Moving Pictures (19 page)

At any rate, while I watched in eight-year-old amazement, the wicked Rosemary Theby and her flapper court, tipsied with gin, get the swell idea that the fountain needs a Cupid. Upstairs in his nursery, sleeps—if that is possible above this din of jazz and drunken laughter—little Jackie, the forgotten and neglected child of the rich man and his exiled wife. “Every fountain needs a Cupid!” Rosemary cries—in words that will later be flashed on the screen in a subtitle. Leading an impulsive charge up the stairs, Rosemary reappears with the bewildered little boy in her arms. While her supporters cheer her on, she dunks the child waist-deep in the fountain, the water from the carved bowl on top pouring out onto his blond curly head. At this moment who should suddenly appear but the prodigal mother. From her sister and the loyal nurse she has heard what is going on in her absence. Now, obsessed with mother love, she has returned to claim and save her child. No longer a Dancing Mother, she runs to the fountain, pushes aside little Jackie’s tormentor, clutches the child to her heaving breast, and promises him she will never leave his side again. The drunken party is suddenly sobered. The rich poppa looks from his wife to Rosemary Theby and realizes in one of those tremulous silent moments where lie true maternity and his own love. Brought to his senses at last, he welcomes his wife back to the family hearth and drives out the heartless Other Woman and her mindless revelers. Fade Out—The End.

To me, standing there with my father watching all this, it looked frightening—and terribly real. But Monsieur Gasnier, the great French director, was not satisfied. In a heavy accent he said, “Cut! Now we do eet again. Only thees time before you put the babee in the foun-tann, hold heem up high so you do not block hees leetle face. And Claire chérie, when you feesh heem out, hold heem away from you for a mo-ment so the audience can see how wet and meeserable he ees.”

I watched as the little boy, almost my size and with curly yellow hair like mine, was removed from the fountain by his father and taken to a corner of the stage where his mother and another woman dried him off, fixed his hair and put on dry pajamas—no, as I see it now he was wearing a nightshirt down to his ankles. His name, my father told me, was Baby Richard Headrick, the most famous child star in Hollywood, thanks to his recent hit,
The Child Thou Gavest Me.
And in addition to being a great little actor, he was also a noted swimmer, diver, and fencer. After the scene was over, my father promised, he would bring me over and introduce me to him.

The scene was repeated, exactly as before, it seemed to me. Again M. Gasnier called “Action!” and hundreds of men and women went into wild gyrations while Abe Lyman’s jazzy orchestra blared loudly. Once again Baby Richard Headrick was thoroughly dunked in the fountain. And again my father’s director had a complaint. The child must throw his arms around his movie mother after she rescues him from the fountain. He must be overjoyed—relieved—to see her. He must hug her just as he would his real mother. I thought that Mr. Gasnier was a little harsh with Baby Richie. But to my surprise, the child actor’s actual father was even more so. “Now Richie, this shot is expensive! See all these people in it. This time, goddamnit, be sure and get it right, just like Mister Gasnier wants.” The most famous child star in Hollywood nodded, and I thought he was going to cry, something he was supposed to do only in front of the cameras.

Now the scene was relit. Once again the hoarse command of “Action!” Once again the bouncy Abe Lyman struck up his band. One more time Baby Richard was immersed in the fountain. This time Mr. Gasnier was satisfied. “Très bien,” he said. “Thees one ees a preent.” I felt a sense of relief. I would not have to see Baby Richard thrown into the fountain again. But I was still innocent of the ways of moviemaking. “Now we do eet in a close shot,” the director intoned. “Just the babee, his muzzer, and Rosemary …”

There was a break in the action as the camera crew moved their equipment closer to the fountain, the cameraman, Karl Struss, giving them instructions as to how to light the closer angle.

Meanwhile, in the corner of the set that the Headricks were using for an impromptu dressing room, another drama was going on. Baby Richie was shivering as his parents removed his soaking sleeping garment. A wardrobe lady was drying him with a big white towel while his mother held yet another dry nightshirt. They seemed to have hundreds.

“Here, now get into this,” his mother said.

The child actor held himself stiffly. “I don’t want to go into that fountain any more.”

“You’ll go into that fountain until Mister Gasnier tells us we can go home,” said his father.

“But I don’t want to,” said the famous child actor.

His father cracked him smartly across the face. “Not too hard,” said his mother. “You’ll ruin his makeup.”

“You’ll do exactly as you’re told,” his father told him. Now sullenly obedient, Baby Richard Headrick allowed himself to be redressed. A
makeup man dried his hair and reset the famous curls. He was ready for the close shot.

“Action—!” and this time the Abe Lyman jazz band blared forth its sound behind the camera. Several prop men lifted Baby Richard into the fountain while Rosemary Thebe shouted, “Look everybody, a little Cupid for our fountain!” Then the righteous Claire Windsor ran in and grabbed him from the water. “Cut,” cried M. Gasnier in the now familiar order. “Rosemary, chérie, do not run away as soon as Claire reach-ezz zee foun-tann. Wait until she forces you away. You understan’? Now we do eet again. Thees time I will tell you when to leave—it ees a veree important mo-ment. Thees time we mus’ do it right, n’est-ce pas?”

Once again the shivering child was carried soaking wet from the fountain. This time his father, who was carrying the boy, saw my father, a well-groomed authority figure on the set, and paused to make his apologies. “I’m sorry, B.P. I don’t know what’s wrong with the kid today. He usually gets these things on the first take. You watch, we’ll get it next time.” He had set the wet child down, next to me. “Right, Richie?” The father’s voice was not a question but a command. The boy was shaking, and fighting back tears. At the age of six he had been in the business for several years and already sensed when he was in the presence of a producer. “Y-y-yes, D-Dad,” he said, his teeth chattering. Then he looked at me. Up and down, sizing me up. “Are you an actor, too?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “I’m just watching.”

“How come?”

I pointed to my well-pressed father. “He’s my daddy.”

“Gee, you’re lucky,” said Hollywood’s most famous child star. “I sure wish I didn’t have to be an actor.”

Then he was swooped upon by his mother and the wardrobe lady, with his father taking leave of my father and following his little meal ticket back to the makeshift dressing nook. A big white towel wrapped around his soaking wet form, Baby Richard Headrick looked back over his shoulder as he allowed himself to be led away, dried again, and prepared for his next immersion. In different angles, close shots, close-ups, and reverse angles, he must have been plunged into that fountain at least a dozen more times that afternoon.

As I came to know other child stars—Jackie Coogan, his little brother Bobby, Baby Peggy, Junior Durkin, Mickey Rooney, thinking now only
of those who worked for my father—I began to see a pattern: These famous little people being hugged, kissed, and praised at previews, press interviews, and gala openings were actually victims of child labor as inhuman as that of the scrawny ten-year-olds sent into the mines for ten hours a day. Like Baby Richie, they were nearly always bullied and abused by greedy and domineering parents. As they grew to teen age they invariably rebelled, turning to drink and drugs, unloving sex and care less marriages. One thinks of Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Lynn. Diana was a bright and provocative actress with whom I discussed the child-star syndrome many times. She drank to excess, abusing her talent and her health, as if determined to shock her wealthy and rather self-righteous husband. “We were all a bunch of goddamned freaks,” she said of herself, her childhood friend Elizabeth, and the rest of the moppet glamour group. “How could Liz be normal? How could she help hating her parents? That’s how we were brought up, with fame, money, and hate. You may try to bury it in drink, or some recent sensation, but deep down you can never forgive them, and never forgive the system, for what they did to you.”

Years after my shivering experience with Cupid-in-the-Fountain, I found myself on a beach in Mexico with Elizabeth and her daughter Lisa, a precious filly by Mike Todd out of Ms. Taylor. Elizabeth’s sixth husband, Richard Burton, was busy on the film set nearby, emoting with Ava Gardner in
Night of the Iguana.
I told Elizabeth my Baby Richie story in exchange for some of her horror stories of childhood stardom. How genteel her parents had seemed, and what an obedient child actress she had appeared to be. She snorted as she led me and her daughter to the very end of the beach, where it was protected by an arm of coral rocks, so that the Mexican paparazzi could not get at them. “Whatever else I do for her, I will never expose Lisa to the kind of life my parents exposed me to.” I glanced at the child playing in the sand. Not a replica of her mother, yet already glowing with a sultry beauty. Photogenic and irresistible. Suddenly, as Liz and I talked with our heads close together, a motor boat approached the beach. I barely glanced at it, accepting it as part of the scene. But Elizabeth had her antennae raised. She spotted the cameraman aiming his weapon at her child from the bow. The self-composed woman who had been talking to me in an undertone so as not to disturb her quietly contented little builder of castles became a banshee. “Get away! Get away! You sonofabitch! Get out of here! Stop following us! I’ll break your goddamn camera!” She waded knee-deep into the surf and hurled pebbles. The transformation was frightening. I
was convinced that she would wade out and overturn the 24-foot boat singlehanded. The boatman must have thought so too. He began to retreat.

