Pat Powers’s methods continued to be muscular. Confronted with a showdown meeting of bank examiners and accountants to decide which faction owned what, he ordered his minions to toss the company records out the window. While Uncle Carl was shooting a picture at their jointly owned studio, Powers had his troops drive a van up to the set and begin to remove the props and equipment. Uncle Carl called the police. But Pat so charmed the boys in blue with his Irish brogue that they actually helped dismantle the Laemmle set.
On such chaos did L.J., the wild man of those pioneers, feed. He noticed an empty office, set up shop in it, and although he had absolutely nothing to do with the company other than having served as intermediary for the Dintenfass stock, he appointed himself general manager of Universal, complete with a door plate and stationery. There was such a total breakdown between the two sides that each assumed he was working for the other. From the moment he sat down at the desk he had appropriated, L.J. knew that he had found his calling. He had always said that jewelry was strictly for suckers. And he had thought he was safe with that business because God had made so many of them. But the movie business was completely crazy. Anybody could get in—all you need is the gall to walk in and hang up your shingle. You look around and you see what the successful people are doing and you beat them at their own game.
Selznick’s first act of derring-do was to use the Universal office to launch his own company, and to woo the beautiful Clara Kimball Young away from Vitagraph, the veteran company that had built her into one of the first bright stars of the day. Her abandonment of Vitagraph for this reckless interloper sent shock waves through the young industry. Why, this ex-“general manager” of Universal didn’t even have the money to pay Clara’s salary. But money was always the least of L.J.’s worries. He simply announced his new star in The Common Law, sold the picture in advance to exhibitors across the country, hustled some backing from Wall Street for his explosive new company, and, with the glamorous Mrs. Young as the shining star atop his rapidly erected Christmas tree, soon had it adorned with such marquee names as Lew Fields, Alice Brady, Lillian Russell, and Lionel Barrymore. A fearless collector of other people’s ideas, he was soon advertising “Features with Well Known Players in Well Known Plays.” Quickly mastering the art of adding insult to injury, he put this sign advertising his productions in lights larger and brighter than my father’s “Famous Players in Famous Plays.”
Soon there were no fewer than ten signs on Broadway brashly proclaiming Lewis Selznick Presents: Elsie Janis, who wowed the doughboys over there; exotic Russian star Nazimova in a smash film-adaptation of her stage hit, War Brides; the handsome leading man, Owen Moore, soon to win the hand of Mary Pickford; the Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance; and the young Ziegfeld beauty, Olive Thomas. Selznick the bankrupt jeweler had transformed himself into Selznick the star maker, with a stable of box-office attractions outshining the roster of Famous Players-Lasky.
Not only had Selznick eclipsed the Famous Players’ electric-light signs on Broadway, stealing their cherished slogan in the bargain, he had actually sent a cable to the fallen Czar Nicholas II:
WHEN I WAS A BOY IN RUSSIA YOUR POLICE TREATED MY PEOPLE VERY BAD. HOWEVER NO HARD FEELINGS. HEAR YOU ARE NOW OUT OF WORK. IF YOU WILL COME TO NEW YORK CAN GIVE YOU FINE POSITION ACTING IN PICTURES. SALARY NO OBJECT. REPLY MY EXPENSE. REGARDS YOU AND FAMILY.
SELZNICK
It happened that at that moment L.J.’s next film was to be The Fall of the Romanoffs.
Lewis Selznick was the first of the original moguls to live like a mogul. It was said that his number-one star was also his number-one paramour. And that the long, thickly carpeted corridor to his private office was lined with uniformed guards. It was said that hopeful young actresses nicknamed him C.O.D. because the passions of his leading ladies were invariably tested on his red-velvet casting couch. His richly furnished 22-room apartment on Park Avenue, his staff of liveried servants, his collection of Ming vases from China, his four Rolls-Royces, his thousand-dollar-a-week allowances to his teenage sons, David and Myron, and his offering them as many starlets as they could handle, his taste for the finest of French wines and the largest of Havana cigars, his reckless gambling: The life style of this scandalous instant millionaire set the stereotype for motion-picture tycoons that a score of quiet, thoughtful, withdrawn Irving Thalbergs would never live down. Indeed, the L. J. Selznick appetite for life was to leave its stamp on his sons as it did on my father and L. B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, and the other great studio kings who were to reign over Hollywood’s imperial days.
