Moving Pictures (31 page)

Lord knows Grandma Rapf was a survivor. But it sometimes seemed that her son Harry’s success as an important producer at MGM had gone to her head. She would yell at us for the slightest infraction. Her warning cry of “Moooor-eece!” would freeze us. Only a bathroom separated her room from Maurice’s and if we played his radio too loudly or laughed too heartily at the jokes we were writing, her voice would come booming through the double doors, “Moooor-eece, stop that racket! I have a terrible headache! I’m going to tell your father when he gets home from the studio!”

Actually, Harry Rapf always seemed like a nice easygoing fellow who had inherited none of his mother’s field-marshal authority. Writers may have sneered at his enormous nose, his malapropisms, and his lack of literary finesse, but he was bringing in the bread-and-butter pictures on schedule while Irving Thalberg was establishing himself as a perfectionist with expensive retakes. From his days as a vaudeville booker, Rapf had an eye for talent. He had signed Joan Crawford when she was still Lucille Laseur, a chorus girl at the Winter Garden in New York City. Now Harry was supervising the picture that would establish Crawford as one of Hollywood’s major stars—
Our Dancing Daughters.

But at 621 Lorraine he was still Grandma Rapf s little boy. He would scold and punish Maurice not of his own inclination but out of fear of that indomitable old tyrant.

Early on, Maurice and I developed the habit of keeping a written record of all our activities. With cyclometers on our bicycles we would clock the exact distance to Paramount Studio, the new lot on Marathon Street. We not only played Foreign Legionnaires on top of the abandoned desert fort in
Beau Geste,
we also wrote out the scenes we were enacting. We accumulated a shelfful of those primitive scenarios. One of our favorite playgrounds was the fantastic set for
Ben Hur,
a film that was to dwarf in size and cost even Griffith’s colossal
The Birth of a Nation.
In fact, my father believed that
Ben Hur
added “super-colossal” to Hollywood’s growing list of hyperboles. Begun by the original Goldwyn Company,
Ben Hur
had been inherited by MGM, with Mayor and Thalberg reluctantly allowing the spendthrift production to go on
shooting in Italy. But production costs doubled and tripled, a new script was ordered, along with a new star (Ramon Novarro replacing George Walsh), and the multi-million-dollar production was thumbed home from Rome and the Italian seacoast to our other playground in Culver City.

Maurice’s Studio, as we called it, obliged us by rebuilding the Colosseum in an open field on Venice Boulevard, a few blocks down from the MGM lot. Inside the studio, behind the huge white-stucco silent stages, realistic Roman galleys floated in battle array in an enormous tank. Of course it was fun to see this extravaganza actually being shot. We could see Ben Hur’s excruciating chariot race against Messala, and we could visit young Ramon Novarro in his dressing room as he was assisted into his dashing costume as a Roman charioteer.

In those days my red-leather autograph book went with me everywhere, and there on a faded pink page is a florid inscription by the then-latest successor to Valentino. (Even studio brats raised in the shadows of the bustling front-office buildings and the towering stages were not too blasé to be autograph hounds.) Our albums were all-inclusive: With the two biggest studios in our pocket and with many of our friends’ fathers at First National, Fox, and Universal, we had every star in town. Unfortunately, almost every inscription was a one-two punch to a tender ego. Although there were a few affectionate exceptions (“May you always be a Buddy to me!!—Yours forever, Clara Bow” and “To Buddy—whose buddy? Mine!—Love and Kisses, Sally O’Neill”), the principal theme running through that dog-eared little album is “Hoping you’ll grow up to be as great a man as your father.” In one sycophantic voice they urged me to “Follow your dad!” (Adolphe Menjou); Emil Jannings wrote exactly that sentiment in German, and Gilbert Roland in Spanish—messages clearly intended for the eyes of my father rather than for mine.

Maurice and I turned ourselves into a pair of abbreviated Ben Hurs and galloped heroically around the enormous oval of the set, managing to portray both the horses pulling the chariots and the intrepid Ramon Novarro snapping his whip over the backs of the high-spirited steeds. Although we were both desperately afraid of girls (was it despite or because of the fact that we were surrounded by starlets and would-be starlets?), we indulged our fantasies with imaginary Esthers in the stands cheering us on as we overturned the chariot of the overbearing Messala.
These phantom heroines represented our shared and secret lives. They were more real to us than the flesh-and-blood young ladies who challenged and intimidated us.

