Hollywood Directors in the Golden Era: 3 Autobiographies

 

I picked Raoul Walsh’s “Each Man in His Time” (1974) off the shelves. I very seldom look at it; it’s one of the least re-read of my film books, scoring maybe one and a half re-reads in forty-five years. Walsh, born in 1887, worked as a young man for D.W. Griffith and his career as a director was already fifteen years on when sound came in. Amazingly, his work would span all the way from “Birth of a Nation” to the end of the Fifties. Walsh credibly manages to equate the end of his directing career with the end of classic Hollywood altogether, and ties in the deaths of Humphrey Bogart (1957), Errol Flynn (1959), Clark Gable and Gary Cooper (1961) as being the last of the major stars of the classic period.

Like many autobiographies, we can guess that some of these detailed memories were written years before Walsh turned 87, and I have no doubt that some or even a lot of it is exaggerated. But this is one of those books where you have to say “If even a third of this is true…” as Raoul Walsh stands on the set of “Intolerance”, rides with Pancho Villa, directs Fox’s first sound film, discovers John Wayne, has an affair with Pola Negri and about, oh, 500 other women, goes to the racetrack with Winston Churchill, becomes a regular guest at San Simeon, and takes Jimmy Cagney to the “Top of the world, Ma!” Quite a life.

Walsh’s book came out in what I now think of as “the first AFI era”, the George Stevens Jr. years of the American Film Institute (1967-’80), when for the first time, massive scholarship and publishing resources were devoted to “serious” motion picture histories. The Institute made its first major steps by interviewing and cataloging, by preserving a past that seemed even then to be long, long ago, but in the retrospect of age, really wasn’t. When this book came out, “White Heat” was only 25 years old.

Even the early sound pictures that were the height of Walsh’s career were, in 1974, only 40+ years old, no older than (gasp!) 1974 is now. Yet even by the time my generation were children, let alone when we were young adults, those black and white films with funny looking cars and clothes and hats, where people spoke either in comically cultured tones or in a nasal gangster’s snarl, were in another world, seemingly behind a barrier of prewar versus postwar, and other vast cultural changes.

Walsh is not just sexist, but exuberantly happy to tell you about how many showgirls and stewardesses and band singers were his weekend companions in Palm Springs or Malibu. His self-cultivated image as “a man’s man” is touted repeatedly as one of the things that helped him out over the years, as he managed to work with or convince other men based on their shared passion for horses, guns, liquor or whoring. I doubt he’s completely wrong about the positive effect on his male bonding, as we’d call it today, but it is typical of times it was published. In 1955, he would have left it out. Today, his editors would probably have helped shape him into a less blatantly offensive “type”, maybe a fearless early pioneer of sexual freedom but with a half-admitted dark edge, or some such recasting of the neutral truth into something ever slightly more appealing.

I compare this autobio to Frank Capra’s “The Name Above the Title” (1973) and John Huston’s “An Open Book” (1980). They came out around the same period and cover similar ground. Capra, much more of a happy family man than the other two, tells you less about his personal life and more about what happened face-to-face with stars on sound stages or in studio boss Harry Cohn’s office. Capra loves film openings, good reviews, and money-making opening weekends. Capra was once as famous as Steven Spielberg is now, but his book declares (confesses might be a better term) that the famous Democrat has turned somewhat conservative, an old time Truman liberal repelled by the excesses of the Sixties. Walsh talks a little about how he directs, but not as much as Capra, and rarely mentions the release of his films unless they make him enough money to buy a brace of Harleys and go roaring off to a brothel in Tijuana.

