Fredric March — The Baby of the Family (1932) 🇺🇸

Don’t miss a word of this fascinating story about Fredric March, written by his own proud sister-in-law

by Mary Dupuy Bickel

“Don’t spoil him. We mustn’t let him get spoiled!”

That’s what the various members of Fredric March’s family — Frederick Bickel it was then — have been reminding themselves and each other ever since he was little. To them he will always be the baby of the family.

It is only in the last year or two, since he has gone successful in a big way, that they are beginning to look at each other and realize, now that he is grown up and still not spoiled, that perhaps he is made of stuff that doesn’t spoil!

For today he is just as quietly, humorously modest as he was the first time I ever saw him — when he was fifteen years old.

It was during the intermission of a tea dance at the Alpha Delt house in Madison, Wisconsin — the old Alpha Delt house — the one on Langdon Street. I was a co-ed then, sitting on the porch with a young man named Jack Bickel — quite a nice person, I thought, never dreaming I was going to marry him — when we saw a boy coming toward us across the lawn, and my companion said, “I want you to meet my kid brother. He’s up here from Racine visiting me.”

There was such a lot of quiet pride in his voice that I knew this must be a very special family.

We watched him come, a tall, young boy in knickerbockers, with the serious, candid eves of an idealist, and lips that quirked upward. His brother, smiling as he watched him, said to me in a low aside, “He’s the pride of the family.”

It was Freddie Bickel, who later changed his name to Fredric March, shortening his mother’s maiden name, Marcher, to do so.

Later, when I was welcomed into the family as the first daughter-in-law, I decided it was the closest family group that I had ever known. In those days no member of that circle — three boys and a girl and their parents — could, or wanted to decide anything of importance without a conclave of all the others. Father and Mother Bickel would ask each other in their soft, sweet voices: “What do you think, Cora?” “What do you think, John?” followed by the oft-repeated, “You know best, dear.”

I have a letter which shows this closeness, which Fred, then a lovable youngster, wrote to his big brother, Jack, who was a college freshman. After telling about the hair cut he got last Monday, and about seeing Maude Adams in Peter Pan, (“sat in pit. 50c. Gee, it was fine!”) he goes on to say, “I have been very earnestly watching proceedings between you and fraternities. It may not be any of my business and I hope you won’t get sore, but I thought my opinion might help a little. I hope you will not consider anything but Alpha Delt. I know what H. L. would say” (that means Harold, the older brother, already an Alpha Delt) — “to use your own judgment. That’s all right, too. But looking at it another way, if I ever get as far as you are, and have to decide between two fraternities, yours and Harold’s, you can readily see it might be a little hard… With lots of love from your kid brother, Fred.”

Needless to say, Jack pledged Alpha Delt. No mere fraternity was going to come between these brothers.

Freddie, the baby of the family, was the last, perhaps, to outgrow that dependence on his family — his need for advice in making his decisions. An amusing example of it occurred after Jack and I were married but still living near the University, and Fred was a college student (another Alpha Delt, of course!). He traipsed way out to our house one day, a good mile and a half, and explained, apologetically but very much in earnest, the object of his visit:

“I have to get a note book, Jack — and what do you think? — shall I get one that opens —” (here he spread his hands sideways) “this way? Or this way?” And he spread his hands up and down!

Naturally, that passed immediately into the treasure chest of family jokes.

For a group as closely knit, as deep in their emotions, as serious and idealistic in their aims, they have always had, however, a marvelous sense of humor.

On my first visits to their table, not understanding them very well at first, I remember positively suffering with sympathy, especially for Fred, who, as the youngest, came in for the most kidding. To literal me, brought up in a family where we said what we meant and no nonsense, it seemed as if his feelings must be terribly hurt, they were so apparently brutal to each other, so seemingly sincere in their cutting sarcasms. But I soon learned to enjoy, with them, the neat comebacks which Freddie invariably had at his disposal. With as grave a face as the rest he would make some devastating remark which left them, for the moment, speechless. Until they could gather their forces for the next attack.

They were like lambs in wolves’ clothing, to reverse a good old simile. Perhaps it was their apparent gravity that deceived me in the beginning. In my family, if you made a joke you laughed as heartily as — usually more heartily than — your hearers. But here the faces were solemn, discreet, the voices low, the manners punctilious. Only the wit sparkled and crackled about the table. I remember when it suddenly came to me, like a delightful discovery, “Why, they’re joking!”

