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68 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
Although there is no actual resemblance, Johnson reminds many people of Lee Tracy when Tracy appeared on Broadway in The Front Page. "A little like a bad-looking Tracy," Earl Wilson, a Broadway columnist, described him, "a little like a good-looking Burton Rascoe."
The suggestion is probably occupational, in an indirect fashion, for Johnson is an ex-newspaperman who still looks, talks and thinks as much like a reporter as he can. His closest friends are still out of his years in New York city rooms, and most of those he has acquired since, whatever their businesses or professions, have an air of once having followed the same calling. Magazine writing and movie work were both afterthoughts in his life. From the day he saw his first picture of Richard Harding Davis dressed to cover a battle, thirty-five years ago, he knew what he wanted to be.
Yale tempted him briefly — through Frank Merriwell — and after high school he thought long and seriously of professional baseball. Tall and fast, he was a first baseman until he noticed that only the names of the batteries were printed in the papers in the brief notices given to school games, whereupon he became a catcher. But a weakness at bat convinced him that a career in that direction was not likely to carry him very far. He tried for West Point and Annapolis only for the higher education he would not be able to afford otherwise. But through all else, the picture of Davis remained bright and clear in his heart, lighting the way to New York and a world in which a reporter rested between wars in the company of the beautious young Miss Ethel Barrymore or like Davis, married the entrancing Miss Bessie McCoy.
Even now he has a recurring dream which involves a clean break with the present, and a start all over again at the very bottom of the ladder of journalism, a dream which Mrs. Johnson, who was an actress and has no moony feeling for newspapers and newspaper work, listened to with horror the first time her husband told it to her.
"First we drop this whole business, everything," he explained; "just walk right out and never think of it again. We go then to the