Home    Childhood     Road Years      Novels      Hollywood      Biographers      Influences     DMP

Two contemporary profiles of tully

JIM TULLY
from The American Mercury, May 1928
By Sara Haardt

That first picture of Jim Tully I shall always remember: the time I saw him in the lobby of the Mark Twain Hotel, in Hollywood, with the late afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows, the tables overloaded with flowers, and the canary birds singing. You couldn't have imagined a more incongruous setting in the world, or one that set him off--and apart--more spectacularly.
He was sitting in the far corner of the room, a crumpled felt hat held loosely in his hand, his heavy shoulders drooping and an abstracted look in his misty blue eyes. His head was tilted to one side, and as he raised it, it seemed to me that it was literally on fire. His hair is a tangled wiry mop of flaming red curls, so thick and so unruly that, with his muscular shoulders, it gives him the appearance of being top-heavy and possessed of an enormous strength. And like most red hair it creates a strange, almost startling impression of youth. I had the feeling, as I looked at him, that I was seeing him as he looked that day, years ago, when he sat by the high trestle spanning the St. Mary's river, in Ohio, and listened to a one-eyed hobo gabble heroically about his wanderings and the far countries of the world. Whatever else the road has done to Jim Tully it has at least left him with that same easy braggadocio of youth. There is a challenge in his manner, and a marvelous swagger; however gnarled and weary he grows, it will always be difficult to think of him as old ....
He got to his feet, and I saw that he was short and powerfully built; that he was heavy-jowled; that his chest was thrust out, that the muscles of his arms bulged his sleeves. Yet, for all his bulk, I sensed a quickness, a kind of shrewdness in his movements. I could imagine his muscles springing into action so quickly that they almost thought for him, or tensing, with his teeth gritting together, into a stubborn, ungiving wall of strength. He greeted me with a curious, appraising reticence. His manner was faintly commiserating -- as if he already pitied me for ignorance of the world and of Hollywood--yet it was distinctly formal. There is that peculiar mixture in Tully: the thing Rupert Hughes has described as a terrific blending of pride and humility. He continued to look at me, and to smile crookedly.
"So you're from Alabama? Jesus, what a Country! I know your goddam Montgomery, with that old white Capitol sitting up on a hill and the trees growing up and down the streets and hiding everything--and the L. & N. yards at night. God--what a loneliness! There's a loneliness here something like that. Well, you'll see!"
We sat down, and he began to talk of the South, and of the vagrancy laws of Mississippi; of Hollywood, and its labored carnival and cheap tragedy; of a hanging he had recently seen at San Quentin; of a 'bo he had met there, and then of the road. He told me of Dago Joe Burdes, and Scrap Iron, and Bright Eyes, and Columbus Jack; of the Bill of "Beggars of Life," and the Red Cawley of "Circus Parade." "Hoboes often take their names from the city from which they first wander," he said. "For instance, Jack London was 'Frisco Jack. I was Cincy Red, and the Red was on account of my hair, and Joe Bertucci was Dago Joe Burdes- because he was Italian. I'll have you meet him some day. He's up in the mountains now running a damned bakery, but he drifts down every little while."
"What has become of the others?" I asked, somewhat warily. I had been in Hollywood less than forty-eight hours, but I had already heard the common town story that Tully had never been on the road at all, or in the ring, that he had faked his tramp and circus stories, that he was a most capital liar.
He looked up with the abstracted gaze I had first seen in his eyes.
"Oh, they're scattered all over," he answered in his low voice. "Bright Eyes, well, you remember,--his history is in a back number of The American Mercury. Columbus Jack, he was the fine clean kid who bumped into the one woman, went clean dippy about her, and died. Red Cawley is in a goddam insane asylum somewhere. Ben Franklin, another 'bo with us, is a wealthy Yiddisher now. He never reads, but he saw the advertisement of my first book in the Times Book Review while waiting in a dentist's once and drove around to the Algonquin in his Packard limousine to see me. Let's see--Bill, in 'Beggars of Life,' is the manager of a taxi company. And Gabe Sullivan--the lad who was doing life in Columbus for murdering a scab -- Gabe is swinging a paint brush now, as useful as a citizen can he in Cincinnati. I got him out after four years on his case. Ben Ames Williams' father was chairman of the Ohio Pardon Board. The Governor of Ohio, the Secretary of State, all helped;' they wrote me a round-robin when the kid got free. I expect Johnny Backus--the Flying Tramp--out of San Quentin this month. He wrote me that he once held a mail-train down longer than I say in 'Beggars of Life'....
"Johnny Sinclair--I fought him twice at the Sawyerwood Club, in Akron, Ohio-came to a lecture I gave in Cleveland. He runs a gymnasium there. ! didn’t know him, he had been pounded so much in the dozen years since we fought. Ted Robinson of the Plain Dealer and others stood around while Johnny and I talked of our fight days. It was a cock-eye hell of an evening. I had given the lecture at a K. of C. Hall, after a man full of booze had come to the Statler Hotel and asked me to do it. I knew the priests would shy at me because of the anti-Catholic attitude of 'Emmett Lawler,' so I had the guy sign the contract in the lobby, then and there. Five priests sat on the front row, but Ted Robinson delivered half of my lecture in introducing me, and so I got away fine and collected. There was another time up in Bellingham, Washington, when a guy in the schools asked me to speak, and I ran into a gang of chainmakers I had known--I still belong to the chainmakers' union, you know. Well. after the goddam lecture I left these cock-eyed educators high and dry, and stuck with the chainmakers, I don't know--there was no sentimentality between us: we simply stuck in a sort of free-masonry of defiance, I guess. A funny goddam thing, isn't it? There was the time Joe Bertucci and I stuck with Bright Eyes when he went blind. And the time Columbus Jack brought me seven quarters when I was broke in a fifteen-cent lodging house in Cleveland -- the Palisades -- every 'bo knows it. I couldn't go out on the street: I was barefoot in zero weather. And the time Joe sent me the dough to get from Omaha to Los Angeles. Joe's a real guy. I see him and other 'bos still, and there isn't much we don't talk about."
He reached for his hat. "Yes, this Bertucci's a hell of a guy. You'll see. I'll bring him around the next time he's down from the mountains."
We stood in the door for a moment looking out on Wilcox avenue. Up the hill the lights of the boulevard had begun to flash on, and the air that had been uncomfortably warm all afternoon was icily cold. Tully put his hat on and started down the steps; it sat on top of his violent curls and gave him a rakish and yet strangely dignified appearance.
"Don't get too lonely, kid," he called back. "This is pretty damned bad--" he waved an arm toward the boulevard -- "but it isn't half as bad as being on the bum in Alabama!"

II
Tully works in a big oblong room on the second floor of his house in Kings road, Hollywood -- a room lined with books from ceiling to floor, and containing a flat square desk with a swivel chair, great dictionary on an old-fashioned brass tripod, an old beer-table--a real one with a hole in the center where the press button used to be --and two huge arm chairs. Back of the desk is a tiny window with iron gratings and a buff-colored curtain across the lower half that looks out, at night, upon hills strung fantastically with lights. It is a charming view but it is the other view from the tiny window across from it that Tully is partial to: a row of eucalyptus trees silhouetted against a blue or mauve or silver sky, so rail and so graceful. Over the mantel is another picture of wind-blown trees and whirling veils of mist and about the room, on odd shelves and tables, are small framed pictures of Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Madame Le Brun, Madame Recamier and Rose Aylmer! The Rose Aylmer is a charming thing. It is set like a medallion in a frame of old gold and green cloisonné; the print was torn from some book, and Tully carried it around with him for years.
"She was Landor's girl, you know," he told me. "She never married him, but he probably kept the image of her to the end of his days. Somehow, I couldn't bear to think of all that loveliness gone to dust, so I carried her picture around with me. I never found a frame I liked until the other day."
The room is full of other things he treasures: books that he lifted from libraries when he was ducking in and out of them on the road; the galley-sheets of "Emmett Lawler" bound by a group of I. W. W.'s at San Quentin; a candlestick presented to him by three ex-bums the night the first copy of "Emmett Lawler" appeared in Los Angeles. At that time Tully was living in a furnished room with scarcely enough money to pay for his meals, much less to buy a copy of his book. The three 'bos met and pooled their cash, hurried to a bookstore and stood over the proprietor while he hammered the box of books open. They bought the first copy he lifted out, together with a bunch of carnations and the candlestick, and hurried back to the furnished room with them. The candlestick bears the inscription, "May the light of truth never be put out by your material success!" "And me without a damned penny," Tully laughed, "Not a goddam penny in the world. But they were the guys!"
He walked the length of the room, past the worn books and the Rose Aylmer and his collection of French bisque figures--these the strangest and most exquisite of all his goods--and back to the swivel-chair. Sitting down, he tilted the chair so that his head rested against the window-ledge, and smiled his crooked smile,
"Good God, that wasn't even the beginning. The big fight was yet to come! I often wonder why in hell I was so persistent. And what for?"
Tully was born in St. Mary's, Ohio, in a log cabin on June 3, 1891--he is sure it was June 3, but he is not quite certain of the year--, the third son of Marie Bridget Lawler and Jim Tully. Both of his parents were born in the Old Country. Marie Lawler was a country schoolteacher, and most of the other Lawlets were successful farmers. There was one uncle, Dennis Lawler, who was a wanderer. Jim Tully remembers seeing his mother standing on the porch watching Dennis through the mist of her tears as he disappeared down the road. He never came back.
There was another uncle, a horsethief, who served fifteen years in the Ohio penitentiary, and died a banker in Canada. He was a kind of family legend: the young Tullys knew of his adventures, and marveled as him. It was from him that Jim Tully got the prison material for "Jarnegan." "He was a damned good horse-thief. He always stole the best horses!" Of his mother, Marie Bridget Lawler, Tully has only a vague memory: she was austere and moody and beautiful. She died when he was four or five.
About the other Tullys he knows and remembers even less. Jim Tully. his father, was a day laborer, with a fierce pride and an insatiable taste for reading. Upon the death of his wife, he let his family slide. Three of the six children were taken by relatives and the other three were put into an orphanage. After that, they saw almost nothing of him, though he was often working in the same county with them. Never in all that time--or afterward---did he ever apologize for this neglect of them. He is alive today, and still in possession of his inviolable dignity. When he heard of his son's literary doings, he wrote to him and reminded him "that his grandmother was an educated woman." But the Lawlers arose and claimed that he had got his talent from them. "And that was where I cut in," Tully chuckles. "I said I got it, such as it is, from neither of them."
When he was four or five years old, soon after the death of his mother--all of these early dates are uncertain--Jim went to the orphanage. He describes his entrance in "Emmett Lawler:"
Large black doors opened and as promptly closed....Without so much as a parting word or the touch of a hand, Mr. Lawler went away -- and never returned...A heavy quiet pervaded the building, while a peculiar odor permeated it...The clothing room was in charge of a woman with a nature as cold as a fish fresh from the sea. Her voice was rasping and harsh. During six years Emmett does not remember to have seen her smile. She had what the children considered an annoying habit of striking a vicious blow without warning when she discovered torn clothing.

