Newspaper Clippings - 1951

June 16, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

John Hodiak, not Bob Walker, will play the lead in “ County Line .” Bob didn't think the part was right for him, but it is for John.

July 18, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

Robert Walker and June Allyson, who twice appeared in comedies (“Her Highness and the Bellboy” and “The Sailor Takes a Wife”) together, will have serious duty in the Armand Deutsch production of “Bowery to Bellevue .” Both will play doctors. Irmgard Von Cube and Allen Vincent are writing the script. This will be Walker 's first picture at MGM since his swing around to Warners for “Strangers on a Train” and Paramount for “My Son John.”

August 10, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

Bob Walker will likely play opposite Dorothy McGuire in “R.S.V.P.” That sounds like a good chemical combination. Bob was planning to take a tramp steamer to Honolulu, but he's so mad about Director Leo McCarey and “My Son John” that he cancelled the trip. Wanted to be on tap if Leo needed him for more scenes or retakes.

August 30, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

The unexpected death of Bob Walker left me in a daze.  Bob struggled so heroically for rehabilitation, and his passing after winning the battle was shocking.  His ex-wife, Jennifer Jones, flew to Hollywood from New York when she learned of the death and asked that her two sons not be told until she arrived.  Jennifer wanted to break the sad news to them herself.

September 1, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

For the Record

I'm fed up hearing that Bob Walker was our unhappiest man; that he was unwanted and unloved.  Just two years ago I interviewed him after his return from the Menninger Clinic.  Among other things he said to me, "I've spent six and a half months of exhausting, exciting and introspective research.  I don't know that psychiatry will help the next fellow, I only know that with the help of psychiatry and psychoanalysis I am now to a certain extent the driver instead of the driven."

 I've known Bob well for the past three years and found him happy and well-balanced.  His whole life was wrapped up in his two sons and his career.  I've never seen anybody happier than Bob when he told me that Leo McCarey had chosen him to play Helen Hayes' son in Leo's picture, "My Son, John."  That part was a challenge to any actor, and it was an acting triumph for Walker .

It's too bad writers go back into old files to drag out statements which make Bob seem "unloved and unwanted."  He had triumphed over his troubles; his career had reached new peaks; and his sons thought him the greatest guy in the world.

September 3, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

Van Heflin gets co-billing with Bill Holden in “This is Dynamite” at Paramount . He'll play the part Bob Walker was reading the day that he died.

September 7, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

Dorothy Morris, a newspaper gal in Malibu, wrote me that she saw Bob two weeks ago in a local restaurant.  While his companion, an attractive brunette went to the powder room, Walker waited in the foyer.  "I hadn't seen him since he left Malibu three years before," said Dorothy.  I didn't expect him to recognize me, so I looked away.  He came right over and said, 'Why Dorothy, how nice to see you again.'  We chatted for 10 minutes.  He said he felt fine; was finishing a marvelous picture with Leo McCarey and had given up a trip to the Islands with his boys to do it."

"How many other Hollywood personalities would go out of their way to recognize and speak to a lay person they had not seen for three years?  A fine and gracious gentleman, Bob Walker and may he now enjoy the peace he sought so desperately."

September 29, 1951 (by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times)

I tried to get Harry Cohn on the phone to ask if it was true that Jimmy Stewart would take over the role originally set for Bob Walker in “European Edition,” which is about life behind the Iron Curtain, but Harry won't talk.

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