Moving Pictures (6 page)

But before
Queen Elizabeth
could be brought to the rococo Lyceum, several major obstacles had to be overcome. First, the Eclipse Company had to be—in the words of my father—literally eclipsed. So, in the great tradition of press agentry, B.P. sat down and banged out a glowing account of Zukor’s determination to win for Famous Players the services
of the greatest living international star. Adolph Zukor, in my father’s dream story, had traveled to Paris to convince
La Sarah divine
that she should appear in a film version of her foremost stage success. At first she had resisted the entreaties of this great American producer, B.P.’s story went on, but Zukor argued that when the last members of her live audience died her art would die with them. However, if she would repeat her performance before a motion-picture camera, it would be preserved for all time. “Madame Bernhardt, you owe it to posterity to make this film,” my father had his employer saying to the aging French star. Finally she had consented, and at last when the great Bernhardt saw herself on the screen for the first time she had embraced her producer, crying, “M’sieu Zukor, you have put the best of me in pickle for all time!”

B.P.’s touching scene caught the eye of the press, not only in New York where it was featured, but all over the world, including Paris where Mme. Bernhardt had completed the film before ever having heard of Adolph Zukor and his still-obscure Famous Players. Zukor was entranced with the story. He read it over and over again until he could recite it by heart. Five years later when Famous Players was celebrating its first half-decade, a testimonial banquet was held at the Hotel Astor, presided over by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel. After the Mayor’s eloquent eulogy to Zukor, he called on the president of the company to tell the distinguished guests, all two thousand of them, what had been the single greatest experience of his career. Zukor took a deep breath and told the story of his ocean voyage to Europe to seek out Sarah Bernhardt and talk her into appearing in her first motion picture. Zukor didn’t leave out a word in his imaginary meeting, even to her throwing her arms around him with those immortal words, “You have put the best of me in pickle for all time!”

But there was still the ever-pressing problem with the Trust. Adolph Zukor had to go hat in hand to the powerful J. J. Kennedy and beg for a license from the Patents Company. For three hours the deceptively meek Zukor was kept waiting. When Kennedy finally heard the little man’s request, he hesitated. He saw no reason to encourage an upstart member of the Independents. These “illegal” outfits, the Laemmle IMP company, the Lasky-Goldfish-DeMille Company, William Fox—not to mention the now-forgotten David Horsley, Edwin Thanhouser, and Mark Dintenfass—were like a band of Indians encircling the wagon
train of the establishment who held fast to their monopoly of the almighty Patent, and who used the license as a club to fight off these new, aggressive, and far more imaginative competitors.

A council of war was held in Daniel Frohman’s spacious office above the Lyceum Theater (the Famous Players offices in the Times Building were too modest for such a meeting) and it was decided to go ahead with the Grand Opening, to which public officials, Broadway celebrities, members of the literati, and wealthy patrons of the arts had been invited. My father worked around the clock to bombard the newspapers with releases, to send out personal invitations to important personages, and to prepare the souvenir program.

But at five o’clock on the afternoon of the opening, the official permission still had not arrived from the Patents Company—a tense moment. If the film was screened without the precious license it would undoubtedly be subject to an injunction, possibly even a police raid. What to do? Zukor was a determined but cautious man. My father thought they should defy the Trust and run the picture for its prestigious audience. It would become a cause célèbre, a front-page story, and put further pressure on the Trust. There was always the streak of the rebel in my father: a desire to shock mingled with a bent to crusade. He would have enjoyed—indeed later did enjoy—taking on the Trust in editorial confrontation.

But in this case the silky, behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Daniel Frohman proved more effective. This was no ordinary Independent film that the Patents Company was rejecting. This would be the first time the renowned Sarah Bernhardt had ever exhibited her art on the American screen. It would be a black eye for the established film industry if they were to bar the image of the Divine Sarah from the Lyceum. Furthermore, Frohman argued—since his distinguished brother Charles, who had never before relented in his opposition to motion pictures, was allowing this one to be shown in their own legitimate theater—the Trust would put itself in the position of being anti-art and anti-culture if it did not go along with Charles’s largesse. Frohman’s prestige and his eloquence carried the day. Shortly before the historic screening, Zukor received a telegram from Kennedy declaring that due to the international eminence of Madame Bernhardt a license was being issued for this particular film. Famous Players had won its battle for
Queen Elizabeth.
But the war against independent production and exhibition went on.

