It was a dare, but the twelve-year-old boy was up to it. His big brother aspired to be an actor and the Pasadena Playhouse of Pasadena, California was having auditions for a production of Eugene O’Niell’s, Ah, Wilderness! This turn-of-the-century hometown play was filled with parts for young people and 16 year old Joe Kirk was hoping for one of the better teen roles—hopefully the central teen character, Richard. The play was set to star Will Rogers, Jr. as the father, too! Joe got a copy of the script and studied the part of Richard. He noticed that the show also had a part for 10 to 12 year-old little brother. So, Joe dragged his little brother along to the audition. Fate was not in Joe’s favor, for the role of Richard was already cast. The part was given to one of the most important working teen actors of the day, a former Disney contract player named Bobby Driscoll.
Driscoll’s credits were great; he had two junior Oscars and had played plum roles in Walt Disney’s Song of the South, So Dear To My Heart and Treasure Island. He was also the voice of Peter Pan. But, the more surprising outcome of the audition was that Joe’s little brother, Tommy Kirk, won the role of the little brother in Ah, Wilderness! Joe went on to become a dentist, but Tommy went on to become….
“I remember meeting the director and his associate sitting at a table,” said Tommy, “They were friendly and asked a few questions. Then we got a call and they said, ‘Come back to another meeting.’” As it turned out, Tommy and his brother had come on the wrong day—they weren't reading for children. Tommy walked up to the director and tugged at his pant leg, “When are you going to read for the part of Tommy?” asked the youngster. “Who did you come with?” asked the director, “Show me.” Tommy pointed to his brother Joe and his friends. “You came here under your own steam, didn’t you?” Tommy replied that indeed he had come under his own steam with his brother. The director was impressed and let Tommy audition.
“What can you do,” asked the director?
“I do impressions,” returned the 12 year old boy. So, Tommy proceeded to imitate an old Baptist minister. He had done the impression once before at school and sent an audience into fits of hysteria. The routine worked on the director too and after reading from the script, Tommy was asked to return for another interview. He did and they told Tommy he had the part in Ah, Wilderness! This time it was the day of the planned children’s audition. A big line of kids and their stage mothers were outraged to hear that the part of Tommy was already cast and they were sent home.
Brother Joe took Tommy to rehearsals and performances and had a lot of fun being a part of the back stage scene. Tommy found acting to be a lot of fun himself. He never had stage fright and felt very natural on stage. He was a big fan of Bobby Driscoll, having seen him on the big screen in Treasure Island. Working with a movie star seemed very exciting to young Tommy and he became good friends with his on stage older brother, “Bobby was extremely nice. I was thrilled.”
Ah, Wilderness! opened at the Pasadena Playhouse on August 19, 1954, just weeks before little Tommy Kirk was to enter the eighth grade at East Junior High School in Downey, California. His mother, Lucy Virginia, a legal secretary and his father, Lewis Al Joe, a journeyman machinist, had settled there when Tommy was two, hoping for a better line of work than they had experienced in Louisville, Kentucky where Tommy was born. Joe Kirk suffered from earaches and the family felt that a move to California would also be better for their oldest son’s health problems. The Kirk family was working class, moving from Downey to Fresno to Berkley and back to Downey as war time work dictated. The Kirks bought a home in Downey and then rented it out while they worked with Lucy’s Uncle in Fresno for a time. Interfamily relations were never ideal in the Kirk family and soon they were back in Downey living in their home, which was formerly a bank building. The house was filled with marble walkways and floors with windows of cut glass that created rainbows. Downey in the 1940s and 1950s was a small town. Near by the house was a river filled with trees and bamboo. The area was surrounded by orange groves and the little town boasted two soda fountains. Los Angeles seemed very far away to the young Kirk boys in those simple days.
Tommy’s father was Baptist and there was a history of Baptist ministers on his side of the family. Tommy’s mother was Methodist, but the family never went to church together. Joe Kirk went to Sunday school because his friends did, but his parents never oversaw a religious upbringing. In fact, the Kirk boys had very little supervision. Lucy worked hard and raised most of the money to take care of the family. Al Joe’s money was his own and he did little to help out the family finances. The father of the Kirk family was an alcoholic and as mean as a snake. “My mother was Joan of Arc and my father was the beast that walked,” said Joe Kirk of his parents. Joe looked at his parents as the angel and the devil and the Kirk boys took a lot of abuse over the years due to their father’s uneven temper. The rules of the house continually changed—once the boys memorized one set of rules the father would change them.
Every now and then there would be a note telling the family that the father had left for Kentucky. The family was never invited along and the Kirk boys never knew their grandparents on their father’s side of the family. Al Joe Kirk felt he had to go back to Kentucky to feel good about himself again. He was raised there and for some reason, he periodically found it important to go back.
