The Hillbilly Who Wasn’t—Walter Brennan

Walter Brennan as Stumpy in Howard Hawk's 1959 Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Dean Martin.

Walter Brennan, the most honored character actor in Hollywood history and often cast as a hick, cowboy, and/or a toothless codger, was born on July 25, 1894 in Lynn, Massachusetts.  In real life he was anything but a hick—he was a well educated New Englander with a keen business sense.   

He was one of three children born to lace curtain Irish immigrants and raised in Swampscott.  His father was a successful engineer and inventor.  Young Walter meant to follow in his father’s footsteps by training at Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge.

While still in school, to his family’s disapproval, he became interested in the theater and began to occasionally perform in vaudeville at the age of 15. He continued acting, off and on after graduating, perfecting a comic routine as a stutterer which he would later use in some of his earliest speaking roles in movies as comic relief.

Brennan also took jobs as a bank clerk, and even as a lumberjack.  But prior to enlisting in the Army for World War I, he was back in the theater, touring with a third rate musical company.  

After front line service in France in the Field Artillery, he immigrated to Guatemala where he operated a small pineapple plantation.

In 1920 Brennan married Ruth Wells who stayed by his side until his death 54 years later.  He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1920’s and began speculating, very successfully, in real estate.  He was soon a wealthy man.

But with time on his hands and the acting bug itching, Brennan began working as an extra in pictures and occasionally even as a stunt man.  By late in the decade he was getting small walk on parts as well and sometimes, if rarely, got screen credit.  But he never shied from continuing to take work as an extra, unlike many actors who came to regard that as beneath them.  In fact he would continue to do so well into the 1930’s when he was beginning to get established as an actor.

The Los Angeles real estate bubble burst after the 1929 Stock Market Crash and Brennan was wiped out.  He then had to rely on his film appearances, which he pursued relentlessly.  By the early 30’s he was beginning to establish a persona.  Because of his thinning hair, slender build and the loss of most of his front teeth in a 1933 auto accident, Brennan found himself routinely cast much older than his years.  Completely un-vain he would work without his dentures if a part required it.  He played an astonishing range of parts, but his appearance got him cast more and more frequently in westerns or as some kind of rustic.

Brennan with the first ever Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1936 for Come and Get It--the first of three such trophies, so many that the Academy worried that it had become "Brennan's category" and moves were made to keep him from being nominated for even better films yet to come.

In 1936 Brennan got his first co-starring role, billed third after Chester Morris and Lewis Stone in the original version of the western The Three Godfathers. More and more important roles soon came his way.  Later that year he was cast as lumberjack Swan Bostrom in the troubled production of Come and Get It based on Edna Ferber’s novel and directed by Howard Hawks, who was fired, and William Wyler who reluctantly completed the film.  Not a great critical success, it was a hit at the box office.  Brennan was nominated for the first ever Best Supporting Actor Academy Award and walked away with the trophy.

A parade of memorable roles followed and he was awarded the Best Supporting Actor Oscar two more times within the decade, for the race track drama Kentucky with Loretta Young and Richard Greene in 1938 and as Judge Roy Bean with Gary Cooper in 1940’s The Westerner. After the third win, the Academy ended voting privileges for member of the Screen Extras Guild who tended to come out en-mass to vote for the actor who had toiled so long among them. As a result, when Brennan was nominated again the next year for one on his best remembered parts, the preacher/shop keeper who counseled Cooper’s Sergeant York, he failed to take home the statue.

Despite many more memorable parts he was never nominated again.  But his three Oscars tie him with Jack Nicholson for the most awards ever given to a male actor.

He worked frequently with Cooper, who regarded him as his favorite co-star.  Their other films together included The Cowboy and the Lady, Meet John Doe, The Pride of the Yankees and Task Force.

Brennan,, Spencer Tracy, and Robert Young in Northwest Passage

Other memorable films of the late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s included Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Buccaneers; as Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; as the befuddled professor in They Shall Have Music; and Stanley and Livingston and Northwest Passage both with Spenser Tracy.

