Moving Pictures (64 page)

“Louie, you’re absolutely right,” B.P. had countered. “If we could set up that system, we’d have our stars exactly where we want them. And our directors and writers. But that system was tried in this country once, and it was overthrown. It’s called slavery.”

B.P. got the laugh he expected from a few of his fellow-producers. But it was one more mark in L.B.’s not-so-little black book. “He has the memory of an elephant,” Mank had said. “And the hide of an elephant. The only difference is that elephants are vegetarians and Mayer’s favorite diet is his fellowman.”

B.P. loved to repeat anti-Mayer stories all over town, from Montmartre to the Mayfair Club. Mother would caution him; it was her hope that she could still effect a reconciliation between L.B. and B.P. Irving Thalberg’s weak heart made him a shaky entry in the big-studio derby. Father might be a potential replacement if he extricated himself from his
Paramount problems, and acknowledged L.B. as the leader of The Industry.

All of this led me to the brief but complex conclusion that “they are both right.” They were both right not only about their emotional conflict but about Father’s position in The Industry. Either because he was a rebel, as he saw himself, or because he was self-destructive, as Mother judged him, Father could never bend the knee to L.B. In his personal life he was willing to come home and try again, but he was too proud, or too pigheaded, to apologize for past transgressions. And Mother, on the other hand, was what her mother would call a
hocker,
one who hammers relentlessly at the same point until the argument becomes self-defeating. “The trouble with your mother,” Ben had said—borrowing from Mank’s ample quiver of one-liners—“is that she refuses to take
yes
for an answer.”

Once again after lights out, I prayed for one more reconciliation. In fact, for a self-announced atheist—who occasionally softened that stand to “pantheism”—I put in my share of person-to-person calls to the Almighty that season. I not only called on Him to bring Father and Mother to their senses, but urged Him to do what He could to get me on a plane to California for Easter.

In letters to my parents I had argued that since Lindbergh’s recent 14-hour flight from coast to coast, more passengers had been encouraged to take to the air, until now some 400,000 were using commercial flights. Planes stopped three or four times for refueling, and put passengers up at hotels near the airfield overnight, so I wouldn’t exactly be doing a Jimmy Doolittle or a Wiley Post. The arrival of one of my appeals coincided with a fatal aircrash in Nebraska, followed a few days later by news of another 20-seater lost in a storm in the Southwest. When my parents wrote that they had decided I had too much to live for to take unnecessary risks, I was secretly relieved.

While I kept on imploring Him to help me make the tennis team, reason told me that getting my first serve in and being less tentative on the overhead smash had more to do with reaching my goal than any heavenly intercession. It was a lonely feeling. I was not really on God’s side, nor was He on mine. Every Sunday morning I mocked Mr. Boyden’s tight-lipped Christianity, and at the same time I felt just as cut off from the religion my grandparents had brought over from the old country. The only time I wanted to be Jewish was when Mr. Boyden
ordered me to worship, as the Messiah, a controversial rabbi I could accept only as a teacher in the tradition of Isaiah.

But I did learn one thing from Frank Boyden, an important lesson: not to push people into cubbyholes and try to confine them to predetermined definitions. On the eve of my first trip to Dartmouth, where I would face my pre-admission interview before taking the train to Boston, Chicago, and home to Hollywood, The Quid intercepted me on my way from Sunday-morning chapel. “Schulberg, I’d like to talk to you for a moment.”

I braced myself and waited nervously as he began, “I wanted you to know I’ve just read your article on the Marx Brothers in
The Stockade.
” In the pause that followed, I prepared myself for “Shocking. Absolutely disgraceful! I expect our boys to live up to the high standards of Deerfield. I think you should forget Dartmouth, and apply to one of those colleges in southern California.”

Instead, I was hearing him say: “I thought it was very well done. So did Mrs. Boyden. I must say, you’ve done very good work for the magazine. When you meet with Dean Bill in Hanover, please give him our best regards.”

