Our Man in Vienna

What Happened to Bobby?

Bobby Driscoll had a dream career as a child actor. He made his first film at the age of six and his last at the age of 18. I saw him in So Dear to My Heart when I was in Locust Valley at the age of 14. Bobby’s partner is Luana Patton, a child actress, who did not grow up to become actress. Bobby too didn’t grow up to be an actor.

The Disney features of the early days, Snow White, Fantasia and Pinocchio were imaginative films with the fascination and fantasy of old-fashioned toys. The films of today are assembly- line products with quick-cutting and loud music. Speed and volume are usually a substitute for quality. The hectic pace cancels out any chance for contemplation.

I loved the wonderful combination of live actors and cartoon characters in So Dear. Since the film showed happy blacks in the Old South, the film was criticized as being racist. I remember the controversy. Uncle Remus, the old storyteller, was depicted by the critics as Uncle Tommy. Well, So Dear was basically a film for children and young people, not a social study.

Disney acquiesced to the criticism at home. The film was taken out of circulation in the States, but is still available elsewhere. Bow to pressure at home, but sell abroad! After all, a buck is a buck.

If there ever was a film with an “indirect” racist view, it was Gone with the Wind. Here happy slaves are part of the family in the Good Old South. And this film is for adults, not for children.

And speaking of Uncles, the happy black par excellence was Louis Armstrong, as far as image is concerned. However, politically speaking, Louis took a stand against discrimination that was anything but “Uncle.”

Bobby’s follow-up film was the classic thriller, The Window, for which he won a special Oscar.

Bobby was handsome and the way he arched his eyebrows reminded me of William Holden. He was under contract to Walt Disney, and when he ceased being a “child actor” and became an “adolescent actor,” Disney dropped him.

Bobby did start to grow up, but of course, he retained had the qualities that had made him popular. He was just as well-suited to play adolescent and grownup roles as he had been to play child roles. But Disney and the other go-betweens had him labeled as a child and that was that.

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland grew up too. And of course, they too had emotional difficulties. Mickey, who had been Number One as a child and teenager, slumped, but picked himself up and went on to character roles. Judy continued her singing and was also successful at playing dramatic roles. Did you ever see her in The Clock with Robert Walker? She was enthralling as a young woman who had meets a soldier by chance in New York during the war. And not a note was sung in the film.

You’d think Walt Disney, who was creative and served up delightful films for children, would have been a good uncle. He wasn’t. In the witch-hunting days of McCarthy, he was one of the leading Hollywood witch hunters. The hunt did not merely seek out members of the Communist Party, but anyone who was suspected of having melioristic views.

Bobby “the child” was a commodity; Bobby “the adolescent” wasn’t, at least as far as Walt was concerned.

But it wasn’t only Walt. For some reason, Bobby couldn’t to latch on to the early successes. The people who had hired the child did not to hire the young man, for some unfathomable reason. Nor could he convince others to give him a chance.

Where were all the film people he had worked with? Couldn’t one of them have acted as an intermediary?

Bobby left Hollywood and went to New York, but things did not work out there either. He tried Broadway and off Broadway, but no theater doors were opened to him.

In 1968, “Bobby the man” committed suicide at the age of 31. The prelude had been alcohol, drugs and time behind bars.

I quote from his website: “He was found dead in a tenement building in New York. No one knew who he was, and he was buried as a John Doe in a pauper’s grave. This talented young man died completely alone and without friends. It was a year later, due to a chance checking of fingerprints, that it was discovered that the John Doe they had buried was actually Bobby Driscoll”

You can still see Bobby in his films of the Forties and early Fifties on TV. I caught The Window recently.

No, you can’t blame it all on Hollywood. You have to learn to cope and you need perseverance, and I can add some other truisms. But I say that Bobby’s fate is one of the most shameful chapter’s in the Hollywood Album.

 

Cruelty

In Love Is Never Silent, directed by Joseph Sargent, there is a deaf and dumb couple with two children, a boy and a girl. The boy accidentally falls from their apartment window. The father and mother tear down the stairs to the street to find him dead on the sidewalk. When they open their mouths to scream, no sound comes out. They scream at the top of their lungs, but their screams remain silent. They cannot even use their vocal chords to give vent to their grief.

