ONE ACTOR’S LONG CAREER: MELVYN DOUGLAS
April 5, 2020: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler
Adapted from an earlier column three years ago.
One of my favorite actors, even from the time I was a little kid, was Melvyn Douglas. Even when I’d watched him on television in severely cut up Hollywood films constantly interrupted by commercials, I still loved Melvyn. Over the years, as I learned more about him, I not only discovered that he excelled in all mediums, but that he also led a truly upstanding life, putting his fame behind important causes and never failing to speak out against fascism and tyrany througout his long and prosperous career. And what a career! There was nothing he ever did that wasn’t first rate or allowed for imagining anyone else in a role for which he was cast. Unfortunately, I never got to see him on stage, as the last play he did on Broadway closed a year before I started going regularly as a teenager. So I doubled down and sought out films and television he did over the course of his long career since as long as I can remember. Nowadays, if Turner Classic Movies is playing a Melvyn Douglas film I’ve yet to see (or have seen many times already), I don’t budge from the couch. If he’s in anything — count me in.
Arriving in this world on this date in 1901, Melvyn Von Hesselberg was born to an immigrant Jewish father from Latvia and Lena Shackelford, a southern belle, the daughter of Col. George Taliaferro Shackelford. His roots were equal parts high-born and low-born: English (Mayflower descendants were part of her family tree) and Italian country folk (hence the Taliaferro). Young Melvyn grew up attending different schools all over the country, due to his father taking any job he could get as a music teacher. Never finishing high school, and lying about his age in order to serve in World War I, Douglas always harbored dreams of becoming an actor. After the armistice, those dreams became a reality when he searched for and found work all over the country, eventually leading him to Broadway. He had fine looks and genuine style, but it took him a long time to become a good actor, as he would tell more than one interviewer in the course of his lifetime.
The first line of his New York Times obituary called Douglas “a debonair performer,” which was entirely accurate. In films of the 1930s and 40s, he played opposite some of the greatest female stars (Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne and Joan Crawford) at a time when the motion picture industry’s hold on its audiences gripped a nation first debilitated by the Great Depression, then brought together by the Second World War. He had that rare ability to sublimate his own personality to a larger than life actress like Greta Garbo (in three films) without coming off as weak or sexless. He had tremendous charisma, exquisite comic timing, and though only half-Jewish, was actually the only leading man in those Golden Days of Hollywood that had any Jewish blood in him at all. I can recall the particular pride my parents took in Douglas’s background when he would show up on TV in some film during my childhood, and they would point to him and say, “He’s a Jew, you know.” I didn’t, and liked hearing it, as it gave me a sense of personal pride in a people for whom I was beginning to find an affiliation, more on a professional level than a religious one, but a connection all the same.
Seeing him as a young person in such classics as Ninotchka, Theodora Goes Wild and Captains Courageous inspired me to figure out he did it all so well. And as I got older, whaddya know? So did Melvyn Douglas. He embraced his thinning hair and the lines on his face, and gracefully transitioned to roles such as Paul Newman’s father in Hud, in a stellar performance that earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He then proceeded to play a series of grand old men in film and television. A TV movie that aired in 1967, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, written by Loring Mandel, was a harrowing story that had a profound impact on me as a young ten-year-old. As a man dealing with giving up his freedom for a new life in a nursing home, Douglas won an Emmy Award. And though I’ve spent years trying to find a DVD of it, I’m finally willing to give in to the fact that it seems to no longer exist.
Douglas’s granddaughter, the wonderful actress Illeana Douglas, knew her grandfather well and called him a “kind, talented man.” She was rightly thrilled when as a teenager he began to take seriously her interest in becoming an actress. On a visit to him on a film set many years ago, Douglas pulled her aside and gave her some valuable advice. With no irony he told Illeana, “Wherever you are, whatever country you are in, if you don’t know what to order from room service, always go with the club sandwich. It will always be good.”
How do you not love someone like that? And I haven’t even delved into all Douglas contributed to the greater good alongside his wife, the former three-term Democratic Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, famously smeared as a “Red” in her Senate election campaign of 1950 against the young and aggressive Richard M. Nixon. Close friends of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Douglases were founders and/or key members of many organizations, including the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Motion Picture Artists Committee, both of which opposed fascism. A true patriot, he enlisted in the service at age forty after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the China-Burma-India sector, he took four years off at the height of his film career, ending up an Army major.
Choosing not to return to Hollywood, Douglas went back to New York and the work that had first given him satisfaction. With the theatre being evanescent, one can only imagine the caliber of performance he gave in the original Broadway production of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, for which he received a Tony Award as Best Actor. It had to have been exceptional: his competition was his marvelous co-star Lee Tracy (who would be nominated for an Oscar when the film version was made five years later), Sidney Poitier (A Raisin in the Sun), George C. Scott (The Andersonville Trial) and Jason Robards (Toys in the Attic). Those were the days.
When he arrived at his mid-sixties to his late-seventies there were many great film performances from Douglas: Billy Budd, The Americanization of Emily, The Candidate, The Seduction of Joe Tynan and I Never Sang For My Father, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. His final nomination came for 1979’s Being There, and when Douglas was asked by a People Magazine reporter if he would be going to that year’s ceremonies, he replied. “No. It has been said an actor has no chance against a child or an animal. Justin Henry’s up for Kramer vs. Kramer and Mickey Rooney’s up for The Black Stallion.”
Sadly, we missed out on what might have been a great speech by Douglas. For on that evening he won his second Oscar.
He died at age 80 a little over a year later. But his films are always with us. Catch one the very next time you can.
If you enjoy these columns, check out Up in the Cheap Seats: a Historical Memoir of Broadway, available at Amazon.com in hardcover, softcover and e-book. Also sign up to follow me here, and feel free to email me with comments or questions at Ron@ronfassler.org.
