Next day, my sober diary reports: “Drove into town to the Studio. Said goodbye to the publicity department again.” Since I had said my goodbyes to everyone I knew, from publicity chief Arch Reeve to the lowest mail clerks, what more was there to say two days later? But the “Stude” had been my nest ever since I could remember. Now I was going off alone into the Eastern Unknown. At lunch I said goodbye to the commissary—to the stars and the Writers’ Table, to the cutters and the cameramen, to the grips and the secretaries, to eager mailroom boys, some of whom I would know later as producers and hot-shot agents. From the world-famous to the lowly, my extended family. Was I over-dramatizing these goodbyes, like Sarah Bernhardt’s ceremonies of farewell? Or was it the realization that I was finally taking leave of my Hollywood childhood, still innocent but no longer an Innocent?
Back in the office of our unofficial family counselor, “I talked to Felix Young again. More trouble brewing—I’m not even putting it in here—that’s how important it is. Felix has been nice about it and is trying to help—but it is almost too late—Jesus Christ! Got all choked up when I spoke to him. Oh my God. Why is there so much dissension in this God-damned world?”
That evening Mother, Sonya, and I picked up the Viertels, Mother’s kind of people: Berthold, a poet-dreamer who had been a distinguished German stage director before he became an unlikely Hollywood movie director when B.P. signed him for a series of pictures; Salka, a former actress for Max Reinhardt, a strong, assertive personality, definitely the wearer of the pants in that family, soon to become Garbo’s confidante, favorite film writer, and—some whispered—lover.
Next day I went to MGM with Maurice—now set for Stanford—for another round of farewells. Metro had been our other playground from grammar-school days; we had roughhoused with George K. Arthur, joked with Slickum, Metro’s answer to Paramount’s Oscar the Bootblack, gaped at Greta Garbo. I had exchanged stutters with Marion Davies and had been privileged to sit at the long executive dining table where the eloquent, illiterate L. B. Mayer presided with an unctuous authority I despised. Around him were his court, tough men like ex-bouncer Eddie Mannix and agent-pimp (with a touch of Little Caesar) Frank Orsatti.
In contrast to “my” studio, the atmosphere of the ruling circle at Metro was oppressively totalitarian. The most heinous crimes could be committed and covered up. Mannix was the studio’s hit man; Irving Thalberg, vice-president in charge of quality at MGM, was as much of a tyrant as L.B., though he ruled his half of the studio with a softer touch. Maurice’s father Harry, the program-picture maven, lacked the drive for power that kept Mayer and Thalberg at the top—and also at each other’s throats. A favorite victim of the cruel wit of the Writers’ Table, because of his enormous nose and his Goldwynlike malapropisms, Harry was a crude but gentle man who knew his show business, from Joan Crawford musicals to Wallie Beery-Marie Dressler-Polly Moran comedies. My parents, and the Hollywood literati in general, looked down on him as an ignoramus, but I thought of him as a warmhearted father-figure who may have lacked my father’s erudition but was more dependable domestically. I didn’t know at the time that Joan Crawford had been Harry Rapf s “Sylvia Sidney” and that a second domestic crisis was brewing on Lorraine Boulevard. The Crawford affair was a fairly well-kept secret while Father and Sidney, with their provocative Malibu arrangement, invited the attention of the gossipmongers.
At Metro, L.B., with the elocution he had developed so doggedly, told me to give his good wishes “to Ad, a wonderful woman and a fine mother.” Although it was an open secret that Orsatti and the casting directors fed him a regular supply of starlets, Mayer seemed to be running on a platform of Motherhood and Family Togetherness. As if my father did not exist, L.B. suggested that if there was no place for me at Paramount when I came back from prep school, I could always join Maurice at MGM.
In his paternalistic tyranny, there seemed to be not the slightest doubt in Mayer’s mind that we would return for grooming as eventual producers. It even struck me as a form of bribery, to lure me away from his enemies, B.P. and Paramount. I doubt that L.B. had ever read a book, but he knew his Machiavelli: master of on-cue emotionalism, of threats sweetened with flattery, of divide and rule. Sharing Father’s contempt for him, I treated him like a dangerous enemy, promising to drop in on him and his wife Margaret (of whom I was fond and for whom I felt sorry) when I returned.
