DUDLEY NICHOLS—LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD

If you’ve ever heard of Wapakoneta, my home town, you’re probably a “moon freak” who knows the story of Neil Armstrong by heart, you stopped off at the Wapakoneta-Bellefontaine (which we say like bell-fountain) Street exit on I-75 to go to the Bob Evans and discovered that there’s an aerospace museum next door—can’t not have one of those in the town where the First Man on the Moon was born—somebody told you about Jim Bowsher’s incredible Temple of Tolerance and, even though you’re not an Ohioan, you decided to go see it for yourself (Johnny Depp did, and so did a number of other notables over the years), or you are a reader of this blog.

Dudley Nichols

But unless you were a real Hollywood connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to Wapakoneta to walk the same streets that saw Dudley Nichols grow to manhood, or to try and get a selfie in front of his family’s home. (If you did, you would be, as my father, the inimitable Whitie, used to say, “shit outa luck”). That house, where Dudley’s stepmother, Kittie, lived until her death, and that used to stand at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, has long since been torn down. Despite the good work of the Auglaize County Historical Society, Wapak (as we natives lovingly call it) has often been less than sensitive to historical value. Not long ago, for instance, what had once been the main station for the late-nineteenth-century Interurban Streetcar Line was purchased and torn down to provide more parking space to the pizzeria next door. But, c’est la vie.

Whether you’ve heard of him or not, Dudley was once a highly renowned personality—one of Hollywood’s most influential writers and a film director and producer in his own right. Born in 1895, the son of a Wapakoneta doctor, Grant Nichols, and his wife, Mary, Dudley got in on the ground floor of the golden age of cinema, the early years of “talking movies”, and earned a place for himself as a true Hollywood icon. He is credited by some film experts with having elevated the status of the Hollywood screenplay to a level of literary excellence, and with having almost single-handedly elicited a whole new realm of respect for the American screenwriter.

The pizza place that I mentioned earlier is in the same building that my grandfather, Murel Newland, built in 1945-46 so that three of his sons, who had gone off to service “for the duration” during World War II, would have a place of business to come back to. And it was there, shortly after the war, that Whitie, his big brother Red and their younger brother Chuck opened the Teddy Bear soda fountain and sandwich shop, which, over the years, would morph into a family restaurant. The Nichols home was just a couple of doors away at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, and Dudley’s widowed stepmother Kittie lived there alone but rented part of the house to a single schoolteacher named Jessie Crawford. Kittie was a "stepmother" in name only, since she and Dudley’s were only eight years apart in age. Dr. Nichols, her husband and Dudley's father, died in 1944 at the age of eighty-two and Kittie never remarried. Curiously enough, she and Dudley both died in 1960, Dudley aged sixty-four and Kittie seventy-two. 

Kittie became a Teddy Bear regular from the outset. She mostly liked the coffee and the pie, but would now and then eat a meal as well. I was only a little boy when Kittie used to come into the Teddy Bear daily, but I remember her well. She seemed somehow regal and a little intimidating if you didn’t know her. I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, elegant with her long silver hair pulled back tight and tied in a kind of ponytail with a velvet ribbon, her makeup ever perfect. I loved her full, pleated, ankle-length skirts and starchy white blouses, her slender hands with their red-painted nails, the long fingers that held her cigarettes the way female-lead movie stars did, up close to her scarlet lips, her elbow propped on the table.

Kittie liked Whitie and he liked her. She often came in between rush hours, and when he had time, Whitie would sometimes pour both of them a cup of fragrant, steaming Continental coffee and sit down with her to chat for a while. She never sat in a booth, always at a table, usually a square table for four right at the end of the counter.

Kittie wasn’t much for small talk. She could be, in fact, a bit cantankerous, so her conversations with Whitie usually verged on serious. Whitie, who was obsessive-compulsive to a fault, often tried to steer the conversation toward religion, or at least toward “belief”. My father had been brought up to be a devout Methodist and it was inconceivable to him that anyone could be an atheist, which Kittie was, and didn’t care who knew it.

This bothered Whitie. It bothered him for her, he said, because he liked her a lot, and he felt that anyone who believed in “nothing” was damned from the get-go. So he tried, as subtly as he knew how (which, if you knew Whitie, was anything but subtle) to convert her. Or at least to get her to say, unequivocally, that she believed in something.

