Walter Abel — Abel Raises Cain (1936) 🇺🇸
Walter Charles Abel, square-shouldered, square-shooting district attorney in Metro's "Fury," hung around Hollywood, off and on, for years before the movie moguls discovered what a good actor he was. Is, pardon!
You will see him, currently, in Warner Brothers' "Green Light," epic of spotted fever fighting in "Montana," story by retired Reverend Lloyd C. ("Magnificent Obsession") Douglas. Abel's home studio is RKO-Radio.
As a Broadway stage actor of a certain amount of prestige — he had done Shaw, Shakespeare, O'Neil, some of the Russians, with a dash of Al Woods and one of the numerous episodes of the Potash and Perlmutter saga — Abel dashed out to have a try at Hollywood, the moment the rumor that the infant industry was at last talking had been verified.
He sat around the town for weeks; landed the part of the carpenter in the Fox-Ferenc Molnar Liliom prize floppo with Charles Farrell and Rose Hobart; sat around a little longer, then returned to deah old Broadway, determined that Hollywood and the lisping screen had nothing to offer him.
Well, you know how Fate is. A studio scout got a good look at Abel in a Broadway show, and tested him for Paramount, with the result that Abel hit the Hollywood trail for the second time. On this stint he sat around for six months without again appearing before the camera, and at the end of that endurance contest, he hopped a "rattler" and beat it back to old New Yawk. "I thought I was 'washed-up' with films for good that time," said Abel, across his St. Moritz plate at Warners' "Green Room Cafe," "but it's funny how things work out. The fall and winter following my 1933 Hollywood excursion and the season before I appeared in George Kaufman's stage show Merrily We Roll Along, I rehearsed five shows on Broadway, got fourteen weeks pay out of the entire lot, and when spring came I was pretty flat.
"My agent worked like the dickens trying to get me a film job, at my suggestion, because I was desperate, knowing that the theatrical season wouldn't pick up until late summer and my family and I had to live during the hot season. There wasn't a nibble from the Coast, although my previous contract had been secured because of my work in a successful Broadway stage show.
"We dragged through the summer, and in the early fall I got the part of the artist in Merrily. The role of the playwright was done by Kenneth MacKenna. The play opened on September 28. Now get this. On September 28 Merrily opened, five, six months before I couldn't get a nibble from Hollywood; the morning of the twenty-ninth my agent was deluged with offers from the Coast movie producers. They all wanted me to make tests for them.
"It proves my point that the youngster who longs for a film career is a sucker to go to Hollywood and wait around for his 'chance,'" continued Abel raising Cain with the accepted theory for gaining picture recognition. "I'd say 'go Broadway and let Hollywood come to you.' The answer is obvious. There is usually a dearth of actors on Broadway because as soon as one clicks, even in a small way, in a good part, the Hollywood producers fight to get his name on the dotted line. It stands to reason that the ranks of Broadway actors are constantly thinning. That the minute one newly 'discovered' — is discovered by Hollywood, I mean — actor goes out to the Coast, there's a stage vacancy that must be filled.
"Instead of rushing to Hollywood, hanging around the studios, waiting for some producer, director, agent, manager, to discover him, I'd advise any young fellow, or girl, too, who wants a theatrical career, to get his acting experience in the theatre. There's something about 'far pastures looking greener' that makes the movie magnate do his film-star seeking some two or three thousand miles to the East of Hollywood."
"Of course there's more to acting than merely getting stage experience. And this almost-six-footer is the first one to tell you that, too. He believes you must have vast and varied knowledge to be able to interpret a part well. Therefore, in Abel, you see the most peripatetic university student that the acting profession knows.
Walter Charles went to school (Harvard) when he was playing in Boston... just for a few months; Yale when he was playing at New Haven; he took six subjects at Chicago University (where his uncle-in-law is instructor) when he was appearing at a Windy City theatre. One Summer he studied economics and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, and another time he enrolled in a school in Philadelphia (don't ask us which) when he was doing a stage stint there.
The sum total of this is that when a studio hands Abel a script in which he is to play a doctor, as Dr. Stafford in Green Light, he has the "feel" of the part before he masters the dialogue, because he's dabbled in medicine, or in law, or in economics, or whatever the part is.
