Moving Pictures (17 page)

B
.P, WAS READY TO TAKE
his Preferred Pictures out to the new movie capital. On that trip west in 1922, all of our worldly belongings were with us and, when we were helped down from the Pullman platform, we were no longer Eastern visitors from Riverside Drive. We had come to take our place in the booming society of Los Angeles, where the new oil money and the new real-estate money still looked with suspicion on the new movie money. Eventually they would all settle down together to expand, and systematically destroy, the old mission town that had become the southwestern axis of the
Santa Fe.
In our four-year absence, downtown Los Angeles had spread out in all directions, determined to turn its back on the architecture of its Hispanic past. The new conquistadors were devoted to money rather than to tradition or beauty; their aim was to build as rapidly and as profitably as possible. As we drove from the station, this time in a limousine, we passed a series of streets with names that suggested a beauty denied by the low-lying blocks of dingy two- and three-story buildings: names like Spring, and Flower, and Hope.

In later years I was to say that I had been shunted from New York to Hollywood without the courtesy of being consulted. If I had been allowed the privilege of foresight, I’m not sure I would have chosen the life of a Hollywood prince. But then I accepted it as my inheritance, my destiny, and finally as my responsibility. In my childhood the studio backlots provided my playgrounds: My best friend and I climbed to the turrets of great castles from which movie heroes had been besieged, or
rode our imaginary steeds into the deserted western street that awaited the arrival of still another cowboy star. In my youth the studio offices provided a workbench from which I could observe the wheels of The Industry turning from the inside. A little later I looked at big studio tycoons with an affection considerably this side of love. All my life, mine was a love-hate relationship with those tycoons—my father’s associates, rivals, and enemies in the geographical and cultural crazy quilt known as Hollywood.

Our company, Preferred Pictures, had rented a house for us in what was then considered a district far to the west of downtown Los Angeles, on Gramercy Place near Western Avenue. These days no self-respecting member of The Industry would be drawn to Western Avenue: It lies miles to the east of the Sunset Strip. But in the early Twenties, Western Avenue was aptly named, a kind of western boundary for the uptown business section. Our first home in Hollywood was a roomy bungalow on a quiet residential street of modest frame houses, with neat little lawns punctuated with orange and lemon trees. Our first backyard had tropical flowers, hibiscus and oleander, and in one far corner, an exotic stand of bamboo: my hiding place, sanctuary, or childhood temple. To squeeze into the middle of it, peering out through the uniformly rounded bars of green, was to know that my life had changed dramatically, that I was never to be a New York City boy again. Now I lived in a world of date palms and klieg lights.

My first studio, as I now think of it, was a place full of endless wonder for an eight-year-old: the now almost completely forgotten Mayer-Schulberg Studio, attached to the old Selig Studio and Zoo on Mission Road, east of Main Street. Chances are, only the oldest of the oldtimers at the Motion Picture Fund Home today would know the name of that now-dilapidated and neglected street, bordered by murky factories and cemeteries for bashed-in cars. But when the Schulbergs and the Mayers arrived as part of the movie rush of the early Twenties, Mission Road was still what its name implied: a narrow, winding rural road that led from the little Spanish church in the Plaza to the mission in the open fields.

The primitive Selig-Mayer-Schulberg studio with its dirty white stucco wall and its small silent stages looked across to two adjoining wonders, the Alligator Farm and Gay’s Ostrich Farm. Since the proprietors rented their giant birds and reptiles to the studios, I had free access
to those exotic farms, and with fear in my throat I could ride the ancient tame ’gator, said to be a great-great-grandfather of the little ’gators in the baby pool. I was also led about the ring astride an ostrich whose head and neck were draped with reins like a horse. One day the keeper of the ostriches gave me an enormous egg so heavy I could hardly lift it. Somehow I got it home to Gramercy Place in one piece and Wilma scrambled that incredible egg, serving Sunday brunch for fifteen people.

