The loss of an honorary uncle was to become a familiar casualty in the motion-picture wars. It came to me at a tender age that the world of the motion picture, depending as it does on personalities and those quicksilver moments of fame and power, is particularly vulnerable to opportunism. Love knots quickly become hate knots, and oaths of personal loyalty, with rare exceptions, are made to be broken and rationalized.
Of course I claim no omniscience at the age of five. Even without Miss Abrams to sit with me out there on that wonderful observation car as I watched the sagebrush and cactus country of Arizona and New Mexico fall away, I was still having fun waving to a lone cowhand or to a few dusty travelers waiting at the little stations where the engine paused to catch its smoky breath. I didn’t know that our long journey had succeeded only in surrendering an original and profitable idea to McAdoo and the screen’s Top Four.
I heard but was not fully cognizant of the lectures being delivered by my mother to my father on the subject of his guilelessness in a world of cutthroats. Escaping “I told you so's, I was now well enough acquainted with the Santa Fe to be able to wander from car to car alone. I would come back to find my parents playing casino, Father with a big cigar jutting from his rather delicate face, Mother frequently returning to the same sore subject. Never trust anybody in this business. It was still too volatile and crawling with phonies. The only protection was to get something on paper. When would B.P. learn not to be so trusting? How many times had she warned him not to place such blind faith in Hiram Abrams? They would all take advantage of his youth and his naiveté and steal his ideas.
Over the years this would become a familiar family theme song, my increasingly suspicious and self-protective mother attacking my self-deceiving, vulnerable father for his lack of armor in the lists of business. Because Ad had an irritating tendency to be right, Father’s vulnerabilities were stung to the swelling and bursting point. The Santa Fe Chief racing us back to the Midwest and on to Chicago arouses my first memory of bitter quarreling. Subsequent arguments were more harshly focused on Ben as a babe in the woods who would be lost without her instinct for self-preservation. Typically, the more Ad was determined to protect Ben from himself, the more he was determined to assert his independence.
In 1919, basically a happy child, with only my persistent stammering to worry about, constantly encouraged by my parents, I was pleased to be reunited with Wilma and little Sonya in the comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive. Ad was glad to be back in New York too, back to her Godmothers’ League and her self-improvement courses at Columbia.
While Ad kept one eye on Freud, Jung, and Brill, and the other on my father’s dreams of independent production, B.P. was preparing himself for the seminal role he would play in the 1920s. He had sued United Artists, but as ex-Uncle Hiram had predicted, his resources had proved no match for McAdoo, whose powerful firm was prepared to fight a delaying action all the way up to the Supreme Court. After a modest settlement, B.P. decided to do what so many of the first wave of movie pioneers were doing: start his own company. Too young to understand how he managed to do it, I still remember his partners, his old school-friend Jack Bachman, a serious, pipe-smoking, bookish accountant who became treasurer, and the ubiquitous Al Lichtman, “the best film salesman in the business,” also leaving Zukor and Lasky to help launch the new company. It was called Preferred Pictures, with B.P.’s slogan built into its very name, suggesting that his were the movies the public preferred.
In the style of L. J. Selznick, W. F. Fox, L. B. Mayer, and the other less-educated but equally high-flying producers, B.P. announced his new company with a flourish and opened an impressive suite of offices in the heart of the theater district on Broadway. Now he needed a star. Selznick had made his name by swiping Clara Kimball Young for World, and Fox had taken a Jewish tailor’s zaftig daughter named Theodora Goodman and transformed her into an Arabian vampire, Theda Bara (which was Arab spelled backward); Mayer had virtually shanghaied Anita Stewart from Vitagraph. B.P. in turn wooed eminently bankable Katherine MacDonald, in those days a major flutterer of masculine hearts and the envy of distaff moviegoers for her well-bred sophistication flavored with just the right degree of “naughtiness” in films like The Woman Thou Gavest Me, The Beauty Market, Passion’s Playground, and The Notorious Miss Lisle.
