Moving Pictures (63 page)

The year ended not with the sound of the Arnheim trumpets but with the heavy breathing and vehement prayers of Grandfather Max. With his children—my mother and her brothers, Joe, Dave, and Sam—I watched him slowly sink away, and confided to the diary: “It was horrible waiting around for him to die. It came at 1:30, a peaceful end which anyone who must die would envy. Just falling asleep, no struggle, no pain, no sorrow. Tonight this funny old world goes on as usual, listening for Paramount songs on the radio, reading of the death of Balzac, ‘his body corroded by suffering, exhausted by living, a victim to his passion for work.’ There was none of that in Grandpa’s life. A typical Old World Jew, he lived mainly for the synagogue. His death has double significance, for it marks the end of orthodoxy in our family. His life was the link between his age and ours. And while ours may seem more rational and based on logic, his was by far the more content. That’s what I was thinking about when he was praying at the top of his voice, unafraid, trusting in his God. We scoffers will be more afraid to die, for we know not what lies beyond. Religion may not be scientific, but it is a powerful thing, the lantern that saves us from the blackness of dismay and protects us from the inky unknown of death.”

By New Year’s Day I had recovered sufficiently from thoughts on mortality and religious philosophy to give a detailed description of the Rose Bowl game between U.S.C. and Tulane. But the thrill of home-team victory was dampened by the post-game family conference with Mother and her brothers about Father’s decision to move out again, this time not just a few miles down Malibu Beach but to the Colleen Moore mansion he had rented in Bel Air. Colleen had been one of the top stars of the Twenties, the “naughty but nice” little flapper as compared to Clara Bow’s sexier version, but her career in talkies had begun to skid, her marriage was on the rocks, and she decided to go east.

B.P. never did things by halves. It was a mansion in splendid Hollywood-Iberian style with sixteen high-ceilinged rooms, several acres of rolling lawns and flower beds, a guest house that would have been ample for Father without the palatial main house, and a swimming pool as large as the one they were building near the downtown Coliseum for the 1932 Olympic Games. Mother was not only outraged at the family rupture, but at the cost of this fourth establishment, for in addition to
Lorraine and Malibu, Father had also indulged a whim to acquire an estate in Santa Barbara. He was buying real estate in all directions in those days, from Santa Barbara to Hollywood apartment houses to Palm Springs. He had dropped a million in the Crash, and Ad accused him of throwing away another million on the wheels and the cards; but, even while under fire from rivals and overseers, the money was still pouring in faster than even he could spend it.

Back on the
Santa Fe Chief
after winter vacation, I realized how much easier it was to leave home this time than the previous fall. I was growing up to the truth. Father’s moving to the Colleen Moore estate probably meant the end of the “happy home life” I wanted to believe in, no matter what the hard realities should have taught me. And his difficulties with the new masters of Paramount made me worry how long he would hang on to that enormous sunken office. We had even talked about it, and Father’s pink-faced optimism and infectious laughter had almost dispelled my fears. The trouble with me, he said, is that I had inherited his talent for writing and Mother’s gift for worrying. The Jaffes, he charged, were great worriers. Always thinking of the worst that could happen, instead of the best. When I scolded him, with the sense of self-righteousness that seems to come to full flower in adolescence, he turned it neatly to his advantage.

“All right, Father,” he’d say, managing to make of this turnabout something gay and amusing, “I’ll try to do a little better, Father.” Then, if there was an audience, he’d elaborate on the family joke: “Hear the way he talks to me? Buddy thinks I’m seventeen and he’s thirty-nine! He came into this world frowning at me. When he was one day old I knew I was in trouble! Isn’t that right,
Father
?” His laughter filled the room, turning the sense of what I was saying into entertaining nonsense.

Yes, it was almost a relief to be away from the pressures of being a self-appointed linchpin of the family and the guardian of Father’s morals. Rolling eastward again on our reliable
Chief
through the sunbaked landscape of the Southwest, I actually found myself looking forward to Deerfield, to the hallmates who were not nearly so forbidding as they had seemed when I first arrived, to the winterscape that seemed a welcome contrast to the constant sunshine in which I had been raised.

B
ACK AT DEERFIELD, I ACTED
out my Walter Mitty life on the fringe of the sports world, proved myself the school’s best journalist, got by with a minimum of study, and enjoyed the camaraderie of corridor roughhousing and nocturnal raids on the commissary. I marveled at the snow, found I was able to give history reports almost without a stammer, familiarized myself with Deerfield history, and published a report on the Massacre of 1704 that won praise from Mrs. Sheldon, the local historian whose ancestors were buried in the mass grave in the local cemetery.

