Disembarking at Southampton was a madhouse. The sporting fraternity was there to receive and interview Young Stribling. And all the rest of England had turned out to surround and embrace George Bancroft. He needed a police escort to clear the way for him to get off the gangplank and onto the train for London. His fame was such that custom inspection was waived, and the Bancrofts reached their drawing room in the style of royalty. Even their cases of Eddie Kaye scotch moved along with them without mishap. When we reached the London terminal, the crowd scene was repeated. English reserve was forgotten as fans closed in and tried to lay hands on him, crying “Go’ge! Go’ge, gimme a kiss!—Sign this!—Shake me hand! Go’ge… !” As we moved into the lobby of the Savoy, wild-eyed fans jostled with photographers and reporters. One of the latter managed to get in a question, “Mr. Bancroft, now that you’re in England, what are you most looking forward to seeing?’ After one of those dramatic pauses—“Bancroft pauses” we had come to call them—George said, “I have come here to see your underworld.”
I exchanged looks with my family. Father was wearing his “I’m going to murder George Bancroft” look. The look on the British reporters’ faces reflected studied self-control. But when George looked into the faces pressed around him, all he saw was a mirror reflecting his own.
On our first night in London, the noted actress Peggy Wood, a close friend of Ad and Ben’s, was opening in Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were to be her guests, both for the performance and for dinner afterward. Aware of George’s chronic unpunctuality, due in large measure to that steady flow of Eddie Kaye’s finest, Father had forewarned him as he would a child, in a tone that even I found myself adopting, “Now George, here’s what you should do—stop drinking at five and take a nap, as I want you to look well in the pictures they’ll be taking of you and Peggy. At six o’clock start dressing. Remember it’s white tie. You and Tava meet us in the lobby at seven. Seven on the dot. Peggy’s been nice enough to give us her house seats. Now let’s be in them ten minutes before curtain. Are you listening to me, George?’
George smiled the big, open smile beloved on all five continents. “Gotcha, B.P.”
At seven, Father phoned upstairs to say we were leaving our suite and heading for the elevator. Were George and Tava ready? B. P. was sure he could hear the familiar tinkle of ice in the highball glasses as George boomed, “Yup, we’re just about ready. Tava’s putting the finishing touches on her makeup. We’ll be down in five minutes, B.P.”
In the lobby, with my young, slender father elegant in white tie, Mother looking like a doe-eyed movie star in her chiffon evening gown, Bancroft’s five minutes ticked on to ten and to fifteen. Father strode to the house phone.
“George, for Christ’ sake!”
Gurgle, tinkle. “On our way down, B.P.”
Seven-thirty brought Father’s ultimatum that we were leaving without them. At seven-thirty-three, just as we were on our way to the revolving door and the waiting limousine, George and Octavia emerged serenely from the elevator.
“George, this is unforgivable. As one star to another, you owe it to Miss Wood to be punctual. It’s the height of professional discourtesy. How could you do this to her?’
Again the big brown innocent eyes begged understanding while the resonant and now well-oiled voice spoke these words: “Now Ben, I’ve only been in this country a couple of hours. How do you expect me to know their customs?”
For Bancroftisms there were no answers. That evening Peggy Wood, always a gracious lady, held the curtain for fifteen minutes, the additional time required by George Bancroft to adjust himself to the strange customs of his English cousins.
Next day the head of Paramount’s London office showed us some of the principal sights of the city. We began with a lovely view of the Paramount emblem, stars forming a graceful circle around an impressive mountain over the company’s “flagship” theater and office building. Eventually we worked our way to Westminster Abbey. The Bancrofts had declined this sightseeing trip, preferring to sleep late. When Father reprimanded George gently at the end of the day, George defended himself on the grounds of privacy. It was no fun being mobbed wherever he went. The night before, he had been pushed and pulled and had bits of his expensive full-dress suit torn off for souvenirs. So Father assured him that for their visit to the Tower of London next morning he would make special arrangements through the Paramount office; a team of English bobbies trained in crowd-control would be provided, as well as a special approach to the rear of the Tower.