Grandfather Kirk was a judge in Kentucky and had been in the U.S. Senate. He died early of cancer and his death caused great financial hardship on the family. Al Joe Kirk was the youngest of ten children and grew up spoiled and indulged. All of the older siblings found a profession in life, but Al Joe got by on his good looks and charm. He started in on marriage early at sixteen and throughout his life had five marriages. Tommy Kirk’s family was part of the third marriage. The Grandparents had a large home in Kentucky. It was the kind of home where the Grandmother drew a line down the center of the house with one side being hers and the other side being his and the two didn’t communicate for the next twenty years. The Kirks were still split from the Civil War and the issues of North and South permeated the family all the way into young Tommy’s childhood.
Tommy was a confident boy and artistic from the start. His favorite subject at school was art and he was continually sketching. Dinosaurs were some of Tommy’s most favorite subjects to draw and some of his artwork made it into episodes of the Matinee Theatre television show. For a time, Tommy thought that he wanted to be a scientist and he busied himself with little experiments. One such experiment was a product to help plants grow that he called “Anti-Grow.” The solution was made from water and crushed marble from around the house. Tommy went around sprinkling his “Anti-Grow” on all of the plants. His brother Joe logically suggested that he might call it “Plant-a-Grow” instead since it was supposed to make things grow.
The boys often took the bus into Los Angeles on Saturdays to go to the movies. They would spend the week collecting bottles and by Saturday they had enough to catch a matinee. On a dollar the boys could ride the bus, see the movie, and even enjoy a bag of popcorn. Tommy also enjoyed a game of tennis, but his carefree days of finding ways to entertain himself and fill time were coming to an end.
In the audience of Ah, Wilderness! was a representative of the powerful Gertz talent agency of Beverly Hills. “An agent came backstage and introduced himself and gave me his card and said, ‘Would you have your folks call me?’” Tommy gave the card to his parents after the show that night and they called the agency. What the Gertz Agency saw in this young pre-teener was a real kid who could act honestly in a completely believable manner. Without any training, this boy had a natural talent and a likable, down-home personality. Tommy seemed corn-fed and truly American. He was cute—not pretty, and he read lines as if he meant what he was saying. The words seemed to flow as if he had thought them up himself. Tommy even received exit applause at the end of one of his scenes every performance. Tommy also played roles in two other Pasadena Playhouse productions, Barefoot in Athens and Portrait in Black before launching into the world of TV and film.
At the age of twelve, this self-proclaimed “theatrical novice” scored a job on the Lux Radio Playhouse followed by his film debut in the Jerry Fairbanks short subject, Down Liberty Road in 1955. This was also Angie Dickinson’s first movie and Marshall Thompson also starred. The director started filming Tommy’s big scene with the back of his head to the camera. Somehow, Tommy convinced the director to change camera angles so his face would be in the shot.
A number of television appearances followed including a guest star appearance on the very popular Gunsmoke TV series. Once he got started, Tommy never stopped working. In fact, by 1955 Tommy seemed to be all over the television. His brother would drive him to interviews and he usually got the job. After a while, the family hired a sitter to drive Tommy to his jobs. His photographic memory enabled him to be a great success in the live dramas presented on the Matinee Theatre. Tommy was given leading roles with as many as three hundred lines and he ended up doing thirty-five episodes of Matinee Theatre, which ran from 1955 through 1958 on NBC at 3 PM. There were also appearances on The Loretta Young Show, The Man Behind the Badge, TV Readers Digest, Big Town, Crossroads and another feature with Sterling Hayden called The Peacemaker from Warner Brothers. Tommy was an instant success, but putting all of his early television and film work aside, 1955 also marked his most important audition.
Walt Disney was holding a big audition to find the right young man to play Joe Hardy opposite Mickey Mouse Club favorite, Tim Considine in a “Mouskeserial” based on The Hardy Boys books. “A lot of kids tested for the series, including me, and I was fortunate to land the role,” said Tommy. Fortunate indeed, for it lead to his long time association with the Walt Disney Company—the machine responsible for making Tommy one of the top teen actors in Hollywood. Disney sent some pages of the script to Tommy’s agent after seeing him in Down Liberty Road and he memorized them for the audition. There was a number of Joe Hardy hopefuls watching Tommy audition with Tim Considine and he felt as if he was pretty raw. However, a few days later his agent called to say that he had won the role. The money was the best he had been paid for a TV show and to Tommy it seemed like a fortune. Tommy had a bank account now, and 20 percent was set aside in a trust. The rest went to pay for the sitter and other expenses, including the family’s general living costs. Tommy was now a very busy boy, for he had only finished four of his thirty Matinee Theatre episodes and now he was also a Mousketeer.
