Moving Pictures (38 page)

In Paris, George repeated his London performance. When the attentive but cynical French press asked him what he most wanted to see in the City of Light, he told them he wanted to see its underworld. In overflowing press conferences in Prague and Budapest, he was a great block of consistency: Take me to see your underworld. In Budapest this particularly infuriated my father. Budapest, of course, was one of the flourishing centers of European theater. Again the Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were invited to the homes of the leading playwrights, the Vajdas, the Zilahys, the Biros, and to the openings of their plays in a theater world that rivaled London’s and New York’s. Again Big George was late for those openings, and failed to catch the names of Hungarian stars who considered themselves as famous in their smaller but highly artistic world as he was in his global fishbowl. George was a constant embarrassment, and we even blamed our growing family tensions on his overbearing presence. In one luxurious
wagon-lit
drawing room there was an un-Schulberglike chain reaction of face-slapping that began with Sonya’s striking little Stuart, my striking Sonya, Father reacting against my reddened cheek, and Mother making some Freudian observations to Ben as to how intrafamily trauma could scar our emotional life, triggering a parental shouting match. When our nurse Ruth, who had replaced
Wilma, burst into helpless sobs, the Schulbergs focused their frustrations on her.

The prospect of seeing Europe for the first time had flushed Ruth with an enthusiasm that waned quickly once we disembarked. As insensitive to Europe as the Bancrofts, she had spent most of her time with a long face sending postcards home and wishing she hadn’t come. Little Stuart was fidgety, Sonya was moody, and I was just old enough to resent having a nurse along at all—especially a clod who cared nothing about football games, or reading Robert Benchley, or meeting Young Stribling, or even listening to the records I had brought along. My favorite was an English hit that went, “I lift up my finger and I say ‘Now now tweet tweet come come …’” By now everybody was begging me not to play it, and Ruth went so far as to threaten to break it.

Mother and Father, momentarily united, turned on Ruth with the accusation that if she had been doing her job instead of moping, if she had taken little Stuart off to play somewhere so that he and Sonya could be peacefully separated, this family explosion never would have happened. To which Ruth answered, perhaps with more reason on her part than any of us appreciated at the time, that she was up to here with little Stuart and moody Sonya and crazy Buddy, sick of all of us, fed up with Europe in general and ready to go home to some place that made sense, like Oxnard, California. She was put off at the next depot, and walked contemptuously out of our lives.

Things were a little more peaceful without Ruth. But Father’s number-one star was still breathing down our necks, still dreaming of the future partnership of Bancroft Schulberg, Jr. In Vienna the Bancroft style drove Father to the wall of ultimate exasperation. Once again George had told the press he was not interested in seeing their famous St. Stephan’s Cathedral, he really had no interest in palaces and opera houses and art museums and all the other cultural wonders of which Vienna was so proud. “What I’ve come here for is to see your underworld.”

That did it. Father decided on a desperate ploy. The next stop on our itinerary was to be Venice, but he canceled that leg of the journey and instead we took off for Biarritz without letting George and Tava in on the secret. There was jubilation in the Schulberg drawing rooms as Bancroftless we sped our way to the French coast. Father’s mood soared as he pictured the Bancrofts finding themselves on the train to Venice. He and Mother even played casino without arguing over the cards. She
invariably won, a canny and cautious player, and he played with his usual unmathematical abandon, a trait that had made him one of the favorite pigeons at the big games in Hollywood. (I would watch with a sense of wonder and unease as fifteen and twenty thousand of his dollars went flying off to shrewder pockets at a single sitting.) It was a hilarious trip to Biarritz as we exchanged our favorite Bancroftisms, which seemed to improve with each retelling, like listening to Father read Robert Benchley out loud.

The Bancrofts finally caught up with us again in Rome, where we made an official tour of the Paramount facilities, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and some of the other interesting sites of that old, provincial city. Always a great convincer—who else could run a big movie studio?—Ben expressed indignation that their travel plans had been fouled up. When Transportation had changed the itinerary at the last moment, he had assumed that the Bancrofts had also been informed. As always, George was understanding. I have never known anyone who could look so thoughtfully understanding.

