Eddie Bracken’s 5-Year Plan (1946) 🇺🇸
Eddie Bracken's a born planner. His first outraged yelp at the doctor's brisk smack on his tender rearend was merely an expression of his initial plan. He was telling the world he'd never be buffeted by life again.
There's a lot of difference between a dreamer and a planner. The dreamer's air-castle rests on a cloud and disappears with the first cold wind. The vision of the planner's finished edifice is clear in his mind as he sweats with pick and shovel at the rock foundation.
All Eddie's plans work; they're laid out that way, so why shouldn't they? But it's when he tells quite seriously of his fiveyear plan about having his children that mouths fall open and eyes pop.
"Oh, yes," he says — and he's not kidding, "Connie and I decided to have five children, one right after the other. We've had three so far on schedule, so there are just two to go. Simple arithmetic."
There's Judith Ann (her name was picked out by Connie and Eddie even before they were married) who's three-and-a-half. Next came Caroline Jean, a year and five weeks, and Michael Edward, their first boy, born November 19, 1945.
The planned names for the next two, still only thoughts for the future, are Barbara Jean and David Vincent. And those amazing Brackens wouldn't care a bit if one of these turned out to be twins or there were an unplanned sixth arrival after the quota was filled.
But, blithe and assured as all this seems at first glance, tragedy almost wrecked it. A pitifully short time after Eddie and Connie were married, they were in an automobile smash-up. Connie was so badly hurt she wasn't expected to live.
A shadow of his agony in those dark hours crossed Eddie's face as he told me about it. "When the doctor gave up hope, he said for me to go in and tell her she was going to die. But when I was there beside her I couldn't do it. All that had happened to me in the accident was a cut on my ear — just a scratch — and she was worrying about that!"
When Eddie failed in something so impossible for him to do, the superintendent of the hospital tried to tell Connie how had things were for her, but she didn't even hear him. She simply wouldn't accept what he was trying to tell her. The cut on Eddie's ear was still more important than her chance for life.
"Then, like a miracle, in just a few days she began to improve," Eddie went on, a subtle movement of his hands showing more than words the hope he had felt — and, quickly, another despair. "When they saw she wasn't going to die, they dared break the news to her that she might never walk again. She had a broken pelvis and injuries to her back. But I don't think Connie even heard that. All she worried about was whether she'd ever be able to have children."
The fulfillment of the beautiful, rosy Five-Year Plan looked impossible — to everyone but Connie. She didn't even notice the definite verdict that she might — and only by the most optimistic diagnosis — perhaps walk with the labored steps of a cripple in two years.
Connie's magnificent spirit that had denied the presence of Death at her very side, took her hand and lead her away from an almost certain Fate. She walked in three months after the accident.
When Judith Ann announced her arrival after the usual interval, Connie calmly mentioned to Eddie that this was it. Eddie leaped to the door to bring the car around — good Heavens, what if he didn't get her to the hospital in time!
"'No, no — there's no hurry.' says Connie." Eddie mopped his brow, remembering his panic. "So she wanders around the house for more than an hour. She packs one thing in her bag, then putters around looking tor something else. She takes a bath. She does her hair. She fixes her face. I am going crazy!"
Finally they started, Eddie crowding the speed limit and ready with his story if the police should stop him. "Wait a minute." His serene wife gestured toward a house they were approaching. "Stop there. I want to see Ginny — something I forgot."
"And then," groaned Eddie, "she sits talking to Ginny for three hours. I am on the edge of my chair. I am pacing the floor. The perspiration is streaming down my face. I am nuts!"
But it seems Connie was right. They got to the hospital in plenty of time. Judith Ann took forty-eight hours to arrive.
Caroline Jean came along on schedule and is called Carol for short. Of course, with Eddie an old, experienced father by this time and Connie never upset by anything anyway, her arrival was simple and uncomplicated.
"I thought I didn't care which the third baby would be, boy or girl," Eddie said, "and it wasn't until the nurse came out of the delivery-room and said, 'It's a boy!' that I realized how much I'd wanted a son. That feeling that came over me — that pride — it just surged up! I can't describe it."
