Moving Pictures (13 page)

The banter from the Army car went on for a few minutes and then a whistle blew—that lovely, prolonged, repeated steam-engine sound—and our train began to lurch slowly forward, the doughboys leaning out of their cars shouting affectionately obscene farewells.

Miss Abrams lowered the blind but the night lights of the city we were passing through flickered around the edges of the window shade into our darkened, cozy drawing room.

What were all those soldier boys laughing about, I wanted to know? What were all those things they were shouting at us?

“You see, boys and girls are different. It doesn’t matter now when you’re so small and I’m so much older than you. But in about ten years it won’t seem right for us to be sleeping together in the same bed like this.”

“Mommy and Daddy sleep in the same bed. And so does your Mommy and Daddy.”

“That’s different. They’re married.”

But the doughboys who were laughing and shouting about coming over and getting into bed with her, they weren’t married to her? Sometimes people do it when they aren’t married, Miss Abrams said. They aren’t supposed to, but they do. She knew all about it from an older girl who had explained it to her. Soldiers who came back from the war seemed to like to do it a lot. And vamps in the movies like Theda Bara and Alia Nazimova could make men want to do it so bad that it drove them out of their minds.

After that, whenever I crawled into the lower to join Uncle Hiram’s daughter, as I did every night of our long trip to California, it was with a new sense of excitement. She never went beyond that first lesson in
la difference
but the risqué invitations shouted across the station platform were to be planted forever in my mind as the first tentative opening of that mysterious door through which we all must pass on our way from the cloying innocence of Mary Pickford to the forthright carnality of Mae West.

Chicago was cold, hurried, and confusing. The
20
^th
Century Limited
had come to the end of its line and all our luggage—great steamer trunks along with a van full of suitcases—had to be removed from drawing rooms and baggage car and transported through a chill, noisy city to another station where we were to board a second train, the
Santa Fe Chief,
which would carry us the rest of the way to Los Angeles.

Another great train to explore, this one even grander than the first. Now the Schulbergs and the Abramses were really traveling in style, for in addition to our three drawing rooms we had an extra compartment, with doors that could open into the adjoining drawing room, so that during the day the adults had a fair-sized living room in which to play their card games, plan their strategy, and even eat and drink. Sometimes my roommate and I would have our meals in the dining car while our parents had theirs served in their rooms. How important I felt being allowed to dine alone with Miss Abrams in that restaurant on wheels!

After we left the East, the landscape changed dramatically. From the splendid balcony large enough for two rows of seats at the rear of the observation car, Miss Abrams and I could watch midwestern America
streaming backward as the great
Chief
sped determinedly westward. Then on to the hot, dry, unexpected Southwest, as exciting to my parents as it was to me.

A man was racing his horse alongside the train. A man with a big hat and a rope wound round the saddle: a cowboy, an honest-to-God cowboy, not Max Aronson pretending to be Broncho Billy but a cowhand who looked after cows and steers and bulls and didn’t aim his gun at you, didn’t go around looking for the bad guys in the black hats, but was just out there in the dust and the grime working the range for a living. A true-to-life cowboy such as Daddy’s movies and Uncle Hiram’s movies and C. B. DeMille’s movies would never show, because all work and no gunplay doesn’t make jack, as my father would have said.

I watched my first real cowboy disappear into the dust of the sagebrush and the cactus. We were in rugged Western country now, crossing New Mexico. It was so hot and dusty that we could no longer sit on the observation platform, 110 in the shade, with no shade in sight for what looked like five hundred miles. We fought off the heat of the Southwest by pulling sheets from the berths, wetting them with what passed for cool water in the pull-down sink, and then draping them across the drawing-room windows: air conditioning, vintage 1918… Who would travel today, in an unairconditioned train through heat that blistered the land? Unthinkable. We lived the unthinkable, just as the pioneers who preceded us loaded their families and their spare worldly goods into covered wagons, crossed a continent without roads, climbed and descended hostile mountains, ran out of food and water, starved and drank a handful of sand for their final toast to whatever god drove them westward…

Those
were pioneers, and so were we, the Schulbergs and the Abramses, even though we traveled strictly first class.

