Moving Pictures (43 page)

“Mrs. Schulberg, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your house has been burglarized. Detective McMahon would like you to walk through it room by room and point out what is missing.”

The first thing that was missing was James. With our gold petit-point Lincoln coach. From the maid’s quarters we heard a terrible wailing and we hurried to Paula’s room to find our stocky German maid thrashing on the floor, kicking and screaming. She began to sob out her story. James had not only cleaned out the entire house, he had even taken her piggy bank into which she had stuffed her life’s savings.

We hurried up to the master bedroom and found that James had taken all the household cash: several thousand dollars, all of Mother’s jewels, diamond brooches, pearl necklaces, sapphire rings, Father’s wardrobe of expensive Eddie Schmidt suits and monogrammed silk shirts, a gold watch inset with tiny diamonds, even his most recent box of dollar-a-smoke H. Upmann Corona Corbnas from Havana.

I ran to my room, found a few things missing, my radio, antique revolver, and a Civil War sword. Under my bed, mysteriously, were a blackjack and an auto wrench. Downstairs the cook, Lucille, was shouting that all the silver was gone, utensils, platters, serving dishes, goblets. It didn’t seem possible that one man could have accomplished all this in a few hours.

While Mother tried to soothe Paula and the other servants, I sat on my bed and stared at the floor. Tears were stinging the corners of my eyes, but not for the cash and the jewels and the silver. James had stolen something much more precious. God, but I had thought he liked me! In fact I had taken it for granted he was crazy about me. Now who was going to box with me and tell me man-to-man stories of high adventure? His apartment above the garage had been an exciting world in which I felt a bond I had never known with my busy father. Father would show
me off at the fights and story conferences, projection-room rushes and previews. But that was different. It was as if B.P. was my studio father and James was my real father. And now James had driven off into the outside world without even a last goodbye.

It was a lonely feeling having the police ask me questions about him. Suddenly he wasn’t James any more. They were asking questions about a stranger, the suspect, the burglar, the perpetrator. “This is no amateur job,” the police were agreeing, almost in admiration. “We’re dealing with a cool customer who knew every corner of this house and exactly what he was doing every minute.”

From the accounts we pieced together from Paula and Lucille, James had used the window-washing as a cover-up for his systematic looting of the household. To empty the dirty water he had made countless trips to the garage. A pail of dirty water was an ingenious place to hide the valuables he was removing from all the rooms. On each trip to the garage, ostensibly to pour the soapy water down the drain, he would hide the loot in the town car. The afternoon had been an exercise in ingenuity. He must have passed the servants a hundred times as he went back and forth with his water pails. How cool he had been, how sure of himself as he paused to make little jokes with them in his charming English way.

“Don’t worry, how far can he go in that town car?” Detective McMahon reassured us. “We’ve sent out a description of the vehicle and the driver. He’ll never get over the city line.”

Of course the city lines of Los Angeles are no ordinary municipal borders. In those days it was not yet the nation’s third largest city in terms of population, but it was surely the largest in terms of square miles, running forty miles from north to south and an even greater distance from grubby East Los Angeles to the mansions rising precariously on the palisades above the Pacific. Even before they had attracted the bodies to populate the rolling open country, the city fathers had grandiose ideas for establishing a city-state. So we didn’t think it would be that easy to check our elusive James at the city line.

But while we all huddled together in the looted house (even the silver and marble ashtrays had been removed from the sunken living room and the tiled library), a detective arrived with the news that our gold bric-a-brac coach had been found, abandoned in a lonely sidestreet in the southeast section of the city. All of the stolen goods had been removed. It was strongly suspected that James was headed for the long and
under-protected Mexican border between Tijuana and Mexicali, a favorite no-man’s-land for smugglers, escaped convicts, and outlaws. Without a trace, James managed to disappear with virtually all the Schulbergs’ worldly goods.

A year later, we heard he had been apprehended at last, on a great estate on Long Island where he had pulled a similar caper. Either the New York police were more efficient or there were fewer avenues of escape from Long Island. At any rate he was caught red-handed, or blue-shirted, for he was actually wearing one of Father’s powder-blue monogrammed silk shirts.

