Will Hays, Jr.: Come Home with Me Now. The Untold Story of Movie Czar Will Hays by His Son. Indianapolis: Guild Press, 1993. 342 pp. Many illustrations, but no index or bibliography.
Readers looking for a systematic defense of Will Hays’ activities as Hollywood’s top censor will not find it here. The only section that deals with the matter (chapter 23) also contains the book’s most memorable anecdote:
Tom White [the chauffeur] told me once when Tom was driving him to his New York apartment after an especially grueling day, Dad suddenly gusted, “ ‘Cleavage,’ ‘cleavage,’ I’m sick of fighting ‘cleavage!’ I’d like to wade through a forty-acre field of breasts!” But he laughed when Tom offered, “Say the word, General, and I’ll join you.” (pg. 220)
One also finds anecdotes about Will Rogers, Walt Disney, Johnny Weissmuller, Carole Lombard, negotiations over film rights with the Germans in 1930 and later with Mussolini (“Will Hays amounts to as much in Hollywood and in the moving picture game as Mussolini does in Italy,” wrote the Western actor Bill James in 1932), but such passages by no means make up the bulk of this book.
Come Home with Me Now has no index, for the simple reason that this is not the type of book that requires one. This is a highly personal volume that rewards a patient, cover-to-cover reader. Despite the subtitle, the subject is not really Will Hays the Movie Czar, but rather Will Hays the often-absent father. Author Will Hays, Jr., a novelist, screenplay writer, and former Mayor of Crawfordsville, IN, has written a memoir about a boy’s yearning to spend more time with his father. But Hays senior was often away, first heading to Washington as Hoover’s Postmaster General before moving to Hollywood and New York to become President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, to give him his full title.
Hays, Jr., alternates chapters based on his own memories with others made up entirely of documents, mostly letters he wrote to his father but also a rich fund of newspaper clippings, drawings, letters from family and friends, and tantalizing excerpts from his father’s diary. Often demonized by Hollywood insiders, the Will Hays that emerges here is a rather likable figure “with an aura of sadness about him,” a reluctant censor who seemed neither to worship nor particularly revel in the considerable power he wielded, and who tried hard to be a good father. As he wrote to his son in 1926, “I am engaged in this work because I think it ought to be done for the benefit of yourself and all the other boys that are around now and will be around in years to come.”
(This review first appeared in Film Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, Autumn 1994)
For related reviews at this site, see Favorite Films 1940-2000; Academy of the Overrated (Film Section); Ring Lardner, Jr., I’d Hate Myself in the Morning; Sidney Lumet, Making Movies, and reviews of individual films listed by title.
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