Moving Pictures (39 page)

I went off to school with a troubled mind. I wasn’t worried about our going broke. It never occurred to me that such losses could drain the plentiful Schulberg reservoir until it would be as dry as the Los Angeles River. At that time Father’s hold on the studio still seemed secure. I knew Hollywood was a roller coaster, but I was too busy or complacent to worry about the Schulbergs ever hurtling off the track. But over there on Western Avenue I had seen a lot of kids who were poor. South of Wilshire Boulevard, in the streets around Pico, I had seen Mexicans and Japanese who worked as gardeners, fruit-pickers, street vendors. I lay no claim to premature social consciousness. I could see that there were people on the bottom, in the middle, and at the top but I was too young, too rich, and too obsessed with my own activities to have much time left for social analysis. So it was less a process of thinking than of feeling that there was something not quite right in Mickey Neilan’s go-for-broke world of white Pierce-Arrows, and Father’s embarrassing and totally unnecessary custom-made town car, or $22,000 tossed away on a friendly game of chance. Something was rotten—whispered my little reality bird—in the state of Hollywood.

When I came down for breakfast on another school morning I found one of Father’s favorite writers, Herman Mankiewicz (a refugee from the New York
World
and the Algonquin Round Table, known later for his screenplay of
Citizen Kane),
winding up a casino duel with B.P. There was genius in Mank—“a spoiled priest,” Scott Fitzgerald would call him—but at the card table he was no Zeppo Marx. This time Mank was the loser, out $15,000, and since Father was making five times the salary Mank was earning as a screenwriter, he arranged to have installments taken out of Mank’s weekly paychecks for the next three months until they were even again.

Here were two of Hollywood’s more sophisticated intellects playing like kids with tens of thousands of dollars that never seemed real to them. It was like funny money you could buy in the ten-cent store. But Mother knew it was real, and although I was drawn to Father’s style, his unique combination of intellectual curiosity and robust joy of life, his superiority to the moguls I knew as tough, selfish, ignorant, and mean, I was shocked by the vulgarity of his mindless gambling. Not that I coveted the money myself. But the waste of it, seemingly for the sheer sake of waste, was not easy to understand. Maurice’s father may not have had the searching mind, the education, and the literary leanings of mine, but at least he didn’t drink as if the scotch faucet was being turned off in the morning, and he didn’t squander four-figure money on the flip of a card.

One Monday morning after Father had played through a weekend poker game with a motley group of Reno professionals and Hollywood high rollers, I asked him in their presence how he could bear losing almost $10,000. Maybe I could understand it if he won, I said, but losing that kind of money—or more—week after week (when he could have bought San Fernando Valley or given it to the poor) was beyond my comprehension. “Buddy, you don’t understand,” Father tried to define it: “Winning and losing is the same thing. It doesn’t matter. It’s the excitement of playing.”

I felt baffled and frustrated. But the daughter of Nick the Greek—somehow she materialized like one of those unbelievable/believable creations of Lewis Carroll—spiritedly seconded B.P. “Your father’s so right!” she shouted at me. “If you’re a real gambler, you never care if you win or lose. It’s the excitement, the thrill, everything riding on how you play your hand—and then the turn of a card!”

I had heard a lot about Father’s gambling, mostly through laments from Ad, but I had never thought about it deeply before. Ad’s theory was that Father was basically a sensitive and serious man who knew in his
heart that nobody was worth $11,000 a week, that he was wracked with guilt and self-doubt about earning that kind of money when his father had been lucky to make five or six dollars a week and when his own brothers Louie and Arthur were struggling to keep a small toy business alive in The Bronx. Father’s sisters were also married to men whose lives ran on the rim of failure. Only Ben had broken through the money barrier into a stratosphere shining with dollar signs instead of stars.

Whatever the explanation, Father was from his premature grey hair to his pedicured pink toenails a gambling man. One Sunday evening after a disastrous Saturday night at the Clover Club, the fever was still in him. Sometimes, in need of action, he would play (and lose) to Mother. But this time in desperation he offered to flip me for half a dollar. I lost. Double or nothing? I lost again. To make the confrontation more bizarre, it all took place—for some reason I can no longer remember—in the bathroom. What I do remember is that I kept losing. I might win an occasional flip, but it seemed as if three out of four times I was on the wrong side of the coin. Suddenly B.P. was doing to me what Zeppo Marx and the pros from Reno to Caliente had been doing to him for years.

