In flight from Paramount and B.P., young Selznick was in New York to work out a deal with RCA’s David Sarnoff to take over production at RKO, the old Joe Kennedy studio. When I returned from Deerfield next summer, he wanted me to see him about a job in the story department where I would be a step closer to screenwriting. Nepotism? Were we not chosen from birth to lead The Industry—an inevitable succession to the throne?
I drew strength from David’s and Irene’s support, just as they had from Mother’s. Ad seemed more maternal toward Irene and her sister Edith than she was to Sonya. While Mother always thought Edith adorable, she admired Irene, whose sharp and what we then called masculine mind set her apart from the other Hollywood princesses. In the face of L.B.’s scorn of his future son-in-law, Ad had encouraged David’s courtship of Irene. It suited her sense of the fitness of things. But her propensity for running other people’s lives had backfired when Edith confided to Ad her feelings for Billy Goetz. Youngest brother in another Industry family also close to us, Billy was a gag man, always good for a laugh, a sidekick of Darryl Zanuck. This time Ad sided with L.B.: “I like Billy, but he’s a lightweight. He’s not good enough for you.” Of course Edith brought this assessment back to Billy—and young Goetz, soon to be a power at 20th Century-Fox thanks to L.B.’s benevolence, had cut Ad dead ever since.
Billy would go on to become one of the entrenched Hollywood millionaires, a collector of Van Goghs, one of the shining examples of the Peter Principle. But my fierce-minded mother was relentless. Instead of ever asking herself if she could have been wrong, she would insist to the end that Billy Goetz was not good enough for adorable Edith Mayer.
But even these bitter differences were family affairs. We feuded among ourselves, helped each other, hurt each other, loved each other as do members of a large, close family. David Selznick felt about The Industry’s mistreatment of his pioneer father Lewis J. as I was to feel about its treatment of my pioneer father a few years later. We were tied together. Irene and David united two of the founding families. Edith’s Billy added another link. Feudal families related through marriage. Hollywood was still small enough to be held together by a single blood-knot. (When Rosabelle Laemmle, daughter of the founder of Universal, took a fancy to Irving Thalberg, Mother considered it her social duty not merely to encourage but to arrange the match. When Irving turned away from Rosabelle in favor of his MGM star Norma Shearer, Mother felt personally jilted, accused Ms. Shearer of being a “hoor”—a category to which she assigned nearly all gentile actresses but which also included Ms. Sidney—and assured Rosabelle and all of our circle that “Irving was making a terrible mistake.”)
In my first speakeasy, David attacked the Hollywood assembly line and B.P.’s place in it, pointed to Father as a creative man with an artistic temperament trapped within the system. He saw the impossibility of exercising good judgment while subject to the higher authority of the New York office. “The money has to trust the talent,” David insisted. “One mind has to run the show. That’s what I’m asking for at RKO. Trust me or fire me. No outside interference. If I show them I can make good pictures at a profit, they should give me a free hand. Your old man has never had that at Paramount. ‘Vice-President-in-Charge-of-Production’ is a nice title, but what does it mean? On top of B.P. is Lasky, or was. Jesse’s a sweet guy but not really tough enough for this business. On top of them is Zukor and on top of him is Kuhn-Loeb, and so it goes. Getting control of your own filmmaking—that’s what we have to fight for.”
David was forecasting a new creative structure in which a producer took full responsibility for only a handful of pictures a year. He sounded so right that I was worried about Father’s clinging to what David insisted was an outmoded, man-killing system. Was that what drove him to his manic gambling and drinking? At heart he was a writer and a filmmaker with an independent spirit. But he had to ride the Super Chief to those big conventions, make speeches about “our great new program” like a politician, charm the exhibitors, play the game. He’d do it, brilliantly, eloquently, win the praise of his New York superiors, then go out and, in a drunken haze, drop fifteen thousand dollars in a crap game.
Of course David could hardly point a finger. On less than half of Father’s surrealistic wages, he was another notorious loser at the Clover Club.
Midtown Manhattan was chockablock with speakeasies, but we wound up at Jack and Charlie’s “21,” a favorite of the literati, the theater people, and the pols. Clara Bow wasn’t dancing on the table in her undies. No one was ostentatiously drunk. Indeed, it looked like a friendly restaurant-retreat for newspapermen. At a nearby table were two of the most celebrated front-pagers, Charlie MacArthur and Ben Hecht. Hecht had a couple of drinks at our table, reminisced about Father and Underworld, and talked to David about coming out to do a picture for him. In his late thirties, he was at the height of his ebullience and self-confidence, the archetypal breezy newspaperman turned novelist and playwright. Mank had urged me to read Hecht’s racy novels for contemporary style. His and MacArthur’s The Front Page had been the rage of Broadway. If anyone had a chance of outtalking David it was Hecht: He talked the way he wrote, rapid-fire, highly colored, highly charged. Of the scores of writers I had come to know in Hollywood—introverts, extroverts, drunks, teetotalers, the scholarly, the vulgar—Ben Hecht seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at and doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well.
I envied him. Dave Selznick may have been on his way to the magic circle of tycoons, but what I fantasized about was walking into Jack and Charlie’s someday with a successful book behind me. I forgave Hecht his cheek and brassiness. Possibly because I had been exposed to so many Hollywood blowhards, I preferred people who talked and walked quietly and let their words speak for them. But damn it, Ben Hecht had done it, he had taken that giant step upward that almost every newspaperman dreams of and only one in a thousand manages to accomplish.
Remembering my highschool efforts, Hecht asked me how my writing was coming along, and recommended that I get a summer job on a newspaper rather than take David up on the story-department offer. “On a newspaper you get kicked around. You learn the hard way. You gotta sit down and write it, ready or not. That’s how I learned to write so fast. I c’n write a novel in four weeks. A screenplay in two. Just pound it out and let the poetry take care of itself.”
With Salka Viertel (Mother’s constant companion) and Irving Pichel, the U.C.L.A. professor turned actor-director, I dined at The Casino in Central Park and complained, “With Paramount at 14, it’s a crime to pay $25 for a dinner for four.”
That night, wearing a soft evening gown, with more makeup on her eyes than I approved of, Mother had gone out to a nightclub with Pichel and the Viertels. I considered her behavior “wild,” drinking martinis, smoking Camels, and flirting with men who seemed to drop in at the end of the day.
At four o’clock in the morning, Mother was still out. With Irving Pichel! I read a Fu Manchu novel in which a victim is attracted to a hotel window where a noose is dropped around his neck from a floor above. A masochistic urge drew me to the window; I thought I saw the shadow of a noose and felt a chill of fear and loneliness. Where the hell was Mom? What was wrong with people? Why in hell couldn’t they stay together the way they were supposed to? I had been raised on flapper wives and philandering husbands as characters in Father’s movies. But now that he was off with Sidney and Mother was out with Irving Pichel, those movies had come home.
I had browsed through Mother’s extensive library on Freud, Adler, and the psychiatric pioneers. Although she had never exposed her children to sex education, she had delivered her little lectures on the interpretation of dreams and the Oedipus complex. As I paced my hotel room I realized that I was jealous of my mother’s all-night escort. Through Father’s delinquency, I now felt I had to fill his role. The little boy lost i
n the maze of Manhattan was the outraged husband waiting up for his faithless wife.
I was at the window watching the first light rediscover the trees of Central Park when I heard her come in. Back in bed, I fell into exhausted sleep dreaming I was home on our Malibu tennis court overpowering Irwin Gelsey—another of the men I suspected in Mother’s new life.