By the late 40’s Brennan was aging into the roles he had been playing for a decade and turning in some of his best performances.  In 1944 he played the thirsty side kick to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and to Have Not. Two years later he played one of his few villains as Ike Clayton opposite Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine.  In 1948 he made his first appearance with John Wayne as his side kick Nadine Groot in Red River. That’s a pretty impressive trifecta of film classics right there.

Brennan with Humphrey  Bogart in To Have and Have Not.

Unlike some leading men, character actor Brennan was able to roll along with a successful and busy career for the rest of his life.  In the ‘50’s he appeared in Along the Great Divide with Kirk Douglas, The Far County with James Stewart, re-teaming with Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, with rare top billing in the boy and dog yarn Good Bye, My Lady, and most memorably of all as Stumpy in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo with Wayne and Dean Martin.

Always eager to work, Brennan had no qualms about also jumping into the new medium of television.  He appeared regularly in popular anthology programs like The Schlitz Playhouse Ethel Barrymore Presents, Cavalcade of America, Ford Television Theater, Zane Gray Theater, and Colgate Theater.

With Richard Crenna and Kathleen Nolan in the hillbilly sitcom The Real McCoys.

In 1957 Brennan began playing the part for which a generation most remembered him, as Grandpa McCoy on the comedy series The Real McCoys which costarred Richard Crenna.  The show ran for five seasons on CBS and for a final year in 1963 as The McCoys on ABC.  He went on to star in three more TV series—The Tycoon in 1965 in the completely different title role, The Guns of Will Sonnet from ’67-’69, and From Rome With Love in 1971.

All the while he continued to guest star on other TV shows and continue to act in movies, by then playing almost exclusively eccentric old men.  Among his more popular late career roles were in Support Your Local Sheriff with James Garner and the two Over the Hill Gang TV movies.

Brennan also had a late recording career. He recorded two albums of semi-spoken word songs in his old codger persona, The Dutchman’s Gold in 1960 and Old Rivers in ’62.  The title song from the second album climbed to Number 5 on U.S. pop charts.

Brennan made several successful spoken word albums and the singe Old Rivers made it to #5 on the Billboard pop charts,

Active until the end of his life, Brennan’s last film was the forgettable Smoke in the Wind in 1975 which was directed by his son Andy.

Brennan died later that year on September 20 of emphysema at his Oxnard, California home.

In his fifty year career he appeared in 239 known films and television roles and probably appeared in dozens more films as an extra that are unknown. That’s what is called a working actor.

So You Think You Know Who Discovered the North Pole

James Clark Ross as a Royal Navy Captain with Arctic furs and an instrument, bottom right, to measure the magnetic field.  

You have been told that the first persons to reach the North Pole were American explorer Robert Perry, a Navy engineer, and his trusty aide Mathew Henson plus four Inuits who are hardly ever mentioned, Ootah, Seeglo, Egingwah, and Ooqueah.  Perry claimed to have finally reached the illusive prize of decades of Polar exploration on April 9, 1909.  But you may have been misinformed on two counts.

First, there is now significant doubt that the Perry party ever actually achieved the Pole.  After an arduous 36 day “dash” across the rugged sea ice, an exhausted Perry may simply have thrown up his hands and declared he was there.  Later analysis of his raw navigational readings showed sloppiness, inconsistency, and perhaps out-right fraud.  Also, his and Henson’s account of the journey were at odds—Perry claiming a relative bee-line crossing from his base camp to explain how he achieved the distance in the time reported, and Henson’s story of painstaking zig-zagging to avoid ice ridges and fissures.

Members of Robert Perry's sledge team including Mathew Henson and four Inuit posed with flags at the alleged North Geographic Pole on April 9, 1909.

