Articles on Mel Ferrer
Collier's / July 29 1950

Lanky Bones, as Mel's friends call him, with Joan Fontaine in Born to Be Bad.	Mel Ferrer in San Miguel de Allende, during the filming of The Brave Bulls.

MEL FERRER, RKO STAR AND DIRECTOR, PINWHEELS FROM JOB TO JOB IN A VIVID SHOW OF
Jet Propulsion, Hollywood Type

If the Russians, as has been rumored, keep files on people of prominence in the United States, they must be fairly well baffled by the dossier of a rising young man about Hollywood named Mel Ferrer. While to all appearances he is engaged in the theatrical profession, the record of his recent peregrinations reads more like that of an Alfred Hitchcock spy.
     In 1937 he was living in Tasco, Mexico, purportedly writing a novel. A year later, he cropped up in Vermont, in the book publishing business. Six months after that, although he could neither sing nor dance well, he was applying for a job in a Broadway musical.
     Around the time of Pearl Harbor, he could have been seen around Los Angeles successively as a battery repairman, a grocery delivery boy and a telephone laundry salesman. Soon afterward, he materialized as a disk jo0ckey in Longview, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. A couple of months after that, while continuing to profess an interest in the radio business, he shifted his base to New York
     Since then, it has been pretty much of a tossup whether a given day would find him on the Atlantic seaboard, the Pacific Coast or somewhere else.
     Recently, to locate him you'd have had to travel to an obscure hamlet some 200 miles northwest of Mexico City.
     The record would appear to be that of someone on the lam. In actuality, it is the odyssey of a young man not pursued, but in tortuous and highly individualistic pursuit--his objective being a living, a niche, a career, or that nebulous state of hypertension called success. While Ferrer's quest is by no means over--is, in fact, proceeding at a more feverish pace than ever--it has started to pay off in a flurry of jack pots of ever-widening clangor.

On the heels of his widely hailed performance as a Negro doctor in Los Boundaries, Ferrer has just landed a long-term contract at RKO which calls for him both to act and direct--the first director hired by Howard Hughes, the multimillionaire aviator and producer, since he took over the studio. Ferrer has just made his debut as a big-time director with The Secret Fury, a million-dollar picture in which he supervised such stars as Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan.       On top of this, he won what is considered likely to be the acting plum of 1950--the lead matador role in the best seller The Brave Bulls, being made by Robert Rossen, creator of the 1949 hit All the King's Men. Ferrer is on loan to Columbia Pictures for The Brave Bulls.      In addition to these preoccupations, Ferrer is president of the La Jolla Playhouse, the West Coast's leading summer theater, where, in collaboration with such figures as Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire, he has planned a season of nine plays.

Ferrer directed Claudette Colbert in The Secret Fury. Here they are shown with his cameraman, Leo Tover (left)

     Finally--for the moment, at least--Ferrer is treasurer and one of the main spark plugs of The Actors' Company, a syndicate of 13 Hollywood notables which produces stage and radio plays, and which is planning a $2,500,000 legitimate theater in Beverly Hills.
     A salesman for casualty insurance who called at the Beverly Hills office from which Ferrer operates betimes got a quick sample of the man's energy. Within 13 minutes, juggling two telephones, Ferrer gave instructions for sound-dubbing on The Secret Fury, arranged to make wardrobe tests for The Brave Bulls, engaged two actors for summer plays at La Jolla, negotiated a deal for The Actors' Company to put on four one-hour national network radio plays for a stove manufacturer, and made an appointment for retakes on Born to Be Bad, the last picture in which he acted.
     Despite all this activity, Ferrer fits the picture of the high-pressure executive less than that of an eager college boy soliciting magazine subscriptions or making time at the senior prom. A product of New York and a brief period at Princeton, Ferrer at thirty-two is a slender six feet two, with black hair, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones, deep-set piercing eyes and a lantern jaw. These, together with a suave manner, a gentle voice, and a gangling carriage, add up to a sort of intriguing composite of Henry Fonda, Charles Boyer and Jimmy Stewart.
     A demon jazz fan as well as a connoisseur of classical music, Ferrer converses much of the time in an almost unreproducible sublimated version of jive-talk, with frequent lapses into dialects and surrealistic plays on words. One moment he may be expounding a thesis with the dignity of a Supreme Court justice, and the next moment picking up a phone and saying, "Hallo, keedo, wha's cooking?" -- the addressee being with equal likelihood a motion-picture magnate, an actor friend or his six-year-old son Mark.
     Ferrer's intensity, his nervous energy and his propensity for riding off in several directions at once are rapidly becoming a Hollywood legend. "I often wonder what else Mel finds to do when he's asleep," a friend remarked, "because I've never seen him do just one thing at a time."
     A routine still-picture sitting in the RKO gallery, which normally would take 20 minutes, stretched out to two hours the other day, due to Ferrer's telephonitis, floor-pacing and general fidgeting. While some directors on the set can vegetate philosophically in a camp chair all day, Ferrer is constantly jumping up and down and darting about with such velocity that even though he's within a radius of 25 feet it's difficult to pinpoint him. When nothing else is in motion, he waves his hands. His gestures are so distinctive that he and a whole camera crew had to be lugged 10 miles to Pasadena to reshoot a scene showing nothing but his hand switching price tags in a store window. The Ferrer hands had become established in the picture, and no one else's would have looked the same.

