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A youthful John Kerr with Lauren Bacall
Actor John Kerr, who won a Tony Award for his role in the Elia Kazan stage production of “Tea and Sympathy,” died on Feb. 2.
He was 81 years old.
I first met Mr. Kerr 35 years ago, in 1978, when he was chairman of the Screen Actors' Guild Legacy Program. He asked me to work as associate producer on the pilots.
Initially, Charlton Heston, former President of the Screen Actors' Guild President Charlton Heston and President of the American Film Institute, was opposed to the idea of SAG producing the Legacy Series.
That is, until John had a lunch meeting with him and obtained Heston's approval of the project. It would be taped at the Film Institute with Heston acting as the interviewer.
Henry Fonda was chosen as the first subject, Eddie Albert the second, and Albert asked for Fernando Lamas to be the interviewer.
The pilots were a huge success with the Guild. Unfortunately, SAG went on strike in 1980 and the project went on hiatus for nine years.
In 1994, when I started taping interviews for “Culver City -The Reel Hollywood,” I produced a 90-minute interview with Kerrin which he shared highlights of his film and television career.
In his first film role, Kerr replaced James Dean in “The Cobweb,” produced by John Houseman and directed by Vincent Minnelli at MGM in 1955. The stellar cast was headlined by Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Graham, Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish and Oscar Levant.
This was also the first film role for Susan Strasberg. She played Kerr’s romantic interest. John confided that he was terrified during the production of the film. Eventually, he became good friends with Oscar Levant who was recovering from a heart attack and had not appeared on screen since his role in “An American in Paris.”
In 1956, John appeared in the film version of “Tea and Sympathy” at MGM. Kerr played a sensitive boy of 17 who was thought to be homosexual by his classmates and the Head Master of the Prep School. Deborah Kerr played the Head Master's wife who makes love to John to assure him of his masculinity.
John hated the tacked-on ending, which had him coming back to the prep school years later to find that the Head Master's wife had left her husband and was living alone in New York, filled with remorse over her actions.
John told me that the Hays Office, the almighty morals arbiter for Hollywood at the time, had ruled that one who committed adultery had to suffer. Therefore, the made-up ending, which was not in the original Tony Award-winning play.
Regrets? Oh, Yes
John expressed regret that his agent had talked him out of playing Gary Cooper's son in William Wyler's “The Friendly Persuasion.”
“If you take a supporting role in a film, you will be playing supporting roles for the rest of your career,” Kerr’s agent warned.
“Well,” John told me, “Tony Perkins played the role, and look at what a star he became!”
Instead, Kerr starred in “Gaby” with Leslie Caron, a remake of “Waterloo Bridge,” a 1940 film starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. The remake was not successful. However, Kerr remained friends with Caron for the rest of his life.
(To be continued)
Mr. Hawkins may be contacted at rjhculvercity@aol.com
