Thirty years later, Wilma might have been able to settle down with George and make a life of her own in southern California. But in the late Twenties (and after), Hollywood was as lily-white as Mississippi. There was no place in the life pattern for a serious light-colored girl like Wilma. How many other Wilmas must there have been, lost between an alien white culture that would not accept them and an underground black culture yet to be discovered.
27
IF WILMA WAS MY second mother, my paternal surrogate was James, the English butler-chauffeur who was with us for several years and who drove that hated gold bric-a-brac royal coach in which Sonya and I tried to melt into the floor.
When Wilma went east, James took over the apartment over the garage and I spent as much time up there with him as I could. He was tall, athletically built, and with a great deal of physical confidence, something I was anxious to develop. It seemed to me that there was nothing in the world—at least nothing important—that James hadn’t done. He had been a machine gunner in the British Army and had killed his share of Krauts. As a merchant seaman he had sailed the seven seas. The first time I saw him undressed, getting out of his tight-necked grey uniform, I noticed colored pictures on his muscular arms—the first tattooing I had ever seen. The one beneath his right shoulder was an elaborate heart on which was inscribed the word MOTHER. The other arm was decorated with the figure of a naked woman with blue script winding artistically around it to spell MARGIE. He explained to me that it was the work of little needles depositing different colored inks under the skin. Didn’t that hurt? He gave a manly shrug. What’s a little pain? After what he had seen in the trenches? Doughboys running back toward their own lines with their guts spilling out like spaghetti? Knife fights in the alleys of Hong Kong in which Limey sailors and thieving Chinks cut each other up until they were slipping and falling in each other’s blood?
As our robust chauffeur with the look and accent of Errol Flynn talked on about blood and guts, I began to see little white pinwheels inside my eyes. Throughout my adolescence I had an embarrassing tendency to faint. Once I was downtown near the old Main Street Gym, after watching the workouts of some of my favorite local boxers. Suddenly those little pinwheels began to spin until they were wider and wider, spinning around me like a hundred metaphysical hula hoops. I leaned against the wall of a building and slowly slipped to the pavement. A half-seen stranger helped me to my feet, and in a few moments my mind was clear again, like a fighter recovering from a ten-second concussion. When I went home that day I was too ashamed to confess my momentary lapse, although I knew that Father had also suffered from these spells in his youth. Had I inherited this weakness along with my stammering?
Another time I was at the Friday-night Hollywood Legion fights with my father in one of his prized regular seats in the first press row, when a tall, skinny-legged Mexican fighter, whose name I remember only as Tony, started to bleed from the corner of his left eye. Blood kept running down from his eye, blinding his vision and smearing his face. At the end of each round the referee would go over to examine the injury. Tony’s handlers would protest that the wound was not serious, and the fight was allowed to continue. Now the eye was a bloody mess, an angry pool of blood that no longer resembled an eye. Father and other first-row fans held their programs up against their faces to protect them from the spray of blood. I heard the screaming, I saw our Mexican sexpot, hysteric Lupe Velez, pounding the apron of the ring to urge on her blinded compatriot, watched the terrible wound in his face grow larger and larger, and suddenly I felt as if I was inside that eye and this time I saw red circles spinning, spinning, spinning…. When I came to I was in the fighters’ dressing room, stretched out on a rubbing table and the old gargoyle of a trainer I had known for years was bringing me to with smelling salts. “Okay, kid? Don’t feel too bad. Everybody gets knocked out sooner or later.” Everybody in the dressing room, even the Mexican kid with a red hole for an eye, cracked up. I wanted to crawl into one of the lockers and hide. But I went back to my ringside seat.
So now I gritted my teeth and weathered James’s goriest tales because I believed that he had been the boxing champion of his regiment, and later of the entire British merchant marine. When Georges Carpentier, the light-heavyweight champion who had figured in the first million-dollar gate with Jack Dempsey, came to London to meet the English champion, James had sparred with the French hero and (according to James) had done so well that he had been urged to turn pro.
