I’ve always been especially attracted to childhood tales and I enjoy listening to them, from anybody.   Yeah, I’m that guy who flips through your photo album uninvited, because he really wants to know what you looked like when you were 7.  This has only gotten worse now that I have children of my own and I experience a second, vicarious childhood through them.  Stories about what people did and thought about as kids – the hopes, fears, aspirations and (to adult ears) kooky associations – are so much more interesting and evocative and entertaining than the complaining and whining and bragging of adults, about their money or their politics or their religion or their cars or their sex lives… or their children!   One of the things I enjoy most about the research involved in writing programming articles and the occasional talent biography for Turner Classic Movies is the anecdotes that I get to read about the childhood years of Hollywood actors, especially ones born before or in the early years of the 20th Century, when life was (or at least seems now to have been) simpler and more essential.  Uncluttered, unplugged and decidedly off the grid, these boyhood and girlhood tales of life during the Great Depression or in the interval between world wars are like the proverbial breath of fresh air, the refreshing blast of ozone after hours spent indoors.  As relatives and older friends succumb to age and illness and take their great stories with them, and as I age and feel my own childhood memories slipping away from me, I embrace these biographical sketches and thank the efforts of biographers and autobiographers for making sure some of the flavor of days gone by is preserved for future generations.

In a letter to his children, published only recently in The Chicago Reader, tough guy actor Robert Ryan (pictured at right) wrote glowingly and a little achingly about his formative years and his dimly-remembered relationship to a younger brother, who died of lumbar pneumonia at the age of six.  “Evidently we got along very well and he looked up to his ‘big’ brother. We slept together and I remember us both lying awake on Christmas Eve while my father stamped around the back-porch and rang sleigh bells in a convincing (to us) representation of the arrival of Santa Claus.”  Ack, that kills me… not even that Ryan’s kid brother was destined to die so young but just the image of sweet-as-pie little boys lying two abed and listening so intently for those jingle bells in the midst of a cold Chicago winter.  It’s hard to believe that same tyke, with his Buster Brown velvet suit, church hair and chum-chum cheeks, would go on to be the hateful racist of CROSSFIRE (1948), the vengeful ex-GI of ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948), the misanthropic cinema projectionist of CLASH BY NIGHT (1952), the bullying Master d’Arms of BILLY BUDD (1962) or the world-weary Deke Thornton  of THE WILD BUNCH (1969)… but he did.  I love reading Ryan’s letter, as I love hearing my parents’ stories about their early years; if you haven’t had the pleasure, I point you to it now.

In her wonderful and much-needed biography of Robert Taylor, Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood and Communism, Linda J. Alexander recounts a touching story from the childhood of “the Man with the Perfect Profile.”  The only child of a Nebraska grain merchant who put himself through medical school to cure his chronically ill wife, Spanger Arlington Brugh was a pampered, spoiled but thoughtful and obedient boy whose sickly, over-protective mother Ruth forbid him to play with other children.  One day, the local latch key kids were holding a funeral for a bird they had themselves killed with rocks and a pellet gun.  Seeing this strange ritual, the future Robert Taylor stood up from the perceived security of his front porch and shouted to the other kids, demanding to be allowed to play the role of the preacher for this funeral service, and to sing the eulogy.  “He loudly sang the ‘eulogy’ for the dead bird from his spot on the porch,” Alexander writes, “his voice ringing out with poignant clarity.”  Yeah, I can relate.  I was one of those weird kids who went around my rural community looking for dead animals to bury in my own pet cemetery and over which I read aloud scripture from a slim volume of prayers meant for grace at holidays dinners.  Well, my heart was in the right place, at least.

