When Sr. Kaplan took us to the famous House of Tiles, the palatial sixteenth-century home of the Marquis del Valle—now transformed by American ingenuity into Sanborn’s, a flourishing restaurant, gift shop, and drugstore—I was distracted by the human carpet of beggars sleeping on newspapers in the entranceway. Our indefatigable Sr. Kaplan nimbly stepped through them, waving us to follow. It was unnerving to try to find room to set down first one foot and then another among the faces, arms, legs, and ragged bodies of old men, women, and children. By the time we had managed to gain entrance to the brilliant, high-ceilinged interior, entirely decorated in colonial tile, Sr. Kaplan’s description of its history and architectural elegance was tainted by the reality of the homeless lying outside. As we looked at the expensive menu, I could not get them out of my mind. But Sr. Kaplan chatted on about theater grosses and the rosy prospects for Paramount distribution if only the Mehicanos would put their pistolas away and settle down to business.
As our Mexican holiday drew to a close, it was still beggars rather than box office that said Mexico to me. It was still sad-eyed mothers in dusty rebozos, with one baby at the breast and another swelling in the belly, squatting outside the massive cathedral, palms reaching toward us for a pinch of the gold they pictured in our pockets.
I hated the relationship: Walk rich among the poor! I blamed the Church for flaunting all that gold and leaving its children to starve in its very courtyard. In Hollywood I had seen many who were hungry for fame and the main chance, and at L.A. High there were Negroes, Mexicans, and a few Japanese dressed shabbily in what were probably hand-me-downs. But raised in my celluloid cocoon, I had never looked into the eyes of the truly hungry.
35
HOME ON LORRAINE, between the challenges of L.A. High and the battles of “The Stude,” as we called the studio, I was beset by demons of insecurity and haunted by goals I could only strain for but never reach. As the new editor-in-chief of The Blue-and-White, one of the few highschool dailies in the country, I was dedicated to perfect typographical makeup of the front page, which meant writing heads, subheads, and the accompanying copy to exact count, so the right-hand column would precisely match the left. Maurice and I had developed this journalistic perfectionism but he was gone now: A semester ahead of me, he was off on an aircraft carrier, doing go-fer duty on a service movie his father was making for MGM. I alone was left to battle the porpoise-bodied, sarcastic print-shop teacher, Mr. Vaughan. Since I refused to lock up the paper until even the most minute imbalance had been corrected, Mr. Vaughan would bellow and rage against being kept in the print shop beyond the day’s closing bell. “Fifty years from now do you think anyone’s gonna give a damn if the lower heads on the left are one em lower than the right?” the black-aproned printer would bluster. Although intimidated by his size and sound, I never bent to his wrath. I had two potent allies, the spirit of my absent “brother,” Maurice, and the presence of Miss Katherine Carr, our homely little dynamo of a journalism teacher who relentlessly drilled into us the “who-what-when-where-how’s” of reportorial clarity. Her brother was Harry Carr, the illustrious columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and so, as I dummied, supervised, rewrote, and squeezed into shape our daily bugle, I felt a titillating sense of connection with the exciting world of professional journalism. In fact, I lost my amateur standing when Miss Carr arranged for me to be a sports stringer for the Times. I gloried in such dispatches as:
“Trailing by 13-7 at the half, the fighting Romans of L. A. High came roaring back in the final minutes to score a dramatic 14-13 victory over the Hollywood Sheiks at Housh Field Friday afternoon.”
Each gridiron struggle was a personal victory for this 17-year-old veteran, summing up 60 minutes of football in five bristling lines that bore the imitable stamp of Grantland Rice. At the rate of five cents a word I was earning three or four dollars a week, and with my scrapbook of reportorial accomplishment I was able to line up similar assignments with the weekly neighborhood papers, The Los Angeles Tribune, The Hollywood News, and The Beverly Hills Citizen. The little checks I collected every week gave me a heady sense of following in Father’s footsteps.
