The life of Rondo Hatton

[The Phantom Creep]

Here is a wonderful article about the life of Rondo Hatton that I thought you might all enjoy. I've always found it rather difficult to find much info on Hatton so I was very pleased to find this.

This comes from the following website which has more good articles about the lives of some other great horror / sci-fi actors. They are under the Unsung Heroes section.

http://www.barrybrown.info/main.html




   

Rondo Hatton

1894-1946

By Barry Brown




"This is not what I was told it was to be; I'd been promised a feast of fools with an election of a pope. We at Ghent, too, have our fools' pope; and in that, Croix-Dieu! we're behind nobody. But we do thus: a mob gets together, as here for instance; then each in his turn goes and puts his head through a hole and makes faces at the others; he that makes the ugliest face is chosen pope." So said the vulgar hosier, Master Jacques Coppenole, in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, preferring a grotesque exhibition to the refinements of a theatrical piece. The crowd gathered for the Festival of Fools blared its approval and, of course, the hunchback Quasimodo was chosen pope.

For several years in the Forties, Hollywood exhibited its own Quasimodo, a disfigured war veteran named Rondo Hatton. The crowds thrilled to this human monstrosity, the first freak to be elevated to the status of film star, knowing little or nothing of the man beneath. In the thirty years since his death, he has remained an enigma, though his story is one of the most poignant and heroic film history has to offer.

Hatton was born April 29, 1894 in Hagerstown, Maryland in the infirmary of a girls' college of which his father, Stewart Price Hatton, was president. He was the only child of Stewart and his wife, the former Emily Lee Zaring. Rondo has a pleasantly normal boyhood. His family moved to Hillsborough County, Florida when he was in his teens and it was there he attended high school. He was a good student and popular on campus. Not once, but twice, he was voted handsomest boy in his class. Rondo went on to matriculate at the University of Florida, where he was also able to attend to his great passion, football. Though he weighed but 136 pounds, he became captain of the University team and was chosen quarterback of the 1913 All Star Southern Eleven. His life up to now, in other words, was so happy as to be envied by most young men. But in the next few years that life would be transformed into a reality that, for actual horror, might challenge any nightmare.

Hatton enlisted in the Army when World War One broke out and was gassed in 1918 while fighting on the Western front. It was later to be assumed that this gassing, tampering as it did with the internal chemistry of his body, triggered within the young soldier one of the rarest diseases known to afflict man: acromegaly.

Acromegaly is a chronic nervous disease characterized by an enlargement of the head, feet, hands and sometimes the chest extremities due to an increased secretion of growth hormones through a malfunction of the pituitary gland. It is to be distinguished from gigantism, which is the enlargement of the skeleton as a whole. Acromegaly is selective in its distortion.

While Hatton was recovering from his battle experience in an Army hospital, the disease began to show itself. His face bones began to rapidly grow until they were nearly double their normal size and his weight shot up to 204 pounds, much of the gain being in extra bone and cartilage that deformed not only his face, but his feet, his back and his hands.

Operation followed operation. In one series of such, his cheekbones were removed and replaced by metal. His lower jaw grew out so far that his lower teeth extended over an inch beyond his upper. Several more operations and four sets of teeth were required before he could chew again. For not so short a period of time he was blind and as he himself later described it, the pain in his bones was like a migraine headache all over his body. Most of these ailments were eventually corrected or, at the least, alleviated, but nothing could be done to restore his former appearance and the physical pain he'd borne was negligible in comparison with the emotional and psychological agony he had now to face.

In an article written by Erma Taylor in the July, 1946 issue of Pageant, Hatton is quoted as saying: "Facing the people you know, seeing the shock and pity and horror...that's tougher than anything that ever happened at the front. To any casualty, the hardest part of war is coming home."


When Rondo came marching home again, there were no hurrahs. Neither his former girlfriends or, sadly, his own parents recognized him, though he quickly became well-known to the children who taunted him with cries of 'Hey, monster man!' when he walked the streets. The depth of his experience can only be imagined; the gloom must have been nearly unbearable. Yet Hatton, however he did, managed to pull through.

As he himself explained: "Finally you get to where your only impulse is to hide, run away, stay out of sight in hospitals, forever! However, you can't stand yourself for long, running away. It's the sympathy that gets you, most of all the self-sympathy. It's an insidious poison that gets into your soul, as this thing I've got gets into your bones. In a veterans' hospital you see so many guys so much worse off than you are that – well, if there's anything left in you, you quit feeling sorry for yourself."

With this stoic attitude, Hatton pulled himself out of a spiritual purgatory. He made an attempt to establish himself in the vocation he'd dreamed of before the war, a football coach, but found the physical exertion formidable and had to give it up. Then he got the idea that since his new countenance made him self-conscious and afraid of meeting new people, he'd combat these feelings by becoming a newspaper reporter. Landing a job on a Tampa, Florida daily, Hatton attacked his new profession with zeal, forcing himself into the mainstream of life once again. Within a short time, he became sports editor of the firm.

It was while working an early assignment as a reporter in 1929 that Hatton met actor-turned-director Henry King who, years later was instrumental in helping Hatton begin a film career of his own. King was filming some location scenes at Rocky Point, near Tampa, for his movie Hell Harbor, a drama set in the Caribbean and starring Lupe Velez, Jean Hersholt and Gibson Gowland, the burly character actor from Von Stroheim's Greed. Hatton was sent to cover the filming for his paper and this led to his playing the small part of the eyepatch-wearing proprietor of a dive where Hersholt witnesses Gowland killing a stranger. Hersholt then makes a deal with Gowland: he'll keep quiet if Gowland will give him his daughter (Velez) in marriage. The villains are later vanquished when Velez appeals to her lover (John Holland).

Director King, impressed with Hatton's unusual appearance, tried to persuade him to go to Hollywood, as he was sure a lucrative career existed for him there, but Hatton was sceptical and politely declined.

Another of Hatton's assignments as a reporter ended with him meeting the woman who was to be his wife. Mabel 'May' Bush was the pretty blonde dress-maker for the hostess of a masquerade ball Rondo had been assigned to cover. She had been working non-stop for many hours in order to have the dress ready and was finally relaxing on a stairway when the ugly reporter saw her and struck up a conversation. Mabel had been married before, reputedly to a very handsome man. She'd learned you can't tell a book by its cover and was impressed with Rondo's strong character and personal gentleness. They were married not long after (circa 1935).

The following year, a siege with arthritis (another concomitant of acromegaly) left Rondo, for a time, unable even to walk and necessitated another long stay in a veterans' hospital*

*Of the last twenty-eight years of his life, ten were spent in infirmaries from Connecticut to California.

Upon his release, he was not only advised by his physicians to move to a drier climate, he also found himself out of a job. Remembering the enthusiasm of Henry King regarding his chances in films, Hatton wrote the director asking if the move might still be a palatable proposition. Receiving an affirmative reply from King, Rondo and Mabel made the move.

Though at least one source claims to have spotted Hatton in the 1936 serial The Black Coin, several newspaper and magazine sources indicate Hatton's arrival in southern California was in the spring of 1937. His first screen work following his emigration was in King's large Fox project, In Old Chicago, starring Tyrone Power and Alice Faye in a role originally intended for the late Jean Harlow. Hatton received billing as a bodyguard to the mayor of Chicago and wore a pearl gray derby, a loud, checkered suit and a large diamond horseshoe stickpin, At the film's climax, he is crushed in the collapse of a building.

Back in Tampa, Rondo was the local celebrity. Featured articles were headed 'Rondo Hatton Makes Hollywood Debut in Henry King's Movie', 'Tampan Listed in Program of New Film Hit: Rondo Hatton on Way to Movie Fame.' A Tampa Tribune writer, Bill Abbott, conducted a special telephone interview with the city's new 'star', in which Hatton was purported to have told him: "I was out here and barely hanging on. The studio called late one afternoon and said Mr. King wanted me. I was 12 miles away, but I got there in record time on a bus with three transfers.

"Bob Webb – another prince and the assistant director – told me right off he had a job for me and sent me up to get the monkey suit I wear. They looked me over and told me to come back the next morning.

"Boy, that was a swell feeling. I was a country yokel, but I got used to things, and everybody was swell. They played some tricks, like putting the 'hot foot' on you, but we had a great time."*

*March 14, 1938 Tampa Tribune

In the next five years, Hatton eeked out a living in bit parts and as an extra, supplementing his income with a job as a reporter on the Inglewood Daily News, a suburban sheet. The Pageant article claims he appeared in twenty-three films in his five three years in Hollywood, not difficult to believe when one takes into account that much of his work was as a day-player, but assertions that all totaled he had over one hundred films to his credit seem a bit far-fetched. Before he began his ascendancy to film notoriety, he received billing in only one other movie besides In Old Chicago. That movie was William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), in which Hatton is one of the lynch mob. Among his other credits are Henry King's Alexander's Ragtime Band and Chad Hanna; Captain Fury, for which casting director Joe Collum chose Rondo to play an Australian convict after seeing him in In Old Chicago; and, of course, as one of the freaks who vies for the ugliest-face prize in the Charles Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

It wasn't until 1944, when Hatton grabbed the role of the Creeper, the half-witted murderer-assistant of jewel thief Giles Conover (Miles Mander) in Pearl of Death, with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, that his career caught fire.

Pearl of Death concerned Holmes' search for a valuable jewel known as the Borgia pearl. It is known the pearl is hidden inside one of six identical plaster busts of Napoleon that have been distributed across London. When the separate owners are, one by one, found murdered, their backs broken, suspicions are, at the least, aroused.

