Screenland (May-Oct 1936)

98 SCREENLAND Ash he was quitting. And though that gentleman threatened and cajoled, Joe left him to join the Bell-Prevost Trio. They say lightning never strikes twice, hut it did for Joe. Bell was another Ash — with his own particular hrand of cussedness added. But Joe was no longer a child, to he cowed with abuse. He was a man of thirteen — with four years of experience behind him. For eight months he stood the gaff, and then he went home. An abject letter from Bell followed him. "All right," wrote Joe, "I'll come back. But you'll have to cut out the dressing-room comedy." It takes more than promise, however, to curb an ungovernable temper. Bell felt himself injured one day because Joe had failed to perfect a trick they were practicing. That night, as the boy jumped to where Bell's arms should have been waiting to catch him, he saw to his horror that the man had stepped out from under. Bell couldn't have known, of course, that Joe was going to break his leg. It might have been a couple of arms — or even his neck. his four weeks in San Francisco and Oakland, they spent as much time as they could together, and she went up to San Jose to bid him goodbye. "That was as near as I got," he said, "to a proposal." How near was that? "Well, I said: 'Some day we're going to get married.' And she didn't say yes and she didn't say no." They wrote to each other, and a year later he wired her from New York. "Got enough money for us to get married. How about it?" He had, as a matter of fact, a hundred and forty dollars. By the time she reached New York, he had thirty left. They were married at City Hall, and their wedding trip was a subway ride to Times Square. As they walked to the "lovely apartment" he'd taken in 43rd Street, the groom bent his gaze upon his bride, who after all didn't know him very well. "Look," he said, "there are certain things married people should — " "I know," she interrupted shyly. "My sister told me before I left home. Never r : Joe E. Brown and his leading lady, June Travis, in Joe's new film, "Earthworm Tractor." Joe "discovered" June, who's the daughter of his friend Harry Grabiner, baseball magnate. Renamed Travis, June justifies Joe's faith in her. "Just one of those things — too bad — it's a dangerous business for kids — or anyone else." Prevost was made of different stuff. He took Joe to his home and nursed him while the leg mended. They built up an act together, and started out as the Prevost Brothers. A year later they became Prevost and Brown, playing the big vaudeville and burlesque houses. It was a happy partnership that lasted ten years, and if they didn't make a fortune, they did make a living. Prevost thought Joe was funny. He kept urging him to don comedy clothes and try some clowning. "And when the audience didn't laugh," Brown recalls, "he always blamed it on them. It was never by any chance because I wasn't funny, but always because they were dumb." In 1914 they were traveling from Winnipeg to California, and Joe fell into conversation with one of their trainfellows, a Mrs. McGraw. Later she introduced him to her daughter Kathryn. "Prevost and Brown?" said the young lady. "Weren't you playing Duluth not long ago?" "Yes," he replied. "Did vou see us?" She blushed a little. "Well— I left just before your act came on. You see — " and then it came out. "It was a comedy bill," she blurted honestly, "and I just felt I couldn't stand one more comedian." That broke the ice. Some snapshots he took gave Joe an excuse to write. During let your husband go to sleep without kissing him goodnight, and never let him leave the house mad." "Those are very good rules," he assented gravely, "and we'll stick to them. But there's something else. I've got a kind of quick temper. I do things, then I'm sorry afterwards. Now we might get into an argument, for instance, and I might take and punch you in the nose. I wouldn't mean anything by it, you understand — " But she'd stopped dead in her tracks, and was staring indignantly at her brand new husband. "If you ever do a thing like that to me, I'll go straight home to my mother !" She couldn't understand why he chuckled and hugged her in the midst of Broadway traffic. But she had other things to worry about. The "lovely apartment," for example. One shocked survey — and Kathryn McGraw Brown was down on her hands and knees, attacking the bathroom floor with soap and water. Don was born on Christmas Day, 191 5 — Joe, Jr. came twenty months later. The risks their father was willing to take for himself he refused for them. As an acrobat, he could only go down-grade. Though it meant the end of his own professional career, Prevost urged Joe to try straight comedy. He'd been earning $150 a week. He took a job in burlesque at $75. The move proved a wise one. John Cort, producer, saw him and offered him the lead in the road company of "Listen, Lester." He rehearsed for it in the summer of 1919, and on September 19th of that year, the phone rang. "I want you to take the part on Broadway tonight," barked Mr. Cort. "Think you can do it?" Could he do it? Could he grab the chance every actor dreams about? He was in his dressing-room that night, made up, letter perfect, ready to go on. Hewas also flat broke. But Cort had promised him an advance on salary tomorrow. A knock sounded at the door, and a head popped in. "No show tonight, Equity's called a strike." How he got through the next weeks he doesn't know. He'd never heard of Equity, but he borrowed money to join it and went on strike with the rest of the actors. His father died, and on borrowed money he went to the funeral. But that was the low point. The strike over, he opened with "Listen, Lester" in Washington. And if you should ask him whether he made a hit, he'd turn a quizzical blue gaze upon you and say : "Well — Cort engaged me again for the following year." His first opening on Broadway. His first raves from New York's critical gentry. There's nothing in any actor's life to compare with it. Mr. Cort sitting beside him in the darkened theatre. "Well, Joe — your name'll be up in lights tomorrow." Next morning he was down at eight — watching the men put up the letters of his name, standing at the fellow's elbow while he painted JOE E. BROWN in letters of gold on the white stone slabs outside the Cort. A happy nation has no history. Neither has a successful actor. While he went from one stage triumph to the next, the movie companies began asking him to make tests. "But they weren't any good," he informed me solemnly. "They all looked like Joe E. Brown." Ralph Ince saw him when he played on the coast, and though he still looked like Joe E. Brown, engaged him without the formality of a test. His popularity has been building ever since. Once there was a legend that Brown was a small-town star, that the cities would have none of him. But the line at the Music Hall in New York stretched round the block when "Bright Lights" was released, and the grosses piled up in cities and villages both. Today, the little boy who ran home to his mother with sixteen cents in his pocket, is one of the ten biggest box-office bets in the business and makes more money, both for himself and his bosses, than any other star on the Warner lot. His mother lives in her own home in Toledo. Let the kids, who helped him pick cinders out of his head, put that in their pipes and smoke it. He has three passions — sports, his work, and his family. Where most householders put their bars, Joe has installed a soda fountain in memory of that starved childhood, when his notion of bliss was to eat all the ice cream his stomach could hold. If you walk up the path, you're likely to come on some such scene as this : Mrs. Brown stands on the steps in the sunlight, her arm round five-year-old Mary-Elizabeth Ann. They constitute the audience. On the lawn three figures — Don, Joe, Jr.. and their father — toss from arm to arm a gurgling bundle of delight, aged three and named Kathryn Francis after her mother. "Just giving the baby a little workout," Brown will call. It's a picture of domestic love and laughter, borne out by the facts. The Brown menage, like the Brown career, is among the most successful in Hollywood. And why not? — based as they are on the qualities displayed so early by the youngster who founded them — imagination, moral stamina, the capacity for work — the qualities that make for happy living. THE CUNEO PRESS, INC., U. S.A.