A Real American Character Quotes

“Walter Brennan (1894–1974) is considered one of the finest character actors in motion picture history. His three supporting actor Oscars were awarded for his roles in Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938), and The Westerner (1940). He was nominated a fourth time for Sergeant York (1941).”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Both Cooper and Brennan got their start as extras. Like Brennan, Cooper had learned his craft by roaming around movie lots, absorbing the atmosphere and watching how things were done—especially the subtle interplay between actors, and between the best actors and the camera lens, which always picked up details that not even the most perceptive directors could spot before they were projected onto a screen. And like Brennan, when Cooper got his first two minutes of screen time, he was prepared. Watch him in Wings, playing an aviator about to go to his death, enter a tent and converse with the film’s two stars, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, who are immediately fascinated by his bluff allure. He is a hero without bravado. He is for those two minutes the picture’s star, the very embodiment of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. Cooper’s ability to convey composure just before a dogfight, to act with such quiet courtesy and aplomb, stuns Rogers and Arlen—and just that quickly Cooper takes the picture away from them.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Before becoming Sam Goldwyn’s prized possession—and during a decade and more of taking roles that put him out there to be seen and perhaps noticed—Brennan did play characters who disparaged women. But what happened when he was offered the plum role of Jeeter Lester in John Ford’s production of Tobacco Road (March 7, 1941) is revealing. Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling novel had been a huge hit when it was adapted for the Broadway stage, and now the prestigious director was casting the film version with several actors—including Ward Bond, Gene Tierney, and Dana Andrews—whose careers would benefit from Ford’s attention. In Tobacco Road, Jeeter is the shiftless family patriarch. Not only does he lack ambition, his jokes, to Walter Brennan, seemed offensive. Ada, Jeeter’s wife, is demeaned just for laughs when he says she “never spoke a word to me for our first ten years we was married. Heh! Them was the happiest ten years of my life.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“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

“I went to Europe in 1917 with sixty-five lbs. on my back,” he told Hedda Hopper in a May 17, 1960, radio interview. To another interviewer, he quipped, “I learned to run the 100-yard dash in eight seconds flat, carrying a full pack.” He served for nineteen months as a private in the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France. He never said much about what combat was like, except to confess that he was “severely frightened 500 times.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“ON APRIL 27, 1970, WALTER BRENNAN WAS INDUCTED INTO THE HALL of Great Western Actors at the Cowboy Hall of Fame’s annual awards ceremony in Oklahoma City. After listening to several speakers lavish praise on him, he stood up and said, “Other than that, I’m a dirty old man.” He often liked to undercut a compliment with a self-directed jibe. But as his son Andy said, his father was thrilled with the honor. Later Brennan donated his papers to what is now the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Walter Brennan, the on-screen grandfather, was also a grandfather on his ranch. Tammy, Mike’s daughter, remembered this period during a tour of Lightning Creek we took with Mike in July 2014. “When the lights were off, the lights were off,” Tammy recalled, “because of the gas generator. You had to find the bathroom in the dark.” “Grampy loved it,” Tammy said, “surrounded by quiet.” Still standing is the cathedral sized, handmade barn Ray Pogue set up just before selling the ranch to Walter, “212 feet long, about 65 feet wide,” Mike said. “I don’t know if Grampy had any funny things happen to him out here,” Tammy mused, perhaps wanting to help out a biographer. “No, none.” Mike said. “He just came out here, sat, and left,” Tammy suggested. “He’d come up and go deer hunting with us,” Mike added. “I don’t recall him ever shooting anything. I’d shoot something. I took the liver out of a deer. I didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I just tucked it in my shirt, the whole bloody thing. He’d get a kick out of it.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“By November 1965, Brennan was hard at work on a Disney movie, The Gnome-Mobile (July 19, 1967), playing, in Roger Ebert’s words, “the world’s most grandfatherly grandfather.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“I’m a great student of Lincoln’s life,” Brennan noted. He wanted to portray both the “admirable and not so admirable” aspects of the man. Clarence Darrow was another role he coveted. Yet there were roles he would have rejected: Hamlet, for example. “He’s just too mixed up for me,” Brennan explained. It was a revealing comment. Although Brennan had a wide range as an actor, virtually every role he played—even “weak” characters like Eddie in To Have and Have Not—were written so that the character had a strong sense of identity and a powerful set of convictions.