Dennis Hoey: A Son’s Remembrance

Film fanatic Leonard Maltin always called them Hollywood’s “Real Stars:” The great supporting players of the 1930s and ‘40s, many of whom became so well-known and well-liked that moviegoers knew what sort of character they would be playing the instant they appeared on screen. Well-known and well-liked, but not nearly as predictable, was the versatile Dennis Hoey (1893-1960), the English-born character man whose range enabled him to play everything from Nazi Germans to men of the West . . . and Middle East . . . and as far south as the Australian Outback! For many film fans, his claim to fame was playing Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade, forever two long steps behind “Mr. ‘Olmes” (Basil Rathbone) in Universal’s enduring Sherlock Holmes series.

His son, Michael A. Hoey, is also multi-talented, but behind the camera. In his 50-year career, he has worn many hats on an assortment of projects, from documentaries to teen comedy and from sci-fi to Elvis; five years on the critically acclaimed Fame (as writer-producer-director) is just the tip of his TV iceberg, with other credits on McCloud, Murder She Wrote, Dallas, et al. His half-century career has been crowned with several awards and many more award nominations, and now his stories from the movieland trenches are coming together in the pages of his book “Elvis, Sherlock, and Me: How I Survived Growing Up in Hollywood.” In this Films of the Golden Age exclusive, he provides a preview by reminiscing for interviewer Tom Weaver about the life and times of his famous father.

My father was what was known in the movie business as a character actor. Which meant that he was part of that extraordinary group of men and women whose faces you recognize, but whose names you seldom recall. He is undoubtedly best remembered for having created the role of the slightly inept but affable Inspector Lestrade in six of the 12 Sherlock Holmes films featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce that Universal Pictures produced during the early to mid-1940s. This role has made him somewhat of a celebrity over the years; recently his name was even part of a Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle. He also appeared in a number of British films during the ’30s, as well as on the London and Broadway stage and in many Hollywood films of the ’40s and ’50s. All in all, he made 70 films in the United States and Britain.

He was a true Victorian, having been born in London in 1893, the son of a hotel keeper who ran a small “bed and breakfast” in Brighton, one of the beach resorts close to London. He originally intended to enter the teaching profession after he graduated from Brighton College, although he actually began a career as a stockbroker before discovering his singing talents performing for the troops during World War I. When he returned from the war, he became interested in acting and was soon appearing on the London stage in musicals and as a concert singer.

He made his first stage appearance in 1919 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in Shanghai and quickly followed that up by portraying Arif Bey in the musical Katinka at the Shaftsbury. He initiated the role of Ali Ben Ali in the London production of The Desert Song, which ran for 432 performances at the Drury Lane in the late ’20s. Wanting to make his name as a legitimate actor, he studied Shakespeare and for several seasons was a member of Sydney W. Carroll’s Shakespearean troupe in the Open-Air Theatre in Regents Park. He also toured with Godfrey Tearle’s Shakespearean repertory company. In 1931 during a special production of Hamlet at the Haymarket Theatre in London, the actor portraying Hamlet became ill, forcing Tearle to take over the role, and my father to take Tearle’s place as Horatio. He also toured in a production of Treasure Island, in which he starred as Long John Silver.

According to my father, somewhere back in the family history, probably in the early to mid-1800s, we had some relatives who escaped Russia during one of the pogroms and came to England. Hoey was not the real family name, it’s actually Hyams. We’re related, in fact, to Peter Hyams, the director, and his sister Nessa, who was both a casting executive and a producer. They’re my second cousins, and they in turn are the grandchildren of Sol Hurok. So, the family has a show business background [laughs]! I have a theory as to why he chose the name Hoey: There was an actress who was somewhat older than he, Iris Hoey, a musical comedy star around the turn of the century who was still performing in the ’20s. Hers was a name that many people associated with show business, and I think that may be why he chose it.

In the mid-1920s, my father traveled to America to co-star on Broadway in two more musical operettas, Hassan, in which he had the dubious distinction of appearing in blackface, and, during the fall season of 1926, in Katja, in which he had a more prominent role and enjoyed a very respectable run of 112 performances at the 44th Street Theatre. I only know of one silent film in which he appeared, Tiptoes, which was directed by Herbert Wilcox and starred Dorothy Gish and Will Rogers. It was made in England in 1927, and shortly after that “talkies” came along and all of the rest of his films were with sound.

He married my mother, Josephine (known as Jo), in 1933. She was somewhat younger than my father when they married, and a very, very beautiful woman all through her life. I think she might have briefly worked as a photo model but, according to her sister, my aunt, she never appeared in any films or plays.

