Moving Pictures (32 page)

Both our ids and our muscles, our inhibited passions and the physical
mischief inherent in fourteen-year-olds were expressed through the facilities of our fathers’ studios. Just inside the MGM auto gate, for instance, was an enormous fig tree, a relic of the days when the whole western basin of Los Angeles was fragrant with fruit orchards. The old tree was a studio ornament now, for no one ever seemed to pick the fruit. The figs would ripen to squashy black missiles, ideal weapons for us to hurl against moving targets. Our fig tree was strategically placed facing the second-floor cutting rooms and small projection rooms which were reached by a metal staircase. Up those steps went not only cutters but directors and stars eager to see their work in progress.

Maurice and I would crouch behind the thickened trunk of the giant tree, under the dark-green protection of its heavy branches, rear back with juicy figs in our hands, and throw them with all our small but considerable might. Black fig skins and pinkish-white pulp would splatter against expensive sports jackets and famous profiles.

When our victims stopped and whirled around we would either freeze in the far reaches of the tree, or race down narrow alleys behind the projection room, through a maze of walkways and alcoves we knew as well as an Algerian sneak-thief knows the Casbah.

There was an inverse caste system to our target priorities. We didn’t really want to splatter the hardworking cutters, their assistants, and the apprentices who toted the film cans. We only fell back on them for want of a bigger game. What we were really after was a John Gilbert in a dapper ascot, a chic Billy Haines, a strutting Erich von Stroheim, a swashbuckling (or swish buckling) Ramon Novarro. Nor were the glamorous ladies neglected. There was no gallantry in the heart of a studio prince. Once one’s hands closed around a ripened fig, the happy-go-lucky Marion Davies could be a target. Or her pal, the bright comedienne Aileen Pringle. The fact that the ladylike Norma Shearer was known to be under the protection of Irving Thalberg provided no shield against the rotting figs that came flying mysteriously from the depths of our leafy barricade. The wicked Mae Murray offered a luscious target. And Maurice and I hold a unique place in Hollywood history. Who else can boast of scoring a direct hit with a ripe fig on the most luminous star in the Metro heavens? Greta Garbo!

Movie personnel were not our only targets. We were democratic enough to fill a brown paper bag with fig ammunition, go out the studio gate to Washington Boulevard, and let fly at the passing motorists. If they stepped on their brakes, ready to jump out of their cars and chase
us, we’d race back through the gates, taking sanctuary under our friendly fig tree.

We might have continued waging our ripe-fig war if it had not been for our friend the mailboy Maurie, only a few years older than us. Passing along on his bike delivering scripts and memos, he happened to catch us unawares as we were firing our light artillery. He seemed to enjoy our assault on studio dignity. But we soon learned never to trust the mail-room boy. He would turn his own mother in to the studio cops if it meant a step up the ladder. So our mailroom Judas ratted on us, revealing us as the perpetrators of the soft-fig massacre. We were called to Harry Rapf’s office and lectured severely. It was a privilege for us to have free run of the studio, and we were abusing that freedom. How could we possibly splatter Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo with overripe figs? (Very easily, we thought to ourselves, but we hung our heads, a little frightened, if not intimidated.)

I do not say that Maurie the Mailroom Boy earned his promotion as a direct result of his betrayal of our youthful figging. It was simply a symbol of his readiness to please the stronger by turning on the weaker.

It was hardly an accident that the MGM lion was the presiding symbol of the lot. MGM was even more of a jungle than “my” studio—and a jungle is a system of survival in which the top lion intimidates the lesser lions who in turn intimidate the smaller animals, from supervisors all the way down to writers and mailroom boys.

Thus Maurie the finger-boy hustled his way up through the jungle pecking order, to become a go-fer, then a second assistant to an associate producer, and finally an associate producer himself. He may have had talent but that was a second virtue. You had to impress somebody at least one rung above you, scramble to get an
in,
and then use that in to climb up over the back of your benefactor if you could. Horatio Alger would do no less. You might call it the American way of life, to gnaw and claw your way to the top, like the Rockefellers and the Morgans and all the robber barons who aced themselves into the American aristocracy. Hollywood, after all, was only a picture of America run through the projector at triple speed.

