Thunder Afloat (1939) was on TCM this morning, starring Wallace Beery and Virginia Grey. It was one of those ’30s movies where the women talked in a machine-gun staccato and called their dad ‘Pop!’. I like to get the background on movies I watch so I looked it up on IMDB. Turns out Wallace Beery was a complete asshole. Jackie Cooper (the boy in the picture who made 4 films with him), said as soon as the cameras were off he dropped the facade and treated him like a dog. He said the persona of Beery as a rough around the edges love-able mug with a heart of gold was complete crap. He said when Beery died “they couldn’t find 8 men to carry the casket“.

When he worked with 16 year old Mickey Rooney, there was a scene where the big man was supposed to ‘slap’ Rooney. Only he used his full force and knocked Rooney to the ground. The director took him aside and told him if he did anything like that again “some lighting equipment might fall on his head accidentally“. In a match made from hell he was married briefly to Gloria Swanson, who said of the uncouth lout, “He was invited to the nicest homes in Beverly Hills – once.” In the 1984 book Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, child actors said the two stars they hated to work with most were W.C. Fields and Wallace Beery.

The more I find out about “old Hollywood” (or new for that matter), the less I like it. What they did to children and animals was inexcusable. All they did was chase a buck and work tirelessly to maintain this wholesome veneer. For every good story of the “old days” (Clark Gable who joined the service in WW II and was being given the royal treatment, one day in the barracks took off his toupee and removed his false teeth and said, “How’s this for the ‘King’ of Hollywood?”), there are 10 bad ones. Which could all be overlooked but for 1 reason: Those movies greatly influence the culture in America, and those are not good movies.