And along with all those names and would-be names, there were the sightseers, the rubes, the hicks, the marks rubbernecking around the lobby to catch sight of a famous face—“Hey, ain’t that Wally Reid?” “You’ll never guess who I just saw getting out of her motor car—hot damn!—Beverly Bayne!”
For the country boys and even the mashers from Council Bluffs there was a new little racket called the Alexandria Game. A sharper would slyly elbow up to someone at the bar and ask what famous movie star he had seen in the lobby. “Well, I just saw Phyllis Haver,” the country boy would say. “Boy, she slays me! I’ll tell you one thing, she c’n put her shoes under my bed any old time!”
“Phyl Haver,” the sharper answered. “Listen, kiddo, I just happen to be her assistant director. And you know what she is, she’s a goddam nymphomaniac. I mean she hasn’t got the morals of a loose goose. After she finishes a picture all she likes to do is stay upstairs in her room and get laid by strangers about ten times a day.”
The mark gulped his drink and ordered one for his new friend. “Say, mister, I’m just passin’ through town, you don’t think—hah!—you don’t think you could take me up and give me a knockdown to Phyllis Haver? Boy, wait ’til I get home and tell that one around the barbershop!”
For a consideration, like twenty dollars, the self-appointed assistant director offered to bring the visitor upstairs to his liaison with Miss Haver. And upstairs in Room 422 lounging around in a negligee was Phyllis Haver, or a reasonable facsimile thereof ….The little butter-and-egg man was too excited to tell the difference. Con men used to make themselves fifty to a hundred smackers a day escorting suckers up to rooms of “Gloria Swanson,” “Norma Talmadge,” and “Katherine MacDonald.”
The Alexandria! Until the business moved uptown to the larger and grander Hotel Ambassador in the early Twenties, it was the capital of filmania. The whole damned industry was there together in one big hotel. You could get laid, you could become a star, you could start a new movie company, and you could go broke, all in that same place the same afternoon.
A generation later there was to be a famous bordello in Hollywood that offered a variation of the Alexandria Game. There you could find look-alikes for Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, and Nancy Carroll. But the later clientele was indulging in fantasies while the greenhorns in the throbbing lobby of the Alexandria, living in simpler times, really believed they were achieving an immortal roll in the hay with Bebe Daniels or Alice Joyce.
I’m not sure whether it was because of these nefarious goings-on in the lobby and the bar and the upper floors of the Alexandria, or because it started to rain, that my mother decided to remove me from its hectic atmosphere. I remember that the rain bucketed down; the land of eternal sunshine began to look like a Griffith production of the Great Flood. I sat by the window staring at the sheet of water and crying. I had been promised a trip to the mountains. But here I was in downtown Los Angeles, with no park to play in, not even a balcony, surrounded by a lot of noisy, frantic, laughing people. Their names meant nothing to me. “I w-w-want to s-see the m-m-mountings,” I cried. “Mom, you and D-d-daddy promised me I could see the sun sh-sh-shine on the mountings.”
One reason Ad had made up her mind to take me away from the lurid Alexandria, away to something finer, was that she was hating Los Angeles herself, the phonies and the fourflushers who passed themselves off as producers and directors, the little whores (“hoors,” she called them) who knew only one way to become actresses. The phonies and the fourflushers and the wheeler-dealers are there to this very day, in their Cardin suits, their dark locks looped over their foreheads, their eyes roving and their minds spinning. But in those days it was a little easier because everything was new and everyone was an overnight wonder. Who knew Triangle Pictures from Quadrangle Pictures, or World from World-Wide? Who knew if you were talking to the junkman who hadn’t even sold his broken-down wagon, or to the mastermind of the next big merger between Metro and Goldwyn (the Goldwyn Company that the peripatetic loner Sam had already abandoned to form a still-newer Samuel Goldwyn Company)?
