Moving Pictures (33 page)

Von Stroheim promised to do his best, because he already had struck out at two of the Big Three, filmmaking was his passion, and where else but here in Hollywood could he find the million or more dollars he needed for each of his extravagant dreams? I watched him work on the Paramount backlot, terrorizing thousands of extras and driving his crew as mercilessly as he drove himself. In those pre-union days, he would often shoot all day, through the night and into the dawn, driving his staggering, bleary-eyed troops onward like a film-crazed Napoleon.

Soon my father was coming home shouting a string of epithets, building to an explosive “That goddamn lunatic Von Stroheim!” At the rate he was going, that #$ &&*!! s.o.b. would take five years to finish his ¢&*$#! s.o.b.’n
Wedding March.
He had warned Von that at his snail’s pace of perfectionism, the two leads—Von himself, and his favorite dramatic actress Zasu Pitts—would be ready to play the parents, if not the grandparents, of the bride and groom by the time the obsessed director got them to the altar.

Von indulged in demented whims worthy of a Paul the First, the mad czar of eighteenth-century Russia. He had ordered silk underwear for a thousand extras, even though these costly underthings would never be seen by the camera, arguing that this inner sense of well-being would make his background people feel more truly aristocratic in the luxurious prewar court of Emperor Franz Josef. In silk underwear they were no longer ciphers, lowly five-dollar-a-day extras who would be back on the Hollywood streets looking for work when the sequence was (finally) concluded. Like all of Von Stroheim’s theories, even the most extreme, this one was provocative. The “silk-underwear” dispute has been refuted as myth by the Von Stroheim authorities and/ or apologists who insist it was one of the many alleged aberrations invented by the “money men” to cut the ground from under the feet of a genius who refused to bend to The System. I only know that at the time my father—caught
between Von’s cavalier approach to money and Adolph Zukor’s realistic concern for that commodity—came home with the news that Von had put in an order to the costume department for those silk undergarments and B.P. had thundered back that he could not justify any expenditures that could not actually be seen on the screen. Father was already getting those panic signals from the New York office—“If you can’t control him, take him off the picture!”

Von Stroheim, B.P. protested, wanted it both ways. He wanted a limitless amount of Paramount money without having to answer as to how it was spent. Indeed, as an artist he felt an inalienable right to an open-ended call on the Paramount bank, just as he had looked on Universal and MGM as boundlessly wealthy patrons who should consider themselves fortunate to be allowed to underwrite his fantasies.

“He’s a genius!” Von Stroheim’s Army cheered him on.

“He’s a raving lunatic!” the studio managers fought back.

“He’s both,” Father agreed as he tried to mediate between an irresistible force and an immovable object.

At the end of two tempestuous years, B. P. finally had to call a halt to the shooting, and to add insult to injury—just as Thalberg and Mayer had cut Von down at MGM—he turned the cutting over to the other “Von,” our Jewish-American Joe von Sternberg. Father had been impressed with Von Sternberg’s first picture,
Salvation Hunters,
an intensely individualistic effort, sordid, uncompromising, with a masterful use of mood photography. Joe was as quirky as Erich, if slightly more tractable, and soon he would be directing for my old man some of the more memorable films of the late Twenties and early Thirties:
Underworld, The Last Command, Morocco,
and
An American Tragedy.
He would become world-famous as Marlene Dietrich’s director/Svengali, and in the mid-Thirties he would collaborate with B.P. on a daring if faulted
Crime and Punishment,
a book from which Father had read aloud on our literary Sundays at home.

Once again, as with
Greed
and
The Merry Widow,
Von Stroheim felt that his
Wedding March
had been mutilated, indeed castrated by the hated Front Office. He had shot one hundred reels of film which he had planned to edit into
two
four- or five-hour pictures. His natural medium seemed to be the ten-hour film, a monstrous form that marked him as a madman in those days of the classic ninety-minute silents. Was Von a demented genius, as Father believed, or
the
master of all directors, too
far ahead of his time? The day would come when Soviet Russia would release
War and Peace
in two long sittings, along the lines that Von Stroheim had projected forty years earlier. And when James Michener’s
Centennial
would be shown on television for a total of twenty-four hours.

