Moving Pictures (35 page)

This was so successful that we decided to expand our presentation. Under the next classroom we gave them Joshua—oh, we had done our homework despite our rebellion—and in our now-practiced biblical voices went on intoning: “I say unto you people of Jericho, surrender now or we shall march around your city for six days—and on the seventh day when we blow our trumpets and all shout together in one great voice, your walls will come tumbling down… !”

We were all the Jewish heroes, Moses and Joshua, Judah and Ehud, as we crawled euphorically from classroom to classroom, showing off our knowledge of the violent history that Jehovah and Rabbi Magnin called holy. Overcome with our powers we crawled back to our own classroom, crying out, “Moses has returned!” By this time our act was such a hit that we were getting requests on small pieces of paper folded and pushed through cracks in the floor. “Do Isaiah…” “Do King Hezekiah…” We were hidden acrobats of the Torah. But then a fat, clumsy boy—Joseph Ray, a name I would always remember—pushed his request down, and, in character, performed his furtive act so unfurtively that with a sudden movement the trapdoor was raised and we found ourselves staring up into the face of our beloved. Now livid with fury.

“All right, you two! Climb out of there! This second!”

Rising from the mud like twin Calibans we climbed up onto the classroom floor. Our Sunday suits were smeared with dirt, and the moldy underside of the building we had navigated on hands and knees had left grotesque streaks across our faces. As our pudgy Judas closed the trapdoor, our classmates were too frightened to laugh at our discomfiture.

We waited in pain while Miss Brick quickly wrote a note, slipped it into an envelope, and handed it to me. “Take this to Rabbi Magnin,” she said, and abruptly turned away.

The Jews on their long march into Babylonian captivity could hardly
have felt more uncertain of their fate than their Hollywood descendants, as the deflated prophets trudged the long mile to the office of Rabbi Magnin.

After what seemed an interminable limbo in his outer office we were finally summoned to our audience with the Rabbi. In his flowing black robe he loomed like Jehovah Himself calling down God’s vengeance on the backsliders and the disbelievers. We had left him no choice but to call our parents and threaten them with our expulsion from Temple B’nai B’rith.

I got off with a light lecture from my parents. Maurice was beaten by his grandmother, tongue-lashed by Tina and Harry, locked in his room immediately after school, and forbidden to see me.

Life quickly lost its flavor when I was barred from contact with Maurice. It wasn’t fun to bring in a new long-distance radio station if I couldn’t pick up the phone immediately to boast of that latest wireless conquest. It wasn’t fun to race my turtles alone, or clock myself in the 50-yard dash alone, or watch rushes of Father’s then-current million-dollar gamble,
Wings,
if I couldn’t use it in my open-ended debate with Maurice as to the respective merits of Paramount and MGM.

Meanwhile, suspense mounted as we approached the impending Sunday morning service at B’nai B’rith. Maurice’s father had spent more time with Rabbi Magnin that week than he had with L.B. He assured him of the depth of Maurice’s compunction, and of his son’s sincere desire to return to the fold. And so it came to pass that Rabbi Magnin granted us permission to come unto the temple on probation. And it so happened that this observance fell on the last Sunday of the month when children and parents alike were called together in common assembly. I always felt that this was a day dedicated not only to the glory of God but to Rabbi Magnin’s as well. Like a peacock he seemed to expand in his rabbinical robes, delivering his sermon with a kind of professional piety that always made me feel he was auditioning for L. B. Mayer and Harry Warner. Here we all were, the children of Israel, again divided into tribes, Mayer-Thalberg, Warners, Fox, Laemmle, Lasky-Schulberg, all enjoying His largesse in the New Jerusalem called Hollywood.

Our rabbi’s message ended with a flourish. And then, as was his practice, he clutched the lapels of his robe, leaned forward on his toes in a familiar gesture of self-satisfaction and said, “Now, if any of you students, or parents, have any questions… ?”

Mine was among the first half-dozen hands to be raised, but my signal was studiously avoided. The questions were all soft ones for which Rabbi Magnin had ready eloquent answers. He was happy to expand on God’s self-revelation to Moses. And on the contemporary value of the Ten Commandments. And on the true meaning of manna from Heaven. Finally, when all the raised hands had been answered, only mine was left. Over his fistfuls of robe, Rabbi Magnin glowered, pressed his lips together, and finally acknowledged me.

“Schulberg.”

