回复：【长篇阅读】公子的传记

ROBERT TAYLOR
July 15 1964
To Whom It May Concern:
If you’re interested in a brief, one-line recommendation, you may as well stop right now. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in what I have to say about Art Reeves (the Bearer) then draw up a chair!
Art Reeves has been in my employ for the past five years, heading up the breeding operation of my little Quarter Horse farm here in Los Angeles, California. In addition to taking care of horses (stallions, mares, colts and riding stock) he’s also taken care of the chickens, the dogs, the rabbits, the pigeons, and, at times, our two small children. I point this out not because ALL of this was his responsibility but because it seems to me a kind of complimentary side-light on the man himself.
In the years Art has been with me I can’t honestly say I have ever found anything which he couldn’t and wouldn’t do. This includs carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, animal husbandry, etc., etc. If there’s anything he does not know something about, I’ve yet to find out what it is—and this may be due to the fact that he has the intelligence and integrity to learn whatever he dosen’t already know.

Although our breeding operation is not a large one we have not lost a foal—or a mare—in all the time. Art has been with us. Our horses have, without exception, been beautifully cared for at all times. The same goes for the entire farm.
Art has a great disposition—an admirable way with people with whom he has been obligated to come in contact—he’s a hard worker and a willing worker—and, most importantly, he’s honest to the “nth” degree and one of the most “sober” people I’ve ever known.
The only thing I have AGAINST Art Reeves is that he’s decided to leave us to tackle another kind of work on his own! Mrs.Taylor, and I, all the children and horses and dogs, are gonna miss him. We wish him all the luck in the world in his new endeavors—and he can work for me again any time, anywhere. . . .
Sincerely but regretfully,
Robert Taylor
However, to the delight of all the Taylors, after a brief absence Art returned to the Uisulor Rancho. Taylor, trying to hide the fact that he was relieved and happy to see Art back in the little cottage near the stables, said, “What happened? Didn’t they want a baby sitter with rough hands?”Then they all walked back up to the main house and sat down to dinner.
There surely was more action on the ranch than there was in Taylor’s professional life. His letters centered on activities at the farm and no words about movie or TV offers. “We had another stud colt out of one of my mares by Audie Murphy’s ＄45,000 horse.The stud fee was ＄500 so I’ll have to sell him at a good price when he’s a yearling.” “I had 50 more baby chicks sent out from Iowa and they’ll start laying in about five months. We will kill off all the old hens and ‘surround ‘em with dumplings! I’m also buyin’ a couple of female rabbits and a buck to harpoon ‘em.” “Caught a litter of five baby skunks down by the barn yesterday. We hadda kill the mother and two of the babies, but the other three have been deodorized and we hope to make pets outa them.”
He told Tom, “The mother woulda made a fine toupee for you, Curly!”

Taylor was getting restless and returned scripts by the dozen. He still refused to accept any roles that called for him to be anything but a guy in his fifties. He was turning down some good offers but repeatedly stated his image meant more to him than money.
He said, “People think I’m a millionaire, but I’m not. I’ve saved a little money, but every time a chance comes along to really strike it rich outside the movie business—like the real-estate deals some stars you hear about—I was always a dollar short or a day late.”
Art said Bob had always wanted a lot of time to hunt and fish, but being out of work was becoming both a serious financial and emotional problem.
“He kept busy, ” Art recalled, “going on errands with me—the two of us looking like a couple of bums. Once we stopped in a diner for some coffee and a man walked up to Bob and asked him if he had ever been on the movie or television screen.
“Without looking up, Taylor took some change out of his pocket, threw it on the counter and said, ‘MORE OFF THAN ON!’, got up and walked out!”

When Taylor got a call that his agents had made an arrangement for him to do a picture for Universal produced and directed by William Castle, he was startled. He asked why he hadn’t been consulted and the answer was that the offer was too good for Bob to turn down, and that they had committed him to do The Night Walker with none other than Barbara Stanwyck.
“I’ll have to give this one some thought,” he said. “Send over the script.”
The script wasn’t bad, because a William Castle production was always good, but it was really the money that made Taylor eager to do the picture. His friends said if he had been consulted before arrangements had been completed, he would have turned it down, but they got him in too deep, and he would embarrass too many people if he backed out.
When reporters asked him how he felt about co-starring with his ex-wife, Taylor replied, “Who could pass up the opportunity of working with such a wonderful, talented woman!”

He was dubious but said while working with Barbara it didn’t seem as if they had ever been married. Ursula was on the set often and hoped to be friends with Barbara.
“Why don’t we have her over for dinner one night, Bob?”
Without any further explanation he said, “You don’t know her like I do.’
He knew that Barbara had been through a great deal herself. She was very much alone now that many of her closest friends had died and her son, Dion, had been arrested for theft and several other crimes. He had gotten himself into trouble on a number of occasions until Barbara refused to talk to him again. She publicly disowned Dion Fay, who said in an interview, “I just worshiped Bob Taylor and he became a real father to me. I shall never forget him.”
However Taylor kept his distance and had no intention of giving in to Ursula’s suggestions that they meet Barbara socially. The Night Walker was completed without incident. Many photos, not for release to the public, showed them laughing together and apparently enjoying each other quite a bit on the set.
The reviews praised Stanwyck and Taylor. “William Castle has two old pros enriching his new eerie suspense thriller, The Night Walker. Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, coming out of semi-retirement from films, are the invaluable assets in the Universal release.”
Taylor commented he didn’t know he was in semi-retirement.

