Moving Pictures (54 page)

In retrospect, Eisenstein was one of those whose genius cannot accommodate
any
social system—as ill-fated for Zukor-Lasky
capitalism as for Stalin’s communism. And in between, soon after my interview with him, came his painfully expensive fiasco for socialist-independent Upton Sinclair, no less: the aborted
Thunder Over Mexico.
Eisenstein may have been to the movies what Michelangelo was to painting. But for all his great knowledge and insight, he lacked patrons.

That afternoon on the Paramount lot I found an Eisenstein who had wanted to be a painter with oils and now had moved on to a dedication to painting with moving-picture frames—becoming a mosaicist of moving pictures, as much an innovator in the late Twenties and early Thirties as was D. W. Griffith ten years earlier. Eisenstein had no illusions about what Paramount could do—and
not
do—for him and his revolutionary theories of filmmaking. He realized he was a misfit on a lot where box-office talents like Lubitsch’s and Von Sternberg’s could be so much more easily exploited. There was something about him that was not so much defeated as bemusedly resigned, like a chess master who had somehow wandered by mistake into the old Ebbets Field of the rowdy Brooklyn Dodgers and decided to sit through the game.

At the typewriter in my corner of Teet Carle’s office, I began transcribing my notes on Eisenstein. Of Soviet Russia I knew only the vague bits I had picked up from my mother’s socialist sympathies for Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens. I wondered why Eisenstein was wandering the corridors of Father’s studio when he could have been making another
Ten Days That Shook the World
in his own country. When I asked him about Father’s idea of making
War and Peace
with the cooperation of the Soviet Film Trust, Eisenstein said, “An interesting idea. But I don’t want to be limited to Russian subjects.” He found Hollywood itself a fascinating place. He wanted to explore California and the West, and even if
Sutter’s Gold
had been ingloriously shelved, he had not given up the idea of doing his own kind of socially oriented Western.

I was on my way to a full-scale appraisal of Paramount’s most unusual (if unused) acquisition when I was interrupted by a question from Teet Carle. “Buddy, how are you coming on your piece—what the stars wanted to do before they got into pictures?”

I had a fistful of notes, I told Teet, but there were at least two dozen I still hadn’t interviewed.

“I need that piece by the end of the day,” Teet said as sternly as a nice man can. And then he did what studio people called a double take—
“Buddy, you don’t mean you’re actually going around asking all the stars personally what their first ambition was?”

“Well, isn’t that what you asked me to do? I’ve cornered as many as I could, but—”

He stared at me dumbfounded. “Buddy, that would take all summer! What I meant for you to do was sit down and make it up. Like—Marlene Dietrich wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Maurice Chevalier wanted to be a pastry cook. Just think of the opposite of what they seem now… Just make it colorful and catchy. You’re not writing this for
Vanity Fair.
It’s for a lousy fan magazine. Mitzi Green wanted to be the first girl jockey. That kind of thing. You think the stars mind? It’s all part of the game. Now get going.”

A few hours of furious invention and I had it in hand. It turned out to be fun! In my studio cubbyhole I could play God: “Gloria Swanson wanted to be a Red Cross nurse and go overseas with the Rainbow Division in the Great War. …” The fact that she had been a 15-year-old starlet for the pioneer Essanay Studio in Chicago three years before we got into that war no longer got in my way. Never again in that first summer of studio work would I let an obtrusive fact clog the spinning wheels of the publicity machine. If I wanted to study the tormented career of a Sergei Eisenstein, I would have to do it on my own time.

O
F COURSE, THE ONE STAR ON THE LOT I WOULD NOT HAVE INTERVIEWED
if I had tripped over her was Sylvia Sidney. If I knew she was working on a set, even one I was eager to see, I would avoid it like the pox. A plague that would carry her off to the Hollywood Cemetery around the corner is what I wished for that little predator. While I didn’t exonerate my father, it was easier to focus my callow but bone-deep hatred on a stranger, an outsider, an intruder.

