Moving Pictures (50 page)

“Every couple of months we have a little revolution, but I think we’ve seen the last of the big ones,” he assured us. “The generals who led the old Revolution are mostly interested in getting rich now. There may be some shoot-’em-ups on election day, but no Pancho Villas: Too many people died. They say the Mexicans are in love with death but even they get sick of dying. No, this Toral thing will blow over. But the trouble is, a situation like this knocks the hell out of our business. The Mexicans are great movie fans. They love our Westerns and the costume pictures and you should hear ’em laugh at the slapstick comedies. But when they set up army patrols like tonight, it’s murder at the box office.”

Sr. Kaplan spoke politely in his perfect Mexican Spanish to sinister groups of soldiers at various intersections of the broad and silent boulevard. I pictured the young assassin—a cartoonist for a Catholic paper, Kaplan had told us—praying on his knees in his dark prison cell as he waited for dawn and the firing squad. I had seen things like this in the movies, but somehow the movies made it seem glossier and more
melodramatic than it really was. There was something casual, almost matter-of-fact in the way the brown-skinned
soldados
fingered their old old-fashioned rifles or leaned against a lamp post to smoke a cigarette. What history would record as a critical counter-revolution put down by an aggressive government dictatorship was for us a quiet stroll through the dark streets of an ancient city a million miles from the laundered estates of Windsor Square.

After the execution, when the authorities were satisfied that the
Cristeros
were not taking to the streets, the people poured out into the parks and onto the sidewalks filled with vendors selling newspapers, cheap candies, lottery tickets… With his happy blend of Bronx and Latin enthusiasm, Sr. Kaplan took us on the round of tourist attractions. We drove out to Teotihuacan to marvel at those architectural improbabilities, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. I was not yet a quasi- or would-be archeologist, but the seeds were planted as I sweated my way up the largest pyramid this side of Cheops’.

Dutifully we boated through the floating gardens of Xochimilco, another marvel of pre-Columbian ingenuity. At Sr. Kaplan’s urging, we even submitted ourselves to our first bullfight. But even our many nights at prizefights had not prepared us for this bloody spectacle. As the first scrawny horse was toppled over and the cruel spear of the picador brought forth a gushing well of blood from the shoulder muscles of the bull stubbornly pushing against the pain, Mother looked away, I stared at my clenched fingers trying not to faint, and Father chewed on his big cigar and grew very pale. With an unannounced but unanimous vote, we all rose and started up the wide aisle toward the exit.
Aficionados
voiced their resentment of
gringo
queasiness as we hurried toward the safety of the tunnel. Years later, when I came to embrace rather than reject Mexico, I would learn to accept the
corrida
as the ultimate expression of her orgiastic culture. But on that initial escape from what seemed to me the butchery in the arena, I was simply reinforced in my dread of Mexico as a country of vicious extremes where the people were dedicated to blood-lust and death was a way of life.

When Sr. Kaplan took us to the famous House of Tiles, the palatial sixteenth-century home of the Marquis del Valle—now transformed by American ingenuity into Sanborn’s, a flourishing restaurant, gift shop, and drugstore—I was distracted by the human carpet of beggars sleeping on newspapers in the entranceway. Our indefatigable Sr. Kaplan nimbly stepped through them, waving us to follow. It was unnerving to try to
find room to set down first one foot and then another among the faces, arms, legs, and ragged bodies of old men, women, and children. By the time we had managed to gain entrance to the brilliant, high-ceilinged interior, entirely decorated in colonial tile, Sr. Kaplan’s description of its history and architectural elegance was tainted by the reality of the homeless lying outside. As we looked at the expensive menu, I could not get them out of my mind. But Sr. Kaplan chatted on about theater grosses and the rosy prospects for Paramount distribution if only the
Mehicanos
would put their
pistolas
away and settle down to business.

As our Mexican holiday drew to a close, it was still beggars rather than box office that said
Mexico
to me. It was still sad-eyed mothers in dusty
rebozos,
with one baby at the breast and another swelling in the belly, squatting outside the massive cathedral, palms reaching toward us for a pinch of the gold they pictured in our pockets.

