Moving Pictures (44 page)

The price seemed high: $10,000 for a 90-foot oceanfront lot that could only be rented for 99 years but not bought outright. The Rindge executors, said to be anti-Semitic and not eager to sell their precious sand to low-life movie people, knew a good thing when they had it. Unspoiled southern California ocean country less than an hour away
from the Hollywood cluster. Usually Ad was a cautious buyer, feeling she had to compensate for B.P.’s impetuosity. But she too knew a good thing when she saw it. While Mrs. Bowes thought this undeveloped beach too remote, Ad decided to sign up for three lots in what is now the heart of The Colony of aging movie stars and unshaven rock stars.

Still drawing on the insurance check that James’s creative burglary had bestowed on us, Ad built a tasteful Cape Cod house across the three lots, called Green Gate Cottage. She filled it with her precious Early American furniture and some innovative interior decorating, such as canopied single beds set in an alcove back to back. My room on the second floor offered a marvelous view of the Japanese farms stretching to the foot of the mountains. From my window I would watch those diminutive farmers tirelessly working their quarter-mile rows of vegetables. Sometimes I would walk along the edge of their farms but they never seemed to notice me. How calm and patient was their labor, how different from the panics and manics of the Hollywood world on which our welfare depended.

I don’t think I was yet aware of the deep split in my attitude toward Hollywood. I seemed a typical scion of Hollywood success, film- and sports-addicted, proud of Mother’s foresight in building the first house at Malibu, and, across the dirt road running the length of the beach, the first tennis court. There I practiced my serve, sharpened my backhand, scrupulously listed my victories, and agonized over my defeats from sunup until the after-dinner matches which we played under arc lights.

But with all the dreams of silver trophies that danced in my head, there was another dream, represented by a Currier and Ives print on my bedroom wall. It showed an early 19
^th
-century manor house shaded by great trees and looking out on a rolling lawn that ran down to the banks of a great river called the Hudson. An old man in a frock coat was sitting on a wrought-iron bench in thoughtful contemplation of this pastoral scene. In old-fashioned type the caption read: “Sunnyside, Home of Washington Irving at Tarrytown.” The picture had a hypnotic effect. Having read
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
I could picture old Mr. Irving in white wig and black frock coat putting to paper with his quill pen his marvelous story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. I would stare at the picture when I woke up in the morning, and whenever I felt upset because my first serve wasn’t going in or I feared having to read aloud in class the following day, or I wondered why I was still so afraid of girls that I wouldn’t allow one inside the sacred confines
of my Model A, or I worried about Father’s latest gambling escapade, or the fact that he seemed to be having new difficulties with that constant ogre, New York—whenever any of these fears penetrated what seemed to be my paradisaical existence at Green Gate Cottage on Malibu Beach, I would lose myself in that print of Sunnyside and join the scholarly Washington Irving in his stately retreat on the beautiful river.

All we had in my hometown was a dried-up joke of a waterway, the Los Angeles River. And although Father’s writers lived in nice houses, in the Hollywood hills or on the flats of Beverly, they did not seem to enjoy the kind of peaceful, creative life I pictured as Washington Irving’s. Instead of the luxury of writing exactly what they pleased in the comfort of a book-lined study, with a fire crackling in the fireplace, Father’s writers (and he often boasted he had the best) had to do their work according to order and have it ready on demand.

Now that we had the Malibu house as well as the house on Lorraine, there would sometimes be story conferences in the big high-ceilinged living room overlooking the sea. There were writers who were gifted talkers, basically performers, who would leap to their feet and bring a seemingly empty situation or set of characters to life. But the life would turn stillborn the moment the story-conference whip tried to put his histrionics on paper. The writing ranks were full of phonies who had mastered the art of the story conference but who struck out at the typewriter. Father liked to think he could separate the real ones from the fakers, but he was often fooled.

Sitting there silently, taking it all in, I would watch in fascination as a self-propelled writer-performer rose dramatically from his chair to act out his brainstorm. It was a ritual going back to the earliest days of storytelling around the campfire. The little audience falls into rapt silence as the volunteer problem-solver takes over. Half-a-dozen inspired ad-libbers come to mind, foremost among them Eddie Goulding, the veteran English writer-director whose scenario credits went all the way back to
Tol’able David
in the early Twenties, and who had established himself as one of the major studio dependables from whom stories poured like Niagara over the Falls.

