Moving Pictures (26 page)

In contrast to his theories, the Judge turned out to be a mild-mannered fellow, prim in appearance, conservative in dress and manner. Somehow Ad found him a place in a Court of Domestic Relations, over which he presided with the same attack on conventional procedure he had demonstrated in Denver. He felt that a couple appearing in court for a contested divorce would have a better chance of working out their personal differences in a more relaxed atmosphere—not just in his chambers but in a private home. Sometimes Ad would be allowed to sit in on these unravelings of domestic knots, and even to put in her psychoanalytical advice. (So deep an impression did Mother’s new prize make on our household that years later, when I was to be married in my
father’s house in Beverly Hills, I felt it only proper to track down Judge Lindsey to officiate. And preside he did, in his most unconventional style, saying “Now let me see, I forget which side you’re supposed to stand on, Budd… I don’t think I ever actually married anybody before. Mostly I helped to get them unmarried, or companionately married.”)
Vanity Fair,
the sparkling magazine of that era, was featuring an amusing series called Impossible Interviews, between, for example, Stalin and Rockefeller, Coolidge and Garbo…. One of these Impossible Interviews came to actuality in our living room when Judge Lindsey decided he would like to meet Clara Bow and asked my mother to arrange it. The apostle of unmarried sex in America wanted to interview one of its most celebrated practioners.

When Clara arrived late, as expected of sex goddesses, it was obvious she had tested her latest delivery of bootleg scotch before leaving home. Introduced by my mother, Clara said, “Hi, Judge, B.P. tells me ya believe people oughta have their fun without havin’ t’ get married. Ya naughty boy!” Whereupon she brought that famous Cupid’s bow of a mouth close to his and gave him a fat smack on the lips. Judge Lindsey drew away—but not before a smear of lipstick was left on his face. Poor Mrs. Lindsey glanced at my mother for help. The Judge had hoped to carry on a conversation with Clara regarding her modern views on sex and marriage. Perhaps it would supply a chapter or at least some apt quotations for his next book. But Clara Bow was the original existentialist before that word was invented. She insisted that the Judge get up and dance with her, and while he tried awkwardly to oblige her, she began to play a coy game with his buttons. Beginning with his top jacket button, she said, “Rich man… poor man… beggar man… thief…,” her busy little fingers unbuttoning with each designation. By the time the childhood game had brought her to “Indian Chief,” Clara Bow was undoing the top button of Judge Lindsey’s fly. The ultra-liberal judge became as arch-conservative as a Salt Lake City elder. He quickly retired to the protective arm of Mrs. Lindsey, reasonably safe from Clara’s ardent pursuit. In a little while the Lindseys had taken flight.

When B.P. upbraided Clara, she pouted like the child she was. “Well gee whiz, if he believes in all that modern stuff like ya say he does, how come he’s such an old stick-in-the-mud?”

My father’s million-dollar property had become a million-dollar headache. He used to call her Crisis-a-Day Clara. When she could not decide
between two persistent lovers, Gary Cooper and the equally virile Vic Fleming, one of B.P.’s strongest directors, she had a nervous breakdown.

Her home in Beverly Hills was modest compared to Pickfair and Valentino’s Falcon Lair, but it was the scene of a nonstop open house. There were all-night poker games; the back door to the kitchen was always open so that patrolling cops and other friendly passersby could drop in and help themselves to beer from the icebox; there were always jazz records playing loudly on the Victrola; Clara’s bootlegger was there so often that he became one of the regular guests; and every now and then a young extra-boy or bit-player from Clara’s last hit picture would threaten her with blackmail if he didn’t get his love letters back.

She would bring her problems to Father’s office, and he would try to bring some order to her life even if finally he was unable to provide the same service for himself. He advised her to settle down a little bit; to concentrate on a single man, if she could; to put her father on a modest salary rather than to indulge his commercial dreams at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. He thought she should find a secretary-companion to live with her and take care of her affairs. When she followed that advice, her father promptly fell in love with the young lady and married her. So Clara had both of them to support while casting about for a new companion.

