Moving Pictures (45 page)

Frank didn’t need B.P., although he was always neighborly with him. Frank made movies that were great box-office successes and won Academy Awards, and he was probably earning as many thousands of dollars a week as Father. His father had been as poor and illiterate a
Sicilian immigrant as my grandfather Max had been a poor and unworldly ghetto Jew. The difference was that Frank seemed to know instinctively that the gods or his God were smiling on him. Now that he had fought his way up from the poverty of his childhood, selling newspapers to see him through a downtown Los Angeles high school, he knew the value of a dollar and he and Lucille lived comfortably but without ostentation. To me, the Capras were symbols of sobriety and sanity for whom all-night drinking or gambling and losing ten thousand dollars a session were inconceivable. It was a comforting thought that right next door lived a man who could be famous, creative, and rich without going crazy. He and Lucille gave me a sense of values (one of Mother’s favorite words) impossible to get from my rich and famous but erratic father.

The same could hardly be said of the other neighbors. When Clara Bow built a bungalow on the south end of the beach and moved in with her current lover, her roommate-secretary, and her all-night party pals, late at night I could hear the beat and saxophone wailing of jazz and the laughter from many mouths even though her place was half a dozen houses away.

To the other side of Green Gate Cottage the ageless Gloria Swanson lived with the Marquis de la Falaise, who seemed to be in the business of bartering his title for a life of luxury with glamorous movie stars who thought they had everything in life except that title. Either there were a lot of Marquises de la Falaise or he played marital musical chairs with—was it Mae Murray, Constance Bennett?… It wasn’t easy to keep up with them. There were all-night parties at the Marquis’s, but they were drinking champagne instead of Clara’s scotch and beer. Whatever they were drinking, Maurice and I disapproved. In the Hollywood of wild parties and three-day binges, the more they partied and binged the more prudish we became. Self-appointed judges of misbehavior, we could not have been more square if we had been card-carrying members of the Emporia, Kansas, 4-H Club. Women, it seemed to us, were sinful little schemers who would do anything to get within the studio gates, and on to the couch and the seven-year contract. The studio heads were ogres who clawed their way to the top over the backs of competitor-victims. They used their total power to womanize and manipulate, although Jack Warner did it with a laugh and Louie Mayer with a tear.

The two top intellectuals in town were Irving Thalberg, the sickly saint who never drank, who worked twenty hours a day, and was faithful to
his beautiful bride Norma Shearer and to his mother who continued to live with them—frail, self-contained Irving who burned with a Jesuitical faith in the world religion of motion pictures; and B.P., a more profound reader and a more original mind but with all the traits that Irving piously disavowed: drinking, gambling, and wenching. In his good years, those Lorraine-Malibu years, Father worked almost as hard as Irving. But he also loved to laugh. Stand-up comics used to be delighted when he took a ringside table. We didn’t get the best of the New York comics, because oddly enough Hollywood was a gambling and a party town but not much of a nightclub town. But when Joe E. Lewis brought his unique, half-stewed mumbling style to the Sunset Strip, B.P. would be there leading the laughter. One evening I was driving down Sunset Boulevard, past the Trocadero, when I actually heard laughter so loud that I was sure it was my father’s. I parked my roadster and there he was, at a big ringside table with half a dozen of his studio cronies. One of these was Felix Young, who had owned restaurants and nightclubs in New York, a dandy with a breezy but polished style who endeared himself to B.P. by borrowing large sums of money from him with which to open newer and splashier cafes. Father finally thought it would be more economical to put him on the payroll as an associate producer. Like so many Hollywooders I knew, Felix could live in high style, with the choicest of wines, Eddie Schmidt suits like Father’s, and opulent motorcars when he didn’t have a dollar in the bank.

Once Felix had called from the Lincoln Street jail, where he had been booked for fraud—Felix could sweet-talk a cardinal out of his red hat. Father had rushed down with the bail money. That must have been about the time Father decided to make Felix (Feel, we called him) a Paramount producer. B.P.’s pals (like Felix) talked about his great personal loyalties and his boundless generosity. To which Mother countered: “Why is it that Ben is so brilliant—one of the three highest-paid people in Hollywood—and still so full of insecurity? He seems to need people around him who tell him what he wants to hear—instead of first-rate minds like Paul Bern and the other bright people Irving has around him.”

