John Stangeland is author of the forthcoming book Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-code Hollywood, to be published by McFarland and Company later this year. 

John recently wrote a guest post for Warren-William.com, Remembering Is Hard, and at the same time consented to answer a series of questions about his book and our site’s subject, Warren William. 

The first three questions come from the readers of Warren-William.com, while the final seven are from myself.  Whether I asked the right questions or not John’s answers make one thing very clear—we need to get this book into our hands ASAP! 

Enjoy the interview and thanks very much once more to John Stangeland.

This first question comes from Warren-William.com’s most active commenter, Jeffers:
Q: What did MGM think they wanted to do with Warren William, and why did they change their minds?

JS: Warren’s imperfect deal with MGM seems to have been a case of his wishful thinking more so than the studio changing their mind. It is doubtful that they thought of him as anything more than a "utility" player when the contract was signed. His immediate assignments to supporting roles in The Firefly and Arsene Lupin Returns (where he could have easily played the lead) indicate to me that they never intended to give him any kind of build up, but rather saw him as a character man / second lead. He was clearly blind-sided by this treatment, expecting better roles than he was getting at Warner’s towards the end. It was quickly apparent that he would not get those roles, and proceeded to leave MGM at the earliest possible opportunity.

 
This next one is from Tom Hodgins:
Q: I’ve always enjoyed Warren Williams’ pre-code performances (courtesy TCM) but know nothing about the man.  Frequent co-star Joan Blondell’s “he was an old man even when he was a young man” comment, however, has always sounded sad to me, like he had an unlived life (aside from the considerable professional accomplishments). What is the basis of Blondell’s comment, and do you regard it as an accurate description of the man?  Thanks for the opportunity to ask this question.

JS: There is no question that Warren William was the type of sober, self-controlled man that people could sometimes see as "old," but it was not an indication of a dour outlook on life. On the contrary – he was very even-tempered, but indulged in his passions with great glee. He got much of his reserved personal manner from his father and grandfather, real old-world types who followed the 19th Century model of social intercourse. Let’s also remember that by the time he came to Hollywood in 1931 he was already 37, an age then definitely considered to be "older." As to him having an unlived life, nothing could be further from the truth. Besides his service in the War where he spent time touring Paris and the French countryside, he travelled extensively in the American southwest, Mexico and often sailed both the blue Pacific and the cold Atlantic. I think he was a very satisfied man, aware of his great good fortune to have a loving wife, and a great career that allowed him to indulge his hobbies and interests as he saw fit.

And finally one more from Jeffers, which I was actually going to ask myself as well:
Q: What does he think of Bette Davis’s recollection that WW was always trying to get her into bed? Is that reportedly untypical behavior perhaps mere projection on her part? Or did her particular appeal “reach” him more irresistibly than that of other co-stars of his who, to me, would have been a lot harder to resist?

JS: The Bette Davis stories are quite problematic. First, there is no attribution to these stories in ANY Davis biography, nor any corroboration in any other book that I can find. Each bio repeats the same stories almost verbatim from her autobiography, occasionally adding facts that are impossible for even Davis herself to have known, again, without attribution. They are the ONLY stories that I encountered of such behavior, or even bad words said about Warren William. Most often he is mentioned as a quiet, professional man or barely mentioned at all – I believe that he sometimes blended into the woodwork, generally being disinterested in showy displays or actions. He was a man, however, and it is entirely possible that he had an interest in Davis that her legendary ego blew out of proportion in later years. I suppose we may never know the REAL truth of the matter. 

 
And here come seven more questions from myself:
Q: What sort of relationship, if any, did Warren William have with his Uncle, the financier, Alvin W. Krech?  The elder Krech came to New York earlier and was a patron of the arts but the few references I find linking the two seem to indicate Warren’s Uncle being disillusioned by either (or both) Warren’s desire to act and his marriage to Helen.  Did either, or a combination of the two, directly lead to Warren W. Krech taking the stage name Warren William shortly after his 1923 marriage to Helen Barbara Nelson?