When the Five-Year Plan first began to work out, Connie and Eddie bought an old, roomy house on five and a half acres of ground. Since then, they've been remodeling it to fit the children and in describing the original house Eddie termed it "bachelor" Spanish, but I think he was just being polite. That's not really what he meant at all.
"The house is Colonial now," he explained. "We've taken off the old gingerbread and extended it at the sides. There's a room for each of the children and a big playroom over the garage for all of them. We're still enlarging and rebuilding and when we get through we'll have' about fifteen rooms. The only thing is, we forgot the nurses and haven't any place to put them. We're trying to figure that out, because there's always one nurse all the time, but right now there are two on account of the new baby."
The Bracken home — through planning — has become one of the show-places of a Los Angeles suburb. The high, old-fashioned hedge in front has been taken out and people stop their cars to study the lines of the house and the beauty of the planting. Eddie and Connie have lately spent $1,000 on the grounds, putting in a new lawn, removing old bushes, laying out a zig-zag split-rail fence with groups of bright flowers in the zigs and zags.
The children have everything on that five and a half acres — a pony, chickens, ducks, horses, a cow. Back of the house are vegetable gardens and orchards of citrus trees, peaches, pears, limes.
Connie, whom absolutely nothing disturbs, runs her home with clock-like precision. "There's never any confusion," Eddie said proudly. "The children are on strict schedule — there's a time to eat, a time to sleep, a time to play. They're all well and strong — outdoors practically all day— and Judith Ann has started to nursery school already. She's beginning to watch my table manners pretty carefully!"
Eddie is a believer in the modern progressive school and, while he'll make plans for himself until the cows come home, won't make any for his children. He'll give them every assistance and advantage but — "Let them plan their own lives," he says sensibly. "I don't believe it's right for parents to point to a child and say, 'You'll be a doctor or a pianist or a lawyer or a dancer' and then try to force the child into a pattern he may not like or be fitted for at all."
Just then the phone rang in Eddie's dressing-room at Paramount where I was talking with him. And who should it be but Connie. And what did Connie want? She wanted Eddie to go to the races at Santa Anita that afternoon. That's right — the mother of a five-week-old- baby had everything at home so well organized that she was off to the races!
And of all the cute and mushy conversations your correspondent tried to overhear, this between a beau and his best girl was the cutest. But, although I couldn't hear it, I could see it; Eddie leaned on his elbow and murmured! You'd think he hadn't talked to the girl for a Month. He skidded across the table on his stomach and giggled. He stood up straight and stared at the ceiling in rapture. That Connie must have something!
Besides the Five-Year Plan about the children that's working out so satisfactorily, Eddie has so many other plans that they'd make your head swim. For instance, his plan to become a producer of his own pictures may very possibly come true this year. After that, he wants to become a director. He wants to establish a book publishing house on the Coast. The field's wide open, as our astute friend has found out, so why shouldn't it, too, be a success? And, now that travel is unrestricted, he wants to finance a travel agency, with profitable tie-ups with hotels, railroads, air lines and bus companies and possibly the Chambers of Commerce of other States.
Some years ago, when Eddie's stage career began to solidify and when the picture offers began to come in, he said to himself, "I'll spend just so many years on the stage, just so many years as an actor in pictures, and just so many years in radio. No more. Then I'll be a producer. After that I'll be a director." See?
Eddie's family never has known how he happened to become an actor. His father is a solid businessman, a salesman of stove appliances, and one brother's a lawyer and the other an accountant. Perhaps it's because he was born within easy sight of Paramount's Eastern Studio in Astoria, Long Island. Anyway, Eddie won a Cute Baby contest.
Besides being. cute, he had a clear soprano voice and sang mother songs on the Knights of Columbus circuit at the age of five. At nine he was so good he got a job with the American Sound Studios in New York City as a Kiddie Trouper, which was a sort of East Coast "Our Gang" comedy group. When adolescence caught up with him, he enrolled in the Professional Children's School for Actors. At thirteen, he got his first chance at Broadway as understudy to Junior Durkin in The Lottery. Then came bits in other shows.
