I could run, I could jump, I could read, I was well coordinated, I could remember every detail of the stories that were read to me, I loved my mother and father, even was surprisingly fond of my baby sister, I was a friendly little tyke, gentle with animals. Yes, I seemed to have been favored by the gods all right. They had lavished everything on me. Except for one slight oversight. The gift of speech.
Another child would ask me my name and I’d try to say,
“B-b-b-b,” then run home sobbing, “I c-c-can’t t-t-talk…” When I opened my mouth to speak I stammered and stuttered and lisped. To say a word, I would squeeze my eyes together until tears leaked from the corners.
My frantic mother took me to the doctor to see if there was anything wrong with my oral equipment. The doctor put a stick on my tongue and I even stammered my “A-a-ahs…” Nothing wrong that Dr. Jellyhouse (what a deliciously unforgettable name for a pediatrician) could see, but he passed us on to a specialist. The specialist could locate no physical disability.
So Ad tried a psychologist, a friend of hers, one of the early practitioners in that virgin field, explaining that I had been a nervous child. Colic. Crying all night. When she had taken me to Schroon Lake with Lottie Zukor and son Eugene and others of the Zukor clan, they had complained because the walls of the old resort hotel were anything but soundproof and my wailing kept them up all night. Ad and the mind doctor discussed my affliction in terms of my father. B.P. also stammered. Not all the time but when he was under stress. One theory is that your mind is working too fast and the tongue can’t keep up with it. Another is that stammering or stuttering is an attention-getting mechanism although it seems to me that little Buddy was being smothered in attention.
Then Mother took me back to her favorite hunting ground, Columbia University. If I had not come along so soon (nine and a half months after their marriage, she always delicately insisted), she would have liked to try for a degree there. At Columbia we entered a speech therapy class for afflicted children and their parents. A group of us would walk around in a large circle, like performing seals, first singing lines that the therapist would give us, then repeating them in a singsong voice. Ludicrous as it may sound, there was more method than madness in the system. The most extreme stammerer can sing the lyrics of a song without difficulty. Even if you try to stammer a song, you can’t. It has to do with breathing. Stammerers and stutterers do not have enough air in their lungs when they begin to talk. Inhaling deeply, as when preparing to open one’s mouth in song, allows the words to flow out smoothly. Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst’s gift to Hollywood, was a chronic stutterer. When she became hopelessly stuck in the middle of a sentence, the golden-haired pixie would break into song.
This cure for stammering worked beautifully—in the therapy sessions. Within the halls of Columbia my stammer-stutter magically disappeared. But as soon as I was on my way home again, I would try a sentence and hear myself saying, “M-m-mommy, c-c-can I-I-I …” Sometimes she would cry in frustration. What had she done wrong? What was the matter with me? Was I imitating my father? What was I frightened of? I stammered my way from therapist to therapist and in and out of special schools. The most expensive advice proved unavailing. I didn’t even learn to sing. Of course there were compensations. From childhood on I loved to listen to people talk. Becoming a good listener was a natural development. Years later when I found myself having to speak in public, with the old stammer still reflected in prolonged hesitations, I enjoyed an extra flow of adrenalin when I finished my talk, a sense of having faced up to a maddening defect and overcoming it.
My stammering also had a productive side effect for my mother. Already intrigued by Freud and the early stirrings of psychoanalysis, she continued to search the reason for my speech defect in the works of Brill and Jung and other disciples who were beginning to spread and develop their own theories. But the stammering little light of her life went right on stammering.
6
DOWN AT THE Famous Players studio B.P. was doing a bit of stammering too, but it had no effect on his increasing importance as one of Zukor’s fair-haired boys. Things were going so well that one day their shrewd, self-contained boss called into his office the Three Musketeers—Al Kaufman the son-in-law studio manager, Al Lichtman the film salesman, and my father. For a conservative man, Zukor made them a most unusual proposition. He was prepared to raise their salaries from two hundred dollars a week to five hundred dollars a week—for life. In the Wilson era, five hundred a week was a fortune. And for life!
