Moving Pictures
“I don’t believe in grudges,” Zukor went on. “A big waste of emotion. We’re still the number-one studio, but we’ve been slipping a little. And the Mayer-Thalberg combination, with the Loew’s theaters behind them, is getting stronger every day. Jesse is still my partner, there’s never been a bad word between us in all these years. He’s a wonderful man, but he’s almost too nice. He would never hurt anybody. He’s a gentleman. But as a result, I feel some of those people in our studio are taking advantage of him. We’ve got a lot of pigheaded stars and directors in the studio who think they can run everything to suit themselves. But we have to make fifty-five to sixty pictures a year. That needs organization and a strong hand. Jesse likes the idea of your coming back. There won’t be any friction. He’ll back you all the way.”
They settled on financial terms that brought an overnight change to the Schulberg economy. And B.P. was allowed to bring his Preferred Pictures staff with him, including his favorite writers Buddy Leighton and Hope Loring, scenarist Eve Unsell, and the rest of the team.
So the Mayer-Schulberg era had come to an end, and with it the downtown Los Angeles studios, for the Famous-Lasky studio was truly in Hollywood, still at the site of the original Lasky-DeMille barn. Our family moved closer to the studio, across Western Avenue to a quiet street lined with palm trees, Lorraine Boulevard, in an exclusive neighborhood called Windsor Square. On Lorraine the houses were not the typical one-story wooden bungalows we had found on Gramercy Place. Lorraine was lined with spacious two-story homes that had a look of permanence.
Five-hundred-and-twenty-five Lorraine Boulevard was to be home to the Schulbergs from the middle of the booming Twenties to the depressed mid-Thirties. There were bedrooms for my parents, myself, my sister Sonya, my brother Stuart, my mother’s brother Sam Jaffe (who had followed us out from New York and, true to the mores of the day, had become B.P.’s studio manager, first at Preferred, then at Paramount), plus maids’ rooms for the nurse Wilma, the downstairs maid Paula, and the cook. There was also an apartment over the garage for the English chauffeur, James, who doubled as a butler for the lavish dinner parties Mother liked to give.
We felt we were living in a palace. On the main floor there was a large, ornate dining room and a sunken living room. French doors opened on a large sunroom with a cozy window seat. My mother had that sunroom extended by a dozen feet and turned it into a library of several thousand volumes, including the rare editions that both my parents had begun collecting. On the wall was an enlargement of the family bookplate featuring a poem that became the Schulberg anthem:
THOU FOOL, TO SEEK COMPANIONS IN A CROWD!
INTO THY ROOM AND THERE UPON THY KNEES,
BEFORE THY BOOKSHELVES, HUMBLY THANK THY GOD
THAT THOU HAST FRIENDS LIKE THESE!
We all caught the reading habit—but I suspect that if we hadn’t caught it, it would have been drilled into us by Ad’s method: She had now raised the ante to fifty cents a book to read the classics. Hardly what one would call “progressive education.” It’s been said that anything you are forced or bribed to do, like reading Tennyson or Shakespeare before you’re ready, will leave you with a lifelong resistance to it. But Mother’s system seemed to work. I began to love sitting in that library or taking a book up to my bedroom, and I learned to appreciate the simpler tales of Tolstoy, and of Melville and Dickens, when most children my age were more at home with the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift.
On Sundays before the elaborate midday dinner there was a family ritual that outsiders would never associate with the habits of Hollywood tycoons. Father might have been up until dawn the night before, trying to lick a particularly stubborn script with the writers, gambling away his weekly salary at the Clover Club, or carousing with his cronies. But no matter how glassy-eyed, exhausted, or hung over he might be, come Sunday morning he would preside in his monogrammed silk bathrobe over the family reading circle in the library. Grouped around him, we listened hour after hour as he read through Melville’s Omoo and Typee and on to Moby Dick; through David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop; through choice sections of The Forsyte Saga, and the classic Russians—Lord, how did he find time to read and we to listen to those torrents of precious words?
