Grant Withers — Just a Crazy Kid (1929) 🇺🇸

When I am old and grey and little children cluster about my octogenarian knee, lisping sweetly for a story, I shall tell them of the time when it bored me to yawns to dance with Grant Withers.

by Janet French

And now Grant is the sensation of Hollywood. Screen stars chuck their nice husbands for one date with him. Ga-ga little girls huddle together and giggle with excitement when he passes by. Elderly matrons send discreet notes to suggest that they would not turn down a dinner invitation.

It is safe to say that no youngster has ever before caused such a stir in the sensible, sedate film colony. If you saw him in “The Time, the Place and the Girl” you saw something of the real Grant Withers.

But I recall a certain monthly Saturday night dance, at the Minnequa Country Club, in Pueblo, Colorado. I had gone with Grant’s brother, Newton (the family car having been borrowed for the occasion), and was feeling very grand in a blue chiffon dress that showed all of six inches of my spinal column. Lord, but I was risqué!

I was sixteen. Grant was two years younger. A mere child. To be tolerated only because he was escort’s brother. Condescendingly, between yawns, I gave him one dance because it was expected of me. What was the good of an old, sophisticated woman of the world like me wasting music on a kid? How was I to know that he’d turn out to be the favorite Beau Brummel of the gold coast?

Pueblo’s one Man About Town committed a heinous crime that night. At the local theater a group of Mack Sennett bathing beauties were making a personal appearance. They weren’t good swimmers, nor were they exactly beautiful, but other accomplishments made up for that. Our Man About Town brought them en masse to our ever-so-nice club dance.

We girls were furious. The risqué qualities of my blue chiffon paled beside their — shall I say bizarre? — costumes. We huddled together in little groups to talk about them and the chaperons raised their lorgnettes and looked horrified. It was town scandal for months.

I was dancing with Grant when they hove on the scene. His mother stopped us right in the middle of the floor. She eyed Grant suspiciously.

“Look here, son,” she said; “don’t you let me catch you dancing with one of those girls.” And then, turning to me, “Please, Janet, see that Grant doesn’t dance with them.”

I complained to Newton about it later. “I can’t stop him from dancing with them,” I said. “I think it’s rather unkind of your mother to ask me.”

Newton laughed. He had an eye on the little blonde in the flame-colored dress, but he knew he didn’t have a chance with Grant around. “Grant always does everything he wants to,” he said. “He’s a crazy kid and he’ll dance with them if he likes, even if he knows he’ll catch the devil at home.”

Grant danced with them. He caught the devil at home. But that’s Grant Withers. He has always done everything he wants to do. And when he wanted to run away from military school and come to California, he did, leaving his nice, conservative family in an uproar.

But there’s no changing the kid.

When he ran away from school, he had his personal belongings shipped to the police station as a Pueblo friend of his was a reporter on the police beat for an evening paper. The friend met him at the train in a police car. They roared up Broadway seventy miles an hour, with the siren going wide open.

That was Grant’s entrance into Los Angeles, and that’s the way he’s gone ever since. Seventy miles an hour! With the siren wide open! Making whoopee! What did he care if he caught the devil at home I

He caught plenty of it. Married and divorced before he was nineteen. An habitué of all the night clubs. In a rented tuxedo. Some one mistook him for a waiter, once. “Show me to my table,” the patron said. Grant did. It became a gag among his friends. “Boy, show me to my table!” Making whoopee! Raising hell! There was just no stopping the boy.

He found a job at a furniture store, but it grew tiresome. So he became a reporter. It lasted until the editor called him in for a rewrite and found he couldn’t use a typewriter.

Letters from home arrived, begging him to come back. A couple of years later he did come back. In an airplane. Making personal appearances at seven hundred dollars a week, with a dozen women mad about him. And the town band met him. Just a crazy kid!

During those early mad days in Los Angeles, when he wore rented tuxedos and showed customers to their tables for the laugh, a friend introduced him to Fanchon Royer and her husband, Raymond Cannon. Fanchon watched him. Big, good-looking, devil-may-care.

“You ought to go in pictures,” she said. “I’d like to manage you.”

Grant laughed. Maybe he even blushed, although that is doubtful. Anyhow, it is history that he said, “Aw gowan!”

But when he got fired from the paper, he thought about it. Fanchon got him a job as an extra with Douglas MacLean. He sat on a suitcase in a hotel lobby all day and they paid him five dollars.

“Whoopee,” said Grant, “this is the life. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find myself a couch.”

He found Elinor Glyn instead. Or, to be more precise, she found him. She asked if he had ever been in the army. Grant said, “Yes.” He lied, but it didn’t matter. Madame Glyn gave him a bit in one of her pictures and paid him one hundred dollars.

His film career had begun. Fanchon Royer managed him and she can step right up and take a big bow. Managing a career as hectic as Grant’s is as difficult as getting jocund with Mussolini, Fanchon got him out of scrapes just in time for him to get into new ones. But she got him jobs, and his work was so steady that his family came on from Colorado.

