Page 50 of Moving Pictures


  I walked back to the Old Dorm in a daze. Those were the first kind words I had ever heard from The Quid, and on a subject that had seemed abhorrent to him. What had turned him around so dramatically? Had he begun to have guilt feelings about cutting off the screening of Monkey Business? Had Mrs. Boyden, my friend at court, talked to him in my behalf? Or had my efforts to define the uniqueness of the Marx Brothers finally convinced him that they were more than vulgar Jewish cutups playing for cheap laughs? I never would know the answer. But it did me good to ponder the implications of the question.

  In high spirits, I went up to Dartmouth. There was a small but enthusiastic group of us, including our Deerfield version of Superman, Mutt Ray. For me, the Dartmouth campus was love at first sight: the old New England village we drove through to reach the campus; the row of white 18th-century buildings; the inviting look of Baker Library; the coziness of its Tower Room; the sound of the chimes; the White Mountains in the background; the wide Connecticut River separating the college from the rolling green hills rising to the Green Mountains of Vermont; the impressive daily newspaper I longed to work on. The look of the student body appealed to me, checked wool shirts and windbreakers, a rugged up-country look that fulfilled our image of Dartmouth as northern New England’s answer to the effeteness of Harvard or the southern-gentleman tradition of Princeton. Mutt Ray seemed perfect Dartmouth material, and I felt a little more rugged myself as I walked at his side, inspecting the sentimental landmarks, the old covered bridge and the 18th-century Daniel Webster Cottage, where perhaps the most eloquent of all New Hampshiremen had lived as an undergraduate, years before he became a senator, a presidential hopeful, a secretary of state, and the successful defender of the college in the crucial Dartmouth College Case. Every freshman memorizes Webster’s summation: “Dartmouth, sirs, ’tis a small college, but there are those of us who love it.”

  To climax our day, Rudy Pacht, now established as one of the stalwarts of the freshman football team, introduced us to Bill Morton, Dartmouth’s reigning backfield star, and one of her all-time greats. After being in his presence, I found my interview with Dean Bill a decided anticlimax.

  48

  HOME AND HOLLYWOOD LOST a lot of their joy for me that spring. Even the usually euphoric Felix Young admitted in the privacy of his studio office that the other female stars on the lot—Claudette Colbert Kay Francis, Nancy Carroll, the Broadway import Ruth Chatterton and the glamorous, still-Sternberg-struck Marlene—were complaining of Father’s focusing a disproportionate amount of time and attention on Sylvia, to the detriment of their own careers. And, as even the carefree Feel had begun to realize, the delayed effects of the Crash and the impact of sound had made these times far more complicated. The old order was gone. It wasn’t only Wall Street that had moved in on Hollywood, it was the giants of high finance, RCA and A.T.&T. Through the sound patents they controlled, they were now the true bosses of Hollywood. The Mayers, the Warners, and even Schulberg loomed big on the local scene, but they were merely junior officers in a much larger war between the Morgans and the Rockefellers for control of what was now the billion-dollar Industry.

  In terms of individual owners, Hollywood had simply outgrown itself. My uncle the studio manager confirmed this ominous change. It was no longer a question of opening theater doors and letting the movie fans rush in. Now that the novelty effect of talking pictures was wearing off, and the Crash of ’29 seemed to have settled under Hoover’s do-nothing policies into permanent Depression, the public had become more discriminating. No matter how Father boasted of his latest hits, Paramount was losing ground to MGM, which had even bigger stars and firmer leadership. B.P. was in a spot. Mother was right. Mistakes which might have been overlooked in 1930 were examined through a magnifying glass in 1932. Warners was capitalizing on its headstart with Vitaphone. New competition was right next door, on the old FBO lot where Maurice and I used to play when we tired of Paramount’s castles and Western streets. Joe Kennedy, master manipulator, had shaken up the old “B picture” studio through merging RCA and the Keith-Orpheum Circuit to form RKO. Our poor neighbor on Gower Street was now another serious competitor.