And although the
Santa Fe Chief
was proud of its cuisine, the confident B.P. in all his 26-year-old affluence had made arrangements with the dining-car captain to take on special supplies at each great terminal where its local product was prized: choice beef in Kansas City and freshly caught brook trout in Colorado… With what marvelous ease did the son of the dollar-a-day sandwich man take to his newfound luxury. With the grace of a Jay Gatz he identified himself to the captain as soon as we were comfortably installed in our drawing rooms, but not in the brash, money-flashing, grammar-smashing way of the immigrant moguls among whom he moved. No, the young man from Rivington Street who
had already forgotten the sound of Yiddish, having exchanged it for the language of Dickens, Galsworthy, and Shaw, knew to the manor born how to express his desires subtly to the traveling maître d’ how to suggest the handsome bribe that would be forthcoming for extra favors without so much as a whisper of that vulgar commodity called money. “It’s all arranged,” he said to my mother, “we’ll have brook trout for dinner at seven o’clock.” And at seven, there we were in the gleaming dining car, the adult Schulbergs and Abramses at their elegant table for four, Miss Abrams and I seated across the aisle at our own table for two, dining on fresh-caught trout cooked to perfection.

In the movies, you always knew when William S. Hart was headin’ into Injun country because suddenly, as the wagon train went by down in the valley, there would be a close shot of feathered headgear rising menacingly from behind a rock on the mountainside. Then a fierce bronze face (a painted Caucasian) would signal to a group of fellow-savages waiting behind him, their deadly bows and arrows at their sides. On
our
wagon train, the
Santa Fe,
the arrival of the Redskins was also announced by bows and arrows, but they were not weapons but souvenirs, hung along the window rails of our Pullman car, along with a generous spread of Indian blankets and silver necklaces. They had been put on at some mysterious stop before we were awake, the work of Hopis, Zunis, and Navajos, subdued long ago. Now they were working for Fred Harvey, who held the restaurant concession for the
Santa Fe
and also had a corner on the souvenir market.

It was because of Fred Harvey, we learned, that our train lingered an extra half hour in Albuquerque. It was there in the awful but somehow exciting heat of the New Mexican depot and trading post that I saw my first Indians. My small blue eyes were looking into their large brown ones because I was on my feet and they were squatting on the ground, leaning against the outside walls of the station facing the tracks. Silently they held up their wooden souvenirs, feeble miniatures of the weapons with which they had hoped to fight off the white man’s guns a few generations earlier. The Indian wars were over now, though some of the older men squatting with the women and the doe-eyed children must have remembered the last of the lost battles. Now they were here on their ragged posteriors at Fred Harvey’s Albuquerqueland, hoping to sell a few limp trinkets to the palefaces whose pocket-money jingled louder than Navajo drums and Hopi tambourines.

Then we heard the train whistle—another “A-aaal aaaa-board!”—
and we were rolling westward again. We sped through desert country, sand and cactus and sagebrush stretching to the horizon and little towns so hot that, at the water stops, the adults debated whether it was better to swelter inside or outside the train. I walked importantly up and down the blistered platform with my Miss Abrams, getting used to the heat now, the sun beating down on us, one or two sullen Indians still trying to peddle their little bows and arrows and some modest brown pottery.

Gallup was even hotter than Albuquerque. I heard “Mohave Desert” and was told people died out there from the heat and lack of water. My mother pointed to the skulls of oxen bleached white, and to a forest that in some mysterious process over millions of years had been turned into stone. A large stone with the beautiful grain of wood was pressed into my hand, the beginning of my rock collection.

The Colorado was not the welcome blue-green of a fresh flowing river but a disappointing muddy brown. Brown was the color of everything in New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada. The people were brown and the water was brown and the sunbaked adobe houses were brown. The mountains were brown and the bushes were brown. Once in a while we saw a strange little animal scurrying over the desert and it too was brown … the whole Southwest seemed to be a blur of brown as we raced on to California. But the cactus was green, and the sky overhead, clear as a movie-studio backdrop, was an endless reach of blue.

