The Iron Man—Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler and his wife were sunning on the beach one day last year when they were approached by a breathless teen-ager. She stood for a moment, looking up and down the length of Jeff’s tall form.

“You are Jeff Chandler, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said.

“That’s wonderful,” sighed the girl. “‘Mr. Chandler, you can settle an argument for me. My friend says you play that mousy Mr. Boynton on the radio. You know—that awful little man who doesn’t even know a girl when he sees one.”

Jeff smiled. “But I do play Mr. Boynton.”

The girl’s face crumpled. “Oh, Mr. Chandler!” she wailed. “You couldn’t! I’ve always thought you were so strong—such a tower of strength!”

When she had left them, Jeff looked at his wife and grinned, “Didn’t know you were married to a tower of strength, did you?” he asked. “A man of iron?”

Marge laughed. “I’ll have to admit it’s a good description. But don’t forget—you’re that mousy Mr. Boynton, too!”

Actually, Jeff is a blend of both. He’s a man of iron in a very quiet way. When he’s with his baby daughters, the iron in him can easily be mistaken for putty. On screen, though, his strength comes through with such mute force that the women in the audience practically rise from their seats to greet it. Those who’ve seen him in Smuggler’s Island, Bird of Paradise or as the Apache chief, Cochise, in Broken Arrow have left the theater feeling sure that they have just met a real leader of men.

Jeff has a sort of noble presence, an invulnerable dignity which imparts power to his performances. His unusual height—six-feet-four inches—helps give that impression, but is only a minor factor. Strangely enough, he claims that his height has given him an inferiority complex, because people always expect so much from big men.

As an only child, and the victim of divorced parents, Jeff was coddled by his mother. Rigorous sports were denied him because she was afraid he would injure himself. By the time he was 15, he already felt embarrassed by the demands made on his behavior because of his height. But this was the year when he was given the first and last beating of his life.

As president of a school club he was conducting a meeting when it was interrupted by half a dozen hoodlums. Jeff knew it was his place to quell the riot. He stepped up to the noisy kids and told them to leave.

“Yeah?” sneered their leader. “Give us a reason!”

“Because you’re a bunch of jerks,” said Jeff, with a bravado he hardly felt.

“Say that again, big boy,” demanded the other kid.

Jeff said it again. Perhaps if he’d been a little guy, the others would have given him some help. But he was the tallest boy in the school, and his classmates expected him to take command. All six of the gang hit him at once, and when, at last, he got to his feet he was a sorry sight.

He telephoned his father the next day. “I need your help, Dad,” he said. “I want you to teach me how to use my fists.”

His father only laughed at him. To this day Jeff doesn’t know why, but he supposes his father, too, expected him to be everything a man should be simply because he was big. In the following years Jeff had to work things out for himself. He found that if he made up his mind about something and then stuck to his guns, people seemed satisfied that he was living up to his size.

The only trouble was. that Jeff often went down the wrong alley when making his decisions; and many times his plan has backfired.

This singleness of purpose made itself evident when he was still a younster, even before he was beaten by the intruders at school. Susan Hayward attended that same school in Flatbush, and because she was as pretty then as she is now, it was only natural that the ten-year-old Jeff decided that Susan was his dish. Any other boy would probably have managed a seat near her in the classroom, and been satisfied with that, but Jeff chose a more devious path. Susan was even then determined to be a movie star and was playing leads in school dramatics, so Jeff decided he would be an actor. For two years he hovered in the background of the stage, and then one day got his big opportunity. He was to play opposite Susan in a musical, and no kid ever quivered as are as Jeff did the day he went to school for his tryout. Susan was to be a daisy in this production and Jeff was going to be a tree; and he dreamed hopefully that perhaps there would be something in the script about the tree putting its branches around the daisy. But that was the day his voice decided to change, and when one half of the song came out in tenor and the other half in bass, Miss Rappaport looked at him sadly. Although Miss Rappaport was his second love, she knew of his adoration for Susan, for he had taken her into his confidence.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “that we’ll have to give the part to another boy. Somebody whose voice is still topside.”

Jeff managed, however, to finally gain the notice of Susan. He was given the job of stage manager for the production, and during the performance learned that Susan had a headache. He ran three blocks to the nearest drugstore and spent his weekly twenty-five cent allowance for a box of aspirin. After Susan graciously accepted an aspirin from him between the second act and final curtain, he went home and wrote a very bad poem about the limpid green of her eyes.

His worship for Susan subsided with the years, and so did the days at ivy covered P. S. 181. When Jeff graduated from high school his father gave him a chance at further schooling. Because his son had shown talent in both art and dramatics, he gave him his choice of career.

“How much are the different courses?” Jeff asked.

“Two hundred for the art school, and five hundred for the dramatic school,” said his father. “But don’t let the cost influence you. I want you to choose the one you really want.”

Jeff really wanted dramatics, but he decided to go easy on his father’s wallet. If he went to art school, he reasoned, he could make a lot of money after graduation, and then could afford to send himself through dramatic school. It was the wrong alley again, but Jeff stuck to it. After finishing his art course he landed a job at Montgomery Ward making advertising layouts, and learned almost immediately that commercial art wouldn’t net him a quick fortune. His salary was rock bottom.

“I’m going to quit,” he announced to his co-workers.

“But look, kid,” they said. “You’re fresh out of school, and naturally you don’t make as much as we do. You haven’t the experience.”

But he’d said he’d quit, and he did. Not long after joining the ranks of the unemployed, he visited Faegin’s Dramatic School, walked right up to one of the big shots, and requested a scholarship. The procedure was unheard of—students work for years before they are granted scholarships—but Jeff figured he was big and he’d act like people expected him to. His pluck paid off, perhaps passing for determination, for he finally did get a scholarship. From there he joined the Millpond Players on Long Island. He was launched on his career as an actor.

At Millpond he met Bill Bryan, the closest thing he ever had to a brother, and soon the two men had formed a stock company of their own.

“Tell you what,” Jeff said one day. “I’m going out to Hollywood and be a movie star.”

“Hold on!” said Bill. “You don’t do it just like that, you know.”

But that was in 1940, and although Pearl Harbor hadn’t yet been attacked, everyone could tell something was about to pop. Bill and Jeff decided to.get into the service early so that they’d have a chance to choose assignments.

Jeff’s father took a dim view of his son’s chances in the service, and soon after war had been declared wrote him a cheering letter. “Dear son,” it read. “Don’t worry about the war. With you in the army it will soon be over. You never did hold a job very long.”

This was one time that Jeff was right. The war lasted a long time, and he was in it for five years. He started out in the cavalry, for no particular reason, except that Bill was an excellent horseman.

“Cavalry all right with you?” Bill had asked him.

“Sure, sure, said Jeff, agreeably.

When they arrived at Fort Riley Bill couldn’t wait to see the horses. Jeff trudged along with him to the stables. A horse stuck its head over the fence and Bill went into a long conversation with it.

“Is it all right if I touch him?” said Jeff.

Bill looked at him in amazement. “Of course you can touch him. What the devil’s wrong with you?”

“This is the nearest I’ve ever been to a horse in my life,” said Jeff.

When Bill had recovered, he asked Jeff why he had agreed, under the circumstances, to join the cavalry.

Jeff shrugged. “You wanted to—so I wanted to. And as long as I didn’t tell anybody about it, nobody could tell me I was crazy.”

It was a slow and painful process, but Jeff learned to ride. He never learned to love horses the way Bill did, but anyone seeing him in a saddle wouldn’t have known it.