John Huston’s book is closer in style to Walsh’s, being rich in detail about his own off-screen pursuit of thoroughbreds, country houses, and the ladies. Like Huston himself, his book is a little drier, a little cagier and wiser than Walsh’s hey-I-got-laid-and-met-some-big-shots memoir. But like Walsh’s “Each Man in His Time”, “An Open Book” is less the detailed technical story of a film artist’s career than the story of a colorful life, “A Rake’s Progress” to put it in 18th century terms. Like “Barry Lyndon”, there’s an air of mortality and regret to Huston, even though unlike the other two men, and unlike almost all the other filmmakers of his generation, his career managed to make it through the cultural changes of the “Sixties barrier” and Huston continued to make big films right until his death in 1987.

It should be noted that he was nineteen years younger than Walsh, whose first silent two-reeler was directed in 1913, and ten years younger than Capra, whose directing career started in 1926, fifteen years before Huston’s first film, “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941.

It’s funny; as in every past time, perspective flattens out. To me (at 67 and after a lifetime of learning film history, I could justifiably say “even to me”) all three directors seem like part of the same old classic Hollywood scene. You could pick a time, maybe just before or after the war, when you might run into all three, holding court at their usual tables at Dave Chasen’s or Musso and Franks. But to them, they were truly of different times, even the ones who are “only” ten years apart.

Walsh’s father was a minor New York City political hack who had worked for older men who’d worked for Abraham Lincoln; it’s sobering to be reminded that there was a generation for whom “prewar” referred to the Civil War. Like the rest of the world, in everyday life I’ve mostly forgotten about the giants of the prewar guys, at least in anything like lifelike detail, remembering them now in the same reasonable, well-meaning Turner Classic Movies categories everyone else does: “the camera of John ‘North Light’ Seitz”, the ‘Men in Groups’ dramatic dynamic of Howard Hawks, that kind of thing.

Speaking of fading memories: Near the very end of the book, Walsh graciously names and thanks various festival and museum curators who’d screened his old films and revived his reputation for a younger generation. As an old festival hack myself, I can tell you that kind of thanks is (too) damned rare. One of them is Pierre Rissient, who Walsh forgivably misspells. Like someone in a dream, suddenly remembering a detail from waking real life, I realized that I knew that man. I have been chagrined the past few years to realize just how many people I’ve forgotten.

One poignant thing is Walsh’s assumption that now that the memories of his generation, of his vanished Hollywood world have been rescued by Sixties and Seventies writers, they’re in the history books forever. He’s not entirely wrong, of course; the fact that I’m writing about his book, forty-five years later, proves it. But public interest fades, and understanding of a period in time fades with the lifetimes of the people (and to some degree, the children of the people) who actually lived it.

 

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  1. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    I once came across a very old film of actual Confederate vets doing the actual Rebel Yell. They were all really old men in their 80s and 90s.

    This one maybe:

     

    That’s the exact one!

    I found that looking for a clip of Gary Busey doing it in Gumball Rally.  He does it properly.

    • #31
  2. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    I once came across a very old film of actual Confederate vets doing the actual Rebel Yell. They were all really old men in their 80s and 90s.

    This one maybe:

     

    That’s the exact one!

    I found that looking for a clip of Gary Busey doing it in Gumball Rally. He does it properly.

    I reviewed that film for the Soho News. Chuck Bail was sort of a pre-Hal Needham, a rare director who worked his way up from stunt coordinator. A gladiator who made it to minor Roman royalty, you might say. This was an era when unpretentious hee-haw highway comedies were a delight with audiences and a bafflement to metropolitan film critics. 

    • #32
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Patrick McClure (View Comment):

    Gary, your movie posts are always welcome. Thanks for opening a window into a fascinating era.

    Thanks for your kind words, Patrick. We’re both of the same ethnicity. That means friends can slug it out on some posts, Monday to Friday, stand next to each other at a brass rail ordering drinks and laughing on Saturday, and line up for Holy Communion on Sunday. 

     

    • #33
  4. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    MichaelKennedy (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    Niven himself wrote Bring on the Empty Horses (a memoir basically of the Golden Age) and The Moon’s a Balloon (a more personal memoir). Both of them are excellent

    His friends have mentioned that his recollections were often “adjusted” by his later life. If you like them, you should definitely read “Niv.”