When he got home, Perry had to dispute claims that a rival expedition led by Frederick Cook had reached the goal on April 21, 1908, almost a year earlier.  Cooks data and claims were even more iffy Perry got prestigious support from the Navy, which honored him with a promotion to Captain on his return, the National Geographic Society, and the Explorers’ Club.  For years Perry’s claims were honored until recent investigators began picking apart his story.

Still, if you grant that Perry made it to the Pole, or at least close enough, as some Arctic scholars continue to maintain, the achievement is for the geographic pole—the point on the globe furthest north at the opposite end from a point in Antarctica marking the axis on which the Earth turns at a slight angle to the plane of the planet’s orbit around the sun.  But there are other poles, representing the ends of the magnetic field that surround the globe.  The Magnetic North Pole is currently about 500 kilometers south of the Geographic Pole in northern Canada, but it can wander several kilometers a year.  It has been as far south as 1500 KM and as close as 200 KM over the millenniums. 

The first person to reach the Magnetic North, or at least where it was on June 1, 1831 was Royal Navy officer James Clark Ross.  Ross became the most celebrated British polar explorer of the Victorian Age.

John Ross sponsored his nephew in the Royal Navy and included him on his first Arctic expedition.

Ross was born into a comfortable middle class family with connections to the Royal Navy in London on April 15, 1800.  Under the sponsorship of his uncle, Scottish born Commander John Ross, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, the boy entered the Navy as a midshipman at age 15.

Three years later in 1818 he accompanied his uncle who was in command of an Arctic expedition organized by the Admiralty to find the supposed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic across the northern coast of North America to the Bering Sea.   This was an international obsession.  The discovery of such a route, even if only available for a few months each year, could cut as much as a year from the long voyages to Asia around either the Cape of Good Hope in Africa or around the Horn of South America, a key to untold riches in trade.  It would also secure claims on North America against Arctic rivals including Norway, Russia, and the United States.

The senior Ross commanding HMS Isabella and accompanied by HMS Alexander under Lieutenant William Edward Parry. They sailed counter-clockwise around Baffin Bay repeating the observations made by William Baffin two hundred years before. In August they entered Lancaster Sound at the north end of Baffin Island which later proved to be the eastern gate of the Northwest Passage. After sailing several miles west Ross turned back after seeing what turned out to be a mirage—a mountain range blocking the end of the straight.

William Edward Parry was John Ross's second in Command in 1819 and then commanded four  more expeditions which included the younger James Clark Ross.                                                                                        

Arriving back home in England, Commander Ross was hailed as a hero and promoted to Captain.  But Parry publicly disputed Ross’s decision to turn back and cast doubt on the existence of the mysterious mountain range.  Ross’s reputation was injured and Parry was given command of the next British expedition in 1819.

Parry thought well enough, however, of young John Ross to include him in the crew. Parry’s voyage, undertaken in an unusually ice-free year, went through what was named the Parry Channel and three quarters of the way across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, making it the most productive voyage in the quest for the Northwest Passage for decades. Parry was rewarded with a promotion to Commander and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Sea Ice by German artist Caspar David Frierich based on Parry's accounts of the 1824-25 expedition  showed the power of the ice to trap and smash the HMS Fury.

John Ross would make four Arctic voyages with Parry from 1819 to 1827.  On the third voyage, 1824-1825 one of the two expedition ships, HMS Fury was trapped in the ice trying to enter Hudson’s Bay from the North.  Parry’s last arctic voyage would have a different mission—trying to reach the Geographic North Pole by sailing north from Norwegian arctic island of Spitzbergen in 1847.  That voyage achieved the furthest point north ever recorded by Europeans, 82°45’N, a record that would stand for 49 years.

