Moving Pictures (25 page)

I said I was. Although I really didn’t see that much of him. Except for Sundays … the Friday-night fights … and the sneak previews. We’d drive or we’d take the train to San Bernardino or Glendale, and the theater manager would hand out cards asking for the audience comment on the movie. The impromptu sidewalk conference outside the theater became an institution.

“Y’see, that’s what I mean,” Clara said. “At least he takes you with him to the sneaks. Someday you’ll grow up and be a big producer becuz of all the things he’s teaching ya. I know he’s awful proud of ya. He’s even showed me some of ya poetry.”

As another outlet for the stammering, I had begun trying my hand at little rhymes that were not quite in a class with Robert Louis Stevenson’s
A Child’s Garden of Verses.
I was surprised to hear of Father’s reaction because, while my mother had been encouraging me to write more, he had seemed rather noncommittal.

“I know yuh gonna make me awful proud of ya, too,” Clara said as we sat in the roadster shoulder to shoulder and chewed gum intimately
together. “Y’know I feel about ya almost like ya my little nephew. Like we’re all one big happy family.”

Like innocent Hugh in
The Plastic Age,
I didn’t know anything about sex attraction and all that stuff. It was amazing how little I knew, considering my father’s profession and my mother’s early fascination with Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis. But I sensed that same Something that hung over the studio lot like incense, Something intimate in Clara Bow’s relationship to our family.

Of course what I did not learn until some years later was that B.P.’s secretary, Henrietta Cohn, who had accompanied us to Hollywood, had written an anonymous letter to Ad alerting her to “the B.P.-Clara Bow situation.” Henrietta was a small, intense, rather homely, extremely able and intelligent woman who spent more time with Father than Ad did, and who felt she was doing this out of loyalty both to mother and to her own boss. His career was in the ascendancy, he was considered one of the brightest and most inventive producers in the competitive town, and Henrietta was afraid a rash move might impede his otherwise inevitable climb to the top.

It seems my mother accepted this bit of intelligence from the studio philosophically. Although I didn’t know it at the time, she was already resigned to his philandering. A curious mixture of old-fashioned and new-fashioned, she believed in the family with a capital F, had become disillusioned but unshaken in her love for my father, and believed he needed her steadying influence to build his career.

There must be, she was determined, no reflection of domestic turbulence within the home. The children (the third and ultimate issue, Stuart, had just arrived, our first Hollywood native son) must be raised in an atmosphere of culture and security. Furthermore, all of the producers had mistresses. If Irving Thalberg was faithful to Norma Shearer, the starlet L.B. had signed in the Mayer-Schulberg days, it may have been due as much to a weak heart as to a strong morality. Some of those back-street companions were full-fledged stars and leading ladies. Some of them were pretty bit-players carried on the company payroll at the insistence of the studio boss. “It was a terribly decadent society,” my mother passed judgment. “The producers had so much more power than they do today. Anybody with a pretty face and a good figure could pass the test in silent pictures. Of course girls like Clara Bow and Colleen Moore and Blanche Sweet had some special appeal. But thousands of pretty girls were pouring into Hollywood from all over the country
hoping to be discovered and the men in power could really take their pick. The ones who failed to catch on in pictures became courtesans. They’d spend all of their time making themselves beautiful and glamorous for the men who kept them: sleeping late, beauty treatments, all kinds of faddist massages after bathing in perfume, milk, scented bath oils. It was like the Middle East, like sultans with their harems. They even had their eunuch yes-men who would pimp for them, front for them, appear in public with them to avoid bad publicity. I used to feel sorry for the wives of all the big producers, because most of those women had no resources with which to fight back. They just played cards with each other, or vied with each other as to who had the most expensive jewels and clothes. Nearly all of them had started out at the bottom and now that the business was becoming a billion-dollar industry, they were living in big houses surrounded by servants and seemingly everything they wanted—except a happy home life.”

Ad felt superior to these luxuriously protected domestic prisoners because she had found an outlet in her studies at the local branch of the University of California, her activities in behalf of child-study and birth-control groups, and her ability to set up what was probably the first Hollywood salon, where the visiting intellectuals and artists—a Theodore Dreiser, or a Count Keyserling—would be invited to meet those members of the movie community who in Mother’s rather snobbish opinion were among the less culturally retarded. She succeeded in establishing herself as an intellectual and cultural force in the Hollywood of the Twenties when those forces were sadly wanting both in supply and in demand. She was the first to bring Early American furniture, child psychology, and progressive education to Hollywood; John Dewey was more of a god to her than John Gilbert.

Her only rival was Bessie Lasky, who painted, encouraged her young son to write poetry, and drew around her an effete gathering of painters, sculptors, and aesthetic hangers-on. Ad’s group seemed more oriented toward the real world and its problems.

Hollywood had been culture-conscious before. The Hollywood of the 1910s, the provincial Hollywood that had been envisioned by its pious founders as the New Jerusalem, had been determinedly cultured, though its taste ran to the precious and pretentious. The preeminent artist was Paul De Longpre, who specialized in painting beautiful flowers. The annual Pilgrimage Play was organized with the Chamber of Commerce boast, “What Oberammergau was to Europe, Hollywood is to be to all the world.” There was the MacDowell Circle of Allied Arts and a natural
bowl in the hills became the romantic setting for classical music. There was the Easter Sunrise Service with tens of thousands climbing those brown hills to immerse themselves in the religious music. The original Hollywood of Midwestern teetotalers and God-fearing Christians liked to boast that
their
Hollywood was “The Theosophical Capital of America.” Hollywood was a cultural schizophrene: the anti-movie Old Guard with their chamber music and their religious pageants fighting a losing battle against the more dynamic culture of the Ad Schulbergs who flaunted the bohemianism of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the socialism of Upton Sinclair. But there was one subject on which the staid old Hollywood establishment and the members of the new culture circle would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low-life and a disgrace to the community.

My relationship to Clara Bow was affected neither by sexual jealousy nor by cultural superiority. As we sat there in her red roadster waiting for the assistant director to summon her for the next scene, I found her easier to be with than the girls of my own age. For all her Juicy-Fruit flamboyance, there was something wounded about her—the Rock-a-bye-Baby bit, we’d call it today—to which I could relate.

When the A.D. called over to us, “Ready for you, Miss Bow,” and I followed her out of the car to watch her play the scene, a curious thing happened. It was so casual, and yet I have never forgotten it. Gilbert Roland came up to me shyly with a small folded note in his hand, pointed to Clara, and asked me if I would hand it to her. I don’t know why he called on me to play Cupid. I don’t even know what was in the note because I was too conscientious to read it, especially when I could feel his strong Latin eyes drilling into my back as I caught up with Clara and delivered it. She mumbled, “Oh thanks, Buddy, sweet of ya,” and took a quick glance over her shoulder at the young bullfighter turned actor.

That evening they came into the local hotel dining room together, two head-turning 20-year-olds whom my father had put together from such totally different worlds—Chihuahua and Brooklyn. For the next year or so they were what Hollywood liked to call “an item.” But, as a host of ardent suitors were to discover, Clara was too capricious—or too promiscuous, or vulnerable—to be ready to settle down with one.

T
HE PLASTIC AGE PUT CLARA’S
saucy face on the cover of fan magazines, and in the year that followed, with Father choosing her vehicles carefully, she achieved full-fledged stardom with
Dancing Mothers
and
Mantrap.
In
Kid Boots,
he cast her opposite his and Ad’s little friend from the Lower East Side, now a top Broadway song-and-dance comedian, Eddie Cantor. But what carried Clara to a peak far above silent rivals like Colleen Moore and Joan Crawford was a providential meeting that my father arranged for her with Elinor Glyn.

Elinor Glyn was the Jacqueline Susann of the Twenties, with the racy best-selling qualities of Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins thrown in. Her autographed picture on the mantle over the fireplace in my study shows a long- and strong-faced, handsome woman in her middle forties, her hair parted in the middle and looped neatly over her high forehead like a theater curtain. “William S. Hart in drag,” a studio wit had described her. More sophisticated than Percy Marks, she had written novels that were considered naughty-naughty if not immoral:
Three Weeks
and
His Hour.
Now she had written
It,
a word that had its modest place in our language as an impersonal pronoun until Miss Glyn, with the showmanship of the English aristocrat she affected, dusted it off, shined it up, and upper-cased it as a more compact and suggestive word for what the Jazz Age magazines had coyly been calling S.A.

