I am in fine shape, [he concluded,] except for a faulty motor. I have led such a clean life that I can’t understand it (I mean I can’t understand the clean life).... But I still carry the torch for you. The torch, alas! is becoming an ember, but it is all I have.
Did anybody ever write such letters?
He spent an evening with Gene Buck, a true friend of ours, dating back to the days when I commuted from Long Island to play on Broadway in Six-Cylinder Love in the evenings and make a movie in New York with Jack Barrymore by day. A letter from the Fowlers’ home in Los Angeles told about the two Genes’ meeting:
He tried to get hold of me for four days, a thing that Sheriff Biscalis always does within an hour, and if it hadn’t been for you, the mighty squire of Great Neck would have gone without paying his disrespects to me.
I suppose there are just as many great people now as there ever were, but it does not seem so to me. Possibly I am thinking of my own youth when I recall the wonderful troupe who were knocking down bottles during the early part of this century. Jesus Christ, Hedda! What a wonderful tribe it was!
Gene and I enumerated them all and drank a toast in milk (not toast and milk) to the many memories. I do not want to classify you as an aged alumna, for you were just a baby ... I wish to God you had been there. We would have called you, busy as you are, but you were at some damned glamorous but uninteresting party to a movie magnate....
If this sounds like a love letter, make the most of it; but, note well, you will have to hurry, for Forest Lawn is sending me literature.
Gene used to say: “The important thing is to see that friends, big or little, famous or otherwise, have a sincere send-off.” He wrote the send-off for Red Skelton’s son Richard, for Jack Barrymore, for Fred MacMurray’s first wife, Lillian, and a dozen other people. “Maybe you will do this kind of thing for me when my own time comes—and may I not keep you waiting too long at that,” he told me.
After his last heart attack two years ago, I did my best, such as it was, in my column: “He was as near heaven as any mortal can get. I feel the loss more every day and will for the rest of my life.”
If, nostalgically, I learned something about how to love from Gene Fowler, I got some advice on how to live from Bernard M. Baruch. I was visiting Hobcaw Barony, his South Carolina plantation, hundreds of acres of pines and live oaks, draped in Spanish moss with the King’s Highway running through the middle of it. The soil’s so rich you can throw a seed down one day and have a plant two inches tall the next. Only a handful of servants were left when I was there; the rest went north years ago. I urged Bernie to hand over the estate to the Negro people as a memorial, to see what they could make of it by building schools, churches, a community center. But he says no: “They’d think I was showing off.” He’s left it to his daughter Belle and built a small house some fifty miles away, where he spends his winters with his devoted hostess-companion and nurse, Elizabeth Navarro.