He had made a picture with Monte Blue at Warners when Daryl Zanuck called him into the office and said, “See here, my boy, how would you like to play the lead opposite Dolores Costello?”

“I’ve got a couple of other things lined up,” he said, lying. “I don’t know whether I could get out of them.”

He promised to try. He’d see Zanuck later. At the corner drug store he called Newton.

“Don’t be an idiot all your life,” said his brother. “Take the job quick before they find you out and change their minds.”

A few hours later Grant swaggered into Zanuck’s office. “Well,” he said, “I think it can be arranged.”

“That’s great and, as an added inducement, here’s a five-year contract for you to sign.”

He has not had an idle moment since, what with pictures and gal friends. But of his large salary he is allowed only fifty dollars a week for himself. The rest is kept for him. He was given several bonuses, a big wardrobe and a car. And they paid up his debts, which amounted to some four thousand dollars. They think right well of the kid.

“But I’m being smart from now on,” he says. “The boy’s using his head for once. I’m buying a big house in Brentwood, and I’m going to stay in it. Believe me, I’m married to this industry. I’m crazy about it. Honestly — don’t laugh — I want to make good. Gosh, I’ve been lucky. Breaks? I’ve had a million of ‘em. Wouldn’t I be foolish to keep on being just a crazy kid? Not much for Uncle Grant. The boy’s really settled down.”

Really? Maybe yes, and maybe no. It is true that he has reached the advanced age of twenty-four. It is true that he is taking his screen success seriously. But I doubt if he’ll ever settle down.

And, for all his success, he’s just a crazy kid. And that’s why you like him.

P. S. Incidentally, don’t be surprised if Grant and Loretta Young have gone into a permanent clinch by the time you read this. Life and Withers are like that!

Well, here is Grant! For once, the Hollywood people and the fans all over the country like him. Do not mix Withers with the party of the second part!

—

“No More Family Pictures!”

says John Monk Saunders

In the old hairpin days a gentleman used to possess “a private life,” apart from his public career. But that day has passed, along with the stiff collar.

The age of intimacy is upon us. When an Amelia Earhart flies the Atlantic, we want to know her brand of bath salts and the color of her undies.

When a screen actress marries, people want to know what about this fellow, and how they look together. That’s how I came to be exposed to demon reporters and fiendish cameramen.

Fay Wray and I belong to the no-print school. We didn’t see how we’d work or feel better if we appeared in newspapers in domestic poses.

So Fay and I decided that ours would not be a movie marriage. We’d enter wedded bliss in a quaint village remote from Hollywood.

That was a noble scheme. See how perfectly it worked out. Rowland Lee decided to take his company to Chesapeake Bay to shoot “The First Kiss,” in which Fay was playing. I was sent to nearby Washington to arrange for the cooperation of the Navy Department in filming “Dirigible.”

Here we were in the East, all the elements of our plan at hand. Here was our little Maryland village, with its minister. I applied for a license in Easton, a lovely spot. I swore old Colonel Hollyday, the court clerk, to secrecy, but he pointed out that the record book was open to public scrutiny.

Once the names of Fay Wray and John Monk Saunders were in that book, it seemed the news was all over Talbot County in a second. It even preceded us back to location. Half an hour later, when I asked Lee when he would be through with his leading lady, he stopped work and delivered a marriage hymn. Was it cricket, he asked, to slip away and get married? Was it fair to Barney Hutchinson, the publicity man, who had scotched many rumors for us?

I gave in. When we set out for the Easton church, Lee, Gary Cooper and Hutchinson — and, alas, a still cameraman — went along. Thank God there was no camera in the chapel. Those few beautiful moments were sacred.

The mischief began outside. The air was full of rice, and humorous small hoys had tied old shoes, tin pans and waggish signs to the car. In a weak moment we allowed Barney to shoot us embracing for the camera. That still picture has haunted me ever since. It has jumped at me from newspapers all over the country, causing me, as lawyers say, anguish, worry, embarrassment and shame.

What grief followed! In New York we were pestered by photographers, writers, jewelers, florists, beauty specialists, insurance agents and wine merchants. The Rolls-Royce people sent nice notes telling about the new models. A race track sharpshooter gave us a hot tip on a crooked bangtail for a wedding present.

And it was distressing to get a note — as Fay did — from an old friend at whose home she had once been a guest, enclosing a bill for that hospitality, “Now that fortune has favored you.”

The climax came after our return to Hollywood, when a young man, desperate for money, tried to extort $2,000 from Fay with a threatening letter. The police got him, after he caused us much grief and woe.

Do you blame me when I scream, “No more family pictures”?

—

Author Saunders wanted no publicity pictures, so they made this one with Big Boss Lasky (Jesse L. Lasky)

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1929