Two-part article . . . Go to Part II now.
Borden Chase was one of the mid twentieth century’s most notable Hollywood screenwriters who gained fame for his distinctive Westerns including Red River, Winchester ’73 and Bend of the River.
Drawing on a lengthy interview with Chase’s daughter, the retired dancer and actress Barrie Chase and originally published in Roundup Magazine this year, this two part article reveals the dark side of Borden Chase that reputedly inspired the creation of the Noah Cross character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974).
By Alan K. Rode
Skimming through a biographical sketch of Borden Chase conveys the impression of a prototypical Hollywood “rags to riches” story. A knock around guy who became an exemplary short story writer, Chase evolved into one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters by creating a darker brand of de rigeur Western.
Besides penning some of director Anthony Mann’s best films (Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country), Chase wrote the original story of Vera Cruz (1954) and screenplays for Lone Star (1952), Man Without a Star (1955), Backlash (1956) and Night Passage (1957). His protagonists included Joh Wayne’s Tom Dunson in Red River (1948) and James Stewart’s Lin McAdam in Winchester ’73 (1950). Chase’s array of hard-bitten Western heroes was doubtlessly inspired by his own colorful life experiences.
But Chase’s life was far from the simplistic saga of a Horatio Alger in chaps who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a success. Instead of John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, Chase’s story was more reminiscent of Glenn Ford’s psychologically damaged Civil War Colonel in The Man from Colorado (1948), a Chase character whose inner demons, politics and personal behavior irretrievably damaged those closest to him.
Born Frank Fowler on January 11, 1900, in New York City, Chase was the son of an English couple who settled in Brooklyn. Early on, the elder Fowler abandoned his wife and young son. To ease the pain, Chase’s mother Winifred immersed herself in religion and alcohol; her son was raised by a set of grandparents in the neighborhood of Benson hurst. Despite accounts stating he left school at 14 to hobo around the country, Chase received a rigorous Jesuit educa tion in parochial school. “My father learned how to speak Latin fluently and he had me do likewise,” remembered retired dancer-actress Barrie Chase.
Chase joined the Navy at 16 to serve in World War I but only made it as far as Marseilles. Returning home, he began working as a bootleg driver and chauffeur for notorious Prohibition mobster Frankie Yale. Yale (Francesco Ioele), who had earlier hired a teenager named Al Capone as a bouncer for his Coney Island restaurant, took a shine to the young man from southwest Brooklyn who brought class instead of brawn to the table. But Yale’s greed became his undoing after he chiseled in on New York liquor shipments to Chicago he was being paid to protect.
Wikimedia Commons
Capone had relocated to the Windy City in 1919 and was now running the town. Since it was his booze being hijacked, Scarface Al’s reaction to his former mentor’s treachery was predictable. On July 1, 1928, lured outside by a phony emergency phone call, Yale decided to drive his new Lincoln solo and was riddled by machine gun bullets fired from a car with Illinois plates. Chase luckily received a pass.
“My father said they [the crew allied with Capone] sat him down and told him if he minded his p’s and q’s, he would be OK,” said Barrie Chase. “Years later, he told me never to accept a favor from gangsters because if you did, they’d own you.”
Chase drove a cab for a spell while working as a sideshow tout who stood on strongman Charles Atlas’s shoulders at Coney Island. He quit a brief stint as a high tower diver after a coworker missed the water tank and lost an arm. He eventually got a job excavating what would become the Holland Tunnel.
Construction on Manhattan’s first vehicular under-river passage with a forced ventilation system began in 1922 and lasted five years with the tunnel officially opening on November 12, 1927 (The incongruity of the duration of the Holland Tunnel construction and Yale’s death calls into question the timing of Chase’s work as a sandhog and driving for Yale).
Chase became a “sandhog,” the nickname for the men who built the aqueducts, subways, tunnels and bridges that enveloped New York. It was dangerous work characterized by repeated exposure to extreme atmospheric pressure. One out of every four sandhogs died before retirement age. As a member of Local 147, Chase became a staunch trade unionist. According to Barrie, his sandhog period begat his lifelong anathema towards Communism: “My father’s best friend in the world was another sandhog named Eddie Powell. When Communists tried to take over the sandhog union, Eddie resisted and was killed.”
Barrie Chase was born in New York City. “I was respon sible for my father becoming a writer,” she said with a laugh.
“My mother was Leah Keith [stage name Lee Keith]. She was a concert pianist whose family was associated with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain. Fats Waller composed my mother’s vaudeville act, and she played for him before she met my father.
“My father used to write her these beautiful love notes, so she suggested he try writing professionally. He was still making a living as a sandhog, but the work was extremely hazardous. My parents were dead broke – they told me about walking across the Brooklyn Bridge during the Depression with cardboard covering the holes in their shoes. Mother used her show biz connections to help get my father’s first magazine article published so he could pay the hospital bill for my delivery and take us home.”
Fowler changed his name to Borden Chase by adopting the dairy company and bank monikers as his nom de plume that became his legal name in 1955. He drew on his sandhog experiences to write “East River,” a serialized Argosy Magazine story in October-November 1934. The resultant book was presold to Fox as a movie property. East River is often confused with 1938’s Sandhog as the source for the Raoul Walsh-directed Under Pressure (1935) as both stories covered similar literary ground (or better put, sand).
