Moving Pictures (12 page)

“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 Players 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
20
^th
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.

E
N ROUTE TO CHICAGO
on the
20
^th
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.

It was already past my bedtime, and the adults suggested that Miss Abrams put me to bed in the upper slung down from the ceiling. The tracks were making a lot of noise—for some reason they had suddenly become much louder—and there was no window up there through which I could look out, so after a while I called down to Miss Abrams in the lower berth. She was stretched out in a nightgown, reading a fan magazine.
Photoplay
and
Screenland
were getting popular then. And it wasn’t only Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks, and Hart that the movie fans
of the late Teens wanted to read about. They wanted to know all their newfound heroes and heroines: Wally Reid, Norman Kerry (patriotically changed from
Kaiser
because of the war), the Gish sisters, Pearl White, the Talmadge girls, Theda Bara, Tom Mix, Geraldine Farrar, William Desmond Taylor, Gloria Swanson, Katherine MacDonald, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Lila Lee, Lon Chaney, Billie Burke, Bebe Daniels, Blanche Sweet…. The sky spreading across the country from our 20
^th
Century Limited
twinkled with a thousand stars. It was a world of vamps and virgins, tough guys, shieks, and funnymen.

When I leaned over the side of my upper to tell Miss Abrams that I wanted to come and join her, she invited me to climb down and tuck in. Then she read a little while longer and turned out the light. I felt much safer with her large and comforting warmth to curl up against.

Sleep was interrupted when the train suddenly came to a stop with a screeching of wheels and the cars bumping together. I didn’t know where we were. … I only remember Miss Abrams raising the wide green window shade, and our peering out with heads close together. On the other side of a big city railroad platform was another train that had just pulled in from the opposite direction. An Army train, full of doughboys. It was early in the morning, maybe one or two
A.M.,
but all those soldier boys were up and dressed in their uniforms and leaning out the open windows. They were in a holiday mood, almost as crazy with joy as the day they had been yelling “Hooray for the Yanks!” and “Hang the Kaiser!” on Fifth Avenue. Only now they were shouting things like, “Hey kid, you oughta be ashamed of ya’self!” “Hey, kiddo, how about givin’ us a chance?” “Hey, girlie, you’re wastin’ ya time—how about me?’