The Irish Cowboys - part 6

      Hart called the New York Motion Picture Company and was put in touch with producer Thomas Ince (the same film-maker that Owen Moore and Mary Pickford had gone to war with in Cuba. This was a fortunate coincidence, for Hart and Ince had once roomed together as actors. Ince immediately agreed to hire Hart as an actor for the picture company. Hart’s couple of outings in this new medium were hardly memorable but there followed two Westerns in 1915 that began to show Hart’s promise; The Bargain, and On the Night Stage. Ince had contracted Hart on $125 a week, a salary that seemed to be a fortune to the actor. But then, as now in Hollywood, nothing was as it seemed. Despite the bonds between Ince and Hart, Ince was taking advantage of Hart financially. The Bargain turned out to be a tremendous success and Ince sensed that Hart was destined for stardom. But he had Hart locked into that comparatively paltry wage. “Although he did not begin to realise that he was being exploited until later, it is clear that Ince took advantage of their friendship from the very beginning,” asserts Katherine H. Child, author of the Terra periodical tribute to the actor.
      Hart followed his first two films with Ince with one success after another and became one of the top-name actors and directors in Hollywood. But Ince still held Hart’s salary to a fraction of what it could and should have been.
      Ince teamed up with Mack Sennett, Harry Aitken and D.W. Griffith in 1915 to form the Triangle Film Corporation. Hart loyally went with Ince to the new film outfit which was paying its stars, Douglas Fairbanks among them, salaries as high as $2,000 a week. Hart’s $125 a week salary was doubled and Ince threw in a $50 bonus. Later Hart’s salary was raised to $1,000 per week after some tough negotiations, but by now it was becoming obvious to Hart that Ince was exploiting their friendship. The result of Ince’s conduct was a successful lawsuit filed by Hart against the film-maker in 1920, by which time Hart had finally achieved the earning power his status as Hollywood’s top Western star and director commanded – a contract with Paramount for nine pictures at $200,000 each. The good times were here and Hart, like so many of his fellow Irish compatriots in Hollywood in those days, Owen Moore and Marshal Neilan among them, was determined to enjoy the success.
      It was said that Hart ‘fell in love’ with most of his leading ladies and proposed marriage to just about all of them, including Winifred Westover, his co-star in John Petticoats who accepted the proposal. They married in December 1921 and were separated by May 1922. At the same time, Hart’s films were losing the spark of authenticity and originality that had been his trademark, and he was beginning to fail at the box office. Paramount demanded that he give over control of the production of his films, which he refused. The clash led directly to his departure from the studio in 1925 to make his own films as an independent, a move that effectively marked the end of his film career.
      He made one more film, Tumbleweed which was doomed at the box office because of a badly mishandled distribution arrangement. Hart died in 1946 without ever making another movie. He left the bulk of his estate to the County of Los Angeles with the stipulation that his home and the grounds of his ranch in Newhall, California, were to be used as a public park and museum. The home stands today as a tribute to this Irish-American film hero and as a museum of Western art and artifacts that Hart bequeathed to the people of Los Angeles.
     

'Emeralds in Tinseltown - The Irish in Hollywood' by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, published by Appletree Press.