Somehow I had managed to get through high school without a single serious date, coping with the graduation dance by being the first to volunteer to rush down to the basement for extra floor wax, and to provide whatever auxiliary services a veteran wallflower could invent. In that last week before we headed off to our respective studios for our summer jobs, Maurice and I were still talking late into the night, determined to solve our “girl” problem. In a later day we undoubtedly would have been marked as queers. But we knew that we felt no sexual attraction to each other or to other boys. We had simply—well, not so simply—built a fear of the opposite sex into a cult. Just as we had once run from the house and camped out under a tree on our pastoral Hollywood block if a girl our age arrived with our parents’ friends, so now we clung to our companionship and all the games of our youth. But the growing pains were setting in.
39
THAT SUMMER IN the Paramount publicity department, my beat was to collect items and boiler-plate news stories on up-and-coming stars like Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, Gary Cooper, Kay Francis, Nancy Carroll It should have been an easy job. After all, the names I was to write squibs about were the same ones who were in and out of our Malibu house every weekend. I didn’t have to introduce myself.
My first interview was with Gary Cooper, who had just finished playing opposite Father’s aging It Girl, Clara Bow. Of all the hot young stars Paramount was building, Coop was the hottest. His small but poignant part in Wings had been one of those instant star-makers. Under the shambling, “shucks-Ma” shyness was a smoldering sexuality. Clara Bow had had it from the moment the imperious Elinor Glyn dubbed her our Jazz Baby Queen. Gary of course was born with it; Father’s service to the Cooper cult was simply to observe how women swarmed around him at the previews, and how movie stars and secretaries alike knelt at his big, slow, western-walking feet.
Like the lame leading the blind, the stammerer developed a lengthy interview from this young yup-’n’-mebbe man. Coop was ill at ease talking about movies and acting, but truly at home on the range, for he had been raised on a ranch in Montana owned by his father, a county judge, and so was more secure with ranch hands and cattle, bear-tracking, and mountain climbing than he was with scenarios, fancy studio front-offices, and movie sets. As an actor he seemed naturally embarrassed: His instinct was to act as if he were trying to escape from the camera. Therein lay his inimitable quality. The talented Cary Grant, the gifted Freddie March, the inspired Jack Barrymore could all talk circles around him but inside those circles there was the laconic, nonverbal, seemingly inadvertently sexual movie star who knew the ways of the camera by always seeming to wish it wasn’t there.
In my Model A roadster, I raced back from Coop’s stucco “Spanish” bungalow in Beverly Hills (the Hollywood architecture à la mode of the early Thirties), eager to roll paper into my typewriter and pound out my first big interview. A few hours later I had produced eight pages of what seemed to me brilliant reportage-biography. Everything I had learned from my father, from Miss Carr, and from Father’s writers, genius-type newspapermen like Mank and Ben Hecht, flowed into it. With a heady sense of having completed a masterpiece, I gave it to Teet Carle. He leafed through it with what struck me as obscene haste, rolled a piece of yellow paper into the Underwood, pounded on it for about thirty seconds, ripped it from the roller, and handed it to me. My two thousand words now read:
Gary Cooper, Paramount’s rising young star now playing the “love interest” to Claudette Colbert in the forthcoming His Woman, is one of Hollywood’s few real-life cowboys, having been raised on his father Judge Cooper’s ranch in Montana.
When I glanced at it, I felt stammery inside. “That’s all you wanted?”
“Papers use little fillers like that all over the country,” my mentor mentored.
“I could have done that without leaving the office.”
“That’s all right. It’s not bad. Just too long. Too many words from a man who’s not supposed to talk. We’ll file it and use it for background.”
Teet turned back to his own typewriter and started punching out more copy. I sat and stared at my typewriter. Had Teet given me the Cooper assignment just to get rid of me for a few hours? For so many years the “Stude” had been my playground. Now that it had become my first workground, I was acutely sensitive to my reason for being there. The sweet-and-sour smell of nepotism. The Depression was finally reaching its bony fingers into Lotusland. Even veteran reporters with families were out of work. But the “Stude” had to give me a job. I was the boss’s son.
Maybe it would have been easier to run copy and write my little sports squibs for the L. A. Times. Here I had to prove that I could be as good at this job as my father had been at his when Edwin S. Porter brought him to Famous Players. In twenty years my father had gone from teenage copyboy and cub reporter to two-reel screenplays and flashy publicity capers, to become the boss of bosses (under founders Zukor and Lasky) of one of the two biggest film factories in the world. How was the 17-year-old son going to live up to those sycophantic inscriptions in his autograph book, “Hoping you’ll grow up to be as great a man as your father”? Father was making eleven thousand a week, not counting stock options and Christmas bonuses, and his son seemed to have only two choices, either to try to live up to and maybe surpass the achievements of his old man—or give up and become a bum like his Grandfather Simon.
Having been surrounded by so many lushes and idlers from childhood days, I didn’t want to be a bum. I had to show Teet Carle and my father that—nepotism be damned—they had a bargain.
After a few weeks of writing better and better copy, some of it passing through Teet’s hands with a minimum of red-penciling, a few planted virtually unscathed in papers around the country, I had passed my first test and was ready for bigger things.
Teet’s idea was to plant in one of the popular fan magazines—Modern Screen or Photoplay—a feature article on what some fifty of Paramount’s most famous stars and directors had wanted to do before they stumbled into moviemaking. I warmed to the subject. Here was something a little less cut-and-dried than the stock releases I had learned to knock out. Since there was still no way of preparing for a movie career, most film stars and directors had simply stumbled, backed, or lucked into Hollywood fame.
John Ford (honest handle, Sean Aloysius O’Fearna) was the son of a saloonkeeper in a small town in Maine. After his elder brother Francis had worked his way to the wide-open Hollywood of 1913 as an itinerant actor, he was able to get young Sean a job right out of high school as a day laborer at Universal. Jack (Sean) was tough and wanted to go to sea. He had nothing but disdain for the Griffiths of his day (although he had had a bit as one of the Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation). But he found himself assisting his brother in directing two-reelers, and moving on to direct low-budget Westerns (Harry Carey, Buck Jones, etc.) through the silent days.
And Marion Marshall Morrison, otherwise known as John Wayne, was a football star at U.S.C. whose bruising tackles won him a job after graduation as a studio “grip” for John Ford. “Duke” Morrison had about as much interest in becoming a movie star as he had in dancing with the Russian Ballet. He was just a big, strong, raw-faced handyman until the canny O’Fearna decided to stick that ruddy bourbon-and-branch-water face in front of the camera—and another cult figure was on his way.
The crap-game aspect of film fame appealed to me. Undaunted by Teet’s diminution of my Gary Cooper feature, I was after another summer masterpiece. Notebook in hand, I prowled the studio lot to corner my victims. I knew all the gathering spots: the barbershop, the gym, Oscar’s bootblack stand; the open square bordered by star dressing rooms on the left and the Writers’ Building on the right; the enormous gossipy commissary…
Trying to grab interviews on the various sets was more difficult, for actors were often edgy, directors demanding, and their officious assistants would snap “Quiet!” even at the boss’s son. Sometimes I would try to follow them into their dressing rooms.
I tagged along with Freddie March, figuring he’d be easy since I played so much tennis with him at Malibu. But right at the door he reached out and grabbed a blonde bit-player and pulled her past me. “I wanted to be a banker, Buddy, but this is more fun!” The door slammed them in and me out. Of all the stars I saw running in the sex derby—not excluding Errol Flynn and the improbable Peter Lorre—Freddie was the most outrageous. He would simply reach out his dressing-room door and pull them in. In public he would grab them in private places. Absolutely out of control. Laughing, screaming, outrageous. But the moment he took his place in front of the camera he was all business, one of the great pros who could play everything from light comedy to heavy tragedy, from Nothing Sacred to Jekyll and Hyde, A Star Is Born, and Best Years…
I stepped back from the impromptu frolic going on inside and conscientiously made my notes: Freddie McIntyre Bickel from Racine and the University of Wisconsin might have been a banker if his good looks hadn’t drifted him into modeling, from there to midwestern stock companies, and on to the New York stage. I could fill in the rest of the story while we rested from hard-fought competition on our Malibu court.
