But this night his mood seemed even more thunderous than usual. One of his many chores was to bring the unruly stars of the studio into line so that pictures could be put into production in an orderly manner. The only way to turn out fifty to sixty pictures a year was to start a new one every Monday. The pressures of the major-studio “dream factory” were killing. At Paramount, Father was trying to do single-handed what Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf were doing together at MGM: make a dozen to fifteen quality pictures (Thalberg) and the rest “programmers” (Rapf). The major stars were no longer permitted to choose their own stories, their directors, and their casts as they had done in the more easygoing days under Jesse Lasky. Although Lasky was now Father’s official superior, he kept his promise to give him a free hand, and served as a buffer between Paramount’s West Coast studio and B.P.’s rival, Walter Wanger, who was in charge of the East Coast operation. The Negris and the Swansons fought back with a vengeance, throwing the temper tantrums for which they were notorious.
This night Father came in red-faced and shouting, “God damn that stupid stubborn bitch of all bitches Pola Negri she’s done it again!” As he poured out his tale of woe he made a stiff scotch-and-soda and paced around the dining-room table working off steam. It seemed that the stupid stubborn little bitch had got it into her goddamn stubborn head that she couldn’t play the last scene. “So the whole company has to stand there at one thousand dollars a minute while this arrogant little bitch—who’s lucky she isn’t working in a sausage factory in Pinsk—locks herself in her dressing room. Now I have to drive out to Beverly and vamp her into coming back on Monday. And if she gives me any back talk I may just strangle her instead and finish the damn picture with her stand-in doing the scenes with her back to the goddamn camera. That goddamn Pola Negri thinks her picture is the only one we’re making at the studio. God damn it, I could strangle her in cold blood without the slightest sense of guilt. Pola Negri thinks she’s even bigger than Swanson and all she is is a pigheaded little whore!”
My father refilled his highball glass and resumed his pacing. I held my breath and waited for the storm to blow over. Why were those movie stars always trying to torture my poor father?
“Ben, why don’t you sit down and start your soup? After dinner you can call Pola and try to work it out.”
“I’m not ready to sit down! For Christ’ sake, Ad, I just got home—give me a couple of minutes to wind down. This is the first moment’s peace I’ve had all day. Sometimes I wish I were back on Mission Road, making one picture at a time.”
“You used to yell about Katherine MacDonald then just as much as you yell about Pola Negri now,” Mother reminded him.
“Katherine MacDonald was a lamb compared to this temperamental little bitch!” Father insisted.
Maybe my poem will cheer him up, I was thinking; maybe I should get up the courage to lift it from his plate and hand it to him.
Father seemed to have heard my thought because just then he glanced down at his plate and noticed the white page with my poem neatly centered in its rainbow frame.
“What the hell is this?”
“Ben, Buddy has been waiting for you for hours. A wonderful thing has happened. Buddy has written a beautiful poem. It’s so—well, it’s absolutely amaz—”
“Ad, if you don’t mind, don’t tell me what I should think of it. Let me decide that for myself.”
I kept my face lowered to my plate. It could not have taken long to read that poem. It was only twelve lines. But it seemed an eternity. I was afraid to look up to see if it was bringing tears to his eyes as it had to Mother’s. It was so quiet that I could hear the ice tinkling in Father’s glass as he held it in one hand and my poem in the other. Then I heard him dropping the poem back on his plate again. I could not bear to look up for the verdict but in a moment I was to hear it:
“I think it’s lousy.”
I bent my head a little closer to my plate and tried to keep the tears inside my head.
“Ben, sometimes I don’t understand you,” Mother said. “This is just a little boy. You’re not in your studio now. You should be pleased that he’s starting to write poetry so young. What he needs is encouragement.”
“I don’t know why,” Father held his ground. “Is there any law that says Buddy has to become a poet? Isn’t there enough lousy poetry in the world already?”
I don’t remember exactly how Mother fielded that one. I do remember that her voice rose and that she started saying very critical things about my father.
