Mitchell: Three weeks ago I took a bullet out of a man who was shot by a “gentleman.” The bullet was in his back!
Carradine’s Hatfield comes to admire Mitchell’s Boone after the “drunken swine” (as Carradine calls him) sobers up to deliver Lucy’s baby. Both put up a hell of a fight in the great chase scene, as the Indians pursue the stagecoach and Carradine suffers a fatal bullet. “If you see Judge Greenfield,” says the dying, fallen-from-grace gambler to Doc Boone and Lucy, “tell him his son...” — and John Carradine dies with his head on Thomas Mitchell’s chest.
Although a Ford regular, Carradine’s relationship with the tyrannical director was hardly a smooth one. As Nunnally Johnson (scripter of The Prisoner of Shark Island and Jesse James) recalled, “Carradine had an ego which was about three times John Ford’s.” Ford would scream and curse at Carradine, trying his vicious best to break him, but the actor stayed maddeningly calm in the face of the storm.
“You’re all right, Jack,” Carradine would smile, giving Ford a pat on the shoulder and walking away. Ford would sputter in profane frustration.
A peek at the salary list for Stagecoach (shot on a budget of $546,200) is revealing in its disparity between the money paid both the stars and the character players: Claire Trevor, $15,000 vs. John Wayne’s $3,700; Thomas Mitchell, $12,000 vs. John Carradine’s $3,666.
Thomas Mitchell, who had married second wife Rachel Hartzell the previous year, had fancy film credits in 1939, appearing in three of the ten movies nominated for that year’s Best Picture Oscar. In addition to nominated film Stagecoach, he appeared in winning movie Gone With the Wind and nominated Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
In Gone With the Wind, Mitchell played Gerald O’Hara, Scarlett’s white-haired Irish immigrant father, a prosperous pre-Civil War plantation owner who goes mad during the film’s Antebellum horrors. In addition to its Best Picture award, the film won nine other Academy Awards including Best Director (Victor Fleming), Best Screenplay (Sidney Howard), Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel) and grossed nearly 192 million dollars. Thomas Mitchell’s Gerald O’Hara memorably delivered the pivotal line “Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts,” setting the stage for his daughter’s obsession with Tara throughout the rest of the film. His later insanity is poignantly portrayed by Mitchell in the scene with Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett where he refuses to acknowledge his wife’s death. He shows his daughter the worthless Confederate bonds — all that’s left of her inheritance.
Scarlett: What are we going to do with no money and nothing to eat?
O’Hara: We must ask your mother. That’s it. We must ask Mrs. O’Hara.
John Carradine had a top year in 1939. He found one of his most infamous roles in Jesse James, 20th Century-Fox’s Technicolor western epic, as Bob Ford — the cowardly traitor who, clutching his pistol in his trembling hands, climactically shoots Jesse (Tyrone Power) in the back.
Fox shot much of Jesse James on location in Pineville, Missouri. Power flew there with director Henry King in King’s private plane, but a train transported the rest of the cast — Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly, Randolph Scott, Henry Hull, Brian Donlevy, Carradine, et al. — to the Ozarks. Five thousand cheering, gawking folk awaited the train, and most of the company ran through the crowd to the safety of the studio cars.
Not John Carradine.
Looking like Lucifer in the mustache and goatee he’d grown for Bob Ford, perched on a site above the crowd, Carradine posed dramatically and proclaimed, “I am here for a sole purpose. To kill Jesse James!” He then launched into Shakespeare — causing many of the Ozark natives to believe he was reciting a foreign language — and braved his way into the mob to sign autographs.
Jesse James was a box office smash and passionate moviegoers never forgave Carradine for his perfidy. When the film opened in Joplin, Missouri, a man stood in the audience and shot Carradine on the screen. As the actor recalled,Another time I was out in front of a theatre where Jesse James was showing. A little kid said, “Did you shoot Jesse?” and I said, “Yes” and the son-of-a-bitch kicked me in the shin!
