21
WATCHING A BEN HUR in the making, a Greta Garbo or a Lon Chaney creating film history, a bizarre figure like Von Stroheim in action was simply part of our daily life—along with rooting for the flamboyant Trojans of U.S.C. in their crimson-and-gold football uniforms as they struggled heroically against the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame or the California Golden Bears. Irreverently we sang “Fight On for Old S.C.—The Halfback Wants His Sal-a-ree…”
When the Golden Age of the silent screen was reaching its end, our western edge of Los Angeles was still so rural that we could safely take our bikes and pedal from Lorraine to Larchmont, bordered by great pepper trees. Every Saturday afternoon at the Larchmont Theatre we could watch our favorite star, not the ones our fathers launched, nourished, cussed, and profited from, but the intrepid western hero, Art Acord. When the silents fell with a resounding crash, Art Acord was one of the hundreds of marquee names caught in the switches. He went galloping off into the sunset of total obscurity. When I was old enough to begin to play the “Whatever-Happened-To?” game, I got a familiar answer: Having silently lassoed his last cattle rustler and having silently saved his last golden-haired damsel in distress, Art found himself overcome by a world he thought he had conquered. The offscreen fade-out was suicide.
Darkness was always lurking behind the bright, leaving a subliminal shadow on our minds. We would roughhouse with the MGM comedy team, English music-hall comedian George K. Arthur and his tall, glowering sidekick, Karl Dane, who had been discovered as a carpenter on the MGM backlot. Scoring in a serious role in King Vidor’s The Big Parade, he had gone on to comedy roles; Arthur and Dane were Harry Rapfs and MGM’s answer to Father’s Beery Hatton comedies at Paramount. But the advent of sound had sneaked up on Karl Dane. Suddenly he wasn’t a five-thousand-dollar-a-week talking actor, he was an unemployed ex-carpenter with a guttural Scandinavian accent. There seemed nothing else to do except put a revolver to his head. Tom Forman, one of Father’s favorite directors from those sunny days at the Selig Zoo, grabbed the same one-way ticket when he was declared “Not Okay for Sound” in a new age of cinematic progress that had turned its back on Tom’s silent Preferred Pictures.
Although we were aware of the dramatic rising and falling of these tides of fortune, the painful exit of Charles Ray, Gilbert, Von Stroheim, Charles King, or Buster Keaton—and what a mixed bag were those vaulters and tumblers!—they were still peripheral to the center of our existence, the elaborate fun and games that gave pleasure to our growing days. We loved track-and-field meets as much as we did those emotional Saturday-afternoon football games. We held our own meets in the open lots on Lorraine, clocking ourselves with expensive stopwatches and keeping personal records. Then we doubled as reporters, hailing these activities in our own sports paper: RAPF SETS NEW HIGH JUMP RECORD AT
FOUR FEET EIGHT!; SCHULBERG WINS STANDING B.J. WITH FIVE FEET TWO! New events were constantly added to our friendly but intense competition. We bought miniature turtles and staged turtle meets in our respective bathtubs—usually mine since Grandmother Rapf took as dim a view of this sport as she did of our other activities.
Radio reception was still an exciting experience. Maurice had an RCA about two feet long with a slanting face, and I had a Superheterodyne more than three feet long with so many different dials it is a wonder that I—outstandingly unmechanical—ever learned to operate it. With our earphones clamped to our heads we would bend over our sets, moving our tuning dials a fraction of a fraction of an inch until we would hear a telltale squeak that meant a distant signal trying to get through. There were no networks in those days, and not too many local stations to overpower us, and so when local stations Star-Spangled-Bannered off the air at midnight, the airwaves would be free for the power station of the East, KDKA in Pittsburgh, WJZ in New York, WBZ in Boston…. As we grew more accomplished at this delicate all-night job, we began to extend our reception range to England, Australia, and finally Japan.
When motion-picture songs came in with the groundbreaking The Jazz Singer, Maurice and I would monitor the radio to keep track of how many times our studios’ songs were broadcast, how many plays for his “Pagan Love Song” or “Singin’ in the Rain” compared to my “Beyond the Blue Horizon” or “My Future Just Passed.”
