Moving Pictures (42 page)

Today most movie stars choose to dress down in jeans and T-shirts, but in those days, top names like Crawford, Swanson, and Dietrich were
conscious of giving performances every time they appeared in public and they dressed the part. The masculine but sexy look was Marlene’s contribution to our folk-film culture. Once she emerged from behind the father figure of Von Sternberg, she blossomed into a new kind of femme fatale able to parody her own sexuality without losing its powers. Giftedly, wickedly on the make, Marlene was able to recreate herself as an American fantasy of how a sexy European woman looks, sounds, and acts. A strange continuity moves through my life, for when I first met Geraldine Brooks, as her baby-sitter, she was a stagestruck six-year-old who would manage to extend her bedtime by perching on a bar stool, tilting her father’s top hat on her head, crossing her little knees, and singing a song her “Aunt Dutchy” had taught her: “Fah-ling een luff a-gane—never vant-ed to—vot am I to do?—caan’t help eet. …”

While Marlene rode her rising wave of sensual self-mockery and Joe von Sternberg retreated to London and then Japan in search of his elusive cinematic muse, Father’s other German star, Emil Jannings, decided that having to speak English in the new talkies was too much of a challenge. So he came to say goodbye with fervent avowal of love for all the Schulbergs and an open invitation for us to be his houseguests whenever we came to Germany. After all, Emil insisted, he was a
landsman,
or at least
half-landsman,
having been born in Brooklyn of a Jewish mother who took him to Europe when he was still a child.

Yet, when Hitler and his Brown Shirts came to power and Jannings’s professional status if not his life was endangered, he went to court and became a certified member of the Master Race by declaring that he had been born out of wedlock to an Aryan maid in the Jannings household. Which prompted Father to say, “I’ve known a lot of bastards in this business, but this is the first time I ever heard of anyone going to court to make it official.”

A
S MUCH DRAMA AS STERNBERG, DIETRICH, AND JANNINGS GENERATED
on the screen, in the studio, and in their private lives, it often seemed as if the world-famous lived less dramatic lives than the servants with whom Sonya and I spent so much of our time.

Our nurse Wilma had been our substitute mother while Ad occupied herself with her Godmothers’ League, her birth-control clinic, her Friday Morning Club, and Hollywood’s first progressive school.

While Mother was busy with her life, Father with his, and I lived my intense existence with Maurice at school and on the tennis courts, there were two lonely souls in our household: Sonya, of whose presence Father seemed almost totally unaware, and Wilma, who was never able to make the adjustment from New York to Hollywood. Back east she had had family and friends, but here among the palm trees, the orange blossoms, and the wide-open spaces of early Hollywood she felt painfully uprooted and homesick. I had outgrown Wilma. And Windsor Square was so quiet that little Sonya could play safely with Marjorie Lesser and the daughters of other movie producers without Wilma’s having to take her to a park. Besides, with separate rooms for the three children, and Ad’s youngest brother Sam now in residence, there was no longer room for Wilma in the main house, so an apartment had been set up for her over the garage. The work on it was done by the studio carpenters and electricians, and probably charged to studio overhead, a form of corruption that Hollywood had winked at from the beginning.

I don’t know exactly how it began—I was too much concerned with my own problems of growing up at the time—but somehow Wilma became involved with one of the studio electricians, a big, ruddy-faced, healthy-looking fellow whose name was George. Wilma had always been a stay-at-home: Even on her days off she hadn’t seemed to know what to do with herself in Los Angeles. Her problem (I would learn later) was her color, that lovely light coffee-color that I had always found so appealing. Too light to feel comfortable among black people, she was still too dark for the whites.

When she developed a relationship with the big electrician, I felt a twinge of ambiguous jealousy I wasn’t able to put into words. I long ago had outgrown Wilma and hardly had time to talk to her with all our activities. But children, like cats, seem to be born conservatives. They want to keep their world exactly as they discovered it. I wanted Wilma to go on living in her apartment over the garage. I didn’t want her going off with any man.

One day when I came home from school I heard Mother talking to her in the library. I lingered in the hallway, at first not meaning to eavesdrop but then held by their conversation. They were talking about George, or rather, Mother was talking and Wilma was listening.

