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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
What infuriated Borden Chase about writing the script for the 1948 hit movie Red River was having to share screen credit with Charles Schnee because of a single rewritten scene.
Barrie Chase recalled her father changing his initial belief about Montgomery Clift “not being man enough” to play opposite John Wayne. Father and daughter attended a preliminary screening of Red River with Chase asking Barrie afterwards how she liked the film.
“I said, ‘I think Monty Clift was terrific.”‘
Chase agreed, ‘You’re right! He was damn good!”
Filmed in 1946 but not released until September 1948,there are two versions of Red River, one with shots of book pages providing the exposition is often erroneously termed “the director’s cut.” It was actually lifted by Hawks in favor of the released version with Walter Brennan’s voice over narration.
All photographs courtesy of Alan K. Rode unless otherwise noted.
Receiving an Academy Award nomination for Red River boosted Chase’s career, but his behavior toward his family changed. Some of it was political. Chase joined the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944, serving on the organization’s executive committee. According to Barrie, her father had trouble getting work at one point as the Canoga Park ranch was sold off. [See Part I] He believed the left-wing faction of the Screen Writers Guild worked against him because of his politics – “I disagreed with them before it was fashionable.”
Chase loathed Communism ever since his sandhog days in the early 1920s when he was helping excavate what would become New York’s Holland Tunnel. The influence of the Communist party members within the Writers Guild during the period preceding World War II and the Blacklist period was not inconsiderable. Chase was an ardent patriot who wept listening to the radio broadcast announcing Great Britain declaring war on Germany, telling a bewildered 5-year-old Barrie “I am crying because our country will be involved in a second World War.”
After the 1947 HUAC hearings divided Hollywood politi cally, Borden Chase joined the strident opposition to left wingers and Communist artists, many of whom would be blacklisted. Barrie was appalled at her father’s support of the Alliance led by right wing demagogues like Sam Wood, Hedda Hopper and the oafish Ward Bond: “How could he go along with this? My mother was a Jew!”
Despite his firm belief that domestic Communists were traitors, Chase’s feelings about the Blacklist became more ambiguous. According to Barrie: “He thought it went way too far, things got carried away and innocent people had their careers destroyed.”
Hollywood Ten screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who went to prison for refusing to name names to HUAC, was an admired colleague. Barrie overheard her father wondering aloud if he could be as courageous as Trumbo by not giving up his friends.
There was an undercurrent of tension within the Chase family. Barrie didn’t get along with her older half-sister Patricia. “Even as a kid, [Patricia] was insensitive,” Barrie said. “I remember my father saying to her, ‘Don’t hit your sister so hard.’ But why should she be hitting me at all?”
Barrie’s relationship with her father was close – “we went riding every day, he taught me how to swim, I was always allowed to stay around the adults, and we had Socratic type dinner table conversations” – but according to Barrie, he became intermittently hostile after she turned 13. Matters reached a head when Leah Chase and a quartet of private detectives discovered her husband and 23-year-old divorced daughter Patricia cohabitating in an apartment on Foun tain Avenue rented by Chase.
Barrie would not discuss the precise circumstances causing her parents’ divorce, except to say, “I held my father responsible for what he did and decided to sever all ties with him. My mother was in bad shape and needed me, so I stayed with her.”
It ended up in court with 16-year-old Barrie testifying why she believed financial support was necessary for her dancing lessons. As Chase mulishly refused to support his wife and Barrie, Leah Chase filed an affadavit with the court attesting to the relationship between Chase and his stepdaughter by naming Patricia as a co-respondent in the divorce action. After the scandal broke above the fold in the June 24, 1949. edition of the Los Angeles Times, Borden Chase’s acrimony towards his wife and youngest daughter turned malevolent.
Universal-International.
According to Barrie, “After she went public, he threatened both our lives. One day we drove down the hill from the house and the car wouldn’t brake. Mother had to turn into the sidewall and scrape up the car to stop. A mechanic inspected the brakes and found they had been disconnected. Another time, I was going to jump into the pool and Mother shrieked at me to stop. There was a live power line in the water. My mother went out and got a gun permit.”
According to a newspaper squib, her gun permit application was denied but she apparently succeeded in getting her husband’s gun permit, obtained as a member of the L.A. Sheriff’s auxiliary, revoked. Leah Chase eventually amended the divorce complaint and dropped mention of Patricia. She was awarded a divorce by default and the case was settled out of court. A July 26, 1949, Associated Press report stated, Leah Fowler “will receive their $100,000 home, two grand pianos, a Cadillac and $100 a week in support. The couple’s 15 year-old daughter Barrie will receive an $8000 saddle horse and $50 a week in support.”
According to Barrie, her father refused to make his required support payments. “My mother and I had to move to an apartment in Hollywood, and I went to work when I was 16,” Barrie said.
She worked as an extra, while her father’s career boomed with a series of hit Westerns at Universal lnternational. A chance encounter occurred when she received a call to report to Universal as an extra for a shoot in the middle of the night. “I discovered the movie being shot was Bend of the River.”
