Moving Pictures (28 page)

As the years rolled on, Clara became unable to speak coherently or even to recognize old friends. Every Christmas she wrote to Louella Parsons, whose column was still a king-maker and a queen-breaker in the fickle fiefdom of Hollywood. “Do you still remember me?” a shaky scrawl begged. There was another brief surfacing in 1960 when Clara wrote to Louella’s rival columnist, Hedda Hopper: “I slip my old crown of It Girl not to Taylor or Bardot but to Monroe.”

Unlike Marilyn, Clara Bow lingered on in living death until she was a completely forgotten sixty-year-old recluse. Her final years were spent in a small apartment in West Los Angeles, watching television. Her favorite shows were the Late-Lates. She needed lots of sleeping pills to
overcome the insomnia that had set in in the days of her mike fright and the ordeal of Daisy De Voe. Early one morning, her live-in nurse discovered, she would be able to sleep forever. Ten years of worldwide fame had been sandwiched between almost twenty years of penniless obscurity and thirty years of has-been obscurity. But for one last day little gum-chewing, g-dropping Clara was back on the front page, and not merely of the racy Los Angeles
Examiner,
but of the august
New York Times:

CLARA BOW, THE ‘IT’ GIRL, DIES AT 60; FILM ACTRESS SET VOGUE IN 1920’S.

When I stared at that story in the
Times
I thought of the vibrant Clara I had known in my youth. And although I had never met her, I thought also of Zelda Fitzgerald, who was
the
flapper of the literate international set during the same riotous period over which Clara Bow had presided. They were like opposite sides of the same shiny coin—let’s call it Zelda for heads and Clara for tails—and when the coin fell dead on the dance floor both sides came up losers.

W
HILE L. B. MAYER WAS
beginning to build the power base at MGM from which he would rule for the next twenty years, my father was drafted to take over as vice-president in charge of production at Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky—MGM’s chief rival. Ever the cool, unexcitable pragmatist, Adolph Zukor had come to Hollywood on one of his periodic trips and decided that his West Coast studio needed reorganizing if it were to compete with the executive ability of L.B., the creative talent of Irving Thalberg, and the bread-and-butter theatrical know-how of Harry Rapf.

For Zukor, now in his early fifties, and the young writer and publicist he had considered his protégé, it was a dramatic meeting. The two men had not talked in seven years. “Well, Adolph, you sent for me.” B.P. was reminding his old boss of his youthful boast that this was the only way Zukor could ever hope to get him back.

“Yes, I remember our last talk,” Zukor said quietly. “But what’s a little pride between friends? I’ve been keeping my eye. on you. You’ve made good pictures on sensible budgets. I can see you’ve got an eye for talent. And
The Virginian
proves to me that you can make a big Western and not just those Clara Bow wild-party movies.”

“The flapper pictures gave us the money to make
The Virginian
,” my father countered.

“I don’t believe in grudges,” Zukor went on. “A big waste of emotion. We’re still the number-one studio, but we’ve been slipping a little. And the Mayer-Thalberg combination, with the Loew’s theaters behind
them, is getting stronger every day. Jesse is still my partner, there’s never been a bad word between us in all these years. He’s a wonderful man, but he’s almost too nice. He would never hurt anybody. He’s a gentleman. But as a result, I feel some of those people in our studio are taking advantage of him. We’ve got a lot of pigheaded stars and directors in the studio who think they can run everything to suit themselves. But we have to make fifty-five to sixty pictures a year. That needs organization and a strong hand. Jesse likes the idea of your coming back. There won’t be any friction. He’ll back you all the way.”

They settled on financial terms that brought an overnight change to the Schulberg economy. And B.P. was allowed to bring his Preferred Pictures staff with him, including his favorite writers Buddy Leighton and Hope Loring, scenarist Eve Unsell, and the rest of the team.

So the Mayer-Schulberg era had come to an end, and with it the downtown Los Angeles studios, for the Famous-Lasky studio was truly in Hollywood, still at the site of the original Lasky-DeMille barn. Our family moved closer to the studio, across Western Avenue to a quiet street lined with palm trees, Lorraine Boulevard, in an exclusive neighborhood called Windsor Square. On Lorraine the houses were not the typical one-story wooden bungalows we had found on Gramercy Place. Lorraine was lined with spacious two-story homes that had a look of permanence.