Ursula always urged Bob to take up writing as a career. He loved to write letters and most of his friends have them to this day—not because they were from Robert Taylor but because of his humor and talent with words. But to him, writing a dozen letters a day was fun.
Ursula told him he should write a script. “The movies will kill you one day.” But Bob didn’t think he was talented enough as a writer and would stick to acting “Besides,” he said, “how can it kill me if I’m NOT working?”
During this inactive time for Bob it was Ursula who had the strength, and she used it wisely. Sitting around the house made Taylor nervous and he began to pick on Ursula about little things, but she ignored him. When he’d fall asleep, which could be any time or any place, she’d work off her frustrations by scrubbing floors, sometimes during the night when she couldn’t sleep.

Taylor never turned down a personal favor. In the early fifties, when he was very busy making movies, Tom wrote that he was opening a new extension to his Ford Agency in Mattoon, Illinois, and was going to have a little celebration. Taylor said he had a few days off and would fly out.
“He didn’t have time off,” Tom said. “He MADE time! Bob arrived on the day of the opening and told me it was okay to publicize the fact that he was there. If he were promoting a picture and asked to make a public appearance he would turn it down. He showed up in Mattoon and signed autographs all afternoon and served coffee. The police had to block off the street and my little opening turned out to be one of the biggest days the town ever had!”
Taylor flew to Orlando and was interviewed by Nancy Purvis on her radio show. He said he’d stay as long as she wanted him to . . . coincidentally, he mentioned that he might be doing a movie in Florida, something called Johnny Tiger, the story of a dedicated teacher of under-privileged Indian children in the Seminole section of Florida.
Taylor wanted to do this picture very much. It was one he thought would change his image at middle age because he was portraying a widower father who wore glasses and smoked a pipe. Chad Everett played the Indian, Johnny Tiger,and Geraldine Brooks came out of semi-retirement for the role of the white doctor of the Seminoles.

When the picture was completed, the Indians awarded Taylor with a fancy jug labeled MOOSE JUICE—complete with cups. They all had a round and though Bob kept a straight face, his insides were on fire. On his way home for Southwest Florida he stopped off to seeTom: “Here, Ol’ Bud! Whatever is left in the jug will knock your head off!”
He was very excited about Johnny Tiger.This was a new beginning as far as he was concerned, and this was what he had been waiting for for such a long time. He put his heart and soul into the movie and would have paid for the entire production to get it on the screen.
Taylor was elated over Chad Everett’s performance and proud that Geraldine Brooks had supported him. Unfortunately, Universal wasn’t. They released Johnny Tiger on a double bill with Munsters Go Home, and there was little backing and publicity.

Taylor, however, attended the world premiere in Florida which was his first appearance at an opening in many years. He wanted Ursula to join him, but she said she had nothing to wear. This was in no way an exaggeration because she lived in jeans and multicolored slacks all the time. She owned one good outfit that she wore to weddings and christenings and a red dress that she put on every Christmas.
She told Bob it would be foolish to go out and spend a lot of money for a dress to wear only once, but he told her it was very important to him and he wanted her to go shopping for a good evening gown and not to worry about the money.
Taylor said she went out and was gone all day, in the end coming back with nothing. She said she saw only one dress that she liked and it cost ＄400, an exorbitant amount! Bob said, “I told her not to be so chintzy and to go back and buy it. Next day she brought ‘something’ home but where she found it, I don’t know, probably at the Salvation Army. She didn’t mention the price, but it sure didn’t fit so she got out her sewing kit, went to work and when she got through it looked fine on her. Now she’ll have a long dress for the next twenty years!”
At the premiere of Johnny Tiger he said, “I felt that part--it was me. This nonsense about 'living the part' being taught today bores me! If you have to be out of breath, getting out of breath is crazy. You can be breathless without running around the studio several times. I’ve worked with ‘method boys’ and I’ve had to keep on guard from laughing in their faces!”

“You’re a legend, Mr. Taylor. How can you sum up your life as a movie idol?”
“Do you know, ”Bob confided, “when they told me I had been chosen for Camille—and I guess you boys heard of that one—I was surprised and damn frightened. I can remember the first day on the set I went home and told my mother, ‘This is incredible! I report for work the first day, they introduced me to Garbo and expected me to make love to her immediately.’ Today it is hard to believe that at one stage I signed a seventeen-year contract with Metro with no options on either side. I had signed many contracts with them, but this one was seventeen years! Can you imagine? When I came off contract I even got a pension from them. I was never suspended once and now that it’s over I find it hard to believe.”
“You aren’t thinking of retiring?”
“Hell, no. The acting profession is a good job.”

