The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 32

A By DEE LOWRANCE HOLLYWOOD THIRTY-THREE years in movies makes you a great great grandfather among lilm actors. The industry itself is barely that old. Few actors have been with it continually for a third of a century. Harry Carey has and that makes him unusual. So you go to meet him expecting someone rather ancient, practically tottering.

You get the shock of your young life. Harry Carey is no antique. Not at all. He's hale, hearty, brimful of. vigor.

He'll talk your head off if you let him but not about himself. For that he must be prodded. Harry Carey can take Harry Carey or leave him. He's his own worst booster. So you talk about farming and water witches.

'Hear you witch wells, I said to him" Harry Carey was off. 'How about witching one for I said. So Timmy came over to the ranch with his willow wand. "Ever see a water witch work? A man looks mighty silly witching wells. Walking all over the countryside vith his hands bent, holding the wand out straight in front of him, touching his chest.

"But it works. Don't let anyone tell you different. The well Timmy found for me must be an underground river. It brings in twice the water in the well the Government surveyors found. I'd like to be able to witch wells!" His blue eyes squinted off into the crinkling his weatherbeaten face so famous on celluloid.

TT'S no wonder wells mean a lot to Harry Carey. His ranch in Saugus, covers 1000 acres small compared to his neighbors' hundreds of thousands of acres. But it shares the need for irrigation with the largest. Saugus is part prairie, part desert. Eight years after he made his first movie in 1908, he purchased the land.

For the last 25 years he has farmed it with Navajo Indian help. At this minute it contains at least 100 head of beef cattle, some saddle horses, work horses, several milk cows and about 40,000 sheep. "Good country for kids, too," he said, beginning to talk about his 20-year son, Steven (nicknamed "Dobie" because his hair was the red of adobe when he was born) and of Ada, his daughter of 17. "Good country for wives, too," chimed in Mrs. Carey, a vibrant, slender woman with gold-blond hair.

Mrs. Carey was Olive Gordon, once Harry Carey's leading woman, an ac tress of promise. "I'm an actress who had sense enough to quit," she smiled. Watching them together, you know that here is the kind of marriage you read about in fiction, seldom find in flesh and blood. It's written all over their faces.

Olive Carey's brightest memory of her husband's career is the nine months they spent in Africa while "Trader Horn" was being filmed. Remember Carey as the white trader who had spent his entire life among African savages? "Trader Horn" was a Harry Carey Special, a new lift to 1 1 tljfi I inJOl MfM J) Jm ywood Movieland was unexplored when Harry Carey started Dlavina western heroes 33 vears aao Here's the story, of his greatest; realrlife adventureK.i i I ilf'' 'j 1 1 r. I -) i i i i vy fa y. ly-'WA 1:7 1 a solid life's work as character actor and western hero. One of the reasons Carey was chosen for the title role is that he is a crack shot with a rifle.

An asset in the jungle. But he modestly explained he was a babe in arms with guns compared to the two white guides the film party picked up in Nairobi. These two spent their waking hours lapping up firewater. But, drunk or sober, they were magicians of marksmanship. All night long, outside the camp, great fires were kept burning to hold Harry Carey's checkered career covers everything from the horse operas and melodramas of movieland's early days to "Sundown," his latest picture, in which he plays against the African background he made famous in "Trader Horn." off curious wild animals.

Mrs. Carey still remembers the way a lion's roar out of the darkness can set your teeth on edge. The "Trader Horn" company was in Africa longer than planned. Sound hit Hollywood at the moment they hit Africa. They had to delay four months, waiting for sound equipment to catch up with them.

But the Careys ate it up, enjoyed every African minute. TF you try to draw a graph of the Carey film career, it looks like an outline of the Alps in silhouette so many ups and downs. "If I can't get good pictures, I do bad ones," he explained. "If I can't get big money, I take small money. I've been in the chips, and I've been good and broke.