That afternoon my cheerful cousin Roz took me on still another round of relatives, from my Grandmother clinging to her musty little apartment on the Lower East Side to my father’s sister Val’s in the Bronx. There Uncle Charley was in bed, recovering from serious burns in an automobile accident. He described the accident with such relish for detail that I suddenly pitched forward in a dead faint. It was a physical or neurological problem that would haunt me all my life. As the violent details piled on, with the morbid intensity so many victims seem to enjoy, I could feel the nausea pressing down on my face like an ether cone and then the inevitable spiral of white lines into which I was falling, falling…
That evening I had recovered sufficiently to go to the theater with Mother, the Viertels, and Norman Burnstine, a young relative of Father’s who aspired to a studio writing job. I had also begun to suspect that he aspired to Mother. The play was The Left Bank by Elmer Rice. Like Father, Rice was a product of the New York intellectual ferment before the first World War. Mother had known him as Reizenstein; she had been an enthusiastic supporter of his experimental work with the Morningside Players. Sometimes I wondered if there was anyone in the artistic world whom Mother had not discovered. From that moment, she took a possessive interest in his success. With The Adding Machine and Street Scene, Rice had established himself as our foremost social dramatist.
Mother had a better eye for innovation than she had for quality. Even then when I knew very little about anything, I sensed her tendency to go off half-cocked. She did have the intuition to get there first, which was admirable. But, once there, she would rush on to the next discovery without really absorbing what she had discovered. To fill an entire wall of our library with books on psychoanalysis was an act of pioneering in the early Twenties. But I always felt her reach exceeded her grasp. It would exasperate her that Father, who had never studied psychoanalysis but had picked it up from Mother, could present Freud’s ideas far more coherently. “All he knows about the subject he learned from me,” she complained. “But he’s so damned glib he’s able to fool people.”
While B.P. had the creative intellect she lacked, Ad could outdistance him in artistic ambition. He called his approach honest and hers pretentious.
At Lindy’s after the play, she talked in that vague way she favored when the subject was slightly beyond her: Elmer Rice was a great playwright. She had been one of the first to realize that, when they were barely twenty years old. Here was a play, about a radical idealist, that made you think—the ideal play for me to see before leaving for Deerfield.
Over my favorite nosh, smoked sturgeon on toasted bagel, I shocked Mother by telling her the play was boring. What promised to be an interesting character study suffered from an obvious plot and an absence of dramatic development. It wasn’t enough for a play to deal with lofty ideas. There was an obligation to be entertaining. I had learned this from a hundred story conferences, listening to good story minds like Mank and Hecht. I had been going to a writing school no college could offer and no money could buy. Having been encouraged by Father to help doctor flawed movie scripts, I had not only seen the holes but had begun my apprenticeship by trying to fill them.
Mother was impressed. At that moment, with my mouth full of sturgeon, I seemed to be more of a sage than Elmer Reizenstein. She could tell from the way I talked and the things I had written that I was destined to be a great American writer like Branch Cabell, Louis Bromfield, Sinclair Lewis, and young Thomas Wolfe. She had felt this, she said, even before I was born. Now there wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind that prep school and college would prepare me for literary glory.
From one point of view it might be considered admirable that Mother (with Father’s more realistic and critical support) could take so sanguine a view of her son’s future. Many of my Hollywood peers—sons and daughters of the powerful studio chieftains of the Twenties and Thirties—have complained of being made to feel unequal to their parents, their egos not strong enough to withstand the pressure of growing up with famous fathers. But with Mother working overtime on my ego, I faced another kind of danger, that of being overpraised and overstimulated to achieve. Some of the fun of growing up was stolen from me by the realization that before I had published anything except in highschool journals and local sports pages, my career already had been chosen for me. It was no longer pure joy to read Conrad and Dickens and Melville. I had to worry about following in their footsteps. And if I should fail, what would there be for me to do? It was as if Mother already had made me a success and there was no margin for failure. That was no carefree youth going off to prep school. How to put my parents together again, how to live up to Mother’s extravagant confidence, and how to make my way alone in the alien world of New England made me feel like a very old man of seventeen.
