Andy Devine — Everybody Was Glad When Andy Got a Break (1933) 🇺🇸
Everybody was glad that Andy got a break. If I heard that story once, I heard it a dozen times on my Andy Devine tour of the Universal lot.
And when I sat down with large Andy himself across a shiny brown table at luncheon in The Brown Derby, I knew what they meant.
The boy isn't good-looking in the Hollywood sense. His facial topography is hilly without being as impressively mountainous as his figure. His complexion is not freckled, but it looks as if it was just going to be. He doesn't wear his incurably curly hair long enough to get in his eyes, but he always looks out from under it as if he were afraid it might. It is his smile that is illuminating. It takes his loosely hung and somewhat unrelated features and gives them a certain — well, there isn't anything to call it but glamour.
"I'm dieting," he said with a laugh, as if he knew that the joke, being on him, must be a big one.
There was a time — and not so very long ago either! — when this boy's dieting was, so to say, automatic; for, although it is six years now since Andy Devine, Santa Clara football hero, opened up a hole for himself through the Hollywood line, it is only recently that he has been able to gain any ground.
He started well. For nearly three years, he played atmosphere in George Lewis's interminable series of "Collegians." This wasn't so bad. It meant a weekly pay check, albeit not a notable one. But the second three years were the hardest. Picture jobs just didn't happen for our Little Boy Blue.
Summers he worked as a lifeguard at forty-two and a half cents an hour. Winters he starved. At least, he did one winter.
"It sounds funny, I know," he said, between smiles and laughs, "that a big husky like me should ever have thought of 'ending it all' — and I don't suppose I ever would have gone through with it, my folks being Catholic — but this is the way it was.
"I had had just two meals in two weeks. No, make that three meals. But none of the three had happened for several days. I had left my room in the morning without breakfast and had been out all day looking for work. I had bummed a couple of rides out to Universal and Culver City; and was walking home after a final turn-down at Warner's.
"It was dinner time — not mine but regular folks' — and as I walked past the long rows of bungalows, I smelled the grandest things — roast pork, stews with onions in them, hot biscuits, pies. And by the time I reached the steps that led up to my room — it was over a garage — I was so hungry I was rolling.
"Walking up the stairs, I made up my mind. I couldn't shoot myself because I didn't have a gun; and I couldn't throw myself in the river because rivers in Southern California don't have water enough to drown a guy like me. But there was a gas-heater in the room, and I figured that if the rubber pipe that connected the heater with the gas supply should just happen to come loose, the police would say when they came for the body:
"'Poor chap! the gas got him when he was asleep.'
"But it was not to be. When I unlocked the door to my room, I noticed on the floor an official looking envelope. Inside there was a brief note. It read:
"'Owing to delinquencies, etc., etc., your gas has been turned off.'"
Andy put down the menu card with a reminiscent laugh. "You see," he said, "I was too poor even to die!"
Andy isn't fat in the Arbuckle sense of the word. No one has ever used him, as Walter Hiers was once used, to try out a stage for an elephant act. Andy weighs only two hundred and thirty pounds; and that isn't much, scattered over the geographical area which constitutes his frame.
Still, Andy has possibilities in the weight line. And he admits that he would weigh more even now if it weren't for an enlightening remark from one of Hollywood's freshest waitresses.
"I like to walk down Main Street," he explained, "and in Hollywood that means the Boulevard. I like to see the sights, and listen to the soap-box orators, and drop into a beanery for a bite. It isn't so much fun as it used to be because too many people recognize me." The regretful note in his voice was absolutely sincere (everything about Andy Devine is that way!) "But this night I knew I was all right, for when I got into the restaurant nobody troubled even to wait on me.
"'If it wouldn't be too much bother.' I finally said to the nearest of the haughty ladies-in-waiting, 'would you mind taking my order?'
"'You wait your turn,'" she said, 'you over-stuffed blimp.'
"Since then," he said, "I've given strict attention to my bustle."
