Moving Pictures (56 page)

I was merciless: “Go on, get in there, you yellow son of a bitch!”

As possessed in his way as I was in mine, Father walked through the doorway and into the house.

I ran ahead of him to alert Mother.

“Mom, he’s home! I brought Dad home!”

If Dad had wanted to walk out now, I would not have had the strength to stop him. But he stayed. He asked where Sonya and Stuart were. Sone was down the beach with Adela Rogers’s precocious daughter, Elaine, and Stu was up the beach with Maurice’s little brother, Matty. Mother and Father sat facing each other, making polite conversation about my imminent drive east. Mother urged me to write down the numbers of all my traveler’s checks, and Father warned me not to
pick up strangers. There were so many people out of work now, on the bum, and possibly dangerous. “What I’m worried about,” I said, “is what’ll happen to you.”

There was an awkward silence and I decided to leave them alone. Upstairs, I stared out at the ocean that had been our front yard since Ad first discovered Malibu. To the south I could see the rickety pier where Maurice and I had caught hundreds of tomcod. Then I looked out at the manicured Japanese farms that stretched behind us all the way to the green foothills. I wondered if I should pack my tennis cup, decided that would be ostentatious, reread the latest version of “Ugly” that my U.S.C. mentor Mrs. Stanton thought “almost ready for a ‘little magazine,’” and gazed at my favorite print of Washington Irving’s ivy-covered castle on the Hudson. I would rather have his life, I thought to myself, than that of a Hollywood mogul. I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if my father had persevered as a writer and never moved up through the ranks of Famous Players to his glamorous but precarious sunken office. Would his drinking and gambling and Sidneying have been this excessive? Knowing nothing but Hollywood, having been exposed all my life to its opportunists, sycophants, pimps, and “hoors,” and wanting to absolve my father as much as possible, I was inclined to shift the blame to the impersonal amalgam we called “Hollywood.”

At dinner that evening there was forced gaiety as Lucille showed off with her rare roast beef, popovers, glazed sweet potatoes, and chocolate souffle. Father was sober, very sober. I was too self- or family-absorbed to wonder how he had explained to Sylvia his continued absence from her hearth.

Already caught up in his story conferences and rushes, he didn’t accompany me to the railroad station—but I went in style in the chauffeur-driven Lincoln gold bric-a-brac town car, with Mother, Sonya, Uncle Sam, and of course Maurice to see me off on the crack overnight
Lark
to San Francisco. There I would hitch up with Rudy Pacht, the husky, easygoing all-city fullback from Hollywood High who was driving east with me, he to Dartmouth, where I would follow if I made good at Deerfield. Heading north through miles of orange groves that were still the landmark of outer Los Angeles, I wrote in my diary with solemnity: “I am going through a great deal before I see them again. After the train pulled out I cried—just a bit. Then I read quite late.”

C
ROSS-COUNTRY DRIVING IN THE EARLY THIRTIES, ONLY A LITTLE LESS
adventurous than in covered-wagon days, offered scenery instead of speed. As we bounced along the narrow road that twisted up the Pacific Coast into Oregon, there was time for the awesome redwoods and the great pines holding the coastline against a white-water ocean. Sometimes the engine boiled over and the tires went flat. Daily crises brought us close to the people and the land. There were sleepy towns with names that ran round and round in the mind like half-remembered poetry: Ukiah … Fortuna … Eureka … Our ratty car was like a pinto pony, driven all day to the point of exhaustion. A list of expenses for an average day on the road is a faded snapshot of the times:

Aug. 22               
[1931]

Hotel                   $1.00

Gas                      3.00

Breakfast             .50

Lunch                  .45

Candy                 .10

Soda                    .15

Supper                 .75

Stamps                .05

Post cards            .05

Tip                       .10

Total                    $6.15

We toured the campuses of Oregon and Oregon State Universities, swam in the Columbus River (lunch 20¢, supper 45¢), and when, out of gas, we coasted into Pendleton, it was almost as if I had reversed course onto the studio back lot. “Pendleton,” wrote the road-battered Hollywood prince, “is a typical little western town, with everyone wearing half-gallon hats and blank expressions—as if they’ve been around their cows so long they’ve begun to look like them.”