Also in 1933, my father was signed to play the title role in a film called McCluskey the Sea Rover and left for Tripoli, where it was to be filmed on location. At that time, the Italians controlled Tripoli. Before filming could begin, however, there was a disagreement between the moviemakers and the Italian government regarding the firearms that were to be given to the Bedouin tribesmen appearing as extras. The government got nervous about the Bedouins getting their hands on guns and perhaps causing some sort of an insurrection, so they said, “No, you can’t do that,” and the film was canceled. A movie like McCluskey the Sea Rover could have been a big break for my father; that was one of a number of disappointments that he had in his lifetime.

He came back to England and within weeks he was signed for a featured role as a Foreign Legion captain in Baroud [1933], a film by Rex Ingram, who was famous for having directed Rudolph Valentino in the silent The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1921], a film that was a big break for both of them.

Ingram and his wife Alice Terry filmed Baroud on location in Morocco, then shot their interiors in the south of France at the Victorine Studio, the same small studio where, many years later, Francois Truffaut filmed Day for Night [1973].

Baroud is famous as Ingram’s only talkie; he not only wrote, produced and directed, he also played a role in it. As it turned out, it was Ingram’s last film.

Baroud was just one of many films my father made in the ’30s. That was the time of “the quota films”: American movie companies had to finance x-number of British films before their films [Hollywood films] were allowed to come into the country and play in theaters, so there was a big run of English films and my father appeared in about a dozen of them. He did Chu-Chin-Chow [1934] with Anna May Wong, The Wandering Jew [1933] with Conrad Veidt and the marvelous The Good Companions [1933], directed by Victor Saville and starring Jessie Matthews, Edmund Gwenn and John Gielgud. He worked with many fine actors in the films of that era, Cedric Hardwicke, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Francis L. Sullivan, Stanley Holloway and Jack Hawkins, to name just a few. Tell England [1931], in which he co-starred as a padre, was the same story as the much more recent Mel Gibson film Gallipoli [1981], about that famous World War I battle. He was even in pictures like The Mystery of the Marie Celeste [1935] with Bela Lugosi and The Murder in the Red Barn [1935] with Tod Slaughter.

Then there was a whole series of films that he did with Stanley Lupino and his [Stanley’s] cousin, Lupino Lane. Stanley was Ida Lupino’s father and Lupino, who was also my godfather, was what they called a “knockabout” comedian.

He used to do physical comedy on the stage, and then he directed and starred in a series of comedy films. My father was in four of them: Never Trouble Trouble and Love Lies [both 1931], The Maid of the Mountains [1932] and My Old Duchess [1933].

The British pictures that he was most proud of were The Good Companions and Baroud — and probably the films in that Lupino Lane series. I don’t know if he sang in any of the Lane films, but I do know that he sang in The Good Companions and in Facing the Music [1933], which also starred Stanley Lupino; in that one, my father performed an aria from Gounod’s Faust. My father did more singing in his career while he was in England than after he came to the United States; here he briefly became a leading man, and then the character actor that he continued to be throughout the rest of his career.

At the time of my birth, 1934, he was appearing at London’s Princess Theatre in a revival of Sir Edward German’s light opera Merrie England. Later that summer, he appeared again in repertory at the Open Air Theatre in Regents Park in several Shakespearean plays, including Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors. Interestingly enough, his namesake Iris Hoey was in the same company, and I’ve often wondered how she might have reacted to learning what he’d done!

In the mid-30s, when I was still an infant, he went to Queensland, Australia, to star in the film Uncivilised, in which he played the part of Mara, the white leader of an aboriginal tribe. The plot is hard to describe, but it includes a white authoress, looking for a story in the Outback, who is kidnapped by an Afghan slaver, betrothed to a white jungle man (my father) and menaced by a hostile witch doctor and opium smugglers. On top of all this, my father breaks into song on several occasions. I finally saw Uncivilised for the first time about seven years ago, and it was quite a marvelous screening. I received a tape of it at a very propitious time: My mother’s sister Yola, her son Lawrence and his wife Sharon had come from England and were visiting with my wife Katie and me, and none of us had ever seen the film. We all sat down to watch it, and it was quite an experience. It was interesting as a piece of family history and to see my father as a young man, but the piece was so heavy-handed that it was hard not to laugh at it. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever laughed so hard in our lives! It astounds me that the Australian actor Paul Hogan [Crocodile Dundee] once told an interviewer that Uncivilised was one of the films that he based his films on — I don’t know what he could have been looking at!

Several times my father just slightly missed having some great moments in his career: Charles Chauvel, who directed Uncivilised, was known for also directing In the Wake of the Bounty [1933], which starred an unknown by the name of Errol Flynn. Flynn had a lot more success with that film than my father did with his; In the Wake of the Bounty was one of Flynn’s steps to stardom.

But I can’t imagine that In the Wake of the Bounty was that much better a film, based on what I saw as an example of Chauvel’s directing and writing on Uncivilised!