But editing my little daily or describing the heroic feats of valor of my peers still left me panting for glory in the field. I would happily have traded all the bylines and editorial honors for a varsity letter in football, tennis, or track. I was a willing but marginal athlete. I scrimmaged with the “B” football team but was never in the lineup. I ran an indifferent 660 on the Class B track team. My one hope for glory was in tennis; on weekends I logged twenty sets in a day, turning on our court lights to play on into the night. On our highschool tennis team, I was ranked eighth or tenth, and since the top four played the singles matches and usually two of the four doubles as well, my main chance to get into the lineup was on the third or fourth doubles team. My aspirations rode on the slender shoulders of our Number Three, a graceful player with the improbable name of Yale Katz.
As soon as the paper was put to bed and the disgruntled Mr. Vaughan liberated from his print-shop prison, I would rush to the school tennis courts to practice with Yale or to play in one of the seemingly endless rounds of elimination matches that would decide my fate.
If I had a silver spoon in my mouth, I was gagging on it. Nothing came easy to me. My peers at L.A. High were almost all accomplished sheiks into whose arms pretty little girls fell like ripe oranges. But Maurice and I had developed a pathological fear of breaking through the sex barrier. We had to force ourselves even to talk to the girls on our newspaper staff. At least there we had a chain of command and a daily professional imperative to force us out of our tight little corner.
As we approached my seventeenth birthday, our friends mutinied against our traditional mode of celebration: a free-for-all fight in the dark in the Rapf projection room. They insisted on bringing their dates to a less pugnacious party. Literally going down fighting, I was forced to give in… and faced the agony of deciding what girl to ask. She would be my first date. The second girl I asked—and I only knew two—accepted.
As I recorded in my diary: “Jeez! I tremble every time I think of that party tomorrow night. But as Maurice preached but didn’t practice: Why cut out half of the world’s population, because of a silly prejudice?”
And so I faced my first G-day: “After the Hollywood-L.A. meet we won, I dressed hurriedly and called for Bella Codon. I was rather burned up but rather liked the idea. It was all so new to me. We had supper at my house and then went to see Seventeen at school. The play was well done. In the car I was rather shy and did little talking. However I could hardly be blamed—this being my first time. After the show we came home and everyone danced—but me. That is what hurt the most. I felt like a wallflower. The party broke up at 12:00. I took Bella home. She seemed pretty nice though was not very talkative. They say: ‘Every time there is a lull in the conversation a Jewish child is born.’ In that case we raised up a great race of Jews this evening. That’s how much we talked. However it was a new feeling and one, I must confess, that I rather enjoyed, despite my embarrassment and uncomfort. Got to bed around 1:00.”
Jack of all sports, master of none, I was unexpectedly summoned back to the track team by Coach Philo Chambers, who had given up on me. It seemed our best half-miler, Beverly Keim, who could just shade two minutes flat, was overmatched against McCarthy of Fairfax High, a champion middle-distance runner. Chamber’s strategy was to put me in as a “rabbit,” instructed to run the first quarter-mile as fast as I could in hope of fooling McCarthy into thinking I was some sort of phenomenal unknown who might steal the race from him. Then as I fell back, Beverly Keim could come on and pass him in the stretch.
That week I was back on the track training hard for this desperate assignment. Suddenly finding myself “in” with Keim and the senior stars gave me the confidence to do something I had never done before. There was a small dark-haired girl in my homeroom class, Penny, who looked awfully cute. Once in a while she would glance at m
e and I would look away. Now I stopped her in the hall, managed to mention that I would be running in the Fairfax meet Friday. I wondered if she would like to see it and then meet me for a malt after the race.
My first “pass” at a strange girl, but isn’t that what all varsity trackmen did? When she promised to be there, I intensified my training to the point of frenzy.
The night before the meet, my family took me to Victor Hugo’s, the fanciest restaurant in town, where I could not resist the fettucine verde. Back in bed I ran my race against McCarthy again and again, coming in a courageous third as our strategy swept Keim to victory.