Parry’s Navy career then took him to other duties and the Admiralty once turned to Captain John Ross to resume the search for the Northwest Passage.  James Clark Ross, now a Lieutenant and the most experienced Arctic junior officer in the Royal Navy, was his uncles right hand man on the Second Ross Expedition, 1829-34.  The expedition was blocked from advancing for four years at the north end of the Boothia Peninsula.  Having been criticized for turning back too early on his first voyage and well provisioned Captain Ross waited for an ice melt that would allow him to go further but in 1831 his ship HMS Victory became totally trapped by the ice.

In 1831 the Captain dispatched his nephew to lead a small party overland to try and find open water.  It was on that trek that James Clark Ross identified what was then the location of the North Magnetic Pole on the western side of the peninsula.  It was on this trip that the younger Ross charted the Beaufort Islands, later renamed Clarence Islands by his uncle.

When the Captain determined the Victory would have to be abandoned, James Clark Ross trekked to the site of the wreckage of Parry’s HMS Fury.  He found that ship gone, presumably crushed and sunk in the ice, but discovered her boats reparable on the beach.  On July 1, 1832, the crew sailed in three of the boats and reached Barrow Strait at the end of August. Finding an unbroken field of ice, they waited four weeks for the ice to melt, gave up, returned south, left their boats at Batty Bay and walked back to Fury Beach. On July 8, 1833 they left for Batty Bay and on August 14 saw open water for the first time. They reached the head of Prince Regent Inlet and on August 26 they were seen by the Isabella which Parry had commanded in 1819.  By October 1833 they were back in England.

The achievement of the Magnetic Pole was widely celebrated when the expedition finally returned, and the saga of the expedition’s ordeal was widely recounted.  James Clark Ross was promoted to Captain and due to his expertise with instruments that measure the earth’s magnetic fields, was given a special assignment to conduct a magnetic survey of Great Britain with Edward Sabin from 1834-39. 

He interrupted that service in 1836 to lead a relief expedition to find and resupply the crews of 11 British whaling ships trapped in the ice around Baffin Island.  He set sail in HMS Cove in January. The crossing was difficult, and by the time he had reached the last known position of the whalers in June, all but one had managed to return home. Ross found no trace of this last vessel, William Torr, which was probably crushed in the ice in 1835.

Despite his fame for these exploits, James Ross’s most celebrated expedition was yet to come and at the other end of the world.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror off the coast of Antarctica.

Between 1839 and 1843, Ross commanded an Antarctic expedition comprising the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, bomb vessels, unusual warships named after the mortar bombs they were designed to fire and constructed with extremely strong hulls to withstand the recoil of the mortars which was of great value in thick ice.  Ross charted much of the coastline of the continent.

In 1841 he discovered the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. They sailed for 250 nautical miles along the edge of the low, flat-topped ice shelf they called the Great Ice Barrier, later named the Ross Ice Shelf. In the following year, he attempted to penetrate south at about 55°W and explored the eastern side of what is now known as James Ross Island, discovering and naming Snow Hill Island and Seymour Island. Ross reported that Admiralty Sound appeared to him to have been blocked by glaciers at its southern end.

Antarctica features discovered and charted by James Clark Ross.

For his monumental discoveries Ross was awarded the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie in 1843, knighted in 1844, and elected to the Royal Society in 1848.

In 1848 Ross had one last adventure.  He commanded one of three expeditions to find Sir John Franklin, an experienced Arctic hand and recently the Governor of Tasmania.  After Ross himself had declined the assignment, Franklin was put in charge of the latest Northwest Passage expedition in 1845 and given Ross’s trusty ships Erebus and Terror to complete the estimated 500 final miles of the Passage.  The expedition was last seen by Europeans on July 26, 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales encountered Terror and Erebus moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound.  It is now believed that the expedition wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island. The ships became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note later found on that island, Franklin died there on June 11, 1847. But no one then knew that.

