Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1943)

In front of the Garfield home, a simple, English-type house — John with Robbie, his wife, "the most important single element in my life," and their little daughter Catherine J' |OHNNY'S a changed boy," they say. "Garfield's different." But I'm not. Something more exciting and a lot more important than that is happening out here. Hollywood is changing. The world is changing. When I first came to Hollywood, I believed that motion pictures were the most powerful medium in the world. I wanted my share of the work to be an honest picture of America. Not hoppedup things built for the box office. Back in those days they weren't making pictures like "Air Force." It's one of the first real examples of how Hollywood is changing. Howard Hawks told me the story one day in his office. I never saw a script. I never knew whether my role was a big one or completely unimportant. I only knew I wanted to be connected with this picture that couldn't fail to be great. Although the cast includes such people as Gig Young, Harry Carey, Arthur Kennedy. George Tobias, Jim Brown, John Ridgely. Faye Emerson, me — there's no star in the picture. The picture itself is the star. There is no magnifying of any personality. That's the right way to make a picture, I think. Subordinating the star roles to the action, to the facts. At first I was pretty wide-eyed about it all. I remember the first Hollywood party I went to. Mike Curtiz took me. We were working late and dropped by after we finished. It was given at the Darryl Zanucks, in their stables. What a stable! Robert Taylor came up and spoke to me. Barbara Stanwyck went out of her way to tell me that she liked my work in "Four Daughters." I had MAY, 1943 never been introduced to them. I thought Gee! We eat at drive-ins one night, my wife Robbie and I. The next night I meet Stanwyck and Taylor. I was thrilled. I wished it could be preserved, this starry-eyed stuff. Instinctively I knew — it's not in the cards. Like became too easy. I didn't have to worry about where my next job was coming from or whether there'd be a next. I didn't have to worry about the rent or the laundry bills. I lost my drive, thought I was losing my objective. Disillusionment set in. Now I know that only the very young can be disillusioned. Because what you're disillusioned about are the surface things of life. As you grow up, you know that the structure underneath is swell and strong. That's where Robbie has been the most important single element in my life. She's a sensible girl. She isn't affected by all the claptrap that affects me. It doesn't impress her or depress her. She takes the long view. Women like Robbie are like the earth. They can wait for things to germinate and then to grow. Kids arc like that, too; my little Catherine, for instance. So at the end of that first year I wanted to go back to New York. If you've watched your mother die as I did. . . . It was back in the days when I was seven, down in New York's lower East Side, a kid born to be a mugg or a gangster if ever a guy was. O'Flannihan, the copper, had to go to my mother, not once but many times, when things were missing from the peddlers' carts. Well, I hadn't taken the stuff, but who was to say I hadn't, banana-snatcher from the cradle. Physical illness killed my mother, no doubt. That's what the ambulance doctor thought, and that's what he wrote on the death certificate. But it may have been something else that killed my mother, that year I was seven. Worry, maybe. So anyway, she died. So you get the feeling you'd like to make something pretty fine out of yourself to make up for something you can never be sure about. If you've ridden the rods, as I have, hobnobbed with hoboes, found them right guys, seen a pal fall between two freight cars and be crushed to death under the wheels, you find you've worked up an allergy for phonies, even on the stage or screen. I remember what Angelo Patri told me that day I tried to run away from his school, jumped a fence and landed squarely in a flower bed. I expected trouble when he called me back. I didn't get it. For the first time, I didn't get it. Patri talked to me as I had never been talked to before. He made me see that flowers are tender, beautiful living things, to be cared for and protected. He gave me the idea that people are like that, too, and hearts, and ideals. And some of the things inside our own hearts and minds that we'd better not trample either. But I didn't like any part of it. So I quit. I was running away from something again. It's always kid stuff to run away from anything. I was running away again after my 53