“The night is cold and wet,” Eddie would intone, his theater-trained British accent giving dramatic emphasis to the scene. He would cross to the door to make a theatrical entrance, the collar of his expensive navy-blue blazer turned up around his neck, his shoulders hunched against the imaginary night air. This was long before the days of the
Actors Studio, but here was a brilliant
impro,
with Eddie assuming the posture and inner feeling of a prodigal husband who has gone off on a fling because he suspected his wife of infidelity, only to learn too late that his decision had been based on circumstantial evidence planted by the heavy. Everyone watched in awe as Eddie Goulding staggered back into our living room and begged for forgiveness. “That’s it, you’ve got it, Christ, Eddie, you’ve licked it!” Father would cry out in relief.

Sometimes the scene would go into the ailing picture just as Maestro Goulding or one of his eloquent colleagues would imagine it. More often, it would set up a chain reaction of “improvements” which would twist the story in the opposite direction from its original concept—if indeed the original charade could be so dignified. Sometimes, following the departure of weary supervisors, battered writers, and harried story editors, Father would reconstruct an Eddie Goulding brainstorm to a jury that sometimes consisted of Sonya, little Stuart, and me, and realize in the telling that the silver-tongued Goulding had sold him a bag of three-dollar bills. Sometimes Father’s own storytelling abilities would embellish the “idea” with sufficient stock graces to save it.

There was the time when Father was desperate for a story for Jeanette MacDonald. It was the old problem of the starting date, the picture presold to theaters before it was even a gleam in a writer’s fevered eye. Eddie Goulding to the rescue. Eddie paced up and down, reeling off his story, playing all the parts, each one a potential Oscar-winner. “Eddie, you’ve saved us,” Father told him. “If you can put it down in five pages and bring it to me tomorrow morning, you’ll have a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

The flamboyant Eddie Goulding jumped into his Packard roadster, called his favorite leading lady of the moment, and headed for the Trocadero and a night on the town. It was champagne for all his friends to celebrate the $25,000 he was to pick up in my father’s office as a result of his ad-lib presentation. By the time he got back to his stucco castle in Beverly Hills, the morning sun was rediscovering the palm trees. In the arms of his blonde companion he fell into a deep and luxurious sleep where champagne bubbles waltzed with thousand-dollar bills. A few hours later, B.P.’s secretary, Henrietta Cohn, knowing Goulding’s habits, phoned him to be sure he was on his way to his vital appointment. With his five pages. Five pages! Eddie didn’t even have five lines. In fact, he realized as the cold spray of the glassed-in shower brought him back to the real world, he didn’t have the faintest notion of what his story was
all about. All he could remember of that faraway Malibu conference was that he had leapt to his feet with a cry of “Eureka!” and my father had promised to reward him with $25,000. Everything in between had vanished like the golden bubbles in his champagne.

Half artist, half charlatan (the ideal Hollywood mix), Eddie tried to make it on bluff as he had so often. So he told B.P. that he had not brought in the five-page outline as promised because overnight he had thought up something that he liked even better. He began to improvise a completely new story, but a few minutes into it, Father stopped him. “Eddie, we’ve made that story three times. But what you told me at Malibu had freshness, a new twist. I’ll call in Henrietta—you can dictate it to her. And still get your twenty-five grand.”

Cornered, and practically speechless for the first time in his spectacular career (he was to direct
Grand Hotel, Dark Victory,
and the remake of
Of Human Bondage),
Eddie finally confessed that he hadn’t the faintest notion of the story-conference inspiration.

“Eddie, next time you get a brainstorm, promise me you’ll write it down before you go out to celebrate,” Father lectured him. Then he suggested a solution: that Eddie come to the Lorraine house that night (now we were back in Hollywood after our weekend at the beach), that they gather the story conferees together and, with each member contributing what he or she remembered, reconstruct the continuity that led up to Eddie Goulding’s providential creation. It was like one of those S. S. Van Dine mysteries where all of the suspects are gathered in the drawing room to recite the details leading up to the crime, whereupon the master sleuth, Philo Vance, gets the flash that puts it all together.

Once again Eddie leapt to his feet with his “Wait a minute! I’ve got it! It’s come back to me—” and proceeded to tell his story of the day before, only this time Father didn’t take a chance on Eddie’s quixotic ways. He had his assistant Geoffrey Shurlock (later the congenial chief censor for the Breen Office) take it all down as Eddie reenacted it. But when the Goulding brainstorm was finally committed to paper, it seemed to have lost something in translation. In fact, when Father read the handful of pages, he gave it that one-word verdict I was to hear so often, whether the work was mine or the thousand-dollar-a-day Ben Hecht’s: “Lousy!”

