Looking Back on Claude Jarman’s Hollywood

I read about the child actor Claude Jarman, Jr., before I saw him in a movie, and it wasn’t a complimentary read. The Medved brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards listed Jarman in the category of Most Obnoxious Child Actor.

Though he didn’t have the dubious distinction of winning that award, Jarman’s entry dwelled on his debut performance as Jody in the 1946 MGM adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling.

Only later did I actually see that movie and assess Jarman’s performance for myself. He performed alongside Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, and a herd of young deer selected to play one pet. Clearly someone who doesn’t like sentimental stories about wide-eyed children and animals wouldn’t like that film or Jarman’s performance. I think Peck as a young father carried the picture, but Jarman performed his major role just fine.

Of course, it helped that Jarman looked like the illustrations of Jody that Edward Shenton drew for the first edition of The Yearling. (Scribner’s commissioned more art from N. C. Wyeth for a deluxe edition the next year.) I came away thinking that Jarman’s performance might be a case of careful casting, director Clarence Brown finding a boy who looked and talked just as that one role required. But, if the Golden Turkey nomination was a fair indication, Jarman wasn’t up to any other part.

Later I ran across Brown’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1947), which I’ve written about as one of the precursors to To Kill a Mockingbird. I hadn’t expected to see Jarman again—The Golden Turkey Awards didn’t mention that film at all. It’s a good movie, and Jarman did a fine job as a southern teenager realizing the racial injustice in his society.

Last week I watched John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), discussed here. Again, there was Claude Jarman, this time playing the estranged son of cavalry officer John Wayne. Again, the Medveds didn’t mention this movie. And again, Jarman did fine with his part. It’s not a deeply nuanced role in a film whose biggest strength is the visuals, but he did all that was asked of him, including a crazy stunt.

How, I wondered, did this supposedly terrible young actor keep doing fine in good movies? In fact, Jarman made only about a dozen films in his whole Hollywood career, so for three to stand the test of time is an achievement. (Two more westerns, Roughshod [1949] and Hangman’s Knot [1952], also have fans, but I haven’t seen them.)

To understand Jarman’s work I sought out his autobiography, My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, published in 2018. It’s a short book, straightforwardly told. Just as the title suggests, it combines Jarman’s own life with the change he saw happening around him during his stint in the movie capital in the late 1940s.

As MGM’s publicity machine trumpeted, Clarence Brown spotted Jarman at his school in Nashville taking down a Valentine’s Day display in 1945. Some versions of the story say Jarman had missed a haircut and was thus sporting a rustic look, suitable for Jody. A photo in My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood casts doubt on that; sent back to a producer in California, that image shows Jarman with hair much shorter than he wore in the movie.

In any event, Brown convinced MGM to bring Jarman and his father out to the coast for a screen test, then to cast the boy as Jody. The Yearling took almost a year and a half to make in Florida and California, released for Christmas season in 1946.

Jarman arrived in Hollywood (technically Culver City) when the studio system was still intact. MGM provided him with a weekly salary, drama lessons, publicity, and acting assignments whether he was interested in those movies or not. He went to school at the studio alongside other child actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O’Brien, and Dean Stockwell. It didn’t take him long to realize that he didn’t share their interest in acting or being a star.

A lot of successful child performers are naturally short or bloom late, so they can play younger roles. Jarman, in contrast, grew several inches in his early teens, meaning his height and body no longer fit his baby face. As Harry Carey, Jr., recalled, at fifteen Jarman “was 6'2" and weighed about 160 pounds.” That made it tough for MGM to cast him. In fact, in Rio Grande Jarman played a West Point dropout—a significantly older role, albeit one that needed an actor with a young face.

Meanwhile, the studio system was crumbling around him. Between television and the antitrust lawsuit that separated movie studios from cinema chains, the industry changed from assembly line to contingency projects. In 1949, Jarman happily went back to Tennessee. He was a star athlete at his prep school, then enrolled at Vanderbilt. Jarman spent summers or skipped classes to make a few more films, such as Rio Grande, and entered the business world.

Eventually, however, Jarman found himself back in a wing of show biz, running the San Francisco International Film Festival. He started in 1965, before revival cinema was everywhere, and he tapped his Hollywood contacts to bring special guests up from LA. That experience gave Jarman another couple of chapters of anecdotes and a perspective on the movie business that enriches his whole book.

Notably, Jarman refers to The Golden Turkey Awards at one point in his memoir, mentioning how his costar in Fair Wind to Java, Vera Ralston, was nominated for Worst Actress of All Time. Though he makes a point of saying he never read his own reviews, I can’t help but think he knew about the Medveds’ critique of his own acting career. Which I’ve now come to think of as unfair.