M
EANWHILE, WE CONTINUED
to roam the lot with an innocence that seemed out of place in the Great-American-Dream-and-Sex Machines our studios represented. When we weren’t acting out our own psychodramas on the backlot we would check the call sheets to find out what pictures were shooting and where.

The talk of MGM was the tempestuous production of
The Merry Widow,
with the gifted, manic, uncontrollable Von Stroheim directing two volatile stars, Mae Murray and John Gilbert. Mae was the original Christy Girl, one of the most coveted of the Ziegfeld Girls, who had survived into the mid-Twenties as a sexy box-office attraction. Her voluptuous dancer’s body with creamy white shoulders and rounded breasts drew foul-mouthed approval from the crew. Mae had fought with Gilbert, who had walked off the set and taken refuge in his handy bottle of scotch. Now she was feuding with Von—who was intensely feudable. She had tried to get him fired from the picture because he had pronounced her dancing “rotten” in the presence of three hundred extras.

Mayer did fire Von Stroheim, substituting Monta Bell, a dependable “company man,” but the extras rebelled. They belonged to what they called “Von Stroheim’s Army,” mostly European war veterans whose autocratic military bearing provided the ideal background for his own grandiose, foreign behavior. When Bell tried to take over the explosive production, the “Army” chanted, “We want Von Stroheim!” Ordinarily, extras got fired for that kind of insubordination. But this time they had a
hole card. They had all been established in ballroom scenes, many of them clearly identifiable. It would cost thousands of dollars to replace them and reshoot those fancy-dress crowd scenes.

So L.B. decided to eat humble pie, a diet for which he had a great aversion, and rehired the rebellious Von Stroheim. Early Hollywood was so completely a world to itself that one of the local dailies carried a front-page banner that could not have been larger if President Coolidge had been assassinated:

MAE-VON SIGN PEACE!

STROHEIM WINS IN SETTLEMENT

For the public record, L.B. and his insolent director marched back to the set arm in arm. Von clicked his heels and kissed the hand of his imperious leading lady. Jack Gilbert, who played no favorites and despised L.B., Von, and Mae with equal passion, was photographed with a malevolent smile on his face. As they approached the big “orgy” scene, an uneasy peace held the unstable
Merry Widow
set together.

Maurice and I didn’t know what an orgy was, but from the way everybody in the studio was talking about it, we knew it was something we had to see. But the set was “closed”—Von’s sets were always off limits to outsiders, including even Mayer and Thalberg—so we missed the big orgy scene, though we hoped to get a peek at it in one of the projection or cutting rooms to which we had access. We could lean over the shoulders of friendly cutters and see all sorts of filmic wonders on the tiny screen of the moviola. We could see them shortening a shot on that ingenious little machine and then running it through again to study the effect of the reedited rhythm. Most of the cutters were conscientious, knowledgeable, congenial technicians, and in their cluttered cutting rooms we felt an air of sanity dramatically absent from Von Stroheim’s
Merry Widow
set.

Even tighter security was to be established for a scene in which Mae Murray was to dance in a tight-fitting gown with decolletage almost but not quite revealing her celebrated bosom. The set was to be cleared of all but the essential technicians. To Von Stroheim’s credit, he was trying to break out of the American corset of prudery and censorship. He had studied Freud and Jung and Krafft-Ebing and was years ahead of his time in conceiving scenes that scorned our superficial approach to “sex appeal,” exploring instead the raw power of sex.

When the stage was dark, we lifted the giant latch and sneaked inside.
Lights flooded a vast nineteenth-century Viennese ballroom set and there was the flamboyant Merry Widow herself beginning to move slowly and sensuously to the lush music of the orchestra. We didn’t dare creep too close for fear of being caught by the terrible-tempered Von. If he was bold enough to tell off L.B. Mayer—to his face, while everybody else did it behind his back—what would he do to a pair of small, uninvited boyeurs, the sons of the high-and-mighty movie executives he loathed? We watched as Von Stroheim barked his command. A perfectionist who would shoot a thousand feet to get ten precious seconds of film, he ordered his star to do the dance again. As the exotic music struck up again, to the staccato command of “Action!”—which sounded in Von Stroheim’s guttural accent like
“Achtung
!”—the golden-haired Ziegfeld beauty went into her act. The musky aroma of sex filled the stage; Maurice and I were ready to be seduced vicariously. Then we were rudely awakened from our dream: A second assistant director shouted, “Hey, you kids! You don’t belong in here! Now get out! And stay out! It’s a closed set! Mr. Von Stroheim’s orders!”

