Randolph Scott

I was raised on Randolph Scott.  He made me want to be a cowboy.  I loved his voice, beautifully modulated and reassuring as it was, and I thought he was handsome in an Old West sort of way.  He was almost always the hero and he didn't want it to be any other way.  He usually got the girl but sometimes he just headed out of town alone.

Those movies I'm referring to, all westerns, came in what was essentially his second career but also his most valued.  After a spotty first career in the acting game, which, despite good work in some good films, he never really ignited in the way he had envisioned.  Around the same time that I was not only discovering movies and westerns in particular, there he was, too, atop the same beautiful horse in most films, giving the young me a taste of hero worship. 

Aside from playing quiet-talking, fast-drawing heroes in westerns, he showed his versatility in romantic movies, war films, screwball comedies and musicals.  He made a couple of films with his life-long friend, Fred Astaire (they even did a dance routine together). Even though he made musicals, he never sang in them. 

Scott was born in 1898 with a silver spoon in his mouth and rather unexpectedly in Virginia where the family was on a brief vacation.  They shortly returned to their Charlotte, North Carolina home where he was smothered in luxury.  He was raised to be the perfect southern gentleman.  Impeccable manners and an education were expected... the blond, handsome face was a bonus.  The smile was infectious.  Despite a clear, masculine, rather unemotional voice, he was more of a listener and his piercing blue eyes made young belles forget what they were talking about.  He was very popular and possessed of much confidence but conceit was not part of his upbringing. 

He developed into quite the sportsman.  He made some noise in two of the big three, baseball and football, and excelled in swimming and had a passion for horse-racing.  He only attended private schools.  Always slim and tall, he was 6'2" by the time he was 19 and a soldier in WWI.  Spending his time in France, he put his horsemanship and weapon expertise to good use.

Back in the states he attended Georgia Tech fully determined to be a football star but injuries put that to rest.  He then attended the University of North Carolina where he suddenly decided to major in textile engineering and manufacturing.  However, as quickly as he determined to join the college, he undecided it.  He was off to Hollywood.

What?  Where did this come from?  Well, c'mon, with his looks, smile, voice, athletic body and confidence, one would have to ask why not?  He was always open to new adventures but at the same time there were those who told him he should try the movies.

Hooray for Hollywood.  Hooray, too, for the letter of introduction Scott's father had given him.  Papa and some untethered billionaire named Howard Hughes were work acquaintances and Hughes was newly dabbling in movie-making.  The eccentric Hughes did come through, too... he got Scott into some grade-H movies.  Scott also helped Gary Cooper with the proper accent to play The Virginian.

I must confess that I have just leaned back in my chair, rubbed my chin whiskers and exhaled a very earnest hmmmm.  I've never heard that Hughes and Scott knew one another that way, but why not?  Both had that DNA, Hughes was a letch, the Harvey Weinstein of his day, and Scott a handsome, blond beauty who wanted a movie career but had little discernible talent.  It is known that Hughes and Cary Grant shared a pillow on occasion and that Hughes introduced Scott to Grant.  And guess what else?

In 1932 Grant and Scott costarred in Hot Saturday and began a love affair that would last all their lives.  It would also result in a live-together relationship, lasting most of a decade, that was remarkably open in those dangerously oppressive times.  More details of the Scott-Grant relationship can be fleshed out in a prior posting titled Randy and Cary.

One can either buy or not buy the Hughes-Scott thing.  The Scott-Grant relationship, however, is undeniable but here's the thing...  I don't think Scott really deserves the label gay in the way some others did.  He didn't work the boulevard or have breathless assignations on the studio backlot or apparently have a lot of partners.  Rather he passionately loved one man for decades and they both kept mum on the subject and in later years denied it.  

And a real hoot is through all this cohabitating, they both married... Grant in '34, Scott in '36.  There was a lot of back-and-forth living and sharing.  Scott married a DuPont heiress. (He had been the best man at her previous nuptials.)  The marriage lasted three years.  Grant's marriage lasted a year but by 1942, with the Scott-Grant still doing the dishes together, Grant wed again... he wanted his own heiress, in this case, Barbara Hutton.

Scott spent a number of years wasted in films that no one ever heard of... then or now.  He didn't strike anyone as much of an actor.  That changed in 1934 with a role in Roberta, costarring  Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne.  The boys-meet-girls-in-Paris gimmick was a fun romp for the four of them.  Harriet Nelson filled in for Dunne when the rest of them were Flying Down to Rio (1936).  Both casts had fun together and Scott proved to be a deft comic foil.  He was on his way.

He got a chance to star as Hawkeye in 1936's The Last of the Mohicans but the film wasn't the draw some had hoped for.  His next three leading ladies were as different as they could be.  He was easy pickins for that mantrap Mae West in Go West, Young Man (1936), paired again with the pious Dunne in the musical western, High, Wide and Handsome (1937) and looking a tad uncomfortable opposite Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).

