Veteran Norman Kerry Returns To Hollywood

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 181, 2 August 1941, Page 17

Veteran Norman Kerry Returns To Hollywood

By Thomas Brady

GORMAN KERRY, who made ] at least a million dollars in the t films of the Nineteen Twenties, ' has returned to Hollywood, be- ' cause he needs to earn a living, j His first job will be a supporting • role in "The Parson of Pana-ma-it," which his friend of an ; earlier era, Harry Sherman, is producing at Paramount. What the part will be Kerry doesn't know, but itwill be a good, solid job lasting the length of the

picture.

The actor says: "I can't play dashing roles any more—look at me!" But he is being self-depreciatory. The man you see is no juvenile, perhaps, but the Graustarkian quality which made him a hero of the silent screen is still distinguishable, even though he has just weathered a siege of pneumonia. He looks what he is—a well-pre-served soldier and gentleman of 46, younger, for instance, than Ronald Colman and Warner Baxter, with some slight resemblance to both of them. War Wiped Oat Savings Kerry has returned because the war wiped out all the savings he had in Europe. The community is different from the Hollywood he left by a good deal more than nine years would indicate. (His last picture was "Bachelor Apartment" at RKO in 1932.) He belonged to the really glamorous era of the films—not that of the founding fathers, but the second generation, when money had begun to pour in and Gloria Swanson made 17,000 dollars a week. It was the period when Hollywood lived hard and built up, or tore down, its repu tation. f - Lew Cody, John Gilbert, Rudolph Valentino, Richard Barthelmess and Norman Kerry were giants of that day. But Kerry goes back beyond the second generation. He started acting in 1916 in "Manhattan Madness," and played opposite Bessie Barriscale, Mary Pickford, Constance Talmadge, Alice Brady and Marion Davies bofore he went off to fight in the first World War. Afterward he joined Universal and made pictures both in Hollywood and abroad for that studio, for Paramount and for Metro. He survived the change from silents to sound briefly, too, but his pinnacle was in the 20's, when he made "Foreign Legion," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "The Phantom of the Opera." In 1933 his American fortune had been largely dissipated—he was an astonishingly generous man, according to all contemporary accounts. But he had made pictures in Europe and had money invested there, and in 1934 he bought a villa in Cap -» 4-.

Ferrat in Southern France. He spent the next five years pleasantly travelling about the Continent, following winter sports in the IJavarian Alps, and riding. Three months before Polanct was Invaded he rode with the Belgian Army team in the international horse show at Ostend and took honours. In Foreign Legion! Then came tho war. On October 12. 1930, unable to join the French Army without losing his American citizenship, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion as a Dutchman, Hcinrich van der A Foreign Legion recruit swears allegiance to the legion, not to France. The service, as he describes it. is tougher and a pood deal nastier than the movies have pictured it. The men live almost like prisoner?, and most of them want to got out within two weeks after they've enlisted. The sergeants. Kerry said, are even tougher than Mrian Ponlevy was in the last version of "Beau Geste."' Then he added, modestly, that he got to be one him.-olf,. The troops are not romanticists with secret sorrows. Kerry spoke of one legionnaire who had an unprintable obscenity tattoed on his forehead so when he saluted he could shove his kepi back and shock the ollicer. The actor-legionnaire underwent a training period at Sidi-bel-Abbas, headquarters of the legion in Algiers and then was returned to France

i where, with his mechanised cavalry . unit, he was thrown into the lines j supporting tlie Maginot Line. The : unit served in the desperate' '"Luxemburg triangle"' and was | finally shifted farther north. When France Capitulated Then an attack of pneumonia combined with a frozen leg caused Kerry to be invalided back to j Cannes, where he was still danger-, ' outly ill when France capitulated, j i By last October he had recovered ; i siilnciently to be demobilised. _ j Bat all his property was lost or , frozen, and. he explained, he had the \ , choice between digging ditches in j the shattered country where even t the rich couldn't get soap or butter i 5 jr returning to Hollywood. His jour-1 1 ney was a nightmarish trip, with the i ] train to Lisbon standing still me-e 1 often than it was moving. Still weak 1 from pneumonia, he slept on the open deck of the ship he sailed in. j ? because -100 passengers were crowded v into space for 100. He arrived in j i America in February. '• After that it is not surprising he ' 3 should be matter-of-fact about , 1 resuming what a younger actor i 0 would call his career. He doesn't yet j e know what his salary will be in "The ;1 Parson of Panamint." but he said he s expected to work for a fraction of what he used to make. He certainly t isn't what you would call stage ', struck. What he wants, he says, is s to earn a living, and he thinks acting j -\ is still his best bet. j