Unfortunately for Von Stroheim, neither the American public, the Paramount exchequer, nor the patience of my father were ready for him. Though New York critics singled out particular sequences in
The Wedding March
as “incomparable,” and
The New York Times
described him as a cinematic Zola, the sad truth was that no major studio would take a chance with him again. A crusty independent, Joe Kennedy, the very good friend of Gloria Swanson, was willing to gamble on him for
Queen Kelly,
but the picture was abandoned halfway through. He was never to finish another Hollywood film. And even in Europe, in what should have been a more congenial atmosphere, never again was he able to mount a picture of his own. Artistically frustrated, he eked out a living as an actor. In films like
Grand Illusion
and
Sunset Boulevard,
he left indelible performances. For the rest of his life he would act, he would write novels and scenarios, and he would agonize over all the marvelous films he would never be permitted to make.

W
ATCHING A
BEN
HUR
in the making, a Greta Garbo or a Lon Chaney creating film history, a bizarre figure like Von Stroheim in action was simply part of our daily life—along with rooting for the flamboyant Trojans of U.S.C. in their crimson-and-gold football uniforms as they struggled heroically against the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame or the California Golden Bears. Irreverently we sang “Fight On for Old S.C.—The Halfback Wants His Sal-a-ree…”

When the Golden Age of the silent screen was reaching its end, our western edge of Los Angeles was still so rural that we could safely take our bikes and pedal from Lorraine to Larchmont, bordered by great pepper trees. Every Saturday afternoon at the Larchmont Theatre we could watch our favorite star, not the ones our fathers launched, nourished, cussed, and profited from, but the intrepid western hero, Art Acord. When the silents fell with a resounding crash, Art Acord was one of the hundreds of marquee names caught in the switches. He went galloping off into the sunset of total obscurity. When I was old enough to begin to play the “Whatever-Happened-To?” game, I got a familiar answer: Having silently lassoed his last cattle rustler and having silently saved his last golden-haired damsel in distress, Art found himself overcome by a world he thought he had conquered. The offscreen fade-out was suicide.

Darkness was always lurking behind the bright, leaving a subliminal shadow on our minds. We would roughhouse with the MGM comedy
team, English music-hall comedian George K. Arthur and his tall, glowering sidekick, Karl Dane, who had been discovered as a carpenter on the MGM backlot. Scoring in a serious role in King Vidor’s
The Big Parade,
he had gone on to comedy roles; Arthur and Dane were Harry Rapfs and MGM’s answer to Father’s Beery Hatton comedies at Paramount. But the advent of sound had sneaked up on Karl Dane. Suddenly he wasn’t a five-thousand-dollar-a-week talking actor, he was an unemployed ex-carpenter with a guttural Scandinavian accent. There seemed nothing else to do except put a revolver to his head. Tom Forman, one of Father’s favorite directors from those sunny days at the Selig Zoo, grabbed the same one-way ticket when he was declared
“Not
Okay for Sound” in a new age of cinematic progress that had turned its back on Tom’s silent Preferred Pictures.

Although we were aware of the dramatic rising and falling of these tides of fortune, the painful exit of Charles Ray, Gilbert, Von Stroheim, Charles King, or Buster Keaton—and what a mixed bag were those vaulters and tumblers!—they were still peripheral to the center of our existence, the elaborate fun and games that gave pleasure to our growing days. We loved track-and-field meets as much as we did those emotional Saturday-afternoon football games. We held our own meets in the open lots on Lorraine, clocking ourselves with expensive stopwatches and keeping personal records. Then we doubled as reporters, hailing these activities in our own sports paper:
RAPF SETS NEW HIGH JUMP RECORD AT

FOUR FEET EIGHT!; SCHULBERG WINS STANDING B.J. WITH FIVE FEET TWO!
New events were constantly added to our friendly but intense competition. We bought miniature turtles and staged turtle meets in our respective bathtubs—usually mine since Grandmother Rapf took as dim a view of this sport as she did of our other activities.

Radio reception was still an exciting experience. Maurice had an RCA about two feet long with a slanting face, and I had a Superheterodyne more than three feet long with so many different dials it is a wonder that I—outstandingly unmechanical—ever learned to operate it. With our earphones clamped to our heads we would bend over our sets, moving our tuning dials a fraction of a fraction of an inch until we would hear a telltale squeak that meant a distant signal trying to get through. There were no networks in those days, and not too many local stations to overpower us, and so when local stations
Star-Spangled-Banner
ed off the air at midnight, the airwaves would be free for the power station of the East, KDKA in Pittsburgh, WJZ in New York, WBZ in Boston….
As we grew more accomplished at this delicate all-night job, we began to extend our reception range to England, Australia, and finally Japan.

