TAKING A LOOK AT A DEAR DAD

Whether the writing gene runs through the generations the way the presidential gene ran through the Adamses, say, can be argued pro and con.

There was Dumas pere and Dumas fils . From Irving Wallace the writing gene has not so much run through as fanned out through sons and collateral descendants and even across the breakfast table to Mrs. Wallace.

And there was Nunnally Johnson pere and there is Nora Johnson fille. He was one of the most prolific and versatile screenwriters in Hollywood’s spritely history, and later a producer and a director as well. His credits range from “The Grapes of Wrath� to “The Dirty Dozen,� and even in Hollywood ranges don’t get much wider than that.

But he also wrote “Holy Matrimony,� a fine and raucous comedy with Monte Woolley, and “The Keys of the Kingdom,� “The Desert Fox� and “How to Marry a Millionaire,� “Jesse James� and “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.�

He died in 1977, and on Monday night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will pay tribute to him at its Goldwyn Theater with an evening that will be hosted by Alistair Cooke and will feature Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner, Roddy McDowall, Richard Zanuck (for whose father, Darryl Zanuck, Johnson did the great majority of his work) and other Hollywood friends and admirers.

His daughter Nora, a novelist, biographer and memoirist, has come out for the occasion from New York. One of her books is a biography of her father called “Flashback� and published in 1980. It did not please all his survivors, but it was well-reviewed. He was married three times and Nora was the child of his second marriage.

“It was inevitable that I should become a writer,� Nora Johnson said earlier this week. “Everyone around the house was always writing. It seemed the perfectly normal thing to do.

“He was amazing. He left the house at 9 every morning and went off to the studio and wrote all day and then he came home at 5. The next day he did the same thing again. The message was that it was a no-nonsense profession. None of this waiting for inspiration.�

Johnson was very encouraging about his daughter’s ambitions to write. “Even now when I write a passage that pleases me especially, I find myself thinking, ‘How he’d like this . . . I hope.’ �

In her student days he could be exacting, and she remembers that one night at the dinner table, Johnson said, “I will not disclose the grade Nora got on her Latin exam. I will only say that if Julius Caesar comes back to town and speaks Latin, Nora will only understand 40% of what he is saying.�

She majored in American Studies at Smith College and, with her first husband, went to live for a time in Saudi Arabia. While there she wrote her first published novel, “The World of Henry Orient,� about two 12-year-old girls who build romantic fantasies about a famous concert pianist.

(The book had its inspiration in her own childhood, and the real-life pianist was Oscar Levant.)

“When I was divorcing my second husband, it was a grim time; I was really flat and needed help. Pop took the moment to say he’d always wanted to make a movie of ‘Henry Orient’ and why didn’t we have a go at it. So we collaborated on the script by long distance.�

She realized again during the project what a pro he was (as well as a perceptive father who saw the need for a timely diversion for her).

“He said of course we couldn’t have a movie about two unknown 12-year-old girls and a fantasy pianist. And he was obviously right.� The pianist moved out of fantasy and into reality and proved to be Peter Sellers.

“George Roy Hill once told me it was his favorite of all his pictures, and I was charmed,� Nora says.

Nora’s parents were divorced when she was 8 and she went to New York to live; her mother had never liked Hollywood. But Nora spent her summers here, and she has fond, hazy memories of the life: Darryl Zanuck and Tyrone Power playing fiercely competitive croquet on the lawn, a party for “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid� (another Nunnally Johnson script) with the Humphrey Bogarts, the James Masons and the Johnny Mercers among the guests, and Mercer singing, “One for My Baby and One More for the Road.�

“For a while I had a snotty Eastern attitude about Hollywood--doubtless influenced by my mother--the idea that it was a little tacky. But at the same time I always felt I had a root here, and now when I come back I love it.�

Her stepmother, Dorris Bowdon, and two other young actresses, Linda Darnell and Mary Healy, had by a fine coincidence all arrived in Hollywood on the same train to begin their careers and they remained friends.

One evening, her stepmother-to-be had a date with Burgess Meredith. But she had already met and been dazzled by Johnson and could talk of nothing else. (He had auditioned her and given her the part of Rosasharn in “The Grapes of Wrath.�) At the end of the evening, according to family legend, Meredith sighed and said, “Get thee to a Nunnally.�

Her father read the John Steinbeck book several times before he attempted the script, Nora says. “He said you had to get to the bones of it, of any book, before you could do anything.� It was an item of fatherly guidance.

“He said you always had to interest and arouse people. He had no patience with turgid writing, no matter how earnest it was. He said the moviegoer’s attitude was, ‘I’ve paid good money and I deserve to know what’s going on around here.’ And he said the moviegoer was right.�

Johnson was a legendary raconteur who had had an extraordinary life: a Georgia-born lad who wrote his way up a ladder of newspapers to the New York Herald-Tribune, then began to sell short stories to the Saturday Evening Post. Hollywood bought and filmed one of them and Johnson came West to stay in 1932.

Toward the end of his life, his daughter says, friends urged him to write his memoirs. “I’ve been writing for 50 years,� Nora says he said. “Isn’t that enough! Leave me alone!�

Some of the tales he might have told will probably get told Monday night.