Now the scene was relit. Once again the hoarse command of “Action!” Once again the bouncy Abe Lyman struck up his band. One more time Baby Richard was immersed in the fountain. This time Mr. Gasnier was satisfied. “Très bien,” he said. “Thees one ees a preent.” I felt a sense of relief. I would not have to see Baby Richard thrown into the fountain again. But I was still innocent of the ways of moviemaking. “Now we do eet in a close shot,” the director intoned. “Just the babee, his muzzer, and Rosemary …”
There was a break in the action as the camera crew moved their equipment closer to the fountain, the cameraman, Karl Struss, giving them instructions as to how to light the closer angle.
Meanwhile, in the corner of the set that the Headricks were using for an impromptu dressing room, another drama was going on. Baby Richie was shivering as his parents removed his soaking sleeping garment. A wardrobe lady was drying him with a big white towel while his mother held yet another dry nightshirt. They seemed to have hundreds.
“Here, now get into this,” his mother said.
The child actor held himself stiffly. “I don’t want to go into that fountain any more.”
“You’ll go into that fountain until Mister Gasnier tells us we can go home,” said his father.
“But I don’t want to,” said the famous child actor.
His father cracked him smartly across the face. “Not too hard,” said his mother. “You’ll ruin his makeup.”
“You’ll do exactly as you’re told,” his father told him. Now sullenly obedient, Baby Richard Headrick allowed himself to be redressed. A makeup man dried his hair and reset the famous curls. He was ready for the close shot.
“Action—!” and this time the Abe Lyman jazz band blared forth its sound behind the camera. Several prop men lifted Baby Richard into the fountain while Rosemary Thebe shouted, “Look everybody, a little Cupid for our fountain!” Then the righteous Claire Windsor ran in and grabbed him from the water. “Cut,” cried M. Gasnier in the now familiar order. “Rosemary, chérie, do not run away as soon as Claire reach-ezz zee foun-tann. Wait until she forces you away. You understan’? Now we do eet again. Thees time I will tell you when to leave—it ees a veree important mo-ment. Thees time we mus’ do it right, n’est-ce pas?”
Once again the shivering child was carried soaking wet from the fountain. This time his father, who was carrying the boy, saw my father, a well-groomed authority figure on the set, and paused to make his apologies. “I’m sorry, B.P. I don’t know what’s wrong with the kid today. He usually gets these things on the first take. You watch, we’ll get it next time.” He had set the wet child down, next to me. “Right, Richie?” The father’s voice was not a question but a command. The boy was shaking, and fighting back tears. At the age of six he had been in the business for several years and already sensed when he was in the presence of a producer. “Y-y-yes, D-Dad,” he said, his teeth chattering. Then he looked at me. Up and down, sizing me up. “Are you an actor, too?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m just watching.”
“How come?”
I pointed to my well-pressed father. “He’s my daddy.”
“Gee, you’re lucky,” said Hollywood’s most famous child star. “I sure wish I didn’t have to be an actor.”
Then he was swooped upon by his mother and the wardrobe lady, with his father taking leave of my father and following his little meal ticket back to the makeshift dressing nook. A big white towel wrapped around his soaking wet form, Baby Richard Headrick looked back over his shoulder as he allowed himself to be led away, dried again, and prepared for his next immersion. In different angles, close shots, close-ups, and reverse angles, he must have been plunged into that fountain at least a dozen more times that afternoon.
As I came to know other child stars—Jackie Coogan, his little brother Bobby, Baby Peggy, Junior Durkin, Mickey Rooney, thinking now only of those who worked for my father—I began to see a pattern: These famous little people being hugged, kissed, and praised at previews, press interviews, and gala openings were actually victims of child labor as inhuman as that of the scrawny ten-year-olds sent into the mines for ten hours a day. Like Baby Richie, they were nearly always bullied and abused by greedy and domineering parents. As they grew to teen age they invariably rebelled, turning to drink and drugs, unloving sex and care less marriages. One thinks of Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Lynn. Diana was a bright and provocative actress with whom I discussed the child-star syndrome many times. She drank to excess, abusing her talent and her health, as if determined to shock her wealthy and rather self-righteous husband. “We were all a bunch of goddamned freaks,” she said of herself, her childhood friend Elizabeth, and the rest of the moppet glamour group. “How could Liz be normal? How could she help hating her parents? That’s how we were brought up, with fame, money, and hate. You may try to bury it in drink, or some recent sensation, but deep down you can never forgive them, and never forgive the system, for what they did to you.”