Aside from the money and a paid trip to the West Coast, Chase was unimpressed by Hollywood. “As soon as Under Pressure was over, bang, I went back East,” recalled Chase in a 1969 interview with film historian Jim Kitses. “I started to write for the magazines, God, I don’t know how many. I used to do a million words per year. My pulp market was Argosy and Detective Fiction, and I used to bat those things out, serials; and the slick market was American Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and Liberty.”
Chase’s characters were in perpetual motion: digging a tunnel, careening around in a taxi, on an ocean liner or traveling on a train. Later the motif became cattle drives and wagons west, but the structure remained the same. Like other Hollywood screenwriters, the pulps provided a solid foundation for writing movies. Nobody realized this more than Chase, who, near the end of his life, bemoaned the demise of magazines:
“We have lost the training ground for writers. I put in quite a few years writing short stories. Short stories are the basis of all screenplay writing. You have to tell a story in less than 5,000 words. You have to have a beginning, middle and an end. Now you don’t have any more Saturday Evening Post, you don’t have any more magazines.”
Similar to other movie scribes who disparaged the studios while cashing their checks, Chase told Kitses, “I didn’t want any part of California or the pictures. Hollywood was even phonier then than it is now.” Ersatz or not, the choice between screenwriting lucre or earning two cents a word from Argosy was a no-brainer. After his Hell’s Kitchen-based short story was adapted for The Devil’s Party (1938), Chase moved to Hollywood.
In addition to Barrie and her parents, the family included her mother’s 14-year-old daughter Patricia from her prior marriage. Chase had a 17-year-old son, Frank, by his first marriage who had been farmed out to his aunt and cousins to raise after his mother became an alcoholic. Chase’s mother lived with them for a brief time before committing suicide.
Barrie remembered Winifred Chase as, “a religious fanatic who couldn’t accept her son getting married to my Jewish mother.” Borden Chase became fascinated by horses and bought an 80-acre ranch in Canoga Park (located in what is now Woodland Hills) in 1943 from IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) labor union gangster Willie Bioff. Under federal indictment for shaking down the studios for union peace, Bioff had to unload the ranch.
“My mother hated the ranch because it was so far away and not near anything – that part of the [San Fernando] Valley was completely rural then,” remembered Barrie. Chase kept the ranch but moved his wife and family to a sylvan property in Canoga Park previously owned by Tyrone Power before settling at an Encino ranch. “Horses became a huge part of my father’s life. He started a quarter horse association, and we ended up owning 15 horses. I rode every day and showed the horses. We also owned the adjoining property that had an orange grove. Our Encino neighbor was Clark Gable.”
Chase and his wife functioned as a writing team – a partnership he never publicly acknowledged. According to Barrie, “He loved to work at home and wanted everything he wrote read back to him. My father believed movie dialogue must be heard to be properly written. He would hunt and peck on an old Underwood. Mother would read it to him, make suggestions and type the clean scripts with the carbons.”
Chase initially sold a number of original stories. Blue, White and Perfect (1942) was converted into a Michael Shayne mystery programmer starring the enjoyable Lloyd Nolan (similar to RKO using Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely for The Falcon Takes Over the same year). Dr. Broadway provided the directorial debut for Anthony Mann and Pay to Learn was the basis of The Navy Comes Through (1942), the first of several Chase wartime propaganda films, which included Destroyer (1943) and The Fighting Seabees (1944).
Chase’s obsession with horses and the West resulted in a Piper Cub flight tracing the 1867 origins of the Chisholm Trail. He joined a cattle round up on the gigantic King Ranch in South Texas. Barrie recalled that her father returned “literally encrusted with dirt.”
Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post as The Chisholm Trail and novelized as Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail and Red River in 1948, Chase sold his treatment to Howard Hawks and Charles Feldman as a starring vehicle for John Wayne. “I got screwed on [Red River],” Chase told Jim Kitses. When he initially met with Hawks to discuss the script, the director had Charles Schnee with him. Chase eyed Schnee, telling Hawks he didn’t collaborate with other writers (not entirely accurate).
Hawks replied that Schnee was just his secretary taking notes (a lie). Chase’s script was fine until his last scene had Wayne being shot to pieces. Hawks told him, “Look, Wayne isn’t going to die.” Chase replied: “All right, if he isn’t going to die, at least don’t have the dame [Joanne Dru] break it up.”
The ending was rewritten by Schnee with Hawks reprising a gag from The Outlaw (1943) having Dunston drawing blood from Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift) by grazing his ears with bullets from his six-shooter. Hawks frequently recycled bits of business from his films, but this time he ran afoul of the litigious Howard Hughes, who was still nursing a grudge after firing Hawks off The Outlaw in 1940.
Hughes filed an injunction halting distribution of the film until Hawks omitted the scene entirely. Although Chase told Kitses some whimsy how he resolved the situation with Hughes, it took a concerted effort by Hawks’s editor, Christian Nyby, to recut the film so Hughes would drop his suit. In another version unearthed by writer Philippe Garnier from producer Edward Small’s unpublished memoir, it was Small, acting as a peacemaker, who brought Hughes and Hawks together in Long Beach to settle the matter. The conference reportedly began with both men screaming at one another but ended with a scramble to get all the prints recalled and have the offending material removed.
Hawks had “the dame” end the showdown between Wayne and Clift, adding a dollop of Hollywood saccharine to an otherwise brilliant movie. The director later labeled Chase an “idiot” and a skirt chaser – a laughable bit of hypocrisy from Hawks, a notable ladies’ man and one of Hollywood’s most prodigious liars.
Continue reading with Part II of this article . . .
