Moving Pictures (29 page)

I remember attending the first Friday night service with my mother, to oblige Grandpa. The bungalow was now one room large enough to accommodate a congregation of perhaps a hundred. Grandpa seemed content as he swayed back and forth and repeated his Hebrew prayers. I remember the mysterious singsong chorus as the bearded fathers of the clean-shaven, worldly studio moguls demonstrated to their children and their grandchildren how to worship the relentless Lord of their universe.

Years later when Grandpa lay dying in a hospital, he prepared himself for the journey by praying, louder than I had ever heard him pray in his little Hollywood
shul.
For two days, hour after hour, he sang his Old Testament praises to his God in that mournful language I would never learn and never understand. There were no personal goodbyes or personal remembrances. He had never been close to his wife Hannah, my withered grandma, who had endured her life with a nagging sense of having married beneath her. But Grandpa Max seemed to have a direct line to Jehovah Himself. When he stopped praying at the top of his voice we knew he was dead.

While the old beards worshipped in their Hollywood
shul
and their sons worshipped at the altar of the box office, at 525 Lorraine our altar was the almighty typewriter. Sonya was to say that in the Schulberg home a typewriter held a central position corresponding to that of a piano in a less word-oriented family. It was difficult to pass it without sitting down to try out a few chords or to pick out an original little melody. With all that literature stuffed into our minds at Father’s Sunday reading sessions, we Schulberg kids found the family typewriter irresistible. As a result of this literary doodling, all three of us would eventually publish works of fiction. In the Schulberg household, in the beginning was the word.

Along with the chicken pox, German measles, and scarlet fever, I came down with another childhood affliction—poetry. I no longer recall the exact moment of infection when I first began to crawl as far back as I could under the piano, to put my thoughts into rhyme. As the self-appointed, mother-encouraged poet laureate of Lorraine Boulevard, I composed couplets appropriate to various holidays. For Mother’s Day I withdrew into the darkest corner under the Steinway for longer than usual: I wanted to make this my masterpiece. When I had finished it, for the third time, I waited for Mother to come home from her antique-hunting expedition in Pasadena. When I heard her drive up in her Marmon I ran to the door, my hand atremble with its sheet of literature.

“M-Mom, I just wr-wrote a p-poem!”

“Wonderful, Buddy. I’d love to read it!”

I followed my mother into the library, where she sat in one of the wing chairs and placed my poem on the circular Queen Anne table while she paused to light a cigarette. I was ashamed of her smoking because somewhere I had heard that it was not a ladylike thing to do. But that day, eager as is every writer for a first reaction to his work, I ignored Mother’s Camel cigarette and kept my eyes focused on her face as she read my dozen lines, artistically divided into half a dozen couplets.

When she finished reading it, real tears, not the glycerine ones I had seen at the studio, were rolling down her smooth, pink cheeks.

“Buddy, did you really write this?”

Shyly, I admitted that I had.

“Why, I think it’s beautiful! It’s—a work of genius. It deserves to be published.”

I glowed.

“What time will Father be home?” I asked. He had told me about having been a writer before he began making movies and running studios. I knew how much he admired writing. The only people he seemed to like having at the house were writers. Maybe when I grew up I could get to be a writer like Dad.

Mom said she thought he’d be home around seven. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing my poem for his arrival. First I typed it out on Father’s big typewriter: By going very cautiously with two fingers I finally had it on paper without a single typo. I thought it looked a little naked, so I got out my crayons and drew a gracefully waving border around it in yellow, green, and red. The frame of three colors was exactly what it needed.

At seven o’clock I placed it on my father’s plate at the head of the long dining-room table. I sat at one side, Sonya on the other. The human butterball we called Baby Stuart was still up in his nursery with Wilma. At seven-fifteen Father had not arrived. I went to his plate at the head of the table and repositioned the poem at a more advantageous angle. The grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past seven. We would have to start without Father, Mother decided. I sat down and started spooning the thick pea soup, but the suspense was awful.

Although it had been nice to hear from my mother that I was a genius, I was eager for confirmation of that status from the man I’d heard proclaimed the top story mind in The Industry. I had seen how people depended on his opinions at those post-preview curbstone conferences, after the rushes in the projection room, or at the story conferences that were sometimes held in our library.

