Moving Pictures (46 page)

There was another handsome heavyweight in town, another pugilistic sun-god named Pat Doyle, who was said to be one of the brace of lovers fancied by Mae West. His muscles were also celebrated as those of a coming champion of the world. And so Doyle-Fiermonte seemed a natural match for the local Legion Stadium. For the heavyweight championship of Hollywood.

Hollywood turned out in style for the big event between these two invincibles. The Mexican bombshell, Lupe Velez, flashed her diamonds. Mae West wore white sable under the hot lights. The biggest stars in town gave the apprehensive Adela the good luck sign.

Doyle—introduced as the Irish Thrush—wore a green satin robe with a golden harp embroidered on his back. Fiermonte matched him in sartorial splendor with a rainbow robe of the Italian national colors.

The Hollywood Legion band played the Irish and Italian anthems while both gladiators stood patriotically at attention. From Father’s precious seats in the front row of the working press, I watched Enzio cross himself in his corner, throw several ominous punches into the air, turn to blow a gallant little kiss to Adela, and stride forward to meet his Irish rival. That was to be the most aggressive gesture the Italian Adonis made that night. In the center of the ring his magnificent jaw made contact with the Irish hero’s overhand right, and before some of the distinguished audience had settled back into their seats, Fiermonte was writhing on the canvas. Some final flick of machismo brought him to his feet at the count of nine but moments later he was back on the canvas again, sleeping soundly like a Malibu sun-worshipper improving his tan.

Although the magnificent Fiermonte had come to the end of his pugilistic career, his Hollywood adventures were not quite at an end. Soon after his abbreviated battle with Mr. Doyle, we discovered that he had been playing hooky from his marriage with one of the princesses of the Astor fortune. That aggrieved lady was charging desertion and suing Adela for alienation of affections. There was a brief period when the fallen gladiator took refuge in our Malibu house while the process servers laid siege to Adela’s. In time Sr. Fiermonte removed his bronze muscles from the
Hollywood scene. But along with the kept women in a town awash in money searching for new ways to be spent faster, there were almost as many kept men, splendid-looking fellows who played excellent tennis, filled their bathing trunks and their double-breasted blazers to perfection, and who could play all the roles from gigolo to business manager to itinerant husband.

There were many dens of iniquity in early Malibu Beach. In the bathroom of Adela Rogers’s house an unexpected scandal was revealed. Cigarette smoke seeped from under the locked bathroom door. Pounding on it, the two irate mothers and inveterate smokers, Ad and Adela, demanded that the culprits come out. After a long silence, the 11-year-old girl perpetrators—our Sonya and Adela’s Elaine—emerged, their hands figuratively raised above their heads, the half-smoked evidence of their guilt already swirling to the bottom of the toilet bowl.

A few years later, Elaine escaped her driving superachiever of a mother by becoming the child-bride of author Paul Gallico. Sonya escaped into the tower room of our beach house where she wrote poetry and stared pensively at the sea and the Japanese farmland. Smack in the middle of the movie colony, she was a wistful, bony-kneed, fatherless Emily Dickinson, pursuing some inner or secret life. I was both athlete and scholar—at least so my parents boasted—and Stuart was small, round, and cute, already a remarkable raconteur. Between these two rather formidable slices of sibling sandwich, Sonya was an almost invisible ingredient. I was writing, I was perfecting my backhand, I was even asked my opinion of new movie ideas. Baby Stuart could hold master-storytellers in thrall—a Mark Twain in short pants—with his long-winded but never boring anecdotes. When Father was home he smiled proudly on Stuart. I don’t remember his smiling on Sonya. Uncle Sam Jaffe enjoyed Stuart and played tennis with me, but teased Sonya as an amateur matador teases a half-terrified, half-furious fighting calf. “Sam, stop,” she would warn, raising a small hand to slap him, using an accent that was neither English nor American but distinctly her own, just as she then called B.P. not “Dad” or “Daddy” or “Father” but “Farth,” a term that always sounded more accusing than endearing, and from which he always recoiled.

So Sonya’s secret retreat was the tower room, where she developed a sensibility and a literary sophistication that was more finely developed and more fragile than either Stuart’s or mine.

