Moving Pictures (36 page)

Von Sternberg had a way of talking to his actors as if they were slightly retarded children, and in his approach to Bancroft we should strike the adverb. “Now George, this is a very simple scene. We should be able to get it in one take. All you have to do is walk up that flight of stairs. You think you’ve thrown your pursuers off the track so you are relatively relaxed. But they’ve been tailing you. Now, the camera is going to be on
your back, but when I say ‘Bang!’ that’s when you get it. You grab the banister and twist around, until you’re facing the camera. As you slip down the steps you try to reach for your gun. But I’ll say ‘Bang!—Bang!’ again, and that’s it. I don’t think we even have to rehearse it. Just give it to me as real as you can. Now George, are you sure you understand what I’m saying?”

George looked at his director with his expressive St. Bernard eyes. “Yes, Joe.”

So the commander-in-chief cracked the order to his aide-de-camp, the assistant director called “Quiet!”, Joe told his head cameraman—Hal Rosson, one of the best—to start filming, and at the crisp command, “Action!”, Father’s overnight number-one box-office star started up the creaky stairs of a realistic-looking boardinghouse. It was an impressive sight, the hulking George Bancroft, all six-foot-two and two hundred pounds of him, charging up that stairway. At the third step, Von Sternberg’s voice rang out. “Bang!!” But George didn’t fall. In fact, he didn’t even flinch. He kept right on going. “Bang!!” Joe shouted again. George Bancroft paused a moment, as if distracted by a random thought, and went on climbing the stairs.

“God damn it, George!” Von Sternberg screamed. “What’s the matter with you—are you deaf?” His voice filled the cavernous set.
“Bang!
—
Bang!”

Still George didn’t fall. Instead he stopped and turned those expressive brown eyes on the Napoleonic Von Sternberg. Then he spoke in the quiet voice of the ultrareasonable. “Don’t shout at me, Joe. Of course I heard you. But just remember this: One shot can’t stop Bancroft.”

It became one of our favorite Schulberg family lines. At home Sonya and I would take turns playing the domineering Von Sternberg shouting “Bang!” while the other took over the swaggering gangster idol: “One shot can’t stop Bancroft.”

When I went to the preview with my father, there came that desperate moment on the stairs. In the picture it turned out exactly as Von Sternberg had planned it. George could keep on walking up those stairs with all the sense of invulnerability that his gangster roles and the powers of stardom had invested in him, but Joe had the final say. All he had to do was establish George on the stairs, cut away for a moment, and then cut back to Bancroft on the decisive “
Bang!
” that made him grab the banister and twist forward. Thanks to judicious cutting, one shot did
indeed bring down the mighty Bancroft. The audience would never know that their rugged hero up there on the silver screen was a muscular presence who had come to believe in his own invincibility.

When I saw it on the screen, with George reacting to the first shot, I tried but was unable to choke back my laughter. Father tried to shush me. I was destroying one of the most dramatic moments in the picture. People were looking around at me. I held my hand over my mouth until the fit passed.

As George’s fame kept mounting to tidal-wave proportions, so did his pretensions. Von Sternberg’s defense was simply to ignore the antics of his star. Nobody could acquire instant deafness more quickly than Joe. They made a remarkable pair, Bancroft whom fame had transformed into an impregnable fortress, and Von Sternberg whose artistic arrogance regarded all actors as empty-headed puppets to be jerked this way and that in the firm grip of the puppeteer.

Frustrated by the Von Sternberg freeze, George would invariably turn to my father as a higher court of appeal. A vital part of B.P.’s job was to cope with his box-office stars, keeping them happy or at least content enough to show up on time for their eight o’clock calls, charming them without surrendering to their often unreasonable demands or complaints. Those were still the days of block booking, and “four Bancrofts” had been sold in advance to movie houses all over the world. So B.P. had to baby George, humor him, and hear him out. Whenever George asked him to fire “that little monster Von Sternberg,” Father would play for time. Why didn’t they think about it and meet over the weekend to discuss it further? Then Father would turn around and say to his director, “For Christ’ sake, Joe, if George wants to do one more take, once in a while give in to him. Sure, we know he’s a moron, but after all his popularity is helping to pay our salaries.” And if George kept coming, as he came constantly to Father’s royal chambers, with ideas for future roles he wanted to play—for now he was convinced that his dramatic range was boundless, from Ahab to Zoroaster—B.P. would smile, offer George one of his Upmanns, and say, “Interesting idea, George, why don’t we think about it…”

