Moving Pictures (37 page)

George didn’t know it but I was working on my first novel on the
Ile-de-France.
I had invented a brilliant plot, about a murderer who leaves no fingerprints because he has only one hand, and his weapon is the hook fitted on to his stump. Every afternoon I would retire to the desk in my stateroom and add a few more pages. I thought “The Hook” was bound for greatness because it drew on scenes that had most impressed me in the works of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Stevenson, and some of the other masters Father had read to us in those Sunday sessions. In addition, my central character inevitably resembled George Bancroft. In my walking dreams, my novel would be published—naturally to critical acclaim—and then would be snapped up by Paramount for a film starring George Bancroft. I even considered adopting Father’s
nom de
plume
from his days as a fledgling short-story writer, and calling myself Oliver P. Drexel, Jr.

This dream of artistic collaboration was in Bancroft’s mind too. “Buddy,” he said to me on the morning of our landfall on the English coast, “this is a momentous day, the arrival of the Bancrofts and the Schulbergs in England. In fact it’s a facsimile of an idea I had when I was trying to get off to sleep last night.” Stardom had made George so sensitive, his wife Octavia confided to us, that she lulled him to sleep by stroking his cheek with peach fuzz. “Peach fuzz!” Father exploded.” His head is so thick I don’t think Gene Tunney could put him to sleep with a straight right to the jaw!”

Despite his intellectual shortcomings, there was something consistently affecting about George Bancroft. He was so predictably and vulnerably full of himself. Even though at fifty he was more than ten years older than Father, having achieved his fame at an age when most stars had already begun to fade, our box-office hero had total faith that he would outlast B.P. as a Paramount power, unto the next generation when I would be ready to take over the studio. Oh, we were a potent team as we leaned on the railing of that luxurious ocean liner and stared out at the blue-green vastness full of whitecaps and facsimiles.

George, incidentally, was not the only celebrity to hold forth on the
Ile-de-France.
There was also Young Stribling, the heavyweight contender from Georgia, “the King of the Canebrakes,” one of the fistic phenoms of the day. Only 25, he was already a nine-year veteran of well over two hundred professional fights. Now he was on his way to London to fight an Italian giant seven inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, at that time an unknown freak discovered in a traveling circus, but soon to become world famous: Primo Carnera. After we met together at the Captain’s table, Young Stribling offered to spar with me on the deck and to teach me some of the finer points of the Manly Art.

George Bancroft looked on thoughtfully, observing that Young Stribling was a facsimile of an idea he had for a motion picture in which he would play the Georgia Peach when Stribling went on to win the championship of the world. By that time, in another facsimile, I would be out of high school and ready to write and produce this epic fight film.

Young Stribling showed me how to place my left and tuck my chin in behind my cocked right hand, and promised to get us ringside seats for his battle with the Italian strongman known affectionately as The
Ambling Alp. Father’s spirits rose considerably. If he had George Bancroft on his back, at least he had the celebrated Young Stribling at his side.

Disembarking at Southampton was a madhouse. The sporting fraternity was there to receive and interview Young Stribling. And all the rest of England had turned out to surround and embrace George Bancroft. He needed a police escort to clear the way for him to get off the gangplank and onto the train for London. His fame was such that custom inspection was waived, and the Bancrofts reached their drawing room in the style of royalty. Even their cases of Eddie Kaye scotch moved along with them without mishap. When we reached the London terminal, the crowd scene was repeated. English reserve was forgotten as fans closed in and tried to lay hands on him, crying “Go’ge! Go’ge, gimme a kiss!—Sign this!—Shake me hand! Go’ge… !” As we moved into the lobby of the Savoy, wild-eyed fans jostled with photographers and reporters. One of the latter managed to get in a question, “Mr. Bancroft, now that you’re in England, what are you most looking forward to seeing?’ After one of those dramatic pauses—“Bancroft pauses” we had come to call them—George said, “I have come here to see your underworld.”

I exchanged looks with my family. Father was wearing his “I’m going to murder George Bancroft” look. The look on the British reporters’ faces reflected studied self-control. But when George looked into the faces pressed around him, all he saw was a mirror reflecting his own.

