Charles Bickford — The Big Goat-Getter from Boston (1930) 🇺🇸
He was Greta Garbo's school-days sweetheart. He was born in the South Seas, knew "Sadie Thompson," and grew up on a ship. He mined for gold in the West, farmed in Rhodesia, and fought in a South American fracas.
by Myrtle Gebhart
That is, Charles Bickford said he did. And Hollywood, naïve Hollywood, was just too thrilled, my dears!
His conceit as Homeric as his bulk, he tongue-lashes the movie people and makes 'em like it. Petty rules are swept with powerful strokes of sarcasm. Dynamite, they call him, not only in remembrance of his first picture, but because he is that way. A chance comment serves to ignite the spark. He finds fault with stories. He likens Hollywood to "a perpetual close-up, mugging its daily dozen of expressions. He considers most of the men who make movies of infantile intelligence, and art a commodity foreign to this gigantic factory where amusement is canned. He ruffles their vanity, necessitating extra yes-men to restore it.
When executives saw that his superb confidence was grounded upon ability, they became alarmed, though his weekly walkout always ends in a stroll around the block. The man actually can act, as well as orate. Most of our oral radicals can't, as you may have observed. He thrashes through his gusty drama, shading it with quirks of humor, occasionally with an apparently unwilling tenderness — a rare art, that.
Some of his vitriolic opinions, delivered with all the delicacy of Vesuvius erupting a morning greeting, are:
"The Germans make artistic films because they are grounded in the theater and its allied arts, and not graduates of sweatshops and second-hand clothing stores." "The stage is a profession, the movies only a racket." "Theatrical producers are heavy brains compared to movie men." — though he did find it necessary to argue principles with them.
He claims a major share of the credit for his good films. He derides Dynamite as a large dose of hokum. Yes, it would be possible for him to make a mistake. "It was a shame to waste a good actor on Matt Burke," he thus disposes of Anna Christie. He did not want the role, because it cramped his self-respect to support a woman star. That he played it so magnificently is due to the fact that he and Matt share a colossal conceit! He adds bits of business to stories, refusing to make ones he considers poor.
"I'm not finicky," he asserts. "Don't call me a stubborn artist, but I won't double-cross my convictions." He has very carefully appraised his stock. M.-G.- M., the concern which has the luck or the misfortune — it's all in the viewpoint — to be agitated by his tempestuous presence and benefited by his talent, is aware that his work is worth both price and trouble.
The public, struck by his smashing personality, steps dizzily back for more. He can rage, if he likes, just so he sticks around.
His vitality stands out like a Warner Brothers billboard. His personality is as big as his girth. He dominates, even in a rare silence. A shock of red hair, tangled over a large head, falls into a rough frame for clear blue eyes. His red face is carved by wrinkles of humor.
A divil a bit of a brogue has he, excepting when it's good business. He can get stuck in the verbal peat with the best of the thick-tongued blarney boys; or he can converse with all the didactic precision of a Boston schoolmaster. As he lunches with the youthful gang in the commissary, in preference to the more secluded stellar balcony, we have engaged in several tilts. His spontaneous humor peppers the conversation with a steady stream of chuckles. I armor myself with a barricade of mockery, disbelieving every utterance on general principles.
Only once did I succeed in drawing his anger. I remarked that he had hooked onto the stage caravan streaming Westward at the smell of caviar. He flushed a shade that paled even his hair and spat back between his teeth: "For five years the moronic movies made overtures to me. I was not concerned, thinking the screen weak as an art form. The talkies, however, offer a wider field. They picture life with more realism. So I agreed — I consented. Understand?"
"Why," I once inquired blandly, "were you acting with Lenore Ulric, if you were Greta's childhood hero?"
"Oh, didn't you know?" His eyes pitied my ignorance. " Ulric is our child."
The seriousness of some lady reporters afforded him such amusement that he decided to be generous with his information. He invented and guilelessly confided a new tale for each. Soon he was involved in strange headlines, keeping the publicity department in a chaotic state making explanations and smoothing ruffled leathers. He will regret that these facts of his life story must rip away much of that colorful embroidery.
Charles Ambrose Bickford is the son of a retired coffee importer. Born in Cambridge, he got out at an early age, fearful of the atmospheric influences. But he was not to escape schooling. They have them in Somerville, too, also in Everett, where later they lived. He had to train a few mental ligaments at Massachusetts Tech. Oddly, he wasn't interested in routine athletics, though he sparred some fast ones with his brother Tom. His first job was mere exercise. He was a piano mover. An uncle, an official of the street-car company, then put him to work. But things happened. As his car tore down Broadway, in Somerville, a truck appeared, usurping the track. After clanging his bell, Charlie removed the truck from his right of way; next he removed the driver from his line of vision, and proceeded.
