Moving Pictures (48 page)

It seemed no accident that the studios were built along a major geological fault and that from time to time actual tremors cracked our windows and made the hanging lamps swing like pendulums. Had we built our magnificent castles of stucco on shifting sands? With our 16-cylinder cars, our liveried chauffeurs, and movie stars for dinner companions and tennis partners, we would seem to have nothing to worry about. Yet the smell of fear mingled with the scent of orange blossoms. Apart from the innate fascination of homing pigeons, our dedication to our loft stemmed from the stability we found in our thoroughbred family. Here we could play God to our growing flock, sending our prize birds off to fly great distances, and choosing the pairs to be mated for life.

But even in this well-ordered world there were aberrations. One of our hens, whom we called Mary, turned out to be a natural-born slut who refused to accept the prevailing marital arrangement and instead set up a little back-street nest in a rear corner of the pigeon house. There she would occasionally distract a roving male from his domestic duties. Mary came from a good family and we tried our best to imbue her with the morality of our feathered bourgeoisie. But she was a dedicated jezebel. We kept her as a curiosity and grew fond of her, though her behavior was more like Clara Bow’s than Bessie Lasky’s.

All through high school we would maintain our meticulously structured pigeon organization. Different bloodlines were separated as carefully as they are in Navajo clans. Each homer in our racing stable had its own page in our book of records. Our vigilance and enthusiasm never slacked until we moved on to college, when we had no choice but to turn the project over to little Stu and Maurice’s kid brother, Matty.

When we returned, order had turned to chaos. The partitions between the cages had been removed, and the separate groups were irrevocably mingled. Squabs had been born and raised without records of their
bloodlines and flight performances. It was like the Fall of the Roman Empire: our carefully constructed civilization of homing pigeons in ruins. And finally, in our absence, the final blow: Unable to care for the growing and now chaotic flock, our younger brothers submitted to the advice of our parents that the pigeon population be liquidated; and, instead of a dignified sale to pigeon fanciers, they were sent off in a tumbril to the neighborhood butcher at fifty cents a head.

But in my mind those noble descendants of Eddie and Peggy are forever airborne, flying their great circles and homing hundreds of miles, unique among the creatures whose wings inspired the myth of angels.

G
OING FROM THE SMALL
, exclusive Coaching School to teeming Los Angeles High was like being wrenched out of the nursery and thrown into the real world. L.A. High was the largest public school in the city, with 3,500 students, including almost 800 freshmen, or “scrubs” as we were called. Halfway between Wilshire Boulevard where the rich people lived, and Pico, where the Mexican, Japanese, some Negroes, and poor whites clustered in modest stucco bungalows and small frame houses, “L.A.” was the classic Southern California melting pot.

At recess there was a riot around the flagpole in front of the three-story neo-Gothic building on Olympic. I watched a lynch mob of older boys in howling pursuit of a hapless “scrub.” It seemed he had made the mistake of wearing corduroys to school: Cords, the dirtier the better, were the special uniforms of the privileged seniors. The offending scrub had his cords ripped from his body and run to the top of the flagpole where they waved along with Old Glory. Then a disciplined group of seniors in respectably worn and soiled cords descended on the mob, and restored order. These authority figures, I learned, were members of the Senior Board. Their word, Maurice explained to me, was law. If you got out of hand, if you tried to cut in on the cafeteria lunch line, if you were wandering around one of the corridors after the classroom bell, the Senior Boardman could either give you a stern warning or send you to Mr. Ault.

Mr. Ault was a Dickensian disciplinarian, a one-man judge,
prosecutor, and jury dedicated to the Napoleonic Code—guilty until proven innocent. But in Mr. Ault’s court, proof was inadmissible. A few days after matriculating, I was late for my nine
A.M.
homeroom. Of course it had not been my fault: My Model A wouldn’t start. By the time I got the chauffeur to drive me in the hated town car I was five minutes late. The bespectacled, narrow-faced Mr. Ault handed out demerit slips with the finality of a Rabbi Magnin. At the end of the first month I was doing what they called “detention study-hall duty.” At Urban Military, I had had to do makeup drills on Saturdays. At B’nai B’rith, the righteous rabbi literally had driven me from the Temple. Now Mr. Ault. “Oh, so you’re back again,” he would greet me when I came to report my latest delinquency. I simply added Mr. Ault to my hate list and tried to stay out of trouble.

