Then I was hearing other voices, closer to home: from my parents’ bedroom directly across the hall. I had heard Mother and Father argue before, had heard Ad nag him about his gambling or his tendency to surround himself with sycophants. But this time, even before I grasped what they were shouting about, I knew this was deeper and more dangerous.
“Now Ad, now Ad, be fair—God damn it, Ad!” Usually loud only when laughing or singing or retelling a favorite story, Father’s voice was trying to smother Mother’s attack. But she would not let go of her prey. She had it in her teeth now and she was going for the jugular like all mothers protecting the lair. I put my earphones aside, sneaked out of bed, and crept to the door.
“Hoor!” The word spat into the night with a venom I had never heard from Mother before. “She’s nothing but a little hoor. Cheap little kike!” Father’s “Now goddamnit, Ad!”s were ineffective punctuations. Gone now was all the understanding from Mother’s five-foot shelf of psychoanalysis. It made me tremble. Who was this hoor? Who was this little kike, who was the mysterious third point to the triangle? When the name Sylvia flashed through the angry words, I became more frightened of what I was beginning to understand. It was Sylvia Sidney—Father’s luscious little plum-blossom, recently plucked from the New York stage.
Puritanical Hansels steeped in middle-class morality, Maurice and I saw Hollywood both as Baghdad and Our Town where, at the end of the working day, Dads come home to Moms—or should. If most males look back on their first sexual experience as a milestone on their road to manhood, for me from that moment at the door it was the shock of Sylvia Sidney. As I listened in the dark I felt no Oedipal leap of joy—at last my chance to move in on old Dad and take his wife! I felt: Oh my God! He’s going to leave home and live with Sylvia Sidney—how can I get Mom and Dad to stay together?
The verbal battle built to its inevitable crescendo of screams, shrieks, accusations—the fearful orchestration of domesticity undone. Then the slamming of the door. An ominous silence. I wondered if Father had gone to the bar or back to the Ambassador Hotel and the sultry young hoor whom movie fans were just beginning to take to their hearts. I crawled back into bed and began to cry.
37
IN THE COURSE OF righteous curiosity, I was to learn more about Sylvia Sidney. Her Hollywood debut, ironically, owed more to Mother’s talent-scouting abilities than to Father’s. On a trip to New York, taking in all the plays, Ben and Ad had seen the 20-year-old Sylvia in the risqué hit, Strictly Dishonorable. Mother prided herself on her ability to spot upcoming actors, directors, and writers who were still “unknowns.” And so that evening, it was Ad who raved about young Sidney’s promise and urged that they go back to her dressing room to introduce themselves. It could have been a scene from one of Father’s movies: the stylish matron in her middle thirties and the elegant, prematurely grey, articulate tycoon at the height of his power and confidence, going backstage to introduce themselves to the fetching ingénue.
Now that the Pola Negris and the Clara Bows were giving way to a new breed who could both dazzle and speak, B.P. was anxious to keep his studio abreast of L.B.’s, and so it was logical that he would back Mother’s judgment and sign young Sylvia before Mayer and Thalberg or the Warner Brothers snapped her up.
I watched Mother’s new rival on the set of City Streets, sitting close to my father while one of his new favorite directors, the brooding Rouben Mamoulian, put her through her paces. I sat with Father, Sylvia, and Mamoulian in the intimacy of the projection room, never sensing that the drama going on around me was more intense than the acting on the screen.
I must say, for both Father and Mother, that until the night their shouting brought me to my bedroom door, their public behavior had been so “correct” that even a greater sophisticate than their firstborn would have been deceived. Whenever I saw Father with Sylvia Sidney, or with any of his other glamorous leading ladies for that matter, he was always a model of decorum. And Mother, no matter what the provocation and humiliation, never took her children into her confidence, or tried to enlist our sympathies against our wandering “Pate,” as my sister now insisted on calling him. With a courage bordering on hypocrisy, Mother went sweetly on, pretending that Father’s habitual and now extended absences from home were due simply to the intense pressure of work at the studio.
My diary continued to be as evasive and self-protective as Mother’s daily cheerfulness. An occasional “worried about Mom and Dad” is as much as I would permit it to reveal of what was happening to our life.
