E

“by 1934, Walter Brennan was in a state of near collapse. “What my grandma said,” Walter’s granddaughter Claudia Gonzales remembered, “[was that] he was eating his dinner, and he put down his fork. He looked at her, and he said, ‘I don’t know what to eat next.’” He had made it through World War I in reasonably good shape. Indeed, he had scoffed at the idea of shell shock. But then, as he told Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton, “Boy, I cracked up.” There were nights when he just wanted to sink into his bed. Then he would wake up at 2 am with a “nameless numbing fear.” As he also told Easton, “If it hadn’t been for my wife, I’d have jumped off the Pasadena Bridge. I fell away to nothin’. I weighed about 140 pounds. Gee, when I got a job in Barbary Coast, I was carryin’ my ground-up vegetables in a mason jar. They had to build muscles into my clothes.” Brennan’s son Walter Jr. (“Andy”) recalled that as a young boy he had not understood what his father was going through, but he knew that his father was in trouble.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan