Moving Pictures

  At the typewriter in my corner of Teet Carle’s office, I began transcribing my notes on Eisenstein. Of Soviet Russia I knew only the vague bits I had picked up from my mother’s socialist sympathies for Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens. I wondered why Eisenstein was wandering the corridors of Father’s studio when he could have been making another Ten Days That Shook the World in his own country. When I asked him about Father’s idea of making War and Peace with the cooperation of the Soviet Film Trust, Eisenstein said, “An interesting idea. But I don’t want to be limited to Russian subjects.” He found Hollywood itself a fascinating place. He wanted to explore California and the West, and even if Sutter’s Gold had been ingloriously shelved, he had not given up the idea of doing his own kind of socially oriented Western.

  I was on my way to a full-scale appraisal of Paramount’s most unusual (if unused) acquisition when I was interrupted by a question from Teet Carle. “Buddy, how are you coming on your piece—what the stars wanted to do before they got into pictures?”

  I had a fistful of notes, I told Teet, but there were at least two dozen I still hadn’t interviewed.

  “I need that piece by the end of the day,” Teet said as sternly as a nice man can. And then he did what studio people called a double take—“Buddy, you don’t mean you’re actually going around asking all the stars personally what their first ambition was?”

  “Well, isn’t that what you asked me to do? I’ve cornered as many as I could, but—”

  He stared at me dumbfounded. “Buddy, that would take all summer! What I meant for you to do was sit down and make it up. Like—Marlene Dietrich wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Maurice Chevalier wanted to be a pastry cook. Just think of the opposite of what they seem now… Just make it colorful and catchy. You’re not writing this for Vanity Fair. It’s for a lousy fan magazine. Mitzi Green wanted to be the first girl jockey. That kind of thing. You think the stars mind? It’s all part of the game. Now get going.”

  A few hours of furious invention and I had it in hand. It turned out to be fun! In my studio cubbyhole I could play God: “Gloria Swanson wanted to be a Red Cross nurse and go overseas with the Rainbow Division in the Great War. …” The fact that she had been a 15-year-old starlet for the pioneer Essanay Studio in Chicago three years before we got into that war no longer got in my way. Never again in that first summer of studio work would I let an obtrusive fact clog the spinning wheels of the publicity machine. If I wanted to study the tormented career of a Sergei Eisenstein, I would have to do it on my own time.

  40

  OF COURSE, THE ONE STAR ON THE LOT I WOULD NOT HAVE INTERVIEWED if I had tripped over her was Sylvia Sidney. If I knew she was working on a set, even one I was eager to see, I would avoid it like the pox. A plague that would carry her off to the Hollywood Cemetery around the corner is what I wished for that little predator. While I didn’t exonerate my father, it was easier to focus my callow but bone-deep hatred on a stranger, an outsider, an intruder.

  I took my problem to Felix Young, despite the fact that Mother always looked down on him as a poseur and a hanger-on with his fancy cologne, his raffish clothes, and his eppis-elegant speech. “Superficial” was Mother’s word for our friend Feel, and she may have been right that there was more style than substance in Father’s handpicked supervisor. And she may also have been right to assume that as a sycophant, without any noticeable qualifications except charm and panache, he would have to take Father’s side in the liaison. Mother even accused him of going further, of actually encouraging the affair and serving as a “beard” when Father and “the Sidney woman” appeared in public.

  Nevertheless, Felix would listen, and so in his spacious office overlooking the studio quadrangle I poured out my feelings. In a few months I would be leaving Hollywood on my own for the first time since our arrival. (I had been accepted provisionally, at a far-off place called Dartmouth, but the consensus was that I was too young, emotionally unprepared for the great leap from Hollywood to Hanover; so, to ease the culture shock, I was to put in a transitional year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.) But, I told Felix, the tension between Father and Mother was now so intense—with constant bickering, open fighting, and Dad’s frequent disappearances—that I felt the family structure would tear apart if I weren’t there to hold it together. I simply had to make Father see the light. Otherwise, I pleaded with my Victorian morality, what would happen to Sonya, a gentle, introspective, and already somehow lost 11-year-old, and little Stuart, who was only seven, and needed his family to develop normally? Because B.P., married to his work, had never been a real father-father, I felt responsible for my only sister and only brother. Not that I ever spent much time with them. Hardly a better “father” to them than their actual father, I moralized about them far more than I actually helped them. But, in my mind at least, I had become the family linchpin. How could I go east, with our home life in such disarray? I’m afraid I had read too much Dickens. Without me, I could see Father disintegrating into a hopeless drunk, Mother thrown on the mercies of a heartless society, and poor Sonya and Stuart winding up in the county orphanage.

