Dean Reisner 1918 – 2002

Written by Dean Riesner
Forward by Todd Farmer
Following are the words of “Dinky” Dean Reisner. He was born in 1918 (as he’ll mention in a moment) and he passed away in his sleep at his house in Encino on August 18 of 2002. Dean was a hero. He wrote real movies. “Dirty Harry”, “High Plains Drifter” and as a writer he took me under his wing. He sent me the following which he’d banged out on his old Royal typewriter — where he’d written all of his old flicks — and wanted my opinion because he was thinking about either writing a novel or script of his life. I thought his story was fascinating and maybe you will too.

My old man was signed for the road company with Charlie Dillingham’s production of an Irving Berlin Show, “Stop, Look and Listen” and he was standing around in front of the building where they were casting when my mother — she was what? Twenty? — came out of the building. My old man wanted immediately to know who she was and such. He was told by one of the wisenheimers that he was huddled with that she was with the New York Company of the show and my old man said, “Not if they want Chuck Riesner in Chicago, she’s not!” And apparently they wanted him badly enough to switch her to the Chicago Company. He was the Leading Man, or rather, playing the chief role and one of the notices (forever embalmed in a scrapbook he gave me on Christmas of ’34) reads.
“It has been many a day since as refreshing a comedian as Chuck Riesner has played here – Riesner is a great hit: he has a personality that is a winner from the jump, and he gets more laughs than all the rest of the company combined.”
At the end of the review it says, “Now for the others feminine. There is a little red headed dame who is said to rejoice in the title of Miriam Lamonte – someday she is going to be a headliner.” Her real name was Miriam Hegarty and she was the youngest of three gals born to John Hegarty and Clara Whelan of Brooklyn, New York. “Stop, Look and Listen” was the first show she’d ever tried out for — and it was her last. My mother and father were married in Chicago by a Justice of the Peace named Dean Franklin.
I was almost named Basil, but one day my mother and father were walking down the street when a lady stuck her head out of a second story and shouted, “BASILLLLL!” Come home fa dinnah!” So they decided on the name of the man who married them and many years later, when the subject came up between us, my mother winked at me and said, “It didn’t hurt to remind him that he was married”.
My old man had the star’s dressing room in the Chicago Theatre where they worked. In those days only concerts could play on Sundays and they’d booked the world famous Irish tenor, John McCormack. So my father gave McCormack the star’s dressing room to use for the day. The Irishman, in turn, invited my father backstage during the concert and they both got stiff on champagne. About seventeen years later, when we all were in London we read in the paper that McCormack was giving a concert at Albert Hall — and not only that, he was staying at the Dorchester (the same hotel where we were spread out all over hell — the law was that we couldn’t take the money back home so my old man figured we might as well live high on the hog). In any case, my mother called McCormack and reminded him of that after noon long ago in Chicago — and my mother and I were invited to his suite and had a lovely tea. My poor old man didn’t get to come with us — he was working. But he did make it to the concert that following Sunday at Albert Hall. Among other things McCormack sang “That Little Silver Ring” — my mothers favorite, which she had happened to mention in passing.
My father had written a war song during world war one entitled “Goodbye Broadway, hello France” and they squeezed him into a uniform and put him on the back of a flatbed truck with a piano man and an upright and he was one recruiting son of a bitch. My Uncle Dave claims that my father hid under the bed for the duration of the First World War, but I doubt it. Because I was born on November, 3rd, 1918 — eight days before world war one ended. Apparently my mother and father were out at Eddie Foy’s house in New Rochelle (Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys was a standard act in vaudeville and Eddie and my father had played on the same bill many times and were good friends). Suddenly my mother began to hear my entrance music. Young Charlie Foy had just gotten hold of a new car and he volunteered to drive us in to New York City. On the way in we were apparently driving through some kind of forest on a winding road when suddenly another car appeared on the same narrow road heading directly toward us on a collision course. Charlie wrenched the wheel (I’m told) and we plunged into the trees by the side of the road, with Charlie barely missing boulder after boulder and tree after tree. Young Charlie managed to get the Riesner family to the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital on Tenth Avenue and Sixty-first Street, which was an area called San Juan Hill. Named in honor of the Ninth Infantry (colored) Regiment which was recruited from there and which was not only on the rough rider’s flank on the charge up San Juan Hill, but — some say — was well out in front of Teddy Roosevelt’s boys.
My old man was a hustler — always on the move. His Father, Johann, worked in the car barns in Minneapolis. Johann had been born in a town called Raab in what is now Hungary. As a young man he was called up and went to war against whoever it was that Emperor Franz Joseph of Astor-Hungary was mad at that year. After a couple of years he was released from the military, got married to my grandmother, settled down in a town called Pamhagan, carved his name on the main living room beam (I’ve seen it) and started a family. My Aunt Lena was born and the Emperor decided he needed grampa for another war. And my grandfather said, “To hell with this” and packed up grandma and Lena and set out for the USA. He settled in Minneapolis, worked in the car barn there and had seven more kids — my father being the eldest boy and the first one born in this country. He went to work at the age of twelve as a song-book boy (They hustled sheet music to the audience in the Bijou Theatre). Then later he became a stagehand and member of the white rats, which was the stagehand’s Union. And he was also a leather-pusher — a prize fighter. Fighting was against the law in those days and they had to meet in garages, barns and theatres. After each fight they’d read the decision in the newspaper the following day. My old man won thirty-three fights in row then finally he got whooped (he clamed he was fouled, a low blow) and he gave it up. He was running around with a gal named Henrietta Gores who was apparently a hell of a roller skater. My father and Henrietta were standing up for a couple of friends of theirs who had decided to get married when the bride’s old man blew in and stopped the wedding. My father protested and the bride’s father (having had quite enough of this surly young punk) said, “If you’re so anxious to have a wedding, why don’t you marry her”, this while pointing at the roller queen, Henrietta. And so they got married. (Don’t blame me, this is the way I heard it). In any case my father and Henrietta went into vaudeville — she as a roller skater and he as a bag puncher. They apparently played barns, backrooms and an occasional privy but my old man began to remember some of the jokes that the vaudevillians told when he was backstage at the Bijou and little by little he became a song and dance man. He was playing better theatres and telling better jokes and soon damned if he wasn’t a big time single. Henrietta got lost (the way I get it she dumped my old man for a hotshot racehorse handicapper named Smokey Moore but that was in another land and besides, the winch is dead).
