Moving Pictures (18 page)

Bordering the far edge of my desk is a row of old photographs from those innocent days, pictures that graphically reinforce these memories. One of my favorites presents my father, standing beside Leo, with L.B.’s brother Jerry on the other side. In the background is a studio stage and just behind this oddly assorted trio are some large wooden trunks, probably for costumes, that look like a throwback to stagecoach travel. In this historic photo, three contrasting expressions create a comedic tableau. B.P. in his five-button vest and smartly tailored suit looks as poised as if he were in his office posing with a visiting celebrity. The old lion’s mouth hangs open more in ennui than anger, his eyes sleepy, his body like that of a seedy, stuffed animal from the prop department. Mayer’s brother, wearing a cap and a rumpled suit, has one tentative hand on the lion’s head, his face betraying acute anxiety, his right foot pointed, obviously ready to run for cover the moment the camera clicks. Proud of that picture, B.P. kept it with him on his moves from house to house during his long climb up and down the Hollywood ladder. Since Father was anything but an outdoorsman, this was one of the few photographs ever taken of him in what might be called—if you overlook the decrepitude of the sleepy lion—a heroic pose. Even when we had our own tennis court, Ben rarely appeared on it, and in the flush late Twenties when we bought a sixty-foot yacht for no other reason than that each of his prosperous friends seemed to have one, he would send me off on expeditions to Coronado and Catalina but would never go near it himself. Yes, B. P. was a dedicated indoorsman. You never saw my father with a fishing rod in his hand, or walking barefoot on the beach at Malibu. His milieu was projection rooms, fight arenas, gambling casinos, boudoirs, and book-lined dens. Proud of his fair white skin, he rarely exposed it to the sun and the elements. Rooms full of expensive cigar smoke were his natural habitat. Even in those early Twenties, when he was still only a budding tycoon, his trademark was
the ever-present outsize Upmann cigar. He would smoke one when he woke up in the morning and chain-smoke several dozen more through the day and far into the night. One dollar apiece they cost, even in 1922, and every Monday a shipment of seven boxes arrived from Dunhill’s in New York. In the late Twenties, with the first faint glimmer of a social conscience, I did a little arithmetic on the weekly cost of my father’s Upmann habit. B.P. was smoking up one hundred and sixty-eight dollars’ worth of Corona Coronas a week, I calculated, with another seven dollars thrown in for parcel post. That didn’t include the ones he gave away.

But who counted? In that free-living, optimistic year of 1922, my father was a 30-year-old boy wonder starring his American Beauty Rose in a series of spicy dramas like
The Beauty Market, The Beautiful Liar, The Woman’s Side,
and
Domestic Relations.
Daring stories for their day. Still a press agent at heart, B.P. had publicity releases put out in the form of four-page, eight-column newspapers, with headlines screaming across the entire front page:

KATHERINE MACDONALD—MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN ON THE SCREEN—

IN “THE BEAUTY MARKET,” BASED ON SEX ANTAGONISM WITH

A GREAT PLOT THAT HOLDS UNTIL THE FINAL FADE-OUT!

More than a dozen of these yellowed scare sheets rest on a side table in my den and cry to me their daring tales of period sophistication that once seemed so bold but that more than a half a century later seem closer to
Godey’s Lady’s Book.
Across that Grand Canyon of time I hear my father’s ebullient journalese in this typical subheading:

Men of Wealth Barter Gold for Wives Whose Entrance Fees of Gowns and Social Rank Are Bought with Suitors’ Gifts Pawned for Cash … and Amelie’s Hand Is Won … A Diamond Brooch Binds the Sale. She Pays—and Pays with a Price “The Beauty Market” Derides with Scorn and Sneers.

The ludicrous Theda Bara vampire-sex of the war years was being replaced with something closer to the real thing—refined sex, the naughtiness that lurked behind every Nice Nellie. You watched the fair and elegant Alice Terry or the seemingly proper Agnes Ayres nicely but seductively turn away from the passionate Latin glances of Valentino
and you were in on the mysterious secret of sex that was creating a new approach to morality in America. It was a morality inextricably braided through the new materialism. The shop girls, the seamstresses, the maids, the small-town housewives finally emerging from their Victorian cocoons lived vicariously the lives of Gloria Swanson and Barbara LaMarr and Katherine MacDonald, and aspired to elegant clothes like their idols, with those dazzling jewels, saucy hats, and seductive hairdos. Von Stroheim was making his extravagant
Foolish Wives,
Gloria Swanson was up to her neck in rhinestones and millionaires in
The Impossible Mrs. Bellew,
and Katherine MacDonald was being wicked and even ruthless, but oh so chic and beautifully dressed, as she went about her scandalous adventures.

