“George, now I’m going to level with you. Lasky and Zukor don’t want me to keep you on even at six thousand a week. I know it hurts but it’s a fact. I’ve been fighting for you.”
George drew himself up to his full six feet two and squared his broad shoulders. “I don’t need anybody to fight my battles. I can walk over to Metro right now and double my salary! I’ll be bigger over there than Wallie Beery.”
“George, for your sake, I hope you’re right,” Father said. “But this is a nutty business. It’s not a facsimile of anything, George. It’s its own crazy world. You’re not Number One any more. And you never will be again.”
George Bancroft turned on his heel and walked out of Father’s office, cleaned out his deluxe dressing room, went home to Tava’s soothing ministrations, let all the other studios know he was now open to their offers, and waited for the telephone to ring. But Hollywood was a cluster of small but powerful feudal states run by half a dozen men. While constantly conspiring against each other, these feudal lords met at least once a week around an apparently congenial poker table. In a room filled with the smoke of the finest Havana cigars and the aroma of the most expensive scotch that could be smuggled in, a casually pejorative comment could make or break a star’s career. So the word was out that George Bancroft refused to budge from his self-appraised salary of $7,500 a week. Teeth clenched to the soggy end of a giant Upmann, a man who was a hundred times tougher offstage than George Bancroft could ever simulate on camera raised the ante another five hundred and said, “Fuck ’im! He’s washed up! who needs ’im?” That’s the way Eddie Mannix of MGM talked, and Harry Cohn of Columbia. The glamour capital of the world was as tough a company town as could be found in the coal fields of Pennsylvania or West Virginia. The men behind the movies carried brass knuckles and never hesitated to use them in the crunch.
When George Bancroft had been off the screen for six months, a studio felt they had a good all-star role for him and offered him $25,000 for a six-week guarantee. Nothing doing, said George. His price was $7,500 a week, take it or leave it. When he had been off the screen a year, he was offered $20,000 for a five-week job. No deal, said George, my price is seventy-five hundred a week. Sulking, stonewalling, peach-fuzzed, he was finally forced to accept bit parts that gnawed at his pride. When he finally came back to work for my father again, in Wedding Present, A Doctor’s Diary, and John Meade’s Woman, starring B.P.’s new find, Eddie Arnold, in a role that would have been considered tailor-made for Bancroft five years earlier, George accepted $250 a week. But when he finished his last scene, on a job that began on Monday and wound up on Friday, he asked if he could come to Father’s office. “Ben,” George said, “I think I’ve got an interesting idea for an entirely different kind of screen credit. Instead of putting my name in the cast list, how about putting just a big question mark and then we’ll run a nationwide contest on ‘Guess Who’s Playing This Part?’ People who may have forgotten me will scratch their heads and say, ‘My God, that’s our old favorite, George Bancroft! They should bring him back in a picture of his own!’ And then, Ben, we’ll find a great story, maybe get Ben Hecht to write it, maybe Eddie Arnold and I could co-star, we’ll play two brothers who become rival gangsters in love with the same girl, one hit picture, B.P., that’s all it takes, and then I’ll be right back there on top again.”
Father had to tell George, as gently as he could, that the “Guess Who?” contest would be laughed out of theater lobbies. It would only remind the public of how precipitately the great George Bancroft had tumbled from the top of the mountain. George Bancroft had become George Who? and all the promotional horses and all the publicity men couldn’t put the Underworld superstar together again.
24
ONE DAY I WAS APPROACHING THE INTERSECTION OF OUR QUIET Lorraine and stately Wilshire Boulevards when the wail of saxophones attracted my attention to two white Pierce-Arrows cruising down Wilshire in tandem. In the rear seat of the chauffeur-driven lead car was the handsome, ruddy-faced, ever-grinning Mickey Neilan, with his arm around a dark-haired beauty, Father’s obstreperous Gloria Swanson. And in the motorized chariot behind them, another chauffeur drove half a dozen jazzmen of the Abe Lyman Orchestra, there to serenade the royal couple wherever they went, and believe me they went everywhere, from the raucous all-night Plantation Club to the decorous gingerbread castle of the Hotel Del Coronado.
I waved from my bike and Mickey, whom I had known all the way from the early Pickford-Famous Players days to those cross-country extravaganzas on the Chief, waved back with his broad, infectious Irish grin. The entire scene was over in a few ticks of the stopwatch I carried in my pocket, but the moment still shines like a diamond in the crown of memory. Did I know then, as I sat on my bike absorbing the splendors not of a mogul but of an irrepressible Irish king, that his silver train of Pierce-Arrows was doomed to sweep down Wilshire Boulevard until it reached the Palisades and plunged into the obscurity of the sea? There must have been something more than a casual wave to a famous director with whom I was only marginally acquainted to make that moment so memorable. A little bird of reality seemed to be cawing, “Too much … too soon … too good to last…”
The reality bird may have been the voice of my mother who never lost her ghetto sense of survival. Facing the gusty winds of Hollywood, she would bend but never break. She might spend sums of money on clothes and houses, American antiques, private schools, travel, and favorite forward-looking charities but she spent wisely, with care and taste, keeping a ledger of investments, determined never to return to the poverty of an impractical father and a trapped mother. While Father didn’t spend money so much as he flung it away by the fistful.
I went up to do the math homework I loathed, leaving Father at the card table with Zeppo Marx. Zeppo was the rather good-looking one who played the inane romantic leads in the Marx Brothers comedies: the only Marx brother who wasn’t funny. Whatever frustrations Zeppo may have suffered in front of the cameras, eclipsed as he was by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, he more than compensated for them with an aggressive card sense that made him the terror of the moguls. He could destroy the smartest of them, with a deck of cards in lieu of a pistol.
When I came down for breakfast next morning at seven o’clock, Father and Zeppo were just winding up the game and settling accounts. I watched as Father wrote out a check for $22,000. He was potted from all-night drinking (while cool-head Zep kept mental record of every card discarded), and I remember his hearty laugh. He loved laughing as much as he did living and losing.
I went off to school with a troubled mind. I wasn’t worried about our going broke. It never occurred to me that such losses could drain the plentiful Schulberg reservoir until it would be as dry as the Los Angeles River. At that time Father’s hold on the studio still seemed secure. I knew Hollywood was a roller coaster, but I was too busy or complacent to worry about the Schulbergs ever hurtling off the track. But over there on Western Avenue I had seen a lot of kids who were poor. South of Wilshire Boulevard, in the streets around Pico, I had seen Mexicans and Japanese who worked as gardeners, fruit-pickers, street vendors. I lay no claim to premature social consciousness. I could see that there were people on the bottom, in the middle, and at the top but I was too young, too rich, and too obsessed with my own activities to have much time left for social analysis. So it was less a process of thinking than of feeling that there was something not quite right in Mickey Neilan’s go-for-broke world of white Pierce-Arrows, and Father’s embarrassing and totally unnecessary custom-made town car, or $22,000 tossed away on a friendly game of chance. Something was rotten—whispered my little reality bird—in the state of Hollywood.
When I came down for breakfast on another school morning I found one of Father’s favorite writers, Herman Mankiewicz (a refugee from the New York World and the Algonquin Round Table, known later for his screenplay of Citizen Kane), winding up a casino duel with B.P. There was genius in Mank—“a spoiled priest,” Scott Fitzgerald would call h
im—but at the card table he was no Zeppo Marx. This time Mank was the loser, out $15,000, and since Father was making five times the salary Mank was earning as a screenwriter, he arranged to have installments taken out of Mank’s weekly paychecks for the next three months until they were even again.
Here were two of Hollywood’s more sophisticated intellects playing like kids with tens of thousands of dollars that never seemed real to them. It was like funny money you could buy in the ten-cent store. But Mother knew it was real, and although I was drawn to Father’s style, his unique combination of intellectual curiosity and robust joy of life, his superiority to the moguls I knew as tough, selfish, ignorant, and mean, I was shocked by the vulgarity of his mindless gambling. Not that I coveted the money myself. But the waste of it, seemingly for the sheer sake of waste, was not easy to understand. Maurice’s father may not have had the searching mind, the education, and the literary leanings of mine, but at least he didn’t drink as if the scotch faucet was being turned off in the morning, and he didn’t squander four-figure money on the flip of a card.
One Monday morning after Father had played through a weekend poker game with a motley group of Reno professionals and Hollywood high rollers, I asked him in their presence how he could bear losing almost $10,000. Maybe I could understand it if he won, I said, but losing that kind of money—or more—week after week (when he could have bought San Fernando Valley or given it to the poor) was beyond my comprehension. “Buddy, you don’t understand,” Father tried to define it: “Winning and losing is the same thing. It doesn’t matter. It’s the excitement of playing.”
I felt baffled and frustrated. But the daughter of Nick the Greek—somehow she materialized like one of those unbelievable/believable creations of Lewis Carroll—spiritedly seconded B.P. “Your father’s so right!” she shouted at me. “If you’re a real gambler, you never care if you win or lose. It’s the excitement, the thrill, everything riding on how you play your hand—and then the turn of a card!”
I had heard a lot about Father’s gambling, mostly through laments from Ad, but I had never thought about it deeply before. Ad’s theory was that Father was basically a sensitive and serious man who knew in his heart that nobody was worth $11,000 a week, that he was wracked with guilt and self-doubt about earning that kind of money when his father had been lucky to make five or six dollars a week and when his own brothers Louie and Arthur were struggling to keep a small toy business alive in The Bronx. Father’s sisters were also married to men whose lives ran on the rim of failure. Only Ben had broken through the money barrier into a stratosphere shining with dollar signs instead of stars.
Whatever the explanation, Father was from his premature grey hair to his pedicured pink toenails a gambling man. One Sunday evening after a disastrous Saturday night at the Clover Club, the fever was still in him. Sometimes, in need of action, he would play (and lose) to Mother. But this time in desperation he offered to flip me for half a dollar. I lost. Double or nothing? I lost again. To make the confrontation more bizarre, it all took place—for some reason I can no longer remember—in the bathroom. What I do remember is that I kept losing. I might win an occasional flip, but it seemed as if three out of four times I was on the wrong side of the coin. Suddenly B.P. was doing to me what Zeppo Marx and the pros from Reno to Caliente had been doing to him for years.
When I got too far behind he gave me a chance to get even by raising the bets to a dollar. And when I still came up a loser, he offered to double the ante again. After all, I reassured myself, sooner or later the law of averages would have to assert itself. So I accepted. But nervously. I was betting to win. The Jaffe side of me was worried about losing so much money. I didn’t think in terms of Father’s eleven-thousand-dollars-a-week, although I would have to think about it later as I tried to find my own place in society. All the fathers of the boys I played with in Windsor Square were making thousands of dollars a week. When I heard my father mention someone as “only making” a thousand a week, I associated the figure with actors, directors, or writers in the lower brackets.
Still, my sense of values was attuned to my own five-dollar-a-week allowance, and what I could earn from my soft-drink business with Maurice, and the extra payments (or cultural bribes) I’d get from Mother for reading the classics. So as this bathroom gambling session with Father escalated from the innocent flip of the coin with which it had begun, I suddenly heard Father telling me I was out two hundred dollars. “How about it, Buddy. Double or nothing?”
“N-n-n-n …” I shook my head NO. I was still thinking like a non-gambler. In terms of real money. How could I pay back $400? It would take me six months of self-deprivation. I went on losing until my debt reached $250. Father was flushed with victory. Like a losing fighter who finally finds himself in the ring with someone he can lick. I was flushed, too, but with fear of losing. It never occurred to me that Father would say, “That’s all right, Buddy, forget it, we were only playing.” That was the human side of him, and when he was human he was extremely human. But when he was gambling he was as crazed as Dostoevsky at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden.
Dostoevsky was in that bathroom with us. Father had read aloud to me and urged me to start reading myself the short novels of the Russian master. All his life he dreamt of doing The Eternal Husband as a film, and while I was still in high school we made some stabs at breaking it down together into screenplay form. So I felt a kinship to Dostoevsky, not only through his work (though the major novels were still in store for me) but through his life as Father revealed it to me in bits and pieces. That’s how I knew that our Feodor had gone to Wiesbaden to make a fortune on the turn of the wheel, had lost stake after stake until he was virtually pauperized again, and had gone away not defeated and suicidal but strangely exhilarated. No wonder Father and Feodor, in my young mind, became a single image of paternity. “Five hundred rubles,” Dostoevsky was saying with that mad glint in the eye. “Double or nothing!”
I managed to mumble “Double” and won. On the next toss of the coin I would either owe or win a thousand dollars, a modest weekly paycheck at the studio but a towering fortune to the young man Ad had taught the difference between Hollywood money and the real thing. When I looked up at Father-Feodor, and felt him almost trembling with anticipation of the next toss, something within me cracked, and I cried out, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to play anymore. Let’s stop! Can’t we stop?!”
The outburst had an immediate effect. It was able to reach Father and bring him back to sanity. “I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t be teaching you to gamble. Ad would kill me.”
25
TEACH ME TO GAMBLE! Father was so intelligent in some ways, the equal, perhaps the superior, of Irving Thalberg as Hollywood’s resident intellectual. But so crazy-dumb in other ways. Didn’t he know that he was teaching me not to gamble, at least for the obscene stakes he had a passion for losing? Didn’t he know that I would become as obsessed with the size of his losses as he was—for totally opposite reasons, his emotional compass pointing 180 degrees away from mine?
The point-counterpoint of gambling is that while it may be wildly self-destructive, it can also inspire the taking of creative chances. And while Father’s (and Von Sternberg’s) Crime and Punishment was hardly in a class with Dostoevsky’s original, it suggested the same drive that had propelled the Russian novelist to psychological depths as yet unfathomed, and that prodded my father to bet on hands still unproven. I am thinking not only of Underworld, where he gambled and won, but of Wings. In Jesse Lasky, Jr.’s account of his own and his father’s Hollywood careers, there is a curious omission: my father. Young Jesse has been one of my good friends; I know him as a charming and talented man. But he manages to describe the ordeal of producing Wings as if it were entirely the product of his father’s courage and creativity. From the starting gate to the backstretch and down to the wire, B.P. doesn’t get a single call. In an odd postscript to the saga, young Jesse has my father asking the dir
ector Bill Wellman after Wings is finished who the tall, handsome, shyly appealing guy is who makes a memorable little gesture before flying off into the wild blue yonder for his final dogfight. And in Jesse’s myopic version, Bill Wellman’s answer is, “Hell, if you don’t know—I don’t, either!”
Sons are understandably vulnerable to fabulous fathers and so that’s how it must have been told in the Lasky domain. But the story doesn’t wash. B.P. had already cast Gary Cooper opposite his prize discovery of the Twenties, Clara Bow, both in It and in Children of Divorce, and had fought for Coop against the directors who insisted he was “wooden” and “couldn’t act.” In those days, thank God, producers didn’t protect themselves by having test audiences twist dials to indicate their reactions—cool—warmer—getting hot—as the film played on. Father used a more direct approach. In Wings, Gary Cooper was still a featured player, with a role subordinate to Richard Aden’s and Buddy Rogers’s. But Father was quick to notice that none of the Paramount stars stirred the hearts of the front-office secretaries—and other parts of their anatomy—like Gary Cooper.
Long before the stardom that came to him in the Thirties, and the superstardom that swept him on from the Forties to the Sixties, Coop was the secret dream and in many cases the literal love of the entire studio secretarial pool. All typing stopped, all eyes turned to devour what Father’s main secretary described as “the most beautiful hunk of man who ever walked down this hall!” My father’s second secretary, the pleasingly plump, happy-dispositioned Jean Baer, carried on a semi-secret (or as secret as those things could be in the studio fishbowl) affair with Gary for years. He was never a flamboyant swordsman like Errol Flynn or (though this may come as a surprise to outsiders) Freddie March. But, for all his quiet speech and diffident ways, Coop might have been the Babe Ruth of the Hollywood boudoir league. It was whispered down the studio corridors that he had the endowments of Hercules and the staying powers of Job. It was local gossip that during his romance (as we used to call it) with Lupe Velez, the Mexican pepper pot was so jealous of her prized possession that she would meet him at the door when he came home from the studio, unbutton his fly, and, spirited primitive that she was, sniff suspiciously for the scent of rival perfumes.