Celluloid Dreams on the Silver Screen: “To the delirious eye/More lovely things of Paradise and Love.”
“I have been happy—tho’ but in a dream./I have been happy—and I love the theme—/Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life—/As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty stride/Of semblance with reality which brings/To the delirious eye more lovely things/Of Paradise and Love—and all our own!/Than young hope in his sunniest hour hath known.”
—Edgar Allen Poe, “Dreams,” 1827
What is a motion picture but a writer’s dream made animate and articulate by light and sound. “That Holy dream,” said Poe in another poem, “While all the world were chiding/Hath cheered me as a lovely beam/A lonely spirit guiding.”
Can you imagine a world without “movies”? What would happen to the popcorn market?
There would not have been or continue to be those demigods of the silver-screen dream. They come before us in a hundred lovely and handsome guises, in fleeting, shadowy, misty stride, a semblance of reality that transcends time.
What would our life be like without those spirits of light and sound transfigured upon the silver screen, those once-upon-a-time motion picture stars of my youth?—Yvonne DeCarlo, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Groucho Marx, Roy Rogers, Boris Karloff, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and, of course, Kankakee’s own Andy McBroom?
Never heard of him? You might know him by his professional name, David Bruce.
Not the proprietor of a local automobile franchise! Today’s owners of which by some peculiar twist of fate first acquired the automobile dealership once owned by the McBroom family; then innocently chose to use the first names of the co-owners, David and Bruce, as the name of their dealership.
Seldom do we have the opportunity to have any direct, meaningful contact with members of the motion picture industry. But occasionally “fate steps in,” as the song says, and life takes an unexpected turn. Only due to another improbable twist of fate would I meet and eventually work with that celebrated celluloid hero of my youth, David Bruce.
Marden “Andy” McBroom was born in Kankakee to Mr. and Mrs. Vernon McBroom in 1916. He graduated from Northwestern University, acted in 72 motion pictures for Warner Bros, and Universal Studios using the stage name David Bruce. He appeared in films with Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Deanna Durbin, Yvonne DeCarlo, Randolph Scott, Ronald Reagan, Robert Mitchum, and Loretta Young. He was seen on TV in Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Burns and Allen, The Red Skelton Show and Hopalong Cassidy. Gillette Razor, Schlitz Beer, Camel cigarettes, both Standard Oil and Lever Bros. hired Andy to do TV commercials. He wrote scripts for Tales of the Texas Rangers and The Beulah Show, and appeared in 80 stage plays, many of which he directed.
I met David Bruce, Andy, in the spring of 1966. He was living in Kankakee at the time. I was introduced to him by Jim Marek, his brother-in-law and owner of Colonial Studios. I was working for Mobil Chemical Company and had hired Jim to do some photographs for an advertisement. We needed a model to pose for pictures. Jim persuaded Andy to take the job. A few days later we were standing among tropical plants in Garfield Park Conservatory (Andy dressed in bush jacket and pith helmet), where I found myself saying: “Mr. Bruce, please stand there, look this way, no, raise your head a bit . . .” Strobe lights are flashing and Jim’s Haselblad is chewing up yards of film. What the hell am I doing? I asked myself. (David Bruce was a movie star—big time—when he came to talk to our high school assembly in 1945; he was co-starring with Deanna Durbin in Lady on a Train at the Paramount Theater.) “Your expression (my voice sounded odd, remote and a bit squelched), ah, Mr. Bruce, look . . . look as if you see something, ah, something that really catches your, uhm, eye, er, attention.”
Well, I’m not sure Andy felt happy about my “stage direction.” The full page ad, however, turned out very nice, thanks to Jim’s excellent photography. It was featured in a wood finishing magazine and used as the theme of a trade show display in Louisville, Kentucky.
At that time I was writing some material for Imperial International Learning. I mentioned to Andy that they were looking for someone with his talent and experience. A year later Andy and I were working together at Imperial.
Andy was a production manager, and developed dramatic material for educational audio tapes. He even recruited me for a role or two in some of his stories. One tape is particularly memorable: Andy, his daughter Amanda, several of the Imperial Players, including me, have roles in a dramatic, recreated moment in history. It wasn’t the movies, but at the time it seemed like the next best thing.
