Ex-Jasper County educator played a wide variety of roles in 40-year acting career

Among the most versatile of Hollywood movie actors to come out of Iowa was John Frederick who once taught school in Jasper County. He convincingly played roles ranging from a prehistoric tribe leader (in RKO’s “Prehistoric Women”) and the alien leader of “Killers from Space,” to a hired gunman (in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West”) and the American Cardinal, Carlin, in “The Shoes of the Fisherman.” He even had a brief stint as Tarzan in a couple of Tunisian-made films!

Frederick never met a camera he didn't like, he said in his autobiography, Name Droppings on Your Head. And the feeling was mutual. Small wonder that the actor with the rugged physique, photogenic face, and deep voice was much sought after for roles on the stage, in film, and on television in a career that spanned more than 40 years.

From 1943 to 1972 John Frederick appeared in numerous films made in the United States, Rome, Spain, and Africa. On television he starred or was featured in over 170 roles (including 22 episodes as Superman and a few episodes of “Bonanza”). He appeared on the New York stage in a dozen roles (including Frank Butler, the musical lead in “Annie Get Your Gun”), and starred in 60 professional summer theatre productions.

Frederick was born Frederick Stiffler in Norwalk on July 4, 1916 (his autobiography says 1919), the son of Fred C. and Maud (Anderson) Stiffler. Frederick remembered his father, a Warren County farmer and cattle buyer, as an “extremely morally good man” with a sixth grade education who got himself elected to the Iowa House of Representatives. His mother boarded school teachers.

Frederick recalled a childhood on miles of Stiffler-owned land behind the houses along Main Street in Norwalk where orchards were plentiful and he and his siblings were kept busy picking and packing cherries, apples, plums, peaches, and pears. These their mother was forever cooking and canning for the harsh Iowa winter ahead.

He also was impressed by memories of “people helping people, and, neighbors concerned about neighbors.” In the fall, at harvest time, “men gathered at daybreak at a neighbor’s farm whose grain was ripe and ready to cut, bundle and thresh.” Also, the women gathered to prepare, “in lavish abundance,” the noontime meal spread out on crudely-built tables covered with checkered tablecloths.

Two things occurred in this rural Iowa boy’s life that got him hooked on Hollywood.

One was the fact that he lived just down the road from the Lane Sisters, Priscilla, Rosemary, and Lola, who were destined to become household names on the silver screen. Their father was Dr. L. A. Mullican, who had a dental practice in Indianola. Mr. Stiffler took the family to see “The Girl from Havana” (1929), starring Lola Lane, at the Orpheum Theatre in Des Moines – his son’s first movie.

Secondly, he caught sight of Pat O’Brien (the Warner Brothers star) and his wife, Eloise, across the street in Norwalk visiting relatives. “Surely they had come from outer space, I fantasized. Sounds stupid? Believe me it wasn’t. That’s exactly how magically movies affected audiences in those early days,” Frederick recalled. “It was profound. It was eerie. It was jolting, and I had been bitten.”

After Frederick graduated from Norwalk High School at the age of sixteen, he sold his prize baby beef calf at the Iowa State Fair to finance a three-day trip to California down Route 66. He stopped off at his great-grandmother’s house, “a stone’s throw from Hollywood” (in Norwalk (!), California), then boarded a bus for La-La Land.

That night, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, he attended the Hollywood premiere of MGM’s much-touted “Dinner at Eight” (1933), starring Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore, and Billie Burke. Not only did the self-described “wide-eyed green horn from Iowa” see these stars “up close and personal,” but many others as well.

Frederick returned to Iowa to study at Drake University and the University of Iowa. He attended SUI on a football scholarship, but when he broke his collarbone in a scrimmage that source for paying his tuition was defunct. So Frederick organized his own dance band, and then got his own daily radio program on WSUI. Fellow Iowan Macdonald Carey was then doing graduate work at SUI, and noticed Frederick.

Following his first Broadway experience (the musical production “Home Sweet Home”), Frederick taught at Ira from 1937 to 1939. He was principal of this northwest Jasper County school as well as head of the music department. He was teaching at Frederika in Bremer County when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Frederick enlisted, but was classified 4F on account of his university football injury. His rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” in a movie talent contest put on by Jesse Lasky during the early days of World War II, however, won him a screen test at RKO.

Frederick, who by now had his Screen Actors’ Guild card, got a job backstage at Des Moines’ Shrine Auditorium when a caravan of Hollywood stars came to sell victory bonds. He invited Olivia de Havilland to church in Norwalk. Joan Bennett, who became one of Frederick’s early Hollywood connections (she was married to producer Walter Wanger), tagged along. That created quite a stir!

Touring the front lines in Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” for the USO, he saw the harsh realities of war close up. He entered German concentration camps in 1945 and experienced both the horrors there as well as the privilege of informing near-dead inmates that the war was over, then arranging their liberation and resettlement in their Jewish homeland in Israel.

In his later career, Frederick worked extensively in Rome, where, ironically, he played, among other roles, a German Wehrmacht officer in Luchino Visconti’s “La caduta degli dei” (“The Damned”).

He played a Russian soldier in one of his earliest pictures, “Song of Russia.” It was in Rome that he met Oleg Vidov, the Soviet Robert Redford, whom he would help to defect to this country in 1985 with some assistance from an old Iowa family friend, President Ronald Reagan.

For ten years, Frederick appeared in motion pictures under the name John Merrick. His agent, Paul Small, "a kingpin among his Hollywood peers," encouraged the change, "because," Frederick told columnist Louella Parsons, "my name is the same as the famous chapeau designer, John Frederic." In retrospect, Frederick considered that decision Small's "only mistake."

Frederick was married briefly to movie starlet Louise Allbritton (1920-1979), to whom he dedicated his autobiography. Career and wartime separations spelled doom for the spur-of-the-moment marriage. Louise married CBS News Correspondent Charles Collingwood in 1946 and moved to New York, returning to Hollywood only to make an occasional film. She died from spinal cancer.

Frederick never got over his Louise. He was able to rebound, however, and, in later years, enjoyed a reputation as quite the man-about-town.

When he gave up film work, Frederick worked for a time as a journalist in Europe (he interviewed Pope John Paul II at the time of his investiture in 1978) then returned to the United States where he retired to his ranch-style home in Palm Springs, California. He busied himself with charity work and gardening as well as writing his memoirs.

Clearly, John Frederick lived a full and satisfying life. In 1993, he was awarded a star on Palm Springs' Walk of Fame. His autobiography was published in 1999. And he was selected for inclusion in the 2012 edition of Who's Who in America.

According to longtime friend Fern Stanley Evans, of San Francisco, Frederick died November 11, 2012 at a Palm Springs-area hospital after a two-month illness. He was 96.

He was a true and valued friend to many Hollywood notables, including Mae West, Elizabeth Taylor, Ginger Rogers, and Ronald Reagan.

But he never forgot his roots.

“. . . I am grateful for my family heritage, which is midwestern USA,” he told an interviewer at the Venice Film Festival. “There you find the people in general live by a code of honor and ethics. My father was a shining example of that code.

“These people have a remarkable sense of the true basic values of life and living, and they seem never to lose sight of those values.”