Toward morning I slept a few hours and woke like a lathered racehorse. I sleepwalked from class to class. Then I was on the track, proud and trembling in my powder-blue-and-white L.A. High track shirt, sandwiched between Keim and McCarthy. At the gun I sprang forward like all my heroes. My legs were spinning like wheels—I knew I had never run so fast before. But no matter how fast I ran, McCarthy was at my heels. After 300 yards, I knew I was in a nightmare. In fact, I was almost hoping it was a nightmare from which I would awaken. For no matter how hard I tried to step up the pace, to run even faster, there was no way I could run away from McCarthy. While my legs were churning—the muscles beginning to tighten—I could feel him loping along easily behind me. He was playing with me, he was toying with me. I was no rabbit outrunning a greyhound, I was a mouse and he was a lithe, graceful predator cat.
At the end of the first quarter-mile we were in front of the grandstand again, and there was Schulberg of L.A. leading McCarthy of Fairfax by an air-sucking yard.
There was a smattering of applause and scattered cheers. But I was unable to romanticize about Penny up there rooting me on. I had too strong a case of McCarthyitis. After 600 yards I literally didn’t know whether I was still running or not. I thought McCarthy was passing me and loping on but I wasn’t sure. I had a strong sensation that my brain was frying like hamburger, and also that my head had no connection with the rest of my body. At the 660 mark was a small section of bleacher seats that blocked a view of the track from the main stands. My subconscious must have welcomed it as an oasis, for the moment I came to it I blacked out, rolled off the track, and threw up Victor Hugo’s fettucine. I didn’t realize I was on a stretcher until I was carried into the dressing room. There I heard that McCarthy had won easily, in record time, with Keim a respectable second.
Next time I passed Penny in the corridor, she was walking with a letterman. I was relieved that she didn’t seem to notice me. We never spoke to each other again.
Sports and movies were my daily addiction. But it was the availability of movies at “Father’s stude” or the Rapfs’ that sharpened our critical senses: “Once in a Lifetime, a burlesque on the movies which contained millions of laughs and not a little truth.” … “Min and Bill: Harry Rapf’s picture deftly combines comedy and tragedy. Dressier, Beery, and Rambeau excellent.” … “In Dad’s projection room tonight I saw one of the finest moving pictures I have ever seen: SKIPPY. Jackie Cooper and little Bobby Coogan are both marvelous in it. The story was human and even when it was over I couldn’t stop crying.”
Skippy had been one of Father’s favorite projects, the Percy Crosby comic strip brought to life, the kind of small-budget film done with loving care that B.P. believed in and that could be slipped almost secretly into a fifty-picture schedule featuring million-dollar epics and extravaganzas. To write Skippy, Father had taken the advice of his gifted drinking-and-gambling crony, Herman Mankiewicz, and assigned Mank’s younger brother, Joe, to do an original screenplay. Still in his early twenties, only a few years out of Columbia (the college, not Harry Cohn’s castle), Joe had already written a couple of successful scripts for Paramount. In Skippy, he came up with what Father considered a little masterpiece. In addition to Jackie Cooper and the five-year-old Bobby Coogan, there was the film-wise Mitzi Green and the specialist in snotnose child heavies, Jackie Searl. Skippy is a doctor’s son; his little pal Sooky lives in shantytown on the wrong side of the tracks. When the mean dogcatcher’s son grabs Sooky’s little dog, an endearing but unlicensed mongrel, they first go searching for him, with Sooky describing him as “always lickin’ ya!” Their struggles to raise the three dollars to save the life of Sooky’s dog had the projection room in tears. And when the boys finally manage to amass that much money, only to learn that this urchin dog of the urchin kid has already been destroyed, I thought of our own beloved dogs, Bozo and Gent, and could bear no more.
From Maine to Manchuria, ferment was in the air. The usually tractable and patriotic veterans of the A.E.F. were marching on Washington to demand their bonus; General MacArthur was ordering his troops to open fire on them. Mussolini was rattling his sword at the world, ranting that Fascism was the answer for the twentieth century. The Klan was marching openly through the South, Ford was having his workers beaten up for trying to organize his flivver plants, a fascist Black Legion was forming in Detroit, and a former screenwriter of my father’s, William Dudley Pelley, was organizing his anti-Semitic Silver Shirts right on our doorstep.
