Moving Pictures (59 page)

On the train were two Deerfield boys I had met in New York. Snooty and formal, they addressed me as “Schulberg.” In the Far West we were used to instant informality. These eastern boarding-school types acted like little old men. I wondered if everybody at Deerfield would be like that. What if I found it unbearable? I wouldn’t have Mother and her luxurious St. Moritz suite to return to. Even the innovator, Mother was off to Soviet Russia with Irma Weitzenkorn, pausing first to visit Latvian relatives in Dvinsk where it all began. This was in the days when Red Russia was not considered worthy of diplomatic recognition—that would come a year or two later with the new spirit of F.D.R. How did Mother arrange to travel through the Soviet Union before American passports were accepted? I could picture her marching past border patrols and insisting that the secret police guide her to her hotel in Leningrad. Maybe she used her gold Paramount pass or explained that her mission was to show my short stories to Maxim Gorky. If she had brought Gorky home to Hollywood to write screenplays for Father, it would not have surprised me.

Passport or no passport, Mother was ready for Russia. She had read Steffens on the Revolution—“I have seen the future and it works”—and the pioneer books of Maurice Hindus
(Red Bread, Humanity Uprooted)
and she didn’t have any qualms about coping with Stalin. In her mind, he couldn’t be any more difficult than Louie B. Mayer, whom she had eating out of her hand.

From the moment I arrived I loved the look of Deerfield, the aged-wood no-nonsense architecture of the 17
^th
-century houses, the green meadows stretching to the great New England river, the Connecticut. Because my hometown Hollywood was so new—a beanstalk sprung up in the Twenties—I felt a reverence for the past, the old farmhouses, the village cemetery where old-fashioned homilies engraved in weathered stone stood over venerable Ebenezers and Abigails, and for the river that ran all the way from northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound, making New England history while our California was still an Eden for aborigines.

But of course I hadn’t come to Deerfield merely for scenery and
tradition. There was a formidable headmaster and a demanding curriculum. I had never been exposed to that kind of tight-minded discipline; my natural response was to resist it and hate it. A loud morning bell brought rude awakening; we were herded (or so it felt to me) to group meals of what seemed prison fare, like porridge for breakfast and creamed beef on toast for lunch. I loathed having to make my bed and keep my room neat, and worst of all having to submit to the routine inspection of the house proctor. I had read enough Dickens to feel like an overgrown David Copperfield. Or Tom Brown at Rugby. No, I wasn’t caned, or hazed. But in those early weeks, feeling so far from home and out of place, I took a psychological beating that made me check off the ten weeks until Christmas vacation like a prisoner counting down to the end of his sentence.

My classmates, nearly all from eastern private schools, treated me with patronizing curiosity, making me feel like a pointy-eared Martian who had mysteriously materialized in their midst. They had never encountered anyone from Hollywood before; their questions were tinged with sexual curiosity mingled with haughty disdain: They assumed that I had been raised on orgies with uninhibited starlets. Walking blindfold on a high wire, I tried to conceal the ridiculous fact that I never so much as held hands with a wicked young would-be. I had to pretend to be an accomplished Lothario or they would have thought me even stranger than I appeared. As it was, being Jewish, a stammerer, from exotic Hollywood, a newcomer to a senior class that had been together for three years, I was an obvious target for schoolboy wit. If I were not actually persona non grata, I felt myself to be persona barely grata.

At night in my monastic cell I would confess in letters to Maurice my subterfuge and my panic when hallmates asked me why I didn’t have a picture of my girl, or of some of those movie kittens with whom I let them believe I frolicked. “When I come home for Christmas, I have to get a picture of a girl,” I wrote Maurice, who was caught in a similar dilemma among five hundred Stanford coeds.

The heart and soul and spine and sinew of Deerfield was Mr. Frank Boyden, always referred to, English-school fashion, as “The Quid,” a strong-willed, puritanical headmaster fanatical in his devotion to his school, having built it from a modest country school to a New England “prep” rivaling such long-established institutions as Hotchkiss, Choate, and Loomis. Revered as an outstanding example of New England
scholarship, he considered himself a molder of young men. But in me he found unruly clay. The general attitude of the student body toward him was an amalgam of admiration, awe, and fear. Again I was made to feel strangely alone because, while others might grumble about the strictness of The Quid, I was the only one who really detested him.