A Lady Limits His Table-Hopping

      No one has ever really had dinner with him in public, for the reason that Mel spends most of the time table-hopping. Eve Arden, the comedienne, sitting down to dinner in his party one night, served stern notice: "All right, Junior. You get four waves and two hops up to and including the meat course."
     When Ferrer does manage to stay at the table, his mind keeps on the jump. Many people have finished a three-minute dissertation on some burning issue to find themselves confronted by either Ferrer's left sideburn or an absent, glassy gaze. Possibly because his regular mealtimes are so frequently punctuated with interruptions, Ferrer does an inordinate amount of eating for a 171-pounder nicknamed Lanky Bones. He stows away an average of four squares a day, plus frequent snacks. After dining with a producer at seven one evening, Ferrer sat through a picture screening. When it ended at ten thirty, he went out, explaining, "I'm going across the street for a steak--I'm hungry!"
     For an actor of his talents, Ferrer has considerable modesty. He is eager to learn from people more experienced than himself. And the quality of sensitiveness and compassion conspicuous in his acting manifests itself in his private life. A studio worker he knew who lived alone was recuperating from a serious illness when Ferrer, with no advance notice, walked in pushing a wheel chair and said, "Come on, you're going to stay at my house until you get on your feet."
     Ferrer's reputation for ubiquity has been enhanced to a degree often confusing even to Broadway and Hollywood by the existence of another theatrical luminary named José Ferrer, who starred in Cyrano de Bergerac and The Silver Whistle on Broadway and portrayed the Dauphin in the film Joan of Arc.
     The two are good friends but unrelated, and their careers have intertwined at several points. Both are of Spanish extraction, but Mel comes from New York, while José was born in Puerto Rico. Both went to Princeton, José being six years older and a classmate of Mel's elder brother. Mel's elder brother, by coincidence, also is named José Ferrer, but he avoided complicating the theatrical picture by becoming a doctor in New York.
     Mel's father (also named José) was born in Cuba of Spanish parents, but settled in New York after marrying Irene O'Donohue, a member of a prominent and wealthy New York family. Mel was christened Melchor Gastón. A couple of years ago he shortened his name professionally, because people kept calling him Melchior, like the opera singer.
     The hectic pace Mel pursues today is in part a hang-over from a singularly arduous decade he put in getting established as an actor.
     One of four children, he grew up in a sumptuous home just off Fifth Avenue, New York. When he entered Princeton in 1935, he had behind him two seasons of odd jobs at the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where his family summered. He became active in campus theatricals to such a degree that the scholastic life palled, and after two years he quit college, married a Maryland girl named Frances Pilchard, and took her off to Mexico for a year's stab at novel writing. His net production for the year was 500 words, comprising the text of Tito's Hats, a children's story of Mexico, which sold 20,000 copies ultimately, but not in time to buy the requisite groceries.
     After six months with a Brattleboro, Vermont, publishing concern, he decided to tackle the theater again. He went to New York and got a job as a chorus boy in the Cole Porter show You'll Never Know, causing Clifton Webb, one of the stars whom he had met casually, to exclaim in his best Belvedere manner: "My deah boy, what are you doing heah?" Mel ackowledged his inexperience, and there followed one of the shortest theatrical apprenticeships in history. Webb took him aside and in two hours taught him enough of the rudiments of stage dancing to enable him to keep his job.
     With that momentum, Ferrer got small parts in Kind Lady, Cue for Passion, and Everywhere I Roam, and was beginning to think he had his stage legs under him, when his career came to a dead end.
     He woke up one night with an excruciating pain in his right arm, and in a few weeks it was completely paralyzed. The trouble later was diagnosed as polio.
     The ensuing three years were a sort of nonalcoholic "lost weekend" for Ferrer. His marriage blew up. Remarried to a New York designer, and convinced that he was through on the stage, he rented a house at Ojai, California, 75 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and at the age of twenty-three started all over again.
      He toted a heavy flatiron around for months to limber up his arm, went to Los Angeles and vainly tried his hand at the battery repair, grocery and laundry businesses; was turned down for service in the armed forces; and after venturing into radio work in the Southwest, screwed up his courage to tackle New York again. He got a job at the National Broadcasting Company, and after two years worked up to producer assignments on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and Mr. District Attorney.
     Ferrer moved to the Coast in 1943 and picked up his theatrical career more or less where he had left off, amicably dissolving his second marriage and remarrying his first wife.
     The biggest influence on him since he came to Hollywood, Ferrer thinks, was his contacts with the late David Wark Griffith, pioneer of modern film techniques. Ferrer met him through a mutual friend, Herb Sterne, a studio publicity man. Griffith, who was living in retirement, took a liking to Ferrer. For over a year, at weekly sessions attended by such old-time stars as Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Mary Pickford, Griffith ran off his classic pictures, analyzing them for Ferrer.
     "Mel was so absorbed," Sterne says in a striking tribute to Griffith, "that I can't remember him picking up the telephone once."
     After a year at Columbia as a dialogue director--an assistant who rehearses actors in their lines and movements --Ferrer worked up to full direction of a low-budget B picture, Girl of the Limberlost. It was a great day. Griffith himself was dissuaded from being on hand only on Mel's plea that he would collapse with nervousness under the eye of the master.
     "The studio hated me because I ran four days over the 12-day schedule on the picture," Ferrer says. "But it made more money than any other B picture they'd had in five years."
     But after Griffith's tutelage, Ferrer palled before the prospect of making a succession of B's, so he launched into a complicated double game, still in progress, under which he has made his way as an actor while continually plotting to get established as a director.
     "I'm a screaming schizoid," he says. "At heart I'm an introvert. I've just cultivated an extrovert exterior. I curl up inside and freeze when I have to act. I much prefer sitting on the side lines and trying to get the best out of other people."

