Jim Tully

American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler

Paul Bauer, Mark Dawidziak

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778907
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito storico

The first biography of the vagabond, hard-boiled writer who rocked Hollywood during the Roaring Twenties

The son of an Irish ditch-digger, Jim Tully (1886–1947) left his hometown of St. Marys, Ohio, in 1901, spending most of his teenage years in the company of hoboes. Drifting across the country as a "road kid, " he spent those years scrambling into boxcars, sleeping in hobo jungles, avoiding railroad cops, begging meals from back doors, and haunting public libraries. After six years on the road, he jumped off a railroad car in Kent, Ohio, with wild aspirations of becoming a writer. While chasing his dream, Tully worked as a chain maker, boxer, newspaper reporter, and tree surgeon. All the while he was crafting his memories of the road into a dark and astonishing chronicle of the American underclass.

After moving to Hollywood and working for Charlie Chaplin, Tully began to write a stream of critically acclaimed books mostly about his road years, including Beggars of Life, Circus Parade, Blood on the Moon, Shadows of Men, and Shanty Irish. He quickly established himself as a major American author and used his status to launch a parallel career as a Hollywood journalist. Much as his gritty books shocked the country, his magazine articles on movies shocked Hollywood. Along the way, he picked up such close friends as W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon, Lon Chaney, Frank Capra, and Erich von Stroheim. He also memorably crossed paths with Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Langston Hughes.

The definitive biography of a remarkable writer, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler compellingly describes the hardscrabble life of an Irish American storyteller, from his immigrant roots, rural upbringing, and life as a hobo riding the rails to the emergent dream factory of early and Golden Age Hollywood and the fall of his fortunes during the Great Depression.

Many saw the dark side of the American dream, but none wrote about it like Jim Tully.

1

Coins for a Dead Woman’s Eyes

In the cool of the western Ohio barroom, young Jim Tully sat with his father, also Jim, and his father’s father, Hugh. The men drank whiskey. The boy sipped beer. As the elder Jim drank silently, young Jim looked up from his glass and studied his grandfather’s face for a moment. It was a face that, by the closing years of the nineteenth century, had seen decades of hard work and hard drink. It was a face framed by a thick head of light gray hair and a beard beginning at his chin with a tuft of dark hair that quickly ran to gray as it followed his jawline back. In his dark moments, he looked like an Old Testament prophet. He had few dark moments. On the contrary, no one knew better than his young grandson that Old Hughie could be counted on for a good story, one full of drama, humor, and not a little blarney—and never more so than when a full bottle sat in front of him. Unless it was a half-full bottle. The tales grew taller as the whiskey grew shorter. “You must have had a lot of fun in Ireland when you were a kid,” young Jim remarked. Hughie’s response surprised young Jim. “There was niver any fun in Ireland, me lad—It was always a wailin’ and a weepin’ country. Hearts full of the great sadness and stomicks empty of food—fools prayin’ to God, and starvin’ on their knays…. There was niver nothin’ like the famine of ’46—an’ the boy here talks about a lot o’ fun.”¹

Old Hughie’s tale of his childhood, elegiac and angry, punctuated by the sound of glass and bottle on the wooden table, fills the opening chapter of Jim Tully’s autobiographical novel Shanty Irish. While Tully’s account of his grandfather’s days in Ireland is certainly more imagined than real, the dire conditions that Hugh Tully describes are certainly true.

The first reports came from the Isle of Wight in the cool, damp August of 1845.² Farmers were alarmed to find that the tops of their potato plants “had been transformed into a black, evil-smelling slime.”³ They saw, upon digging up the tuber, that it too was rotten or would rot quickly when removed from the soil. The collapse of the potato crop, staple of the Irish diet in the nineteenth century, would lead to famine and disease on a staggering scale and result in the deaths of a million-and-a-half people and the migration of another million, nearly all peasants.⁴

Amid the unfolding tragedy, life went on. Young men still courted young women, marriages were made, and families started. One such union took place in 1847 in the parish of Inverness,⁵ County Donegal, between twenty-three-year-old Hugh Tully and Catherine Byrn. The groom was the son of Andrew Tully and Margaret McGrorty, his bride, the daughter of Anna Gaitens and Charles Byrn. She was educated; he was not.⁶ Both families were from County Donegal, and according to family lore, “about half way between Mount Charles and Dunkenalia, all west of Donegal.”⁷ As there is no Dunkenalia, it is likely that the families were from the area between Dunkineely and Mountcharles on Ireland’s northwest coast. The newlyweds settled in the area and produced three babies over the next half-dozen years.

