Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,539

This is the grave of Alan Hale, Sr.

Born in 1892, Rufus McKahan grew up in well-off Washington, D.C. family. His father had a patent medicine that was super popular (the secret ingredient to cure all your ills–petroleum!). Now, the Pure Food and Drug Act cracked down on this fake medicine. But by this time, the McKahan family was pretty wealthy. So when the patent medicine couldn’t keep going, his father turned toward selling stocks in Philadelphia. The family was just fine.

Rufus was a big strapping young lad, good looking kid. He was a terrible student as well. So he dropped out of the osteopathy school his father had enrolled him in and started to act. Evidently, he went to apply for a chorus boy job and the secretary was taken aback at his incredibly suitable name. He went home, somewhat distressed over this. His parents, perhaps thinking that the kid was never going to be a serious student, not only supported his move to acting, but suggested changing his name. In fact, it was his father who suggested Alan Hale. The kid ran with it.

So by 1910, Hale was working a few local theaters and then he decided to give the opera a try. He took vocal training courses, but was told that he wasn’t any good. So it was back to the acting. But here he started to have success. He was the lead in Poor Little Rich Girl on Broadway in 1913 that made Viola Dana a star and ran for 160 shows, which was good for this time. So he started getting movie parts too. He would spend the next several years in New York, switching between the stage and the silent screen, at the time when not all the studios were yet established in California. His first film was The Cowboy and the Lady, in 1911. He had some pretty early success and became something of a leading man in the Biograph stable from 1913 to 1915. He was considered to sexy that Biograph sold him to the public as “The Adonis of the Films.”

But really, Hale was more of a character actor and moved into that world early. He got a big part in the 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, working next to Rudolph Valentino. They became buddies. In the 1922 version of Robin Hood, with Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery, Hale was cast as Little John. He would reprise the same role in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, this time working with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone. Amazingly, he would play Little John yet again, this time with John Derek in 1950’s Rogues of Sherwood Forest. In fact, Hale and Flynn would be cast together on several occasions, as he could nearly match Flynn’s swashbuckling roles, but of course never upstage Flynn.

Through the 1930s, Hale was not a film star exactly, but he was a successful actor and solid supporting man who got good parts. He transitioned from silents to talkies pretty easily. In 1934 alone, he played key roles in the great It Happened One Night, in Fog over Frisco, working with Bette Davis, in The Little Minister, where he played opposite Katharine Hepburn, and in Miss Fane’s Baby is Stolen. Among the other leading films he showed up in include Stella Dallas (I need to watch that again), They Drive By Night (another one I could spend more time with), Virginia City, Dodge City (not surprising that he would be good in a western), Manpower, and This is the Army, the latter a 1943 film that was part of Hollywood’s propaganda effort in the war. Over the years, he worked with Flynn in a mere 13 films, as well with James Cagney in 7 films. Basically, he was the perfect sidekick.

Hale also directed a little bit in the 20s and 30s, though nothing of huge importance. He also was a bit of a tinkerer. He took out at least a few patents, one on a sliding back to movie chairs so people wouldn’t have to stand up in the middle of the show when someone wanted to get out (I am not entirely clear on how this was supposed to work). He spent $200,000 on this. He also invested some kind of greaseless potato chip. Supposedly, at least according to his Wikipedia page, for whatever that is worth, Hale invented the handheld fire extinguisher. This is obviously a massive oversimplification of whatever he actually did, since we know that portable fire extinguishers of various forms existed for a long time before Hale was around. Maybe he improved on something within it, which wouldn’t be that shocking since the contemporary version of the fire extinguisher was created in 1912 and I am sure needed some improvements. Anyway, people make invention claims over all sorts of things that are dubious at the first look. In any case, he had his own invention company between 1937 and 1946 that employed 100 people, so I guess he made money on some of this stuff!

Alan Hale also had a son named Alan. Yep, the Skipper. Eventually I will have to do a whole grave series of people from Gilligan’s Island. In fact, Hale’s daughter Karen worked in Hollywood for years too, as a script supervisor.

Hale died in 1950, thanks to his decades of legendary boozing. Hollywood men in those days did like to drink and Hale was right there with them. Let’s put it this way–his drinking buddies included Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields and if you are drinking with freaking Fields, you are a drunk. In fact, his later films had him playing much older characters because decades of drinking made him look like an old man when he was in his late 40s. Hale’s liver finally gave out, combined with a bout of pneumonia from a couple of trips he took to Montana and Utah that he should not have taken. He was 57 years old.

Alan Hale, Sr. is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit Hale’s drinking buddies, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. W.C. Fields is also at Forest Lawn, though I didn’t get to it (it’s a huge place) and Pat O’Brien is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.