We were herded out the large stage door, shutting us off from Von’s passionate world. The sensuous lure of that set had a stronger effect on us than any sense of being in on film history, on a creative tug-of-war between Von Stroheim and his constant antagonist, the Front Office. When Von the Headstrong stormed off the Metro lot in a fury because they took away his cutting rights on
The Merry Widow,
L.B. retaliated by canceling Von’s percentage of the profits.

So when the picture created a riot in staid Pasadena—where police stopped the screening in the middle of the seduction scene—Von wasn’t there. The cops held L.B. responsible and wanted to book him at the station house. When Father heard of it, he laughed: Louie the Pious being arrested for salacious filmmaking! But L.B.’s tongue was soaked in honey. Of course he realized the scene was an insult to American morality, he assured the officers. That’s why he had chosen to preview it “in God-fearing Pasadena. Von Stroheim obviously had exceeded the bounds of decency. Exposing such licentiousness to the right-thinking people of Pasadena was the best guide to editing it so as not to offend the morals of America.”

Whenever a studio washed its hands of the dynamic, spendthrift, inspired but uncontrollable Von Stroheim, another studio took him on. Now it was “my” studio’s turn.
The Merry Widow
made him a hot property: a calculated risk because of his cavalier disregard of costs, but still
“bankable.” His behavior on
The Wedding March
repeated his
Merry Widow
performance, only this time it was even more extreme. Vienna, vintage 1914, was resurrected on the back lot. A relative of Emperor Franz Josef, brought over to affirm the authenticity of the sets, swore he could not tell them from the Alt Wien he knew. Von Stroheim’s creative hunger for cinematic realism, so exactingly achieved in
Greed,
drove set- and costume-designers mad. No slipshod “Hollywood license” was permitted. Von Stroheim, perfectionist, madman, or both, knew every detail of the period he was recreating. A minute error on a uniform, an anachronistic touch on a period gown would call down his wrath. And to be on the receiving end of his fury was to be stunned by thunder and struck by lightning. Extras and underlings literally trembled in his presence. I too was so afraid of the head-shaved, bullnecked Von that even though I saw him frequently during the seemingly endless shooting of
The Wedding March,
I never dared approach him for his autograph. Erich von Stroheim was the Last Tycoon of silent directors, a satanic Galahad in search of some cinematic Holy Grail, an obsessed Quixote forever tilting his lance at the hated Front Office my father represented.

In fairness to B.P., he had his own feeling for realism and he kept trying to slip honest, realistic films into the schedule. He admired Von’s dedication to
Greed,
even though he joined the MGM brass in deploring his determination to release the film as a forty-reel, ten-hour monster. Veteran screenwriter June Mathis had slimmed it down to a ten-reel version we had seen in the Rapf projection room.

My father felt that
Greed
represented a highwater mark in American cinematic realism, with scenes that would never be forgotten. Relentless, brutally honest, it was unrelieved by the commercial touches usually inserted to leaven tragic material. B.P. was convinced that every talented director striving for realism owed a debt to Von Stroheim. But B.P. also believed that he was pigheaded in insisting on his ten-hour version, and that piling detail on detail, no matter how brilliant those details were, finally became self-defeating. Watching the shortened version—even though sections were necessarily jumpy and bridged with subtitles—Maurice and I were inclined to agree with our fathers: Von Stroheim was brilliant, innovative, and original but driven to excessive, needless expenditure.

Many years later, when Von became a cult figure, he was described as a martyr of cinematic purity destroyed by crass studio bosses like Mayer, Thalberg, and my father. That can be argued from either side. In the
great days of the silents, there was no director who could match him in combining uncompromising realism with an erotic imagination that made his films so sensuous they became emotionally disturbing. Father realized that in Von Stroheim he was dealing with an authentic genius and not merely a temperamental egomaniac. And, to give B.P.’s side of the controversy as I remember it, he was ready to give Von as free a hand as possible,
provided
—and that was always the rub between Von and the Front Office—he could hold
The Wedding March
within the prescribed budget and shooting schedule.