Walter Catlett: Wise Guy
Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) was a long time shooting, and in the first few weeks, Katharine Hepburn wasn’t doing well. Hawks said later that she was telegraphing the fact that she was trying to be funny and it wasn’t working at all, so he had another actor in the picture, Walter Catlett, coach her and even read her part for her. Catlett was an old pro comic with long stage experience, and he made Hepburn see the dead serious, oblivious way that her screwball heiress Susan Vance should be played. Eventually Hepburn got the hang of it, and Catlett himself set down to work playing Constable Slocum (!), an easily distracted small town copper who huffs and puffs like a cartoon come to life.
Catlett’s Slocum runs the last third of the film, which takes place in jail, and Hawks lets him conduct these scenes physically and vocally just as he trusted the actor to guide Hepburn’s performance. Slocum wears wire-rim glasses and has bushy eyebrows and wispy curly hair. He’s always hitching himself up and out at other people in an authoritative way, but his wits are so fuddled that his authority keeps getting punctured so that he physically deflates. People keep telling Slocum that they’ve been looking for a leopard, but he just knows there aren’t any leopards in Connecticut. “Oh, ah, you’ve been hunting leopards?” he asks Charlie Ruggles’s Major Applegate, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes. “Any luck?” he asks, in Catlett’s gravelly yet nuanced voice. Sometimes a movie really is all about the sound created by a group of people, and the ringleader of the Bringing Up Baby sound is unmistakably Walter Catlett.
Catlett was born in 1889 in San Francisco, and he worked in vaudeville and also opera before settling into being a comic in the Ziegfeld Follies. He introduced the song “Lady, Be Good” on Broadway, and when movies needed talkers, he was imported to Hollywood to act in some comic shorts before making his first impact as Murphy in the Lewis Milestone film version of Ben Hecht’s blast of Chicago newsroom nastiness, The Front Page (1931). In that picture, Catlett gives most of his performance sitting down, playing poker with his co-workers and issuing a series of cynical wisecracks. When he hears a fellow reporter talking to a peeping tom victim on the phone, out of the side of his mouth he says, “Tell her to come over here, we want her to re-enact the crime.” Catlett almost always wore glasses of some kind, sometimes oversized black horn rims, which is what he sports as Murphy, and the glasses were the finishing touch on his wiseacre persona. This is a man who wears glasses that you shouldn’t mess with, not because he might beat you physically but because he’s capable of one-liner insults so sharp and deadly that they might stick to a man for the rest of his life.
“He’s gonna write poetry about the ladies’ panties!” Murphy sneers, when Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) talks about a cushy New York advertising job he’s landed, and Murphy has no patience when it comes to hooker Molly Malloy (Mae Clarke), who wears her heart on her sleeve; when he’s heard enough of her sob sister condemnation of the press, Murphy actually gets himself up out of his chair and pushes her steadily out of the room. In many ways, Murphy is the worst guy in this infernal news office, yet Catlett makes something attractive out of his toughness, his refusal to feel bad for the Molly Malloy’s of this world. In Big City Blues (1932), Catlett plays the most heartless of Manhattan sharpies, a con man who bilks a naïve relative (Eric Linden) out of his money in record time, and in that movie there’s nothing all that comic about Catlett’s chiseling thuggery.
Off the set, Catlett could be just as unsettling. Lewis Milestone arranged a dinner to kick off the shooting of Rain (1932), a film where Joan Crawford was set to play Sadie Thompson, a part made famous on stage by Jeanne Eagels in the 1920s. Crawford was seated next to Catlett at the dinner, and as she earnestly told him about how she was going to interpret the role, Catlett got deeper and deeper into his bootleg rye until he finally fixed her with his Slocum “Any luck?” beady eyes and said, “Listen, fishcake, when Jeanne Eagels died, Rain died with her.” In Rain, Catlett doesn’t wear his trademark glasses, and he attempts a Cockney accent. When he dances with Crawford, they both seem uncomfortable, and surely his discouraging words had something to do with her own lack of confidence in her work here, which was poorly received at the time but looks just fine now.
“A fugitive from the old ladies’ home wouldn’t listen to a line of condensed milk like that!” Catlett cries in a Mack Sennett short, Dream Stuff (1933), where he tries to teach a young man how to be a Romeo with the ladies. Like so many of his theatrical peers, Catlett was seen, on screen and off, as a kind of teacher figure for younger players, and if he was given sour enough dialogue, he could sometimes walk off with a film, but his parts in A features were often little more than bits. Though his stage and film persona often erred on the side of larceny, James Cagney wrote in his memoirs that Catlett could be a soft touch for a dollar (Catlett played a flustered stage manager in Cagney’s Oscar-winner, Yankee Doodle Dandy {1941}).
He worked up to the late 1950s, in films large and small, but maybe Catlett’s most unforgettable role was un-credited: the voice of J. Worthington Foulfellow in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940). In that best and most disturbing of all Disney cartoons, Catlett gruffly sang the song, “Hi Diddle-Dee-Dee, An Actor’s Life For Me.” Can you hear that song in your head, and the way Catlett sang it? It is the very voice of corruption, the voice that tells you to quit school and join the circus, the voice that tells you that something is “fun” when “fun” really means debilitating self-indulgence and cynicism. It’s the ultimate Catlett part because he always seemed to want to be a cartoon, both less and more than human, and because it outright admits what a destructive thing teaching can be.
By Dan Callahan