Many dream of a life of stardom in the camera’s eye, and the actor’s art — as transitory as the moon’s shimmering reflected sunlight on dancing waves — given immortality in microscopic grains of silver on celluloid. Only a celebrated few out of legions, have the Midas touch that turns celluloid dreams into the movie Mogul’s golden dreams.
“A small group of actors, fresh out of college hit New York in the 1937-38 season to try to make it on Broadway,” recalled Ardis Marek, Andy McBroom’s sister. “It was a disastrous time as the country tried to work its way back from the devastating depression. Theater was moribund, few plays were mounted, and only experienced, sure fire draws were being cast.”
Within that group, who were enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, was Ardis’s brother, Andy McBroom, and three of his friends, Dotty Keaton, Phillis Isley and Bob Walker. Between acting assignments they took whatever odd jobs available. Andy was hired as a page at CBS; Dotty and Phillis had waitress work, Bob spent a summer on a South American freighter. They shared a flat in Greenwich Village and parcelled out care packages from home.
Had these four seen their future at that moment, would they have turned aside from the bright dream of stardom? Probably not. Utah born, twenty-year-old Robert Walker, already emotionally wounded by his parents divorce, was high strung and vulnerable, slight of build, boyish in appearance. He would eventually take a “star turn” in the World War II movie, See Here Private Hargrove; Alfred Hitchcock would give him an unforgettable roll as a psychopathic killer in the 1951 nail-bitter, Strangers on a Train. Phyllis Isley from Tulsa Oklahoma, angelic of face and sensual of body, would at 24 be christened Jennifer Jones by the Moguls, star as the tragic Bernadette of Lourdes, and live the golden dream as best actress of 1943. Dorothy Keaton within a year would surrender the acting life. Andy in the guise of David Bruce, tall, athletic, answered Hollywood’s call for the hero, the swashbuckler, the stoic military man, the laconic cowboy, and the impassioned adventurer. Andy’s career would be longer, more diverse and perhaps more satisfying than those of his companions. But he would never focus down to one brilliant golden moment of celluloid afterlife. His ubiquitous talents as actor, writer, narrator and stage director; his cultivated air of urbane civility and an innate wit for light comedy, would never be transfigured by a Mogul’s Midas touch.
Bob and Phillis found work as a team in Greenwich Village’s Cherry Lane Theater at fifty cents a performance. Then a call came from Phillis’s home town of Tulsa asking her to join a dramatic group. Phillis suggested the four form a stock company, accept the offer and say good-bye to New York.
When their Grayhound bus pulled into Chicago, Andy offered them a weekend stopover at his parent’s home in Kankakee. While there Dotty Keaton decided she would not continue on to Oklahoma, nor return to her home in Oregon. The McBrooms offered her a job in their restaurant and she remained in Kankakee for seven years.
“Oklahoma provided audiences with some good plays,” said Ardis, “and the actors with the experience they needed.”
Bob saved his $25-a-week salary for 14 weeks. On January 2, 1939, Robert Walker and Phillis Isley were married.
Andy, Bob and Phillis then journeyed on to Hollywood. Phillis soon was cast as an ingenue in Tracy’s G-Men, and a western with John Wayne, The New Frontier. However, the roles did not keep coming in and the Walkers returned to New York, where they took up housekeeping in a $16-a-month room at the rear of a tenement.
Andy soon found himself under contract to Universal Studios and in a number of motion pictures. His 1940 filmography lists 13 appearances in such diverse movies as The Sea Hawk, River’s End and Dispatch from Reuters and others.
As we see annually on TV, the pride and power of Hollywood’s Moguls still have the Midas touch of fame and fortune for talented artists of the motion picture industry. Perhaps the gift of an Academy Oscar does not gild the recipient as augustly as in the era of the strict studio system. There was a time in the 1930s and ‘40s when future stars were groomed carefully, pampered and contractually bound as celluloid chattel. For some, the happiest days of managed stardom were luxurious beyond imagination; for others, they were far too short and sometimes ruinous.