Our first meeting was not exactly propitious. Father had suggested that if Deerfield lacked motion-picture equipment, he would provide projectors and a supply of Paramount films for weekend entertainment. Mr. Boyden was not overwhelmed by this offer. He would have to think about it, he said, because his time was too valuable to spend at the movies, and he did not regard them as healthy influence on the student body. I may have been hypersensitive, but in his contempt for
movies
I sensed a veiled, genteel anti-Semitism. But there was one thing movies
could do,
he acknowledged. If I could get my hands on a movie camera, I could photograph our football team in action. It might be helpful to the coaches and players to study their mistakes. And scenes of our games could be shown at the Sunday evening “sings.”

The Quid was an avid booster of Deerfield athletics. It was an open secret that along with our gentleman athletes he recruited players from the working-class neighborhoods of mill towns like Holyoke and Haverhill. Most of these “ringers” lived with me in the Old Dorm to which the sloppier members of the student body were consigned. The “good boys,” housed in the New Dorm, kept their rooms immaculate and were proud of the sharp creases along the edge of their beds. Visitors were invariably given a tour of the New Dorm.

Although The Quid was a stern disciplinarian, he clearly pampered the star football, baseball, and basketball players. That was fine with me, as I got along with them better than I did with the snooty aristocrats. It had been the caddies with whom I had gotten along best at Adolph Zukor’s luxurious estate. And back in Hollywood I had always felt most at home with the prizefighters, the mailroom boys, and the grips. I don’t know where I got my egalitarianism but it seemed deeply rooted, in ghettos where I had never lived, in pogroms I had suffered only vicariously through Mother’s vague accounts and her brother Joe’s painful memories.

My first Sunday at Deerfield triggered my first confrontation with The Quid. When I heard that religious services were mandatory, I went to Mr. Boyden and asked if I could be excused on the basis of my religious differences. He fixed me with a dour look, and then in a tight
voice informed me that Sunday morning services were an obligation of every Deerfield boy, without exception. Deerfield, I was discovering—not unlike Hollywood at the opposite end of the spectrum—was its own world with its own law. Separation of Church and State, or Church and School, stopped at its campus boundaries.

So Sunday mornings I would sit in the rear row, huddled down in hope of escaping The Quid’s inquisitorial eye. Concealed behind my prayer book were the Saturday football results; I needed all the time I could get to study comparative scores and mail my predictions to Maurice so he would have them in time for our weekly competition.

When the congregation rose for the traditional hymns, the rebel in me refused to invoke the name of Jesus. Brazenly I would substitute the word “Amos.” And instead of mouthing “Amos” discreetly under my breath, the devil within me would increase the volume to make sure the worshippers around me knew I was not conforming. An obedient lad sitting next to me made a face at me and, by way of rebuttal, I pulled out his tie.

On the podium I saw The Quid staring at me in puritanical hatred. After the service he beckoned me to his side. “I know you don’t believe in our faith,” he intoned, “but at least you can try to be quiet so we can enjoy a solemn ceremony.” He had had his eye on me, he warned. If I could not measure up to the high standards of Deerfield, I would force him to write my parents; perhaps I would do better in a western school where students were allowed to wear sloppy clothes, with behavior to match. Like my classmates, he was too genteel to mention Jews as such. But when he referred to me as “you people in Hollywood,” the inflection was unmistakable. My resistance was guarded. His was the hated voice of authority, reminding me of my little war with Rabbi Magnin five years earlier. But this was different. With Mother in Russia and Father hardly even a part-time parent, I felt a need to put down new roots in this older, greener part of the world.

Three factors saved me from quitting or cracking those first ten weeks. Even though I couldn’t measure up to the football varsity, I played substitute guard on the second team. I made flying tackles with gusto if not precision. I boasted to my diary that I was so covered with bumps and bruises that it was painful to crawl into bed. At a magic show one evening I fell so soundly asleep that my classmates thought I was hypnotized and did not appreciate my condition until the mystified magician failed to bring me to.