A blue-eyed tower of charm and patience at the studio, Father let go at home in his ritual walk around the dinner table with scotch highball in hand. “That stupid sonofabitch George is driving me out of my goddamn mind!” he’d shout in a voice that must have been heard from one end of Windsor Square to the other. Sometimes I was afraid that our
genteel neighbors would think my parents were fighting when Father was only crying out at his studio tormentors. There were some who were vicious and some who were openly defiant and some who were secretly conniving and conspiratorial, but that season George was the worst of all: as ever-present and persistent and noisy as an overgrown horsefly. At school, kids who marveled at his powers in
Underworld, The Drag Net,
and
Thunderbolt
would say, “Gee, you’re lucky, you actually know George Bancroft!” And while I was admitting “Y-y-yes I do,” I was thinking to myself, “If you only knew!” Their idol had feet of clay that went all the way up to his head.

One evening Father came home saying, “Ad, if I don’t get away from George for at least a couple of weeks, I’m going to crack. I’m not exaggerating—his stupid ideas for new bits of characterization, new scenes, new pictures to make are driving me out of my mind.”

Since there was a slight lull in the frenetic fifty-picture-a-year schedule and since Father had put together what he considered a dependable team of supervisors (the fancy new name for associate producers), he thought this would be an opportune time to take a vacation. Although Ad didn’t agree with Ben’s estimate of his producing staff—she thought they were mostly sycophants whose greatest talent lay in their knowing how to play up to Father’s weaknesses, which were wide-ranging, rather than to shore up his strengths, which were impressive—she welcomed the idea.

“Let’s go to Europe,” Mother suggested, “and take the children.” What she had in mind was a cultural holiday, museums and art galleries, Shakespeare at Stratford, the Louvre, the sea- and history-soaked wonders of Venice, the Italian opera and the Caesarean splendors of Rome. Over dinner they talked out the elaborate itinerary, from the Tower of London to the Tower of Pisa, from the English Channel to the Adriatic, from the Savoy to the Adlon to the George V to the Excelsior—our version of that most spendthrift and splendiferous British institution, the Grand Tour.

Father liked his culture too, but for him the ideal vacation was sneaking over the Mexican border to the gambling casinos at Agua Caliente. Traveling with Ad, the children, and their nurse was not his idea of getting away from it all. But he’d go along with anything if it spelled temporary relief from the agony of daily exposure to the ever-expanding ego of George Bancroft.

Our trip was planned like an official journey of state. Steamer trunks and suitcases were packed with changes of clothing for the five of us for
every possible occasion, from formal affairs to beachside picnics, and duly labeled:
The Santa Fe Chief—The Ile-de-France—The Hotel Savoy …
Our itinerary, the size of a movie script, arrived from the studio Transportation Department, complete with the name of the head of the Paramount office in every one of the eight foreign capitals we would be visiting. The studio even provided us with books from Research so that we could read up on the histories and cultures of the cities and countries we’d be visiting. With our minds and our steamer trunks overpacked, the Schulbergs were ready for their European invasion. Mother kept telling Sonya and me, and even little Stuart, how much we would profit culturally and intellectually from the long journey, and Father’s home-from-the-studio mood lightened dramatically as we reached Departure Day minus one. Then it happened.

Fifteen hours before we were to board the luxurious
Santa Fe Chief,
George Bancroft came shambling into Father’s throne room. “B.P.,” he announced, “I’ve got great news. We’re going with ya!”

Father began to stammer, as he frequently did under pressure. “G-G-George, that would be great, but I’m afraid it’s a little late—w-w-we’ve got a complicated schedule—thirty different reservations…”

“Don’t worry, we’re all set!” George talked through B.P.’s protestations with his wide-screen smile. “I just checked with Transportation. We’re on the
Chief
with you, in the same car! And we’ve got a stateroom on the
Ile-de-France,
in the same corridor. We couldn’t get on the same floor with you at the Savoy, but we’re in the suite right above yours. All you have to do is open the window and call ‘George’ and I’ll pop right down. Isn’t that swell? We’re booked with you all the way, the Blue Train, the George Sank, right down to the Excelsior in Rome and back on the
Da Vinci.
That’s how it’s gonna be for the rest of our lives—the Bancrofts and the Schulbergs like
this
!” George held up two long thick fingers pressed together in a gesture of inseparability.

