Moving Pictures

  Entering the oak-paneled dining car that evening for the first meal of the journey, Father was recognized by the attentive captain from previous crossings. Satisfied travelers tipped at the far end of the trip, but Father liked to hand out his gold pieces at the beginning as well. In return, the smiling maître d’ reserved Father’s favorite table for him and served specially prepared dishes that were not on the menu. I don’t think Father really cared that much about three-star dishes. It was simply his way of maintaining the status to which he had become accustomed.

  Over his drinks before dinner (a supply of imported scotch laid on at Chicago), I would offer him for criticism descriptive paragraphs I had sketched in the observation car, invariably getting more than I bargained for. If he liked one line in half a dozen, I was encouraged. Tough criticism was helping me. The flattery I almost invariably heard from Mother was balm for the wounds. But I knew I needed the sting of the stick as a racehorse does if it is not to bear out. Already he had told me he thought I was hopelessly over my head with Judge Lynch. And the scenario Maurice and I had written for Bughouse Fables had not changed his earlier opinion that putting the Marx Brothers in charge of a lunatic asylum was a self-defeating idea. Stung, I insisted that I had just read their Horsefeathers screenplay and thought ours was better. Father admired my spirit, but warned me that if I were to repeat that cockiness to Mank, he’d make us the laughingstock of the town. “Cockiness is helpful while you’re writing,” he advised, “but humility is the ticket to rewriting.”

  Leaving Albuquerque, that calculated tourist stop, where the squatting Navajo vendors had become familiar faces, Father made notes in the screenplay of Madame Butterfly, his next big production; it would star Sylvia Sidney, in kimono and clogs, as Cio-Cio-San. There had been an unspoken truce about the Sidney problem all the way out. It had been a congenial, stimulating trip in which both of us had repressed the urge to anticipate the future that waited so threateningly at the end of the journey. While Father studied and tried to cut a script he goddamned for being so long, I tried to write a short story about a young Navajo whose crude bow-and-arrow is rejected by a prosperous young passenger. “Only twenty-five cents,” says the Indian boy. “I’ll give you a quarter to keep the damned thing!” says the callow traveler, and flips him a coin. As the conductor calls “All aboard!” the traveler is on his way back to the comfort of his Pullman car when he feels a sharp pain between his spine and his shoulder blade. One of the rejected toy arrows has found its mark. I could feel the arrow in my own back as I wrote. I handed Father the short-short, a popular form at the time, and he pronounced it one of the better things I had done.

  That night in the dining car there was a banquet suggestive of a farewell feast on a transatlantic crossing: fresh venison from the Reservation, prepared in illicit red wine, accompanied by articulate toasts from Father and other distinguished travelers.

  At Needles on the Arizona-California border, the heat brought back to mind the trip a dozen years earlier: Again it was 110 in what was euphemistically called “the shade,” but outside the dry, stucco houses there was no shade. The Mojave Desert was relentless: hour after hour of scorched sagebrush and sand. The drawing room was stifling. The railing on the observation car was too hot to touch. I thought of Greed: McTeague the simpleminded dentist and his envious rival Schouler, dying of thirst with no water within a hundred miles, as they staggered after their gasping mule loaded with gold. What would it be like to fall off the observation platform and crawl through that alkali wasteland?

  And then, modestly at first, followed by an abundance of groves, came mile after mile of orange trees. A whole country of festive oranges to welcome us home. At the old station in the Mexican backwater, the entire tribe was there to greet us—Mom, Sonya, Stuart, Maurice, and Father’s loyal followers from the studio. For a few minutes there was jubilation. Then my parents drove off in separate cars.

  51

  INSTEAD OF A JOYOUS reunion at the Lorraine house, that night the living room was full of anger as Uncle Sam Jaffe and Felix Young clashed in heated argument as to how the studio would run without Father at the helm. Felix thought the board of directors had made a tragic mistake and that Paramount would never recover from Ben’s demotion. Possibly because he was being kept on as studio manager, possibly out of loyalty to Mother, Sam blamed B.P. for losing control. “I begged him to listen to the people around him, and to learn how to delegate authority to his supervisors, like Irving. But Ben can be awfully stubborn. He wanted to be the boss.”

