Our Latvian cheering section was tense and silent as Karl went back for his final try. He expanded his chest at least four inches, ran with grim purpose down the runway, vaulted straight into the bar and fell on his back with the splintered bar draped across his mighty chest.
That was the end of Karl at the Los Angeles Olympics. For weeks we had been wining and dining an athlete who could not have made our L. A. High School track team. In fact, a boy on our B squad had cleared 12 feet! As the vaulters cleared 13 feet and on up to a record 14, Karl picked up his pole and trudged off into the tunnel on his way to the locker room and oblivion. He was too humiliated even to say goodbye.
My own connection with the Games—through my classmate at L.A. High, Cornelius Johnson—was a happier experience. He was the same skinny, barely literate Corny whose copy I had doctored in Miss Carr’s journalism class.
The first day he had come out for track, in the high jump, I had advised him to try for the Class B team because we already had two six-foot jumpers on the varsity. A little later I was taking my laps when I noticed an unusual crowd around the high-jump pit. I was told that Corny had just cleared six feet on his first try, by what looked like half a foot! The bar was raised two inches, and again Corny flew over it without really seeming to try. At that point an awed Coach Chambers told Corny not to go any higher—he wanted to keep him under wraps.
Now, in the Coliseum, my Corny Johnson was up there with the greatest jumpers in the world. By some magic transformation, the L.A.H.S. letters on his chest now read U.S.A. I, who had once cleared five feet doing the old-fashioned scissors, concentrated, took a deep breath, loped down the runway toward the bar, and—secreted in Corny’s body—cleared six-four without even trembling the bar. I turned and hugged my date, Maurice’s cousin Polly, a very pretty girl signed as an ingénue at MGM, a warm, happy person with whom I felt safe. The bar went to 6 feet 5, and then to a fraction under 6 feet 6. The intense competition ended with Corny being edged out by a Canadian, a veteran from Southern Cal. Four years later, however, an athletically mature Cornelius Johnson would take the gold at the Berlin Games and go on to establish a world’s record.
Unfortunately, after the glories of the high bar, there was nowhere for him to go but down. Lost in alcohol, he’d be carried off a merchant ship during World War II, a wreck of the genius highschool athlete who had soared like a black angel almost seven feet above the ground.
53
COMING BACK FROM the Games to The Hollywood Reporter, I found that my routine items—who was cast in what picture, what director had been assigned, when the next production would roll—had become boringly easy. I asked the managing editor for a chance at something bigger, like covering a sneak preview. Grumbling, Billy Wilkerson assigned me a Columbia meller sneaking in Glendale. Feeling as important as a first-night reviewer, I went alone so I could concentrate. Conscientiously, I took notes in the dark on the formula stuff I was to appraise, then raced back to the Sunset Boulevard office to bang out my review. I gave the picture no stars. Feeling righteously honest, I tore it apart sequence by sequence. Long after midnight I drove home tired but happy, congratulating myself on a hard job well done.
Next morning I couldn’t wait to see my review in print, the first real chance I had had on the paper. I turned to the third-page banner over the review and read—an out-and-out rave! Socko programmer! Smart megging and first-rate cast more than make up for formula story! Here and there, toward the end, they kept a line or two of my original critique. But sometime after I had slung on my cap and hopped into my Dusenberg phaeton, little goblins had crept in and completely rewritten me to please a muscle-minded Harry Cohn who otherwise would have threatened, “No more fuckin’ ads!”
Lincoln Steffens had opened a window, a whole houseful of windows, on municipal corruption. My brief career on The Hollywood Reporter added a local footnote: District Attorney Buron Fitts had just been caught taking bribes and at last was losing his sinecure. The dull Los Angeles Times and the lurid Herald-Examiner published nothing objectionable to the Hollywood powers. And of course the Industry “trades” religiously read at thousands of studio desks every morning carried only the news and reviews that Louie B., Jack L., and the rest of the moguls thought fit to print.
