Moving Pictures (62 page)

A year before the election of F.D.R. and the subsequent recognition of the Soviet Union, Mother had chalked up another “first.” Having discovered Freud, John Dewey, Queen Anne furniture, and—God help us!—Sylvia Sidney, now she had discovered Soviet Russia. I confess I squirmed a little as she reminded her staid New England audience of our background in a ragged Jewish
shtetl
on the banks of the Dvina. Selfishly, I knew it would not make my acceptance at Deerfield any easier. And yet, as I watched her from the back of the hall, I had to admit that there was something gallant about her sense of adventure. When there was no way to get from here to there, no embassies or consulates to help her on her way, she was the one who made it to a land where Mr.
Hearst assured us they ate capitalists for breakfast. And she had come back with the courage to get up before an audience of WASPs and tell it as she thought she had seen it.

As our train rushed us westward for Christmas vacation at what seemed a breakneck speed of 75 miles an hour, I spent hours with a new book Mother had brought me from Moscow,
Short Stories out of Soviet Russia.
There were the good old standbys, Gorky and Boris Pilnyak, but also sharp new writers I had never heard of—Isaac Babel, identified as a “protégé of Gorky’s”; and a satirist who dared to pull the whiskers of the Soviet bureaucracy, Zoshchenko. Far into the night I kept the light on in my Pullman berth, reading and dreaming of the day when I could be included in such an anthology. Ever since I had left Hollywood in August I had kept Ludwig’s
Genius and Character
close at hand, reading, underlining, and daydreaming of literary glory. Finally I had come to the impassioned chapter on Balzac. I saw him in a loose, monklike dressing gown and nightcap, writing in frenzy through the night, trying to capture on paper the entire society of mid-19
^th
-century France, a social realist in a day of romanticism. I copied into my notebook: “Today the writer has replaced the priest … he consoles, condemns, prophesies. His voice does not resound in the nave of a cathedral, it spreads thunderously from one end of the world to the other Many a word weighs more than many a victory…”

When we pulled in to Albuquerque for the half-hour layover, I no longer hurried into the station as in times past. “Stayed near the train because I couldn’t bear to look at those poor Indians sitting along the entrance to the Harvey House selling their ten-cent-store drums and bows,” I confided to my diary. What we had done to those Indians I did not yet understand. I only knew that they had been reduced to something uncomfortably close to begging, that their trinkets were a mockery of what had been a strong culture, and that somehow
we
—white American civilization—had approached them in a spirit of lynch-and-destroy not so different from our treatment of the Negroes I had been reading about in the booklets of the N.A.A.C.P.

B
UT IF THIS SOUNDS
as though Mother and I now spent our time worrying about the oppressed, or the future of the Five Year Plan, it is misleading. As the
Super Chief
rolled across the home-state border, the diary cheerfully shifts gears from Balzac and Babel to: “California looked marv. The sun was out and the orange trees waiting.” As was the custom in those days, family and friends did not wait for the train to pull into the old Santa Fe station in downtown Los Angeles, but instead made the hour-long drive to San Bernardino to welcome us home. There were all the familiar faces: Maurice, my tennis partner cousin Phil, gawky Sonya, and plump little Stuart, along with the Jaffes and Dad. Yes, even Father had taken time off from the increasing pressures of the studio to make this sentimental journey. I carefully measured his greeting to Mother.

Home on Lorraine, surrounded by the familiar servants, pets, and pigeons, I was assured by Aunt Milly that Father would be living with us again. Since both parents seemed so anxious to please me, I wondered if I should stay home to hold our fractured family together. Father rushed back to his office, and I gathered from Uncle Sam, our studio manager, that the situation there was deteriorating. Father was still in charge of all production, but under mounting pressure now that Lasky was out and Zukor no longer in complete command. The Chicago crowd was moving in, and there were rumors that Manny Cohen—assistant to Lasky before deserting Jesse’s sinking ship—was being favored to replace Father as production chief.

