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"Why Don't You Take Up Acting?" Dana Andrews Arrives in Hollywood
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Carver Dana Andrews (1909-92) became famous in the 1940s as a leading man in such Hollywood films as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Laura (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). But Dana Andrews began his adult life working as an accountant in Texas. In this 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews talks about how he got to Hollywood, and how he managed to break into the movie business. |
Dana Andrews talks about his early experiences in Hollywood.
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 decided to go to Hollywood and see what I could do, so I quit my job in Austin and hitchhiked out. I spent all my money on a farewell party for all my friends there in Austin, Texas, and literally hitchhiked--in a homburg hat and a camel's-hair coat--out to Hollywood. This was my idea of what it took to become a Hollywood actor. That was in 1930. |
 When I arrived there, I made my rounds of the studios. It was in the wintertime. It was very cold. The first thing I decided was that my idea of Hollywood was completely wrong. Hollywood is just a city like any other, except around the studios--not like New York or any cosmopolitan area, but more like Houston and Austin, a sort of a country town almost. I mean Hollywood itself. Downtown Los Angeles is a little more of a city. But it's all scattered out. My family lived briefly in the San Fernando Valley, so I lived with them a little while. They moved back almost immediately. |
Having had some experience with personnel managers, I made the rounds of the studios, and it didn't take me three days to realize that just going and asking for an opportunity to act in pictures would get me nowhere. So I decided that I would have to get a job at something else. This was in the middle of the Depression, and it was fairly tough. I couldn't get a job as an accountant, so I got a job as a school-bus driver, which gave me lots of time during the day, and my evenings were free. I immediately enrolled in a night course in dramatics. It was from this that I first started seriously trying to become an actor. |
During this time I had employment as various things--filling-station operator, newspaperman, one thing and another--anything to keep body and soul together, which would give me time to work on this thing. Two men for whom I worked at the time, men connected with the Associated Oil Company--John Wardlow and Stanley Toomey--had ideas at the time, through the late Pauline Frederick. She told them that there were a number of people who came to Hollywood to get into films who had a great deal of talent, but that the job of making a living became so arduous that they had no time or energy left to pursue their goal, and she thought there were a lot of people who, with a little help, could make good. At this time, Mr. Toomey noticed that Bing Crosby was quite the big singer, and his wife thought I was quite attractive, working at the filling station, so this gave him an idea. He was a promoter at heart, I think. So he said, "If I give this young man some help, possibly he can be another Bing Crosby." |
He knew I was taking singing lessons, and at the salary I was making ($100 a month, beginning at $70), paying out $20 a month for singing lessons, or $30, was a thing that just astounded him. I must be very serious about it, he thought. So he came in and offered to help me, but his idea, of course, was that I should become a popular singer. I had a deep, more or less dramatic, operatic type of voice, and the ballad-singer type was not for me. But he didn't know that much about singing, nor did I, at the time. So he offered to pay for my music lessons. Later, I left my job, and he paid me a certain amount per week, for which I did some amount of work for him at the distributing station of the Associated Oil Company. |
Finally he got me an audition with an agent who was the brother of Russ Columbo, a singer. Because he was the brother of Russ Columbo, naturally Mr. Toomey thought that he would be the man for a singer to go to. As it turned out, Mr. Columbo advised quite a different thing. He heard me sing and he said, "Well, you have a pretty good voice, but singers don't make very much money. And how many singers can you name that are nationally famous?" |
Well, at the time I could think of Lawrence Tibbett, John Charles Thomas, Richard Bonelli and two or three others, and that was it. So he said, "What chance would you have? You realize what the odds are against your becoming a singer and really getting to the top, when there are only five out of probably millions that would like to be singers?" Then he said, "Why don't you take up acting? Second-rate actors make five times as much money as first-rate singers, lots of them." |
This sounded very attractive to me, especially as I liked acting, too, and had intended to combine the two. So I went to the Pasadena Playhouse, which at that time was one of the outstanding showcases for the country and for the world. Victor Jory was there, and Robert Preston, Victor Mature, Edgar Buchanan, George Reeves--any number of them--Bill Holden ... There were very few girls at the time, because the girls generally got the chance at the studios, but men, no. So I went there. I did not go to the school. The playhouse was divided into two sections at the time, and I think still is. There is the School of the Theatre, which is literally a school, and then they have the Little Theatre, which is a community playhouse. People of Pasadena and the neighborhood areas come there. From a reading, or from the director's knowledge of their work, they are cast in a particular play. |
On Sunday night they had a reading. I went there and read, and since I have this deep voice and they were doing Shakespeare, they asked me to come back. So I started in a very minor part in "Antony and Cleopatra." I did two Shakespeare plays, and then became more or less a regular player over a period of three years, developing from walk-on parts to leads. This is something that in ordinary movie training you don't get: I played anything from a 16-year-old to a 400- or 500-year-old man ["Back to Methusaleh," Shaw]. Strangely enough, it was while I was doing this old man that one of the critics came to the Playhouse and saw it and said, "I think Dana Andrews is about ready to be caught in the net of Hollywood." As it turned out, he was wrong, but nevertheless something was beginning to show on the stage, as he said, a certain assurance, and so on. |
During this time, I did keep up the singing for a while, and then I forgot it. I was a little older than a lot of the fellows, because I had also been an accountant and worked in the San Fernando Valley for a while before I ever started on this, and also on singing, so that I was almost 27 years old when I started this. Robert Preston got a contract, and Victor Mature got a contract. I had been called to all the studios, but at that time they were looking for principally leading men of the Robert Taylor type, who was a recent success at MGM, and Oliver Hinsdale, who was then quite famous as the man who trained Robert Taylor, gave me an interview. He was quite enthusiastic about the possibility of my becoming a star for them and arranged an interview with Mr. Grady, who had been a casting director for MGM (and I think still is in the casting department). Mr. Grady gave me some very fatherly advice, after having talked to me for a few minutes. He said, "I understand you've had some training as an accountant. My advice to you would be, go back to the accounting or the bicycle shop or something. This is not a business for men who don't have what are immediately seen as leading-man qualities. You'll work now and then, but you really won't make a good living." |
This is the second time this had happened to me, because the same thing had happened over at RKO. But I was not really discouraged at that particular moment because I thought, "Well, this is one man's opinion." After all, here was Mr. Hinsdale in the same studio who had said, "Great!" I had had enough experience by this time to realize that opinions could differ, and that people were turned down time after time who finally made it. So I was very hopeful. Also, since Mr. Toomey was still paying my $50 a week, I was able to continue for a while. |
Very shortly after that, I thought, "Well, I have given it a chance, three years. If I've wasted three years and I'm not going to be an actor, it's about time that I thought about doing something else." It was later than '34, because there was a period in there when I didn't do much of anything, except that I was married and had a child and worked very hard and studied singing. I studied singing from about 1932 to 1936, almost exclusively. Then I studied on to 1938. I decided that I had given it about as much chance as I should. |
Right at this moment, the adage "darkest at dawn" really came to pass. I was just about ready to give up. I was doing a play with the late Florence Bates, which was about the life of Marie Dressler, called "Oh Evening Star," played by Zoe Akinson, in which I had a comparatively small part. An agent saw me, and an interview was arranged with Sam Goldwyn. I'd been to every studio in Hollywood but Sam Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox. Later I signed a contract with both at the same time for 10 years, the two that I hadn't visited. |
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