Moving Pictures (10 page)

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.

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.