L. B. Mayer, his warmhearted wife Margaret, and their two daughters, slightly my senior—the pretty, gentle Edith, and the handsome, tomboyish Irene—seemed almost like a part of our household in those innocent days when we alternated Sunday brunches at our modest bungalows. Ad and Margaret would drive down to Temple Street in the Jewish quarter, and bring back for our Sunday spread such East Side delicacies as lox, smoked whitefish, cream cheese, fresh bagels, and onion rolls. Those were what I would call L.B.’s Jewish days, when he was still relatively humble, when he still liked to reminisce about having courted Margaret on his junk wagon, driving her out from South Boston for picnics in the country. Louie had nothing then but the junk he was able to salvage. That and ambition, compact physical strength, and ghetto cunning. On young Louie’s wedding day some sense of the grandiose impelled him to add a middle initial to his signature on the marriage license. So he became, with a flourish of the pen, Louis B. Mayer, a precursor of the godlike figure he would eventually become when the second
M
in the enormous MGM sign over the great studio in Culver City stood for him. He would rule with a draconian hand not only his own studio but in effect The Industry, all of Hollywood as we knew it in the Twenties, the Thirties, and the Forties.

The Mayers and the Schulbergs at their Sunday brunch were feasting on the American dream. Who could have guessed how success would consume L.B. in one way, B. P. in another, and that for each the lining of the dream that seemed to shine with silver would blacken to nightmare? Who could have predicted as they observed those two resourceful young movie pioneers that one would become a despot—walking as a Caesar among Caesars, striking terror into the hearts of the 30,000 employees who manned his studios—the other a desperate victim? Both men could trace their lifelines back to poverty-stricken Jewish stock in Czarist Russia. The Mayers too had somehow managed to worm their way into steerage and to live through that seemingly endless journey across the ocean.

Like my grandfathers Max Jaffe and Simon Schulberg, L.B.’s father Jacob Mayer was lost in the bustling new world into which he had wandered. From New York, where he had been unable to survive, somehow he had found his way to Saint John in the hostile land of New Brunswick in eastern Canada. It was a move L.B. seemed never able to explain, any more than my Grandpa Simon knew what had taken his straggling family to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Without roots or possessions or any immediate means of support, these were truly the wandering Jews. Grandpa Jacob, for he seemed like my grandfather too in those days when B.P. and L.B. were still close friends, had turned to the most likely occupation of the have-nothing. He simply had picked up junk, whatever he could find that the industrious citizens of Saint John had thrown into the streets or into the garbage, and he had sold it door to door—old nails, pieces of tin, rusted locks… Meanwhile, with the pennies that dribbled in from the junk that Jacob managed to peddle, his spunky wife Sarah was able to buy chickens from the farmers outside of town and to hawk them house to house at a niggling profit. And soon little Louie was out on the streets picking up rags, old papers, discarded trash. In that sense, Louie Mayer grew up in the street. The Jew-baiting that was one of the year-round sports of Saint John made him tough, and rag-picking made him resourceful and opportunistic.

L.B. and B.P. were to struggle to make their way outward and upward from these restrictive centers. But for the Old World mentalities of Grandfather Max and Grandfather Jacob, material work seemed to be a kind of sideline; their real life went on inside their synagogues.

While the minds of the elders were riveted to their Torahs, the Americanized brains of L.B. and B.P. were focused just as intently on their studio. They were not partners in the actual filmmaking. They had separate companies, with separate stars and directors, chose separate stories, and turned out separate movies. But since their resources were limited—there were Saturdays when L.B. could not meet his payroll—it had seemed to both of them sound business to rent studio space from Colonel Selig together. It was, for a while, a happy, symbiotic relationship, with both men economizing by sharing a single reception office, common guards and cleanup men, and carpentry and paint shops, and even exchanging and redressing sets for their sometimes interchangeable plots.

A sixty- or eighty-thousand-dollar picture could enjoy a return of five or ten times its film cost
if
it could hold its own against the product of
major companies with large chains of their own theaters. Famous Players, Fox, and First National had replaced the Patents Company, and were taking on all the monopolistic controls of the bygone Trust. The infighting to get hold of as many theaters as possible was as intense and bitter as the earlier struggle to set up independent exchanges and theater chains.

While my father and L.B. were struggling to make their movies cheaper and better and to squeeze them into the programs of the big theater chains, I was having the time of my eight-year-old life as an almost daily visitor to the Selig Zoo. Colonel Selig—whether this impressive military title stemmed from the Spanish-American War or his own showman’s imagination I will never know—was perfectly cast for his role, a ruddy-faced hail-fellow with a Falstaffian figure. I remember him as a kind of W. C. Fields, without Fields’s bibulous craftiness (on stage) or bibulous meanness (in his private life).