  Uncle Sam Jaffe was a concerned if somewhat patronizing brother-in-law. In installing him as studio manager, Father had exposed himself to accusations of nepotism. But with his usual eloquence and self-confidence, he had stood up to his critics, insisting that Sam had shown an aptitude for “our business” from the moment that Mother had brought him out from New York, and that he was now the best damn studio manager in the business. Sam, on his part, had grown in the job, with a self-assurance tilting toward arrogance. Still loyal to Father, he was convinced that he could now stand on his own two feet if he had to. Like Ad, he had what Father described as “Jaffe push,” or chutzpah, an eye for the main chance. B.P. had the charm and intelligence to win a thousand arguments. But there was something unprotected or naive about him as compared with Ad’s or Sam’s grittier instinct for survival.

  In Father’s office I told him what people were saying about his losing his grip on the studio because of the favoritism he lavished on Sylvia Sidney. As was to be expected, he unleashed one of his brilliant defenses. Since I seemed to be so involved in studio politics—Father’s sarcasm stung—I should be able to find out that none of his other actresses had protested his stewardship of their careers. Nancy Carroll was becoming a full-fledged star, and so was Kay Francis. What I had heard about this distaff mutiny at the studio obviously came from friends of Mother’s. Again he urged me to concentrate on my own work and my own future; let him run the studio and try to work out his difficulties at home. He wanted to read my latest chapters on the lynching book. And since I was on my way to the set to interview Richard Arlen for the Scroll, he’d like to read that piece if I could finish it before catching the train back to Deerfield.

  He kept trying to prove that he could be a good father despite the domestic triangle. He read my stories, he encouraged me, he took me to previews and fights, he was almost excessively proud of me—what more did I want? The answer was painfully obvious: What I wanted most of all was a conventional family.

  In the tiled library at home, surrounded by classics I had been urged to read, I discussed with Mother her end of the drama. She looked like a beautiful leading lady—Norma Shearer or Eleanor Boardman—playing the role of the woman scorned, the elegant and dutiful wife abandoned for the studio fleshpots. Vigorously pacing up and down, smoking one cigarette after another, she sounded firmer and tougher than I had ever heard her before. She had decided it would be easier on all of us if they arranged a civilized separation, and, after the year required in California, probably divorce. “I don’t know anyone in this town quite like your father,” she said, determinedly lighting another cigarette. “Well, maybe Mank. They’re both brilliant, and charming, and self-destructive. Only for Ben the stakes are so much higher; Mank will never be more than a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-week writer. [B.P. was still making his unreal $11,000 per week plus bonuses.] But if Father is no longer head of the studio—”

  She paused and drew hard on her cigarette. I knew she was on the verge of tears but a fierce, mean pride made her sound angry. “—I’m sick and tired of waiting up for him, or worrying about him, or wondering where he is or—you’ve been through all this or I wouldn’t discuss it so openly—knowing where he is. I’ve almost reached a point where I wouldn’t care, as long as I thought he could keep his balance.” Her voice was rasping in anger now. “If only he weren’t so damn gullible. The best mind in Hollywood—if he’d only protect it. If he’d only listen to me. I’m the only one who can help him. But he’d rather listen to those hangers-on and hoors who ‘yes’ him to death and tell him only what he wants to hear. It’s so frustrating to see talent like that [and money like that, she might have added, for she loved and respected money almost more than culture itself] slipping through his fingers. I can’t sleep at night, worrying about it. I get up and pace back and forth. No wonder I smok
e so much!”

  I had always thought of her as tough and formidable but suddenly she looked so small and vulnerable that I had an impulse to throw my arms around her and hug her. But she had never been a hugger: She reached out to our minds, loving us vicariously through the intellectual and creative accomplishments she encouraged with the persistence of a coxswain exhorting his crew to the finish line. So I didn’t put my arms around her. Instead, I watched her pause in her restless pacing to make a surprising announcement: “I’ve decided to hire Mendel Silverberg to work out a satisfactory settlement.” Silverberg was known in Hollywood as one of the smartest, toughest lawyers in town. She caught the expression on my face and went on to explain, “I’m not doing this for myself. I have to protect the children, see that you all get a good education. Dartmouth. A good finishing school for Sonya. And maybe a good boarding school would be the best thing for little Stuart. It’s all very expensive. Tuition, and travel. Your trip back on the train alone cost two hundred and sixty-five dollars, and that doesn’t include meals and tips…”

  In Mother’s head there always seemed to be a kind of double-entry bookkeeping: one emotional, the other economic. She was able to weep for the loss of her first and, as it turned out, her one true love—and the breakup of the family she over-romanticized—and, with eyes still moist with domestic rue, she could figure out to the penny what everything was costing.

