A Digger goes to Hollywood
Dr Jeff Brownrigg
When my Anzac Cove to Hollywood was published in 2010 (Anchor Books Australia, Sydney), one reviewer questioned the accuracy of the book’s title. He argued that Tom Skeyhill, the blind Gallipoli veteran (who was never actually blind), had not been to Hollywood and that the book should therefore be called Hamilton to Hyannis Port. In fact, Tom had many friends in Hollywood, including his de facto partner Marie Adeles, the mother of his only child, Joyce. Both Anzac Cove and Hollywood were crucial for an understanding of what the book was about.
Tom pretended to be blind for three years. He was successful with the ruse on the Gallipoli Peninsula, claiming he had been blinded by a shell explosion on 8 May 1915, and admitted to hospitals at Alexandria on 12 May. He returned to Australia, arriving in Melbourne on the transport ship Beltana on 10 October, 1915. His deception was discovered a couple of times between 1915 and 1918 but observer’s suspicions were never serious enough to expose his scheme; never obvious enough to raise a confident challenge. In fact, there is some chance that the Army recruitment people turned a blind eye (so to speak), especially Major-General J W McCay, but that is a longer story. McCay was used, with more than a little hypocrisy perhaps, to find volunteers to be sent off to the war in Europe and the Middle East. And he was aided and abetted by several others whose supposed wounds from battle can be shown to have been bogus.
In 1917, after Tom headed across the Pacific, still feigning blindness, but becoming part of the emerging war effort in the USA. It was there in 1919 that he first met Sergeant York, who was on his way home from the war in Europe. He also met Jesse Lasky, of the company, Famous Players-Lasky, at that time based in New York, but already a part of Paramount Pictures. Tom largely wrote the War Diaries of Sergeant Alvin C York. These diaries became the basis of the 1941 film Sergeant York, in which Garry Cooper, the hero of the film’s title, won his first Oscar. Tom did not live to see Cooper receive his award. Tom died in 1931 after his plane crashed near Hyannis Port, where he had a summer house. But that too is another story. So, Tom was certainly connected to Hollywood through his family and friends, and also, posthumously, via his ‘editing’ of York’s war diaries. But he had been associated with filmmaking there, twenty-odd years before that.
Another Australian - whose career remains a mystery - was Robert Carnie. Carnie was a member of Lasky’s troupe and was later a mover and shaker in Hollywood. When Tom published his 1930 children’s book Sergeant York: Last of the Long Hunters, he sent a copy to Carnie who was then on tour and appearing in Detroit. (The book has been in print since 1930.) Lasky and his brother-in-law Samual Goldfish (who wisely changed his name to ‘Goldwyn’, becoming the G in MGM) together with Cecil B DeMille, had established Lasky’s vaudeville/film making company circa 1912. These last two went on to stellar careers in cinema. However, Marc Wanamaker writes in Early Paramount Studios, 2013), that Lasky and De Mille were ‘largely responsible for creating the film industry in Southern California’. I have yet to unravel Robert Carnie’s place in all of this. He is part of the work in progress.
In the late 1920’s Tom courted actress Marie Adeles at Jessie Bonstelle’s theatre in Detroit. Adeles went on to have a minor career in Hollywood, where Tom’s daughter Joyce, grew up. (It was Adeles who arranged for Tom’s library to be returned from California to the Mechanic’s Institute in Hamilton, Victoria in 1922. In the later 1920s Tom had nursed the desire to establish the National Library of Australia there. Tom would, he imagined, annotate all his books before they became a part of this great library. One shipment arrived in Hamilton where, ultimately, its interest and significance were not understood. As a result, the library was dispersed and then, it seems, largely destroyed. (That too is another story.) A second shipment of hundreds of books sat forlornly with a California lawyer before it, too, vanished for want of support from Australia to bring that part of Tom’s library to add to the volumes already in Hamilton’s Mechanic’s Institute.
All of this research is a work in progress, of course. My first book put Tom Skeyhill’s name and career ‘on the map’ for Australians, I hope. But Tom was also closely associated with Hollywood in its early years (1919 to 1931, and posthumously after 1941 when the Sergeant York film was released) and more than this, he retained contact with people such as Robert Carnie. Carnie worked for Lasky, who was in turn, ‘largely responsible for creating the film industry in Southern California’. United Artists, founded by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, grew out of companies such as Famous Players-Pickford and Famous Player-Lasky. It is very convoluted story of rapidly changing companies. How many other Australians might be found in the emerging Hollywood cinema ‘empires’?
I don’t think Hamilton to Hyannis Port would have alerted possible readers to what the book was actually about. Discovering lost careers and unknown characters in Australia’s forgotten history is facilitated by people taking an interest in research such as that sketched in this brief article. Perhaps somebody knows more about Robert Carnie in the USA? Perhaps there is an archive of Lasky material and even a stack of Tom Skeyhill’s books gathering dust in a California warehouse?
That sort of investigation and discovery after all, was one important focus at the NFSA Owls inception. We hoped that we might extend existing knowledge and fearlessly improve an understanding of the cultural activities that formed a part of the complex history of Australians making films and sound recordings, anywhere.
Jeff Brownrigg 2024
Paramount logo from circa 1912
Tom dedication of his kids book to Robert Carnie
Tom Skeyhill’s book for kids. ‘Long hunters’ were those, like Davy Crockett, who hunted with a musket. York was from and in that tradition and a noted sharpshooter.
Frontispiece for Last of the Long Hunters.
The book remains popular with people who ‘home-educate’ their children