Jack Oakie (Lewis D. Offield), the country-boy comic who had become one of the Paramount dependables in racy hits like Sweetie and The Wild Party, was easier. He liked to hang around Oscar’s and clown for passersby. “What did I want to be before I got to be a ham movie actor? Well, first I tried selling Eskimo pies to Eskimos, but—”
“Please, Jack,” I told him. “This is a serious piece. I really want to do it well.”
“Oh, you d-d-do?” he mimicked me good-naturedly, even though that little joke always rankled. “Well, believe it or not, Mrs. Offield’s little boy was a whiz at math and put in a couple of years on the New York Stock Exchange. Remember the New York Stock Exchange? It was fun while it lasted. Then somebody saw me getting laughs at a party and I drifted into stock—” Drifted was becoming the key word of movie-star careers. “Next thing I knew I was making funny faces for B. P. Schulberg. Hey, how about telling your old man I want to play romantic leads, I’m getting sick of clowning around as the pal of the guy who always gets the girl.” Then he gave Oscar an exuberant goose, Oscar accommodated with a squeak and a ludicrous leap, and my quarry went swaggering back to the set.
I caught the ladylike Lily Cauchoin (Claudette Colbert) in the wardrobe department, where she was trying on costumes for the next Chevalier musical. “What did I want to be when I was growing up? An actress!” she said, and swept by me. Tallulah Bankhead I cornered at Lucey’s, the speakeasy-restaurant across the street. “Darling, what did I want to be before I became an actress?” A dirty laugh erupted from that still-lovely throat. “I couldn’t decide between a Mother Superior, a whore, and President of the United States. I hope you’ll put down in your notes that I’d be damned good at all three!”
I spotted Peggy Shannon getting out of a red roadster near the entrance to the Studio. Since she was being groomed to replace B.P.’s self-destructive Clara Bow, naturally she had to drive a red roadster. She was a marvelous-looking Irish girl, with red hair and unsubtle sex appeal. “What did I want to be…?” Like a breezy Hecht-MacArthur reporter, I waited, notebook in hand, with one foot on the running board. If Father should happen to look out, he could see me from the open stained-glass windows of his big office. “… I wanted to be a great swimmer like Gertrude Ederle. I was in junior high when she swam the English Channel. Overnight she was famous. But then I realized … I hated to get my hair wet!” She laughed, a lovely, no underpants laugh, and gunned her jazzy little car down Marathon Street to the studio gate.
Day after day I persevered, cornering stars whose fame would last down the years, others doomed to careers of fluttering brevity. I was into my third notebook when I started knocking on doors in the Writers’ Building. A gravel-voiced “Come in!” brought me into the presence of Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt, a pair of barrel-bellied ex-newspapermen who had risen to the top of the Paramount writers’ roster—earning four thousand a week as a team, writing original stories and preparing screenplays for the stars under contract.
It was one of those steamy Hollywood summer days, and when I barged in, there were Father’s $400-a-day writers sitting on the floor in their BVD’s, a bottle of scotch balanced on a pile of scripts, playing cards. The office reeked of sweat, booze, and studio stucco.
When they recognized me they threw down their cards in disgust. “What the fuck are you doing in here, spying for your old man? Tell ’im he’ll have his fuckin’ script by Friday. Now amscray!”
Bill McNutt was shuffling the cards, dangerously. When I told the two besotted geniuses the reason for my mission, a series of ribald invocations poured from their lips. “My big ambition was to marry the madam of the local whorehouse!” “And mine was to bugger the piano player of the Bijou Theater!” I decided if I didn’t beat it out of there, they might hurl me through the window into the wilting flower beds below. I shut the door behind me and retreated into the hallway. As I worked my way down the corridors of the buildings, I met with similar if less explosive rejections. Writers were either writing or reading or playing, and whatever they were doing they tended to greet my interruption with sarcastic wit. Some invented ribald answers, others simply said they didn’t have time for such nonsense. I felt discouraged. An assignment I thought I could finish in a week was turning into a project that could devour the rest of the summer.