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Brennan was well aware of the irony inherent in catering to an audience who still thought of him as a hillbilly: “Some of my friends say that the Tycoon is remarkably like myself, much more so than McCoy.” Almost plaintively he declared, “I do wear suits, shirts, ties, and even shoes. . . . The fact is that I actually do have business interests, and am in personal life much closer to being an executive than a farmer.” Richard Crenna said as much about his Real McCoys co-star. In fact, Brennan owned a piece of The Tycoon not to mention his ranch and other properties in California and Oregon. And like Walter Andrews (his first and middle names, which as an extra he sometimes used together), he enjoyed learning other peoples’ business—as when he ran the store in Joseph when its owner was late showing up. When in Joseph, he always liked to stay in room 16 in his motel, which had an adjoining room he used as an office.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“In How the West Was Won (February 20, 1963), Brennan, in a Benjamin Franklin hairstyle, is a gleeful villain, Colonel Jeb Hawkins, a river pirate who deprives mountain man Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart) of his beaver pelts. Masquerading as a merchant with an American flag serving as a backdrop in his general store, Brennan’s Hawkins a character right out of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“An avid collector of Old West memorabilia, Walter Brennan remained ensconced in a vision of the American frontier and the myth of bootstrap individualism. As early as 1962, he was deploring the image of America that Hollywood sent abroad with pictures such as West Side Story. “Why don’t we make more pictures like How the West Was Won, The Alamo, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Westerner?” he asked journalist Jean Bosquet of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Brennan did not seem to realize that in his portrayal of Judge Roy Bean, a character whose mentality borders on a kind of homegrown fascism, he had conveyed the impression of a lawless West.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“On the Date with Debbie [Reynolds] television program in 1960, Charlie Ruggles, another veteran character actor used to playing grandfathers, asked Brennan in mock outrage, “How did you get to be the main grandfather?” Brennan did not answer the question, but instead told a joke about Martians who land in Hollywood: One Martian says, “First take me to Marilyn Monroe and then to your leader.” He enjoyed that kind of comic misdirection. He did not care to explain the reasons for his success—although he enjoyed that success mightily. He loved parades and loved serving as grand marshal, usually decking himself out in cowboy clothing, as he did on December 2, 1961, in the Bethlehem Star Parade that marched near his Northridge home.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“When Walter Brennan was asked how close in character he was to Amos McCoy, he replied, “Sure, I’m a mean old so-and-so.” More to the point, though, Brennan believed in Grandpa’s “godliness, a reverence for his family.” It was a good description of himself, although he did not discuss his faith or philosophy with his fellow actors. When I asked Kathleen Nolan if she knew that Brennan was a devout Catholic, she was startled. “We never, ever, talked about religion,” she said.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“As Grandpa McCoy, Brennan’s energetic hobble personified his indomitable reaction to hardship. Fans always asked Crenna if Brennan actually limped. “No, that was acting,” Crenna replied. “Off the set, Walter was like a Boston businessman. He was a very tall, erect, very proper kind of guy. But when he got into the character of Grandpa McCoy, no other actor could do that kind of character better.” Before taking on the role, Brennan went through entire wardrobes, rejecting many outfits, shoes, and hats, until he found the right long underwear and overalls. “Then he WAS Grandpa McCoy,” Crenna concluded. “You could say that it was his style of method acting.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“In Brothers: Black and Poor (1988), the story of twelve African American men in a housing project on Chicago’s South Side, one of main characters, Half Man Carter, has a prized record collection that includes “Mama Sang a Song,” by Walter Brennan. In the early 1960s, Brennan became a recording star, narrating brief stories like “Old Shep” and “Tribute to a Dog,” and producing several popular albums, which have had an extended life on CDs and the web, where many of his songs can be downloaded. In A World of Miracles (1960), to the accompaniment of orchestra and choir, he recites the stories of Noah, the Ten Commandments, and the Resurrection, transforming his familiar way of speaking into a solemn, yet friendly New England accented prophetic voice.