Screenland (Jan–Jun 1948)

The Man from Down Under Continued from page 27 familiar surroundings and friends. It wasn't fun to quit high school after one year to earn a living. When Rod was 12, his father died, and after that things weren't easy for his mother, his sister, and himself. He sold newspapers, worked in drugstores, grocery stores — all the things kids do. Only his jobs were a little different. For he didn't blow his dough on malts; his money went to pay the rent. I wonder if any screen role will ever give him the thrill he got from his first regular job? It was polishing brass at the Brooklyn Museum. There was more brass there than there is in the Navy, and it needed constant, loving care. It was a secure kind of job, one that would last as long as the brass did. It lasted until Rod and his mother left for Florida. He went to school there for awhile, just doing odd jobs in the afternoon. He quit before long and started to work for a florist. Sounds zany now, seeing Rod — as big as a mountain — arranging floral displays, doesn't it? But he made fair money. Occasionally, when he needed some extra coin, and he always did, he worked as a diver on a glass bottom boat. That was fun, all except when he'd see a shadow on the ocean floor. Shadows usually meant sharks. At 15, Rod had a healthy fear of sharks. He must have been wearing a horseshoe around his neck in 1936, too, when the hurricane came and swept everything before it. Rod and his family lived quite a bit inland, but that hurricane was no spring zephyr. The garage in back of his house was lifted completely off the ground. For two days, he sat with his feet on the kitchen table to keep them out of the water. Back in New York, Rod held so many jobs he couldn't keep them straight. He was too big, too restless, to sit behind a desk. He tried it — in the Prudential Insurance Company, for Western Electric, as a shipping clerk. It just wasn't his dish. He looked as fitting behind a desk as Man Mountain Dean. Maybe that's why he took up professional football. Maybe that's why he worked summers in the hotels on Long Island. Remember the play, "Having Wonderful Time"? Rod lived that play. He was the gay fellow who asked the visitors to dance, who washed dishes, who acted as guide. Winters he worked as a surveyor, became interested in construction work: rough, tough, hard. The kind of work where you strip down to your waist and use a pick and shovel. The depression was on, in full swing. Jobs were scarce. But not where danger was paramount. Rod started working underground digging tunnels. He would finish one job, and — since the only people he knew were tunnel people — he'd wind up underground again. He had plenty of work, at good pay. He worked in compressed air because he got more money for that, a straight salary plus double time for pressure up to 26 pounds. Every pound after that, your salary went up. 58 Rod got up to 46 pounds, the maximum you can work under. He thought he was lucky, that he had a cinch. He worked just 45 minutes a day, because it took five hours to become adjusted to the increased doses of compressed air. He worked underground for eight years. You've seen pictures where tunnels are blasted? Where the mud and slime spew forth in your face? It was that kind of a life that conditioned Rod Cameron for stardom. Yes, he was in New York, but not pounding agents' doors. His success story isn't the typical one of waiting for the breaks in New York. If ever a movie hero had a real he-man's background, Rod is that guy. His memories aren't those of dancing A call for Vic Mature between scenes of 20th CenturyFox's "The Fury of Furnace Creek." lessons, opening nights, the smell of grease paint. His memories are of things like these: looking around and seeing that there were no older men in tunnel work. They were all dead. That time the whole heading crew was killed, Rod nearly drowned in the water. He was the only one alive when the rescue crew came. How do such accidents happen? "When you drill, you have a pattern," explains Rod. "You drill it, shoot it, and muck it. A crew is supposed to drill, shoot and muck before the next crew comes on, but sometimes you don't get finished in time. The day this happened, the crew left before the hole was finished. Now, there is one thing you are never supposed to do: put a drill in the same hole. But this fellow thought he could save a little time, so he started drilling and hit a stick of dynamite. It killed all nine guys. You could scrape them off the wall. In a space that size, an explosion is really something. I was lucky." There it goes again — this lucky business. And-yet you have a feeling, when you talk to Rod, that he makes some of his own "luck." For instance, he didn't stick around in tunnels after it began to dawn on him there was no future to the work, literally. He wanted to see the sun, so he came up from down under and got a job at a dime store. SCREENLAND "That was a rare experience," says Rod, laconically. It must have been. Can't you just see Rod, with his size, his strong hands, his direct manner born of his years digging in the earth, as a dime store clerk? "You couldn't smoke, you couldn't talk to anybody in the place," marvels Rod, "you couldn't even buy a car, so help me! It was only because of the depression that Rod stuck to that job for eight months. After his "stretch" as a white collar worker, he went back to work in Long Beach digging tunnels again and glad of it. At least, there he had a freedom of word and action. He decided he just wasn't cut out to be a prissy pants. But the dime store job was lucky for him, too. Because while he was working regular hours for a change, he met a certain girl. Before too long, they were married. Maybe some people might figure, since they were eventually divorced, what was lucky about it? But this was lucky; they had a little girl. And she's the light of Rod's life today. Maybe Rod would have stuck with his tunnel digging if he hadn't reasoned that tunnel digging was even more hazardous in California than it was in New York. For in New York, there is rock underground. In California, they have earthquakes. "Here," elaborates Rod, "there is shifting sand. They use these big timbers underground, and they have a man who walks around tapping them. When they get too much pressure, they ring like a bell. When that happens, you know there is too much pressure, and you'd better do something about it, fast. Of course, sometimes they don't catch them and they go off like firecrackers. That's when you don't want to be around if you're smart." With his penchant for making "luck" happen, Rod played it smart, and quit. By no stretch of imagination, though, could the next years be described as bedecked with four-leaf clovers. He put his hard-earned cash into a chemical business, which folded. He and his wife were divorced. He was broke and living on what past-due bills he could collect. How black can things get? Then one day he sat down and said to himself, "What business pays the most for the least work?" You don't need to be an Einstein to figure that one out: motion pictures. He'd never been on a stage in his life; he knew nothing about stock companies, agents, "pull." He simply started making the rounds of the casting offices asking for work. He didn't ask for extra work, either. He wanted to be a leading man. The casting directors may have been impressed by his brash entrance upon the Hollywood scene, but they couldn't do much about it. Rod didn't belong to the Guild. If you didn't belong to the Guild, you couldn't get a job. And you couldn't get a job if you didn't belong to the Guild. It was a vicious cycle. For seven months, Rod tried to crack Hollywood. He didn't succeed. He hated to ask favors, but he began to feel that you just had to "know" somebody to get any sort of a break. So he wrote a friend of his, Nicol Smith, a writer, and outlined his predicament. Nicol wrote back, enclosing a letter of introduction to director Edmund Gould