Ross was given command of HMS Enterprise, accompanied by HMS Investigator, Because of heavy ice in Baffin Bay he only reached the northeast tip of Somerset Island where he was frozen in at Port Leopold. In the spring he and Francis McClintock explored the west coast of the island by sledge. He recognized Peel Sound but thought it too ice-choked for Franklin to have used.  In fact, Franklin had used it in 1846 the sea ice was atypically low. The next summer he tried to reach Wellington Channel but was blocked by ice and returned to England, frustrated.

The fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew as imagined by artist W. Turner Smith in The End in Sight,  1848. 

He was not alone.  None of the first three expeditions had any better luck.  In 1854, the Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson’s Bay Company, learned from Inuit hunters that both ships had become icebound, and the men had tried to reach safety on foot but had succumbed to cold, and some had resorted to cannibalism.  The report horrified Victorian society which refused to believe it.  Public pressure to find Franklin or a more heroic ending resulted in 25 more expeditions being sent over the next four decades, including one commanded by 70-year-old Sir John Ross in 1870.  Eventually, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself.

As for Sir James Clark Ross, he settled into an honored and comfortable retirement with his wife, Lady Ann Ross.  They split their time between a London townhouse and in the ancient House of the Abbots of St. Albans in Buckinghamshire.  He died at Aylesbury in 1862, five years after his wife.  They were buried next to each other in churchyard of St. James the Great, Aston Abbotts. In the gardens of the Abbey there is a lake with two islands, named after the ships Terror and Erebus.

Serendipity—It’s Not Just a Coincidence

Horace Walpole, the word coiner.

It is the birthday of one of the most useful and beautiful words in the English Language—serendipity.  It is not often that we know the exact date a word was coined—and who is responsible.  But thanks to the quaint 18th Century custom of keeping letter books or tying up one’s correspondence with nice—and expensive—silk ribbon, etymologist have this one nailed down.

On January 28, 1754 Horace Walpole, a/k/a the Earl of Orford took up his quill to write to his friend Sir Horace Mann, Horace evidently being a more popular name back then than it is today. Walpole was a noted English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician who happened to be the son of the very first English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole.    Mann was a scholarly gentleman and sometime diplomat who was a long time resident of Florence, Italy who kept a legendary open house there for the English gentry touring the Continent.  The two Horaces kept a correspondence for more than 40 which was published in 1833 and widely read among the literary set.  Mann was no direct relation to the later American Transcendentalist, social reformer, and educator of the same name but the Yankee was named in his honor. 

The Three Princes of Serendip from an old Persian manuscript..

In his letter to Mann, Walpole boasted about creating a new word after reading a Persian fairytale called The Three Princes of Serendip in which said princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”  Yeah, Walpole was the kind of guy who passed his time reading Persian fairytales, quite likely in some dead language.  The creation story of the word is practically its definition.

Serendip, it turns out was a translation into Persian from Sanskrit, and Tamil before that for Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.  The Tamil, dark skinned Hindu people, ruled much of the island divided with the lighter skinned Indian Kings of Kerala.  The story was very old and is thought by some to be the inspiration of the Magi described in the nativity story.

All very well and good, you say, but just what the hell does serendipity mean anyway?

It is part chance, part coincidence, part happy accident.  But more than that, it is the recognition of or creation of unexpected benefits from a seeming random event by someone sagacious enough to make the connection.

This movie may not have fully understood the concept.

The term is often applied to scientific discovery or invention.  Think of something as grand as Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928 or as trivial as the development of Silly Putty from a failed attempt at creating synthetic rubber.

Writers and artists of various kinds also have similar experiences and make the connections described as “finding bridges where others find holes.”  This experience is related to, but not identical with the concept of an epiphany.

Serendipity is so fun to say that it has entered popular use where, however, the sagacious transformation of a pleasant surprise is often missing.  In these uses it is reduced to mere luck.

In fact the meaning of the word is so nuanced that a British translation service placed it on a list of the ten English words hardest to translate into other languages.  Its scientific applications, however have introduced it into many languages, even French where the defenders of linguistic purity at the Académie française try their damnedest to stomp it out.