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Richard Crenna, who played Grandpa’s grandson, told an interviewer in 1999 that he had only recently understood the program’s widespread appeal: I was doing a show a couple of years ago and I was in a gymnasium and we were in a university situation and there were a couple of young, African-American athletes working out there. They were in their late 20s. . . . And they came over and said, “When we were growing up, we loved ‘The Real McCoys.’” And I said, “Oh, really? What attracted you?” And they said, “Well, as a minority group, it was one of the few shows we could relate to. It was one of the few shows that had the same kind of problems we had in our family life, problems with money and making ends meet, and there was a strong family relationship we related to.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“It strikes me now that The Real McCoys appealed, among other audiences, to Americans with extended families who had made similar moves and lived with several generations in the same home or close by. My own immediate family, for example, moved in 1961 from Detroit to the suburbs, where my grandparents moved into my home to help my mother out after my father died.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“The show was shot on an enormous sound stage, the largest one in Hollywood, and the same one used for Gone with the Wind. A complete house for the McCoys was built on the set. In those days, the all-consuming grind of doing a television series meant that actors spent their downtime in little huts called “knockdown greens.” They were like tents, said Kathleen Nolan. “Now you have a trailer outside, but then it was an efficient way of keeping the talent close at hand. They did four shows a week, and then took a week off, so that Brennan could rest.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Even away from the set and in Joseph, Walter Brennan continued to police his performances—as Louise Kunz observed when he visited his wife in the hospital, where she was recuperating from an operation. At the only television set in the hospital, everyone gathered around to view The Real McCoys. Louise and a group of teenage kids watched as Walter said, “Oh, I did that okay. Oh, I’ve got to work on that, that’s terrible.” When the episode ended, a boy asked him how he remembered to limp. Walter said he put a tiny pebble in his shoe; otherwise he limped on the wrong foot. Diane Turner remembers the times Walter would enter the local drugstore, sit down at the soda fountain, and entertain everyone with his Grandpa Amos routines. When his granddaughter Tammy Crawford watched The Real McCoys, she would get upset because every episode the characters would get mad at her Grampy—although by the end of the show he would have learned his lesson.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Although NBC took a one-year option on the show, and Danny Thomas’s production company agreed to finance the pilot, the network decided not to air what appeared to be a poor prospect. When ABC finally broadcast the show, it seemed doomed from the start, since it was in the same time slot as two popular dramatic programs, Climax! and Dragnet. The first review, in Variety (October 7, 1957), seemed to confirm Brennan’s original misgivings: “‘The Real McCoys’ is a cornball, folksy-wolksy situation comedy series destined to find the going tough.” The Variety critic called the humor “forced,” the pacing “sluggish,” and the characters’ adventures “only lightly amusing.” And too many lovable characters! Brennan received due praise as a “fine actor,” but the rest of the cast was just “okay.” And yet, by the third week the show was number one in its time slot, compelling the Variety skeptic to allow, “It’s all so hokey that it can’t be taken seriously, and for that reason this quarter can’t see any really strong reason why cityfolk shouldn’t appreciate and enjoy it for what it is. The show is already big in the hinterlands.” By December 2, 1957, the critic was obliged to report that the “laughs come freely.” And then, for season after season, the praise escalated. The show began with an audience of ten million, but within a year the”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“SOMETIME IN 1954, IRVING AND NORMAN PINCUS, APPROACHED WALTER Brennan about appearing in a series featuring a “West Virginia hillbilly family transplanted to California.” Having already invested his time in one pilot without results, Brennan rejected the idea of another, but Irving Pincus continued to press his case. After a year or so, Brennan said yes, claiming he did so “just to get the cuss off my neck.” But surely Pincus’s pitch that Brennan had an opportunity to make television history by starring in the first situation comedy to feature rural characters in an endearing format was persuasive. Brennan portrayed a character that was a distillation and domestication of his ornery and affectionate screen persona—deprived only of the malevolence on display in The Westerner, My Darling Clementine, and Brimstone.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Rio Bravo is an answer to the lionization of the lone town marshal, portrayed so powerfully by Gary Cooper in High Noon, but Rio Bravo is also a deft remake of Red River, one that highlights Brennan’s role as a moral authority and a witness to history central to the ethos of Howard Hawks’s Westerns. But heretofore the Brennan persona rarely displaced that of the stars he supported. That would happen when, in the television age, the actor became, like Ward Bond in Wagon Train (1957–61), the locus of the action, the center around which the family and the nation revolved.