After he came back from doing Uncivilised, he appeared in another stage musical, a revival of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, opposite Isabel Jeans. The following month, signed to appear in a new Broadway play produced by the Shuberts, he sailed off to America for the first time since 1926. The play, Green Waters, opened and closed in five days [in November 1936] — and almost closed the theater as well! But while he was in New York City, he met an agent who said he could get him plenty of work on the radio, which was very hot at that time. My father remained in New York to find out what the new agent could do for him. Well, he was immediately working on radio’s The Theater Guild on the Air, and then co-starring in a 15-minute, five-times-a-week radio serial called Pretty Kitty Kelly and playing a recurring role on The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

In December of 1936, my father was signed to play Edward Rochester opposite Katharine Hepburn in a Theater Guild production of Jane Eyre that would tour the country and then come to Broadway. At that point, Hepburn’s film career was in the toilet — she was box office poison. I think my father and Hepburn were on the road for something like six months, and for part of that time my mother came over to travel with him, while I of course stayed in London with my nanny at my mother’s parents’ home. It was when Jane Eyre was in Chicago that suddenly Hepburn had a new suitor, a tall man who wore Stetson hats pulled down over his eyes. It was Howard Hughes. He and Hepburn would run off together after each show and have dinner in a quiet corner of a restaurant. My mother and father also frequently dined there, and quite often would see them huddled together.

Jane Eyre was doing quite well, and I think my father had high hopes that it would go into Broadway; obviously, playing the romantic lead opposite Katharine Hepburn on Broadway could have done his career a great deal of good.

What no one knew at the time was that Hepburn was only doing Jane Eyre as she bided her time waiting while playwright Philip Barry was writing The Philadelphia Story as a vehicle for her. By the time Jane Eyre reached Washington D.C., Philadelphia Story was completed, and Hepburn decided that THAT was the play she wanted to open on Broadway. For her it was the right choice, there’s no question about it, but it didn’t help my father’s career!

Amidst all this work, the war clouds were beginning to build in England, so my father decided to move my mother, me, and our nanny, Violet Miller, to the U.S., to be with him. That’s when we came over, somewhere around mid-1937. He rented a lovely two-story flat in a brownstone at 175 East 71st Street.

On September the 2nd, 1937, just before my third birthday, my father was part of the enormous cast in the opening performance of the new Broadway production Virginia. The book was written by Laurence Stallings, who had written What Price Glory, and Owen Davis, who had Jezebel and Whoopee to his credit, and the music was by Arthur Schwartz, who co-wrote the songs for the movie The Band Wagon [1953] — and yet Virginia enjoyed only a run of about eight weeks. Which is unfortunate, because by all reports it was a marvelous spectacle. My father played Sir Guy Carleton, one of the wealthy landowners in the Virginia colony, and another member of the cast, portraying the governor of the colony, was Nigel Bruce, which is rather interesting considering what happened later on.

As a special birthday treat, my mother took me to the theater to see a matinee. I don’t personally remember doing this, because I was just three years old at the time, but years later I was told that when my father first appeared on the stage, I grew very excited and announced to the entire audience that there stood “my daddy” [laughs]! Of course, the poor actors had to wait for the laughter to die down before they could continue with the performance, but I’m sure my father secretly enjoyed being singled out in that enormous cast. He might not have appreciated my upstaging him, though—probably the only time in my life that I ever did!

Around 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened, and one of the big things that was introduced by RCA there was television. Later that same year, my father starred in a live television production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever. Appearing opposite him in the small cast were his very close friend, actress Isobel Elsom, and a 19-year-old Montgomery Clift, in one of his first professional appearances.

My father went on tour again, this time playing Col. Pickering opposite Ruth Chatterton and Barry Thompson in a revival of Shaw’s Pygmalion; the plan was for the play to finish its run in Los Angeles and for us to join him there. The war in Europe had started by that point, and my father felt that Hollywood would soon need British character actors who could also be called upon to play rather nasty Germans. So that’s when he decided to move the family to California. We came out in the spring of 1940 and lived at first in a very lovely little apartment on Charleville Drive in Beverly Hills. Then, about a year and a half later, we moved into a house on North Crescent Drive that he had bought. I can tell you the exact date — December the 7th, 1941 — because I still vividly remember standing for the first time in the driveway at 167 North Crescent Drive, listening to the radio in our car announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

My father made his first Hollywood picture in 1941, a small scene in A Yank in the R.A.F. He had a good run in Hollywood, as many as seven pictures a year. That was terrific in those days, and nowadays it would be impossible for an actor to get that many films a year. He was very well-known at 20th Century-Fox and did a number of films there in the early to mid-40s: In addition to A Yank in the R.A.F., he was in two other Tyrone Power films, Son of Fury and This Above All [both 1942]; in Bomber’s Moon and They Came to Blow Up America [both 1943] he played German officers. Fox director Henry King liked him a lot, and so did John Cromwell, who directed him in Son of Fury and Anna and the King of Siam [1946].

