That week B.P. made the front pages of the New York papers with his story of the purchase of Paramount by Famous Players for $25,000,000. “Now the bark was back where we in the studio felt it belonged, in the head of the dog. Or, to vary the metaphor, the Jonah of film production had somehow managed to swallow the whale of distribution.”
It seemed like something of a miracle at the time, but actually it was a nice example of the quiet way Adolph Zukor worked behind the scenes. For months he had been having secret meetings at his Riverside Drive apartment with Hiram Abrams of Boston and his partner Walter Green, who together controlled all of the distribution in New England. At those meetings, Abrams and Green agreed to vote their Paramount stock on Zukor’s side. In return Abrams would become president of the newly constituted Paramount.
The Zukor strategy worked to perfection. The next step was to buy Paramount outright. Zukor and his company now controlled motion pictures from their inception to the theaters. By acquiring a chain of motion-picture palaces, Famous Players in half a dozen years was well on its way to replacing the Trust. Paramount, the first national distribution chain, could now supply two Famous Players-Lasky pictures a week to theaters from Bangor to San Diego.
Outgrowing its improvised Manhattan studio, Famous Players had built an imposing new studio in Astoria. On the West Coast, the barn that Jesse Lasky and C. B. DeMille had rented was not only enlarged into a full-size studio stage but was now surrounded by other stages. Instead of bedding down in a primitive boardinghouse in the wilds of Hollywood, stars like Geraldine Farrar, lured to the new movie capital from the Metropolitan Opera by the engaging Lasky, arrived in private railroad cars and enjoyed what was then considered luxurious surroundings at the Hollywood Hotel, the only hotel in that rural village.
I saw this expansion through the eyes of my father, who had been assigned by Zukor to assist Hiram Abrams in the important job of running Paramount. The Abramses, moving down from Boston after the Zukor coup, took over a large apartment at 110th Street and Central Park West. My first memory of being attracted to a young woman other than Wilma is associated with the Abrams household. She was the Abrams daughter, who had reached the advanced age of thirteen. She would play with me and take care of me while our parents played their incessant card games, talked shop, or gossiped about who was sleeping with whom. The choicest morsel of the day was that while America’s Sweetheart still looked sweet fifteen in her Pollyanna roles, Little Mary had been cheating on husband Owen Moore with dashing Doug Fairbanks, her companion on the Liberty Bond tours. But I was more interested in the Abrams girl. Although she cannot be romanticized into a first love—alas, I cannot even call back her first name—I remember her as a tantalizing influence on my four- and five-year-old life.
While I was gazing into his daughter’s eyes, Hiram Abrams was apparently resisting and resenting the position of figurehead in which Adolph Zukor placed him. Zukor’s time was increasingly devoted to the complex financial activities of running a multi-million-dollar nationwide film company. B. P. was no longer his immediate right hand, as he had been since the merger with Porter. Now my father was spending his working hours and more and more of his social hours (they have a tendency to overlap in the movie business) with Hiram Abrams. When tension between Zukor and Abrams approached the breaking point, B.P. found himself so intimately associated with his immediate superior that he began to take his side against Zukor’s.
There were intense business discussions between my father and my mother. Adeline had begun to appreciate their stake in this growing industry. B.P.’s salary of five hundred dollars a week was the least of it. There was that Famous Players stock, which was already worth some $200,000. As a young film executive, B.P. was initiative, ingenious, creative; but already my mother was beginning to call him a schnook when it came to business.
The bad blood between Zukor and Abrams continued until the head of Famous Players made up his mind that there was no longer any room in the company for the newcomer. Whereupon B.P., without telling Mother—who would have cautioned him against such a precipitate move—marched in and told his old boss that if Abrams went he would have to go with him. Zukor was in a bad mood. The influenza epidemic that past summer had caused the first box-office depression. And now he had just heard his biggest star, Mary Pickford, after all the concessions he had made to her, was deserting him for a million-dollar-a-year contract at First National, a new rival formed by theater owners who had decided to make their own pictures, much as Zukor had done half a dozen years earlier.
