It was the beginning of a bitter struggle between the profit-oriented, conservative front office on one side, and the writers and directors on the other. But a one-sided battle it was. One by one the Neilans and Von Stroheims, and other so-called “troublemakers,” were weeded out. The important directors who stayed on began to get the message. Either play the game and shoot the picture the front-office way or go their own road. Rex Ingram, riding so high with The Four Horsemen, chose Europe. Mickey Neilan tried to set up his own productions at First National but became one of a host of high-paid silent directors washed away in the tidal wave of sound. As for the incredible Von Stroheim, brilliant, driven, uncontrollable, Maurice Rapf and I had front-row seats watching his struggle at MGM over Greed, and later over The Merry Widow. And when Thalberg gave up on Von Stroheim again as he had earlier at Universal, and Von moved on to Paramount, my father took over the front-office struggle to keep the inspired wild man from bankrupting the studio.
While Mayer, Thalberg, and my friend’s father, Harry Rapf, were weeding out the uncontrollables and building the first great film factory, the thorny feud between L.B. and my father was beginning to grow. Its roots are buried in forgotten film history. I’ve talked with my own family and with L.B.’s wife Margaret and his daughters Irene and Edith, and have yet to uncover all. But I believe the breach went back to L.B.’s secrecy about his negotiations with Rubin and Loew. The tradition of Sunday brunch at our alternating homes, ours on Gramercy Place, theirs on Kenmore, had brought the two pioneer producers together on a basis of friendly exchange of professional problems. If L.B. was having troubles with Mickey Neilan, B.P. would tell him how he thought that burr under L.B.’s saddle could best be removed. And, in turn, L.B. would listen sympathetically to B.P.’s tales of woe concerning the headstrong Katherine Mac Donald or his battle to get better distribution deals from the major companies, a campaign in which these two independents had been natural allies.
But for many months, it seems, L.B. had been carrying on secret negotiations to sell his Mayer-Schulberg Studio assets to the emerging Metro-Goldwyn Company, along with his own services as chief executive. When Mayer pulled out, according to my father, B.P. was left holding the bag with half a studio, half the equipment, and half the technical pool they had been sharing. It placed B.P. and his Preferred Pictures in a precarious financial position. Without warning, he was left with responsibility for the entire rent of the Selig lot. When the Rubin-Loew negotiations began, and apparently they had continued over a long period, L.B. should have leveled with his studio partner, B.P. reasoned. So Mayer’s departure from their joint studio and his becoming the third capital letter in MGM was preceded by a quarrel. And over the years, that quarrel was to develop into a feud of Old Testament proportions. At least that was B.P.’s story.
Mother had a different version. L.B., in those more innocent days, was a stickler for morality, both on and off the screen. Not only B.P.’s movies, which had been more sophisticated than Louie’s, but also Father’s private life, had begun to offend the staid Louie B. There was gossip of wild parties at the home of Ben’s French director, Louis Gasnier, parties which would begin at the end of the week’s shooting and would mount to a riotous climax by Monday morning. I have a faint remembrance of this, for one night after we had seen a particularly good fight at the Legion—I was still underage but could attend fights regularly now, since in Hollywood B.P. enjoyed special privileges—the chauffeur dropped Father off at Gasnier’s home in Hollywood Hills.
For a moment, as B.P. approached the door, it was held open, and from the hallway came the blare of saxophones and wild laughter. A couple appeared on the stoop, still dancing to a jazzy fox-trot. The dapper casting director I recognized from the studio came out to greet my father with a tall glass in his hand. I could hear Father laughing with the others.
That moment obviously made a deep impression on my ten-year-old mind. Of course I had heard Mother complain about Louie Gasnier and his weekend parties. Gasnier, it seemed, was French and decadent, kept a number of mistresses, and his wicked ways were a temptation to my hardworking but easily distracted father. According to my mother, Gasnier maintained his position at the studio not because of the quality of his pictures but because of the merry social life he created for my father and other business associates. This morals charge Father heatedly denied. Louis Gasnier had an impressive list of silent-picture credits. It was an insult to B.P.’s intelligence to suggest there was any other reason for choosing a director.
