“It is a wise man who knows when courage ends and stupidity begins.”
– Jerome Cady, from
“The Purple Heart” (1944)
I often get buttonholed by people on the street asking me where I come up with some of the material for this column, particularly the arcane, obscure stuff that nevertheless seems to qualify, at least in my opinion, as “interesting.”
“It is a wise man who knows when courage ends and stupidity begins.”
– Jerome Cady, from
“The Purple Heart” (1944)
I often get buttonholed by people on the street asking me where I come up with some of the material for this column, particularly the arcane, obscure stuff that nevertheless seems to qualify, at least in my opinion, as “interesting.”
My answer to them is that I usually “make it all up.” But once the polite laughter subsides I tell them truth: I get a certain number of ideas from locals, a percentage of ideas from my own personal experiences, but quite often my ideas originate from good-old fashioned dumb luck. That is to say, dumb luck combined with hours and hours of pouring over vintage yellowed newspaper articles or combining unlikely search strings on the Internet, always with the phrase “Catalina Island” thrown in.
Such was the case with this week’s column and the death on Catalina of a profoundly accomplished screenwriter, well-known in his day, but—alas—long since faded into obscurity. The myriad films he worked on, however, are nothing short of the stuff of Hollywood legend.
I was perusing the website for the venerable American Book Exchange—the premiere clearing house for valuable rare and collectible books—when something caught my eye.
Under a listing for a First Edition copy of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” I noticed that this particular copy had “belonged to screenwriter Jerry Cady” who had “died of an overdose of sleeping pills on his yacht off Catalina Island.”
The Nov. 11, 1948, edition of this very newspaper, the Catalina Islander, confirmed this tragic event. “’Jerry’ Cady Found Dead on Cruiser ‘Hart,’” screamed the front-page headline. According to Avalon’s constable at the time, L. Moricich, Cady’s yacht had arrived full of friends and relatives late in the evening the previous day.
Who was Jerry Cady? The name rang a bell so I immediately took to the Internet and the archives of the Catalina Islander to learn that Jerome “Jerry” Cady had indeed perished here on November 7, 1948. This after an accomplished life of writing screenplays ranging from the legendary Charlie Chan series to wartime dramas like “The Purple Heart” and “Guadalcanal Diary” to post-war blockbuster hits like “Call Northside 777” starring Jimmy Stewart. In 1944, he was nominated for an Oscar for his work on “Wing and a Prayer.”
He had lived one of those rags-to-riches stories that sometimes occur in Hollywood on both sides of the camera, rocketing to the top of the slush pile of screenwriters in the span of only a couple of years.
For such a high profile person in the motion picture industry, much of Cady’s life is surprisingly shrouded in mystery, albeit partly owing no doubt to the paucity of early record-keeping (read “pre-Internet”).
For reasons upon which we can only speculate, much of his earlier life was apparently kept from even his children. (His first wife reportedly knew little of his childhood, or wasn’t willing to share it with others if she did).
He was born in West Virginia and was by some accounts orphaned at the age of 13. He moved from New York to Chicago where he wrote copy for an unnamed newspaper.
Despite the handicap of being a newspaperman, by 1935 he found himself on the West Coast where the census has him listed as “Screenplay Writer.”
His movie credits begin two years later, in 1937, with a gangster film titled “The Great Hospital Mystery” along with “Charlie Chan on Broadway,” the first of what would be several Charlie Chan films.
The official account of Cady’s death never evolved beyond the “overdose” scenario and once again we are left with speculation. The Los Angeles Express newspaper even stirred the “scandal” pot with their blazing headline “Screen Writer Dies in Mystery.”
But since his yacht was loaded with friends and family, a solo “swan dive” trip to Catalina can apparently be ruled out. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes an overdose is just an overdose.
For more than a century, Catalina Island has been a prime destination for celebrities and Hollywood film types. They come here to work and they come here to play, but—as was the case with Jerome Cady and later with Natalie Wood—sometimes Catalina Island is their last stop on this Earth.
Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.