    I’ve seen that said about other Hollywood bios and autobios too. Even when the intention is fully honest, and that’s never a given even outside of Hollywood, there’s a tendency for the self-protectiveness and and desire to be remembered to yield to prevailing winds, to shape their stories into being on the winning side.

    I don’t just mean in the usual conservative, anti-PC sense, though there are a lot of quotable cases of that, but just of conventional wisdom’s deadening hand on perceiving the mixed, complex truth about the past, a time we can know only incompletely. For example, one reviewer tactfully and gently suggested that “Time has smoothed Kim Novak’s path to Vertigo“; after decades of stories leaking out about how much she disliked working for Hitchcock, a perfectionist and not always the nicest one around, Novak came to realize that there was no advantage to her in resisting giving the version that most people seemed to want, roughly: “I was just so thrilled. When Hitch called on my best, I leaped at the chance”.   

    • #34
  5. Richard Easton Coolidge
    Richard Easton
    @RichardEaston

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    MichaelKennedy (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    Niven himself wrote Bring on the Empty Horses (a memoir basically of the Golden Age) and The Moon’s a Balloon (a more personal memoir). Both of them are excellent

    His friends have mentioned that his recollections were often “adjusted” by his later life. If you like them, you should definitely read “Niv.”

    I’ve seen that said about other Hollywood bios and autobios too. Even when the intention is fully honest, and that’s never a given even outside of Hollywood, there’s a tendency for the self-protectiveness and and desire to be remembered to yield to prevailing winds, to shape their stories into being on the winning side.

    I don’t just mean in the usual conservative, anti-PC sense, though there are a lot of quotable cases of that, but just of conventional wisdom’s deadening hand on perceiving the mixed, complex truth about the past, a time we can know only incompletely. For example, one reviewer tactfully and gently suggested that “Time has smoothed Kim Novak’s path to Vertigo“; after decades of stories leaking out about how much she disliked working for Hitchcock, a perfectionist and not always the nicest one around, Novak came to realize that there was no advantage to her in resisting giving the version that most people seemed to want, roughly: “I was just so thrilled. When Hitch called on my best, I leaped at the chance”.

    This is also true in other fields. Anyone who follows my posts knows there is a controversy about whether my father or Brad Parkinson played a bigger role in the invention of GPS. There’s a big difference between Parkinson’s tale of how GPS came to be and the primary source materials. In one case, his own 1974 document flatly contradicts his current story. I’m almost the only person who notes this in public; reporters tend to accept uncritically his assertions and the staff awarding big prizes are often shockingly ignorant (I have some of the private deliberations of the 2003 Draper prize committee and Mickey Mouse could have done a better job researching GPS’s history).

    • #35
  6. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Gary McVey: One poignant thing is Walsh’s assumption that now that the memories of his generation, of his vanished Hollywood world have been rescued by Sixties and Seventies writers, they’re in the history books forever. He’s not entirely wrong, of course; the fact that I’m writing about his book, forty-five years later, proves it. But public interest fades, and understanding of a period in time fades with the lifetimes of the people (and to some degree, the children of the people) who actually lived it.

    Gary,

    The strangest phenomenon is now YouTube. Anybody who is connected to the internet can start searching for much older movies. They usually find only short clips 3-10 minutes in length because those who own the Copywrite are hoping you will get hooked and want to buy the whole movie. As this only costs $2.99 why not buy the whole movie if you really like it.

    Back to the clips. In 3-10 minutes you can get quite a good glimpse of the camera work, acting, script, plot, etc. I often find this completely fascinating. I have rarely gone to a movie at a theater in the last 20 years. As far as I can tell, other than in the sci-fi fantasy genre, there is little reason to go. Even in historical movies where the CGI massively enhances the story, the acting & dialogue are weak. Watching a classic clip of a movie from the 30s or 40s can be a very refreshing experience. The story & dialogue are king but the framing of the shots is also a high art. This is far more interesting than CGI especially after you’ve seen the 100th CGI oh wow scene.

