Andy Devine: Man of the West

Andy Devine became Hollywood's favorite cowboy sidekick, but the real life adventures of the prankster from Kingman rivaled his movie roles The Devine

It was 1926 in a Southern California hamlet called Hollywood. A strapping 21 year old from Kingman, Arizona, was standing on the corner of Hollywood and Highland when a car wheeled up and the driver hollered: "Hey, do you play football or basketball?" "Both," responded the gravel-voiced youngster. "I might be able to get you a job in pictures over at Universal," said the man, an assistant director. "Take my card." Without hesitation, Andy Devine hopped a streetcar to the studio, thus beginning an acting career that lasted for 50 years and included more than 200 pictures and numerous radio, stage, and television appearances. But wealth and fame never changed Devine. Even though he acted opposite the likes of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda, the glitter never rubbed off. Best known for his portrayal of Jingles on the TV series "Wild Bill Hickok," Devine knew his role and relished it: he was the perpetual sidekick, the good-natured chum who followed the star's lead. Late in his life, Devine summed up his career with characteristic honesty: "I never starred in pictures. I was always the second man through the door. I never got the credit when a picture was a hit. But I never got blamed for all the crap I was in either." As for his friendships with many of the industry's marquee names, Devine cracked: "I never won an Oscar, but I've lent money to a lot of guys who did." That homespun attitude always played well in Kingman, and, by the time he died in 1977, Devine had earned the town's enduring affection. The feelings ran both ways. Even in his heyday, Devine returned to his hometown to celebrate significant events in his life. He enjoyed many birthdays there and spent part of his 1933 honeymoon at the Hotel Beale, once owned by his dad. The smiling Irish actor was born in Flagstaff on October 7, 1905. A year later, Amy and Thomas Devine moved to Kingman with their children, Mae, Tom Jr., and little Andy. The Devines were a prominent family in the community, thanks to Thomas' position as Mohave County treasurer and his ownership of the Beale. It was not much later that two-and-ahalf-year-old Andy had the accident that produced his distinctive voice. While playing with a curtain rod in his mouth, the youngster fell, damaging his larynx. For the rest of his life, his voice carried a squeaky hitch. Young Andy always had a way of attracting attention, sometimes making the newspaper with his mishaps. In February, 1908, Andy and a friend accepted an offer from Judge Van Marter: fifty cents each to dispose of a mangy cat. The boys tied a stick of dynamite around the doomed beast. lit it, and ran like the dickens.

Comedy

Then there is the oft-told tale of Andy dumping water from the roof of the Hotel Beale onto unsuspecting citizens below.

The Mohave County Miner reported that little Andrew had fallen "from the rear porch of the Hotel Beale to the ground, a distance of about 13 feet, sustaining a fracture of the left arm and sundry cuts and bruises." Five years later, in May, 1914, the Miner reported that Andy had done it again, this time falling from the rear porch of the Hogan residence. That tumble resulted in another arm fracture. Boyhood friend Glenn H. Johnson, 88, said his oversize and not-too-graceful pal once won a greased-pig contest when he fell on the animal, flattening it beneath him. Johnson also recalled the time near the end of WWI, when the U.S. Army brought a one-man tank into Kingman as part of a liberty-bond drive. To excite the populace into ponying up for the cause, a soldier rolled through town firing off the tank's 30-caliber machine gun. Things went smoothly until Andy climbed on board and wouldn't heed orders to get off. Townsfolk found it amusing when the helpless tank driver finally gave up and drove his rig around town with the teenage whippersnapper still perched on back.

With mischief as his goal, Andy often targeted the traveling salesmen who used the Hotel Beale as a way station. The men carried their products in satchels while waiting for the train and often left them by the front door while they went into an adjoining room to play pool. Andy once nailed the bottoms of the satchels to the floor, then strolled into the pool room and hollered, "Train's leavin'!" The men darted for the door, grabbing at their satchels as they passed. But all they got were the top halves. The stunt left a trail of goods all the way to the door, including a selection of ladies underwear, and more than a few angry salesmen.