Still furious, Miss Taylor returned, picked up our beach towels and picnic basket and Lisa’s toys, and moved further up the beach away from the water. “Goddamnit, Lisa’s going to have privacy!” the voluptuous, true-grit mother cried. “Something I never had. Privacy! I’ll kill those sonofabitches before I let them make a public thing of her!”

But dwelling on the ordeals to which the Baby Richie Headricks and other child stars were subjected is painting the canvas from a palette prematurely dark. For I did find joy among the alligators and ostriches and animals of the Selig Zoo, and excitement mingled with fear at watching those wild party scenes that seemed to adorn most of my father’s pictures. There were memories of early filmmaking that caught my imagination. Father seemed to have developed a creative approach to moviemaking, his box-office pictures balanced by films with offbeat subjects, innovative and controversial. The winners, he would argue, should pay for an occasional experimental film, artistic but inexpensively done. And looking at it pragmatically, if one of these experiments should catch the public fancy and become a “sleeper,” then a new market, a new kind of subject matter would open up.

A gambler by nature, a strange mix of drinking-wenching-studio-intellectual—and still the frustrated writer who loved to boast of the hundred-dollar gold piece he had won in the citywide highschool short story contest—B.P. read as many novels and short stories as he could cram into a crowded week. One of these,
Ching, Ching, Chinaman,
by Wilbur Daniel Steele, had won the O. Henry Prize for best story of the year. It featured Yen Sin, a lowly Chinese (a redundancy in those days of mindless white supremacy) who is washed ashore in a storm and finds himself in a smug, self-contained New England seaport town where he becomes the inevitable laundryman. Scorned as a yellow man and a heathen, Yen Sin discovers that a deacon of the church is cuckolding the minister. The accused and their supporters attempt to ridicule the charges of this Oriental pariah. Eventually the hypocrisy is exposed—and Yen Sin, who has taken the mounting abuse by turning the other cheek, makes the bigoted community realize that he may be closer to the ideals of true Christianity, or at least true charity, than any of the
holier-than-thou’s.
…

Now, that may not be exactly an earthshaker today. But in the early Twenties the standard villains were the “Redskins,” “Mexican greasers,” and occasionally “a wily Chink.” And black men were “coons,” to be used for laughs.

To make a Chinese character the
hero
of a motion picture was just not done. But that’s what B.P. proposed to do. To adapt the story he engaged two of his favorite continuity writers, Eve Unsell and Hope Loring. And assigned the direction to one of his top three, Tom Forman. For the role of Yen Sin he chose the outstanding character actor of his day, Lon Chaney, who had played scores of offbeat roles since the middle Teens but was still on the threshold of the stardom he would achieve with
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The ever-practical Al Lichtman warned my father that no theater was going to run the movie. And he was right. The major theater chains, Famous Players, First National, Fox, and Metro, fighting fiercely for control of first-run houses in every city, flatly refused to run
Ching, Ching, Chinaman,
even after its title was softened to
Shadows.
No self-respecting theater in New York would take the picture. B.P., riding the crest of youthful defiance, welcomed the battle.

He had taken me on the set so I could watch the unique Lon Chaney giving a sensitive and convincing performance as the gentle, hated Chinaman. In an age susceptible to overacting, Chaney was considered a model of restraint. He was to tragic mime what Chaplin was to comedic. He made every movement and every gesture count and I remember my father telling me that Chaney had learned this by communicating with his deaf-mute parents.

That movie set was a fascinating place for me to enter. There was the stooped, shuffling Lon Chaney serving tea to the errant couple, Marguerite de la Motte and Harrison Ford. Behind the camera were several dozen mysterious workers. And in the background in those days of blessed silence, a small orchestra—an organ, a violin, and a bass fiddle—played mood music, sometimes just before the scene, sometimes during the scene. Actors and actresses had special songs that would make them laugh or cry.