Moving Pictures (40 page)

But Lindy, our blue-eyed young god, was positively un-American in his determination not to cash in on his overnight fame. Willing to be feted by Doug Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, and the rest of our local peerage, he was unapproachable on the subject of turning over his life story to the whims of the movie moguls.

One of Father’s writer friends was John Monk Saunders, who had lost a leg after being shot down by a Von Richtofen fighter-pilot in an
air-duel over St.-Mihiel. Saunders, married to the beauteous Fay Wray (later of
King Kong
fame), was one of those literate, colorful romantics spawned by the Great War. With gusto he told us about his adventures in the days when fliers jousted with each other through the clouds with all the dash and aplomb of knights of old. Father, who loved to play his hunches, told Saunders that if he wrote the story, Paramount would buy it. Thus the first motion picture of the world’s first battles in the air was launched. The story—two fellows in love with the same girl—was the plot Hollywood war-films seemed unable to avoid. But B.P. felt a simple story line would allow for more footage of the dogfights that had never been seen before.

Jesse Lasky backed B.P. on the crucial decision to add
Wings
to the Paramount production schedule for the coming year. “We will make the first epic of the air, the
Big Parade
of the Lafayette Escadrille,” Lasky announced with the same ebullience with which he had backed C. B. DeMille when they had rented that old barn in the wilds of uninhabited Hollywood to make
The Squaw Man
almost fifteen years earlier.

With that kind of encouragement, Father assigned his favorite writing team to the project, Buddy Leighton and his talented wife Hope Loring. As the only producer at that time who had served his apprenticeship as a screenwriter, B.P. had a built-in appreciation of the writer’s contribution to the finished film. He drummed into me that unless the writer’s structure is sound, the plot has its own logic and power, and its characters are believable, intriguing, and
vital,
the combined cinematic genius of John Ford, King Vidor, and Lewis Milestone couldn’t bring the script to life. In time Buddy Leighton would become a producer, as most good writers became producers or directors in self-defense, in protest against their well-paid serfdom. But just as I learned, at 525 Lorraine and at the Studio, the answer to that frequent question, “What do producers do? ”, I also saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears how much more the writers were doing than the public would ever know.

I had already learned that not all actors and actresses were the bastards and bitches Father liked to call them. Gary Cooper was always nice to me on the set (nice to everybody, it seemed to me), and Cary Grant parked his Model A roadster in our driveway to deliver one of my favorite dogs, a young Airedale called “Gent.” Richard Arlen, who would play one of the leading roles in
Wings,
took me boating with his bride-to-be, Jobyna Ralston, who had a supporting role in that picture but was never to achieve the stardom of her sister Esther.

But my admiration was reserved for the Buddy Leightons and the Hope Lorings. Sometimes, fighting panic, I would show them and other writers who came to the house some of my groping efforts at short stories and poems. It was their praise and Father’s I hoped to earn. In turn I’d be allowed to read their scripts and sometimes even be asked for comments. I never spoke up at the story conferences. But sometimes Father would ask me what I thought of their scripts, or of a particular scene or character. I was learning to read with a pencil in my hand—to make notes in the margin. To this day I am unable to read a novel without a pencil in hand for marginal comments. I can still see Father reading a script in the library with a pencil in one hand and a highball within reach of the other. That is how I thought reading was done.

While
Wings
was in the works, a brash young second-unit and special-effects director intercepted Father in the long corridor between the reception desk and his office. That’s where underlings he couldn’t crowd into his daily schedule would be able to steal a minute moving along at his shoulder as he hurried on to the protective presence of his secretaries. (When the Hungarian playwright Ernst Vajda—pronounced
Voida
—was imported to Paramount, and in turn brought his brother Victor, they would lurk in this corridor and pounce on Father for impromptu story conferences whenever he appeared. Father’s only defense was to add to his bathroom repertoire a little number entitled “Oh, you can’t avoid a Voida in the hall… !”)

An active member of this corridor army was the impetuous and then-unknown William Wellman, called “Wild Bill” because he was thought to be slightly crazed as a result of a steel plate in his head.