There were two editions of The Hardy Boys series: “Mystery of Applegate Treasure” and “Mystery of Ghost Farm.” Both editions played between September 1955 and the fall of 1957. Compared to his attractive co-star, Tim Considine, Tommy is instantly noticeable as the stand-out actor. Tommy demonstrates, in this early part of his career, his gift for presenting a true and honest person on the screen. There is a rather moving scene in “The Mystery of Applegate Treasure” when Tommy expresses his passionate desire to be a real detective like his father. It is moving only because Tommy Kirk seems so desperate about it—being a detective is his dream and he wants it so badly that he can taste it.
The difference between Tommy Kirk and the other child actors in the series (some of the adults too) is that the stakes are high. This approach is the sign of a great talent. Since none of the other actors in the series seem to be committing to the world of the Hardy Boys quite like Tommy Kirk does, it can only be assumed that his good performance is not due to the director bringing it out of him. Nearly all of the other kids in the series sound like they are just reciting lines. Tim does better than most—and his handsome good looks made him very popular with audiences, but Tommy is actually turning in a performance of merit. It is no wonder that he would be selected to play the pivotal teen role in Disney’s next live action film, Old Yeller.
Besides The Hardy Boys, Tommy was given a Mickey Mouse Club assignment that would influence the rest of his life. As part of the Newsreel segment of the show, Tommy was assigned to cover both the Democratic and Republican conventions. Tommy interviewed Senator Everett Dirkson on “Why I should be a Republican,” as well as interviewing Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee on “Why I should be a Democrat.” He watched Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey and John Kennedy. “But, I saw everybody who was anybody in politics in that era and it was fantastic. I was at both conventions for their duration, and it was like a dream. I’ll never forget it,” said Tommy. The experience nurtured Tommy’s passion for a good debate and it taught him to follow the politics of his country very closely. This aspect of his personality even came up in a 1964 press release for the film Pajama Party which stated that he, “never misses an opportunity to attend a political convention or a debate.”
There were other small assignments given to Tommy on The Mickey Mouse Club such as a voice-over on a show from Denmark called “Boys of the Western Sea.” There was also a segment that Tommy and Annette Funicello would introduce about how kids lived in different parts of the world. Tommy’s relationship with Annette Funicello was rather distant: “We got along. I was smart enough to realize that, if I’m gonna be under contract [at Disney] and she’s under contract here, it’s very important that we get along well.” Even though he played her boyfriend in eight films, Tommy indicates that he had a work only relationship with Funicello: “…I always tried to behave nicely toward her, and she was nice to me. Well, she’s nice toward everybody.”
Tommy made another TV appearance in 1957 in the second half of the fourth anniversary episode of Disneyland. The Mousketeers honor Walt with a song and dance salute to the TV show on its third anniversary (“Going on four,” adds Kevin “Moochie” Corcoran). Tommy Kirk is among them and says a few words of congratulations to Uncle Walt. Although he was photographed for publicity in the regulatory mouse ears, Tommy was never a singing and dancing Mousketeer. He sits behind Walt the whole time with Kevin Corcoran (also a serial player, but strangely dawning the Mousketeer wardrobe) watching the other kids put on the show. The episode serves as an intriguing plug for a future project that would have featured Tommy and the other Mousketeers in a movie based on the “Oz” books to which Disney had acquired the rights. Although some of the project’s songs are featured and fully staged with the Mousketeers performing as the Oz characters, the film was never made.
Walt Disney was looking around for a project to feature the popular Mousketeers, but most of them were let go when the TV series folded due to rising production costs. A few remained to appear in other projects, most notably Annette Funicello and most significantly Tommy Kirk. Disney offered Tommy a seven-year contract and he jumped at the chance. Going to work at the same studio everyday would have taken a great burden off of his family having to run Tommy around to various auditions—his schedule was more or less set for the following seven years.
While on the Mickey Mouse Club, Tommy continued to attend public school. He was teased more than praised by his peers for being a television star. However, all of that ended with the seven year contract and Tommy went to school at the studio. There was a Mrs. Penny who took Tommy to and from the studio every day. She had two children, Victoria and Mark, with whom Tommy became friends. Mrs. Penny was a conniving woman who started spreading around a lot of nasty stories regarding Tommy’s father. She was hoping to have his parents declared unfit and take Tommy into her custody and profit by him. None of this ever materialized, but Al Joe was smart enough to leave Tommy alone at home. He knew that under the protection of Walt Disney he couldn’t lay a hand on Tommy—the studio wouldn’t have it. The other boys in the family had a harder time with their father than Tommy did for they were not magically protected. By this time there were four Kirk brothers in all, Andrew and John were the youngest. Tommy could talk down to his father and get away with it while the other kids caught hell for it. Andy (named Andrew Jackson Kirk, III. after his uncle and grandfather) was treated the worst by Al Joe. The youngest, John, didn’t have it so bad at home as the father had mellowed by the time John reached his teens. It was definitely not “Leave it to Beaverland” in the Kirk home, but on screen, Tommy’s growing up was the American dream come true.