Father told George we were leaving the hotel next morning at nine, while advising our Paramount guides to pick us up at ten. George was instructed to lean back in the middle of the rear seat of the limousine, so as to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Thus we drove uneventfully toward the Tower without inciting any local pedestrians. So far, so good. But as the Tower came into view a few blocks ahead, George began to stir and lean forward, peering out into the street over my shoulder. At that moment, a young pedestrian, happening to glance into the car, could not believe his starstruck eyes. “Go’ge! That really you, Go’ge? Blimey… ! Hi, Go’ge! Go’ge!”
His cries attracted other passersby until soon there were a dozen faces at the window. George leaned forward, presenting that famous face to them. It was like honey to flies. Now there were twenty, fifty, a hundred … you could see them buzzing with their revelation: “It’s Go’ge! Go’ge Bancroft!!” The limousine was surrounded, a spontaneous Limey version of a Hollywood opening. The narrow street was clogged and tight-lipped bobbies tried to push back the crowd to clear a way for our car. Suddenly a large hand reached down over my shoulder and found the handle of the door. The rear door of the limousine swung open, and George Bancroft flung himself out of the car and into the midst of that churning human sea.
Later we would laugh about it, the crowd-shy George Bancroft literally throwing himself to the wolves of fame. But at that moment we watched in amazement and horror as George’s head bobbed along like a loosened buoy in an angry sea. It was half an hour before we found him again, in the Tower of London where the intrepid bobbies had rescued him from the crowd. He was battered and torn and flushed with victory.
“George, goddammit, you could have been killed out there,” Father scolded him, promising us that this was the last time he would ever urge the Bancrofts to join us in our sightseeing.
“I’m sorry, B.P.,” George was still panting, “but after all, they’re my public. I owe that to ’em.”
The London leg of the Grand Tour was full of turmoil. It led to the first real fight I’d ever had with my father. It had to do with another theater evening. The Stratford Theater was doing Twelfth Night and Father had a ticket for me. I told him I couldn’t go because I had to pick the college football games coming up that Saturday for my weekly contest with Maurice. We picked the scores of a hundred college football games, all the way from the Trojans of Southern California and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame to struggles involving Slippery Rock and Bowling Green. It was hard work at best, with all the available sports sections to provide vital intelligence. But all I could find in London was the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune, and so I was under a great deal of pressure, especially since my predictions had to be postmarked before the day of the game.
My usually permissive father began to raise his voice. An evening like this was exactly why we had come to Europe, to see all the good things that never came to Hollywood. He had had to use his influence to get these seats. The theater had been sold out for weeks. It would be a dramatic experience I would remember all my life. I was to put away that silly list of football games, he insisted, and open my mind to Shakespeare. When I tried to explain that if I did not get my football picks in the mail that night I would break a vital link in the continuity of my gridiron competition with Maurice, he tried to lift me bodily out of my chair. I squirmed out of his grasp and suddenly he slapped me across the face. My eyes smarted with tears, fal
ling upon the paper on which I was inscribing those thoughtful numbers: “Washington State 21—Idaho 7 …” I shouted at him: “Leave me alone, you sonofabitch! I never wanted to come on this crazy trip anyway!”
He tried to drag me down the hallway to the main door of the suite but I fought back. There was another terrible scene at the door. “All right, Buddy, I’m sorry I hit you. But for the last time—you’re coming with us to Twelfth Night.”
“I’m staying here and picking football games!”
“You know what’s going to happen to you?—you’re going to grow up to be one of those typical, stupid Hollywood kids who collects autographs from morons like George Bancroft and sings ‘Fight On for Old S.C.!’ Your mother and I may have been poor, but we knew what was important in life. We would have saved up all year to see something like the production we’re seeing tonight.”
“Dad, you don’t understand. I’ve got to pick these football games.”
