Three generations of friendship

McCrea son
David McCrea and his wife, Lauralea, who live in New Mexico, stopped at Will Rogers Memorial during the summer on his way to Illinois for a class reunion. Members of the McCrea family may be here for the 70th anniversary Will Rogers Days celebration. Jody, the eldest, also lives in New Mexico. Peter, the youngest, lives in Connecticut.

 

“My dad talked more about him than he did his own father,” Jody McCrea, eldest son of actor Joel McCrea said. The only one of the three sons of Joel McCrea and his wife, actress, Frances Dee, who had a movie career, he grew up hearing about Will Rogers. From an early age he realized he impact Will had on his father and his family.

Born just a year before Will was killed, like his two brothers, they heard lots of stories about their father and the short time he knew Will Rogers from the first time they met on the movie set. “I remember he talked about him all he time, he was like a father to my dad.”

“One of the most important impact on our lives was he encouraged my dad to get his ranch at Thousand Oaks (California). Ranching was the thing he was most successful.”

Although it has been a long time since Jody has been in Claremore, he remembers coming in the early days of the museum to do some taping” with the late Paula Love, Will’s great-niece and the first director.

Jody’s movie career covered several venues, primarily as a soldier and cowboy. He co-starred with is father in “Wells Fargo” and in the NBC series “Wichita Town.”

He moved to New Mexico in 1980 and lives near his brother, David.

David and his wife, Lauralea, visited the Memorial last summer on the way to his college reunion at Principia College in Illinois.

“Will gave Pop his first significant part in the movies and he remembered that,” he said. “He talked about him periodically, all his life.”

Before his death, Will and Joe McCrea got together often for lunch and “ranch” talk.

David lived in Ocheleta 1964-68 and visited the museum during that time.
David’s son, Wyatt, lives on the family ranch in California and is a close friend of Jennifer Rogers Etcheverry, Will’s great-granddaughter, granddaughter of Jimmy and Astrea Rogers and daughter of Kem Rogers. He has been involved with Jennifer in preservation projects at the Will Rogers Santa Monica Ranch.

Peter, the youngest of the McCrea sons, is a Connecticut real estate investor. Twenty years younger than his brothers, he laughing calls himself a “mistake.” He came to the museum as a teen-ager with his parents, probably in 1966 when the Charles Banks Wilson painting of Will Rogers for the Oklahoma State Capitol was on display here.

Joel and Frances met on a movie set and were married in 1933. He died in 1990, Frances Dee died in 2004.

Joel McCrea was a frequent visitor to the Claremore Memorial, several times for the Nov. 4 Will Rogers Days celebration. He celebrated his own birthday on Nov. 5. They were active in the Will Rogers Centennial Celebration in 1979, they 100th anniversary of Will’s birth.

The movie David remembers most of his father and Will is “Lightnin’.” Lightnin’ Bill Jones (Will) nicknamed for his lack of speed was partial to tall tales and hard liquor. Filmed near beautiful Lake Tahoe, Nevada, his wife owned a hotel half in California and half in Nevada, frequented by divorce seekers. Joel played John Marvin, a law student who intervened when Mrs. Jones and her daughter were about to sell the hotel in a stock certificate scam.

While filming this movie, Joel discovered not to look for cues for Will often changed the dialogue. In a book by Bryan and Frances Sterling, he described Will as a man who never had time to drink or smoke or do anything that would take extra time. He was “always going fast … on fire all the time.”

It was during this filming he talked to “Joe” — as Will always insisted on calling him — about buying land, which led McCrea o eventually buying the ranch still in his family today.

They played together again in “Business and Pleasure” with Will as an Oklahoma razor blade king and Joel a playwright who meets Will’s daughter on a ship enroute to Syria.

In his contract, Joel McCrea was not to be preceded in the billing by the names of more than two other members of the cast, in type as large as that used for any other member of the cast — except Will Rogers.

Under contract to play Will Rogers in “The Will Rogers Story,” he talked Warner studios out of it. Although he had played Will’s son, he didn’t feel he was good enough for the part. They used Will Rogers Jr.