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Mrs. Bert Hall, who stoically follows
her husband wherever he goes. . . .
Above right, Bert Hall as he looked
when a member of the Lafayette
Escadrille.
By Paul Harrison
HOLLYWOOD.
ERT HALL is in Hollywood, so
there may be a war going on
i here any time now. Mr. Hall
and Trouble —important trouble
B
—have a peculiar affinity for each
other, he being a professional soldier of
fortune and a veteran of practically all
the scraps worth mentioning in the past
25 years.
He came here with the pacific in
tention of doing a little writing for the
movies, but after only a few months he
is beginning to find the screen colony
pretty dull.
Mr. Hall is 52, and looks it. He has
a husky physique but thinning gray
hair and pale brown eyes set deeply in
a weather-beaten face. But tuck him
into a fast fighting ship and he’s gone
with the wind. When that happens
pretty Mrs. Hall will sigh one of her
stoical sighs, kiss her three strapping
sons, and catch the next plane in pur
suit of her husband.
Said he: “People at some of the stu
dios want me to sign a contract, and
they just can’t understand why I re
fuse to be tied down. Right away they
start talking money. They seem
to think there isn’t any important
money anywhere else on earth. I try
to tell ’em that I can make more money
at my regular business in a month than
Hollywood would pay me for a year of
drudgery. Yeah, 1 said ‘drudgery’.”
Hall speaks five languages fluently
and he honestly believes that he knows
more people than any other man alive.
It’s a knack he has. Some of his ac
quaintanceships are not to be bragged
about now, but tomorrow the “wrong
people” may be “right” and the “right
people” may be saying, “Don’t blind
fold me, lieutenant; I can die like a
man.”
TJE knows quite a few of the “right
11 people” in Hollywood. When he
was “General Chan” in China, head of
the Nationalist government’s air forces,
he occasionally performed favors for
movie companies.
Hall started for Hollywood at the
invitation of the late Irving Thalberg.
That famous producer wanted the ad-
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venturer to write and assist in the pro
duction of the story of his own life.
But Thalberg died unexpectedly and
other executives instructed Hall to
choose a single country for the locale
of his story. One country, for a man
who has fought in and over dozens of
countries, and on four continents!
He said no, thanks, and went over to
Twentieth Century-Fox to serve as
technical adviser for the Chinese se
quences in Shirley Temple’s “Stow
away.” Warner Brothers now have him
working on the story of the Lafayette
Escadrille. Hall knows considerable
about that outfit, having been one of
the seven original American members
—the only one of the seven alive today.
Hall was born in unexciting Higgins
ville, Mo., but his father had been a
soldier with Emperor Maximilian of
Mexico and with the Confederate army
in the Civil War. ... At 9, Bert tried
a parachute jump from a barn and
broke nine bones, including both arms.
... At 13, he and his father joined
the Alaskan gold rushr- They got lots
of experience but little gold. In Dallas
in 1904 he saw a circus performer
killed when he missed the net after be
ing shot from a cannon. Hall asked for
the job and held it for six months.
An automobile demonstrator, then a
race driver. ... In France, in 1910,
he learned to fly. . . . Exhibition flights
until early 1913, when an agent of Sul
tan Abdul Hamid hired him to observe
the movements of the Bulgarian forces.
Before his Lafayette Es
cadrille adventure, Hall
spent six months getting
shot out of a cannon for
a circus.
. . . Came the day when Turkish gold
ran out and Hall didn’t get his SIOO in
advance. So he flew over to the Bul
garian side and made a similar deal
with them.
TIE escaped by bribery, flew to Russia,
then to Germany. In Germany he
tested planes which he soon was to be
fighting against. ... He got to Paris
and was in the Foreign Legion two days
after war was declared. In 1914 he
was transferred to aviation, and on
April 16, 1916, was transferred again
as a charter member of the Lafayette
Escadrille.
Hall was lucky. He shot down sev
eral enemy planes, carried spies behind
the enemy lines, but was wounded only
once and never crashed a plane or
failed to reach his home port.
The Russian revolution caught Hall
in Petrograd. With the wife of a czarist
general and a fortune in platinum and
jewels he escaped across Siberia,
reached Harbin, sailed for America.
Back in France, and in the war again,
he was assigned to the making of a
propaganda picture for aviation re
cruiting.
Hall toured'America with the picture,
then came to Hollywood for “Border
Patrol.” . . . But he didn’t like the
movies, and in 1921 joined the abortive
revolution of Governor Estaban Cantu
in Lower California. After gathering
planes and pilots in Los Angeles, Hall
saw all his plans upset when Cantu’s
Bert Hall, above, when he was the
Chinese General Chan, wearing
French, Russian, Rumanian and
Chinese decorations.
brother-in-law stole all the revolution
ary funds.
Then to Japan for three years as an
aviation expert. ... In 1924 he joined
Mexican Generals Serrano and Gomez
in their scheme to overthrow President
Calles. . . . Again he bought planes
and recruited pilots, but Calles heard of
the plot, assumed the offensive and un
ceremoniously executed the two lead
ers. . . .
Next came a minor squabble in Peru,
with Hall engaged by the government
to strafe some troublesome rebels. Late
in 1929 he became commander of the
aviation forces of China’s Nationalist
government, and was known as Gen
eral Chan. . . . Took part in suppress
ing 15 bush-league revolutions
In May, 1931, for a flat payment of
$50,000 and a promise of SSOOO a month
he absconded with all the government’*
planes and pilots, went to Canton and
joined the revolutionary de facto gov
ernment headed by General Chen Ch;
Tong.
Everything was going fine wher
President Chiang Kai-shek, in prefer
ence to fighting, paid General Cher
Chi Tong several million dollars to cal:
off hostilities and be a good boy. Hal.
was left high dry. He went barn
storming about China; spent two yean
in prison, before returning to America
And that is the story of Weston Berl
Hall to date. His three sons, Weston
16; Don, 15, and Norman, 11, attend £
military school here and make modei
airplanes in their spare time. Theii
father hopes they’ll never go to war.