It’s always been a mystery to me why my father’s name is listed in the credits for How Green Was My Valley [1941], but he doesn’t appear in the film. I remember once seeing a production still from the film, showing him standing in young Hew’s (Roddy McDowall) classroom with Rhys Williams and Barry Fitzgerald looking threateningly at him. In trying to fill in the gaps, I visualized a scenario where director John Ford cast my father as the sadistic teacher who takes a cane to Hew’s back and is then in turn beaten by Fitzgerald and Williams in retaliation. In my version, when Ford saw how small the two men looked beside my father he decided to recast and reshoot the sequence with another, more diminutive actor. I would have liked to have questioned Mr. Ford personally about this while I was working as his assistant editor on Sergeant Rutledge [1960], but I never found the appropriate moment. As it turned out the answer was much simpler. Ford filmed Philip Dunne’s screenplay exactly as he had written it, with Morton Lowry playing Mr. Jonas, the sadistic teacher who gets his comeuppance from Williams and Fitzgerald; however, the scene then continued with my father (Mr. Motshill, the school’s headmaster) entering and angrily confronting the two men. What takes place is definitely anticlimactic to the moment and it’s my guess that it was appropriately cut from the final print after one of the previews. So, an editor’s scissors was the culprit.

In those days, 20th Century-Fox had a magnificent back lot filled with all kinds of wonderful sets and set pieces and props. The back lot backed up to a fence near the Beverly Hills High School football field — and there was a hole in that fence. One Sunday afternoon, my buddies Neville Jason, Ed White and I decided to crawl through that hole and go exploring. So these three little ten-year-olds went scrabbling through the hole in the fence, and through a lot of tall grass, and then began walking toward a group of Naval aircraft that were probably being used for Fox’s movie Wing and a Prayer [1944]. But before we got to them, I saw a rooster tail of dust in the distance and realized that there was a car speeding out towards us. We’d hardly gotten through the fence and we’d already been spotted! We hid in the tall grass and the car pulled up and stopped, literally inches from my head. The driver, one of the Fox security guys, climbed out and said, gruffly, “All right, kids, come on, get up!”

Eddie and Neville stood up, and I did not. But I thought to myself, “I’ve got to get up, because if I don’t, when this car moves again, it’ll roll right over me,” and so I also got to my feet. The three of us were put in the back of this guy’s car and, as he drove us down to the studio police office, he gave us a line about, “Don’t you kids know that there’s a war on, and we’ve got machine-guns on the top of every stage? You could have been killed!” Of course, all of this was just to scare the heck out of us. But what scared me even more was, I ended up having to give them my father’s name and phone number — and he was appearing in Fox at the time in The Keys of the Kingdom [1944], playing Gregory Peck’s father. “Oh-oh,” I thought to myself, “this is going to go over like a lead balloon!” So on this Sunday afternoon, my father had to get in his car and come over and pick us up, and he was pretty furious. But by the time he dropped Ed off, and he dropped Neville off, and we got home, his anger had subsided enough that I didn’t get the belt, just the lecture!

This, incidentally, was just one of the several times in our lives when Neville and I tried to get away with something, and always we would get caught before we ever got three steps into it. One particularly boring summer afternoon, we sneaked up onto the roof of the California Bank Building and discovered that we could work our way from building to building up the entire block of Beverly Drive from Wilshire Boulevard to Dayton Way. We were happily playing cops and robbers on the roofs when suddenly it turned into the real thing, as two Beverly Hills policemen showed up with drawn weapons and escorted us back down. Somebody had reported two suspects with guns up on the roof and there we were, busted again.

In the spring of 1942, my father returned to New York to appear in the Broadway production of Heart of a City. It was based on the true story of the Windmill Theatre, a small London playhouse that was famous for its musical revues and for the fact that it refused to close its doors during the London Blitz. My father played Leo Saddle, a character based on the Windmill’s impresario, Vivian Van Damm — the role recently portrayed by Bob Hoskins in the film Mrs. Henderson Presents [2005]. In spite of a New York Sun review that called the play “funny and moving and full of unobvious excitements,” it managed to go dark in less than a month and my father was on his way back to Hollywood and the beginning of a new chapter in his career.

In 1942, my father was hired by Universal to play the Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, the second in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce “Sherlock Holmes” series, and the first in which Lestrade appears. My father eventually did six of the 12 Holmeses. He could have done seven: There was one other film, Dressed to Kill [1946], that called for Insp. Lestrade, but unfortunately my father was committed to doing another film at the time, Anna and the King of Siam, and was not available. So Universal went back to the script and gave the Scotland Yard man a new name, Inspector Hopkins, and hired an actor who was one of my father’s best friends, Carl Harbord, to play the part. I noticed when I saw Dressed to Kill that they also cut down the importance of the character.