But no Andy Devine story has been told more often than the cat incident. It began when Andy and a friend accepted an offer from Judge Van Marter: fifty cents each to dispose of a mangy cat in whatever manner the boys chose. It turns out that Andy and his accomplice, the judge's son, had swiped some dynamite from a powder house not long before. So when the judge made his offer, Andy turned to his pal and said, "One stick oughta do it." The boys took the cat to the town dump, where they had the explosives stashed. They secured a stick of dynamite and a long fuse around the doomed beast, lit it, and ran like the dickens. It seemed like a good plan, until the boys turned and saw the cat running after them. They panicked and ran, unwisely, straight to the Van Marter house. The cat, still in pursuit, slithered under one side of the house and out the other, ending up in the pump shed in back. When the fuse fizzled down, the dynamite exploded, and the shed was blown to smithereens. But the story didn't come to full resolution for another 25 years. The next night, Andy and his friend, figuring they'd better ditch the remainder of the dynamite, went back to the dump and stuffed the leftover sticks into a sack, planning to dispose of it outside of town and across the railroad tracks where a small group of Hualapai Indians lived. As they tiptoed through Kingman's back alleys, a bank night watchman heard them and called, "Hey, who's there!?" The boys panicked again, dropping the sack and bolting. Soon the Miner was publishing stories about how the night watchman had foiled an attempt by desperadoes to rob the bank. He was feted as a hero and given a gold watch and bragging rights in every bar in town. Andy, of course, knew the truth. But, at first, he was too scared to reveal it, and later he kept quiet because he didn't want to bust the night watchman's bubble. It wasn't until he'd become a successful actor, a quarter of a century later, that he returned to Kingman and publicly solved the mystery of the phantom bank heist. Then there is the oft-told tale of Andy

The Devine Comedy

Once, at about age 12, young Andy got a job helping a neighboring rancher herd cattle near Kingman. When the cowboys finally got the cows to the corrals, they noticed that Andy was missing. It turned out that he had been acting up a bit more than usual along the way, talking incessantly and causing an assortment of headaches. One of the hands, no longer able to stand it, decided to take drastic action.

He made the boy stand on a pile of rocks while he fashioned a rope into a noose, tossed it over a tree branch, and slipped the noose around Andy's neck. Then he told him if he didn't want to hang himself, he'd better stand perfectly still. A couple of hours later, the cowboy returned and found Andy standing on the rocks, exactly as he'd left him.

It was the only time on record that anyone was able to get the better of the rambunctious Andy. Not even truant officers, highly skilled at thwarting the evasive moves of delinquent youngsters, could keep up with Andy, who was always skipping school.

"His folks sent him to parochial and military schools, one after another, but he was always getting expelled," said boyhood friend Johnson, who recalled that Andy was the first boy he met when he moved to Kingman in 1916. "He came up to me and said, 'Hello, kid, what's your name, and do you want to fight?" remembered Johnson. "I said, 'I'm not mad at you.' From then on we were friends."

Devine's own favorite memory dated to February 14, 1912, the day he carried the American flag in a parade in Kingman celebrating Arizona's new statehood.

Always athletic, Devine played football at whatever school he attended. He left Kingman after the ninth grade and enrolled at the Harvard Military Academy in Los Angeles. A year later, after brawling with the headmaster's son, his parents sent him to St. Benedict's in Kansas, a Jesuit school.

But he was such a good football player that he was recruited by St. Benedict's College on the same campus, and he played there without ever graduating from high school. When recruiters from the University of Santa Clara in California came calling, Devine moved back to the Coast to play football.

That led, in 1925, to an offer to play professionally in a loosely organized league. At the time, Devine was still studying at Santa Clara, and he sidestepped the taboo against a student playing pro ball by inventing a name to use on the pro field. Thus, Andy Devine became Jeremiah Schwartz.

In later years, the Schwartz story became a longstanding joke among Devine's friends. But some in the press took it seriously, and stories began appearing saying that Devine's real name actually was Jeremiah Schwartz. The name gag even became a question on the TV show "Jeopardy."

Devine never graduated from college, either. Thomas Devine's stomach cancer brought Andy back to Arizona to be

closer to his folks. He enrolled at Northern Arizona State Teacher's College in Flagstaff, and played football there, too, as well as basketball.

Thomas Devine died during surgery in Los Angeles in 1926. Andy had rushed to the Coast to visit his dad before that operation. After the bad news, he took a streetcar from Long Beach to Hollywood and wandered the streets, wrestling with grief and memories.

In a twist only a movie lover could believe, fate had scheduled the best and worst events of Devine's young life on the same day, and within hours he was discovered at that Hollywood intersection, wearing his Northern Arizona letterman's jacket. Real success in movies was a long time coming, though. He started acting in a string of silent comedies about college life. Two years later talking pictures came on the scene. "When sound came in, they threw me right out into the street," Devine told United Press International in 1970. "With my voice they thought I'd clear theaters." To make ends meet, he rented an apartment with three buddies, two of whom also would become well-known movie sidekicks. They were George "Gabby" Hayes and Slim Summerville. As Devine struggled to establish himself as an actor, he worked as a lifeguard, at a miniature golf course, and he traveled up the California coast and on to Alaska with the U.S. Lighthouse Service, reprovisioning lighthouses.

But when they got to Devine, the FBI agent said: 'Not you, Andy. If you can't trust Jingles, who can you trust?'

During the Depression, Glenn Johnson ran into his old pal at the golf course in Venice. The young actor asked if he could borrow $5, and Johnson handed it over, worried that it was gone for good. Not with Devine. Johnson was back in Kingman a week later when he got his money returned to him in the mail. "Andy was personable and jolly. Anybody would've liked him," said Johnson, comparing the actor to the characters he played. "If you've ever seen any of his pictures, you can judge the type of man he was." Those early years were tough times for Devine. Things were not going well in the picture business, his father had died, and a first marriage had failed. One day, returning to his apartment in a deep funk, a thought hit: he had a leaky gas hose in his bedroom. He imagined how easy it would be to shut the window, disconnect the hose, and just lie down. But the despondent young man quickly learned even that option was closed to him. In the front doorway was a notice that his gas had been turned off for nonpayment. Devine thought, "Shoot, I'm too poor to even take the short way out."

Soon thereafter Devine won an acting part that turned his life around. He played football player Truck McCall in Spirit of Notre Dame. The year was 1931, and the movie was a big hit. It proved that Devine was good for box office, unusual voice or not, and his career was assured. The same film was a tragedy for famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, whose plane crashed en route to the Coast to advise the film's producers. Ironically it was one of Devine's youthful mishaps that played a role in his success in talking films. His career picked up again when producers figured a way to put his squeaky voice to good use. "They put me in a bearskin coat and let me play college sophomores," Devine said. The big actor's continuing popularity challenged Hollywood writers to keep inventing new metaphors to capture the sound of his voice. They rose to the occasion again and again with numerous descriptive beauts: a longhorn cow in labor, a steam calliope with a broken key, a combination factory whistle and freighter horn, and the squeaky wheeze of a badly played accordion. A throat specialist once told Devine he might have nodes on his vocal cords, prompting the actor to joke that he had the same nodes as Bing Crosby, “only Crosby’s were in tune.” But a battery of tests found nothing wrong. “The doctors said it was my natural voice, and I was stuck with it,” said Devine.

The Devine Comedy

Universal must’ve figured it was onto something because the studio insured his trademark sound for $500,000. Audiences liked what they heard, too. Devine played Peter the manservant in a 1937 production of Romeo and Juliet, and he even did radio. From 1935 to 1940, he teamed with Jack Benny, playing Buck Benny’s madcap partner. And he was the voice of Friar Tuck in Walt Disney’s animated motion picture Robin Hood.

After the early comedies, Westerns became Devine’s mainstay. He appeared in six Roy Rogers movies, replacing old roomie Gabby Hayes, and, in 1939, he played the stagecoach driver in the acclaimed John Ford film Stagecoach. Part of what convinced Ford to hire Devine was the actor's skills on horseback, and in particular his ability to handle a six-up: a stagecoach rig pulled by six horses. After Stagecoach, he broke into the film world's A-league several more times: in The Red Badge of Courage, Around the World in Eighty Days, How the West Was Won, Two Rode Together, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

He was a fixture on TV as well, particularly from 1950 to 1957 when "Wild Bill Hickok" aired. The actor delighted in telling of an incident in 1974, 17 years after the popular show ended. He was on a plane in Miami when a bomb threat forced all the passengers to open their luggage for inspection by FBI agents. But when

During his days with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at Republic Pictures, he topped out at 358 pounds.

they got to Devine, an agent said: "Not you, Andy. If you can't trust Jingles, who can you trust?" But Devine's film life as a second man presented an unexpected problem. He told an interviewer in 1970 that he kept working primarily to let movie fans know he wasn't dead.