III
Six years of this. He became an adept at reading and would often read aloud to the women while they knitted or sewed or peeled potatoes in a circle about him. Here he was confirmed under the name of Jim Alexander. He wanted to take Napoleon as his middle name but this boon was refused him and so he chose Alexander instead. "A pagan, by God!" he laughs today. Here he first made use of his phenomenal memory. The children were required to memorize what they could of the priest's sermon, and though there were many of them more attentive and pious than Jim, he always won the prize. Once he won a rosary. "But later it was stolen from me," he adds, "by a more pious child."
When he was about eleven years old Tully left the orphanage in search of a home. He remembers a ride with his sister Virginia, who was working in a neighboring town in a laundry for $1.50 a week. Virginia had managed to save three dollars, and when her young brother appeared she hired a horse and buggy and rode into the country ten miles with him to look for their father, who had last been seen there. The hire of the horse and buggy amounted to all of the three dollars--there was no extra money for food--and after driving the long distance they returned without dinner or supper, for their father had disappeared again without a word of his whereabouts.
That night Jim Tully slept in the loft of a stable. He went back to the orphanage, and it was soon afterward that he was taken away by the farmer Boroff, the name he has given him in "Beggars of Life," to work on his farm, fifty miles north of his birthplace. It was a Protestant home and a Protestant neighborhood, and during the eighteen months that Tully lived there he was put through the most trying Christian experiences of his life. He remembers, particularly, the parlor hung with horrid crayon portraits of living and dead Boroffs, with the taint of madness that was in the family caught by the village artist in their gleaming eyes. He remembers, too, the four books on the table: "Pilgrim's Progress," "Earth, Sea and Sky," "Robinson Crusoe" and the Bible--and the long Winter nights when he sat there reading the Bible and Bunyan aloud to them, almost frozen to the bone, for they hadn't given him any underwear. On the day that he ran away from the farm, he stood in the room beside the books, stabbed by an overwhelming sense of loneliness.
He was about thirteen then, and he took to the road. During the six years that followed he drifted hack to St. Mary's from time to time, where he became a citizen of Rabbit Town, and came to know all its odd characters: Old Raley, the drunkard, a cleaner of cuspidors, a mopper of bar-room floors, who carried a tattered volume of Voltaire in his pocket; the two stalwart youths who later became nationally known pugilists; the saloonkeepers, the bums, the prostitutes--and Albert Koch, the mail-carrier, who made $3.50 a day and who seemed to Jim to be in society.
Several years ago when the town of St. Mary’s celebrated its centennial, a committee of citizens asked Tully to attend the show as one of the speakers. His reply was characteristic: he wrote a Spoon River anthology about the committee, and sent it back, saying. "A hell of a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I left St. Mary's on a freight, one of the loneliest kids in the world." At another time, however, he did return to the town. and stayed all night at the hotel where he had washed dishes as a boy. He wanted to see the old bums and saloon-keepers, the inhabitants of Rabbit Town he had loved in the old days; but they were all gone. Instead, he met the first citizens and walked up and down the street with the mayor and the editor. When he boarded a streetcar, a strange conductor asked, "Are you the guy that wrote them books?" But Albert Koch still lived there, and at dark Tully went down to his house by the station, and they sat talking and drinking through the night. He took the first train out next morning.
Two of the six Winters he was on the road he heated chains in mills at Racine, Wisconsin, and Kent, Ohio. He was sixteen or seventeen years old by now. Save for his affection for his sister Virginia, he had no family feeling. Virginia he loved devotedly all her life, and she, in turn, was fiercely proud of him. She seemed more gypsy than Irish. and though she never had any education she knew everything in the world. In later years she moved to Chicago, and her apartment there became a rendezvous for beggars and an anchorage for Jim. The last time he went to see her, just before the publication of "Jarnegan," she was ill and dying. When he entered the room, she mustered the last of her strength to greet him, and sat up, smiling. "It isn't pleasant to lie here with things grabbing at you out of the shadows. But I'm not going to die! I can't die with a kid brother getting famous." He left the next day, and never saw her again. '"I’ll put her in a book some day," he says.
The rest of the family scattered or died, and Jim seldom heard of them again. There was a brother, Hugh, a jockey, "with the eyes of a life-whipped lamb, who could tell stories better than I will ever be able to write them." And there was another and favorite brother, Tom, who died a skull-cracked adventurer in Mexico at twenty-five. At the time Jim had wanted to go with him; but Tom ordered him to stay home and get an education.
"Jim, my boy, you're going to get somewhere some day," he told him, "just as sure as God put worms in sour apples. Don't you never give up, Jim; by God, don't you never! You got it in you, and, by God, you'll show all the scum who think the Tullys are a lot o' trash, just because dad was a drunken ditch-digger." Today, Jim, recalling him, likes to quote the postscript of the only letter he ever received from him: "If I win out in this country, Jim, you will share it with me. If I lose I will share it alone."

IV
Tully says he was never a good chain-maker, though he is still in good standing with the union. During the six years that he was on and off the road he worked on farms as a migratory laborer, and hitched up with a circus for a year. But most of the time he was reading and dreaming. He became an inveterate library bum, ducking in and out of public libraries from one end of the country to the other. He read everything: biography, history, fiction: Dostoievsky, Carlyle, Olive Shreiner, Balzac, Dumas, Mark Twain, Conrad, the files of the old Smart Set.
His reading enthralled him and absorb him, but more than anything else he was possessed by the dream that some day he would become a writer himself. While he was in Ohio, working as a chain-maker, Ted Robinson published his first verses--a few lines on Keats. Robinson was amused at the idea of a hobo, working as chainmaker, writing verse. Tully remembers his kindness; how it made him the more madly determined to succeed--and how another little poet appearing in Robinson's column at the time committed suicide. About this time he got a job reporting on an Akron paper, but he was soon discharged. Then he drifted into the ring.