They were all like that. A marvelous family. And always when Fred came out on top, they were prouder than he was of his success. But they wouldn’t show it. (“We mustn’t spoil him.”)

“Ever since Fred was old enough to talk he has spoken “pieces.” His first selections were about a little colored boy named “Poor Little Mose.” From that he went on to more ambitious subjects. While he was still in short trousers his father went with him upstate where he won the State Oratorical Contest, the youngest of all the contestants. That was a proud day for the Bickels.

And from his babyhood he has loved to imitate people.

“But always,” as an older member of the family once recalled seriously, much to our joy, “in the kindliest manner!”

And on the heart interest side, ever since his baby days, Fred has had girls. Or rather A girl. For with Fred it was always one at a time and each time it was “yes, but this is different!”

He always took his love affairs very seriously, and yet family approval was important to him, too.

But when he let himself fall there were no half measures — he fell hard, and stayed down. Until the next one.

Recently, when we were all re-unioning in Racine, we came across a motto Fred had kept in his mirror for years:

“Be a Whole Man to One Thing at a Time,” and his wife suggested that it should have been, “Be a Whole Man to One Girl at a Time”!

He told me once, when he was twenty-two — we were on a train bound for New York, both of us with the glamorous adventure ahead of actually living, for the first time, in New York — “I am fascinated by the idea of being true to one woman all my life.”

Even then he was, unconsciously, play-acting. He would tell of some terrific quarrel he had had with the girl of the moment and exclaim, “Gosh, it was dramatic!” His eyes would shine so, his voice would fairly tremble, and before you knew it, you, too, felt that it was terribly important, although you knew, in a way, that you were only seeing footlights and feeling the glamour of the stage.

Now at last, however, it looks as if he is going to make good on that threat of being “true to one girl all his life.” His happy marriage to Florence Eldridge, enduring quietly in a city of easy divorces and re-matings, shows every sign of having “taken.” Five years is a long while in Hollywood.

His family’s present pride in him is not only for his success but because that success has made him neither arrogant nor cynical. He is still devoted to shaping his life to contain the things that endure: friendships — love in his marriage — doing a conscientious job.

Though my husband is more and more proud of him, he still, big brother fashion, can’t or won’t show it. When the first reviews began to praise Fred, Jack was so carefully laconic that his only comment to Fred was — and this, too, has become a household word: “That won’t do any harm.”

Nowadays Fred anticipates him and it is he who first remarks to Jack about a good notice, “This won’t do any harm, will it?” They understand each other.

Fred has been the perfect uncle to our two children. He has taken turns at wheeling my baby carriage with admirable composure; he has had the patience to overcome the tongue-tied self-consciousness the older daughter developed in his presence after he became a celebrity, and persuade her that he was just “Uncle Freddie” after all. He still kisses his father with utter naturalness, still listens with a very real respect to the brave and wise advice of this parent who has known so well when to guide and when to leave alone. “I can trust you to do the right thing, my boy,” he’ll say with his hand on Fred’s knee.

When the children were asking for inscribed photographs, one day, and he had obligingly written, “To my beautiful blonde sweetheart, Barbara,” and “To my favorite comic, Jane” — I asked for one, too, so he wrote, “To Mary — my very first sister-in-law.”

Of course, that was terrible. I was highly incensed. I said, “It’s like writing ‘To the very first woman I meet on the street after ten o’clock next Thursday morning.’” I pretended I had burned it up.

So, one day. to make up for it, he wrote another and inscribed that one:

“To Mary. I love you! I love you! I LOVE You!”

Now, all I’m waiting for is for him to make his first cool (no, it won’t be cool under those Klieg lights) million, and then, heavily veiled, I am going to appear at his lawyer’s office one fine morning and do a little business in blackmail.

Quite a pretty scandal I could make out of that. “Your money or your reputation,” I shall hiss.

As I think of Fred there seems to be a strange affinity between him and bathtubs. It isn’t only because of the famous bath scene in ‘The Royal Family,” when Ina Claire and Henrietta Crosman watched him take a bath in order to hear his story.

It isn’t only that a little girl said to us the other day, “Oh, my auntie knows Fredric March! She broke her rib in his bathtub. She was so thrilled!”

It developed that her aunt had visited some people in Beverly Hills who had occupied the March house after they came East, and having bathed, slipped and broken her rib, all in his tub, her niece felt she must know him at least fairly well.

You can’t blame her.

No. I think it is because of our own priceless bathroom story about Fred. When Barbara was about three, Fred was in the bathroom (the bathroom, I might add) running water for a bath. Barbara was outside clamoring to get in, a noise he could not hear above the running water.

