Moving Pictures (15 page)

It turned out to be one of those nights when a battle is won but the seeds are planted for a long and losing campaign. In the course of his
extensive Liberty Bond tours and his access to the White House, Doug Fairbanks had become friendly with William Gibbs McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law and Secretary of the Treasury until his appointment to the key wartime role of Director-General of the railroads. McAdoo was on his way to Los Angeles in his special Pullman car for a much-needed rest, and Fairbanks was planning an elaborate reception for him. With due respect to Hiram Abrams and young Schulberg, Fairbanks said, he felt that such an array of stars as Mary, Charlie, D.W., and himself should have as president of their new company a figure of national prominence, a man of the calibre of Director-General McAdoo.

“How could we say ‘no’ to one of the most powerful men in America, who was at that very moment tasting the fruits of victory of what we were still calling the Great War?” my father said in defense of his and Uncle Hiram’s acquiescence. So a second meeting was scheduled in the luxurious bungalow that McAdoo and the President’s daughter had rented for the winter in Santa Barbara, where he planned to map out his political and economic strategy for the years of leadership awaiting him. There was considerable speculation that McAdoo might be the Democratic nominee to succeed his father-in-law in the 1920 presidential race. But at this moment Doug Fairbanks had put McAdoo’s name in nomination as president of United Artists, thereby threatening Uncle Hiram’s ambition, and my father’s as well.

At that meeting in McAdoo’s spacious bungalow, the former Director-General of the railroads declined Doug’s nomination. Instead he deferred to his press secretary, Oscar Price, suggesting that Price occupy the presidency, with McAdoo serving the new company as general counsel. And where would the originators of the concept, Abrams and Schulberg, fit into this new organization? Well, McAdoo strongly objected to the twenty percent for Abrams and Schulberg that had been part of the original plan. He thought two percent was more like it, with Abrams to receive that amount as general manager. Since Price had had no previous motion-picture experience, they would need Abrams’s know-how to keep the distribution and exhibition wheels turning. And where did that leave my old man, on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday? Without a single percentage point in the company he had dreamt up so enthusiastically with “Uncle Hiram.” And since he was damned if he’d be a hireling, B.P. was out of a job.

After the Defeat of Santa Barbara, as my father would look back on it
like a battle-scarred Napoleon, his efforts to launch United Artists were doomed to wind up as a footnote to the history of motion pictures. Indeed, a description of his role as the true father of United Artists is to be found in authoritative histories of American film. But as Samuel Goldwyn is said to have remarked, a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. B.P.’s verbal agreement with the man for whom he had forsaken his favorable position with Adolph Zukor turned out to be the most elastic of rubber checks.

On that unhappy drive back to Los Angeles there were the inevitable recriminations. B.P. accused Hiram of selling him out. Abrams protested that Doug Fairbanks had sold them both out by turning to McAdoo and Price instead of accepting the two of them as the deal had been presented originally. (This was all the more ironic, B.P. would remember, because in a crucial earlier meeting at the Alexandria Hotel, between an alarmed Adolph Zukor and an intimidated Doug Fairbanks—a meeting called to head off Doug’s rumored defection from Famous Players—Fairbanks had hurried off to study B.P.’s manifesto, “Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists,” to reinforce his stand.) It was Ben’s educated guess that there had been meetings between Abrams and the McAdoo group behind his back, and that a compromise had already been worked out in which Abrams would receive a liberal salary as general manager, and a token two percent in return for not opposing the McAdoo-Price-Fairbanks ploy.

Abrams denied the accusation, but when my father urged him not to go along with McAdoo and Price and instead to stand up and fight for their rights and take the usurpers to court, Abrams demurred. They might have a chance against a Richard Rowland (then head of Metro), a lone eagle like Sam Goldwyn, or even a determined organization man like Zukor. But this was William Gibbs McAdoo, the man to whom most Democrats looked as the successor to Wilson’s national leadership. What legal weapons could they muster against such artillery? They had simply been outsmarted and outmaneuvered, and Hiram Abrams argued he had no choice now but to accept the crumbs from the McAdoo table. Father stared at him and then turned to look out at the ocean as they drove on in silence.