In addition to her unprecedented million, the hard-driving Mary had also wangled $50,000 a year for Mama Charlotte and four pictures a year for brother Jack at $50,000 each. A million and a quarter for the Pickford family had broken Zukor’s paternalistic hold on the star he (and B.P., Mickey Neilan, and others) had created.
Now an embattled Zukor urged B.P. not to follow Abrams out of Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky. Abrams, he warned, was headstrong and untrustworthy: B.P., who was then 26 years old, should stay with the company he had helped to build. In fact Mr. Zukor would even consider giving him Abrams’s job, since he felt that B.P. had the potential while Abrams lacked the stature of a big-league motion-picture executive. But B.P., now grown fiercely loyal to Abrams, stuck to his guns.
Going out of his way to smother this unexpected rebellion, Zukor asked B.P. to come to his apartment after dinner that evening.
My father came home from the office visibly upset, drank a series of scotch highballs in lieu of dinner, and told my mother he was going over to see Zukor on important business (but was afraid to tell her just how crucial it was). He walked the few blocks down Riverside Drive trying to make up his mind: Which was it to be, Zukor and the company which had been B.P.’s family from his late boyhood, the expanding company which could make him a millionaire before he was thirty? Or Hiram Abrams, whom I was now calling Uncle Hiram, a man with whom B.P. would have to plot a whole new course through the high seas of increasingly rough competition?
Late into the night Adolph Zukor argued with his young but valued employee. There was no one in Famous Players with B.P.’s education, literacy, story sense, and promotional ability. Schulberg had worshipped Zukor from the day Edwin S. Porter had brought him into Famous Players as scenario editor. How could he now transfer his allegiance to a man he had met through Zukor only a few years before?
My father could not entirely explain it, even to himself. Ad (as Adeline had come to be called) knew that Ben was comfortable with Hiram, both professionally and socially, in a way he could never really be with Zukor. As he insisted, he was a one-man dog. First attached to Porter, then to Zukor—and now to Abrams. So at midnight he was still saying, “If Hiram goes, I go with him.”
Uncle Adolph’s anger had a very long fuse, but B.P.’s inexplicable devotion to our new Uncle Hiram brought him to the end of it. “All right, Ben,” he said coldly, “I think you’re being a damn fool, and I know you’ll regret it. But I’ve said my last word about this. Come to the studio in the morning and clean out your office.” He stood up and with an icy calm walked B.P. to the door. “Some day you’ll want to come back without Abrams,” he challenged him at the threshold.
“Adolph,” my father said, calling his employer by his first name for the first time since he had met him in the old Famous Players Film Company days of 1912, “I’ll only come back when you send for me!”
B. P.—as he told me when I was old enough to understand it—hurried home and briefed Ad. She had not forgotten the hungry days on the Lower East Side. She may have been a theoretical socialist but she was a practical capitalist. Her reverence for the Pankhursts and the Emma Goldmans in no way diminished her reverence for the almighty dollar. Less trusting than Ben, she examined people with a more calculating or perhaps more realistic eye.
The night of the break Ben talked excitedly of his future plans. He confessed to Ad that if he had told her of his decision to follow Uncle Hiram out of Paramount-Famous Pl
ayers he knew she would have tried to talk him out of it. She reminded him that at the studio he had the respect of Zukor and a firm niche in the structure of a company so powerful that even the loss of a number-one money-maker like Mary Pickford could no longer slow its forward progress. Now he was throwing all that away for an unknown quantity, a company yet to be formed.
“But,” B.P. pointed out, “the stock we’ve accumulated since 1912 is now worth two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And since I’m the best press agent in the business I shouldn’t have too much trouble blowing my own horn. Don’t worry, Ad. Hiram and I will do something exciting.”
Too exhilarated to sleep, B.P. phoned Abrams, told him of the confrontation with Zukor, and suggested they get together right then—one o’clock in the morning—to start planning their future.