When I got too far behind he gave me a chance to get even by raising the bets to a dollar. And when I still came up a loser, he offered to double the ante again. After all, I reassured myself, sooner or later the law of averages would have to assert itself. So I accepted. But nervously. I was betting to win. The Jaffe side of me was worried about losing so much money. I didn’t think in terms of Father’s eleven-thousand-dollars-a-week, although I would have to think about it later as I tried to find my own place in society. All the fathers of the boys I played with in Windsor Square were making thousands of dollars a week. When I heard my father mention someone as “only making” a thousand a week, I associated the figure with actors, directors, or writers in the lower brackets.

Still, my sense of values was attuned to my own five-dollar-a-week allowance, and what I could earn from my soft-drink business with Maurice, and the extra payments (or cultural bribes) I’d get from Mother for reading the classics. So as this bathroom gambling session with Father escalated from the innocent flip of the coin with which it had begun, I suddenly heard Father telling me I was out two hundred dollars. “How about it, Buddy. Double or nothing?”

“N-n-n-n …” I shook my head
NO.
I was still thinking like a
non-gambler. In terms of real money. How could I pay back $400? It would take me six months of self-deprivation. I went on losing until my debt reached $250. Father was flushed with victory. Like a losing fighter who finally finds himself in the ring with someone he can lick. I was flushed, too, but with fear of losing. It never occurred to me that Father would say, “That’s all right, Buddy, forget it, we were only playing.” That was the human side of him, and when he was human he was extremely human. But when he was gambling he was as crazed as Dostoevsky at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden.

Dostoevsky was in that bathroom with us. Father had read aloud to me and urged me to start reading myself the short novels of the Russian master. All his life he dreamt of doing
The Eternal Husband
as a film, and while I was still in high school we made some stabs at breaking it down together into screenplay form. So I felt a kinship to Dostoevsky, not only through his work (though the major novels were still in store for me) but through his life as Father revealed it to me in bits and pieces. That’s how I knew that our Feodor had gone to Wiesbaden to make a fortune on the turn of the wheel, had lost stake after stake until he was virtually pauperized again, and had gone away not defeated and suicidal but strangely exhilarated. No wonder Father and Feodor, in my young mind, became a single image of paternity. “Five hundred rubles,” Dostoevsky was saying with that mad glint in the eye. “Double or nothing!”

I managed to mumble “Double” and won. On the next toss of the coin I would either owe or win a thousand dollars, a modest weekly paycheck at the studio but a towering fortune to the young man Ad had taught the difference between Hollywood money and the real thing. When I looked up at Father-Feodor, and felt him almost trembling with anticipation of the next toss, something within me cracked, and I cried out, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to play anymore. Let’s stop! Can’t we stop?!”

The outburst had an immediate effect. It was able to reach Father and bring him back to sanity. “I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t be teaching you to gamble. Ad would kill me.”

T
EACH ME TO
GAMBLE
!
Father was so intelligent in some ways, the equal, perhaps the superior, of Irving Thalberg as Hollywood’s resident intellectual. But so crazy-dumb in other ways. Didn’t he know that he was teaching me
not
to gamble, at least for the obscene stakes he had a passion for losing? Didn’t he know that I would become as obsessed with the size of his losses as he was—for totally opposite reasons, his emotional compass pointing 180 degrees away from mine?

The point-counterpoint of gambling is that while it may be wildly self-destructive, it can also inspire the taking of creative chances. And while Father’s (and Von Sternberg’s)
Crime and Punishment
was hardly in a class with Dostoevsky’s original, it suggested the same drive that had propelled the Russian novelist to psychological depths as yet unfathomed, and that prodded my father to bet on hands still unproven. I am thinking not only of
Underworld,
where he gambled and won, but of
Wings.
In Jesse Lasky, Jr.’s account of his own and his father’s Hollywood careers, there is a curious omission: my father. Young Jesse has been one of my good friends; I know him as a charming and talented man. But he manages to describe the ordeal of producing
Wings
as if it were entirely the product of his father’s courage and creativity. From the starting gate to the backstretch and down to the wire, B.P. doesn’t get a single call. In an odd postscript to the saga, young Jesse has my father asking the director Bill Wellman after
Wings
is finished who the tall, handsome, shyly appealing guy is who makes a memorable little gesture
before flying off into the wild blue yonder for his final dogfight. And in Jesse’s myopic version, Bill Wellman’s answer is, “Hell, if you don’t know—I don’t, either!”