My father looked at his two pals and muttered something about wanting to go off with the two Al’s and think it over. The three of them, up-and-coming film tycoons, all of them still in the pink of youth, ordered a round at the saloon across the street from the studio, and discussed this unexpected offer. From the conservative point of view, Al Kaufman suggested, five hundred a week plus increasing stock in the company would set them up for life. At the age of 25 they would never have another financial care as long as they lived.
The three young men discussed it excitedly over a second round of drinks, and then a third. They were feeling on top of the world. “Let’s go in and grab it before Uncle Adolph changes his mind,” Al Kaufman said. But halfway through his third highball my father was having second thoughts. “Wait a minute, Al. Five hundred looks awfully big this year. And probably will next year. And maybe even the year after. But we’ve seen Mary Pickford go from a hundred dollars a week to ten thousand a week in the short time we’ve been working with her—well, we aren’t America’s Sweetheart but in a couple of years we might be worth a thousand a week. Or two thousand. We’re on the ground floor of a business growing bigger every day. Five years from now we may feel that Mr. Zukor has got us caught in his trap at five hundred a week.”
Al Lichtman agreed. He and Ben were born gamblers, at cards, at the crap tables, and with their lives. “I’m with B. P. Let’s ask for five hundred for the next two years. During that time we work like hell, make ourselves indispensable. Then we go in and ask for more.”
Flushed both with alcohol and their own daring, the three young men trooped back to Mr. Zukor’s office. Before they could deliver their decision, he could read it on their faces. “Gentlemen,” he said, beating them to the punch, “I’ve thought it over and I withdraw the offer.”
So B.P. was back to his salary of two hundred a week. But he told my mother he felt sure he had made the right decision. He knew he had hitched his wagon to a star, or rather two stars, Zukor and Pickford, and soon they would be strengthened through amalgamation with the Jesse Lasky-Sam Goldfish company, whose young, still inexperienced, but already self-confident director was Cecil B. DeMille.
Lasky, Goldfish, and DeMille were such a strange grouping that they might be thought of as The Odd Triple. Goldfish, later to become Goldwyn, had been a twelve-year-old Jewish refugee from Poland who managed to work his way to America in steerage, wangle a job as an apprentice in a glove factory in Gloversville, New York, and, although his grasp of the English language was rudimentary, become a glove salesman. In his late twenties he came to Manhattan to open his own glove agency.
There he met an altogether different kind of Jew, Jesse Lasky, second generation from California, who had knocked around as a reporter on The San Francisco Post, as a luckless miner in the Alaska gold rush, and had finally drifted to Honolulu as a cornetist, the only white man in the Royal Hawaiian Band. Apparently this was not distinction enough and soon Jesse was back in San Francisco, talking his sister Blanche, also a cornetist, into forming a vaudeville team, The Musical Laskys. With their mother along to take care of them, The Musical Laskys toured the backwaters of the vaudeville circuit, lucky to earn fifty a week for the act. Then Lasky happened to hear one of the better cornetists of the day, B. A. Rolfe, and suggested they go into business together. Lasky would be his manager. The partnership generated musical acts up and down the East Coast, until finally the tall, gentle, pince-nezed Jesse felt he was ready for somethin
g even more ambitious: launching the Folies Bergère as New York’s first cabaret.
It was a dismal failure and Lasky was now desperate to find some other toehold in the entertainment business. He had an idea for a one-act comic opera and tried to sign William DeMille, a successful playwright, as the librettist. But with a hit play on Broadway, he considered such an offer below his standards. So Mama DeMille, who managed William and his younger brother Cecil, decided her number-two son could do the job. In his early thirties Cecil had had only moderate success as an actor in touring companies and was now trying his hand at playwriting. When Cecil wrote the comic opera quickly and acceptably, Lasky signed him to write other one-act sketches at the rate of twenty-five dollars a week.