    Who knows Gary, high movie culture might make a comeback.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #36
  7. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    Being a joker, for his third choice he wrote “anything but the Highlander Light Regiment.” The HLR was the only highlander regiment that wore trousers instead of kilts for their dress uniforms. So, of course, off to the Highlander Light Regiment he was dispatched.

    And that didn’t teach him that jokers in the military do not go terribly far.

    Primarily, what it taught him is that army clerks have senses of humor too.

    • #37
  8. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    RightAngles: I remember asking her when I was about 5, how old she was when her life became in color haha

    Reminds me of Billy Crystal talking about going to Yankee Stadium for the first time and being knocked out about the greeness of everything, as up to that point in his young life baseball was only experienced in black and white. When he directed the HBO flick 61* about Roger Maris, he went to great lengths to recreate that special shade in the seats of the recently abandoned Tiger Stadium in Detroit. 

    • #38
  9. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    RightAngles (View Comment):
    We used to watch those old movies on TV on Saturday mornings.

    There is a school of thought that the TV need for content led to the enduring popularity of “Casablanca” and Topper.”  Topper has faded but it was revived as a series for a few years.

    Also, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which had not done well on release was out of copyright.  TV snapped it up and made it popular again. It had lost out to “The Best Years of our Lives,” which was a huge hit at the time and it is still a great movie but largely unknown by those younger than the war generation.

    • #39
  10. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    has an affair with Pola Negri and about, oh, 500 other women,

    Yeah, never heard of her before; internetted her and she seems a wee bit…black-widowish to me.

    My daughter’s inlaws own a restaurant in LA with a big poster of Pola Negri on the wall.  The restaurant, which is great, was a firehouse in the neighborhood which was the 1920s Hollywood before civilization moved farther west. Miss Negri lived nearby and it was a movie star area before Hollywood got popular. That area is between Glendale and Silverlake, if you know LA.

    • #40
  11. MichaelKennedy Inactive
    MichaelKennedy
    @MichaelKennedy

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    just of conventional wisdom’s deadening hand on perceiving the mixed, complex truth about the past,

    Some of the stories in “Niv” were not publishable until the principles died off.  One was a story Niven told of a drinking party he and Prince Rainier attended where the prince asked about his experiences with girls in Hollywood.  He asked about a particular favor the local censor would not approve. Niven had a bawdy sense of humor and started to tell him about the “best” of these favors he had ever had and it was by Grace…. and he remembered who he was telling the story to, and quickly finished the story attributing the favor to Gracie Fields.

    • #41
  12. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    MichaelKennedy (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):
    We used to watch those old movies on TV on Saturday mornings.

    There is a school of thought that the TV need for content led to the enduring popularity of “Casablanca” and Topper.” Topper has faded but it was revived as a series for a few years.

    Also, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which had not done well on release was out of copyright. TV snapped it up and made it popular again. It had lost out to “The Best Years of our Lives,” which was a huge hit at the time and it is still a great movie but largely unknown by those younger than the war generation.

    My wife worked for the Goldwyn company in the Eighties and Nineties. One of her favorite discoveries was an unassuming bound notebook, the kind with the marbled, black and white covers that every schoolkid used to know. It was the company’s official register of projects, written with pen and ink, going back to the Thirties. Production numbers were assigned there for the film lab, the budget department, and copyright registration. My favorite entry was a title written down at the end of 1945, Glory For Me, which was crossed out and written over with the new title, The Best Years of our Lives.