Besides, in those years three-day binges were the weekend sport. Small-town Hollywood had to make its own entertainment. There was no television, no outdoor barbecues, no theater or opera or art, except the one they were creating in their silent studios. There was a lot of pent-up energy among those primitive talents. The whole country—if you believed Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Carl Van Vechten—seemed to be going off on one prolonged toot of bathtub gin, dance crazes, and a newly liberated sense of sex. It was fun to drink because you weren’t supposed to, to fornicate because Dr. Freud had now informed you that it was time to let your id take over from that puritanical superego. If the whole country was going to the party, why should Hollywood be any different? And if the Hollywood party was excessive, it was only because Hollywood had always been an excessive, speeded-up, larger-than-life reflection of the American Way. So even after the Fatty Arbuckle debacle, and the scandals the studios had learned how to hush up, the wine flowed and the sexual laughter mounted through my growing years. The effect on me and my “brother” Maurice Rapf was to inhibit rather than liberate us.
On Monday mornings the wild parties were often the talk of the little town where everybody still knew everybody. Mickey Neilan had celebrated the wrap-up of his picture by throwing a three-day party for five hundred people, with Abe Lyman’s Ambassador Hotel Orchestra to welcome the daylight. We heard that scores of couples danced and drank themselves into oblivion and were still sleeping on the lawn. The police had come but the twinkle-eyed Mickey had bought them off with hundred-dollar bills. This little celebration was said to have set Neilan back $20,000. It’s only money, was the Mick’s philosophy, and at the rate he was earning it in those days all the party had cost him was a few weeks’ salary. In those easy-come days before taxes, accountants, business managers, and tax shelters, the make-it-and-spend-it philosophy ruled the town. Americans were going to the movies by the millions. They had caught the habit. Entire families went at least twice a week. The ticket total was half the population of the United States. Mickey Neilan, as well as B.P. and the other early winners, felt secure astride their bobbing steeds on the merry-go-round.
16
ONE OF THE GOLD RINGS THAT MY FATHER REACHED OUT FOR MAY have looked like an extremely brassy alloy but it turned out to be eighteen karat. Her name—unknown when B. P. signed her—was Clara Bow. Every film decade seems to discover its own sex symbol: Theda Bara in the Teens, Jean Harlow in the Thirties, Jane Russell in the Forties, Marilyn Monroe in the Fifties, Raquel Welch in the Sixties, Farrah Fawcett-Majors in the Seventies, with the Earth Goddess Mae West embracing all the generations. I don’t think that even B.P., who had a well-developed instinct for star power in those days, would have predicted the impact that little Clara was to have on the Twenties. In 1922 she was a red-haired, minute, effervescent flapper whose beauty-contest crown had been awarded by the cartoonist Harrison Fisher, the illustrator Neysa McMein, and Howard Chandler Christy, creator of “The Christy Girl.” A bonus for Clara was a screen test, leading to a small part in Down to the Sea in Ships.
With his biggest star Katherine MacDonald in decline and L.B. deserting the doughty little Mayer-Schulberg ship, B.P. was on the lookout for new talent. When he saw Clara Bow in her film debut, he sent for her and promptly signed her to a long-term contract with Preferred Pictures. Clara couldn’t act, and she wasn’t exactly a quick study—of all the movie stars I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some famous birdbrains, Clara Bow was
an easy winner of the Dumbbell Award. A lot of stars have come up so fast that they have had no chance to learn along the way. They flounder and flutter like wounded birds in the blinding and confusing light of their stardom: Olive Thomas, Mabel Normand, Alma Rubens, Barbara LaMarr, Mae Murray, Harlow, Carole Landis, Hedy Lamarr, Marilyn. … It demands intelligence and/or strength of character to cope with the pressures of excessive celebrity. Clara Bow was definitely not a coper. She was simply an adorable, in fact irresistible, little know-nothing. It was as if Father had picked out a well-made collie puppy and trained her to become Lassie.