Elinor Glyn, with her arch
-grande dame
manners, her exaggerated British accent, and her sweeping conception of
it,
was as generic to the Twenties as Aimee Semple MacPherson, Peaches Browning, and—
thanks to Miss Glyn’s magic wand—Clara Bow. If her work was laughed off by the highbrow critics as unadulterated junk, you would never have guessed it from Miss Glyn’s hauteur. To hear her talk, she was the embodiment of all the great English lady novelists from Emily Bronte to Virginia Woolf.

When
It
was published, my father snapped it up as the ideal balloon in which to waft his red-haired protégée even higher into the Hollywood heavens. He arranged a meeting at the studio between the preeminent authoress and the preeminent Jazz Baby, and Miss Glyn placed on the head of Miss Bow the official crown: “Of all the lovely young ladies I’ve met in Hollywood, Clara Bow has
It
!”

Thus Clara Bow became not just a top box-office star but a national institution: The It Girl. Millions of followers wore their hair like Clara’s and pouted like Clara, and danced and smoked and laughed and necked like Clara. They imitated everything but her speech because fortunately the silent screen protected them from that nasal Brooklyn accent.

Fifty-odd years ago—in the Golden Age of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Gertrude Ederle, Bobby Jones, Big Bill Tilden, and Lucky Lindy—Clara Bow reigned as the carefree princess of a carefree generation, the idol of the shopgirl and the sweetheart of the frat house. Her salary jumped like a hot tip on Wall Street from fifty to two-fifty, from five hundred to a thousand dollars a week, and then two, three, four, five thousand dollars pouring in every week! She couldn’t spend it fast enough, though she found a lot of people who were happy to help her. She bought the most expensive red roadster she could find, to match her hair, and she filled it with seven chow dogs, also chosen for fur to match Clara’s flaming locks. In a great blur of red she would speed down Sunset Boulevard, driving faster than the cars on the oval racetrack on the open flatlands of Beverly Hills (where the Beverly Wilshire Hotel now stands). A press agent’s dream, she kept firing her chauffeurs because they were afraid to drive fast enough to please her. Her simultaneous love affairs with her leading men, her directors, and handsome hangers-on were the talk of Hollywood and the subject of spicy fan-magazine spreads.

By this time, it seems, B.P. had become more father-confessor and guidance counselor than paramour. Her own father, frankly, was a mess, though in the true Clara Bow style she remained openhearted and openhanded in her devotion. Robert Bow had followed his daughter to Hollywood, where he made awkward stabs at managing her unexpected
career. Then she set him up in a dry-cleaning establishment, but even though she twisted the arm of all her studio friends to bring their business to him, the enterprise failed. Even when Clara offered to hustle the clothes from the studio to his shop on roller skates, Robert Bow failed. Undaunted, he opened a restaurant. That too went down the drain, at a cost B.P. estimated at $25,000. Everything Robert Bow touched turned to tin—or worthless paper. But in those high-kicking Twenties, it didn’t really seem to matter: Clara had more than enough for everybody. Fan mail was flooding in at the rate of 3,500 letters a week. If she watched her weight and her booze—an extra few pounds on that energetic little frame could make the difference between the irresistibly curvaceous and the undeniably pudgy—there was no reason why The It Girl, still in her early twenties, could not roll along at her dizzy pace of two hundred and fifty thousand a year for at least another ten years.

While my father was working to keep Clara’s star high above the world, my mother was coming to the rescue of another volatile career, Judge Ben Lindsey’s. The Judge had established himself as one of the controversial figures of the period by advocating Companionate Marriage. People, according to his daring conception, should not join together in marriage without first knowing if they were sexually compatible. A period of trial marriage, in Lindsey’s opinion, would avoid a great number of the divorces over which he was presiding in his Denver court. A particular case in which he voiced this opinion caused him so much notoriety that he was virtually hounded out of that straitlaced city. Ever on the prowl for intellectual innovators, Mother invited Judge and Mrs. Lindsey to come to Los Angeles as her houseguests while she tried to find a place for him in the local judicial system.