  “And so,” I heard Mother saying, “I’ve decided not to depend on Father—for anything. In all these years he has practically nothing to show for the millions he’s earned—a few apartment houses, some acres in Palm Springs, his Paramount stock, insurance—I don’t think he’s got ten thousand dollars saved—he lives in that dream world of his, with people like Felix and the Sidney woman telling him how great he is—”

  More serious pacing and thoughtful inhaling. Time for decisionmaking.

  “—So I’ve decided to go into the agency business.”

  “The agency business!” I could not have been more shocked if she had told me she was going to join the fallen ladies at Madame Frances’s notorious home-away-from-home for the Hollywood famous. We knew producers and movie stars, big directors, and high-paid writers. Agents—this was forty years before they took over The Industry—were just a cut above the wantons who referred to themselves as “actresses” when they were booked for soliciting on Hollywood Boulevard. The only agent we knew was David Selznick’s maverick brother, Myron. Foulmouthed, hard-drinking, irreverent, looking and acting more Irish than Jewish (like my mysterious Grandfather Simon), Myron would turn the business around. Until he began storming into front offices, stars were merely incredibly high-paid slaves, their three-to-five-thousand-dollars-a-week salaries not protecting them from producers who could shove them into any sort of role or picture they chose and give them an arbitrary starting date. It was standard procedure to finish one picture, take a week’s or ten days’ rest, and plunge into the next. If they rebelled, as some of the more independent or idealistic did, put them on suspension! No more money coming in, and no competing studio allowed to touch them.

  When he began to change all this, Myron Selznick was somehow accepted as the son of a pioneer getting back at The Industry for what he and his brother felt was the shafting their father L.J. had gotten. But agents in general were still at the bottom of the Hollywood barrel. And a woman agent! What would people think? It would be a reflection on Father, on all of us!

  49

  ON THE TRAIN rolling through the southwestern desert, I jotted a note in my diary to call on the overworked Being in whom I claimed not to believe: “Oh God, please don’t let Mom become an agent!” And if He had time, I had a further request: “And help me finish my book on lynching.”

  At my last meeting with Mrs. Stanton, my patient counselor at U.S.C., she had been more impressed with my industry than with the creative future of Judge Lynch. Even with a feeling for the subject, and a thick file of searing N.A.A.C.P. statistics, I was like a social engineer who knew both sides of the river but didn’t know how to build the bridge. In the year I gave to Judge Lynch (along with its loony opposite, Bughouse Fables) I was learning a healthy lesson: In writing there could be success in failure. I was learning to write and rewrite, and I was also learning that all the rewriting in the world won’t help the poor scribe who doesn’t know what he’s rewriting about.

  Going east, I walked the train looking for Hollywood familiars and fell in with Sol Wurtzel, a prototype of what outsiders thought a Hollywood producer should be. A burly cloak-and-suiter who had never read a book and who had his scenarios synopsized for him by more literate assistants, Sol was known in Hollywood as The Keeper of the B’s, the penny-pinching minor mogul who ran the old Fox Studio on Western Avenue that specialized in oaters and mellers. The trouble with The Industry, he lectured me, was experimentation. In these difficult times, he felt that he—and not the sainted Irving Thalberg or young upstart Dave Selznick—had the answers. “If you got a good story, stick to it. The public loves to see the same goddamn story over and over again. They feel comfortable with it. To hell with unhappy endings, offbeat material. I hear these directors bitching about what they really wanna make. Fuck ’em. What they wanna make, maybe five thousand highbrows in the whole country will pay their four bits t’see. I don’t give a shit about art. It’s a business—and anybody who doesn’t think so oughta get out of it!”

  Maybe because he knew B.P. looked down on him as an illiterate and an ignoramus, he stared at me as if challenging me either to agree with his lowbrow approach or get off at Omaha.