Although life for the young Bette (then known as Betty) Davis was difficult and even traumatic following the divorce of her parents in 1918, I did love reading about her adventures as a young girl and an aspiring actress in Depression era New York.  Her mother Ruthie had taken up photography as a form of therapy during the three year separation from Harlow Morrell Davis, a patent lawyer, and she would fall back on this vocation in a bid to support her children.  (Other jobs included working as a nurse maid and a house mother at an all girls school.)  Despite $200 a month from Harlow in child support, times were tough for Ruthie and her daughters, beginning with the day she told the girls Daddy wouldn’t be coming home anymore.  According to Charlotte Chandler’s The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis – A Personal Biography, news of the divorce hit the kids quite differently.  While younger sister Barbara (called Bobby) reacted with dismay, Betty is remembered to have clapped her hands excitedly and exclaimed  “Oh, goodie… now we can go on a picnic and have another baby!”  Her outlook wasn’t always so rosy.  At age eleven, the bashful and inhibited Betty was forced by poverty to pose nude for a proposed piece of park statuary and at Christmas 1920 she was badly burned when the costume Santa Claus beard she was wearing caught fire.  What makes this story especially poignant is that it had been Harlow who had played Santa Claus in happier years and that Betty was no doubt reliving happy childhood memories when hear-tragedy struck.  Some family members and friends who remembered the incident decades after it occurred speculated that the attention Betty received after the accident was her first taste of the spotlight in which she would bask for nearly all of her life, as the immortal Bette Davis.

As was the case with Robert Ryan, it’s a bit difficult to reconcile the slit-eyed, sardonic Bogie of THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) with this early studio portrait of Humphrey DeForest Bogart, age 2.  Before he became a problem for authority (by most accounts, around the age of 9), Humphrey Bogart was a shy, retiring youth forced, as was Robert Taylor, into Little Lord Fauntleroy suits.  His mother Maude was a gifted painter of portraits, trained in Paris under the tutelage of James McNeill Whistler (of “Whistler’s Mother” fame).  As a female in a man’s, man’s, man’s, man’s world, Maud Bogart didn’t have a shot at getting commissions from great men needing their portrait painted and so children became her subjects – one of them her own son – and she enjoyed considerable success as a commercial illustrator.  An urban myth circulated for years that Humphrey Bogart had in his infancy been a model for the Gerber Baby but it was for Mellin’s Baby Food that his likeness was employed.  (Gerber did not begin to market baby food until 1928, at which point Humphrey Bogart was pushing 30.)  In later years, Bogie said of his tenure as “the original Mellin’s Baby” that “there was a period in American history when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser in it.”

There are so many these kinds of stories – of John Cassavetes idolizing James Cagney as a child of the Depression, of Woody Strode knowing his daddy was coming home because he could smell his cigar, of Ray Harryhausen’s father taking him by the RKO studio backlot to see the leftover sets from KING KONG (1933), of filmmaker Sam Fuller becoming a copy boy for William Randolph Hearst at the age of 13, of Gloria Grahame making a go of life in Hollywood with her sister and mother after her father left home, of future “King of the Gimmick” William Castle stealing money from his sister’s purse to go see a 1927 production of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, of director-producer Roger Corman discovering the stories of Edgar Allan Poe while a student at Beverly Hills High school – and so many great pictures that have been preserved from oblivion of actors from Hollywood’s classic period, back when they were precious little things and sprightly young saplings.  My favorites include a shot of Peter Lorre, when he was 3 or 4 years old and known as László Löwenstein, posing with a wooden rocking horse and a ball nearly the size of his perfectly round (and shaved) head; a family snapshot of an 8 year-old Eli Wallach sitting somewhat uncomfortably on a pony forty years before his mounted career milestones in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1965); and of a tomboyish-looking Audrey Hepburn, coming off as a cross between Anne Frank and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, decades away from the elegance and haute couture that would characterize her professional life.  These stories and images are precious to me, as if they were leaves plucked from my own family tree.  I love these backward glances because they speak to childhood the way I want childhood to remain – simple, unstructured but guided and full of fresh air and equal doses of sunshine and moonglow.  I’m not naive enough to want those tender years to be trouble-free, as adversity is such a time-tested builder of character, but reading stories about children growing up in less prosperous times has given me some clues toward child-rearing and the future care and feeding of my own cast of characters.