Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1963)

pealed to the captain to put into port and get some decent food supplies. Captain Kidd— a good loyal company man. “I’m eating this food,” he said, “and if it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.” They were en route to Durban, passed Mozambique, there were plenty of ports available, but the captain refused to stop. So the night before they landed at Durban, to make sure they got fresh supplies, the men broke into the storeroom and threw everything overboard — the rotten, fetid meat, the weevil-infested flour and cereals, everything. Captain Kidd promptly charged them with mutiny — he wired ahead to the American consulate and arranged for every man jack of them to be thrown in jail upon landing. Very few of the crew were actually sentenced to jail, and Jack, a member of the Seaman’s United Protective Union, went off scot free to new adventures. Once he missed a ship and was courtmartialed. Luckily, he had won $2,400 the week before in a crap game in Bahai, Brazil — there’d been a Navy gun crew aboard and he’d cleaned them out. Then he’d loaned the guys back their money so they could go ashore. At the courtmartial, an ensign appeared and vouched for the fact that Jack couldn’t have deliberately missed the ship, it was an accident. He could prove it. He owed Jack $600, others owed him as well, and he'd certainly not give up that kind of money! **A two-fisted sailor man” There were plenty of fights. As Jack says, “The men who follow the sea never really come to terms with the world, for the most part they’re guys running away from themselves, the lost people. It was great when I was a kid, but you have to grow up. And when you do, looking back, you feel a great compassion for these men, they have no direction and no future, just freedom.” But when he first came off the sea, he kept right on with the two-fisted part of the sailor life. It wasn't a matter of booze — this man doesn’t drink. It was always a flash of temper. Self will. He’d gotten himself a job in the swank Cadillac agency on West 52nd Street, a good secure job at a good secure salary with pension plans, the opportunity of learning about financing and the opportunity to deal with people of great means — a job for life. He was top salesman on the floor when one day he threw a potential customer out of the showroom. Bodily. Not only a potential customer, a duke. This arrogant gentleman had strutted about the showroom and at one point, as he was examining the cars, said haughtily to Jack, “Hold my cane!” “ You hold your cane,” said Jack evenly. “I’m not a cane holder.” The duke waxed obnoxious. Jack heaved him ho. It caused quite a flutter in the staid Cadillac emporium. The General Motors executive in charge summoned Jack upstairs. “Just exactly what did you do?” asked the boss. “I threw that guy out.” r “And what right have you to throw out a customer?” “None. He was obnoxious and nasty, I thought he needed to be thrown out.” 80 And expected to be thrown out himselt. But the old man paced the floor muttering, “Dammit, what am I going to do with you?” And nothing happened. The boss had grown up in a rough area of New York City, as Jack had. He understood. “I’ve been blessed with people,” Jack says. “You know, they say that angels watch over sailors, drunks and fools. I was a sailor, and I guess my guardian angel was on hand. Not too long after that, I found another guardian angel — Marie. “My last fight was shortly after she and I were married. I was still working at Cadillac, was driving in Manhattan at high noon one day and this taxi driver bumped me. Now this is the kind of a guy I teas. I stopped, got out, advanced on that cabbie with blood in my eye. He must have sensed my antagonism, he reached through the window and threw this punch at me. A big, tough, 240-pounder. I pulled him out of that cab and there in the middle of Broadway and 42nd Street at high noon, worked him over. When I finished he was a wreck. I know. I paid his doctor bills. “It was nothing new to me — just one more scrap — only this time I had to tell Marie. It was very difficult telling her. I’ve never been in another fight since.” As a matter of fact, Jack’s life was changing at this point. He was moving into quite another sphere and channeling his energy into a fight — but not with his fists — for his life. Not the life of the sea which he’d had; not the life of the Cadillac agency, he'd had that too; but a secret life he’d kept locked up in him since childhood, when his dad had taken them to see every show on Broadway. Ten blocks away from the Cadillac agency was his dream — the theater. But how to get there? One day, the manager called Jack onto the floor to meet a tall, Jack Lord says he was a scrapper before he married Marie and turned peaceable. painfully shy Inali WIKI 75 limousine. Gary Cooper. Jack was shaking like a bird dog and his easy flow of conversation was suddenly paralyzed. The two of them walked around the show room. Coop said nothing. Jack said nothing. After a while it occurred to Jack that this guy was, like himself, a car spook. He started talking about cars, about an old Cadillac 12 he’d taken apart and put together, about a Pierce he’d once had, and a Duesenberg. “Duesenberg” proved the magic word that unlocked things. Fellow Duesenbergers Coop lighted up, his blue eyes sparkled, “I just came back from Plattsburg,” he said. “Went up to see a Duesenberg I once owned.” The movie star had traveled five hundred miles to see an old car! From that minute on, the two men became friends, it was a friendship that was going to last until Gary Cooper’s death, That first day Jack asked him what he’d never dared ask anybody. “How did you really get started in show business?” “Well, you have to have a galvanized gut,” Coop said. “You can’t take no for an answer.” He’d gotten his start by scraping together enough money to have a test made, on a horse. He hired the cameraman, bought the film and sent the test around. Jack made his own start. He went to Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse and said “I want to be an actor. I think I should learn how to act.” Meisner wanted to know why . . . where he wanted to go and why . . . and after a four-hour interview Jack was admitted to the evening class. A couple of months later he quit his job at Cadillac. December, 1952. It was a major decision and Marie very definitely helped him make it. “We hadn’t been married very long and it was asking a lot, for me to go to her and say I’d like to drop an $18,000-a-year job for nothing, a venture into the strictly unknown, and against such odds. There are very few women who will sacrifice security — it’s a necessary thing for most women — for all women. They should have it. But I had a dream and I was afraid of being trapped by my comfortable job, my comfortable hours, my comfortable income. So I told Marie and she said fine, she was all for it. I told you she was tough. She is. And she believed in me. kept believing, even though it took me a year and a half to get my teeth into anything substantial.” Jack’s first real job was with Ralph Bellamy on “Man Against Crime” which he did for peanuts. His break in the theater with Kim Stanley in “The Traveling Lady” on Broadway paid $500 a week, but it wasn’t the money that mattered, it was the open door. In nothing flat he was in Hollywood to make “The Courtmartial of Billy Mitchell” — with Gary Cooper. “Well.” Coop said when they met on the set, “the guy who likes Duesenbergs!” Marie and Jack make their home now in Hollywood in a two thousand-squarefoot apartment which is their ivory tower. “It’s furnished with things we love, our books, my photographs, our art collection. We have no children, no relatives, we are everything in the world to each other. “I talk everything over with my wife.