JS: According to my information, Warren did NOT change his name for anything other than professional reasons. Alvin Krech was an amazingly successful businessman who helped look after his 21 year old nephew when the boy moved to New York City (before Warren’s parents came east), and was a strong secondary male influence in his life. It is my belief that Warren’s character in Gold Diggers of 1933 was at least partly based on his Uncle’s sober personality. There are some other interesting connections between Alvin and his nephew that provide illuminating stories in the book. As to his interest in acting, Warren’s father and mother endorsed the idea and paid for his schooling, so I doubt that Alvin’s feelings (whatever they were) would have been of much consequence. 

Q: Was it his success in The Vinegar Tree, the passing of his father, or again, both, which led to Warren William leaving the New York Stage for Hollywood?

JS: Neither had any direct influence on his signing with Warners. Warren had been trying to break into pictures for many years, and it was entirely coincidence that the test he took at that time finally led to a contract. The story of that period is very poignant, and provides strong insight into the family dynamic.

Q: From what I’ve seen from the Warner Brothers Archives relating to Warren William it appeared he could be a thorn in the side of the studio but that most of their discrepancies were settled amicably.  Even his suspension appears to have been a situation more negotiated than an actual punishment served.  What in your mind was the lead factor in the quality of William’s projects spiraling downward from the heights they reached during the Pre-Code era?  Was it due to the shift on material, behavior related (ie: punishment) or some other factor?

JS: His decline at Warner Brothers is quite curious, and covered extensively in the book. I believe that there were a number of factors that contributed to his decline, not the least of which was his own professional apathy. Whatever troubles he had with Warner Brothers (and there were a few) came about after a long run of mistreatment that should have been addressed far earlier. Also, the simple fact is that by 1936 the image of the screen actor was changing to something entirely different than what Warren William projected. Warner Brothers must have felt far more secure with the future of Cagney, Flynn, Robinson and others than they did with him.

Q: By all period accounts Warren William mostly kept to himself and out of the Hollywood social circle except for the occasional party.  Was he close to any other actors or actresses away from the studio?

JS: The person that he seems to have been closest to was Gene Lockhart, the great character actor of films like The Sea Wolf (and who Warren co-starred with in Times Square Playboy). They met on Broadway and stayed friends until Warren’s death. Gene’s daughter June (of Lost in Space fame) remembered him as "a very tall, very kind man" who often came to  their house to play billiards and cards with her father. Among his other famous friends were Leslie Howard, Anna Mae Wong, Alan Dinehart and Charles Laughton.

Q: Are there any Harry Cohn stories from his time at Columbia?

JS: Oh, I wish there were. The Columbia records are tough to access, sadly. There is one amusing story concerning director Andre De Toth’s work on Counter Espionage, but I’ll leave that one to the book…

Q: There appears to be a definite literary bent to the last few films Warren William chose to appear in: Strange Illusion and it’s Hamlet similarities, Fear being a more or less direct retelling of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bel Ami based on Maupassant; was this by design and is it an indication of the type of projects Warren William would have continued to choose had he lived longer?  (Did he have any pending screen projects?)

JS: I suppose that the literary pedigree of those final films must have appealed to Warren, but it was not really an active choice on his part. At the time those projects were all he had offered to him. In the mid-to-late 40′s there were a few possibilities to return to the stage that did not happen, plus the radio drama US Postal Inspector that never got past the pilot (presumably because of his illness). There was also a starring role in a big budget film that was scuttled by a first-time producer’s ineptitude, but those final years were not really productive for him. Again, more about why in the book. 

Q: Your previous essay for Warren-William.com, Remembering Is Hard, really showed us why you undertook this project and what you thought of William’s career.  After spending so much time in William’s world what are your final thoughts on him as a person?  Did you like him?

