ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 22, 1997 TAG: 9704220112
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM THE ROANOKE TIMES
The peculiar marriage of Hollywood and Virginia Military Institute boasts four films that, among other things, feature:
The first big movie role for a goofy young future president of the United States whose character notes, "I guess you gotta expect anything at a coed school."
A ho-hum performance by the guy who later turned up on television as the second Darin on "Bewitched."
Squeaky-clean Pat Boone as a crooning cadet who takes a break from his studies to belt out the ``disturbin' Bourbon Street Blues'' on the barracks stoop.
And a blasphemous musical number that relates the battle strategies of VMI hero, nay, deity Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson to dating and "the battle of the female and the male."
A peculiar marriage indeed, but an enduring one that was consummated nearly 60 years ago with the production of "Brother Rat," in which Ronald Reagan, as the upright working-class cadet Dan Crawford, tells his spendthrift roommate Billy Randolph, played by Wayne Morris:
"What do you do with all your dough? If I was your father, I'd boot you all the way to Buena Vista and back."
The last film was a 1950s Pat Boone vehicle called "Mardi Gras" that critic Leslie Halliwell summarized as a "mindless musical using up available
talent."
The real story of how VMI met Tinsel Town, however, began when cadets Johnny "Monkeyjohn" Monks and Freddie "Fink" Finklehoffe sneaked out of the VMI barracks - or "ran the block" in VMI parlance - to meet some girls one night in 1932 and wound up on room confinement with an English project to write.
The result was a play called ``When the Roll Is Called,'' later renamed ``Brother Rat.''
``We went to our teacher and said, `Instead of writing something like the life of [English novelist William Makepeace] Thackeray, can we write a play?''' Monks, now 86, told the cast of a production of the play that ran at VMI this month during Monks' 65th reunion. Finklehoffe died in 1977.
What they came up with was a farcical embellishment of the trouble that had landed them on confinement in the first place.
Monks had ``run the block'' to see a girl who was in town visiting her grandmother and had dragged Finklehoffe along with him as a date for the girl's roommate. For the play, they added a third character, Bing, who had secretly married a girl in Roanoke.
He was based on a cadet named Ralph Franklin ``Wobbles'' Waite, who really was secretly married. Wobbles was a football player with a big bottom that shook when he ran.
The play didn't see the stage, though, until several years later when Monks, who went on to become a radio actor in New York, caught Finklehoffe on a break from Yale Law School and persuaded him to help do a rewrite.
After 32 producers turned it down, George Abbott agreed to put on the show. He had just dropped $80,000 on a ridiculous musical comedy based on ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' Monks said, and was looking for a new project.
The play ran for 18 months on Broadway and had two road companies, too, including one featuring Jose Ferrer that made a stop in Roanoke.
That Hollywood would call was inevitable, Monks said. If a script was a hit on stage, movie producers figured it could make money on the screen.
Monks and Finklehoffe had given up other pursuits to become writers, but the studio hired others to adapt "Brother Rat" to the screen.
The VMI of 1938 - at least Hollywood's rendition of it - is a slap-happy, ``aw, shucks'' kind of place where the social conventions of the day ruled and the notion of coeducation wasn't even up for discussion.
Eddie Albert, who played Bing on the stage, took up the role in the film, too. Bing is a not-too-swift senior to whom his freewheeling roommate Billy Randolph confides: ``Listen, Bing, I'm going to tip you off to something about women. Right off the bat, they know if you got a yen for 'em. That's what's known as female intuition. They've got it, and a dog's got it.''
Bing, however, is already married to Kate, whom he tells that he's ``sure been miserable since you went away to Roanoke.''
Only now she's back, and she's pregnant. Much of the plot after that involves keeping Bing's marriage and imminent fatherhood a secret until after graduation.
Reagan, by the way, met his first wife, Jane Wyman, while filming ``Brother Rat.'' Wyman played Claire Adams, the commandant's daughter and Reagan's love interest.
In one scene, Claire has been smuggled into the trio's barracks room to help the dimwitted Bing study for his chemistry exam.
Dan Crawford, played by Reagan, dozes off and then is roused by Claire tickling his ear.
"Huh?" he says. "Oh, I guess you gotta expect anything in a coed school." The line is charged with import in these days of a soon-to-be coed VMI, but Monks doesn't even remember writing it.
The film was successful enough that "the boys," as Monks and Finklehoffe were referred to back then, managed to pull off a sequel, "Brother Rat and a Baby," released in 1939. It features the same cast in suits with big lapels and broad-brimmed hats, and with the addition of Bing and Kate's baby, named "Commencement" after the day he was born.
Monks said it was a moderate success. Critic Halliwell called it a "scatty follow-up" to the original flick.