My first Job was in Chicago, playing in a two-reeler for a man called Rocco Vocco. The plot was that a bunch of gals who visited a certain bathhouse along the shores of Lake Michigan (that’s the way they did it in those days — you went to a bathhouse and changed into your bathing costume). In any case, these gals complained that there was a “peeping Tom” watching them change through a knothole. The owner of the bathhouse circled the knothole with some sort of blacking and guess who they caught with the big black eye? Me. And I wasn’t even walking yet, but I was on the right track.
At that time Jack Dempsey was the Heavyweight Champion of the World and my old man, being an ex-pug was tight with the champ and also Doc Kearns, Dempsey’s manager. Somebody got the idea to form a vaudeville company, starring the champion of the world — the first act would be straight vaudeville and the second act would be the champ taking on “all-comers”. I was three at the time — in fact I had my third birthday with the troupe in Winnipeg, Canada. I remember that there was a nautch dancer named Lagonna, and my old man did his single and there were a couple more acts on the bill and then at the beginning of the second act the curtain would rise on the champion’s black tights and striking mitts (like boxing gloves, but much lighter, for bag punching). He’d be wearing the big, ornate championship belt with its red, white ribbon and to his right, with a towel over his arm and his cap on gally-wampus would be me (looking as much like Jackie Coogan as possible). I was Dempsey’s second. His corner man. He used to carry me around a lot — on his shoulder. He was basically a shy man and I suppose he used me to deflect attention from himself. Dempsy had a trainer named, “Old Folks” and a trainer-driver (whose name I forget) who usually came up out of the audience in the “all-comers” part of the show — but once in a while there’d be some local hero whose fellow townsmen thought could fight and they’d send him up to knock Dempsey on his can. Now, any silly bastard can get lucky with a punch but Doc Kearns wasn’t going to have his meal-ticket punched out by some fortunate plow jockey so he had some special boxing gloves made with heavy leather on the inside of the glove. So that the local hero couldn’t get his fist properly closed. The poor bastard would be fighting with half open hands — and Jack would clobber him.
The tour ended when the champ signed to fight the French Champion, Capentier, and my old man went off with Charlie Chaplin as an actor, gag man, assistant director and (I think) muscle. In those days they used to shoot on the streets a lot and when a company’d move in, a crowd would gather. And in every crowd there’d be a loud-mouth, a tough guy — somebody who would be trouble. The company would try to reason with the guy or ignore him but if neither of these approaches seemed to work it was nice to have somebody who could beat the bejesus out of the big mouthed trouble maker — and that task would fall to my old man. Not too often — but once in a while.
One day, when they were casting “The Pilgrim” they came to a part — a three-year-old brat — who tortures poor Charlie (who is an escaped convict, pretending to be the new preacher in town) by throwing water from the fish bowl on him and substituting his derby hat for the pudding and so on. I was, according to the script, supposed to catch a goldfish in my hand and slip it down the neck of Charlie’s priestly garb. Of course, I couldn’t catch the damned fish in my hand so they had an artist (named Granville Redmond who lived on the lot with his wife) carve a gold fish out of a large carrot. It was a beautiful job but it sank to the bottom of the fish tank where it lay, looking like a beautifully carved carrot. So they decided to skip the goldfish grabbing and move right to the part where I slapped Charlie in the face. When they explained to me what I was to do, I shook my head. “I’m not going to hit Uncle Charlie”, I said. And that was that. Then, and I’ll never forget this, Charlie and his brother Syd sat down together, side on a couch that was part of the set and proceeded to tell me just how much they loved being slapped in the face. They were whacking themselves and each other as they chortled and chuckled and whooped with laughter — it was very convincing. At least it convinced me and I’ve got about seven outtakes plus the one they used in the film to prove it.
After “The Pilgrim” my father put me in a bunch of two-reelers then faked up a script called “A Prince of a King” which they shot on the Universal Lot (using a lot of the sets from the Lon Chaney film, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”). I don’t imagine that it was very good but good, bad or indifferent, my old man was on the hustle — until my mother stopped him short. He had other jobs for me all lined up and it looked like I was going to out-Coogan Jackie when my mother put her foot down. Her ultimatum: I was going to have a childhood and my father was going to get a job like everybody else and stop running around making deals at the Momartre Cafe for a four-year old kid.
So my father went to work and I went to school at a kindergarten named “Wee Tots Villa,” down on Cahunga Boulevard. We were then living on Franklin Circle but my father moved up the ladder with the Chaplin Company — he ended up as associate-director on “The Gold Rush”. This led directly to a job with a new company (Warner Brothers) where he directed Charlie’s half brother, Syd, in half-a-dozen pictures including “The Better Ole”, “The Man on the Box” and “The Missing Link”.
In the meanwhile we moved out to Beverly Hills (Where else?) and I was enrolled in Berkely Hall, a Christian Science School. My father was a very religious man, but it was hard to tell exactly which religion he was following, from day to day. He was a Christian Scientist when he made “Steamboat Bill Jr. up on the Sacramento River. There was a big Hurricane sequence at the end when the whole front of a building comes crashing down on Buster Keaton — who was the star of the show (and who had, many years before, played on the same vaudeville bill with my father, Chuck). In any case, the whole front of the house falls out on Buster, who is standing in the road, in front of the house. What happens is that exactly where Buster is standing there is a little open dormer window and when the whole front of the house crashes into the street, the dormer window falls over our boy, leaving him untouched and unharmed. Now the front of the house — it was two-stories — must have weighted four or five tons. If Buster was a few inches out of position the whole weight of the front of the house would have smashed down on him and driven him into the ground like a little tent peg. But Buster was a game little bastard and while my old man, who was still taking from Mary Baker Eddy, was walking around the back lot praying with a Christian Science practitioner, little Buster directed the whole damned scene — and emerged unscathed. Of course, the whole front of the house was hinged to fall precisely in the same place. It had an immovable base plate and was firmly hinged — but even so, if Buster wasn’t in the right place it’s goodbye picture, well, not exactly — They’d scheduled that shot for the last day of the Movie.
