Nunnally Johnson - Personal Life

Personal Life

Johnson was born, the first of two sons, to Johnny Pearl "Onnie" (née Patrick) and James Nunnally "Jim" Johnson. He and his younger brother, Cecil Patrick Johnson, were raised in in Columbus, Georgia. His father was a journeyman mechanic, turned tinsmith and copper-smith, turned pipe and sheet-metal shop superintendent for the Central of Georgia Railway. Nunnally graduated from Columbus High School in 1915. While living in Columbus in 1919, at 1312 Third Street, Nunnally was a second lieutenant in field artillery reserve corps. Cecil graduated from Georgia Tech in 1924, married Gene Clair Norris, and moved to Bellingham, Washington, where he was first a gas department superintendent and later a vice-president with Puget Sound Power & Light.

Johnson's first marriage, in 1919 at Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights, was to Alice Love Mason, with whom he had one daughter, Marjorie Fowler (film editor, born July 16, 1920). Alice was an editor with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Mason and Johnson divorced in 1920. His second marriage was to Marion Byrnes in 1927, also a staff member of the Daily Eagle, with whom he also had a daughter, Nora Johnson. Byrnes's and Johnson's marriage ended in 1938.

While filming The Grapes of Wrath, Johnson met his third wife, a fellow southerner, actress Dorris Bowdon, a Mississippi native. The two were married at the home of Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes, in Nyack-on-the-Hudson (Nyack, New York), on February 4, 1940. Together they had three children; daughter Christie Johnson Lucero, daughter Roxanna Johnson Lonergan and Johnson's only son, Scott Johnson.

In 1964, Johnson adapted daughter Nora Johnson's novel The World of Henry Orient into a film of the same title, starring Peter Sellers.