I hated the relationship: Walk rich among the poor! I blamed the Church for flaunting all that gold and leaving its children to starve in its very courtyard. In Hollywood I had seen many who were hungry for fame and the main chance, and at L.A. High there were Negroes, Mexicans, and a few Japanese dressed shabbily in what were probably hand-me-downs. But raised in my celluloid cocoon, I had never looked into the eyes of the truly hungry.

H
OME ON LORRAINE
, between the challenges of L.A. High and the battles of “The Stude,” as we called the studio, I was beset by demons of insecurity and haunted by goals I could only strain for but never reach. As the new editor-in-chief of
The Blue-and-White,
one of the few highschool dailies in the country, I was dedicated to perfect typographical makeup of the front page, which meant writing heads, subheads, and the accompanying copy to exact count, so the right-hand column would precisely match the left. Maurice and I had developed this journalistic perfectionism but he was gone now: A semester ahead of me, he was off on an aircraft carrier, doing go-fer duty on a service movie his father was making for MGM. I alone was left to battle the porpoise-bodied, sarcastic print-shop teacher, Mr. Vaughan. Since I refused to lock up the paper until even the most minute imbalance had been corrected, Mr. Vaughan would bellow and rage against being kept in the print shop beyond the day’s closing bell. “Fifty years from now do you think anyone’s gonna give a damn if the lower heads on the left are one em lower than the right?” the black-aproned printer would bluster. Although intimidated by his size and sound, I never bent to his wrath. I had two potent allies, the spirit of my absent “brother,” Maurice, and the presence of Miss Katherine Carr, our homely little dynamo of a journalism teacher who relentlessly drilled into us the “who-what-when-where-how’s” of reportorial clarity. Her brother was Harry Carr, the illustrious columnist for the
Los Angeles Times,
and so, as I dummied, supervised, rewrote, and squeezed into
shape our daily bugle, I felt a titillating sense of connection with the exciting world of professional journalism. In fact, I lost my amateur standing when Miss Carr arranged for me to be a sports stringer for the
Times.
I gloried in such dispatches as:

“Trailing by 13-7 at the half, the fighting Romans of L. A. High came roaring back in the final minutes to score a dramatic 14-13 victory over the Hollywood Sheiks at Housh Field Friday afternoon.”

Each gridiron struggle was a personal victory for this 17-year-old veteran, summing up 60 minutes of football in five bristling lines that bore the imitable stamp of Grantland Rice. At the rate of five cents a word I was earning three or four dollars a week, and with my scrapbook of reportorial accomplishment I was able to line up similar assignments with the weekly neighborhood papers,
The Los Angeles Tribune, The Hollywood News,
and
The Beverly Hills Citizen.
The little checks I collected every week gave me a heady sense of following in Father’s footsteps.

But editing my little daily or describing the heroic feats of valor of my peers still left me panting for glory in the field. I would happily have traded all the bylines and editorial honors for a varsity letter in football, tennis, or track. I was a willing but marginal athlete. I scrimmaged with the “B” football team but was never in the lineup. I ran an indifferent 660 on the Class B track team. My one hope for glory was in tennis; on weekends I logged twenty sets in a day, turning on our court lights to play on into the night. On our highschool tennis team, I was ranked eighth or tenth, and since the top four played the singles matches and usually two of the four doubles as well, my main chance to get into the lineup was on the third or fourth doubles team. My aspirations rode on the slender shoulders of our Number Three, a graceful player with the improbable name of Yale Katz.

As soon as the paper was put to bed and the disgruntled Mr. Vaughan liberated from his print-shop prison, I would rush to the school tennis courts to practice with Yale or to play in one of the seemingly endless rounds of elimination matches that would decide my fate.

If I had a silver spoon in my mouth, I was gagging on it. Nothing came easy to me. My peers at L.A. High were almost all accomplished sheiks into whose arms pretty little girls fell like ripe oranges. But Maurice and I had developed a pathological fear of breaking through the sex barrier. We had to force ourselves even to talk to the girls on our newspaper staff.
At least there we had a chain of command and a daily professional imperative to force us out of our tight little corner.

As we approached my seventeenth birthday, our friends mutinied against our traditional mode of celebration: a free-for-all fight in the dark in the Rapf projection room. They insisted on bringing their dates to a less pugnacious party. Literally going down fighting, I was forced to give in… and faced the agony of deciding what girl to ask. She would be my first date. The second girl I asked—and I only knew two—accepted.