I wanted to quit. I wanted to stand up to Billy Wilkerson. But with millions out of work, and hundreds of local writers hungry for jobs, I had a strong case of the Ad Schulberg guilts. And when I dropped in at Father’s new quarters, he urged me to swallow my pride, keep on working, and not alienate Wilkerson. He admired my principles, but reminded me that I was still serving my journalistic novitiate: Covering the Hollywood beat and meeting deadlines were invaluable training for the work ahead. Father’s outspokenness had already alienated L.B., Sam Goldwyn, and other Hollywood rivals. But he was always ready to give sound conservative advice he was never able to follow.
That Sunday at Malibu I was bailed out of my moral dilemma by a timely visit from Dave Selznick. He and Irene—lively, loyal friends in those days—had stopped by for tennis, brunch, and local gossip. When David, ever-curious, ever-working, asked me what I was doing, I told him a story I was outlining: A Negro cook and her young son live on a Bel Air estate where her little boy and the white owner’s son, of an age, become inseparable. Both sets of parents try to break up what they consider an unhealthy relationship. The cook, modeled on our own irrepressible Lucille, is as determined a segregationist as her white employers. “When us black folks mess with whites, who do you think gets the short end of the stick?” she warns her small son, then sings the old saw, “Stay in your own backyard.” But the boy won’t listen. When the young white master invites him to the pool and teaches him how to swim, they hold a diving contest in which the white boy is injured; the black boy tries to save him and drowns in the attempt. Of course the dead child is blamed by the white parents for challenging their son to take unnecessary risks. The mammy, obviously Hattie McDaniels, is left with her drowned son in her arms, crooning, “Stay in your own backyard.”
This was not exactly Langston Hughes, or Jean Toomer, or even DuBose Heyward. But the young, enthusiastic Selznick enthused. He saw a kid’s picture, a Skippy or Sooky, with a new touch of Negro pathos (or was it bathos?) thrown in. With feelers always out for new material, he was ready to buy it on the spot. My mother the agent made the deal. I was to be paid $1,500 on delivery of a ten-page outline. At that point, if David liked what he read, I would go to work at RKO for $50 a week to develop the story until I had to leave for Dartmouth.
With a flourish, I signed my first writing contract, Budd Wilson Schulberg (for we all had to have three names in those days), shook the mighty hand of David Oliver Selznick, and was assigned an office in the writers’ wing of the studio. My immediate supervisor was an old friend from Father’s staff, Benny Zeidman, whom David had brought with him to RKO. On the first day I discovered that I would not be working alone. David had decided that I should be teamed with an older, more seasoned writer. He turned out to be a published mystery writer, Stuart Palmer, a sympathetic and congenial fellow who took a rather patronizing view of my story and was more involved in the serious business of finishing his next mystery novel on company time.
Assigning two total strangers to collaborate on a film story was a bizarre but familiar Hollywood practice. It had never been clear to me why an established Broadway playwright or a published novelist could not sit down and write alone as he had done before. Hollywood believed in safety in numbers. Not just a single team but often a series of teams would be used to turn out a single screenplay. What the studio bosses failed to appreciate was the impossibility of two strangers closeting themselves in a small office and plunging into instant collaboration. First we had to break the ice.
Stuart Palmer and I talked about my father and his complex relationship to David Selznick, about mystery-writing and fiction-writing in general, about the general low I.Q. of supervisors and the specific mental deficiencies of little Benny Zeidman
, and about gambling. Father’s addiction was common knowledge. When I said I had developed such a loathing for the subject that I did not even know how to play poker or shoot craps, my new collaborator produced a pair of dice and rattled them against the wall of our office to begin my education.