“B.P.,” Wild Bill ran up to him one day, “you’ve got to let me direct
Wings.
”

“That’s asking the impossible,” Father told him. “In the first place we haven’t got a green light from New York to make the picture yet. And if we do sell them on it, it will be our first picture costing over a million. Can you imagine the look on Zukor’s face if we tell him we’re putting all that money in the hands of an unknown director?”

“Fuck ’im!” said Wild Bill, who had brought back from France not only a wild temperament but a World War vocabulary. I was in the Lafayette Escadrille. I know what it is to be in one of those fuckin’ dogfights! In fact, I’ve got a fuckin’ plate in my head to prove it!”

“And when I tell Mr. Zukor I’ve chosen you to direct
Wings
he’ll say we both have plates in our heads,” Father told him.

“Fuck ’im! I thought
you
were the boss of the studio!”

“I am,” Father said, “but it’s like the Army, Bill. Jesse Lasky is the Chief of Staff, and Mr. Zukor is the President, the Commander-in-Chief. What I
can
do—if we get the go-ahead we’re working on—is to put you in charge of all the aerial photography. Even if it’s called second unit it will be a good credit. After all, two-thirds of this picture will be in the air. In fact, right now the whole thing’s in the air.”

“Fuck second unit,” Wellman said. “If anybody directs
Wings,
it’s Wellman. That picture is
mine.
My own life story. I’ll tear this joint apart if I don’t get the chance.”

Day after day Bill Wellman would be waiting in that front-office corridor to pounce on Father and pump the same message into him until “Wellman—
Wings,
Wellman—
Wings …
” began to throb in B.P.’s brain like an overplayed radio commercial. Finally the green light flashed from the New York office! Lasky had convinced Zukor, who in turn had convinced his Board of Directors to let B.P. put
Wings
into production. Now came the vital question. Whom would you assign to direct it? Vic Fleming was a big name on the lot. And James Cruze. Or should they try to borrow King Vidor from MGM?

B.P. heard himself saying, “I think we should use Bill Wellman.”

“Bill
who
?”

And then Father, whose own resistance finally had given way to his gambling instinct, his flair for the dramatic, and his feeling for the underdog, ran through the now-familiar lexicon of Wellman’s virtues. “I’ve got to play my hunch. Every once in a while a director comes along who’s born to make a certain picture. Bill fought in those air-battles we’ll be staging in
Wings.
He’ll be able to show Buddy [Rogers] and Dick [Arlen] and Coop how it felt to climb into those fighter planes and how they acted between missions when they were afraid that every night they had on the ground might be their last. Bill knows what it’s like to be shot down by a Von Richtofen ace—he has a steel plate in his head!”

If the Schulberg household had had its own Hollywood Smithsonian, that celebrated steel plate would have been one of our principal exhibits. For Father loved to tell that story. A slender cigar-wielding St. George fighting the dragons of New York, he could tell it four or five times in succession, usually to guests at his bar, but sometimes only to Sonya and me for want of a fresher audience. Although his obsessive repetition may sound boring, it was like a passionate pilgrim’s sharing a stirring episode from the Crusades with his family.

And so it came to pass that Adolph Zukor, the little man with the overall power, called my father and said in his quiet voice, “Ben, so you still want to use Wellman? If it’s all right with Jesse, I don’t care—I think everybody who stays out there in Hollywood too long gets a little
meshugah.
New York never heard of Wellman. New York feels you’re taking a terrible gamble. You’re putting a million dollars of our money in the hands of a boy who’s never handled an epic before, who’s only made two C pictures in his whole life.”

“Mr. Zukor,” Father said, “if Wellman doesn’t do a great job with this picture—if he doesn’t make it the picture of the year—you can have my resignation. So help me God, if Wellman’s a flop with
Wings,
I’ll quit.”

“You won’t have to quit,” Zukor warned, “you’ll be fired first.”

“It’s a deal, Mr. Zukor,” Father said, always excited by high stakes. “And this is one bet both sides can win.”