The young family’s financial position, tenuous from the start, strained with the addition of each hungry mouth. Like so many of his countrymen before him, Hugh Tully looked across the Atlantic for a better life and sailed to America, most likely in 1854. He left his wife and small children behind.⁸

Having survived the privations of the eight-week voyage, which almost certainly included overcrowded living quarters and primitive cooking and sanitary conditions, and often typhus, he landed, probably in New York or Boston.⁹ Unlike many of his countrymen, he did not settle in the bursting slums of either of these port cities. Instead, beginning in 1857, he spent the next three years traveling across the South, selling Irish linen and lace.¹⁰ If Hugh Tully thought he had seen the depths of human suffering in Ireland, he soon learned otherwise in the antebellum South. He watched as black slaves, stripped naked, were auctioned like livestock to the highest bidder.¹¹ It was a sight he would never forget.

One foray north of the Mason-Dixon line took Hugh Tully to Clinton County, Ohio, southeast of Dayton, where he took up farming.¹² He sent for Catherine in 1860, and together they worked the land. Their three children— James Dennis, Anna, and Maria—remained in Ireland in the care of aunts and uncles. With the death of her father, Catherine inherited twenty acres of land, which she sold to her brother, using some of the proceeds to bring the children to Ohio in 1864.¹³ The children were thirty-eight days, thirty-four of them at sea, in reaching their parents.¹⁴ The family kept the farm another two years before one last move, north to St. Marys, a town of about 1,500 people located in Auglaize County.

The town of St. Marys, Ohio, not yet fifty in 1866, had grown from a Shawnee village and trading post alongside the St. Marys River to a shipping and milling center for corn, lumber, and wheat.¹⁵ Three developments spurred this growth. The first was the expulsion, by treaty, of the Indians in 1831. As one local historian dryly noted, “At last, we secured every foot of their land and sent them into the far west.”¹⁶ The second factor in St. Marys’s growth was the completion in 1845 of the Miami and Erie Canal and the creation of the St. Marys Reservoir, which supplied the canal with water. Finally, the sodden land began to drain. The digging of ditches in the fertile but flat muck had been undertaken by the early pioneers and farmers with mixed success. The ditch that drained one farmer’s land often flooded his neighbor’s. Such disorganized and chaotic attempts led to the enactment of ditch laws, with the first government ditch in Auglaize County being dug in 1868. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than a million feet of ditches would be dug at a cost of more than $200,000.¹⁷

The arrival of the Tullys in Auglaize County coincided with these organized efforts to drain the land. Indeed, it might be said that the history of the Tully family in Auglaize County is largely writ in mud. First Hugh Tully and, when he was old enough to operate a shovel, his son, Jim, dug ditches. Hugh Tully was said to be able to dig a ditch a mile long across a meadow and keep his line within a foot of true.¹⁸ As his son, Jim, recalled, “It was all woods, no gravel roads anywhere not even in St. Marys…. My boyhood was spent in the country clearing land and ditching. We had to build roads and clear them. We used to use poles called corduroy and put them across the roads and cover them with dirt. We had to do that in summers or we couldn’t get out at all in the spring.”¹⁹

The first school did not open in Hugh and Catherine Tully’s part of the county until their son was eighteen. It was open for two months in the summer and three months in the winter, bypassing the spring planting and fall harvest. Jim’s attendance was limited to winter days when no work was possible.²⁰ By the time he was twenty-one, he had saved enough money to move to Wisconsin, where he took a job as a railroad brakeman on the run between Racine and Savannah, Georgia. Homesick, he returned to Ohio after a year. He married Bridget Lawler, eighteen years old and the daughter of Irish immigrants, in February of 1875.²¹

The Lawlers had come from County Kildare, close to the rolling greensward of the Curragh, Ireland’s pastoral horse country.²² Family lore has it that when Thomas Lawler sailed for America in 1852, he too left his wife and small children behind.²³ His wife joined him three years later, but their three children remained in the care of relatives in Ireland. Two of the children later started the voyage to America but died aboard ship. The oldest child, John, stayed behind.