While Lasky and DeMille were making something less than vaudeville history, Sam Goldfish was losing interest in his glove business because he was finding a new outlet for his restless nature—moving pictures. Jesse’s sister Blanche had married the enterprising Sam, in part because she was weary of the one-night stands and insecurities of show business, and ready to settle down to economic security. But Sam had first been attracted to the adventure films of Broncho Billy Anderson, and then to the longer, classier films of Famous Players, and now he proposed to his brother-in-law that they take a flyer in the movie business. At first Lasky was cool to the idea. At least he knew something about vaudeville, about music. And yet, he had to admit at a pessimistic dinner with Cecil, he was still beating the bushes of failure: “I’m 32 and all I’m doing is comic operas.” Said DeMille, “And I’m writing twenty-five-dollar-a-week vaudeville turns.”
After dinner they strolled over to the Lambs Club. There, drinking champagne in the taproom, was Dustin Farnum, who had just starred on Broadway in The Squaw Man, one of the stage hits of the year. Lasky and DeMille looked at each other and a bell sounded simultaneously in both heads. Here was their first star and their first movie! They approached him, introduced themselves, and asked him if he would like to be in their first motion picture. Farnum had appeared in a foreign film, and was intrigued with the new medium.
Next day the Lasky Feature Play Company was capitalized at $25,000, with Lasky and DeMille subscribing $5,000 each, mostly borrowed from relatives, and the aggressive Sam Goldfish offering to underwrite the rest. Farnum was offered $5,000 worth of stock for his services but he preferred hard cash. A few years later that stock would have been worth more than a million dollars.
The rights to The Squaw Man were acquired for $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in notes. There was $15,000 left for DeMille and Farnum to go to the Southwest (the setting for the picture), set up a studio, buy the equipment, and hire technicians and a cast. While DeMille and Farnum were making this pioneer journey—a journey that was to have a direct effect on my life and that of my family—Goldfish and Lasky worked feverishly to sell their nonexistent picture to independent exchanges for cash, or for notes which they could discount at the bank. The little company was hanging by a thread, a company that had never produced a picture and that was entrusting its entire capital to a twenty-five-dollar-a-week sketch-writer who had never directed a film.
The rest is Hollywood history at its most quixotic. Near the intersection of rural Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street, then a picturesque country lane flavored with the scent of orange blossoms and lined with pepper trees, DeMille found an old barn which he rented for one hundred dollars a week. The actors were bounced to work in a secondhand truck from a dilapidated boardinghouse a mile away.
DeMille, who had never really found himself on Broadway, knew he had found his medium now. In three weeks The Squaw Man was in the can and he was ready for the five-day railroad journey east to show the first production of the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company to its backers. After some technical difficulties with projection which threatened to wipe out the entire assets of the company, The Squaw Man was exhibited successfully, and earned back twice its investment. This money was immediately invested in a second DeMille feature, Brewster’s Millions, which enjoyed even greater success. The Squaw Man had been thrown into theaters like a quickie, without any fanfare, because the small company had no money for publicity and they needed as quick a return as possible. But for their second picture, they borrowed from B. P.’s sense of promotional ballyhoo. They rented a legitimate theater and coaxed and begged every stage star and Manhattan celebrity to be on hand for the gala opening. Mr. Zukor accepted the invitation, went to the showing with my father, and was impressed with what these newcomers had been able to achieve.
Instead of treating the upstart Jesse Lasky as a rival, Zukor welcomed him into the fraternity of serious filmmakers. He invited him to lunch at Delmonico’s and discussed with B.P. and the other young partners the advantages of bringing the Lasky Company into the fold. Zukor now owned movie theaters as well as producing facilities, those theaters were changing their bills twice a week, and Famous Players was unable to keep up with this appetite for celluloid. Lasky, Goldfish, and DeMille struck him as enterprising young men, ready to enlarge their Hollywood barn into a full-time movie studio.
Soon B.P. was announcing the merger. It was now Famous Players-Lasky, with the gentlemanly, ebullient Jesse Lasky operating from the little studio among the orange groves while Adolph Zukor continued to preside over his growing empire from his studio in New York.
