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Becoming Raoul Walsh 6 There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another. . . . —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn When Albert Edward Walsh was born on March 11, 1887, in New York City, the moving-picture business was little more than a flicker in the country’s collective consciousness. George Eastman would not produce or market celluloid film for another year, and the earliest known film on record, W. K. L. Dickson’s Fred Ott’s Sneeze, was still four years away. So was Thomas Edison’s move to file patents for the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, neither of which would be displayed until the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. By the time the first nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh in 1905, Walsh would be eighteen years old, having left home for the adventures he so craved—the fantasies movies are made of. Yet the stories that the soon-to-be renamed “Raoul” Walsh would write and direct were already taking shape around him. In New York City, the Bowery that he later put on film was already a sprawling tenement full of lower-class concert halls, brothels, and flophouses, an area Walsh soon relished as a childhood hangout. The ships and schooners that he spent hours sniffing out as a kid and that billowed into huge proportions in his films Captain Horatio Hornblower and Blackbeard the Pirate already stirred his imagination—there they were, docked at New York’s Peck’s Slip, a romantic neck of the city that Walsh and his younger brother, George, loitered in regularly. Even the gangs on the Lower East Side were taking over Hell’s Kitchen and adjacent neighborhoods that Walsh later re-created on the “New York” streets of Warner Bros. for The Roaring Twenties, his Cagney-Bogart gangster picture. 1 Becoming Raoul Walsh 7 Out West, mythic heroes had already made a place for themselves somewhere in Walsh’s imagination. Just seven years before his birth, Wyatt Earp, whom Walsh later claimed to have met on a Hollywood back lot, had just joined his brothers at the OK Corral and gunned down the Clanton boys. Buffalo Bill Cody, whom Walsh said used to stop by his family’s brownstone when he was a kid to sample his father’s fine wines, had just set up his first traveling show in 1883. Sitting Bull had surrendered his rifle to General Alfred Terry, who five years earlier had directed the campaign that ended in the Lakota chief’s victory over General George Custer at Little Big Horn—a battle no one would reimagine as romantically as Walsh did when he later directed They Died with Their Boots On at Warner Bros. studios. Fiction and myth followed Walsh so closely throughout his life that it almost seemed as if he’d forged himself from them. If he was not creating a story for the big screen, he was creating one for his own life—a way to explain himself to himself and to others so as to weave his life inexplicably into legend. The line between what was fiction and what was fact would always be blurred in his imagination; he would be the last one to find a distinction between them. Speaking to reporters and to his myriad of film-buff followers, Walsh loved to tell a good story; no one ever knew whether it was truth or embellishment. Although it was well-known that he was raised in New York City, Walsh thought nothing of changing that story for dramatic effect. Sometimes he was born in Montana, at other times in Texas. Even better than the “stretchers” that escaped the lips of Huck Finn—in a novel published, serendipitously, just two years before Walsh’s birth—Walsh’s stories could be taller and wider. No one loved a stretcher more than he did. “I’m not a Mortimer,” Cary Grant yelps to a cabbie at the end of Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace, “I’m the son of a sea captain!” “I’m not a cab driver,” the cabbie yelps back, “I’m a coffeepot!” Walsh could have easily joined the choir, himself yelping, “I’m not just the son of a man named Thomas Walsh of New York City; I’m a fiction of my own making, and I’ve slipped off the page, off the screen, and into the public eye...

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