He got kind of lost while fourth-billed in 1939's Jesse James.  Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda got all the attention.  He was both friend and foe to Errol Flynn in the Civil War drama, Virginia City (1940).  Also in 1940 he was boldly teamed with his boyfriend Grant and again with Dunne in the marital comedy, My Favorite Wife, which was a great success.  Throughout the 40's he made a number of war dramas... To the Shores of Tripoli, Corvette K-225, Bombardier, Gung Ho and China Sky among them.

The year 1942 was a good one for the actor due to his appearance alongside Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne in two, back-to-back movies, The Spoilers and Pittsburgh. The former, about the Alaskan Gold Rush, had Scott in a rare villainous role and he and Wayne had one of the best movie fights ever filmed.  Pittsburgh isn't as good as its predecessor but the story of battling partners in the steel industry had its moments.  Wayne was third-billed in both films but was the star nonetheless.

These two films generated a lot of press for Scott but he continued his long-held avoidance of publicity.  He never gave in-depth interviews or got involved in too many public appearances because he believed movie stars who kept out of the public eye (a la Garbo) did themselves a world of good.

Mr. & Mrs. Scott

He married actress Patricia Stillman in 1944 and they remained so until his death in 1987.  They adopted two children.  By all accounts it was a blissfully happy marriage and while it was grounded in their religious beliefs, it did not stop him from seeing Grant until the end of their lives.  They did not meet in secret because the Scotts together considered Grant a family friend.  Whether she knew the full truth or not has been lost to history.

He made his last modern-dress film in 1947 (not counting a cameo in a 1951 Warner Bros musical starfest) with Home Sweet Homicide, a delightful film about the young children of a writer who try to solve a neighborhood murder.  Peggy Ann Garner is the adorable star, Lynn Bari plays the writer-mother and Scott is a cop.  He had 38 films yet to make and they would all be westerns.

One of my favorites is 1949's The Walking Hills which seemed about as film noir as a western could get.  Full of tension it concerns a group of shady folks out to locate a lost treasure.  One by one, something happens to them before the taut ending.  Scott heads the group which consists of spirited Ella Raines, Arthur Kennedy and John Ireland.  I've never figured out why this film has remained under the radar.

A brief paragraph about Scott's favorite horse.  Like all great western stars, he had his own, a dark blond palomino named Stardust.  The horse was so beautiful that he was easily recognizable in most of the actor's 1950's films.  Scott did not own the horse but always requested him for his next film.

True cowboy fans know that some of Hollywood's best westerns come out of pairing certain actors with specific directors, such as John Wayne and John Ford or James Stewart and Anthony Mann.  Scott and veteran director Budd Boetticher carved out their own slice of the western frontier.  At Columbia Pictures the pair teamed up for a series of smart B westerns that hold as much interest today as they did when they were made from 1956-60... Seven Men from Now, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, Westbound and Comanche Station.  Scott now had a weathered look, although still possessed of a good face.  His cowpokes could be short-tempered, vengeful and laconic.  

It doesn't much matter what these films were about because now, as well as then, I simply knew that with Scott starring and Boetticher directing, I was in very capable hands and my entertainment was all sewn up.  Boetticher was as rootin-tootin'-shootin' as Scott was low-key but their trusting relationship produced tidy, efficient stories with all the fat trimmed.

John Wayne visiting a Scott-Boetticher film set

  


Scott made a slew of other westerns in the fifties including The Man Who Wore a Gun, Thunder over the Plains, Hangman's Knot, Fort Worth, Man in the Saddle, Ten Wanted Men and Rage at Dawn and I saw them all.

In 1961 he announced that he had been signed to make a film for director Sam Peckinpah and would costar with another western icon, Joel McCrea, in the highly-anticipated Ride the High Country. He also announced it would be his final film... and it was.

Ride the High Country features the two old stars as friends who are transporting gold to a mining camp but what one doesn't know is that the other is planning to take the gold all for himself.  Peckinpah, directing only his second film, brings a poetic feeling to the west and puts character in his characters, no cookie-cutter cowpokes for him.  While Scott ends his long, heroic western career by playing a villain, he does so with more humor than he's perhaps ever displayed in an oater and he allows one to see his thinking.  It's an elegant swan song for the old cowboy.  The film has long claimed its spot on lots of those best westerns lists.

Staff at the Beverly Hills Hotel reported seeing Scott and Grant at their favorite, hidden-away table many times and one of those was shortly before Grant died in November, 1986.  Those who peeked in said the pair was quite touching.  Getting news of Grant's death, it's said that Scott put his head in his hands and wept uncontrollably.

Four months later Scott, too, died.  He was 89 years old when he died in his sleep in his Bel-Air home.  He had had a weak heart for several years (and likely a broken one for four months) and had battled several bouts of pneumonia.  He is buried in Charlotte.

Randolph Scott was one of the greatest of the movie cowboys... right up there with McCrea, Wayne, Stewart and a few others.  When things were not quite right at home and I was shuffled off to a Saturday double bill, Scott often helped me to forget my troubles and get happy.  I have always been beholden.


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