Everything was in flux the day we walked into the Alexandria lobby, the old standbys like Essanay and Vitagraph on their way down, fly-by-nights like Peralta and Jewel just passing through, the big independents like Famous Players-Lasky and Universal very much holding their own, and a whole new cluster of companies signing one or two stars and one or two top directors and beginning to claw their way up.
I wish I’d been old enough to understand more of what I saw, but I heard it all in due time, from my parents and their friends who were dealing in the lobby in the late Teens. So I feel as if I was there for the famous fisticuffs—one of filmdom’s many such unscheduled events—between Charlie Chaplin, the Little Tramp with a penchant for Lolitas, and Louie Mayer, the ex-junkman and not yet the polished rajah, super-showman, super-hypocrite, arch-conservative of my highschool days. Chaplin had just suffered a tempestuous divorce from Mildred Harris, the wife he had taken (under rather hurried circumstances) when she was sixteen, and was feuding with L.B., who was just getting his first movie company together. Needing every star name he could attract, Mayer was billing Mildred as “Mrs. Charlie Chaplin,” which sent Charlie into a fury.
Encountering Chaplin in the Alexandria dining room, the pugnacious L.B. challenged him to step outside onto that million-dollar rug, and is said by my mother and father, who happened to have ringside seats, to have flattened the highest-paid actor in the world. L.B. must have felt he had no choice. Anita Stewart was his only star. Marshall Neilan was his name director, but Mickey often would not even tolerate the eager boss’s presence on his set. If L.B. was going to survive he needed every break he could get, and if they weren’t coming his way he simply had to make them himself, and damn the consequences, damn Charlie Chaplin, screw the world! The Alexandria days were desperate times. Those were the days from hunger, when what you lacked in credentials and assets you made up in bluff and chutzpah.
Eager to expose me to the tropical countryside of southern California, Ad hired a car and driver and we went what seemed a very great distance, from Sunset Boulevard as it wound through small-town Los Angeles on its way west, through sparsely settled Hollywood with its little movie studios, white bungalows, and stucco bungalow courts. We paused at Sunset and Vine, and stared at the spreading Famous Players-Lasky studio, where DeMille was remaking The Squaw Man, which had established him as a director five years before. Even though they’d lost Mary Pickford, the studio was still going full blast. They had Gloria Swanson, whom C.B. was transforming from a background bathing beauty to a foreground sophisticated siren in naughty pictures like Don’t Change Your Husband and Male and Female. The former one-barn studio was now devouring all the open country around it.
But of course we couldn’t stop in to visit, not with B.P. on the outs with Zukor and ready to start a rival company. No, we kept right on driving into Beverly Hills, way out in the country then, a lone house here and there on the flatlands, and back up on the hillocks at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains a few mansions of the stars, modeled on Spanish haciendas, surrounded by acres of terraced gardens and groves.
The landmark on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, toward which we were slowly motoring, was the enormous pink stucco Beverly Hills Hotel. It’s still there today, its architecture essentially unchanged but its reason for being entirely transformed. Today its Polo Lounge has taken over from the Alexandria lobby. Basically the same sort of people, only in different clothes, different hairdos, different vocabularies, are still wheeling and dealing. But when we first came to the Beverly Hills Hotel, it was an isolated resort hotel filled with wealthy old couples from the East, the white gentile aristocracy wintering in the sun of the Far West as now they winter in Palm Beach or the Bahamas. White-haired ladies rocked on the front portico. Oriental servants in uniform performed their duties with quiet bows. Everything was hushed and genteel. The gardens outside the hotel offered an exotic
zoo, with plume birds from Florida and South America, and many different kinds of monkeys.
No talk of movies here. Chances are my mother and I would never have been admitted to this elite clientele if they had known my father’s calling. For although the Great War had broken down some of the resistance to the movie people, “No movies” was still a sign to be found in many a boardinghouse window on the quiet streets of Hollywood. The gentle old ladies who came to the Beverly Hills Hotel to escape the bitter Eastern winters and to enjoy the purest of air and the clearest of skies would have turned up their noses at the sight of Fanny Ward or Lila Lee. They might stare at a face so perfectly formed that it could be blown up to the full size of a silver screen and still betray no blemish, but there would still be that turn-away voice of disdain, “She’s a movie!”
