An Ernest Hemingway Hero

I recently came across Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journals of Clifford Odets on my local library's shelves. Franchot is mentioned a handful of times in Odets' daily diary. Unlike the brief "Franchot Tone was also there at the Mocambo" diary entries I stumble across from others in the business at that time, Odets' delves into Franchot's complicated character and Odets' own mixture of interest and frustration with Franchot.

Franchot in Dark Waters, 1944.
Scan from my collection.

On Valentine's Day 1940, Franchot and the rest of the cast from The Fifth Column stopped by to see Odets' matinee showing. Three days later, Franchot joined everyone at a "certain bad restaurant" the actors dined in every night. Odets writes:

He was ill-at-ease, tense, and obviously very lonely or he wouldn't have joined us. All of us tried to put him at ease, but he is poor table company. He wanted to go out whoring and drinking at a speakeasy (liquor after 1:00 a.m.), but was unable to find a companion. Franchot, with all his fame, money, and position, is still afraid of rejection and repudiation. He is blustery and pushing, anxious and uneasy, just like Steve Takis*, but slightly more adult; in short, he is an Ernest Hemingway hero, and that is saying the whole thing.

*Steve Takis was the main character of Odets' play Night Music, which would begin official performances shortly after this diary entry.

On March 16, 1940, Odets writes that he had just finished Stefan Zweig's essay on Casanova the night before and that it "gave me several good ideas, particularly for a play about a modern sort of Casanova to be played by a fellow like Franchot Tone. It is not the great lover element which interests me at all; the element of adventurer, swindler, fake prince among American aristocracy, etc. is where the play lies."

June 8, 1940:

At ten we [Odets, Sid Benson, Geebee] rode uptown, we three, ate a light supper at Schrafft's, saw a newsreel and two films, or part of them. One with Heifetz fiddling...the other an old film, the first F. Tone made when he went to the coast in 1932*. Very instructive. We move so fast in this country that the film, the acting style, the lighting and settings, the clothes—all are already old-fashioned. Franchot was not bored then, not blasé, but fresh and impulsive.

*I assume Odets is referring to Franchot's first film The Wiser Sex which starred Claudette Colbert, Lilyan Tashman, and Melvyn Douglas. This is the only Franchot film I have never seen. It has been preserved by AFI's National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center and it was shown at a film festival several years back. Unfortunately, it's not on physical media or shown on television.

On July 7th, Odets dines at the Stork Club:

There I met Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, and John O'Hara, and a brother-in-law together at one table. Meredith was leaving for a Western ranch vacation the next day, so they were celebrating together by getting drunk and more morose each minute. They were in moods of careful (or cautious) self-abnegation, admitting carefully that their lives were useless, that, as Franchot put it while discussing Maxie Baer, the fighter, "the thing is to look good even while you're going down." Franchot, whom I like, still a very unusual talent in the theatre, always brings out in me a certain caginess and over consideration, a real and acute discomfort.

September 29, 1940:

Every time I see Franchot Tone around town, something stirs in me. He is one of that fraternity equally at home here or in the East, drinking, sleeping around, trying to suck the marrow out of a bony friend or two who has no marrow, making a movie, looking for a play—he is too good for this sort of life; that is what touches me about him.

That September entry is the last time that Odets mentions Franchot in his 1940 journal. Odets had known Franchot since the very early days of the Group Theatre and in a later interview would remark on Franchot's talent:

Toward the end of the summer, Franchot Tone, after being quite erratic in his relationship to the company—he was a spoiled boy in many ways—decided to leave the Group, and everyone was sick. He was very gifted. The two most talented young actors I have known in the American theater in my time have been Franchot Tone and Marlon Brando, and I think Franchot was the more talented. And when he lost what he did, I think a very valuable gift was lost to the American theater. He was our leading man. It was like a beehive had lost its queen. 

Source: 
Odets, Clifford. Time Is Ripe: the 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets. Grove, 1989.
Hethmon, Robert. Days with the Group Theatre: An Interview with Clifford Odets. Michigan Quarterly Review. Volume XLI, Issue 2, Spring 2002