I walked back to the Old Dorm in a daze. Those were the first kind words I had ever heard from The Quid, and on a subject that had seemed abhorrent to him. What had turned him around so dramatically? Had he begun to have guilt feelings about cutting off the screening of
Monkey Business
? Had Mrs. Boyden, my friend at court, talked to him in my behalf? Or had my efforts to define the uniqueness of the Marx Brothers finally convinced him that they were more than vulgar Jewish cutups playing for cheap laughs? I never would know the answer. But it did me good to ponder the implications of the question.

In high spirits, I went up to Dartmouth. There was a small but enthusiastic group of us, including our Deerfield version of Superman, Mutt Ray. For me, the Dartmouth campus was love at first sight: the old New England village we drove through to reach the campus; the row of white 18
^th
-century buildings; the inviting look of Baker Library; the coziness of its Tower Room; the sound of the chimes; the White Mountains in the background; the wide Connecticut River separating the college from the rolling green hills rising to the Green Mountains of Vermont; the impressive daily newspaper I longed to work on. The look of the student body appealed to me, checked wool shirts and windbreakers,
a rugged up-country look that fulfilled our image of Dartmouth as northern New England’s answer to the effeteness of Harvard or the southern-gentleman tradition of Princeton. Mutt Ray seemed perfect Dartmouth material, and I felt a little more rugged myself as I walked at his side, inspecting the sentimental landmarks, the old covered bridge and the 18
^th
-century Daniel Webster Cottage, where perhaps the most eloquent of all New Hampshiremen had lived as an undergraduate, years before he became a senator, a presidential hopeful, a secretary of state, and the successful defender of the college in the crucial Dartmouth College Case. Every freshman memorizes Webster’s summation: “Dartmouth, sirs, ’tis a small college, but there are those of us who love it.”

To climax our day, Rudy Pacht, now established as one of the stalwarts of the freshman football team, introduced us to Bill Morton, Dartmouth’s reigning backfield star, and one of her all-time greats. After being in his presence, I found my interview with Dean Bill a decided anticlimax.

H
OME AND HOLLYWOOD LOST
a lot of their joy for me that spring. Even the usually euphoric Felix Young admitted in the privacy of his studio office that the other female stars on the lot—Claudette Colbert Kay Francis, Nancy Carroll, the Broadway import Ruth Chatterton and the glamorous, still-Sternberg-struck Marlene—were complaining of Father’s focusing a disproportionate amount of time and attention on Sylvia, to the detriment of their own careers. And, as even the carefree Feel had begun to realize, the delayed effects of the Crash and the impact of sound had made these times far more complicated. The old order was gone. It wasn’t only Wall Street that had moved in on Hollywood, it was the giants of high finance, RCA and A.T.&T. Through the sound patents they controlled, they were now the true bosses of Hollywood. The Mayers, the Warners, and even Schulberg loomed big on the local scene, but they were merely junior officers in a much larger war between the Morgans and the Rockefellers for control of what was now the billion-dollar Industry.

In terms of individual owners, Hollywood had simply outgrown itself. My uncle the studio manager confirmed this ominous change. It was no longer a question of opening theater doors and letting the movie fans rush in. Now that the novelty effect of talking pictures was wearing off, and the Crash of ’29 seemed to have settled under Hoover’s do-nothing policies into permanent Depression, the public had become more discriminating. No matter how Father boasted of his latest hits, Paramount was losing ground to MGM, which had even bigger stars and firmer
leadership. B.P. was in a spot. Mother was right. Mistakes which might have been overlooked in 1930 were examined through a magnifying glass in 1932. Warners was capitalizing on its headstart with Vitaphone. New competition was right next door, on the old FBO lot where Maurice and I used to play when we tired of Paramount’s castles and Western streets. Joe Kennedy, master manipulator, had shaken up the old “B picture” studio through merging RCA and the Keith-Orpheum Circuit to form RKO. Our poor neighbor on Gower Street was now another serious competitor.

