Moving Pictures (14 page)

Our proud procession of Schulbergs and Abramses drove to the grandest hotel in town, the Alexandria. Standing there in all its glory at Fifth and Spring Streets (today a rundown relic in the slums), it was named for the great Mediterranean port founded by Alexander the Great. Many miles to the west was our Venice, with canals that were said to rival Italy’s own, and, halfway between, a Greek theater, open to the starlit skies and scooped out of a Santa Monica mountainside to suggest a theater in Athens, though the dramas performed were more apt to be pious morality plays than the works of Euripides and Aristophanes.

Into the lobby of the Alexandria we marched. How vast and grand it seemed, with marble pillars, and its fabulous million-dollar rug, so named not for its cost, though it seemed opulently Persian to our Eastern feet, but because it was there that Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, Louie-come-lately Mayer and his star Anita Stewart, Joe Schenck with his stars the Talmadge sisters, Mabel Normand, D. W. Griffith, William Desmond Taylor—geniuses, con men, cloak-and-suiters become overnight movie moguls—cooked up their million-dollar deals. From that crowded, overly ornate lobby sprang the new spirit of the new industry being born before our eyes.

The lobby was also full of unknown girls showing off their faces and their figures in hopes of being discovered. And in those simpler, silent days, girls with striking faces
could
be discovered on the spot. Along with Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden from grand opera there were a host of hopefuls from all the little towns across the country, waiting for Mack Sennett to put them into fetching one-piece bathing suits. The doors of the Alexandria lobby were not marked Ladies and Gentlemen but Obscurity and Fame.

And along with all those names and would-be names, there were the sightseers, the rubes, the hicks, the marks rubbernecking around the lobby to catch sight of a famous face—“Hey, ain’t that Wally Reid?” “You’ll never guess who I just saw getting out of her motor car—hot damn!—Beverly Bayne!”

For the country boys and even the mashers from Council Bluffs there was a new little racket called the Alexandria Game. A sharper would slyly elbow up to someone at the bar and ask what famous movie star he had seen in the lobby. “Well, I just saw Phyllis Haver,” the country boy would say. “Boy, she slays me! I’ll tell you one thing, she c’n put her shoes under my bed any old time!”

“Phyl Haver,” the sharper answered. “Listen, kiddo, I just happen to be her assistant director. And you know what she is, she’s a goddam nymphomaniac. I mean she hasn’t got the morals of a loose goose. After she finishes a picture all she likes to do is stay upstairs in her room and get laid by strangers about ten times a day.”

The mark gulped his drink and ordered one for his new friend. “Say, mister, I’m just passin’ through town, you don’t think—hah!—you don’t think you could take me up and give me a knockdown to Phyllis Haver? Boy, wait ’til I get home and tell that one around the barbershop!”

For a consideration, like twenty dollars, the self-appointed assistant director offered to bring the visitor upstairs to his liaison with Miss Haver. And upstairs in Room 422 lounging around in a negligee was Phyllis Haver, or a reasonable facsimile thereof ….The little butter-and-egg man was too excited to tell the difference. Con men used to make themselves fifty to a hundred smackers a day escorting suckers up to rooms of “Gloria Swanson,” “Norma Talmadge,” and “Katherine MacDonald.”

The Alexandria! Until the business moved uptown to the larger and grander Hotel Ambassador in the early Twenties, it was the capital of filmania. The whole damned industry was there together in one big hotel. You could get laid, you could become a star, you could start a new movie company, and you could go broke, all in that same place the same afternoon.

A generation later there was to be a famous bordello in Hollywood that offered a variation of the Alexandria Game. There you could find look-alikes for Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, and Nancy Carroll. But the later clientele was indulging in fantasies while the
greenhorns in the throbbing lobby of the Alexandria, living in simpler times, really believed they were achieving an immortal roll in the hay with Bebe Daniels or Alice Joyce.

I’m not sure whether it was because of these nefarious goings-on in the lobby and the bar and the upper floors of the Alexandria, or because it started to rain, that my mother decided to remove me from its hectic atmosphere. I remember that the rain bucketed down; the land of eternal sunshine began to look like a Griffith production of the Great Flood. I sat by the window staring at the sheet of water and crying. I had been promised a trip to the mountains. But here I was in downtown Los Angeles, with no park to play in, not even a balcony, surrounded by a lot of noisy, frantic, laughing people. Their names meant nothing to me. “I w-w-want to s-see the m-m-mountings,” I cried. “Mom, you and D-d-daddy promised me I could see the sun sh-sh-shine on the mountings.”