Sons are understandably vulnerable to fabulous fathers and so that’s how it must have been told in the Lasky domain. But the story doesn’t wash. B.P. had already cast Gary Cooper opposite his prize discovery of the Twenties, Clara Bow, both in
It
and in
Children of Divorce,
and had fought for Coop against the directors who insisted he was “wooden” and “couldn’t act.” In those days, thank God, producers didn’t protect themselves by having test audiences twist dials to indicate their reactions—
cool
—
warmer
—
getting hot
—as the film played on. Father used a more direct approach. In
Wings,
Gary Cooper was still a featured player, with a role subordinate to Richard Aden’s and Buddy Rogers’s. But Father was quick to notice that none of the Paramount stars stirred the hearts of the front-office secretaries—and other parts of their anatomy—like Gary Cooper.

Long before the stardom that came to him in the Thirties, and the superstardom that swept him on from the Forties to the Sixties, Coop was the secret dream and in many cases the literal love of the entire studio secretarial pool. All typing stopped, all eyes turned to devour what Father’s main secretary described as “the most beautiful hunk of man who ever walked down this hall!” My father’s second secretary, the pleasingly plump, happy-dispositioned Jean Baer, carried on a semi-secret (or as secret as those things could be in the studio fishbowl) affair with Gary for years. He was never a flamboyant swordsman like Errol Flynn or (though this may come as a surprise to outsiders) Freddie March. But, for all his quiet speech and diffident ways, Coop might have been the Babe Ruth of the Hollywood boudoir league. It was whispered down the studio corridors that he had the endowments of Hercules and the staying powers of Job. It was local gossip that during his romance (as we used to call it) with Lupe Velez, the Mexican pepper pot was so jealous of her prized possession that she would meet him at the door when he came home from the studio, unbutton his fly, and, spirited primitive that she was, sniff suspiciously for the scent of rival perfumes.

Anyway, in every meaning of Miss Glyn’s provocative two-letter word, Cooper had It, and Father was one of the first to recognize it and to guide him from supporting to starring roles. At least that’s the way the Cooper legend spun its golden threads through the Schulberg household. And in his memoirs in
Life,
Coop—like Gary Grant and the rare
few among a legion of ingrates—acknowledged his debt to B.P. as the first producer to recognize his potential and give him his break.

Wings
was an embattled picture, both on the screen where the vicious dogfights between the American and German fighter planes of World War I were reenacted for the first time, and behind the scenes where a running battle was fought between the West Coast studio (where Jesse Lasky loyally supported B.P.) and the ever-threatening New York office of Adolph Zukor. Father had wanted to do an air picture for a long time. The seed may have been planted when we were coming home from New York through the Panama Canal and the news was radioed to our ship, the
President Van Buren,
that Lindbergh had landed safely in Paris. The
Van Buren
went berserk. Passengers who had never spoken to each other kissed and hugged, and nearly everyone on board got gloriously drunk. Father had been so carried away with the historic 33-hour flight of our Lone Eagle that he had wound up in the wrong stateroom with a young homeymooner who had lost track of her bridegroom in the shipboard excitement.

From the moment that the single-prop one-seater
Spirit of St. Louis
touched down at Le Bourget, America became instantly air-minded. People treasured envelopes that arrived by airmail, and sporting types offered great sums to aviators who would fly them from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles in an open cockpit. After Harding, Teapot Dome, splitting headaches from bathtub gin, the cynicism of the American press, and the nihilism embraced by the so-called “lost generation,” America seemed to be born again in the individual triumph of the modest, diffident (Cooperlike) hero of the skies. When Lindbergh came to Hollywood that year, world-famous movie stars crowded around him like kids, begging for his autograph. My parents took me to the reception for him at the Ambassador Hotel and his autograph in my precious red-leather book gave me vicarious celebrity when I showed it off at school. Of course Father wanted to make a picture of what everybody was hailing as “the greatest single exploit in the history of the world.”