One day, Whitie came home crestfallen. He said that he had suggested that Kittie must believe in something. He just couldn’t believe that she believed in nothing. So after he had badgered her into a state of acute ill-humor, it seems Kittie snapped, “I didn’t say I didn’t believe in anything, Norman. I said I didn’t believe in God. I do believe in something. I believe in money!”

Although few people I’ve ever met were more interested in money than my father—perhaps because he never was able to figure out how to make a ton of it and had to make do with being just “comfortable”—this statement of Kittie’s shocked him. “How could she say that?” he wanted to know. “Money couldn’t buy happiness, could it?”

“It will buy a hell of a lot more of it than poverty will,” Kittie Nichols responded. “The more money you have, the more insulated you are from hardship, and therefore, the happier you’ll be. Money is the solution to almost everything.”

Despite this answer that was very apparently designed to get Whitie to put a sock in it, however, he persisted, for as long as he knew Kittie, in trying and get her to admit she was a believer at heart. He felt that he should know. He’d been through several years of combat during the war and he’d seen it time and again. When shit started flying, even the most ardent non-believers started praying. But he never managed to convince her, even though they remained friends for years.

There was lots of talk over the years about Dudley and Kittie. Some said that they didn’t get along at all, that there was a lot of resentment over his father’s having married a much younger woman. Others said they got along very well indeed. Too well for some of the worst tongue-waggers around town. Still others said they had practically no relationship at all, since Dudley left home quite young and, basically, never went back. But it was through Kittie, via my father, that I knew that Dudley was a famous writer, and since I was in awe of writers and, more than anything in the world, wanted to be one myself, I always fantasized that Dudley might drop by for a visit and come to the Teddy Bear, where I might meet him while he was having coffee and pie. But, no such luck.

Already at age eighteen, Dudley was getting his first communications experience as a radio operator aboard a ship on the Great Lakes. From 1914 through 1917, he furthered his education at the University of Michigan. There, one of his activities was working as a student assistant in the university’s radio laboratory.

This experience both on the Great Lakes and at the university, served him well during the two years that he spent in the Navy, right at the end of World War I. Such was his expertise that, while in service, he created two highly useful inventions. One was a new kind of electronic discharger that would find application in commercial radio following the war, and the other was a new method of electronic protection for naval minesweepers. The new Nichols Method was successfully used in the sweep-up of some fifty thousand mines in the North Sea after the war. It was because of these inventions that Dudley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920. And it was during this period that he honed technological skills that he would later be able to apply to movie-making.

After his discharge from the Navy, Dudley went straight to the Big Apple to start accumulating the skills that he would need to become a successful writer. Hollywood was nowhere in his plans at the time. Like many writers before him, he believed that the best place to learn writing skills was in journalism, and there was no better place to do it than in New York City.

The World Building

His first writing job was at the New York Evening Post in 1920. Before long, however, he sought and got a job at New York World, which operated out of New York’s World Building. The paper, which was founded in the 1860s, and had featured the likes of Mark Twain, among other renowned writers, was owned by the Pulitzer family. Joseph Pulitzer himself commissioned construction of the World Building, located at 99 Park Row, specifically to house the paper. Built in the 1890s, it was one of New York’s early skyscrapers, a “towering” twenty floors, designed by famed architect George Browne Post. If you’re planning a trip to New York, however, you won’t be able to visit it, since it was razed, unfortunately, in 1955.

At New York World, Dudley not only met, but worked alongside such writing legends as Dorothy Parker—the brilliant satirist and short story writer who would also later turn to screenwriting, only to be blacklisted for her left-wing politics during the McCarthy Era—and Heywood Broun, founder of the American Newspaper Guild. Dudley would spend the next decade in New York City, working as a court reporter and theater critic for the World, and eventually as one of its columnists. He also free-lanced for other publications during that time.

In 1929, Dudley was scouted by Hollywood film companies as a screenwriter. He made it clear that he knew nothing about cinema, but the scouts insisted that what they were seeking were professionals with sound writing skills to create quality scripts for the growing “talking movie” market. So, in 1929, he accepted an invitation to move to Hollywood. He moved there a newlywed, with his bride, Esther “Esta” Varez, to whom he would remain married for the next thirty years, until his death in 1960.

