Wilma must have handled this well, for Sonya remembers her lovingly, while I also felt reassured that Wilma had not deserted me. Mostly I remember her gentleness. I remember my mother and father telling me they were going off on a trip—I think it was to Atlantic City to a motion-picture exhibitors’ convention—and my asking, “Is Wilma going, too?” And when I was assured that Wilma would stay right here with us, I said something like, “Then I don’t care when you come back.” I remember Wilma’s face, gently disapproving, and my mother’s tears.
One day when Sonya was nearly two, Wilma set her on the park bench and began to chat with some other nurses. I was busy feeding a squirrel. Suddenly Wilma ran up to me: “Isn’t little Sonya with you?” When I shook my head, Wilma raced around looking around bushes and begging the other nurses to join the search. She was crying and that made me want to cry, too. We searched for half an hour, with Wilma becoming more and more hysterical.
When we hurried back to the Riverside Drive apartment to break the news, Mother screamed at her, then phoned B. P. at the studio to call the police.
“How could you let our little girl out of your sight?” Mother was accusing Wilma. And Wilma was sobbing, “If they don’t find her I’ll kill myself! I swear I’ll kill myself!”
A few minutes later Father came rushing in. Movie people were looked on as overnight millionaires, and he was terrified that Sonya had been kidnapped. The cops questioned Wilma and me but we were very little help. Sonya simply had vanished into thin air. I pressed my head against Wilma’s heaving breast and sobbed, “I’ll never see that little face again!” It sounded like a subtitle from one of Father’s photoplays. But what I was really crying about was the fear of losing Wilma. For Father was angrier than I had ever seen him before, and the more he shouted at her the more she cried out that it was all her fault and she wanted to die.
If Wilma died, who would take care of me? I wanted to die too.
Then one of the policemen looked up from the phone. “One of our boys just found her—at the edge of the park!” My parents rushed out. There at the 125th Street police station was little Sonya, perched on the sergeant’s desk, quietly licking an ice cream cone.
At home the distraught Wilma rocked Sonya in her arms and bathed her with grateful tears. Father went back to his studio, and Mom went back to her meetings. And I had Wilma back again.
Mother loved us, and expressed that love through her determination to improve us, but she was busy. The winds of social change blowing through the middle Teens bestirred her wavy blonde hair. A suffragist since before I was born, an active member of the Godmothers’ League for unwed mothers, she continued to support the socialism-tinged Educational Alliance. When Emile Coué, the French psychotherapist, was all the rage, we had to recite at bedtime, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better…” Night after night I slipped off to sleep drugged in self-improvement. No doubt about it, Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, our frail little flower of the East Side ghetto, the would-be librarian, was reaching up for every intellectual branch she could close her little hands around. She attended lectures the way the masses who were gradually making us rich lined up for their moving-picture shows.
With Wilma as our full-time nurse and companion, we naturally came to depend on her emotionally. Mothers and fathers were for getting presents from and saying goodnight to. It was through Wilma that I learned, inadvertently, that there was something difficult in having a dark skin in a white world.
I saw very little of my father—as publicity director of Famous Players he was out most nights, dining and drinking with movie stars and directors and visiting firemen—and I suppose I was trying to ingratiate myself with him so he would take more notice of me. I asked him if I could pour the cream into his morning coffee. He had been out late with his company cronies, Al Lichtman, Al Kaufman, and Frank Meyer, the studio manager—they called themselves “The Four Hoarsemen” because in their cramped offices at the studio on 26th Street they had to shout their business to each other over the din of the Model T’s and the heavy clop-clopping of the horses pulling delivery wagons. Anyway, B.P. had been a little late in rising and he was in a hurry to get to the day’s work. Picturemaking was a passion with him, and Mary Pickford was finishing one of the films he had written. I wasn’t interested in Mary Pickford, nor was I aware that her phenomenal success was helping him to pay for this airy apartment. My personal star was Wilma, and as I poured the cream into his coffee, I said, “L-l-look, D-Daddy, I’m m-making a Wilma c-color.”