“Wilma, I know he says he loves you, and he wants to marry you,” Mother was saying, “but your parents are giving you the right advice. Even if you tell him you’re—” there was a discreet pause—“what your background is, and he says it doesn’t matter, believe me in time it will. Especially if you have children. And they turn out to be—well, the color of your sister. Or your father. It might not matter to people of intelligence and education. But is it fair to the children themselves? They could go through hell, raised out here in a white neighborhood. And sooner or later, it’s bound to affect your relationship with George.”

There was a soft protest from Wilma—always so gentle and passive—and then I heard quiet crying. I peered in. Wilma had her head on Mother’s shoulder. It looked like one of those four-handkerchief scenes from an Eddie Goulding movie. Except that there weren’t any colored people in the movies unless they were dancing and singing as in King Vidor’s
Hallelujah!,
or in there for watermelon jokes like Stepin Fetchit (born Lincoln Peary).

Wilma must have accepted Mother’s well-meaning if negative advice. For I became aware of the fact that George wasn’t calling on her
anymore. She was totally “ours” again. When I came home from school I would often see her on the little balcony over the garage, slowly rocking back and forth, nodding at me with a smile of gentle resignation. She would sometimes call down to me and I would go up and tell her how school was going, or about some new movie I had seen. She seemed quieter than ever, and then she slipped into some mysterious sort of illness. She was steadily losing weight. It was as if the light was slowly flickering out of her. And then one day I heard that Wilma was very ill and that she was leaving us, going back to New York where her family could take care of her.

Thirty years later, Wilma might have been able to settle down with George and make a life of her own in southern California. But in the late Twenties (and after), Hollywood was as lily-white as Mississippi. There was no place in the life pattern for a serious light-colored girl like Wilma. How many other Wilmas must there have been, lost between an alien white culture that would not accept them and an underground black culture yet to be discovered.

I
F WILMA WAS MY
second mother, my paternal surrogate was James, the English butler-chauffeur who was with us for several years and who drove that hated gold bric-a-brac royal coach in which Sonya and I tried to melt into the floor.

When Wilma went east, James took over the apartment over the garage and I spent as much time up there with him as I could. He was tall, athletically built, and with a great deal of physical confidence, something I was anxious to develop. It seemed to me that there was nothing in the world—at least nothing important—that James hadn’t done. He had been a machine gunner in the British Army and had killed his share of Krauts. As a merchant seaman he had sailed the seven seas. The first time I saw him undressed, getting out of his tight-necked grey uniform, I noticed colored pictures on his muscular arms—the first tattooing I had ever seen. The one beneath his right shoulder was an elaborate heart on which was inscribed the word
MOTHER.
The other arm was decorated with the figure of a naked woman with blue script winding artistically around it to spell
MARGIE.
He explained to me that it was the work of little needles depositing different colored inks under the skin. Didn’t that hurt? He gave a manly shrug. What’s a little pain? After what he had seen in the trenches? Doughboys running back toward their own lines with their guts spilling out like spaghetti? Knife fights in the alleys of Hong Kong in which Limey sailors and thieving Chinks cut each other up until they were slipping and falling in each other’s blood?

As our robust chauffeur with the look and accent of Errol Flynn
talked on about blood and guts, I began to see little white pinwheels inside my eyes. Throughout my adolescence I had an embarrassing tendency to faint. Once I was downtown near the old Main Street Gym, after watching the workouts of some of my favorite local boxers. Suddenly those little pinwheels began to spin until they were wider and wider, spinning around me like a hundred metaphysical hula hoops. I leaned against the wall of a building and slowly slipped to the pavement. A half-seen stranger helped me to my feet, and in a few moments my mind was clear again, like a fighter recovering from a ten-second concussion. When I went home that day I was too ashamed to confess my momentary lapse, although I knew that Father had also suffered from these spells in his youth. Had I inherited this weakness along with my stammering?