After seeing her father and brother on set, Barrie attempted to avoid them, but they spotted her. “My brother came up to me – I loved my brother – and said my father wanted to talk to me. He couldn’t even ask me himself, so he sent my brother. I said, ‘I don’t talk to him.’ Frank replied, ‘Come on, he’s your father.'”
Barrie walked over to her father’s Cadillac and sat next to him. “He said to me, ‘Little girl, what’s your name?” I looked at him and replied, ‘If you don’t know my name, neither do I.” Barrie left and didn’t speak to her father for nearly a decade.
During the 1950s, Borden Chase was a top Hollywood screenwriter. In addition to his big screen oaters, he penned the boxing pie Iron Man (1951), His Majesty O’Keefe starring Burt Lancaster and The World in his Arms with Gregory Peck. He wrote for television: Tales of Wells Fargo, Overland Trail and General Electn·c Theater among other programs. “His success drove my mother crazy,” remembered Barrie. Leah Chase went back to court not only to seek an increase in her court-ordered support but also to press her ex-husband for payment of $19,829 owed in back alimony. Chase reportedly contended he was wiped out when he de clared bankruptcy and seemingly always had a ready excuse concerning a lack of money for his support payments.
When Leah initially sued for divorce, he claimed that he spent $32,000 of his $50,000 payment for Red River on a swimming pool for the Encino house and only had $43 in the bank. He again claimed poverty while announcing his pending marriage to Patricia on August 15, 1953, saying in a news interview, “My wife almost ruined me in the picture business with her insinuations. I couldn’t say how it came to the point where we decided to get married, but it all started after my wife made those charges. After being slapped around like that we started to look at each other. Four years passed and that’s the story. The fact that we were accused really started it.”
Leah Chase’s original 1949 affidavit reportedly included sworn statements by detectives who found Chase and his stepdaughter in the Fountain Street apartment “entirely naked and unclothed” along with photographs and tape recorded conversations of the pair. While Chase pleaded poverty, he was listed as a principal in a quarter-horse race track project in Palm Springs.
In 1954, Chase announced that Patricia was expecting, and he was building a home on Mulholland Drive with an additional room for the new baby.
Barrie Chase appeared as a dancer with bit parts in Scaramouche, Hans Christian Anderson, Road to Bali, Deep in my Heart, and Kismet, among other films. Director Michael Curtiz spotted her on a Paramount sound stage, casting her in White Christmas (1954) for an uncredited, but memorable role as “Doris Lenz.” Curtiz used her again as a chorine in The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956).
But it was her work with choreographer Jack Cole at MGM and an appearance in Silk Stockings (1957) that brought her to the attention of Fred Astaire. Barrie’s appearance as Astaire’s dance partner in the TV special An Evening with Fred Astaire elevated her to national prominence and prompted a phone call from her father.
“He told me the strangest thing after the Astaire special,” Barrie recalled. “He called me – he loved Fred and Ginger and wanted to meet Fred. My father said, ‘You have left a bigger mark than your old man. Your name will be remembered more than mine.”‘
Her father’s supposition was prescient. Barrie’s instruction from actor-teacher Jeff Corey resulted in several memorable film credits including Cape Fear (1962), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).
Chase’s ability to create stories continued to be tapped. He worked harmoniously with Marlon Brando on an un credited rewrite of the troubled Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), conceived and wrote the pilot for the Daniel Boone show in 1964 and penned an episode for The Virginian that spawned Laredo, another episodic TV Western. A Man Called Gannon (1968) was his final feature film. Although he imbibed steadily, (Chase had a Scotch cocktail named after him), the booze didn’t initially compromise his work or health. But Chase and Patricia continued to drink heavily and there was a 1957 newspaper report of a severe illness causing him to drop 20 pounds.
He suffered a series of strokes in 1970 with a massive at tack in December landing him in the hospital.
Barrie remembered: “I got a call from my brother tell ing me that if I wanted see him, I should go now because he wasn’t going to pull through.” She initially hesitated but thought better of it and went anyway. “When I tried to enter his hospital room, there was my sister trying to keep me out by blocking the doorway. I hit her with my arm and moved her out of the way.”
Nurses came running and told Barrie she couldn’t go in. “I told them, ‘The hell I can’t! I’m his daughter.'”
Chase was lying in bed partially paralyzed. “He had to talk out of one side of his mouth asking me, ‘Why are you here?” I said, “Because of you. You’re my dad.”
Chase looked away, replying “I’m just a dirty old bum.”
Borden Chase died at home on March 9, 1971. His wife Patricia followed him three years later at the age of 48. They are buried together at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Widowed after a long, successful marriage, Barrie Chase believes she overcame the trauma of her father’s betrayal because “I have a very black and white personality – things are either right or wrong, I don’t do the grays very well.”
It was a trait that didn’t apply to her father. Despite his unseemly behavior (it is suggested by Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye that Chase might have inspired the fictional pariah Noah Cross in l974’s Chinatown), Borden Chase experienced long-term success by creating memorable Western cinema in Hollywood, a locale where real-life happy endings are often elusive.
Editor’s Collection.