He chortles over the happenings of those days: for example, the time he fought a German boy, in 1914, somewhere in Ohio, and the Irish and German settlements were so bitter against each other, and he and his backers spread a wild yarn through the town--that in Europe, where the real fighting was, one Irishman had kept back a whole trainload of Germans! It was a framed fight, and Tully won. Then there was the time Johnny Kilbane boasted to him: "You may get to be a writer, Jimmie, but by God I'm going to be featherweight champion!" And, by God, he was. And another time when Spike Robinson said, "Well, Jimmie, you ought to make good as a writer; you've got executive ability!" And the last time in San Francisco when he was knocked unconscious, and remained so for nearly twenty-four hours, and then gave up the ring for fear of going goofy.
For the next few years he became a tree surgeon, or a tree-fakir, as he calls it, and traveled from one end of the country to the other again. The work was seasonal, and he would often be laid off unexpectedly. On such a day, with Spring coming rapidly to a head, he found himself in Omaha without money or the hope of a job. He went to a library and borrowed a copy of "Almayer’s Folly," and sat in a hotel lobby until he finished it. Sitting there, with the book laid aside, a black depression settled over him. He recalled the time back in Cincinnati when he was a boy of fifteen and had first seen a picture of Jack London, wearing a cap and a black sweater. "By God, I'll do it too!" he said.
He got to his feet now, determined that he would go to California and write a book. He remembers walking across the lobby of the hotel and standing in the door, and then talking to a youngish man who loafed about the place, and then walking down the street and turning in "Almayer's Folly" at the library. He telegraphed to Joe Bertucci, in Los Angeles, to send him the money for his fare, and in the allotted hours the faithful Joe telegraphed it back. The same night he boarded a train.
From that May until October Jim Tully stayed in Los Angeles, living as best he could, and working on "Emmett Lawler." Joe Bertucci had a job as bell-hop in a hotel, and Jim would sneak in with the porters and hide in the cloak-room until meal-time, when they would slip him a hand-out. Often, between shifts, he would sit in a chair in the lobby for hours at a time, staring into space in a kind of daze. Once, when he had sat there for four hours, without moving, Joe came up and dragged him away. "You'll go goofy, kid! You got to snap out of it somehow, or you'll go goofy. You'll crack!"
Yet, despite his uncertainty, his deprivations, his despair, he plugged on. He didn't know anything about grammar or punctuation; he couldn't have told a verb from a noun; but he kept at it. By October he had written 100,000 words--100,000 words in one long paragraph! But now that it was finished, there was the more ticklish problem of getting it read. One night Joe Bertucci hurried to him with the news that a great novelist by the name of Harold Bell Wright was stopping at the hotel. He had seen and talked with this Mr. Wright, and told him he had a friend who had written a book and would like to get his criticism of it. Mr. Wright had told him that he might bring his friend in later in the evening!
Tully laughs still over the picture he and Joe Bertucci made that night as they were ushered into Mr. Wright's suite of rooms--two bums calling upon a great literary man: Jim in his battered clothes with the 100,000 words-in-one-paragraph under his arm and Joe Bertucci with his grand air of effecting a climactic meeting! Joe has the most ingratiating manner in the world.
"Mr. Wright, this is my friend Jim Tully I was telling you about."
Jim laid the bulky manuscript on the table, and stood there, waiting in agony. Mr. Wright had written many novels, and must know a great deal about writing. He was in a position to offer a new and struggling writer untold advice. Mr. Wright gestured toward a chair. Then, gathering himself together, he began to talk eloquently, not about writing, but about himself: about how the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal had once held the forms open for one of his stories; about how one of his novels had sold over a million copies; and about how Irvin S. Cobb and Charles Van Loan had got together one night and roasted him, with a lot of other writers. "Not that I care though," ended Mr. Wright, after his speech of three hours, "I write about life!"
Tully left the manuscript, and Mr. Wright took it away with him. Then followed strained, tortuous weeks of waiting for an answer. At last, it came--thirteen pages "bawling hell out of me."
"I should advise you," concluded Mr. Wright, "if you continue as a writer, not to use the first person."
In the depths, Tully sought Joe Bertucci.
"What did he say?" Joe asked eagerly.
"He bawled hell out of me. He said I was no good."
"Don't pay any attention to him," Joe commanded consolingly. "What the hell--he's not so good himself!"

V
There was an even more memorable time when he had his first encounter with "an academic guy not half as human as Wright." In Pasadena lived Upton Sinclair, the renowned Socialist: surely he would be interested in a youth who was struggling to get on. Much more willingly than the reactionary authors, he would read his manuscript and offer helpful criticism.
Tully walked the long distance to his house and left the manuscript, after Mr. Sinclair had said politely that he would look at it. Then Tully waited, in a fever of anxiety for days, weeks, months. At last, in desperation, he sent for the manuscript and it was returned to him--unread. Mr. Sinclair's yard was filled with fierce watch-dogs to keep off the desperadoes of Wall Street, and the small boy who fetched it away counted himself lucky to escape with it, and the clothes on his back.
"It was Rupert Hughes, the reactionary, who helped me with my first manuscript--who went over with a pencil those 100,000 words and offered me money when I was destitute, after Sinclair, the mob-lover, had failed me," says Tully. "Hughes stuck with me faithfully through that tough revision of 'Emmett Lawler.'" After Tully had left the manuscript with him the first time, he wandered about the city for days in the depths of despair. At last one night, unable to endure it any longer, he went to the Los Angeles public library and called Mr. Hughes by telephone. "I remember his words to this day. After I had finally choked out who I was, he said, 'I just sent you a letter today. You will be a very great writer.' I was so dizzy I fairly reeled down the street!"