All through my life I have found that I remember the negatives much more clearly than the positives. A barbed line from a critical notice burrows into my skin like a chigger while an entire page of unstinted praise fades to half-forgotten generalities. And so I remember clearly my father’s voice rising to meet the pitch of Mother’s as he made this self-defense:
“Look, I’m paying my best writers fifteen hundred dollars a week. I’ve just come from a long story conference where I’ve been tearing their scripts apart and telling them their stuff is lousy. I only pay Buddy fifty cents a week. And you’re trying to tell me I don’t have a right to tear his stuff apart if I think it’s lousy!”
The repetition of that hard word hit me over the heart like the fist of a Benny Leonard. I ran out of the dining room. Upstairs in my bedroom I threw myself on the bed and sobbed into my pillow. When the worst of the disappointment was drained out of me I could hear my parents still quarreling loudly across the dinner table about my beautiful/lousy poem.
Many months later when I took a second look at that controversial poem, I had to agree with my father. It was a pretty lousy poem. Maybe it was time to turn my efforts to fiction. I wrote a short story called “Ugly,” influenced by Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. A young man is so hideous that he’s ashamed to be seen in public. He travels from village to village at night and hides in the haylofts of barns so that no one will see him. In one village just before Lent, he finds a masked ball about to take place in the square. He fashions an attractive mask for himself, joins in the festivities, and enjoys the company of a woman for the first time. But when the time comes to remove the mask he runs away. In what I fancied to be the dark, Russian manner, I ended my story with the poor wretch hiding under the hay in a loft again.
When I worked up the courage to expose “Ugly” to my father, he said it was overwritten but far from hopeless. He thought I should rewrite it and simplify the prose. I was learning to rewrite. And my mother was learning that she could criticize my work without crushing me. We were all learning. I was going on thirteen, and still having a hard and unhappy time in school, learning more at home and at the studio than through any formal classes.
When I was only a few years older I stumbled into further insight one day when Sonya and I climbed up into the attic for a rainy-day exploration. Sonya did the familiar little-girl thing of flouncing around in Mother’s high-heeled shoes and discarded hats. I was looking through the old magazines and papers that my father had saved. Suddenly I saw “The Man from the North,” the famous (at least in our family) short story by Townsend Harris High School student Benjamin P. Schulberg that had won him the incredible prize of one hundred dollars for the best story by a New York City schoolboy. Over the years, “The Man from the North” had accumulated major literary virtue. Whenever Mother, relentlessly driving us onward and upward, wanted to invoke the family literary heritage, she would remind us that Father was not only a pioneer photoplay writer but the author of “The Man from the North.” His story took on the immortality of Pushkin’s “The Overcoat” or De Maupassant’s “A Piece of String.”
So I approached the opening line with awe. But on the second line I burst out laughing. The story was about a man lost in the frozen North, a man a New York East Side kid could never have known. The prose was Jack London in the depths of his purple. The third line, a string of adjectives, struck me as funnier than the second. By this time Sonya was at my
side, wanting to know what was so funny. I started to read her the opening paragraph. She was a secret poet who never showed anything to Father because they were barely on speaking terms. Already, she knew wordiness when she heard it. We not only laughed, we became hysterical. Our legs crumpled. We rolled on the attic floor, our chests hurting. We’d try to comment on the story and go into another convulsion. We were in danger of writing our own obituaries: “Cause of death—‘The Man from the North.’”
At that moment the attic door opened and Mother appeared. Our laughter had carried all the way through the large house. What had we found up here that could be that funny?
“We found D-Dad’s st-st-st …” That was always an extremely difficult sound to make and this time, impossible. I simply handed her the manuscript.
She stared at it.
Suddenly Sonya and I had stopped laughing. We watched her, now defensively.
“This is what you were laughing about?”
We looked at each other and went off into another paroxysm, then stopped. Mother didn’t think it was funny.
“Remember your father was only a highschool student. And after all, styles change. That was almost twenty years ago.”
