Out Spotlight CVXXI

Today's Out Spotlight is actor, performer, activist, vegetarian, radical leftist and trained botanist, Will Geer. You may know him best as Grandpa Walton.

Will Geer was born William Auge Ghere on March 9, 1902, in Frankfort, Indiana, where he was deeply influenced by his grandfather, who was said to say hello to trees by their Latin names and who taught the young Will the botanical names of the plants in his native state. His grandfather's love of nature passed on to Will who went on to study botany at the University of Chicago and earn a master's degree in Botany from Columbia Univeristy.

Geer also got his love of the arts from his grandfather who used what his money brought back to Indiana from his profits from the California gold rush to build Frankfort's first opera house. During high school and college, Will got his first taste of performing by appearing in student theater.

He began his professional acting career touring in tent shows and on river boats. He worked on several left-oriented documentaries, including narrating Sheldon Dick's Men and Dust, about silicosis among miners.

Geer made his Broadway debut as Pistol in a 1928 production of Much Ado About Nothing. He created the role of Mr. Mister in Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. He appeared in numerous plays and revues throughout the 1940s on Broadway including one-man performances as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. He was a member of Orson Welles' and John Houseman's Project 891 theatre company.sponsored by the Federal Theatre Project. The story is that he was cast as "Slim" in the Broadway play version of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" by Steinbeck himself, because he showed up to the audition in bluejeans and Steinbeck thought he looked the part. It is said that Steinbeck was sitting outside the stage door on a chair when he made the decision as Geer filed past him.

From Broadway Greer went on to films and from 1948 to 1951, he appeared in more than a dozen movies, including Winchester '73, Broken Arrow, and Bright Victory.

What might not be know is his personal life and his life-long role as a political agitator and radical.

Always a bit of a rebel with a genuine love of people and the land, Geer hooked up with folksingers Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives during the Depression to travel about and perform, mostly at government work camps. He introduced Woody Guthrie to the People's World and the Daily Worker; Guthrie would go on to write a column for the Daily Worker.

He was an early boyfriend of Harry Hay, an activist and radical who later founded America's first large-scale gay activist organization, the Mattachine Society. Hay joined the cast of the Tony Pastor Theatre. where he met and began a relationship with fellow actor Will Geer, whom Hay credited as his political mentor.

In an interview with Hay late in his life he described Geer, how they met and their relationship. "When I met Will he was the leading man in a show I was cast in called "The Ticket of Leave Man." Will was so wonderful, I used to sit in the wings every night and just moon over his performance. At that time he was one of those sort of ugly men who could be gorgeously sexy."

Geer became a member of the Communist Party of the United States in 1934. It is believed by some that Harry Hay may have influenced Geer to become interested in communism. But Hay in same interview said it was Geer who introduced him to communism. "He was indeed.[who introduced me to communism] He wasn't terribly interested in theory. He didn't know a great deal about Marxism. He was very much caught up in the romanticism of the struggle but was never very strong on theory. I'm the opposite--I have to know everything I'm doing or I have trouble with it. During this time I tried to interest him in my theory of the brotherhood, but he just couldn't see it or understand why."

Hay and Geer participated in a milk strike in Los Angeles, where Hay was first exposed to radical gay activism in the person of "Clarabelle", a drag queen who held court in the Bunker Hill neighborhood, who hid Hay from police. Later that year, Hay and Geer performed in support of the San Francisco General Strike, West Coast waterfront strike lasted 83 days Hay witnessed police firing on demonstrators and this cemented his commitment to social change. Though marred by violence, it was an organizing triumph, one that became a model for future union strikes. Geer became a reader of the West Coast Communist newspaper, the People's World.

Geer was the significant influence in the formation of Hay's early political beliefs and activist passions. Hay realized early on the similarities between an oppressed labor force and its exploitative bosses with that of the gay minority and the restrictive, oppressive society that ruthlessly scapegoated gays.

Continuing his activism, Geer is also credited with introducing Guthrie to Pete Seeger at the 'Grapes of Wrath' benefit he organized in 1940 for migrant farm workers.

In 1951, after appearing in four films that year, Geer because of his fervant, active interest in liberal politics, was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee for questioning and was ultimately blacklisted for refusing to answer their questions. During the period of being blacklisted in Hollywood, he went on to build the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga, California, with his wife, actress Herta Ware.

He built the Theatrical Botanicum during those hard times not only in order to find an acting haven for himself and but for his many blacklisted friends as well. He not only coached actors but also encouraged outdoor philsophical discussion and, of course, folksinging. He also combined his love of acting and botany at the Theatricum, making sure that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare was grown there.

Still, Geer managed to appear in at least one film during that time, Salt of the Earth, a defiant, incendiary documentary look at a worker's strike led by the wives of abused salt miners in New Mexico that featured a production staff largely comprised of blackballed Hollywood artists.

Other than that, Geer returned to Broadway for work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he played several seasons at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, where he created a second "Shakespeare Garden" on the theater's grounds. By this time he was also working sporadically on Broadway. Then in 1962 Otto Preminger cast him as a Senate minority leader in Advise and Consent for his first Hollywood film in 11 years.

During the '60s, the 6'2", 230-pound Geer was frequently cast in villainous roles.
He often appeared on television throughout the decade in shows ranging from Gunsmoke to Hawaii 5-0 as well as playing a regular role on the short-lived series The Young Rebels (1970-1971). His became best known for his last role of his six-decade career, that was Zebulon (Zeb) Walton, aka Grandpa in the long-running television series "The Waltons" that began in 1972.


He was a key member of The Waltons from the pilot special through his death. His was among the show's most popular characters and he is said to have patterned Grandpa Walton after producer/creator Earl Hamner's book character, himself, and his own grandfather, a successful sourdough during the California goldrush who sported a mustache and white hair similar to Geer's own.

Even late in life, Geer described himself as a folklorist. Actress Helen Hayes wryly described him once as "the world's oldest hippie."

Geer maintained a vacation home on the East Coast, called Geer-Gore Gardens, in Nichols, Connecticut. It was created after his Theatricum Botanicum. He visited often and attended the local Fourth of July fireworks celebrations, sometimes wearing a black top hat or straw hat and always his trademark denim overalls with only one suspender hooked.

He and his wife Herta Ware, eventually divorced, but remained close throughout the rest of their lives. They had three children, Kate, Thad and Ellen Geer. Ellen following in her parents footsteps of acting.

Geer passed away on April 22, 1978, of respiratory failure. His family gathered at his bedside and sang Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and recited poems by Robert Frost. He was cremated and his ashes were buried at the Theatricum Botanicum in the "Shakespeare Garden" in Topanga Canyon, near Santa Monica, California.


Dying shortly after completing the sixth season of The Waltons, the death of his character was written into the show's script as well.