A strawberry blonde with limpid blue eyes and the sensuous but classy high-bridged nose that gave character to the leading ladies of the silent screen (vide Constance Talmadge, Florence Vidor, and Barbara LaMarr), Katherine MacDonald had completed her contract with Famous Players, and would soon be free of First National as well. B.P. went after her with all his boyish charm, wit, and intelligence. He wined her at the Waldorf, dined her at Delmonico’s, and showed her his elaborate offices, with an Italianate boardroom featuring a long cherrywood conference table and chairs which Ad considered pretentious and needlessly costly.
Katherine MacDonald must have been impressed with that Venetian boardroom, which doubled as a projection room, and my father must have been persuasive in his promises to make her more than a leading star of the day. In his young but knowing hands she would become as much of a household word as Mary Pickford. Miss MacDonald would be known from coast to coast, he promised, as “The American Beauty Rose.” Like America’s Sweetheart, the American Beauty Rose had a mother who seemed to know her way around a contract, and again like Mary who always saw to it that sister Lottie was also signed, there was another flower in the family, the patrician Mary MacLaren, who would also be Preferred. After extended negotiations, during which Miss MacDonald threatened to form her own company under the Famous Players banner, or to defect to Universal, Metro, Goldwyn, or Fox, a deal was finally consummated, toasted in champagne in the grandiose boardroom, with the film press of New York on hand to wish their erstwhile colleague well.
Soon Ben and Ad were reading novels and magazine stories and going to plays to find the ideal vehicles for the first jewel in the diadem of Preferred Pictures. Meanwhile the high-living, fast-talking Al Lichtman was out in the field selling the rights to “four great new Katherine MacDonald pictures” soon to be made by The Industry’s youngest and brightest producer, Adolph Zukor’s own protégé, B. P. Schulberg.
Those were busy days. B.P. was writing reams of publicity for his own company and working on scenarios, banging away at his typewriter. All his life he clung to his old Underwood as an aging matinee idol clings to his toupee. In 1920 that Underwood was zipping. So was the movie business. So was the country. The Golden Age was upon us.
11
WHEN MY FATHER WAS organizing Preferred Pictures in New York and getting ready to set up shop at the Mayer-Schulberg Studio in Los Angeles, he was a passionate fight fan. An habitué of the old Garden on Madison Square, his favorite fighter was the Jewish lightweight Benjamin Leiner who fought under the nom-de-boxe of Benny Leonard. On the eve of my seventh birthday, my hero was neither the new cowboy star Tom Mix nor the acrobatic Doug Fairbanks. I didn’t hoard and trade face cards of the current baseball stars like the other kids on Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth could hit 54 homers that year (when no one else had ever hit more than 16 in the history of the League) and I really didn’t care. The legendary Ty Cobb could break a batting record almost every time he came up to the plate, but no chill came to my skin at the mention of his name. That sensation was reserved for Benny Leonard.
He was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L. B. Mayers and the B. P. Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters, proving the advantage of brain over brawn, fighting the united efforts of the goyische establishment to keep them in their ghettos.
Jewish boys on their way to shul on the Sabbath had tasted the fists and felt the shoeleather of the righteous Irish and Italian children who crowded them, shouted “You killed our Christ!”, and avenged their gentle Savior with blows and kicks. But sometimes the little yid surprised his racist foes by fighting back, like Adolph Zukor, or Abe Attell, who won
the featherweight championship of the world at the turn of the century, or Abe Goldstein, who beat up a small army of Irish contenders on his way to the bantamweight title. But our superhero was Benny Leonard. “The Great Benny Leonard.” That’s how he was always referred to in our household. There was The Great Houdini. The Great Caruso. And The Great Benny Leonard.
My father gave me a scrapbook, with a picture of Benny in fighting stance on the cover, and I recognized his face and could spell out his name even before I was able to read. In 1920 he was only 24 years old, just four years younger than my hero-worshipping old man, but he had been undefeated lightweight champion of the world ever since he knocked out the former champion, Freddie Welsh, in the Garden.