  In those days Hollywood was such a small town that Mr. Wurtzel felt obliged to look after me in Chicago, during the long stopover to change trains from the Chief at the Dearborn Street Station to the La Salle Street Depot, where we caught the 20th Century to New York. But having been locked into those Pullman cars for three days and nights with the stolid chieftain of Western Avenue, I muttered something about having friends to look up in Chicago, and slipped away.

  I spent most of the day with my golden pass, taking in The Roar of the Crowd with Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell, followed by a brace of the formula movies in which Sol Wurtzel took such pride. On my way to still another movie in the Loop, I passed a burlesque theater. Glancing around as if in fear of being followed, I lowered my head and snuck in. The strippers—“specialty dancers” in my prim diary—provoked desires that had been repressed or sublimated in sports since my middle teens. One statuesque lady so demonstrated the art of titillation, to the steamy music of “Stairway to Paradise,” that I suddenly realized I might miss my train.

  Racing to La Salle Street, I made it to the Pullman platform on the final All aboard!, watched the familiar old station fall away behind me, and then realized that I had left my wallet with all my money at the newsstand where I had grabbed a Chicago Trib on my way to the gate. The kindness of strangers to whom I stammered out my plight provided dinner and breakfast money. Meanwhile, with another small loan, I wired Western Union to please search for my wallet and send it on to me at Deerfield. A few days later it reached my mailbox at school, my seventy-one dollars intact. In my innocence, and that of the times, I accepted this miracle of integrity with not even a cry of surprise. I didn’t even consider it a news item for the Scroll. Times were hard, and dollars scarce, but we had a quaint attitude toward money: If it wasn’t ours, we gave it back.

  Spring at Deerfield should have been a happy time, but I was tortured by old ghosts. I managed to make the A list in tennis, but so far down that I lived in terror of tumbling into the humiliating B’s every time my service failed. “Tomorrow is my last chance!” I suffered through an entire season of Last Chances, playing life-and-death two-hour matches in which scores like 8-10, 10-12—always on the narrow edge of winning, and always losing—punctuated my dreams.

  I took out my frustrations in reading and writing, wrestling in the hallways, and heckling the dreary Sunday sermons. In what must have seemed an obviously losi
ng cause, I continued to exhort my parents by mail and occasional long-distance calls to conform to my conception of how they should conduct their marriage.

  I seemed to be living my life in a kind of righteous rage, storming against hypocrisy, from Hollywood to Scottsboro to Deerfield. I was inclined to take the positives for granted: my letter of acceptance by Dartmouth, praise for my stories and book reviews in The Stockade, literary encouragement from Mrs. Stanton, a growing feeling of belonging in the Old Dorm. But the hypocrisy of the more snobbish of the student body, and of The Quid himself, continued to agitate me. When B.P.’s controversy with Von Sternberg over the choice of story material for Marlene Dietrich made the New York papers, I noted: “Dad’s argument with Von Sternberg has made a lot of fellows greet me who have never done so before. What hypocrites!”

  Repressed violence and simplistic idealism played tug-of-war with my emotions. Headlines on the Lindbergh kidnapping prompted this outburst: “There was an extra out that the Lindbergh baby was found dead in the woods. What a lousy country this is! Those kidnappers ought to get hung up by their balls.” The same week brought news of the shooting of the President of France. Retreating from a sermon in church, I was ready with one of my own: “The newspapers carry the story that the assassin of Paul Doumer was a Bolshevist. More trouble. I wonder if there will ever come a time when all nations shall scrap all armies, all armaments. Not until that time will we be fully civilized.”

  But my real war was still with Mr. Boyden. On his way to New York, Father requested by wire that I be permitted to come down to meet the train. “The weekend is all set!” I assured myself.

  The following entry strikes a different tone: “God damn fucking bastard son-of-a-bitch! [While I had heard profanity in Hollywood, I had had to come to an eastern prep school to learn how to use it.] Jesus I’m sore tonite. Dad wired the Quid (GDHBH) to let me meet him tomorrow. Boyden refuses because it is too near finals and ‘no one is having a weekend.’ Now I find out that half a dozen fellows I know have permission to leave. Sons of presidents of colleges and big companies get special treatment. What a hypocrite!” The month of May was neatly summed: “Improved in tennis. Had two short stories in The Stockade. Acquired deep bitterness against Mr. Boyden.”