That was one of the familiar discoveries of the story conference. The talented actor who could galvanize his small audience could get away with murder, and just as often the gifted writer who had a genuine but inaudible contribution was drowned out. Of course it’s tempting to
satirize the story conference as Moss Hart and George Kaufman did in their irreverent
Once in a Lifetime
and as the mysterious Graham brothers did in their scandalous roman à clef,
Queer People.
Put along with the honey-throated medicine men like Eddie Goulding, there were a lot of good story minds like Buddy Leighton and Hope Loring, Jules Furthman, young David Selznick, and Ben Hecht who helped hammer out with Father what they called “a straight dramatic line.”

Of course the phonies were the ones we laughed and talked about. At MGM there was a story genius, Bob Hopkins, who had truly mastered the shorthand of the surefire movie. Maurice and I would watch him in awe. He probably had an office somewhere, a cubbyhole in the Writers’ Building. But his arena was the studio commissary, the barbershop, the vital avenues from the executive offices to the parking areas where chauffeured limousines waited for the sultans and sub-sultans who ruled the lot. In his writer’s uniform of checkerboard sports jacket and baggy grey slacks he would wait in ambush for a Louie Mayer, an Irving Thalberg, a Harry Rapf, a Hunt Stromberg, and grabbing him by the arm, confront him with his double whammy. One of his most famous was “Earthquake—San Francisco—Gable and MacDonald—can’t you see it, L.B. [or Harry or Irving]?—Clark’s on one side of the street, Jeanette’s on the other—goddamn street splits right between them—it’s gotta be but terrific!”

That’s how one of Metro’s blockbusters was born, for that time the studio brass recognized a hot idea when they heard it. When one of Hoppy’s telegraphic brainstorms was given official recognition, he had a way of waving his hand in an imperious gesture, “Okay—now put a word man on it.” The poor wretch—the one who had to take those bare bones, not even a recognizable skeleton, and somehow build and flesh out a 90-minute feature. Meanwhile the irrepressible Hoppy, as much a part of the studio scene as the front gate and the backlot, would be back at his old stand, the barbershop and the commissary, peddling his wares.

Every major studio had a Hoppy. Warners had two of them, Darryl Zanuck and Jerry Wald. They weren’t writers but their busy minds bubbled with story ideas—ideas torn from the front pages or borrowed from cocktail-party shoptalk or twisteroos of ideas already sold. Hungry and without shame, they were eager studio beavers like Hoppy. Except that Hoppy was content with his life as a sidewalk catalyst and Darryl and Jerry were men with bigger dreams—glib
toreros
who discovered in
the big studio compound the perfect arena for their hyperthyroid energies. Given the Hollywood in which I was raised, it was inevitable that young doers like Darryl and Jerry would soon graduate from
novilleros
to full matadors who cut screen credits instead of ears and tail and then took over the arena itself as front-office impresarios. They were all around us, the Hoppies in the barbershop and the Darryls and the Jerrys racing up the golden stairs.

J
UST AS HOLLYWOOD HAD
been growing up around me, or I within it, so it was with Malibu. First our sprawling “Early American” cottage was the only house on the half-moon beach. But an odd mix of Hollywood celebrities began to build comfortable two-story houses all along the beach on either side of us. As for the Capras next door, if I hadn’t know that Frank was one of Hollywood’s leading directors I never would have guessed it. He had none of the hauteur of a Griffith, a Von Sternberg, a DeMille. He wasn’t a madcap like Wellman or a character like Jack Ford or Alfred Hitchcock. He lacked the flamboyance of Leo McCarey and the European cynicism of Ernst Lubitsch. He was down-to-earth, hardworking, seemingly always smiling. Born a Catholic, now converted to Christian Science with his endearing wife Lucille, he liked to spend his evenings quietly reading or studying his scripts. Just as we idealize the Girl (or Boy) Next Door, the Capras were the perfect Couple Next Door. Sometimes if the waves were rolling in, I would body-surf them to the beach for an hour, then run up and down the beach, feeling the salt and the sun soaking into my skin. If I saw Frank and Lucille at their picture window, I would wave, and sometimes drop in. They made me feel welcome, they liked me for myself, and not for what my father could do for them.