Moving Pictures
So Sonya’s secret retreat was the tower room, where she developed a sensibility and a literary sophistication that was more finely developed and more fragile than either Stuart’s or mine.
Another den belonged to a mysterious fellow down the road, Tod Browning, who had come to Hollywood as had we, in its ranch-house and orchard days, an old circus hand who got into the movie game as an actor and go-fer for D. W. Griffith, and who had an affinity for darkness, evil, and malignant creatures. London After Midnight was his forte, and Dracula, and at Maurice’s studio we watched him make Freaks, a bleak circus movie in which the heroes were not the clowns and the high-wire artistes but the midgets, the hermaphrodites, and an armless and legless thing that drew pictures with a pencil in its teeth. There was a certain glee in the way Tod Browning went about making this picture that made us think of him as Count Dracula on Stage Ten. Those freaks were all over the set and it sent shivers through us to look at them. But he enjoyed it too much. The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica Pier to watch the young unemployed zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow-motion danse macabre that earned them a handful of desperate dollars. (One of our local novelists, Horace McCoy, was to describe this minuet of misery in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) If a couple succumbed to motionlessness, they were instantly disqualified, but it was permissible for one contestant to drag his unconscious partner along the floor. Compared to this humiliation of the human spirit, a prizefight seemed as ennobling as the tragedies of Shakespeare.
Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent resident sadists in the same front-row seats every night, cheering on their favorites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing Freaks. It was whispered around Green Gate Cottage that Tod Browning was a bona fide sadist and that we should not allow him to entice us into the dark interior of his brooding beach house. In later years he put up a sign, “Tod’s Little Acre,” and seemed quite harmless as he literally cultivated his garden on the east bank of the old dirt road.
The Malibu Colony was both wild and naive, and what passed for sophistication was a kind of gold-rush free-spirited individuality. Along that historic dirt road was another Malibu pioneer, Fred Beetson, second-in-command of the Hays (later Breen) Office, official overseer of film morality and unofficial guardian of the moviemakers’ personal morality. Fred was another of the early colonists who seemed to loathe the surf and sand. On the narrow road behind the row of beach houses he would take his stand in the morning, with a scotch highball somehow permanently attached to his right hand. He would chat and gossip with passersby and invite them in to join him in a glass. He never seemed to be altogether drunk or altogether sober. He was what he was, Fred Beetson of the Hays Office, forever stationed there with a highball in his hand.
Many years after leaving Malibu, I decided to drive out there on a sentimental journey to old Green Gate Cottage. It was a weekday in the off-season, and the beach was deserted. I stopped at the familiar fence, opened the gate, and from the front deck stooped down and peered under the drawn window shade into the living room. The furniture was different, changed for the worse I thought, “modern,” no longer Early American. As I stared in at that room full of familiar ghosts, an accusing voice interrupted my reverie. “What are you up to?”
I found myself facing a uniformed beach patrolman.
“I just stopped by to look at my house,” I said.
“This house belongs to Mr. Breen.”
“No, it really belongs to me,” I said. “It will always belong to me.”
“You’re coming with me,” said the beach patrol.
Passively, or perversely, I followed as he led me to his car. “Get in,” he ordered. “I’m taking you to the Highway Patrol.”
We drove in silence for a long thirty seconds. Atavistic pride urged me to insist on my sentimental rights. Damn it, it was my house. Mr. Joe Holier-Than-Thou Breen of the Production Code might hold the deed to the house and now be residing there, but I had seen it rise from the empty sand. Ad had given it the warm Early American look that had come to be a more natural expression for her than the musty, crowded, hand-me-down furnishings of the Lower East Side from which she had escaped. It was my house, scene of elaborate Sunday brunches, furious tennis matches, exhilarating body-surfing, of adolescent apprehension at the sound of expensive chips clacking and adult voices rising in alcoholic bickering that would swell and break into anger as surely as the waves of Malibu mounted and tumbled over into white foam rushing up to our homey picket fence.