In his first major motion picture, Old Yeller, young Tommy Kirk, still a Mousketeer serial player, displays the best use of his talents—arguably the best use of his talents during his entire career. He truly gives an amazing performance and one wonders why the Academy did not recognize him with a junior Oscar. He had already been nominated for an Emmy award for his work on Matinee Theatre. The part of Travis Coats is a challenging one for it requires an acting talent that can run the gamut from high drama to comedy, not to mention some rigorous physical demands. Tommy is drug by a mule across a field at top speeds, he is attacked by wild hogs and he is required to sit in a tree and rope the hogs—lifting them up to his level once he has caught them. Tommy gives a confident and fearless performance filled with adventure and charm. He develops, for the first time here, his truthful sibling relationship with Kevin Corcoran as the little brother—“...two promising newcomers…” as Variety put it. Dorothy McGuire as the mother is perfect and although Fess Parker receives top billing he is barely in the picture. “Fess Parker, at that time, was on the outs with Disney—I presume over money,” said Tommy. Disney was notorious for paying lower salaries than any other studio for its top talent. “This was simply his last contractual obligation and he only worked about three days on this film, but good, competent, professional that he is, he came in and did it. I think he helps the movie a lot.”
Tommy Kirk’s performance is truly exemplary—not only because there is not a single dishonest moment in the film for him, but for a specific scene—the very climax of the film where Tommy is forced to shoot his suffering dog. There is a close-up on his face as he points the rifle, anguishing over the thought of having to do it. He is trying with all of his might to be brave, but for a second he drops his head into his arm and cannot find the courage to do it. We cannot stand to see him in such pain—the situation is as miserably sad as can be. Then, suddenly, Tommy lifts his head with determination and pulls the trigger. Tommy delivered the scene to its fullest potential under Robert Stevenson’s guidance and it should be marked down as one of the most beautifully realized moments by a child actor in films. Tommy credits director Robert Stevenson, and justly so, with the quality and sensitivity with which Old Yeller was made. “I worshipped him,” declared Tommy, “I really loved him. He’s the reason Old Yeller is so good. He’s a very nice man, very gentle. I loved him like a father.”
Leonard Maltin said in his book, The Disney Films, that, “In many ways the outstanding performance of the film is that of Tommy Kirk, complete with Texas accent.” Maltin also noted that Tommy “…carries off the full range of intense emotions with uncanny skill. Knowing that he was capable of this makes it all the more sad to watch him in the bumbling comedy parts he played later on.”
Quality roles like Travis in Old Yeller do not come around for teenage actors very often. Unfortunately, though he was handed some of the better teen roles of the 1960s, Tommy would never get the chance to show the full range of his talents again—not even in adulthood where he most definitely should have had the chance. “I’ve always been annoyed by that, but it’s water under the bridge,” said Tommy of his lack of dramatic parts.
Old Yeller and his second feature, The Shaggy Dog, established Tommy Kirk as a prominent young star. Unfortunately, none of the films that followed would allow him the opportunity to display his excellence in the world of drama, but he was as able in the world of comedy and spent most of his time at Disney in screwball fantasies. His appeal is classic, for he plays the underdog who gets ahead. And he gets ahead on his own merits, by drumming up the courage and good character to make it through the toughest of odds. “Tom in the movies was the way he was in life,” says his brother Joe, “He was that charming, that funny, and that serious.”
Those qualities Joe Kirk describes struck this writer, at the young age of twelve or thirteen, watching a release of Swiss Family Robinson on the big screen in Placerville’s Empire Theater and noticing Tommy Kirk for the first time. Next I noticed him popping up on TV here and there as his old movies began to be shown from time to time. So, although he was an icon of my parents generation, and perhaps remembered most fondly by those who grew up with the original Mickey Mouse Club, because of Disney’s tradition of continually promoting their old product, my generation got to see some of Tommy on the big screen too. Today’s teens are seeing him on TV and DVD. He is difficult to miss, although he is strangely unfamiliar when his name is mentioned. From the small town of Downey to the wonderful world of Disney, Tommy Kirk had quite a trip.
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| Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller |
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