On our first night in London, the noted actress Peggy Wood, a close friend of Ad and Ben’s, was opening in Noel Coward’s
Bitter Sweet.
The Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were to be her guests, both for the performance and for dinner afterward. Aware of George’s chronic unpunctuality, due in large measure to that steady flow of Eddie Kaye’s finest, Father had forewarned him as he would a child, in a tone that even I found myself adopting, “Now George, here’s what you should do—stop drinking at five and take a nap, as I want you to look well in the pictures they’ll be taking of you and Peggy. At six o’clock start dressing. Remember it’s white tie. You and Tava meet us in the lobby at seven. Seven on the dot. Peggy’s been nice enough to give us her house seats. Now let’s be in them ten minutes before curtain. Are you listening to me, George?’

George smiled the big, open smile beloved on all five continents. “Gotcha, B.P.”

At seven, Father phoned upstairs to say we were leaving our suite and
heading for the elevator. Were George and Tava ready? B. P. was sure he could hear the familiar tinkle of ice in the highball glasses as George boomed, “Yup, we’re just about ready. Tava’s putting the finishing touches on her makeup. We’ll be down in five minutes, B.P.”

In the lobby, with my young, slender father elegant in white tie, Mother looking like a doe-eyed movie star in her chiffon evening gown, Bancroft’s five minutes ticked on to ten and to fifteen. Father strode to the house phone.

“George, for Christ’ sake!”

Gurgle, tinkle. “On our way down, B.P.”

Seven-thirty brought Father’s ultimatum that we were leaving without them. At seven-thirty-three, just as we were on our way to the revolving door and the waiting limousine, George and Octavia emerged serenely from the elevator.

“George, this is unforgivable. As one star to another, you owe it to Miss Wood to be punctual. It’s the height of professional discourtesy. How could you do this to her?’

Again the big brown innocent eyes begged understanding while the resonant and now well-oiled voice spoke these words: “Now Ben, I’ve only been in this country a couple of hours. How do you expect me to know their customs?”

For Bancroftisms there were no answers. That evening Peggy Wood, always a gracious lady, held the curtain for fifteen minutes, the additional time required by George Bancroft to adjust himself to the strange customs of his English cousins.

Next day the head of Paramount’s London office showed us some of the principal sights of the city. We began with a lovely view of the Paramount emblem, stars forming a graceful circle around an impressive mountain over the company’s “flagship” theater and office building. Eventually we worked our way to Westminster Abbey. The Bancrofts had declined this sightseeing trip, preferring to sleep late. When Father reprimanded George gently at the end of the day, George defended himself on the grounds of privacy. It was no fun being mobbed wherever he went. The night before, he had been pushed and pulled and had bits of his expensive full-dress suit torn off for souvenirs. So Father assured him that for their visit to the Tower of London next morning he would make special arrangements through the Paramount office; a team of English bobbies trained in crowd-control would be provided, as well as a special approach to the rear of the Tower.

Father told George we were leaving the hotel next morning at nine,
while advising our Paramount guides to pick us up at ten. George was instructed to lean back in the middle of the rear seat of the limousine, so as to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Thus we drove uneventfully toward the Tower without inciting any local pedestrians. So far, so good. But as the Tower came into view a few blocks ahead, George began to stir and lean forward, peering out into the street over my shoulder. At that moment, a young pedestrian, happening to glance into the car, could not believe his starstruck eyes. “Go’ge! That really you, Go’ge? Blimey… ! Hi, Go’ge! Go’ge!”

His cries attracted other passersby until soon there were a dozen faces at the window. George leaned forward, presenting that famous face to them. It was like honey to flies. Now there were twenty, fifty, a hundred … you could see them buzzing with their revelation: “It’s Go’ge! Go’ge Bancroft!!” The limousine was surrounded, a spontaneous Limey version of a Hollywood opening. The narrow street was clogged and tight-lipped bobbies tried to push back the crowd to clear a way for our car. Suddenly a large hand reached down over my shoulder and found the handle of the door. The rear door of the limousine swung open, and George Bancroft flung himself out of the car and into the midst of that churning human sea.

