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ALAN LADD. ..How!l remember my friend
AL AN LADD and VERONICA LAKE skyrocketed to the top in ‘This Gun for Hire” for Paramount.
by Teet Carle
There is something about a close and affectionate friendship between men that seems to preclude the survivor of such an intimate relationship of indulging in precious recollections of those “Golden Years,” even for decades after one of the two has been stolen away by death.
For some ten years, I have been doing pieces for STUDIO magazine, recounting amusing, amazing and sometimes awesome experiences that came to me during forty years as a studio movie publicist. Until now, I have recorded nothing about probably the only, and surely the best, friend I ever had among all the actors with whom I worked.
He was Alan Ladd whose first major screen role which made him an instant star was in a picture which I handled as the unit publicist. The film was the classic “This Gun For Hire,” filmed in the fall of 1941. I had the assignment because I was the Veronica Lake “promoter” from her first movie. Alan became, thereafter, my special assignment and we were together through a flock of movies and experiences, both professionally and as friends.
How close we were can be told sufficiently by me stating that I never was socially intimate enough with any other actor to be a dinner guest at his home other than Ladd, and his wife Sue.
I long have wondered if I could write about Alan objectively and without becoming maudlin. Most likely, I have refrained from making him the subject of a piece by the fact that his death all alone in his Palm Springs home nearly a score of years ago was a traumatic thing for me. Such an
10 HOLLYWOOD STUDIO Magazine
unbelievable tragedy, a needless and senseless accident, a totally unreasonable waste of talent at such an early stage in his life. But most of the scars now are faint and the hurt over having our friendship lapse into almost nothing for several years preceding his death is partially gone. The memories remain clear. So I will recall some of the “things that were.”
Director Frank Tuttle was the catalyst that brought me an actor friend just as he was the factor that make Alan a star and a picture about a sympatetic psychotic hired killer, ““This Gun For Hire,” a classic. Few In Hollywood believed that the book by Graham Greene could ever be made into a popular picture. Tuttle aruged that it could be done if the right actor played the role of the killer, Raven. Although Veronica Lake and Robert Preston would be starred in the romantic leads, the part of the assassin was the central character, actually the “hero” who “pays for past crimes” by dying as he does a noble deed. An established star might not come off—if one would accept the role. Tuttle offered to make a test that would not only find a new star but would test the appeal of the whole story.
Paramount optioned the book and gave a “‘go ahead.”
Enter: Alan Ladd. He was a bit player, who had been signed as a client by Sue Carol, a former starlet at Fox who had turned talent agent. She was the only person in Hollywood who believed that Ladd was a future star. Casting directors and talent scouts, directors and producers, had been agreeing that “the kid can act,” but that he was far too short of stature (around five, nine). They told Sue and Alan he never would