After Wee Tots Villa I went to Berkely Hall, then Urban Military Academy, then Pacific Military Academy; then I picked up a case of acute Haemmoragic Nephritis (all I know is it was kidney trouble) in fact I was in bed for about six months and when I managed to get back on my feet we were living in Laguna Beach. I had a tutor — Johnny Minter who was a real good looking young stud and he had more beautiful women hanging around then I’d ever seen before. It was a lovely beginning to young manhood.
In the meanwhile my Uncle Dave had a couple of new careers or hobbies. He’d become a songwriter and the partner who invented the melodies for my Uncle’s rhymes was a piano man and race horse trainer named George Fairman. So my Uncle was not only a songwriter, he was also a race horse owner. It seems that Fairman had a crazy damned race horse named Tom Hill — Tom’s sire was a hellova good horse from France named Volta. Tom could run like hell, but the trouble was the he hated starting gates. My Uncle Dave bought half of the Horse from Fairman and they raced him at Harvre De Grace in Maryland. Tom jumped over the damned infield fence in the only race they managed to enter him in. So Dave decided to bring him out to Agua Caliente to run him and then he gave or sold Tom to my old man who in turn gave him to me. I was the youngest horse owner in the book. So I spent a couple of summers living at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego (Fairman was my rommie) while running two horses at the track (We also bought a fine two year old named Harshaw — who actually won a couple of races — I’ve got pictures). Not only the youngest owner at the track but I had my own colors (green with three white hoops around the middle and green and white cap). As far as I know those are still my colors — in so far as green is supposed to be bad luck around the track. Who knew?
Johnny Minter got me into Beverly Hills High School (I think it was in the winter of ’32). By this time my old man had become quite the hot director and I was acting again. I played an Indian kid in the railroad at Albuquerque in a Jack Benny film (Jim Thorpe, the famous American Indian Athlete played my father) and I tested for the boy in O’Neill’s comedy “Ah Wilderness”
About the O’Neill picture, it was a rather weird thing. I was sitting on the set, all by myself — it was during lunch and I wasn’t hungry — when who should walk onto the set but Mister “Hollywood actor” himself — Clark Gable. He sat and talked with me for half an hour, just we two. He calmed me down considerably and it was the act of a hell of a decent man. One more thing (interesting and perhaps kind of spooky) happened on the Jack Benny picture. As I mentioned I played an Indian at the Albuquerque station and Jim Thorpe was playing my father. About halfway through the shoot Big Jim looked over and spotted my moccasins, which were not only beaded on the top but these particular moccasins were also beaded on the bottoms. Thorpe turned pale and he told me to take those things off — right now. I, of course, couldn’t — they’d already been established in the long shot and it was simply impossible to change shoes. Jim shook his head and told me that I was wearing Burial Moccasins — the worst possible luck. I didn’t really believe him and we finished the scene and were dismissed. I was trotting along the company street on my way to the dressing rooms, when suddenly a truck appeared around the corner stage. I planted my feet to stop but the beads on the bottom of my moccasins just kept merrily sliding along. I went down on my butt, slid under the truck and broke my damned ankle. So much for Indian curses and so on.
Not long after this my father got a job in England, directing a comedy starring Cicily Courtnedge — a very well known British comedienne at the time. My mother, my father and I all went to England, which was a lovely place at the time. I’ve been to London half a dozen times since then and it is still nice but my first trip was pure magic. For openers, we had to spend the money Chuck made — or most of it anyway, and it was considerable (again you can’t take it with you) — so we stayed at the Dorchester and lived high on the hog. There was a young American boy in the script (I suspect my father’s fine Italian hand at work — at least I know that he was the one who cast me in the part). The girl who played my sister was actually in her early twenties while I was just barely sixteen. She had a lovely American accent and Although she’d never been to the United States she’d gone to school in France with a lot of American girls and had the accent down perfectly. And that wasn’t the only thing she had down perfectly. She got me too. Or I got her. Somebody sure as hell got somebody. But that wasn’t all of it. There was a lovely little American actress (a little older) also staying at the Dorchester at the time. She had come to England with a contract to do a film but had fallen ill with diverticulitis (which is apparently an inflammation of the diverticulum — a vermiform appendage to the intestines and nobody knows what the hell it does, except cause trouble). My mother took this actress under her wing and when she was well enough I was chosen to take her downstairs to the big showroom at the Dorchester where I (resplendent in my Hawes and Curtis tails) played escort. Later that evening — let’s just say it was a marvelous experience.
Soon after my mother and I came home to Laguna Beach — while my father was finishing up his work in England. My school credits as enhanced by Madam Novello-Davis were accepted by Laguna Beach High and I graduated with the group. From there I went on to UCLA where I had a rather uninspiring career as a freshman footballer. It was my bad luck to have tried out for the team on the year that UCLA did some heavy recruiting and they had maybe 40 nuggets out for the team (a couple of them made All-American). My memories are few. However I remember playing up at Bakersfield Junior College. We had a running back named Stafford and when we were getting our game jerseys I drew number 33. Stafford came up to me with pleading in his expression. It seems he’d had number 33 throughout his high school career and he wanted to change jerseys with me. He promised that he’d take care of telling the coach of the switch and I didn’t give a damn so we traded. Well, up at Bakersfield they didn’t get the word and the announcer was saying “It’s Riesner off Tackle — ten — Fifteen — Twenty yards!!” And “It’s Riesner around end — and it’s a touchdown for Riesner!” And so on. Finally our coach looked down the bench to where I was sitting and said, “You’re having a hell of a night, Riesner.” The only game I got to start was in the coliseum — and they had a special edition of the Herald out with the starting lineups on the front page. I couldn’t wait to see that damned thing — and wouldn’t you know it – they had my named spelled wrong. Biesner was UCLA’s quarterback. In any case, that team was the first football team from Westwood to beat USC and somehow I managed to win my freshman numerals.
During my second semester I managed to get all my classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I usually cut classes on Wednesday so I was having a hell of a good time at the beach. Then one day my mother had a little talk with me and the upshot was that my old man took me up to Warner brothers — where Bryan Foy (One of the seven little Foys) was a producer, and not only that, he was in charge of all the B-pictures. My father had gotten “Brynie” his first job at Warners and now my old man wanted payback. “No problem,” Brynie said, “What do you want to be kid — an actor? Writer? Cutter? What?” I told him that I wanted to be a writer and suddenly I was working. Age nineteen. Fifty bucks every week — and I never had so much money in my life. They took out two 50-cent pieces and I had 49 bucks to go mad on.
We were living at the Ravenswood Apartments then, which was owned by Mae West. Her trainer (and I guess her sweet lovin’ man) was a fine middleweight named Johnny Indrissano — a Boston Italian and a hell of a good guy — not to mention, a good friend of my old man’s. Mae was in New York doing a show but her cook was always there at the apartment and Johnny was always there too. We had dinner every night at her place (she lived in the Ravenwood also — the top deck). And I not only had dinner high on the hog at her place but I also drove her car — a big beautiful Duesenburg Roadster.
Talk about living, however my career as a writer wasn’t going all that well. Then one day Foy called me into his office and told me that they had a hell of a priest picture over at Metro (he was talking about “Boy’s Town” with Spencer Tracey and Micky Rooney). So we had to have one too. Brynie even had an idea for our leading man — Father Damien. But I had a better idea, one that didn’t get leprosy in the last reel — Father Duffy of the Fighting 69th. There was a big statue of Duffy in Times Square — and he’d been a priest up in Washington Height where part of my mother’s family came from. As a matter of fact one of my “Uncles” is in his book when Duffy tells of a large young man named Michael O’Sullivan who was killed by enemy fire at the River Orque. According to Duffy the Irishmen in the old sixty-ninth called it the River O’Rourke. In any case, Foy knew a good idea when he heard one and he picked up the phone right then and registered the title, “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth” with the Guild. He put me together with a writer named Fred Niblo Junior and we (mostly he) wrote a first draft. In the meanwhile Zanuck, over at 20th Century Fox got the idea that he wanted to do a picture on Duffy too. There was some kind of an argument about it in the papers but Foy had registered the idea months before Zanuck did, so Twentieth finally dropped out of the running. But Jack Warner read about the trouble with Zanuck and he sent for the script. We — that is Fred and I — had been looking at stock footage and Foy was going to steal what he could in terms of stock footage and put an actor he liked (Wayne Morris was his name) in the main role. But Jack liked our script so much that he suddenly decided to make an A-picture out of it. So he took it away from Foy and gave it to a good writer named Norman Reilly Raine — a Canadian who had written the “Tugboat Annie” stories for Collie (or was it the Saturday Evening Post?). In any case, Norman was a hell of a good guy too and he insisted that Fred and I be given full credit (along with him) on the picture. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of our stuff in it — more than half. My name at the time was Dean Franklin (My first two names) without the Riesner. Foy had said “Jack’d kill me if he knew that I’d given Chuck’s kid a job.” I didn’t get it then and I’m not sure I get it now but that’s what Foy said to me.
So while the “Fighting 69th” was shooting Foy called me and another young writer named Lee Katz and told us he’d booked a picture into a projection room for us to see and he wanted us to “steal it scene for scene”. It seems he had a young actor named Ronald Reagan and he wanted to make a series of pictures with him about the secret service but we ran the picture (a fair little adventure flick named “39 steps”, with Robert Donat and Medeline Carrol). Of course, our picture didn’t work, not as a secret service flick — not as anything — as a matter of fact it turned out to be one of the worst pictures ever made — maybe not the worst but we’re certainly in the foto — two noses on the wire. In any case, we wrote it in a couple of weeks and they shot it in a couple of weeks and on the last day of filming we found out that they were shooting on stage seven which was twice as tall as the other stages. They had built the exterior of an abandoned mission on the stage. It was one of my ideas that Brass Bancroft (that was the hero’s name) had been locked in this abandoned church and left to die, but our hero sees the rope leading to a bell tower. So our boy climbs the rope, then leads it out of the little window in the tower and lets himself down. We were standing there watching Reagan let himself down the outside of the church when something went wrong. He caught his pants on a nail or some damned thing. Whatever it was, the director yelled “Cut, Cut, Cut!” And while Ronnie hung there on the side of the church he said in a ringing voice, “I wish I could get my hands on the two idiots that wrote this thing!” Lee and I took off running. I stopped when we got to the fence but Lee went over it and I don’t think he stopped till he got back to New York City.
The Fighting 69th hadn’t come out yet — but with Pat O’Brien (playing Father Duffy, what else?) and Jimmy Cagney playing the New York tough guy who turns yellow in the trenches, Warner Brothers was expecting a Bonanza — and that’s exactly what they got. People were lined up around the block in New York. My Uncle Dave saw it and broke a blood vessel in his eye, he was weeping so copiously. Of course, I was expecting a better office, a pretty secretary — maybe even a smallish dinner in my honor. What I got was fired. As well as I can remember I wasn’t even twenty-one yet.
Not one to brood about the injustices of the world I went back to Laguna and had a hell of a good time. I didn’t feel bitter then (I do now but I didn’t then). I guess it was because I was going with Barbara Read — the prettiest girl in town. As I say, I wasn’t twenty-one yet, in fact I’ve got a picture of myself — taken by my mother or maybe my aunt Gene — in the living room of our Laguna house — half sozzeled on my birthday champagne and with a couple hundred dollar bills rolled up and stuck in each ear. The Hundies were my birthday present.
A friend of mine named, Bunny Rathbun, came down to Laguna (from the Yale Dramatic School) and we did a summer of plays in the local playhouse there. I played Fletcher in “My Sister Eileen” with Benay Venuta (Fletcher’s the guy who thinks he’s in a whorehouse). I played the father in “Dark of the Moon” (with Hurd Hatfield) complete with a phony beard. And so on. At the end of the season Bunny and Barbara Read and I went back to New York (to try our luck on the stage) in Bunny’s station wagon which was named “Moon Point” and had a Yale sticker or two on it. Bunny insisted that we go up beyond Taos and into the foothills of the Sangria De Cristo range where D.H. Lawrence had lived with Frieda (Von Richtoven) Lawrence. D.H. was dead but Frieda lived up there by herself in this big old place in the lonesome foothills. We knew we were getting close by the fact that the big tin plaques were nailed to the trees and painted on the plaques in brilliant colors were these birds, symbols of re-incarnation, rising from the flames. Maybe she was just lonesome for company or maybe she thought her dead lover had sent us or maybe she simply took pity on three over-awed kids who came to pay their respects. However it shook out, she was charming. She first showed us the little cabin where he went to work. She had all his things laid out for him. His hat. His desk. His walking stick. The feeling was inescapable. She was expecting him. Unfortunately for her none of us quite measured up. Undaunted by our shortcomings she gave us a lovely lunch and sent us on our way — next stop, New York.
I started out living at the YMCA on West 3rd Street and Barbara was at the Barbizon Hotel for women but we soon ended up on ninety-second Street living together. I don’t suppose I was a very good writer and my acting was of the casual, throw-away school — that is to say, dreadful. But I almost got a part as one of the Brazilian cadets in “My Sister Eileen”. My father was working at Metro at the time with a writer named Charlie Lederer who wrote a short note to Moss Hart that I remember verbatim. It said, “Dear Mouse, this letter will introduce Dean Riesner and if you don’t give him a job I will pee on you.” When I gave the letter to Mister Hart, the play was already in rehearsal, but he hired me instantly. Unfortunately, the next day I got a note from the coast telling me that my number was up and I was about to be drafted.
So, I went home and a few days later I was sent up to the reception center where the doctor asked me if there was anything I’d like to tell him that wasn’t in my papers. I told him that I’d had acute heamorrogic nephritis and to make a long story short, the next day they sent me back home. I was Four-F. This was, I believe, in the early middle of 1941. In December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Soon after that, while still Four-F I decided to join the Coast Guard — that way I thought I could be in uniform but I wouldn’t have to be a Marine. — Or anything dangerous. If I was lucky I could be stationed somewhere near Laguna and I could comfort the wives and girlfriends of the guys who didn’t think things out as neatly as I did. However, something was wrong with my calculations and I (after having served on a cutter and having gone back east to Quartermaster School on Long Island) ended up on a Freight supply vessel.
We used to take ammunition to the cruisers lying off shore, knocking the tops off the palm trees. The Japanese snipers used to tie themselves to the tops of the trees, among the fronds, and pick our guys off as they came up the beach. So we were bringing the cruisers the wherewithall to eliminate the tops of palm trees. Don’t get me wrong; there was nothing heroic about what we did, as a matter of fact, one day we were underway, just passing Corregidor on the port beam. I was on the flying bridge, sitting on a ready box, eating a fried egg sandwich and drinking a Coca Cola (we had just been to Sydney and gotten some real eggs); when all of a sudden I noticed some DC3’s heading for Corregidor and then suddenly paratroopers started pouring out of the DC3’s (I later found out it was the 503 parachute infantry). I turned to my striker (I was all exalted QM2C by then) and said, “Thank God we’re not in this fucking war.” I did three years, nine months and my butt didn’t get a scratch.
Back home after the war I went to work at Warner Brothers. A newspaperman named Mark Hellinger called me in — I guess he took pity on the old seadog — and he told me that he was going to do a movie about Helen Morgan. He was going to have a guy called Manciewitz write it, but in the meanwhile he had three cardboard boxes full of clippings, and blurbs and autobiographical material and bullshit — beside which he had the names of a dozen guys and gals who knew her. Morgan herself was dead by then — whether it was booze or not is up for grabs, but I’ll tell you this: the booze didn’t help. I was supposed to go out and talk to these people and read this material and come up with a sort of file — a biographical file on Helen Morgan. And that’s what I did. For some reason or other it didn’t work out — maybe manciewitz blew it or maybe Hellenger moved on to another studio but the whole schmegegie went into a drawer someplace. Some years later it was revived under a producer named Bob Arthur and I got a split screenplay credit on it. But right then when I could have used the credit, nothing.
Starvation was averted when my old man got me a job on a picture called “The Traveling Saleswoman” as an actor. I was a heavy — what they call “the third man through the door” — strictly a dog heavy without any lines to speak of. But I do get dumped into a horse trough full of soapy water at the end and I’ll always remember they had a little stunt man on the picture named Davy Sharp. He was paid a flat fee to do all the stunts on the flick and as I was about to dive into the drink, he told me that he was ready to do my horse trough dunking. We talked about it and finally I thought, “What the hell — why should I get wet if I don’t have to?” So I told Davy that he could do the bit. He walked right over and plunged his arm into the trough and by God there were unseen pipes sticking up in the soapy, bubbly water (that’s why it was bubbly). If I’d have gone into that damned thing back first — as I’d planned — One of those pipes would have hit me right in the goddamn spine — and I’d probably have had a broken back to show for my ignorance.
One other thing of importance happened on that picture. The main dog-heavy, a burley, blonde guy named Joe Sawyer had just been back to Washington D.C. to talk with senator McCarron of Nevada. Joe was a go-getter. The last winter had brought very heavy snows and the cattle (who were range fed) were starving to death. Nobody could get hay to them. McCarron had talked the other senators into something called “Operation Haylift” in which big army transports would fly over clusters of these starving cattle and the crew would kick out bales of hay. The bales would break open on hitting the ground and the cattle would chow down. As I say, Joe had been back to Washington D.C. and gotten the Government’s and McCarron’s okay to go ahead. He also had a studio interested — All he needed was a script. So, I wrote him one — for nothing. Like I say — Joe was a go-getter. We made the picture “Operation Haylift” — and I was dialogue director and I played one of the players. Most all of it was made up in Nevada and it was a lot of laughs. We had Ann Rutherford and Tommy Brown and Bill Williams — and Joe and me. It was directed by Bill Berke who hired me to do parts and dialogue direction on four films he was making with (some red-headed cowboy actor) — I can’t think of his name right now but he killed himself a couple of years ago — out in front of his girlfriend’s house. I guess he showed her! Don “Red” Barry! That’s the name!
In any case, for me, the jobs weren’t exactly going along beautifully. Most importantly, my mother had died and my father had had a massive heart attack while in a hotel in New York.
It was a Hungarian from Warner Brothers who finally saved my ass — Mike Curtiz had seen me playing Fletcher in Laguna and he hired me to play some kind of hot-shot in the “Young Man with the Horn” starring Kirk Douglas. Years later I wrote a mini-series that Kirk played in, “The Moneychangers” by Arthur Haily — and I worked for his son, Michael on a flick called “Starman” (for which I did five — count Îem — rewrites and those bastards at the Writer’s Guild Decided that I didn’t rate a credit). Ah well — snows of yesteryear — now, where was I?
Oh, yeah, “Young Man with the Horn” — around that time I met a gal named Maila Nurmi (She later became Vampira) and we got a room and a bath over a garage up in Laurel Canyon and went around looking for work. A couple of times I almost got a job hustling ice cream as the Good Humor Man. I guess I wasn’t good humored enough. We had it rough for a while, Maila and me, and then she finally hit. All the queens in town were having a big fancy dress ball at the Palladium and Maila wanted to go. But I didn’t. There was a little old guy working behind the counter in a one-armed joint that we went to once in a while — when we could spare the price of a couple of cups of coffee. Maila found out that he was a true Scott and that he had Highland drag — kilts and all. So she got the little counterman (everybody called him “Scotty”) to take her to the dress ball and she came home with first prize. A portable radio. It turned out that the final contest was between Maila and some queen whose costume was mostly hat and lights flickering on and off — and, of course, a bare ass. Maila and the queen strode around the dance floor at the Palladium as the judges pondered. Finally the crowd started yelling “Charles Adams! Charles Adams!” and Maila won it. And not only that, Hunt Stromberg Junior who was some sort of a magnifico at ABC needed a host for a Saturday night spook show — and Maila filled the bill beautifully. Trouble was — he couldn’t find her. Nobody knew who she was. He stumbled across her one day — she was probably at Googies (the coffee shop next to Schwabs drugstore) with Jimmy Dean before he hit big. In any case, ABC hired her. And I ended up down at ABC every Saturday midnight, holding lights, getting coffee. Whatever. Soon after that Maila and I broke up. Ah, life!
About this time a guy named Ed Beloin (who used to write the Jack Benny radio show) was looking for a junior partner. One of the networks (I can’t remember which) wanted him to do a series. He had a director — Dick Bare — but Eddie needed a collaborator (one who didn’t mind a 40-60 split). Somebody — I guess it was Dick who I knew from Warners — suggested me. And things started to immediately get better. We wrote a Playhouse 90 — “The Big Slide” starring Red Skelton and we wrote a series “So This is Hollywood” starring Mitzi Green. And Little by little I was pretty much on my way — but gradually.
However, before that moment when I went with Eddie Beloin — I’d had a few small victories I should mention. The first job I actually got, not counting the year at Warner Brothers that my Uncle Sam got for me on the G.I. Bill and during which I wrote a couple of stories (including the one I showed Sawyer). The first job I actually got by writing something was a half-hour comedy for the Joe Palooka series. Johnny Indrissano — the Boston prize-fighter who was Mae West’s trainer (and main man for a while) had been hired to stage the fights and train the guy who was to star in the series. They were looking for a writer and Johnny insisted that I was just what the doctor ordered. To make a long story short — I wrote them a teleplay, they loved it and I wrote a couple more before the world had had enough of Joe Palooka.
On a side note, Johnny Indrissano hanged himself one bright day and I wish I had been able to do something to stop it. But Johnny was getting older — the jobs were not coming along so fast (he’d recently had a big brou-ha-ha on the set with a hot shot director who didn’t like the fight he’d staged). And most importantly, Johnny had a wife back in Boston. And so what with one thing and another Johnny took the big slide. He was a hell of a good guy and I’m sorry I didn’t know how tough things were breaking for him.
There is one more suicide that I might as well mention — someone closer than Johnny. Barbara Read was a long term gal friend of mine but she had married three different guys during the time I knew her. She married an artist down in Laguna and she married some other guy and finally she married Bill Tallman — an actor who played Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason series. He was the lawyer who never won a case against Mason. Never. I’d first met Bill in the Philippines where he was an army lieutenant travelling with a bunch of entertainers — the way I understood it, they put on shows for the actual soldiers who were doing the actual fighting. However, I mentioned it once to Bill (how we were both really dog-asses as far as the actual fighting went) and he sat me down and told me some of the goddamnedest war stories I’d ever heard. Maybe they were true. I don’t know. Bill’s dead now — in fact he died before Barbara killed herself. I was just married to Marie and we were still living in Laurel Canyon and Barbara came calling to see if I had any Marijuana. I’d laid some on her a couple of weeks before that — I never used the stuff myself — not that I had any moral feelings about it. I just never got any real boot out of it — I was strictly a booze man and that was that. I’ve known some people who liked pot and I’ve known lots of people who did both but I was strictly a lush head. As I say, Marijuana did nothing for me and the only times I ever blew it was when it was easier to take the drug than to explain why you didn’t care to. In any case, after Bill died Barbara went back to Laguna and apparently tried to live her childhood all over again and when that didn’t work she took her car into the garage and ran the motor until she was gone. I realize that I’ve spent too much time on this — but she was a hell of a gal. Nutty as a chi-chi bug but special — and a hell of an actress too.
I broke off to speak about a couple small victories and here I speak of suicide. So, back to small victories — one last thing about those days right after WWII. My old man came home from New York after he’d had his heart attack. He used to sit in a restaurant on Cahuenga, just South of Hollywood Boulevard which was owned by Franklin D’Amaore, a good guy and a good friend of my father’s ever since the old Vaudeville days. Ken Murray had a show going across the street and around the corner. The show was called “Blackouts” and it was pretty much vaudeville starring Ken and others such as Marie Wilson (in that dress that barely covered her two main assets) and a guy named George Burton who had a bird act. George was a little guy who trained falling horses. Now, in Hollywood, they have two kinds of falling horses. The kind that George trained would fall on cue from the rider. The other kind (now outlawed in this country) would use a flying-W which is a rig that takes an animal’s front legs out from under him and he goes ass-over-tip — sometimes landing on the rider — sometimes killing the horse and occasionally killing the rider too. Get a copy of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and you’ll see plenty of Flying-W horse falls. They had to shoot all that horse fall stuff in Mexico. It was against the law by that time in the U.S.
In any case, George Burton trained horses that would fall on cue and even that was — to a certain extent — dangerous. And one day, the falling horse fell on little George. And busted him up something awful. Broken back, legs, ribs — name it. So he was in the hospital, with maybe one working arm and his little wife — who was even smaller than George — brought him a couple of love birds on St. Valentine’s Day. And George who wasn’t a great reader or anything started training the birds. And she kept bringing him birds — and as he lay there in the hospital he kept training them to do all kinds of stuff. They ran little washing machines and climbed ladders and one of them walked a tightrope with a stick in its beak — and on each end of the stick was flaming cotton. And when he finally came out of the hospital, about nine months later, he had a vaudeville act. Burton’s Birds. The falling horses were in the past. Now there were little parakeets running washing machines etceteras.
