Moving Pictures (51 page)

Next time I passed Penny in the corridor, she was walking with a letterman. I was relieved that she didn’t seem to notice me. We never spoke to each other again.

Sports and movies were my daily addiction. But it was the availability of movies at “Father’s stude” or the Rapfs’ that sharpened our critical senses:
“Once in a Lifetime,
a burlesque on the movies which contained millions of laughs and not a little truth.” …
“Min and Bill:
Harry Rapf’s picture deftly combines comedy and tragedy. Dressier, Beery, and Rambeau excellent.” … “In Dad’s projection room tonight I saw one of the finest moving pictures I have ever seen: SKIPPY. Jackie Cooper and little Bobby Coogan are both marvelous in it. The story was human and even when it was over I couldn’t stop crying.”

Skippy
had been one of Father’s favorite projects, the Percy Crosby comic strip brought to life, the kind of small-budget film done with loving care that B.P. believed in and that could be slipped almost secretly into a fifty-picture schedule featuring million-dollar epics and extravaganzas. To write
Skippy,
Father had taken the advice of his gifted drinking-and-gambling crony, Herman Mankiewicz, and assigned Mank’s younger brother, Joe, to do an original screenplay. Still in his early twenties, only a few years out of Columbia (the college, not Harry Cohn’s castle), Joe had already written a couple of successful scripts for Paramount. In
Skippy,
he came up with what Father considered a little masterpiece. In addition to Jackie Cooper and the five-year-old Bobby Coogan, there was the film-wise Mitzi Green and the specialist in snotnose child heavies, Jackie Searl. Skippy is a doctor’s son; his little pal Sooky lives in shantytown on the wrong side of the tracks. When the mean dogcatcher’s son grabs Sooky’s little dog, an endearing but unlicensed mongrel, they first go searching for him, with Sooky describing him as “always lickin’ ya!” Their struggles to raise the three dollars to save the life of Sooky’s dog had the projection room in tears. And when the boys finally manage to amass that much money, only to learn that this urchin dog of the urchin kid has already been destroyed, I thought of our own beloved dogs, Bozo and Gent, and could bear no more.

From Maine to Manchuria, ferment was in the air. The usually tractable and patriotic veterans of the A.E.F. were marching on Washington to
demand their bonus; General MacArthur was ordering his troops to open fire on them. Mussolini was rattling his sword at the world, ranting that Fascism was the answer for the twentieth century. The Klan was marching openly through the South, Ford was having his workers beaten up for trying to organize his flivver plants, a fascist Black Legion was forming in Detroit, and a former screenwriter of my father’s, William Dudley Pelley, was organizing his anti-Semitic Silver Shirts right on our doorstep.

While the world was going smash on a dozen fronts, I was obsessed with my tennis match against Manual Arts. My diary gives Yale Katz and his shaky partner twenty lines to record another disaster: Needing our match to win the overall victory, we are even in sets and four-all in the third. Our Roman teammates are on the sidelines trying to root us home. Joe Davis, our Number One, a ranked junior player, is shouting encouragement. And once more I choke in the clutch and double-fault the match away. The stars of the team turn away. My partner and pal, Yale Katz, can’t look at me. Coach Crumley—my lifeline to athletic respectability—walks off without a backward glance.

With the terrible stink of defeat clinging to me like the persistent odor of skunk, I slunk home to my haven on Lorraine.

T
HE STORY OF WHAT
I omitted from my simpleton diary that crucial spring of ’31 is more telling than what I included. Missing were not only the millions of unemployed, the dispossessed farmers, the armies of fascist bullyboys; something personal and central to my life was also missing: Father—almost a non-person.

An entry devoted to Maurice, Miss Carr, Coach Crumley, and Yale Katz ends with three mysterious words: “Saw Dad tonight.” Where had Father been and what kind of talk did we have together when he surfaced at last? Troubled by his absence, I concocted a cover-up. I agonize over my San Pedro match and again call on God to help me win it. “My last real chance! I must make good on it!” And then: “Mr. [Louis] Weitzenkorn [author of
Five Star Final]
and [Uncle] Sam [Jaffe] were over for supper. Dad was not here. I believe he is sleeping at the Ambassador for a while to concentrate on his work since he maintained that he was disturbed too much here.” If I was aware of the backstage drama at our cozy little mansion, I imposed on myself a censorship as tight as the Hays Office’s.

