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October 15, 2009
Tay Garnett: Hollywood Circumcision
Actress Patsy Ruth Miller with director Tay Garnett.
Hollywood director Tay Garnett's (1894 – 1977) best known film is The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946. Lana Turner burns through the screen with her cool and murderous sensuality. John Garfield, real name Jacob Julius Garfinkle, gives a towering performance as the cynical chump who allows himself to be drawn into the femme fatale's web of adultery, homicide and betrayal.
Garnett was an efficient but notoriously uneven director, and as revealed in his eccentric autobiography, Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights, deeply immature, and for years a raging alcoholic.
In 1923, Garnett gained access to the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring the great Lon Chaney. Novice actress Patsy Ruth Miller (1904 – 1995) just 17-years old, was cast as Esmerelda, her first leading role. Garnett, star struck, fell in love, or more accurately in lust, with the high school age actress on the sprawling medieval set.
Before shooting the massive crowd scenes Hunchback's assistant director instructed the hundreds of extras through his megaphone: “Light your torches and pull up your tights!” Thus, Garnett's eccentric title for an eccentric memoir. He glosses over The Postman Always Rings Twice in just a few frustrating sentences.
But there are golden nuggets in Garnett's modest volume, and they shed a good deal of light on the director's character and career.
Undoubtedly, the most revealing details in the memoir are reserved for a woman named Joan Marshfield. For most of his adult life, Garnett was in love with Marshfield, the virtuous and elegant wife of Garnett's commanding officer in the Navy. It was a love of Shakesperian proportions that was never consummated. When she was married, Garnett was single. When he was married, she was divorced. On it went, missed opportunities, until death.
Several years after seeing Patsy Ruth on the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Garnett was an established Hollywood director, he and Miller entered into a marriage that was doomed before it began. He claims that Miller bullied him into marriage, and coolly manipulative, moved her father and brother into their home on their wedding day. Miller, no doubt, viewed Garnett as unreliable, emotionally stunted, more interested in boozing, gambling and sailing off to exotic tropical islands with his Irish buddies.
Garnett served his country as an aviator in World War I.
During training, he and fourteen members of his squad, chosen for Naval Flight Training, were, until training commenced, condemned by a hostile officer, to latrine duty.
Garnett, whose first job in Hollywood was as a gagman for Mack Sennett, dreamed up a plan to ditch latrine duty.
In disbelief, I read the following passage twice because it comes across like a lunatic gag in some lost Hollywood picture.
Here's Garnett's rather prosaic description:
Not being totally without defensive resources, the fourteen of us devoted hours of brainstorming to find a away to beat the rap. I am still proud to announce—even in memory of later misery—that it was I who came up with a Navy-proof solution.
I knew a two-striper, a medic named Dr. Cohn, who had been a urologist in San Francisco before joining the navy. I outlined our predicament to Lieutenant Cohn , and asked how long a man should remain in sick bay after undergoing circumcision.
“At least two weeks,” said the sympathetic doctor.
“Sold,” I said.
All fourteen of us signed up for surgery, and all were treated the same morning.
Snip. (No pun intended.)
That night, after surgery:
On that bygone night in sick bay, I remembered that I was sleeping on a mattress supported by a white enameled iron bedstead. I staggered to the foot of my bed and applied the chill metal to the conflagration.
Nearby I heard a groan of relief duplicating the involuntary moan I had just uttered. Another moan joined the refrain, then another.
Opening my eyes, I squinted into the gloom. Gradually it dawned on me that I was the anchor man in what had to be the world's most grotesque chorus line. There we were, all fourteen of us, lined up in identical poses, each at the foot of his icy iron bed. A frieze of outstandingly male Rockettes.
One can only shudder.
Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmerelda, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1923.
Garnett had quite a few good years in Hollywood, but frittered away all his money in an alcoholic haze. Later, his career was rescued by television where he directed multiple episodes of The Loretta Young Show, Wagon Train, Laramie, The Untouchables, Naked City, Rawhide, and Bonanza.
