Moving Pictures (11 page)

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.

A
S 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.

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.”

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 110
^th
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.