But it was festering inside, so deeply that I could not share the pain of it even with Maurice, although we had shared every other experience from the age often. This time, when Father left home, I knew the reason and, as the dutiful elder son—and dedicated prude—I was determined to do something about it. It never occurred to me, of course, that my father and his young protégée might be in love. I loved our dog Gent and I loved to watch our homing pigeons circling high above their loft. I loved to watch the graceful half-miler, Eastman of Stanford, breeze toward the finish line, and I loved to watch a director who knew what he was doing—like King Vidor or Ernst Lubitsch—take control of his set. I loved to reel in a ten-pound bass from the Malibu kelp and I loved to “sleep over” at Maurice’s and talk about everything we liked or hated and feared until the tropical morning light began to creep under the window shades. Of loves we had many but of love we knew nothing. “Love” was what an actor professed to an actress on the movie screen. Clara Bow with Buddy Rogers in the big fade-out smooch. But that my 40-year-old father and the 20-year-old gamine could be physically, romantically, passionately, and even tragically in love was something my mind was as closed to as the big studio gate was to outsiders peering in.
I would give Miss Sidney no quarter. In my eyes there was nothing she could do to redeem herself, nothing to modify my preconception that Sylvia Sidney was simply the latest (and in Father’s case the most destructive) of the pretty little vampires who sucked his blood to fatten their studio careers. I had no idea how long Father’s liaison with Sidney had been going on, but I knew that discretion on Mother’s part would not protect us from the country-club gossip and the wits who held forth in the studio commissary. If I had been living in a small midwestern town—well, maybe that’s what our Hollywood was—I could not have been more “mortified” by the public scandal that I knew was spreading from one end of the principality to the other, from Malibu to Culver City. I was a palm-tree Puritan.
From the sound of the midnight battle in the bedroom, I knew that Father’s studio cronies were in on It, and that of course Ad’s brother, Uncle Sam the studio manager, knew about It, as did his wife Milly, who loved to check in every morning for a detailed exchange of the news of the day with Poorsarah Mankiewicz, Herman’s wife. For Poorsarah and the ubiquitous Mank, no matter how much they owed to my father, also had a responsibility to their reputation as gossipmongers of a high order. So I could imagine those daily Aunt Milly-Poorsarah shovel-sessions. I could hear Milly’s stylized outcry, “I don’t be-leeve it!” Mildred Jaffe, Mother’s little protégée, who matriculated at Ad Schulberg University and eventually (inevitably) challenged her as our local Queen of Arts. We lived among orange groves that were really poison trees. I would even hear forked-tongue gossip that Aunt Milly had succumbed to the undeniable charms of my father.
Open Modern Screen, say, for the period when I was feeling the first shock waves of Father’s intrigue with Sylvia Sidney, and all on one page we read: “Garbo has a new girl friend—an exotic, amazing person” (Mercedes Acosta); “Latest inside facts about the suit the ex-Mrs. Sternberg is bringing against Marlene”; “Fast and furious rumors about Joan and Doug (Jr.)”; “Betty Compson and Hugh Trevor tell the world they’ll never marry”; “Wedding of Paul Whiteman and Margaret Livingston took place last month but as we go to press rumor has it that there is a rift between them.” I dreaded the issue that would blazon the Schulberg rift.
I went to my p
unching bag and hit it hard, seeing the provocative little face of Sylvia Sidney bobbing in front of me. Or I would belt her Mamma for good luck. For I had heard—rightly or wrongly didn’t matter to me then—that her mother Sophie was with them, encouraging the affair. It was all part of the obscenity, it seemed to me: Mrs. Kosow serving as madam for her dewy-eyed siren, both on the make for big studio success.
From my mother I had learned to take everything hard, the working and the playing. Pleasure was to be earned and life pursued with Mosaic zeal. Working for A’s in Taking It Hard, I took the stone of Sylvia Sydney to bed with me, swallowed it for breakfast with my cornflakes, felt it stick in my throat as I went through the big studio gate. It didn’t help at all that I found Sylvia painfully appealing, with a New York waif-like quality that was coming into style with the Depression—a kind of female John Garfield. Or that she could play a working-class role like Roberta in An American Tragedy with exciting sexuality. I watched the scene in which her socially ambitious lover, Clyde (Phillips Holmes), takes her for a boat ride on the lake (our studio tank), and decides to drown her so he can marry the debutante (Frances Dee) who represents high society and, for him, upward social mobility. In the famous Dreiser scene, premeditated murder is ironically avoided when the boat tips over accidentally and Roberta drowns.