Across the Montana border, “the road gave up any ambition of being a road … result was a rocky lane which vibrated every bone in my body. Troy, where we had a tough roast beef (65¢), is undoubtedly the World’s Worst Place. Lacking one paved street, the burg is a typical old-western town with a pack of booted hicks lounging on the corner. The houses are most dilapidated and even the women look run-down.”

We were averaging 15 miles an hour now, hugging a narrow dirt road winding around a mountain. A lumber truck approaching from the opposite direction provoked a life-and-death crisis. Shouted at to move over, I complied until my left wheels were hanging over the edge, in the air, Harold Lloyd-style. Later, in a Montana ranch town, “The movie house is a rattrap of 100 seats. The picture,
Ship of Hate,
typifies both the town and the theater.” Since American ingenuity was yet to present us with one of our great cultural forward thrusts, the motel, we stayed in dusty two-story hotels where the going rate was one dollar a night. “There is a rope tied to my bed which is to be thrown out the window and slid down in case of fire. I don’t know which I’d rather do—slide down the rope or fry.” And before sinking down into his lumpy bed, the western-weary traveler makes a final observation: “Montana is beautiful virgin country—but the roads are more virgin than beautiful.”

To a Los Angeleno raised on Westerns of Art Acord, Tom Mix, Tim McCoy, and Hoot Gibson, the real West, or at least the one-tacky-hotel western town, was an eyesore. Missing our Hollywood bungalow courts, I complained that we were motoring back into the 1880s. In a sleepy stopover named Challott, where the only restaurant bore the faded legend EATS, the most prominent sign in town read “Funeral Parlor. Nice Assortment of Caskets.” On the way to Yellowstone National Park we not only ran out of gas but had a flat; when the car fell off its flimsy jack into a road of tar softened by summer heat, we waited for hours until a good Samaritan arrived in a wood truck and not only jacked us up but siphoned a gallon of gas from his own tank.

At Old Faithful, the mysterious geyser that goes off every sixty
minutes according to its own primordial clock, more serious disaster brushed our shoulder, although we would not feel its grip until the following day. It seemed a happy coincidence that we met Ralph Cohn, son of Jack Cohn, the nicer of the two brothers who ran Columbia. Ralph was on his way to Cornell with his roommate Bernie and, considering the hazards of western auto travel, it seemed logical that we drive on in tandem.

The wisdom of this decision proved out almost immediately. While we were giving high marks to the beauty of Teton National Park, our car ran out of gas again. When two gallons had been siphoned from Ralph’s and it still refused to start, we had to be towed ignominiously into Jackson, the first truly wild-west town I had ever seen. Horsepower came mostly from horses there, tied to hitching posts while their riders shouldered through the swinging doors of the side-by-side saloons that opened on the raised wooden walkway. I was used to seeing people getting drunk in their homes, and Father staggering in from casinos and “speaks,” but in those days of national Prohibition, these were the first wide-open bars I had ever seen. The town, we were told, had a population of 333, of which the entire male population seemed to be in a state of extreme inebriation. The lone gas-station attendant was drunk, and stared at our dead engine and admitted he “don’t know how to fix the damn thing.” When I asked if the Sheriff might be able to help us out, he pointed with an oily finger: “Most of the time he’s drunk. You’ll find ’ im in one o’ them saloons across the street.”

Somewhere along the way Ralph and Bernie had picked up a pair of girl hitchhikers. Fairly attractive, tough country girls. We all had supper together in a greasy spoon while a would-be mechanic tinkered with our stubborn Chevy. The girls were on their way to Cheyenne, and urged Ralph and Bernie to take them along. Since the two couples were already holding hands, and since Cheyenne was directly on our route, why should there be any objection? Girl-shy and puritanical, I said I didn’t like the idea. In this unreconstructed Old West, I could feel the hostility against outsiders, intensified by unspoken but unmistakable anti-Semitism, and I thought the presence of two Wyoming girls would not improve our welcome at gas stations and lunch counters. But I was outvoted by the two swains and the amiable Rudy.

Next day on the winding road from Jackson to Rock Spring, we were following Ralph’s car, Rudy laughing at the ostentatious necking between both couples that had been going on for miles. Suddenly, on a
sharp turn, Ralph turned his head to the girl, lost his grip on the wheel, and as we watched it like a horror show, the car went catapulting off the road and into an open field where it cartwheeled over and over, finally crashing to a halt upside down. We heard the screams and the splattering of glass, jumped out of the car, and ran toward them.