Walking toward the main entrance to Paramount, I had been approached by good-looking young girls who obviously belonged to the company of hopefuls waiting for lightning to strike. And in those far simpler times, sometimes it did. There was no Actors Guild, or Extras Guild, to serve as a go-between. A producer, director, casting director, or a self-important assistant would pick a face out of the crowd—“Just the type we’re looking for!” Sometimes it was true and one of the thousands of girls in town to “break into the movie game” would get lucky and find herself a star. Sometimes the studio powers and demi-powers were merely on the make, or looking for kickbacks. It was a chancy, ever-hopeful, and corrupt little world. Outside the gates all those good-looking
have-nots,
inside so many imperious but vulnerable
haves.
Big kings and little kings who could whimsically touch you on the head with their magic wands and change your rags to cloaks of gold.

There was a kind of frenzy to the outs yearning to get in. Once two young men stopped me at the entrance to the reception area and greeted me as if we were old friends—“Hi, Buddy, how’d ya like to meet a hot little flapper who’ll really knock yer eye out?” All of fourteen, I hesitated, stammering that I was going in to see some rushes with my father. This only served to incite them further. “This’ll only take a minute. She lives right here in this apartment.” Facing the studio was a pseudo-English apartment house full of eager beavers who watched the lot from their windows, living the moviemaking life vicariously. Carried along by their aggressive charm and never too proficient at saying “No,” I found myself hurried up a flight of stairs and down a dark, uninviting hall to the door of a room overlooking the studio.

My two guides knocked happily on the door, continuing to assure me that I was going to meet someone who was really the cat’s pajamas. The door opened and a wistful young redhead with bangs and spit curls, dressed flapper-style in a skirt showing off her pretty round knees, smiled at us.

“Jackie,” one of the young men said, “guess who we brought to meet you. Buddy Schulberg. The boss’s son!”

She smiled at me as if I already had her contract in my hand.

“ What’d I tell you?” asked the other young man. “Isn’t she a lulu? And who does she look like? A dead ringer. They could be twins!”

I didn’t have to answer because Jackie was eager to volunteer.

“Do I really look like Clara Bow?” She fed me my lines, batting her false eyelashes at me, and going into the little vamp step identified with the It Girl. “Everytime I go out, people ask me for my autograph and call me Clara. It sure gives me a funny feeling.”

The It Girl vs. the If Girl. So tantalizingly near, so desperately far. On the other side of that narrow street, somewhere over the rainbow, a pot of gold was waiting for Jackie, she thought. You didn’t have to be smart, you didn’t have to be an Ethel Barrymore. You just had to look cute and know your onions.

For that moment it must have seemed as if fate had served me up as Jackie’s onion. Suddenly, to my extreme embarrassment, I found myself alone with her. Her friends had muttered something about having to go down to the coffee shop on the corner. Jackie sat down on the frayed couch and invited me to join her. I did but I didn’t know what to say to her. She asked me if I knew Clara Bow and I said yes. She said it must be wonderful to know all the big movie stars and I said yes it was. I didn’t say what my father thought of most of them and I didn’t tell her what a low-down no-good common tramp my mother considered Clara Bow. She said it must be wonderful to be able to walk into the studio whenever I wanted and to be close to great people like the famous directors and my wonderful father. She edged so close to me that I could smell her perfume—or maybe her ambition. My mouth felt dry as I edged away. “You know, you’re not at all the way I pictured you to be,” she said. “I thought the sons of the big producers would be real shieks—real cavemen. Why,” she said, puckering up and looking like Clara, “I’ll bet you never even kissed a girl.”

Thinking back on that entrapment, I realize that Jackie could not have been more than two or three years older than I was. But I was still a child while Jackie, physically at least, was a pocket-size adult, a sex object, an almost-It Girl on the wrong side of Marathon Street. I knew I should have invited her to accompany me into the studio. I sensed the power I had to introduce her to Vic Fleming or Eddie Sutherland—or even to the great B. P. Schulberg himself. But what I really wanted was to escape from Jackie and never see her again.

