The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

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I used to travel around from one Saint Patrick's Day picnic to the next . . . dancing a jig, and singing old ballads at the top of my lungs. I danced so badly that finally in self-defense my family sent me to a dancing teacher in Chicago ... to a Professor MacNamara. They thought I'd soon find out that I was no good. They hoped the professor would tell me in a nice way. But if he did drop a hint to that effect, I never caught on. ANYWAY, when I was nineteen, I ■ staged The Pilgrim's Progress' in Milwaukee . . . and believe me that took some staging for there were nine hundred people in it. But do you think I got a kick out of it? I did not. 'Cause I wasn't out there on the stage showing off myself, getting applause, taking the bows. The man who gave me the job thought I had great possibilities as a director and producer. But even if I was good, I wouldn't have liked it." Pat grinned — that same Irish grin that you see so often on the screen. "Listen," he threw in as an aside. "I'm only talking about myself, because I suppose you want me to, if you're going to find out anything about me." "Don't get modest now," I said. "Well, getting back to my story, after two years at school, spent mostly in playing football, my feet got 'itchy' for a different kind of field to work out on. So I wrote Spencer, and both of us ditched our respective schools at the same time and went to New York to be actors." Pat paused a minute. His mind was looking a long way back. "I guess I can best tell you what those years were like by saying that no one has ever really experienced life until he has gone hungry. Those years were full of that kind of experience for me — more hunger experience than stage experience. Anyway, I worked for a while as a chorus boy in a musical show — and don't laugh either, for that job meant all the difference between a full stomach and an empty one. "Later, Jimmy Gleason gave me my first job in a stock company. After that I got parts here and there. And when I wasn't in a show I'd work as a bond salesman, or a haberdashery salesman, or a cement worker, or anything I could lay my hands on. "It was during those days that I met Eloise Taylor, an actress — an actress at times, I might say, for she was out of a job half the time too. I was crazy about her from the very beginning. I guess I proposed to her a thousand times in the five years that we knew each other before we finally married. But though there was nothing doing in a romantic way, we were the closest friends and best pals anyone can imagine. I'll tell you what pals we were. We always pooled our money. If I was working and she wasn't, she was welcome to half of what I made, and when I didn't have a job and she did. it was the same thing. It saved both our lives many times. "How did I happen to get into the movies? Well, that's something that I shall never forget. I got into the movies when I did, as I did, all because I lied. And it's the only time a lie ever got me anywhere . . . except over my mother's knee for a spanking. I had appeared in New York in 'The Who— Me? {Continued from page 19) Front Page' in the part that Adolphe Menjou later played in the movies. Lee Tracy had played the leading role of Hildy Johnson, a reporter. He was a tremendous success in it, you remember. Well, after the show had closed its long run, Howard Hughes, the producer, bought the play to do it as a movie. I remember I was rehearsing in New York in a play called 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow' with Herbert Marshall, when Howard Hughes called me from the Coast. He said, T understand you played the part of Hildy Johnson in "The Front Page" and everyone says you were swell. How would you like to come to Hollywood to do the part in the picture?' "VTOW, my heart practically stopped -L^ beating. I hadn't played the part at all . . . it was Tracy. There had been a mistake. I wondered if I should be honest about it and tell Mr. Hughes. I would have, I am sure, if I had had more than four dollars and fifty-three cents in my pocket. But that was my capital until the new play opened . . . ten days later. It would be a week after that before I would get my first pay check. I did some fast mental arithmetic. Four dollars and fifty-three cents would buy only about ten or eleven meals for Eloise and me. That was less than a meal a day. I said, 'Sure, Mr. Hughes. I'll come out . . . but only on one condition . . . that you allow me to bring Eloise Taylor with me. She's a great little actress and you could use her. So if you'll send the railroad fare for both of us, we'll be on our way.' "Well, that was the long and short of it. They wired me the contract and the fare, and the next day Eloise and I were on our way to