Father’s bulging, sensitive eyes would have destroyed me if I had not been armored in self-righteousness. “All right, be an idiot,” he said. “It’s that goddamn California sunshine. It makes everybody football and tennis crazy.” The last word I heard was “Idiot!” Then the door slammed with what seemed to me at the time a tragic finality.
But in time, family relations were repaired by the tribulations we suffered in common from the Bancrofts. Father forgave my cultural lapse sufficiently to take me to the Young Stribling-Primo Carnera bout, which attracted great attention at the time. Sandwiched among the English fancy, I saw the largest fighter I had ever seen win an awkward and unsatisfactory decision on a foul in the fourth round. Father had bet on Stribling because he had watched the Georgian train. In the gym he had looked stylish and hard to hit, and Father had made one of his casually reckless wagers—a thousand pounds, he admitted later. The ungainly stray from a small Italian circus had been awarded a most peculiar decision, claiming he had been hit low by what seemed to us at ringside to be an invisible punch. They repeated their act again a few weeks later, in Paris, this time with Stribling winning on a foul. By now I had seen enough fights to learn one of the sad realities of the sweet science: Every so often the fix was in.
In the case of hapless Primo Carnera, as we would learn in time, the fix was always in, right up to the championship of the world he would win from Jack Sharkey. But when the mob who owned him had made their point, and the handcuffs were removed from his opponents, he was defenseless, thrown to lions like Max Baer and Joe Louis.
In Paris, George repeated his London performance. When the attentive but cynical French press asked him what he most wanted to see in the City of Light, he told them he wanted to see its underworld. In overflowing press conferences in Prague and Budapest, he was a great block of consistency: Take me to see your underworld. In Budapest this particularly infuriated my father. Budapest, of course, was one of the flourishing centers of European theater. Again the Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were invited to the homes of the leading playwrights, the Vajdas, the Zilahys, the Biros, and to the openings of their plays in a theater world that rivaled London’s and New York’s. Again Big George was late for those openings, and failed to catch the names of Hungarian stars who considered themselves as famous in their smaller but highly artistic world as he was in his global fishbowl. George was a constant embarrassment, and we even blamed our growing family tensions on his overbearing presence. In one luxurious wagon-lit drawing room there was an un-Schulberglike chain reaction of face-slapping that began with Sonya’s striking little Stuart, my striking Sonya, Father reacting against my reddened cheek, and Mother making some Freudian observations to Ben as to how intrafamily trauma could scar our emotional life, triggering a parental shouting match. When our nurse Ruth, who had replaced Wilma, burst into helpless sobs, the Schulbergs focused their frustrations on her.
The prospect of seeing Europe for the first time had flushed Ruth with an enthusiasm that waned quickly once we disembarked. As insensitive to Europe as the Bancrofts, she had spent most of her time with a long face sending postcards home and wishing she hadn’t come. Little Stuart was fidgety, Sonya was moody, and I was just old enough to resent having a nurse along at all—especially a clod who cared nothing about football games, or reading Robert Benchley, or meeting Young Stribling, or even listening to the records I had brought along. My favorite was an English hit that went, “I lift up my finger and I say ‘Now now tweet tweet come come …’” By now everybody was begging me not to play it, and Ruth went so far as to threaten to break it.
Mother and Father, momentarily united, turned on Ruth with the accusation that if she had been doing her job instead of moping, if she had taken little Stuart off to play somewhere so that he and Sonya could be peacefully separated, this family explosion never would have happened. To which Ruth answered, perhaps with more reason on her part than any of us appreciated at the time, that she was up to here with little Stuart and moody Sonya and crazy Buddy, sick of all of us, fed up with Europe in general and ready to go home to some place that made sense, like Oxnard, California. She was put off at the next depot, and walked contemptuously out of our lives.