When my father first came to the Selig Zoo and set up with L. B. the painted half-moon sign of the Mayer-Schulberg Studio, he had told me the Colonel was one of the original film pioneers. A one-man vaudeville show, Selig had toured the West Coast as a magician and early minstrel man. Once he had seen Edison’s Kinetoscope, in ’96, he had begun tinkering with his own invention for screen projection, joining half a dozen others who were working independently on this logical extension of the Edison peephole. The result was the Selig Polyscope. At the same time that Edwin S. Porter was experimenting with his story films in New York, Colonel Selig was operating his innovative little studio in Chicago. When another colonel, Teddy Roosevelt, announced that he was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Selig’s nose for showmanship led him to the White House. What he proposed was a documentary innovation—that a Selig cameraman go along to record the trip for posterity: Col. Selig Presents Col. Roosevelt’s Big Game Hunt In Africa! According to Selig, the ebullient Teddy had cried “Bully!” to the idea. But somehow, when the actual expedition was under way, Selig found himself double-crossed. Instead of a Selig cameraman, a Smithsonian technician was taken along on the safari. Perhaps someone had whispered in the President’s ear that these movie people were something less than respectable.

Colonel Selig plunged in with his usual energy and daring. If the Selig Polyscope Company was unable to go to Africa, the Selig Company
would bring Africa to Chicago. Accordingly, he acquired a lion and other beasts from a bankrupt traveling circus and built an African setting into a corner of the Selig studio. He hired an actor to impersonate the famous big-game hunter from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from mustache to safari outfit. A handful of Chicago Negroes who had never been closer to Africa than the Loop were pressed into loincloth service as his runners. The lion, Selig had confided to my father, was a rather tired or cowardly old fellow who had to be prodded into action. He would lie around the set and the stage hands could walk right over him. They would have to pull his tail to make him react. Once this tame cousin of the mighty king of the jungle yawned and the cameraman astutely shot a close-up of the gaping mouth and supposedly deadly teeth. When the ancient beast fell asleep, they photographed him as if he were dead, and then cut to the bogus T.R. pointing his rifle at him. When Teddy Roosevelt returned home in triumph happily displaying his trophies of the adventure, Col. Selig released his one-reel film,
Hunting Big Game in Africa.
The name of Roosevelt was never mentioned in the film; it didn’t have to be. T.R. was the acknowledged inventor of the African safari, and timing the Chicago Colonel’s film to the arrival of the Washington Colonel’s party made an ideal box-office launching. The naive movie public of that day was fascinated by what they accepted as authentic and thrilling footage of Roosevelt’s gung-ho penetration into Darkest Africa.

Now that his first African picture was such a success, Col. Selig figured he might as well continue making sequels ostensibly photographed on the Dark Continent. African adventure pictures became a Selig specialty. To the lot on Mission Road the rotund Colonel brought his menagerie, now expanded from the poor creatures who had inhabited his Chicago studio. There were a noisy assembly of monkeys, from little spiders to extroverted chimps, plume birds, a couple of elephants and camels, reindeer and bears, panthers, tigers, and lions. And that original lion, star of
Hunting Big Game in Africa,
was said to be still in residence.

I can’t vouch that it was the same one who had played possum to an unknown actor’s “Teddy Roosevelt,” but I do remember well the old lion we called Leo, an aged, blinking precursor of the mighty beast that a few years later became the roaring trademark of almighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Leo was the most pacific of jungle beasts. Ex-jungle, one should say. His mascot and constant companion was a little black-and-white
mutt that someone had mischievously named Tiger. Whenever Leo the lion was removed from his cage to take his place before the cameras in one of Col. Selig’s African adventure films, Tiger had to go along. Leo would refuse to perform, indeed he would even refuse to eat if Tiger were not at his side. I loved to watch them curled up together in their cage. Sometimes Leo would be half dozing while Tiger played idly with his tail. So gentle was this old lion that I was allowed to go into the cage and stroke his head.