After "Emmett Lawler" finally saw print, there was the struggle to be lived over again while he worked upon "Beggars of Life." But Tully, by that time, began to find himself, and to play the magazine market. His days of hunger were over. He wrote for True Confessions and other such magazines, saving his best stuff for "Beggars of Life"--only to find, when it was done, that the high-toned literary magazines unanimously refused it, and that the editor of Triple X, a magazine of Western stories, unerringly selected the best chapters out of it, and enthusiastically published them.
Soon he began to get orders for other stories and articles. He entered into correspondence with a New York editor who wanted a whole series of stories, but it developed that they must be written according to a standardized pattern. The editor outlined a score of plots--plots that snuffed the individuality and life out of their characters, and reduced the delineation of them to a formula. Tully wrote one story, but when it came to forwarding it, he tore it up and wrote a letter instead. "I’m sorry I can't go it," he said, "but I'm still wandering in the woods looking for a Mick by the name of Jim Tully--and I'd better keep plugging along."
"No real writer," he now adds, "ever sells out his real stuff. You'll get it on paper as you see it and feel it--heeding what you have to. It may be just as cheap and egotistical as anything else you do, but you'll sacrifice anything to do it. But a writer's a damned fool who doesn't play some sort of game on the side--when he has to live. I've played the magazine market: I’ve written literally hundreds of interviews about a lot of superficial people here in Hollywood who will never matter, but nobody has touched my books. I've serialized picture stuff, but never any tramp stuff."
It was during the time when he was working upon "Beggars of Life" that Tully drifted into interviewing and publicity work with motion pictures. About the eighteen months that he worked with Charlie Chaplin as one of his ghost writers and yes men, he has only this to say: "It was fitting that the King of Laughter should feed a hungry guy!"
Thirteen years in Hollywood have developed him into a Hollywood specialist. but not a motion picture specialist. He is not interested in pictures, except as a phase of the greater spectacle of Hollywood; it is only once in a long while, he believes, that anything true gets into them, and then it is accidental. It amuses him to hear outraged writers crying out that the films have ruined their stories. How can pictures ruin anything--when they are what they are? The only person who can hurt a story is the author himself. The picture version--poor or good--of any story is unimportant; if the story itself is worth anything it will endure in the end. Hollywood is full of defeated writers, for even when they succeed in pictures they have, more often than not, succeeded at the expense--or the hopes!-of their better writing. They lead embittered lives, dreaming always of the novel or play they mean to write some day, when they cut loose from pictures. But somehow, as time goes on, that day is pushed farther and farther into the future.
"It is hard for writers to work out here," says Tully. "There is a fever in the picture game that gets them. A few, wiser than the rest, have their little hour--and clear out. They're the guys who are on to Hollywood."
In spite of the fact that Tully's fierce denunciations of the movies and the movie folks have for thirteen years made him the most hated man in Hollywood, he has continued to make pat of his living writing about them. In the beginning the magazines of the trade refused to publish his interviews: he was the first writer who dared to be realistic, or even to hint at the real stories behind the publicity lavished on the stars. Today, it is an amusing fact that his articles are not only in such demand in nationally popular magazines--they have appeared in twenty-six magazines in the last five years--that, writing his hardest, he could never write enough, but the stars themselves would rather be unflatteringly noticed by him than not at all. Hollywood, in fact, while loudly disclaiming him on the one hand, naively blurts all its secrets to him on the other. And Tully has an amazing talent for seeing through people, their motives and their affectations, and getting the little asides and whimsicalities chat make his interviews live.
He and his wife Marna live in the house in Kings road that Marna calls "One More Illusion." This is the fourth year of their marriage. Marna is just twenty-four, and as exquisite as one of Jim's Dresden figures. They seem a strange pair: Jim, with his powerful fighter's build, his great brush of blazing hair and his devastating, outspoken manner; and Marna, so fragile and dainty, with her soft charm and understanding. The road, Jim often says, made him old at twenty; today, he lives largely in the memory of his adventure, reviewed the more vividly in Marna’s sympathetic presence. The house in Kings road, though apparently far removed from the windy trails of the road, is at the very heart of them. For wanderers are continually drifting in, with fresh tales of adventure, and reminiscences of the old days when Cincinnati Red tramped the ways with them...
"The beautiful thing as I see it," he always ends, "is Marna's fine love for these rovers and her loyalty to them. I've watched eight or ten of them around her--and every one of them is in love with her. They would do anything in this damn sad world for her."

While Sara Haardt (1898-1935) is best remembered as the wife of H. L. Mencken, she was also a writer of some note. Most of her early work appeared in women's magazines before moving on to The American Mercury which published a number of her profiles and essays including this piece on Jim Tully. She also tried her hand at screenplays and novels with less success. Mencken and Hardt met at one of his annual lectures ("harangues," as he called them) at Goucher College in Maryland, where she was an instructor. Mencken took such an interest in her writing that when she planned a trip to Hollywood (a place Mencken loathed) to sell a screenplay, he advised her, "Jim Tully is the only big person in the landscape." Her health, never very good, began to decline after her marriage to Mencken and she finally succumbed to tuberculosis. Mencken collected her best short stories and posthumously published them as Southern Album.     
--Paul Bauer

Jim Tully
A Left-handed Compliment to Hollywood's Classic Hobo, America's Mighty Oak of Profane Letters
Scribner's Magazine, August 1937

by Frank Scully 

If you took the physical Danton on which Belloc and Robinet, his biographers, agree (if they agree on nothing else), and cut him down a foot, and then gave him something of Longfellow’s Village Blacksmith, and used Bunyan’s Great Heart to set this massive and mighty machinery in motion, you’d get a good working blueprint of Jim Tully. But you’d still be miles from the secret of what makes this enfant terrible of Hollywood a mighty oak of American letters.