On a sunny Sunday in June, with our Negro cook, Lucille, serving up sumptuous late breakfasts of creamy waffles and Canadian bacon, life at Green Gate Cottage to an outsider must have seemed like Hollywood heaven. I could trade forehands with Freddie March and Edmund Lowe, trounce Jeanette MacDonald at Ping-Pong, ride the breakers with Frank Capra, have Lawrence Tibbett sing booming arias at me as we fished in his sleek motorboat off the Malibu pier. I could go sailing
with the elegant leading man, Neil Hamilton, and drop in for a Coke at any movie star’s beach house, from gum-chewing Clara Bow’s on the south to high-style Lilyan Tashman’s on the northern boundary of our principality. Could a 17-year-old possibly ask for more?

The answer is as simple as the plot of a four-hanky Andy Hardy movie:
Yes
—for Dad and Mom to act like parents in an L. B. Mayer family picture and live together. One Sunday early in June comes a tight-lipped but ominous entry: “Mom and Dad quarreled tonight before supper. I am worried about them.” And on the following day: “Tonight Mother and Dad had an awful quarrel before they went to the preview. I happened to hear them and never before did I realize how serious the matter was. I hate to go into detail here; the facts hurt me that much! They left a few minutes ago with Sam and Milly. Incidentally their fight gave me a great idea for a short story.”

There beats the double heart of the child writer, gloating over the literary possibilities of the very event that is eating him alive. Next day I recorded: “Dad and Mother are okay again but Mother seems sad.”

“Okey” meant that Mother and Father were back under the same roof for the sake of appearances. An uneasy truce had been declared.

Father was having trouble at the studio—the perennial power struggle with New York, intensified because Walter Wanger was running a rival studio of the Company’s back east in Astoria. Mr. Zukor himself was involved in a far-off Wall Street power fight brought on in some mysterious way by the Depression. In bed with my radio earphones on so Mother would think I was asleep, I lay there worrying. I had tuned in old Aimee Semple MacPherson. Even though I knew little or nothing of the outside world, I knew that Sister Aimee was another of our gaggle of spiritual frauds, a female Elmer Gantry decked out in Hollywood tinsel…

Then I was hearing other voices, closer to home: from my parents’ bedroom directly across the hall. I had heard Mother and Father argue before, had heard Ad nag him about his gambling or his tendency to surround himself with sycophants. But this time, even before I grasped what they were shouting about, I knew this was deeper and more dangerous.

“Now Ad, now Ad, be fair—God damn it, Ad!” Usually loud only when laughing or singing or retelling a favorite story, Father’s voice was trying to smother Mother’s attack. But she would not let go of her prey. She had it in her teeth now and she was going for the jugular like all
mothers protecting the lair. I put my earphones aside, sneaked out of bed, and crept to the door.

“
Hoor
!” The word spat into the night with a venom I had never heard from Mother before. “She’s nothing but a little
hoor.
Cheap little
kike
!” Father’s “Now goddamnit, Ad!”s were ineffective punctuations. Gone now was all the understanding from Mother’s five-foot shelf of psychoanalysis. It made me tremble. Who was this
hoor
? Who was this
little kike,
who was the mysterious third point to the triangle? When the name
Sylvia
flashed through the angry words, I became more frightened of what I was beginning to understand. It was Sylvia Sidney—Father’s luscious little plum-blossom, recently plucked from the New York stage.

Puritanical Hansels steeped in middle-class morality, Maurice and I saw Hollywood both as Baghdad and Our Town where, at the end of the working day, Dads come home to Moms—or should. If most males look back on their first sexual experience as a milestone on their road to manhood, for me from that moment at the door it was the shock of
Sylvia Sidney.
As I listened in the dark I felt no Oedipal leap of joy—at last my chance to move in on old Dad and take his wife! I felt: Oh my God! He’s going to leave home and live with
Sylvia Sidney
—how can I get Mom and Dad to stay together?

The verbal battle built to its inevitable crescendo of screams, shrieks, accusations—the fearful orchestration of domesticity undone. Then the slamming of the door. An ominous silence. I wondered if Father had gone to the bar or back to the Ambassador Hotel and the sultry young
hoor
whom movie fans were just beginning to take to their hearts. I crawled back into bed and began to cry.

