John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part One

Author, Poet, Journalist, Reviewer, Screenwriter, Movie Producer, Stage Actor, Performer, & Director
Born August 23, 1902, Evanston, Illinois
Died April 18, 1984, Santa Monica, California

I have been writing about lesser-known writers who contributed to Weird Tales. John Lee Mahin, Jr., isn't one of them. He was in fact very well known in Hollywood for his dozens of screenplays. Even so, there aren't any biographical facts for him in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb). The ISFDb could link to Wikipedia, for there is an entry on Mahin on that website, but they don't. I don't blame them, for the entry on Mahin is typical Wikipedia. When Wikipedia doesn't lie, by omission or commission, or spout left-wing propaganda, its information is often incomplete, erroneous, or self-contradictory. So I guess I'll write about Mahin here.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., was born on August 23, 1902, in Evanston, Illinois, to John Lee Mahin, Sr. (1869–1930) and Julia Graham (Snitzler) Mahin (1867-1934). A native of Muscatine, Iowa, Mahin Senior got his start in the newspaper business but made a name for himself in advertising. He had his own advertising firms in Chicago and New York and wrote books on advertising and sales. His father had been a newspaperman before him. If you go searching for Mahins and related families, you won't lack for newspaper accounts of their activities.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., got his name and face in the newspaper at age eleven when his picture and a boosterish but vague profile of him appeared in the Chicago Tribune along with those of a dozen other children, all of whom were candidates for future fame. This thing--I'm not sure whether to call it a feature article, contest, promotion, publicity campaign, or what--is so foreign to me that I have a hard time understanding its purpose. In any case, it appeared as a full-page spread in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 1914. There at the bottom of the page is a portrait photograph of John Lee Mahin, Jr., No. 12, dressed in a suit and tie, posed and serious, sitting, as a child, below a possible pinnacle of future fame. I haven't checked out the other candidates, but his candidacy for fame proved to be a good one, for he became well known for his work in Hollywood.

Mahin graduated from Middlesex School in Massachusetts in 1921, giving the valedictory address for his class. One of his classmates was Finley Peter Dunne, Jr., another future screenwriter and son of the famed humorist and author. Mahin was in the Harvard University class of 1925, but I don't know that he ever graduated. His life began taking another turn during that roaring decade.

In his early career, Mahin was a poet and a stage actor. He was with the Clark Street Players in Brooklyn, New York; the Provincetown Players; and the Fenimore Players, of which he was also director. He was also an actor with MacGowan, O'Neill and Jones, a firm that may or may not have been the same as the Provincetown Players. (Macgowan was Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill was Eugene O'Neill, and Jones was Robert Edmond Jones.) Mahin played on Broadway in Bad Habits of 1926, a revue that ran for only nineteen performances in April and May 1926. He was in other revues and played with stock companies in the East during the 1920s.

Mahin married Hume Nancy Derr, also known during her life as Hume Dixon (1903-1955), on June 25, 1926, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She also performed on the Broadway stage, also in Bad Habits of 1926 with Mahin and Robert Montgomery. Later she wrote radio scripts for Robert Ripley's radio show, called Ripley's Believe It or Not!, just like his syndicated comic panel. She was involved in promotions for Karo syrup and other products. Hume Derr had her own radio show in later years. After her divorce from Mahin, she married Alfred Dixon. She and Mahin had two sons, future editor and screenwriter Graham Lee Mahin (1927-2008) and Michael John Mahin (1928-1965). Hume Derr Dixon died entirely too young in 1955.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley