A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.
Lest you think I exercise any undue influence on Charlie’s Walk of Fame choices, it was only after we got home from Hollywood that I realized how appropriate his current pick was for St. Patrick’s Day. I also realized how much Charlie favors actors — I’m glad he decided to honor a director and screenwriter for a change, especially one as gifted as Leo McCarey.
Born in Los Angeles on October 3, 1898, McCarey attended USC Law School but soon after graduation went to work for Hal Roach. He wrote some of the Our Gang comedies and took over directing the popular Charley Chase shorts. McCarey’s first credit as director was on Isn’t Life Terrible? in 1925 starring Chase, Oliver Hardy and Fay Wray — a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful? It was Leo McCarey who first had the idea of putting Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel together and he directed a few of their silent shorts in the late 1920s including Liberty and Wrong Again.
McCarey had no trouble making the transition into the sound era. He directed many movie classics in the 1930s and worked with some of the industry’s biggest stars including Gloria Swanson (Indiscreet), Mae West (Belle of the Nineties), W.C. Fields (Six of a Kind), and the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup).
In 1937, Leo McCarey won his first Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth, the brilliant screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Though Grant tried to get out of the film at first, he grew to admire McCarey as a director and then ended up making several more films together including My Favorite Wife (1940), Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) and An Affair to Remember (1957). Grant later said that his on-screen suave “Cary Grant character” was largely based on the real-life Leo McCarey. The two looked a bit alike and it was easy for Grant to copy McCarey’s mannerisms.
Being a good Irish Catholic, McCarey developed the story for one of his most successful films in the 1940s, Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby as an unconventional young priest who gets a gig at parish in New York City and immediately gets into conflict with the older priest there played by Barry Fitzgerald. To everyone’s surprise, Going My Way was the highest-grossing film of 1944 and won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and another Best Director prize for McCarey who also won an Oscar for Best Original Motion Picture Story (a category that was eliminated in 1957). Crosby and Fitzgerald both won Oscars, too, and McCarey soon got to work on a sequel to the popular film.
The Bells of St. Mary’s found Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley at loggerheads with Ingrid Bergman’s Sister Mary Benedict. At the 1945 Academy Awards, when Crosby and McCarey won for Going My Way, Ingrid Bergman took home the Best Actress Oscar for Gaslight. When she accepted her award, she said, “I’m glad I won, because tomorrow morning I start shooting the sequel to Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Leo McCarey, and I was afraid that if I didn’t have an Oscar, they wouldn’t speak to me!” The Bells of St. Mary’s was also hugely popular and became the most profitable film ever released by RKO.
Not all of Leo McCarey’s films were box office hits. One that I would love to see was his anti-communist film My Son John (1952) starring Helen Hayes, Van Heflin and Robert Walker as a young man who returns from a trip to Europe acting strangely. His worried parents ultimately find out that he’s a Commie spy! One of McCarey’s last big movies was An Affair to Remember, a scene-by-scene remake of his own 1939 film Love Affair. The 1957 version starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and is considered by many to be one of the most romantic films of all time. I get completely engrossed in this film every time I see it, despite the frustratingly tragic plot of Kerr missing her rendezvous with Grant on top of the Empire State Building because she’s struck by a car and paralyzed.
Leo McCarey died on July 5, 1969, from emphysema. “I like my characters to walk in clouds,” he once said. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale. As long as I’m there behind the camera lens, I’ll let somebody else photograph the ugliness of the world.”