I took my problem to Felix Young, despite the fact that Mother always looked down on him as a poseur and a hanger-on with his fancy cologne, his raffish clothes, and his
eppis-
elegant speech. “Superficial” was Mother’s word for our friend Feel, and she may have been right that there was more style than substance in Father’s handpicked supervisor. And she may also have been right to assume that as a sycophant, without any noticeable qualifications except charm and panache, he would have to take Father’s side in the liaison. Mother even accused him of going further, of actually encouraging the affair and serving as a “beard” when Father and “the Sidney woman” appeared in public.

Nevertheless, Felix would listen, and so in his spacious office overlooking the studio quadrangle I poured out my feelings. In a few months I would be leaving Hollywood on my own for the first time since our arrival. (I had been accepted provisionally, at a far-off place called Dartmouth, but the consensus was that I was too young, emotionally unprepared for the great leap from Hollywood to Hanover; so, to ease the culture shock, I was to put in a transitional year at Deerfield
Academy in Massachusetts.) But, I told Felix, the tension between Father and Mother was now so intense—with constant bickering, open fighting, and Dad’s frequent disappearances—that I felt the family structure would tear apart if I weren’t there to hold it together. I simply had to make Father see the light. Otherwise, I pleaded with my Victorian morality, what would happen to Sonya, a gentle, introspective, and already somehow
lost
11-year-old, and little Stuart, who was only seven, and needed his family to develop normally? Because B.P., married to his work, had never been a real
father
-father, I felt responsible for my only sister and only brother. Not that I ever spent much time with them. Hardly a better “father” to them than their actual father, I moralized about them far more than I actually helped them. But, in my mind at least, I had become the family linchpin. How could I go east, with our home life in such disarray? I’m afraid I had read too much Dickens. Without me, I could see Father disintegrating into a hopeless drunk, Mother thrown on the mercies of a heartless society, and poor Sonya and Stuart winding up in the county orphanage.

Suave and soothing, Felix did his best to reassure me. I was too young to understand these things. No one was as perfect as I thought they should be. Maybe the best thing for me to do was not to interfere, try not to take it so hard, concentrate on my own job of doing well at Deerfield and developing my writing. Did I know Father thought I showed signs of becoming a better writer than he had been at my age—when he was on the threshold of his own career?

Although Felix spoke with genuine concern, it wasn’t good enough. I begged him to talk to Father about giving up Sidney. Make him realize how he was destroying our family and my peace of mind. Otherwise, I warned Feel, I was determined to take things into my own hands. I would call Mother and Father together before I left, and if I did not succeed in getting them to promise to bury their differences and resume life together, I would cancel my trip east and stay home to keep them together. And also, I told Feel, I was considering going to Sylvia Sidney myself, telling her off, and—I added almost casually—threatening to kill her unless she left Father alone.

By this time my moral guide had switched from Dickens to Dostoevsky. Felix urged me not to do anything foolish and promised to help put our house back together.

Working hard at the studio, playing furious tennis on Malibu weekends, I was unable to take Felix Young’s advice not to worry so much
about Sidney. Dad still took me to the Friday-night fights, but tension between us spoiled the old excitement when we rooted together for our Jewish champions. He was still living with us, technically, but Sylvia and her mother had rented a large house just outside the Malibu Colony, only a few miles south, and it was now an open secret as to where he spent his time away from the studio. It was a knife twist in the wound to have to pass her place on the Pacific Highway on the way to our once-peaceful Green Gate Cottage.

By this time, in place of my jazzy Model-A roadster, I had inherited Father’s Dusenberg phaeton. A notoriously poor driver, he found it easier to operate his Lincoln roadster. For some reason, maybe because of his erratic habits, he did not like to use the chauffeur. It made him self-conscious, he said, to have someone sitting in a car waiting for hours while he watched rushes, went off the lot for occasional luncheon meetings at Perino’s or Victor Hugo’s, stopped at the Clover Club, or (though he didn’t admit this) went on his nocturnal prowls.

Driving back from the studio in midtown Hollywood, once I reached the two-lane Coast Road I would gun that fifteen-thousand-dollar toy until the murky ocean on my left and the sunbaked palisades on my right were falling away behind me at a speed of almost one hundred miles an hour. That was a
real
Duzie. Sold later to a professional antique-car collector, it turns up occasionally in movies trying to recapture the look of luxury in the early Thirties.