One day he decided to take me onto the set of the Holmes film he was then working in, and I asked if my friend Neville Jason could come along. (Neville was also English; he, his mother and his brother had been evacuated from London during the Blitz.) My dad was agreeable to that, and so the two of us went with him over to Universal and watched the shooting of the British Museum scene in The Pearl of Death [1944] where the villain steals the pearl, runs across the room and up some stairs, crashes out through a stained-glass window and escapes. In the movie, the villain was played by Miles Mander, but it was a stunt double, naturally, who went out through the window. At the time I thought, “My God, it’s real glass!,” but of course in those days it was actually candy glass — plates of “glass” which could be broken without injury. After the scene was shot, the director Roy William Neill gave Neville and me, as a souvenir, a fairly large piece of this broken “glass.” Of course, when Neville and I went home, we began to turn my garage into a “soundstage” and put together a “camera” out of cardboard boxes and immediately began to “refilm” the whole sequence with our imagination. That was how I first began to really become fascinated with film, by watching the making of films with my father. (And maybe Neville was inspired, too, because he went on to become a successful actor.)

My father’s hair was light red, a “blondish” red color — what there was of it. He lost his hair fairly early, so in most of his films he’s wearing this marvelous toupee that he owned. Except when he plays Lestrade. In real life, he grew his hair long on one side and combed it over the bald spot on top, and so as Lestrade you see him as he actually looked, with his own hair.

He was very good friends with Nigel Bruce — “Willie” Bruce — a lovely, lovely man. I visited the Holmes sets on a couple of occasions, and one time Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce signed 8x10 photographs for me. Nigel Bruce signed a photograph of himself, “To Michael, who is a nice boy in spite of his father.” [Laughs] I had that picture pinned to my bedroom wall for some time, and then one day it “mysteriously” disappeared. I think my father must have gotten tired of seeing that particular comment up there! As for Rathbone, I found him to be somewhat of an aloof person, and I didn’t really warm up to him. Rathbone and my father probably respected one another, I don’t think they disliked one another, but they were never close.

One day in 1965, while I was working at Producers Studio on an American International film called Sergeant Dead Head, I wandered over to the sound stage next door where they were filming The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, another of the AIP teenage specials. I had heard that Mr. Rathbone was working that day and I wanted to pay my respects. It had been 21 years since I had sat with him on the set of The Pearl of Death at Universal and, although I had watched him perform in numerous films over those years, I was nonetheless shocked to see the frail old man seated in a director’s chair, away from all of the activity, quietly drinking a cup of tea. It saddened me to think that this once-great actor was now reduced to playing a supporting role to a cast of callow teenagers in a low-budget exploitation film. I introduced myself, reminding Mr. Rathbone of my father, and of our meeting in 1944 on the set of the Holmes film.

He seemed to vaguely remember my father and politely asked about his health. When I informed him that my father had died several years earlier, he nodded silently, as if acknowledging the inevitability of what he knew would soon be his own fate. I couldn’t help feeling that I was intruding, as he seemed to drift off into his own thoughts, so I made some self-conscious comment about the continuing popularity of the old Sherlock Holmes films, to which he smiled in gratitude, and I excused myself.

My dad was under a non-exclusive contract to Universal, playing Lestrade. They only used him in two or three other (non-Holmes) pictures, but they seemed to see him playing only one role, Lestrade, even though they might have called his character by another name! In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943], he plays a Scotland Yard inspector and even wore the same bloody wardrobe — Lestrade’s bowler hat and the raincoat! Then he did a film called She-Wolf of London [1946] and it was the same thing, a Scotland Yard inspector, only at least he was not wearing the same clothes in that one. So my father was very typecast at Universal.

He also kept busy doing radio. There was also a Sherlock Holmes radio series with Rathbone and Bruce, and my dad played Lestrade on that for about a year of its run. One evening he took me to watch a live broadcast of The Whistler, a very popular CBS mystery program that he was appearing on. The Whistler, you’ll recall, was the host-narrator whose opening speech went, “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women . . .” and so on — and of course he also whistled. The thing that absolutely amazed me the night of that broadcast was that the whistling was actually done by a woman — a woman who, I learned years later from one of the Old Time Radio websites, worked at one of the local defense plants. Apparently she was a very accomplished whistler, so she would come in once a week on the night they did the program and she would do the [Hoey whistles the Whistler theme]!

Another mystery program on which my father appeared quite frequently was Suspense, and there’s one episode I particularly liked. It was based on “August Heat” by W.F. Harvey, a marvelous short story that takes place during — if you can imagine — a heat wave in London. The first time it was done for Suspense [May 31, 1945], Ronald Colman and my dad were the stars, and it was so very successful that it was redone for radio about three times. For each “remake” they brought my father back, but the role that Ronald Colman played was now done by somewhat lesser actors. I don’t think it was redone as many times as Suspense’s other big success Sorry, Wrong Number, but August Heat was performed at least four times over the years and it was a wonderful story.