With the help of our Latin trot, Mac and I laughed our way through our translation of Vergil. Our real work was driving with our housemaster, Mr. Allen, to the print shop in Greenfield to put the paper to bed on Friday nights. Printer’s ink was on my fingers again and neat headlines jumped into my head. We’d go to a spaghetti joint, use my gold pass to see half an hour of a current movie, and then go back to correct the galleys.

Even though I squirmed through math and the boring Sunday sermons, envied the boys allowed to visit their New England homes for weekends, and fought a running battle against Deerfield discipline, I had found my place in the school. I felt I had only one enemy now, but he was a formidable one, the Headmaster himself.

Now that Father had given the school a movie projector, Mr. Boyden had asked me if I could get a film from the studio that would be appropriate for a weekend general assembly. I thought I had pulled off a
coup by obtaining a print of the latest Marx Brothers picture,
Monkey Business,
still hot from the cutting room. Here was a milestone in the history of New England film exhibition. But The Quid did not see it that way. With each zany reel he became more disturbed, until finally his rigid schoolmaster’s soul could take it no longer.

I took it out on my diary: “I would like to enter here that Mr. Boyden is a god damn sonofabitch. After announcing that he would show
Monkey Business,
we saw 4 reels of it. At that point he said he had enough, that he found it in vulgar bad-taste and that it should be cut off right there, before the climax! Instead, he showed some pictures of frogs and
Mickey Mouse.
What a bastard of an old Puritan he is! Am so sore tonight I don’t feel like working for a week.”

My alienation was compounded by my having started a composite interview with the madcap Marxes for our school magazine. I had been in on the making of the Marx Brothers’ movies. I had watched them cavort on the set under the knowing eye of director Norman McLeod and had laughed at antics almost as funny off the set as on. I had watched the straight “love-interest” Marx Brother, Zeppo, relieve B.P. of countless thousands every week, for what he lacked in acting talent he more than compensated for at the card table. I had wondered at how different they were, Groucho wickedly witty and mean; Harpo the intellectual sharing his leisure time with the Gershwins, Moss Hart, and Dorothy Parker; Chico sharing his with the bookies and card-sharks who regularly mugged him without violence as they did my old man…

When I calmed down I realized I had in my power what might be called The Writer’s Revenge. If I could finish my article on the Marxes and slip it into
The Stockade,
our literary magazine, I could have the last salvo in my running battle with The Quid. So I expounded on the comedic art of the Marx Brothers, comparing Harpo to Chaplin and invoking the commedia dell’arte as the classic forerunner of “the Marxism of laughter.” I could picture The Quid’s face growing darker as he read my tribute to the comedy team he had censored so arbitrarily. A further reason for cussing out The Quid was that Maurice and I had embarked on our first filmwriting project, outlining a scenario for the Marx Brothers entitled
Bughouse Fables,
in which the Marxes inherit a lunatic asylum. Our plan was to develop the script through correspondence, each of us taking turns rewriting the other until we would have it ready for presentation to B. P., Herman Mankiewicz, and the Marxes by the following summer. Even the fact that Father had questioned the
soundness of the premise and Mank had laughed us off as “Hecht and MacArthur
Junior
” in no way diminished our enthusiasm. At least B.P. had promised to read our material, and so had the Marx Brothers. Twice a month our script flew back and forth across the country; as soon as a thick envelope arrived from Palo Alto I would push everything aside to add new one-liners and bits of business. We could picture ourselves marching into Paramount that summer with our risible screenplay under our arm, the youngest writing team in the history of the Studio.

That season I was something of a literary schizophrenic, trying to write funny for the Marx Brothers while trying to absorb the material on lynching that continued to arrive from the N.A.A.C.P. During the Christmas holiday, the devoted Mrs. Stanton had urged me to outline the book and write an opening chapter, in time for her appraisal when I came home for spring vacation. In bed at night, I would concentrate on the horror of a lynching. The most effective way to open the book, I decided, was to recreate the mob hysteria of lynch murder. Again, I imagined a mob stringing up and burning Oscar the Bootblack. And then I thought of an altogether different kind of black, the giant heavyweight George Godfrey. I could see him cracking the jaw of a young redneck, and the white mob closing in on him like hyenas and tearing him apart.