Though he'd been seen before in small roles, at last Rondo had a featured one that, for the first time, paired his misshapen face with a character whose mental makeup, unlike Hatton's was deformed. The result worked a chemistry among film audiences that was elementary in concept but profound in impact. What might have been a conventional, if impressive, fright-mask had it been devised with makeup was made truly horrible by the realization that this 'monster' was real. One exhibitor, after showing a Hatton film for a week, wrote to the Motion Picture Herald: "...his ape-like appearance on the screen brings a gasp from the audience." Other comments, equally distasteful, included this one from a Variety critic: "Hatton's facial features .... run a close second to those of Frankenstein's monster." Rondo even made Ripley's Believe It or Not column.

However uncouth was Hatton's appeal, his performance (or, more precisely, appearance in Pearl of Death) was an unqualified triumph for his career. Those ingenuous mercenaries at Universal, noting the tremendous popular response to the ugly fellow, signed him to a seven-year contract and in the next eight months he worked in four pictures nearly back to back, though in the first three he yielded center stage to more professional actors.

Jungle Captive, a 1945 release, was a sequel to Captive Wild Woman, made two years earlier, in which scientist John Carradine had changed a gorilla into a woman. In Jungle Captive, Otto Kruger revived the ape woman from the dead with the assistance of his servant Moloch, played by Hatton.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back kept Hatton safely tucked away as Spider Woman Gale Sondergaard's deaf-mute servant Mario. In this sequel to a 1944 release, Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, Sondergaard played a woman who cultivates exotic plants that feed on the blood of young women; thus, her frequent advertisements for 'companions to a blind woman'. Delicious Brenda Joyce (later a screen Jane in four Tarzan pictures) narrowly averts becoming the entrée.

House of Horrors , the second of the three 'Creeper' films, featured Rondo as a dimwitted murderer rescued from drowning by a demented surrealist sculptor (effectively play by Martin Kosleck). The artist proceeds not only to use Hatton's remarkable physiognomy for the model of a bust, but employs the large fellow to murder the critics who have castigated his work. Unfortunately, the movie critics eluded Hatton's grasp and lived to testify quite severely against the film.

Finally, in The Brute Man, Hatton was the main character, the title role, and the story was painfully close to his own. As the result of a laboratory explosion, a young, handsome scientist is horribly disfigured and turns into a maniacal killer when his former sweetheart rejects him. Here, finally, was the opportunity to elicit an interesting performance from Hatton. But with the pedestrian direction of the late B-movie director Jean Yarbrough and an uninspired script by George Bricker and M. Coates Webster, the film emerges as an insensitive, cursory use of Hatton's deformities, with little regard for the accompanying pain of the character's situation. Of course, it remains moot whether Hatton could have, in fact, met any demands on his lethargic, inhibited style; at any rate, he walks through this role as he did all his others, an enigmatic, dull figure. It was his final performance.

Ironically and pathetically, the very 'mother' of Hatton's late-found success, his disease, was to contribute, at least indirectly, to his death, with the affliction of acromegaly, one's blood pressure is raised and a precarious heart condition is the result. Hatton had had recurrences of myocarditis, characterized by inflammation of the muscular walls of the heart, for some time. In October of 1945, after completing work on The Brute Man, he became ill and was confined to his home at 308 North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, where he lived with his wife and his mother. Emily Hatton had moved from Florida in 1938 to take up residence with her son and daughter-in-law at their then-home, 228 South Tower Drive, Beverly Hills.

Attended by his physician, Dr. H.W. Wagonseller, Hatton remained a semi-invalid for several months and on the morning of February 2, 1946, he suffered a fatal heart attack (coronary thrombosis). Funeral services were held in Los Angeles and the body sent to Tampa for burial under the auspices of the American Legion of War Veterans.

Of course, no newspaper obituaries remarked that 'The Creeper' had passed on, for Hatton had died before his last three films were released. Universal, prior to the release of The Brute Man, instituted a 'no more Bs' policy and sold the film to Producers' Releasing Corporation (PRC) for distribution. By the time it appeared, Hatton had been dead over six months and the modest fame he'd earned was awarded posthumously. Vulgar as its raison d'etre was, and as transitory as it would undoubtedly have proved, he might have enjoyed that fame.

But, in a way, Rondo Hatton had already given the lie to misfortune, which could have cheated him out of a lot more than it did had he succumbed to that self-pity he spoke of so acridly. There isn't much dispute over his thespic abilities; he wasn't a good actor, to put it kindly. But in a world where tragedy and misfortune is a constant, carping companion, Hatton was a hero, as uncommon as his features, as seemingly aloof to personal travail as he was sensitive to the pain of others.

In his last years in California, besides writing poetry, Rondo had another personal hobby. He spent a considerable amount of time visiting Sawtelle Veterans' Hospital in West Los Angeles, cheering up the men, saying to them as they lay on their beds, "Look at me, boys! You won't believe it, but I once won a beauty contest!". He did, too, in a way that his film roles never let on.

[The Drunken Severed Head]

And his likeness lives on in an award...

[The Phantom Creep]

One of the highest honors anyone could receive. Being the award that is. Although getting it is pretty good as well.