    • #42
  13. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    EJHill (View Comment):

    RightAngles: I remember asking her when I was about 5, how old she was when her life became in color haha

    Reminds me of Billy Crystal talking about going to Yankee Stadium for the first time and being knocked out about the greeness of everything, as up to that point in his young life baseball was only experienced in black and white. When he directed the HBO flick 61* about Roger Maris, he went to great lengths to recreate that special shade in the seats of the recently abandoned Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

    Car 54, Where Are You, an early Sixties cop comedy filmed in New York, was black and white. It was produced by Nat Hiken, creator of Sergeant Bilko (aka You’ll Never Get Rich). NYC, like LA, is cautious about movie/TV patrol cars being mistaken for the real thing in an emergency. In Los Angeles, when they’re being taken to a location they have to be carried covered on a flatbed truck. Because Car 54 was black and white, the simple solution was paint: Everywhere the real NYPD cars were painted medium green, the show cars were medium red, which looked the same on TV. 

    Fred Gwynne, a talented artist, did sketches of the film set for TV Guide. Everything in it was on wheels–the camera dolly; the lights; the microphone boom. Everything except Car 54 itself, which had its wheels removed. It sat on milk crates.  

    • #43
  14. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    MichaelKennedy (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):
    We used to watch those old movies on TV on Saturday mornings.

    There is a school of thought that the TV need for content led to the enduring popularity of “Casablanca” and Topper.” Topper has faded but it was revived as a series for a few years.

    Also, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which had not done well on release was out of copyright. TV snapped it up and made it popular again. It had lost out to “The Best Years of our Lives,” which was a huge hit at the time and it is still a great movie but largely unknown by those younger than the war generation.

    My wife worked for the Goldwyn company in the Eighties and Nineties. One of her favorite discoveries was an unassuming bound notebook, the kind with the marbled, black and white covers that every schoolkid used to know. It was the company’s official register of projects, written with pen and ink, going back to the Thirties. Production numbers were assigned there for the film lab, the budget department, and copyright registration. My favorite entry was a title written down at the end of 1945, Glory For Me, which was crossed out and written over with the new title, The Best Years of our Lives.

    Warner Brothers probably had one where Everybody Comes to Rick’s was replaced with Casablanca.

    • #44
  15. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    Gary McVey: Everywhere the real NYPD cars were painted medium green, the show cars were medium red, which looked the same on TV. 

    During the heyday of black-and-white cinematography art directors utilized colors for the way it photographed, not for the way it looked in real life. The huge Art Deco sets of the Astaire-Rogers musicals looked like shimmering whites and silvers and were, in reality, nauseating shades of pale greens and pinks and dark reds that looked black. 

    • #45
  16. Patrick McClure Coolidge
    Patrick McClure
    @Patrickb63

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Patrick McClure (View Comment):

    Gary, your movie posts are always welcome. Thanks for opening a window into a fascinating era.

    Thanks for your kind words, Patrick. We’re both of the same ethnicity. That means friends can slug it out on some posts, Monday to Friday, stand next to each other at a brass rail ordering drinks and laughing on Saturday, and line up for Holy Communion on Sunday.

     

    Well, nobody said it was a private fight.   I figured anyone could join in.

    • #46
  17. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Patrick McClure (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Patrick McClure (View Comment):

    Gary, your movie posts are always welcome. Thanks for opening a window into a fascinating era.

    Thanks for your kind words, Patrick. We’re both of the same ethnicity. That means friends can slug it out on some posts, Monday to Friday, stand next to each other at a brass rail ordering drinks and laughing on Saturday, and line up for Holy Communion on Sunday.

     

    Well, nobody said it was a private fight. I figured anyone could join in.

    Every fight on Ricochet is by definition a public fight! That’s what the Member Feed is for, and often the Main Feed too. 

    Although…I never venture into Groups, even open ones, to disagree with people who are discussing stuff among themselves. If the ELCA Lutherans want to have it out with the LCMS Lutherans, it’s none of my business. 

    Of course, if someone ventures out of their group to opine in public, Member or Main, that’s different. Then they’re inviting comment and should expect that some will disagree. 

    • #47
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