Father would fight back eloquently, without the trace of a stammer. “Stop picking on Felix. As a matter of fact, he’s a smart showman. But why don’t you mention young David [Selznick], Buddy Leighton, Lloyd Sheldon, who was a damn good newspaperman? I have a better staff than Irving’s—and if you want to know something, I’m making better
pictures than Irving. He’s not responsible for the entire program the way I am—he’s smart enough to pick off the plums. It’s Harry Rapf who makes the bread-and-butter pictures—the Wallie Beery-Marie Dresslers and the Joan Crawfords…”

“Harry Rapf is a lucky ignoramus,” Mother would say. “And that’s what you mostly have around you, too—lucky ignoramuses who never tell you you’re wrong.”

It was one of those endless family arguments neither could win because both were right. I took it all in, at first without any sense of pain or foreboding because it was all part of the Paramount-MGM air I breathed, not unlike the “My father’s studio makes better pictures than your father’s” game I used to play with Maurice. And the edges of the argument were softened by the fact that the cast of advisors they were arguing about had become either Malibu neighbors or constant weekend visitors. Felix Young rented a house as close to ours as possible and was constantly on our tennis court. Young David Selznick, who struck me then as an eager, alert St. Bernard, often dropped in with a young actress who was very pretty and very shy—I would be surprised later to see how bright and perky and outspoken Jean Arthur would seem in the knowing hands of Frank Capra when they did
Mr. Deeds.
I remember a Sunday afternoon when she sat on the floor and listened with a lovely and I thought loyal intensity while David was busy talking enthusiastically, as was his style, about some new picture-idea. Studio and home were virtually interchangeable. The people Mother attacked as hangers-on and Father defended as indispensable (or vice versa) were around us all the time. I couldn’t help noticing that some of the people whom Mother accused of being the most flagrant hangers-on were the same ones who went out of their way to be my friends, too. So she was undoubtedly right a lot of the time. She might have been able to help Father separate the creative wheat from the fawning chaff. Even I, an emotionally retarded Buddy-in-Wonderland, was beginning to spot the difference. The trouble with Ad was the trouble with most people who are much more often right than wrong—that human and almost irresistible need to trumpet one’s hits over one’s misses.

And of course when Ad would confront Father with a Felix Young (or directors like Louis Gasnier or Marion Gering who she thought would bring him down), he would counter with low blows: “How about your goddamn brother, Sam? I’ve made him studio manager. Do you think he’s any smarter than all these
schmucks,
as you call them? I catch hell
because of Sam. I attack Louie’s nepotism—well, he does have his whole goddam family on his payroll, even Jerry, the one he hates—and I have to stand up to Lasky and Zukor about making your brother studio manager!”

“Now, Ben, that’s not fair. Sam may not be intelligent but he’s very smart. He’s worked hard to learn the business. He’s learned a lot from both of us since we brought him out from New York. Everybody says he’s one of the best studio managers in the business.”

Those were the sunshine days before my mother and her brother, my very savvy Uncle Sam Jaffe, had developed a blood-knot hatred for each other.

“Who’s everybody?” Ben would storm back, “You and Milly?” (Milly, Sam’s very pretty, dark- and frizzy-haired wife from the Bronx, was studying Culture I and II with Ad the great mother hen. She had been added to the brood of Freudian- and art-oriented protégées—Rosabelle Laemmle, Sylvia Thalberg, and the Mayer girls—Ad liked to think she was hatching and rearing.)

Sam and Milly were now regulars at our Sunday brunches, our tennis tournaments, our perpetual rattle of Ping-Pong matches, our family feasts, celebrations of hit pictures, and smoldering quarrels. It was fascinating to see how quickly immigrants—not from the Old Country now but from the Bronx—could acquire the look and the speech of what passed in those days for Hollywood quality, as determined by the Ad Schulbergs and the Bessie Laskys. When Milly, our new aunt, had stepped down from the
Santa Fe Chief
and into our lives for the first time, she looked the typical gum-chewing, coarse-haired, cheaply dressed New York highschool girl. But now her hair was sleek, pulled back into a chignon, her deep tan gave her an unexpected Egyptian beauty, and she quickly learned the language of this self-contained little kingdom. For some reason the conjunction
but
was in favor, and soon Milly was using it just as effectively as the rest of us. Asked, “How do you like this new dress?” the answer would be, “I think it’s
but
adorable!” References to death took over the conversation, in a most casual way. “Want to hear this,” Milly (and the others) would say, “this is going to but kill you.” Whereupon a choice piece of gossip—what Sara had heard from Martha about whom Jean Harlow was doing it with behind Paul Bern’s back (or Norma Shearer behind Irving’s)—to which the answer would be, “It’s but unbelievable! I can’t
stand
it!” Sometimes it seemed as if everything that we couldn’t
stand
we stood every day.

