Moving Pictures (55 page)

From the beach house a few miles south of us, the one I had marked in my mind with a scarlet
A,
I could almost hear “Schulberg” saying, “Buddy, your mother is right. But she’ll say the same thing nine straight times, until comes the tenth, you’re so sick of hearing yourself say, ‘You’re right, Ad, you’re right!’ that you want to do just the opposite!”

Once they had been two prongs of a tuning fork producing a single sound. Now the prongs had been pried apart.

At this critical moment in his personal and professional life, Father had to make a key address at the Company’s convention in Denver. Over at MGM, Louie Mayer—with the chestbeating and crocodile tears for which he deserved an Oscar—had begged his employees to accept a 50 percent cut to keep the studio solvent. Secretaries and office boys complained in private (to avoid the wrath of hatchet man Eddie Mannix) that L.B.’s cutting his salary from a million to half a million a year was not the same as cutting theirs from forty dollars a week to twenty. At Paramount,
New York
(now becoming
Chicago)
was in favor of a similar cut. Father resisted the cut not only for himself, but for the army of employees at the bottom of the ladder. Instead he advocated shutting
down the Astoria studio where Walter Wanger reigned as his opposite number. There was wasteful duplication, Father charged, and the eastern studio had not justified its existence.

“Dad will be back tomorrow,” read my Malibu diary. “Everything turned out fine. He won’t have to take the cut (or all the others either) and Walter Wanger is out. I believe the Eastern Studio is to be closed, so Dad must have enjoyed great success at his Denver confabs.”

Despite Mother’s fears, he had held on to his room at the top. While admitting that the recent product had not lived up to expectations, he had held out rosy prospects for 1932, with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Dietrich, Lubitsch, Powell and Lombard, Cary Grant, and another important discovery, Sylvia Sidney…. From the divided convention, he had received a standing ovation and a nearly unanimous vote of confidence. His studio court circle had met his train at Pasadena and in the traditional sleek black limousine had driven him back to Paramount in triumph. So, according to Father, Mother’s alarums had been only another example of her overprotectiveness. She had to feel that she was in command, the power behind the throne, “what every woman knows,” and that without her he would fall from his high wire.

Too busy cranking out publicity releases to cope with my diary, I returned to it on my last payday at the “Stude”: “Quit work today. Hated to leave the old place. Mr. Reeve said I had made good. Played tennis all day in preparation for the tournament… the best Saturday tennis of my life….”

Next day’s entry: “WON THE CUP! An all-star audience of actors, actresses, producers, and directors filled the pavilion. Father arrived alone, looking both dapper and slightly hung over in his Sunday whites, waving his impressive Upmann like a royal wand as he greeted famous employees and guests from rival studios. Mother was coolly correct. I felt ashamed at this public acknowledgment of their separation, at the first gathering both had attended since the rupture. Still I was grateful to them for being there rooting for me.”

Winning the silver Capra Cup in doubles was a major challenge to this marginal athlete who would have traded three Freddie Marches for one Ellsworth Vines. With the seriousness of a Wimbledon finalist, I had turned in early, jogged and wind-sprinted the length of the beach before
breakfast, cooled off in the ocean rolling up toward our fence, run through calisthenics, and knelt in the quiet of my bedroom in desperate prayer.

The shy exterior of the child stammerer hid a fierce if largely frustrated competitiveness. Now that I had proved in the Paramount publicity department that I was no mere “producer’s son,” I wanted—oh, how I wanted!—that cup: my Holy Grail. Proof that I was not a flawed but a true knight of Malibu.

At the end of a triumphant day the would-be jock (rather than the would-be Melville) recorded: “First set, marched through them 6-0. Then tired and lost 6-2. In the last set they led 3-1 and 40-0 and things looked black. I played my best here, driving every serve. Even at 4-all, we went on to win. What a match. Three times today we won games after trailing 0-40. That’s what I call fight!”

Back in the Schulberg beach house, a victory party was in progress. There was a supper buffet with the gleaming silver trophy, surrounded by flowers cut from our garden, as the centerpiece. The finest whiskey our studio bootlegger could supply inspired alcoholic laughter. Couples were dancing to the current hits as played by our local favorite, Abe Lyman and his Orchestra.

