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

John Lee Mahin, Jr., had one story in Weird Tales. Entitled "The Red Lily," it appeared one hundred years ago last month, in July 1925, when its author was just twenty-two years old. The FictionMags Index has two more credits for him, the short stories "Yo-Ho-Ho, and a Bottle" in Ladies' Home Journal (Feb. 1928) and "Back to Glory" in Liberty (Feb. 7, 1931).* By the time that second story appeared, Mahin was moving towards a date with destiny as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mahin wrote newspaper reviews of movies and plays during his two years at Harvard University. He worked two more years as a journalist in New York City before switching to the advertising business. Maybe that was in his father's business, but Mahin's father died in late 1930. Maybe Mahin Junior needed a new line of work as 1931 rolled around. Luckily for him, he became acquainted with Ben Hecht, a former Chicago newspaperman who was rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished and successful of Hollywood screenwriters. According to his obituary in the New York Times (Apr. 21, 1984), Mahin "was brought to Hollywood by the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had read one of Mr. Mahin's short stories." Mahin assisted Hecht in writing the screenplay for The Unholy Garden, which was released in October 1931. That suggests that Mahin began working as a movie scenarist in 1931. The New York Times doesn't say which story by Mahin that Ben Hecht had read. Maybe it was "The Red Lily," a bitterly ironic tale that would easily have lent itself to a treatment for the screen. We know that Hecht was interested in genre fiction, including weird fiction.

I won't list Mahin's screenwriting credits except for a few near the beginning of his career. They include: The Beast of the City (1932), Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Bombshell (1933). The Beast of the City is a memorable crime drama with a very memorable ending. The male lead was played by Walter Huston. A quarter of a century later, Mahin was nominated, along with Huston's son, John Huston, for an academy award for best screenplay for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). He had previously won a Christopher Award for his screenplay for Quo Vadis (1951). Mahin was friends with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, among other actors and actresses, and was a favorite writer among Hollywood directors. He wrote screenplays for several crime dramas but only one for a fantasy or horror movie as far as I know, this one for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). In this month of anniversaries regarding the atomic bomb, I can say that Mahin was brought in early on in the making of The Beginning of the End (1947), about the Manhattan Project. However, he was not credited for any work he might have done on that film.

In 1937, Mahin married Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995), who years before had played Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). They had a son, Timothy Miller Mahin (b. 1941), who appeared as a baby in the movie Thoroughbreds in 1944. In addition to being a movie and stage actress, Patsy Ruth Miller wrote radio scripts, short stories, and books.

From the Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1937, page 3.

The Mahins' marriage must have ended in divorce by 1948, for Mahin remarried on June 16, 1948, in California. His new wife was named Barbara A. Bonnett, and if I have all of this right, they had a daughter named Margaret Lee "Maggi" Mahin (b. 1949). Mahin's fourth wife--and widow--was Muriel M. "Micca" McKinnon Mahin (1914-1984), whom he had married on October 16, 1954, also in California. She had previously been married to Argentinian swimmer and actor Justo José Caraballo (1914-2003). But maybe that's enough Hollywood gossip and name-dropping for now.

By the way, Mahin served in the U.S. Army Air Force from September 14, 1942, to August 13, 1945. I believe he was stationed in Los Angeles, where he wrote scripts for training films and rose to the rank of captain.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., died on April 18, 1984, in Santa Monica, California, at age eighty-one. He was survived by his fourth wife, but only for a few months. Mahin was also survived by three of his four children. His remains were cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

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*I also found a poem by Mahin called "The Song of the Bridge and the River," published in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and dated September 27, 1922 (page 10). Mahin's poem was undoubtedly syndicated. 

John Lee Mahin, Jr.'s Story in Weird Tales
"The Red Lily" (July 1925)

Further Reading

There is a lot of reading on John Lee Mahin, Jr., in newspapers alone. Maybe he is in books about the Golden Age of Hollywood, too.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

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