James still had his old pair of heavy sparring gloves and one day he made me a present of them, beautifully aged red-leather boxing gloves. On the back lawn James showed me the stance, how to hold my hands so I was ready to jab with my left and protect my chin with my right, how to balance on my toes so I could move back and forth like a dancer, how to punch harder by pivoting on my left foot and corkscrewing my left wrist as my hook landed. James would use his own body as a heavy bag, urging me to punch him in the belly as hard as I could. I would punch him so hard that it would sting my hands right through the gloves, and James would say, “Now again, only harder, keep your hands close to your sides and throw your whole body into it. Like this!” And my marvelous James would whistle punches into the air that would have KO’d Gorgeous Georges Carpentier himself. When I hit James again, and he said, “Hey, that’s better, I could really feel that one!” I felt the way Dad must have felt when Wings won the Academy Award.
James seemed to grow more and more fond of me as he became practically a member of the family. He even offered to take me camping, but my parents didn’t feel they could spare him from his chauffeur-and-butler duties. Someday, he promised, when he had a vacation, he would take me up into the Sierras and teach me how to hunt and fish and live off the land. It seemed as if there was nothing of a practical nature that James didn’t know how to do. When he drove us up to Lake Arrowhead, he made his own trout rod from a sapling, and with a red fish egg on the point of a bent pin he caught several small trout in a deep pool under a five-foot waterfall. Father, of course, spent the entire weekend in the playroom of the Lodge losing at poker with Joe Schenck and other members of the rich inner circle. James was the ideal outdoor counterpart, healthy, ruddy, energetic, resourceful. He attracted so many interested looks from our actress friends and producers’ wives that B.P.—who loved to discover “unknowns”—half-seriously suggested that he take a screen test. But James said a refreshing No. He had no desire to go into the movies, he was quite content with the job he had. The spaces in my family life were more than filled by Maurice as a surrogate brother and James as a surrogate father.
One afternoon, I was downtown with my mother taking a music lesson, she on her mandolin, me on my banjo—still struggling with “Mighty Lak a Rose.” We had taken Mother’s Marmon rather than the hated town car and James, ever helpful, had volunteered to put the extra time to practical advantage by washing all the windows. Usually we had a special window-washer in to do this job, but James suggested that it was a waste of money, and besides he had been a professional window-washer. The panes of 525 Lorraine would be pristine by the time we returned.
After a desultory hour with our music teacher, whose winces were barely suppressed as we misfingered our chords, we drove home to find our usually quiet Lorraine Boulevard lined with police cars. Policemen were on our lawn pacing the driveway, and stationed at our front door.
“Mrs. Schulberg, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your house has been burglarized. Detective McMahon would like you to walk through it room by room and point out what is missing.”
The first thing that was missing was James. With our gold petit-point Lincoln coach. From the maid’s quarters we heard a terrible wailing and we hurried to Paula’s room to find our stocky German maid thrashing on the floor, kicking and screaming. She began to sob out her story. James had not only cleaned out the entire house, he had even taken her piggy bank into which she had stuffed her life’s savings.
We hurried up to the master bedroom and fou
nd that James had taken all the household cash: several thousand dollars, all of Mother’s jewels, diamond brooches, pearl necklaces, sapphire rings, Father’s wardrobe of expensive Eddie Schmidt suits and monogrammed silk shirts, a gold watch inset with tiny diamonds, even his most recent box of dollar-a-smoke H. Upmann Corona Corbnas from Havana.
I ran to my room, found a few things missing, my radio, antique revolver, and a Civil War sword. Under my bed, mysteriously, were a blackjack and an auto wrench. Downstairs the cook, Lucille, was shouting that all the silver was gone, utensils, platters, serving dishes, goblets. It didn’t seem possible that one man could have accomplished all this in a few hours.
While Mother tried to soothe Paula and the other servants, I sat on my bed and stared at the floor. Tears were stinging the corners of my eyes, but not for the cash and the jewels and the silver. James had stolen something much more precious. God, but I had thought he liked me! In fact I had taken it for granted he was crazy about me. Now who was going to box with me and tell me man-to-man stories of high adventure? His apartment above the garage had been an exciting world in which I felt a bond I had never known with my busy father. Father would show me off at the fights and story conferences, projection-room rushes and previews. But that was different. It was as if B.P. was my studio father and James was my real father. And now James had driven off into the outside world without even a last goodbye.
It was a lonely feeling having the police ask me questions about him. Suddenly he wasn’t James any more. They were asking questions about a stranger, the suspect, the burglar, the perpetrator. “This is no amateur job,” the police were agreeing, almost in admiration. “We’re dealing with a cool customer who knew every corner of this house and exactly what he was doing every minute.”
From the accounts we pieced together from Paula and Lucille, James had used the window-washing as a cover-up for his systematic looting of the household. To empty the dirty water he had made countless trips to the garage. A pail of dirty water was an ingenious place to hide the valuables he was removing from all the rooms. On each trip to the garage, ostensibly to pour the soapy water down the drain, he would hide the loot in the town car. The afternoon had been an exercise in ingenuity. He must have passed the servants a hundred times as he went back and forth with his water pails. How cool he had been, how sure of himself as he paused to make little jokes with them in his charming English way.
“Don’t worry, how far can he go in that town car?” Detective McMahon reassured us. “We’ve sent out a description of the vehicle and the driver. He’ll never get over the city line.”
Of course the city lines of Los Angeles are no ordinary municipal borders. In those days it was not yet the nation’s third largest city in terms of population, but it was surely the largest in terms of square miles, running forty miles from north to south and an even greater distance from grubby East Los Angeles to the mansions rising precariously on the palisades above the Pacific. Even before they had attracted the bodies to populate the rolling open country, the city fathers had grandiose ideas for establishing a city-state. So we didn’t think it would be that easy to check our elusive James at the city line.
But while we all huddled together in the looted house (even the silver and marble ashtrays had been removed from the sunken living room and the tiled library), a detective arrived with the news that our gold bric-a-brac coach had been found, abandoned in a lonely sidestreet in the southeast section of the city. All of the stolen goods had been removed. It was strongly suspected that James was headed for the long and under-protected Mexican border between Tijuana and Mexicali, a favorite no-man’s-land for smugglers, escaped convicts, and outlaws. Without a trace, James managed to disappear with virtually all the Schulbergs’ worldly goods.
A year later, we heard he had been apprehended at last, on a great estate on Long Island where he had pulled a similar caper. Either the New York police were more efficient or there were fewer avenues of escape from Long Island. At any rate he was caught red-handed, or blue-shirted, for he was actually wearing one of Father’s powder-blue monogrammed silk shirts.
Sometime later there appeared in The American Weekly, the sensational Sunday magazine section of the Hearst newspaper chain, a most illuminating how-to article by my erstwhile mentor. James, we were fascinated to learn, was a second-story man of international celebrity. His game was to gain access to a prosperous household as a charming and efficient butler-chauffeur, ingratiate himself with the family, stay long enough to win their confidence completely, and then at the appointed moment, clean them out. He would then sail off and live the good life on some tropical island for the next six months to a year, masquerading as a British blue blood of independent means. As I read it I could see him bamboozling his new island friends as easily as he had bamboozled us. When he began to run out of fluid wealth, he would go to an area he had never worked before and begin the charming-servant routine all over again.
It was a tantalizing piece. He had the same felicity for writing he had for everything else. He was one of those irresistible scoundrels who could have been a success at anything he put his mind to, but, James admitted, he found life more interesting as a second-story man.
In every household—his tone was more boastful than confessional—he would look for the weakest link in the family chain. It might be a wife or servant who found him sexually attractive. It could be a wandering husband with whom James would buddy up, smoothly covering for him as he went about his chauffeur duties. In our household, he pointed out, while he had flirted experimentally with Paula, he decided early on to involve me in his caper. In search of a father-surrogate, I was a pushover for his blandishments. Quickly scouting me as gullible and naive, and noting both the favoritism that Mother bestowed on me and the pride-cum-guilt that Father felt toward his much-admired but rather neglected firstborn, he had decided that I was the key to the Schulberg vault. He had done his job so well that in a matter of months I was as emotionally dependent on him as I had been on Wilma during my childhood. And he was able to have the run of the house because Mother and Dad felt grateful to him for filling the emotional vacuum their busy schedules created.
Once he had won my devotion and their gratitude, it was, as he put it, “easy fruit.” He had only to bide his time until the golden apple fell into his hands.
He had almost struck several months earlier—and here his confession cleared up a family mystery. One night Mother was giving one of her grand dinner parties. The all-powerful Louella O. Parsons, self-styled “Gay Illiterate,” had dubbed Ad “one of Hollywood’s most gracious hostesses,” and Mother vied with Bessie Lasky and Norma Shearer Thalberg as a leader of local society. Present at this elegant sit-down dinner were Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, the Ernst Lubitsches, Dietrich and Von Sternberg, the recently arrived Broadway star Ruth Chatterton, and the latest English import, Ralph Forbes—lovely targets all.
Impeccably, James served the rare roast beef from a large silver platter, poured the Lafitte Rothschild into delicate glasses we had bought in Venice on our Grand Tour—and then, after the glittering company had raised their glasses in a witty toast, the lights went out. After a few anxious minutes the lights came on again and James reappeared to explain that a fuse had blown and he had gone down to the cellar to replace it.
In his American Weekly article, James confessed what had really happened. Hearing from my mother of the distinguished company who would be present that night, he had decided to throw the light switch and then at gunpoint remove from our guests their cash and valuables. Windsor Square had its own private security patrol, with a signal alert to its neighborhood headquarters. James had taken the precaution of disconnecting it. But just before he was ready to set up these movie stars in a true-life drama, a late guest, Hector Turnbull, arrived. Turnbull was a writer-producer at the studio and one of Father’s favorites. He was also well-built and rugged and there was something about his late arrival that threw off James’s timing and confidence.
Once the lights were out, he confessed, he lost his nerve and decided to turn them back on, invent the story of the blown fuse, and wait for a safer opportunity.
The next morning, Mother had lectured James for some slight derelictions the night before. After the brief blackout he had spilled a bit of wine when filling the glass for Mr. Turnbull, and he had not seemed as attentive to his butlering duties as he had been at many other formal dinners. James had apologized profusely, protesting that he loved the job, loved me and the younger children, and that his one ambition was to make this his permanent home.
Through the following month he was the model chauffeur-butler-second father. In his room over the garage, what wonderful tales he would spin. While I was sitting there at his feet in adolescent rapture, he was weighing the possibilities of taking me to the mountains and holding me for ransom. But deciding that was also too risky, he finally settled on his ingenious window-washing scheme.
His published confession was an even greater blow to us than the actual burglary because the act exposed our nouveau-riche grandiosity, pomposity, and vulnerability. From the inside out we seemed to ourselves a serious, intelligent, creative family, superior to the clichéed foibles of such Hollywood boss-families as the Mayers, the Warners, and the Laemmles. L.B. was a tyrant, Jack Warner was a loudmouthed vaudevillian, and Uncle Carl Laemmle—although one of Hollywood’s original “mound builders”—pretty much a joke for the way he surrounded himself with boatloads of relatives from Laupheim, his birthplace in Bavaria.
But here were the literate if profligate B.P., the cultured and resourceful Adeline, and their trusting little genius of a son being ripped off and publicly exposed to millions of Hearst readers as “easy fruit.”