John Carradine’s 1939 finale was Drums Along the Mohawk, John Ford’s first Technicolor movie based on the Walter D. Edmonds historical bestseller. Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda starred, and Carradine played the Tory villain, looking like a vampire pirate in his cape, eye patch and three-cornered hat. Once again, 20th Century-Fox sent the company on location, this time to Cedar Breaks National Monument, 11,000 feet up in the mountains of Utah. Every night there was a bonfire, and the actors would perform songs and skits. Carradine, naturally, recited Shakespeare, and the sight of him delivering the classics in firelight was a spectacle.
Anthony Quinn labored at Paramount in B-fare such as the 57-minute King of Chinatown . The studio’s epic of ’39 was Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific, starring Barbara Stawyck and Joel McCrea. The villain was a spit-curled Brian Donlevy, who heads west in a train filled with gamblers and whores; Anthony Quinn was one of the gamblers. “I found it embarrassing,” said Quinn of his small role in his father-in-law’s movie. A consolation for Quinn was his and Katherine’s baby son, Christopher, whom they both loved dearly.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur credits for 1939 included RKO’s Gunga Din, a great adventure saga, and Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights, one of its greatest romances. Hecht and MacArthur humanized Brontë’s doltish, selfish lovers Cathy (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) so the story was actually tolerable and under William Wyler’s direction, ultimately moving. As always, Hecht picked up fast cash doctoring scripts and making suggestions to producers and directors — including John Ford on Stagecoach. Ford said it was Hecht’s idea to accent that Claire Trevor was playing a prostitute, and John Wayne an outlaw. The outcast quality was as much a texture of the rousing film as the stunning Monument Valley scenery.
He also spent two feverish weeks working with his old pal David Selznick (“Genghis Selznick,” he called him) on the script for Gone With the Wind. Selznick wanted him to stay on for GWTW, and gave Hecht a firsthand look at the hysteria surrounding the epic one Sunday as Selznick acted out the saga for him, playing Scarlett and her father, while director Victor Fleming acted out Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes. Hecht skipped town and headed home to Nyack. Hecht received no onscreen credit for his work, and the 1939 Best Screenplay Oscar went to Sidney Howard, who’d written the original GWTW script and died in a tractor accident in ’39. Howard’s posthumous win defeated, among others, the screenplay of Hecht and MacArthur for Wuthering Heights.
The Bundy Drive Boys almost lost a member in late 1939. Gene Fowler and director Leo McCarey were driving back to Hollywood from Big Bear Lake, McCarey driving 95 miles an hour and singing away, when an elderly driver pulled out into the highway from an orange-grove trail. As Fowler wrote in Minutes of the Last Meeting: I afterward learned that McCarey was hurled one hundred and twenty-six feet — by police measurement — into the freshly irrigated orange trees. The car, with me folded inside it, turned over three times. I stayed pinned upside down for a half an hour, my clothes and body drenched with raw gasoline. I suffered two split vertebrae, three cracked ribs, a skull injury, and wrenched knees. Other wise I was as good as new.
An ambulance arrived in the darkness to take the unconscious McCarey to the nearest hospital at Covina. The ambulance doctor had been unable to find my pulse and understandably had sent for a mortician.
I briefly came to in a hearse. “Is anyone here?” I called out.
Both men recovered, with Fowler offering his agent 10% of his injuries. As he wrote 14 years later, “... even now, when I get out of bed, I sound like a castanet solo.”
Meanwhile, John Decker had an idea for a movie. As he later explained:I recall writing a movie scenario with a professional author [probably Gene Fowler] about a painter who forged Old Masters, foisted thirty millio
n dollars’ worth of them on an unsuspecting public, and when his conscience bothered him, decided to confess. But the painter wasn’t permitted to confess. The police told him to forget about it. Because if the public ever learned about the wholesale forgeries, their confidence in art would forever be destroyed! Now that was just the idea of the script. The Hays office frowned on it — because in our story, the criminal was not brought to justice.
Word leaked out. And our idea appeared in the newspapers. One major studio liked our idea, copied it from the newspaper, and added a final twist more suitable to the screen. But the studio had no knowledge about copying Old Masters. So they sent one of their representatives to see me, with the audacity to ask me if I’d be willing to give them free technical advice on — the picture his studio had stolen from me! That’s Hollywood!
