Paul Cavanagh — The Strangest Reason of All (1931) 🇺🇸
During the six years I have spent interviewing film celebrities, I have heard many reasons why acting has been chosen for a career. Most of them could be simmered down to two good ones. The desire for expression. And the desire for money.
by Mary Sharon
It remained for Paul Cavanagh to give me a new and understandable reason. He confessed cheerfully that although he appeared in amateur theatricals in school, he never felt any inner urge to act. And while it has been nice to receive money and quite a lot of it for acting, he wasn’t influenced by the thought of gain when he made his initial try. But his reason can come later! My first impressions of him won’t wait.
I wasn’t especially keen about interviewing Paul Cavanagh. I have been slightly fed up on Englishmen with monocles, who sprinkle “don’t you know’s” and “jolly well’s” all over their conversation with here and there a “dash it all.” You know the kind. I looked forward to a dull half hour.
But before the introduction was over, I saw that my expectations were all wrong as far as Paul Cavanagh was concerned. And before the interview was half over I had formed a wholesome respect for Englishmen-at-large.
Every woman has an ideal in her mind by which she measures all men. Well, Paul Cavanagh can be my ideal from now on and I won’t kick. He is tall, dark and handsome. And he has an air of having been everywhere, and done everything and found it to his liking. He is reserved, without being high-hat. And poised, without being sophisticated.
He told me quite frankly that he doesn’t like to be quoted. In fact, if his success lies in telling the public all about his private life, then success can go hang. With sound effects.
Which is pretty easy to understand. Life, to him, is an adventure. He wants to keep it so. And if he strings out each experience, explaining and pondering on the this and so of it, it ceases to be thrilling and is reduced to an equation.
Everything that Paul Cavanagh has done since he left Cambridge University has been an adventure. And before he left, too. He was on the rowing squad at Cambridge, and if you think rowing in a fixed-seat boat isn’t an adventure, that’s because you haven’t done it. So is mantel eating after the rowing is over.
After he secured his degree at Cambridge, he started out with a University pal to see the world. They began by shipping to Canada and landed “on a beam end,” which is Paul’s colorful way of saying “broke.” They worked at the C.P.R., or maybe it was the C.R.P., waiting-room as baggage porters for five nights until they had enough to get them to Edmonton, where they engaged in haying for four weeks. There were a lot of adventures and misadventures in towns which I can’t now remember. I started to make notes while Paul was talking about his adventures. And as soon as I pulled out my pencil, he quit talking. I had to tell a few of my own experiences in order to get him reminiscent again.
To sum it up, after working the five nights as baggage porter, and four weeks in haying, Paul and his pal shipped north on an engineering project. When the engineering thing palled on them, they enlisted in the Royal Mounted Police.
Did you know that the Royal Mounted Police send their recruits to Saskatchewan to learn to ride? The things they learn there are worth writing home about. They have got to learn, among other things, how to ride a horse on what is called a slip-seat. And a slip-seat is a plain stirrupless saddle that could not be slicker and more slippery if it were greased.
Paul thought that he could ride before he became a Royal Mounted Police recruit, but he found that he was only a rank amateur when he ran up against those tricky saddles. He fell off and under and over at least five hundred times. He insists that five hundred is a conservative estimate, too.
The discomforts of their rigid system of training stand out more clearly in his memory than the dangers that his work later entailed. You know what kind of dangers if you have ever gone to the movies. The Royal Mounted Police captain tells you to get your man, and if you are a regular R.M.P., you get him. That’s all there is to it. Paul was an R.M.P. for nine months and then the adventure began to seem humdrum. So he bought himself out of the Mounted and signed up as a Dragoon, for by this time the World War was going strong.
He mentioned that he enlisted in the 202nd battalion of infantry that was formed in Edmonton. I made the mistake at this point in the story of bringing out my pad and pencil again. I was afraid if I didn’t jot it down that I would forget and say 142nd or something like that. Immediately, Paul shut up and the silence grew thick enough to cut. I never did hear what happened to him or the 202nd after that.
I managed to drag him through the war, however, and back to Calgary, where he accepted an appointment as a barrister. His chief duties were to revise the statutes of Alberta. This took him two years. At the end of that time, he found that he had worked so hard he hadn’t had time to spend any money and he was in possession of $18,000.
The old spirit of adventure came to the surface again. He decided to take that cash to Monte Carlo and break the bank. He went. He took a “system” along with him. But instead of breaking the bank, the bank broke him. He landed in England “on a beam end” again.
And right here is where the reason for his career as an actor comes in. When he found himself penniless and out of work, he decided this was the time for him to try out as an actor. He had done everything else at one time or another. It looked to him like a new adventure. It was.
He found it surprisingly easy to get on, for he was given a job immediately in stock at fifteen pounds a week. Two years later, he played in the same theatre at one hundred and fifty pounds a week.
It was only a matter of time until the movies claimed him. If you saw him in “Born to Love” or “Always Goodbye” or “Transgression,” there is no need for me to rave about his ability or good looks.
It would be very easy to type Paul Cavanagh as a heavy, but I hope to goodness they don’t. He would make such an admirable hero. He is just the right kind of a fellow to live through all the adventures and to get the girl in the end.
Why he hasn’t married is a mystery. In a town where eligible bachelors are at a premium, Paul Cavanagh has managed to exist free and unassailed for eighteen months. I came right out and asked him how he had escaped matrimony. And he truthfully acknowledged that he didn’t know himself.
But I know. Paul Cavanagh is a romanticist as well as an adventurer. He won't ever give up his freedom unless he finds a girl who will be a perfect complement to his own being. A girl who will bring as much to their union as he will. Marriage to him will need to be all or nothing. He is not the sort of man to be satisfied with half a loaf. How do I know all this? I know it by listening to Paul talk about his home.
When he talks of his home on the Isle of Wight, you can see that he has a bad case of nostalgia. You can almost see the place. It looks across the sound and the waves dash over the picturesque rocks below. Airplanes are forever humming overhead, for this is the spot where the Schneider cup flights are made. There is sometimes sun, and sometimes rain, but never monotony. It goes without saying that Hollywood is monotonous to him. Reared in a land where there is fog and winter, interspersed with sunshine and flowers, he feels keenly the need of change.
This explains why he likes acting. Each day is a new adventure. There is no sameness, no groove to fear. And after the picture or play is over, he takes a trip back home.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to hear, by the time this is in print, that Paul is vacationing again on the Isle of Wight. Swimming and flying and yachting. He says the swimming there is great, and he flies quite a lot. And there is nothing like yachting. And though he hasn’t a yacht, he has a friend who has.
All of which leads up to Paul Cavanagh’s reason for acting. He does it because it’s adventurous. And if you know a better reason than that for doing anything, I’ll be glad to hear about it.
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Paul Cavanagh climbing up to fame. He has had a more adventurous career than a dozen stars in Hollywood put together. He’s been “on a beam end” (ritz for broke) any number of times. He once tried to break the bank of Monte Carlo, but the bank of Monte Carlo broke him, instead. He was born in England. He’s been a Dragoon and a Royal Mounted Policeman, a barrister and a baggage porter. His experiences have taken him all around the world
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Collection: Movie Mirror Magazine, November 1931