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I got to chat briefly with former child star Dick "Dickie" Moore last night and asked him what he remembered about Kay Francis, who is one of my favorites from the 1930s.
He said when he and Francis worked together on My Bill, she was on the outs with Warner Brothers and wasn't in the best frame of mind on-set. (She was not happy, for one thing, about the picture being named after Moore's character.)
He said she was friendly enough, but he wouldn't, he said, describe her as "warm," but he suspected it had to do with her professional circumstances at the time.
He said Matthew "Stymie" Beard was his favorite among his fellow "Our Gang" actors, the only one he socialized with off the set. They even had sleepovers.
I also got to meet Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies. I'd done an email interview with him some years ago, and he was kind enough to say he remembered it (I suspect he didn't). He seemed a very likeable fellow.
He's much bigger than I expected him to be. He's something over six feet and with a big build, too.
Jane Powell and Moore, whose careers the event was celebrating, were both delightful. Very personable -- and clever, too. And they are very sweet together, clearly very much in love.
When asked about the ups and downs of childhood stardom, Moore came across as much less bitter than he did in his book. It's a mixed bag, he said, but life is a mixed bag.
Moore said he remained close to Marlene Dietrich until her death (they, of course, made Blonde Venus together). He said Dietrich was something of a packrat, keeping all sorts of odd stuff -- old Kleenex and false eyelashes and stuff.
But not long before her death, she sent him a picture of the two of them taken during the filming of Blonde Venus that she said had been in the bottom of a drawer since 1932.
He also told a funny story about Robert Mitchum, with whom he worked when he was a teenager (Moore, not Mitchum) on the film noir classic Out of the Past. Moore played a deaf-mute in the movie, and in the early '80s, nearly forty years later, he saw Mitchum at some event and went over to say hello.
"Hi, Bob," Moore said.
Mitchum gave him a shocked look and said, "You can talk??"
Moore said he was one of the few actors in history who looked over his scripts when he first received them, hoping for as few lines as possible. As such, Out of the Past was one of his favorite roles, he said, because he had no lines whatsoever.
Moore's first role was at 11 months. He played Francois Villon as an infant in a 1927 silent movie, The Beloved Rogue. John Barrymore played the adult Villon, and the story goes that, while visiting the set one day (naturally, he and Moore had no scenes together), he was brought over to view young Dickie in his crib.
Barrymore reportedly peered in and looked up again, aghast, saying, "My god, he looks like an owl!"
(Moore did have large, expressive eyes as a child.)
Moore also has retained some renown for having given a teenaged Shirley Temple her first on-screen kiss. When the moderator of last night's event protested to Moore, after screening a clip of the scene in which the historic smooch took place, that "that wasn't much of a kiss" (and it wasn't -- Moore just kissed Temple on the cheek), Moore quipped, "That's just what Shirley said!"
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