Jeff was eventually sent to the Pacific. In 1945, he was back in California, at Fort Ord, awaiting his discharge, and it was during this period that he decided he would tackle Hollywood. He figured it would be quite simple; he’d merely tell them about his dramatic experience and they would give him a job. He hoped it would be a good one, because he’d fallen in love with Marjorie Hoshelle, and he thought a movie star’s salary would be a likely sum with which to start married life. He made an appointment with a Hollywood agent, and decided to hitchhike because thumb waving was faster than the devious railroad service. In the early hours of the morning he was given a ride by some benign soul who shortly afterwards steered into a head-on collision. Jeff woke up sitting on a fender, and his head felt as though it had been inside a cement mixer. They took him.back to Santa Barbara where they shaved his head and did quite a bit of embroidery on his skull. In Hollywood, weeks later, Jeff saw the agent in a restaurant and the man passed him by as though he had the bubonic plague.

By the time Jeff’s hair had reappeared his last dollar had grown wings. He thought perhaps he should start an apprenticeship in the plumbing trade, or paint thumbtacks—anything to earn a living. But he couldn’t give up the idea of acting.

When he finally landed a couple of small jobs in radio, he and Marge went to a Justice of the Peace, and from there to a little apartment, sparsely furnished with orange crates. Jeff went on with his struggle to get somewhere in Hollywood. Radio jobs kept coming in, due in part to one producer’s secretary, a girl who was six feet tall. Envisioning a possible future dancing partner, she went to bat for Jeff on every possible occasion, and soon the orange crates were replaced by softer items of furniture. His first movie work came with an important part in Sword in the Desert. After that he made an appointment with Jules Blaustein and Delmer Daves, the men who were going to make Broken Arrow. They were looking for a man to play Cochise, the Apache chief, and Jeff realized that if he could land this part, it would be his big break. He figured that his attitude during the interview should be nonchalant, that he should repress all signs of anxiety.

When he was ushered into the plush office and seated in the middle of the room he found it difficult to be nonchalant. Blaustein and Daves stared at him silently a full five minutes, the former squinting, and the latter cocking his head from side to side.

“Would you mind if I crawled up the wall?” Jeff said.

They laughed and apologized, explaining that they were trying to decide if Jeff looked too typically American to portray an Indian.

“If you ask me,” said Jeff, “nobody could look more typically American than an Indian.”

They didn’t laugh at that one, and Jeff decided to let the wheels grind in silence.

He got the part, of course, and he worried a great deal about it. How did an Indian chief carry himself? How did he speak? Was his voice at all guttural? Director Daves settled the whole problem with one simple instruction.

“Just be natural,” he told Jeff. “You have a good body and a good voice, and if you’ll just be yourself you’ll have the necessary dignity.”

Jeff gave the impression not only of dignity, but also of a man who knew what he wanted and went after it in no uncertain terms. When the fan mail began pouring in, it came from as many men as women, from people in all walks of life. It proved that Jeff Chandler has the universal appeal of a strong man.

His wife says that the quality, whatever it is, can pass politely as determination. If Jeff decides that a thing must be done a certain way, fire, high water, or other people’s advice won’t stop him. But if a subject is new to him he will swallow advice like a lamb, and then strive for perfection. This is currently being demonstrated in his new picture, The Iron Man, where he plays a boxer. For this role Jeff learned, scientifically, the art of self-defense.

There is one character, however, who could push Jeff Chandler over a cliff if she felt so inclined. This is Jamie, his four-year-old daughter, and running a close second is his younger daughter Dana, who at the age of two doesn’t yet know her own strength. Jamie does. She spends her days artfully winding her father around her little finger. One night he was reading her “The Three Little Pigs” as a bedtime story, and happened to omit a line of dialogue. Jamie looked at him in disgust.

“That’s not right, Daddy,” she said. “That’s where the wolf comes and says he’ll blow the house down.”

Jeff raised an eyebrow. “Who’s reading this story?” he said.

“You, Daddy, but you left out something.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Mr. Chandler, who at 32 feels he knows “The Three Little Pigs” backwards and forwards. And then his eye fell on the neglected line of print, and his face betrayed him.

“There!” said Jamie triumphantly. “You look as though you’ve found it.”

“Well—” said Jeff lamely, and then cleared his throat. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”

Now there, indeed, is a man of iron!

THE END

—BY JANE WILKIE

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE MAY 1951