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22
SCREENLAND
Exploding the
Joel McC rea Myth
IN THE dark archives of Hollywood's social files, one finds — "McCrea, Joel — nice boy, heart-breaker." Blithely combining the two hopelessly antonymous terms, Hollywood has him docketed thus. Proceeding from these labels, many a magazine thesis has been written on Joel. Sometimes it is one way, sometimes another, sometimes both together in an ambitious attempt to make credible such an unlikely character as a clean-cut, wholesome home-breaker !
It is flying in the face of tradition, therefore, that I decline to select either the Jekyll or Hyde of Joel for comment. Because neither is there. He is not a simple, homespun boy. He is not a heart-breaker. He is, it is true, a forthright and honest young man with good manners. He is also an ardent admirer of charming, gay women. But, knowing him, these attributes are not predominant enough to classify him.
By some fluke, perhaps because of preconceived ideas in interviewers' minds, Joel has usually sounded "sweet" in print. Such a nice boy that the stomach was slightly turned.
"Sweet!" he raged noisily to me a few hours ago. "What's wrong with these people? They don't know McCrea. Why, I'd steal the milk out of their babies'
bottles !" Speaking slowly and punctuating his words with an angry fist on the arm of the chair, he added, "I — am — not — nice !"
He is, of course. But not nauseously. The average, human number of pleasant faults makes him palatable.
"I can see," he says, "where it all started. It's easy to trace back.
"It started as far back as my first part in pictures. I had done some extra work here and there, when a friend of mine took me over to Colleen Moore's set one day and asked her if there was a chance I might get a couple of days' work in her picture, which was just beginning then. Colleen had been having trouble finding the right type for her leading man. She looked at me and said, 'Just for fun let's give you a test and see if you couldn't do the lead.' It was one of those incredible miracles — I just happened to be the type and I got the part.
"Colleen was charming to me. She knew I was nervous as the devil and desperately anxious to learn something. And out of her kindly — and purely impersonal, God knows — helpfulness to me a big myth grew. You know the kind — star crazy about her leading man, producer-husband in a fury, leading man's career to be wrecked, etc. Since there was no vestige of anything