B.P. knew Benny Leonard personally. All the up-and-coming young Jews in New York knew Benny Leonard personally. They would take time off from their lunch hour or their afternoon activities to watch him train. They bet hundreds and often thousands of dollars on him in stirring contests against Rocky Kansas, Ever Hammer, Willie Ritchie, Johnny Dundee, Pal Moran, Joe Welling…. He was only five foot six, and his best fighting weight was a few pounds over 130, but he was one of those picture-book fighters who come along once or twice in a generation, a master boxer with a knockout punch, a poised technician who came into the ring with his hair plastered down and combed back with a part in the middle, in the approved style of the day, and whose boast was that no matter whom he fought, “I never even get my hair mussed!” After his hand was raised in victory, he would run his hand back over his sleek black hair, and my father, and Al Kaufman, and Al Lichtman, and the rest of the triumphant Jewish rooting section would roar in delight, as Ali’s fans were to raise the decibel level at the sight of the Ali Shuffle. To shake the hand of Benny Leonard was to touch greatness and to share in his invincibility. To see him climb into the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighborhood gauntlet.
One of my father’s friends practically cornered the market on the early motion-picture insurance business. But all through his life he would be singled out as the incredible amateur boxer who had sparred with Benny Leonard and had actually knocked Great Benny down! Every time Artie Stebbins came to our house, my father prefaced his arrival by describing that monumental event. Artie Stebbins had a slightly flattened nose and looked like a fighter and it was whispered that he would have gone on to a brilliant professional career except for an unfortunate accident in which his opponent had died in the ring. No matter how modestly he dismissed the legendary knockdown of Benny Leonard—“I think Benny slipped …” or “I just happened to tag him right”—that knockdown remained with him as a badge of honor. My father would say with a note of awe, “He might have been another Benny Leonard!”
But when I was going on seven, there was only one Benny Leonard; my scrapbook fattened on his victories. In those days fighters fought three or four fights in a single month. Benny had been an undernourished 15-year-old when he first climbed into the professional ring, getting himself knocked out by one Mickey Finnegan in two rounds. He was knocked out again by the veteran Joe Shugrue when he was only sixteen. But from the time he reached the seasoned age of eighteen, he had gone on to win more than a hundred and fifty fights, in an era in which the lightweight division was known for its class. The Great Benny Leonard had gone to the post twenty-six times in 1919 alone, and almost every one of his opponents was a name to the cognoscenti. As for me, I had only one ambition, to become a world champion like The Great Benny Leonard. Or rather, two ambitions, for the second was to see him in action.
I had asked my father if he could take me to the Joe Welling fight, but he thought I was a little young to stay up so late. Instead he had promised to tell me all about it when he came home. That night, I waited for Father to bring news of the victory. In what round had our Star of the Ghetto vanquished the dangerous Joe Welling? How I wished I were in Madison Square Garden! Old enough to smoke big cigars and go to the fights like my father!
I have no idea what time Daddy got home that night. Probably three or four in the morning. Where had he gone with his pals after the fight? The Screen Club? The Astor? Jack and Charlie’s? A dozen other speakeasies? The apartment of a friendly or ambitious young extra girl who hoped to become a Preferred feature player? When my father finally gave me the blow-by-blow next evening, he admitted that our hero had underestimated Welling’s appetite for punishment. Ben and the rest of the young Jewish fancy had bet that Welling would fall in ten, as Leonard had predicted. But Welling was nobody’s pushover, and he had even fought the referee who finally stopped the fight. B.P. was out five hundred smackers. He and his pals had gone back to the dressing room to see the triumphant Benny, and the fistic Star of David, still proud of his hair-comb, apologized for leading his rooters astray. B.P. told Benny about my scrapbook, and The Great B.L. promised to autograph it for me. Then the boys went out on the town to celebrate Jewish Power.
When father told me about the Joe Welling fight and helped me paste the clippings into my bulging scrapbook, I begged him to take me with him to the next Great Benny Leonard fight. “When you’re a little older,” he promised.
In the early weeks of 1921, he brought me the news. Great Benny had just signed to defend his title against Richie Mitchell in Madison Square Garden! Now Richie Mitchell was no ordinary contender. He was a better boxer than Joe Welling, and a harder puncher. He was three inches taller than Benny Leonard, in the prime of his youth, strength, and ability at 25, and he had more than held his own against all the good ones and some of the great ones: Wolgast, Kilbane, Tendler, Dundee, Charley White, Joe Rivers… Only once in his impressive nine-year career had Richie Mitchell been knocked out. Benny had turned the trick back when I was three years old. My old man had taken the train to Milwaukee to see it, and had come back flushed with victory and victory’s rewards.