My father glanced nervously at Wilma, who was beginning to clear the table. He had exceptionally pale skin, almost porcelain in quality, his fine features and his sandy hair and his high white collar all seeming to blend together. I thought of my mother as pale pink, with faint roses glowing from her cheeks and a pretty mouth that was much redder than the rest of her. Wilma was the only person I had ever seen who looked like rich cream stirred into black coffee. My father turned back from Wilma and his voice was scolding. “Buddy, I want you to remember this. You must never, never mention Wilma’s color again. We are all very fond of Wilma. She’s become like a member of the family. It isn’t nice to talk about people’s color.” This was half a century before “Black Is Beautiful.” It was back in the know-nothing days of “Black Is Invisible,” or “Black Is Unmentionable.”
In a few minutes Dad was rushing off to the studio. To another big, exciting day, another hit movie for “America’s Sweetheart,” whose curls were as yellow as butter and whose skin was as white as snow. All the movie stars were snow-whites. The Pickford sisters and the Gish sisters, and Florence Lawrence, “The Girl of a Thousand Faces,” every one of them white.
I went out on the balcony and stared at the river. Why was it bad to mention Wilma’s color? Especially when it seemed a prettier color than pale white or pink. It seemed exactly the right color for skin to be. Hadn’t we spent the summer in Far Rockaway where my own very white skin had finally tanned and my mother had announced happily, “Look at little Buddy—he’s brown as a berry!” Why was it nice for me to be brown as a berry, but not nice for me to mention Wilma’s coffee-and-cream color?
When my mother saw me brooding on the balcony, not playing with my tin soldiers (I had a big set of American doughboys and they were always destroying the rival set of dirty Huns), she asked me what was the matter, and when I told her, she did her best to explain, in the limited vocabulary of 1918. She said it might offend Wilma because white people considered Negro people their inferiors. They had come over from Africa as slaves and did not have the advantages of education or the cultural background that we enjoyed. Of course Wilma was something of an exception. Her father had been a minister or a teacher or something and she seemed to be far better educated than “most of them.” We were very lucky to have someone like Wilma to take care of Sonya and me, Mother said. And this whole color thing—I was much too young to worry about it. My mother knew a great deal about psychology from books (I think she was then in her Behaviorism period, a disciple of Watson), and for her age and time she was unusually well-read in this field, but I don’t think even Ad could comprehend the deep impression that Wilma and her color and the “problem” of her color were having on me.
I finally went to the source that day, to Wilma herself. When I asked her what I had said that was wrong, she took me up on her lap and kissed my cheek and I held her smooth coffee-colored earlobe. “Buddy, you’re awfully little to understand this. But maybe some people can understand things at four that other people can’t understand when they’re a hundred-and-four. There’s nothing wrong with saying what color a person is. I don’t mind my color. I think it’s a nice color, just like you said. The reason why your daddy said it isn’t nice to mention it is because most people are glad that they’re white and most of the colored people know it would be a lot easier for them if they were white. But there’s nothing wrong with being my color, or chocolate brown or coal black. The only thing wrong is the way some peopl
e feel about it.”
“But w-why do they f-feel that way about it?”
Wilma hugged me. “Maybe the time will come when people will all be just people and won’t pay no mind as to whether they’re white or brown or peppermint stripe.”
That made me laugh. Peppermint stripe would be fun.
Wilma kissed me again. “Children just seem to start out knowing all the things that big people forget.”
A fire in the middle of the night! My father and mother jumped up and threw their clothes on. I heard frantic cries: “My god! We’ll be ruined! We’ll lose everything!” I can still remember the fear, the sense of a terrible threat to our existence. No, the fire was not in our Riverside Drive apartment, but at the studio: the old Famous Players studio, a four-story building on 26th Street and Eighth Avenue where all my father’s hopes and dreams, current activities and professional future lay. While B.P.’s salary was still a relatively modest two hundred dollars a week, the shrewd and benevolent Mr. Zukor also paid his key young employees one share of stock per week, so that we had an equity in the company. An equity that was literally going up in flames.