Back in Hollywood the Bancroft parade marched on. Another film—
The Docks of New York
—another success. With Humphrey Bogart still playing the clean-cut WASP juvenile complete with white flannels and tennis racket, George Bancroft was riding high as the world’s favorite tough guy. At a wrap-up party on the set, I watched as George singled out a lowly bit-player hovering in lonely anonymity near the bar. “Well, are you enjoying the party, young man?” George asked with professional affability several sizes larger than life.

“Yes, Mr. Bancroft,” muttered the awestruck unknown. “Been in pictures long?” George kept the conversational ball rolling. “No sir,” said the neophyte. “In fact, this is my first one.” “Is that so!” George seemed delighted to hear it. “Well, that’s why I came over. I just wanted you to know that George Bancroft talks to everybody.” And I had a new Bancroftism for our collection.

Bancroft continued to star in tough-guy movies through the early Thirties, but now the gangster film was hitting its stride and Warner’s had begun to take over the field with Cagney in
Public Enemy.
After Paul Muni scored in Howard Hughes’s
Scarface,
they would make super-tough guys of Bogey and John (né Jules) Garfield. Now every studio was in the
Underworld
business and George was no longer Mr. Underworld.

George had been signed to a seven-year contract that began at one thousand a week, with each year’s option raising his salary an additional
thousand. But his weekly salary for the seventh-and-final year under the original contract called for a raise from $6,000 to $7,500. By this time he was still a “name” but far from Number One. Responsible to Lasky and Zukor and the awesome power of New York, whence the banking capital flowed, Father felt he could not recommend picking up George’s option at a cost of $380,000 a year. But George was still a valuable property, and so B.P. suggested that George be kept on at his present salary of $6,000 a week, or $312,000 for the coming year.

When George heard this from Father, he grew red in the face. He couldn’t believe that Father would insult him like that. He insisted that rival studios had offered him $10,000 a week if he could get out of his contract but he had felt a loyalty to B.P. and the Company. Now, where was their loyalty to him? It wasn’t a question of loyalty, Father argued, but of hard dollars and cents. In fact, he offered to show George the box-office receipts on all his pictures from the beginning. Then he could see for himself how far grosses had fallen off. But Bancroft refused to look or listen. Father begged him to take the six thousand. “George, please listen to me, you’ll never make more money in your life.”

George looked at him with those big, brown, hurt, and now angry eyes, “Ben, I can’t believe this—I thought you were my friend.”

“George, now I’m going to level with you. Lasky and Zukor don’t want me to keep you on even at six thousand a week. I know it hurts but it’s a fact. I’ve been fighting for you.”

George drew himself up to his full six feet two and squared his broad shoulders. “I don’t need anybody to fight my battles. I can walk over to Metro right now and double my salary! I’ll be bigger over there than Wallie Beery.”

“George, for your sake, I hope you’re right,” Father said. “But this is a nutty business. It’s not a facsimile of anything, George. It’s its own crazy world. You’re not Number One any more. And you never will be again.”

George Bancroft turned on his heel and walked out of Father’s office, cleaned out his deluxe dressing room, went home to Tava’s soothing ministrations, let all the other studios know he was now open to their offers, and waited for the telephone to ring. But Hollywood was a cluster of small but powerful feudal states run by half a dozen men. While constantly conspiring against each other, these feudal lords met at least once a week around an apparently congenial poker table. In a room filled with the smoke of the finest Havana cigars and the aroma of the most expensive scotch that could be smuggled in, a casually pejorative comment could make or break a star’s career. So the word was out that
George Bancroft refused to budge from his self-appraised salary of $7,500 a week. Teeth clenched to the soggy end of a giant Upmann, a man who was a hundred times tougher offstage than George Bancroft could ever simulate on camera raised the ante another five hundred and said, “Fuck ’im! He’s washed up! who needs ’im?” That’s the way Eddie Mannix of MGM talked, and Harry Cohn of Columbia. The glamour capital of the world was as tough a company town as could be found in the coal fields of Pennsylvania or West Virginia. The men behind the movies carried brass knuckles and never hesitated to use them in the crunch.

