Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 23.
Hollywood: The Gatineau Connection
Archie M. Pennie
The author is deeply grateful to Pat Tone for supplying biographical information and lending the family photographs. Copies of these photographs have been made for the HSG Archives.
Many of the middle and older generations will always remember the distinguished and debonair stage and screen actor, Franchot Tone. Few will know that he had a very strong link to the Gatineau and particularly to Thirty-One Mile Lake and Lake Pemichangan. This link had been forged strongly many years ago, for his grandfather S. P. Franchot, then from Buckingham, was one of the founding members of the Gatineau Fish and Game Club, which celebrated its centenary in 1994. His father Frank J. Tone was a long-term member of the Club as well, so it is not all that strange that Franchot should have had such a close affinity to that area of the Gatineau.
Franchot was an Arts graduate from Cornell University and also studied in France. His acting career began in Buffalo, New York, where he joined a local theatre company. He moved later to the New York stage, where he appeared in The Age of Innocence with Katherine Cornell as well as many other Broadway productions. He moved from the stage to Hollywood in 1932, making his debut with Joan Crawford in the film Today we Live. He later married Joan and she was a frequent distinguished visitor to the family cottage at Lake Pemichangan. After his divorce from Joan he married Jean Wallace, also a film star, who often came to the lake with their two sons.
My wife Barbara, whose parents owned the cottage next door, often recalls how she and several of her summer friends would hide in the bushes eavesdropping on Franchot, Joan and other Hollywood celebrities as they relaxed on the porch. He had a rich and fascinating voice which appealed so much to young and old.
Franchot was a great outdoors man and was never happier than on holiday at the lake. He loved the Gatineau and the opportunities it gave him for exercising his skills with a fly rod. Despite his international status as a star, he was a real down-to-earth gentleman, and a great friend and companion to anyone who would share his canoe as he fished and enjoyed the peace and stillness of the lakes. During the 1930s and 40s he was one of the leading figures in the entertainment world and appeared in many films and stage productions, including The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Mutiny on the Bounty, Five Graves to Cairo, Man on the Eiffel Tower, Here Comes the Bride, Without Honour, and many, many others. In all, he appeared in close to fifty films and plays.
One of the summer highlights at Pemichangan was the arrival on the lake of the Grumman Goose airplane from Ottawa bringing Franchot and his distinguished passengers to share with him the great Gatineau outdoors. The excited summer residents would watch from a respectable distance to see whom they could recognize. These were great occasions up there and almost equivalent to a Royal Visit.
The Tone family has continued its strong attachment to the Gatineau, and Franchot’s two sons, Pascal (Pat) and Jeff return at regular intervals to the old family cottage to enjoy the unique surroundings that were so much a part of their father’s life. Another Franchot, his grandfather’s namesake, represents the fifth generation of his family to summer at the lake. Although he lived and worked in the United States, Franchot Tone’s heart and soul were firmly entrenched in the hills and lakes of the Gatineau. When he died in 1968, his ashes were scattered near his cottage. To some of us who were his friends this somehow makes us feel that he still shares with us the pleasures of his beloved Gatineau.