When motion-picture songs came in with the groundbreaking
The Jazz Singer,
Maurice and I would monitor the radio to keep track of how many times our studios’ songs were broadcast, how many plays for his “Pagan Love Song” or “Singin’ in the Rain” compared to my “Beyond the Blue Horizon” or “My Future Just Passed.”

On almost every level but one we competed with intensity. Jumping, running, criticizing current films, and writing copy, jokes, and songs for our private newspaper, our talents seemed virtually interchangeable. But in the esoteric field of music, Maurice was clearly my master. Just as, if you put a hammer in my hand, I would invariably hit not the nail but the fingers holding it, so it was for me with musical instruments. Maurice’s parents insisted that he learn to play the piano, and under the determined surveillance of his grandmother, who saw to it that he practiced the prescribed hour a day, he learned to play acceptably. My mother soon discovered that the best I could do with the piano was to turn on the switch that started the rolls.

So they bought me an expensive, gleaming saxophone, with its mysterious keyboard that only inspired madmen like Lester Young and Stan Getz can solve. When the sax was turned in for a trumpet, the trumpet for a trombone, and still no music came forth, a string instrument was suggested. When I failed to conquer the mandolin, my mother took it over and I was given a banjo. A small fortune was lavished on instruments and frustrated teachers. Still no music issued from the Paramount prince. After several years, my mother on her mandolin and her music-resistant son on his banjo were able to play a duet, more or less together, of “Mighty Lak a Rose.”

Fortunately for us, there were no tape recorders in those days, and so the world has been spared any relic of our musicales. But I remember the earnestness with which Mother picked at her shiny mandolin, and the boredom that engulfed me as I failed to master yet another instrument. Still Ad pressed on as she did with all things cultural. We had to be complete people in the Grecian sense, at home with intellectuals and artistes and on the playing fields. My sister Sonya was given a far more elegant instrument, a harp, which she mastered with about as much proficiency as I brought to the saxophone, the piano, and the banjo. But who could resist the image of little Sonya, ethereal and painfully shy,
dressed for her role in a long, flowered Victorian gown, bending toward the harp that towered above her yellow curls? Mother was so proud of her creation that she hired a successful local portraitist, Stewart Robertson—an artist of the court, so to speak—to preserve Sonya and her harp in an oil painting that oozed affluence and culture.

But commerce went hand in hand with culture in our multipurposed life. Those were the days when houses were rising from the vacant lots all over Windsor Square, and once in a while a carpenter or bricklayer sweating under the winter sun would ask us for a drink of water. With hundreds of laborers building mansions for our expanding city, it struck me that a profitable business might be set up selling orange juice fresh from our kitchen. With lumber and canvas from the studio, my Uncle Joe built us an impressive orange juice stand. The oldest of Mother’s brothers, Joe was strong and useful with his hands. He liked to boast of how he had beaten off Cossack assailants in his native village. But like Grandpa Max, he was a fish out of water in this new world. He could not cope with the urgent challenge of Hollywood that his young brother Sam and my father found so exciting.

The thirsty workmen were grateful for our cold orange juice, and at the lunch hour Maurice and I did a brisk business. Since the oranges came from our own kitchen, obligingly squeezed by Anna the cook, who also supplied the punch bowl, the ice, and the small glasses, Father estimated that at five cents a glass the household was a nickel behind on every transaction. But this economic logic was lost on us, as we pocketed our nickels.

Allowed, in the permissive climate of California, to operate motor vehicles at age 14, I soon owned a Ford Model A roadster, and with this new freedom came a significant expansion in our soft-drink business. Driving all the way down Sunset Boulevard to its source at the old Mexican Plaza, we found a wholesale bottling works in East Los Angeles, not far from the now-abandoned Mayer-Schulberg Studio. We would buy cases of root beer, orange pop, and cherry soda, selling them on our quiet, tree-lined Lorraine Boulevard at twice the cost, thereby encouraging Mother to believe that I was not only an athlete and a scholar but also a respecter of the almighty dollar, in which she placed as much trust as she did in Freud and Jung and such social heroes as Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.