Silver Screen (Jun-Oct 1940)

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I stepped off the train in a pouring rain. I went straight from the station to lay a wreath on Rockne's grave, before I did anything else. A Chicago sports writer accused me of publicity-seeking for doing something it was legendary for Coach Howard Jones to do, whenever U. S. C. went to South Bend. If I hadn't done what I did, that same sports writer would probably have asked : 'Doesn't the guy even think enough of Rockne to go near his grave?' " Whether or not the role of Rockne will change Pat's whole screen future depends on public reaction to the picture. He's keeping his fingers crossed. Meanwhile — "after an hour and a half's vacation" — he is playing a hard-boiled gent, this time in an oil-field setting, in "Flowing Gold." His reward for being a good boy, and not raising a fuss about one more roughneck role, will be eight weeks off. He will be free during August, the racing season at the Del Mar track, of which he is partowner, along with Bing Crosby and some other people. Unlike Bing, he owns no horses, himself. "Haven't I got enough headaches already?" he asks. The time he doesn't spend at Del Mar, he will spend right at home. He hasn't had a real chance yet to enjoy the new O'Brien house. All their lives, he and Eloise, his pretty wife, have dreamed of having a white Colonial house, and they finally have it. And, to quote the passersby who don't suspect that Pat O'Brien, the specialist in screen roughnecks, lives there: "What a house!" The pillared front is a replica of Mount Vernon. Pat, with all the independence of an Irishman, scorned the idea of having an interior decorator. He and Eloise had the fun of planning the interior, themselves, so the interior reflects them, personally. "Especially Eloise," he says with a wink. His favorite hangout is the library, a huge, cheerful room that looks like one of those club lounges for which men leave home. His dressing-room is also something: completely walled in pigskin. He opens a closet door and exhibits his own idea of how to stow away hats (which he seldom wears) : a tier of four or five sloping shelves, each with a row of pegs rising from it, to hold the hats in place. One entire wall of the master bedroom is a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which gives a staggering illusion of spaciousness to the room. You have the feeling, all over the house, that Pat is a man with a phobia against feeling cramped. The children, 6-year-old Mavourneen and 4-year-old Sean, have not only their own bedrooms and baths, but their own separate playrooms. They're not going to feel cramped, either. Sean (pronounced "Shawn") is destined to go to Notre Dame. That was decided long before Pat played Rockne. "But the Rockne tradition at Notre Dame decided it," Pat says. The back lawn is spacious enough for a pool, a combination guest-house-andplayhouse, trees, flower gardens and a handball court. He has a tough time finding handball competition. "It's a pretty strenuous game," he concedes, "unless your ticker is all right." His must be all right. He's a hard player. Now that he's down to 171, he intends to stay there. He feels better than he has in years. "No more of that Fat O'Brien stuff," he states, emphatically. His closest friends are Spencer Tracy. Jimmy Cagney and Frank McHugh, Irishmen all. He and Spence grew up together in Milwaukee, ran away together to join the Navy, later went off to New York together to learn to be actors. Pat doesn't say so, but the real reason why he didn't go after the role of Rockne was that he knew Warners were thinking of Spence for it, if they could get him. As it turned out, they couldn't. Meanwhile, Pat couldn't speak up for himself without knifing his best friend. And he doesn't play that way. He says he owes a lot to Cagney, and their friendship. "One summer I was playing in stock in Asbury Park, New Jersey. A road company of a New York show came through and played there a week. In the company was a red-headed Irishman named Jimmy Cagney. We hit it off as if we'd known each other all our lives. We didn't meet again for years, until we both landed on the Warner lot. As soon as we laid eyes on each other, we both yelled 'Asbury Park!' and took up where we had left off. "Seeing that Jimmy and I were pals, the studio got the idea, years ago, of casting us as pals on the screen. Quarrelsome pals maybe, for dramatic effect, but still pals. So we did picture after picture together. Most of them were big box-office. "Then Jim had a blow-up with the studio. He was away for a year and a half. When he came back, they wanted to make it seem like old times. So they teamed the two of us again in 'Boy Meets Girl' and 'Angels with Dirty Faces' — even though that meant casting me as a priest in Angels.' "If I hadn't played that priest, they wouldn't have thought of me for the role of Father Duffy in 'The Fighting 69th.' And if I hadn't done that bit of biographical acting, they would never have thought of me to play Rockne. Funny how life works out, isn't it?" Pat, being Irish, is a combination of sentimentality and pugnaciousness, seasoned with a sense of humor. Somebody asked him the other day what the population of Ireland was. He said, "Do you mean when they're fighting or when they're at peace?" Somebody asked him also, the other day, what he thought of Ann Sheridan's statement that, to her, he ranked second only to Charles Boyer in the matter of sex appeal. "What should I do?" he quipped. "Get sore, because I didn't rank first?" In the October Issue of SILVER SCREEN Stories on Katharine Hepburn Ann Sothern Virginia Bruce Jeffrey Lynn And many others