Sometime later there appeared in
The American Weekly,
the sensational Sunday magazine section of the Hearst newspaper chain, a most illuminating how-to article by my erstwhile mentor. James, we were fascinated to learn, was a second-story man of international celebrity. His game was to gain access to a prosperous household as a charming and efficient butler-chauffeur, ingratiate himself with the family, stay long enough to win their confidence completely, and then at the appointed moment, clean them out. He would then sail off and live the good life on some tropical island for the next six months to a year, masquerading as a British blue blood of independent means. As I read it I could see him bamboozling his new island friends as easily as he had bamboozled us. When he began to run out of fluid wealth, he would go to an area he had never worked before and begin the charming-servant routine all over again.

It was a tantalizing piece. He had the same felicity for writing he had for everything else. He was one of those irresistible scoundrels who could have been a success at anything he put his mind to, but, James admitted, he found life more interesting as a second-story man.

In every household—his tone was more boastful than confessional—he would look for the weakest link in the family chain. It might be a wife or servant who found him sexually attractive. It could be a wandering husband with whom James would buddy up, smoothly covering for him as he went about his chauffeur duties. In our household, he pointed out, while he had flirted experimentally with Paula, he decided early on to involve me in his caper. In search of a father-surrogate, I was a pushover for his blandishments. Quickly scouting me as gullible and naive, and noting both the favoritism that Mother bestowed on me and the pride-
cum-
guilt that Father felt toward his much-admired but rather neglected firstborn, he had decided that I was the key to the Schulberg vault. He
had done his job so well that in a matter of months I was as emotionally dependent on him as I had been on Wilma during my childhood. And he was able to have the run of the house because Mother and Dad felt grateful to him for filling the emotional vacuum their busy schedules created.

Once he had won my devotion and their gratitude, it was, as he put it, “easy fruit.” He had only to bide his time until the golden apple fell into his hands.

He had almost struck several months earlier—and here his confession cleared up a family mystery. One night Mother was giving one of her grand dinner parties. The all-powerful Louella O. Parsons, self-styled “Gay Illiterate,” had dubbed Ad “one of Hollywood’s most gracious hostesses,” and Mother vied with Bessie Lasky and Norma Shearer Thalberg as a leader of local society. Present at this elegant sit-down dinner were Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, the Ernst Lubitsches, Dietrich and Von Sternberg, the recently arrived Broadway star Ruth Chatterton, and the latest English import, Ralph Forbes—lovely targets all.

Impeccably, James served the rare roast beef from a large silver platter, poured the Lafitte Rothschild into delicate glasses we had bought in Venice on our Grand Tour—and then, after the glittering company had raised their glasses in a witty toast, the lights went out. After a few anxious minutes the lights came on again and James reappeared to explain that a fuse had blown and he had gone down to the cellar to replace it.

In his
American Weekly
article, James confessed what had really happened. Hearing from my mother of the distinguished company who would be present that night, he had decided to throw the light switch and then at gunpoint remove from our guests their cash and valuables. Windsor Square had its own private security patrol, with a signal alert to its neighborhood headquarters. James had taken the precaution of disconnecting it. But just before he was ready to set up these movie stars in a true-life drama, a late guest, Hector Turnbull, arrived. Turnbull was a writer-producer at the studio and one of Father’s favorites. He was also well-built and rugged and there was something about his late arrival that threw off James’s timing and confidence. Once the lights were out, he confessed, he lost his nerve and decided to turn them back on, invent the story of the blown fuse, and wait for a safer opportunity.

The next morning, Mother had lectured James for some slight derelictions the night before. After the brief blackout he had spilled a bit of wine when filling the glass for Mr. Turnbull, and he had not seemed as attentive to his butlering duties as he had been at many other formal dinners. James had apologized profusely, protesting that he loved the job, loved me and the younger children, and that his one ambition was to make this his permanent home.

Through the following month he was the model chauffeur-butler-second father. In his room over the garage, what wonderful tales he would spin. While I was sitting there at his feet in adolescent rapture, he was weighing the possibilities of taking me to the mountains and holding me for ransom. But deciding that was also too risky, he finally settled on his ingenious window-washing scheme.