During this so-called search for stability, she wandered off to the Cal-Neva Lodge on the California-Nevada boundary at Lake Tahoe. In those days Las Vegas was not even a gleam in a Godfather’s eye. But as soon as you were one inch into the state of Nevada, you could take part legally in games of chance, and the boys who operated these games were happy to make them available to the well-heeled suckers from Hollywood. So Clara Bow was introduced to the game of blackjack. A nice man in a tuxedo explained the rules to her rather quickly and gave her some pretty blue chips to play with. The trick of the game is to draw a total of 21. If you draw a card that carries your total above that amount, you lose the bet you anted. If you stop with a total under 21 and the dealer has a greater total under 21, you also lose. It’s a nice game, lots of fun to play, and very nice for the boys in the tuxedoes.

Clara was already a rather proficient if reckless poker player, and this game seemed easy. The only trouble was, the dealer seemed either better at it or luckier than Clara. After twenty minutes she had lost all her pretty blue chips. But the tuxedoes could not have been more obliging.
They were happy to hand her another hundred chips. In less than an hour the dealer had raked in all her chips again. By this time she was bored with the silly little card game and thought she would try roulette. This was fine with the tuxedoes. Clara Bow didn’t have to worry about credit at Cal-Neva. They would advance her anything up to one hundred thousand dollars. But meanwhile, they thrust a blank check in front of her, for her to sign for her losses at the blackjack table.

As in a scene from a movie my father was soon to produce,
Underworld,
the diminutive Miss Bow looked around at the lumbering bodyguards with wrestlers’ chests stretching their starched shirt-fronts, and signed—a check for twenty thousand dollars.

What Clara thought she had lost was a mere one hundred dollars. For as she tried to explain to my father, “Y’see Ben, I thought those chips were only worth fifty cents each. It wasn’ until I had to sign the check that they told me they were a hundred dollars each. I was bettin’ ten ’n’ twenty on every deal. How was I supposed t’ know?”

My father told his tearful little sexpot that she had been duped. If they had failed to explain the value of the chips in advance, and had encouraged her to buy a second stack, she had been doubly duped. This was the morning after the infamous blackjack game and there was still time to stop payment on the check.

“Oh, what a swell idea!” she said. “They really cheated me. I shouldn’t hafta pay it.”

“I’ll help you,” my father promised, “but only on one condition, Clara. That you never go into a casino again. They’re dangerous places when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

My old man was talking from firsthand experience.

“I promise. I promise. Anything to get out of this awful mess!” said the poor little rich girl.

Two days had passed when Clara called my father at midnight. She was almost too hysterical to talk. “B.P., something awful—something terrible just happened! I’ve got to talk to ya right away—hurry—please!”

My father put down a script he was reading late—for he worked as hard as he played—and drove out to Clara’s. She was still in hysterics. Two tough customers had come from Cal-Neva to see her. Their bosses had sent them with this message: “Either you make that check good—tomorrow—or you’ll get acid all over your pretty puss. Instead of the It Girl you’ll be the Ain’t Girl.”

That may sound like dialogue left over from a Grade-B Warner
Brothers movie, but my father told me this story at least a hundred times without a single variation, until I not only memorized it but became convinced of its truth.

When Clara told him of this threat, he advised her to appear cooperative, but to ask them to pick up the check at the studio from her boss, Mr. Schulberg. She was to say that she was such a hot property that the company was prepared to pay her debt rather than risk the destruction of her face.

Early next morning my father phoned Buron Fitts, the local district attorney. This was a legitimate extortion case, but even if it hadn’t been, Mr. Fitts was always ready to go out of his way to help any motion-picture executive. To put it bluntly, the studios owned Buron Fitts. This was in the post-Desmond Taylor and Arbuckle days, when scandals that might have destroyed the reputations of valuable movie stars could be hushed up by the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil approach of the D.A.’s office. This was Cover-up, Hollywood Style, in the days when the film capital was a self-sufficient oligarchy, sunny and benevolent on the surface but hard and vindictive at the core.