In one game, against the bulky but slow Massachusetts Aggie freshmen, I had an uncanny experience that calls to mind an Irwin Shaw football story. A willing but uninspired lineman until that particular day, I got into the game earlier than usual when a first-stringer was injured. Suddenly I felt that I could read the mind of the opposing quarterback and anticipate every play. I would charge forward, lay back and wait, or move horizontally to the other side of the line, making tackle after tackle. As my confidence grew, I felt invincible, a one-man line, able to stop their lumbering fullback and their speedier halfbacks. When I trotted to the sidelines in happy exhaustion, the embraces and loving slaps on the rump from my teammates brought tears of joy. Here at last was the athletic acclaim for which I had hungered all through high school. I didn’t even mind waiting on table that evening because I was serving my peers in a new atmosphere of social acceptance.

On the following Friday afternoon our coach, convinced that he had discovered a new defensive star, put me into the starting lineup. The first play came right at me. I set myself, and let the ball-carrier slip away. The opposing quarterback decided he had found a patsy, and how right he was. Intuitive as I had been in the previous game, I was now a victim of every trap and feint. The superman of the week before was exposed as a one-day wonder. Halfway through the quarter I was benched. No more embraces, no more ego-stroking, shouts of “Attaway t’go, Schulie!” I was back where I belonged, a marginal athlete, reduced to writing anguishedly, “Why do we always come so close and always fail?”

The second factor that kept me at Deerfield was Mutt Ray. Mutt came from what was called “a good family,” which is how they described the inheritors of “old money,” but what was important to me was his all-around ability on the playing field. As our fullback he hit the opposing line with a ferocity that belied his size, dragging tacklers along with him yard after yard. In those hardier days when a single team played both offense and defense, he was a furious linebacker. In game after game the Deerfield line would bend or break, only to have our valiant captain plug the holes. Bulling his way to precious touchdowns, then saving the game with crushing open-field tackles, Mutt Ray was the consummate sixty-minute hero. At final gun he would often sink into unconsciousness, having survived the last quarter on guts and instinct. How I envied him as he was carried from the sidelines to the infirmary, to be treated for his weekly concussion.

Armed with the movie camera Father had provided, I was allowed to
record the game from the sidelines, my third bridge to Deerfield acceptance. There was one glorious moment in the Loomis game when Ray went hurtling out of bounds, slamming my camera against my forehead and knocking me over. My head was pounding but I jumped quickly to my feet, proud to have a hand in pulling him back to his, unforgettably involved in this moment of violence. Ray winked at me and I said, “Way to go, Mutt!”

Ray’s heroics weren’t limited to the football field. While the housemaster—pink-faced, bespectacled, Harvardian Mr. Allen—scrupulously saw to it that lights were out and the Old Dorm locked for the night at ten, presumably safe against the shades of Mohawk Indians left over from 17
^th
-century raids, Mutt would be out on the prowl in search of warmhearted farm girls. Early in the morning he would creep back through a main-floor window left open for him. A genuine folk hero, he could float through space when he wanted to, and see in the dark. Of course part of his bravado was the confidence that even if he were detected, he would not suffer the punishment awaiting the ordinary Deerfield boy. The Quid loved his Deerfield eleven, and without Mutt Ray we would have been the doormat of the Mohawk Valley.

Maybe because I was such a sorry workhorse of a football player, maybe because there was something titillating about my unlikely Hollywood background, maybe because I worshipped him even more fervently than did my eastern classmates, Mutt would do me the honor of dropping in to bull in my room. Inevitably, other hallmates would appear. I began to feel a grudging acceptance. I was still teased about my stammering, my name, my life in Hollywood, and—without their ever daring to give it a name—my Jewishness. But after a month or so I did not seem quite as ludicrous or as untouchable and they in turn did not seem quite as reserved and unreachable.

There had been one early breakthrough. On the first day of school we had been encouraged to introduce ourselves to our dormitory-mates. Passing a tall, earnest-faced young man in the hall, I did my best. “Sch …Sch…Sch …oolberg, La …La …La …Hollywood” (like all stammerers, when I couldn’t make it with one consonant I tried another), I offered; to which my classmate responded, “Eee …Eee …E … ton T-t-t-Tarbell, B …buh …buh …BANGor!” I had been teased that way all my life, and was ready to strike Master T-t-Tarbell. Until I realized that here was a schoolmate who stammered even more convulsively than I did.