My legs were shaking, my hands were trembling, I could feel the cold sweat on my forehead and the words were like chicken bones in my throat. But for some reason I had to get them out.

“R-R-Rabbi, h-h-how d-did the J-Jews g-g-g-go to the t-t-t-t…” It seemed I would never get the word out; when it finally emerged it was with the force of a shotgun:
“TOILET
… in the desert?”

My question hung there in the silence as if the air was too oppressive to let it fall. In a dramatic show of loyalty—for the price he had to pay for defiance was far greater than mine—Maurice stood up with me: “Yes, Rabbi—how
did
the Jews go to the toilet in the desert?”

Again, knuckles tightened in the fists holding the folds of the temple robe. How dare these two little gadflies mock their faith and upstage their rabbi? But Magnin said merely, “If you two young men will go to my chambers and wait for me, I will see you at the conclusion of the service.”

With the eyes of the entire congregation drilling holes in our backs we edged into the side aisle and retreated from the hall.

Again the long wait, then the heavy steps down the corridor informing us that doom was approaching.

“Now,” Rabbi Magnin began in a tone surprisingly reasonable, “if you had asked your question out of genuine curiosity, I could have answered it in terms of rabbinical scholarship. I could have told you that we Jews were the first people in the ancient world to have any concept of sanitation and bodily cleanliness. On the flight from Egypt through the desert our ancestors were required to walk thirty paces away from the caravan to take care of their bodily functions, and to dig a hole in the sand and then cover it up. They kept themselves as clean as they possibly could under those difficult circumstances.”

There was a long, dangerous pause. When he spoke again his tone had
hardened. “But unfortunately I think you asked the question not from any sincere desire for knowledge, but only to mock your God and your faith. What you did was blasphemous and unforgivable. I will inform your parents that you are as of this moment expelled for all time from B’nai B’rith.”

Thus we were driven from the Temple. When she heard the news, Grandmother Rapf set up such a howl that I thought Maurice might be the first Jew to be nailed to the cross since the days of the Romans. The possibility that he would be driven from the House of Magnin before Bar Mitzvah loomed as a tragedy even darker than, say, Harry Rapf’s being driven from the House of Mayer. All communication between Maurice and me was severed again while his parents implored the rabbi to take Maurice back into the fold. At last Magnin relented and Maurice was allowed to return and resume the studies that would technically convert him from boyhood to manhood.

Since my parents accepted my expulsion with much more equanimity, I was left to struggle into man’s estate without help from the Lord and/or Rabbi Magnin. Locked out of the temple I went through a period when I no longer considered myself Jewish because, as I would try to explain, “Rabbi Magnin kicked me out.” And all through my teens I considered myself un- or non-Jewish. It would take Adolf Hitler to bring me back to a sense of identification with the culture of my forebears. When I learned that German bullyboys were beating up Jews in the streets, breaking the windows of their shops, forcing them to wear yellow stars, and finally pushing them into sealed cattle cars and gas chambers, I realized of course that I was one of them. But there were curious years of limbo when I felt that I had been excommunicated.

I did not surrender all of my Jewish ties, however. In my biweekly attendance at the prizefights with my father, I still continued to identify with and root for Jewish boxers. All the movie celebrities were ringside, for on Friday nights it was no longer the
shul
but the Hollywood Legion Stadium where you would find the studio heads and the big-name stars and directors. The night Mushy Callahan (born Morris Scheer) won a close decision over the local Irish hero, Ace Hudkins, Father managed to squeeze me into the victory celebration in the dressing room. When Mushy presented me with the gloves with which he had held off the bull-like rushes of Hudkins, I had to fight back tears of pride.

Those gloves hung on the wall above my bed until I was ready for
college, the closest thing to a religious symbol I had in those days. If I have been accused of making a religion of boxing, blame it on my youth and Mushy Callahan.

When I heard that my father had invited the great lightweight champion, Tony Canzoneri, to tour Paramount Studio, I asked to be his guide. Not wanting him to know I was the boss’s son, I posed as a mailroom boy assigned to take him from set to set. What a thrill to stand beside Tony Canzoneri and introduce him to movie stars as the champion of the world. His warmest reception was on the set of the Marx Brothers, especially from Chico and Zeppo the gamblers, ardent fight fans from the East. But it was there I came a cropper. When the cameras started rolling for the next take the zany Marxes made me laugh out loud, ruining the take. The assistant director wheeled with a snarl that all A.D.’s used to cultivate in those days. “For Christ’s sake! I said
quiet
! Who the hell’s that?” He turned around. “Oh, it’s you, Buddy. You ought to know better. Do that again and you’re barred from the set—even if your old man
is
the boss!”

