last year of the First World War. After the war he graduated from the University of Utah and attended Harvard Graduate School, then appeared in small parts in stock and vaudeville shows. A strikingly handsome man, he was chosen to be a model for artist J.C. Leyendecker's famous Arrow Collar ads. Howes was only one of several models for the ads (others include John Barrymore, Fredric March, Brian Donlevy and Jack Mulhall), but alone of all the future actors who modeled for Leyendecker, he has been remembered as "the former Arrow Collar Man" (some sources have also claimed that Howes was Leyendecker's lover, but they have confused Howes with the original Arrow Collar model, Charles Beach). Actor-director-producer Ben F. Wilson noticed the handsome model and signed him