As I recorded in my diary: “Jeez! I tremble every time I think of that party tomorrow night. But as Maurice preached but didn’t practice: Why cut out half of the world’s population, because of a silly prejudice?”

And so I faced my first G-day: “After the Hollywood-L.A. meet we won, I dressed hurriedly and called for Bella Codon. I was rather burned up but rather liked the idea. It was all so new to me. We had supper at my house and then went to see
Seventeen
at school. The play was well done. In the car I was rather shy and did little talking. However I could hardly be blamed—this being my first time. After the show we came home and everyone danced—but me. That is what hurt the most. I felt like a wallflower. The party broke up at 12:00. I took Bella home. She seemed pretty nice though was not very talkative. They say: ‘Every time there is a lull in the conversation a Jewish child is born.’ In that case we raised up a great race of Jews this evening. That’s how much we talked. However it was a new feeling and one, I must confess, that I rather enjoyed, despite my embarrassment and uncomfort. Got to bed around 1:00.”

Jack of all sports, master of none, I was unexpectedly summoned back to the track team by Coach Philo Chambers, who had given up on me. It seemed our best half-miler, Beverly Keim, who could just shade two minutes flat, was overmatched against McCarthy of Fairfax High, a champion middle-distance runner. Chamber’s strategy was to put me in as a “rabbit,” instructed to run the first quarter-mile as fast as I could in hope of fooling McCarthy into thinking I was some sort of phenomenal unknown who might steal the race from him. Then as I fell back, Beverly Keim could come on and pass him in the stretch.

That week I was back on the track training hard for this desperate assignment. Suddenly finding myself “in” with Keim and the senior stars gave me the confidence to do something I had never done before. There was a small dark-haired girl in my homeroom class, Penny, who looked
awfully cute. Once in a while she would glance at me and I would look away. Now I stopped her in the hall, managed to mention that I would be running in the Fairfax meet Friday. I wondered if she would like to see it and then meet me for a malt after the race.

My first “pass” at a strange girl, but isn’t that what all varsity trackmen did? When she promised to be there, I intensified my training to the point of frenzy.

The night before the meet, my family took me to Victor Hugo’s, the fanciest restaurant in town, where I could not resist the
fettucine verde.
Back in bed I ran my race against McCarthy again and again, coming in a courageous third as our strategy swept Keim to victory.

Toward morning I slept a few hours and woke like a lathered racehorse. I sleepwalked from class to class. Then I was on the track, proud and trembling in my powder-blue-and-white L.A. High track shirt, sandwiched between Keim and McCarthy. At the gun I sprang forward like all my heroes. My legs were spinning like wheels—I knew I had never run so fast before. But no matter how fast I ran, McCarthy was at my heels. After 300 yards, I knew I was in a nightmare. In fact, I was almost hoping it
was
a nightmare from which I would awaken. For no matter how hard I tried to step up the pace, to run even faster, there was no way I could run away from McCarthy. While my legs were churning—the muscles beginning to tighten—I could feel him loping along easily behind me. He was playing with me, he was toying with me. I was no rabbit outrunning a greyhound, I was a mouse and he was a lithe, graceful predator cat.

At the end of the first quarter-mile we were in front of the grandstand again, and there was Schulberg of L.A. leading McCarthy of Fairfax by an air-sucking yard.

There was a smattering of applause and scattered cheers. But I was unable to romanticize about Penny up there rooting me on. I had too strong a case of McCarthyitis. After 600 yards I literally didn’t know whether I was still running or not. I thought McCarthy was passing me and loping on but I wasn’t sure. I had a strong sensation that my brain was frying like hamburger, and also that my head had no connection with the rest of my body. At the 660 mark was a small section of bleacher seats that blocked a view of the track from the main stands. My subconscious must have welcomed it as an oasis, for the moment I came to it I blacked out, rolled off the track, and threw up Victor Hugo’s
fettucine.
I didn’t realize I was on a stretcher until I was carried into the
dressing room. There I heard that McCarthy had won easily, in record time, with Keim a respectable second.