Clarence Brown, respected movie
director during Hollywood’s glamour’s heyday, had a different career as a very
young man. How much influence the
manufacturing city of Chicopee, Massachusetts, had upon his future choice of
career in during the short time he lived here is unknown and probably
negligible, but it is intriguing to observe how the fledging movie industry and
the fledgling auto industry ran a parallel, and interdependent, course.
Mr. Brown, before he ever knew
what movies were, was employed by the Stevens-Duryea auto manufacturer in
Chicopee.
Brown was born east of Chicopee
in the town of Clinton, Massachusetts, in 1890.
The turn of the 20th century fast approaching, a menagerie of
new innovations in science and art, and especially in new inventions, burst
forth in such a stream of imagination that many qualities of the next century
would find their prelude in this very decade. To narrow it down a little, both
automobiles and moving pictures had their impetus in this frenetic decade
called the Gay Nineties.
Both cars and movies have come to
mean a great deal to us, and certainly to Clarence Brown.
While Brown was a small child,
Frank and Charles Duryea were tinkering with their experimental
gasoline-powered horseless carriage, the prototype for which was supposedly
designed in their boardinghouse on Front Street in Chicopee. It didn’t take
long for the auto industry to be off and running. The Overman Wheel Company in
the section of town called Chicopee Falls was one of the country’s many new
automobile factories; they were producing cars as early as 1900.
The men who designed and produced
these marvelous machines were considered to be wizards of technology, dreamers,
and rugged individualists. Clarence Brown may have fit into this mold, for
surely he was a unique young man. Intelligent and gifted, he was allowed
special permission to attend the University of Tennessee when he was only 15
years old.
While he studied engineering
there, the threads of his future destiny were already forming for him thousands
of miles away. In 1907, while Brown was away at college, the Duryea firm back
in Chicopee contracted with the J. Stevens Arms plant in Chicopee Falls to
produce their cars.
Stevens Arms company, postcard, Image Museum website, public domain
The following year the first
movie theater in Chicopee opened. It was called the Gem, and it was located
around the corner from the Stevens plant on Main Street. Any connection between
these two newborn industries was unapparent at the time, and would even be to
Brown at first.
His father, Larkin Brown, had run
a cotton mill in Massachusetts, but when Clarence was a boy, the family moved
south where his father continued in cotton textile manufacturing. His father hoped that Clarence would go into
the family business, but after graduating with two degrees at only 19 years
old, the remarkable young man decided to follow his passion at the time—which was
the new automobile craze.
He first went to Illinois to work
at an automobile plant there, but soon came to Chicopee and the Duryea company
around 1910.
Industry in the manufacturing
town of Chicopee was diversified and booming at this time. Any number of
products were produced here then, from foodstuffs to bicycles to clothing.
Though we may think of the opportunities presented to the thousands of skilled
and unskilled laborers who came here for work as represented by the huge influx
of immigrants from Europe and Canada, Chicopee also became the proving ground
for any number of professionals and “bright young men” who began their careers
here. One of them was Clarence Brown.
The Stevens-Duryea 1905 model
While Brown was working at the
Stevens-Duryea auto plant, two more moving picture theaters opened up in the
city. It would be tantalizing to think that Brown’s future fame as a director
was born in a dark theater in Chicopee, but we’ll never know. Surely any
interest he might have discovered in the flickers was put to the back of his
mind, for about 1912 he left Chicopee.
1912 advertisement
Brown is quoted in Kevin Brownlow’s
The Parade’s Gone By…, “I became the
traveling expert mechanic for Stevens-Duryea.
One of my calls was to a dealer in Birmingham, Alabama, who took a
liking to me, and he set me up in a subsidiary company, called the Brown Motor
Car Company. I had the agency for the Alco truck, the Stevens-Duryea, and the
Hudson. It was around this time—1913,
1914—that I became interested in the picture business.”
His favorite flickers at the time
were produced by the Peerless Company, and Brown left Alabama and his business,
and became an assistant to Maurice Tourneur, one of the directors for Peerless,
whom he always credited with being his greatest teacher and directing mentor.
Years later Clarence Brown’s own
films played in the new Chicopee theaters: the Rivoli, the Wernick, the Willow,
and the Victoria—“second-run” neighborhood theaters which Brown never heard of
because they were built after he left Chicopee.
Brown directed Greta Garbo in Anna Christie and Anna Karenina and five of her other films. His film A Free Soul made a star of Clark Gable,
and his National Velvet introduced us
to Elizabeth Taylor. He gave us The Yearling, The White Cliffs of Dover, and Plymouth
Adventure before retiring in 1953. He was nominated for a Best Director
Academy Award five times.
Brown died in 1987 at 97 years
old. Talent and ambition in one field brought him to Chicopee, but he made his
mark in that other new industry in Hollywood.
And where would “the flickers” be without car chases?
A previous version of this
article appeared in In Chicopee (a
publication of the Holyoke
Transcript-Telegram, Holyoke, Mass.) 1992.
Sources:
Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… (University of
California Press, 1976), pp.138-140.
Siegel, Scott and Barbara Siegel. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood (NY: Facts
on File, 1990) pp. 62-63.
Springfield (Massachusetts)
Republican. September 19, 1937, p.
3E.
Thomas, Nicholas. Ed. International Directory of Films and Filmmakers:
Directors, Vol. 7 (2nd ed. (Chicago and London:
St. James Press, 1991), pp. 103-105.
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