Rex Harrison, whose first film role when he came to this country was as the king in Anna and the King of Siam, was a friend of my father’s from London. My father was cast in Anna as the British ambassador to Siam and there’s an interesting story about that: In the film, there’s a sequence where the king has invited the ambassadors from various governments, England, France, Germany and so on, to a dinner at the palace to show them that he is an educated man.

For entertainment, the wives in the king’s harem are going to present a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Anna, played by Irene Dunne, is supervising the wives as they get into their costumes and she expresses her concern that the women aren’t wearing any underwear under their hoop skirts. In the film as it was released, there’s all this buildup to presenting the play, but no pay-off, as the play is never seen. Well, I remember my father telling me that there was a pay-off gag, and that he was the one who reacted to it: When the wives took their bows at the end of the play, all their hoop skirts went up in back. Of course, in 1946 they couldn’t show what was revealed — the reaction was played off my father’s face, as he saw their nude bottoms smiling at him. But that was enough for the Breen Office to say, “No, no, you can’t do that, it’s too risque,” and Fox had to cut the whole sequence. After this cut was made, my father, who was on the film for weeks as I recall, now had only one brief closeup and I think maybe one line of dialogue. This, coming after How Green Was My Valley, was the second time he’d been cut out of a film at 20th Century-Fox.

Naturally, I would go to the movies to see the films my father was in. I loved movies — I wouldn’t miss any movie that came along. My buddies and I loved my dad’s Sherlock Holmes films and also the war movies he was in. I’m sure that I saw just about every new film of his, with the exception of a couple of the “women’s films” that he made during the latter part of his career. One of my favorites, I think THE favorite, was A Thousand and One Nights [1945], the only film he made at Columbia, a wonderful “play” on Aladdin and the magic lamp. The reason I liked it so much was that my father played a dual role: He played the caliph and the caliph’s evil brother, who at one point sneaks up behind the caliph and hits him on the head. As in The Prisoner of Zenda, the real caliph ends up imprisoned somewhere while the evil brother pretends to be the caliph and does all these dastardly deeds. Evelyn Keyes played a genie, Cornel Wilde was Aladdin, Phil Silvers was Aladdin’s pickpocket sidekick (and played it very anachronistically, as if it was 1945), and “the OTHER Rex Ingram,” the African-American actor, played a giant, recreating his role from the 1940 The Thief of Bagdad. A Thousand and One Nights was fun and had a lot of sharp dialogue, and I really enjoyed seeing two of my father in some scenes, via a split screen. Years later I edited the sound effects on a film that Cornel Wilde directed, Beach Red [1967], and when we reminisced about A Thousand and One Nights he agreed it was one of his favorites as well.

Being the son of an actor, and growing up in Hollywood, naturally I had ambitions to become an actor myself, and all through high school I was appearing in plays. The first production in which I appeared was an original musical at Beverly Hills High School in which James Drury [from TV’s The Virginian] and I were members of the chorus. (The student directing was Jay Sandrich, who went on to become one of the top television directors — everybody went to Jay to do their pilots.) In addition to acting, I also started a vocal group called the Harmonaires with two other singers and two musicians — one of whom was Robert Blake, who played guitar! Shortly after graduation, I went to the Laguna Summer Theater, spending one season there as an apprentice (I appeared in two plays that year), and then came back a second year only as an actor and appeared in Black Chiffon with Selena Royle. I also did a couple of plays in Los Angeles — “little theater”-type stuff. But I didn’t make any headway in films because I wasn’t “the right type.” I wasn’t the blond, good-looking boy next door, I was tall, which was also a problem for my father, who lost several roles because of it. He had a terrific chance to play a ruthless sea captain opposite Alan Ladd in Two Years Before the Mast [1946], but since my dad was 6’ 3”, Ladd didn’t want to work with him. The Two Years Before the Mast role went to Howard da Silva, who was much shorter.

Another near-miss: He was actually signed to play Paulus the Centurion in The Robe. Not the 1953 20th Century-Fox The Robe with Richard Burton, but an earlier [never-produced] attempt to film that story. Several years before the Burton Robe was made, Mervyn LeRoy, who was going to direct, and the producer Frank Ross hired my father’s good friend Herb Meadow to write the screenplay. But unfortunately, for budgetary reasons, they never got the film off the ground, and then Fox got ahold of the project and of course they hired an entirely new cast. Jeff Morrow, who played the Centurion, became a character star out of that film. My dad, poor guy — again, close, but didn’t get the brass ring.

But despite the parts he did not get, he made a very comfortable living. He did very well throughout his career, and we enjoyed living in good surroundings at all times. We had a baby grand piano in the living room of the house on North Crescent, and for years, long after he last performed professionally as a singer, he would vocalize and do some singing every morning, as part of his routine. My father had a marvelous voice and I really enjoyed hearing him sing. Two of the songs he’d sing, I really loved: “Danny Boy,” which to this day when I hear it brings me to tears, and “Old Man River.” He was a bass baritone, but his lower range was very, very solid. He would sit at the piano and do chords. To some extent, I inherited his voice, but I was more of a lyric baritone, I had a higher range than he did.