Father read those novels well, forgetting to stammer as he became involved in their plots and their characters, and we could close our eyes and see the scenes he was describing. Since B.P., perhaps inheriting his father’s lack of Hebrew piety, never bothered with the services at Rabbi Magnin’s Temple B’nai B’rith in downtown Los Angeles, and since Ad was also a liberated spirit who attended only on High Holy Days, these Sunday literary sessions were the closest we second-generation Latvian Jews came to any sort of spiritual observance.
Our family life had a split personality. Father was working furiously at the studio, working hard and well in those days. And I was fascinated with our other home—the great sets, the ancient castles, ocean liner, and Western streets. I loved to walk into the dark stages and watch the actors go through their scenes. It was fun to sit in the projection room with Father watching the rushes, or to travel with him in style to a sneak preview.
I grew up on the sidewalk conferences outside the theater that followed the previews of pictures still in the process of final editing. My father, his director, film editor, and various assistants would pass around the preview cards on which the audience had written their capsule critiques—which varied from “God bless you for making this beautiful movie!” to “Burn it—it stinks!”
Members of the curbstone conference would come up with flash ideas for countering unfavorable reactions: suggestions for speeding up one sequence or slowing down another, sometimes for throwing out an entire scene that seemed to stop the flow, sometimes for adding a series of intercuts without which the rhythm seemed static. Making movies for the largest possible world audience and still trying to make them well was a complicated business. At first I would look up into the thoughtful, worried face of my father and his aides without fully comprehending what they were saying. Later, as I grew up to their shoulders, I would listen more carefully, realizing that a picture could be made or destroyed in reediting and reshooting. The day would come when I would be old enough to find myself stammering out an opinion of my own.
There were no film schools in those days. But those sidewalk postmortems offered thorough lessons in practical filmmaking. Crucial decisions were made there at the curb, as the impromptu conference became an hour-long reexamination of the picture practically frame by frame. Happy endings replaced unhappies that had left the audience dissatisfied. Actors would be recalled for retakes of a scene that clearly wasn’t working. Sometimes a director begged for a chance to supervise the reediting along the lines he had originally envisioned.
Sometimes of course the comments were good, and the curbstone conference became a celebration. But if half the audience had walked out, the conference became a wake, and there were angry accusations, anxious passing of the buck, and threats of resignation on the part of hotheaded directors. Most of the time the curbstone conference was a time neither for laughing nor back stabbing but simply for hard work and detailed analysis before those ten thousand precious feet of film went back to the cutting room. Ad had brought her parents, Max and Hannah, to this bright new world of sunshine, and B.P. bought a tidy Hollywood bungalow for them. But Grandpa Max never had time to enjoy the fragrance of the citrus blossoms. He was always praying, or so it seemed to this bewildered grandchild who would stare at him across the wide, deep gulf of two generations. With the black yarmulke on his head, the silk tallis around his shoulders, the leather tfillim on his forearms, he would bow to the East, intoning what seemed to me an endless prayer. He would rock back and forth as he chanted in Hebrew to his demanding God. In one of our early visits to that pious bungalow I tried to interrupt him: “What are you d-doing, Gr-Grandpa?” He ignored me and went on davening while Grandma gently wagged her finger at me and coaxed me back to the dining-room table.
Grandfather’s friends were the fathers of the other studio heads: Old Man Mayer, Old Man Warner, Old Man Cohn, and so on, all of them from the same Old World mold, all of them aged anachronisms in their dark suits and long beards, with Yiddish as their daily speech and Hebrew for their daily prayers. All of them mystified that from their loins had sprung such unlikely offsprings as a loud, wisecracking, sports-jacketed Jack Warner; a profane, irreverent, mob-oriented strongman like Harry Cohn; or a crafty, ambitious powerbroker like Louie Mayer… Somehow the seed of the Old World had produced these brash, amoral, on-the-make Americans. The sons with their bankrolls and their girlfriends and their fuck-you’s would tolerate and humor these old men as relics of the past.
The first thing the old beards wanted in this new bungalow city baking in the sun was a shul where they would feel at home. (Indeed, my paternal grandmother was so attached to her shul in New York, directly across the narrow, teeming street from her crowded tenement flat, that she had refused to make the cross-country trek with the Jaffes and the Mayers.) In Hollywood the old men suffered culture shock: The unctuous Rabbi Magnin did not preside over a synagogue but over a Reform Temple that, like the goyim’s, included a Sunday school taught in English to cater to the sons and daughters of the new movie money. Temple B’nai B’rith was grand enough, modern enough, unorthodox enough to repel Grandpa, Old Man Mayer, and the rest of their bearded cronies.
