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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Irish Cowboys - part 3There were few in Hollywood to equal Ford in the ranks of curmudgeons, unless you include that other Irish-American giant of the silver screen, director Raoul Walsh. ‘Many wild Irishmen helped brighten the history of Hollywood, but none has made greater contribution than Raoul Walsh. He has more than four hundred pictures to his credit, discovered more stars, befriended more struggling talent and been best friend and severest critic to more players than any director in the business,’ chirped Hollywood gossip Hedda Hopper of Walsh.Once when Ford was complaining on set about a bad eye, and making life miserable for all in sight of his good one, his friend Walsh, who was visiting the shoot, advised, “Jack, I have the answer to your problem.” “You do?” asked a relieved Ford. “Sure I do. Damn, I went for years with a bum eye, gave me nothin’ but trouble. I told the doctors to take the damn thing out once and for all. Have it out like I did, Jack,” was Walsh’s advice. Like Ford, Walsh is celebrated for his brilliant narrative style and the vastness of the Western wilderness landscapes that his lens could capture in Westerns like The Tall Men, Pursued and They Died With Their Boots On. Like Ford, Walsh commanded the utmost respect of the Hollywood cowboy riders and stuntmen, many of whom he counted among his best friends. Walsh’s spirit of adventure was probably inherited from his father, whom Walsh would claim had fled Dublin with his four brothers and Walsh’s grandfather. “They had sprung the old man from jail where he had been serving time for subversive activities,” he contended. ‘Raoul’ was the name of the captain of the ship that brought them to the United States… “Life was good when I was a boy. I was born in New York but raised in different cities… I hated the life of the city. I ran away to sea. My uncle Matt owned a sailing vessel. We were broke up in a hurricane so I went ashore in Mexico and joined a cattle drive across the Texas Panhandle. I learned breakin’ horses, mendin’ fences, and went on to Montana, where I broke in more horses for the wagons. They had tough boss fellas in those days. Toughest guys in the whole world, in Butte,” an ageing and failing Walsh told respected Hollywood journalist Charles Higham for The New York Times. His first taste of the movies and of war, another theme realistically explored by Walsh, came in 1911 when D.W. Griffith dispatched him with a camera to ride with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and film all the dreadful events of that most bloody of wars. “I rode alongside Pancho all the way from Juarez to Mexico City. We paid him $500 a month and gold to let us film him… when Pancho would line up the Federales along a wall to shoot them,” Walsh told Higham. Though Griffith liked what the twenty-two-year-old adventurer had filmed, Walsh still had some way to go before gaining his director’s stripes, including numerous bit parts as an actor, the best known of which was the role of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Later he signed on with William Fox where he learned the craft of directing while whipping cowboys into shape in Hollywood. One of Walsh’s early jobs in Hollywood when Fox was making a Western was to tour the Hollywood hangouts of the cowboy crowd and hire riders for the shoot. Usually he didn’t have to look very far for the cowboys drank almost exclusively in a small bar called ‘The Waterhole’, a squat building at the junction of Cahuenga and Sunset where a mini-mall now stands. Walsh who “could twirl a lariat, jump through the loop, rope a steer,” was not unknown to lift a shot or two of rye whiskey at the Waterhole with his cowboy friends. If he couldn’t find enough riders at the Waterhole he would ride over to the barns of the Mixville Studios in Edendale (where John Ford got his first job in Hollywood), which many of the cowboys used as free shelter. “Roll up and roll out, you bastards,” was his shout. With Walsh leading the way, the posse for the day’s filming would pick its way back to Hollywood, almost a six-hour ride over the hills. Though noted for his gritty Westerns – including the first ‘talking’ Western titled In Old Arizona featuring a character called the Cisco Kid, and The Big Trail which gave John Wayne his first lead role – his mastery of film extended to many other themes. Walsh directed the war films The Naked and the Dead, Battle Cry, and What Price Glory, and the chillingly brutal