That wasn’t easy; from Mother’s Lower East Side “socialism” and my childhood rooting for underdogs, I had developed a resistance to self-important despots. I had no politics except the rub-off from the avant-garde interests of my mother and the Al Smith-sidewalks-of-New York democracy of my father. But I knew that I didn’t like President Hoover or our Republican Governor Merriam or William Randolph Hearst. I didn’t like people who used power for self-aggrandizement. I didn’t like the way Oscar the Bootblack was always being goosed. I didn’t like the way little people were pushed around in the studio, or the way crimes by Hollywood “names” could be covered up because Eddie Mannix, the MG M hatchet man, and the inner circle of studio bosses had the district attorney in their pocket.

Men in frayed white collars were half-heartedly selling apples on street corners. We read about breadlines and farm foreclosures. But the Depression hadn’t really touched us yet. Father had lost a million dollars in Paramount stock, but he went blithely on drawing that monster weekly salary and blowing most and sometimes all of it at the Clover Club. I was more concerned with improving my backhand at tennis and with cheering the L. A. Romans on the gridiron than with the mounting pressure of social injustice.

A few weeks into my life at L.A. High, a specter began to haunt me again: having to read aloud. In the English class, our teacher, Mrs. Loomis, would start with the A’s—we were seated in alphabetical order—with each student having to read a paragraph or a stanza of a boring classic like
Idylls of the King.
I would watch the big round clock over the door and pray that time would run out before my ordeal began. Cold sweat would form on my forehead, little white spots would spin in
back of my eyes until I was sure I was going to faint. Once, when the public reading was only two seats ahead of me, I went to Mrs. Loomis, told her I felt ill, and asked for permission to go home. She said I could if I brought a written excuse from my family doctor to Mr. Ault. I got an excuse from the studio doctor, Dr. Strathern, who would sign anything, and back at school next day I begged Mrs. Loomis not to make me read out loud.

She thought I would get over my nervousness if I gave myself a chance and practiced at home. She didn’t seem to understand that it was no problem for me to read out loud to myself at home. It was the pressure of reading or talking to other people that undid me. Mrs. Loomis agreed to skip over me in the reading assignment, but in return for this privilege I had to attend a special class for—she didn’t call us misfits, but that’s what we were. It was a primitive catchall for anybody with any sort of handicap. There was one boy with a harelip, another with a head too large for his body, and a third, a gentle, husky kid called Tom, who was slightly retarded and whom I often took to movies in the afternoon when Maurice was busy. Strangely, I don’t remember any girls in that little gathering of freaks. Maybe we segregated ones were further segregated as to sex. Or maybe my fear of girls blocked them out of my memory.

The kindly but primitive lady therapist couldn’t help me stop stammering, any more than she could give the poor hydrocephalic kid across the table a normal head. I see a dozen of us gathered there around that long conference table, as if caught in a frieze by an artist of the grotesque like Goya or Daumier. In one way, though, the freak class was helpful. In my English class, as I prayed that the sweep-second hand would save me from having to read out loud to my snickering peers, I could feel terribly sorry for myself. What had I done to suffer this terrible affliction? Why could Maurice talk, and all my other friends, Buddy Lesser, big Fred Funk, Bud Blumberg? And why was little Stuart so fluent that he was on his way to being a polished monologist? “I had them in the palm of my hand,” this fat little seven-year-old confided in me after holding a group of sophisticated adults spellbound with an anecdote he had spun into a thirty-minute cliff-hanger. But surrounded by the harelipped, the deformed, and one poor boy who stammered so desperately that efforts to talk made him spit and slobber, I felt that my speech defect was something I could learn to live with. The freak class was a lesson in humility. No matter how much pain I thought I was suffering, others in the room had deeper wounds.