Next day there was a news story, prompted by B.P.’s energetic releases, on the enthusiastic response of the scores of literary, artistic, and dramatic figures who showed up at the Lyceum, who had sat entranced throughout the four reels, and who had applauded at the end as though Madame Bernhardt were there in person to take a bow. But the officials of the Trust who attended out of curiosity remained unconvinced. The exclusive audience was impressed, they argued, only because they were seeing Sarah Bernhardt. Try the same four-reel experiment with your ordinary actor and this overly ambitious form would fall flat on its face.

While I was teething, this Motion Picture War of Independence was seething. General Kennedy employed an army of spies to infiltrate the independent productions. Spying was easy because filmmaking was still so informal. When extras were needed they were usually recruited from the curious onlookers attracted to the open sets. There were no unions or guilds to bar the way to instant employment. And the young moviemakers were ever on the lookout for fresh talent, from bit players to technicians. Just as my father had walked in on Edwin S. Porter at his studio in The Bronx and immediately become a photoplay writer because he obviously knew how to put words together, so anyone who had ever tinkered with a camera and knew how to thread one with raw stock might find himself hired on the spot as a cameraman.

Kennedy’s spies were paid not only to report back to him, but to sabotage independent production. James Cruze, later to become famous as the director of
The Covered Wagon
in the heyday of the silents, told my young father of a typical Trust-war incident: He was acting in a western on the plains of Mamaroneck, with the good guys shooting it out with the bad guys, their blank cartridges giving off the sound of a miniwar, when suddenly a live bullet went crashing through the unlicensed or “pirated” camera, ending in every sense the shooting for that day and very nearly the life of the cameraman as well. One of the good guys, now revealed as a Kennedy goon disguised as a cowboy, spurred his bronco to make his getaway from Jim Cruze and the Thanhouser Company extras whom this sabotage had transformed into a genuine posse.

Goons were sent out from the Trust to destroy Independent equipment, expose their film, and burn their sets. An “extra” would suddenly turn out to be a process server, with orders for the police to confiscate
equipment. The dragons in my fairy tales were Kennedy and his goons.

Despite the financial and political power of the Trust, month by month the Independents were winning. And they were winning for the same reason that rebel leaders often win—they had the people with them. Zukor, with Porter and B.P. and the rest of his advance guard, was right: Once audiences saw lengthier films with better stories and finer actors they quickly turned away from the stale old one-reelers that the Trust companies went on cranking out at so much a foot. Once they saw someone on the screen to whom they responded emotionally they demanded to know his name, or hers. When Mary Pickford was appearing in one-reelers for Biograph, one of the most influential companies in the Trust, she began to receive a stream of letters—the first fan mail. Instead of embracing this great new audience, Biograph gave it the back of its hand. Thousands of letters, my father remembered, were simply dumped into the trash can. People begging to know the name of “that cute little girl with the beautiful curls” were not to be told that she was Mary Pickford. For if Little Mary, as her fans began to call her, began to realize her importance, she would want more money. Mary had been on the stage since she was five years old, touring with her mother Charlotte; at fifteen she had a sense of the dollar and of her impending value at the box office. Give her and her tough old mama an inch and they would take a mile, J. J. Kennedy argued.

“They actually thought they could keep her anonymous,” my father told me. “She was making one picture a week, and with every release she was becoming more of a national idol. Talk about not being able to see the handwriting on the wall, they literally couldn’t see the close-up on their own screen. So Mary Pickford came to us, to Famous Players, and first we paid her twenty thousand a year and then one thousand dollars a week, then two thousand, and finally four thousand—but she and her mother were never satisfied—especially when they heard that her chief rival in popularity, Charlie Chaplin, had just signed a new contract for six hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year. Suddenly four thousand a week—even back in ’16, the good old days before taxes—looked like chicken feed. She wanted a thousand dollars a day.”

