Moving Pictures (60 page)

Since misery welcomes company, we would spend hours in our rooms at night speculating on why we couldn’t talk like normal people. Why did we never stammer when we sang? Or when we were alone together? Years later Eaton Tarbell was to become one of New England’s more distinguished architects. But I still see him with his earnest face twisted into verbal spasm. Strangely, it was the same look he would have at the end of the mile run when he performed on the same track team where I ran my dogged 880s. At the end, grasping for breath, we also discovered that exhaustion was a cure for our affliction. We never doubted that our disability was psychological. But there did seem to be physical solutions. Why, when we were unable to sound the opening word of a sentence, did it help to pound our feet on the floor like a jazz musician working himself up to the beat? Or similarly, to slap our hands against our thighs until the desired word broke through the barrier? And why, when no other words came out at all, were four-letter cries of frustration so easy to release?

Eaton Tarbell and Mutt Ray and my mouth-drying confrontations with Mr. Boyden gave form and substance to those first ten weeks. I would confide to my diary exactly how I felt about the self-righteous Quid. “All the athletes around here pull some awfully raw stuff, but I, for only trivial wrongs, have to be called down every day or so. Boyden wants boys to be subdued—the only-answer-when-spoken-to types of the old Mayflower days. Go to hell, Frank!”

The first semester at Deerfield was a useful lesson in hypocrisy. For while I was giving Mr. Boyden the humble
Yes sir
and
No sir
treatment, going through the motions of the apologetic penitent, I was seething inside, wishing I could use his smug ministerial face as my punching bag. It is what we call manners. We had manners in Hollywood, too, but these were more genteel (and gentile) and more sophisticated—in other words, more full of sophistry and hypocrisy. It was one of the things I had been sent to Deerfield to learn: how not to walk hard or talk loud, how to drop a scrim over my feelings.

My most serious confrontation with The Quid had come just before the Christmas vacation, when I was feeling a little giddy at the thought of being released from Deerfield discipline and joining Mother, who was returning from Russia, on the four-day journey home. Mutt Ray had suggested that after lights-out we sneak over to the mess hall and raid the huge icebox in the pantry. I was already in Mr. Boyden’s black book, but how could I resist this clandestine invitation from the great Mutt Ray? Making our way into the pantry in the dark, we gorged ourselves on
illicit muffins and jams, ice cream and cake. But climbing back into the Old Dorm, disaster struck. Mutt made it through without difficulty, but just below the window I dropped a jar of orange marmalade and a box of saltines I had hoped to squirrel away for after-lights-out feasts. The delay and my scurrying in the bushes brought to the window a most unhappy Mr. Allen. As much as he tried to meet us halfway, this time he would have to send me to Mr. Boyden.

The Quid was terrible in his wrath. “He was so sore he was black in the face,” I reported to the diary. His voice wore a long dark robe as he sat in judgment. “After the first few months I had hoped you might become more accustomed to our ways. If there is no improvement in your deportment after you return from vacation, I will not be able to recommend you for Dartmouth.” I had retreated to my monastic room and added a cryptic note to my diary: “The Quid—GDHBH,” which stood for God Damn His Bastard Hide, the ultimate epithet in Maurice’s and my lexicon.

It was maddening to think that my fate, or at least my chances of moving on to Dartmouth, depended entirely on his judgment. Because no matter how well I did scholastically—and I was beginning to hold my own—The Quid had the power to bury my application. And now, despite Mr. Boyden, I felt a strong attraction to New England as a place and as a culture. Indeed, even Mrs. Boyden herself was a refreshing counterbalance to her Calvinistic mate. Attractively homely, in the style of Eleanor Roosevelt, she was an outgoing spirit, with a tolerance for others that made me wonder how she and The Quid ever got together. Because my mind was stubbornly resistant to algebra, or any other form of mathematics, a subject she taught, she offered to tutor me in her spare time. When I told her how useless I knew algebra would be to my life, she didn’t lecture me about my Hollywood sloppiness of mind. Instead she took an eminently practical approach. Even if it made no sense for Dartmouth to demand that I get high marks in mathematics in order to be accepted, that was their rule and if Dartmouth was my choice I would have to make it my rule as well. “It’s a little like taking castor oil,” she insisted. “You open your mouth, Mother spoons it in, you make a face, and in a minute or two it’s all forgotten.” Mrs. Boyden was determined to spoon in enough algebra, geometry, and trig to get me by the College Boards: “Even if you forget it the next day as you probably will. For years I’ve been coaching students who hate math. I happen to love math, but it’s like cauliflower or turnips—lots of people hate them, too.”