“Sin now, pay later” would sum up the plots of most of the successful movies in those innocently wicked early Twenties. B.P.’s
The Beauty Market
offered the same callow sophistication as the then-daring Scott Fitzgerald novel,
The Beautiful and Damned.
Both Fitzgerald and the creators of
The Beauty Market
were stricken with a double vision and a double morality, glorifying the society they were so heatedly exposing, exposing the society they could not resist glorifying.

In picture after picture, the Katherine MacDonald formula of fashionable sin built B. P. Schulberg’s Preferred Pictures into one of the strongest of the new independent companies. The American public, B.P. insisted, accepted Katherine MacDonald as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” in part because she was strikingly attractive with a patrician self-confidence and partly because his press agentry had fixed this hyperbolic description in its collective mind. But how did the American Beauty Rose reciprocate? She played mean little tricks on B.P. and his directors, Victor Schertzinger, Tom Forman, and Louis Gasnier, three of the top men of their day. For instance, she wore an expensive necklace (her own) in her first scene for
White Shoulders,
and once the jewelry was established as part of her wardrobe for that sequence, she refused to wear it again until Preferred Pictures rented the necklace from her at an exorbitant figure for the duration of the filming.

At those Sunday brunches, L.B. would match B.P.’s charges of Miss MacDonald’s duplicity with his own tales of abuse at the hands of his star Anita Stewart. Mayer’s
bête noire
was Rudy Cameron, who had been Miss Stewart’s leading man before retiring from the screen to become her husband/business manager. “Mr. Stewart,” as he was often
called, had accused L.B. of using his romantic wiles on Anita in the New York days when Mayer was trying to woo her away from Vitagraph. In turn L.B. had accused Cameron of being a second-rate leading man who saw a more secure future as the bedmate and financial advisor of Anita Stewart. Since he paid her an annual salary, L.B. was determined to get as many pictures a year as possible from his box-office star; Cameron was equally determined to limit their number. On the day that a new Anita Stewart movie was scheduled to start shooting, Cameron would frequently appear at the studio without his celebrated wife. Miss Stewart had been so overworked due to Mayer’s inhuman schedule, the wily ex-leading man would explain, her doctor had advised her to remain in bed for another week. If she were forced to appear before the cameras prematurely, L.B. would have to take the responsibility for permanent damage to her health.

Facing these professional crises, L.B. had developed a unique defense mechanism. Told, for instance, by an emissary from the bank that his credit had run out and that he could not expect another loan to meet next week’s payroll, L.B. would groan, roll his eyes, clutch his heart, and crumple to the floor. His loyal secretary was so used to this phenomenon that she kept a bowl of water and a towel handy. Creditors who managed to work their way into Mayer’s still-modest office would often retreat in confusion and sympathetic concern, fearing that their pressure had caused what might prove a fatal heart attack.

Whether L.B.’s pitching headlong to the carpet was an indication of devilish histrionics or of some genuine nervous or physical disorder is still a matter of speculation in our family. My mother, for instance, was inclined to believe that L.B.’s fainting fits were the real thing. “He was a very emotional man, so intense that he might be described as on the borderline of insanity. Well, maybe that’s too extreme, but L.B. was always very strange. Absolutely the worst hypochondriac I ever met. He was paranoid about his health, as if the whole world was conspiring to give him a heart attack, or double pneumonia, or whatever disease was fashionable at the time. So, in a crisis, whereas B.P. would start to stutter, L.B. would faint. He was always an extremist. One moment he could be so cocksure of himself that he was positively obnoxious. But the very next moment, facing a situation for which he was not prepared, or for which he knew he did not have the resources, he could break out in a cold sweat, lose his voice and actually his ability to function.”

The explanation of this neurasthenic behavior—Ad spoke from the
depth of her Freudian knowledge—could be traced to L.B.’s childhood: a father who was ineffectual; a mother who was strong. Circumstances forced the young Louie to leave home early to seek his fortune. This he did with a combination of outward courage and inner fear. When courage rode the mental saddle he could be fearless to the point of ruthlessness and tyranny. But that self-propelled courage had a way of slipping precipitately from the saddle. And when it did, the erstwhile tough-minded, two-fisted L.B. was transformed into a tower of quivering jelly. His collapse on the rug would bring his anxious secretary to his side. It was like calling into the intercom, “Send in Mother!”