44
GROWING UP WITH A SENSE of dramatic form, exposed to Father’s daily struggles with his writers to achieve sound continuity and structure, I thought of my departure from Grand Central Station for Deerfield as a significant fade-out, and new fade-in. At the platform, instead of embracing and kissing me, Mother became my intellectual cheerleader, sending me into the literary game to run up the score for Schulberg and Jaffe U. She was remorseless in her love. She did not bestow it on the unfit. Compassion for weakness was not her way. If Sonya was shy, frightened, and unable to show off her poems to illustrious guests, poor Sonya could stay upstairs in her room. For Mother, love was confused with enabling her to shine in reflected glory.
And yet a telegram sent to Father at this moment tells of “broken heartstrings” at this first extended separation from her children. She was like a fiercely loving bitch determined that every one of her litter win a blue ribbon at the show. Of course I was expected to win Best of Show.
From the window of the train I watched New York fall away behind me. Harlem, where I was born, was becoming Negro now as Jews moved south of 110th Street or north to the greener city limits. I stared down into long, narrow, forbidding streets, watched kids playing stickball or leaning over precarious fire escapes, and wondered how different I might have been if my parents hadn’t taken me west on the old Santa Fe Chief and planted me among the palm and citrus trees of rural Holywood.
As the train rolled into Connecticut, I began to enjoy the scarlet and golden leaves of October, unlike any I had ever seen before. Our hills at home were sunbaked brown. Although this new world appealed to me, the strangeness of it intensified my sense of transition from Hollywood insider to eastern outsider.
On the train were two Deerfield boys I had met in New York. Snooty and formal, they addressed me as “Schulberg.” In the Far West we were used to instant informality. These eastern boarding-school types acted like little old men. I wondered if everybody at Deerfield would be like that. What if I found it unbearable? I wouldn’t have Mother and her luxurious St. Moritz suite to return to. Even the innovator, Mother was off to Soviet Russia with Irma Weitzenkorn, pausing first to visit Latvian relatives in Dvinsk where it all began. This was in the days when Red Russia was not considered worthy of diplomatic recognition—that would come a year or two later with the new spirit of F.D.R. How did Mother arrange to travel through the Soviet Union before American passports were accepted? I could picture her marching past border patrols and insisting that the secret police guide her to her hotel in Leningrad. Maybe she used her gold Paramount pass or explained that her mission was to show my short stories to Maxim Gorky. If she had brought Gorky home to Hollywood to write screenplays for Father, it would not have surprised me.
Passport or no passport, Mother was ready for Russia. She had read Steffens on the Revolution—“I have seen
the future and it works”—and the pioneer books of Maurice Hindus (Red Bread, Humanity Uprooted) and she didn’t have any qualms about coping with Stalin. In her mind, he couldn’t be any more difficult than Louie B. Mayer, whom she had eating out of her hand.
From the moment I arrived I loved the look of Deerfield, the aged-wood no-nonsense architecture of the 17th-century houses, the green meadows stretching to the great New England river, the Connecticut. Because my hometown Hollywood was so new—a beanstalk sprung up in the Twenties—I felt a reverence for the past, the old farmhouses, the village cemetery where old-fashioned homilies engraved in weathered stone stood over venerable Ebenezers and Abigails, and for the river that ran all the way from northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound, making New England history while our California was still an Eden for aborigines.
But of course I hadn’t come to Deerfield merely for scenery and tradition. There was a formidable headmaster and a demanding curriculum. I had never been exposed to that kind of tight-minded discipline; my natural response was to resist it and hate it. A loud morning bell brought rude awakening; we were herded (or so it felt to me) to group meals of what seemed prison fare, like porridge for breakfast and creamed beef on toast for lunch. I loathed having to make my bed and keep my room neat, and worst of all having to submit to the routine inspection of the house proctor. I had read enough Dickens to feel like an overgrown David Copperfield. Or Tom Brown at Rugby. No, I wasn’t caned, or hazed. But in those early weeks, feeling so far from home and out of place, I took a psychological beating that made me check off the ten weeks until Christmas vacation like a prisoner counting down to the end of his sentence.