The quiet, undemonstrative Zukor, exasperated with L.J.’s “showmanship,” his excessive living habits, and most of all with his penchant for stealing Famous Players’ ideas, summoned my father to discuss what to do about it. In behalf of Famous Players, my father had staged the first celebrated openings, with the stars of other companies and the leading celebrities of the city invited to attend. But L.J. was making those openings seem tame by staging his with military bands, ragtime music, dancing girls, and the atmosphere of an incipient orgy.
“From the beginning I’ve fought for good taste,” Mr. Zukor said solemnly, looking at the Selznick billboards from his office window. “But this man cheapens everything he touches. He’s a disgrace to our business. We’ve got to get rid of him!”
“Maybe we can talk him into going back to Russia to present his offer to the Czar in person,” my father suggested. “The Red Guards will take one look at that cigar-smoking capitalist and throw him into the same cell with Nicholas.”
Zukor wasn’t amused. He was a man of total concentration and now his mind was fixed on running this unpredictable rival out of motion pictures. “He’s meshugah for those Chink vases,” Zukor said. “Tell him I’ll meet him at the Astor. I’ll offer him five thousand a month to live in China. He can fill a palace with his dancing girls and those crazy vases of his.”
The story sounds apocryphal but since both my father and L.J.’s son David told it to me in almost identical steps twenty years apart, I believe it. In fact the entire saga of Lewis J. Selznick has the ring of apocrypha, for L.J. was always larger than life. But the tales my father taught me are authentic.
When Adolph Zukor had his meeting with Lewis Selznick at the Hotel Astor and made his desperate proposition to this thorn in the heel of the young film company, L.J. laughed in his face. “Hell no, Adolph! You can’t send me to China!” he roared. “I’m having too much fun!”
So Zukor conceived a less direct, more insidious idea. He would make Selznick a partner! He would offer L.J. one million dollars to give up his own company and form a new one, a subsidiary of Famous Players to be called Select, in which Selznick and Zukor would each own 50 percent of the stock. L.J. could still produce his own pictures with his own stars, but they would be made at the steadily expanding Famous Players-Lasky studio in Hollywood, under the aegis of the parent organization.
“Even if it wasn’t a brilliant business move,” my father told me, “it was worth a million dollars to Zukor to remove the name of Selznick from the billboards of Broadway. L.J. would still make a lot of money but there would be no more L.J. SELZNICK PRESENTS. L.J. would prosper, but under the thumb of Zukor, in anonymity.”
The plan worked, but only for a while. The original creator of Advertisements For Myself sulked in his opulent tent of anonymity; he now had a million dollars and no fun. And he had always taught his sons that money was only worth making as a means of gaining fame, power, and a hell of a good time. Broke and out of work only a few years before, now he could lose a hundred thousand dollars in a jumbo pot at a poker game, laugh off his outrageous bluff of a hand, light up a dollar Havana, and be eager for the next deal. “Mr. Zukor despised him,” Father told me later, “but I always had a sneaking admiration for him. He wasn’t a good gambler because he liked to bluff all the time, in business and at cards, but at least he did it in a big way. And he always laughed when he lost.”
B.P., as I was to observe him in the years ahead, wasn’t a bluff in his profession. He had a real gift for writing and later making and promoting pictures. But he was the same kind of gambler Selznick was. My mother tells me that L.J. and B.P. at the same poker table were an impossible pair. Both of them liked to go all out on every hand regardless of how poor it was. To throw their cards down and watch the other players vie for the pot was to be out of action, to miss the excitement. In self-defense, Adeline, shy and still naive in her early twenties, learned to play poker and was soon playing it more knowledgeably than Ben; Florence Selznick too learned to hold her own in those wild games with big-league gamblers like Joe Schenck, Bill Brady, the “Zukor boys” Kaufman and Lichtman, and the cigar-smoking happy loser, B.P.