We heard her call, “Fred, let me in!” And then, more urgently, “Fred, let me in!” And finally, in exasperation: “Oh, Uncle Fred, let me in! What’s the difference!!”

Nowadays we, who stand on the sidelines, look back, as people do. and try to analyze the secret of his success. His last visit home was a fair indication of that success. It must have been little short of a riot. The citizenry apparently let themselves go in hero-worship with a fine abandon that Freddie himself must have felt on one historic occasion of his early youth, when someone had a di­vine inspiration. Fred still tells about it and its beginning is always thus:

“Let’s have a paint fight!” says Jimmy.

“All right,” says Vinny.

“So we has a paint light!”

Florence Eldridge (Mrs. Fred March), writing me about this homecoming which was intended for a family visit, said: “Nothing was lacking but the brass band. We had reporters, photographers, crowds of small boys — cars parked across the street, cleaners offering to clean suits gratis, aldermen offering to conduct Freddie and party through the new court house, radio, telegrams, and an incessant phone ringing, to say nothing of Mrs. March in a corner grinding her teeth and making weird

It seems a far cry from the lonely boy who lived in a cheap rooming house in Brooklyn, eating insufficient and irregular meals, developing acute appendicitis suddenly and not knowing the name of a single doctor, but having the luck to have a kind and sensible landlady who found one for him (both the doctor and the landlady have been two of his good friends ever since).

A boy, whose brother, hardly more experienced, was summoned in the middle of the night faced with the grave responsibility of deciding whether or not to let this unknown doctor operate and later thanking God that he had — a boy who, during his convalescence had the time to think things out and decide that the stage was the only life he could live and be happy.

It was a decision that was gravely momentous. For the first time he had no parental approval backing him up. His parents were devout church people of the old school, and the stage as a profession, naturally seemed to them not only frivolous but almost an invention of the devil. But Fred, for the first time, knew!

He felt so unalterably right about it that he stood squarely against everything, feeling his power, defying the world to prove he had made a mistake. When our little girl Jane came, and we gave her “March” for a middle name (he had only recently changed his name), he wrote, I suppose feeling very unpopular with his family just then and as if he were very much the black sheep, a humorously pathetic letter about it. “I feel,” he said in effect, “like some little new country getting its first diplomatic recognition from one of the old line powers.”

After leaving his job at the bank came, of course, that rather heart-breaking period most young artists must go through, when, as far as the stage was concerned, he was almost continuously “at leisure” (or do they call it “resting”?).

Anyway, he posed for collar ads, for underwear ads, toothpaste ads — he posed for illustrators, among whom were Howard Chandler Christy and Neysa McMein — anything to keep the wolf from growling.

And then the two-line part in Belasco’s “Deburau,” which was the beginning.

“The rest,” as I like to say dramatically, along with better men than I am, “is history!”

Last summer after Barbara went to camp, the Marches and the Bickels visited her there. The little girls gather around Fred as we sit on the cots chatting with them. Big-eyed kids, shyly sitting around, watching every move he makes. Finally one of them gets up her courage and says:

“Is it very hard to get into the movies, Mr. March?”

Fred looks at us helplessly and we all laugh a little, all thinking the same thing — what’s the answer to a question like that? First he was there, on the outside, and now he’s here, a movie star. How did he get there? We don’t know — he doesn’t know — nobody knows.

Was it because his mother taught him to “Be a whole man to one thing at a time”? Was it because he is handsome and has a musical speaking voice? Was it because of the job at the National City Bank which brought him to New York in the first place? Was it because of that convalescence from appendicitis which gave him the leisure to find out he wanted to go on the stage?

Yes. It was all those things. All those. And a thousand others.

Fredric March — who made a screen success in spite of family objections; who is considered the best youthful character actor in Hollywood; who has stayed married to the same woman for five years and who never gave Will Hays any trouble! When he was a boy the motto which he kept stuck upon his mirror read, “Be a whole man to one thing at a time.” And Freddie has not forgotten that doctrine

Here’s the family to whom Freddie March (nee Bickel) is still the baby. (Top row, left to right) Harold, the oldest brother; the father; brother Jack and Fred. (Lower row) Harold’s wife; Elizabeth, the married sister; Mary (Mrs. Jack) Bickel, the authoress of this story, and Florence Eldridge, Freddie’s wife, also of stage and screen

Recognize the future Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Freddie when he was page boy in a church entertainment

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1932