One reason Ad had made up her mind to take me away from the lurid Alexandria, away to something finer, was that she was hating Los Angeles herself, the phonies and the fourflushers who passed themselves off as producers and directors, the little whores (“hoors,” she called them) who knew only one way to become actresses. The phonies and the fourflushers and the wheeler-dealers are there to this very day, in their Cardin suits, their dark locks looped over their foreheads, their eyes roving and their minds spinning. But in those days it was a little easier because everything was new and everyone was an overnight wonder. Who knew Triangle Pictures from Quadrangle Pictures, or World from World-Wide? Who knew if you were talking to the junkman who hadn’t even sold his broken-down wagon, or to the mastermind of the next big merger between Metro and Goldwyn (the Goldwyn Company that the peripatetic loner Sam had already abandoned to form a still-newer Samuel Goldwyn Company)?

Everything was in flux the day we walked into the Alexandria lobby, the old standbys like Essanay and Vitagraph on their way down, fly-by-nights like Peralta and Jewel just passing through, the big independents like Famous Players-Lasky and Universal very much holding their own, and a whole new cluster of companies signing one or two stars and one or two top directors and beginning to claw their way up.

I wish I’d been old enough to understand more of what I saw, but I heard it all in due time, from my parents and their friends who were dealing in the lobby in the late Teens. So I feel as if I was there for the
famous fisticuffs—one of filmdom’s many such unscheduled events—between Charlie Chaplin, the Little Tramp with a penchant for Lolitas, and Louie Mayer, the ex-junkman and not yet the polished rajah, super-showman, super-hypocrite, arch-conservative of my highschool days. Chaplin had just suffered a tempestuous divorce from Mildred Harris, the wife he had taken (under rather hurried circumstances) when she was sixteen, and was feuding with L.B., who was just getting his first movie company together. Needing every star name he could attract, Mayer was billing Mildred as “Mrs. Charlie Chaplin,” which sent Charlie into a fury.

Encountering Chaplin in the Alexandria dining room, the pugnacious L.B. challenged him to step outside onto that million-dollar rug, and is said by my mother and father, who happened to have ringside seats, to have flattened the highest-paid actor in the world. L.B. must have felt he had no choice. Anita Stewart was his only star. Marshall Neilan was his name director, but Mickey often would not even tolerate the eager boss’s presence on his set. If L.B. was going to survive he needed every break he could get, and if they weren’t coming his way he simply had to make them himself, and damn the consequences, damn Charlie Chaplin, screw the world! The Alexandria days were desperate times. Those were the days from hunger, when what you lacked in credentials and assets you made up in bluff and
chutzpah.

Eager to expose me to the tropical countryside of southern California, Ad hired a car and driver and we went what seemed a very great distance, from Sunset Boulevard as it wound through small-town Los Angeles on its way west, through sparsely settled Hollywood with its little movie studios, white bungalows, and stucco bungalow courts. We paused at Sunset and Vine, and stared at the spreading Famous Players-Lasky studio, where DeMille was remaking
The Squaw Man,
which had established him as a director five years before. Even though they’d lost Mary Pickford, the studio was still going full blast. They had Gloria Swanson, whom C.B. was transforming from a background bathing beauty to a foreground sophisticated siren in naughty pictures like
Don’t Change Your Husband
and
Male and Female.
The former one-barn studio was now devouring all the open country around it.

But of course we couldn’t stop in to visit, not with B.P. on the outs with Zukor and ready to start a rival company. No, we kept right on driving into Beverly Hills, way out in the country then, a lone house here
and there on the flatlands, and back up on the hillocks at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains a few mansions of the stars, modeled on Spanish haciendas, surrounded by acres of terraced gardens and groves.