I
N THE COURSE OF
righteous curiosity, I was to learn more about Sylvia Sidney. Her Hollywood debut, ironically, owed more to Mother’s talent-scouting abilities than to Father’s. On a trip to New York, taking in all the plays, Ben and Ad had seen the 20-year-old Sylvia in the risqué hit,
Strictly Dishonorable.
Mother prided herself on her ability to spot upcoming actors, directors, and writers who were still “unknowns.” And so that evening, it was Ad who raved about young Sidney’s promise and urged that they go back to her dressing room to introduce themselves. It could have been a scene from one of Father’s movies: the stylish matron in her middle thirties and the elegant, prematurely grey, articulate tycoon at the height of his power and confidence, going backstage to introduce themselves to the fetching ingénue.

Now that the Pola Negris and the Clara Bows were giving way to a new breed who could both dazzle and speak, B.P. was anxious to keep his studio abreast of L.B.’s, and so it was logical that he would back Mother’s judgment and sign young Sylvia before Mayer and Thalberg or the Warner Brothers snapped her up.

I watched Mother’s new rival on the set of
City Streets,
sitting close to my father while one of his new favorite directors, the brooding Rouben Mamoulian, put her through her paces. I sat with Father, Sylvia, and Mamoulian in the intimacy of the projection room, never sensing that the drama going on around me was more intense than the acting on the screen.

I must say, for both Father and Mother, that until the night their shouting brought me to my bedroom door, their public behavior had been so “correct” that even a greater sophisticate than their firstborn would have been deceived. Whenever I saw Father with Sylvia Sidney, or with any of his other glamorous leading ladies for that matter, he was always a model of decorum. And Mother, no matter what the provocation and humiliation, never took her children into her confidence, or tried to enlist our sympathies against our wandering “Pate,” as my sister now insisted on calling him. With a courage bordering on hypocrisy, Mother went sweetly on, pretending that Father’s habitual and now extended absences from home were due simply to the intense pressure of work at the studio.

My diary continued to be as evasive and self-protective as Mother’s daily cheerfulness. An occasional “worried about Mom and Dad” is as much as I would permit it to reveal of what was happening to our life.

But it was festering inside, so deeply that I could not share the pain of it even with Maurice, although we had shared every other experience from the age often. This time, when Father left home, I knew the reason and, as the dutiful elder son—and dedicated prude—I was determined to do something about it. It never occurred to me, of course, that my father and his young protégée might be in love. I loved our dog Gent and I loved to watch our homing pigeons circling high above their loft. I loved to watch the graceful half-miler, Eastman of Stanford, breeze toward the finish line, and I loved to watch a director who knew what he was doing—like King Vidor or Ernst Lubitsch—take control of his set. I loved to reel in a ten-pound bass from the Malibu kelp and I loved to “sleep over” at Maurice’s and talk about everything we liked or hated and feared until the tropical morning light began to creep under the window shades. Of loves we had many but of love we knew nothing. “Love” was what an actor professed to an actress on the movie screen. Clara Bow with Buddy Rogers in the big fade-out smooch. But that my 40-year-old father and the 20-year-old
gamine
could be physically, romantically, passionately, and even tragically in love was something my mind was as closed to as the big studio gate was to outsiders peering in.

I would give Miss Sidney no quarter. In my eyes there was nothing she could do to redeem herself, nothing to modify my preconception that Sylvia Sidney was simply the latest (and in Father’s case the most destructive) of the pretty little vampires who sucked his blood to fatten their studio careers. I had no idea how long Father’s liaison with Sidney
had been going on, but I knew that discretion on Mother’s part would not protect us from the country-club gossip and the wits who held forth in the studio commissary. If I had been living in a small midwestern town—well, maybe that’s what our Hollywood was—I could not have been more “mortified” by the public scandal that I knew was spreading from one end of the principality to the other, from Malibu to Culver City. I was a palm-tree Puritan.

From the sound of the midnight battle in the bedroom, I knew that Father’s studio cronies were in on It, and that of course Ad’s brother, Uncle Sam the studio manager, knew about It, as did his wife Milly, who loved to check in every morning for a detailed exchange of the news of the day with Poorsarah Mankiewicz, Herman’s wife. For Poorsarah and the ubiquitous Mank, no matter how much they owed to my father, also had a responsibility to their reputation as gossipmongers of a high order. So I could imagine those daily Aunt Milly-Poorsarah shovel-sessions. I could hear Milly’s stylized outcry, “I don’t be-leeve it!” Mildred Jaffe, Mother’s little protégée, who matriculated at Ad Schulberg University and eventually (inevitably) challenged her as our local Queen of Arts. We lived among orange groves that were really poison trees. I would even hear forked-tongue gossip that Aunt Milly had succumbed to the undeniable charms of my father.