“I can’t swallow turnips,” I said.

“I’ll teach you to swallow math.” Her smile came through to me encouragingly. In helping me feel I could cope with math, she also encouraged me to think I could cope with Deerfield. I was on the school paper, and while I looked down on the weekly
Scroll as
an overly sedate weekly compared to my jazzier
Blue-and-White
daily, I was proud to have made the staff. But the contrast between West Coast and East Coast journalism threatened to end my New England career almost as soon as it began. A football game between Fordham and Bucknell had resulted in two fatalities—Murphy, a former Deerfield star, dying of internal injuries a few days after the game, and his substitute Zymanski succumbing from a brain injury two days later. Two other Fordham players had been seriously injured. The Bucknell line had been recruited from the hard-muscled mining towns of western Pennsylvania, and the contest had been what present-day commentators like to refer to as “physical,” for which read downright vicious. The two deaths had brought the fatalities for the season to 29! Although I still loved the feeling of trying to drive my body between opposing linemen to get at the ball-carrier, the neophyte writer in me, as well as the moralist, came up with a fiery editorial in which I compared the football stadium crowd to the bloodthirsty hordes in the Roman Colosseum rooting for the lions against the Christians.

That evening I was honored with a visit from the editor of the
Scroll,
the 250-pound “Mac” MacConaughy. Although his father was president of Wesleyan University in nearby Middletown, Mac did not at all resemble the snooty, upper-class easterners who looked down their Aryan noses at me. He enjoyed ribald jokes and Latin double entendres. The strict discipline of the school, a constant irritant to me, was to Mac merely a source of cynical amusement.

Mac flopped down on my bed, threatening to collapse it, and tossed back to me my white-heat editorial, blithely titled “Roman Holiday.” “Afraid we can’t use it, Schulie. Nice piece of writing. But God almighty, if I ran this in the
Scroll,
The Quid would pee in his pants. We have to write it like this: All Deerfield mourns the untimely passing of one of her outstanding sons, Robert Murphy, etcetera etcetera. All quiet and dignified. Make it sound like an unfortunate accident that could happen in any activity. Not like a lynching—the way you wrote it—or as if the entire Bucknell team should be indicted for premeditated murder. I wish I could run it. It would be a hell of a lot of fun. But The Quid would get
my old man on the phone, and the next thing I know I can’t even make it to Wesleyan.”

I was discouraged. “Roman Holiday” was the strongest piece of writing I had ever done. It combined my fascination with American football with my growing awareness of American violence. If I couldn’t score with a piece on a Deerfield boy dying for Fordham … “Look, Schulie, stop worrying about staying on the staff. Hell, you
are
the staff. You see the drool we get from all the others—” It was true that I had begun to rewrite all the limp leads and stodgy pieces in which whatever feeble news there was lay buried three or four paragraphs into the story. Mac turned to me more and more until he and I basically edited the paper together. But I had to be careful to keep a tight rein on my style, or Mac would be on my back for writing “Hollywood.”

Words and writing had begun to share equal time with football and track and the compulsion to make a team. Mac delighted in using words he thought others would not comprehend. “Schulie, I think your piece would be more efficacious if it were a little less polemical, as well as less quixotic,” he would say. I would nod wisely, and then secretly hurry to my dictionary to see what in hell he was talking about. Any word heard or read that I did not instantly recognize would be entered in my handwritten dictionary. In my first ten weeks at Deerfield it had grown to a thousand words I had not known on arrival. Instead of counting sheep to invite sleep I would mumble, “
Salacious … euphemistic … diaphanous
…” I began to realize that I had been talking and writing with a kindergarten vocabulary. Even with all the reading my parents had exposed me to, somehow I must have skipped over the words I did not know. Now they jumped up from the page and challenged me to understand them, and make them my own.

