Douglass Montgomery — I’m Sure He’s Nuts... and I Envy Him (1934) 🇺🇸
Douglass Montgomery, who scored a hit in "Eight Girls in a Boat" and is now filming "Little Man, What Now?" has an infinite capacity for living — a talent that all Hollywood envies.
The late Robert Ames, himself a Thespian of some note, once declared that all actors are crazy. That may be a little exaggerated, but believe you me in my time I've known some funny ones. These have ranged from downright bugs to simply vague, from riotous to all but unconscious.
There is one, however, whose odd actions stem from that delightful indifference to results which the late Lilyan Tashman, using it as a term of admiration, called "mad." He is that blond fellow (real name, Robert Montgomery!) whom you once knew as Kent Douglass, and who recently has returned to you under the moniker he made so well-known on the stage, Douglass Montgomery. He is now appearing in Universal's Little Man, What Now? with Margaret Sullavan.
Like most of Doug's friends, I am sure he is a little nuts. And like the rest of them, I am not sure that I am not a bit envious of him. For if there is anyone screwy or sane who has a better time than does he in this erstwhile vale of tears, I have yet to meet him, her, or it. He has, without question, a mighty lot of what editorial writers call a Capacity for Living.
I have seen him in all the situations which ordinarily distress the rest of us: ill, in love, contract trouble, financial pinches, jail and bum parties. And in all of them his never failing "madness," his screwy reactions, have turned the menace into a gag.
Few knew, for instance, that he worked all through those storm scenes of "A House Divided" — his last film before his recent return to pictures — with a sprained ankle and incipient pneumonia. Rather than hold up the picture, however, he used his disabilities as a good excuse to stay pleasantly and necessarily mellow all through the closing scenes of the production. And in them he did his best work.
One night, bored with a party, we started for Agua Caliente. It was raining fiercely and near Long Beach the car slipped off the highway. We were mired to the hubcaps. Dressed in a white suit, Doug got out in the road and waved his arms until a truck stopped.
"What's a idea?" the driver demanded angrily. "What's a matter with ya, anyway?"
"Just wanted your autograph," Doug said blithely, "but I changed my mind. Drive on, you humorless mug."
Charlie Bayly, the playwright, lives in Long Beach. At last we reached his home, soaked. We all were cold and miserable and glum, so Doug, between sneezes from a terrific cold, set out to lift our spirits. He borrowed a mandarin robe, painted himself up with picture-frame gilt, and gave us imitations of Mei Lang Fang until the rain stopped. That is how the legend started that he gilds his toenails.
Another night we were driving through the late streets in that always recognizable ancient roadster of his, when a motor cop sirened us over to the curb. The officer's face was alight with glee. "I been looking for you for a long time," he told Doug happily. "Remember me arresting you a year ago?"
"Vaguely," Doug said. "So what?"
The copper was looking in the side pockets for liquor, and presently he pulled out the ticket he had written the year before! "So!" he yelped. "This is the attention you pay to 'em, is it? This is the way you show up to pay your fines, is it?"
Doug slowly examined the tab. "Fred H. Schmaltz," he read. "What a handle! Officer Schmaltz, have you ever tried numerology?"
It was six o'clock in the morning before I could get him out of the tank.
He appeared in the room where the rescue party waited, his face glum. Knowing he had an important test that morning, I told him we soon would have him sprung, He shrugged. "That's all right. I kind of like it here. I'm seeing life. The only thing is," he hesitated, "they won't let me sing in there."
Well, most writers have a more or less secret yen to paint, and I know a sculptor who fancies himself as an adagio dancer. But Doug's passion for singing is truly an awful thing. Despite the stoutest opposition he will render — and that's the proper word — musical compositions with no warning. And these, oddly enough, are always the numbers of his extreme youth.
Last year, during his engagement as guest star of the Pasadena Community Playhouse many were puzzled why he chose Green Grow the Lilacs as a vehicle. The reason is not far to seek. The play contains the cowboy songs he dotes on.
The summer appearances at the Pasadena theatre, where he appears without pay, are out of gratitude for the fact that here he received his dramatic training. Graduating from high school, he chose this famous school of the theatre in place of college and under the tutelage of Gilmore Brown played in everything from Shakespeare to (hooray!) musical comedy.
Presently, still in his 'teens, he was appearing in Los Angeles as the son of Sarah Padden in Hell Bent For Heaven, of Bert Lytell in Silence, and of Lionel Barrymore in The Copperhead. He then set the whole town talking with swell performances in Kempy and Desire Under the Elms — and deserted it in favor of New York.
Doug's success in New York should be ample refutation for the ancient contention that genius has a difficult time being recognized in America. True enough, there were few boys ever willing to give more to their work than was he.
"I was willing to give everything to get ahead," he once admitted to me. "I thought that if I could get to be a leading juvenile on Broadway it would be everything that I wanted from life — that it would be food for me, love and play... everything."
Making his New York debut in God Loves Us, he started the list of plays which in four years brought him to the enviable position of having playwrights bring their stuff to him for appraisal. His work in Daisies Won't Tell, with Pauline Lord, was of such quality as to win him the role of the boy in Crime. In this piece also appeared Chester Morris, James Rennie, Kay Johnson, Jack La Rue, Kay Francis and Sylvia Sidney — all of whom subsequently have scored in pictures.
This play established both Doug and Sylvia, and after Women Go on Forever and The Garden of Eden, Max Marcin and Sam Shipman wrote a show, Kidnaper, expressly for him. Then he capped his ambition by being taken into the Theatre Guild as a featured player.
With the Guild, Doug was to have his greatest success. The role which gave him the most satisfaction was in Volpone, when he took over the part introduced by Alfred Lunt and played it for an entire season. Then Faust and Caprice, with Lunt and Lynne Fontanne. In this latter he was an outstanding hit in New York and London, as well as on tour for two seasons. Next he did Sam Behrman's Meteor (Behrman once told me that he never went to a fashionable party in London at which he did not find Doug conspicuously in attendance), and Many a Slip, in which he again appeared opposite Sylvia Sidney — which gives an idea of his consistent good fortune!
Then, three years ago, with the closing of an engagement of summer stock in Baltimore, he decided to vacation in the old home town. He hadn't been West for four years — not since he had sallied forth to battle the theatrical dragons. So he appeared at Edgecliff, to rest, to swim, to read under its magnificent old trees, and hike about in the surrounding hills. To get acquainted with the earth again — the urge which every Californian periodically feels.
Too, he wanted to test a theory which slowly had come to him when the Theatre Guild was making its celebrated tours; that the movies are the American theatre of today. All his short life had been packed as tightly as possible with activity pertaining to the footlighted stage. Yet — and it is to be remembered that in the cities which so famous an organization as the Guild plays, it allegedly is the attraction — whenever he was outside New York proper he was faced by the irrefutable evidence of hundreds of movie theatres for every legitimate house.
"I began to wonder if perhaps I wasn't affiliated with a dying profession. The crowds all were going to the pictures, and the patronage of the crowd shows the state of an enterprise's condition. I thought 'Am I not too young to be with anything which seems to have had its best day? Shouldn't I, as a young actor, be with the most active theatrical affairs of the period?'
"And thinking so, I would look more and more to those huge, glittering signs of the picture palaces, those great gatherings of people — all that magnificence which goes to make the opportunity of the motion picture actor the greatest the world has ever known."
But the test ended, for him, in disappointment. He made several pictures, and though he was well received, concluded that pictures were not for him. He went back to the stage, and there he stayed until given the chance to appear opposite his old friend Katharine Hepburn in Little Women. This was an inspiring engagement, in that he considers that she has "the greatest natural talent in the business today" — and he next took the part of the young student in Eight Girls in a Boat, which further clinched Hollywood's opinion of the sincerity and fine articulation of his work. He was an inevitable choice, then, for the role opposite Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now?
"Naturally, I'm enthused," he says. "Who wouldn't be, getting such parts? And if I continue to get them, I'll continue to stay here, and gladly. It seems that I may have the chance to do this, what with pictures growing up as amazingly as they have been doing. If not, well, I suppose I'll be off to the races again!"
And there, frankly stated, is the credo of one of the most eccentric, talented — and honest — young men in filmdom. Will Hollywood be able to hold him? We shall see — we shall see.
Photo by: Roman Freulich (1898–1974)
Photo by: Wide World
Mrs. John D. Spreckels, III, is the latest prominent socialite to enter pictures. Her husband, who recently came into an inheritance of more than $20,000,000, is the son of the late John D. Spreckels.
Collection: Hollywood Magazine, June 1934