Since Sam Goldfish also remained in New York, this brought him head to head with Zukor and it was obvious that each was too strong-willed for the other. Goldfish withdrew, to go into partnership with the Selwyn brothers. But Sam was a congenital loner, daring and dynamic and emotionally designed for one-man operations. Soon he was shearing off from the Selwyns to form his own company: the Samuel Goldwyn Company. “Sam not only walked away with half their company but half their good name,” said Father.
Another lone wolf whom Adolph Zukor tried to corral and tame was that wild man of the early independents, Lewis J. Zeleznick, who had shortened his name to Selznick. He belongs to the Schulberg saga partly because my father had to cope with his outrageous publicity techniques, but also because there seems to have been a dramatic inevitability about the way Selznick’s son David kept getting involved with Schulbergs, father and son. David would get his training as a producer through assisting B.P. in the glory days when my father was a four-star mogul. The time would come when I would be signed by David to one of those seven-year contracts in what David hoped would be a Schulberg-Selznick relationship in reverse. “You know, Buddy,” David said to me when he was hiring me right out of college, “it’s really as if the Selznicks and the Schulbergs are so intertwined that it’s all one big story.”
All one big story. At least all one beginning and all one pattern. Like Sam Goldfish in Poland and Adolph Zukor in Hungary, like my father’s family and Mother’s in Latvia, L.J. escaped from Russia and its pogroms and its lack of opportunity for Jews. He was twelve years old when he fled the Cossacks, somehow making his way to England, and then on to America. He became a jeweler in Pittsburgh, opened a bigger jewelry store in New York City. It went broke. Other immigrants might have been crushed, but L.J. was as little discouraged by this failure as is a crapshooter who lets all his winnings ride on the next roll and comes up with snake-eyes. What do you do, shoot yourself? Hell no, you find another sucker to borrow from and you roll again. That was L.J. Made to order for those gold-rush days. If you hit, you hit big. If you crapped out you found yourself another stake and strode back to the table.
I wasn’t there, of course. I was still in that speech therapy class at Columbia walking around the large room holding the hand of my mother on one side and the hand of the mother of a fellow-stammerer on the other, singsonging, “I can speak like this without stammering if I really want to…” I can do anything I really want to…
L. J. Selznick may not have been aware of Dr. Coué, but the grand-pappy of the Power of Positive Thinking was his man, too. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. These weren’t bromides: In the days of my childhood, when the
silent movies were growing out of short pants, these were daily challenges. After auctioning off his failed jewelry store, pocketing a few diamonds for a rainy day, L.J. renewed his acquaintance with a man he had befriended in Pittsburgh, Mark Dintenfass, a herring salesman turned moviemaker. Every one of the early moguls stumbled, tripped, or backed into the movies, but Selznick’s meeting with Dintenfass marked—if you will excuse another B.P.ism—perhaps the most bizarre entry into motion pictures in the history of our bizarre business.
L.J. learned from Dintenfass that Universal, one of Famous Players’ early rivals, was torn in two by a bitter struggle for control between “Uncle” Carl Laemmle and Pat Powers. Dintenfass’s stock in the company could tip the scale either way.
Uncle Carl, as he came to be called because he hired so many relatives from his native Germany that a small army of employees could literally call him uncle, had operated a chain of nickelodeons before he merged his independent company with that of Pat Powers. But this oddly matched pair turned out to be in agreement on only one issue, their hatred of the Trust. By the time L. J. Selznick heard about their feud they were engaged in bitter civil war. The Universal offices at 1600 Broadway were an armed camp. This battleground provided the ideal stage for the impulsive and daring L. J. Selznick. He told his friend Dintenfass that he would sell the ex-herring salesman’s stock to either Powers or Laemmle, thereby giving one or the other control of the divided company. He approached Powers first, but Powers said he didn’t need the Dintenfass stock. An ex-blacksmith who towered over the diminutive Laemmle, he could whip Laemmle’s ass without the formality of stock majorities. So Selznick made a similar approach to Uncle Carl. Laemmle was more amenable. He bought the Dintenfass stock.