“Yes, B.P.!” “Great idea, B.P.!” “Glad you like it, B.P.!” “I think you’ve licked it, B.P.!” Everybody at the studio from the secretaries to the stars kept telling me how lucky I was to have such a brilliant and important father. “He’s got a mind like a razor,” a writer said after a heated story conference. “Cuts straight through to the heart of the problem.” “He knows what he wants and never passes the buck,” another said. “He doesn’t shilly-shally around waiting for other people to make up his mind. He listens, carefully, and then makes his decision. And when he makes it he sticks to it, he backs up his judgment. That’s unusual out here.”

We had reached the dessert course, my favorite chocolate soufflé, but I could only pick at it in my anxiety. What if Father wasn’t coming home at all? There could be an unexpected studio crisis: a star sick, an
important picture couldn’t start on schedule? Or maybe a star was feuding with her director and threatening not to report for work unless he was taken off the picture? Or what if a top writer had gone off the wagon and could not be found, his screenplay only half-completed? At the studio, crisis was an everyday occurrence.

At eight o’clock we were ready to leave the dining room. Soon I would have to go upstairs and start my homework. A few minutes after eight we heard Dad’s car pulling in. Father never came home quietly. He would burst in, crying down terrible oaths on the heads of his stars, directors, the “New York office”—a Hollywood version of
Life with Father.
But his special wrath always seemed directed at the stars.

Maybe that was why I was never able to think of movie stars as the glamorous gods and goddesses worshipped in those great cathedrals, and glorified in the fan magazines.
Modern Screen, Screen Romance,
and
Photoplay
outsold all the other magazines put together. After all, they reported what time Gloria Swanson liked to get up in the morning, what her favorite breakfast foods were, what kind of bed she liked to sleep in, and of course with whom. And dealt with the burning question of whether or not Greta Garbo was truly in love with Jack Gilbert. In England the common people felt a need for a royal family with whom to identify. It seemed no accident that we called our stars of the silent screen queens and kings.

But not in the Schulberg household. Father may have sold the public on the concept of Little Mary as the perennial fifteen-year-old “America’s Sweetheart,” but he knew—and told us about—the tough little mind hidden beneath those golden curls, and behind all the golden smiles of the stars with whom he labored. To him, movie stars never had just two names like
Pola Negri.
Father would come bursting in shouting, “Oh-that-goddamn-bitch-how-I’d-like-to-wring-her-goddamn-neck-that-double-crossing-Pola-Negri!” I became so accustomed to hearing them addressed that way that I accepted the string of epithets as part of their names. It seemed as if all the stars in the studio, or nearly all, were engaged in a great conspiracy to try my father’s patience.

But this night his mood seemed even more thunderous than usual. One of his many chores was to bring the unruly stars of the studio into line so that pictures could be put into production in an orderly manner. The only way to turn out fifty to sixty pictures a year was to start a new one every Monday. The pressures of the major-studio “dream factory” were killing. At Paramount, Father was trying to do single-handed what
Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf were doing together at MGM: make a dozen to fifteen quality pictures (Thalberg) and the rest “programmers” (Rapf). The major stars were no longer permitted to choose their own stories, their directors, and their casts as they had done in the more easygoing days under Jesse Lasky. Although Lasky was now Father’s official superior, he kept his promise to give him a free hand, and served as a buffer between Paramount’s West Coast studio and B.P.’s rival, Walter Wanger, who was in charge of the East Coast operation. The Negris and the Swansons fought back with a vengeance, throwing the temper tantrums for which they were notorious.

This night Father came in red-faced and shouting, “God damn that stupid stubborn bitch of all bitches Pola Negri she’s done it again!” As he poured out his tale of woe he made a stiff scotch-and-soda and paced around the dining-room table working off steam. It seemed that the stupid stubborn little bitch had got it into her goddamn stubborn head that she couldn’t play the last scene. “So the whole company has to stand there at one thousand dollars a minute while this arrogant little bitch—who’s lucky she isn’t working in a sausage factory in Pinsk—locks herself in her dressing room. Now I have to drive out to Beverly and vamp her into coming back on Monday. And if she gives me any back talk I may just strangle her instead and finish the damn picture with her stand-in doing the scenes with her back to the goddamn camera. That goddamn Pola Negri thinks her picture is the only one we’re making at the studio. God damn it, I could strangle her in cold blood without the slightest sense of guilt. Pola Negri thinks she’s even bigger than Swanson and all she is is a pigheaded little whore!”