One night after eating too many marmalade sandwiches swiped from the commissary, I woke in a cold sweat just in time to escape a lynch mob burning a cross on the lawn of our home on Lorraine. Obviously I was taking to heart Mrs. Stanton’s advice to live myself into my material, to get as close as imagination could draw me to the actual feeling of being roped by my white enemies and dragged, battered and bleeding, to the hanging tree. They all had the face of Mr. Boyden glowering at me at Sunday morning service.

A weekend trip to New York City to visit my Uncle Sam and Aunt Milly, east on vacation, was like being sprung from Sing Sing. On the bumpy five-hour train trip to Grand Central, I started, with much underlining,
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens,
hailed as the book of the year. I had been curious about him ever since he first came to our house and told his fascinating stories. He had progressed from individual muckraking to a theory of the muckrake that was truly revolutionary. “Bribery is no mere felony,” he learned from a St. Louis reformer. “It’s treason…. It’s systematic…. Bribery and corruption is a process of revolution, to make a democratic government represent, not the people,
but a part, the worse part, of the people It is good businessmen who are corrupting bad politicians…”

Books are time bombs that go off not once but again and again. Lincoln Steffens’s clear-eyed presentation of the shame of the cities would keep on ticking and exploding in my mind for the rest of my life. The impressionable teenager was torn between emulating Steffens and exposing lynch law, going back to Hollywood to write the Marx Brothers’ next comedy hit, and writing the most stirring account of a Deerfield basketball victory ever printed in the
Scroll.

After Mr. Boyden’s baleful glances and the 19
^th
-century reproaches of my Latin, German, and math instructors, I happily gave myself up to the flattery and attention of my aunt and uncle. That weekend, word came that Mother and Father were reunited! They were having a second—or was it a twenty-second?—honeymoon at the Desert Inn in Palm Springs. From their fancy hotel suite, Sam and Milly put through a call to them and I was able to hear their reassurances: “Sometimes, I don’t think you give us enough credit for being intelligent, civilized people. And try to stop taking the whole world on your shoulders. Sonya is doing fine at L. A. High. She just published her first poem there. She’s following in your footsteps. And little Stuart is happy at Progressive School. Even Paramount stock is going up. I think we’ve got a big hit in
The Smiling Lieutenant.
By the way, Dick Arlen sends his best and wants to take you out on his boat when you get back for vacation. And Publicity wants you back this summer, with a ten-dollar raise. And every Friday night at the fights everybody asks for you, Maxie Rosenbloom, Mushy Callahan—we’ll see some great fights this summer, and the Olympic Games…”

Uncle Sam, still under B.P.’s protection as studio manager, assured me he would keep an eye on the situation. I returned to Deerfield refreshed, encouraged, inspired, did my Latin without a trot, practiced tennis indoors for the oncoming tennis season, finished and sent off to Mrs. Stanton my latest chapter on the lynch book, mailed off the Marx Brothers rewrite to Maurice, wrote a triumphant piece on the last-second victory of the basketball team, delivered a lecture on Russia to the history class with barely a stammer, and confided to my diary that my only worries now were that I might not make the tennis team and that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria could lead to a second world war.

At that critical moment in local and world history I received another Dear Buddy letter from Father: All bets were off. He had done his best to
reconcile with Mother, but apparently that was not good enough. She seemed incapable of forgiving him for the Sidney affair, or to keep that provocative name out of the verbal attack he had to face every time he came home late from the Studio.

Father’s letter was a well-written appeal for understanding. He wanted me to believe that he had done everything he could to keep his part of the bargain. The fact that he did not come home until eleven or twelve o’clock at night did not mean that he was trysting at Sylvia’s house. He hardly had to tell me that these were critical days for Paramount, for the entire motion-picture industry. He had to compete with Mayer and Thalberg at MGM, with the Warner Brothers who had become a third power with their headstart in sound, and with the devious intracompany politics. Manny Cohen and his backers were waiting for him to make a mistake. And so was Walter Wanger, who was now at the Marathon Street studio in an ambiguous position since the Astoria studio had been taken away from him. So B.P. had to defend his rear while fighting a frontal action against the other majors. L. B. Mayer had become a particularly dangerous enemy. He was vindictive, vicious, egomaniacal, and my father seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting him and humiliating him intellectually at meetings of the Producers’ Association. L. B., for instance, had suggested that one way to keep costs down and stop the runaway market in stars’ salaries was for the studio heads to agree not to hire away each other’s marquee names at the end of their contracts. “That way they won’t be able to play off one studio against the other. We can keep them forever!” Mayer had declared.