  The pros and cons of Father’s new status were argued way past midnight. Sam was obviously feeling his oats. He had come up in the world from the nebbish brother-in-law who had had to room with his nephew at the Lorraine house. Now increasingly sure of himself, Sam began to see that he could survive without Father. Felix was more dependent, and therefore more defensive. Soon he would move on from studio supervisor to the town’s leading boniface, first with the Vendôme restaurant, then the Trocadero. Of course Father would lend him money to help him get started, just as once he had bailed him out of jail. Where the elegant Felix was loyal, Sam was righteous. Mother managed to be both sad and angry. And as for me, noting in my diary that “I was up till after 2 talking with Maurice about this mess of Dad and Mom,” I closed out the long day on a note of Chekhovian gloom: “I will never be really happy again.”

  Tension increased as little Stuart kept wanting to be with Father, and would take off on his bike to visit the rival beach establishment. Mother objected on the old-fashioned, non-Freudian grounds that it was harmful to Stuey’s sense of morals to let him see his father living openly in sin “with his little hoor.” The ten-year-old was confused because he had seen so little of his father that he kept reaching out to him. And it was more fun at Father’s, where they made a great fuss over him and where our old man’s booming laughter encouraged Stu to deliver his droll, precocious monologues.

  Meanwhile, Mother was setting up her agency office in the Taft Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She used her decorator’s touch to give the suite an unusually homey atmosphere, full of antiques and fine fabrics. It looked like an extension of the Lorraine and Malibu houses, but underneath the charm it was all business. To counter the tough studio lawyers in contract disputes, Ad was the first to cast around for a lawyer of her own and make him part of the agency. With her eye for talent, she picked a winner in Charley Feldman, a tall, handsome young man with diffident charm, recently out of law school. Her idea was to pay him a mere $100 a week, but a percentage of the earnings of the clients he brought in as well. An ideal combination, Ad and Charley were an almost overnight threat to Myron Selznick’s domination of the agency business. In time Charley would become an art connoisseur, a confidant of major Hollywood figures like Darryl Zanuck and David Selznick, and the producer of such films as Red River and A Streetcar Named Desire. Years later, facing a premature death in his tasteful mansion in Coldwater Canyon, surrounded by his Cézannes, Picassos and Renoirs, he would remember how much Ad had taught him. “She was really Hollywood’s first lady,” he said. “In different times, she would have run a major studio.”

  But to my innocent eyes, her new profession and way of life were still a disgrace to the family. I dreaded to watch her fill her briefcase with scripts and contracts and drive off early each morning to the Vine Street office. I debated whether or not to take a job with The Hollywood Reporter because, even with several in help, I worried that the children would be left unprotected. And that 14-year-old Sonya would be led astray by Adela Rogers St. John’s wild daughter Elaine. And that little Stuey was going to hell on a bicycle spending so much time at that beach house with Father and Sylvia.

  Actually, Mother was building a flourishing business that would in time support the family in the manner to which it had become accustomed. She had seized the reins just when B.P. was beginning to lose hold of them.

  Again I tried to drown my sorrows in sports—my own, as well as the specta
tor track-and-field scene Maurice and I had cultivated so intensely. On our tennis court I played as if my life depended on winning.

  Still virgins, still teetotalers, still babes in the holly woods, Maurice and I were increasingly concerned with the symbols of growing up. We strayed into a wicked San Francisco dance hall, and, terrified by what we saw, shyly withdrew. We assured each other that this summer we had to learn to dance. Our wallflowering had become ridiculous. Deciding to go to a “speak” we had heard about, we were rudely turned away. Still, we went to the grand St. Francis Hotel, mingled with the smart people until the late hours, and felt we were carousing.

  After thirteen hours down the twisting Coast Road, running out of gas and suffering flat tires as usual, we finally reached the old homestead in the Malibu Colony, only to find a drunken party in progress, including Nancy Carroll, her hard-drinking boyfriend, and a writer I had objected to as “an old souse,” who seemed to be Mother’s “date.” A solemn entry in the diary: “Sonya and I felt sad to think how things have changed.” And the following morning, after four vicious sets of tennis and a long swim out to the raft, “That guy is still there this morning. God what riffraff! It seems that now I find failure and wretchedness at every corner.”