On almost every level but one we competed with intensity. Jumping, running, criticizing current films, and writing copy, jokes, and songs for our private newspaper, our talents seemed virtually interchangeable. But in the esoteric field of music, Maurice was clearly my master. Just as, if you put a hammer in my hand, I would invariably hit not the nail but the fingers holding it, so it was for me with musical instruments. Maurice’s parents insisted that he learn to play the piano, and under the determined surveillance of his grandmother, who saw to it that he practiced the prescribed hour a day, he learned to play acceptably. My mother soon discovered that the best I could do with the piano was to turn on the switch that started the rolls.
So they bought me an expensive, gleaming saxophone, with its mysterious keyboard that only inspired madmen like Lester Young and Stan Getz can solve. When the sax was turned in for a trumpet, the trumpet for a trombone, and still no music came forth, a string instrument was suggested. When I failed to conquer the mandolin, my mother took it over and I was given a banjo. A small fortune was lavished on instruments and frustrated teachers. Still no music issued from the Paramount prince. After several years, my mother on her mandolin and her music-resistant son on his banjo were able to play a duet, more or less together, of “Mighty Lak a Rose.”
Fortunately for us, there were no tape recorders in those days, and so the world has been spared any relic of our musicales. But I remember the earnestness with which Mother picked at her shiny mandolin, and the boredom that engulfed me as I failed to master yet another instrument. Still Ad pressed on as she did with all things cultural. We had to be complete people in the Grecian sense, at home with intellectuals and artistes and on the playing fields. My sister Sonya was given a far more elegant instrument, a harp, which she mastered with about as much proficiency as I brought to the saxophone, the piano, and the banjo. But who could resist the image of little Sonya, ethereal and painfully shy, dressed for her role in a long, flowered Victorian gown, bending toward the harp that towered above her yellow curls? Mother was so proud of her creation that she hired a successful local portraitist, Stewart Robertson—an artist of the court, so to speak—to preserve Sonya and her harp in an oil painting that oozed affluence and culture.
But commerce went hand in hand with culture in our multipurposed life. Those were the days when houses were rising from the vacant lots all over Windsor Square, and once in a while a carpenter or bricklayer sweating under the winter sun would ask us for a drink of water. With hundreds of laborers building mansions for our expanding city, it struck me that a profitable business might be set up selling orange juice fresh from our kitchen. With lumber and canvas from the studio, my Uncle Joe built us an impressive orange juice stand. The oldest of Mother’s brothers, Joe was strong and useful with his hands. He liked to boast of how he had beaten off Cossack assailants in his native village. But like Grandpa Max, he was a fish out of water in this new world. He could not cope with the urgent challenge of Hollywood that his young brother Sam and my father found so exciting.
The thirsty workmen were grateful for our cold orange juice, and at the lunch hour Maurice and I did a brisk business. Since the oranges came from our own kitchen, obligingly squeezed by Anna the cook, who also supplied the punch bowl, the ice, and the small glasses, Father estimated that at five cents a glass the household was a nickel behind on every transaction. But this economic logic was lost on us, as we pocketed our nickels.
Allowed, in the permissive climate of California, to operate motor vehicles at age 14, I soon owned a Ford Model A roadster, and with this new freedom came a significant expansion in our soft-drink business. Driving all the way down Sunset Boulevard to its source at the old Mexican Plaza, we found
a wholesale bottling works in East Los Angeles, not far from the now-abandoned Mayer-Schulberg Studio. We would buy cases of root beer, orange pop, and cherry soda, selling them on our quiet, tree-lined Lorraine Boulevard at twice the cost, thereby encouraging Mother to believe that I was not only an athlete and a scholar but also a respecter of the almighty dollar, in which she placed as much trust as she did in Freud and Jung and such social heroes as Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.
Branching out from our soft-drink business, Maurice and I next directed our multi-talents to the magazine field, pressing subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Country Gentleman on our parents’ friends who were too embarrassed to refuse. When that guest list was exhausted, we took to the streets, hawking our wares on the bustling corner of Western Avenue near what was then the Fox Studio.