So the old men got together and held a council of religious war. They wanted a real shul like the ones they had left behind in their cozy Eastern ghettos. For ninety dollars a month they rented a Hollywood bungalow and set about transforming the interior into something as close as they could make it to the genuine synagogue they missed. Anxious to keep the old men happy, their powerful sons sent studio carpenters and painters to bring about the transformation. The results were astonishing. From the outside, Grandpa’s shul looked like any other little white bungalow on the street, complete with small green lawn and the obligatory miniature orange or lemon tree. But once you stepped inside you found yourself walking into an old world steeped in Jewish tradition, where Grandpa Max, and Old Man Mayer and Old Man Warner (those seemed to be their official names) and the rest of the immigrant Talmudists, finally felt at home. They sent to New York for a real rabbi, a little Moses who would see to it that the Laws of the Torah were upheld and the Sabbath observed as Jehovah had intended. When the rabbi arrived, a young man whose features were appropriately hidden by a bushy black beard, Grandpa and his Orthodox pals were driven down to the Santa Fe station in studio limousines as the reception committee. At last Hollywood had its own shul with its own rabbi who would walk to the services on the Sabbath, and who would not touch money or otherwise profane that holy day.
I remember attending the first Friday night service with my mother, to oblige Grandpa. The bungalow was now one room large enough to accommodate a congregation of perhaps a hundred. Grandpa seemed content as he swayed back and forth and repeated his Hebrew prayers. I remember the mysterious singsong chorus as the bearded fathers of the clean-shaven, worldly studio moguls demonstrated to their children and their grandchildren how to worship the relentless Lord of their universe.
Years later when Grandpa lay dying in a hospital, he prepared himself for the journey by praying, louder than I had ever heard him pray in his little Hollywood shul. For two days, hour after hour, he sang his Old Testament praises to his God in that mournful language I would never learn and never understand. There were no personal goodbyes or personal remembrances. He had never been close to his wife Hannah, my withered grandma, who had endured her life with a nagging sense of having married beneath her. But Grandpa Max seemed to have a direct line to Jehovah Himself. When he stopped praying at the top of his voice we knew he was dead.
While the old beards worshipped in their Hollywood shul and their sons worshipped at the altar of the box office, at 525 Lorraine our altar was the almighty typewriter. Sonya was to say that in the Schulberg home a typewriter held a central position corresponding to that of a piano in a less word-oriented family. It was difficult to pass it without sitting down to try out a few chords or to pick out an original little melody. With all that literature stuffed into our minds at Father’s Sunday reading sessions, we Schulberg kids found the family typewriter irresistible. As a result of this literary doodling, all three of us would eventually publish works of fiction. In the Schulberg household, in the beginning was the word.
Along with the chicken pox, German measles, and scarlet fever, I came down with another childhood affliction—poetry. I no longer recall the exact moment of infection when I first began to crawl as far back as I could under the piano, to put my thoughts into rhyme. As the self-appointed, mother-encouraged poet laureate of Lorraine Boulevard, I composed couplets appropriate to various holidays. For Mother’s Day I withdrew into the darkest corner under the Steinway for longer than usual: I wanted to make this my masterpiece. When I had finished it, for the third time, I waited for Mother to come home from her antique-hunting expedition in Pasadena. When I heard her drive up in her Marmon I ran to the door, my hand atremble with its sheet of literature.
“M-Mom, I just wr-wrote a p-poem!”
“Wonderful, Buddy. I’d love to read it!”
I followed my mother into the library, where she sat in one of the wing chairs and placed my poem on the circular Queen Anne table while she paused to light a cigarette. I was ashamed of her smoking because somewhere I had heard that it was not a ladylike thing to do. But that day, eager as is every writer for a first reaction to his work, I ignored Mother’s Camel cigarette and kept my eyes focused on her face as she read my dozen lines, artistically divided into half a dozen couplets.
