Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1941)

COUNT HIM OUT! Most Hollywood people would condemn hinn for what he did. But it takes a man like Randolph Scott to know that what seems like a detour at first is sometimes the shortest road to happiness BY JOHN R. FRANCHEY WITH his stock now being quoted at an all-time high, he is taking it all very calmly, which is definitely the wrong attitude for a man whom the local "experts" had counted out some two years back. That makes twice. He was equally baffling when his career was at low tide and his agents were getting the brush-off at the studios. He took it all very calmly then. You couldn't teU that his days were numbered just from looking. The explanation is very simple. It is bound up with Randolph Scott's fataUsm: What is to be will be. Heavens knows he hadn't the slightest intention of becoming a movie star when he took off for a trip West the summer of 1928. Fashionable Woodbury Forest prep school, as befits a young Virginian ... a trick at Georgia Tech . . . transfer to the University of North Carolina ... a brief intermezzo with a lady he was later to marry ... a short turn or two in business . . . and then that trip West with a friend named Jack Heath. They didn't even know they were coming to California. Ardent golfers, they stopped ofiE at Dallas, Texas, were received with open arms by Dallas society and the dazzling Dallas debbies, and were sorely tempted to camp there for a century or two. But wanderlust urged them still farther West and inevitably to Hollywood. Arrived in Hollywood, the two Virginians discovered that they were in clover: No less than two fancy golf tournaments were scheduled to be played oflf within the next six weeks. They took a small apartment and prepared to stay vmtil October. It was Jack Heath who remembered that they had a mutual friend in town, the -then wife of Howard Hughes. They gave her a ring. Being the lady she was, she invited the boys to dinner. Also to meet her charming husband. They were sold on Mr. Hughes from the start: He was an ardent golfer, when he wasn't producing pictures. They became a golfing threesome right then and there. Late in October, they reluctantly began packing their bags, arranged for their final tour of the links with Hughes. They were on hole 17 when Scott remembered all of a sudden that here they were going back to Virginia and they hadn't seen the inside of a studio. It might be pretty embarrassing when they got back and everyone started asking questions. He said something about it to Hughes. "How would you boys like to work in a picture?" Hughes came back. "That would be better than taking a Cook's tour, wouldn't it?" You know, of course, what the boys said. Well, the next day it came off on schedule. Randolph Scott and Jack Heath were over on the Fox lot, working as one-day extras. They had identical roles, if you could call them roles. Dressed in the dashing getup of AustraUan army officers, hats turned up rakishly on one side, their chore was to suggest "complete abandon." How complete the Scott abandon must have been you can guess from the following: James Ryan, casting director for Fox, called him over and invited him to make a screen test. He was so flabbergasted that he said he'd do it, although on the way home that evening he was mentally composing the polite no-thank-you letter which he planned to send Ryan later that night. He never sent the letter. Waiting for him at the apartment was a message to get in touch with the great Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, apparently, had received a glowing report from someone on the Fox lot. At any rate, he rolled out the red carpet for Scott and told him frankly that he had him in mind for the lead in "Dynamite," his next picture. Negotiations were proceeding fine until C. B. discovered that Scott was (Continued on page 92) 53