What would still confuse you is how a man who made a fortune out of writing for motion-picture-fan magazines over a span of eighteen years could gain a world-wide reputation at the same time as the leader (and founder) of the hard-boiled school of writing. How could one lobe of his brain turn out stuff that made him the highest-priced peddler of a picture star’s passions and kitchen recipes, and the other lobe of his brain make him, as he is currently, the best-seller among foreign authors, pilfered by the U. S. S. R. for such non-political portraits of Americana as Jarnegan, Circus Parade, Beggars of Life, Ladies in the Parlor, Shanty Irish, Emmet Lawler, Laughter in Hell, and The Bruiser?
He hasn’t been in a boxcar in fifteen years, but he’s still catalogued in the newspaper morgues of the country as "the hobo author." He has a three-acre, $100,000 estate on Toluca Lake over the hill from Hollywood. A brick mansion, modeled on the lines of George Borrow’s, and hidden among dozens of eucalyptus trees, it houses Hollywood’s best library. There aren’t more than three civilized homes in that land of magnificent mansions, and Tully’s is one of the three.
Fifteen miles beyond this retreat, now too hemmed in for him, what with the Crosbys, Powells, Astors, Twelvetrees, Brians, Bruces, Brents, Disneys, and other picture personalities building on all sides of him, Tully has bought an eighty-nine-acre ranch so that he may retreat farther from the civilization that attacks him from the West, where he found his fame, and the East, where he has none to lose.
He grows alfalfa on his acres and thinks that when the revolution comes he can live off his land because land, in his curiously innocent opinion, is the last thing the revolutionists, whether from the left or right, will take. The revolution, to hear him tell it, is just beyond the tenth hill and several leagues this side of the horizon already.
"Let’s have another drink."
If you don’t let him have another drink, you’ll find his wrath swerving from the generality to the particular, and you’ll soon be writhing under the lash of his incredible candor. It is a curious mixture of Billingsgate and Shakespeare, a poet pelting you with manure. If you do let him have another drink, his voice goes more basso profundo, and deeper truths come out, all of them about you and all of them destined to make others grin and you squirm.
His huge head with its mass of curly red hair, now streaked here and there with gray, leans toward you. His eyes, particularly the right, which is chronically bloodshot, a hang-over from his boxing days, bore into your soul and damn you with far from faint rays.
His right arm weaves across your vision, feinting like a fighter leading you into the final blow which will leave you slug-nutty for life, and you either take it and stagger from the salon a stumble-bum, or you scram for your car and scream all the way home that the guy’s impossible, an army tank let loose among civilized people in a drawing room.
The bigger you are the harder you fall. There isn’t a mind in all Hollywood that can stand up to him in a finish fight. From picture producers down to stars, from script writers up to traffic cops, all of them have tried to kill him with logic, and the more foolhardy ones with their fists, and all of them have been dragged home, beaten men and women.
The next morning, still groaning under the weight of their wounds, as likely as not they’ll get a telephone call from a terse and alert Tully. That basso profundo voice will have been sunk without a trace. A voice with a smile is doing the call. But their egos are not even consoled with the knowledge that as badly as they feel this morning, Tully at least is in the agonies of a hang-over. If he is, he conceals it so well that it’s silly not to concede him the honors of being the best actor in Hollywood.
Langston Hughes, Henry Armstrong, and another Negro were at Tully’s one night for dinner. Tully filled the featherweight with ring instructions for a coming bout, but fighter Armstrong only stared at the carpet. While the world was being dissected and generally condemned by the writers, the black bruiser made no comment. He sat through the meal as silent as night.
After they had gone, Tully decided he had talked not too wisely or too well.
"My God," he commented, lost in brooding study as he watched his three dark guests disappear through the tall eucalyptus grove, "a great man has been here. Armstrong was the wisest of us all. He saved his breath for the pork chops."
Naturally, such a talker breaks up friendships at a terrific rate of speed. People are enamored by his speech or his reputation and almost break their necks in their efforts to meet him. In all too short a time he has broken the rest of what’s left of them and tossed it back to their humbler relations for a decent burial.
The nearest thing we have had to him in our time is Frank Harris. Both could talk brilliantly. But were short, stocky men. Both were Irish. Both got at least one book suppressed by Sumner. Both had come to their art after difficult labor in the lower orders - Harris as a cowboy, Tully as a chainmaker. But whereas Harris was a man-of-war of modern letters who, in Shaw’s immortal phrase, sailed the Spanish Main with the blackest of flags, the reddest of sashes, the hugest of cutlasses, and the thinnest of skins, Tully never carried anything more threatening than a walking stick, never battled in print with anybody, and never (at least that’s his belief) believed in anything or anybody, and contradicted this on every turn by befriending everybody and everything.
At fourteen he took Billy Ross, a fellow orphan, on the road. Jim bummed a dime at Sixty-third Street in Chicago and went to the Loop. Billy was late bumming his and got picked up and sentenced to sixty days. Jim still broods about the incident.
Twenty years later, after Billy no longer had any value to the state as a prisoner, Tully subsidized him at five dollars a week for a whole winter in a California jungle. When spring came and Ross took to the road again, only to die in Arizona, the state, hoping to get Tully to take up where its benefactions left off, was answered with:
"Bury him in potter’s field. He’s known harder beds in your prisons."
Oscar Wilde said Frank Harris was received in all the great houses once. Tully couldn’t be dragged to them. I once drove with him from the San Fernando Valley to Bel-Air, where Peter Freuchen was staying. We had to pass through Beverly Hills. He was depressed every foot of the glamorous way.
"My God," he groaned, "you could feed five poets on what it costs to keep up one of these lawns."
