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Show r4yj Looking at Ihollywood A FTER all his years here the town hasn't yet been able to corral and brand Walter Huston as a complete Hollywoodian. It isn't that Walter's snooty. It's just that he prefers the outdoor life of a rugged man to the social stuffed shirt of some of our cinema gentle-' gentle-' men. Give him Then "he decided to "go "to New York. He arrived there frozen stiff, he had jumped a freight during a blizzard. Richard Mansfield was auditioning audition-ing players and Walter was handed a part. Mansfield personally honored hon-ored him that night by throwing him out of the theater. Electrician, Then Vaudevillist Next he went to Detroit, tried electrical elec-trical engineering, then tried vaudeville. vaude-ville. In one of the acts on the circuit cir-cuit he was playing there was a girl named Bayonne Whipple. She and Walter decided to merge professionally profes-sionally and maritally. For about 12 years they were headliners on and Keith circuit with their song and dance act. This marriage like a former one blew up. He decided to go on his own with a big-time act The Schu-berts Schu-berts paid him $1,750 a week. At 39 he turned to the legitimate stage. He managed to get backing and made his Broadway debut in "Mr. Pitt" The play wasn't so hot. But Walter was. He's never played anything but star roles on Broadway since. It was during the run of "Elmer the Great" that he met Nan Sunderland Sunder-land and later married her. They are till working happily at it. He began to make pictures in 1929, and since then has alternated between be-tween Broadway and Hollywood. I've known Walter for years. He's a square shooter. All he asks of life is a reasonable amount of the wide open spaces and you can have your too - too swank small talk. "I don't live away from Hollywood Holly-wood because I don't go in for social so-cial life," Walter told me as we . "I security, good companionship, and the respect of his fellow men. They'll Throw Weight Now The Lehman brothers move into the top list of movie moguls with their recent buy of a sizable block of 20th Century-Fox. They bought the Chase bank holdings of that company com-pany a couple of years ago. This gives them control of one of the most powerful lots in the industry. They also have their hands in Paramount, Para-mount, RKO, and in Technicolor. . . . Twentieth Century-Fox thinks it has a second Judy Garland in a little blue-eyed redhead, Georgia Lee Settle. i I chatted on the set Walter Huston of "Ten Little Indians." In-dians." "When you come right down to it, social life isn't important any more. People say it is, but all that counts is the job you do on the screen. You can be perfectly happy here without ever doing anything but go to a drive-in for a hamburger. hambur-ger. It's just that I'm a funny kind of a guy. I have to get out where I can breathe where I can get corn- pletely apart from pictures when I want to. But don't get me wrong I love pictures." When he's making one he lives at the Beverly Hills hotel, but Walter has two other homes where he goes whenever he can get away. One is his huge and ultra mountain lodge in Running Springs, in the San Bernardino Bernar-dino mountains. The other his 8,000 acre cattle ranch at Porterville, Calif. The Inner Man It's in these two places that you'll uncover the real Huston, the man who is not an actor, but the man who has found that elusive something some-thing you're always hearing about and always wondering what it really is happiness. When you're talking to this character char-acter actor who has dignified so many important films, conversation switches from his lodge and ranch to his favorite subject his son, John. In Walter's mind John is the best director and writer in Flick-erville. Flick-erville. "Give John a story he likes, let him alone, and he'll come up with the doggonedest picture you ever saw," Walter told me. "There's nothing I'd like better than to go into the producing business with John when the war's over." Rare Bird for Hollywood Walter's modest. He never talks about his performances just goes ahead, does his job the best he knows how and shuts up. His whole life has been one of plugging away at acting. Even when he was a kid in Toronto, Canada, he knew he was going to act. There was a matter of schooling. He was one of the worst students Canada had ever known, so it wasn't too hard to understand why he left school rather early and got a job as a clerk in a hardware store. ' From here he joined a dramatic outfit out-fit in Toronto, where he stayed until un-til a traveling repertoire company came along |