A few days later I would enter in my ledger: “Did little work on my story. Lost $2 at craps. But we have a swell angle on the story. A Green Pastures touch.” This was far different from being allowed to sit in on Father’s conferences, indulged, flattered, and encouraged to make a suggestion now and then. I was on the other side now, waiting for conferences always late in being called. When Benny Zeidman liked our Green Pastures approach, our stock rose. Back to work, between crap games and bull sessions, our confidence grew. A few days later, when we heard that Zeidman—in the familiar game of Hollywood musical chairs—had been fired, and that David O. would assign a new supervisor to Your Own Back Yard, our stock plunged. Up and down the halls, and across at Lucey’s, we found fellow-writers in the same predicament. Everybody seemed to be waiting for Selznick. And young David seemed to shuffle film projects the way Zeppo Marx shuffled cards. One of the reasons David had given for walking out on Father was B.P.’s inability or refusal to delegate authority. Now the underlings of RKO were voicing the same criticism of David. The intense D.O.S. simply wasn’t geared to turn out the forty to fifty pictures a year the RKO program demanded. He wanted to concentrate on his own class production, A Bill of Divorcement, starring George Cukor’s young Broadway discovery, Katharine Hepburn; The Animal Kingdom; Topaze… My little story, and low-budget pictures like it, were neglected as young David indulged ever-bigger dreams.
54
A S THE DAYS OF SUMMER marched and then broke ranks to race us into fall, the pace of our family drama accelerated. Mother’s overnight agency success was the talk of the town. Of course, as a woman wronged, a loyal Hollywood wife cruelly abandoned, she had martyrdom going for her. No matter what sexual tricks the moguls might perform behind closed doors, they were all devoted followers of Will Hays, champions of decency. While W. R. Hearst dallied with his adorable, tipsy, stuttering Marion Davies, his newspaper editorials inveighed against sin, adultery, and divorce and came out bravely for the sanctity of the home. As for Louie B., if there were adulterers in his pictures, they had to be punished for their misconduct. The threat of divorce had to be countered by domestic reconciliation neatly timed to the final fade-out. Louie truly thought of his company not just as an entertainment factory, but as a mighty pillar of society holding up the House of Rectitude that was America. In his Byzantine mind, God, Country, the GOP, and MGM had become a holy quaternity.
When Mother made her first official call on L.B., the mogul of moguls had her admitted immediately. Instead of sitting behind his enormous desk to impress visitors with the power of his authority, he had hurried across his great office to greet her as she entered. Here were two old friends who went back to the Mission Road days of a dozen years earlier, when L.B. and B.P. had shared a primitive studio for shoestring productions. What a pivotal dozen years those had been: L.B. rising from his Anita Stewart formula pictures to the pinnacle of Hollywood success, the confidant of Hoover and Hearst, the admiral of the Industry flagship; B.P. becoming a household name, at least in Hollywood households, directing MGM’s major rival for more than half a dozen years, but now being pushed from his catbird seat.
As Mother came in, a smartly dressed woman of thirty-nine, looking rather like Irene Rich crossed with Eleanor Boardman, Louie threw his arms around her and began to cry. His tears, Louie explained, were for her unfortunate predicament. A disgraceful photograph of Father and Sylvia on the dance floor of the Coconut Grove had just appeared in the local paper. How Ben could do such a thing to a wonderful woman like Ad, a model wife and mother, Louie would never understand. Gallantly he led her to the couch where they wept together, two grown-up street urchins who had clawed their way to the top, he through elocution lessons, Ida Koverman lessons, and a nose for power; she through Coué, Freud, and a gift for survival. She would never have to worry about her agency business, Louie assured her, because his door would always be open to her. She could bring her clients directly to him and he would see to it that she would be treated with generosity and the respect she deserved.
It was no accident that the source of L.B.’s power was celluloid dramatics. A man of extremes, he could sob, laugh, strike out at enemies, or fall on his knees in fervent humility, on cue. Power has always been sexual. And when he wanted to exude them, L.B. could send forth waves of warmth and reassurance. On the couch he stroked Mother’s shoulder consolingly, his hand slid down to her breast, and when she expressed the demurrer expected of her, “Why, Louie!” he went to his knees—a familiar position when he wasn’t at one’s throat—and confessed his love. He had been too much of a gentleman to express his true feelings while she had been married to Ben. But now that they had separated and she was contemplating divorce, he had to tell her that he had been smitten with her for years.