I remember the first time I was introduced to Clara, in my father’s office at Preferred. She seemed very short, the top of her head barely reaching to his shoulder. She was wearing a tight cotton dress, and her Cupid’s bow of a mouth was constantly moving in the act of chewing gum. It seemed to me that she wore both bangs and spit curls. Her cheeks were round, in fact it was a pretty moon face that she presented, with bouncy, flirty brown eyes. She was no breathtaking beauty like Claire Windsor, and her features weren’t as pert and doll-like as Colleen Moore’s. But she gave off sparks, vivacity, a sense of fun. Since I had become a Los Angeleno with my ear attuned to the flat Midwestern accent spoken in southern California, Miss Bow’s unabashed Brooklyn-ese sounded raucous and funny. “Golly, Mr. Schulberg,” she said, still on a formal basis that would soon give way to a closer relationship, “Is this your little junior? Gee, he’s cute as a button!” She threw her soft little arms around me. “Where’d ya get all that pretty yellow hair?” To my embarrassment my hair was almost white, not the august white of sixty but the yellow-white of childhood.
“I had yellow hair just like that when I was his age,” my father said. At thirty-three he was already turning slightly gray.
Clara Bow ran her fingers teasingly through my hair. “Mmmmm. How wouldja like ta drive up to Arrowhead this weekend, Buddy? Just the two of uz!”
“Now Clara,” my father warned, as proper as Louie Mayer when his family was concerned. “He’s just a little boy.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll hafta wait a couple years,” Clara pouted. She toyed with her spit curls and seemed to be openly flirting—with both of us. I hung my head, almost physically suffering from shyness. There was something about the uninhibited affection with which actresses came at you. And except for my mother (and even she had once been offered a contract as a leading lady for Essanay), the only women I knew were actresses.
My father put a protective arm around me and ushered me toward the door. “I may not be home for dinner. I’ve got a story conference on The Plastic Age and then I’ve got to look at the rushes with Gasnier. But tomorrow night Jimmy McLarnin is fighting the rematch with Fidel LaBarba. Should be a great one.”
“See ya, Buddy boy,” Clara Bow patted my blond curly head. “C’mon ’n’ see me on the set. Sincerely, I’m very glad to’ve meetin’ yuz.”
That is not funny-paper talk, but really the way the gum-chewing 19-year-old sounded as she approached the threshold of international fame as America’s Number One Flapper.
When Clara started shooting her next picture for my father, I did go on the set and she ran over and kissed me and told everybody I was her secret boyfriend. Then the assistant director made sure the set quieted down because Miss Bow had a very difficult scene to play. It was a scene in which her leading man felt she had misbehaved with another man and was walking out on her. She was only flirting with the other man, the heavy, in order to make her suitor jealous enough to marry her. But the heavy had plied her with gin from his silver flask (the prop man had a trunk load of silver flasks in all shapes and sizes to accommodate the obligatory drinking scenes of Prohibition), and, unused to bootleg hooch, she had gone a little too far. But now that the man in her life had apparently abandoned her to her fate, she had to cry.
It takes a real actress to cry from the inside. The good ones reach in for a moving experience of their own, overlap it with the emotion of the scene they are playing, and cry for real. There are actresses who have to fake it: A makeup man squirts glycerine on their cheeks, then steps back behind the camera and our leading lady seems to have an eyeful of tears.
As I was to see for myself, Clara Bow’s tears came a little more naturally. First the set fell silent while the director explained the scene to her. She nodded. She seemed rather nervous. Then the assistant director called for quiet, and gave the cue for the three-piece orchestra to begin. They played a soft, tender, schmaltzy rendition of “Rock-a-bye, Baby …” Clara, now in front of the camera, was listening intently. Not breaking the quiet mood, the director said, “Action …” The little behind-camera trio played on. The violin cried. The portable organ wept: “On a tree top… when the wind blows… the cradle will rock…”
Clara Bow, the tough little jazz baby, began to rock a little. No longer did her face look happy and full of the devil as it had at our first meeting. She was pressing her lips together and her big round eyes were blinking. “When the bough breaks … the cradle will fall…” A little shudder passed through Clara Bow. Tiny clouds of mist began to float across her eyes. “Down will come cradle…” Photogenic tears welled in the eyes of Clara Bow, gathered like waves in miniature and began rolling down her cheeks. “Baby, and all…” Clara Bow was crying. Crying beautifully. Crying like a real actress. And when the director triumphantly cried “Cut!” Clara went on crying. The music stopped, a makeup lady powdered Clara’s moist cheeks and in a few moments the mood of the tragedy subsided.