Later I would begin to understand the difference between English and American writing, learning how Mark Twain and Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson had prepared the ground for Ernest the Strong. But in those early months at Deerfield I was happy with my
elegiacs
and
anomalies.
Already I had begun publishing short stories in the Deerfield monthly
Stockade.
A story about an old prizefighter and one about the ghosts of the victims of the Deerfield Massacre interviewed in the local cemetery established me as the school’s most distinguished author, an honor not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe’s winning the mayoralty of his island.

Heady with success, I decided to plunge on in the literary world.
Before I left home, Mrs. Stanton, who taught English at U.S.C., had been sufficiently impressed with my story “Ugly” to suggest I try to write a book. And my parents, with their quite different styles of enthusiasm, had agreed. The pressure was on me. And time was running. I was closing in on eighteen. If I was to be a book writer, I had better get going.

B
UT WHAT DID I
have to write about? All I knew about was growing up in Hollywood. And even though I had made some notes on Von Stroheim and Von Sternberg, on Eisenstein and Clara Bow, I knew I wasn’t ready. What made me choose the subject I did remains one of those social mysteries. All I remember is that it was triggered by a book I happened to read, recommended by one of the writers who came to our house, the hard-drinking rebel Jim Tully, who liked to grouse to Mother about the honest books Hollywood was afraid to make into films. One of these was
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson.

It did what good books are supposed to do. I could not put it out of my mind. It made me want to write a book of my own. It is about a light-skinned “colored man,” a classical musician, a cultural aristocrat traveling in the South who follows a crowd to a lynching he is only able to watch because the redneck posse takes him for white. Johnson describes the victim dragged in between two horsemen, his eyes glazed with fear and pain, already more dead than alive. No mention is made of his crime; in this atmosphere of mindless violence, it doesn’t really matter. A primitive gallows is set up, but before the poor wretch can be dragged to it, an even more vicious idea takes possession of the mob: “Burn the nigger! Burn the nigger!”

While the author looks on in numb horror, the limp black body is chained to the post, drenched with gasoline, and set on fire. Cheers and sadistic laughter mingle with the screams and groans of the dying man.
Johnson looks around at the fiends who accept his terrified passivity for compliance, and there and then decides on a coward’s escape. He will cease to be a black man. It is too dangerous and too degrading. He will go north and pass as a member of the ruling majority. This he does successfully until he falls in love with a beautiful white girl attracted to him by his sensitivity and his classical musicianship. He feels he cannot marry her without revealing his racial secret. When he does, she leaves him, bereft. Eventually they are reunited, and he lives a life of white respectability. But in the end, seeing “a small but gallant band of colored men publicly fighting for their race,” he is made to feel small, weak, selfish, and empty. He has, in the final line of the book, which went into my diary and indelibly into my impressionable young mind, “sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.”

The closest I had ever been to a lynching was the playful if sometimes spiteful goosing of Oscar the Bootblack at Paramount Studio. And Oscar would not scream in pain but in feigned, obsequious delight. But as I read the nightmare episode in the Johnson autobiography, I pictured Oscar chained to a stake and writhing in agony as the fire devoured his flesh. And I decided to try writing a story about it. Aware that I lacked the details of a firsthand observer, I chose to tell it through the eyes of a child carried on the shoulders of his father and not really comprehending what he is seeing. When the
Stockade
rejected it as unfit material for our precious magazine, I sent it to Mrs. Stanton, who thought it quite well done but of course in need of rewriting. With this meager encouragement, I decided on a bolder course. I would write a book about lynching, and about the persecution of the Negroes in the South. With the courage of my ignorance and the benign arrogance of youth, I wrote to Clarence Darrow. I had not yet read any of his books, but I had heard of him through my parents as a fighter for the right and a defender of underdogs.

Whatever private doubts Clarence Darrow may have had about the abilities of a prep-school teenager to write a book on lynching and the virulence of white supremacy, he answered promptly in his own handwriting: