(Morgan is a Beverly Hills attorney. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and was a Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Chile (1966-1968), then at UCLA, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif. Morgan received his law degree from UCLA in 1971. He is a past president of this organization and is the son of actor Harry Morgan.)
The founder of this Norwegian American Bar Association of which I
am proud to be a past president, Roger Grace, has asked me to say a few words
about Norwegian Americans in Hollywood.
I am not a student of Hollywood; and while I have met some of the
Norwegian American film people who are depicted on this organization’s web
site, these meetings occurred when I was a child or at best an adolescent
living with my parents. These weren’t the sort of meetings among adult peers
which might leave me with impressions worth commenting about.
Still, I’ve known Roger since we were both around 15 and worked
on the student newspaper at University High
School here in West Los Angeles. He was
the editor of that school paper, I was the associate editor, so by and large he
called the shots and I followed his lead. Old habits die hard, so I couldn’t
turn him down when he asked me to speak on this topic now some 40-odd years
later.
While neither a student of the industry nor of the Norwegian
American community within it, I surely ought to qualify at this point as a
student of my father, Harry Morgan, who is surely the Norwegian American with
the longest and most prominent career in the film business. So perhaps I can
fashion a few comments about him and how he relates to Norway,
and then leave you with a few film-related anecdotes which he has shared with
me and which pertain in one way or another to Norwegians, and then perhaps I
might sneak away from this podium and claim “mission accomplished.”
Harry Morgan arrived here from New York in 1941 in order to do a
film called “The Ox Bow Incident,” a classic Western in which he and Henry
Fonda play a couple of cowboy drifters who fall in with a mob of vigilantes,
and in the end a few innocent men including Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn are
put to death. It has a lot to say about group behavior and the
crumbling of human values when confronting a perceived enemy, with parallels
running from witch hunts to cross-burnings and to prisons in Iraq.
For many years in my youth the film was shown in high school civics classes.
My father never went back to New Yorkafter that film, but stayed on here to appear as a character actor in more than
100 movies and a total of 12 television series. The movies included “High
Noon,” “How the West Was Won,” “Not as a Stranger,” “Inherit the Wind,” “The
Glenn Miller Story,” “Support Your Local Sheriff” and “The Shootist.” Television
started with “December Bride” and “Pete and Gladys” in the 1950’s (both of those
shows were produced by Desilu and shot on a stage adjacent to where they shot
“I Love Lucy”) and continued on with “Dragnet” and MASH” in the 1970’s and
80’s. When you add it all up. My father appeared as an actor on prime time
television in the homes of Americavirtually nonstop for 35 years.
My father enjoys good health and is mentally quite sharp, but his
mobility is limited now that he has passed his 89th birthday. I wanted
to bring him with me today, and we did talk about it right up until last night,
but today wasn’t the right day. I haven’t given up hope that he may come to one
of our future meetings.
There have been a host of actors with Norwegian parentage on one
side or the other, and virtually all of them I think are listed on the web site
of this organization. I think the number might have been greater, but it seems
to me that people who grew up in Norwegian households as my father did don’t
take naturally to the stage or screen.
I wonder if there is not something in the Norwegian character
that is resistant to getting up on a stage, or putting face in front of camera,
or indeed to doing anything that might attract attention to oneself. This is a
trait that is certainly akin to shyness, but I think it is shyness with a
philosophical underpinning, and that is the considered belief that it is just
sort of unseemly and show-offish to seek to be the center of attention.
I discovered evidence of this Norwegian trait when I first
visited Norway in the mid-1960’s and stayed with close relatives whom I had never
met nor seen before (my father’s uncle and his two cousins) in Trondheim. I had
sent word a few days before that I would be coming up on the train from Oslo,
but I had never seen any of my Norwegian relatives (we had no recent family
photographs at home), and so I was a bit worried about how I would find members
of the Bratsberg clan—that is the family name—among the dozens of people
waiting at the station. All of the people waiting at the station, it turned
out, were fellow Bratsbergs.
We left together and went on to share a smorgasbord meal in a
large room, where people remained mostly silent, with a lot of bright eyes and
smiles, enjoying each other’s company without a lot of verbalization. It seemed
familiar to me from the home that I had grown up in. No one felt the urge to
speak up beyond a sentence or two, and it’s funny how you can enjoy people’s
company in relative silence, and enjoy the feeling that things are as they
should be and no one needs to speak up and take the risk that in doing so there
might be harm done to the more subtle and quiet niceties that make the moment special.
And so my father has been able throughout his professional life
to become immersed in a role and a character, and he is a consummate actor like
few others. He has a near-photographic memory and always spoke his lines as if
they were his own, as if they had just occurred to him rather than arriving as
imports from a screenplay.
But he has never appeared on a talk show despite a lifetime of
requests, he has never been interviewed on Steve Allen or Johnny Carson or Jay
Leno or the Today Show, because it did not seem appropriate or necessary. Appearing on a talk show to focus on himself because
he was Harry Morgan was not nearly as natural as appearing in a role as Pete
Porter or Bill Gannon or Colonel Potter, or as the cowboy drifter who wandered
into town with Henry Fonda and got wrapped up in a vigilante brigade in “Oxbow
Incident.”
Our family name of Bratsberg is apparently a traditional Norwegian
name; the family at the center of Ibsen’s play “The League of Youth” is named
Bratsberg. It is the name that appears on my birth certificate, but my father
had to take up Morgan at the behest of a producer, who at first had suggested
that he use the name Eric Norway. I guess I’d rather carry forward the name
Morgan, and am glad that he decided to pass on Eric Norway, but it is awkward
to go through life with a name that carries an ethnicity to which one is
basically a stranger.
Morgan is a Welsh name, and I am sure that the Welsh have
wonderful customs and folklore, but I’m not going to learn them in order to
keep faith with a name that came to me because of a producer, and so I have to
beg off when people want to know about my Welsh heritage. I casually mentioned
to my wife prior to our marriage that we could go back to the Bratsberg name
which after all remains on my birth certificate, but she was set on Charlotte
Morgan and the mention of the Charlotte Bratsberg possibility had her
suggesting that we call the whole thing off.
Harry Bratsberg was born in Detroit in 1915 and was raised in
Muskegon, Michigan, where he
played varsity football at the high school, was a regional debating champion and
president of his senior class. Throughout his youth, Norwegian was spoken on
the streets in Muskegon and his
Norwegian father and Swedish mother carried on most conversations with others in
their mother tongues, but they wanted the family to be American, and so they used
only English in the home. My dad can understand a fair amount of Norwegian, but
cannot really speak it, and has always wished that he could.
Well, with that as an introduction, I want to share with you just
two anecdotes that I have picked up from my father’s lore about life in the
film business, anecdotes that relate in one way or another to things Norwegian.
My dad appeared in the excellent 1955 film “Not as a Stranger,”
which has a terrific starring cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Charles
Bickford, Gloria Graham and Olivia de Havilland. Frank Sinatra also has a role
in it. Olivia de Havilland plays a Norwegian nurse whom Robert Mitchum marries
for all the wrong reasons, and his awkwardness within that relationship is
brought home in a dinner table scene which features my dad as Olivia de
Havilland’s brother-in-law, Ole, married to her sister, Bruni. Mitchum wants to
break the ice at the table and so he tells a joke which unfortunately involves
a play on words; it’s pretty plain that his Norwegian bride and her sister Bruni
and the sister’s husband Ole do not follow the joke; but after an embarrassing
pause my dad sets out to inject some fun and save the moment by announcing,
“Ya, dat’s pretty funny!”
Earlier, in 1949, he appeared in another gem of a picture called
“Down to the Sea in Ships.” It was directed by the legendary Henry Hathaway,
and starred Lionel Barrymore and Richard Widmark. Dick Widmark became a
lifelong friend of my dad’s and really of our entire family, and he is a
wonderful human being—but Widmark is Swedish, not Norwegian.
Anyway, “Down to the Sea in Ships” is a coming of age story in
which a young boy played by Dean Stockwell is taught lessons in life aboard a
whaling vessel in turn of the century America
Hathaway wanted everything about the boat to be authentic, and
somehow they managed to find a very elderly Norwegian man named Sven who had
actually spent his youth as a crewman on a whaling vessel. He was introduced
all around as the man in charge of being sure that the set with the ship on it
was as close as possible to the way a true-to-life whaling ship would have
looked.
Well, they got to a key scene wherein Barrymore was to relate this
very meaningful story about fundamental things in life to the young boy. The
ship deck was attached to rollers so that it could be made to sway back and forth,
and rising above the deck was a tall mast. Hathaway wanted just those stark elements,
the deck and the mast, with a lantern hanging from the mast way up high to
light up the deck while Barrymore was telling the story. The lantern would then
sway a bit from side to side as the boat swayed on the rollers, and the light
from the lantern would hit the deck intermittently so that the rolling of the
ocean would seem to dictate the lighting of the scene just like on the open
sea, or so it was supposed.
So Mr. Hathaway had everything in place, but nothing could be
committed to film until they had heard from Sven as to the authenticity of what
had peen planned and set up on the stage. Hathaway called for Sven, and said to
him, “Now. Sven, I want you to tell us, you’re the one who experienced all of
this, isn’t this just the way that they would have had things on the whaling
ships, with the lantern up there just like that?”
Sven had to be straightforward and honest, for that was his job
as well as his nature:
“No, Mr. Hathaway, no
sir, never in the history of whaling would you have
the lantern up high like that on a ship’s mast. You wouldn’t be able to control it, and it would swing wildly
and perhaps fall and cause a fire. It would
be dangerous, irresponsible in fact, to have it up there like that. No sir, never in the history of whaling.”
Hathaway looked up at the lantern, looked back at Sven, and
announced, “F— it, Sven, I like the lantern up there just like it is!”
Sven suffered through a couple of more humiliations like that trying
to do his job, and muttered once to my father, “You know, I am supposed to be
the expert, but he won’t listen to me.” Eventually he quit coming to work.
My father missed old Sven on the set. Sixty years using the name
Morgan has not made my father any less Bratsberg. He liked being around
authentic people like old Sven, also like Henry Hathaway, William Wellman, John
Ford and all of the others great directors and characters he has met in the
film business.
As I have said, I hope to
bring him to one of our upcoming luncheons, for I know that my father would
like being around you—well, all of us part Norwegians like him—in the same way.