I wish I could tell a tale of schoolboy heroics, dragging bleeding victims from a burning wreck. In truth, the next thing I knew strange men were bending over me, strange hands were lifting me onto a stretcher, and it was only then that I came to, and sheepishly confessed, “No, I’m okay… I was in the car behind.” They had found me lying near the other bodies in a dead faint. In disgust they dropped me back on the ground and turned their attention to the real victims. Silently, Rudy and I followed the ambulance into Rock Spring.

My diary picks up the thread: “Tragedy hit us hard today. A girl who we never knew existed yesterday is fighting for her life at the hospital. (Fractured skull, face lacerated by glass, arm and leg broken.) Bernie has a bad head wound and Ralph is also injured, though less seriously. The other girl, miraculously if you saw the total wreckage of the car, is only superficially bruised and cut.”

So there were Rudy and I holed up in a dingy hotel in a tough little Wyoming town with the other girl, a strange and frightened trio locked together while we kept the hospital vigil. Diary scolds my lack of decision the night before: “I wanted to say
no
—but I settled for ‘I’m not wild about the idea.’ I didn’t argue enough. I’ve learned a great lesson today—to follow my own inclinations from now on. Please God! Let her live! Back and forth to the hospital many times. One time almost fainted again. Everything went white. The other girl is scared to death. Why in hell didn’t I say
no!
It looks lousy with these girls here and we didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with it.”

Maybe we didn’t, but it seemed as if the whole town had put us on trial and already found us guilty. The waspish hotel clerk glared at us as we left our key at the desk next morning. Unfriendly eyes followed us through the airless lobby. The waitress shoved our eggs at us and hurried away as if we were lepers. As we walked the now-familiar route to the local hospital, the citizens of Rock Spring stared at us as if we were horned creatures sprung from the Moon. Ralph and Bernie, the architects of our fate, were isolated in their hospital beds and we, with the stranger-girl ever-present at our side, the Unholy Three, were exposed to the cold hatred of a myopic western town. (Almost fifty years later, Rock
Spring would be described as one of the most wide-open as well as paranoid towns left in the West.) Nervously, Rudy and I considered the possibility that if the girl should die, a spontaneous posse might close in on us and string us up to the nearest tree. It didn’t take Houdini to read their narrow minds:
Them dirty Hollywood Jews can’t keep their lecherous hands off
’
n our young girls.
Even the hospital staff were barely civil as they gave us the latest bulletins: Ralph would be out in a few days and Bernie would recover, but the girl’s life was still in the balance.

At the drugstore the bald-headed proprietor pulled my milk-shake glass away.

“Wait a minute, I haven’t f-f-finished,” I protested.

“I’m closin’ up,” he said through tight lips, and poured the rest of my milk shake down the drain. I was convinced that he was the Head Dragon of the local Klan fixin’ to do us in.

Back at the hotel, I phoned Ralph’s father at his studio. Long-distance calls were still such a luxury that we hadn’t thought to call home simply to report our progress along the way. Mr. Cohn was relieved about Ralph and told us how to report the accident to the insurance company. But he did not see how it would help matters for him to come to Rock Spring himself. I had been hoping he would relieve us of our embarrassing hospital watch. Instead, he advised us to get in touch with the manager of the local Rialto Theater, which played Paramount pictures, and let him guide us through our dilemma.

A few days later, when the girl was finally declared out of danger and Ralph was able to leave the hospital and keep the vigil, Rudy and I checked out of that hostile hotel, to the undisguised relief of the theater manager, torn between his obligation to come to the aid of these errant scions of Hollywood and his concern that this association would be bad for business.

We sped away from Rock Spring like prisoners going over the wall. Driving all day and all night, the nightmare West was finally behind us. The roads of Iowa were “smooth as glass—and no speed limits! No flats or lack of gas today!”

Chicago: “Same old noisy, windy place. Hitting Michigan Boulevard is like finding a pearl in a garbage can.” Notre Dame: “Disappointing, with dirty-looking buildings and ragged grounds.” Niagara: “Same old Falls, a beautiful sight marred by the commercialism and the crowd you have to fight through to see it. A head waiter in full-dress refused to seat
us because my cords were so dirty and badly ripped.” New York, on Labor Day: “Two million people leaving the mountains and beach resorts—the last day of vacation—torturous driving, three miles an hour—a line of cars ahead of me as far as I can see. What a day I picked to drive to a city of seven million!”