As Decker remembered, he bellowed. “Go to Hell!” Yet his anger possibly fueled John Decker’s fraud that still echoes in the sacrosanct halls of Harvard University’s Fogg Museum.
A firsthand primary source account of the caper came from the late Will Fowler, in a videotaped interview Bill Nelson conducted in 1999. Nelson mentioned the rumors that Decker’s forgeries still hang in major museums.
“What the hell are you telling me for?” laughed Fowler cheerfully. “I watched him paint a Rembrandt!”
The Christ Head…. Thomas Mitchell wanted a Christ Head, and Decker said, “Well, you know, I think I know where I can put my hands on one.” The L.A. Art Museum was just the worst museum in the entire world, and the curator there was named Valentini — he was a Dutchman, I think, whatever. So Decker told Tommy Mitchell, “I can get one for you for $2,000.”
This is back in 1940, almost 60 years ago, and the [San Fernando] Valley wasn’t really developed then. We came out in the Valley, where there were antique houses, and they put their antiques on Ventura Boulevard — it only had one lane west of Sepulveda. We got one drawer out of an old dresser, the purpose being that we wanted the wood. So Decker said, “What size do you think we should do it?” — they measured art in millimeters. And my claim in history was that I said, “How about an 8 x 10?” — Like a movie star photograph! And this Christ Head is measured in inches.
So Decker painted it, and then he aged it and then he took it and cracked the back. Then he gave it to Valentini, who was paid $600, and Valentini put it through customs in Amsterdam to give it a little history of its own. And then in Amsterdam they bent it back with criss-crossed pieces of wood, and each time it went through customs it got authenticated. Well… he sold it to Tommy Mitchell for $2,000 — and I watched Decker paint it, for Christ’s sake!
There are, as will be noted, a few flaws in Fowler’s account. The picture was painted in 1939 when “Valentini” (who was in fact Dr. W.R. Valentiner) was director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (he joined the L.A. Museum of Art in 1945). In fact, Valentiner had impeccable credits, but with one very sore Achilles heel. According to Alex Beam’s feature “A Cloud Hangs over Rembrandt at the Fogg” in the Boston Globe (October 14, 2004, which included a color image of the painting), Valentiner had a hair trigger for authenticating Rembrandts — 700 of them in fact, about half of which turned out to be fakes. It’s true that Valentiner was a crony of Decker’s — indeed, after Decker’s death, he wrote to Forest Lawn, campaigning to have Decker buried in the Court of Immortals (and receiving a resounding “No!”). Yet his validation of the Rembrandt was probably sincere, and Decker, aware of the man’s overboard enthusiasm in validating Rembrandts, likely figured he was just the man he needed to make his forgery bear fruit.
Decker’s Rembrandt forgery that still hangs in Harvard’s Fogg Museum
At any rate, by June of 1939, Bust of Christ had arrived in New York City. According to Leslee Mayo, an expert on Decker forgeries, Thomas Mitchell had acquired a photo of the painting and assurances dated June 20, 1939 by Valentiner that it was a true Rembrandt. Valentiner’s august authentication appeared in The Art Digest of March 15, 1940, under the headline REFUGEE REMBRANDT BOUGHT BY AN AMERICAN:The painting reproduced in this photo is, in my opinion, a remarkably expressive, original work by Rembrandt. It was painted in connection with the Christ of the Supper at Emmaus in the Louvre, about 1648, similar in type to the head of Christ in the Detroit Museum, and in the John G. Johnson Collection. These different representations of Christ belong to the most characteristic studies of Rembrandt at a period when he was especially interested in depicting the Passion of Christ. The painting is in a fine stage of preservation.