Robert Taylor was a motion picture star and wanted more than anything to be an actor. With seventy-two movies behind him, he had been panned, stewed, cooked, degraded, criticized, embarrassed, deceived and humiliated. Yet now with the press on his side, he still could not forget that it was they who almost destroyed not only his career, but him as well. It was the press who had labeled him “Pretty Boy” and put him on the front page of every newspaper to prove that he wasn’t a homosexual after all because he had some hair on his chest. It was the press who said he didn’t look like a doctor in Magnificent Obsession, that he didn’t look like the type who should be bitten by mosquitoes in My Brother’s Wife, that he should have had a reservation in Arlington Cemetery rather than assume the role of an officer in This is My Affair, that he looked like a kid in a new cowboy suit in Billy the Kid, that his widow’s peak gave him away as the gangster in Johnny Eager, that he got his wings during the war because he was a movie star, that he stunk in Quo Vadis. When he was given a good review, it was despite the fact he was beautiful, despite the fact he didn’t look the part, or despite the fact the public liked him. The New York Times loved to hammer at him with statements like, “Though Robert Taylor is not one of our favorites, we have to give him credit, etc. . . .”

One female reporter reminisced by saying she thought that the male members of the press had always had a private war going on with Taylor, and though they apologized on several occasions, they would not make up for ripping him to shreds when he was doing his best. She added that the top columnists, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Earl Wilson, Hy Gardner and Joe Hyams, were always on Taylor’s side because they took the time to sit down with him and find out how truly modest he was. They could make or break any Hollywood star, but they chose to defend the “punk kid from Nebraska.”
The fact that Johnny Tiger did not launchTaylor into a new type of leading man upset him so that he said, “From now on,I’m a strictly for money actor. I couldn’t care less without that green stuff!”
He made up his mind that the movie industry wasn’t going to kill him like it did the others.
Cooper died of a broken heart; Gable collapsed because he tried too hard in The Misfits; Dick Powell gave his voice to cancer; and Tracy’s health was failing. Who was left?
“Nobody . . . nobody . . . God damn!

“The Golden Age” by Robert Taylor was an article originally written for Variety and later published in Film Fan Monthly.
He expressed himself directly in this article and perhaps he was speaking for those few who were left—Crawford,Turner, Garson, Stewart:
No matter how old one is, the Golden Age of Hollywood was long ago. I hope I’m not talking tired because I refer to change. Many of the major people are still working today but they have all been transformed.
If today is still the 20th Century , the Hollywood of the 1930’s and early 1940’s was 200 years ago. In a sense it was baroque. There was astyle of living and making motion pictures which no longer exists. It has been coldly modernized into something very factual, very efficient—and I’m afraid, not very much fur.
The creative and artistic management and the fabulous “showmen” still exist—there are a few—but they’re largely working for themselves on a one-picture-every-two-years basis. Their great talent isn’t directed toward a “program” of pictures—toward the management and betterment of a studio.

For some of us who were fortunate enough to have been a part of the Golden Age, however, the memory lingers on.
In my own case, I was part of the MGM “stable.” We called Metro the campus—and even the seasons were semesters. Camaraderie was shared at work and at play, up and down the line, and the aspect of jealousy was virtually nonexistent—at least among the male stars.
There was nothing predictable, except perhaps sunrises and L.B. Mayer—and not necessarily in that order.
L. B. was the most important person in my career, as he was in hundreds of others. He was not a “desk jockey.” He was constantly on the move around the lot—he knew every department—he knew the heads of every department—and he knew everyone’s problems.
Gable was legend, he set the style and the pace. His cars, especially, drove the lesser lights, like myself, mad with envy. I remember two very distinctly—one a green Deusenberg convertible and the other a Darrin Packard Twelve which Carole Lombard had had built for him.

We associated with each other in those days for fun—not just publicity. The Trocadero was the clubhouse—and on Sunday nights, some outstanding wit was master of ceremonies, introducing for the first time on the West Coast such people as Martha Raye or Joe E. Lewis. Owner Billy Wikerson would wander around accepting compliments on the wonderful food, wonderful entertainment and wonderful service. And it was just that—wonderful!
People pop up in my memory. Many of them are gone. Wallace Beery was special. Lionel Barrymore had forgotten more about acting than most of us would ever know. Yet he was always—and strangely—shy—about voicing his opinions. However, if you asked him he could sketch a lesson on portrayal that was complete and perfect in a matter of seconds.
I recall visiting his stateroom on the Queen Mary after we finished A Yank at Oxford. I found him asleep in his chair—the ashes of his cigarette all over his chest, the butt extinguished by his own lips. He was a very tired man—and unwell—but none of us ever thought that such a marvelous, warm moment would ever leave us.