From her guidebook, Mother pointed out the sights; I still remember those early geography, history, and geology lessons. Mother wanting to be sure her little genius squeezed every possible ounce of knowledge from this maiden journey. Always trying a little too hard and yet somehow succeeding in planting seeds, ideas, questions, bits of fact, observations, theories that would penetrate the skull of her five-year-old and cling there like burrs.

Late that night in the drawing room, Ad’s conversation with Ben grew heated as they prepared for bed. He and Uncle Hiram were now only one day from Los Angeles. B.P. had rehearsed his Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists until he could recite them in his sleep. But, she demanded, what did he have on paper? Shouldn’t he have a contract with Hiram Abrams? At the very least, a letter of agreement? After all, Abrams would be approaching the Big Five with the prestige of his recent presidency of Paramount. B.P. would be there simply as Abrams’s young assistant, even though he had masterminded the plan. Uncle Hiram looked like an important motion-picture executive. B.P., after
eight years as a scenario writer, editor, and publicist, still looked as if he had strayed from the campus of C.C.N.Y.

Voices grew in volume and intensity. B.P. felt challenged because Ad was always questioning his business judgment. She thought he was too easily taken in by people, too impulsive, too ready to accept their word on good faith: a creative mind, but lacking common sense. Gullible. So anxious for people to like him that he never wanted to question their motives.
A schnook.
He was on the threshold of sparking the formation of a new company that could make motion-picture history. But, she repeated until Father began to lose his temper, what did he have on paper? What proof did he have that this was
his
idea, and that he would be an equal partner with Hiram Abrams?

“My God, Ad,” Ben said, “these aren’t strangers you’re talking about. You can’t go through life being suspicious of everybody. This is Hiram. My closest friend. We shook hands on the agreement. He appreciates the fact that I took his side against Zukor. We’re in this together. When we talk Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks into this, when we’re ready to draw up the papers to found United Artists, then we’ll spell out our duties and our share of the business.”

“Ben, I’m warning you,” Mother said again. “I don’t care how close you and Hiram are. If I were you, I’d get it on paper—before we get to Los Angeles.”

My father told my mother to mind her own business. What did she think she was, a theatrical attorney without a diploma?

T
HE LAST MORNING
, the fourth day out from New York City, began with a sense of exhilaration. Any minute now we’d be crossing the border into California. In 1918 the name still had a magical ring.

Finally leaving the desert behind, we entered the land of the orange groves. More orange trees than any Easterner had ever seen, miles and more miles of them, each one decorated like a Christmas tree with great orange bulbs. From the observation car Miss Abrams and I could smell them and almost taste them. Indeed for lunch we did taste them: oranges sliced thinly, scalloped, sprinkled with powdered sugar and decorated with a maraschino cherry, served as a special dish.

San Bernardino. We were in the land of Spanish names that spoke to us of a time when California was a country of Spanish land grants that stretched for twenty miles from fence to fence, and of Spanish missions, San Juan Capistrano, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. The Yankee gold-rushers had moved in on the Spanish and the Mexicans, and had taken over the city we would soon be reaching, Los Angeles, the city of the angels. The orange trees were behind us at last, but we were passing vineyards, passing a dried-up creek that was grandly described as the Los Angeles River, and then we all had our noses to the windows as we approached the low-lying nondescript skyline of northeast Los Angeles, rolling to a stop at an odd-looking red-brick Moorish-style station. With a grand flourish the smiling porter brushed us off in what was not so much a cleansing as a ceremony of arrival. The sun was beating down,
not as intensely as in Needles near the Arizona border but hot enough to inform us that we had come to a lush and exotic land.

Our luggage piled onto baggage trucks, we were driven through a small Far Western city of undistinguished four-and five-story buildings. We passed the Spanish Plaza: Olivera Street, all that was left of the original village of the
conquistadores
and their Indian peons. A real Mexican church. And then just as suddenly as we had come upon it we left it behind. We were crossing Main Street, not the derelict alley for winos it would be half a century later but the main thoroughfare of downtown L.A., narrow, crowded with autos and people and streetcars clanging.