Her full name was Maria Bridget Lawler, but to her family she was simply Biddy. Born in Butler County, Ohio, in 1856, a year after her brother Dennis, she was soon joined by younger brothers Tom, Jim, and Pete, and a baby sister, Maud or Moll.²⁴ The Lawlers moved to Preble County, Ohio, where they were eventually joined by seventeen-year-old John.²⁵ Biddy Lawler’s childhood was hard and short. A week before her twelfth birthday, Biddy had to quit school and work at fifty cents a week as a house servant for “an old doctor woman.”²⁶ She worked there for a year before moving to the home of a couple of schoolteachers, doubling her salary.

When Biddy was fourteen, her mother, Margaret, took over a boarding-house near a short line and, together, mother and daughter baked bread, pies, and cakes; prepared meals; and saw to the laundry of two- to four-dozen boarders, most of them laborers, but also a handful of small children.²⁷ Biddy’s father worked on a road crew. In less than two years, Biddy’s mother managed to save $1,500, enabling the Lawlers to move to Auglaize County, where they bought a 160-acre farm in 1872.²⁸

The farm would not remain intact for long. Since joining his family in America, John Lawler had worked on a farm and stayed out of trouble, but when he was twenty-two, a young woman came forward, pregnant with his child. She sued him and was awarded $300, which John got from his parents. He reconciled with the woman long enough to get the $300 back from her and flee to Illinois.

Passing from the simply immoral to the positively criminal was the work of but three years. When John Lawler determined that the coast was clear, he returned to Preble County. After a month in Ohio, he hit upon a nearly foolproof scheme. He stole an old team of horses and drove them back to Illinois, where he surreptitiously swapped them for a good team. He covered his tracks by burning the barn containing the old horses and returned to Preble County, where he sold the new team at the desired profit of 100 percent. Things came a cropper when the Illinois owner observed that the shoes on the charred horses in the ruins of his barn did not match the ones obtained from his blacksmith. Once again, John Lawler laid low for a while. When the heat had died down, he repeated the scheme in Preble County, leaving behind another burning barn filled with panicked horses. He returned to Auglaize County to sell the new team but this time was caught redhanded. While he awaited trial in Preble County, the Illinois authorities traced the first theft back to him but were forced to wait until the state of Ohio was through with him.²⁹

In her efforts to keep her oldest child from the penitentiary, Mrs. Lawler sold some of the farm acreage to raise money for John’s defense. The land was sacrificed in vain as, in 1878, John received a fifteen-year sentence. In a rare bit of good fortune for the Lawlers, the remaining property stayed in the family at Margaret’s death when the high bidder for the remaining eighty acres at a September 1892 auction was the wealthy German Axe family, whose daughter Sadie married Biddy’s brother Tom.³⁰

If life was hard for Biddy before her wedding, it scarcely improved after. The young couple’s first home was a few miles outside St. Marys, deep in the woods at the end of what was, for most of the year, a glutinous mud road. Jim had cleared a small plot, building a log cabin and stable.³¹ The location of the cabin proved to be a mistake, as the damp woods bred clouds of mosquitoes “as big as chickenhawks,” and the young couple suffered repeated bouts of malaria and yellow fever.³² After three years in the woods, they moved out, poorer than on their wedding day.

For the next two years, Jim dug ditches. His boss’s son recalled that Jim “was the best ditch digger in the country” and “had a great reputation of being able to lay tile in the spring or summer even when there was no water running to indicate the fall.”³³ Hoping to pull down a little more money, Jim tried his hand at farming for a year. The couple, now with two children, Hugh and Margar...