My father was still interested in writing and directing, and in fact came up with a story about the famous Drury Lane Ghost, which supposedly haunts that London theater. He wrote a treatment that he thought he could sell to Universal for the Sherlock Holmes series. It would have been a natural but, unfortunately, his timing was off; by the time he did this, they were winding down the series. I still have a copy of the treatment and it would have made a wonderful episode for Holmes, Watson and Lestrade. Then in 1946 he optioned a book by Anthony Gilbert, adapted it into a play, took it back to New York, and actually got some producers interested in it. The play, which he called The Haven, was a “drawing room mystery”: one set, five or six characters. He didn’t direct it, he hired someone else to do that, but he did play the lead, and he had in the cast Melville Cooper, Dennis King, Valerie Cossart and Queenie Leonard.

Marvelous actors, right? It should have been a hit. It was a . . . well, it was a bomb [laughs]. It lasted about five performances, and then it closed. He was trying to do kind-of an “Agatha Christie mystery,” but it wasn’t Agatha Christie and I guess that’s what went wrong. Ironically, only a year later, there was an enormous success on Broadway called An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley, which was in effect the same idea. But there was a much more philosophical bent to the story, it wasn’t just a straight murder mystery.

Shortly after my father returned from New York, he and my mother were divorced. A short time later, he married the younger sister of foreign correspondent Charles Collingwood. I barely got to know her because I was away in boarding school in Canada for several years, and by the time I returned, the marriage had also ended in divorce. I remember that I spent an interesting week with my father while he appeared at the La Jolla Playhouse with Sylvia Sidney in Edward Chodorov’s play Kind Lady. Gregory Peck, who was born in La Jolla, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer had formed the Playhouse that year, and my father’s play was the second one of the inaugural season. My mother remarried in 1949 and my father moved back to New York the following year. His last film before he left Hollywood was a Universal Western called The Kid from Texas [1950], starring Audie Murphy as Billy the Kid. I didn’t see much of my father for the next few years, although he did return a couple of times to perform in films.

The first time he came out in 1952, I met his newest wife, a wealthy widow who, under the pen name of Bayka Russell, wrote poetry and published it herself. I have to admit that she and I didn’t hit it off.

One of the two films he made after his move to New York was Plymouth Adventure [1952], in which he had a rather small role. It was a large-scale film with an all-star cast and my father “opened” the film, playing the constable who sends the Pilgrims off on the Mayflower at the very beginning. The other was Caribbean [1952], sort of a B-grade pirate movie made at Paramount by Bill Pine and Bill Thomas — “The Two Dollar Bills,” as they were called. It had a good cast, including John Payne and Arlene Dahl, with my dad playing the first mate of a notorious pirate captain (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Once again I visited him on the set and met Payne and Hardwicke, and was reintroduced to the director Edward Ludwig, who was directing my father for the fourth time and who I had originally met on the set of the John Wayne movie Wake of the Red Witch at Republic in 1948. Of course, at that time I was far more impressed with meeting Wayne; this time around, however, my interest lay with the job of the director. In fact, I had decided that a director was what I wanted to become.

Following these two films, my father returned to New York and I wouldn’t see him again for almost eight years. He did do some more TV work there, including one show that was very interesting: an episode of Omnibus in which some of the world’s most famous detective story writers attempt to solve a murder.

The irony was that, although my father was playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he was dressed like Sherlock Holmes, with the pipe and deerstalker hat!

He and Bayka had an apartment on Park Avenue, a “co-op,” and she also had a nice home in Tampa, Florida. Tampa, unfortunately, was definitely where my father should not have been living, because he suffered from emphysema, and the humidity must have caused serious problems for him. In 1959, when my second child was born — my son Dennis, who of course was named after him — my father immediately flew out to spend a week or two with us. It was the first time he’d been out here since doing those last two movies, and it was sort of a reconciliation, because for a few years we had been somewhat estranged. It was kind of a wonderful time, as we were able to rekindle our relationship. I was then working at Disney Studios as an assistant film editor, and I took him to the studio to meet an old friend of his from England, Albert Whitlock, the matte artist. I had written a screenplay called “The Guilty,” which I gave him to read, and he was very impressed with it. So impressed, in fact, that he gave it to our very successful writer-friend Herb Meadow to read, saying, “Look what the kid has done,” but with great pride, Herb later told me.