VMI didn't find its way back to the screen until 1954, when Warner Brothers decided "Brother Rat" would play well as a musical. It didn't. Set at the Southern Military Institute, which looks like what VMI would look like if you had only seen it in pictures and tried to rebuild it on a sound stage, it opens with a silly musical number called "Reveille" with all the boys dancing through the showers at ``Ol' SMI.''
"It was just awful," Monks said. "I think I saw about half of it and left the theater."
The producers give Monks and Finklehoffe credit for the original story at the opening of the film.
"I wish they hadn't," Monks said.
Hollywood finally managed to turn out a picture about VMI without Monks and Finklehoffe in 1958's "Mardi Gras." Pat Boone plays a straight-laced cadet who wins a raffle that earns him the chance to invite tres leggy, tres French film star Michelle Martone, played by Christine Carere, to graduation. The regimental band, it seems, is going to be in New Orleans at the same time as Martone.
Boone is a bookish boy who nevertheless finds a few minutes to wander away from his studies and sing about how he's ``tryin' hard to lose those early in the mornin' disturbin' Bourbon Street blues.''
That song, however, pales in absurdity next to a subsequent number sung in a barracks shower. Boone's roommates attempt to teach their buddy how to relate to women by drawing on the battle strategies of fallen Confederate General and former VMI professor ``Stonewall'' Jackson.
``Put your two arms around her, that way you'll surround her, that's what `Stonewall' Jackson said,'' sings Dick Sargent, later of "Bewitched" fame.
``Oh yessirree,'' Boone responds, ``if it was good enough for `Stonewall,' it's good enough for me.''
The song rankles a little bit with the usual image of the revered VMI professor, but that's OK.
"Heck, it's all show biz," Public Relations Director Col. Mike Strickler said.
Jackson, by the way, was not known for surrounding the enemy, Strickler said. "He was a master of the 'hit and run.'"
And nobody ever "burst into song" around the barracks, anyway, at least not when he was a cadet in the late 1960s.
Monks, who never saw "Mardi Gras," remains proud of his alma mater, whether anybody did any singing there or not.
And he never tires of talking about the senior project that brought VMI to Hollywood and launched the writing careers of its two authors.
Monks went on to win two Oscar nominations, for ``13 Rue Madeline" and "House on 92nd Street." Finklehoffe, who Monks said could have had a great career as a lawyer, earned a nomination for "Meet Me in St. Louis."
Monks, though, has outlived most of his class of '32 - only about 10 of more than 100 were well enough to attend their reunion this year - as well as his old Hollywood pals.
"The only one that's still living is Eddie Albert," he said. He's a close neighbor to Monks in Pacific Palisades, Calif.
As for the future president who launched his acting career from a character Monks helped create?
Monks used to see him around at parties, but ``we never did buddy.''
VMI film clips
``Brother Rat,'' 1938. Starring Wayne Morris, Ronald Reagan, Eddie Albert, Jane Wyman and Priscilla Lane. ``Fun and games with the cadets at a military academy. Brisk but dated farce from a highly successful Broadway original.''
``Brother Rat and a Baby,'' 1939. Starring the same cast as ``Brother Rat.'' "Scatty follow-up to the above, with the cadets graduating.''
``About Face,'' 1952. Starring Eddie Bracken, Gordon Macrae, Joel Grey and others. ``Moronic remake of `Brother Rat,' shorn of all wit, pace and style.''
``Mardi Gras,'' 1958. Starring Pat Boone, Christine Carere, Tommy Sands, Dick Sargent and Gary Crosby. ``In New Orleans at holiday time, a film star falls for a cadet. Mindless musical using up available talent.''
-Source: Halliwell's Film and Video Guide, 5th edition.
LENGTH: Long : 179 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. CARY BEST/THE ROANOKE TIMES. Playwright and VMIby CNBalumnus Johnny Monks (above) recently was back in Lexington for his
65th annual reunion. color. 2. In 1932, Monks and Freddie
Finklehoffe (left, in a publicity photo) wrote a play for a senior
English class assignment that eventually became ``Brother Rat'' 3.
(program at far left), a successful Broadway show and Hollywood
movie. 4. The film version of ``Brother Rat'' (above) opened in 1938
and starred Eddie Albert and Ronald Reagan (both looking on) in the
future president's first major movie role. 5. 1958's "Mardi Gras"
(right) starred Pat Boone (left) and Dick Sargent, who went on to
relative fame as the second Darin on TV's "Bewitched." 6. A 1930s
traveling show of ``Brother Rat'' starred these fresh-faced young
actors: (from left) Jose Ferrer, Frank Albertson and Eddie Albert.
7. Pat Boone and the cast of ``Mardi Gras'' frequently break into
song.