Then I recrossed undeveloped West Los Angeles to have my first shave at—where else?—the Paramount studio barbershop. I had done my first boxing in the studio gym, and when I broke my arm at L.A. High in a frenzied effort to clear five feet in the high jump, it had been to the studio clinic that I rushed, to Dr. Strathern, who obligingly set my left arm without lining up the palm of my hand with the inside of my elbow. I would carry the twisted arm with me all my life, but as with so many Hollywood flaws, no one ever seemed to notice. In the barbershop, head barber Bill Ring boasted that he would remind me of my first shave when I returned from college to take over the studio. Even in those troubled Paramount days, no one on the lot entertained any doubts about the rights of divine succession. I was the Prince of Marathon Street, shyness, stutter, and all.
I called my parents together for a farewell showdown. It took place, with great solemnity, in the library of the Lorraine house. How could I go east with any peace of mind, I challenged them, if Father was still living away from home? Unless they gave me their promise to reconcile, I would cancel my trip.
Mother cried a little and Father stammered that they both were proud of me, hoped I would concentrate on my studies and writing at Deerfield, and try to worry less about their personal differences.
After an hour, I went up to my room with a sinking feeling that I had failed. The best I was able to get from Father was that he loved all of us and would do his best to work things out. In my bedroom I punched my bag lackadaisically, looked out at my flock of pigeons, fingered my old long-distance Superheterodyne, and cryptically confided to my diary, “Spoke to Dad and Mom but somehow couldn’t tell them in just the words I had chosen previously.”
That night, after packing the four books I had chosen for the long drive east—Famous Russian Short Stories, Emil Ludwig’s Genius and Character, Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, and Francis Wallace’s football novel, Huddle—overexcited and deeply upset I indulged in dreams of glory as to how I would settle the Sidney affair. If I could not bring myself to poison or drown her, there must be some other way.
The next day was ritual: The Last Swim. The Last Talk with Maurice. The Last Talk with Mom. The last of the last farewells. One would have thought I was leaving for Darkest Africa with slim hope of survival. I took my Dusenberg out for a Last Spin because I would be driving a democratic Chevy across the country to New England. I did some farewelling along the beach mansions of Santa Monica, including Margaret Mayer, whom I found alone in their big house, painting a crude still life.
On my way back the Duzie was racing along when suddenly, as if with an impulse of its own, it braked to a halt at the Sidney house. In a kind of trance, the young driver got out of his chariot and strode toward the gate. To his surprise it was open. As if sleepwalking, he followed the wooden walk until it brought him to a side porch. Slowly he walked up the steps and through a screen door. There on an oversized couch facing the ocean sat Sylvia Sidney, with her mother. And pacing, scotch highball in one hand, a big cigar in the other, was Father, apparently just returned from the studio.
He was in mid-sentence when he saw me. Undoubtedly reciting the tribulations of the day, which had been mounting as company enemies kept sniping, and other stars complained that B.P. was picking the choice roles for Sylvia at their expense. Now, as I materialized in this alien place, the eyes of my father bulged in disbelief. Sylvia and her mother stared, waiting to see what I would do.
I was waiting, too. I have never known a sensation like this, before or since. I must have been, quite simply, possessed. I could feel a trembling all through my body. When I f
inally spoke, it was with a new voice—and words I had never used before, certainly not to my father:
“You son of a bitch! You’re coming home with me. Right now, you son of a bitch!”
I was grabbing Father by the arm and pulling him toward the door. My body and my spirit were stronger than his. I pulled him out through the screen door, down the wooden walkway, and out to the Dusenberg. At the running board he resisted, but I had the door open and pushed him in. The Duzie sprang forward like a trusty steed and I, in my own mind, must have been Malibu’s Galahad, strengthened by ten because my heart was pure. I dragged Father out of the car and up the walk to Green Gate Cottage. At the entrance to the house he tried to pull away. “Buddy, I can’t! I can’t!”
I was merciless: “Go on, get in there, you yellow son of a bitch!”
As possessed in his way as I was in mine, Father walked through the doorway and into the house.
I ran ahead of him to alert Mother.
“Mom, he’s home! I brought Dad home!”
If Dad had wanted to walk out now, I would not have had the strength to stop him. But he stayed. He asked where Sonya and Stuart were. Sone was down the beach with Adela Rogers’s precocious daughter, Elaine, and Stu was up the beach with Maurice’s little brother, Matty. Mother and Father sat facing each other, making polite conversation about my imminent drive east. Mother urged me to write down the numbers of all my traveler’s checks, and Father warned me not to pick up strangers. There were so many people out of work now, on the bum, and possibly dangerous. “What I’m worried about,” I said, “is what’ll happen to you.”
There was an awkward silence and I decided to leave them alone. Upstairs, I stared out at the ocean that had been our front yard since Ad first discovered Malibu. To the south I could see the rickety pier where Maurice and I had caught hundreds of tomcod. Then I looked out at the manicured Japanese farms that stretched behind us all the way to the green foothills. I wondered if I should pack my tennis cup, decided that would be ostentatious, reread the latest version of “Ugly” that my U.S.C. mentor Mrs. Stanton thought “almost ready for a ‘little magazine,’” and gazed at my favorite print of Washington Irving’s ivy-covered castle on the Hudson. I would rather have his life, I thought to myself, than that of a Hollywood mogul. I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if my father had persevered as a writer and never moved up through the ranks of Famous Players to his glamorous but precarious sunken office. Would his drinking and gambling and Sidneying have been this excessive? Knowing nothing but Hollywood, having been exposed all my life to its opportunists, sycophants, pimps, and “hoors,” and wanting to absolve my father as much as possible, I was inclined to shift the blame to the impersonal amalgam we called “Hollywood.”
At dinner that evening there was forced gaiety as Lucille showed off with her rare roast beef, popovers, glazed sweet potatoes, and chocolate souffle. Father was sober, very sober. I was too self- or family-absorbed to wonder how he had explained to Sylvia his continued absence from her hearth.
Already caught up in his story conferences and rushes, he didn’t accompany me to the railroad station—but I went in style in the chauffeur-driven Lincoln gold bric-a-brac town car, with Mother, Sonya, Uncle Sam, and of course Maurice to see me off on the crack overnight Lark to San Francisco. There I would hitch up with Rudy Pacht, the husky, easygoing all-city fullback from Hollywood High who was driving east with me, he to Dartmouth, where I would follow if I made good at Deerfield. Heading north through miles of orange groves that were still the landmark of outer Los Angeles, I wrote in my diary with solemnity: “I am going through a great deal before I see them again. After the train pulled out I cried—just a bit. Then I read quite late.”
41
CROSS-COUNTRY DRIVING IN THE EARLY THIRTIES, ONLY A LITTLE LESS adventurous than in covered-wagon days, offered scenery instead of speed. As we bounced along the narrow road that twisted up the Pacific Coast into Oregon, there was time for the awesome redwoods and the great pines holding the coastline against a white-water ocean. Sometimes the engine boiled over and the tires went flat. Daily crises brought us close to the people and the land. There were sleepy towns with names that ran round and round in the mind like half-remembered poetry: Ukiah … Fortuna … Eureka … Our ratty car was like a pinto pony, driven all day to the point of exhaustion. A list of expenses for an average day on the road is a faded snapshot of the times:
Aug. 22 [1931]
Hotel $1.00
Gas 3.00
Breakfast .50
Lunch .45
Candy .10
Soda .15
Supper .75
Stamps .05
Post cards .05
Tip .10
Total $6.15
We toured the campuses of Oregon and Oregon State Universities, swam in the Columbus River (lunch 20¢, supper 45¢), and when, out of gas, we coasted into Pendleton, it was almost as if I had reversed course onto the studio back lot. “Pendleton,” wrote the road-battered Hollywood prince, “is a typical little western town, with everyone wearing half-gallon hats and blank expressions—as if they’ve been around their cows so long they’ve begun to look like them.”
Across the Montana border, “the road gave up any ambition of being a road … result was a rocky lane which vibrated every bone in my body. Troy, where we had a tough roast beef (65¢), is undoubtedly the World’s Worst Place. Lacking one paved street, the burg is a typical old-western town with a pack of booted hicks lounging on the corner. The houses are most dilapidated and even the women look run-down.”
We were averaging 15 miles an hour now, hugging a narrow dirt road winding around a mountain. A lumber truck approaching from the opposite direction provoked a life-and-death crisis. Shouted at to move over, I complied until my left wheels were hanging over the edge, in the air, Harold Lloyd-style. Later, in a Montana ranch town, “The movie house is a rattrap of 100 seats. The picture, Ship of Hate, typifies both the town and the theater.” Since American ingenuity was yet to present us with one of our great cultural forward thrusts, the motel, we stayed in dusty two-story hotels where the going rate was one dollar a night. “There is a rope tied to my bed which is to be thrown out the window and slid down in case of fire. I don’t know which I’d rather do—slide down the rope or fry.” And before sinking down into his lumpy bed, the western-weary traveler makes a final observation: “Montana is beautiful virgin country—but the roads are more virgin than beautiful.”
To a Los Angeleno raised on Westerns of Art Acord, Tom Mix, Tim McCoy, and Hoot Gibson, the real West, or at least the one-tacky-hotel western town, was an eyesore. Missing our Hollywood bungalow courts, I complained that we were motoring back into the 1880s. In a sleepy stopover named Challott, where the only restaurant bore the faded legend EATS, the most prominent sign in town read “Funeral Parlor. Nice Assortment of Caskets.” On the way to Yellowstone National Park we not only ran out of gas but had a flat; when the car fell off its flimsy jack into a road of tar softened by summer heat, we waited for hours until a good Samaritan arrived in a wood truck and not only jacked us up but siphoned a gallon of gas from his own tank.
At Old Faithful, the mysterious geyser that goes off every sixty minutes according to its own primordial clock, more serious disaster brushed our shoulder, although we would not feel its grip until the following day. It seemed a happy coincidence that we met Ralph Cohn, son of Jack Cohn, the nicer of the two brothers who ran Columbia. Ralph was on his way to Cornell with his roommate Bernie and, considering the hazards of western auto travel, it seemed logical that we drive on in tandem.
The wisdom of this decision proved out almost immediately. While we were giving high marks to the beauty of Teton National Park, our car ran out of gas again. When two gallons had been siphoned from Ralph’s and it still refused to start, we had to be towed ignominiously into Jackson, the first truly wild-west town I had ever seen. Horsepower came mostly from horses there, tied to hitching posts while the
ir riders shouldered through the swinging doors of the side-by-side saloons that opened on the raised wooden walkway. I was used to seeing people getting drunk in their homes, and Father staggering in from casinos and “speaks,” but in those days of national Prohibition, these were the first wide-open bars I had ever seen. The town, we were told, had a population of 333, of which the entire male population seemed to be in a state of extreme inebriation. The lone gas-station attendant was drunk, and stared at our dead engine and admitted he “don’t know how to fix the damn thing.” When I asked if the Sheriff might be able to help us out, he pointed with an oily finger: “Most of the time he’s drunk. You’ll find ’ im in one o’ them saloons across the street.”
Somewhere along the way Ralph and Bernie had picked up a pair of girl hitchhikers. Fairly attractive, tough country girls. We all had supper together in a greasy spoon while a would-be mechanic tinkered with our stubborn Chevy. The girls were on their way to Cheyenne, and urged Ralph and Bernie to take them along. Since the two couples were already holding hands, and since Cheyenne was directly on our route, why should there be any objection? Girl-shy and puritanical, I said I didn’t like the idea. In this unreconstructed Old West, I could feel the hostility against outsiders, intensified by unspoken but unmistakable anti-Semitism, and I thought the presence of two Wyoming girls would not improve our welcome at gas stations and lunch counters. But I was outvoted by the two swains and the amiable Rudy.