In the midsummer of 1960, I was working at Warner Brothers as an assistant editor on the movie Sunrise at Campobello. One morning my then-wife Barbara told me across the breakfast table that she’d just had “the most awful dream”: She was standing in a room . . . there were rows of chairs on either side, and an aisle that led down the center . . . and there at the other end of the room was an open casket. She couldn’t see who was in it, but somehow she knew that the head was on the left side of the casket and the feet were on the right. I went to work and, about an hour and a half later, Barbara phoned to tell me that she had just received a call notifying us that my father had passed away. My father’s wife . . . I suppose I could call her my stepmother, but we didn’t get along . . . had never called to tell me that he was in hospital. Dore Schary, the writer-producer of Sunrise at Campobello, knew my father because he [Dennis] had appeared in a number of MGM films both before and during Schary’s tenure as head of the studio. Schary told me, “Go to Florida, we’ll find someone to take over your job while you’re gone. Take as much time as you need.”

My flight to Tampa was quite a hair-raising experience, actually: From L.A. to Dallas I flew in my first jet, which was quite wonderful, and in Dallas I transferred to another airplane, a four-engine DC-4. About four minutes after it left Dallas’ Love Field, we passengers all suddenly noticed black smoke coming out of the side of one of the engines. Black smoke meant fire — and that wasn’t good! I had recently worked on a film called The Crowded Sky [1960], which was all about a midair collision [laughs], so I was full of information I didn’t need to have at that particular moment about what the pilot should be doing! I was sitting there saying, “The pilot should be pulling the lever that activates the fire extinguishers so that it will extinguish the flames and the black smoke will turn white. That’s what he should do.” But he didn’t; instead, the plane suddenly went into this very steep dive, which was the pilot’s attempt to snuff out the fire before it burned through the firewall into the fuel tank. He succeeded in putting the fire out, but by this point the passengers were in hysterics. Then, of course, that wonderful, quiet voice that pilots have came over the loudspeaker saying, “You may have noticed that there was a slight problem . . .” [Laughs] The pilot turned us around and returned to Love Field, and in the landing he blew a tire and almost ground-looped the plane.

I finally was able to book myself on another plane, and during that flight it was struck by lightning! I thought, “My father is definitely trying to tell me something!”

I finally arrived in Tampa at about 6:30 A.M. of the day of the funeral. My “stepbrother” — again, that’s only a technical term, I hardly knew the man — was kind enough to come out at that time of the morning and pick me up and take me to the hotel that they had arranged for me to stay at. (I wasn’t invited by Bayka to stay at their house, even though it was a large mansion on one of the canals in Tampa.) I slept for about an hour, and then my stepbrother picked me up and we went to the funeral home. When I walked in, it was the exact replica of my wife Barbara’s description of the scene that she had dreamt. I walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs to the open casket, and there he was, lying in state, his head on the left side and his feet on the right.

That was the last time that I saw him. After the funeral, I did have a brief opportunity to come to the house, where my “stepmother” said, “You can go in your father’s study and spend an hour in there if you’d like, and take whatever you can.” That’s why, today, I have some of his pictures — he had retained a few of his movie stills — and his scrapbook.

In spite of our sometimes fractious relationship — I go into this in more detail in my book — I loved my father, and his loss was a terrible blow. I had no brothers or sisters and had never known my grandparents on either side of the family. Years later I would learn that I did indeed have a family in England, that I could come to know and love, but at the time, apart from my wife and my children, the loss of my father carved out an enormous portion of my immediate family. I still keep the photos of him in his various film roles, and I enjoy watching his films on television. Although he seems to have become forever associated with his portrayal of Inspector Lestrade, I personally think that some of his best work was in other films such as Kitty [1945], Wake of the Red Witch and, of course, A Thousand and One Nights.

My one regret has always been that my father’s death, two years before Jack Warner promoted me to producer at Warner Studios, denied me the opportunity of ever working with him, or of knowing if my later career as a writer/director would have made him proud of me.

Dennis Hoey: A Son’s Remembrance

Film fanatic Leonard Maltin always called them Hollywood’s “Real Stars:” The great supporting players of the 1930s and ‘40s, many of whom became so well-known and well-liked that moviegoers knew what sort of character they would be playing the instant they appeared on screen. Well-known and well-liked, but not nearly as predictable, was the versatile Dennis Hoey (1893-1960), the English-born character man whose range enabled him to play everything from Nazi Germans to men of the West . . . and Middle East . . . and as far south as the Australian Outback! For many film fans, his claim to fame was playing Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade, forever two long steps behind “Mr. ‘Olmes” (Basil Rathbone) in Universal’s enduring Sherlock Holmes series.

Ann Rutherford: Happy Survivor

Whistling in Brooklyn was my first screen acquaintance with Ann Rutherford. It was at a kiddie matinee, the year was 1945, and I was seven years old. She played Carol, the fiancee of “The Fox,” a comical radio detective played by Red Skelton. To my young eyes she was gorgeous, and in the films finale, she was also a gutsy heroine, joining in battle with the gang of criminals.