When George Bancroft had been off the screen for six months, a studio felt they had a good all-star role for him and offered him $25,000 for a six-week guarantee. Nothing doing, said George. His price was $7,500 a week, take it or leave it. When he had been off the screen a year, he was offered $20,000 for a five-week job. No deal, said George, my price is seventy-five hundred a week. Sulking, stonewalling, peach-fuzzed, he was finally forced to accept bit parts that gnawed at his pride. When he finally came back to work for my father again, in
Wedding Present, A Doctor’s Diary,
and
John Meade’s Woman,
starring B.P.’s new find, Eddie Arnold, in a role that would have been considered tailor-made for Bancroft five years earlier, George accepted $250 a week. But when he finished his last scene, on a job that began on Monday and wound up on Friday, he asked if he could come to Father’s office. “Ben,” George said, “I think I’ve got an interesting idea for an entirely different kind of screen credit. Instead of putting my name in the cast list, how about putting just a big question mark and then we’ll run a nationwide contest on ‘Guess Who’s Playing This Part?’ People who may have forgotten me will scratch their heads and say, ‘My God, that’s our old favorite, George Bancroft! They should bring him back in a picture of his own!’ And then, Ben, we’ll find a great story, maybe get Ben Hecht to write it, maybe Eddie Arnold and I could co-star, we’ll play two brothers who become rival gangsters in love with the same girl, one hit picture, B.P., that’s all it takes, and then I’ll be right back there on top again.”

Father had to tell George, as gently as he could, that the “Guess Who?” contest would be laughed out of theater lobbies. It would only remind the public of how precipitately the great George Bancroft had tumbled from the top of the mountain. George
Bancroft
had become George
Who?
and all the promotional horses and all the publicity men couldn’t put the
Underworld
superstar together again.

O
NE DAY I WAS APPROACHING THE INTERSECTION OF OUR QUIET
Lorraine and stately Wilshire Boulevards when the wail of saxophones attracted my attention to
two
white Pierce-Arrows cruising down Wilshire in tandem. In the rear seat of the chauffeur-driven lead car was the handsome, ruddy-faced, ever-grinning Mickey Neilan, with his arm around a dark-haired beauty, Father’s obstreperous Gloria Swanson. And in the motorized chariot behind them, another chauffeur drove half a dozen jazzmen of the Abe Lyman Orchestra, there to serenade the royal couple wherever they went, and believe me they went everywhere, from the raucous all-night Plantation Club to the decorous gingerbread castle of the Hotel Del Coronado.

I waved from my bike and Mickey, whom I had known all the way from the early Pickford-Famous Players days to those cross-country extravaganzas on the
Chief,
waved back with his broad, infectious Irish grin. The entire scene was over in a few ticks of the stopwatch I carried in my pocket, but the moment still shines like a diamond in the crown of memory. Did I know then, as I sat on my bike absorbing the splendors not of a mogul but of an irrepressible Irish king, that his silver train of Pierce-Arrows was doomed to sweep down Wilshire Boulevard until it reached the Palisades and plunged into the obscurity of the sea? There must have been something more than a casual wave to a famous director with whom I was only marginally acquainted to make that moment so memorable. A little bird of reality seemed to be cawing, “Too much … too soon … too good to last…”

The reality bird may have been the voice of my mother who never lost her ghetto sense of survival. Facing the gusty winds of Hollywood, she would bend but never break. She might spend sums of money on clothes and houses, American antiques, private schools, travel, and favorite forward-looking charities but she spent wisely, with care and taste, keeping a ledger of investments, determined never to return to the poverty of an impractical father and a trapped mother. While Father didn’t spend money so much as he flung it away by the fistful.

I went up to do the math homework I loathed, leaving Father at the card table with Zeppo Marx. Zeppo was the rather good-looking one who played the inane romantic leads in the Marx Brothers comedies: the only Marx brother who wasn’t funny. Whatever frustrations Zeppo may have suffered in front of the cameras, eclipsed as he was by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, he more than compensated for them with an aggressive card sense that made him the terror of the moguls. He could destroy the smartest of them, with a deck of cards in lieu of a pistol.

When I came down for breakfast next morning at seven o’clock, Father and Zeppo were just winding up the game and settling accounts. I watched as Father wrote out a check for $22,000. He was potted from all-night drinking (while cool-head Zep kept mental record of every card discarded), and I remember his hearty laugh. He loved laughing as much as he did living and losing.