  These notes of despair were sounded in a lovely tower room overlooking our private beach, with those still-unspoiled meadows rising to the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, with Father announcing a promising program of B. P. Schulberg releases for Paramount, and Mother launched on a meteoric agency career, with my Dusenberg parked at the gate, a staunch group of friends (mostly the sons of other Hollywood producers), a good summer job on the leading Hollywood trade paper giving me entry to every studio, and matriculation at Dartmouth set for the fall.

  I threw myself into the Reporter job, whipping my Dusenberg all the way from Universal City in the Valley to the walled fortress of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, where Maurice was now working as a junior writer. Harry Rapf’s Joan Crawford, having made the transition to sound that Father’s Clara Bow had sadly failed, was seducing Walter Huston in Rain, but now Maurice and I were no longer barred from the set. Now we were passing for young professionals, and instead of shyly asking for her autograph as I had half a dozen years before, I was the eager young reporter taking brisk notes on Miss Crawford’s burgeoning career.

  She had just surprised her critics by holding her own in Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery. She was moving up from the racy but rather stereotyped jazz-baby roles of the late Twenties. Having started at the bottom, in a stag movie that had become a Hollywood collector’s item, Joan had the drive that separates stars from feature players. She was mastering the art of big-studio success. It involved much more than sleeping with Harry Rapf or other MGM producers. We could see how hard she worked at stardom, in front of the camera, between takes, in her dressing room, and away from the studio. The commissary, the main studio street, the Vendôme, her limousine—these all became sets where the driven Lucille Laeseur acted out the fantasy that had become Miss Joan Crawford.

  Joan Crawford may not have been the greatest actress who ever played Sadie Thompson, but no one exposed to her portrayal could ever forget that powdered, rouged, and lipsticked mask of seduction and sin. Her face was like a sensuous canvas on which were drawn come-hither eyes larger than life and a full mouth painted even fuller as if by an artist consumed by sexual hunger. As Greta Garbo represented sex repressed and subtle, Joan Crawford was sex at the ready, her dancer’s figure threatening—promising—to burst from the tight silk that barely held it in. The poor Reverend Davidson had about as much chance of standing up to the onslaught of Joan’s wanton Sadie Thompson as the little Pomona College eleven had to stop the Trojans of U.S.C. And yet when one talked with Joan, it was not the physical but the mental power that came through, the mind of the superachiever. No matter where you think I came from, her will imposed itself on you, I recreate my life story as I live it. She had convinced one fan-magazine writer that she had been raised in a convent and had a degree from Stephens College, where she had majored in science and studied drama. That she had been a tough little hoofer at the age of 14 had less reality for her than all the convent school-Stephens College window dressing. If movie fans escaped into their tinseled dreams, why shouldn’t the movie stars who floated through those dreams? Now that the former taxi-dancer was Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and reigned over a castle in Brentwood, how could she be anything else but a convent-bred Stephens graduate?

  An old vaudevillian turned master Broadway actor turned offbeat movie star, Walter Huston also made good copy on the set of Rain. I had first met Huston when he was playing bad guy to Gary Cooper’s soft-spoken nice guy in The Virginian, one of Father’s early hit talkies. Having seen Huston on the New York stage as Dodsworth, and having heard my old man praise him as one of the few actors he knew incapable of giving a bad performance, I approached the Reverend Davidson with considerable awe. To my surprise he wasn’t interested in talking about his own career, or what choice role he was after next. Instead, he was worried about his young son Johnny. “Johnny’s got talent,” he said, “I know he’s got talent. Trouble with Johnny is, he’s got too damn many talents.” John Huston first had wanted to be a fighter; even had a couple of pro fights at the Hollywood Legion. He could ride as well as any Western stuntman and had put in some time with the Mexican cavalry. He had worked in New York as an actor, he had set up a studio in Paris and decided to be a painter, had turned to short stories which he sold to The American Mercury, and thought he’d be a novelist, a reporter, a screenwriter, a movie actor. …