I felt I was paying for that car pretty dearly by having to drive it past Miss Sidney’s beach house in order to reach our two-story “cottage.” Sometimes I would slow down, stare at the forbidding fence of the Sidney house and think dark thoughts about what was happening within. There must be some way I could put death into that house! Like using the tomcod I caught off the pier, lacing them with strychnine and leaving them at the gate with a clever note: “Dear Dad, I was thinking of you when I caught these fish, and …” Or I would wonder if I could sneak something lethal into the groceries being delivered from the Malibu store. Or should I simply barge in and drag my father out? If Father thought he could buy me off with a Dusenberg… I gunned it to the floor and raced on into the Colony. Mother was there, taking a tennis lesson. I felt sorry for her. I told her how well things were going at the “Stude”—at least my little corner of it.

She said she was anxious about Father. Careful not to mention Sidney, she went on: “I’m worried about his concentration.” Not since
he entered The Industry was he in greater need of it. No longer was moviemaking the carefree carnival it had seemed in the Twenties. The invisible intrigue of finance capital was setting in. Until now, Famous Players-Lasky, despite its Wall Street backing, had been a personal company, with Zukor in New York and Lasky in Hollywood maintaining almost as much control as when they had founded the company some twenty years earlier. But the innovation of
sound,
plus the delayed pinch of the Depression, was throwing The Industry into its first convulsion. Soundproofing the giant stages, investing in new equipment both for production and exhibition sent costs soaring, while profits were pinwheeling down like a fighter plane crashing in
Wings.
The hundred shares of stock that Father had given me for my fifteenth birthday when it was selling at 75, and that he had been sure would be worth more than twice as much by the time I finished high school, had plunged to 1. Insiders who were backing it on margin—like the free-spirited Lasky, one of the more lovable of the moguls—were losing much more than their shirts; they were losing their oceanfront mansions.

Overexpansion and the pressure of the times had led to a vicious power fight for control of the Company. In the early days, when Hodkinson and his Paramount chain had tried to absorb Famous Players-Lasky, Zukor and his henchmen had turned the tables and swallowed Paramount instead. This time the opposition was tougher—Sam Katz, of Balaban and Katz, the Chicago theater chain, was moving in on the Company, through his (and Paramount’s) subsidiary, Publix; so was Sidney Kent, the self-made ex-boiler stoker from Lincoln, Nebraska, whom Zukor had put in charge of distribution in the early twenties. The battle for control of the stock between Katz and Kent made pawns of the patriarchal Zukor and the flamboyant Lasky, while Father was at the mercy of them all. In this internecine struggle, the cautious Zukor would survive, if never again the power he had been, and poor Jesse, overextended and outmaneuvered, would come crashing down, forced out of the Company that had mushroomed from the amalgamation of his Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company with Zukor’s Famous Players. When Sam Katz had outfoxed (or, as B.P. said, outkatzed) rival Sidney Kent, Lasky lost his champion. But tough little Zukor hadn’t been a banty East Side fighter for nothing. Exiled to South America for a while, he was kicked upstairs as chairman of the board.

As a studio politician, Father was more like Lasky than like Zukor, more impetuous and partisan, less cautious and shrewd. He had a
disturbing habit of saying what he thought and, on his third or fourth highball, of saying it a little too loudly. Mother, on the other hand, was battle-tough like Zukor. She was a lady now, but she knew the “gracious living” to which she had become accustomed demanded
gelt,
as her poor relations would have put it. And to make, keep, and expand
gelt
demanded self-discipline and forethought—hers.

With the collapse of the old Paramount, with heads as high as Lasky’s rolling into the basket, she was convinced that only her own highly developed art of survival could keep Ben’s head from tumbling after Jesse’s. Concerned for him because she loved him with the fierce devotion of Ruth for Boaz, she was also dedicated to the preservation of that half-a-million-dollar annual income on which she was determined to build a family dynasty.

“Schulberg has the best mind in the whole industry,” Mother would say to me, using the surname as a First Lady might in lieu of saying “The President.” “He’s much better-read than Irving [Thalberg, our patron saint]. But Irving knows how to protect himself, even against Louie [Mayer]. Schulberg is reckless. He loves to take chances. He goes out of his way to make enemies of powerful people who might be helpful to him later. I know he doesn’t like to hear it, but right now Schulberg needs me more than ever.”