Next day on the winding road from Jackson to Rock Spring, we were following Ralph’s car, Rudy laughing at the ostentatious necking between both couples that had been going on for miles. Suddenly, on a sharp turn, Ralph turned his head to the girl, lost his grip on the wheel, and as we watched it like a horror show, the car went catapulting off the road and into an open field where it cartwheeled over and over, finally crashing to a halt upside down. We heard the screams and the splattering of glass, jumped out of the car, and ran toward them.
I wish I could tell a tale of schoolboy heroics, dragging bleeding victims from a burning wreck. In truth, the next thing I knew strange men were bending over me, strange hands were lifting me onto a stretcher, and it was only then that I came to, and sheepishly confessed, “No, I’m okay… I was in the car behind.” They had found me lying near the other bodies in a dead faint. In disgust they dropped me back on the ground and turned their attention to the real victims. Silently, Rudy and I followed the ambulance into Rock Spring.
My diary picks up the thread: “Tragedy hit us hard today. A girl who we never knew existed yesterday is fighting for her life at the hospital. (Fractured skull, face lacerated by glass, arm and leg broken.) Bernie has a bad head wound and Ralph is also injured, though less seriously. The other girl, miraculously if you saw the total wreckage of the car, is only superficially bruised and cut.”
So there were Rudy and I holed up in a dingy hotel in a tough little Wyoming town with the other girl, a strange and frightened trio locked together while we kept the hospital vigil. Diary scolds my lack of decision the night before: “I wanted to say no—but I settled for ‘I’m not wild about the idea.’ I didn’t argue enough. I’ve learned a great lesson today—to follow my own inclinations from now on. Please God! Let her live! Back and forth to the hospital many times. One time almost fainted again. Everything went white. The other girl is scared to death. Why in hell didn’t I say no! It looks lousy with these girls here and we didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with it.”
Maybe we didn’t, but it seemed as if the whole town had put us on trial and already found us guilty. The waspish hotel clerk glared at us as we left our key at the desk next morning. Unfriendly eyes followed us through the airless lobby. The waitress shoved our eggs at us and hurried away as if we were lepers. As we walked the now-familiar route to the local hospital, the citizens of Rock Spring stared at us as if we were horned creatures sprung from the Moon. Ralph and Bernie, the architects of our fate, were isolated in their hospital beds and we, with the stranger-girl ever-present at our side, the Unholy Three, were exposed to the cold hatred of a myopic western town. (Almost fifty years later, Rock Spring would be described as one of the most wide-open as well as paranoid towns left in the West.) Nervously, Rudy and I considered the possibility that if the girl should die, a spontaneous posse might close in on us and string us up to the nearest tree. It didn’t take Houdini to read their narrow minds: Them dirty Hollywood Jews can’t keep their lecherous hands off’n our young girls. Even the hospital staff were barely civil as they gave us the latest bulletins: Ralph would be out in a few days and Bernie would recover, but the girl’s life was still in the balance.
At the drugstore the bald-headed proprietor pulled my milk-shake glass away.
“Wait a minute, I haven’t f-f-finished,” I protested.
“I’m closin’ up,” he said through tight lips, and poured the rest of my milk shake down the drain. I was convinced that he was the Head Dragon of the local Klan fixin’ to do us in.
Back at the hotel, I phoned Ralph’s father at his studio. Long-distance calls were still such a luxury that we hadn’t thought to call home simply to report our progress along the way. Mr. Cohn was relieved about Ralph and told us how to report the accident to the insurance company. But he did not see how it would help matters for him to come to Rock Spring himself. I had been hoping he would relieve us of our embarrassing hospital watch. Instead, he advised us to get in touch with the manager of the local Rialto Theater, which played Paramount pictures, and let him guide us through our dilemma.
A few days later, when the girl was finally declared out of danger and Ralph was able to leave the hospital and keep the vigil, Rudy and I checked out of that hostile hotel, to the undisguised relief of the theater manager, torn between his obligation to come to the aid of these errant scions of Hollywood and his concern that this association would be bad for business.
We sped away from Rock Spring like prisoners going over the wall. Driving all day and all night, the nightmare West was finally behind us. The roads of Iowa were “smooth as glass—and no speed limits! No flats or lack of gas today!”
Chicago: “Same old noisy, windy place. Hitting Michigan Boulevard is like finding a pearl in a garbage can.” Notre Dame: “Disappointing, with dirty-looking buildings and ragged grounds.” Niagara: “Same old Falls, a beautiful sight marred by the commercialism and the crowd you have to fight through to see it. A head waiter in full-dress refused to seat us because my cords were so dirty and badly ripped.” New York, on Labor Day: “Two million people leaving the mountains and beach resorts—the last day of vacation—torturous driving, three miles an hour—a line of cars ahead of me as far as I can see. What a day I picked to drive to a city of seven million!”
42
AFTER ELEVEN HOURS’ SLEEP and a hearty Jewish breakfast at Uncle Dave’s modest flat in the Bronx—he was another of Ad’s brothers—I was ready with my appraisal of New York: “As bad as ever. People busy dodging cars and outsmarting each other. A city of wise guys. I never saw a town like this, where everyone is trying to put something over on you. Felt like a real hick. A shampoo, shave, and facial made me feel like a new man.” That evening I took my cousin Rosalind—“prettier than ever”—out for supper and a movie, and as we walked up Fifth Avenue “I felt a little hamed [our private word for ashamed] because I had to take her arm in mine—first time I’ve ever done that. But I’m still here so guess it didn’t kill me.” On pretty cousin Roz I was able to practice my callow social graces, learning how to hold a girl’s arm and how to help her into a taxi, modest beginnings to sexual contact I somehow had managed to avoid all my years of growing up in Hollywood.
Late that night I had an important long-distance call from Mom and Dad. They were relieved that I had made it safely and that I (having inherited Father’s myopic sense of direction) had been able to locate New York City all by myself. Even in my naiveté, I knew that their calling together was merely a show of matrimonial convention, to shore up their anxious son on the eve of his Eastern Adventure.
There was a long weekend at the Zukors’ Mountain View Farm (three large houses, a huge swimming pool, private golf course, tennis and handball courts, a great projection room, and their own river to fish in). I swam with Maurice Chevalier, played tackle football with the caddies, and walked the golf course with Primo Carnera, in training for his big fight with Jack Sharkey.
The Zukor family and their friends seemed to have a sublime faith that with a little encouragement from the Hoover Administration, the economy would eventually pull out of its doldrums. But a long talk with Mr. Zukor himself was not about the current state of the world but about the current state of the picture business, and of Paramount in particular. He admitted that these were troubled times for Paramount, and that The Industry was going through growing pains. But he recalled the early-morning fire that had almost destroyed his Famous Players in its downtown New York infancy. Apparently if deceptively still ruler of all he surveyed, he was able to maintain a stoic confidence: “This too shall pass.”
I was relieved to hear him speak so well of Father. If he had any criticism of B.P.’s indiscretions with Sylvia Sidney, or of Father’s box-office record for the past year, he was too polite to voice them. Having discovered young Ben before I was born, when Father was a teenage prodigy, a natural writer and idea man, he seemed proud of Father’s progress, and pleased to hear that I also had begun to write.
M
onday morning, I was awakened at dawn because Mr. Zukor, still the little furrier working a 12-hour day, liked to be at his downtown New York office by nine A.M. I returned to my busy waiting-for-school-to-open life, seeing two movies a day, visiting what seemed an endless round of Schulbergs from downtown Manhattan to the Upper Bronx (“I suppose it sounds cynical but a guy gets kinda hardened, kissing 2 or 3 Schulbergs 4 or 5 times a week”), and discovering a world I had only heard about at a distance—the Broadway theater:
“Grand Hotel a great show, a new idea. Sam Jaffe—not our Sam Jaffe—steals the show…. Barretts of Wimpole Street, starring Katharine Cornell as Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the tragic family life of the dreamy Wimpole Street poetess. Payment Deferred, a great show. Charles Laughton gives a powerful portrayal. To watch him sit at the window and gaze at the spot where he buried the lady in the garden was enough to give anyone the willies.” Not exactly Burns Mantle, but for all my Hollywood provincialism (“finally tracked down an L.A. Times and devoured it”), my eastern education was beginning.
As if drawn back to the scene of the crime, I couldn’t resist using my gold pass at the Paramount Theater to see An American Tragedy again. I had seen the picture half a dozen times from the studio projection room to the sneak previews to Grauman’s Chinese and on to Broadway. Dreiser’s story had held a fascination for me ever since I had read it two years earlier, when Father first began thinking of doing it as a picture. Dreiser himself had come out to discuss the project and had turned out to be a terrible disappointment, not at all the literary god I had imagined but instead a difficult drunk who literally chased Mother around the dining-room table. How could the book be so real when its author was a pompous, alcoholic ass? Dreiser had turned on the picture and had even brought suit against Father and Paramount for distorting his work. But the film, for its day, was an honest effort to bring the raw, tough, searching novel to the screen. I was so proud of what I thought of as “Father’s picture” that I tipped the cabdriver a quarter instead of my usual dime when he told me it was the best picture he had ever seen and that he was going back to see it a second time. To me, An American Tragedy reflected Father’s interest in American literature, an attempt to bring to the screen the feeling for good writing he had brought to our Sunday morning reading sessions. Tackling a radical Dreiser theme was his way of reminding himself of the writer he might have been.
Of course the film had an ambivalent fascination for me: How many sons have an opportunity to stare at their father’s mistress on the screen of a darkened movie palace? Watching Sylvia Sidney crinkle her face in a provocative smile, first sexually aroused, then socially rejected, watching her pout, suffer, plead, “You’ve got to help me, Clyde/ Ben,” I could understand her attraction for Father. Clara Bow had been cute and saucy, but Sylvia had a sensuous Jewish quality that reached out to me and troubled me. In that vast audience held under her spell, I knew that I was the only one involved in personal drama with her, the only one who actually wanted to kill her as Phillips Holmes was mustering his courage to do in the movie. Nor was there any release or therapy in watching her drown again.
For by this time I had heard from Father’s studio friends that the enforced reconciliation had broken down. He had gone back to the other Malibu house and my mother with her sad eyes had decided to come east with the Viertels, ostensibly to see me off to Deerfield, but also to put space between herself and Father.
Homesickness induced a recurring dream of entering Grauman’s Chinese to attend an opening of one of Father’s pictures, or of being ushered to the studio-reserved section of an out-of-town movie house for a sneak preview, only to wake up just as the movie was beginning. I felt let down to find myself back in Uncle Dave Jaffe’s apartment in the Bronx, even though they treated me like a visiting prince, lavishing lox and cream cheese, fresh bagels, and all manner of Jewish goodies on me. Warm and supportive, they were proud to show me off at the social club where they went almost every evening to play cards and schmoos with their neighbors. The son of the wealthiest and most glamorous of all the relatives, I was asked questions tinged with envy—what was Hollywood really like? What was it like to know Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant? How could I explain to them that what I really missed were track meets, tennis games, homing pigeons, and parents as devoted to each other as our feathered thoroughbreds?
43
THE ARRIVAL OF MY mother on the 20th Century Limited from Chicago brought light to the tunnel between Hollywood and Deerfield. I had never felt close to her before. She had never been the kind of mother who touches and hugs and loves. She had always been too busy improving me, and then boasting about me. I felt she was claiming my accomplishments as an extension of her own ego. But now she represented home and Hollywood, and I couldn’t wait to see her.
From the old Pennsylvania Station we taxied to the St. Moritz, “a fairly good hotel with a radio.” Suddenly life had become richer and more glamorous. An inadvertent snob, I had found life with the New York Schulbergs and Jaffeys dingy and cramped. It had been an uncomfortable relationship because while they fawned over me, I felt their envy and their need. Father’s sister Val had a husband, Charley Beckman, who had the smell of failure on his clothes and on his breath, and who was always looking to Father for another loan. Mother’s brother, Dave, was a sweet, sentimental man with none of her drive and intelligence; he and Aunt Ray were counting on Ad to bring them to Hollywood and set him up in business. We were the glamorous relatives from sunny California who could open the golden door. Grateful to them for taking me in when I arrived alone and intimidated by New York, I pretended a humility I did not feel.
That day at the plush rooftop restaurant of the St. Moritz overlooking Central Park, dining with the intellectual Viertels, listening to talk of the latest books, plays, and films in work, I felt more at home. Hollywood was sunshine, open fields along Sunset Boulevard, blue-green waves delivering our bodies to the Malibu beach; the unforgettable smell and mysterious darkness of a studio stage and the staccato “Cut! How was that for you? Print that!”; the heady fraternity of famous and busy people gathered to toast and roast each other at favorite haunts like Henry’s, Montmartre, and Victor Hugo’s; the manic weekend drinking of the Mickey Neilans and the Billy Wellmans; the Ad Schulberg and Salka Viertel gatherings of literati with whom Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo liked to mingle. It was all the things I missed.
That afternoon my education progressed when the young couple considered Hollywood’s brightest, David Selznick and his bride Irene (Mayer), learned I had never been inside a speakeasy and offered to guide me on an illicit tour. Still in his late twenties, David had a fleshy, sensuous face, an exuberant intelligence, and a feisty independence. Until his recent resignation over creative differences, he had been Father’s most promising assistant. It was his contention that the major-studio “factory” system was wrong and that no man, not even a brainy young veteran like B.P., could personally oversee fifty pictures a year. Instead of the system Paramount and the others employed, with “supervisors” standing in for the studio chief but never completely responsible for the finished product, David advocated a more personal approach, with supervisors becoming full-fledged producers heading their own independent units—a system of creative decontrol.
Raised in the business as a boy-producer under the maverick, often outrageous L. J. Selznick, David was a roaring river of self-confidence. Like his scrappy brother Myron, Hollywood’s first big-time agent, David was ready and eager to take on the world. He liked and admired Father but would let nothing get in the way of making his own pictures. He was bursting with ideas, books he had read, plays he had seen, his own originals. From his father he had inherited a curmudgeon resistance to authority. His memo-mania is now Hollywood legend. But those 5,000-word dictations were a natural extension of the verbal Niagara that poured from him day and night, for he was also a nocturnal force who seemed unable to stop the flow until he fell asleep from exhaustion in the early hours. Later,
when I heard about Thomas Wolfe—who, like Dreiser, also chased my mother around the dining-room table—the prodigious novelist reminded me of a literary version of David Selznick, larger than life and pouring words from a bottomless well, good words, great words, needless words all gushing forth together, flooding one’s mind.
David talked at you rather than with you, but you didn’t mind because it was informed and entertaining talk, charged with intensity. Hailing him as the Boy Wonder, Hollywood insiders told each other that Louie Mayer had his eye on David as a counterbalance to Thalberg, who had begun his MGM career as L.B.’s protégé but who was Frankensteining into a rival. MGM had its share of son-in-law/brother-in-law supervisors. There were sinecures in the wardrobe, makeup, and sound department for relatives of Mayer, Thalberg, and Rapf. But David had no desire to go into the son-in-law business. Though he would succumb, a year or so later, for $4,000 a week and a relatively—or, B.P. would say, unrelatively—free hand in his choice and control of productions, he was temperamentally incapable of bending the knee, even to a superpower father-in-law like L.B.
David and Irene: what an unbeatable combination they seemed as we sat around the traditional red-and-white-checkered table of a midtown “speak” that day. More sparing of speech than David, and tougher-minded, like her old man, Irene was the ideal running mate for a movie mogul on the rise. If there had been woman producers in those days, Irene would have been right up there with David. (Indeed, twenty years later, after their divorce, Irene would produce A Streetcar Named Desire and other hits on Broadway.)
David at 29, Irene at 24, I at 17, each of us the offspring of a Hollywood tycoon, were drawn together—despite our fathers’ feuds—by our sense of belonging to a private club, the real Hollywood aristocracy. No matter that the bloodlines went back only a single generation. No matter that David was now on the outs with Father who in turn was locked in bitter warfare with L.B. We were still a family. David and Irene were like my big brother and sister who would help me grow up. They seemed so wise and strong for their age, so sure of where they were going, accepting without question their divine right to rule. And in truth, they had come here equipped to exercise their power.