Soon we were back on the
Santa Fe Chief
again, heading east. But the Schulbergs and the Abramses were no longer traveling together. In fact they weren’t even speaking to one another. No longer could I have Miss
Abrams to turn to if I grew lonely or frightened in my upper berth. No longer would there be a guiding hand to steady me as I made my way down the lurching aisles on the long walk back to the observation car. Nor do I remember ever seeing Uncle Hiram again. Or even thinking of him as my lost uncle.

The loss of an honorary uncle was to become a familiar casualty in the motion-picture wars. It came to me at a tender age that the world of the motion picture, depending as it does on personalities and those quicksilver moments of fame and power, is particularly vulnerable to opportunism. Love knots quickly become hate knots, and oaths of personal loyalty, with rare exceptions, are made to be broken and rationalized.

Of course I claim no omniscience at the age of five. Even without Miss Abrams to sit with me out there on that wonderful observation car as I watched the sagebrush and cactus country of Arizona and New Mexico fall away, I was still having fun waving to a lone cowhand or to a few dusty travelers waiting at the little stations where the engine paused to catch its smoky breath. I didn’t know that our long journey had succeeded only in surrendering an original and profitable idea to McAdoo and the screen’s Top Four.

I heard but was not fully cognizant of the lectures being delivered by my mother to my father on the subject of his guilelessness in a world of cutthroats. Escaping “I told you so's, I was now well enough acquainted with the
Santa Fe
to be able to wander from car to car alone. I would come back to find my parents playing casino, Father with a big cigar jutting from his rather delicate face, Mother frequently returning to the same sore subject. Never trust anybody in this business. It was still too volatile and crawling with phonies. The only protection was to get something on paper. When would B.P. learn not to be so trusting? How many times had she warned him not to place such blind faith in Hiram Abrams? They would all take advantage of his youth and his naiveté and steal his ideas.

Over the years this would become a familiar family theme song, my increasingly suspicious and self-protective mother attacking my self-deceiving, vulnerable father for his lack of armor in the lists of business. Because Ad had an irritating tendency to be right, Father’s vulnerabilities were stung to the swelling and bursting point. The
Santa Fe Chief
racing us back to the Midwest and on to Chicago arouses my first memory of bitter quarreling. Subsequent arguments were more harshly focused on Ben as a babe in the woods who would be lost without her
instinct for self-preservation. Typically, the more Ad was determined to protect Ben from himself, the more he was determined to assert his independence.

In 1919, basically a happy child, with only my persistent stammering to worry about, constantly encouraged by my parents, I was pleased to be reunited with Wilma and little Sonya in the comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive. Ad was glad to be back in New York too, back to her Godmothers’ League and her self-improvement courses at Columbia.

While Ad kept one eye on Freud, Jung, and Brill, and the other on my father’s dreams of independent production, B.P. was preparing himself for the seminal role he would play in the 1920s. He had sued United Artists, but as ex-Uncle Hiram had predicted, his resources had proved no match for McAdoo, whose powerful firm was prepared to fight a delaying action all the way up to the Supreme Court. After a modest settlement, B.P. decided to do what so many of the first wave of movie pioneers were doing: start his own company. Too young to understand how he managed to do it, I still remember his partners, his old school-friend Jack Bachman, a serious, pipe-smoking, bookish accountant who became treasurer, and the ubiquitous Al Lichtman, “the best film salesman in the business,” also leaving Zukor and Lasky to help launch the new company. It was called Preferred Pictures, with B.P.’s slogan built into its very name, suggesting that his were the movies the public preferred.

In the style of L. J. Selznick, W. F. Fox, L. B. Mayer, and the other less-educated but equally high-flying producers, B.P. announced his new company with a flourish and opened an impressive suite of offices in the heart of the theater district on Broadway. Now he needed a star. Selznick had made his name by swiping Clara Kimball Young for World, and Fox had taken a Jewish tailor’s
zaftig
daughter named Theodora Goodman and transformed her into an Arabian vampire, Theda Bara (which was Arab spelled backward); Mayer had virtually shanghaied Anita Stewart from Vitagraph. B.P. in turn wooed eminently bankable Katherine MacDonald, in those days a major flutterer of masculine hearts and the envy of distaff moviegoers for her well-bred sophistication flavored with just the right degree of “naughtiness” in films like
The Woman Thou Gavest Me, The Beauty Market, Passion’s Playground,
and
The Notorious Miss Lisle.

