THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

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On April 18, 1964, publication of "The Answer Depends." The Saturday Evening Post. The Horse Knows the Way. John O'Hara's Hollywood.

A retired actor reminisces while watching old movies on television.

We don't see what they (the younger generation) see in those old movies. The news and sports and weather are finished, and the night's movie comes on. Sometime it is a picture I never heard of, sometime it is a picture in which I had the male lead...That was the year I had my first Dusenberg. That was the year I had my first Rolls.

Yes, I am momentarily uncomfortable when my grandson sees me as a gallant young subaltern - wearing too much lipstick and too much eye-shadow. Only too well do I know what he is thinking: his grandfather must have been a swish. His manners are just good enough to keep him from coming out and saying so, but he looks at me on the TV screen and then at me, there in my den, and in his mind are serious doubts of my virility. I, on the other hand, cannot banish those thoughts by revealing to him that at the time I was making MacKenzie of the Royal Rifles, his grandmother was sulking in our North Canon Drive mansion because I was away on location with Doris Arlington. I cannot  tell the boy that his grandmother had every good reason to sulk. I would not tell him that I very nearly did not go back to his grandmother, that Doris Arlington and I went from the High Sierras location to a cruise in a borrowed yacht that had nothing to do with the making of MacKenzie of the Royal Rifles. "My boy," I could but cannot say to him, "if Doris Arlington had been a better sailor, you would no be alive today, and neither would your father."