How good it felt to watch that drowning scene and to see Sylvia pitched into the “lake,” floundering and going under. What an ideal solution! If only I could take Sylvia rowing in Westlake Park, tip the boat over, watch the little homewrecker go down for the third time, and swim to shore insisting it was an accident. The perfect crime. The family saved. I not only watched that scene being filmed, but studied it again on the screen when Father ran the rushes a few doors down from his big office. I listened to Father and Von Sternberg dissect the scene, which take was best, and how to intensify suspense through intercutting—Sylvia nagging about her “condition” and Phillips nervously trying to work himself up to the act of desperation. Father was blowing smoke from his big cigar and insisting that while Sylvia should of course look pregnant and haggard, she must still look sexy and beautiful; after all it was she—and not lovely but somehow “too nice” Frances Dee—who was on her way to stardom.
I listened, sucking it deep into myself, living Phillips Holmes’s role vicariously. But the would-be murderer was careful to keep these feelings to himself.
38
WHEN I WENT BACK TO Father’s office with him, we talked for a few minutes about my summer job—instead of my working as a sports stringer for the Los Angeles Times, he thought it was time for me to take my first “regular” job. Maurice was going to work at MGM, so it seemed fitting that I should enroll at Paramount. B.P. suggested I break in with the publicity department, as he had with Adolph Zukor in the old Famous Players days. He had done the same thing for Zukor’s son, Eugene. “The old man,” as Zukor père was called, sent his son to B.P. for assignment in the minuscule publicity department of the New York office. “Do you know how to write a publicity release?” Father asked him. Young Gene wasn’t sure. “Well, here’s some paper,” B.P. said, “and there’s a typewriter. Sit down and write one.” Gene sat down in panic, not even sure he could type his own name. Then B.P. gave him some facts—the new Mary Pickford picture, the title, the featured players, the theater in which it would open. Years later Gene would say that he never forgot that experience, akin to Sam Goldwyn’s challenge to an aspiring scenarist, “So you’re a writer? Here’s a pencil. Write.”
As soon as I got my highschool diploma, I was given a week off to recover from graduation before reporting to Teet Carle, an experienced publicity man in the flourishing department headed by veteran newsman Arch Reeves. “It won’t be a snap job,” Father promised. “I’ve told Arch to work the hell out of you. And to fire you if you don’t pull your weight. Just the way I told Mr. Zukor I would fire Gene. It’s what I call ‘enlightened nepotism.’”
My literate old man, never at a loss for words or clever phrases, kept at me to enlarge my vocabulary, to read (all of Dickens, all of Melville and Twain …), and to “Here’s a pencil—there’s a typewriter—write!”
This was what I loved about my old man. You couldn’t dismiss him as a boozer, a gambler, a wencher. He had intellect, and at his best, in the good years, he used it well. I sat in that big office and one part of my mind despised him for what he was doing to my mother, and to my sister and little brother, with this Sidney thing. If only I could kill that part of him and keep intact the intellect, the literary bent, the filmmaking skill, the creative drive…
Burlesques and satires of Hollywood like Once in a Lifetime had reinforced the stereotype of the movie producer as an illiterate cloak-and-suiter who could say with the profane Harry Cohn of Columbia, “When my ass begins to itch, that’s what tells me there’s something wrong with the story.” As Mank liked to point out, “The trouble with this business is that people like Harry Cohn think the taste of the American public is wired to their ass.” But what the satanic Mankiewicz said about Father was quite the opposite. “The trouble with your old man,” he confided to me in his book-cluttered office at the studio, “is that he’s read too goddamn many books. That can get you in a lot of trouble out here. B.P. should have stayed in New York [where Mank had served as drama critic of The World], and if only he hadn’t sent for me out here, I might have been writing Once in a Lifetime with George [Kaufman].”
Poor Mank, Hollywood’s Ambrose Bierce, was a spendthrift in every way, including brilliant lines which he wasted on studio commissary quips, cocktail chatter, and story-conference ripostes. It was typical of a play Mank had written and submitted to my father, who passed it on to me, that the stage directions sparkled with witticisms that outdazzled the dialogue.
