Eric Linden — Boy Wonder (1932) 🇺🇸
"I have always been a boy wonder," Eric Linden announced casually over cigarettes and coffee. "It has kept me awfully busy."
by Edward Nagle
The tone of his voice mocked the words. His eyes searched mine humorously. But he meant what he said.
Here, for a change, is an actor who does not and need not refer apologetically to the indulgence of the gods. Eric doesn't think he's good. He knows he's great. His self-confidence, because it is justified, is a thing beautiful to behold.
Last summer when every juvenile in New York was taking tests for "Are These Our Children?" not even Eric's best friends thought he would land it. Ethel Barrymore's son, especially, had set his heart upon getting the part, and it seemed likely that he would.
"When I heard that he was serious competition, I went down to watch his test. After he had torn out the third curl, I left because I realized that he hadn't a chance."
But let Master Colt take heart. Eric thinks the kid shows promise.
Eric is the most amazing lad in Hollywood. His appearance alone is startling. Not only do his ties and socks clash with everything, but his suits never fit and they always look as if they had been slept in.
The day I first met him, he was in shocking need of a hair cut and a manicure. Eric laughed at my expression of dismay.
"I'm just characterizing Eric Linden," he explained. "It breaks mother's heart that I don't dress up, but I can't help it.
"You must meet mother," he went on, "but you'll probably despise each other. Mother is a dreadful cynic — hates every one and everything."
I murmured that I'd adore meeting mother. Mrs. Linden is remarkable. Some day I'll get her on paper, if Eric doesn't beat me to it. She was born on an island off Sweden, and had never seen a human being except her parents until at thirteen she went to Stockholm to work.
There she became enamored of Eric's father, a pianist and actor in the Royal Theater. So great was her naivete that she went backstage to meet him. He was touched by the admiration of this child and continued to see her, teaching her an appreciation of music and literature.
On her fifteenth birthday, she married him. They moved to New York, where five children were born to them. When Eric, the youngest, was six, his father left them. They have never heard from him since.
The children were all phenomenally bright. Especially Eric who at five could read and write Swedish and English perfectly. Mrs. Linden resolved to give him the best educational advantages possible, and entered him in the Paul Hoffman, Jr., School, of which Angelo Patri was principal.
When at seven Eric attracted a great deal of attention in New York by the zeal and brilliance of his Liberty Loan speeches, Patri told newspapermen that the boy had read every book in the school library, including Homer, with appreciation.
But while great literature filled his mind, his stomach was often empty. And to relieve its pangs, Eric, with his brothers and sister, peddled papers. "I was the most raucous-voiced newsie on Tenth Avenue," he says.
"And the most enterprising," Mrs. Linden adds.
He didn't care much for the street games, so dear to the hearts of young New Yorkers, but preferred to remain in the flat and act Shakespeare and Ibsen with the family. His other enthusiasm was writing.
Even now he can forget time when he gets hold of pen and paper. He has written about sixty short stories, all of which editors have returned with haste and regrets. Eric broke all academic records at the DeWitt Clinton High School where he was the youngest student. After school he washed dishes in a restaurant.
"Did you mind much?" I asked, remembering with what anguish of soul I had done the same thing.
"Not at all," Eric said. "I love everything — and everybody," he added thoughtfully.
When he was graduated from Clinton with unprecedented honors, every one expected him to step right into great things. But the family funds were low and Eric had to take the first job he could find. So he became an usher in the Rivoli Theater and went from there to the Rialto.
Finally he landed in the Roxy, where his well-knit figure in a skin-tight uniform served as an aesthetic tonic to tired young business women who dropped into the "Cathedral" of an evening.
While basking in the flattering light one evening, he heard a shriek. Turning, he saw his English teacher rushing toward him. She led him by the ear into one of the lobbies and there, with tears, gestures, and muffled cries, demanded to know if this was the depth to which the great Eric had sunk.
All the pent-up disappointment of the two futile years since he had left school moved Eric, too, to tearful expression. He and his teacher had quite a crying spree. When it was over, Eric, moved by the high purpose which usually follows tears, turned in his uniform.
He went immediately to the offices of the Theater Guild and bluffed his way into Philip Moeller's sanctum sanctorum. He reviewed his ambitions, and so eloquent was he that both he and Mr. Moeller were softly weeping at the conclusion. Moeller took him to the casting director, and within a week he was rehearsing for a bit in Marco's Millions.
The studio publicists insist that he was the boy wonder of the Theater Guild. Having lived so long here in the provinces with no access to city papers, I can't refute them. It is not unlikely.
I do know that he did extremely well in Guild plays, especially in Strange Interlude. Lynn Fontanne, who coached him, was quoted as saying that, given the right role, he would wow 'em.
He did some Broadway things after that, but hungering for the rarefied atmosphere of intellectuality — the phrase is his — he took himself up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he joined the Berkshire players.
After that he went to Paris, where he performed the juvenile leads in Road to Rome, The Barker, Holiday, and Beyond the Horizon.
He saw much of Europe on his own at that time, and did all the young intellectuals do, including sobbing over thin Rupert Brooke's grave.
Coming back, he became juvenile in the radio dramas put on by the National Broadcasting Company. The latter work paid handsome dividends, and Eric regrets financially having given it up for Hollywood. But art must be served.
Eric enjoyed characterizing Eddie Brand, in Are These Our Children? Eddie was the answer to a juvenile's prayer — a cross between Tol’able David and The Public Enemy.
In Are These Our Children? he established himself as the first genius among the juveniles.
For all his "intellectuality," there is something undeniably lovable about him. Like all great minds, his is rather simple upon analysis. He writes poetry to Garbo. He keeps a pipe in his mouth, which he does not smoke, because it gives him confidence.
He boasts of his big sister's prowess as a comptometer operator. She is head operator at Woolworth's with twenty-seven girls working under her. Eric has been in love with each of the twenty-seven. He used to read his poetry to them at the noon hour. When he was playing in New York, they used to organize parties and attend the first nights. Eric loved it.
I went over some of his fan letters with him. He got terribly excited over a rave written by a Chicago man on elegantly engraved paper. "Do you think he's rich?" Eric asked.
"Undoubtedly, with that address," I said. "Why?"
"Then I must get in touch with him. My option may not be taken up, you know."
Eric is twenty-two. It annoys him that the publicity office says twenty. His face — and I mean this not unkindly — has character. He has lived and thought too much to approach the Kansas Boy Scout in comeliness.
But Clark Gable, the answer to the maiden's prayer, exceeds him in virility. So he may never incite the shopgirls to verse. But he has what none of his contemporaries in Hollywood can boast — a first-rate acting talent.
If he can survive the vapidity of social life in our hectic hills, and ward off those whose vanity it would flatter to call him friend, he need not bother about wealthy admirers. His options will always be taken up.
Eric's self-confidence is a happy relief from the usual inferiority-complex pose.
Eric broke all records in school, became the boy wonder in the Theater Guild, and has now wowed the fans in Are These Our Children?
Photo by: Ernest Bachrach (1899–1973)
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1932