A strawberry blonde with limpid blue eyes and the sensuous but classy
high-bridged nose that gave character to the leading ladies of the silent screen
(vide
Constance Talmadge, Florence Vidor, and Barbara LaMarr), Katherine MacDonald had completed her contract with Famous Players, and would soon be free of First National as well. B.P. went after her with all his boyish charm, wit, and intelligence. He wined her at the Waldorf, dined her at Delmonico’s, and showed her his elaborate offices, with an Italianate boardroom featuring a long cherrywood conference table and chairs which Ad considered pretentious and needlessly costly.

Katherine MacDonald must have been impressed with that Venetian boardroom, which doubled as a projection room, and my father must have been persuasive in his promises to make her more than a leading star of the day. In his young but knowing hands she would become as much of a household word as Mary Pickford. Miss MacDonald would be known from coast to coast, he promised, as “The American Beauty Rose.” Like America’s Sweetheart, the American Beauty Rose had a mother who seemed to know her way around a contract, and again like Mary who always saw to it that sister Lottie was also signed, there was another flower in the family, the patrician Mary MacLaren, who would also be Preferred. After extended negotiations, during which Miss MacDonald threatened to form her own company under the Famous Players banner, or to defect to Universal, Metro, Goldwyn, or Fox, a deal was finally consummated, toasted in champagne in the grandiose boardroom, with the film press of New York on hand to wish their erstwhile colleague well.

Soon Ben and Ad were reading novels and magazine stories and going to plays to find the ideal vehicles for the first jewel in the diadem of Preferred Pictures. Meanwhile the high-living, fast-talking Al Lichtman was out in the field selling the rights to “four great new Katherine MacDonald pictures” soon to be made by The Industry’s youngest and brightest producer, Adolph Zukor’s own protégé, B. P. Schulberg.

Those were busy days. B.P. was writing reams of publicity for his own company and working on scenarios, banging away at his typewriter. All his life he clung to his old Underwood as an aging matinee idol clings to his toupee. In 1920 that Underwood was zipping. So was the movie business. So was the country. The Golden Age was upon us.

W
HEN MY FATHER WAS
organizing Preferred Pictures in New York and getting ready to set up shop at the Mayer-Schulberg Studio in Los Angeles, he was a passionate fight fan. An habitué of the old Garden on Madison Square, his favorite fighter was the Jewish lightweight Benjamin Leiner who fought under the
nom-de-boxe
of Benny Leonard. On the eve of my seventh birthday, my hero was neither the new cowboy star Tom Mix nor the acrobatic Doug Fairbanks. I didn’t hoard and trade face cards of the current baseball stars like the other kids on Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth could hit 54 homers that year (when no one else had ever hit more than 16 in the history of the League) and I really didn’t care. The legendary Ty Cobb could break a batting record almost every time he came up to the plate, but no chill came to my skin at the mention of his name. That sensation was reserved for Benny Leonard.

He was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L. B. Mayers and the B. P. Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters, proving the advantage of brain over brawn, fighting the united efforts of the
goyische
establishment to keep them in their ghettos.

Jewish boys on their way to
shul
on the Sabbath had tasted the fists and felt the shoeleather of the righteous Irish and Italian children who crowded them, shouted “You killed our Christ!”, and avenged their gentle Savior with blows and kicks. But sometimes the little yid surprised his racist foes by fighting back, like Adolph Zukor, or Abe Attell, who
won the featherweight championship of the world at the turn of the century, or Abe Goldstein, who beat up a small army of Irish contenders on his way to the bantamweight title. But our superhero was Benny Leonard. “The Great Benny Leonard.” That’s how he was always referred to in our household. There was The Great Houdini. The Great Caruso.
And
The Great Benny Leonard.

My father gave me a scrapbook, with a picture of Benny in fighting stance on the cover, and I recognized his face and could spell out his name even before I was able to read. In 1920 he was only 24 years old, just four years younger than my hero-worshipping old man, but he had been undefeated lightweight champion of the world ever since he knocked out the former champion, Freddie Welsh, in the Garden.