Obviously such a hammered-down Titan needs a Boswell as good as himself, and the pity of that is there is none. I have met many of the great men of our time, both in Europe and America, but one has fetched me with the force of his personality as Tully has. And none has pulverized my confidence to portray them as Tully has. You could burn Hollywood down as a horrible nightmare and I wouldn’t mind as long as you spared Tully. Tully wouldn’t mind, either, as long as you spared Tully.
That last crack would get a laugh out of him. And his laugh is good to hear and see, because he has fine big teeth, dimples in his cheeks, and those nursery touches in a man that are lovely things.
They are in my five-year-old son, Skippy. He, at five, and Tully, at forty-five, are brothers under the skin.
"Skippy says it in a sentence," says Jim. "Skippy says, ‘I want bread!’"
He wants it so badly he’d loot hell to get it. So would Tully. The economics and social structure of this world are not for them. To them, crawling is a mug’s game. If they’re going to be anywhere in the setup, they’re going to be where they can rook peasant and plutocrat alike.
In Tully’s case, at any rate, the world has recognized his circus psychology and has paid him off in handsome royalties rather than be subjected to the raids of a redheaded Pancho Villa from St. Mary’s, Ohio. But paying him off has brought the world no peace.
Robbed, starved, mauled, jailed, slandered, praised, exalted and educated by the mob in its cumbersome whim, Tully learned its psychology so well that he’s landed copy for it to read in over fifty different magazines.
In one and the same month he appeared in Vanity Fair, Scribner’s, True Confessions, the American Mercury, and Photoplay. And if that isn’t getting a feel of the public pulse, Lydia Pinkham never had it either. Swamped with the memory of this mass of bilge and enduring literature that his pen has turned out impartially and the public has paid for generously, he grins like a weary schoolboy. Tully has certainly got as much out of Hollywood as Wodehouse did, though it took him a much longer time. But the tribute has brought Hollywood no peace.
Producers rarely hire him. They’d pay a palooka as illiterate as a cow $2500 a week to do a circus picture before they’d pay Tully $600 to do a job ten times as well. The reason for this is they can impose their will only on inferior men. Putting themselves in the same room with Tully is like putting Jim Jeffries today in the same ring with Joe Louis.
"When I was a road kid I went out with a Jew boy," he once told us. "We’d make the rounds of the back doors. He’d always come back to the jungle from Jewish houses loaded with food. All I’d bring back from the Irish was good advice - diet for a doghouse."
Nobody has ever been quite so willing to op in doghouses as Tully, feeling certain he’d bark his way out before dawn. And his bark, more’s the pity, is far worse than his bite. He has a compassion for men which hobbles him at every turn, and that compassion, of course, takes him out of the running in the Superman Sweepstakes, the Nietzschean dope sheet which drove its author crazy, Mencken to beer, and Shaw to clowning.
When Mencken sent Tully to San Quentin to report the hanging of a youth, Tully stood by the scaffold and watched the lad’s neck pop, then sat down without a quaver of emotion or a break in a line and wrote his most hard-boiled report. Without even one aside, A California Holiday remains the most terrible indictment against capital punishment as yet written in America.
A wandering spider sometimes finds itself face to face with the red-haired gnome in his study. Jim grabs a stick and fiddles around with the spider until it catches on to it. Then with an immense oath, he hurls it out the window into freedom. He once said, reflecting on such an incident:
"We must have compassion. I pity everything that lives, because it has to die."
His loneliness is a burden he can’t shake off. With a fire roaring through a brain mixed up with the futility of all things human and divine, he is at heart an artist frustrated and contemptuous.
"I’m not exactly interested in writing -- except there’s little else to be interested in. Dying as I expect to die, out of the church, I can’t go to heaven, and I’m too indiscreet to make limbo. My only remaining ambition it to invent something that prevents hang-overs."
He has few dead heroes, and the living ones by no means crowd the headlines daily. Of those who do manage to get their quota of the notoriety which passes for fame, he is proudest of Jack Dempsey. Both were road kids; both made the grade. Dempsey made more money, but Dempsey senses that Tully did more with what talent he brought out of the ring.
A casual conversation with Dempsey makes Tully swell with pride. Again he has this trait in common with Frank Harris, who felt the same way about Wild Bill Hickock that Tully does about Dempsey. While Harris never quite caught his hero in words, Tully did an immortal portrait of Dempsey. One explanation of this might be that Harris never even met Bill Hickock, whereas Tully and Dempsey were close friends.
Unbelievable tragedies have come into his own life, and to hear him retail them later, you’d think they were custard-pie comedies. I wish I were tough enough to tell his story of getting a lad out of jail on the promise that he’d be shipped to China and Tully’s racing from Los Angeles to San Francisco to make the boat, only to be stopped three times en route and fined each time for speeding. I wish I could tell in detail the youth’s part -- in a worse crime and a longer jail sentence, one to fifty years -- with Jim’s sending the youth a watch to help him tick off the hours in San Quentin, and the youth writing: "Some guy stole the watch. So I’ve learned that there are thieves even here."
His tales of Hollywood are Olympian. you can start him anywhere and come out with a classic. His chief regret is that nobody has written the authoritative book on Hollywood.
Curiously, while Hollywood has shown a willingness to make money by wiring lighter novels or plays for sound, it has fought shy of any deeper drama. Merton of the Movies was all right, as were Once in a Lifetime, Boy Meets Girl, and Personal Appearance; but Jarnegan, even after it was dramatized and toured the country as Richard Bennett’s best vehicle, couldn’t get to first base in pictures.
Other properties of Tully’s have sold to producers and brought their author as high as twenty thousand dollars for the picture rights, but Jarnegan, the truest picture of what makes great directors, couldn’t get a dime of any producer’s money.