While Mother held her group spellbound with her Russian adventures, I wandered onto sets to greet actor- and director-friends, the camera crews, the grips. They all seemed happy to see me. A good sign, I thought: Father will still in power. We dropped into his projection room to see
Sooky,
a sequel to
Skippy
that seemed almost if not quite as good as the original. After a festive lunch in the commissary where I made my way from table to table, chatting with the stars, kidding with the backlot workmen, we saw another strong Paramount picture, the
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I knew so well from the story conferences.

Maybe, I hoped, if Father could keep on turning out pictures like these, the studio crisis would blow over. Freddie March was so convincing in the film that I decided to interview him for our Deerfield paper. He was shooting another picture now and, always amiable, never the kind of star who gave Father bad dreams, he invited me to drop by his dressing room. I waited on the set for him to finish his scene. When he strode to his dressing room, a pretty extra hurried in ahead of me. I stood there staring at the door: Nothing had changed in my absence.

When I did get into the dressing room, I found the true Jekyll behind Mr. Hyde. March was a thinking actor and a considerate man, and instead of brushing me off as a kid reporter or the boss’s son who had to be tolerated, he spoke seriously and at length about his profession, and about the difference in demand and discipline between stage acting and working before a camera. In the first place, he explained, you have to think as if every member of the audience is sitting in the front row. Sometimes in the theater you have to do things which are a little too broad for first row center but perfect for the balcony; in other words, you have to play a little larger than life. On film, as Gary Cooper had sensed, you had to play smaller. But what really made screen acting more complex than stage acting, he went on, is that the continuity of a play carries you along with it; you draw strength from it and from the players around you. In film, since scenes are not shot in continuity but according to all sorts of practical demands (like getting rid of a set even if it includes the opening scene and the climax, or moving back to a studio set when an exterior scene is weathered out), you have to keep the entire script in your head. You have to play a particular scene
as if you
have already played the scenes that precede it in the script, even though they still lie ahead of you in actual production. Of course a good director, a Mamoulian, helps. But if you can’t develop the continuity within you, and hold to your own inner line, you are merely doing
Smile—frown
—
now look
slowly back over your shoulder
the way oldtime directors nursed their actors through megaphones in the silent days.

Freddie talked easily and knowledgeably, and as I scribbled it into my notebook I found myself hoping that even an old prude like The Quid wouldn’t object to so serious an interview on film acting when I wrote it for the
Scroll.

It pleased me to hear Freddie describe Father as a pleasure to work with because B.P. was literate and open-minded and, if things went wrong, the kind of studio head an actor could appeal to for intelligent advice. “The only thing he has in common with the other studio moguls is that big cigar,” Freddie laughed.

When I went back to my father’s office to report my success, his longtime secretary Henrietta Cohn told me not to go in: B.P. was in serious conference. I found that strange, since all my young life I had walked in on Father’s conferences.

Back at the Lorraine house a little while later came a frantic phone call from Henrietta. We were not to panic but B. P. had been in a serious auto accident. Although he had been urged not to drive his Lincoln roadster home in what was described as his “condition,” he had stubbornly insisted, taking his pal and crony, Zukor’s son-in-law Al Kaufman, along with him. It was a drinking bout in his private office that Henrietta had not wanted me to see. Now, in a freak accident, B.P. and Al had fallen out of the car, leaving it to career crazily around and around, bumping into parked cars and knocking down lamp posts. Somehow it had finally come to rest against an obliging tree without doing any further damage. Father and Al had been rushed to the hospital. But by the time we rushed after them, Father was sitting up in his hospital bed puffing on one of his big Upmanns and laughing as he embellished the story of how his huge roadster kept going around and around while he and Al sat in the middle of Third Street, wondering if it was going to run over them, and laughing together like the Katzenjammer Kids.

Every time Father climbed into that giant Lincoln roadster, he was playing Russian roulette. He had an odd habit of stopping on the green light and starting on the red, which often brought him into interesting disputes with rival vehicles. Sometimes he turned on the headlights instead of the ignition and decided that the battery was dead. And though he lived less than ten blocks from the studio, and had driven there and back literally thousands of times, he still had trouble finding his way his way.

