Personal Life
Beery's first wife was actress Gloria Swanson; the two performed onscreen together. Although Beery had enjoyed popularity with his Sweedie shorts, his career had taken a dip, and during the marriage to Swanson, he relied on her as a breadwinner. According to Swanson's autobiography, Beery tricked her into swallowing an abortifacient when she became pregnant, and caused her to lose their child. Beery's second wife was Rita Gilman. They adopted Carol Ann, daughter of Rita Beery's cousin. Like his first, this marriage also ended in divorce.
According to E.J. Fleming's book The Fixers (about MGM's legendary "fixers" Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling), Beery, gangster Pat DiCicco, and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli (who was also DiCicco's cousin and eventual producer of the James Bond films) allegedly beat comedian Ted Healy to death in the parking lot of the Trocadero nightclub in 1937. The book claims that Beery was sent to Europe by the studio for a few months, while a story was concocted that three college students had killed Healy. Immigration records confirm a four-month-long trip to Europe on Beery's part immediately after Healy's death, ending April 17, 1938. A pencil drawing of Beery survives that was done on a film set by Healy, an amateur artist as well as movie actor and the organizer and original leader of The Three Stooges.
Beery owned and flew his own planes, one a Howard DGA-11. On April 15, 1933 he was commissioned a lieutenant commander in A-V(S), USNR at NRAB Long Beach.
In December 1939, the unmarried Beery adopted a seven-month old infant girl Phyllis Anne. No further information on the child appears to exist, and she is not mentioned in Beery's obituary.
Beery left an impression of being misanthropic and difficult to work with on many of his colleagues. Jackie Cooper, who made several films as a child with Beery, called Beery "a big disappointment", and accused him of upstaging and other attempts to undermine the boy's performances out of what Cooper presumed was jealousy. Child actress Margaret O'Brien also worked with Beery, and she ultimately had to be protected by crew members from Beery's insistence on constantly pinching her. Mickey Rooney remains an exception to this attitude among child actors, however, and has frequently stated that he enjoyed working with Beery.
One of his proudest achievements was catching the largest black sea bass in the world off Santa Catalina Island in 1916, a record that stood for 35 years.
A noteworthy episode in Beery's life is chronicled in the 5th episode of Ken Burns' documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea: In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating Jackson Hole National Monument to protect the land adjoining the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Local ranchers, outraged at loss of lands they wanted to graze and comparing this action of FDR's to Hitler's taking of Austria, were led by the aging Beery as they protested by herding 500 cattle across the monument lands without a permit.
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