The redheaded Irwin Gelsey, our studio tennis-champ, “drank a lot and was a riot.” Gelsey entertained with imitations of the eccentricities of “our crowd,” drawing screams with his impersonation of our Hungarian star Paul Lukas, who invariably cried “Out!” the moment his opponent’s racket met the ball. Looking around at our Beautiful People, vintage ’31, laughing it up, drinking it up, there to make merry in the house of the influential forty-year-old hostess, a familiar sound was missing: the hearty laughter of my father. He could outlaugh all the professional laughers at the party, Jack Oakie, Frank Fay, and Eddie Lowe (from whom he won $800 that day, betting me to win at 5 to 8). Exulting in athletic victory while feeling trapped in our domestic triangle, in adolescent dismay I watched Mother dancing with Gelsey and her other admirers.

Next day, my sober diary reports: “Drove into town to the Studio. Said goodbye to the publicity department again.” Since I had said my goodbyes to everyone I knew, from publicity chief Arch Reeve to the lowest mail clerks, what more was there to say two days later? But the “Stude” had been my nest ever since I could remember. Now I was going
off alone into the Eastern Unknown. At lunch I said goodbye to the commissary—to the stars and the Writers’ Table, to the cutters and the cameramen, to the grips and the secretaries, to eager mailroom boys, some of whom I would know later as producers and hot-shot agents. From the world-famous to the lowly, my extended family. Was I over-dramatizing these goodbyes, like Sarah Bernhardt’s ceremonies of farewell? Or was it the realization that I was finally taking leave of my Hollywood childhood, still innocent but no longer an Innocent?

Back in the office of our unofficial family counselor, “I talked to Felix Young again. More trouble brewing—I’m not even putting it in here—that’s how important it is. Felix has been nice about it and is trying to help—but it is almost too late—Jesus Christ! Got all choked up when I spoke to him. Oh my God. Why is there so much dissension in this God-damned world?”

That evening Mother, Sonya, and I picked up the Viertels, Mother’s kind of people: Berthold, a poet-dreamer who had been a distinguished German stage director before he became an unlikely Hollywood movie director when B.P. signed him for a series of pictures; Salka, a former actress for Max Reinhardt, a strong, assertive personality, definitely the wearer of the pants in that family, soon to become Garbo’s confidante, favorite film writer, and—some whispered—lover.

Next day I went to MGM with Maurice—now set for Stanford—for another round of farewells. Metro had been our other playground from grammar-school days; we had roughhoused with George K. Arthur, joked with Slickum, Metro’s answer to Paramount’s Oscar the Bootblack, gaped at Greta Garbo. I had exchanged stutters with Marion Davies and had been privileged to sit at the long executive dining table where the eloquent, illiterate L. B. Mayer presided with an unctuous authority I despised. Around him were his court, tough men like ex-bouncer Eddie Mannix and agent-pimp (with a touch of
Little Caesar)
Frank Orsatti.

In contrast to “my” studio, the atmosphere of the ruling circle at Metro was oppressively totalitarian. The most heinous crimes could be committed and covered up. Mannix was the studio’s hit man; Irving Thalberg, vice-president in charge of quality at MGM, was as much of a tyrant as L.B., though he ruled his half of the studio with a softer touch. Maurice’s father Harry, the program-picture
maven,
lacked the drive for
power that kept Mayer and Thalberg at the top—and also at each other’s throats. A favorite victim of the cruel wit of the Writers’ Table, because of his enormous nose and his Goldwynlike malapropisms, Harry was a crude but gentle man who knew his show business, from Joan Crawford musicals to Wallie Beery-Marie Dressler-Polly Moran comedies. My parents, and the Hollywood literati in general, looked down on him as an ignoramus, but I thought of him as a warmhearted father-figure who may have lacked my father’s erudition but was more dependable domestically. I didn’t know at the time that Joan Crawford had been Harry Rapf s “Sylvia Sidney” and that a second domestic crisis was brewing on Lorraine Boulevard. The Crawford affair was a fairly well-kept secret while Father and Sidney, with their provocative Malibu arrangement, invited the attention of the gossipmongers.

At Metro, L.B., with the elocution he had developed so doggedly, told me to give his good wishes “to Ad, a wonderful woman and a fine mother.” Although it was an open secret that Orsatti and the casting directors fed him a regular supply of starlets, Mayer seemed to be running on a platform of Motherhood and Family Togetherness. As if my father did not exist, L.B. suggested that if there was no place for me at Paramount when I came back from prep school, I could always join Maurice at MGM.