Whereupon, this two hundred and thirty-pound, hulking boy from Flagstaff, Arizona — there's a Main Street for you, the highest, the hottest, the bleakest in the world! — piped up in that nice boyish voice of his, which always seems to be at the changing stage, and ordered as his sole luncheon dish a chef's salad!
He's a rough-diamond Charlie Ray — that's what he is, this hulking, slouching, loose-jointed, small-town boy.
Don't misunderstand me, Andy is no untutored hick. He was born in a small town; and since he owes to his small-townness a large measure of his success, he will probably never take the trouble to rub it entirely off. In fact, if it weren't too late, he might refuse, as Will Rogers does, to learn grammar for fear he might use it. But as it is, Andy has exposed himself to education in several western universities — in any western university, so far as I can find out, where the football recruiting was good.
"Sometimes," he explained, "I only went to the High School, but I played on the 'Varsity just the same. You could get away with that if you were big."
After college — notice I don't say after being graduated from college — and after working all day at the Universal studios, furnishing authentic, muscular background for the collegiate love affairs of George Lewis and Dorothy Gulliver, Andy would rush out to the nearest stadium and practice for two hours, between six and eight, with the Los Angeles football professionals. It was good graft while it lasted, seventy-five dollars every Saturday afternoon, but it didn't last. And when the referee's whistle ceased to blow for football on the field or on the screen, Andy went back to life-guarding and landlord-dodging.
One episode connected with the latter activity Andy tells with such conviction that I was almost tempted to believe him. One morning as he was dragging his huge but then somewhat emaciated form out of his room over the garage, he encountered, of all people, the garage man himself.
"I knew he was irked with me," said Andy, "for I had lived in his place for nearly a year without paying any rent, but I wasn't prepared for what he handed me.
"'Andy, me boy,' he said (he was a good fellow and as Irish as they make them), 'you can't say I haven't been aisy with ye.'
"'Indeed, I can't say that,' I said.
"'But a year's a long time, Andy. I can't carry ye any longer. After all, your own mother only carried ye nine months — and I ain't even related to ye.' "
The lifeguarding part of this period of Andy's career was no hardship. He is — and he would be the first to admit it — a far more enthusiastic swimmer than he is an actor. They threw him into the water, dress suit and all, in "The All-American," and they'll do it in dozens of other films so long as the big boy retains his ability to do an Eleanor Holm.
He lives, whenever engagements will permit, on the water. He and Tom Buckingham, Universal script writer, have a sloop for sleeping purposes only in the harbor at San Pedro. Andy has been to the Behring Sea in the lightship service. And it wouldn't be surprising to hear of him going sea-wire any time, even now.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "I decided to stick to life-guarding for good and pass up the picture racket. After all, the beach job has been a life-saver for me more than once — and forty-two and a half cents an hour for eight hours every day was better than seven-fifty a day three or four times a month. That's what I told 'em when they sent for me to do that bit in 'The Spirit of Notre Dame.'"
That bit was the part of Truck McCall, the injured player, whose performance on the side lines stole the picture from Frank Carideo and the Four Horsemen.
The Universal bosses didn't wait for the final whistle of the game in the Notre Dame picture before signing our hero on the justly famous dotted line. The moment they looked at the first "rushes" in the projection room, they knew that Andy had scored a touchdown; and right then and there they put down a little bet that he would also kick a goal.
Result: a long-time contract for the smiling extra boy, the atmospheric collegian, Andrew Vabre Devine.
Andy doesn't talk much about his picture work — that is, not much for Hollywood! He is modestly aware of his limitations as an actor. In fact, he has learned by hard experience that it was only when he had ceased to take his picture acting seriously and started to be himself that he really began to click.
What he would much rather talk about is "Truck."
Truck is the dog he has named after the character which gave him his celluloid fame — a pit bull, which, Andy explains, means a bulldog that fights in a pit. Andy says he is going to get a Sealeyham and call the two of them Truck and Trailer.
"If I ever get plenty of money," he said, "I'm going to buy a big lot of land. I'll pitch a tent for myself on the back of it, and build a big dog house in the front."