For my parents’ fifth wedding anniversary, L.J. presented them with an expensive poker table, large enough to seat eight players. There were brass indentations for chips in the felt beside the place of each player, and the large circular table had an outer rim also trimmed in felt into which a winning player could sweep his chips. It was to become a family heirloom, accompanying us to Hollywood and holding an important place in half-a-dozen homes from Los Angeles to Malibu and back again as our fortunes rose and ebbed. I was to watch B.P. throwing his money away on that table through a thousand and one nights. On that same anniversary, the expansive L. J. Selznick gave me a toy card table: in the hope that I would develop into the same reckless plunger he had encouraged his sons to be? But my father’s profligacy at that table and at countless tables in private homes and casinos around the world forever cured me of the gaming itch.
B.P.’s gambling, like L.J. Selznick’s, was of Dostoevskian proportions. Instant psychoanalysis tells us that they were suffering from guilt at the size of their weekly paychecks and were determined to rid themselves of the filthy stuff to which, deep down, they did not feel rightly entitled. In both L.J. and B.P. there were wild streaks, but as this father’s son sees it, L.J. would cross the line into an area of questionable principles where the equally reckless but somewhat more scrupulous Schulberg hesitated to follow.
For example (while I was still four), Mr. Zukor glanced out of his office window one morning and let out the nearest thing to a scream my father had ever heard from that quiet man. What had triggered this outburst was a large sign, again dwarfing one of Famous Players’, proclaiming SELZNICK PRESENTS … OLIVE THOMAS.
Olive Thomas was a 1918 forerunner of Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe. Born Oliveretta Duffy in a grimy Pennsylvania mining town, unhappily married to a drunken miner in her middle teens, escaping those depressing surroundings by fleeing to New York, she won the Christy Girl competition to find a new model, caught the eye of Florenz Ziegfeld and became a Ziegfeld Girl—with a new name and a new fame as the most glorified of the Follies beauties. Rich men filled her dressing room with American Beauty roses and tucked pearl necklaces and diamond rings into the bouquets. Olive Thomas was the toast of Broadway, but Triangle Pictures hoped to make her the toast of America. When its contract ran out, every company in town was after her, but she signed with L.J.’s precocious seventeen-year-old son Myron.
Young Myron had never produced a picture, but L.J. had filled him full of that Selznick super-confidence. More important, L.J. could use his son to get around his contract with Famous Players, calling for the removal of his name from the posters, the billboards, and the screen. But Myron’s name was also Selznick, and there was nothing in L.J.’s contract to prevent his son’s using his own name over his own pictures.
But were they his own pictures? The Selznicks’ Olive Thomas ploy led to another of those bitter internecine motion-picture wars. It did not require the service of the Pinkertons to discover that Myron was working out of L.J.’s Select Pictures office at 729 Broadway, and that it was full of posters featuring Olive Thomas and plans for further Myron Selznick productions. Obviously L.J. had pocketed the million dollars that Zukor had given him as a payoff and then had outfoxed him by backing his son’s production company.
Famous Players fought back. Zukor had my father write an open letter under Zukor’s signature in the trade papers denouncing Selznick’s underhanded tactics. He engaged lawyers to hale Selznick into court and to force him out of the presidency of Select Pictures. But L. J., counterattacking, finally managed to buy out Zukor and revert to the ballyhoo of LEWIS J. SELZNICK PRESENTS…
“L.J.’s gall couldn’t be divided into three parts like Caesar’s,” said my father. “That gall was as big and as durable as Gibraltar. The sharpest knives in the industry, including my own, couldn’t make a dent in it.”
The happy pirate of other companies’ slogans, picture ideas, and stars had paraphrased the Mutual slogan, “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly,” with typically Selznickian variation, “Selznick Pictures Make Happy Hours.” In a characteristic gesture of that gall which both offended and fascinated my father, L.J. had presented a gold watch to Al Lichtman, sales manager for Famous Players-Lasky, with an inscription on the back illuminated in diamonds. In small letters it said, TO AL LICHTMAN. Then, in letters more than twice that size:
From
LEWIS J. SELZNICK
In grateful appreciation of
SELZNICK PICTURES
MAKE HAPPY HOURS
The expensive gift was such a conversation piece that Lichtman could not resist showing it wherever he went, and since he was in charge of selling a hundred Famous Players-Lasky pictures a year, he was constantly on the move. So the infuriating L.J. had succeeded in hanging a widely circulated ad for Selznick Pictures on the wrist of the head salesman of his most hated competitor.