Dudley in Hollywood

Dudley fit beautifully into the glimmering world of Hollywood. He was over six feet tall, a handsome, slender man who wore a suit well. And his elegance and intellect, combined with his superior writing skills, made him an almost overnight success. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood.

Despite his enormous success, Dudley remained a highly principled man, a democratic liberal with a strong sense of solidarity. I never tire of saying that Wapakoneta has had two major firsts: the first man to walk on the moon, and the first person ever to refuse an Academy Award.

This last happened in 1936, when Dudley Nichols was granted the Academy Award for best-written screenplay, for the 1935 hit, The Informer. The movie, directed by iconic film-maker John Ford—with whom Dudley would work on another dozen pictures—is set in 1920s Ireland and is about a former Irish rebel named Gypo Nolan. The plot finds Gypo recently ousted from the rebel movement and on the point of starving. When he finds out that his destitute lover Katie has turned to prostitution in order to make ends meet, Gypo decides to accept a twenty-pound bribe from the British authorities to rat out a former fellow rebel and the tense storyline recounts the consequences of that decision.

At the time, film companies were involved in a stand-off with screen writers and other unions in the industry. For obvious reasons, the Academy opposed independent unions, claiming that the Academy itself was the sole representative of all people working in the motion picture industry. If the Academy refused to recognize his guild, Dudley reasoned, he would refuse to recognize the Academy by turning down its award and boycotting the Academy Awards ceremony.

Twice the Academy tried to mail the Oscar to Dudley, as a de facto means of forcing acceptance, since his unprecedented snub was a slap in the face to film industry leaders. But both times, Dudley mailed it back.

His stubbornly ethical stance paid off, and, in 1938, two years after the boycott, the Academy finally certified the Screen Writers Guild as a bona fide and representative labor organization, and Dudley finally accepted his Oscar for The Informer. By that time, Dudley had been elected president of the guild, a post he held in 1937 and 1938.

Over the course of his career, Dudley Nichols garnered numerous honors. The same year that he won the Academy Award, he also won the Venice Film Festival Prize for best-written screenplay, also for The Informer. In 1940, he was nominated for an Oscar for best-written screenplay for The Long Voyage Home. He was nominated again in 1943 in the category of Best Original Screenplay for Air Force. He received the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1953 for his contribution to screen writing, and was nominated again for an Oscar in 1957, for Best Writing and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. It was for his original story, The Tin Star, which became an Anthony Mann movie starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Perkins and Betsy Palmer.

He had one spectacular flop—the 1947 screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Mourning Becomes Electra, for which Dudley wrote the screenplay as well as directing the picture, for RKO. It starred Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey. Despite the fact that it was critically acclaimed and that Michael Redgrave was awarded Best Actor for his role, the picture was a box-office disaster on which RKO lost 2.3 million dollars—at the time, the most money a film company had ever lost on a movie. But he bounced back in the fifties with new hits including not only The Tin Star, but also films like Rawhide, Return of the Texan, The Big Sky, Prince Valiant, Run for the Sun, The Hangman and Heller in Pink Tights.

A letter from Chaplin

In all, Dudley Nichols—Wapakoneta boy made good—wrote, directed and/or produced over sixty motion pictures, including some like Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Stagecoach and The Bells of St. Mary’s that were destined to become film classics. But he never forgot his activism for democratic and humanitarian causes. In 1947, at the outset of the so-called “Red Scare” and its attendant “McCarthy Era” of persecution, paranoia and anti-democratic witch-hunts that wrecked numerous lives and careers—nowhere more than in Hollywood—all-time emblematic silent film star Charles Chaplin wrote a letter to Dudley praising him for his independent stance. On meeting Dudley at a mutual friend’s house, the British-born Chaplin, who, himself, would be persecuted and deported for his socialist political stance, seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, and wrote in part: “It is deeply gratifying to know that in these reactionary times of hate and conspiracy, there are still voices of protest and sympathy for what is being done to individuals by the so-called ‘free press,’ which is so violent and crude that intelligent criticism is inadequate to cope with it.”

Small-town people, like those of us from Wapakoneta, all too often think that “nothing ever happens here.” But it’s not true. Quite often, stars are born among us and we fail to see them until they wander elsewhere and then streak through a different sky with blinding light.