So my impulsive 26-year-old father raced across from Riverside Drive to Central Park West for what was to be an historic emergency meeting. This was soon after the Armistice, when the blessings of peace and postwar prosperity were being expressed in the building of more and more ornate movie theaters, with marble, gold leaf, crystal chandeliers, and rich carpeting giving them the look of cinematic Taj Mahals.
Nineteen-nineteen was only weeks away. This was a time for new approaches to distribution, a time for innovation. Why—my father paced up and down, pouring all this out to Abrams—should the Big Five of the industry, Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, Griffith, and William S. Hart, only receive salaries, even if they ran to ten or twenty thousand a week? If these artists formed their own company they could eliminate the producing fees, take over the large profits made from distribution, and have a controlling interest in a company from which they could reap dividends even after they retired from the screen. If the Big Five could be sold on the idea of uniting, B.P. and Uncle Hiram could control their futures, in fact virtually control the industry.
Thus was United Artists born. Schulberg and Abrams talked excitedly through the night and by sunup had begun to formalize their plans. B.P. would immediately start writing a prospectus for the new company, which was to become a manifesto of artistic independence entitled “Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists.” While B.P. was banging out this presentation, Uncle Hiram would be using his prestige as the former president of Paramount to study the contractual relations between Pickford and Chaplin, now at First National, and Fairbanks and Griffith at Famous Players-Lasky. Once they knew when these four key figures, and the earnest horse-faced Western star Hart, would be free of their present obligations, my father and Uncle Hiram could approach them with this unprecedented idea of becoming not only the highest-priced stars in the world but their own bosses as well.
Abrams and Schulberg again swore each other to secrecy. It was one of those ideas so daring and yet so simple that it could be “borrowed” by the first person who got wind of it—even the stars in question, who might then proceed without the participation of my father and Abrams. Charlotte and Mary Pickford were veteran operators who had proved they could negotiate with and outmaneuver the canniest minds in the business. And Charlie Chaplin gave almost as brilliant a performance in a business meeting as he did in his comedies. Like my mother, Charlie was another of those idealists who talked socialism and practiced capitalism. Uncle Hiram and my father plotted their strategy carefully. The secret plans for the organizing and launching of United Artists went on in both households, with B.P. banging out his “Eighty-nine Reasons” on his old Underwood, while Ad patiently did the clean retyping.
The frenzy of United Artists activity I dimly remember, but the period—the end of World War I—is placed clearly in my mind, for the Armistice Day parade or riot or mass hysteria is one of those experiences caught and forever held in the memory of a child. All of a sudden (or so it seemed to the small boy who heard the news) the war was over! What it meant to me mainly was no more of those silvery tinfoil balls to roll. In some way I never comprehended, they had “helped” to win the war.
My mother took me in a touring car across town to Fifth Avenue, to a grandstand reserved for important personages. Apparently we qualified because Father had been writing Liberty Bond speeches for Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, and the other movie stars who had been trekking back and forth across the country urging the public to back up our boys in the trenches.
In all my life I had never seen so many people crowded into the streets. They were all around our car, screaming and laughing, crying and kissing. As we neared Fifth Avenue we had to get out and walk because the street was jammed with people dancing, singing, and hugging each other. Nice people made room for us in the grandstand and we spent hours there watching the parade go by. I guess the entire city was either marching in that parade or shouting and clapping their hands at it as it moved up the Avenue.
After a while I got very tired and had to go to the bathroom and since Mother (obviously) couldn’t get me there, I began to wet my pants and cry. A soldier, a real doughboy in a khaki uniform with ribbons on his chest and several pretty girls hanging onto him, picked me up and said, “What’s the matter, buddy?”—it was always strange how everybody seemed to know my name—“You shouldn’t be crying today! This is the happiest day in the history of the world!” And everybody around him started to yell, “The war is over!” “Hang the Kaiser!”; and I got so nervous and scared that I wet the front of the hero’s uniform. Then I really got scared that this soldier would get mad at me but instead everybody was laughing, even the hero, and when he handed me back rather gingerly to my mother he said to his crowd of admirers, “Well, it could be worse. It was a helluva lot wetter in the trenches!”