But time or fate was to do to L. J. Selznick what his most determined rivals had been unable to accomplish. The nude body of Olive Thomas was discovered sprawled across a king-size bed at the luxurious Hotel Crillon in Paris. Only 20 years old and at the height of her fame, married to Mary’s madcap brother Jack Pickford (also doomed to die young from an excess of living), the beautiful Selznick star was found with an empty bottle of mercury tablets in her hand. The press of the day played up the angle of drug abuse, and so the Selznick company not only lost its most promising attraction but came under attack for foisting dissolute stars upon a trusting public. With his customary ingenuity, L.J. fought back, conceiving of Will Hays, Harding’s Postmaster-General, as an official overseer of public morals to take the heat off the industry.
But there was more to come. In Adolph Zukor he had made a dangerous enemy who worked quietly behind the scenes and enticed L.J.’s first big star, Clara Kimball Young, away from him. Soon there were other raids on his crumbling empire. David and Myron would always believe that the industry ganged up to drive their old man out of the business and they may have been right. The Zukors, the Laemmles, the Goldwyns, and the Laskys all feared Selznick the buccaneer, and, as they had proved to the once almighty Trust, they could be a dangerous wolf pack when they ran together.
So the fast-moving L.J. was finally run to earth. The man who could have sold out for millions of dollars only a few years after walking uninvited into Universal was now discovering that Wall Street and the banks had lost faith in him. Companies like Famous Players-Lasky and Universal were obviously more stable and better organized. One by one he had to sacrifice his Rolls-Royces. One by one Florence sold her diamonds and rubies. From the extravagant 22-room apartment on Park Avenue, the Selznicks were forced to retreat to three rooms cluttered with mementos, Ming vases, and other trophies of his short-lived glory. His main assets were his sons Myron and David, who would wreak their vengeance on what they considered an ungrateful industry with triumphs even more spectacular and longer-lasting than his own.
7
AS THE PICTURE business flourished through the war years, its economic structure became increasingly complicated. Film salesmen like Al Lichtman had been selling their companies’ products state by state to exchanges or middlemen who then turned around and leased the movies to the individual theaters.
br /> One of the pioneer theater-owners was W. W. Hodkinson, who started with one small theater in Ogden, Utah, ran it into a chain, then became interested in the distribution of films to theaters, and was soon general manager of the Western operation for the Trust. When the Trust collapsed, Hodkinson formed his own exchange or distribution company, Paramount, absorbing many smaller exchanges in the process.
Although Zukor distrusted Hodkinson as a hard-driving businessman who did not have the best interest of the production companies at heart, they pooled their interests in Paramount, which would now distribute the Zukor-Lasky pictures, with 35 percent to the producers. Hodkinson became president and general manager. Regrettably, in controlling all of the Paramount exchanges across the country, he thereby became the boss of Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky. He could tell them how many comedies he wanted, how many dramas, how to budget them, and whom to hire and fire on the basis of the box-office returns. As Father said when I first became aware of this tug-of-war between business and art, “It was not only a case of the tail wagging the dog, Hodkinson was trying to take over our bark.”
At the annual Paramount meetings, Hodkinson was re-elected president by acclamation year after year. But then came the unexpected moment when a New England exhibitor rose and said, “I nominate Hiram Abrams.” “That name dropped on the meeting like a bombshell,” Father recalled. “Before the s.o.b. Hodkinson knew what hit him, there was a vote of hands and he was out of office. He was a silent, unfriendly man, cold and abrupt in his dealings with all of us, even Mr. Zukor. When he saw his control of Paramount, and therefore of Famous Players, disappear like that, he didn’t say a word. He simply reached for his hat and walked out.”