Story Doesn’t End at ‘Fly Away Home’

John Weld, former longtime editor and publisher of the old Laguna Beach Post, has titled his autobiography “Fly Away Home: Memoirs of a Hollywood Stunt Man.”

“Fly Away Home” refers to the fact that Weld, whose father died six months after Weld was born in Alabama in 1905, did not have a permanent home for much of his early life.

At 11, he was sent to live with relatives in Colorado, where, his mother reasoned, ranch life would strengthen and toughen her son. Thereafter, until he was on his own at 17, Weld lived in a succession of military academies, boardinghouses and relatives’ homes.

Had he had more permanent roots early on, the 86-year-old Laguna Niguel resident may never have left Birmingham.

But he did leave, and therein lies the fascinating life that fills 249 pages of his recently published autobiography (Mission Publishing; $19.95).

As a young man in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Weld’s wanderlust took him to Hollywood, New York and Paris, where he labored variously as a stuntman, newspaper reporter, screenwriter and novelist (the legendary Maxwell Perkins was his editor on four books for Scribner’s).

Along the way, Weld had two failed early marriages (the first for a week; the second for six months) and numerous love affairs and dalliances, most notably in Paris with stage actress Nan Sunderland, then engaged to actor Walter Huston. (Both Huston and his son, John, would later become Weld’s close friends.)

“Fly Away Home” is liberally sprinkled with many of the most famous names of that bygone era:

* Clark Gable, a dress-extra in the mid-’20s when Weld and the future King of the Movies were making the rounds of movie studios looking for extra work: “There’s no way you’re ever going to become a movie star,” the far-from prophetic Weld told Gable. “Your ears stick out too far. And if you do get leading roles, you’ll have to change your name. Clark’s too namby-pamby for a marquee.”

* Charles Lindbergh, whom Weld bird-dogged as a newly arrived reporter in Paris a few days after the Lone Eagle’s historic transatlantic flight: “To almost everyone on Earth, Lindbergh was a demigod, but not to me. I considered him an incredibly lucky, rather stuffy young man.”

* James Joyce, one of the many famous writers Weld met in Paris. Weld occasionally typed letters for the nearly blind author: “He believed himself to be the most laborious writer who ever lived and may have been. He spent hours every day researching, reading and making notes from books and periodicals in several languages.”

* Pioneer aviatrix Pancho Barnes, who lived in Laguna in the ‘30s: “In creating her, the gods had erred. She had a short neck, a stocky body, a baritone voice, face hair, which she shaved, and an unwomanly personality.”

It was while attending a weekend party at Barnes’ oceanfront home that Weld came, as he writes, “face to face with the most desirable woman I had ever known. . . . I was so hypnotized by her that, while shaking her husband’s hand, I was hardly aware of him.”

Katy Parrish, a movie actress whose stage name was Gigi Parrish, would become Weld’s third wife. They recently celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary.

“It has been fascinating,” Weld said of his long, eventful life, in an interview. “I really feel just very comfortable in it. In other words, I don’t regret any of it. I think it’s just been fabulous. I would like to have had a home as a young boy, but it’s just as well I didn’t have.”

As the book’s subtitle indicates, much of “Fly Away Home” centers on Weld’s three years as a Hollywood stuntman.

Three weeks shy of his 18th birthday, Weld and three Atlanta pals piled into a Model T and headed West to break into movies. “It seemed kind of an adventuresome thing to do, rather romantic in a way,” said Weld.

Broke and unable to find work as extras, Weld’s buddies returned home. But he stayed on, joining the swim team at the Ambassador Hotel swimming pool, where he was recruited by Fox Studios to swim and dive in a picture being shot on Santa Cruz Island off Santa Barbara.

That’s where Weld did his first movie stunt: diving off a 137-foot cliff, the equivalent of a 13-story building, for $60. (“It didn’t look so bad when I saw it from the beach,” he said.)

Weld quickly became a member in good standing of the stuntmen’s 20-83 Club, so-called, Weld writes, “because when one of us got hurt the state of California paid unemployment insurance compensation of $20.83 a week until he was able to work again.”

After three years of jumping off cliffs and dropping off bridges onto moving trains as a stunt double for the likes of Buck Jones, Tom Mix, and Laurel and Hardy, Wells, bent on becoming a writer, left Hollywood.

With a letter of recommendation from Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons, he was hired as a reporter for the New York American. A year later, Weld and another young reporter quit their jobs and, having been inspired by reading Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” hopped a freighter to France, where Weld landed a reporting job on the Paris Herald.

After returning to Hollywood and earning a modest living writing screenplays and novels, Weld spent World War II working as director of publications at Ford Motor Co. Although not chronicled in the book, Weld became editor and publisher of the Laguna Beach Post (now the Laguna Beach News) in 1952. He also owned Ford dealerships in Laguna and San Clemente.

“After the war, I wanted to make some money,” he said. “Writing books, I found out, was just no way to support yourself.”

“Fly Away Home” concludes with a lively account of what was perhaps Weld’s greatest adventure. With the intention of filming travel documentaries, John and Katy Weld set sail on a freighter bound for Hong Kong. But one night off the coast of Japan, the freighter was rammed by another ship and sank, Weld nearly losing his life in the process.

That was in 1961.

“I thought that was a good time to end it,” said Weld. “I could have gone on with a great deal more, and I may do so with another book.” With a chuckle, he added: “I’ve done so many things since then.”

After publishing 12 books, Weld has never forgotten the thrill of seeing his first byline--on a poem published in the Birmingham Age-Herald when he was 8: “I could hardly stand it, it was so exciting. I was intoxicated. It so affected me that, all my life, I’ve been writing.”

And he, says, has no intention of quitting.

BOOK SIGNING: Dan Simmons (“Summer of Night”) will sign from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday at Book Carnival, 870 N. Tustin Ave., Orange.

ENGLISH LIBRARIES: Fallon Evans, an English instructor at Los Angeles Harbor College, will discuss “The Libraries of England” at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Newport Center Library, 856 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Free.

Send information about book-related events to: Books & Authors, View, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Deadline is two weeks before publication.