Things were a little more peaceful without Ruth. But Father’s number-one star was still breathing down our necks, still dreaming of the future partnership of Bancroft Schulberg, Jr. In Vienna the Bancroft style drove Father to the wall of ultimate exasperation. Once again George had told the press he was not interested in seeing their famous St. Stephan’s Cathedral, he really had no interest in palaces and opera houses and art museums and all the other cultural wonders of which Vienna was so proud. “What I’ve come here for is to see your underworld.”
That did it. Father decided on a desperate ploy. The next stop on our itinerary was to be Venice, but he canceled that leg of the journey and instead we took off for Biarritz without letting George and Tava in on the secret. There was jubilation in the Schulberg drawing rooms as Bancroftless we sped our way to the French coast. Father’s mood soared as he pictured the Bancrofts finding themselves on the train to Venice. He and Mother even played casino without arguing over the cards. She invariably won, a canny and cautious player, and he played with his usual unmathematical abandon, a trait that had made him one of the favorite pigeons at the big games in Hollywood. (I would watch with a sense of wonder and unease as fifteen and twenty thousand of his dollars went flying off to shrewder pockets at a single sitting.) It was a hilarious trip to Biarritz as we exchanged our favorite Bancroftisms, which seemed to improve with each retelling, like listening to Father read Robert Benchley out loud.
The Bancrofts finally caught up with us again in Rome, where we made an official tour of the Paramount facilities, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and some of the other interesting sites of that old, provincial city. Always a great convincer—who else could run a big movie studio?—Ben expressed indignation that their travel plans had been fouled up. When Transportation had changed the itinerary at the last moment, he had assumed that the Bancrofts had also been informed. As always, George was understanding. I have never known anyone who could look so thoughtfully understanding.
Back in Hollywood the Bancroft parade marched on. Another film—The Docks of New York—another success. With Humphrey Bogart still playing the clean-cut WASP juvenile complete with white flannels and tennis racket, George Bancroft was riding high as the world’s favorite tough guy. At a wrap-up party on the set, I watched as George singled out a lowly bit-player hovering in lonely anonymity near the bar. “Well, are you enjoying the party, young man?” George asked with professional affability several sizes larger than life.
“Yes, Mr. Bancroft,” muttered the awestruck unknown. “Been in pictures long?” George kept the conversational ball rolling. “No sir,” said the neophyte. “In fact, this is my first one.” “Is that so!” George seemed delighted to hear it. “Well, that’s why I came over. I just wanted you to know that George Bancroft talks to everybody.” And I had a new Bancroftism for our collection. br />
Bancroft continued to star in tough-guy movies through the early Thirties, but now the gangster film was hitting its stride and Warner’s had begun to take over the field with Cagney in Public Enemy. After Paul Muni scored in Howard Hughes’s Scarface, they would make super-tough guys of Bogey and John (né Jules) Garfield. Now every studio was in the Underworld business and George was no longer Mr. Underworld.
George had been signed to a seven-year contract that began at one thousand a week, with each year’s option raising his salary an additional thousand. But his weekly salary for the seventh-and-final year under the original contract called for a raise from $6,000 to $7,500. By this time he was still a “name” but far from Number One. Responsible to Lasky and Zukor and the awesome power of New York, whence the banking capital flowed, Father felt he could not recommend picking up George’s option at a cost of $380,000 a year. But George was still a valuable property, and so B.P. suggested that George be kept on at his present salary of $6,000 a week, or $312,000 for the coming year.
When George heard this from Father, he grew red in the face. He couldn’t believe that Father would insult him like that. He insisted that rival studios had offered him $10,000 a week if he could get out of his contract but he had felt a loyalty to B.P. and the Company. Now, where was their loyalty to him? It wasn’t a question of loyalty, Father argued, but of hard dollars and cents. In fact, he offered to show George the box-office receipts on all his pictures from the beginning. Then he could see for himself how far grosses had fallen off. But Bancroft refused to look or listen. Father begged him to take the six thousand. “George, please listen to me, you’ll never make more money in your life.”
George looked at him with those big, brown, hurt, and now angry eyes, “Ben, I can’t believe this—I thought you were my friend.”