One day Ad dropped in on L.B. just as he was going into one of his fits of fear. She knelt down beside him and put her hand on his perspiring forehead. “Oh, that feels so good—like the hand of my mother,” whimpered the man who only a few years later would be described by one of his writers as Hollywood’s Jewish Himmler.

O
FTEN, WHEN I AM ASKED IF I WAS BORN IN HOLLYWOOD, I
have to pause and think because Hollywood’s growing up and my own are inextricably bound together. For me, Hollywood was a way of life, indeed the only way. Except for the Armistice Parade, the day of my sister Sonya’s disappearance, the Great Benny Leonard-Richie Mitchell fight, my stammering classes at Columbia, and my first visit to the Pickford-Neilan movie set, my New York days quickly receded into a vast fog of forgetfulness. For me it was Home Sweet Hollywood, a lovely place to play with lions and alligators, to ride my bike down lanes of palms and pepper trees, and to make lemonade from my own lemon tree. But by the time I was in the third grade I had learned the hard lesson that filmmaking was anything but glamorous. Not only was it hard, tedious work, with the same scene shot over and over again until a temperamental director decided it had achieved perfection, it was also a place inhabited by demoniac film producers and conniving movie stars. It was a hit-or-miss town where little film factories like Mayer-Schulberg had to grind out their dozen Katherine MacDonald movies a year, and where Anita Stewart had to be led, scolded, or dragged to her commitment of a movie a month.

Many, many years ago, I found myself trying to describe to Scott Fitzgerald the Hollywood I knew as a child. People coming to it from the East might regard it as the glamour capital, I told him, but for me the magic was stripped away when I was still struggling in the early grades at the Wilton Place public school. I saw Hollywood as a company town.

One of my father’s early hits was
Rich Men’s Wives,
another of those society dramas he had virtually perfected with Katherine MacDonald, only this time the fancy-dressed, high-stepping, social-butterfly wife was played by a beautiful newcomer, Claire Windsor. It was of Miss Windsor that the improbable Louella O. Parsons—our local Ogre in Charge of Hollywood Stars—repeatedly used the phrase, “She never looked lovelier.” “Seen at the fabulous party so graciously hosted by Jesse and Bessie Lasky,” Louella would ooze, “was that loveliest of our silent lovelies, Claire Windsor—and she never looked lovelier!” It became a standing joke: “Miss Claire Windsor was buried today at Forest Lawn—and she never looked lovelier!”

One day when I wandered into Father’s office from a visit with Leo and Tiger, he said he was going to take a look at the “wild party” scene for the Claire Windsor picture he was making. I followed him onto the enormous set, the banquet hall of a millionaire’s mansion. There were hundreds of pretty girls in party gowns and good-looking men in smart tuxedoes. A huge wild party was supposed to be in progress, and here is the scenario: Claire Windsor is a college flapper wooed and won by an older man, House Peters, a millionaire master of men. While he is busy making more millions, she is having one of those wickedly innocent “flings.” Her husband has caught her in what looks to be a compromising position with Gaston Glass, the suave heavy. The audience knows that Claire was actually not accepting but indeed doing her darndest to repulse the insistent Gaston. In a rush to judgment, Peters turns Claire out into the cold, telling her she is not a fit mother for their baby boy.

Now comes the scene my father brought me to the stage to enjoy. Since his separation from Claire, Peters has been hitting the bootleg bottle. Meanwhile a social-climbing enchantress (Rosemary Theby) has set her little cloche for the wealthy father.

When the director, Louis Gasnier, called “Action!” the ballroom became a madhouse. Abe Lyman’s Orchestra from the new Ambassador Hotel played jazz, couples danced madly, drank from silver flasks, necked ostentatiously, and in general did their Hollywood best to create the 1922 version of a Roman orgy.

In the middle of this whirling revelry was a large fountain. Fountains, as we know from our Fitzgerald, were a necessary ingredient of these jazz orgiastics. Something irresistibly drew those sheiks and flappers to wild immersions in fountains. Perhaps it was a subconscious rite of bootleg baptism.