Now it was time for the rematch, and Richie Mitchell had come to New York confident of reversing the only loss on his record. The day of the fight I boasted to my classmates, “I’m g-g-going to M-M-Madison Square Garden tonight t-to s-see The G-G-Great B-B-Benny Leonard!” Even if they had been able to understand me, I don’t think the other kids would have known what I was talking about. When it came to boxing they were illiterates. They simply had no idea that the rematch between Benny Leonard and Number One Contender Richie Mitchell was an event more earthshaking than the election of a new President, the arrival of Prohibition, or the publication of the first novel by Scott Fitzgerald.
Finally, the moment arrived. Mother had dressed me warmly for this mid-January adventure. I was wearing long white stockings and a blue velvet suit with fur-lined coat and hat. All that was lacking was one of my father’s big Cuban cigars. But it didn’t matter. I would smoke it vicariously as I sat snugly beside him in the front ringside seats near our idol’s corner that B.P. always got from Leonard.
“Well, Buddy,” my father said as we got out of the cab near the crowded entrance to the Garden, “I kept my promise. Your mother thought you were still too young, but I wanted you to see The Great Benny Leonard in his prime, because it’s something you’ll remember the rest of your life.”
There were thousands and thousands of big people, a lot of them wearing derbies, a lot of them puffing on big cigars, a lot of them red-faced from winter wind and the forbidden but ever-plentiful alcohol, bellying and elbowing their way toward the ticket-takers.
As we reached the turnstile, my father urged me ahead of him and held out a pair of tickets. A giant of a guard in uniform glanced at my father, then looked in vain for the holder of the other ticket. When he saw where Father was pointing, his voice came down to me in a terrible pronouncement, like God’s: “What are ya, nuts or somethin’? You can’t take that little kid in here! Ya gotta be sixteen years old!”
My father argued. He bargained and bribed. But in a city known for its
Tammany Hall corruption, we had come upon that rare bird, an honest guardian of the law.
By this time Father was telling me to, for Christ’s sake, stop crying! He was frantic. The preliminaries had already started, and in those days before television and radio, there were no extra bouts standing by to hold the audience until the pre-announced time for the star bout. If there were early knockouts in the prelims, B.P. ran the risk of missing The Great Benny. And we were all the way down on Madison Square at East 26th Street, miles away from home on Riverside Drive near 100th Street. If traffic was heavy he might miss the event of a lifetime. But there was nothing for it but to hail a cab, tell the driver to speed across town and up the West Side, wait for him to dispose of his sobbing and expendable baggage, and race back to the Garden. Delivered to my mother, awash with tears, I stammered out my tale of injustice. I would have to wait ten long years to be admitted to the Garden and by that time our champion would be retired from the ring. Now I would never see him, I cried, never in my whole life!
Mother tried everything in her extensive repertoire of child psychology to console me. But it was too late. For me life simply had come to an end at the entrance to the turnstile of Madison Square Garden.
To ease the tragedy, I was allowed to wait up until Father came home. And this time, sensitive to the crisis, he did not linger with his cronies over highballs at a friendly speakeasy. He came directly from the Garden, his fine white skin flushed with the excitement of what had happened.
B.P. had given the taxi driver an extra five-spot to disregard the speed limits and get him back to the Garden on a magic carpet. As he rushed through the turnstile and looked for the aisle to his seat, he heard a roar from the crowd that was like the howl of a jungle full of wild beasts. Everybody was standing up and screaming, blocking his view. A frantic glance at the second clock told him it was the middle of Round Three. When he got closer to his seat and was able to see the ring, the spectacle that presented itself was the Unbelievable. There on the canvas was our champion. And not only was his hair mussed, his eyes were dimmed as he tried to shake his head back to consciousness. The count went on, “Six… seven… eight…” Thousands of young Jews like my father were shouting, “Get up! Get up, Benny! Get up!” And another multitude of anti-Semitic rooters for Mitchell, “You got ’im, Richie! You got that little mockie sonuvabitch!” But just before the count of ten Leonard managed to stagger to his feet.