Ken wanted my old man to direct a short using these birds. Of course, my old man was starving but he sure as hell wasn’t about to direct no short with parakeets. But he did a selling job on Ken: “I gotta kid,” he said, “who’ll make you a hell of a picture.” Long story short, I’m backstage at the “Blackouts” looking at all the pretty chorus gals and Ken hires me to write and direct. So I wrote a script for it. There are two kinds of parakeets — peach-faced and masked. Bill was a little peach-faced parakeet and Coo was masked. And I put a little bow tie on Bill and a little hat on Coo. And a friend of mine had just directed a picture up in Washington using a great Raven trained by a guy named Curley Twiford — so I decided to use the Raven as the “heavy” and so on. I used half a dozen different peach faced parakeets as Bill because they each had one trick — one could climb a ladder, another could pull a little kind of taxicab and so on. In any case, I directed the picture and about six weeks later the phone rang at this place where I was staying and it was my aunt congratulating me. I wanted to know what I had done that was worthy of waking me up at that time of the morning — and she told me that the flick that I’d both written and directed had won an Academy Award — a special award. I found out that Ken had invited a bunch of people to a big table (the Academy Awards were then in places like the Coconut Grove) and he had somehow forgotten to include me. Not that I gave a damn. As a matter of fact, they’ve got a copy of the film (it finally came to about sixty minutes) at the Academy on La Cienega and I went to see it. And it was really dreadful. I think Ken must have re-cut the damned thing — but I wouldn’t swear to it. I guess that if anybody else ever did a picture with lovebirds I would have been first on the list to direct it.
Ok, where was I? The breakthrough — with Eddie Beloin. Of course, Eddie was well established and I was damned lucky that he was looking for a young collaborator — and that somebody mentioned me. I don’t remember what we did first but Eddie was an established writer and he had employers lined up trying to get him to write for them. I’ll never forget the Red Skelton thing we did for Playhouse 90. It was shot live on one stage. We were there all during the three weeks of rehearsals and then for the actual shooting — which took place on one stage at CBS. It was great — running from set to set. It was live television. If anybody blew a line there was no such thing as doing it over — the actors just went right on ahead. Fortunately we had no catastrophes and the show was very well received.
We then did a television show, half-hour comedy starring Mitzi Green as a Hollywood stunt Gal. Eddie got sick during this show — we had a year’s run — and that was that. Eddie pretty much retired. He went down to Balboa to live and I started to do television; some comedy, some straight Westerns. Rawhide. Cheyenne. Sugarfoot. Dobie Gillis. I had more work than I could handle. And I drank more booze than I could handle.
One day when I was smashed I went into a producer’s office and he gave me an assignment and a story to write. He laid it out for me scene by scene — and when I got out of there I couldn’t remember a word he’d said. The next day I told my agent and he thought it was funny and said he’d handle it. And he handled it by telling the producer the truth — that I was drunk and forgot everything that the producer told me. Of course, I never worked for that producer again — and I changed agents.
By this time I was married and I told my wife that when I was forty I was going to stop drinking and go to work. And nobody was more surprised than me when I actually hit forty and went on the wagon and stayed on the damned vehicle for more than forty years now. I did have one lapse. I went back to Chicago with Scott Brady to see the USC-Notre Dame game which I saw but I don’t remember a damned thing about it. I got a bottle of booze and got in the bathtub with a book and drank the whole damned bottle. I was still drunk when I got home. My wife, Marie, put me to bed, called a doctor and got me sober. This was about two years into my sobriety — and I haven’t slipped again since. Marie drank a little too — so she joined me on the wagon. Unfortunately I just can’t handle booze but I’ll tell you the truth — I’ve been dry with that one exception for more than forty years now, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss the lovely goddamned stuff.
We moved up to Woodrow Wilson Drive and then after a while my wife bought a house out in Encino — Where I live now. We were going to move down to Del Mar. It was handy to the Race Track and there is a nice betting room where they have direct connections between Hollywood Park, Santa Anita and the Oak Tree Meeting. However, when Marie died (About 6 years ago) those plans went out the window. But back to the Fifties –
I was doing a lot of television and somebody called me to Universal to do the screenplay on a “features for television” project that they had. It was called “Stranger on the Run” and they got Henry Fonda and Ann Bancroft to play it. They’d hired a maverick director named Don Siegel and they gave him a bunch of scripts to read and he liked mine best. Don was a hell of a good director but he was sort of a “bad boy” on the lot. He had earlier had a big argument with Lew Wasserman — who ran the studio — and the way I heard it he had jumped up on Wasserman’s desk and raised all kinds of hell. But he went over to Twentieth Century Fox and made a couple of very good pictures over there so Uncle Lew decided to forgive him. In any case, Don directed the Fonda flick and they next offered him a cowboy-sheriff-goes-to-New-York movie that Clint Eastwood was interested in doing.
Clint, being the cautious type, ran a couple of Don’s pictures. And Don’s hackles rose so he grabbed me and we ran a couple of Clint’s pictures — and when they stopped circling each other they decided they liked each other’s work so Don and Clint got together and I was dragged along for the ride. “Coogan’s Bluff” played in New York and they had to get there quickly and start shooting it because it was already fall and we had a lot of New York exteriors to shoot. We all went back there, praying for the good weather to hold. My wife, Marie, came back and we had a hell of a good time in the big city.
While we were there Clint was walking up Park Avenue one day and he saw me and dragged me into a bar where he had one of those little Green-bottled beers he drinks and I had a Coke (I was on the wagon by then). He told me the story of “Play Misty for Me” and offered me the rewrite. I broke my ass saying yes and Siegel played the Bartender — whom I called Murphy after a Bartender I knew. Siegel said he’d play the part if we didn’t change the character’s name. So Siegel played Murphy and not long after that Warner Brothers came up with a script called “Dirty Harry” that Clint liked.