While the world was going smash on a dozen fronts, I was obsessed with my tennis match against Manual Arts. My diary gives Yale Katz and his shaky partner twenty lines to record another disaster: Needing our match to win the overall victory, we are even in sets and four-all in the third. Our Roman teammates are on the sidelines trying to root us home. Joe Davis, our Number One, a ranked junior player, is shouting encouragement. And once more I choke in the clutch and double-fault the match away. The stars of the team turn away. My partner and pal, Yale Katz, can’t look at me. Coach Crumley—my lifeline to athletic respectability—walks off without a backward glance.
With the terrible stink of defeat clinging to me like the persistent odor of skunk, I slunk home to my haven on Lorraine.
36
THE STORY OF WHAT I omitted from my simpleton diary that crucial spring of ’31 is more telling than what I included. Missing were not only the millions of unemployed, the dispossessed farmers, the armies of fascist bullyboys; something personal and central to my life was also missing: Father—almost a non-person.
An entry devoted to Maurice, Miss Carr, Coach Crumley, and Yale Katz ends with three mysterious words: “Saw Dad tonight.” Where had Father been and what kind of talk did we have together when he surfaced at last? Troubled by his absence, I concocted a cover-up. I agonize over my San Pedro match and again call on God to help me win it. “My last real chance! I must make good on it!” And then: “Mr. [Louis] Weitzenkorn [author of Five Star Final] and [Uncle] Sam [Jaffe] were over for supper. Dad was not here. I believe he is sleeping at the Ambassador for a while to concentrate on his work since he maintained that he was disturbed too much here.” If I was aware of the backstage drama at our cozy little mansion, I imposed on myself a censorship as tight as the Hays Office’s.
On a sunny Sunday in June, with our Negro cook, Lucille, serving up sumptuous late breakfasts of creamy waffles and Canadian bacon, life at Green Gate Cottage to an outsider must have seemed like Hollywood heaven. I could trade forehands with Freddie March and Edmund Lowe, trounce Jeanette MacDonald at Ping-Pong, ride the breakers with Frank Capra, have Lawrence Tibbett sing booming arias at me as we fished in his sleek motorboat off the Malibu pier. I could go sailing with the elegant leading man, Neil Hamilton, and drop in for a Coke at any movie star’s beach house, from gum-chewing Clara Bow’s on the south to high-style Lilyan Tashman’s on the northern boundary of our principality. Could a 17-year-old possibly ask for more?
The answer is as simple as the plot of a four-hanky Andy Hardy movie: Yes—for Dad and Mom to act like parents in an L. B. Mayer family picture and live together. One Sunday early in June comes a tight-lipped but ominous entry: “Mom and Dad quarreled tonight before supper. I am worried about them.” And on the following day: “Tonight Mother and Dad had an awful quarrel before they went to the preview. I happened to hear them and never before did I realize how ser
ious the matter was. I hate to go into detail here; the facts hurt me that much! They left a few minutes ago with Sam and Milly. Incidentally their fight gave me a great idea for a short story.”
There beats the double heart of the child writer, gloating over the literary possibilities of the very event that is eating him alive. Next day I recorded: “Dad and Mother are okay again but Mother seems sad.”
“Okey” meant that Mother and Father were back under the same roof for the sake of appearances. An uneasy truce had been declared.
Father was having trouble at the studio—the perennial power struggle with New York, intensified because Walter Wanger was running a rival studio of the Company’s back east in Astoria. Mr. Zukor himself was involved in a far-off Wall Street power fight brought on in some mysterious way by the Depression. In bed with my radio earphones on so Mother would think I was asleep, I lay there worrying. I had tuned in old Aimee Semple MacPherson. Even though I knew little or nothing of the outside world, I knew that Sister Aimee was another of our gaggle of spiritual frauds, a female Elmer Gantry decked out in Hollywood tinsel…