So Father had a beautiful/ lousy literary work of his own. We nodded dutifully, but we still thought it was funny. All our lives the mere mention of the title would trigger laughter.
19
A PERSONAGE IN THE EYES of my mother, catered to by Father’s studio employees (including those “stupid” movie stars), made to feel important in my front-row seat at the Friday-night fights, I still suffered the miseries of a misfit at the Wilton Place Grammar School. The bullies wrestled me to the dirt of the schoolyard, threatened to beat me up, and imitated my stammering. I can still smell their clothing—a smell compounded of dirt and sweat and anti-movie hostility. Often I would try to avoid the yard and sneak out the front entrance of the school, longing to make it home to the security of the big house on Lorraine. Almost as often, the little cossacks of Wilton Place would scent their quarry and chase me down the block. I learned to run very fast. I didn’t know it but I was already in training for the highschool runner and tennis player I would become a few years later. Often I would make it safely inside the protective door of 525 Lorraine before giving in to tears, too upset to write poetry or to play in the backyard with its swings and rings and basketball net.
But there was a punching bag on the back porch outside my bedroom. Given my mother’s proclivities, it had been set up there more in the interest of child psychology than of physical culture. I was encouraged to work off my aggressions, frustrations, and hostilities by punching away at the light bag. Whether or not it was sound psychological theory I have no idea. But I became quite proficient on the light bag and have carried one with me through half a dozen different lives in Hollywood, on a Pennsylvania farm, a West Florida beach, a Beverly hill, and a Long Island retreat. Working out my angers on the punching bag with a “Take this, Duke Wayne!”, “And this, Dick Nixon!”, and “Right in the middle of your two faces, Sam Spiegel!”, it may be that I overdeveloped my capacity for absorbing emotional blows without striking back, for turning the other cheek until my head was spinning, turning instead to my punching bag with the ferocity of a Dempsey.
Although my mother was to add to her “credits” by cofounding our town’s first progressive school, none of those John Dewey-like experiments were tried on me. I was flipped from the frying pan of public school into the fire of the Urban Military Academy. This was an elite concentration camp on Melrose, not far from Paramount Studio, where Major Urban, supposedly a hero of World War I, dressed us up as miniature West Point cadets and marched us up and down the parade grounds every afternoon. There is a picture of me in my smart grey uniform, complete with puttees and Sam Browne belt, my cape thrown grandly over my shoulder to display its crimson lining. But I didn’t feel all that grand.
True, I wasn’t chased and ridiculed for my stammering or my high position as a Hollywood prince: The Urban cadets came from well-to-do families and were much better mannered than the poorer kids in the public school. And of course the strict military discipline imposed a rigid standard of behavior in which public fighting and humiliation were sternly punished. So the cadets were civil with me, and some were even friendly because they wanted me to show them through the studio. I had the power to enter the studio, past the imposing reception booth or through the big iron gate, whenever I wanted to and with whomever I wished. Since almost everybody wanted to meet the movie stars and see movies being made, I seemed rather popular. But I came early to the feeling that it was the producer’s son they were buttering up, not the stammering cadet.
I have no memories of any educational activities at Urban. What calls to me are the staccato military commands: “Fall in!” “By the right flank—march!” “Company—halt!” Those orders seemed easy to follow for everybody but me. I proved to be an incurable non-marcher. I was forever “falling in” a few seconds too late. And marching along, my mind would wander to other things—maybe the lyrics I was working on, as I added songwriting to my other accomplishments—and I would fail to hear the command and would step on the heels of the cadet directly in front of me. The drill instructor would shout “Company halt! That includes you, Schulberg!” When I had drained his patience he put me to the rear of the rear squad, where I comprised a squad of my own, inevitably marching out of step but no longer interfering with the rhythm and obedience of my fellow-marchers.