crime story White Heat with a young Irish-American actor called James Cagney in the lead role of psychotic gangster Cody (“Made it Ma! Top o’ the world!”) Jarrett. Walsh’s movies were by the most part tough, macho and brutal. Someone once suggested he direct a romance movie. Warner Studios boss Jack Warner, for whom Walsh was working at the time, responded, “Walsh’s idea of a tender love story would be burning down a whore house.” One of Walsh’s personal non-Western favourites was Gentleman Jim which starred the Irish-Australian and real-life Hollywood buccaneer Errol Flynn in the role of legendary pugilist ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett. The title of his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways says it all about Hollywood’s most colourful Irishman Errol Flynn. Although he was born in Tasmania, he liked to be referred to as Irish when he was at his peak as the movies’ most infamous swashbuckler. His father Theodore Thompson Flynn was a popular professor of Zoology at Queen’s University Belfast and during the Blitz was Chief Casualty Officer in the Civil Defence organisation in the city. Errol Flynn shot to Hollywood fame in Captain Blood in 1935 and went on to play a plethora of action-man roles in such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Dawn Patrol, and Against All Flags which co-starred Maureen O’Hara and Anthony Quinn. One of his best roles was in the film Gentleman Jim (1942) in which he played the legendary pugilist Jim Corbett. The film’s director Walsh took a liking to Flynn, who greatly impressed him by going one-on-one in the movie with real boxers, no punches pulled, no stunts, no doubles. The movie made Walsh and Flynn fast drinking buddies and they were often joined in their carousing by another screen legend of Irish descent – John Barrymore, whose corpse once paid an unwelcome visit to Flynn’s Hollywood mansion. Flynn and Barrymore had been inseparable friends and Barrymore would always sit in the same place in Flynn’s house as they drank and talked into the dawn. When Barrymore died, Walsh played a devilish practical joke. He talked a film extra who worked at the morgue where Barrymore was lying into lending him the great actor’s remains. Walsh placed Barrymore’s stiff corpse into the chair in Flynn’s home that he had favoured in life, and placed a lit cigarette in the corpse’s fingers. When Flynn arrived home and saw his old friend back from the dead he very nearly collapsed. He remained conscious long enough to jump into his car, clutching his chest and screech off down the Hollywood Hills in terror. When Walsh returned the body an hour or so later the mortician/movie extra, who worked regularly on Walsh’s films, asked, “Where did you take him?” “To Errol Flynn’s,” Walsh replied. “Why didn’t you tell me,” the mortician/extra responded. “I would have put a better suit on him.” Also considered a Walsh masterpiece is High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart as a desper-ate gunman on the run who heads into the high country to escape the law. The harrow-ing script was penned by John Huston, the director/writer/actor who spent many years of his life raising a family in Ireland, including actress daughter Anjelica and director Tony Huston. John Huston is best known today for the screen classics The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo and The African Queen and in later life The Dead. He was the son of legendary character actor Walter Huston whose credits were legion from the 1930s to the early 1950s. No account of Walsh’s life and career, no matter how brief, would be complete without mention of the fact that he discovered and launched the career of an actor who called himself ‘Rock Hudson’. Hudson’s real name was Roy Fitzgerald. Walsh had been the first to recognise the handsome young actor’s possibilities after he played a bit part in Fighter Squadron in 1948. Walsh put the actor under personal contract and brought him around to see such leading producers as Hal Wallis and Walter Wanger without any luck. Then he arranged a meeting with John Ford. Ford knew that nobody was named Rock by their parents. He asked the young actor what his real name was. Hudson said it was Fitzgerald, then Ford roared in rage, “Why did you change it! Now get out!” Of course, Ford had changed his own name from Feeney. But ‘Rock Fitzgerald’ was not being entertained that day by Ford. Walsh eventually sold Hudson/Fitzgerald’s contract to Universal and the rest, as they say, is history.
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