  “He could be anything he wants to be, and what worries the hell out of me is that he could also be a bum,” brooded the famous father of the future famous director. He was confiding in me because he knew my parents and was aware of their confidence—virtually amounting to a decision—that I would become a writer. There was something rather feudal about it, as if I had been apprenticed at the age of fourteen. Mr. Huston wished young Johnny would settle down to a single career. “I hope to hell it isn’t acting,” he said. “I think it’s writing. But nothing would surprise me about Johnny—he could wind up winning the Pulitzer Prize—or robbing a bank!”

  Years later, I would remember this conversation as I watched them win their historic father-son brace of Oscars for performance and direction in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Johnny would be flamboyant and unpredictable all his life. Sometimes his restlessness and versatility would affect his concentration and derail his progress as a film director. But the time when he would come into his own with The Maltese Falcon, and then move on to the African Queen and other film classics, was still years ahead of him.

  On my rounds of the studios, I met what may be considered my first Hollywood date. Perhaps because I didn’t think of her as a member of the opposite sex but instead as potential copy for the Reporter, I found myself able to talk with Sidney Fox about her career, to ask her about her role in Strictly Dishonorable, then being adapted from Preston Sturges’s risqué Broadway hit. She was small, pert, pretty, bright, Jewish, and had given up law school for a Broadway stage career.

  Since she was all of 22 and I only 18, I thought of her as an older woman, and so I was surprised when, at the end of the interview, she asked me if I would like to go to a party at the Laemmle mansion in Beverly Hills. I was afraid of parties, but the winsome Miss Fox dropped the kind of names calculated to bring me out of my social shell: It was a party honoring the Ail-American football team, celebrating the wrap-up of a contemporary epic entitled All-American.

  Except for the parties my parents and the Rapfs had given—like the reception at our Lorraine house for Maurice Chevalier, at which Charlie Chaplin had gone into another room and pounded the piano to sabotage the attention being lavished on the French singer—this was the first real Hollywood party I had ever attended. It was a mob scene of gridiron celebrities, movie stars, and starlets, with saxophon
es blaring and bartenders serving the finest bootleg hooch. Sidney asked me to dance, but of course I refused. I had been taking desperate lessons in the box step from Sonya but wasn’t ready to make my debut on the dance floor in the arms of a movie star. Instead, I did what I did best—watched and listened. And what I saw and heard horrified me. My heroes, the beloved gods of my sports pantheon, were looped in the coils of Bacchus. “Those backfield stars, all those great linemen, they were all stinko, it was a drunken orgy!” the young Puritan reported to his diary. I watched, half in jealousy, half in horror, as vivacious little Sidney Fox was bounced around the dance floor by an uninhibited blond giant from Nebraska.

  I was ready to go. Sidney said she was, too—the party was getting out of hand. But instead of being driven home, she asked if I’d come with her to Paramount where “one of her beaus,” as she called Jean Negulesco, the European painter now given a chance to direct, was shooting overtime on a low-budget picture. We watched a scene repeated over and over again, until Sidney said she had seen enough and suggested we move on. Again I expected to drop her off at her home, but instead she suggested a speakeasy off Sunset Boulevard. This was my first taste of Hollywood nightlife, a small, dark room full of film people who recognized us, invited us to join their tables, and seemed to take for granted that we were a new Saturday-night “item.” It gave me a racy, sporty feeling to be accepted at Sidney’s escort. Mickey Neilan was there, with a snootful as usual, “between pictures” after a twenty-year career that had left him shipwrecked in the rough crossing from silents to sound. Teasing Sidney about robbing the cradle, Mickey drew suggestive laughter from Jack Oakie and Eugene Palette, the gravel-voiced character actor who seemed never to stop drinking or working, averaging half a dozen features a year, a pace he would continue for years to come. When Gene wasn’t on the set, the assistant director always knew where to find him: at Lucey’s, the speak across from Paramount, or in one of these Hollywood late spots where an animated piano player with a midnight pallor pounded out the happy songs of hard times, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” …