I can take either one." But he keeps on. Thus the record of 33 years continually in the business. Other actors who almost reach his status are Donald Crisp, Lionel Barrymore, William Farnum. Born Jan. 16, 1878, he is 63 today.

He looks 10 to 15 years less. The first 20-odd years he spent foiling his father's endeavors to make him a lawyer. Father Carey was a Special Sessions judge in New York City. He wanted a judgeship for young Harry. But somewhere along the line the acting bug hit Harry DeWitt Carey IL His school and college life were highlighted by athletic achievements.

He became so rugged, he thought of himself as a character out of the Wild West. The law had no appeal, so he (1:11 joined a stock company and traveled. After touring some months, playing villains, an attack of pleurisy sent him to bed for several weeks. Flat on his back, he passed the time writing a western dime novel. Later he made it into a play.

Eventually "Montana" became a touring road show with the author playing the hero's role. TVOW the movies 1908. Signed for four westerns at $85 a week, Carey was his own stuntman, his own trick shot, his own coach driver, his own barroom fighter. He was everything but the heroine, in fact. And heroines were unheard of then.

He was paid for three but the check for the fourth western bounced. That did not deter Mr. Carey. He and his director went to the Carey home on City Island, off the Bronx coast in New York. There they shot pictures on a "spec" basis.

The negative was given them on credit and tha price deducted from their profits. THIRST they made more two-reel westerns. Then a Northwest Moun- tie epic. They actually slept with their pictures, drying the film on frames that hung over their b.eds. "We used our best razor blades for cutting," Carey said, "practically pieced the film together with spit.

Very modern methods!" That was all too hand-to-mouth. His next venture was a contract with the old Biograph Company on tha same payroll with Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, the Gish sisters, et a I. Chiefly he played crooks, second-story men. They nicknamed him tha "Biograph Burgler." "My, but I was sinister in those days," he recalled. "I used to go and see my own pictures just to count the screams when I appeared." Then California was discovered.

D. W. Griffith shanghaied Carey to tha West Coast to appear in "The Sheriff's Baby." He was back in his chosen field Westerns. So much for the beginning ot the zig-zag, up-and-down line of tha Carey fortunes. When they paid good money, he got it.

When they didn't, he acted anyway. Always he made a living, kept the loan sharks away from the Saugus homestead. "It's a good life, acting," he pointed out. "My kind keeps you outdoors. There's time off to farm and stay home and be with the family.

There are new people and new parts. I couldn't have a better time. "That see-saw career line has been good for me, too. Disappointment is not a word in my dictionary. I've got a protective skin.

You can't hurt my feelings. "And when the parts grow few as they have from time to time I try something else. Like touring with a circus, playing the Broadway stage. Did a lot of vaudeville, too, in between pictures. "Those jaunts away from Hollywood have helped.

You meet your public, and you can't beat the feeling. I have men 40 and 50 years old come up to me and say they remembered me 'way back. The other day one showed me an autograph I'd signed 32 years ago!" TTARRY CAREY has lost track of the exact number of pictures he has been in. A conservative estimate puts it at about 300. Over 200 have been straight Westerns.

Some of his better parts, too, have been a little off the beaten track like the shepherd in the most recent, "Shepherd of the his vice president in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." When he was interviewed on the Wanger lot, he was indulging in some fond recollections. The locale of "Sundown," his next picture, is the same part of Africa where "Trader Horn" was filmed. Again, he is playing a white trader among savage tribes. "This uniform feels pretty natural," he patted his jacket.

"And look at these guns with a loving hand he caressed the gun he will carry throughout "Sundown." Young actors should have a talk with Harry Carey at the voy start of their careers. They wu.ilrin't make such fools of moaning and groaning about their "iirMks" if they took a leaf from his ni.t wk. A little of his easygoing pliil might help. "Sure, it's an up-awl-dwn business," is Harry Carey's "Take it as it comes you'll live And, we might add, ynili ave a younger old age. Look sit Mr.

Carey, (KvcryWeek Magazine 1'rlntod In U. S..