To commemorate a new contract bringing him more than half a million dollars a year, B.P. ordered a custom-made town car that became for many years the bane of his children’s existence. The body was a model of an 18th-century coach, laced with gold bric-a-brac, incongruously placed on a Lincoln chassis with a 16-cylinder engine. On either side of the door to our royal coach were two genuine antique lanterns. The interior was a jewel box, large enough for three on the plush rear seat, with two small circular jump seats that folded into the carpeted floor. Over each of the small rear windows was a small cut-glass vase in which fresh tea roses were placed every morning. There was also a delicate telephone with which we could communicate with James, our liveried chauffeur, a lean, ruddy-faced English war veteran who carried himself with the dash of Errol Flynn and indeed bore some resemblance to that irrepressible Tasmanian.
That automotive hybrid with its powerful engine from Detroit and its Hollywood replica of an Empire coach was an unlikely vehicle from which to peddle magazines. But forbidden to drive my new Model A into the dangerous traffic of Western Avenue, and laden with my magazines, I had no choice but to be driven to my corner in that gaudy symbol of conspicuous consumption. I never sat in that car in an upright position. To avoid the humiliation of being seen by passengers in ordinary vehicles, I always traveled on the floor, folded more or less into the fetal position. “Dressed down” in old knickers and a worn shirt, I would huddle there clutching my bagful of magazines. Near Western Avenue, as James opened the door for me, I made my escape in a manner that Lon Chaney might have admired. From my prone position on the floor I would crawl out onto the curb, move away from the car as quickly as I could, and then suddenly rise from my knees and stride away rapidly as if I had nothing to do with that $18,000 monster.
Once I was out on that Western Avenue corner I became the typical small-fry solicitor. Only my vocal pitch sounded like this: “G-get your S-saturday Evening Post—C-country G-G-G [soft g was always one of my most difficult consonants] Gentle-man—L-Ladies’ Home J-J-Jour-nal?” Passersby must have felt pity for my affliction. Perhaps they thought I was retarded or that I had a harelip and was saving my nickels for an operation, for I was able to lighten my load of magazines through the afternoon. But it was a nerve-wracking job, as I always had to keep an eye out for dirty Alex and his Wilton Place yahoos. Our little nemesis, Pancho Villa, Jr., he was my chief tormentor at the Wilton Place Grammar School. Here on the Avenue he led a small band of outlaws who frankly terrified me. Once I saw them coming, just as James was driving to get me. Tucking my bundle of unsold magazines under my arm, I ran for my life down Third Street toward Van Ness. James saw me, stopped, flung open the door of the town car, and I dove in, hugging the floor as he drove home.
I was not the only member of the family to be a floor-rider in this glorious carriage. Whenever my sister Sonya was sent off in that car she would also hide on the floor, as ashamed of its ostentation as was I.
One night, in the car with my parents, I was all dressed up and forced to sit on the jump seat. We were on our way to the opening of one of Dad’s pictures, Old Ironsides, at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. The ornate entranceway on Hollywood Boulevard was jammed with frenzied fans pushing against the barricades for a glimpse of their idols—Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky, Billie Dove, Jackie Coogan… Suddenly a young girl, breaking through the barricades, ran toward our car which was caught in the star-studded traffic. The fan jumped onto the single step beneath the carriage door. There I was, with parents in evening clothes, in a fabulous chauffeur-driven carriage of gold. That was all a star-blinded fanatic needed to see.
“Who are you? Who are you?” she shouted at me. “Are you a movie star?” I shook my head. A slight drizzle added an extra note of madness to this searchlight circus.
“Who are you!”
It was not a question but a command. For those timeless seconds I belonged to her.
“I-I’m n-nobody,” I stammered.
“Nobody?” She was moving along with us, her face peering over the half-lowered window, growing suspicious of elusive movie stars who high-hatted their fans.
“Are you sure? Do I know your name?”
I shook my head. “I-I’m not in the m-movies. I’m n-nobody j-just like you.”
She stared at me and then suddenly accepted me, with a kind of ecstasy, as if miraculously the nobodies were inside this golden carriage riding with the greats. Still clinging to the coach, she turned around and shouted to the crowd pressing forward behind her. “He says he’s nobody!” Her voice rose triumphantly. “Just like us!”
That was as close as I ever came to egalitarianism in Father’s dream machine.