JS: After all this time, I feel very close to Warren William. The more I learned about him, the more I liked him, and that helped spur the project along. He was apparently a very sincere, humble, decent person who truly never let Hollywood go to his head. In this age of entitlement, ego and self-absorption, I find his lack of star temperament very endearing. With everything I’ve seen and heard, I have the feeling that I would have found him a good and loyal friend, intelligent and interesting – just a simple Minnesota boy with a very public career.   

Thanks very much, John!  Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-code Hollywood can be pre-ordered right now on Amazon.com, and if you read this far, you know you’re going to buy it …

I don’t know if you saw the last comment on the site, though if you didn’t I don’t blame you—commenting on Warren-William.com was broken earlier this week and I don’t know how long it would have taken me to notice it if not for top commenter Jeffers, who found me on my other site and let me know what was going on.

The reason I’m not just letting this slip by is because the goof came the same morning that I posted John Stangeland’s fantastic guest post, which really makes me feel terrible.  Here’s John’s post again, if you had anything to add there won’t be a problem this time, plus I want to restate my own little note at the bottom, which you can comment on either here or there if you so wish:

Besides his kind contribution here, Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood author John Stangeland has consented to a text-based interview exclusively for Warren-William.com.  I have plenty I want to ask him, believe you me, but I also wanted to open up the floor to you guys—I’ll take the first two or three Warren William related questions you have an pass them on to John with my own.  I’m posting this June 8, figure deadline for questions next Wednesday, June 16, e-mail them along to me here.

Let’s extend that until the end of the week, make it Friday the 19th and I’ll get questions over to John during that weekend.

Speaking of John’s book, and it gives me great joy to do this:

… We’re getting close.

Here’s the extra Warren William image promised in the title.  I’d originally scanned it to fit into John’s post, but it didn’t make the final cut.  The only identifying mark is a November 1935 stamp on the reverse:

And here’s a closer-up shot of the same photo, minus the strange giant borders:

One last time, my apologies for the commenting goof, to you and to John Stangeland.  Look forward to hearing from you soon–

This is a guest post by John Stangeland is the author of the upcoming book Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood, to be published by McFarland and Company late in 2010.

He was a cad and a reprobate; a base scoundrel; a licentious, amoral profligate, and an oleaginous, depraved, impenitent swine. For three years Warren William swaggered across America’s cinema screens as the undisputed, unremitting, incontrovertible nadir of civilized human behavior: sociopathic, predatory, emotionless, uncaring, treacherous and evil. He was Ted Bundy without the serial killing.

Despite his pedigree as one of the singularly unique characters in the annals of Hollywood, Warren William has been nearly erased from film history. By the end of his career, and for decades after his death in 1948 he sat unnoticed behind other personalities that historians and the public perceived to be far more relevant. Erroneously deemed merely the Shadow behind the object or the Assistant to greatness, Warren William’s memory reposed, quiet and unconcerned, as the man had in life. It wasn’t until the greatest institution of nostalgia culture ever devised – Turner Classic Movies – began to reacquaint us with this Genius of Scurrility that his long-forgotten fame has gradually reemerged.

When Warner Brothers brought Warren William from the Broadway stage to world cinema in 1931, it was during a short-lived window in time when it was possible for screen characters to embody the basest qualities of modern man while still allowing them to be portrayed as sympathetic and even likable. Before the strict imposition of Hollywood’s long-standing Production Code excised iniquity from the movies in 1934, he was the preeminent example of the new depression-era male; a Social Darwinist to the core, hungry and angry, ready to take what was his and damn the rest. Meaner than James Cagney, randier than Clark Gable and wilier than William Powell, Warren William staked out his territory as the biggest bastard of them all, and became a supremely profane presence in darkened theaters across the nation.

