George Stevens Jr. - My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington

Copyright 2022 by George Stevens, Jr.

Published by the University Press of Kentucky, scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Spalding University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stevens, George, Jr., 1932 author.

Title: My place in the sun : life in the golden age of Hollywood and Washington / George Stevens, Jr.

Description: Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, [2022] | Series: Screen classics | Includes indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021062358 | ISBN 9780813195247 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813195414 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813195254 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Stevens, George, Jr., 1932 | Stevens, George, Jr., 1932Family. | Stevens, George, 19041975Family. | Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. | American Film InstituteHistory. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. | Biographies.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.S739 A3 2022 | DDC 791.4302/330922 [B]dc23/eng/20220112

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062358

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of University Presses

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes excerpt courtesy Penguin Random House LLC and Harold Ober Associates.

The Times They Are a-Changin excerpt courtesy Universal Music Publishing Group, Bob Dylan.

For George Stevens and Michael Stevens.

Men of creativity and decency. I was blessed to have my journey nourished first by my father, then by my elder son, savoring their humor and courage.

Landers Stevens theatrical company performing Lead, Kindly Light in San Francisco, circa 1914. Landers, left in white hat, his wife Georgie Cooper, center. George Stevens, Sr., age ten, kneeling far left. Jack Stevens, age eleven, holding newspapers, right.

A fog-shrouded September night in 1900.

Landers Stevens was the last to leave the Dewey Theater on Twelfth Street in Oakland, the town of his birth. He secured the doors, packed the receipts in his pouch, and bid the watchman goodnight. Landers was just twenty-four but the playbill from the day lists him as Proprietor and Manager of the Dewey, where he directed the plays and was the companys leading man. Tall and square-jawed, always carefully dressed, he set off briskly down Broadway to catch the last ferry across the bay to San Francisco.

When he turned onto Fourteenth Street two toughs sprang from the darkness and tackled him. As the San Francisco Call reported the next day, One of the robbers struck him a powerful blow on the face at the point of the jaw, staggering Landers and nearly knocking him insensible. He gathered himself, threw off one of the men, managed to draw his pistol, and beat down the assailant with a half-dozen blows on the face with the clubbed weapon. Nursing a severely cut hand and a swollen jaw, Landers told the Call reporter that it was the hardest battle he ever fought. While I was fighting the man whom I captured, the first man recovered and ran. I didnt want to take a chance of killing him so I did not fire.

John Landers Stevens was my grandfather. He was the younger son of James William and Hannah Laura Stevens. James came to San Francisco from Maryland in the 1850s with his parents and five brothers and sisters. He became a businessman and met Hannah Laura Thompson, who came west across the Sierras in a covered wagon from Liberty, Missouri, propelled by whatever dreams drove pioneers to make that grueling journey. James and Hannah Laura fell in love, were married, and fostered the Stevens family.

A few years after his encounter with the robbers, Landers sat in a darkened theater and watched an ingenue, a tall girl with fine features and a lilting soprano, perform in an operetta. He waited at the stage door and introduced himself to Georgie Cooper, undertook a courtship, and asked her to marry hima proposal that proved pivotal to my own existence.

Landers Stevens at age twenty-two on the stage of Moroscos Grand Opera House in San Francisco, 1898.

I knew Landers as an older man, with lines of silver showing through his black hair, living in a small house in Glendale where I would sleep on the living room sofa. He and my grandmother Georgie were then in their sixties and there were few signs of a glamorous past. But my mother, who became our familys informal archivist, left me a copy of their wedding license along with a note in her handwriting.

Landers was married to Fannie Gillette (sister of Gillette Razor) and she got a divorce so he could marry Georgie. They drove all night from San Francisco to San Jose after the showwere married at 9:05 a.m. and drove back to S.F. to do the show that night.

A yellowed clipping from a San Jose newspaper, dated April 20, 1903, supports my mothers account:

John Landers Stevens, the actor, who was divorced in San Francisco yesterday, was remarried in this city today by City Justice Davidson to Miss Georgie Cooper, the soubrette at the Central Theater. Thomas McGoeghegan, city treasurer, was best man. The bride was attended by her maid. Eighteen year old Georgie is a second generation actress whose mother, Georgia Woodthorpe, is an audience favorite on San Francisco stages.

It was Georgia Woodthorpe, my great-grandmother, who launched five generations (and counting) of Stevens family participation in the entertainment world. She was born in San Francisco in 1859, when the Gold Rush town was becoming a cosmopolitan city. Her father loved amateur theatricals, and one afternoon J. B. McCullough, a noted impresario and one of the leading tragedians of the American stage, heard five-year-old Georgia recite an impromptu entertainment in the basement of the Actors Club. He persuaded her parents to let her join his company and she made her debut as young Prince Arthur in Shakespeares