Wild Bill Wellman threw himself into
Wings
with all the zeal he had promised. The picture was dedicated “to those young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever,” and the realism of the air-battles impressed the critics and amazed the public. In a creative transition between silence and sound, subtitles were still used in place of audible dialogue, but when the fighter planes took off the audience could hear the roar of the engines, and when one of the aviators was shot down they could hear the haunting whine of his fatal descent. Because these sounds came from a screen that had been silent for thirty years, they had more effect than they would ever have again.

All over the world
Wings
was hailed as a cinematic milestone, and with that one big chance Wild Bill Wellman was up there with the big boys like Ford and Cruze, Fleming and Vidor. He would go on to
Nothing Sacred, The Ox-Bow Incident,
an impressive list of well-directed hits.
Wings
won the first Academy Award for best picture of the year, and that spring at the white-tie dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel the bibulous Wild Bill threw his arms around my father. “B.P., I just want you to know, I’ll never forget what you did for me. I owe everything to you. If you ever want me for anything, just holler. I’ll work for you for nothing!”

There would be other nights of triumph for Father before the fire burned to ash, but never again would he sit down to a table and draw a royal flush. For in addition to
Wings,
the first Best Actor award went to his foreign import, the rotund and unforgettable Emil Jannings, for
The Way of All Flesh.
One night in the studio projection room a year or so
before, we had seen a brilliant German film called
The Last Laugh,
starring Jannings as the self-important, elegantly uniformed doorman of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. What was unique about the film was that it was not interrupted by a single subtitle. Yet without a word to prompt or distract us, we knew at every moment what Jannings’s imperious doorman was thinking and feeling. He ruled over his domain between the curb and the revolving door as if he were the commander-in-chief of the entire world. When he opened the door of a limousine and bowed to arriving guests, it was a gesture not of servility but of the gracious hospitality of an overlord. When he escorted people to his grand revolving door, he was inviting them into his palace. And when he went home to his dingy room in a tenement, he enjoyed another kind of adulation. To the tenement dwellers his arrival was the highlight of their day. They adored the magnificence of his uniform and the overbearing benevolence with which he wore it. Here was a symbol of the power they would never have and could only taste vicariously through their proximity to this great man.

Then, one day, the hotel manager sees Jannings stumble under a heavy trunk he is carrying into the lobby. Deciding that the world’s greatest doorman is too old for the job, he assigns him an easier job as an attendant in the lavatory. But Jannings has to exchange his fieldmarshal’s uniform for a shapeless white smock. We see the pride of the man seeping out of him like air from a huge balloon. Before our eyes Jannings becomes just another fat, stooped, defeated old man. We suffer with him as he goes back to face his former subjects in the tenement. Seeing him without his uniform, they feel deprived of the grandeur that has given meaning to their meaningless lives. So they turn on him, taunt him—a deposed king dragged to the guillotine. He goes back to the hotel to die in the lavatory; no longer is there any reason to go on living.

And that—an unexpected subtitle informed us—is how the story really ended. But since Hollywood loves its happy endings, this picture would give us one: A millionaire who dies in the hotel wills his fortune to the doorman. And so we have Jannings at the second fade-out, once more a swaggering, self-important figure, with a lovely lady on his arm, obsequiously helped into his limousine in front of the Adlon Hotel by a new uniformed doorman who will never be quite so grand as the original.

When the lights came on, instead of the usual postscreening chatter, there was a long, thoughtful silence. Here was genius at work. With
subtle shadings of self-deprecating humor (poignantly directed by F. W. Murnau), Jannings had done for drama what Chaplin had done for comedy.

The film had a profound impact on the Schulbergs. I saw in it the kind of mood I had been working for in my short story, “Ugly.” I related to it much more than to the romantic, surefire happy endings Hollywood was grinding out. I was proud of Father for saying that evening that he would like to sign Jannings and bring him over for a series of pictures in the European mode. Despite the support of Lasky, who reigned from his palatial beach house at Santa Monica, again there was opposition from New York.
The Last Laugh
might be a work of art, Zukor and his principal Wall Street backer Otto Kahn acknowledged, but this was the picture
business
and who the hell ever heard of Emil Jannings in Oshkosh?