My father refilled his highball glass and resumed his pacing. I held my breath and waited for the storm to blow over. Why were those movie stars always trying to torture my poor father?

“Ben, why don’t you sit down and start your soup? After dinner you can call Pola and try to work it out.”

“I’m not ready to sit down! For Christ’ sake, Ad, I just got home—give me a couple of minutes to wind down. This is the first moment’s peace I’ve had all day. Sometimes I wish I were back on Mission Road, making one picture at a time.”

“You used to yell about Katherine MacDonald then just as much as you yell about Pola Negri now,” Mother reminded him.

“Katherine MacDonald was a lamb compared to this temperamental little bitch!” Father insisted.

Maybe my poem will cheer him up, I was thinking; maybe I should get up the courage to lift it from his plate and hand it to him.

Father seemed to have heard my thought because just then he glanced down at his plate and noticed the white page with my poem neatly centered in its rainbow frame.

“What the hell is this?”

“Ben, Buddy has been waiting for you for hours. A wonderful thing has happened. Buddy has written a beautiful poem. It’s so—well, it’s absolutely amaz—”

“Ad, if you don’t mind, don’t tell me what I should think of it. Let me decide that for myself.”

I kept my face lowered to my plate. It could not have taken long to read that poem. It was only twelve lines. But it seemed an eternity. I was afraid to look up to see if it was bringing tears to his eyes as it had to Mother’s. It was so quiet that I could hear the ice tinkling in Father’s glass as he held it in one hand and my poem in the other. Then I heard him dropping the poem back on his plate again. I could not bear to look up for the verdict but in a moment I was to hear it:

“I think it’s lousy.”

I bent my head a little closer to my plate and tried to keep the tears inside my head.

“Ben, sometimes I don’t understand you,” Mother said. “This is just a little boy. You’re not in your studio now. You should be pleased that he’s starting to write poetry so young. What he needs is encouragement.”

“I don’t know why,” Father held his ground. “Is there any law that says Buddy has to become a poet? Isn’t there enough lousy poetry in the world already?”

I don’t remember exactly how Mother fielded that one. I do remember that her voice rose and that she started saying very critical things about my father.

All through my life I have found that I remember the negatives much more clearly than the positives. A barbed line from a critical notice burrows into my skin like a chigger while an entire page of unstinted praise fades to half-forgotten generalities. And so I remember clearly my father’s voice rising to meet the pitch of Mother’s as he made this self-defense:

“Look, I’m paying my best writers fifteen hundred dollars a week. I’ve just come from a long story conference where I’ve been tearing their scripts apart and telling them their stuff is lousy. I only pay Buddy fifty
cents a week. And you’re trying to tell me I don’t have a right to tear his stuff apart if I think it’s lousy!”

The repetition of that hard word hit me over the heart like the fist of a Benny Leonard. I ran out of the dining room. Upstairs in my bedroom I threw myself on the bed and sobbed into my pillow. When the worst of the disappointment was drained out of me I could hear my parents still quarreling loudly across the dinner table about my beautiful/lousy poem.

Many months later when I took a second look at that controversial poem, I had to agree with my father. It was a pretty lousy poem. Maybe it was time to turn my efforts to fiction. I wrote a short story called “Ugly,” influenced by Lon Chaney in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
and
The Phantom of the Opera.
A young man is so hideous that he’s ashamed to be seen in public. He travels from village to village at night and hides in the haylofts of barns so that no one will see him. In one village just before Lent, he finds a masked ball about to take place in the square. He fashions an attractive mask for himself, joins in the festivities, and enjoys the company of a woman for the first time. But when the time comes to remove the mask he runs away. In what I fancied to be the dark, Russian manner, I ended my story with the poor wretch hiding under the hay in a loft again.