Don DeFore — Stooging for Stardom (1945) 🇺🇸
Bucking pictures the hard way — that's been the story of Don DeFore's career up to the minute Hal Wallis and Paramount gave him his first really good, undiluted, unadulterated chance to make a hit in "The Affairs of Susan." Up to then he'd been just an unhappy stooge for stardom.
It all started when Don appeared in a drama-class play at the University of Iowa. A well-dressed stranger introduced himself as a talent scout and awarded him, then and there, a scholarship in the Pasadena Community Playhouse.
Dropping his incipient law course with pleasure and saying goodbye to his mother, his brother and the three sisters who lived in the family home in Cedar Rapids, Don set out for the West to win fame and fortune and to take up residence with a fourth sister, married and living conveniently in Pasadena. Everything was all set for Don to be a success.
"— Only they don't give free scholarships at the Community Playhouse, and the well-dressed stranger had no right to say they did," Don explained. "Everything you get there you have to work for. And how I worked! I couldn't go back home and I couldn't ask them for money. That would have been a confession of failure. So I lived with my sister and brother-in-law for a while and walked clear across town every morning to service the Playhouse bus. I had to be at the garage at six and then back at the Playhouse in time for the eight o'clock class. I got a job washing dishes for my meals in a Greasy Spoon nearby and some of the fellows and I made a deal with a contractor to paint the whole Playhouse dormitory. We did a swell job, too. It sure looked nice."
Came the eventful day when Warners called him to stand-in for Errol Flynn. So Don — with beautiful, much-needed dollars and a chance to be discovered dancing before his eyes — rushed down to the "beach to get a virile, he-man coat of tan. This was on a Sunday and he was to work the next day. Monday morning it was about all he could do to raise his well-cooked form from his bed of pain long enough to call the studio and ask if he should let them know when he was able to work again.
"No," replied the casting-office dryly, "no, Don, you needn't bother to call us again."
Meantime, his brother had come out from Iowa to see him and they decided to go home together for a visit. The problem of money reared its ugly head, for their combined assets amounted to about fifteen dollars. However, thought conquers all, and by registering with the Travelers' Bureau, they made a deal with an East-bound motorist to go along. The two boys were to take turns at the driving as their contribution to the trip. The DeFore brothers slept in the car nights and ate sparingly during the day to conserve their cash; the party whizzed along blithely as far as Wyoming.
"Then, all of a sudden, the guy insisted we sleep in the hotel that night," Don said. "My brother and I thought that was kind of funny and told him we were perfectly comfortable in the car. Of course, we were really thinking of the money a hotel room would cost, but when he began to get kind of sore, we gave in. At that, a real bed looked pretty good to us by that time and we slept like tops."
In the morning — you guessed it — both the car and the driver were gone. Completely.
"We were wearing hiking boots and sweaters and had one suitcase and about three dollars now between us," Don continued, "and the only way to get to Cedar Rapids was by good old rule-of-thumb. So we stood beside the road and thumbed for hours. Whiz! — you should have seen the big cars go by. I guess we didn't look pretty enough. Then we had the bright idea of writing University of Iowa By Sept. 1! in chalk on the side of our suitcase. The very next car stopped to pick us up and we rode into Cedar Rapids in state!"
When he came back to California later, he and Wayne Morris, another alumnus of Pasadena Community Playhouse, were signed by Warner Brothers to long-term contracts. And here started his real career as stooge for stardom. Just as Patric Knowles was held there as a sort of second-run Errol Flynn, Don was kept as a threat to Jack Carson. Though he was often promised parts "just like Jack Carson gets," he never got them and the contract ended in a year-long, very unpleasant wrangle between the Screen Actors' Guild and the studio. Unlucky Don — the Stooge — was buffeted back and forth in the middle of a "test-case."
A part of the squabble was because of Don's appearance on the stage in Sailor, Beware! hit show that ran for nine months. Later, he and some other graduates of Pasadena Community organized co-operatively and staged a hit show themselves. They collaborated on a rollicking comedy of life in a college fraternity house and called it Where Do We Go From Here? This title, by the way, is now the subject of litigation between them and 20th Century-Fox, who have used it on a picture recently released.
The co-operatives took a small theater in Hollywood and the morning after the opening, the reviews were ecstatic. Oscar Hammerstein II came to see it on the second night and bought the show on the spot.
However, instead of allowing the boys a run for their money and effort, he closed the piece immediately and took the lot of them to New York, where they went into rehearsal for a Broadway engagement. But because of a difference in direction, the spontaneity and verve of the original Where Do We Go From Here? was lost and the production failed after one of the shortest runs on record.
Incidentally, because of their co-operative agreement, the boys voted on any additional member of the cast, for or against — and Robert Walker was one they voted against. But Bob, who's never held a grudge in his whole, sweet life, trotted around with the rest of them evenings after the work of the others was done, and today is one of the DeFores' closest friends and most frequent visitors.
But Fate had something worse in store for Don besides the failure of Where Do We Go From Here? He was about to face a personal disaster that was almost fatal.
"I didn't feel well all through the show," he said, "and I thought it was because I was working so hard. Nothing I ate agreed with me and I could only manage to drink a little milk. Then, right after the closing, I collapsed and was rushed to the hospital and operated on for five ulcers."
He was very near death and the whole family hurried to him from Cedar Rapids. In the two months he was in the hospital all the important producers on Broadway sent him cheerful messages and cartons of cigarettes, but not one of them knew him when he was finally able to totter to their respective doors to ask for a job.
Times were bad for him, very bad, and for awhile he worked at the World's Fair in the Railroad Building. This rounded out some sort of cycle, for Don's father was an engineer on the Chicago & Northwestern for more than forty years.
The dark clouds broke, though, with a part in The Male Animal, which ran for two years on Broadway. And his work in The Male Animal brought him a hurry call from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to come to the Coast for a part in "The Human Comedy," starring Mickey Rooney.
Meantime, Don and Marion Holmes, singer with a name-band, had met and fallen in love. Their courtship was intermittent, however, with Don in one place and Marion in another most of the time. But she would fly to meet him, and vice versa, at midway points as their work would allow. They were married in 1940 at Chapman Park Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles, with Judy Garland as matron of honor and Dave Rose, best man.
"Marion's the business head of the family," Don boasted admiringly. "Such brains — and what a personality! People come to the house to see her, not me — and she knows everybody!"
"The house" is modest, comfortable, English, in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, convenient to the famous "Miracle Mile" shopping center. Don and Marion want to buy the house, but the owner, who lives in another city, won't pay any attention to their queries. They want it particularly because it's home to their Penny Lou (who's the dearest little 3-year-old anybody ever had and the spittin' image of her papa) and for the new baby son who arrived just three months ago.
Though Don's home-life is, and was, ideal, his career wasn't going too smoothly. As I said, Metro had brought him out for "The Human Comedy" and later put him in "A Guy Named Joe." The deal was on a free-lance basis with a conversion clause in the contract. This means that, after a stated length of time, the studio has the privilege of converting the player from a free-lance salary (which is 'higher) to the week-by-week contract salary, which is lower but steadier. When the conversion was eventually made, the contract was dated several months back, thus cutting Don's salary on a retroactive basis. The argument that followed, as to who owed whom $4,000, went into another "test case" with unlucky Don again in the middle between the Screen Actors' Guild and a major studio.
"Right at that point, I was drafted into the Army and stayed all of seven weeks," Don said. "It only took that long to get thrown out by a medical examiner who took one look at the surgical scars left after that ulcer operation. When he saw those, he found out about my cut-up insides. So back I went to MGM."
But things weren't the same. He was cast in a dog picture, a Pete Smith short; he was vis-a-vis for the tests of aspiring new players. In other words, he was making no progress at all. Even Van Johnson's near-tragic accident that kept him out of pictures so long didn't give Don a chance at the parts he might have played.
"I asked for my release but couldn't get it," Don explained. "If it hadn't been for Mervyn LeRoy I don't know what I would have done. I knew I must get on the screen or be sunk. So when he gave me the part in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, it was a real life-saver!"
Don decided after that, though, he was tired of being a stooge for Hollywood and all its works; he'd go back to New York and the stage. His good friend Elliott Nugent had a play for him and his agents there several others for consideration. He got gas from his ration board and the three DeFores piled into the car and were off to another world. They got as far as the homefolks in Cedar Rapids when long distance calls to come back began to catch up with him.
It seemed there was a picture at Paramount ("Nope," said Don) with Joan Fontaine, Academy Award winner ("Out-classed," said Don) and George Brent, Dennis O’Keefe, Walter Abel ("I'd be buried," said Don) with William Seiter directing ("Oh," hesitated Don) and Producer Hal Wallis was offering ("We - 11 — ") a long-term contract with a salary of —
The first week's shooting told the story. Joan was at her brilliant, scintillating best; George, Walter and Dennis at their top in sure-footed, tried-and-true excellence. But the newcomer, the young fellow who was expected to be forgotten in such fast company, was giving the standout performance.
Right after that, Buddy De Sylva was delighted to be able to borrow him for his own first independent production for Paramount, so Don played opposite Betty Hutton in "The Stork Club." Then Wallis took him back again for "You Came Along," with Robert Cummings and Wallis' brand new discovery, Lizabeth Scott.
Don DeFore's through stooging for stardom.
One reason Don found the fight worth winning — adorable three-year-old daughter, Penny Lou. The wooden cow in the backyard is a birthday present from Dad. The DeFores live a short five minutes from the Paramount Studio, and that's a lucky thing because Don's about the busiest actor on the lot, now working in "The Stork Club" with Betty Hutton.
Don's daughter is a little too young for piano lessons, but it's the highlight of her day when she is permitted to "play" a tune or two. Sometimes Dad gets the worst of it — for example, Penny plays the sand game, upper right, and Don gets a sand shower right in the eyes. Mrs. DeFore was a successful band singer before her marriage but is strictly the home type now. She and Don have a collection of color pictures of Penny since the day she was born, all neatly filed (right).
Collection: Screenland Magazine, December 1945