Later we would laugh about it, the crowd-shy George Bancroft literally throwing himself to the wolves of fame. But at that moment we watched in amazement and horror as George’s head bobbed along like a loosened buoy in an angry sea. It was half an hour before we found him again, in the Tower of London where the intrepid bobbies had rescued him from the crowd. He was battered and torn and flushed with victory.

“George, goddammit, you could have been killed out there,” Father scolded him, promising us that this was the last time he would ever urge the Bancrofts to join us in our sightseeing.

“I’m sorry, B.P.,” George was still panting, “but after all, they’re my public. I owe that to ’em.”

The London leg of the Grand Tour was full of turmoil. It led to the first real fight I’d ever had with my father. It had to do with another theater evening. The Stratford Theater was doing
Twelfth Night
and Father had a ticket for me. I told him I couldn’t go because I had to pick the college football games coming up that Saturday for my weekly contest with Maurice. We picked the scores of a hundred college football games, all the way from the Trojans of Southern California and the Fighting Irish
of Notre Dame to struggles involving Slippery Rock and Bowling Green. It was hard work at best, with all the available sports sections to provide vital intelligence. But all I could find in London was the Paris edition of the
New York Herald-Tribune,
and so I was under a great deal of pressure, especially since my predictions had to be postmarked before the day of the game.

My usually permissive father began to raise his voice. An evening like this was exactly why we had come to Europe, to see all the good things that never came to Hollywood. He had had to use his influence to get these seats. The theater had been sold out for weeks. It would be a dramatic experience I would remember all my life. I was to put away that silly list of football games, he insisted, and open my mind to Shakespeare. When I tried to explain that if I did not get my football picks in the mail that night I would break a vital link in the continuity of my gridiron competition with Maurice, he tried to lift me bodily out of my chair. I squirmed out of his grasp and suddenly he slapped me across the face. My eyes smarted with tears, falling upon the paper on which I was inscribing those thoughtful numbers: “Washington State 21—Idaho 7 …” I shouted at him: “Leave me alone, you sonofabitch! I never wanted to come on this crazy trip anyway!”

He tried to drag me down the hallway to the main door of the suite but I fought back. There was another terrible scene at the door. “All right, Buddy, I’m sorry I hit you. But for the last time—you’re coming with us to
Twelfth Night.
”

“I’m staying here and picking football games!”

“You know what’s going to happen to you?—you’re going to grow up to be one of those typical, stupid Hollywood kids who collects autographs from morons like George Bancroft and sings ‘Fight On for Old S.C.!’ Your mother and I may have been poor, but we knew what was important in life. We would have saved up all year to see something like the production we’re seeing tonight.”

“Dad, you don’t understand. I’ve
got
to pick these football games.”

Father’s bulging, sensitive eyes would have destroyed me if I had not been armored in self-righteousness. “All right, be an idiot,” he said. “It’s that goddamn California sunshine. It makes everybody football and tennis crazy.” The last word I heard was “Idiot!” Then the door slammed with what seemed to me at the time a tragic finality.

But in time, family relations were repaired by the tribulations we suffered in common from the Bancrofts. Father forgave my cultural
lapse sufficiently to take me to the Young Stribling-Primo Carnera bout, which attracted great attention at the time. Sandwiched among the English fancy, I saw the largest fighter I had ever seen win an awkward and unsatisfactory decision on a foul in the fourth round. Father had bet on Stribling because he had watched the Georgian train. In the gym he had looked stylish and hard to hit, and Father had made one of his casually reckless wagers—a thousand pounds, he admitted later. The ungainly stray from a small Italian circus had been awarded a most peculiar decision, claiming he had been hit low by what seemed to us at ringside to be an invisible punch. They repeated their act again a few weeks later, in Paris, this time with Stribling winning on a foul. By now I had seen enough fights to learn one of the sad realities of the sweet science: Every so often the fix was in.

In the case of hapless Primo Carnera, as we would learn in time, the fix was always in, right up to the championship of the world he would win from Jack Sharkey. But when the mob who owned him had made their point, and the handcuffs were removed from his opponents, he was defenseless, thrown to lions like Max Baer and Joe Louis.