Fertilizer Discipline

I open a random obituary and find that Pearl Berg died at the age of 114. She was designated the ninth oldest person in the world by the Gerontology Research Group, which must have Sherpa guides in the Himalayas scoping out old people and asking them when they were born.

Pearl herself was born in 1909, which was a good year for births. Benny Goodman was born that year. So was Errol Flynn. Also Frances Dee, who was a beautiful actress in the early days of Hollywood. She was married to Joel McCrea and stayed married to him from 1933 until his death in 1990, which makes it as rare in Hollywood marriages as the Blue-Footed Booby in the Galapagos.

Dee herself made it to age 94.

Joel McCrea was one of the most decent men ever to achieve movie stardom, not letting celebrity go to his head, and holding to a strong set of values, as my own father found out one day. You see, my grandfather built a house on Nichols Canyon Road in Hollywood in 1923, and later Joel McCrea moved in next door where there was land for him to have horses.

When my father was a lad he was chatting with Joel McCrea in one of the stalls and he uttered a bad word, a very bad word, and Joel McCrea did what a father used to do in those days, which was wash out a boy’s mouth with soap, only there wasn’t any soap around, so Joel McCrea used a bit of fertilizer.

Now, such was the way men in those days looked out for the boys in the neighborhood, helped keep them of trouble, but on occasion when the father of the child was not around (as my grandfather was not, being on the road as a traveling salesman for Encyclopedia Britannica) a man might step in in loco parentis and do some disciplining. And while such enforcement shocks the conscience of many sensitive souls today, my father remembered Joel McCrea with great affection and admiration, as I remember my own father and mother who needed at times to correct the direction of their own bounding boy’s journey along life’s road.

Joel McCrea, by the way, is known today primarily for three films: Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and Ride the High Country. But his favorite film, and a hidden gem, is Stars in My Crown. The script was written by a woman named Margaret Fitts, about whom very little was known. There was no biographical entry for her on IMDB, only a few movie and TV credits, and then, whoosh, by 1962 she was gone from the business.

With my film professor son doing research at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, we managed to find a phone number down San Diego way. I called. A woman answered. It was, indeed, Margaret Fitts. She was 86, two years before her death. Sharp as a tack, she allowed me to interview her. My son did up a little bio for her and posted it at IMDB:

Margaret Fitts grew up in Los Angeles. She graduated from Stanford University in 1945, where she studied speech, drama and journalism. She wrote a regular column for the Stanford Daily in her senior year. Ms. Fitts applied to the junior writers' program at MGM and was accepted, signing a studio contract in 1947. Her scripts were primarily adaptations, a noted exception being her original story and screenplay, The King and Four Queens. After leaving MGM in 1954 she worked in television for a time, then retired from the film business.

I’m happy that is up there, preserved for those lucky ones in the future who discover Stars in My Crown.

I had my own mouth washed out with soap once that I recall. It was my mother who did the cleaning after I’d defied her with a word that I’d heard adults say after a few beers, and I can still see her face, shock all over it as she hauled me into the bathroom and grabbed the soap out of the dish and shoved it in my mouth.

To this day I watch my doggone words with care. 

And so should we all.

“Words have a longer life than deeds.” – Pindar (518 BC – 438 BC)

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” – Kipling