The landmark on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, toward which we were slowly motoring, was the enormous pink stucco Beverly Hills Hotel. It’s still there today, its architecture essentially unchanged but its reason for being entirely transformed. Today its Polo Lounge has taken over from the Alexandria lobby. Basically the same sort of people, only in different clothes, different hairdos, different vocabularies, are still wheeling and dealing. But when we first came to the Beverly Hills Hotel, it was an isolated resort hotel filled with wealthy old couples from the East, the white gentile aristocracy wintering in the sun of the Far West as now they winter in Palm Beach or the Bahamas. White-haired ladies rocked on the front portico. Oriental servants in uniform performed their duties with quiet bows. Everything was hushed and genteel. The gardens outside the hotel offered an exotic zoo, with plume birds from Florida and South America, and many different kinds of monkeys.

No talk of movies here. Chances are my mother and I would never have been admitted to this elite clientele if they had known my father’s calling. For although the Great War had broken down some of the resistance to the movie people, “No movies” was still a sign to be found in many a boardinghouse window on the quiet streets of Hollywood. The gentle old ladies who came to the Beverly Hills Hotel to escape the bitter Eastern winters and to enjoy the purest of air and the clearest of skies would have turned up their noses at the sight of Fanny Ward or Lila Lee. They might stare at a face so perfectly formed that it could be blown up to the full size of a silver screen and still betray no blemish, but there would still be that turn-away voice of disdain, “She’s a movie!”

M
Y FATHER AND UNCLE HIRAM
had an appointment with the elusive Charlie Chaplin, who was sometimes at the Alexandria, sometimes at the Athletic Club which he used as a sort of hideout from the mobs, sometimes at a large house he had rented far to the west of downtown Los Angeles—a genius in the studio, a troubled recluse away from his work, drawn both to intellectuals and empty-headed nymphets. B.P. and Uncle Hiram had sounded out his cronies and felt they were approaching him at the opportune moment when he was quarreling with First National and looking for new outlets for maturing work like
The Kid.

Father and his partner spent a full evening with Charlie Chaplin, and Hollywood’s first authentic genius-performer was intrigued. He would have complete artistic freedom, he would make even more money from distributing his films through his own company than he was earning at First National, and he would have a sizable interest in the future of the company as a whole. Years after he retired, although he was then only 29, he would continue to be a major stockholder in United Artists.

He liked the idea well enough, Charlie said, to recommend it to his friends Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. Meanwhile, B.P. enlisted the support of D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s temperament was artistic and the idea of artists joining together to form their own company, make their own pictures, and distribute them through their own organization appealed to his desire for independence from the “money men.” If the other members of the Big Five came in, he was ready to be a United Artist.

Only the western hero William S. Hart had second thoughts. The plan was for each picture to be sold on its individual merits, with the star enjoying the producer’s profits, except for what Uncle Hiram and my father would charge for their services. Hart would have the same stock interest as his fellow-artists but his immediate profit would come from the release of his own pictures. He gave a tentative yes but then called my father to say he had thought it over and had changed his mind, deciding to form his own company. Over the years as my father refought his battles for, with, and against United Artists—sorties, skirmishes, and frontal actions that took on the drama and the significance of a Borodino or a Balaklava—I listened to his theories of William S.’s lack of heart for this project:

Bill Hart was still a national idol. Ten-year-old kids all over the country were saying, “Let’s play cowboys and Indians—I’ll be Bill Hart—bang, bang, you’re dead!” But the lean, unsmiling Hart had come from the stage to the movies when he was already over 40. He was now closing in on 50 and although he would go on making his
Wagon Tracks
and
Wild Bill Hickoks
for another half-dozen years, riding Pinto Ben, the horse as famous as he, Hart sensed that his star was on the wane and that he’d be overwhelmed in the company of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks. A victim of that unique American phenomenon, success in America, Bill Hart’s career had reached late autumn and was beginning to feel the first chill of oncoming winter.

Only slightly daunted by the defection of the old cowboy star, Uncle Hiram and my father went on to their key meeting with Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and Fairbanks at Doug’s new castle in Beverly Hills. It was, B. P. reported, a long and lively evening, with the four commanding figures of Hollywood’s rapidly expanding industry endorsing the Abrams-Schulberg concept. With their own company to produce and distribute their own pictures, they would become overnight the dominant factor in that industry. Neither Famous Players nor First National, let alone Fox, Metro, or Universal, would be able to compete with them. Hiram Abrams, who had backed into the business less than ten years earlier selling sing-along slides to nickelodeons, and who was now an acknowledged theater veteran, would handle the distribution, while B.P. with his creative experience under Porter and Zukor would supervise the studio operation.