Hollywood. Everything looked rosy until I realized that they hadn't wired me expense money too. En route, I had to wire (collect) for an advance so we could eat. Of course they knew then that I was on my uppers, but I didn't care. I had a contract. And Eloise was going to get a job too. "A week later, on the set, the director asked me how I had done a certain bit of business in the play. I had to confess then that all my business in the play was in another part. But it didn't matter then. We had already started on the picture, and I guess they were satisfied with my work. When I got my first pay check, I refused to take another of Eloise's "No's" for an answer and we were married at once. "That was four years ago . . . and I've had good luck ever since . . . that's why I always say that my good luck charm is my wife. Like all Irishmen, I've got plenty of superstitions, only they're sort of funny ones. For example, I don't think that walking under a ladder means bad luck . . . but I never read the last line of a play until the opening night. Then, ten minutes before the curtain goes up, I read it, and if it's mine, I learn it. But never before." AND right here is where I take time -^* out on Pat, and pick up where he left off when he said, "Like all Irishmen . . ." He is like all Irishmen — only more so! Except for the temper. I have checked with a lot of people and they all agree that if Pat has any Irish temper, he certainly never has displayed it. But he has the traditional sentimentalism of the Irish, there is no doubt about that. Pat's greatest hobby today is collecting rare old Irish books and manuscripts. He used to know Gaelic and is learning it all over again, so he can decipher some of them. He also collects old theater programs and has them framed on his walls beside the fireplace in his den. That room, incidentally, with a bar at one end, is the greatest evidence of his sentimentality. All four walls are completely covered with three hundred framed photographs of scenes from every play and picture that he has ever been in. The photographs are framed in — well, you guess the color. (Could it be anything but green!) His bar, too, bears markings of his love for mementoes. Everyone who ever sets foot on the rail of Pat's bar is asked !o autograph his name in the wood, with an ice pick. There is room for about 1,000 signatures on the bar. and it is already one-third covered. The names engraved there read like a who's who of the theater. Everyone is represented, from Mrs. Leslie Carter on down to the present day. Around the house there are numerous pictures of Mrs. O'Brien holding their baby, Margaret Mavourneen, on her lap. The baby is wearing the 35year-old, old-fashioned christening dress that Pat himself wore when he was named. (Yes, Pat was thirty-five on last November 11th, Armistice Day . . . and he admits it proudly. "Incidentally," I asked, "is Mrs. O'Brien Irish?" "Well, she's half Irish," he said . . . "though she'll insist she's all Irish . . . and not just to please me either, but because she loves anything and everything from that country. You know, she was in several pictures after we first came out here, but she finally decided that one Thespian is enough in the family. I had nothing to do with her giving it up. If she wanted to go on with her career, that's what I would have wanted her to do. But she has too many other things now to interest her. She sews a lot . . . makes her own clothes, and pajamas for me, and she's taken up knitting and quilting with all of the rest of the women in Hollywood. She pals around a lot, too, with Mrs. Jimmy Cagney, and her other women friends ... so she's having just as good a time, and better, as she would if she were acting. As long as she's happy in what she's doing now, that's all that matters. And of course she's nuts about the baby. "We don't run around very much because we've got such a swell home, and we'd rather be there than anywhere else. I've just put in a new handball court, and a badminton court . . . and we've got a swimming pool . . . and what more could anyone want. Incidentally, it was all paid for in cash. I never want to have anything that I don't own completely. It's — it's just a principle of mine. "That's about all there is to tell about me," he said. "You see there really isn't very much. I'm sorry. Maybe I could have made up something wild and exciting, but I'm not much good on story telling . . . though I do try to write a little on the side. I'm working on a play now. But that's about somebody else. I haven't any great gift of dramatizing myself. I'm sorry." I wasn't. And I don't think the Pat O'Brien fans are either. For now maybe you can understand why he is one of your favorite actors. It's because he is, on the screen, what he is in real life — just a regular guy! 46 The New Movie Magazine, August, 1935