Five-hundred-and-twenty-five Lorraine Boulevard was to be home to the Schulbergs from the middle of the booming Twenties to the depressed mid-Thirties. There were bedrooms for my parents, myself, my sister Sonya, my brother Stuart, my mother’s brother Sam Jaffe (who had followed us out from New York and, true to the mores of the day, had become B.P.’s studio manager, first at Preferred, then at Paramount), plus maids’ rooms for the nurse Wilma, the downstairs maid Paula, and the cook. There was also an apartment over the garage for the English chauffeur, James, who doubled as a butler for the lavish dinner parties Mother liked to give.

We felt we were living in a palace. On the main floor there was a large, ornate dining room and a sunken living room. French doors opened on a large sunroom with a cozy window seat. My mother had that sunroom extended by a dozen feet and turned it into a library of several thousand volumes, including the rare editions that both my parents had begun collecting. On the wall was an enlargement of the family bookplate featuring a poem that became the Schulberg anthem:

THOU FOOL, TO SEEK COMPANIONS IN A CROWD!

INTO THY ROOM AND THERE UPON THY KNEES,

BEFORE THY BOOKSHELVES, HUMBLY THANK THY GOD

THAT THOU HAST FRIENDS LIKE THESE!

We all caught the reading habit—but I suspect that if we hadn’t caught it, it would have been drilled into us by Ad’s method: She had now raised the ante to fifty cents a book to read the classics. Hardly what one would call “progressive education.” It’s been said that anything you are forced or bribed to do, like reading Tennyson or Shakespeare before you’re ready, will leave you with a lifelong resistance to it. But Mother’s system seemed to work. I began to love sitting in that library or taking a book up to my bedroom, and I learned to appreciate the simpler tales of Tolstoy, and of Melville and Dickens, when most children my age were more at home with the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift.

On Sundays before the elaborate midday dinner there was a family ritual that outsiders would never associate with the habits of Hollywood tycoons. Father might have been up until dawn the night before, trying to lick a particularly stubborn script with the writers, gambling away his weekly salary at the Clover Club, or carousing with his cronies. But no matter how glassy-eyed, exhausted, or hung over he might be, come Sunday morning he would preside in his monogrammed silk bathrobe over the family reading circle in the library. Grouped around him, we listened hour after hour as he read through Melville’s
Omoo
and
Typee
and on to
Moby Dick;
through
David Copperfield
and
The Old Curiosity Shop;
through choice sections of
The Forsyte Saga,
and the classic Russians—Lord, how did he find time to read and we to listen to those torrents of precious words?

Father read those novels well, forgetting to stammer as he became involved in their plots and their characters, and we could close our eyes and see the scenes he was describing. Since B.P., perhaps inheriting his father’s lack of Hebrew piety, never bothered with the services at Rabbi Magnin’s Temple B’nai B’rith in downtown Los Angeles, and since Ad was also a liberated spirit who attended only on High Holy Days, these Sunday literary sessions were the closest we second-generation Latvian Jews came to any sort of spiritual observance.

Our family life had a split personality. Father was working furiously at the studio, working hard and well in those days. And I was fascinated with our other home—the great sets, the ancient castles, ocean liner,
and Western streets. I loved to walk into the dark stages and watch the actors go through their scenes. It was fun to sit in the projection room with Father watching the rushes, or to travel with him in style to a sneak preview.

I grew up on the sidewalk conferences outside the theater that followed the previews of pictures still in the process of final editing. My father, his director, film editor, and various assistants would pass around the preview cards on which the audience had written their capsule critiques—which varied from “God bless you for making this beautiful movie!” to “Burn it—it
stinks
!”

Members of the curbstone conference would come up with flash ideas for countering unfavorable reactions: suggestions for speeding up one sequence or slowing down another, sometimes for throwing out an entire scene that seemed to stop the flow, sometimes for adding a series of intercuts without which the rhythm seemed static. Making movies for the largest possible world audience and still trying to make them well was a complicated business. At first I would look up into the thoughtful, worried face of my father and his aides without fully comprehending what they were saying. Later, as I grew up to their shoulders, I would listen more carefully, realizing that a picture could be made or destroyed in reediting and reshooting. The day would come when I would be old enough to find myself stammering out an opinion of my own.