I introduced him to Canzoneri, and the A.D. in turn introduced the smiling little champ to the entire crew. “Jeez,” Canzoneri said, “I only have three guys in my corner. These guys have thirty. I had no idea it took this many to make a movie.” Tony clowned with the Marx Brothers and all was forgiven. On the way to the next set, to meet Richard Arlen and Esther Ralston, the champ asked me why I hadn’t told him I was the boss’s son. There he was, a man who had beaten the best lightweights in the world, impressed with a kid whose old man ran a movie studio. Only the kid who took movie stars in stride had put Tony Canzoneri up there on a pedestal with Jack Dempsey and The Great Benny Leonard. Falling stars were part of his daily life. He would save his tears for a feisty little champion like Canzoneri, who years later would be found dead, alone, in a five-dollar Manhattan hotel room.

E
VEN GRAND MASTERS
of motion-picture trivia who know the names of the second unit director of
Gone With the Wind
and Humphrey Bogart’s stand-in on
Casablanca
draw a blank on this question: “Who was George Bancroft?”

It happened again the other day. My niece, a bright avant-garde movie producer, wanted to know about the stars her grandfather had discovered before she was born. Clara Bow she’d heard of, vaguely. But George Bancroft? Not a clue. And yet there was a time when that name had risen like a surfer’s dream-wave and then had come pounding down across America and on around the world. “You mean you
never
heard of George Bancroft?” I pressed her. “Never,” this member of the Wertmüller and Scorcese generation confessed.

“He was the world’s number-one box-office star, bigger than Gilbert and Colman, Beery and Barthelmess and all the rest of them!”

I had been more involved with him than with any of Father’s other stars. I had been there at the birth of George Bancroft as a world figure and I had traveled with him at the height of his fame.

Underworld,
which brought George Bancroft overnight acclaim, was an example of Father’s filmmaking at its best. He was proud to have bought a gangster story—he claimed it to be the daddy of them all!—by Ben Hecht.
Underworld
was to be made on a low budget, starring Bancroft, then considered a mere feature player, and Evelyn Brent, a sultry, dark-haired heroine of a dozen Paramount melodramas. To direct the picture Father turned to Joe von Sternberg.

The vicious, unrelenting, but loyal lord of the underworld, treated not as the conventional heavy but as a new kind of cult hero, made
Underworld
an overnight sensation, creating national and even international life-styles. In big cities, box offices opened an hour earlier and stayed open an hour later to accommodate the unexpected demand. All but forgotten now,
Underworld
was then as much of a milestone as
The Great Train Robbery, The Birth of a Nation,
and
The Big Parade.
The moment that
Underworld
hit the screen, gangster movies were in. Big, bumbling, rugged-faced George Bancroft became the forerunner of that immortal backfield of good baddies, Jimmy Cagney, Eddie G. Robinson, John Garfield, and Bogie. George was the first of the anti-hero heroes to walk curly-lipped into machine gun fire and who died not only oozing blood from his noble mouth but with epigrammatic fade-outs like “Mother of God, is this the end of Ricco?”

Father knew he had a gold mine in Bancroft, and the imperious, inscrutable Joe von Sternberg was now established as a star director. So B.P. assigned them to further explorations and exploitations of the underworld in
The Drag Net, The Docks of New York,
and
Thunderbolt.
Father often said that Von Sternberg was as impossible with success as he had been in his years of struggle for recognition. Of George Bancroft, on the other hand, to say that fame went to his head is understatement. Like fire down a cotton suit it spread to his chest, his pelvis, and down to his toes. As
Underworld
drew rave notices and lines around the block from New York to Rome, George Bancroft began to talk differently, walk differently, eat differently, think differently. I could see it in the way he drove through the main studio gate to his redecorated dressing room. When he waved at old Mac, the gateman who had been there forever, George’s little flip of the hand was not so much patronizing as what one would expect of a British monarch acknowledging the salute of a loyal subject. Fame not only turned Bancroft’s head, it seeped into his acting, as I would see for myself when Von Sternberg was directing Parmount’s king of the underworld in
The Drag Net.