Introduction: A Wild Ride
It’s a rank understatement to say that Walsh’s personality
has never been properly identified.
—Manny Farber
"When Raoul Walsh was fifteen years old he awoke one night from a dream that left him shaking. He trembled as much from dread as from a half-formed sense of excitement. In a sleep that seemed as much nightmare as fantasy, he saw that his beloved mother, Elizabeth, had suddenly died. He could make no sense of it and could no longer reach out to touch her. An overwhelming sadness took over. But at the same time he had a sense of something startling: he now stood on the brink of a fabulous journey, a great adventure that offered escape from the hole he felt had just been shot through the middle of his heart."
"The dread that touched young Walsh that night was no fiction. Just two days earlier, his beautiful and much beloved mother, Elizabeth Walsh, died of cancer at the age of forty-two, leaving behind a devoted husband, three children and a household she had filled with endless storytelling and fanciful flights of imagination. For Raoul Walsh the grief was almost unbearable. As he wrote in his autobiography over seventy years later, “I was quite unprepared for the sudden blow that left me motherless at fifteen…Mother passed away in the big master bedroom into which I used to steal and beg for one of her stories about an earlier America…Where before I had loved it, the place became unbearable… The terrible thing was that she was gone and I was only half a person…”
"As he grew older the press saw Walsh not so much as a wild spirit but as a humorous man who life spilled out onto the public through endless anecdotes; he told crazy stories about his antics with Errol Flynn, Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. He quipped endlessly about prostitutes he had known, cowboys and bandits he ran with; about getting drunk with the legends who visited his set, with the crew he adored more than any other bunch."
"But these were stories, part of the adventure, part of the fiction he learned to wrap around himself so that he would not really be seen. “Let’s get the hell out of here!,” he often yelled out on the set when a scene wrapped. Part humorous, part serious, the quip is the essential Walsh—the man half in but at the same time half way out the door, perpetually ready to bolt, to leap and walk quickly away and to disappear into the dark corners of a soundstage where no one could find him but always knew he was there just the same."
From Marilyn Ann Moss’ biography of Raoul Walsh, The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh, by Marilyn Ann Moss, published by The University Press of Kentucky.
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