Sitting in on a story conference with my father and Mank was enlightening entertainment. I listened to Father and his other top writers analyzing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the language of cinema. These weren’t ignoramuses butchering the classics; they were men and women who knew their Stevenson and were serious about bringing his work to the screen as authentically as possible. “Don’t change Stevenson just for the fun of rewriting him,” Father was urging. “You can kill a classic with ‘improvements.’ A big, sprawling novel, say Bleak House, you have to pare down to a continuity that will hold an audience for ninety or a hundred minutes. But remember, Jekyll and Hyde already has a continuity. We don’t have to waste time hammering out a story line. What you have to do is visualize it, think of every scene as the camera will see it and not as you—or Stevenson—would describe it in prose.
“We’ve got the makings of a great picture. A great story, a great director [Rouben Mamoulian], a great cast [Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins], and a great cameraman in Karl [Struss]. But take it from an old scriptwriter, every one of us is only as good as our script. You can build the most beautiful building in the world, I don’t care if it’s Monticello or the Taj Mahal—but if it doesn’t have a solid foundation, down it falls.”
Father didn’t deliver this from behind the big mahogany desk, but on his feet pacing as was his habit, twirling the gold chain of his diamond-studded watch clockwise around his index finger, then counterclockwise in what seemed a hypnotic perpetual motion.
He wasn’t stammering now. He was eloquent. His face was slightly flushed. His eyes, always bulging a little, gleamed with excitement. A lot of boiler-plate comedies and “mellers” had to be ground out by the majors to fill the public hunger for at least one new movie a day. Television was still almost twenty years away and America went to the movies virtually en masse. But Jekyll and Hyde was different. Here was a chance to please Bob Sherwood, make the coveted Ten Best list, and still bring Paramount the profit it needed to keep its head above water in these tricky Depression days.
Watching B.P. send his scenarists back to the Writers’ Building all fired up to do or die for Paramount, I was reminded of Pat O’Brien playing Knute Rockne in that jock
strap classic, The Spirit of Notre Dame: “Men, you’re going out there in the second half and win it for the Gipper!”
Sometimes when one story conference was over, I had a few moments alone with my father before the next began. He did work deep into the night. It wasn’t all booze-time and poker and play with Sylvia. A studio head functioned in a pressure cooker of unrealistic starting dates, impossible demands from New York, and the vicious competition of the rival “majors.” In the early Thirties, Hollywood was still working a six-day week—the long weekend had not yet become a way of life. But even before the unions won the five-day-forty, the mogul reminded me of a hamster in his cage running in place to keep up with himself. There was no way that a man in charge of a schedule geared to producing movies on the average of one a week, year in, year out, could have time for family or friends who were not also his working associates, or for creative diversion away from the movie machine. With rare exceptions like Irving Thalberg, who was a mama’s boy with a weak heart, the demands of the dream factory drove the studio heads to manic behavior. In the wenching or gambling or drinking of Jack Warner, Dave Selznick (only a junior mogul then), Harry Cohn, and B.P., there was a fevered quality, an unquiet desperation. The casino tables, the casting couch, the studio bootleggers, and the private bars more lavish than the best of the speakeasies offered swift surcease to these pressure people. The gaming rooms of the Clover Club were a study in ten-thousand-a-week anxieties.
Graduating from L. A. High was like adolescent menopause. Somehow I had survived my tennis disasters, my traumatic exposure to the half-mile on the track team, my stammering breakdown in English debate, my dread of having to take girls to school dances or squire them to parties. I had learned to write declarative sentences for the daily, and to run it efficiently. I had quietly fought my way up through a teeming interracial high school to become a member of the various status groups that ran it. As a first-rate editor and a third-rate athlete, I had become a campus figure. If my poetry was at a standstill, my short stories seemed to be improving. Even my hard taskmaster of a father, when I could catch him between rushes or conferences or drinks, would mutter an occasional, “Not bad. Better than the last one. But still not quite De Maupassant.” At least he wasn’t slamming it down on the dining-room table and pronouncing it “Lousy!” Mother, on the other hand, was her consistent Coué self. I had started on a level somewhere between De Maupassant and Tolstoy, and “Day by day in every way you’re getting better and better!”