I knew the trenches were wet, in fact were full of water like a bathtub, because I had just seen my first movie. It was Shoulder Arms with Charlie Chaplin. My parents had taken me to see it one weekend in Atlantic City. Everything I knew about the war I had learned from Shoulder Arms, which made it look awfully dirty and sloppy and uncomfortable for “our boys in the trenches.” I have never seen the movie since, even in the Chaplin retrospectives, but over the years I’ve been able to describe one scene that fastened itself inside my head like a barnacle:
Charlie, the most miserable of doughboys, is getting ready to go to bed in his watery trench. He stretches and yawns and acts like a man about to climb into a clean double bed in a luxury hotel. He reaches down beneath the surface of the water, pulls up a soggy pillow, pats it and fluffs it up as if it were warm and dry, and then places it at the bottom of the trench under water again. Then Charlie puts his two hands against his cheek, lies down on his side, sighs blissfully as if he could not have been cozier or more comfortable, and disappears into the muddy water.
I remember how hard I laughed and how sad I felt. That was the measure of his genius.
By the end of 1918 my father had polished his “Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists” until they glittered like the stars around the Paramount mountain. And he and Uncle Hiram were supremely confident that their new concept of a company would soon outshine Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky.
Now I was beginning to hear about Hollywood for the first time. We were going to take a long, long train ride all the way across the country to a beautiful place on the opposite side. There it was warm with sunshine even in the winter time and all kinds of tropical fruit grew in abundance, oranges and grapefruit and figs and dates. It was a place where the air was clear and the climate so healthy that thousands of people traveled there every year just to enjoy the sun, the pastoral landscape, and the rejuvenating breezes. Little Sonya would stay home with Wilma while I accompanied my parents on the four-and-a-half-day Pullman journey. It was to be a great adventure for all of us, since my father, despite his high position at Famous Players, had never been farther west than Chicago, and Ad’s travels had been restricted to Middletown, Atlantic City, and Far Rockaway.
Castles-in-the-sky for the have-nots from the ghettos of Eastern Europe were floating down to rest on that distant shore of the blue Pacific. It had to be blue. Just
as surely as the sands had to be golden and the skies sunny and cloudless. For so it was writ in the Book of Celluloid Dreams that beckoned us westward.
“All … aaaaaaboard!” My father handed me up the steps of the platform onto the crack 20th Century Limited and into the waiting arms of a man in a white jacket with a big black face and a lot of smiling teeth. “Welcome aboard, young man. Are you goin ’tuh Chicago?”
“N-n-no, I’m going to H-h-h-h …” I wasn’t trying to give Hollywood the old ha-ha. It simply came out that way. Still smiling, the porter led us and the Abramses down the long windowed corridor to our drawing rooms.
A few minutes later we heard the sound of the Pullman doors slamming shut, the engine whistle calling us to attention, and then with a gentle lurch we were rolling forward through the dark tunnel to an unknown place called Chicago.
From the program for the First Annual Ball of the Screen Club, April 19, 1913. B.P. Schulberg, then all of 21, had already been a film publicist and a screenwriter and was now a Famous-Players-Lasky executive. Here, a sample of public relations writing circa 1913.
8
EN ROUTE TO CHICAGO on the 20th Century Limited, the Schulbergs and the Abramses had three drawing rooms—one for my parents, one for Uncle Hiram and his wife, and a third for their tall thirteen-year-old daughter and me.
After dinner in the dining car, where courteous Negro waiters balanced their trays like circus performers, Uncle Hiram and B.P. went back to one of the drawing rooms, and in a cloud of cigar smoke began figuring out how much they would offer the Big Five they were going to collar in Los Angeles, and how much they would try to keep for themselves. Of course the first step was to convince Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, and Hart. They decided to make Chaplin target number one because he was the best combination of artist and money man; riding high now at First National, he wanted to be his own producer and director. Surely he would be attracted to the concept of complete artistic freedom for his future work, along with a healthy chunk of the profits of distribution and exhibition.