My next memory of Clara Bow is associated with my first trip to a movie location—to Pomona College, about sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles, a two-hour journey in those days—for the shooting of The Plastic Age. Wesley Ruggles, one of the best of his time, was directing and the cast included Clara Bow as the wild flapper, a role she was making her trademark. This time “Cynthia” comes to the college prom and breaks the heart of the pure young hero, “Hugh,” played by Donald Keith, by coming on with the sophisticated college boy, “Carl,” a man of the world played by a newcomer, a 20-year-old son and grandson of Mexican bullfighters from Chihuahua. The newcomer’s name was Luis Antonio Damasco de Alonso. One of my father’s favorite office (and dining-room) games was to choose marquee names for the young players he signed. It was he who was said to have changed Gladys Mary Smith to Mary Pickford. In the case of young Sr. Luis Antonio, at first B.P. considered Antonio Alonso. But by this time he feared that there had been too many Latin competitors—Antonio Moreno, Ramon Novarro, and some long forgotten. So he went in the other direction. It was his theory that the name chosen should already have the ring of stardom. So he wrote down the names of stars then current, and experimented with phonic amalgams. Jack Gilbert was an established star, and Ronald Colman was just coming into his own. Put those two names into a mixer, whirl them around, and what do you come up with? Gilbert Roland.
The Plastic Age is one of my most vivid early memories of silent-movie making, for many reasons. For one thing I was away from my home and family for the first time, living in a rustic hotel with the film company. Everybody went out of the way to make me feel welcome, including my gum-chewing girlfriend Clara Bow, who kept telling everybody I was her steady fella.
That location trip may have marked the beginning of my sex education, for despite the advanced Freudian theories of my mother, and my growing childhood awareness that Something was going on behind the doors of the studio offices and those Spanish stucco homes in the Hollywood hills, I was painfully naive. Girls of my own age were to be avoided whenever possible. I remember being in a rowboat at Arrowhead Lake with the child star Baby Peggy, and people teasing me about our big romance—suggesting that the pint-size actress was playing up to the boss’s son so he’d talk his father into buying her a particular story. I remember trying to stay as far away as I could from Baby Peggy after that. Somehow sex and commerce, even innocent childhood attraction, were inextricably woven into the pattern of ambitious careerism. So—and Mauri
ce Rapf’s recollection overlaps with mine—instead of being thrust into a titillating pool of sexuality as might be expected of sons of Hollywood moguls, we regarded sex as something culturally corrupt. Back in those days of Jazz Babies and Dancing Mothers, sex was our own personal Watergate. We sensed the cover-up, the bald-faced lying of the front men, and the backroom payoffs.
It’s true that I could feel on my skin Clara Bow’s gum-chewing sex appeal. Even then I think I sensed that she communicated sexually because she had no other vocabulary. She had to flirt with me, as she did with everyone, because she simply didn’t know anything else to do.
My awareness of sex on that location grew not only from my proximity to Clara Bow but from the content of the film itself. I had read The Plastic Age; in fact, Percy Marks’s novel was the first book with an “adult” theme I had ever read. At least in those days when Victorian morality had not entirely surrendered to the new freedoms of the Twenties, it seemed like an adult theme. It was considered an ultraliberal act on the part of B. P. and Ad to expose a kid still in elementary school to a book as suggestive, downright naughty, and full of sex appeal as Marks’s treatment of college life in those days when Youth was allegedly Flaming.
Partly because of my stammering, still so severe that I could not complete a single sentence, or sometimes a single word, partly because of my father’s literary leanings and his hope that I’d follow in his footsteps not as a movie producer but as a writer, and partly thanks to my mother’s intellectual ambition (she had begun a practice which would continue into my highschool years of paying me twenty-five cents—the rates advanced as I got into more serious literature—for every book I read and reported on to her), I had become a precocious reader. I could escape from my tormentors at the public school who imitated my stammering, led the jeering laughter, and bullied me against the schoolyard wall by retreating into a corner of my own room and losing myself in a book.