After a solid career as a reliable leading lady, Patsy Ruth Miller retired from the screen in 1931. She turned her talents to writing and won three O Henry Awards for her short stories. Miller authored a deeply autobiographical novel, That Flannigan Girl, 1939, one of the most revealing tinsel town tales I have ever read.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at October 15, 2009 10:06 AM
Comments
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Is latrine duty really that bad? I mean really?
Posted by: Jake at October 15, 2009 12:48 PM
Clean the latrine or be cut- hmmm... Decisions, decisions...
Posted by: Jack at October 15, 2009 02:09 PM
Considering how nasty latrine duty was during WWI, it is not surprising that the baby boom did not occur until after WWII.
Posted by: Johnny at October 15, 2009 03:23 PM
More seriously, what kind of cajones did it take for someone to be an aviator in WWI? They were involved in real dogfights and the planes were hardly a reliable mode of transportation.
And since he flew for the U.S. he probably launched off balloons instead of ships since we were behind the Brits and Japanese in developing seaplane carriers. Not that being in the trenches was fun but those pilots really were putting their life in danger every time they went up.
Posted by: Johnny at October 15, 2009 05:36 PM
Johnny: A good movie that details WW1 aviation - and the Lafayette Squadron - the American volunteers who flew for the French - is Flyboys.
The characters are for the most part composites of the actual members - but the mascot - a most unusual selection - was real.
They got the most rudimentary instruction and then were sent to combat where a huge percentage didn't make it.
This was before parachutes - which came into use towards the end of the war - a pilot was given a revolver - because if the plane was burning your choice was to either burn up or shoot yourself.
I recommend that movie for WW1 aviation - training and tactics.
Posted by: Bill Brandt at October 15, 2009 10:09 PM
Latrine duty in the military has never been pleasant but their means of evasion seem a bit extreme ;-)
Posted by: Bill Brandt at October 15, 2009 10:14 PM
Forgive me, but as I read the story about the, ah, latrine duty evasion, all I could think was: The Towering Inferno...
Posted by: Kent G. Budge at October 16, 2009 08:37 AM
Some of your Holywood stories would make great movies....
Posted by: Batya from Shiloh at October 18, 2009 01:12 PM
Had to comment on this one, as I may be the only other person active in the film blogosphere who has her very own copy of Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights. Frankly, as much fun as I had reading it, Garnett strikes me as the biggest example of an unreliable narrator this side of The Remains of the Day. But he does give good yarn. I was surprised that he had so little to say about Postman, but then I read that he spent at least part of that filming on a bender and it occurred to me that he probably didn't remember big chunks of it. He wrote much more about one of my favorite 1930s romances, One-Way Passage, a film he seems to have been very proud of. Certainly he was very eager to set the record straight about having written it. The story about Patsy Ruth quite possibly having disposed of his first draft in a fit of pique made it into a Kay Francis bio I read, along with an understated description of Garnett's memoirs as "lively." Uh, yeah, and so is Manhattan. But that was enough for me to order the book from Alibris, for the bargain price of about $2.
At least 1/3 of the book is taken up with tales of Joan. It's such a made-for-Hollywood, "Back Street" sort of fable that I was prepared to think he had made her up, like Herrick and his Antheas and Julias. But he did include that portrait in the pictures section.
Posted by: The Siren at October 19, 2009 11:43 AM
Siren:
Thanks so much for the valuable comment.
Yes, Garnett's book is definitely unreliable, that's why I chose to highlight the circumcision episode because, well, let's face it, it's impossible to invent.
Patsy Ruth says very little about life with Tay though she does go into detail about their nutty overseas divorce.
For a prime example of another unreliable narrator see Raoul Walsh's memoir ”Each Man in his Own Time.” He never once mentions wife Miriam Cooper.
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.seraphicpress.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 26, 2009 04:35 PM