The Clara Bow-Cal-Neva case gave Mr. Fitts an opportunity to score a double whammy: to provide an invaluable service to a studio while throwing a net around criminal invaders from Nevada. Fitts told my father to alert his office as soon as the call came in from the Lake Tahoe boys. B.P. was to make an appointment with the goons, his tone promising payment on arrival. The call came in as expected. Fitts ordered a brace of detectives to B.P.’s office, where they staked themselves out behind the long red-gold curtains on the far wall. When the enforcers arrived, Father played out the scene he had rehearsed with the district attorney. A large checkbook was displayed conspicuously open on his desk.

“Now let me get this straight,” B.P. began. “You’re telling me that unless I write out this check and hand it over right now, you’re going to throw acid in Miss Bow’s face, so that she’ll never be able to work in pictures again?”

“You heard it right, mister,” one of those George Rafts rose to the bait. “And we ain’t playin’. We got the juice right on us. So no more jaw-music. Gimme that check or Miss It won’t be worth shit.”

The visitors were enjoying their little couplet when out from behind the curtains, pistols drawn, sprang the Buron Fitts specials. Before the blackjack cowboys knew what hit them, they were in handcuffs and
booked for extortion and a sheet of other crimes. For a while both my father and Clara Bow were given police protection, for fear that the Cal-Neva masterminds would retaliate. But gamblers needed the good will of the free-spending movie crowd and someone up there must have called off the dogs, for there were no further threats or efforts to get even.

There was a joke going around in the dying months of the Twenties: “She had It but she lost it at the Astor.” Precisely where Clara Bow lost It was more difficult to pinpoint. The decline and fall of It and the It Girl was a downward spiral. The economic collapse near the end of 1929 had only an indirect effect on the world’s most identifiable flapper. She wasn’t wiped out in the market as were some of her famous co-stars. Her money had never been invested, wisely or unwisely. It was all in cash and furs and jewels and handouts and, best of all, in the contract that promised her five thousand dollars every week, come rain or come shine, come drunk or sober, come champagne happy or midnight blue, for years on end. So should Clara Bow worry?

The answer was a sobbing
yes.
The impact of sound on silence was nightmare and renaissance: literally death and life. These victims didn’t jump out of windows like the Wall Street plungers. Their suicide was more gradual. Behind the locked doors of their Beverly Hills mansions, the talkie drop-outs searched for an answer to their fears and frustrations in the amber bottles their bootleggers hauled to the back door by the case.

For Clara Bow it was the beginning of a thirty-five-year death-in-life. Her first sound picture was a resounding disaster. Overnight, the Clara Bow I had listened to on my father’s sets and locations, and in his office and living room, had to talk from the newly installed sound-picture screen. Millions of adoring fans heard for the first time the flat, nasal Brooklynese we who knew her had always associated with her. It was a playback to the days of Theda Bara, when the Vampire suddenly went out of style at the end of World War I. Unbelievably out of a job after having played to a million fans a week, the little Jewish girl from Cincinnati—whom William Fox promoted as an Arabian princess born at an oasis in the shadow of the Sphinx—turned to the theater. Her opening on Broadway drew a sold-out audience laced with all the reigning celebrities. The first time she opened her mouth, they laughed.
This
was the irresistible vampire against whom the Church and an organized group of outraged wives had fulminated as a threat to the established order? This was the Serpent Woman? Cleopatra and Salome
incarnate? At the first sound of her childlike piping, cruel laughter ended Theodora Goodman’s career.

Clara’s trouble was more than vocal. In the early days of sound, photographic fluidity was surrendered to mechanical rigidity. The microphone, not yet movable from a boom, had to be hidden in a flowered plant or a centerpiece on a table. The actors had to play to it. And the camera, imprisoned in an enormous soundproof box, had lost its mobility. In those early years of primitive sound, the performers were far more circumscribed in movement than they would have been on a proscenium stage. Clara’s appeal was in her movement—her impromptu Charleston, her incomparable necking. Even her moments of Rock-a-bye-Baby sadness could not be played to a stationary mike.

To add to the pressure, she was faced with the new leading men with stage experience, like Freddie March. His voice was theatrically trained and when he spoke his dialogue he did so with a confidence that conveyed a new kind of screen realism—realism in sound. And the more effective the image of this new wave from the theater, the Marches and the Ruth Chattertons, the more pathetic and ludicrous became the efforts of the great silent stars like Jack Gilbert and Clara Bow.