While I brought up the inglorious rear, our company was led by a dashing fellow on horseback, whose father was not only Mayor of Beverly Hills but probably the most famous man in America, Will Rogers. While Will, Jr., was high man on the Urban totem pole, and I the lowest, he never chewed me out like the other student officers. Junior was the sort of genial, easy-going, thoughtful fellow his old man pretended to be. Will, Jr., was a heroic figure, and I was the Good Soldier Schweik of Major Urban’s Military Academy. My punishment for inept marching, below and behind the call of duty, was to have to report to Urban on Saturday mornings and march for an hour by myself.
When finally I was able to convince my parents that Urban had nothing to offer me in the way of education, a cure for my stammer, or military demeanor, I was allowed to shed my uniform and return to civilian life.
Parental love at 525 Lorraine was expressed not in terms of physical touching—embraces and kisses—but in educational and artistic prodding. Perhaps influenced by Grandpa, an austere man, and Grandma, withdrawn in unhappiness, Mother was physically undemonstrative. Cultural achievement was stressed over personal happiness. I have read somewhere that “passion for learning is for the Jews one of the ways to God.” Consciously and determinedly, Mother had struggled upward and outward from the ghetto. She never forgot the teaching of one of the early leaders of immigrant Jewry, Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward: “You must try to be an intellectual.”
There were no pushcarts on Lorraine Boulevard, no synagogues, no frayed laundry hung out from tenement window to window. The great houses were set back from the street by spacious lawns. But the ghosts of Abe Cahan and the Daily Forward still breathed in our elegant Hollywood home, exhorting me to write, learn, improve, achieve, make something of myself that could be measured in something more valuable than money. To this day the Cahan-Ad Schulberg ethic clings to our shoulders like Grandpa’s prayer shawl. If we do not write something every day we greet the darkness with an uneasy conscience. There is time off only for good behavior—if we have done enough to appease those Jewish gods or muses.
But to leave an impression of a driven child forever hiding under a piano composing poetry to please and appease his mother is to deal in half-truths. Another relationship was to dominate my youth, my friendship with Maurice Rapf. Maurice’s father, as I have mentioned, was the first studio manager of Warner Brothers, then at a small lot on Sunset Boulevard. When Maurice’s family bought a house on Lorraine, we began creating a busy and imaginative
world of our own within the big-studio world around us.
In many ways we were conventional kids playing our games on the studio backlots or the Hollywood side streets. Instead of saying, “My pop c’n lick your pop,” we literally used to say, “My father’s studio c’n make better pictures than your father’s.” We would get into heated arguments as to which was the better movie, The Vanishing American with Richard Dix and Lois Wilson (mine), or His Secretary with Norma Shearer and Lew Cody (his). It wasn’t easy to top the great Big Parade with Jack Gilbert and Renée Adorée (his), but I would put my best foot forward with Ralph Forbes, Neil Hamilton, Ronald Colman, and William Powell in Beau Geste. Maurice would say, “My father discovered Joan Crawford,” and I’d say, “Well, my father discovered Clara Bow and she’s even bigger than Joan Crawford.” We compared comedy teams. He had Karl Dane and George K. Arthur. I had Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. We compared directors. I had Vic Fleming and he had King Vidor. I had Greg La Cava and he had Robert Z. Leonard.
We even compared bootblacks—the only blacks I remember on the lot in those backward days of the total flour face. I had Oscar and he had Kid Slickum. Oscar the Bootblack, as he was known to thousands of white employees on the Paramount lot, had his stand just outside the main studio gate. Part of his job was shining shoes and part was serving as a squealing, supposedly good-natured target for the passersby who would sneak up behind him and goose him outrageously. He knew the names of everybody on the lot and he’d chuckle, “Now, Mr. Sutherland” [Eddie, the comedy director]—or “Mr. Holt” [Jack, one of the stars]—“You stay ’way from me, heah? You stay ’way from me!” Sometimes they’d flip him a quarter or half a dollar just to hear his exaggerated squeals. Oscar probably earned more money every day than the average extra. And he presided over his stand rain or shine. I thought he was happy, when I was twelve. It was not until I grew into my teens that I began to think more about him and to wonder why he was the only Negro in that whole thriving studio.