In 1940, when Phyllis and Robert Walker returned to New York from Hollywood, their future in films seemed at an end. The bright hope of stardom paled in the melancholy shadows of Phyllis’s bleak tenement apartment. Bob answered casting calls for stage work. He took odd jobs to support a growing family. Two sons were born. Then, favored by a bit of luck, Bob got a role in the radio soap opera, Yesterday’s Children. By 1943 the Walkers were again on their way to Hollywood.
Their Kankakee friend Andy McBroom, who had remained in Hollywood, married Cynthia Sory in January 1943. He also had appeared, more or less as a face in the crowd, in several action motion pictures—The Sea Wolf, Sergeant York, Flying Tigers, Gung Ho! The parts were small but they led to bigger assignments.
Universal Studios offered Andy a second banana part in a movie billed as “A Sensation in Horror!”; sharing the romantic lead as the fiance of B movie queen, Evelyn Ankers, and victim of George Zucco’s “ancient Mayan nerve gas.” As the plot coagulates, Zucco, aka Dr. Alfred Morris, hoping to romance Ankers, slips Andy a Mayan “mickey.” The devious doctor is unaware that lurking in the background is another Ankers fancier, the inscrutable Turhan Bey. Under the influence of the nerve gas Andy becomes what the movie’s title describes as “The Mad Ghoul,” a revengeful Zombie. Although this parchment-skinned horror was not as fearsome as the Mummy, Dracula, the Wolfman or Frankenstein’s monster he did provide a few Saturday afternoon thrills at the long-gone Luna Theater on Kankakee’s South Schuyler. Fortunately there was no sequel and Andy escaped the fate of other actors who were forever breathing life into the living dead to earn their bread and butter.
Nineteen forty-three was an auspicious year for Phyllis Flora Isley Walker. David O. Selznick changed her name to Jennifer Jones and cast her as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette. In a twinkling of the camera’s magic eye, at the age of 24, Phyllis ascended to that seventh heaven of cinematic fame, best actress of 1943.
The Walkers soon were separated. He took small rolls in Bataan and Madam Curie; she prepared for the next Selznick epic, Since You Went Away. This film starring Claudette Colbert, Shirley Temple, Lionel Barrymore had the pretensions of a previous Selznick blockbuster, Gone With the Wind. Estranged in life the Walkers were reunited as lovers in Since You Went Away.
For her portrayal of Jane Hilton in Since You Went Away, the Academy nominated Jennifer Jones as best supporting actress of 1944. The same year, Robert Walker triumphed as a journalist GI in See Here Private Hargrove.
Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick were married in 1949. She continued to be cast in a number of first run movies including Madam Bovery, Ruby Gentry, and A Farewell to Arms. Her last movie, Towering Inferno, was in 1974.
A dispirited Robert Walker died unexpectedly in 1951, soon after finishing what is considered the best performance of his career as Bruno Antony in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
Meanwhile, Universal gave David Bruce a small part in a Deanna Durbin movie, Christmas Holiday. He then played opposite Louise Allbritton in That Night With You. In a film that put Yvonne De Carlo’s name up in lights, Salome, Where She Danced, Andy shared with Rod Cameron a rivalry for Yvonne’s affections, and he dueled with villainous Albert Dekker. Andy was given a romantic lead in the 1945 Deanna Durbin comedy-murder mystery, Lady on a Train. He later had top billing in a low budget 1948 production of Prejudice; and was featured as Daniel Boone in Young Daniel Boone in 1950.
In 1952 and ‘53, Andy played Harry Henderson on the Beulah TV series. He also was writing scripts for Tales of the Texas Rangers, making guest appearances on TV’s Lone Ranger, Sky King and The Cisco Kid, and acting in several adventure movies. The last one was Jungle Hell, with Sabu, “the elephant boy,” in 1956.
Andy’s wife Cynthia died in 1962.
After several years absence Andy returned to Hollywood intending to resume his acting career. He died on May 3, 1976, while working on the set of a TV series.