The deliciously obscene Warren William persona that eventually ran roughshod over Hollywood morals during those years did not congeal immediately, and his fame, like many of those bound as indentured servants to the studio system, was almost an accident. As a stage star during the Golden Age of Broadway he most often played effete aristocrats and wealthy playboys, men who instilled confidence in nothing so much as their ability to pick up a check. Although by his own admission he could not carry a tune, he appeared in two musicals, and sang a song titled Express Yourself in his first big stage success. Twice he portrayed a man literally and physically emasculated by service in the World War. There was also a murderer who buried his mistress’s husband in a coal bin, a Viking warrior, a pickle salesman and, once – seriously – a Jewish Cowboy. When it came time to put him on screen – unsurprisingly – no one knew what to do with him. It wasn’t until nine months into his film career, when Edward G. Robinson and “every other Warner’s / First National star” passed on a quick programmer called The Mouthpiece early in 1932 that Warren William had a starring role, a major hit and the first genuinely nefarious rogue in his oeuvre. As Vincent Day, the lawyer of deformed ethics and predacious sexuality, Warren William made the nations critics (and more than a few of its women) sit up and take notice. He was an overnight sensation twelve years in the making.

As they did with the other stars on their lot, Warner Brothers insisted on him repeating the image that generated the biggest box office receipts for as long as the public would pay to see it. Thus, 1932 was a sustained, yearlong carnival of larceny for the studio and their new star. After The Mouthpiece, he was a magnificently immoral campaign manager to Guy Kibbee’s perverse gubernatorial candidate in The Dark Horse, and the corrupt, philandering owner of the phallic Dwight Tower in Skyscraper Souls at MGM. The Match King found him embezzling from, lying to, debasing, cheating, putting to ruin, falsely imprisoning and murdering anyone who came within arms reach of continental businessman Paul Kroll. Employees’ Entrance made him the deeply misogynistic head of a department store staffed with beautiful women upon whom he takes out his sexual frustrations. And in The Mind Reader (shot in December of ’32) he was Chandra the Great, bunco artiste par excellence, fleecing hayseeds, hicks, rubes, dopes, dolts and other assorted yokels throughout the great Midwest. That year Warren William was Bernie Madoff, Leona Helmsley, John Edward, Carl Rove, Ken Lay and Wal Mart rolled into one. It was twelve months that should be placed in the pantheon of great career years alongside Einstein’s accomplishments of 1905 or Babe Ruth’s amazing 1927 season – a cosmic alignment of magnificently sordid corruption and iniquity.

During the Pre-Code land rush of 1933 and 1934 his popularity continued to rise, the high water mark being a fifteen-month stretch when he appeared in three films nominated for Best Picture honors. Shortly thereafter, Warner Brothers cavalier treatment of his career (all three Oscar nominees were made outside his home studio), the changing image of the screen actor, and his own sometimes-maddening professional apathy put Warren William on a long, looping spiral to public indifference. The vulgar Shangri-La of his early years retreated into the mists, replaced by a decade of shysters, thieves, gumshoes, cracksmen, and blatant, unsubtle blackguards. Unlike his Pre-Code villains, the bad guys he essayed in the post-code era (Wild Bill Hickock Rides, Arizona, Trail of the Vigilantes) are as subtle as an avalanche, but they are still enormously fun; Warren William could do more within one dimension than a team of quantum physicists. Following World War II he found himself sick and unable to work regularly. His last years were relegated to the dismal fringes of the industry, knocking off performances geometrically better than the productions they inhabited. He died, pleasantly, before he could reach the absolute bottom of the ladder, on a set with his old contract mate Lyle Talbot, taking direction from Ed Wood.

Sadly, given the nature of his licentious and sexually impudent pre-code persona, most of Warren William’s true starring roles could not be broadcast on television for many years after his death. For four decades, he was rarely seen on America’s TV screens, but for unmemorable character appearances in films like The Wolfman or Madame X. With no regular reminder to their collective memory, his films faded out of the minds of audiences that grew up with him, and he was never properly presented to succeeding generations. Unlike William Powell, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn and his other contemporaries, there was nothing for the public to rediscover. We simply never saw him at all; a classic movie fan may have done just as well looking for Elmo Lincoln during those years.