Years after my shivering experience with Cupid-in-the-Fountain, I found myself on a beach in Mexico with Elizabeth and her daughter Lisa, a precious filly by Mike Todd out of Ms. Taylor. Elizabeth’s sixth husband, Richard Burton, was busy on the film set nearby, emoting with Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana. I told Elizabeth my Baby Richie story in exchange for some of her horror stories of childhood stardom. How genteel her parents had seemed, and what an obedient child actress she had appeared to be. She snorted as she led me and her daughter to the very end of the beach, where it was protected by an arm of coral rocks, so that the Mexican paparazzi could not get at them. “Whatever else I do for her, I will never expose Lisa to the kind of life my parents exposed me to.” I glanced at the child playing in the sand. Not a replica of her mother, yet already glowing with a sultry beauty. Photogenic and irresistible. Suddenly, as Liz and I talked with our heads close together, a motor boat approached the beach. I barely glanced at it, accepting it as part of the scene. But Elizabeth had her antennae raised. She spotted the cameraman aiming his weapon at her child from the bow. The self-composed woman who had been talking to me in an undertone so as not to disturb her quietly contented little builder of castles became a banshee. “Get away! Get away! You sonofabitch! Get out of here! Stop following us! I’ll break your goddamn camera!” She waded knee-deep into the surf and hurled pebbles. The transformation was frightening. I was convinced that she would wade out and overturn the 24-foot boat singlehanded. The boatman must have thought so too. He began to retreat.
Still furious, Miss Taylor returned, picked up our beach towels and picnic basket and Lisa’s toys, and moved further up the beach away from the water. “Goddamnit, Lisa’s going to have privacy!” the voluptuous, true-grit mother cried. “Something I never had. Privacy! I’ll kill those sonofabitches before I let them make a public thing of her!”
But dwelling on the ordeals to which the Baby Richie Headricks and other child stars were subjected is painting the canvas from a palette prematurely dark. For I did find joy among the alligators and ostriches and animals of the Selig Zoo, and excitement mingled with fear at watching those wild party scenes that seemed to adorn most of my father’s pictures. There were memories of early filmmaking that caught my imagination. Father seemed to have developed a creative approach to moviemaking, his box-office pictures balanced by films with offbeat subjects, innovative and controversial. The winners, he would argue, should pay for an occasional experimental film, artistic but inexpensively done. And looking at it pragmatically, if one of these experiments should catch the public fancy and become a “sleeper,” then a new market, a new kind of subject matter would open up.
A gambler by nature, a strange mix of drinking-wenching-studio-intellectual—and still the frustrated writer who loved to boast of the hundred-dollar gold piece he had won in the citywide highschool short story contest—B.P. read as many novels and short stories as he could cram into a crowded week. One of these, Ching, Ching, Chinaman, by Wilbur Danie
l Steele, had won the O. Henry Prize for best story of the year. It featured Yen Sin, a lowly Chinese (a redundancy in those days of mindless white supremacy) who is washed ashore in a storm and finds himself in a smug, self-contained New England seaport town where he becomes the inevitable laundryman. Scorned as a yellow man and a heathen, Yen Sin discovers that a deacon of the church is cuckolding the minister. The accused and their supporters attempt to ridicule the charges of this Oriental pariah. Eventually the hypocrisy is exposed—and Yen Sin, who has taken the mounting abuse by turning the other cheek, makes the bigoted community realize that he may be closer to the ideals of true Christianity, or at least true charity, than any of the holier-than-thou’s. …
Now, that may not be exactly an earthshaker today. But in the early Twenties the standard villains were the “Redskins,” “Mexican greasers,” and occasionally “a wily Chink.” And black men were “coons,” to be used for laughs.
To make a Chinese character the hero of a motion picture was just not done. But that’s what B.P. proposed to do. To adapt the story he engaged two of his favorite continuity writers, Eve Unsell and Hope Loring. And assigned the direction to one of his top three, Tom Forman. For the role of Yen Sin he chose the outstanding character actor of his day, Lon Chaney, who had played scores of offbeat roles since the middle Teens but was still on the threshold of the stardom he would achieve with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The ever-practical Al Lichtman warned my father that no theater was going to run the movie. And he was right. The major theater chains, Famous Players, First National, Fox, and Metro, fighting fiercely for control of first-run houses in every city, flatly refused to run Ching, Ching, Chinaman, even after its title was softened to Shadows. No self-respecting theater in New York would take the picture. B.P., riding the crest of youthful defiance, welcomed the battle.