22
TO COUNTERBALANCE OUR PRINCELY position, Maurice and I found an outlet for our pent-up energies on Halloween. A favorite target was the large red-brick Edwardian home of the Listicos on the corner. Mr. Listico, constantly overseeing his beautifully manicured lawns and hedges, was on the lookout for us. “Hey, you kids, stay off my grass!” he was always shouting at us.
One Halloween we decided to get even. From a mansion going up on Wilshire Boulevard we carried a barrel of wet cement. Then we collected garbage from neighboring houses, dragged it up the bricked entrance-way to Mr. Listico’s front door, and covered it with the cement. Hearing sounds within, we turned and ran. Panting, I hurried into the house and turned on the player piano. Moments later came a knock on the door: the police, asking for my father. It was one of the nights he happened to be home. I ran up the stairs and hid under my bed. After a while, I crawled to the doorway to listen. Father was doing his best to save me from reform school. Creeping out into the hallway, I peered down the banister. Father was reaching into his pocket and handing the officers some money. Their tone softened. He offered them some of his blimp-sized Upmann cigars. I heard the mingled chuckling of grown men who understand each other. The best sound of all was the front door closing behind them. Then I heard Father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. I was more anxious than frightened because he had never struck me.
Perhaps because of his own human weaknesses he could not bring himself to sit in judgment on me. His permissiveness was instinctive and emotional where Mother’s was theoretical and intellectual. Father simply explained to me that although he had managed to persuade the police not to arrest us, we would have to atone by removing the hardened cement and decaying garbage within, and by forfeiting next month’s allowance to pay for the damage.
I never forgot Father’s understanding, nor forgave Mr. Listico for calling the cops.
Another enemy was Rabbi Magnin, who presided over the local Temple B’nai B’rith, a position of grandeur he continues to enjoy an incredible half-century later. Today the Temple is a magnificent dome on Wilshire Boulevard, a monument to the affluent religiosity of Los Angeles. But in those days it was housed in an unprepossessing block-long two-story building in downtown Los Angeles. Instead of the traditional Hebrew school for youngsters, we had Sunday School, viewed as outright heresy by our Orthodox grandfathers.
But if the Rabbi’s Sunday activities scandalized the bearded fathers of the studio bosses, it had cha
rms for the young bosses themselves. Louie Mayer, William Fox, and the other moguls were happy to contribute large sums for front-row pews, and Rabbi Magnin rewarded them with flattery that poured like honey, and with a sanctimonious air that played up to their image of a man of God. Magnin was the right rabbi in the right temple in the right city at the right moment in time. If he had not presided over our B’nai B’rith, God and Louie B. Mayer—whose overpowering presences tended to overlap—would have had to create him. Or maybe they did.
Since my father had inherited his father’s lack of interest in the religion of their ancestors, and since Mother gave lip service to the High Holy Days but had her head in other clouds, the teachings of Judaism meant little or nothing to me. Still, there was an irresistible force that drew me to B’nai B’rith every Sunday. Her name was Elsie Brick. Our Sunday School teacher. The first woman I was ever in love with. I should say we were ever in love with. Since Maurice and I were now accustomed to doing everything together, it followed that we should become mutually devoted to Elsie Brick. Still fearful of girls our own age—we would run from our houses to hide under a spreading evergreen whenever one appeared—and wary of those predatory little animals called starlets, in Elsie Brick we discovered an altogether different and superior female specimen. She had about her a dark and intense yet ethereal Rebeccalike beauty. Looking back, I realize that she was in her early twenties. But she was old enough for us not to feel challenged in offering her our love. Thus an innocent ménage à trois formed in our heads. In some cloud-banked kingdom of youth the three of us would live happily ever after.
Our Sunday School lessons began with the creation of the Earth, according to the Hebrews. I don’t think we yet knew the difference between fact and fancy, law and legend. There was, for instance, something about Miss Brick’s account of the origin of man that struck us as a little fishy. The Lord created Adam in His image, the lonely Adam gave up one of his ribs to form Eve, and the two of them gave birth to Cain and Abel. So far so good. But after Cain killed his brother, there should have been only three people left on earth. Yet Cain goes forth to the land of Nod and finds a wife, from whom came Enoch who begat Irad who begat Mehujael who begat Methushael, who begat Lamech, who took unto himself two wives, Adah and Zillah.