Screen and Radio Weekly (Jun 25, 1939)

SCREEN & RADIO WEEKLY Lo ea Ba ct x 5 ‘ 7 * Ameche is a:horse-lover. With Chet Lauck, Lum of Lum:'n’ Abner, he owns -a string of race: horses. ON AMECHE is a very nice guy. There is no argument about that. Just mention his name in Hollywood and anybody will say immediately: “There’s the nicest guy in pictures”—or in radio, or something. And then whoever is talking will say: “Now that blankety-blank so-and-so Joe Doaks,” and for the next 10 minutes everybody will talk about what a blankety-blank this Doaks is. Get the idea? On account of this and that, including publicity and pictures and radio and Ameche himself, the impression has got around that Don is a kind of masculine Elsie Dinsmore, and that when you have said he is a nice guy, you have said it all. You think of that effulgent grin, with dimples and teeth like the lights on, the Golden Gate bridge, and right away he is the kind of a guy that nice old ladies think of as resembling the sons they would have liked to have had. Then there are the characters he has played on the screen, very admirable characters with whom you would gladly trust your sister, only what fun would there be in it for her? . And even on the radio his voice, which soméhow makes me think of gold dust mixed with syrup and sweet oil, adds a little bit to the general idea that Pollyanna was just a rough model the Creator used while figuring out the pattern for Ameche. You wind up thinking maybe this guy is too nice to be human, and that he probably keeps old rose sachet in his haberdashery drawer. Now ALL. this wouldn’t matter much only this Ameche guy has, in three years and in spite of some inauspicious screen roles and too innocuous publicity, become a pretty important selling point at the movie poxoffices as well as master of cere‘monies of the most popular radio show on the air. Even the shining halo which has been placed around ‘his brow has not been able to hold him down. However, it is high time that somebody made it clear to the world at large that this Ameche is not so all_ fired nice; that he is not the. kind of guy who would always give Alice Faye ‘up ‘to: Tyrone Power in the last reel, . for instance; that he likes straight -hourbon better than grape juice; knows _ his way around below the curbstone and $0 what-if he is nice to his mother, so was A] Capone. Ameche. at the gate‘of his Encino home. You-see the house in the background, comfortable, modest, on one and a half acres of land and with no swimming pool. Simplicity is’ preferred. He's No Angel As a matter of fact, Ameche wouldn’t be what or where he is today if he had been the shining soul you get the idea he is cracked up to be. He would have studied hard and stayed away from poker games and finished law school, and by now he would probably be working in‘ some corporation legal department and would be very poor and honest. Instead he is making more money than almost anybody on the screen, when you figure up his movie and radio jobs; he has a fine family and a comfortable home, takes caré of a batch of relatives and with Chet Lauck (of Lum ‘n’ Abner) owns a racing stable _ which gives him a lot of fun and even makes a little money. In that respect he is unique; for a long time certain people have known that it is possible to make money running horses, with a little luck and sound business methods, but the fact was carefully guarded from movie stars on the ground that they bought race horses thinking they were a luxury and why should they be disillusioned. Ameche works on the principle that if being a sucker is fun, it is twice as much fun to be a. non-sucker. He came by this practical philosophy honestly. The community where he started, in Kenosha, Wis., where Papa Ameche ran a saloon, was not one to breed a class of softies. And Dominic Félix Ameche was a spirited kid, the kind that learns you can miss a lot of trouble by being quick and smart. The kind of kid that is portrayed in the movies as a freckle-faced_ choir boy with a black eye. (Ameche once played the role of the Virgin Mary with a black eye.) ae OUNG DOMINIC started school at Kenosha, and then went to a Catholic boarding school, St. Berchman’s Seminary at Marion, Ia. Don _ explained that there wasn’t a parochial] -gschool near home in Kenosha, and be sides, his younger brother, Louis, was already. at St. Berchman’s.. Also it is possible to suspect that concentrated association with the good: Sisters was considered an influence not uncalled for. After a couple of years at St. Berch By Clarke. Wales man’s, Don went on to Columbia Academy and College at Dubuque, finishing his high school work in three years, causing the master of discipline. Father Kucara, some worry, playing on all the school athletic teams, competing in oratorical contests and somewhere along the line, before finishing his two years of college work at Columbia, setting out to become a lawyer. It sounded like a good thing. Once in law school at Marquette, in Milwaukee, Ameche began to discover that the drudgery of the law interfered with the very popular pastime of raising a mild bit of hell. Too much devotion to books hampered the development of a guy’s research into the mathematical possibilities of rolling a pair of deuces before a seven came up, and also got in the way of such interesting psychological questions as how often the other guy would believe that the hole card filled out an inside. straight. Says Ameche: “So the next fall I went to Georgetown University, at