"There's a certain group of character actors who come from the same era of movies that the public gets confused," explained Devine. "When they die, my wife, Dorothy, gets letters and cards of condolence. Some people telephone to express sympathy. Once in a while, I answer the phone, and the person on the other end of the line almost swallows his teeth when he hears my voice, thinking I am dead."

Andy and Dorothy Irene House were introduced in 1933 by Will Rogers during the filming of Dr. Bull. Dorothy was an extra in the movie and a senior in high school. She was 18 when they married. Andy was 28 and recently divorced. The marriage lasted 44 years and produced two sons, Tad and Dennis.

As he headed into his 60s, Devine was wealthy enough that he no longer had to work. But when he tried to retire, he "went crazy" with boredom. "In my early days in pictures, we'd work in as many as three different films the same day," said Devine.

"There were no guilds or unions then. I got used to hard work, and it's difficult to break the habit."

The actor spent his last years performing in dinner-theater plays such as Anything Goes, Never Too Late, and Showboat. He and Dorothy traveled the country in a van equipped with a ham radio. Devine enjoyed chatting with other ham enthusiasts as he drove along, and he had no trouble convincing his radio buddies who he was. They heard his voice and knew it couldn't be anyone else.

For the last 20 years of his life, Devine struggled with health problems aggravated by his weight. During his days with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at Republic Pic-tures, he topped out at 358 pounds, and in 1957 doctors told him he had diabetes.

Devine went on a diet, losing 100 pounds in 10 months. Almost 20 years later, he told a writer for The Kingman Daily Miner that he weighed 238 pounds and that he hadn't drunk "any booze for 30 years," although he enjoyed an occasional glass of wine or beer.

He learned that he had leukemia in 1973, but even that didn't cloud his outlook: "It's not the bad kind. I can keep it under control by watching my white-blood count. My doctor says I might die of two or three other things before leukemia gets me."

In the same 1975 interview with the Daily Miner, Devine summed up his career this way: "I've done some things I'm proud of, things like the original A Star Is

The Devine Comedy

Born and Stagecoach. I've also done a lot of clinkers. I guess the worst was Yellowstone [made in the early '30s]. In that one, a bunch of crooks were planning a bank robbery in a cave under Old Faithful. The ammonia seeped in [from the geyser], and when the sheriff arrived, the crooks were frozen stiff with a coat of frost all over them.

February 18, 1977, Devine died of cardiac arrest at age 71. An Associated Press account of his funeral described mourners John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart brushing tears from their eyes as they left the chapel in Newport Beach. Ken Curtis, who played Festus on "Gunsmoke," joined a Western duo singing "You Don't Know What Lonesome Is Until You Get to Herding Cows."

Another duo sang "Red River Valley," "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," and "Come and Sit by My Side, Dogie." (Doagie, a variant spelling of what cowboys call an unbranded calf, was Devine's pet name for Dorothy.) It seemed fitting for a successful actor who never forgot his roots.

As Kingman resident Karin Goudy wrote in a 1986 tribute, the town calls Devine its favorite son "partly because he was a famous movie star but primarily because he was one of our own, a decent, caring man who took what gifts he had and built a life to be proud of."

Devine Days in Kingman took place October 7, 1977. This year's celebration will be held September 24 and 25. Activities usually include a parade, a rodeo, and athletic events. For more information, call the Kingman Chamber of Commerce, (602) 753-6106.

The Andy Devine Room of the Mohave County Historical Society, (602) 753-3195, officially opened October 2, 1988. Exhibits include photography, a mock dressing room, and motion-picture posters.

The Hotel Beale is located at 325 E. Andy Devine Ave.; phone (602) 753-2297.