As for the mechanics of drama, Abel went about learning those, too. He is an alumnus, as are Bill Powell and other Hollywood scintillators, of the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Like Bill, who lived on crackers, apricots, followed by water, when he attended the Academy, Abel lived, in his own words, on "oatmeal for breakfast, soup for lunch, hope for dinner." But he learned all the histrionic calesthenics, diaphragm breathing, voice placement. After two years' time he was an actor. All he had to do was to prove it. That was eighteen years ago.
Originally Abel migrated to Manhattan from St. Paul, his birthplace, by way of Heron Lake, Minnesota, pop. 945, several decades ago. When he was fourteen he bade farewell to his mother, father, sister, brother, and hied himself off to Heron Lake, two hundred miles distant, where, by working as soda-clerk in the drug store, he put himself through high school. His spare time went into furnishing theatrical entertainment for the town's residents. Later in his career he stage-managed big-time theatrical companies. Today he describes that form of activity as the "glorified title given the janitor."
When he was eighteen Abel packed his duffle bag and dashed to the Big Town. Two years at the Academy followed. He has been eighteen years on the stage. Today at thirty-eight, Abel has been married to Harpist Marietta Bitter, Bryn Mawr graduate who is also a good cook (her husband says so), for ten years; has two sons Michael and Jonathan, aged two and four. He hates mayonnaise (you should see what he did to the Waldorf salad on his "St. Moritz plate"); loves golf; shoots a 91 after only a year's pursuit of the game; and has a funny kind of contract, in a town where eccentric contracts flourish.
His five-year contract with RKO-Radio reads that every two years Abel is allowed six Broadway months in which to appear on the stage. One look at the man and you’d know that he insisted on the clause. He is a first-class champion of the theatre, as art and entertainment. He's worked in stock with Katharine Cornell and her husband Guthrie McClintic; in the Provincetown group he played the Sheriff to Walter Huston in Desire Under the Elms, rushing from one theatre to another to do it, too, because that was a dizzy moment when he was doing two shows at a time.
When Kaufman's Merrily (that's the way Abel refers to the play) closed its successful run, Abel dashed off to that mad Hollywood where the part of General Grant awaited him. The studio tested him with whiskers, without; with cigar, without; with campaign hat, without; and just about the time the film was ready to go into production, General Grant was called off. "Too expensive for the budget at the moment," was the answer.
With a mighty ha-ha, Abel roared at his luck. He decided, then and there, that the third attempt to crash Hollywood was most emphatically not the charm, as the old saw has it. But he was wrong. By this time Radio was casting the stirring Three Musketeers, from the Dumas tale, and they took one look at Abel. "Why not use him?" they said. "We have to pay his salary anyway, until his contract is ended, so why not put him to work?"
When Abel heard there was a chance for him to do the swashbuckling D'Artagnan, lastly immortalized by the super-swashbuckler, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., he was besieged by doubt. "Don't be a fool," counseled friends. "That picture will make you. Once you get a part like that, you're set in films for a lifetime. Boy, it's your chance."
Abel is one of those funny fellows who, when he wants to, slips easily out from under worry. He simply doesn't let it get him down. "Let 'er rip!" is his attitude. That was the mood he carried into The Three Musketeers. That was the attitude he held when he signed the studio's new five-year optional contract that preceded the part of D'Artagnan. Under this contract, by the way, he has made eight films. Radio was smart in signing Abel to a long-term contract. To date, two other film companies have made gestures toward taking it over: Metro because of his excellent work, on loan, in two of its films; Warners because of his Green Light trouping. Radio, however, will not part with its contractee. Before he went to Warners, Abel finished "Second Life," with Gertrude Michael, for his home studio, and it wants him for "Mother Carry's Chickens" and several others, as soon as the Burbankers are through with his services.
Abel, we think, rather enjoys all this fuss about his artistic talents. He is enough of the Latin (his mother is Italian and Swiss — his father was born in Leipzig, Germany) to respond emotionally to the rapidly growing interest in him. After all. there were years when Hollywood bounced him around from pillar to post and it's comforting to know that one's talents are at last appreciated. Abel is human enough to enjoy expanding under the warm sun of Hollywood's approval. Humanness, come to think about it, is Walter Abel's outstanding trait. Perhaps that explains why he is such a consistently good performer.
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, December 1936