One day when I was being driven through the studio gate in the family town car to pick up my father, I glanced up through the rear window and caught a glimpse of Jackie at her second-floor lookout staring at the
entrance as it stood open for the little prince whom all the sycophants accepted as Father’s logical successor to the throne.

I felt a twinge of guilt about Jackie, for not having swept her into my arms and into the studio. But, like my sidekick Maurice, I was a curious mixture of emotional immaturity and professional insight. I could have told Jackie that the studio would not welcome a “dead ringer” for Clara Bow, with the same shade of red hair combed into the same bangs and spit curls, the same dimpled cutie-pie face, the same provocative Cupid’s-bow mouth. Clara wouldn’t welcome a double Charlestoning along in her shadow, and neither would her public. There was room for one It Girl, one ladylike Shearer, one mysterious Garbo, one saucy Mae Murray, one soulful Lillian Gish….Each star was a special personality with her own inimitable identity. Each had the star quality that set her apart from a hundred imitators. There were ten thousand Jackies, luscious girls with photogenic if forgettable faces and figures perfectly proportioned if interchangeable. In time Jackie would become a carhop, an usher, a call girl, or take the bus home to North Platte and settle for marriage to an insurance salesman or the local plumber, or, if she kept her looks, a small-town politician. I could have told Jackie that Clara Bow, for all her brainlessness, was an original. She hadn’t tried to be Billie Dove or Mabel Normand. And little Jackie, back on the Greyhound for the long ride home, or up at Madame Frances’s luxurious bordello still passing herself off as Clara’s look-alike, would never know the difference.

Meanwhile, back at the
Ben Hur
set, Maurice and I pursued our childishly elaborate fantasies. There was a current of benign sexual masochism to our scenarios. In the bowels of the Roman galley we strained at the heavy oars while an imaginary breast plated Simon Legree drove us to exhaustion with his snakelike whip. We flinched and groaned, our naked shoulders bending to the oars. We had projected ourselves so deeply into this violent hallucination that we were not even aware of intrusion until a harsh voice cut through our reverie. “Hey, you kids—what you think ye’re doin’ out here?”

The old watchman, who had a boring day patrolling the valuable standing sets on the backlot, obviously thought he had a couple of hot fence-jumpers on his hands. Sometimes kids would scale the walls to roam the studio. Today a studio like Universal is patrolled with Waffen-SS security measures. In those days, everything was much more relaxed.
But even then our captor was marching us off the set and threatening to turn us over to the chief of the studio police.

“You damn kids c’n be arrested for trespassing,” he said. “You’re comin’ with me!”

I can’t remember if he had us literally by the collar but that’s the way it felt. And we did something slightly perverse, although it stemmed more from a severe case of modesty or insecurity than from a wish to turn the screw. We walked along silently and quietly. We let the poor old codger think he had us in his power. And then, just as we were approaching the studio police office, Maurice identified himself as the son of Mr. Rapf.

The guard stopped, turned pale, frowned, scratched his head. “You have some identification—a studio pass?”

“We don’t need them. They all know us at the gate. You can ask them. Or we can go to my father’s office if you don’t believe me.” Maurice pointed to the big white building near the gate. “It’s right down there.”

Our captor was becoming our captive. He could see his soft job going out the window, not because he failed to collar a pair of trespassers but because he had foolishly collared the boss’s son.

“So ye’re Mister Rapf’s boy, huh? Great fella, your dad. You should’ve told me right away. Y’see, if some kids jumped over that wall ’n’ drowned in the tank, their parents could hold the studio responsible and I’d lose my job. But I’ll know ya from now on. Yes suh, I’ll keep an eye on yuh.”

Of course that is exactly what we didn’t want. A number of times we were humiliated in the middle of our romantic agonies by looking up to see a studio cop or a stray carpenter staring at us as we writhed, moaned, or swore undying devotion to our invisible beloveds.

These Peeping Toms brought Maurice and me even closer together. We would retreat to another exotic standing set even further removed from the center of studio activity and commiserate with each other about the intense embarrassment we had just suffered. Undoubtedly these inadvertent voyeurs simply thought of us as a couple of crazy kids. But we felt something far more personal, a sense of guilt because our games had grown to be more than games, more than childhood imitations of our fathers’ movie scenes played on the same sets where they had just been filmed. We were acting out, for our eyes and ears alone, our secret lives.