But Hollywood lured him so he took off one fine day with $4.20 his mother had given him to have his picture put in the Astoria Daily. Star. The hitchhike across the Continent was a bitter experience for the sixteen-year-old boy and his first night in Hollywood, broke, tired and hungry, was spent under a tree at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. The next day. though, he found his pal of Broadway days. Junior Durkin, then making pictures in Hollywood. Junior and his sisters invited Eddie to live with them while he looked for the break that was surely his.
But there wasn't any break. He tried for two and a half months without one glimmer of hope. He couldn't even get in the front gate of Paramount, where he's a star now. The bus fare his family wired when they finally found him looked like manna from Heaven to Eddie, so he took it and most sensibly went home.
His luck changed, though, the day he arrived in New York. He got a small part in "The Lady Refuses" with the late Lou Tellegen. After that came bits in "Life's Too Short," So Proudly We Hail and "Iron Men." Producer George Abbott, who'd turned him down once on an audition, now saw his value and Eddie became one of the mainstays of Abbott productions. He was called for the lead in "What a Life," but a switch in casting gave that role to Ezra Stone and a subordinate part to Eddie.
It worked out all right, though, because when Abbott sent out a road company, it was Eddie who played the Stone part and a certain young Miss Constance Nickerson who was cast as his leading lady. And that certain Miss Nickerson is the same Connie who's now Mrs. Eddie Bracken.
Of the six movie offers that came to him, Eddie chose Paramount's as the best. He brought his creation of Dizzy to the screen as foil to Jackie Cooper's Henry Aldrick. In the past two years he's had the amazing record of having starred in nine pictures: "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "Rainbow Island," "Hail The Conquering Hero," "Out of This World," Bring on the Girls and "Ladies' Man" — and the all-star Star Spangled Rhythm and "Duffy's Tavern."
However, the radio show that went along concurrently with the latter part of these two years didn't work out as well with Eddie's ideas of Perfect Planning. But let him tell it:
"When I signed the usual thirteen-week contract with the sponsors, I emphasized that I wanted thirteen completed, scripts before the show even went on the air," Eddie explained. "The advertising agency said, 'Oh, yes, yes — sure, sure' — and handed me three. Then they stalled around and finally hired a writer who took nine days to complete a script. With shows seven days apart you can figure out that it's not going to be very long before you're in a jam!"
Eddie worried himself practically into a state of collapse. He was, of course, starring in his own pictures all this while and in the midst of that responsibility, fretted and fumed and battled to get his air show written and rehearsed on the deadline. Preston Sturges, Eddie's brilliant director and author of "Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "Hail the Conquering Hero," helped. Bill Demarest, his foil both in pictures and on the air, helped.
But it was too much. Eddie took the only possible course: he simply cancelled the show. He's had many other radio offers since, including two particularly good ones. But he has refused them because there's not enough time to prepare them However, he tells me a show will go on in September, fully mapped out, with thirteen completed scripts before he ever set foot in the broadcasting studio.
So there you see what planning a life can do. It's done pretty well for Eddie Bracken, who spent his first night in Hollywood under a tree.
Eddie, star of "Ladies' Men," seems to be trying to belie the title as he struggles from Cass Daley's clutches. It's just good, clean fun on Paramount set.
Irrepressible Eddie cuts up a few hot touches with dancer Johnny Coy between scenes of "Ladies' Man," in which they appear with Virginia Welles, Cass Daley, Spike Jones' band.
Virginia Welles — doesn't she resemble Joan Fontaine? — competes with studio makeup man Don Donaldson trying to pretty up Eddie.
Below, melodious (?) moment as Bracken joins Spike Jones and company.
Carole Landis autographs a picture for one of her charming little fans, Agnes Reilly, whose adoration of the "Scandal in Paris" star lights up her whole face.
Collection: Screenland Magazine, July 1946