His stage bow was made in his teens, in a hick role with another uncle who was presenting a sketch at an Everett theater. His mother approved. She believed in his ability, though some years intervened before he proved it. The rest of the family remained tactfully silent.
Why did he saunter away from home, with sails set, to see the world? Because, he replied, he met a widow. Did he, I asked solemnly, make her a widow? No, she was one already.
As a matter of fact, he moved on because he thought school a waste of time and the sea more exciting. Besides a seafaring hitch in Uncle Sam's pay, Charlie has scrubbed the decks of vessels ranging from yawls to yachts, from whalers to traders. Once he journeyed to the Emerald Isle of his ancestors' birth. He likes to talk of those Irish forbears who were rebels and fought under the motto, "Truth on our lips, virtue in our hearts, strength in our arms." One of them, he boasts, was hanged for smuggling.
Between wanderlust spells, he concentrated on higher math and physics and managed to become a construction engineer.
He was dared into acting as a profession. As well wave a red flag before a bull as to question the Bickford ability. An actor from a burlesque show, with whom he had become fraternal in a San Francisco water-front saloon, boasted a five-dollars-an-evening salary and derided Charlie's possibilities as a mime. He was treated to a fine exhibition of temperament, enjoyment of which was mitigated by a bump that grew on his head.
The big boy squared front, headed for the theater, and stampeded them into giving him a job. His feelings matched part of his first costume, the red necktie. It became his banner. He almost always wears one.
Thus began sixteen years on the stage, beating a bumpy path through the hinterlands, but mostly spent in stock at Newport, Providence, and Lynn, and a two-year stretch at the Castle Square Theater in Boston. Once a year he went to New York to look over plays, and abruptly departed. They weren't good enough. He is said to be the only actor ever to choose stock in preference to Broadway and poor dramas, and to win a reputation as a radical in advance of his appearance in New York.
Broadway recognized the fact that the Boston actor had the stuff. He flung his back-o'-me-hand accolade, learning the rudiments of the fine art of insulting movie people, and strode off to the sticks. He played everything, directed his own companies, learned drama in its toughest, rawest school, majoring in the roughneck characters which were to make him known.
"Dark Rosaleen," "Bless You, Sister," "Chicago." "Glory Hallelujah," "Zander the Great," and "Gods of Lightning" occupied him. Roustabout heroes stir him. He likes to get his teeth into meaty drama. Rough-and-ready, two-fisted, hot-tempered fellows, whose work keeps them close to the soil or the sea, and whose emotions are simple, and therefore primitive and rugged. Miners, construction workers, seamen — the thick-necked, brawny lads.
He admits two ambitions: to acquire an acting technique better than any man's and to obtain a huge amount of money.
His side rackets net him, he claims, more cash than his film contract, though his stipend is greater than his verbal scorn would indicate. Two garages, two gasoline stations, two markets, a restaurant, a farm for training animals for movie work, hog farms, and a whaling business operating three vessels out of San Pedro harbor, are among his investments. In each of them he takes an active hand.
His business decisions are based upon quick consideration. Driving into Los Angeles, he bought a gasoline station for four thousand dollars before even entering the city. It paid for itself in a few months. Another returns him one thousand dollars a month net profit. His local hog ranch promises to rival the output of his Dover, Massachusetts, farm where he breeds porkers and sells four thousand annually.
One day he remarked, "I'm lunching with three underwear men. Their proposition looks good. Everybody wears underwear." Next day he was part owner of a concern making garments. He believes that the money is to be made out of staple commodities rather than luxuries.
While at the Castle Square Theater, he met Beatrice Allen, a Boston girl acting under her mother's name of Loring. Maybe she thought he needed domesticating. It she did, now, after thirteen years, she probably realized the futility of such a notion. Possibly he stampeded her. Or else — and sure, it is possible — she just loved him, the very contrariness of him. Anyway, she took him for better or worse, and won't say which it turned out to be. What with him, and their two children, she hasn't much idle time.
He paints well — a weakness he never would confess in Hollywood. Those who have seen his oils — seascapes and dogs — that hang in the family home at Malden insist they are good.
He is attempting, by an apparent disregard of insinuating remarks, to live down the inevitable references evoked by his being cast in The Passion Flower. He insists he is not the floral half of the title, and I tell him that the role was given him to match his sunrise dome. Kathleen Norris's story concerns a California fruit grower whom "the other woman" tries to transform into a boulevardier. It is perfectly tailored to the measurements of his sweeping talents.
"Don't call me a stubborn artist; but I won't double-cross my convictions," says Bickford.
Mr. Bickford modestly claims a major share of the credit for his good films.
Charles Bickford learned to act in the rawest school, majoring in roughneck characterizations.
Photo by: Ruth Harriet Louise (1903–1940)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, December 1930