The people he writes about -- hobos, prize fighters, circus troupers, prostitutes, fugitives from chain gangs, and beggars of life generally -- are what the trade knows as money pictures, but Tully’s treatment of them is too tough in the main for the Hays office censors. Producers find it easier to steal his raw material and dress it up as society drama, a seduction on a drawing-room couch being easier to condone, presumably, than one in a box-car or a haymow.
So Tully goes his way as he has from Emmett Lawler -- the novel he wrote in one paragraph of 100,000 words. Every time he hit a town in his old hobo days he headed for a library. His huge head became crammed with the literary labor of others, as his belly became crammed with the food of others.
That he can write at all he lays to the nuns in the orphanage where his father led him with far-from-loving care at the age of five. The son of a ditchdigger who seemed only too glad to get rid of him at that early age, Tully might have been considered a success when he could earn thirty dollars a week as a chainmaker.
When he went miles above that form of success, even his father was willing to overlook the both made in judging Jim as a child. Tully supported his father, until he died, in a style to which the old ditchdigger never had been accustomed, and laughed every time he thought of what a sucker he had been for that old Shanty-Irish shaliber.
When Jim decided he had had enough of the road and of boxing and even of chainmaking, he staked out a claim for himself in Hollywood and worked a lode which everybody believed in but few knew how to mine--publicity. He became a public-relations counselor.
In that field he moved about as high as it is possible to go. He became Charlie Chaplin's press agent, and had to handle the public relations of the Genius during the difficult years of Chaplin's lovelife with Lita Grey. For that jittery labor he received fifty dollars a week out of the millions Chaplin was making for being a clown in clover.
His softest studio job was doing the script of Trader Horn with John Howard Lawson. He got a thousand a week for that, and still looks back on it as Shakespeare must have looked back on the bounty he got from the Earl of Southampton.
"All I contributed to Trader Horn," confessed Trader Tully, "was that animals are afraid of fire."
He grins in a way that shows he still feels pretty proud of his contribution to the million-dollar travelogue.
Of his fights, his battle with the late John Gilbert remains as the most hilarious set-to in Hollywood's long list of smacks on the nose. He was upbraided, as an old boxer, for hitting a matinee idol.
"I didn't hit him," he explained. "He was swinging away at me, and it looked to me as if he'd fan himself to death. So I just put him to sleep for his own protection."
How he can hold on to the roots of his serious writing in such an atmosphere is, as I say, the most enigmatic thing about Tully. Writers with as much industry, leaving out entirely the issue of talent, say, to a man, that they can't work in California. Tully, on the other hand, swears by Hollywood. He can't work in New York. He may fly there twice a year just to see Dempsey, Mencken, and others of the old mob, but after a week or two he begins to die every night waiting for the dawn and then suddenly he hops a rattler or a plane and blows for his Hollywood hideaway.
Of the Rotarian vices which surround us all, Tully is singularly free. He doesn't even smoke. Harris, who didn't either, used to say it was the only vice without a redeeming virtue, and he dropped it in his youth as soon as he found its weakness out. Tully swears, of course, and can drink most women and all men under the table.
It's the Irish in him. When things become intolerable and the wounds of living ache beyond all describing, all Irishmen stifle their imaginations in whiskey and Tully is no exception.
Half-seas over with Barry Fitzgerald of the Abbey Players, he kept telling everybody at a party recently that Fitzgerald was the greatest comic of our times. "I'll regret having said this, in the morning," he added, "but it's true."
Nothing shocks him unless perhaps it's the lewdness of a censor's mind. It hurt him like a mortal blow to have Ladies in the Parlor suppressed by Sumner. The fact that it put him in such distinguished company as D. H. Lawrence, Frank Harris, James Branch Cabell, James Joyce, and Arthur Schnitzler didn't mollify him at all.
"I worked three years on that book," he argues, "and as a result of the suppression found my whole income from that three years' effort amounted to five hundred dollars. The book at best never would have made its expenses, but at least it should have had a chance to prove Mencken's contention that it's the best of all my novels."
That he may have the further distinction of being the last eminent author suppressed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice is another honor that leaves him cold.
How he turned to writing is one of those incredible accidents of history. He was twenty-three at the time and had been sent by Martin Davey, the famous tree surgeon who rose to be governor of Ohio, into the South in command of ten men. His letters to Davey were so interesting the tree surgeon asked him to write something for the company's bulletin. Tully did. That was his first published piece, and though he didn't make much money at writing for a long time, he's averaged $80,000 a year for the last ten years.
Recently he has given up fan-magazine writing, his greatest source of revenue, and glories in the fact that his alfalfa grosses $8000 a year and he gets half of that without doing a stroke of work for it. Amelia Earhart once gazed on his hundred lovely eucalyptus trees towering one hundred feet above his Toluca Lake home.
"How old are they?" she asked Tully. "Forty years," was his answer. "The spring they were being planted in California I was being taken to an orphanage in Ohio to serve six years (my mother was burning with fever and I gave her the forbidden glass of water which killed her) and all during my sentence in the orphanage I had the trees watched and watered for me. Later when I was being yanked out of box-cars and thrown into jail, when I was being knocked slug-nutty in rings, when I was writing sixteen hours a day and selling not a word of it in twelve years of trying, those trees were growing for me. And after forty years here they are and here I am."
Retelling the tale of this divinity which shapes our ends, he smiles, his teeth shine, dimples shadow his red cheeks. He stands on his own land now and drinks from a cloud in the valley.
Life may be "all nuts on a windshaken tree," as he says, but an older Tully, grown mellow, can pity even a nut as he does everything else alive, because it has to die.

Frank Scully was, in the words of Paul Bauer, "a West Coast-Los Angeles bon vivant magazine writer man-about-town." His Rogue's Gallery is a collection of character sketches.

Home    Childhood      Road Years       Novels       Hollywood       Biographers       Influences     DMP