Washington, D. C., and for two months I cracked a lot of books and got along fine. However, at that time my Dad was running out of money, and I had gone to Georgetown expecting to get a job which would help pay my way. Well, the job didn’t develop, and I didn’t like being broke. So I went back to the old routine. That was the best run of luck I ever had at poker, but I didn’t even finish out the semester at Georgetown.” Y ov see what I mean? Sure he was and is a nice guy, one of the best, but he didn’t go around giving people cause to start measuring him for wings. From Georgetown Don went back to Kenosha and got a job in a mattress factory, and then a job on the assembly line of an automobile factory. “I made pretty good money in the automobile factory,” he says, “about 50 bucks a week. By the end of the summer I had enough money to go to college again, and I went into the law schoo] at the University of Wisconsin. Full of ambition and good resolutions.” With his first” tricycle. could. easily pass. for-a picture of Ameche’s boy, Donny, now 6. This That was the fall of 1928. The Twentieth Century-Fox Publicity Department has made the world pretty well. acquainted with what happened to his resolutions. The story about Ameche going to work in a professional stock company on three hours’ notice, on Thanksgiving Day, to take the place of the leading man who had been hurt in an automobile accident, is true, except that it wasn’t the leading man. It was the second lead. The leading man wasin , the accident, but he was able to go on for the matinee. The other guy broke an arm, and the company manager, who had seen Ameche in a college play, hired Don to take his place in “Excess Baggage.” tai eet Don stayed in college for the rest of the semester, but he also stayed with the stock company. His efforts at the higher learning were over, except, for a little summer school work which he took because it allowed him to collect $25 a week from the university dramatic organization for playing leads in three plays. In the fall of 1929, which you will remember was quite a fall, Don went, to New York’ and did some first-class starving while trying to set Broadway on fire. Eventually he got a job %s juvenile in a Fisk O’Hara show, “Jerry for Short,” and he was with Tex Guinan in vaudeville for three weeks, until Tex told a Brooklyn theater manager to jump in the river and broke up ser act, and he did two weeks in “Illegal Practice” in Chicago. But mostly he starved, and wound up writing home for train fare. Bacx in Kenosha he tried to get a job with the power and light company, with the telephone company, with any company at all that might promise some kind of a future for an ex-actor. But they weren’t needing any ex-actors just then. He was saved for the drama, as they say in theatrical circles, when Bernadine Flynn (of the Vic and Sade radio show), whom he had known at the University of Wis consin, suggested a radio audition in Chicago. He got a job in a railroad show, The Empire Builders, at $60 a week, and then another job in The First Nighter at an additional $50. Eventually he got up to $500 before the end of his five years on The First Nighter, which shows what you can do if you go to school and study hard. He gave up The First Nighter when he took Ameche is pretty good at skee!-shooting and bowling. He likes to spend-his vacations at Deep Well ranch, Palm: Springs. over the’ M.C. job with Charlie McCarthy some years ago, and now $500 a week wouldn’t pay his income tax. In another couple of years, if nothing untoward happens, he’ll be financially independent for life. For the Ameches have not gone Hollywood. If you want to see Don shrivel up and die on his feet, accuse him of going high hat. It curdles his soul to such an extent that he can’t even get mad. He has a lot of fun with his money, but he wouldn’t be comfortable a 3 on: the Hollywood millionaire act. Neither would his wife, who was Honore Pendergast when he met her #r Dubuque and whom he calls Honey. They live in a tasteful Colonial house in Encino, with their two boys, six-yearold Donny (called Mugg) and four-yearold Ronny (called Boo-boo), an Irish setter named Sheila, two servant girls whom the Ameches brought out from a Midwest farm, and Gabe, a _ Belgian World War refugee whom Don first knew at St. Berchman’s. Gabe has worked for the Ameches so long that he is a family fixture. When Don decides he wants to go to the Kentucky Derby or to San Francisco to look over the horses at one of the tracks there, he gets in a plane and goes. He really gets a lot of fun and satisfaction out of life, more than any yher actor I know in Hollywood. His arents live near him in the San Fer#ando Valley. He has his three younger sisters in school and his youngest broth‘ay, Bert, is about finished with studies become an architect. Jimmy is ing all right on the radio, and Louis has a job at Twentieth Century-Fox. Since “Alexander Graham Bell” and since Don’s casting in the lead of “Fallen Stars,” now being made, his screen career has taken on added luster. However, just to make things right, I would like to see ‘him do a picture in which he plays himself, instead of a paragon of self-effacing virtue. Sure he is a nice guy. Very nice. But I hope by now that you get the idea—. he is no tin angel. Ameche, Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen on the train on their recent trip to New York. Ameche has been on the radio since 1930, on the First Nighter series for five years and now on the NBC Sunday. program.