10
MY FATHER AND UNCLE HIRAM had an appointment with the elusive Charlie Chaplin, who was sometimes at the Alexandria, sometimes at the Athletic Club which he used as a sort of hideout from the mobs, sometimes at a large house he had rented far to the west of downtown Los Angeles—a genius in the studio, a troubled recluse away from his work, drawn both to intellectuals and empty-headed nymphets. B.P. and Uncle Hiram had sounded out his cronies and felt they were approaching him at the opportune moment when he was quarreling with First National and looking for new outlets for maturing work like The Kid.
Father and his partner spent a full evening with Charlie Chaplin, and Hollywood’s first authentic genius-performer was intrigued. He would have complete artistic freedom, he would make even more money from distributing his films through his own company than he was earning at First National, and he would have a sizable interest in the future of the company as a whole. Years after he retired, although he was then only 29, he would continue to be a major stockholder in United Artists.
He liked the idea well enough, Charlie said, to recommend it to his friends Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. Meanwhile, B.P. enlisted the support of D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s temperament was artistic and the idea of artists joining together to form their own company, make their own pictures, and distribute them through their own organization appealed to his desire for independence from the “money men.” If the other members of the Big Five came in, he was ready to be a United Artist.
Only the western hero William S. Hart had second thoughts. The plan was for each picture to be sold on its individual merits, with the star enjoying the producer’s profits, except for what Uncle Hiram and my father would charge for their services. Hart would have the same stock interest as his fellow-artists but his immediate profit would come from the release of his own pictures. He gave a tentative yes but then called my father to say he had thought it over and had changed his mind, deciding to form his own company. Over the years as my father refought his battles for, with, and against United Artists—sorties, skirmishes, and frontal actions that took on the drama and the significance of a Borodino or a Balaklava—I listened to his theories of William S.’s lack of heart for this project:
Bill Hart was still a national idol. Ten-year-old kids all over the country were saying, “Let’s play cowboys and Indians—I’ll be Bill Hart—bang, bang, you’re dead!” But the lean, unsmiling Hart had come from the stage to the movies when he was already over 40. He was now closing in on 50 and although he would go on making his Wagon Tracks and Wild Bill Hickoks for another half-dozen years, riding Pinto Ben, the horse as famous as he, Hart sensed that his star was on the wane and that he’d be overwhelmed in the company of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks. A victim of that unique American phenomenon, success in America, Bill Hart’s career had reached late autumn and was beginning to feel the first chill of oncoming winter.
Only slightly daunted by the defection of the old cowboy star, Uncle Hiram and my father went on to their key meeting with Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and Fairbanks at Doug’s new castle in Beverly Hills. It was, B. P. reported, a long and lively evening, with the four commanding figures of Hollywood’s rapidly expanding industry endorsing the Abrams-Schulberg concept. With their own company to produce and distribute their own pictures, they would become overnight the dominant factor in that industry. Neither Famous Players nor First National, let alone Fox, Metro, or Universal, would be able to compete with them. Hiram Abrams, who had backed into the business less than ten years earlier selling sing-along slides to nickelodeons, and who was now an acknowledged theater veteran, would handle the distribution, while B.P. with his creative experience under Porter and Zukor would supervise the studio operation.
It turned out to be one of those nights when a battle is won but the seeds are planted for a long and losing campaign. In the course of his extensive Liberty Bond tours and his access to the White House, Doug Fairbanks had become friendly with William Gibbs McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law and Secretary of the Treasury until his appointment to the key wartime role of Director-General of the railroads. McAdoo was on his way to Los Angeles in his special Pullman car for a much-needed rest, and Fairbanks was planning an elaborate reception for him. With due respect to Hiram Abrams and young Schulberg, Fairbanks said, he felt that such an array of stars as Mary, Charlie, D.W., and himself should have as president of their new company a figure of national prominence, a man of the calibre of Director-General McAdoo.