When she finished reading it, real tears, not the glycerine ones I had seen at the studio, were rolling down her smooth, pink cheeks.
“Buddy, did you really write this?”
Shyly, I admitted that I had.
“Why, I think it’s beautiful! It’s—a work of genius. It deserves to be published.”
I glowed.
“What time will Father be home?” I asked. He had told me about having been a writer before he began making movies and running studios. I knew how much he admired writing. The only people he seemed to like having at the house were writers. Maybe when I grew up I could get to be a writer like Dad.
Mom said she thought he’d be home around seven. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing my poem for his arrival. First I typed it out on Father’s big typewriter: By going very cautiously with two fingers I finally had it on paper without a single typo. I thought it looked a little naked, so I got out my crayons and drew a gracefully waving border around it in yellow, green, and red. The frame of three colors was exactly what it needed.
At seven o’clock I placed it on my father’s plate at the head of the long dining-room table. I sat at one side, Sonya on the other. The human butterball we called Baby Stuart was still up in his nursery with Wilma. At seven-fifteen Father had not arrived. I went to his plate at the head of the table and repositioned the poem at a more advantageous angle. The grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past seven. We would have to start without Father, Mother decided. I sat down and started spooning the thick pea soup, but the suspense was awful.
Although it had been nice to hear from my mother that I was a genius, I was eager for confirmation of that status from the man I’d heard proclaimed the top story mind in The Industry. I had seen how people depended on his opinions at those post-preview curbstone conferences, after the rushes in the projection room, or at the story conferences that were sometimes held in our library.
“Yes, B.P.!” “Great idea, B.P.!” “Glad you like it, B.P.!” “I think you’ve licked it, B.P.!” Everybody at the studio from the secretaries to the stars kept telling me how lucky I was to have such a brilliant and important father. “He’s got a mind like a razor,” a writer said after a heated story conference. “Cuts straight through to the heart of the problem.
” “He knows what he wants and never passes the buck,” another said. “He doesn’t shilly-shally around waiting for other people to make up his mind. He listens, carefully, and then makes his decision. And when he makes it he sticks to it, he backs up his judgment. That’s unusual out here.”
We had reached the dessert course, my favorite chocolate soufflé, but I could only pick at it in my anxiety. What if Father wasn’t coming home at all? There could be an unexpected studio crisis: a star sick, an important picture couldn’t start on schedule? Or maybe a star was feuding with her director and threatening not to report for work unless he was taken off the picture? Or what if a top writer had gone off the wagon and could not be found, his screenplay only half-completed? At the studio, crisis was an everyday occurrence.
At eight o’clock we were ready to leave the dining room. Soon I would have to go upstairs and start my homework. A few minutes after eight we heard Dad’s car pulling in. Father never came home quietly. He would burst in, crying down terrible oaths on the heads of his stars, directors, the “New York office”—a Hollywood version of Life with Father. But his special wrath always seemed directed at the stars.
Maybe that was why I was never able to think of movie stars as the glamorous gods and goddesses worshipped in those great cathedrals, and glorified in the fan magazines. Modern Screen, Screen Romance, and Photoplay outsold all the other magazines put together. After all, they reported what time Gloria Swanson liked to get up in the morning, what her favorite breakfast foods were, what kind of bed she liked to sleep in, and of course with whom. And dealt with the burning question of whether or not Greta Garbo was truly in love with Jack Gilbert. In England the common people felt a need for a royal family with whom to identify. It seemed no accident that we called our stars of the silent screen queens and kings.
But not in the Schulberg household. Father may have sold the public on the concept of Little Mary as the perennial fifteen-year-old “America’s Sweetheart,” but he knew—and told us about—the tough little mind hidden beneath those golden curls, and behind all the golden smiles of the stars with whom he labored. To him, movie stars never had just two names like Pola Negri. Father would come bursting in shouting, “Oh-that-goddamn-bitch-how-I’d-like-to-wring-her-goddamn-neck-that-double-crossing-Pola-Negri!” I became so accustomed to hearing them addressed that way that I accepted the string of epithets as part of their names. It seemed as if all the stars in the studio, or nearly all, were engaged in a great conspiracy to try my father’s patience.