He had taken me on the set so I could watch the unique Lon Chaney giving a sensitive and convincing performance as the gentle, hated Chinaman. In an age susceptible to overacting, Chaney was considered a model of restraint. He was to tragic mime what Chaplin was to comedic. He made every movement and every gesture count and I remember my father telling me that Chaney had learned this by communicating with his deaf-mute parents.
That movie set was a fascinating place for me to enter. There was the stooped, shuffling Lon Chaney serving tea to the errant couple, Marguerite de la Motte and Harrison Ford. Behind the camera were several dozen mysterious workers. And in the background in those days of blessed silence, a small orchestra—an organ, a violin, and a bass fiddle—played mood music, sometimes just before the scene, sometimes during the scene. Actors and actresses had special songs that would make them laugh or cry.
The picture was “sneaked” in a small town near Los Angeles—the institution of sneak previews having just begun—and to the pain of my father, the director, Lon Chaney, and the other filmmakers, it was booed. Not in the beginning, because the provincial audience clearly expected Yen Sin to belie his apparent gentleness and become an insidious Fu Manchu. But as the film went on and the good Caucasians were exposed as sinners or hypocrites and the yellow laundryman recognized as the avatar of virtue, there was audible protest from the paying customers. Half the house walked out in disgust even before it was over. Father’s noble experiment seemed to be a disaster. I was proud of his response: If Shadows was rebuffed by the major chains, he said, he would have his distribution partner Al Lichtman try to sell it to small independent houses. When even they refused to advance money on it, B.P. told them to play it for nothing—give it a try, with Preferred Pictures gambling on a percentage of the profits, if any.
Then came good news. The National Board of Review, a welcome lever for elevating the quality of motion pictures, singled out Shadows for special commendation, praising its courage as a forceful lesson in religious and racial tolerance. Robert E. Sherwood lent his prestige by including it in a new annual anthology, The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23, a hopeful sign that intellectuals and highbrow critics were no longer scorning the movies as pabulum for the masses. A movie could be a work of art, even carry a message, and still being entertainment to large audiences.
The year 1923 marked a long step forward in the progress of the motion picture. Sherwood described his recent conversion to the art of films: “If we can succeed in luring a larger number of intelligent people into the film theaters, we shall automatically receive more intelligent pictures.” And so his companion volume to Burns Mantle’s celebrated Best Plays, while never ignoring the sure things like Valentino’s Blood and Sand and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood, helped to open the doors to small, brave tries like Shadows.
Later that year Sherwood had kind words for another Schulberg film, The Hero, “that well might have proved highly unpopular with the dear old general public.” Adapted by Eve Unsell from a controversial play by Gilbert Emery, it starred Gaston Glass as a war hero who in civilian life turns out to be an utterly worthless human being. Heroes were still heroes to the patriotic audiences of the early Twenties. Although the Hemingways and the Dos Passoses were beginning to question whether the War To Make The World Safe For Democracy had been cynically sold out by the international powerbrokers at Versailles, when B.P. dared to make The Hero, nationwide audiences still insisted that their bemedaled warriors be true blue. To evoke the sort of stir created by The Hero, we would have to imagine John Wayne playing a Green Beret officer as an empty-hearted scoundrel. I was nine years old when The Hero was released, just barely of an age to nibble around the edges of cinematic unorthodoxy. I remember my father fighting for this film as he had fought for Shadows. His bread-and-butter pictures, frankly, I have to leaf through the old scrapbooks to remember. But the brave little pictures live on in my head.
Another was Capital Punishment, with a now totally forgotten Schulberg star, Donald Keith. A murder is committed. Donald is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. The Governor, finally convinced that Donald is innocent, phones the warden to unstrap him from the chair. But the call is made a few seconds too late. In vain did the exhibitors, fearing for their dear old general public, plead for a last-minute reprieve, a happy ending. But young B.P. refused to bend. “If you’re going to make a movie attacking capital punishment,” he said, “then goddamn it, attack it!” Sometimes when he was aroused like that he even forgot to stammer.
B.P. never lost the touch for press agentry he had developed in his early Porter and Zukor days. Every Preferred Picture had a hardcover campaign book. No key was left untouched in B.P.’s efforts to woo the public to his Preferred Pictures. Long before “street theater” came into our language, B.P. was spelling out “street stunts” that could be set up to draw a crowd and excite them to see his picture. For instance, a woman carrying a baby accosts a man, ostensibly her estranged husband, on a public street, and begins to berate him as a cad who has deserted her. “The two actors should be Vaudeville people if possible. Impress upon them the necessity of putting pep in their argument as soon as the crowd collects,” my father’s instructions read. “They are to settle their differences and move on to the next corner to repeat the spontaneous performance. Whenever the street wife has a chance, she is to tell the crowd who pause to enjoy these matrimonial fireworks that she has just seen The Girl Who Came Back—and it was the movie that convinced her to give hubby another chance!”
14
I WASN’T BORN IN a trunk like Judy Garland, but a silent studio was my first home. I remember it more clearly than the bungalow where we first lived on Gramercy Place, or the Wilton Place public school around the corner, where I was an ignominious figure.
I gained importance as “B.P.’s little boy” on the Mayer-Schulberg lot. So B.P.’s struggles and triumphs and street stunts were vital to me. Since he was hardly a devoted father, being preoccupied with his pictures and his extracurricular activities, the studio became my composite father. With the exception of the prize fights B.P. and I attended religiously every Friday night, the paternal ties to which I clung we
re the studio, its product, and my father’s flair for salesmanship.
B.P.’s story conferences and projection-room “rushes” were my nursery; I went to kindergarten on his inventive promotions. A page headed SOME SNAPPY STUFF THAT’S DIFFERENT includes the following:
Aeroplane cuts loose a girl dummy when over town. Parachute opens—dummy drops (so light, no danger). Sign on sweater—“The Girl Who Came Back.” Interest in this can be worked to fever heat by inducing newspaper to print notice of girl abducted in aeroplane a thousand miles from your town, thought to be coming your way. Plant this story in outside paper first—then show to your local paper.
When the winter rainy season hit southern California, B.P. capitalized on it with the grand announcement that the extravagant outdoor garden party in The Girl Who Came Back would have to be reconstructed on an indoor stage, “bushes, trees, pool and all, with the oval pool in the center floating a flower-decked boat, and in whose depths splash Oriental maidens.” This decision made it possible to bring into play the Schulberg Studio’s new lighting paraphernalia—used for the first time on an “exterior” scene. Against that ubiquitous pool, the star Miriam Cooper, who had started the picture as an innocent country girl, had now become a bare-shouldered, sequin-gowned woman of the world swept into the arms of the bespangled and beturbaned Kenneth Harlan, a most unlikely “sheik.” Hollywood had a terrible case of the Valentino vapors, and even the most Anglo-Saxon profiles in town were being pressed into service as irresistible Arabs. Indeed, “sheik” went into the language as the generic term for the playboys of the John Held, Jr., generation.
The Mayer-Schulberg Studio was not only my nursery and kindergarten. It also offered an advanced course in psychodrama, neurasthenia, and pathological insecurity. A vivid case history is that of the director Marcel DeSano, a name you will not find in any of the film histories but which lives on in our family folklore. Where DeSano came from I don’t remember. He was simply one of a number of young European geniuses who materialized in early Hollywood. In silent pictures, remember, mastery of the English language was no prerequisite. In that sense motion pictures were more international than they are today. In Marcel DeSano’s case, he had been around Hollywood for a year or so. He had worked for Irving Thalberg when Irving was the 20-year-old wunderkind of Universal. Now L.B. had brought Irving to the Mayer-Schulberg Studio as his assistant, undoubtedly the single best move Louie ever made, and the young Irving in turn had told B.P. about his problems with Marcel DeSano. DeSano talked like a genius. He had fascinating ideas. He claimed to have made brilliant short films in Europe. But Irving had never been able to sell him to the warring factions at Universal. And, Irving admitted, young Marcel was erratic. Stimulating, seemingly bursting with talent, but terribly neurotic. Irving himself wasn’t yet sure enough of his position with L.B. to take on DeSano. But he thought B.P. might be interested.