Bruised and sobered, if not subdued, Father was convalescing at home next day, dropping his cigar ashes on Mother’s expensive comforter, and staying in touch with his office by phone. Mother had a long face, convinced that with his position already in question at the studio, this latest escapade, gossiped from one end of Hollywood to the other, would put him in greater jeopardy. It triggered one of their familiar arguments. Ad, Ben insisted, was a born worrier. With a facility for self-justification he had developed over the years into a personal art form, he ran down the list of successful Hollywood friends, guilty of far more serious offenses, whose careers had rolled merrily along. The police who had come to the scene had laughed along with Ben and Al at the absurd turn of events. So Louella might run a bitchy item in her column because she wanted to ingratiate herself with L.B., but everybody in town would know she was only doing it to please her boss W.R. (Hearst) whose Marion Davies was an MGM star. And look at Louella’s own husband, “Doccy” Martin, who not only was dead drunk every night but staggered to the hospital in that condition to perform operations without knowing whether he was supposed to remove an appendix or a kidney!

The more Mother tried to point out his shortcomings and remind him of the enemies who could undermine his hold on the studio, the more Father boasted that his production record had never been better, the studio and the exhibitors never more solidly behind him, and that he was looking forward to a banner year. Mother flew into a rage, Father raged back, and it was Punch and Judy in Hollywood; only these weren’t puppets, these were my parents, this was the home I had been counting off the days at Deerfield to return to again.

Refusing a second day of recuperation, Father insisted on going back to work, bruises and all. Christmas Day found him presiding at the big party in the sunken office. It was a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, with all the glamour and power of Paramount on display, champagne popping for the Lubitsches, Mamoulian, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert… Young Gary and Cary were there, Marlene dropped in, Adolphe Menjou…. Clara Bow, looking a little puffy, made a surprise call. The dapper, gin-complexioned Eddie Sutherland, the young up-and-coming Dave Selznicks, Norman Taurog (the pudgy, sweet-natured director of
Skippy),
the Mankiewicz brothers, even Mother’s pals, Peg Le Vino and Dorothy Arzner, stopped in. There was the endless popping
of corks and the fine wine flowing, the flirtatious laughter and the cutting inside jokes of any high-level Christmas office party.

But there was something special about a Hollywood Christmas party, with so many world-famous people gathered together in one room, some with so much to celebrate and others with so much to fear. America was a grab bag, but everything America did seemed to be magnified in Hollywood. Even as an unformed prep-school boy, I was learning to watch it with questions in my eyes. Father may have had some good friends among all these marquee names lighting up the room. But how many would be here toasting him in bootlegger Eddie Kaye’s finest imported champagne if Mother’s worst fears were realized and the Chicago group, moving in, decided to push him off the throne?

Meanwhile, as it did every Christmas, a truck had dropped off at our house those outrageously expensive gifts from “Uncle Adolphe” Menjou, “Aunt Nancy” Carroll, and all the other grateful employees on the studio payroll. There had been a time when I still believed in Santa Claus and had been told by Mother that all these celebrated aunts and uncles were Santa’s helpers. But now I had learned that Daddy was Santa Claus and would remain so as long as he could hold on to that grand office with the stained-glass windows.

Similar parties were going on in every executive office. I was still the prude who abstained from alcohol and extra girls, and since these were the staples of the festivities, and since I worried about Father’s returning home in one piece from this marathon celebration, I couldn’t throw myself into it as a homecoming teenager might have been expected to. I dropped in on Felix Young’s party, over which he was presiding with the elegance and grace he would soon lend to Hollywood’s favorite new restaurant, the Vendôme. Feel always made a great fuss over me, and I was enjoying the attention until I spied Sylvia Sidney among the revelers. Flushed with champagne and studio success, young Sylvia was looking particularly piquant and sexy that day. Again, a primitive desire for revenge and murder crept into my mind. I left the party.

Meanwhile, the holiday charade of parental respectability continued. My parents took me to one of those awesome openings at Grauman’s Chinese,
Hell Divers
this time, and then on to the Ambassador’s Coconut Grove, where stuffed monkeys swinging from fake palm trees made us all feel like extras on a studio set. Gus Arnheim played hit numbers from Father’s movies, “Sweeter Than Sweet,” “My Future Just Passed,”
the Maurice Chevalier-Jeanette MacDonald love songs. Father took a little bow and people crowded around the table to ask him favors.