The Famous Players Film Company had not been using the entire building, only the top two floors, and the roof where sets had also been constructed. It was a rundown neighborhood with a junk shop and a Chinese laundry across the way. Twenty-sixth Street was very narrow, and cumbersome horse-drawn wagons parked along the curb made access by the huge firetrucks extremely difficult.
Father and Mother stayed there until dawn, inside the police barricade, while the firemen fought a losing battle against the flames. Actually the building was a firetrap, a jerry-built renovation of an old armory. As the disaster was reconstructed, it had started in a braid or rope factory on the second floor and had raged upward through the Famous Players offices on the third floor and the flimsy sets and cutting room on the top floor. Film companies were uninsurable because of the flammability of their product. So the entire assets of Famous Players were seemingly being consumed in that flaming inferno of a “studio.” However, since insurance was not available, Frank Meyer, the studio manager, had installed a fireproof vault on the third floor; in it, seventeen completed but still unreleased features had been deposited.
The night of the fire all of the Famous Players “family,” my father included, had gone to a lightweight boxing match between two great Irish fighters, Packy McFarland and Mike Gibbons. (Irish fighters were then the dominant performers, with the East Side Jews getting ready to battle them for supremacy. There were some marvelous Negroes—Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, Joe Gans—but the great Black tide was still to come.) All the Famous Players crowd were ardent fight fans, maybe because their leader, Mr. Zukor, had implemented his meager earnings as a fur worker with five-dollar purses as a flyweight. The entire staff had gone to the big fight that night, with one exception: Frank Meyer. He had decided to pass up the event to finish cutting the latest Mary Pickford film. Apparently he was trapped up there in the cutting room and my parents, along with the rest of the “family,” were terrified that he would be burned alive in his cubbyhole. But suddenly he appeared. It was a scene as melodramatic as anything he had been working on. He had been trapped on a fire escape but had finally managed to jump across to an adjoining roof. To keep the fire from spreading, firemen had been pouring powerful streams of water onto that roof and instead of burning to death, Frank had almost been drowned. He was soaked to the skin and shivering, but quite alive.
To my parents and their friends waiting outside, it was miraculous to see him emerge from a building now totally ablaze. But they were movie people and after being reassured of Frank’s safety, their first question was: Did the Pickford film burn? And what about the cans of film on shelves in the cutting room? Frank said he had fought through the smoke to throw as much footage as possible into the cylinder vault. This was heroic but only partly reassuring. If the walls fell in as they threatened to, it was doubtful that the precious vault would survive. And even if it did, the intensity of the fire might be so great that enough heat would be generated inside the cylinder to melt their completed films. They had been trying to turn out fifty feature films a year, or one a week, to satisfy the aroused appetite of the American public—with a new Mary Pickford picture promised every month—and the loss of their product plus the loss of a huge investment in equipment could mean the end of Famous Players.
While watching his first studio engulfed in flames, Adolph Zukor remained incredibly cool, according to my father. He never lost control of himself, never cried out, but simply waited for the smoke to clear. “I never admired him as much as I did during those hours when we were waiting to see if the roof was—literally—going to fall in on us,” my father told me. “The rest of us were hysterical, but Mr. Zukor, who had the most to lose, stood there like a general watching his army go into a crucial battle. If the fire resulted in total loss, I’m sure he had no idea how he would meet his next payroll. But he assured us that come what may we would all be paid at the end of the week.”
By morning the building had been reduced to smoking rubble. The fireproof vault had come loose from the wall but was found in the wreckage, too hot to open. For three days, B.P. paced with Zukor and the rest of the staff, waiting to know whether or not they were still in business. On the third day a safecracker was employed to open the vault: The lock had melted or jammed in the intense heat. Not only were those seventeen film negatives intact, but the Pickford film and the other cans of material that Frank Meyer had frantically tossed into the fireproof container could be sent out to the theaters waiting for them across the country. Famous Players was saved.
Zukor wasted no time renting an abandoned riding academy across town, on East 56th Street. There a new studio was quickly set up and the hectic pace of turning out what were then super films with Zukor’s illustrious company of star names continued. But every one of Zukor’s famous stars of the stage—John Barrymore, James K. Hackett, Minnie Maddern Fiske—had to play second fiddle to the movies’ first Cinderella girl, Mary Pickford. Little Mary’s movies were grossing more than all the others put together.