Jarman published his memoir through Covenant Books, a self-publisher that markets itself to Christian authors. That probably limits the reach of the book into physical stores and libraries, but there’s a digital edition available. The book is written and produced at a professional level. (Jarman credits Sloan de Forest with helping him write his story.)

People interested in the history of America’s movie studios should enjoy My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, not because it reveals a great deal new but because it shows those details through one wide-eyed child’s perspective. Jarman’s Hollywood career was short and in many ways atypical. But he did fine, and he came out fine.

Rio Grande and Roman Riding

Rio Grande is the third western that John Ford made about the US Cavalry with John Wayne as one of the stars. Ford made it only because the head of the Republic studio demanded another western before financing the movie Ford really wanted to make, The Quiet Man.

As such, Rio Grande was quickly shot, with even more continuity lapses than usual. (Ford always delivered minimal footage so the studio couldn’t edit his movies into something he didn’t want.) There are a few too many musical numbers, and the central story of a cavalry colonel, the wife he won during the Civil War, and the son he barely knew who becomes one of his recruits gets played out but not deeply explored.

At the same time, Rio Grande works. Shot in the Moab Valley of Utah, its visuals are amazing. Wayne and Maureen O’Hara are strong in their roles, and Ford’s usual cast of supporting players enact their usual parts well. The jokes land. The final action sequence is set up by just a couple of shots in the opening montage. The movie might have been a masterpiece if its makers had put more into it, but it’s as entertaining as it needs to be.

One of the most impressive scenes comes early as a sergeant, played by Victor McLaglen, challenges the new cavalry recruits to do “Roman riding,” standing astride two galloping horses. There’s no reason for this to be in the movie but spectacle. That skill never comes back later in the action, but it looks good on screen. And it looks even better when you realize that the actors—Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., and Claude Jarman, Jr.—performed the Roman riding themselves.

Now I knew Johnson got into the movies as a horseman, supplying horses and then doing stunts before becoming an actor. But Jarman started out as a child star in The Yearling. I had to go back in the video to confirm that yes, there’s one unbroken shot of him vaulting onto two horses, standing, and riding off. So I went hunting for the story behind that sequence.

A few years back, Arthur Arnell posted excerpts from a conversation with Carey on a John Wayne discussion site. Carey recalled his and Johnson’s first conversation with Ford about the movie:

The old man sat there for a while, and finally said, “You guys know how to Roman ride?”

I said, “No, sir,” and Ben said, “No, sir,” and Ford said, “You’re going to have to learn it; we’re going to have Roman riding!”

We knew what it was, and Ben being real careful said, “Well, Mr. Ford, how long before we have to know how to do it?”

And he said, “A month.” So Ben looked at me and I looked at him and we both thought, “Oh, s**t!”

The two actors started training. At first it was so difficult that after riding sessions they “had to go to a nearby town to visit a physiotherapist,” Arnell reported. But after three weeks they could show off their new skill to the director.

Ford was pleased. In fact, Carey recalled, “I’d never seen the old b******d so happy.” And he decided, a week before filming, that Claude Jarman should also ride that way.

Jarman was only fifteen years old at the time, though tall enough to play a West Point dropout. According to Carey:

Now he looked like he barely rode at all, but he came out, croupered those horses, jumped up on my team, and went down the road no practice.

So basically the scene in the movie played out just like real life.

Ben said, “Well, Jesus Christ.” We wanted to crawl under a board. And old man Ford said, “Well, Jesus, it took you guys three weeks, for Christ’s sake.”

Ben said, “He’s never been hurt before, Mr Ford.”

Ford said, “What?” He made you repeat everything.

“Well, he’s never been mashed up or hurt, he’s not afraid.”

“You’re goddam right, he’s not afraid!”

So Claude rode, too. He used my team since we only had two. It was unusual for people who had critical parts in a movie to do that kind of stunt, but Ford would do it. We shot that Roman riding sequence right in the middle of the picture, and we were even out Roman riding every morning on location.

Carey added that Jarman, unlike his adult castmates, “felt no ill effects whatever” from standing on horses.

A man named William T. Brooks, who had been on extra on Rio Grande, added some moviemaking details on that discussion site:

They were not attached to the horses, but they did have on black rubber sole tennis shoes. But if you look close the next time that you watch the film, you might see that the horses have “trace straps” holding them together so they would not go in different directions.

And the final word from Jarman’s autobiography:

They seemed as surprised as I was when I stood up without a hitch on my first try! Ben even seemed a little chagrined that I took to trick-riding so easily and was heard to mutter, “The reason that kid did it so easy is that his feet are so goddamned big they just wrapped around the horse’s back!”