Charlotte and Mary were perhaps the first star bargainers in the history of this tough bargaining business to employ the now familiar blackmail against which the best written contract is helpless: “Little Mary is so unhappy at hearing how much more Charlie Chaplin is
making that the poor child is positively sick. She might become too upset to come to work. And if she does show up at the studio, how can she do her best work when her mind is distracted by her financial problems?”

“What a crisis that was for Mr. Zukor, for all of us,” Father said. Zukor used to walk the streets all night trying to solve problems like that. If he signed her, it would be at a staggering sum for twenty pictures a year; they would have to raise prices at all the movie theaters springing up around the country. He paid and prayed.

“She was not just the first screen idol, she had become a national institution,” my father explained. “The symbol of rags to riches, of the good little girl overcoming evil. The titles of the pictures we made with her say a lot about what she meant to America:
Cinderella, Poor Little Rich Girl, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A Dawn of Tomorrow…
She was poised delicately between childhood and adolescence. Even when she was twenty years old, married to Owen Moore, and able to play young romantic leads, America still wanted to see her with her long golden curls and her puckered little-girl lips. They wanted to keep her a perennial child. I really think she was the perfect symbol of our own wide-eyed innocence, before the War and the new generation of sheiks and flappers changed our morality.

“Calling Mary ‘America’s Sweetheart’ was not exactly a stroke of genius. I was simply putting down in two words what everybody in America seemed to be feeling about her. I was standing in front of a theater one day watching people buy tickets to see Mary in one of the early movies I wrote for her when a middle-aged couple stopped in front of a display of stills from the picture. ‘There she is,’ the husband said. ‘My little sweetheart.’ Remember, people really talked a lot more sentimentally in those days. ‘She’s not just your little sweetheart, she’s everybody’s sweetheart,’ his wife said. It rang a bell. That’s exactly what she was—
America’s Sweetheart
! I went back and tried it first on Al Kaufman, and then on Mr. Zukor himself, and they loved it. I wrote it into our next ad and she’s been ‘America’s Sweetheart’ ever since.”

By the time I was three years old, the businesslike Mary and her shrewd mother-manager Charlotte Smith were raising the ante to ten thousand a week, and half the profits. They insisted that her pictures—now limited to ten a year—not be sold in a block with all the other Famous Players product but released through a subsidiary to be called the Mary Pickford Famous Players Company. In four incredible years, unlike any in the history of entertainment from Aesop to Zukor, Little
Mary had gone from an uncredited fifty-dollar-a-week moving-picture-show performer to a star whose earning power for a single year had rocketed to a cool million. It was a price that not even Zukor was prepared to pay, even though, in that same dynamic period, he had gone from an obscure nickelodeon owner to president of a twenty-five-million-dollar company that was growing every day.

Although I had adopted Ed Porter and Adolph Zukor as my simulated uncles, I never thought of Mary Pickford as a vicariously glamorous aunt. Maybe I inherited from B.P. a sense of her ingratitude for his services. I had only the dimmest memory of her, unlike my lasting impressions of Mr. Zukor, and my trips to the Zukor farm in New York City—where I saw my first cow. (In our apartment overlooking the park I had been drinking the fresh milk delivered by the Zukor chauffeur without appreciating the source of this cool white liquid.) My “bad” grandfather Simon had disappeared, mysteriously, and my “good” grandfather Max wasn’t much fun, drinking tea from a saucer and rocking back and forth muttering prayers in a strange language. But “Uncle” Adolph was young and spry, a neat, energetic, kindly figure as he showed off his horses and cows.

Influenced by the European-made biblical spectacles, D. W. Griffith, while still working for Biograph, went out to California to make his ambitious four-reel
Judith of Bethulia.
One of the reasons he took that long trip across the continent was to get out from under the grip of the Trust. Independents were going to “the coast,” as it was called then and has been known ever since, not so much for the perpetual sun that would light roofless interiors (winter sunshine was more accessible in Florida) as to escape the goons and the process servers of the Trust. It was this game of cat-and-mouse that really started Hollywood on its way to becoming the film capital of the world.