Sometimes I’m overcome by the cruelty of life.

 

The Dog in Dark Blue World

Jan Sverak’s Dark Blue World is a bittersweet story of two Czech pilots who fly for the RAF during World War II and their love interests.

Karel crashes in an attempt to save Franta.

Franta goes home to his small Czech town in uniform and is saluted by the uniformed stationmaster. He finds his former girlfriend hanging up laundry and they sadly greet each other. She married stationmaster, thinking that Franta was dead. As Franta starts to leave, his dog, a blonde spaniel no longer young, emerges from under the laundry and greets him. The dog is female; I won’t use the word bitch, because it has acquired another connotation. Franta walks off with the dog following him. Now has his dog, but it is only for a moment. A little girl appears and says, “That is our dog.” Franta and the dog look at each other. They both know that there is no choice. It is as if the dog says, “I must stay with her.” Franta departs as the dog sits by the girl watching him walk away.

I am so moved by this. It is a touching love scene between a man and a dog, one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen on film.

Life is not easy for man, but the same can be said for animals.

I had a dog as a boy, who was as much of a friend as a friend can be. And I needed such a friend at the time. His life came to a tragic end and I cannot forget that, nor can I stop blaming myself. Not a day has gone by when I did not think of him. I have thought about him more than I have thought about the women I loved.

But getting back to Karel, he survived all the aerial dogfights to be thrown into a Stalinist prison for having fought in the RAF. The brave Czech pilots, like the veterans who fought for the Republican side in Spain, were guilty of some kind of crime in the Eastern Bloc. God knows what it could have been.

If the Battle of Britain had been lost, the United States would not have been able to have a foothold in Europe, and the chances for victory for Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would have been very good indeed.

Thinking about man and beast, and man’s integrity and loyalty, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d take a dog anytime. Do you know what I mean?

 

to be continued . . .

– Herbert Kuhner

Larry, Marilyn, Vivien and Noblesse Oblige

He could speak Shakespeare’s lines as naturally as if he were actually thinking them.
– Charles Bennett, English playwright

Larry was the greatest of them all – and the most handsome. He was the prince and his princess was Vivien. She wasn’t bad at acting, and she was the most beautiful of them all.

Laurence Olivier directed and acted in The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957, co-starring Marilyn Monroe, who was also beautiful in a ditsy way. She was the epitome of showgirls, starlets, pinups and party girls. It is not the elegant beauty of Vivien Leigh, but it was a kind of beauty too. Actually it was the kind of beauty that was more in demand. There was nothing subtle about it. The appeal was immediate. There was no aura to it, and it did not increase with observation. I wouldn’t use the word superficial, but I would say that it was anything but classic.

Marilyn had a reputation for showing up late and for being difficult to work with. Here’s how other directors put it. The words are Larry’s: “Billy Wilder said that it had been like working with Hitler. He and Josh Logan commiserated with me and said it was hell, but that I would be getting a pleasant surprise when it was over.”

Marilyn arrived in London with new hubby Arthur Miller, as well as Lee and Paula Strasberg –
to Larry’s dismay. Marilyn’s devil was aided and abetted by those other two devils.

Here’s Larry on Lee: “My opinion of his school is that it did more harm than good to his students and that his influence on the American theater was harmfully misplaced.”

Seven years later Lee would cross the Atlantic with Studio actors to assay Chekhov’s Three Sisters on the West End in one of his very few stints as a director. He got his comeuppance for whatever transgressions he had committed. The production was described as the turkey of all turkeys and the bomb of all bombs in the British press.

And here’s Larry on Paula: “The truth came to light with uncanny speed: Paula knew nothing, she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no, adviser – except in Marilyn’s eyes, for she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up. On one car journey I heard Paula play an innings in this, her special ploy, which pinned my ears back as I sat in the front with the two of them in the back. ‘My dear, you really must recognize your own potential, you haven’t even yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world, you are the greatest sex symbol in human memory, everybody knows and recognizes that and you should too, it’s a duty which you owe to yourself and to the world, it’s ungrateful not to accept it. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time; of any time, you name it; you can’t think of anybody, I mean – no, not even Jesus – except you’re more popular.’ Incredible as that must s exaggeration; and it went on in unremitting supply, for good hour, with Marilyn swallowing every word. This was Paula’s unique gift to the art of acting, or rather the artful success of Marilyn’s career, out of which the Strasbergs stood to make much capital. This was what I realized in growing alarm, I was stuck with.”

And it can be said that the Prince as actor and director suffered as no one in film and show business had ever suffered before and after the filming of “Prince.” Time and again he was insulted and humiliated.

Vivien had played the role on the stage, but in the film, she had to give way to Marilyn. Of course she didn’t relish being passed over. She had caused a stir as Blanche in Streetcar, and now unfortunately she started to live that role to the hilt.

So poor Larry was getting his ankles snapped at from all sides. He had them snapped at on the set, and there was snapping galore after he dragged himself home by Vivian, who had been left out of things.

But ankles were not the only part of Larry’s anatomy that suffered. His nether region was getting the brunt of it too. That’s the area of the greatest ache when the fair sex has in for men.

After the royal Prince torture was over, Larry limped off the set and went on to other things.
A quarter of a century later, he saw the film again and here’s what he had to say: “I was as good as can be, and Marilyn! Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all.”

So a good film and good performances had come from all the suffering, and Larry the gentleman had given Marilyn her due.

There wasn’t much noblesse oblige in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. The Marilyn character has no saving graces in the play, and not an iota of charm. Never had there been a heroine on the stage who was less of a heroine.

But Larry was not so noble with Vivien. Here’s what he wrote after her passing: “While I was keeping my short vigil in the bedroom, I noticed that between the bed and the bathroom was a stain, and connecting this with the expression on her face which had caused me to wonder, I now realized what must have happened. What a cruel stroke of fate to deliver that particular little death-blow to one as scrupulously dainty in such matters as was she.”

Quotations from Laurence Olivier: Confessions of an Actor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1982.

 

The American Actress and the Italian Actor

The American actress had never met anyone like the Italian actor. He didn’t go to ball games, he didn’t go hunting or fishing and he didn’t play cards with the guys. He was there for her. And although his English was broken, he listened to her. Yes, he’d sit there with his dark liquid eyes drinking in every word that came from her mouth. It seemed that no word was ever wasted. Even if some of the words she spoke were strange to him, he seemed to get the gist of it. No, there could not be another man more understanding and attentive to a woman.

He had a reputation as a skirt chaser, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to believe that this was true. He was so kind and understanding. She would just swoon in his arms. He was her prince and she was his princess. He made every venue they found themselves in seem like Heaven.

For two years Heaven remained Heaven.

Heaven is a dream and she was dreaming.

Why do dreams end? Dreams end because one wakes up. Reality is the end of all dreams.

The actress found out, that although the Italian actor’s English was broken, what he understood was less than you can understand with broken English.

In a rented villa in Rimini, the kitchen sink was clogged and she asked him to call the plumber, but he didn’t react. He just kept looking at her with the same expression on his face. And even when she asked him again, the dreamy look was as dreamy as ever. Only when she showed her consternation, did it change.

She had been in Heaven, but now she plopped down to Earth. The sink had brought reality into her life.

He had never listened to her. He made believe that he was listening. He dreamed too. God knows what he was dreaming, but his dreams weren’t about her. He could dream with his eyes open. He could dream and make it seem that he was listening.

Now, his expression no longer pleased her. It became the drippy expression of a dope. And that was the end of that.

The actress packed it in and went her way. And the actor went his way as a successful Lothario.

Here’s how she put it: “There are so few people you can talk to. I’ve tried it with all my partners. “Dreamboat” always listened to me, but then I realized that he was only making believe.

The moral of this story is that there is one sure-fire method of seduction. You don’t have to read a “how to” book. You don’t have to use a spiel.

All you have to do is listen. Or make believe that you’re listening.

The object of your seduction may eventually wake up. But then there are other fish in the pond.

Clue: They made a film together in ‘68. It was directed by one of the world’s great directors, but it flopped. Here’s what one critic wrote: “The most god-awful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I’ve ever seen!”

 

to be continued . . .

– Herbert Kuhner