Aunt Milly had joined our circle as a result of Uncle Sam’s liaison with the ubiquitous Clara Bow. When his family began to fear that he was seriously considering marriage with this
meshuganah shiksa,
the word went out that young Sam must be saved by finding him a Nice Jewish Girl. A certified NJG was my new Aunt Milly from New York. Milly would flower in Hollywood, growing more chic, outdoing Mother at U.C.L.A., and eventually outdistancing her in such fields as modern art and classical music. The day would come—after Sam had made his fortune taking over and expanding Mother’s agency business—when he and Milly would move to London’s exclusive Eaton Square because they found Hollywood stultifying. But in those early years of their marriage, Aunt Milly was still fascinated with our Babylon-by-the-sea.

Along the beach, as the Colony continued to sprout houses in both directions, were people who might be described today as Far-out, Kooks, or Swingers. But in those days they just seemed our normal everyday Hollywood screwballs. Edmund Lowe, who came to stardom as Captain Flagg in
What Price Glory?
—famous for his “Sez you-Sez me” confrontation with Victor McLaglen’s Sergeant Quirk—lived with his wife Lilyan Tashman (when he was not on our tennis court) in a candy-cane house on the north side of the beach, where the Rapfs had also moved from Santa Monica. Eddie Lowe was tall, dark, and handsome, the leading-man ideal of the period, and Lil was a stylish, sexy, slender blonde who had a passion for red and white. The Tashman-Lowe house was Christmas eternal, red-and-white striped furniture, red-and-white striped walls: From the kitchen to the master bedroom no other color interrupted its candy-box perfection. The cotton-white, apple-red beach house seemed to say, Let us be gay, let us be bright, live for today and the party tonight.

Nights at the Tashman-Lowe candy box were given over to parties—drinking and singing around the white baby grand. To keep her sinuous and famous figure, Lilyan was known for her habit of going to the powder room during the revels and putting her slender fingers down her lovely throat to induce vomiting—or
upchucking
as it was more decorously described. Lilyan was no rowdy Clara or golden chorine like Marion Davies. She was always chic, smartly turned out, a modish girl at play rather than a playgirl. Even that self-appointed social arbiter, Ad Schulberg, approved of Lil Tashman. She was always bright and friendly with me, would call me in for a soft drink if she saw me riding the waves or
jogging along the beach. But whenever I looked at this sinuous Jewish princess of the sun, I thought of the self-induced retching in the candy-striped bathroom.

When she died, still looking as high-style as ever, her friends explained that she had only planted the story of the forced upchucking to conceal the true cause—cancer of the stomach.

A
NOTHER MEMORABLE NEIGHBOR IN
the early Malibu colony was Adela Rogers St. John, once married to screen comic Al St. John. Adela was the female counterpart of the two-fisted drinker/ hard-nosed newspaperman, a sob sister who could give lessons to Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, and the free-spirited newshawks they created in
The Front Page.
Adela’s old man, Earl Rogers, was the original Great Mouthpiece from Denver: She had been raised in knowledge of what the real world of homicide and grand larceny was all about. Accordingly, when she wrapped her stories in tinsel and fan-magazine gush, she knew what she was prettying. Give her a typewriter and twenty minutes and she could write you a thousand words that would tickle or touch your heart. She was a formidable word-machine who could more than hold her own in the male-dominated world of the early Thirties. And just as successful producers and directors had shapely mistresses, Adela had a gorgeous piece of beefcake by the name of Enzio Fiermonte.

Fiermonte was an Italian pugilist, reputed (by Adela) to be the heavyweight champion of Italy. According to the Malibu legend, Primo Carnera had been afraid to fight him. And that was understandable, for although he was not built to the proportions of the peasant Goliath, Adela’s tiger displayed chest, arms, and legs that might have been sculpted by Michelangelo. He would hurl that great physique into the waves and then come leaping out with all those marvelous muscles glistening with the spray of the sea and the bronze of the sun. Sometimes
I would trot behind him on the beach, as the incoming breakers licked at his golden feet. My own arms grew thinner, my legs spindlier, my chest seemed to shrink as I tried to keep up with this heroic specimen. Please God, I’d pray as he ran on until I would have to stop and gasp for breath, when I grow up if only I could look just a little like the champion of Malibu—Enzio Fiermonte…