Another den belonged to a mysterious fellow down the road, Tod
Browning, who had come to Hollywood as had we, in its ranch-house and orchard days, an old circus hand who got into the movie game as an actor and go-fer for D. W. Griffith, and who had an affinity for darkness, evil, and malignant creatures.
London After Midnight
was his forte, and
Dracula,
and at Maurice’s studio we watched him make
Freaks,
a bleak circus movie in which the heroes were not the clowns and the high-wire artistes but the midgets, the hermaphrodites, and an armless and legless thing that drew pictures with a pencil in its teeth. There was a certain glee in the way Tod Browning went about making this picture that made us think of him as Count Dracula on Stage Ten. Those freaks were all over the set and it sent shivers through us to look at them. But he enjoyed it too much. The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica Pier to watch the young unemployed zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow-motion
danse macabre
that earned them a handful of desperate dollars. (One of our local novelists, Horace McCoy, was to describe this minuet of misery in
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?)
If a couple succumbed to motionlessness, they were instantly disqualified, but it was permissible for one contestant to drag his unconscious partner along the floor. Compared to this humiliation of the human spirit, a prizefight seemed as ennobling as the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent resident sadists in the same front-row seats every night, cheering on their favorites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing
Freaks.
It was whispered around Green Gate Cottage that Tod Browning was a bona fide sadist and that we should not allow him to entice us into the dark interior of his brooding beach house. In later years he put up a sign, “Tod’s Little Acre,” and seemed quite harmless as he literally cultivated his garden on the east bank of the old dirt road.

The Malibu Colony was both wild and naive, and what passed for sophistication was a kind of gold-rush free-spirited individuality. Along that historic dirt road was another Malibu pioneer, Fred Beetson, second-in-command of the Hays (later Breen) Office, official overseer of film morality and unofficial guardian of the moviemakers’ personal morality. Fred was another of the early colonists who seemed to loathe the surf and sand. On the narrow road behind the row of beach houses
he would take his stand in the morning, with a scotch highball somehow permanently attached to his right hand. He would chat and gossip with passersby and invite them in to join him in a glass. He never seemed to be altogether drunk or altogether sober. He was what he was, Fred Beetson of the Hays Office, forever stationed there with a highball in his hand.

Many years after leaving Malibu, I decided to drive out there on a sentimental journey to old Green Gate Cottage. It was a weekday in the off-season, and the beach was deserted. I stopped at the familiar fence, opened the gate, and from the front deck stooped down and peered under the drawn window shade into the living room. The furniture was different, changed for the worse I thought, “modern,” no longer Early American. As I stared in at that room full of familiar ghosts, an accusing voice interrupted my reverie. “What are you up to?”

I found myself facing a uniformed beach patrolman.

“I just stopped by to look at my house,” I said.

“This house belongs to Mr. Breen.”

“No, it really belongs to me,” I said. “It will always belong to me.”

“You’re coming with me,” said the beach patrol.

Passively, or perversely, I followed as he led me to his car. “Get in,” he ordered. “I’m taking you to the Highway Patrol.”

We drove in silence for a long thirty seconds. Atavistic pride urged me to insist on my sentimental rights. Damn it, it
was
my house. Mr. Joe Holier-Than-Thou Breen of the Production Code might hold the deed to the house and now be residing there, but I had seen it rise from the empty sand. Ad had given it the warm Early American look that had come to be a more natural expression for her than the musty, crowded, hand-me-down furnishings of the Lower East Side from which she had escaped. It was my house, scene of elaborate Sunday brunches, furious tennis matches, exhilarating body-surfing, of adolescent apprehension at the sound of expensive chips clacking and adult voices rising in alcoholic bickering that would swell and break into anger as surely as the waves of Malibu mounted and tumbled over into white foam rushing up to our homey picket fence.

It was the house where the radio in my room initiated me into the mysteries of political conventions and election nights, where I heard in sadness the returns that gave the election to Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, a friend of Zukor’s and a political hero of my father’s. It was in that beach-house bedroom that I first read Molnar’s novel,
The Paul Street Boys,
and wept so hard at the end that I had to lock the door so no one would see my weakness. If a house is paid for not in dollars but in
memories, then ineluctably the house that I had been caught staring into was forever mine.

But as we drove on, subjective courage capitulated to realistic cowardice.

“When I say it is my house, I mean, my family built it, I grew up here, the Colony grew around me.”

There was a constabulary silence, then: “Is there anybody here who can identify you?”

Who was left? The shade of Clara Bow? Lawrence Tibbett, who used to take me sailing? The glamorous ghost of Lilyan Tashman? Suddenly it came to me: “Fred Beetson. I used to know Mr. Beetson. Is he still here?”

A dozen yards ahead of us the question answered itself. There he was, old Fred himself, still planted where I had left him, holding his highball glass like a liberty torch.

“Fred!” I shouted and started to escape from my captor.

“Buddy, where you been? C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink!”

Reluctantly, with the possessive spirit of the good cop, the Colony patrolman released me to the custody of the drink-and-let-drink custodian of motion-picture morality.

W
HEN ALL OF MOTHER’S
psychiatrists and all of Father’s Hollywood vocal therapists couldn’t mend my broken speech, I was allowed to drop out of public school, where my peers never seemed to tire of the humor inherent in imitating a chronic stammer. At the Los Angeles Coaching School, run by a venerable monster by the name of Macurda, there were only five or six students to a teacher, and the faculty was better able to cope with problems like mine. The other students were either misfits of one sort or another, or professional working children who could benefit from the concentrated and abbreviated schedule. Instead of languishing in a thirty-student classroom until three
P.M.,
we were out at noon. Inevitably, Maurice became restive at the most conventional public school. Meanwhile I found it difficult to fill in the three hours until our daily partnership was reunited. Over the usual objections of Grandma Rapf, Maurice’s parents surprisingly gave him permission to join me at the Coaching School.

After we dutifully put in our three hours, Maurice and I would grab a bite at a lunch counter and rush downtown to the theater district to see the current movies. Armed with our gold passes we would race from feature to feature, and since movies averaged ninety minutes in those days, we often managed to take in four in the course of a single afternoon. No daily film critic could have worked harder. Miles of celluloid streamed through our minds. We saw the godawful (30 percent), the passable (45 percent), the good (15 percent), and the better-than-good to excellent (that happy 10 percent), and we argued their merits with the
knowledge if not the style of a Robert E. Sherwood, a pioneer of serious film criticism. Our heads were stockpiled with ammunition in the war between our fathers’ studios. I would argue that my father was smarter than Thalberg because Irving had given up on Von Sternberg while B.P. had made him one of our top directors. Maurice would counter by reminding me that my father had used Wallace Beery in routine comedies teamed with Raymond Hatton while
his
father had realized the dramatic potential of that grizzled alumnus of Mack Sennett slapstick. And indeed his old man’s
Min and Bill
comedies with Beery and Marie Dressier put the burly comic on the road to dramatic success in
The Champ, The Big House,
and
Grand Hotel.

Seeing movies all afternoon, watching rushes and rough cuts in our fathers’ projection rooms, taking the Red Car (halfway between a streetcar and a short-line
Super Chief)
to the previews at Glendale, Burbank, and Pasadena, we couldn’t help becoming premature or self-appointed experts on the art of the cinema. We knew why Charlie Chaplin was almost as funny but somehow not as moving in
The Circus
as he had been in
The Gold Rush.
We traded names like picture cards of major-league baseball players. My father thought he might have “a blonde Clara Bow” in gum-chewing, wisecracking Alice White, who stole
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
from Ruth Taylor. Maurice thought Alice White was a flash-in-the-pan compared to Sally O’Neill and that “my” Esther Ralston would never have the star power of “his” Norma Shearer. We argued the relative merits of two Jewish charmers,
my
Evelyn Brent and
his
Carmel Myers, and of two suave leading men,
my
Adolphe Menjou and
his
Ronald Colman. Seeing almost all of the four to five hundred pictures Hollywood was grinding out every year, we could name not only the top ten but the top one hundred actors and actresses, including names still far down the list like Janet Gaynor, Mary Astor, Lionel Barrymore, and William Powell.