Another time I was at the Friday-night Hollywood Legion fights with my father in one of his prized regular seats in the first press row, when a tall, skinny-legged Mexican fighter, whose name I remember only as Tony, started to bleed from the corner of his left eye. Blood kept running down from his eye, blinding his vision and smearing his face. At the end of each round the referee would go over to examine the injury. Tony’s handlers would protest that the wound was not serious, and the fight was allowed to continue. Now the eye was a bloody mess, an angry pool of blood that no longer resembled an eye. Father and other first-row fans held their programs up against their faces to protect them from the spray of blood. I heard the screaming, I saw our Mexican sexpot, hysteric Lupe Velez, pounding the apron of the ring to urge on her blinded compatriot, watched the terrible wound in his face grow larger and larger, and suddenly I felt as if I was inside that eye and this time I saw red circles spinning, spinning, spinning…. When I came to I was in the fighters’ dressing room, stretched out on a rubbing table and the old gargoyle of a trainer I had known for years was bringing me to with smelling salts. “Okay, kid? Don’t feel too bad. Everybody gets knocked out sooner or later.” Everybody in the dressing room, even the Mexican kid with a red hole for an eye, cracked up. I wanted to crawl into one of the lockers and hide. But I went back to my ringside seat.

So now I gritted my teeth and weathered James’s goriest tales because I believed that he had been the boxing champion of his regiment, and later of the entire British merchant marine. When Georges Carpentier, the light-heavyweight champion who had figured in the first million-dollar gate with Jack Dempsey, came to London to meet the English
champion, James had sparred with the French hero and (according to James) had done so well that he had been urged to turn pro.

James still had his old pair of heavy sparring gloves and one day he made me a present of them, beautifully aged red-leather boxing gloves. On the back lawn James showed me the stance, how to hold my hands so I was ready to jab with my left and protect my chin with my right, how to balance on my toes so I could move back and forth like a dancer, how to punch harder by pivoting on my left foot and corkscrewing my left wrist as my hook landed. James would use his own body as a heavy bag, urging me to punch him in the belly as hard as I could. I would punch him so hard that it would sting my hands right through the gloves, and James would say, “Now again, only harder, keep your hands close to your sides and throw your whole body into it. Like this!” And my marvelous James would whistle punches into the air that would have KO’d Gorgeous Georges Carpentier himself. When I hit James again, and he said, “Hey, that’s better, I could really feel that one!” I felt the way Dad must have felt when
Wings
won the Academy Award.

James seemed to grow more and more fond of me as he became practically a member of the family. He even offered to take me camping, but my parents didn’t feel they could spare him from his chauffeur-and-butler duties. Someday, he promised, when he had a vacation, he would take me up into the Sierras and teach me how to hunt and fish and live off the land. It seemed as if there was nothing of a practical nature that James didn’t know how to do. When he drove us up to Lake Arrowhead, he made his own trout rod from a sapling, and with a red fish egg on the point of a bent pin he caught several small trout in a deep pool under a five-foot waterfall. Father, of course, spent the entire weekend in the playroom of the Lodge losing at poker with Joe Schenck and other members of the rich inner circle. James was the ideal outdoor counterpart, healthy, ruddy, energetic, resourceful. He attracted so many interested looks from our actress friends and producers’ wives that B.P.—who loved to discover “unknowns”—half-seriously suggested that he take a screen test. But James said a refreshing No. He had no desire to go into the movies, he was quite content with the job he had. The spaces in my family life were more than filled by Maurice as a surrogate brother and James as a surrogate father.

One afternoon, I was downtown with my mother taking a music lesson, she on her mandolin, me on my banjo—still struggling with “Mighty Lak a Rose.” We had taken Mother’s Marmon rather than the
hated town car and James, ever helpful, had volunteered to put the extra time to practical advantage by washing all the windows. Usually we had a special window-washer in to do this job, but James suggested that it was a waste of money, and besides he had been a professional window-washer. The panes of 525 Lorraine would be pristine by the time we returned.

After a desultory hour with our music teacher, whose winces were barely suppressed as we misfingered our chords, we drove home to find our usually quiet Lorraine Boulevard lined with police cars. Policemen were on our lawn pacing the driveway, and stationed at our front door.