A good writer named Harry Julian Fink wrote it with some girl (the way Siegel told it to me, Fink was divorced and his ex-wife got half the money for everything he wrote — so his current girlfriend got the credit). Walter Matthau was the first one they thought for it. Dirty Harry was really dirty and in the first scene (as Harry wrote it) he’s standing in the rain, hatless at a funeral and water from a nearby umbrella is pouring down his neck. Matthau passed and the next guy to come along was Sinatra. He got a hotshot writer on the script and then he broke his hand or something. To make a long story short Warner Brothers borrowed Clint, Don and Me for the project (we were all under contract at Universal then). Once I’d turned in the script the powers that be at WB had a lot of ideas — including (I suppose) a new writer but Siegel told them “terrific — good luck on the picture and who are you going to get to direct it?” The powers that be at WB were shocked but Don stood firm and they backed down and the picture was shot as written by me and the picture was a major success (and spawned about half a dozen sequels). Later I did another of the Dirty Harry’s (the third — The Enforcer). Clint asked me to do a third one and he liked my ideas for the rewrite — but the gal he was going with at the time came in to our first story conference with ideas ad infinitum and I left Clint’s office and walked right down to Columbia (which was on the same lot back then) and took a job with Frank Price, an old friend and head man at Columbia.
“Rich Man, Poor Man” was the last TV show that I did. Prior to that I had written (or say, translated) another book into a long form television show. That was “Vanished” by Fletcher Knebel. It was a story in Washington D.C. in which the President (played by Richard Widmark) suddenly disappears. Knebel came out to the coast and we had a talk and a big studio sponsored lunch with the press and so on. Although Fletcher was a very amiable guy and reasonably hip, I had a strange feeling every time we met — and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time. It was only later that I nailed it. It was like when you’re in high school and you want to make a date with a certain girl but she says that you have to meet her father first. You say “I don’t want to meet him”, and she says you have to — otherwise you can’t go out together. So you meet the daddy and he’s shaking your hand and giving you a look. And what that look is telling you is “No Hanky-Panky” and you’re giving him back a wide-eyed, innocent choir-boy expression that says to him “Hanky-panky — I wouldn’t think of it.” But that’s what it’s all about. Hanky-panky. And that’s how adapting a guy’s novel is going to be. Hanky-goddamn-panky from beginning to end. There is no “as I opened the door my mind went back to our high school days – ” And so on for four of five pages, setting the back story. In other words, when you are adapting a book, there’s going to be hanky-panky and a lot of it. You are changing things and violating his work — there is no way around it if you’ve got twenty minutes of story but only three minutes at that end of the act to tell it — you’d better start changing things around or get permission from the news maven who comes on next to slop into his show for a few minutes. I don’t think they like that. So what you do is change the story around. Name of the game. I remember when I finished Shaw’s novel they brought him out — screaming and kicking — to see it. Twelve hours. That’s a lot of movie and it took him two days in the projection room to view the whole thing. He saw it and he was delighted. So he called me and told me how much he liked it and how he’d like to buy my lunch and so on. He was very congratulatory and very nice but at the end of the conversation he couldn’t resist saying, “But I do wish you’d have left my three girls alone.” But no way I was gonna have that unnecessary bit of exchange.
In any case, I’d moved to Columbia with Frank Price and they gave me a script, “Blue Thunder” to rewrite. I do a couple of page one rewrite jobs on it and the studio puts my name on it but the kids who wrote the original protest. So the Writer’s Guild takes over and the Powers-That-Be decide that I don’t rate a credit. So the studio says “okay” and they dedicate the picture to me. Another protest. So I don’t get a dedication. Big deal. Not that it mattered a hell of a lot — except in terms of residual payments. But my wife made good investments so what the hell did I care?
Then a friend of mine from the races had a story that he wanted me to write but at the same time I was up for a big picture at Paramount called “Hunt for Red October”. Quinn Martin was the friend and he kept calling me about the story that he wanted me to screenplay. I kept stalling him, hoping to hear from the people at Paramount — and I finally did. It looked very good but I’d have a definite “go” or “Forget it” by Friday at the end of the workday. I told Quinn that I’d know by Friday — so he called me on Friday afternoon (after six) and I hadn’t heard so I committed to his project. Early Saturday morning Paramount called with a “go ahead” on the submarine picture but I’d already committed to Quinn. And Poor Quinn dropped dead a few weeks later — and “Red October” went on to be a blockbuster. When you’re hot you’re hot and when you’re not, you’re not.
The Last flick that I got a credit on — “Fatal Beauty” — was originally intended for Cher but Whoopi Goldberg took over and did a hell of a good job. At least, I thought so. The only trouble was that the director and Whoopi had a fight half way through the movie and didn’t speak to each other for the last three weeks. The director, Tom Holland, is still a friend of mine and I admire Whoopi a lot — and I have no idea who was right or wrong. I just know that the flick would have been better had they spoke. Not that it was bad — just okay. Not great. But it could have been damn good if (writer’s lament) they’d have shot the script I gave them.
In any case I was about seventy-two or three at the time — and in so far as a writer is supposed to be finished at Forty, I guess I’d managed to fool them for awhile. I’ve never had an ambition to be a producer or a director or to own a studio. Howard Rodman used to say that we were the only two pure writers in Hollywood — but he always had a fragment of a grin on his face so I never really knew what the hell he was talking about.
The last time I worked at Universal I went wandering on the back lot — trying to find the place where, so many years ago, I played the part of “Gigi, the boy Acrobat” in “A Prince of a King”. But two studio cops in a black-and-white told me to get the hell back where I belonged — back to civilization and my manual typewriter. And to my job, whatever the hell it is. I certainly don’t consider myself sage enough to give advice but I will say this — Good writers steal from good people, bad writers don’t know any better so they steal shit. And I’ve always stolen from the very best.
My wife got sick soon after my last Universal stint and she died slightly more that six years ago. So there went the house in Del Mar and so on. I’m in Encino and I’m writing a story (a four hour television drama) about Virginia City in the 1860’s when Sam Clemens worked on the Daily Enterprise and Julie Bulette was the Queen of the Bawds — Later Sam Clemens took the name Mark Twain and wrote about Tom Swayer and Huckleberry Finn to great acclaim and Juilie Bulette got murdered and buried in a hidden grave on the slopes of the Sun Mountain. And I’m no spring chicken myself. Eighty-two years old on my last birthday and sometimes I even feel it. But I’m still working. When I finish the Virginia City piece I’m going to write the story of the early twenties with my mother and my father and Charlie Chaplin and me. And after that — question mark. As the poet Arthur Symonds once wrote —
But we’re the same and the rent’s to pay —
And you haven’t a friend in the world today —
And the money comes and the money goes —
And tonight who cares — and tomorrow, who knows.