A Dual Personality at Work

     With one side of his dual personality, he directed José Ferrer in Cyrano on Broadway, put in two years directing screen tests for David O. Selznick, along with organizing the La Jolla Playhouse as an outlet for unoccupied Selznick stars, assisted John Ford in the production of  The Fugitive, and finished up Howard Hughes' Corsican-feud picture Vendetta after the ruggedly individualistic impresario had hired and fired three other directors.
     In his other guise, Ferrer starred on Broadway in Strange Fruit, produced by José Ferrer; played the lead in Lost Boundaries, a quasi-documentary detailing the true story of a Negro doctor in New Hampshire who for 20 years passed as white and, demonstrating his versatility, played a society cutup, along with Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan in Born to Be Bad.
     "I had been acting," he says in half-apologetic explanation of his double-jointed career, "just to get the directing." His plan ultimately was successful, in bringing him the job of directing The Secret Fury, a mystery melodrama made by Jack Skirball, head of an independent producing unit at RKO. Ferrer gave the picture some individualistic touches, including a realistic jazz jam session, in which he put Dave Barbour, the swing guitarist, in his first movie role. An unidentified extra in the scene, put in "for good luck," is José Ferrer.
     On the strength of The Secret Fury, Ferrer figured he might wangle a directing job from Hughes, who since their Vendetta deal had accquired control of RKO.

Howard Hughes Was Surprised

     When he called on Hughes, he found the producer had just seen his comic performance in Born to Be Bad.
     "Why didn't you tell me," Hughes asked, "that you were an actor?
     "Well, I wasn't exactly trying to keep it from anybody," Ferrer told  him. "Haven't you seen Lost Boundaries?"
      "No," Hughes said. "What's that?
      "When he saw the picture," Ferrer adds, "he almost fell out of those gray flannel pants." There ensued a long talk between Hughes and Ferrer over whether he should be an actor or a director. They finally compromised on a seven-year directing-acting contract, although it does not specify any directing assignments. So Mel is still wondering where he stands in his seesaw battle to get behind the camera instead of in front of it.
     Despite his turbulent professional existence, Ferrer manages to lead a fairly normal family life, getting home at least half the time for dinner, and averaging about six hours' sleep a night. The Ferrers, who have two children, live in a small, modernistic house near the ocean in Santa Monica. In his infrequent moments of relaxation, Ferrer likes to concoct gags. Sobersided male guests at his house have been ceremoniously presented with elaborate packages that turn out to contain red satin, can-can-girl garter belts.
     Ferrer turned the final performances of Petticoat Fever, the closing La Jolla play last summer, into bedlam by injecting half the residents of the town into the last scene in outfits ranging from polar bear skins to divers' suits--to the accompaniment of the airplane battle sound recording from Command Decision.
     One day during the filming of Vendetta when Billy Josephy, an agent, was on the set, Ferrer asked him to talk with a fanatically ambitious Italian character actor who'd been pestering him. After 15 minutes of incoherent and exasperating conversation which had Josephy reduced nearly to a state of nervous collapse, the intruder was triumphantly unmasked, from beneath several layers of make-up, as José Ferrer.
     Mel's friends are divided between the oldest and the newest contingents in Hollywood. A gathering at his house is likely to turn up such an assorted group as Alida Valli, Louis Jourdan and Christian Kelleen on the one hand, and Clifton Webb, Constance Collier and Charlie Chaplin on the other.
     Among Ferrer's intimates, there are two schools of thought about his future. One is that, under the laws of centrifugal force, he is liable to fly apart or fission at any time. The other school is confident that, with so many irons in the fire, he can't miss setting the world ablaze with one of them.
    When he set off for Mexico for two months of location work on The Brave Bulls, his wife expressed natural concern about his getting hurt.
     "Don't worry about old Lanky Bones," Gregory Peck reassured her in a cable from England. "He'll be all right - if he just doesn't insist on fighting two bulls at once."