The midtown livery stable was my first studio. Four years old, a towheaded kid dressed up for the occasion in a new sailor suit, I held tightly to my father’s hand as we entered that strange, enormous room, dark in the back and very bright in the front, with strong lights shining into the faces of the actors. What struck me most was that there were so many people standing around in the dark watching so few people in the light. A young man seemed to be in charge because he was busy telling everybody what to do. He would say “Action!” and the people in the bright lights would begin acting funny. A young girl with long yellow hair suddenly began to cry. “W-w-why is she c-crying, Daddy?” My father raised to his lips a long tapering index finger. “Shhh,” he whispered. “They’re shooting.” Then he bent over and put his mouth to my ear. “That’s Mary Pickford. She’s not crying. She’s just acting that she’s crying.”
I was confused and frightened. “But w-why?”
The director looked around, pained. “B.P., please! This is a tough scene.”
Another man standing alongside him called out loud as if he was talking to everybody but stared sharply at me, “Quiet, everybody!” Again the director said “Action!” and again the young girl in the white dress and white stockings said a few words and then began to cry. She kept on crying until the man in charge said “Cut,” and then she stopped, just as suddenly as she had started, and asked in a businesslike voice, “How was that?” “Better,” said the young man with the megaphone. Then she started crying again and everybody watching her seemed very pleased, and then they turned off the big bright lights. It was very dark in there, and a bunch of men started taking the furniture away and moving the walls around. Two men could lift them like cardboard. My father led me toward the young girl in white who was now sitting in a chair while a woman fixed the long yellow curls that hung down almost to her waist. A man was da
bbing some white stuff on her face with a powder puff. The young man with the megaphone, with a handsome ruddy face and wavy hair, was kneeling in front of her.
“Mary,” my father said, “I’d like you to meet my little boy Buddy.”
The people working to make her pretty stood back a moment while she drew me toward her and kissed me on the forehead. “Buddy,” she said, “I hope you’ll always be a buddy to me.”
I don’t actually remember blushing when Mary kissed me, but I remember the embarrassment caused by all the fuss that was made about it. The man with the megaphone, whom I was later to know as Mickey Neilan, a matinee idol before he succeeded D. W. Griffith as Mary’s film director, this ruddy-faced stranger shouted at me, “Hey! Cut that out, Buddy boy. Don’t you know I’m jealous?” Everybody laughed and my face felt very hot because I didn’t know what they were laughing at. Then he picked me up and affectionately bounced me up and down. “No hard feelings, Buddy. You’re a good-looking kid. A helluva lot better-looking than your old man. How’d ya like to be in my next movie?”
“N-n-no!” I said. And everybody laughed again.
D. W. Griffith and C. B. DeMille may have been greater directors, but when you seek a prototype of the carefree movie days of the Teens and Twenties, Mickey Neilan was the man. Think of the Twenties and you think of Valentino, Greta Garbo, Mae Murray, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, of Irving Thalberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Von Stroheim, John Ford…. Those were the gold-dust days, and in his prime nobody had more gold dust in his hair or in his laughing eyes than the Mickey Neilan who lifted me up on the set of Amerilly of Clothes Line Alley.
5
AT FOUR YEARS OF age I would seem to have been in kiddie’s heaven, with prosperous parents who doted on me, a nurse who loved me—a child who had been kissed by America’s Sweetheart, who could go with his father to the studio whenever he wished to see movies being made, and who had been assured by his studious and well-meaning mother that he could do anything he really wanted to do. When epidemics hit the city—influenza and infantile paralysis—I was quickly motored upstate to the safety of Schroon Lake. My mother read me the best children’s literature available to develop my mind. I learned to read before I went to kindergarten. The famous friends of my parents kept telling them how precociously intelligent I was. In other words, it would have seemed to the objective observer that the little Schulberg boy, whose papa was getting to be such a big shot at Famous Players while still in his mid-twenties, had the whole big world for his toy balloon.