Philip Dorn — The Indomitable Dutch (1943) 🇺🇸
Five sturdy boys were standing on the tower that was built out into the shipping waters off the Holland shore. With a shout the first boy dived off the tower. For a full minute the others looked on impassively, waiting for his head to come up beside a small craft a little distance from the tower.
This was a favorite trick of their companion — to make them think that he was drowning. But when tiny bubbles began to appear on the surface close to the piles of the tower, the second boy plunged into the water. He, too, failed to reappear. The third youth went in after the second; then the fourth. There were now four ominous little streams of bubbles.
Cold terror gripped the heart of the fifth boy. Nothing but his indomitable will drove him into the sea after his chums. Straining his eyes in the murky depths he saw their four bodies, saw also the steel net which had caught them. If he could just summon enough strength to give it one good shove — there!
Slowly five heads reappeared on the surface. The fifth boy clambered out, hauled his companions onto the tower. Two were already turning blue. With the knowledge of those who live by the sea three of the boys worked quickly on the other two, administering artificial respiration. Presently the patients were breathing again. And the excited citizens of the little Dutch town proclaimed the fifth boy a hero.
That fifth boy? He was Fritz Van Dungen. You know him as Philip Dorn of Hollywood.
In real life Dorn looks like Gary Cooper, talks like Charles Boyer and his thinking has, been definitely influenced by a Javanese holy man. All of this with a few minor differences, of course. For instance, he's six feet two, instead of Cooper's six feet four.
But he never convinced the estimable London ladies of that difference when they rushed up to him and said, "May we have your autograph, Mr. Cooper?" It seems Gary Cooper was in London at the time. "Four days later he left," said Dorn with a dry twinkle in his Dutch blue eyes, "and nobody looked at me any more."
Regarding his similarity to Charles Boyer, the modest Hollander says this in his deep, quiet voice: "If you had seen Boyer in Paris, you wouldn't mention us in the same breath." This from the man who was the leading star of the Dutch theater before he came to Hollywood!
The Javanese holy man requires a little more explanation — one that starts way back when Philip was growing up.
His father built boats with his own hands — fine seaworthy craft of a gay rakish beauty. His parents, pious, ultraconservative folk, had opposed his acting ambitions. They wanted him to be an architect, or at least an artist, since he could draw such fine pictures of ships. They sent him to the Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture at The Hague. But Philip wanted to be an actor and so, after two years, he ran away from school and for several nights slept in the dunes. His worried parents couldn't find him. The bodies of some drowned men were washed ashore and they went to the morgue, looking for his body. When he reappeared after two weeks, they let him apply for a job in a theater, lest he run away again. He was fifteen, was hired as a juvenile and made good.
Under his real name, Fritz Van Dungen, he toured the overseas territories of the Netherlands with a dramatic company. Actors from the homeland were warmly received in these distant colonies of the kingdom. The arrival of Dorn's troupe was a social and cultural event for the nostalgic Hollanders in the Tropics.
The peculiar timbre of his voice, which is unmistakably that of a thinker, is in part at least the product of his years in the Far East. "When I first went to the Netherlands East Indies I felt perfectly at home, while the other actors in my troupe found their new environment very strange. But for me it was like coming home. It seemed as though I had lived there before. You may call it reincarnation if you wish. I learned the Malay language in two months. Everything I saw was familiar to me by some mysterious inner knowledge. The two and a half years I spent there were, spiritually, the most formative in my life. We in the West have little idea about the profound wisdom of the East.
"It was there I learned my philosophy of life. For in Java I met a man who had been sitting for twenty-four years on a tiger skin. He lived in a cave and looked like an old Christ. He taught me a lot. He was waiting for death — Toengoe Matti, as he said in Malay. He wasn't afraid of death When I returned to Europe I was a changed man for having known him. Nothing could bother me am more. I had learned to wait."
Dorn developed a passion for Oriental art, investing his guilders in Javanese. Chinese, East Indian and other Oriental stage costumes, props, musical instruments. He insured his collection for $83,000, "a lot of money for a Dutch actor," and prepared to leave for Holland.
"After our last performance I gave a farewell dinner party. We were eating, drinking and enjoying ourselves, when I was informed that the ship on which I was to sail had caught fire and was burning. Two hours before the fire had broken out I had cancelled my insurance, thinking the insurance of the ship company was enough. However, I learned to my chagrin that it wasn't effective while the ship was still in the harbor. Everything I had in the world was destroyed in the flames. My savings of a lifetime were gone and I had to start all over again."
But even a disaster like that couldn't get Dorn down. Back in Holland, he entered pictures and one of the directors he worked with was Henry Koster, a great admirer of Dorn's.
After his first picture, four Hollywood studios bid for his services, and he turned all four down. But the threat of war and Henry Koster's persuasions eventually brought him here. "I didn't think I would last six months in Hollywood, so I made my trip in the nature of a vacation. To me Hollywood was like Monte Carlo and everybody was a gambler here. You could be great stuff in ten minutes, or remain neglected for ten years."
Well, he has been in Hollywood now three years, and is here to stay. He lives with his actress wife in Brentwood, in a house they own. They frequently entertain Dutch sailors and soldiers. He is deeply tanned and his brown hair is a little bleached.
Twice he volunteered to serve in the armed forces of the United States, but was turned down because of a leg injury he suffered during his first American picture, "Ski Patrol." He has taken out his first citizenship papers and hopes to be able to fight in another year, when his leg injury will heal. Meanwhile, he is making one picture after another, the two latest being "Random Harvest" and "Reunion In France." Currently he is being starred in the Serbian saga, "Chetniks!"
When you talk with Philip Dorn you feel the inner power of the man. He looks invincible. To his native Dutch stubbornness and courage, he has added the wisdom and tranquillity of the East. If you ask him what is the guiding principle, the philosophy of his life, he will tell you, "Waiting." He considers waiting a great art.
The End
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, May 1943