Raymond Hackett — The Lawyer for the Defense (1929) 🇺🇸

“Here is a heart for you,” said the veteran actor to the very small boy. “Remember, it will break easily. Treat it tenderly, carefully, reverently.”

by Muriel Babcock

With a grandiloquent gesture he pinned the tiny red heart to the child’s velveteen jacket.

And the boy, blue-eyed, tow-headed, serious-minded, looked up gravely and said, “I will.”

These lines were from a play, “The Toymaker of Nuremberg.”

The boy was Raymond Hackett, the veteran actor William J. Ferguson, and the play was at the old Garrick Theater in New York.

In telling of the incident last year at the Lambs Club, Ferguson said, “And the lad sounded as if he were making a vow.”

Perhaps he was; who knows? For today Raymond Hackett does not remember that speech. Nor does he recall anything about the little toy heart that would break so easily. Yet, ever since he was in knee pants, Raymond Hackett’s life has been one of responsibility. He cannot remember his father, a wholesale grocer, who died suddenly, leaving a young widow practically penniless. He began contributing to the care of his mother at the age of four — he and his brother Albert and his sister Jeannette.

The part in “The Toymaker of Nuremberg” was his first that brought in money to help the family budget. Undoubtedly, therefore, it wielded a psychological influence upon his entire life.

Perhaps that is why the role of the young attorney fighting passionately in the courtroom for the life and honor of a sister in The Trial of Mary Dugan seems to have been created just for him. Even with Norma Shearer, one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ace actresses in the title role, Hackett’s work stands out as one of the fine things of the production.

Perhaps it is why again in the role of an attorney, this time pleading at the bar for the life of his mother in “Madame X,” even the electricians and the prop boys found themselves reduced to lachrymal outpourings. They couldn’t help crying — these hard-boiled men who usually regard the emotional histrionics as part of the mechanics of the job.

It is because of the fine sincerity in his work in these first two pictures that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now regards Raymond Hackett as one of their “big shots” in talking pictures. His next will be “Eva, the Fifth.”

Hackett is twenty-six — the boyish type. Clear, blue eyes. Blond hair. He is reserved, shy, the sort of lad mothers like to point proudly to as son.

From the beginning, Raymond took his work as only a serious-minded boy with a deep sense of chivalrous protection toward a mother and sister could.

When he was seven, he was playing the important child role in “The Awakening of Helena Ritchie” with Margaret Anglin. He came early to work one day to find a newcomer rehearsing his role.

A little later, he was discovered choked up with sobs in a dark corner of the wings.

“Why, Raymond, what’s the matter?” he was asked.

No answer. Only a dismal shake of the head.

Margaret Anglin, summoned, sensed the trouble.

“Raymond, did you think we were going to put a new actor in your role?”

The boy nodded.

“Why, he’s just an understudy. Didn’t you ever hear of an understudy?”

Another shake of the head.

“He’s someone trained to take your place in case you are ever ill.”

Raymond sat straight up. “I’ll never be ill,” he stated quite simply. And he never was during the run of that play.

When he was sixteen, he went to see about getting the role of Scott, the boy whom Lincoln pardons in Drinkwater’s famous drama.

William Brady and Lester Lonergan were interviewing the applicants. They liked Raymond’s looks.

“What salary do you want?” Lonergan asked.

“Well,” he said almost apologetically, “I was getting $125 in my last part.”

“What?” bellowed Brady, “a boy like you? I don’t believe it.”

Raymond, suddenly white-faced, picked up his hat and walked away.

By the boy’s very gesture, they knew he was telling the truth.

“I believe he’s the one we want,” Lonergan said.

“Send a messenger for him,” returned Brady.

From this engagement and a later one with Lionel Barrymore in “The Copperhead” Raymond became a veritable encyclopaedia on Lincoln.

He never had an education, in the formal sense of the word. Two years in a private school, three years with a tutor.

But ask him about Lincoln. Or ask him about Dickens’ haunts, Stratford-on-Avon, Westminster Abbey — he knows them all. For about the time the average boy is a freshman in college, he was playing in George M. Cohan’s “So This Is London” on the London stage.

He knows a good deal of law from “Mary Dugan.” He knows most of the contemporary dramatists from appearing in their offerings. He knows the best literature of the world from his study for the drama.

One of his childhood tragedies was that he couldn’t own a bicycle. He did find time in the midst of his stage career, however, to try the movies.

When he was five, after appearing with Maude Adams in “Peter Pan,” D. W. Griffith chose him for a role in a picture. Raymond cannot remember the name of it.

“I remember I liked Griffith because he let me play with a lot of tin soldiers and then gave them to me,” he grinned.

“And I played parts on the old Lubin lot in Philadelphia from 1912 to 1915. My mother was married to Arthur Johnson, a Lubin star, whom she later divorced.” He paused a moment, looked away regretfully — his way of saying that chapter was closed. Then he added, “For three years, Albert, Jeannette and I worked on the lot.”

“No, I don’t remember much of what I played then. No important parts. I was the child carried from the burning cabin at midnight, or the little boy who galloped miles on horseback to let the settlers know the Indians were coming. Things like that.

“I didn’t care much about the movies then. I liked the stage. I liked the applause the audience gave me. Now that I’ve come back to pictures,” he grinned — “I say that as if I had the choosing — I am terribly interested. It’s been hard work getting the technique. I should have known my part in ‘Mary Dugan’ letter perfect. In fact, I did on the stage, but when it came to the cameras and the microphone I found I had a great deal to learn. Oh, well —

“The nicest part is that it gives Mrs. Hackett and me a chance for a home and evenings together. We have a house at Santa Monica overlooking the ocean. It’s a nice, homey sort of a place. Brown shingled — NOT Spanish. It has green shutters and a red chimney.

“Awfully cozy. I have some things in New York, some old books picked up in London, some old brass and odds and ends, you know, that we still need to make it thoroughly homelike.”

Hackett is married to Myra Hampton, whom he met while playing in that raucously funny farce, “The Cradle Snatchers,” in New York. That was two and a half years ago. They have never been separated, although Miss Hampton is an actress and has carried on professionally all the time. There was a period during which Raymond went into the cast of “The Nightstick” and Miss Hampton went to Chicago with a play, when it looked as if they might be separated, but Raymond’s piece was sent West, too. After that, they both came to California in the stage version of “Mary Dugan.” He was performing in this melodrama at the old Mason Opera House in Los Angeles when M.-G.-M. agents saw him and signed him.

One of the ironic things about his success, however, is that the movie magnates were not thinking so much of his personality as they were of getting an actor-proof cast for Norma Shearer’s first talking picture. They needed him for that play only, they thought, but he turned out to be so good that he seems to be on the books for keeps.

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A serious-eyed small boy, he played with his step-father, the beloved Arthur Johnson, in the old Lubin thrillers

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1929