But my powers of perspective failed me utterly when I had to face
another senseless highschool requirement: To pass eleventh-grade English, we all had to participate in a debate. Sides were chosen and debate issues assigned. My subject—Resolved, that commercial advertising is deleterious to radio broadcasting—stirred the social reformer drowsing within me in the California sun. I buried my terror of public speaking in a mountain of research. I sacrificed my afternoon tennis lessons and hours of practice to read every book on radio I could find at our big downtown public library. I became a hive of indignation at the evils of commercial radio. Carried away by my mission, I wondered if a combination of encyclopedic knowledge and strong feeling might provide the magic formula to break through the speech-defect barrier.

The night before the debate I was unable to sleep. At four
A.M.
I was practicing my delivery. I thought of all my lessons from various therapists over the years: Take a deep breath like a singer before you begin. Use a singsong cadence that relaxes the vocal chords. Remember Mother’s Coué-like optimism: “I—can—do—enn-ee-thing—I really—want to do. …” I reread my voluminous notes. Demosthenes, Daniel Webster, and William Jennings Bryan rolled into a single oratorical genius could not have been better prepared.

In English class that morning, I leaned forward in my seat like a boxer waiting for the opening bell of a championship fight. Numb with anticipation.
Clang.
I heard my name and went to the center of the ring, or rather to the front of the class. Sixty curious eyes were staring at me, sixty skeptical ears waiting for me to begin. A terrible hush fell over the crowded room. I opened my mouth for the first broadside in the denunciation that would demolish the excesses of commercial broadcasting for all time. From my mouth came… silence. A silence so prolonged that it seemed to take on some agonized life of its own. Five seconds? Five minutes? Five years? I could feel the muscles inside my neck braided together like the thick strands of a rope. I felt myself strangling in silence. They had kicked the stool out from under me and I was hanging by the cords in my neck. White circles spun like dizzying pinwheels behind my eyes and I was both resigned to and hoping for a fainting spell. There was laughter, nervous and malicious, and I wished I were back in the freak class among my own kind. At least we didn’t laugh at each other up there.

I must have blacked out without fainting because the next thing I knew I was walking home. Crossing broad Wilshire Boulevard into the peace and safety of palm-treed Lorraine, I was suddenly aware of a cold
wet feeling in my pants and realized what had happened. My God, had it happened while I was standing there in front of the class with silence stuck crossways in my throat like a fishbone? Is that when the class started laughing at me? Not that they needed scatological encouragement. Watching me squirm there with my mouth open and no words coming out was funny enough.

After I got home and hit the punching bag for a few minutes I felt a little better. Then I released our racing pigeons and watched them fly in great circles. When Maurice got back from school, we practiced the standing broad jump, worked on our prediction of the score of the U.S.C.-Stanford track meet that coming Saturday, timed ourselves running around the block, and wrote a song: “Things that go up—are sure to come down—my love reached the blue skies—then fell to the ground…”

That night I did my homework with the earphones on, listening to the blow-by-blow of the Speedy Dado-Pete Sarmiento fight, and hating arithmetic which never would have any meaning for me, and that English class because English was my best subject. After all, it had helped Father become a writer, and although everybody at the studio seemed to expect me to take over Paramount as soon as I got through college, like Junior Laemmle at Universal, my parents expected me to become a writer. Writers don’t have to know algebra unless they want to know how
n
for novel equals
x
in royalties, and even then it won’t do them any good. And writers didn’t have to debate. Even if Mother pointed out that Father had stammered on to victory. Writers write—or at least they did in the golden days before they were expected to go out on the media circuit and shill for their own books—because that is their way of not having to talk.

In the morning, up at dawn to exercise our flock, I wished I could stay there in safety for the rest of the day. When I went in for breakfast I told our cook I wasn’t hungry. I went back to my room and decided to be sick. When Mother came in to remind me that it was time to leave for school, I told her I was sick to my stomach. And I was—with a severe case of not wanting to return to the scene of my shame where I would have to face my peers. Rhymes with jeers and fears. I was allowed to take the day off and crawl back into bed. Shutting my door against the world of talk transformed the room into an island of peace and security.