“A fine stage of preservation” indeed — considering the painting was very possibly not even a year old! The news spread and the legend grew. As The Art Digest noted, the painting was now in Thomas Mitchell’s collection, and reported on its provenance:When the German Army last fall came crashing into Poland, an unnamed Polish prince, fleeing before the Blitzkrieg, gathered up some prized possessions among which was an unexhibited panel by Rembrandt that had long belonged in the noble’s family. The prince brought his panel to New York and thence to the E. & A. Silberman Galleries.…
Again, this is a howler — as noted, the painting was already in New York in June of ’39, three months before the Blitzkrieg. Time magazine picked up on the story, with Mitchell claiming he’d paid the Silberman Galleries $45,000 for the Bust of Christ. (Was the $2,000 Mitchell paid Decker a finder’s fee? Was Mitchell’s $45,000 figure and name-dropping of the Silberman Galleries a creation of the actor to cover up his “underground” acquisition of a Rembrandt?)
Mitchell loaned his Rembrandt to Phyllis Decker for a showing after Decker’s 1947 death, and the press played up its presence. After the showing, the painting went home to its proud owner, and Will Fowler told Bill Nelson:Years after Tommy died [in 1962], I went over to visit his widow. I still remember the address, 1013 North Roxbury Drive, just north of Sunset. She said, “Oh, you’ve come to see the Rembrandt!” I said, “Oh, yeah, sure!” And she had it above their huge fireplace — a big filigree with the Christ Head, and a light on it. I think the family eventually sold it for $180,000.
If so, the Mitchell family made a killing. Leslee Mayo learned that Seymour Silve, Fogg Museum director, saw Bust of Christ in the Paul Kantor Gallery in Beverly Hills in 1964 and had the painting authenticated by experts on the East coast and in Europe. A well-to-do donor named William A. Coolidge bought the painting for $35,000 (far less than Fowler claimed the Mitchell family received for it) and donated it as a gift to the Fogg Museum.
And what, after all these years, does the Fogg Museum officially have to say about all this?
In Alex Beam’s Boston Globe 2004 story, Ivan Gaskell, curator at the Fogg, admits that the fairy tale of the Polish Prince, in his own words, “stinks.” Nevertheless, based on a 1977 dendrochronological test (which Gaskell says is similar to “fingerprinting”), the Fogg dates the wood to Rembrandt’s era and in fact claims it’s the same wood Rembrandt used for Portrait of a Young Jew, which hangs in a Berlin museum. While Gaskell comes short of insisting the painting is by Rembrandt (in 1996, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt, an indication of how many fakes are out there), he did tell Beam:There is nothing to suggest that this is anything other than a 17th-century painting on a 17th-century panel. This is my field of scholarly specialization. One must be open to the possibility that it’s a forgery, but it’s highly unlikely.
Who to believe? The Decker forgery saga surely has credibility, based on these points, as Leslee Mayo has expertly gathered:• Will Fowler’s account, although incorrect in minor ways, described the painting accurately, including its size, crack, and criss-cross beams, matching the painting’s description in the Fogg’s records.
• There is no record of this Bust of Christ having ever existed before it appeared in New York in 1939.
• The “Polish Prince” story is surely nonsense and no other provenance has ever been established.
• Dendrochronology checks the rings of trees, but Decker reportedly
painted Bust of Christ on a flat wood that, as Ms. Mayo notes, “presumably was cut perpendicular to the rings.”
• W.R. Valentiner had a weakness for validating fake Rembrandts and was a buddy of John Decker.
• Will Fowler was telling this story for years before his death, and long before the Fogg Museum officially responded to it.
Decker’s signatures of all the painters he forged
• The posthumous tribute to John Decker at his studio had the Bust of Christ on the cover.
• Decker’s scrapbook has a professionally taken photograph of the Bust of Christ.
• John Decker was a genius at aping the works of the Old Masters.
There’s another key point that Leslee Mayo had not included: John Decker was, in Elaine Barrie Barrymore’s words, “a bastard.”
One of the real mysteries here is … why? Indeed, why did Decker play this fascinating but cruel prank on a man who was his friend? Thomas Mitchell loyally purchased Decker’s work when the artist was in desperate straits, paid him handsomely to paint the fireplace tiles at his Oregon ranch, ignored his in-his-cups insults (Decker once called him, to his face, “a fat Borgian”) and was unfailingly kind and generous to Decker — and after Decker’s death, to his widow and his daughter, even taking in a destitute Phyllis for a time years later after a disastrous marriage.
Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys Page 17