There were no film schools in those days. But those sidewalk postmortems offered thorough lessons in practical filmmaking. Crucial decisions were made there at the curb, as the impromptu conference became an hour-long reexamination of the picture practically frame by frame. Happy endings replaced unhappies that had left the audience dissatisfied. Actors would be recalled for retakes of a scene that clearly wasn’t working. Sometimes a director begged for a chance to supervise the reediting along the lines he had originally envisioned.

Sometimes of course the comments were good, and the curbstone conference became a celebration. But if half the audience had walked out, the conference became a wake, and there were angry accusations, anxious passing of the buck, and threats of resignation on the part of hotheaded directors. Most of the time the curbstone conference was a time neither for laughing nor back stabbing but simply for hard work and detailed analysis before those ten thousand precious feet of film went back to the cutting room.
Ad had brought her parents, Max and Hannah, to this bright new world of sunshine, and B.P. bought a tidy Hollywood bungalow for them. But Grandpa Max never had time to enjoy the fragrance of the citrus blossoms. He was always praying, or so it seemed to this bewildered grandchild who would stare at him across the wide, deep gulf of two generations. With the black
yarmulke
on his head, the silk
tallis
around his shoulders, the leather
tfillim
on his forearms, he would bow to the East, intoning what seemed to me an endless prayer. He would rock back and forth as he chanted in Hebrew to his demanding God. In one of our early visits to that pious bungalow I tried to interrupt him: “What are you d-doing, Gr-Grandpa?” He ignored me and went on
davening
while Grandma gently wagged her finger at me and coaxed me back to the dining-room table.

Grandfather’s friends were the fathers of the other studio heads: Old Man Mayer, Old Man Warner, Old Man Cohn, and so on, all of them from the same Old World mold, all of them aged anachronisms in their dark suits and long beards, with Yiddish as their daily speech and Hebrew for their daily prayers. All of them mystified that from their loins had sprung such unlikely offsprings as a loud, wisecracking, sports-jacketed Jack Warner; a profane, irreverent, mob-oriented strongman like Harry Cohn; or a crafty, ambitious powerbroker like Louie Mayer… Somehow the seed of the Old World had produced these brash, amoral, on-the-make Americans. The sons with their bankrolls and their girlfriends and their
fuck-you
’s would tolerate and humor these old men as relics of the past.

The first thing the old beards wanted in this new bungalow city baking in the sun was a
shul
where they would feel at home. (Indeed, my paternal grandmother was so attached to her
shul in
New York, directly across the narrow, teeming street from her crowded tenement flat, that she had refused to make the cross-country trek with the Jaffes and the Mayers.) In Hollywood the old men suffered culture shock: The unctuous Rabbi Magnin did not preside over a synagogue but over a Reform Temple that, like the
goyim
’s
,
included a Sunday school taught in English to cater to the sons and daughters of the new movie money. Temple B’nai B’rith was grand enough, modern enough, unorthodox enough to repel Grandpa, Old Man Mayer, and the rest of their bearded cronies.

So the old men got together and held a council of religious war. They
wanted a real
shul
like the ones they had left behind in their cozy Eastern ghettos. For ninety dollars a month they rented a Hollywood bungalow and set about transforming the interior into something as close as they could make it to the genuine synagogue they missed. Anxious to keep the old men happy, their powerful sons sent studio carpenters and painters to bring about the transformation. The results were astonishing. From the outside, Grandpa’s
shul
looked like any other little white bungalow on the street, complete with small green lawn and the obligatory miniature orange or lemon tree. But once you stepped inside you found yourself walking into an old world steeped in Jewish tradition, where Grandpa Max, and Old Man Mayer and Old Man Warner (those seemed to be their official names) and the rest of the immigrant Talmudists, finally felt at home. They sent to New York for a
real
rabbi, a little Moses who would see to it that the Laws of the Torah were upheld and the Sabbath observed as Jehovah had intended. When the rabbi arrived, a young man whose features were appropriately hidden by a bushy black beard, Grandpa and his Orthodox pals were driven down to the Santa Fe station in studio limousines as the reception committee. At last Hollywood had its own
shul
with its own rabbi who would walk to the services on the Sabbath, and who would not touch money or otherwise profane that holy day.