His published confession was an even greater blow to us than the actual burglary because the act exposed our nouveau-riche grandiosity, pomposity, and vulnerability. From the inside out we seemed to ourselves a serious, intelligent, creative family, superior to the clichéed foibles of such Hollywood boss-families as the Mayers, the Warners, and the Laemmles. L.B. was a tyrant, Jack Warner was a loudmouthed vaudevillian, and Uncle Carl Laemmle—although one of Hollywood’s original “mound builders”—pretty much a joke for the way he surrounded himself with boatloads of relatives from Laupheim, his birthplace in Bavaria.

But here were the literate if profligate B.P., the cultured and resourceful Adeline, and their trusting little genius of a son being ripped off and publicly exposed to millions of Hearst readers as “easy fruit.”

B
UT IF JAMES
thought he had the last laugh, leave it to Mother for the last word. With a thorough inventory plus total recall, she presented Father’s pal and insurance agent Artie Stebbins with a claim that brought in a generous bounty she closed her pretty pink-nailed claws around before Father could dump it on the gaming tables at the Clover Club.

Although—or perhaps because—Artie was a crony of Ben’s from the New York-Benny Leonard days, he handed over the insurance check directly to Ad, who as usual had decided how she was going to invest the windfall.

Over the years the filmmakers had been moving west, from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood, from Hollywood to Beverly Hills, then all the way out Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards to Santa Monica. Hearst had built a winter palace there for Marion Davies, and soon other mansions rose alongside it on the beach looking out on the green and often seaweed-clogged Pacific. The MGM triumvirate, Mayer, Thalberg, and Rapf, soon followed Hearst’s example, and so did Jesse Lasky, Jack Warner, and most of our other feudal lords.

Although relations between B.P. and L.B. grew increasingly strained as their studios fought each other for Hollywood supremacy, Ad managed to maintain our friendship with the Mayer family. Louie’s wife Margaret was sweet but somehow lost as the simple days of Mission Road and the Mayer-Schulberg Studio were left behind, and the once rough-talking Louie took elocution lessons and cultivated his
friendships with Hearst, President Hoover, and Republican leaders. Ad enjoyed her role as intellectual mentor and social guide to the Mayer daughters, Edith and Irene, and the four of us, with introspective little Sonya tagging along, enjoyed elaborate picnics at Catalina Island. Even then the Mayer girls seemed to have little respect for poor Margaret. (“Poor,” incidentally, was a Hollywood adjective frequently applied to studio widows who rarely saw their husbands, who were either busy working into the night or playing into the day. The word became so attached to the first name of the wife of the brilliant and erratic Herman Mankiewicz that no one ever referred to her as Sarah. It was always “Poorsarah.” To this day I am unable to think of that quiet, intelligent, long-suffering sister-in-law of director-writer Joe Mankiewicz, and mother of talented sons Don and Frank, without “
Poorsarah
” flashing in my mind.)

At one of the brunches at the Mayers’, with Father discreetly absent and presumably working at the studio, Mrs. Bowes (wife of the amateur-hour radio impresario Major Bowes) mentioned a new beach area that was opening up twenty miles north of Santa Monica. It was called Malibu, and belonged to the Rindge Estate, which had inherited one of the sprawling land grants into which Spanish California had been divided. The Rindge Estate had been a self-contained enclave with its own castle on a promontory overlooking the bay, and sullen armed guards to keep the curious away. Now a choice private beach was being opened to the public at last.

In character, Mother suggested that we look at this
terra incognita
that very afternoon. We motored up the narrow, winding road under the trecherous clay palisades until we reached the pastoral waterfront of Malibu. From the foothills ran a freshwater stream that spilled into a crescent-shaped lagoon between the imposing Rindge mansion and the isolated beach. On the other side of the coast road, several thousand acres of rich land were under cultivation by Japanese farmers. On a knoll rising above the foothills was a monastery. Below it, near the deserted beach, was a jerry-built office where an energetic salesman with the country smarts, Art Smith, was waiting for his first customers.