  Suave and soothing, Felix did his best to reassure me. I was too young to understand these things. No one was as perfect as I thought they should be. Maybe the best thing for me to do was not to interfere, try not to take it so hard, concentrate on my own job of doing well at Deerfield and developing my writing. Did I know Father thought I showed signs of becoming a better writer than he had been at my age—when he was on the threshold of his own career?

  Although Felix spoke with genuine concern, it wasn’t good enough. I begged him to talk to Father about giving up Sidney. Make him realize how he was destroying our family and my peace of mind. Otherwise, I warned Feel, I was determined to take things into my own hands. I would call Mother and Father together before I left, and if I did not succeed in getting them to promise to bury their differences and resume life together, I would cancel my trip east and stay home to keep them together. And also, I told Feel, I was considering going to Sylvia Sidney myself, telling her off, and—I added almost casually—threatening to kill her unless she left Father alone.

  By this time my moral guide had switched from Dickens to Dostoevsky. Felix urged me not to do anything foolish and promised to help put our house back together.

  Working hard at the studio, playing furious tennis on Malibu weekends, I was unable to take Felix Young’s advice not to worry so much about Sidney. Dad still took me to the Friday-night fights, but tension between us spoiled the old excitement when we rooted together for our Jewish champions. He was still living with us, technically, but Sylvia and her mother had rented a large house just outside the Malibu Colony, only a few miles south, and it was now an open secret as to where he spent his time away from the studio. It was a knife twist in the wound to have to pass her place on the Pacific Highway on the way to our once-peaceful Green Gate Cottage.

  By this time, in place of my jazzy Model-A roadster, I had inherited Father’s Dusenberg phaeton. A notoriously poor driver, he found it easier to operate his Lincoln roadster. For some reason, maybe because of his erratic habits, he did not like to use the chauffeur. It made him self-conscious, he said, to have someone sitting in a car waiting for hours while he watched rushes, went off the lot for occasional luncheon meetings at Perino’s or Victor Hugo’s, stopped at the Clover Club, or (though he didn’t admit this) went on his nocturnal prowls.

  Driving back from the studio in midtown Hollywood, once I reached the two-lane Coast Road I would gun that fifteen-thousand-dollar toy until the murky ocean on my left and the sunbaked palisades on my right were falling away behind me at a speed of almost one hundred miles an hour. That was a real Duzie. Sold later to a professional antique-car collector, it turns up occasionally in movies trying to recapture the look of luxury in the early Thirties.

  I felt I was paying for that car pretty dearly by having to drive it past Miss Sidney’s beach house in order to reach our two-sto
ry “cottage.” Sometimes I would slow down, stare at the forbidding fence of the Sidney house and think dark thoughts about what was happening within. There must be some way I could put death into that house! Like using the tomcod I caught off the pier, lacing them with strychnine and leaving them at the gate with a clever note: “Dear Dad, I was thinking of you when I caught these fish, and …” Or I would wonder if I could sneak something lethal into the groceries being delivered from the Malibu store. Or should I simply barge in and drag my father out? If Father thought he could buy me off with a Dusenberg… I gunned it to the floor and raced on into the Colony. Mother was there, taking a tennis lesson. I felt sorry for her. I told her how well things were going at the “Stude”—at least my little corner of it.

  She said she was anxious about Father. Careful not to mention Sidney, she went on: “I’m worried about his concentration.” Not since he entered The Industry was he in greater need of it. No longer was moviemaking the carefree carnival it had seemed in the Twenties. The invisible intrigue of finance capital was setting in. Until now, Famous Players-Lasky, despite its Wall Street backing, had been a personal company, with Zukor in New York and Lasky in Hollywood maintaining almost as much control as when they had founded the company some twenty years earlier. But the innovation of sound, plus the delayed pinch of the Depression, was throwing The Industry into its first convulsion. Soundproofing the giant stages, investing in new equipment both for production and exhibition sent costs soaring, while profits were pinwheeling down like a fighter plane crashing in Wings. The hundred shares of stock that Father had given me for my fifteenth birthday when it was selling at 75, and that he had been sure would be worth more than twice as much by the time I finished high school, had plunged to 1. Insiders who were backing it on margin—like the free-spirited Lasky, one of the more lovable of the moguls—were losing much more than their shirts; they were losing their oceanfront mansions.

  Overexpansion and the pressure of the times had led to a vicious power fight for control of the Company. In the early days, when Hodkinson and his Paramount chain had tried to absorb Famous Players-Lasky, Zukor and his henchmen had turned the tables and swallowed Paramount instead. This time the opposition was tougher—Sam Katz, of Balaban and Katz, the Chicago theater chain, was moving in on the Company, through his (and Paramount’s) subsidiary, Publix; so was Sidney Kent, the self-made ex-boiler stoker from Lincoln, Nebraska, whom Zukor had put in charge of distribution in the early twenties. The battle for control of the stock between Katz and Kent made pawns of the patriarchal Zukor and the flamboyant Lasky, while Father was at the mercy of them all. In this internecine struggle, the cautious Zukor would survive, if never again the power he had been, and poor Jesse, overextended and outmaneuvered, would come crashing down, forced out of the Company that had mushroomed from the amalgamation of his Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company with Zukor’s Famous Players. When Sam Katz had outfoxed (or, as B.P. said, outkatzed) rival Sidney Kent, Lasky lost his champion. But tough little Zukor hadn’t been a banty East Side fighter for nothing. Exiled to South America for a while, he was kicked upstairs as chairman of the board.

  As a studio politician, Father was more like Lasky than like Zukor, more impetuous and partisan, less cautious and shrewd. He had a disturbing habit of saying what he thought and, on his third or fourth highball, of saying it a little too loudly. Mother, on the other hand, was battle-tough like Zukor. She was a lady now, but she knew the “gracious living” to which she had become accustomed demanded gelt, as her poor relations would have put it. And to make, keep, and expand gelt demanded self-discipline and forethought—hers.

  With the collapse of the old Paramount, with heads as high as Lasky’s rolling into the basket, she was convinced that only her own highly developed art of survival could keep Ben’s head from tumbling after Jesse’s. Concerned for him because she loved him with the fierce devotion of Ruth for Boaz, she was also dedicated to the preservation of that half-a-million-dollar annual income on which she was determined to build a family dynasty.

  “Schulberg has the best mind in the whole industry,” Mother would say to me, using the surname as a First Lady might in lieu of saying “The President.” “He’s much better-read than Irving [Thalberg, our patron saint]. But Irving knows how to protect himself, even against Louie [Mayer]. Schulberg is reckless. He loves to take chances. He goes out of his way to make enemies of powerful people who might be helpful to him later. I know he doesn’t like to hear it, but right now Schulberg needs me more than ever.”

  From the beach house a few miles south of us, the one I had marked in my mind with a scarlet A, I could almost hear “Schulberg” saying, “Buddy, your mother is right. But she’ll say the same thing nine straight times, until comes the tenth, you’re so sick of hearing yourself say, ‘You’re right, Ad, you’re right!’ that you want to do just the opposite!”

  Once they had been two prongs of a tuning fork producing a single sound. Now the prongs had been pried apart.

  At this critical moment in his personal and professional life, Father had to make a key address at the Company’s convention in Denver. Over at MGM, Louie Mayer—with the chestbeating and crocodile tears for which he deserved an Oscar—had begged his employees to accept a 50 percent cut to keep the studio solvent. Secretaries and office boys complained in private (to avoid the wrath of hatchet man Eddie Mannix) that L.B.’s cutting his salary from a million to half a million a year was not the same as cutting theirs from forty dollars a week to twenty. At Paramount, New York (now becoming Chicago) was in favor of a similar cut. Father resisted the cut not only for himself, but for the army of employees at the bottom of the ladder. Instead he advocated shutting down the Astoria studio where Walter Wanger reigned as his opposite number. There was wasteful duplication, Father charged, and the eastern studio had not justified its existence.

  “Dad will be back tomorrow,” read my Malibu diary. “Everything turned out fine. He won’t have to take the cut (or all the others either) and Walter Wanger is out. I believe the Eastern Studio is to be closed, so Dad must have enjoyed great success at his Denver confabs.”

  Despite Mother’s fears, he had held on to his room at the top. While admitting that the recent product had not lived up to expectations, he had held out rosy prospects for 1932, with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Dietrich, Lubitsch, Powell and Lombard, Cary Grant, and another important discovery, Sylvia Sidney…. From the divided convention, he had received a standing ovation and a nearly unanimous vote of confidence. His studio court circle had met his train at Pasadena and in the traditional sleek black limousine had driven him back to Paramount in triumph. So, according to Father, Mother’s alarums had been only another example of her overprotectiveness. She had to feel that she was in command, the power behind the throne, “what every woman knows,” and that without her he would fall from his high wire.

  Too busy cranking out publicity releases to cope with my diary, I returned to it on my last payday at the “Stude”: “Quit work today. Hated to leave the old place. Mr. Reeve said I had made good. Played tennis all day in preparation for the tournament… the best Saturday tennis of my life….”

  Next day’s entry: “WON THE CUP! An all-star audience of actors, actresses, producers, and directors filled the pavilion. Father arrived alone, looking both dapper and slightly hung over in his Sunday whites, waving his impressive Upmann like a royal wand as he greeted famous employees and guests from rival studios. Mother was coolly correct. I felt ashamed at this public acknowledgment of their separation, at the first gathering both had attended since the rupture. Still I was grateful to them for being there rooting for me.”

  Winning the silver Capra Cup in doubles was a major challenge to this marginal athlete who would have traded three Freddie Marches for one Ellsworth Vines. With the seriousness of a Wimbledon finalist, I had turned in early, jogged and wind-sprinted the length of the beach before breakfast, cooled off in the ocean rolling up toward our fence,
run through calisthenics, and knelt in the quiet of my bedroom in desperate prayer.

  The shy exterior of the child stammerer hid a fierce if largely frustrated competitiveness. Now that I had proved in the Paramount publicity department that I was no mere “producer’s son,” I wanted—oh, how I wanted!—that cup: my Holy Grail. Proof that I was not a flawed but a true knight of Malibu.

  At the end of a triumphant day the would-be jock (rather than the would-be Melville) recorded: “First set, marched through them 6-0. Then tired and lost 6-2. In the last set they led 3-1 and 40-0 and things looked black. I played my best here, driving every serve. Even at 4-all, we went on to win. What a match. Three times today we won games after trailing 0-40. That’s what I call fight!”

  Back in the Schulberg beach house, a victory party was in progress. There was a supper buffet with the gleaming silver trophy, surrounded by flowers cut from our garden, as the centerpiece. The finest whiskey our studio bootlegger could supply inspired alcoholic laughter. Couples were dancing to the current hits as played by our local favorite, Abe Lyman and his Orchestra.

  The redheaded Irwin Gelsey, our studio tennis-champ, “drank a lot and was a riot.” Gelsey entertained with imitations of the eccentricities of “our crowd,” drawing screams with his impersonation of our Hungarian star Paul Lukas, who invariably cried “Out!” the moment his opponent’s racket met the ball. Looking around at our Beautiful People, vintage ’31, laughing it up, drinking it up, there to make merry in the house of the influential forty-year-old hostess, a familiar sound was missing: the hearty laughter of my father. He could outlaugh all the professional laughers at the party, Jack Oakie, Frank Fay, and Eddie Lowe (from whom he won $800 that day, betting me to win at 5 to 8). Exulting in athletic victory while feeling trapped in our domestic triangle, in adolescent dismay I watched Mother dancing with Gelsey and her other admirers.