He Meets His Biographer at the Gym
My Mother and Audie Murphy Chapter 127
In Hollywood, Audie Murphy trained at Terry Hunt’s gym, where he boxed with competitive fighters. After the Cagney brothers let him go, he moved into the gym and lived there, sleeping on the floor and mingling with the actors and producers who worked out there. It was there that he met David “Spec” McClure, who worked for the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. McClure befriended Murphy and helped him land his first acting roles.
McClure, a war veteran who had served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, saw promise in Murphy and believed his story could make a great book and films. He proposed that they collaborate on a memoir of Murphy’s war years. To make the account accurate, the two traveled to France in 1948 and retraced 1,500 miles of battlefields so Murphy could recall the specifics of his experiences. The trip could not have been easy. Murphy had to relive the war in detail and repeat those memories to McClure, and he was struggling with the psychological aftermath of his service, which often strained his relationships. Reliving a trauma can be therapeutic, but it can also reinforce PTSD symptoms and cause retraumatization. The outcome likely depended on how the exposure was handled. Neither man wrote about the trip, so how it affected Murphy is hard to know. Back in Los Angeles, the two rented an apartment and wrote To Hell and Back, which was published in 1949 and became an instant bestseller.
When Murphy returned from the war, he had bought a house in Farmersville, Texas, for his sister Corinne’s family, hoping to reunite his orphaned siblings. The arrangement collapsed under the strain. Unable to support them while his acting career stalled, Murphy placed his brother Joe at the Variety Clubs Boys Ranch near Copperas Cove, Texas, and sent his sister Nadene to live with his brother Buck.
The Variety Clubs was financing a film called Bad Boy to draw attention to its work with troubled children. Many in the industry doubted Murphy’s ability because he had no acting experience. However, the film’s backers refused to fund the project unless Allied Artists gave Murphy the lead role. His strong performance finally drew Hollywood’s attention, and Universal signed him to a seven-year studio contract. His career as a movie star had begun.
In 1949, Murphy married actress Wanda Hendrix, who co-starred with him in the movie Sierra. He was still plagued by depression, chronic insomnia, war nightmares, night terrors, and vomiting. He slept in the garage, where he could keep the lights on, and kept a gun under his pillow. Hendrix later reported that he once held her at gunpoint. They separated after only a few months, and their divorce was finalized in 1951. Four days later, he married Pamela Opal Lee Archer, a former airline stewardess, with whom he had two sons. They stayed together until 1971.