The next day as our trunks and bags were being loaded onto the
Chief,
a truck drove right across the station platform and parked alongside our Pullman car. Two men began unloading several dozen heavy wooden cases wrapped in brown paper. We watched from our three connecting drawing rooms, having already settled in for our four-day train ride to New York. The Bancrofts, we had begun to learn, were habitually late. The pride of the Santa Fe line had to delay its departure a few precious
minutes while the mysterious cases were handed up to the Pullman platform.

“George, what the hell have you got in those boxes?” B.P. wanted to know.

“My scotch,” George said.

“George,” Father spoke to him softly as he might to a five-year-old child, a five-year-old with a bottle-a-day habit. “All you need is half a dozen bottles. In less than a week we’ll be on the
Ile-de-France.
Five days later we’ll be in London. The
home
of scotch whiskey, George. Not bootleg stuff. The real thing.” Father looked at the half-dozen cases still waiting to be unloaded from the truck. “Tell them to take that back and keep it for you. I just can’t let you bring all that bootleg booze to England.”

“Now Ben,” George said with those box-office brown eyes, “I don’t care what you say about the scotch over there, I trust Eddie Kaye.”

Eddie Kaye was our studio bootlegger. He was a marvel of offbeat casting, jockey-size at five feet two, a hundred and ten pounds, with a falsetto voice. Legend had it that Eddie had been castrated by rival gangsters who resented his muscling in on their lucrative studio bootleg preserve. He always expressed deep devotion to me, which he begged to prove by offering to “take care of any enemies I might have. “Anybody gives you a hard time—just tell me who ya wanna hit, Buddy—I’ll get ’em in a dark alley—I’ll break their legs—I’ll …” Tiny Eddie Kaye represented the real Hollywood underworld, but audiences would have rocked with laughter if they had seen him on the screen. They wanted George Bancroft who looked every inch the killer. They would never believe that under that formidable exterior beat the heart of a marshmallow, while under the child-size hairless chest of Eddie Kaye beat the heart of your friendly neighborhood sadist.

“I trust Eddie Kaye” became another Bancroftism. Big George was loyal to his trust. He not only drank Eddie Kaye’s finest throughout the four-day journey to New York, but made sure that it was installed in his spacious stateroom on the
Ile.
He drank Eddie Kaye all the way across the Atlantic and right into his suite at the Savoy. I’m not sure whether or not he brought his trusted bottle of Eddie Kaye to the captain’s table on the
Ile-de-France,
but I’m sure he would have if he could. George Bancroft, my father used to say, had the courage and the simple faith of profound ignorance.

On that ocean voyage George and I had many serious conversations. That was the only kind of conversation George knew. He liked to talk and he had a favorite word:
facsimile.
I don’t know where he had picked it up, and clearly he had never looked it up, but there was something touching about the loving way he rolled it around on his tongue before delivering it. “You know, Buddy,” he’d say, leaning on the ship’s railing and squinting his eyes at the horizon, “that sunset is a facsimile… of the first play that Tava [his wife] and I ever did together. An absolute facsimile …”

I would nod. I had learned to nod and half-listen to George. “You know, Buddy,” he said, always with that thoughtful squinting of the eyes, “this trip to Europe is a facsimile of the wonderful relationship I have with your father. And that I’m going to have with you as you grow older. An absolute facsimile.”

Father and Mother had encouraged me from childhood to look up any word I didn’t understand. I was to drag that growing list all the way to prep school with me, and beyond, until I had compiled what amounted to my own personal dictionary. So I knew what
facsimile
meant. And I knew that poor, world-famous George didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. At times I had an impulse to tell him. But there were at least three reasons for resisting the temptation. I had learned enough of studio politics to know that the boss’s son doesn’t offend his father’s bread winning stars. In the second place I knew that George Bancroft was basically harmless. And finally I was too timid to correct him even if I had wanted to. With my stammering, my natural form of expression was to write things down.