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Angie Dickinson has often spoken of her admiration for Brennan, and did so again for this biography: Brennan and I had no scenes together, and therefore rarely crossed paths. On a big set like that, if you don’t work, you don’t just come around and “hang out.” Either for me or for WB. One day we were on the set together in Tucson, and we had a lovely brief chat, and he was so very dear, gentle and calm. But we made no other contact. I can only say that he was a sweet man, and he was brilliant in Rio Bravo, as in everything he did. He was a true ACTOR. And by the way, I regret I did nothing to promote a friendship. . . . However, I think he was a very private man, and one just didn’t do that to a legend like WB. It was so like Brennan to be utterly accessible on a set, but also to draw a sharp distinction between work and his personal life.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Howard Hawks took the credit for goading Brennan into a great performance: [H]e amazed me with the first scene he did. I said, “What the hell is going on here? Are you going to play that goddam television show that you’ve been doing, for me. Do you think I’m gonna make a Real McCoy out of it? This is supposed to be a crabby, evil, nasty old man.” “Oh God,” he said. I said to Wayne, “Come on, Duke, let’s go over and play a game of checkers and let this dumbbell think up what he’s got to do.” So for fifteen minutes we stayed away, and he just sat there. Then he came in and he was really a bastard. It was easy the rest of the time.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“To Rio Bravo, Brennan brought his own brand of realism. He explained his reaction to the script to reporter Steven H. Scheuer: They tell me I’m playing a crippled old man who’s got a rifle built into his crutch. Any time they get rough with him, he shoots them down with his crutch. I think about this for a little while, and then I asked them a simple question. I said, “When this crippled old man picks up his crutch and shoots why doesn’t he fall flat on his doggone back?” They changed the script.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and for The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Skeeter (Brandon DeWilde) lives with his none too ambitious uncle Jesse (Brennan) in a swamp, where they find a strange dog with a hyena-like laugh. (It is, in fact a basenji, bred in Africa). Jesse realizes the dog must have escaped from a very different environment, but Skeeter adopts the dog without thinking about the consequences should the dog’s true owner show up. Much of the picture is taken up with Skeeter training the dog to hunt better than other hounds. The deliberate and careful way Wellman paces the film makes it utterly absorbing, even as Brennan delivers one of his best understated performances. With its emphasis on rapport with nature and the land and taking responsibility for other animals, the inspirational script serves as Walter Brennan’s credo. And when the dog’s owner shows up, Skeeter has to learn how to let go of his creation, making for an ending far more real than those of most family films. Sidney Poitier has a small role as a neighbor, and though this story is set in Georgia, there is no evidence of segregation. To the contrary, Poitier’s character appears quite at home with his white neighbors, with whom he shares a bond with the land and its creatures.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“In Come Next Spring (March 9, 1956) and Goodbye, My Lady (May 12, 1956) Brennan was able to rise above the pedestrian roles that followed Bad Day at Black Rock by perfecting the persona of the small town or rural character that emerges in films such as Driftwood and The Green Promise.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“A pilot for Mr. Tutt, a series produced by Desilu and based on a Saturday Evening Post story about a curmudgeonly lawyer, was not made into a series, but it was broadcast on Colgate Theatre (September 10, 1958). The Variety reviewer considered Brennan excellent in the part, even though the script for the pilot was subpar. Brennan’s subsequent career on television might have been quite different if this role had made the same indelible impression as Amos McCoy, a part that made it difficult for audiences to accept Brennan as a sophisticated character in a series that did not have rural aspect to it.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan

“I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me while we talked. After we finished the take, I asked him where he’d been looking. “Your ear,” he replied. “Why?” I asked in surprise. “Because that way more of my face is on camera. Don’t look at the other actors. Look in three-quarters, so your face is more prominent. Stick with me. I’ll teach you some tricks.” And Walter did teach me. He shared his bag of tricks for how to make the most of a scene. Walter was one of the greatest scene-stealers I’ve ever known—in the major leagues with Thelma Ritter and Walter Matthau. You couldn’t turn your back on any of them. It’s hard to rank them; they were all superb at their craft. I’d say it was a three-way tie for who could get the most out of their camera time.”
― Carl Rollyson, A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan