Soon pigeon racing began to crowd out our other intense hobbies. Still tuning into the early-morning radio stations in Australia or Japan, we managed to meet at our loft at dawn to release our fledglings first one block away, then four blocks, then up to Melrose near the studio, a mile away. We watched as our young birds circled over our heads, round and round until the little compass in their heads clicked there; then they winged straight home, pushing the movable bars and flying into their loft. Occasionally a backslider would land in a tree or on a rooftop. If he or she persisted in this dereliction, we would try to trade or sell the sluggard. Other birds would “home” but, instead of flying right in and going to the feeder, would dawdle on the convenient roof of our teahouse. As we lengthened the training flights to five miles, ten—rising ever earlier to drive that distance—some birds would never make it back at all. Although homing was an instinct, it had to be developed with care.
Soon we were driving 25 miles out of provincial Los Angeles, fragrant with orange groves. We watched our birds circle under an impeccable blue sky and then aim themselves like arrows flying at sixty miles an hour. Then we raced them home. Joy it was to see them swoop down through the movable entranceway for a well-earned breakfast: cracked corn and fresh water. A homing pigeon will starve to death before giving up the homeward flight, even five hundred miles. Legendary homer heroes used for messenger service in the Great War managed to complete their missions even when fatally wounded.
As our young racers matured, their range outdistanced our ability to drive them 50 to 75 miles and still get back in time for school. We began to impose on friends motoring up to Santa Barbara, or down to Tijuana on weekend forays. Would they mind pulling off the road a moment to release our birds? We’d pick up the empty cages at their homes when they returned. As we grew more professional, entering our best in the formal races of the Sierra Racing Pigeon Club, we’d entrust our sleek champions to a railroad conductor on the old Santa Fe, who—for a modest fee—would release them from the baggage car when the train stopped at Victorville a hundred miles away.
When our homers streaked in from their first long flight, we were as proud as the owners of a winning three-year-old Kentucky colt headed for Churchill Downs. We learned how to breed our own thoroughbreds, selecting the superior young males and females and confining them in a mating box. There they would stare at each other through a partition. When they were ready for the next act of Boy Meets Girl, we removed the partition. Nature prevailed.
One day a strange white pigeon followed our birds into their coop. It was almost a third larger than any of our thoroughbreds and looked more like a sea gull than a homing pigeon. We released him with a new class of young birds we were training. To our surprise Whitey returned, first from a mile, then five. Had we discovered a new species of homing pigeon, even bigger and stronger than our Belgian blue bloods? As we increased the distance to 25 and 50 miles, he continued to lead the new trainees back. He had only one bad habit. Instead of flying directly into the coop through the movable bars, he would land on the slanting roof of the nearby teahouse and preen himself. In pigeon races each entry has a rubber racing band on his leg which must be inserted into the official racing-pigeon clock as soon as he returns to his coop. Like horse and foot races, it is a sport of precious seconds; and we had learned to work with quick-fingered efficiency to grab our birds and stop the clock. So we tried to train the powerful but erratic Whitey by not feeding him the night before a long flight and by scattering cracked corn on the landing platform leading to the loft entrance.
When we thought Whitey was ready, we entered him in one of the major races in southern California. Two hundred miles over the rugged San Bernardino mountains. Depending on weather conditions, a fast bird would make it home in about four hours.
Half an hour before E.T.A., Maurice and I set up our vigil, our eyes trained on a sea-blue sky. In those smogless years, we could see the rim of the yellow-brown mountain range rising behind Hollywood, dividing us from the rolling country of Ventura Valley.
Flying over those hills and down into Windsor Square a fluttering speck appeared—Whitey! Home in less than four hours—record time over those mountains. We crouched near the door to the coop, ready to punch the racing band into our racing clock the moment we could slip it off his leg. But there we waited, and waited, while a self-satisfied Whitey preened himself on the teahouse roof. While the winning seconds ticked away on our racing clock, he refused all our blandishments. Fifteen minutes later, when our first group of entries appeared, Whitey condescended to follow them into the coop.
When we rushed our clock to the club headquarters, our fears were confirmed. If Whitey could have been timed from the second he landed on the teahouse roof, we would have won! Less tenderhearted or more professional pigeon-trainers would have consigned Whitey to the nearest butcher shop. Hard-nosed breeders, like Mr. Nettles, told us it was a waste of valuable grain to maintain a homer who wasn’t literally up to scratch. A quick twist of the neck and a one-way trip to the stew pot was the common fate of the reluctant racer. But our birds were pets with names and personalities. Losing them in races and long training flights was painful enough. How could we sentence them to cold-blooded execution? Handy Uncle Joe built us more coops as our flock expanded.
There was a reassuring sense of order to our racing-pigeon world, so different from the movie world that was our larger nest. There we knew of the fractured if not broken marriages, and the flashy studio pimps—the casting directors and the favored agents who served up pretty hopefuls to the studio bosses like squabs on toast. Again and again we saw last year’s stars transformed into this year’s flops; careers hung by a golden but flimsy thread. While everybody wanted to get close to L. B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, Jesse Lasky, and B. P. Schulberg, those moguls lived in daily anxiety. L. B. was wary of Irving, and Father woke up each morning with new fears about the machinations of “New York.” Clara Bow was worried about gaining weight and Gloria Swanson was worried about losing box-office appeal. Margaret Mayer was worried about losing her self-righteous L.B. to studio starlets. Harry Rapf was worried that his position as the Number Three man in the MGM hierarchy was being undermined by the Thalberg henchmen. Like rival principalities, each major studio intrigued against all the others, and at the same time was a house divided, a hive of enemy camps.
It seemed no accident that the studios were built along a major geological fault and that from time to time actual tremors cracked our windows and made the hanging lamps swing like pendulums. Had we built our magnificent castles of stucco on shifting sands? With our 16-cylinder cars, our liveried chauffeurs, and movie stars for dinner companions and tennis partners, we would seem to have nothing to worry about. Yet the smell of fear mingled with the scent of orange blossoms. Apart from the innate fascination of homing pigeons, our dedication to our loft stemmed from the stability we found in our thoroughbred family. Here we could play God to our growing flock, sending our prize birds off to fly great distances, and choosing the pairs to be mated for life.
But even in this well-ordered world there were aberrations. One of our hens, whom we called Mary, turned out to be a natural-born slut who refused to accept the prevailing marital arrangement and instead set up a little back-street nest in a rear corner of the pigeon house. There she would occasionally distract a roving male from his domestic duties. Mary came from a good family and we tried our best to imbue her with the morality of our feathered bourgeoisie. But she was a dedicated jezebel. We kept her as a curiosity and grew fond of her, though her behavior was more like Clara Bow’s than Bessie Lasky’s.
All through high school we would maintain our meticulously structured pigeon organization. Different bloodlines were separated as carefully as they are in Navajo clans. Each homer in our racing stable had its own page in our book of records. Our vigilance and enthusiasm never slacked until we moved on to college, when we had no choice but to turn the project over to little Stu and Maurice’s kid brother, Matty.
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When we returned, order had turned to chaos. The partitions between the cages had been removed, and the separate groups were irrevocably mingled. Squabs had been born and raised without records of their bloodlines and flight performances. It was like the Fall of the Roman Empire: our carefully constructed civilization of homing pigeons in ruins. And finally, in our absence, the final blow: Unable to care for the growing and now chaotic flock, our younger brothers submitted to the advice of our parents that the pigeon population be liquidated; and, instead of a dignified sale to pigeon fanciers, they were sent off in a tumbril to the neighborhood butcher at fifty cents a head.
But in my mind those noble descendants of Eddie and Peggy are forever airborne, flying their great circles and homing hundreds of miles, unique among the creatures whose wings inspired the myth of angels.
33
GOING FROM THE SMALL, exclusive Coaching School to teeming Los Angeles High was like being wrenched out of the nursery and thrown into the real world. L.A. High was the largest public school in the city, with 3,500 students, including almost 800 freshmen, or “scrubs” as we were called. Halfway between Wilshire Boulevard where the rich people lived, and Pico, where the Mexican, Japanese, some Negroes, and poor whites clustered in modest stucco bungalows and small frame houses, “L.A.” was the classic Southern California melting pot.
At recess there was a riot around the flagpole in front of the three-story neo-Gothic building on Olympic. I watched a lynch mob of older boys in howling pursuit of a hapless “scrub.” It seemed he had made the mistake of wearing corduroys to school: Cords, the dirtier the better, were the special uniforms of the privileged seniors. The offending scrub had his cords ripped from his body and run to the top of the flagpole where they waved along with Old Glory. Then a disciplined group of seniors in respectably worn and soiled cords descended on the mob, and restored order. These authority figures, I learned, were members of the Senior Board. Their word, Maurice explained to me, was law. If you got out of hand, if you tried to cut in on the cafeteria lunch line, if you were wandering around one of the corridors after the classroom bell, the Senior Boardman could either give you a stern warning or send you to Mr. Ault.
Mr. Ault was a Dickensian disciplinarian, a one-man judge, prosecutor, and jury dedicated to the Napoleonic Code—guilty until proven innocent. But in Mr. Ault’s court, proof was inadmissible. A few days after matriculating, I was late for my nine A.M. homeroom. Of course it had not been my fault: My Model A wouldn’t start. By the time I got the chauffeur to drive me in the hated town car I was five minutes late. The bespectacled, narrow-faced Mr. Ault handed out demerit slips with the finality of a Rabbi Magnin. At the end of the first month I was doing what they called “detention study-hall duty.” At Urban Military, I had had to do makeup drills on Saturdays. At B’nai B’rith, the righteous rabbi literally had driven me from the Temple. Now Mr. Ault. “Oh, so you’re back again,” he would greet me when I came to report my latest delinquency. I simply added Mr. Ault to my hate list and tried to stay out of trouble.
That wasn’t easy; from Mother’s Lower East Side “socialism” and my childhood rooting for underdogs, I had developed a resistance to self-important despots. I had no politics except the rub-off from the avant-garde interests of my mother and the Al Smith-sidewalks-of-New York democracy of my father. But I knew that I didn’t like President Hoover or our Republican Governor Merriam or William Randolph Hearst. I didn’t like people who used power for self-aggrandizement. I didn’t like the way Oscar the Bootblack was always being goosed. I didn’t like the way little people were pushed around in the studio, or the way crimes by Hollywood “names” could be covered up because Eddie Mannix, the MG M hatchet man, and the inner circle of studio bosses had the district attorney in their pocket.
Men in frayed white collars were half-heartedly selling apples on street corners. We read about breadlines and farm foreclosures. But the Depression hadn’t really touched us yet. Father had lost a million dollars in Paramount stock, but he went blithely on drawing that monster weekly salary and blowing most and sometimes all of it at the Clover Club. I was more concerned with improving my backhand at tennis and with cheering the L. A. Romans on the gridiron than with the mounting pressure of social injustice.
A few weeks into my life at L.A. High, a specter began to haunt me again: having to read aloud. In the English class, our teacher, Mrs. Loomis, would start with the A’s—we were seated in alphabetical order—with each student having to read a paragraph or a stanza of a boring classic like Idylls of the King. I would watch the big round clock over the door and pray that time would run out before my ordeal began. Cold sweat would form on my forehead, little white spots would spin in back of my eyes until I was sure I was going to faint. Once, when the public reading was only two seats ahead of me, I went to Mrs. Loomis, told her I felt ill, and asked for permission to go home. She said I could if I brought a written excuse from my family doctor to Mr. Ault. I got an excuse from the studio doctor, Dr. Strathern, who would sign anything, and back at school next day I begged Mrs. Loomis not to make me read out loud.
She thought I would get over my nervousness if I gave myself a chance and practiced at home. She didn’t seem to understand that it was no problem for me to read out loud to myself at home. It was the pressure of reading or talking to other people that undid me. Mrs. Loomis agreed to skip over me in the reading assignment, but in return for this privilege I had to attend a special class for—she didn’t call us misfits, but that’s what we were. It was a primitive catchall for anybody with any sort of handicap. There was one boy with a harelip, another with a head too large for his body, and a third, a gentle, husky kid called Tom, who was slightly retarded and whom I often took to movies in the afternoon when Maurice was busy. Strangely, I don’t remember any girls in that little gathering of freaks. Maybe we segregated ones were further segregated as to sex. Or maybe my fear of girls blocked them out of my memory.
The kindly but primitive lady therapist couldn’t help me stop stammering, any more than she could give the poor hydrocephalic kid across the table a normal head. I see a dozen of us gathered there around that long conference table, as if caught in a frieze by an artist of the grotesque like Goya or Daumier. In one way, though, the freak class was helpful. In my English class, as I prayed that the sweep-second hand would save me from having to read out loud to my snickering peers, I could feel terribly sorry for myself. What had I done to suffer this terrible affliction? Why could Maurice talk, and all my other friends, Buddy Lesser, big Fred Funk, Bud Blumberg? And why was little Stuart so fluent that he was on his way to being a polished monologist? “I had them in the palm of my hand,” this fat little seven-year-old confided in me after holding a group of sophisticated adults spellbound with an anecdote he had spun into a thirty-minute cliff-hanger. But surrounded by the harelipped, the deformed, and one poor boy who stammered so desperately that efforts to talk made him spit and slobber, I felt that my speech defect was something I could learn to live with. The freak class was a lesson in humility. No matter how much pain I thought I was suffering, others in the room had deeper wounds.
But my powers of perspective failed me utterly when I had to face another senseless highschool requirement: To pass eleventh-grade English, we all had to participate in a debate. Sides were chosen and debate issues assigned. My subject—Resolved, that commercial advertising is deleterious to radio broadcasting—stirred the social reformer drowsing within me in the California sun. I buried my terror of public speaking in a mountain of research. I sacrificed my afternoon tennis lessons and hours of practice to read every book on radio I could find at our big downtown public library. I became a hive of indignation at the evils of commercial radio. Carried away by my mission, I wondered if a combination of encyclopedic knowledge and strong feeling might provide the magic formula to break through the speech-defect barrier.
The night before the debate I was unable to sleep. At four A.M. I was practicing my delivery. I
thought of all my lessons from various therapists over the years: Take a deep breath like a singer before you begin. Use a singsong cadence that relaxes the vocal chords. Remember Mother’s Coué-like optimism: “I—can—do—enn-ee-thing—I really—want to do. …” I reread my voluminous notes. Demosthenes, Daniel Webster, and William Jennings Bryan rolled into a single oratorical genius could not have been better prepared.
In English class that morning, I leaned forward in my seat like a boxer waiting for the opening bell of a championship fight. Numb with anticipation. Clang. I heard my name and went to the center of the ring, or rather to the front of the class. Sixty curious eyes were staring at me, sixty skeptical ears waiting for me to begin. A terrible hush fell over the crowded room. I opened my mouth for the first broadside in the denunciation that would demolish the excesses of commercial broadcasting for all time. From my mouth came… silence. A silence so prolonged that it seemed to take on some agonized life of its own. Five seconds? Five minutes? Five years? I could feel the muscles inside my neck braided together like the thick strands of a rope. I felt myself strangling in silence. They had kicked the stool out from under me and I was hanging by the cords in my neck. White circles spun like dizzying pinwheels behind my eyes and I was both resigned to and hoping for a fainting spell. There was laughter, nervous and malicious, and I wished I were back in the freak class among my own kind. At least we didn’t laugh at each other up there.
I must have blacked out without fainting because the next thing I knew I was walking home. Crossing broad Wilshire Boulevard into the peace and safety of palm-treed Lorraine, I was suddenly aware of a cold wet feeling in my pants and realized what had happened. My God, had it happened while I was standing there in front of the class with silence stuck crossways in my throat like a fishbone? Is that when the class started laughing at me? Not that they needed scatological encouragement. Watching me squirm there with my mouth open and no words coming out was funny enough.