One person who did have time for me—nothing but time, it seemed—was a man whom many consider the authentic genius of silent motion pictures. Sergei Eisenstein. I found him wandering the second-floor corridor of the Paramount front-office building. Eisenstein had come to Hollywood from an avant-garde film conference in Switzerland—after a stop in New York, where he presented Adolph Zukor with letters from people like H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Zukor had politely passed Eisenstein on to Jesse Lasky, who passed him over to my father.
Father, a political liberal in the reactionary world of Mayer and Hearst, welcomed the idea of adding the great Eisenstein to the Paramount roster. Mother, with her Rivington Street-cum-Fabian socialism, was also impressed by Eisenstein’s intellectual credentials. In fact, she had played hostess to the Russian master, considering him a cultural catch on a level with Count Keyserling and the other international philosophers who frequently held forth at her Friday Morning Club.
On a stone bench in the studio garden, Eisenstein told me that his father had been a well-known architect, a profession he had planned to follow. Then he had become a painter and stage designer, in time a stage director, then an assistant to the Russian film directors who were creating their own form of social cinema in the revolutionary Twenties. I listened carefully, for in Father’s projection room I had seen not only Potemkin but Ten Days That Shook the World, great silent films that put montage into the language, with the intercutting of vivid images creating a new cinematic experience.
I had heard Father’s version of Eisenstein’s “failures” at Paramount. Now I took notes from the source himself. His first idea had been to make a film about a city made entirely of glass—in which everyone could look into everyone else’s private life. But this had been abandoned as impractical—“My God, B.P.” Father had been warned by studio manager Uncle Sam, a pragmatist, “it would cost us a million dollars to build that city, and we couldn’t use it as a standing set and write off the cost against other pictures, like our ocean liner, our castle, or our New York street.”
Next, Eisenstein and his team had worked enthusiastically on Sutter’s Gold, which Father hoped would become a social classic like Greed or Modern Times. But Eisenstein and his collaborators were convinced Marxists, and their story of how the gold discovered at Sutter’s ranch destroyed a legitimate pioneer was too radical for the money men in New York who had the final say on studio decisions.
Each script Eisenstein had worked out with his meticulous eye for visual detail. Turning to An American Tragedy, he
had discussed the novel with Dreiser. He had been impressed with my father’s knowledge of the book. (Despite two strikeouts he spoke warmly of my father, with a kind of good-natured condescension, surprised by his literacy, but not surprised that he would have to defer to the financial bosses who pulled the strings.) In the end, Tragedy also would be snapped from Eisenstein and he would leave our studio—to its shame—without ever having made a picture.
In retrospect, Eisenstein was one of those whose genius cannot accommodate any social system—as ill-fated for Zukor-Lasky capitalism as for Stalin’s communism. And in between, soon after my interview with him, came his painfully expensive fiasco for socialist-independent Upton Sinclair, no less: the aborted Thunder Over Mexico. Eisenstein may have been to the movies what Michelangelo was to painting. But for all his great knowledge and insight, he lacked patrons.
That afternoon on the Paramount lot I found an Eisenstein who had wanted to be a painter with oils and now had moved on to a dedication to painting with moving-picture frames—becoming a mosaicist of moving pictures, as much an innovator in the late Twenties and early Thirties as was D. W. Griffith ten years earlier. Eisenstein had no illusions about what Paramount could do—and not do—for him and his revolutionary theories of filmmaking. He realized he was a misfit on a lot where box-office talents like Lubitsch’s and Von Sternberg’s could be so much more easily exploited. There was something about him that was not so much defeated as bemusedly resigned, like a chess master who had somehow wandered by mistake into the old Ebbets Field of the rowdy Brooklyn Dodgers and decided to sit through the game.