George Raft

FROM HELL’S KITCHEN TO HOLLYWOOD

Broadway Bound by Neil Simon

Belgrade Theatre Coventry, 1995

Before he became a tough guy in the movies, George Raft had been a dancer. And not just any dancer – by 1920 he had gained a reputation as one of the fastest – and sexiest – ballroom dancers in New York.

Born George Ranft on 26 September 1895, the eldest son of ten children, he grew up in an area around 41st Street known as Hell’s Kitchen, which was little more than a forcing ground for gangsters. Having first tried baseball, boxing and pool with limited success, Goerge Raft eventually settled on dancing as his meal ticket out of the gutter. He was soon making seven cents a time as an instructor art the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, and supplementing his income as a paid partner for bored housewives and wealthy dowagers in louche little tea rooms all over town. His smouldering Latin looks and sensual style made him very popular with the opposite sex while his talent in competitions and exhibitions was earning him money and acclaim. Unconsciously too he was developing the look that would stand him in such good stead later – a hard, unsmiling face, hair as shiny and smooth as his patent leather shoes, and razor-sharp suits.

In the late twenties, having gone as far as he could go in New York, Raft made the move to Hollywood. His first big success was Scarface in 1932, during which he developed his trademark of the nickel flipped one-handed, over and over. Far from being a symbol of menace and authority, it in fact came out of Raft’s nervousness on camera. The director Howard Hawks invented the trick to disguise Raft’s shaking hand. (Al Capone later told the actor he enjoyed the movie but had been offended it wasn’t a twenty-dollar gold piece he was spinning…)

The quality of his films varied but George Raft’s acting was always the same – cool, intuitive, low-key. George Burns once remarked that when Gary Cooper and George Raft played a scene in front of a tobacco store, it looked like the wooden Indian was over-acting. But it obviously worked for him – he was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Souls at Sea in 1939. As his career progressed, he attempted to distance himself from his criminal image and to this end probably turned down more great roles than any other actor in Hollywood. These included High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, all of which finally went to Humphrey Bogart.

His on-screen persona belied his off-screen nature. He was a quiet man whose temper could flare up at the slightest sign of condescension from the Hollywood glitterati. Having started with nothing himself, he was a big tipper and a generous man. He could also be surprisingly naïve, to his cost. His first marriage to his touring dance partner Grayce Mulrooney was a disaster and they separated almost immediately, but from 1923 until her death in 1970, she refused to grant him a divorce yet continued to receive ten per cent of his earnings. Still, although never free to share his life with anyone else, Raft enjoyed long relationships with several women. His name was linked at various times with Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Betty Grable. In the mid-thirties he built a mansion in Beverly Hills for the heiress Virginia Pine, but would not live openly with her out of respect for her reputation.

If his career went into a decline in the fifties and sixties, it was probably because the character Raft had created for himself was no longer in tune with the changing times. In Some Like It Hot (1959) and Casino Royale (1967) his tough guy role was no more than a pastiche of what it had been. In an effort to diversify he became the resident host of the high-class Colony Club in London, only to be banned from England in his absence because of his – and the club’s – alleged connections to organised crime.

But though his glamour faded, he was and remains one of the best-respected leading men of Hollywood’s boom years. “He always had pride,” the comedian Milton Berle, a friend for forty years, said of him, “and great dignity. And there isn’t a person in show business who has a bad word to say about him. Whether he was up or down, he’s always been a real man.”

George Raft died in 1980.