“How could we say ‘no’ to one of the most powerful men in America, who was at that very moment tasting the fruits of victory of what we were still calling the Great War?” my father said in defense of his and Uncle Hiram’s acquiescence. So a second meeting was scheduled in the luxurious bungalow that McAdoo and the President’s daughter had rented for the winter in Santa Barbara, where he planned to map out his political and economic strategy for the years of leadership awaiting him. There was considerable speculation that McAdoo might be the Democratic nominee to succeed his father-in-law in the 1920 presidential race. But at this moment Doug Fairbanks had put McAdoo’s name in nomination as president of United Artists, thereby threatening Uncle Hiram’s ambition, and my father’s as well.
At that meeting in McAdoo’s spacious bungalow, the former Director-General of the railroads declined Doug’s nomination. Instead he deferred to his press secretary, Oscar Price, suggesting that Price occupy the presidency, with McAdoo serving the new company as general counsel. And where would the originators of the concept, Abrams and Schulberg, fit into this new organization? Well, McAdoo strongly objected to the twenty percent for Abrams and Schulberg that had been part of the original plan. He thought two percent was more like it, with Abrams to receive that amount as general manager. Since Price had had no previous motion-picture experience, they would need Abrams’s know-how to keep the distribution and exhibition wheels turning. And where did that leave my old man, on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday? Without a single percentage point in the company he had dreamt up so enthusiastically with “Uncle Hiram.” And since he was damned if he’d be a hireling, B.P. was out of a job.
After the Defeat of Santa Barbara, as my father would look back on it like a battle-scarred Napoleon, his efforts to launch United Artists were doomed to wind up as a footnote to the history of motion pictures. Indeed, a description of his role as the true father of United Artists is to be found in authoritative histories of American film. But as Samuel Goldwyn is said to have remarked, a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. B.P.’s verbal agreement with the man for whom he had forsaken his favorable position with Adolph Zukor turned out to be the most elastic of rubber checks.
On that unhappy drive back to Los Angeles there were the inevitable recriminations. B.P. accused Hiram of selling him out. Abrams protested that Doug Fairbanks had sold them both out by turning to McAdoo and Price instead of accepting the two of them as the deal had been presented originally. (This was all the more ironic, B.P. would remember, because in a crucial earlier meeting at the Alexandria Hotel, between an alarmed Adolph Zukor and an intimidated Doug Fairbanks—a meeting called to head off Doug’s rumored defecti
on from Famous Players—Fairbanks had hurried off to study B.P.’s manifesto, “Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists,” to reinforce his stand.) It was Ben’s educated guess that there had been meetings between Abrams and the McAdoo group behind his back, and that a compromise had already been worked out in which Abrams would receive a liberal salary as general manager, and a token two percent in return for not opposing the McAdoo-Price-Fairbanks ploy.
Abrams denied the accusation, but when my father urged him not to go along with McAdoo and Price and instead to stand up and fight for their rights and take the usurpers to court, Abrams demurred. They might have a chance against a Richard Rowland (then head of Metro), a lone eagle like Sam Goldwyn, or even a determined organization man like Zukor. But this was William Gibbs McAdoo, the man to whom most Democrats looked as the successor to Wilson’s national leadership. What legal weapons could they muster against such artillery? They had simply been outsmarted and outmaneuvered, and Hiram Abrams argued he had no choice now but to accept the crumbs from the McAdoo table. Father stared at him and then turned to look out at the ocean as they drove on in silence.
Soon we were back on the Santa Fe Chief again, heading east. But the Schulbergs and the Abramses were no longer traveling together. In fact they weren’t even speaking to one another. No longer could I have Miss Abrams to turn to if I grew lonely or frightened in my upper berth. No longer would there be a guiding hand to steady me as I made my way down the lurching aisles on the long walk back to the observation car. Nor do I remember ever seeing Uncle Hiram again. Or even thinking of him as my lost uncle.