At present, however, Truck alone is sufficient. He completely fills Andy's life.
"The other night," the proud owner said, "I had a couple of the boys up to the house for a drink of home-brewed beer. Usually, when that sort of thing is going on, Truck assumes an injured look as if he were saying, 'When will all this be over?' This night, however, we couldn't separate him from the party.
"In the course of the evening, I went into the pantry to get some matches, leaving behind me an almost untouched mug of beer. When I returned, the beer had almost entirely vanished. I looked at my two friends accusingly. Then I noticed, propped up on his hind legs in a corner of the couch, my old friend Truck, his eyes bleary from the beer and his beard white with foam."
One dog led to another. There was, it seems, a studio pet of which Andy was very fond. His name, derived from a mixed lineage, was "Collie and Neighborhood." Collie's great achievement was to get on his toes at the word "Camera!" and lie on his face at the word "Cut." Then there was "Short and Dirty," half Dachshund and half Scotty; not to mention Marian Nixon's six newly acquired puppies, offspring of her pet Dalmatian and a neighbor's black Chow.
Andy went on this way for some time. Dogs were obviously his obsession. He even admitted that he frequently went down to the local pound and came away broken-hearted because he couldn't take all the little doggies home with him.
"When it comes to dogs," he said, "I'm sunk."
Next to Truck the biggest thing in Andy's life at the moment is a little girl out on the Universal lot named Alene Carroll. He went so far as to buy a dinner coat, his first, so as to take Alene to the premiere of Rain. He still takes her with him wherever he goes, even to marathon-dance contests. (Andy, by the way, is the champion marathon dance sitter-out in Hollywood. His record is said to be thirty-eight hours, but I don't believe it and you don't need to, either!)
He won't admit he is "that way" about Alene. All he will say, when pressed, is:
"I'm afraid I'm in love!"
About his mother, now dead, he is much more talkative. She hadn't been well for a long time before she died. For months she had been under treatment in a sanatorium. The last time she went out, she went to a local theater to see Andy play in "The Spirit of Notre Dame."
"Tom," she said to Andy's oldest brother who was with her, "you're a success. You're well established in business. Now Andy is a success. I am quite ready to die, because I feel that I'm a success, too."
I don't know about Tom. But I do know about Andy. And I am sure that his mother was right. For there is no question about Andy Devine's success. The only question is — what is this big, good-natured, honest ox going to do with it?
Well, I asked myself that question more than once over the salad and the coffee, and afterward, when we tooled off again to Universal City to see some of the reels from his latest films.
At the moment, he was crazy about doing Joe Palooka, the fighting sap of the cartoons and the mike. Jimmie Durante, he hoped, would up and play Nobby, the fighter's manager, the Jimmie Gleason of the air. Personally, I thought it was a grand idea. I could almost see him scoring as the good-natured guy with the knock-out wallop.
Maybe that's what he'll do — play comedy parts in big-time films. If he does, he is a sure-fire success, because a little of Andy Devine would improve any film, just as a little salt or a little lemon will improve any dish. Or he may play star parts in small-time films — the kind of attraction that goes on for years packing them in without a thought of Broadway.
He doesn't need to be a great actor to succeed in either of these roles. All he has to be is himself — a natural. It wasn't until he stopped "acting" and became Andy Devine that he really succeeded. It is as Andy Devine that he must still succeed in the years to come.
"Anyhow," he said, with that quick smile which makes his whole facial area gather itself up and become a very charming, subtly, ingratiating, definitely human thing, "I can always go back to life-guarding if this career fails."
"But those days are over," I ventured.
"Don't be too sure," he answered modestly, "I still have my bathing suit put away in moth balls, and every once in a while I take it out and make sure I can still get into it."
It isn't hard to figure out, is it, why everybody was glad to see Andy get a break?
Andy Devine, big, good-natured, and unspoiled, suddenly catapulted to fame, would much rather talk about "Truck," his pet bull terrier, than about himself.
Collection: The New Movie Magazine, February 1933