In his paternalistic tyranny, there seemed to be not the slightest doubt in Mayer’s mind that we would return for grooming as eventual producers. It even struck me as a form of bribery, to lure me away from his enemies, B.P. and Paramount. I doubt that L.B. had ever read a book, but he knew his Machiavelli: master of on-cue emotionalism, of threats sweetened with flattery, of divide and rule. Sharing Father’s contempt for him, I treated him like a dangerous enemy, promising to drop in on him and his wife Margaret (of whom I was fond and for whom I felt sorry) when I returned.

Then I recrossed undeveloped West Los Angeles to have my first shave at—where else?—the Paramount studio barbershop. I had done my first boxing in the studio gym, and when I broke my arm at L.A. High in a frenzied effort to clear five feet in the high jump, it had been to the studio clinic that I rushed, to Dr. Strathern, who obligingly set my left arm without lining up the palm of my hand with the inside of my elbow. I would carry the twisted arm with me all my life, but as with so many Hollywood flaws, no one ever seemed to notice. In the barbershop, head barber Bill Ring boasted that he would remind me of my first
shave when I returned from college to take over the studio. Even in those troubled Paramount days, no one on the lot entertained any doubts about the rights of divine succession. I was the Prince of Marathon Street, shyness, stutter, and all.

I called my parents together for a farewell showdown. It took place, with great solemnity, in the library of the Lorraine house. How could I go east with any peace of mind, I challenged them, if Father was still living away from home? Unless they gave me their promise to reconcile, I would cancel my trip.

Mother cried a little and Father stammered that they both were proud of me, hoped I would concentrate on my studies and writing at Deerfield, and try to worry less about their personal differences.

After an hour, I went up to my room with a sinking feeling that I had failed. The best I was able to get from Father was that he loved all of us and would do his best to work things out. In my bedroom I punched my bag lackadaisically, looked out at my flock of pigeons, fingered my old long-distance Superheterodyne, and cryptically confided to my diary, “Spoke to Dad and Mom but somehow couldn’t tell them in just the words I had chosen previously.”

That night, after packing the four books I had chosen for the long drive east—
Famous Russian Short Stories,
Emil Ludwig’s
Genius and Character,
Herbert Asbury’s
Gangs of New York,
and Francis Wallace’s football novel,
Huddle
—overexcited and deeply upset I indulged in dreams of glory as to how I would settle the Sidney affair. If I could not bring myself to poison or drown her, there must be some other way.

The next day was ritual: The Last Swim. The Last Talk with Maurice. The Last Talk with Mom. The last of the last farewells. One would have thought I was leaving for Darkest Africa with slim hope of survival. I took my Dusenberg out for a Last Spin because I would be driving a democratic Chevy across the country to New England. I did some farewelling along the beach mansions of Santa Monica, including Margaret Mayer, whom I found alone in their big house, painting a crude still life.

On my way back the Duzie was racing along when suddenly, as if with an impulse of its own, it braked to a halt at the Sidney house. In a kind of trance, the young driver got out of his chariot and strode toward the gate. To his surprise it was open. As if sleepwalking, he followed the
wooden walk until it brought him to a side porch. Slowly he walked up the steps and through a screen door. There on an oversized couch facing the ocean sat Sylvia Sidney, with her mother. And pacing, scotch highball in one hand, a big cigar in the other, was Father, apparently just returned from the studio.

He was in mid-sentence when he saw me. Undoubtedly reciting the tribulations of the day, which had been mounting as company enemies kept sniping, and other stars complained that B.P. was picking the choice roles for Sylvia at their expense. Now, as I materialized in this alien place, the eyes of my father bulged in disbelief. Sylvia and her mother stared, waiting to see what I would do.

I was waiting, too. I have never known a sensation like this, before or since. I must have been, quite simply, possessed. I could feel a trembling all through my body. When I finally spoke, it was with a new voice—and words I had never used before, certainly not to my father:

“You son of a bitch! You’re coming home with me. Right now, you son of a bitch!”

I was grabbing Father by the arm and pulling him toward the door. My body and my spirit were stronger than his. I pulled him out through the screen door, down the wooden walkway, and out to the Dusenberg. At the running board he resisted, but I had the door open and pushed him in. The Duzie sprang forward like a trusty steed and I, in my own mind, must have been Malibu’s Galahad, strengthened by ten because my heart was pure. I dragged Father out of the car and up the walk to Green Gate Cottage. At the entrance to the house he tried to pull away. “Buddy, I can’t! I can’t!”