It was the house where the radio in my room initiated me into the mysteries of political conventions and election nights, where I heard in sadness the returns that gave the election to Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, a friend of Zukor’s and a political hero of my father’s. It was in that beach-house bedroom that I first read Molnar’s novel, The Paul Street Boys, and wept so hard at the end that I had to lock the door so no one would see my weakness. If a house is paid for not in dollars but in memories, then ineluctably the house that I had been caught staring into was forever mine.
But as we drove on, subjective courage capitulated to realistic cowardice.
“When I say it is my house, I mean, my family built it, I grew up here, the Colony grew around me.”
There was a constabulary silence, then: “Is there anybody here who can identify you?”
Who was left? The shade of Clara Bow? Lawrence Tibbett, who used to take me sailing? The glamorous ghost of Lilyan Tashman? Suddenly it came to me: “Fred Beetson. I used to know Mr. Beetson. Is he still here?”
A dozen yards ahead of us the question answered itself. There he was, old Fred himself, still planted where I had left him, holding his highball glass like a liberty torch.
“Fred!” I shouted and started to escape from my captor.
“Buddy, where you been? C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink!”
Reluctantly, with the possessive spirit of the good cop, the Colony patrolman released me to the custody of the drink-and-let-drink custodian of motion-picture morality.
31
WHEN ALL OF MOTHER’S psychiatrists and all of Father’s Hollywood vocal therapists couldn’t mend my broken speech, I was allowed to drop out of public school, where my peers never seemed to tire of the humor inherent in imitating a chronic stammer. At the Los Angeles Coaching School, run by a venerable monster by the name of Macurda, there were only five or six students to a teacher, and the faculty was better able to cope with problems like mine. The other students were either misfits of one sort or another, or professional working children who could benefit from the concentrated and abbreviated schedule. Instead of languishing in a thirty-student classroom until three P.M., we were out at noon. Inevitably, Maurice became restive at the most conventional public school. Meanwhile I found it difficult to fill in the three hours until our daily partnership was reunited. Over the usual objections of Grandma Rapf, Maurice’s parents surprisingly gave him permission to join me at the Coaching School.
After we dutifully put in our three hours, Maurice and I would grab a bite at a lunch counter and rush downtown to the theater district to see the current movies. Armed with our gold passes we would race from feature to feature, and since movies averaged ninety minutes in those days, we often managed to take in four in the course of a single afternoon. No daily film critic could have worked harder. Miles of celluloid streamed through our minds. We saw the godawful (30 percent), the passable (45 percent), the good (15 percent), and the better-than-good to excellent (that happy 10 percent), and we argued their merits with the knowledge if not the style of a Robert E. Sherwood, a pioneer of serious film criticism. Our heads were stockpiled with ammunition in the war between our fathers’ studios. I would argue that my father was smarter than Thalberg because Irving had g
iven up on Von Sternberg while B.P. had made him one of our top directors. Maurice would counter by reminding me that my father had used Wallace Beery in routine comedies teamed with Raymond Hatton while his father had realized the dramatic potential of that grizzled alumnus of Mack Sennett slapstick. And indeed his old man’s Min and Bill comedies with Beery and Marie Dressier put the burly comic on the road to dramatic success in The Champ, The Big House, and Grand Hotel.
Seeing movies all afternoon, watching rushes and rough cuts in our fathers’ projection rooms, taking the Red Car (halfway between a streetcar and a short-line Super Chief) to the previews at Glendale, Burbank, and Pasadena, we couldn’t help becoming premature or self-appointed experts on the art of the cinema. We knew why Charlie Chaplin was almost as funny but somehow not as moving in The Circus as he had been in The Gold Rush. We traded names like picture cards of major-league baseball players. My father thought he might have “a blonde Clara Bow” in gum-chewing, wisecracking Alice White, who stole Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from Ruth Taylor. Maurice thought Alice White was a flash-in-the-pan compared to Sally O’Neill and that “my” Esther Ralston would never have the star power of “his” Norma Shearer. We argued the relative merits of two Jewish charmers, my Evelyn Brent and his Carmel Myers, and of two suave leading men, my Adolphe Menjou and his Ronald Colman. Seeing almost all of the four to five hundred pictures Hollywood was grinding out every year, we could name not only the top ten but the top one hundred actors and actresses, including names still far down the list like Janet Gaynor, Mary Astor, Lionel Barrymore, and William Powell.
Both studios managed each year to make a handful of classics and a truckful of turkeys. Often it seemed a dead heat as to which studio could make the worst pictures. I cringed for Hula, a carbon copy of a carboncopy Clara Bow story, where everybody gets drunk and Clara inevitably takes off her clothes and dances on a table. Maurice was unable to come to the defense of a weirdo Tod Browning picture, The Unknown, in which Lon Chaney cuts off his arms to prove his love for Joan Crawford and thinks this sacrifice will induce her to marry him. On the other hand there were honorable failures like Father’s Old Ironsides, in which Jim Cruze and the screenwriters effectively recreated the atmosphere of the three-masted U.S.S. Constitution, sailing into battle against the Tripoli pirates. I had crossed from the mainland to Catalina Island on a replica of Old Ironsides, and had spent an idyllic summer on location there. I watched the veteran Cruze maneuver those unwieldy sailing ships, took swimming lessons from the Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku, and received the obligatory attention of the cast: Wallace Beery as the burly bos’n, George Bancroft (hot from Underworld) as an embattled gunner, with Charley Farrell and Esther Ralston supplying the somewhat implausible “love interest.” The formidable black heavyweight George Godfrey, also aboard, talked fights and sparred with me. I was in a Paramount paradise.
Also with us on location was Dorothy Arzner, one of Paramount’s best film editors, whom Ad was urging Ben to promote to the ranks of directors. Soon she would get that chance—follow the path of the original, Lois Weber—and become one of the top directors of the Thirties and Forties.
It had been Father’s expectation that Old Ironsides would do for the canvas Navy what MGM’s The Big Parade had done for the doughboys of the Great War. He thought it had everything, the romantic involvement of our fledgling Navy in a war against pirates, a score so stirring that I could hum it all my life, and a dramatic technical innovation: the curtains on stage rolling back to reveal a superscreen more than twice as large as the standard 12 x 18.
Expecting the bows he had taken for Beau Geste and Underworld, Father was bewildered and angry when the picture was praised by the critics but ignored by the public. As self-appointed experts, Maurice and I knew what was wrong with Old Ironsides. It was too long. It was strong on history and production values but short on story and character development; it insisted on being an epic. Judicious editing by the incisive Dorothy Arzner would have helped, but Father had fallen into one of those prevalent Hollywood traps Mother kept warning him against: self-deception. Seduced by his own press-agentry, he persisted in overpraising Old Ironsides and was gallantly prepared to go down with the ship.
32
ALTHOUGH WE WERE ALREADY ON A FEVERISH SCHEDULE THAT left us only a few hours a night for sleep, Maurice and I discovered still another hobby that soon became a passion: racing pigeons.
Mr. Nettles, the pigeon man, sold us our first pair of Belgian thoroughbreds, the original king and queen of our racing stable. Eddie and Peggy came from a noble line. Mr. Nettles had shown us how to differentiate them from their plebeian cousins, the culls in city parks. Our pair had broader chests and stronger wings, stood more erect, had a thick wattle (or white fleshy tissue) circling the eyes and over the beak. Once you had a close look at a thoroughbred racing pigeon, you could no more mistake it for a park pigeon than you would a racehorse for the lead pony that accompanies it to the starting gate. With Eddie and Peggy, Maurice and I were launching on a great adventure into the world of “serious birds.”
To build a pigeon house at the far end of our backyard, although we could have “borrowed” the materials from the studio, we preferred the bolder crime of filching the tar paper, wire screening, and wood; with so many houses still being built around us, it was irresistible to creep at night into construction sites. Our rationale was primitive socialism. The mansions going up on or near Wilshire Boulevard were larger than ours. A banker was building one with twenty rooms in an architectural style best described as Southern California Moorish. These new arrivals at Windsor Square could obviously afford whatever we needed for Eddie and Peggy’s dream house.
Following the instructions in our “pigeon bible” (by Elmer C. Rice), my dependable Uncle Joe built us a model loft that would last for years. Near the roof was an entranceway, with bars that moved in but not out so our birds could “home” into the loft but would not be able to fly out again until we released them.
Maurice and I were proud voyeurs as Eddie and Peggy began their elaborate mating ceremony, he puffing out his chest, spreading his tail and strutting while she coquettishly turned her head away. We could almost see her flouncing her crinoline petticoats. Finally, they held each others’ beaks, their necks throbbing in a pigeon soul kiss. Then she hunched down on the floor of the loft; he mounted her with a flashing of wings. In a few seconds it was over. He strutted off like a matador accepting the olé’s! of the crowd while she sauntered away with a practical “Well, at least that’s taken care of.”
In due course, two small white eggs arrived. For weeks we waited while Eddie and Peggy sat their eight-hour shifts. There was no protest from this husband that a woman’s place is in the home. We learned that the male accepts an equal share of the domestic responsibilities and that thoroughbred pigeons are mated for life. The philandering that flourished among homo sapiens Hollywoodiensis was practically unknown to homing pigeons.
On schedule our first two squabs were born. We noticed the activity in the nest and hurried into the loft to welcome the first entries in our racing stable. (Since Eddie and Peggy were from Mr. Nettles’s loft, they would always “home” there and so had to remain caged. But now we would have our own sleek thoroughbreds homing to 525 Lorraine.) Not that those featherless little bodies with oversized heads and feet bore anything but the most ludicrous resemblance to mature homing pigeons. Their heads wobbled like mechanical toys as we inspected them like proud parents. We slipped metal bands identifying our loft over their rubbery toes and onto their tiny legs, where they would remain until death.
We watched the first of our Lorraine homers enjoying their frequent daily meals as the parents flew from the feeder to the nest to regurgitate the “milk” of cracked corn and other grain into the eager, celluloid-like beaks of their young. In a week the squabs had doubled their size; in two weeks the nest was too small for them and their parents. Eddie and Peggy used the adjoining nest box. Every mated pair needed two nest boxes,
since they often laid a second pair of eggs while the first set of squabs was still fattening in the other nest.
One morning we noticed an unusual commotion in the nest. Our squabs were screeching as if they were being killed. Eddie and Peggy were also in the nest and seemed to be attacking them. What they were actually doing was driving them out. The parents had a new nest to attend to now. The moment had come for the month-old children to go out on their own. But the children had other ideas. In terror and confusion, they protested through wide-open beaks, and flopped their unused wings so as not to lose their balance on the ledge of the nesting box. But they were no match for their parents. With a sickening thud (for they had yet to learn they could fly), they tumbled out onto the floor of the coop.
Hungry, frantic, abandoned, they ignored the feeder and fluttered their immature wings to beg their parents’ attention. Whenever Eddie and Peggy flew down to the feeder, the squabs hurried over to them with beaks wide open. But Eddie and Peggy pecked at them and drove them away. Their cries were piteous; at night they would huddle together in a corner of the coop. On the third day, prolonged hunger drew them to the feeder.
We were learning along with them. We bought another pair so as not to inbreed. We (or rather Uncle Joe) built a second coop so we could separate the homebred birds from their parents. We set up books to trace the bloodlines and to record their individual homing and racing performances. For homing pigeons must be bred, trained, and raced as carefully as four-footed sons of Man o’War and Seabiscuit.