I was one of those people who were still utterly unaware of Warren William’s career after nearly 30 years of watching and reading about movies, and Warner Brothers movies in particular. When a friend introduced me to him in 2004, I was taken aback; how could I have missed such an essential personality from my favorite studio, in my favorite era? It was like suddenly discovering that there had been movies made during the Renaissance, or that The Beatles had released another album between Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour. There was no book, no in-depth article and no serious scholarship about his life or career available anywhere. Even the myriad histories of Warner Brothers, or essays on Pre-Code Hollywood barely mentioned him. Only Mick LaSalle’s outstanding volume Dangerous Men made effort to examine his extraordinary film persona, and still there was nothing of the man himself. What little I encountered during some tentative online sorties repeated the same series of interesting, but mostly erroneous facts: Warren William was a reporter before turning to acting (he never worked as a newspaperman); he fought in France during World War I (as a Sergeant in the Allied Expeditionary Forces, the actor saw no action overseas); an amateur inventor, he patented the first lawn vacuum machine (there is no such record in the US Patent Office). After two years service in the Great War, twelve years on New York stages and 17 years in Hollywood, his entire life had been fractured and reduced to a series of incongruous, rough-hewn factoids, each becoming smaller and less relevant as we moved further away from his influence on culture.

It took me three years to unearth the long buried details of Warren William’s life. The remnants were exhumed from decayed newsprint that had waited patiently for a hundred years to be questioned and consulted, unspooled in cramped and dingy screening rooms and cobbled together through conversations with the precious few left alive that knew him. I felt it a race against time that had almost run out. Only a little longer and there might have been nothing to retrieve.

John Stangeland at Warren William's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (Photo courtesy John Stangeland)

Each generation, each era endures the gradual disintegration of the fame and notoriety of most of its celebrated citizens. Only a famous few can penetrate beyond their living celebrity to remind others of the reasons for their temporary renown. Warren William was one of those who was simply lost in line behind innumerable other noteworthy men and women. Many that outlasted him have subsequently also been scratched from our minds, casualties of our overburdened capacity to remember. How many immensely famous names of the past have been reduced to nothing? For each and every Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or Abraham Lincoln, there are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of equally famous contemporaries who did not succeed in remaining alive in the mind of history. It is only a matter of time before other names join Warren William in mainstream cultural obscurity. One day Bill Gates, Marilyn Monroe and Osama Bin Laden will be guaranteed to draw the same blank stare from the average person that Warren William now elicits; today will always retreat into yesterday, no matter how hard we might try to hold onto it.

If anything outside the living memory of those who witnessed it is to survive, it must be nurtured and passed along by devotees of subsequent ages. Without help, Warren William – and many other worthy men and women – will fade off again, perhaps never to return. It is up to us then, to protect the names, faces, events and ideas of our lives – and those that preceded us – before their legacy is lost forever. I cannot pretend that this is not difficult work; the mental energy required to save, catalogue, collate, access, retrieve and remember is hard. Forgetting is easy.

Please remember.

John Stangeland is the author of the upcoming book Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood, to be published by McFarland and Company late in 2010.

Essay © 2010, John Stangeland

PS from Cliff: Besides his kind contribution here, Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood author John Stangeland has consented to a text-based interview exclusively for Warren-William.com.  I have plenty I want to ask him, believe you me, but I also wanted to open up the floor to you guys—I’ll take the first two or three Warren William related questions you have an pass them on to John with my own.  I’m posting this June 8, figure deadline for questions next Wednesday, June 16, e-mail them along to me here.

Thanks all, and special thanks once again to John Stangeland, really appreciate it, John!

Warren William's Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, (Photo courtesy John Stangeland)