As the entreaties, and the groping, increased, Mother may have calculated what effect the rejection of this home-lover would have on her agency business. Benevolent despot to those who favored him, malevolent to those who dared cross him, L.B. could be either ardent lover or dangerous enemy. Mother admitted that she was attracted to Louie. In a scene that must have sounded like a holdover from one of Father’s old Katherine Mac Donald movies, she protested that they couldn’t do this to Louie’s wife, her dear friend Margaret. And in dialogue familiar to triangle situations, Louie countered that he and Maggie had drifted apart, that she lived in isolation from his needs and problems, and indeed that her mind had begun to wander. He needed a strong woman in his life, someone he could respect and appreciate. Ben had been a damn fool not to realize what a gem he had. Together King Louis and Queen Adeline could rule the Hollywood kingdom for years to come. It was virtually a proposal of marriage.
Mother had always been fond of Margaret, a sweet, plain-looking woman who somehow had remained the simple daughter of a struggling kosher butcher from Boston. But it would be more accurate to say that her attitude was one of patronizing sympathy. There were very few women in Hollywood on whom Mother did not look down, mostly with good reason. To her credit she tried to live with her peers and to cultivate and learn from her superiors. And she had thought of herself as a surrogate mother, having to take the Mayer daughters in hand because Margaret could not provide them the intellectual guidance and stimulation they needed. From the beginning, this Mayer-Schulberg interrelationship had been incestuous.
To give L.B. his due, Margaret had failed to keep step with him as he boldly climbed the ladder. And Mother must have seen in Louie the strength she had looked for in vain in the man she loved. At any rate, either during that first visit to Louie’s office, or in subsequent visits, this tryst of middle-aged Montague and Capulet was consummated, on what was vulgarly called “the casting couch.”
Of course, at the time I did not hear even the breath of a whisper of such an affair. I knew only that Mother returned from her meeting with L.B. greatly encouraged that her new list of clients would find an open door at the busiest studio in town. And that L.B. had been courtly, sympathetic, and helpful. Even this receptive attitude struck me as a vicarious slap in the face. No matter what I thought of Father’s behavior—and my thoughts were still murderous—I had inherited his attitude toward L.B. as our archenemy. Obviously, Mother’s turning to him for invaluable professional assistance handed him the ideal weapon with which to shoot Father down. I couldn’t help feeling that she had betrayed the man she still professed to love. And yet, what was she to do? She was a free woman now, or almost, still extremely attractive, and challenged through no fault of her own to establish her identity. While she had a strong in at Paramount through connections inherited from Father, and enjoyed the friendship of the Warners, the Laemmles, and the Cohns of Columbia, the stamp of approval from L. B. Mayer gave her exactly the leve
rage she needed to become Myron Selznick’s major competitor overnight.
Her first encounter with Father’s successor at Paramount, Manny Cohen, was less crucial, less traumatic for me, but in its own way almost as memorable. Because Ad’s feelings toward Ben were so ambivalent, and because she found it painful to go down that familiar hall, confront a new secretary, and enter a domain so long identified with B.P., she felt herself choking up, with a large chip on the shoulder of her small, sturdy figure. She was, after all, still Mrs. B. P. Schulberg, proud of the name and of what it had represented, and she had built up a head of steam against the usurper, both for the cold-blooded way he had eased out her friend Jesse Lasky, and for the way he had weaseled himself into the good graces of the new bosses of Paramount at Father’s expense. As Mother made her entrance at the top of the steps leading down to the splendid office that had been for so many years her husband’s second home, she cast a withering look at the diminutive mogul squatting behind the imposing desk like a watchful toad.
“Mr. Cohen,” Mother said in her grande-dame manner, “when a lady enters your office, I would expect you at least to have the courtesy to stand up like a gentleman.”