Uncle Sam Jaffe was a concerned if somewhat patronizing brother-in-law. In installing him as studio manager, Father had exposed himself to accusations of nepotism. But with his usual eloquence and self-confidence, he had stood up to his critics, insisting that Sam had shown an aptitude for “our business” from the moment that Mother had brought him out from New York, and that he was now the best damn studio manager in the business. Sam, on his part, had grown in the job, with a self-assurance tilting toward arrogance. Still loyal to Father, he was convinced that he could now stand on his own two feet if he had to. Like Ad, he had what Father described as “Jaffe push,” or
chutzpah,
an eye for the main chance. B.P. had the charm and intelligence to win a thousand arguments. But there was something unprotected or naive about him as compared with Ad’s or Sam’s grittier instinct for survival.

In Father’s office I told him what people were saying about his losing his grip on the studio because of the favoritism he lavished on Sylvia Sidney. As was to be expected, he unleashed one of his brilliant defenses. Since I seemed to be so involved in studio politics—Father’s sarcasm stung—I should be able to find out that none of his other actresses had protested his stewardship of their careers. Nancy Carroll was becoming a full-fledged star, and so was Kay Francis. What I had heard about this distaff mutiny at the studio obviously came from friends of Mother’s. Again he urged me to concentrate on my own work and my own future; let
him
run the studio and try to work out his difficulties at home. He wanted to read my latest chapters on the lynching book. And since I was on my way to the set to interview Richard Arlen for the
Scroll,
he’d like to read that piece if I could finish it before catching the train back to Deerfield.

He kept trying to prove that he could be a good father despite the domestic triangle. He read my stories, he encouraged me, he took me to previews and fights, he was almost excessively proud of me—what more
did I want? The answer was painfully obvious: What I wanted most of all was a conventional family.

In the tiled library at home, surrounded by classics I had been urged to read, I discussed with Mother her end of the drama. She looked like a beautiful leading lady—Norma Shearer or Eleanor Boardman—playing the role of the woman scorned, the elegant and dutiful wife abandoned for the studio fleshpots. Vigorously pacing up and down, smoking one cigarette after another, she sounded firmer and tougher than I had ever heard her before. She had decided it would be easier on all of us if they arranged a civilized separation, and, after the year required in California, probably divorce. “I don’t know anyone in this town quite like your father,” she said, determinedly lighting another cigarette. “Well, maybe Mank. They’re both brilliant, and charming, and self-destructive. Only for Ben the stakes are so much higher; Mank will never be more than a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-week writer. [B.P. was still making his unreal $11,000 per week plus bonuses.] But if Father is no longer head of the studio—”

She paused and drew hard on her cigarette. I knew she was on the verge of tears but a fierce, mean pride made her sound angry. “—I’m sick and tired of waiting up for him, or worrying about him, or wondering where he is or—you’ve been through all this or I wouldn’t discuss it so openly—
knowing
where he is. I’ve almost reached a point where I wouldn’t care, as long as I thought he could keep his balance.” Her voice was rasping in anger now. “If only he weren’t so damn gullible. The best mind in Hollywood—if he’d only protect it. If he’d only listen to me. I’m the only one who can help him. But he’d rather listen to those hangers-on and
hoors
who ‘yes’ him to death and tell him only what he wants to hear. It’s so frustrating to see talent like that [and
money
like that, she might have added, for she loved and respected money almost more than culture itself] slipping through his fingers. I can’t sleep at night, worrying about it. I get up and pace back and forth. No wonder I smoke so much!”

I had always thought of her as tough and formidable but suddenly she looked so small and vulnerable that I had an impulse to throw my arms around her and hug her. But she had never been a hugger: She reached out to our minds, loving us vicariously through the intellectual and creative accomplishments she encouraged with the persistence of a coxswain exhorting his crew to the finish line. So I didn’t put my arms around her. Instead, I watched her pause in her restless pacing to make a surprising announcement: “I’ve decided to hire Mendel Silverberg to
work out a satisfactory settlement.” Silverberg was known in Hollywood as one of the smartest, toughest lawyers in town. She caught the expression on my face and went on to explain, “I’m not doing this for myself. I have to protect the children, see that you all get a good education. Dartmouth. A good finishing school for Sonya. And maybe a good boarding school would be the best thing for little Stuart. It’s all very expensive. Tuition, and travel. Your trip back on the train alone cost two hundred and sixty-five dollars, and that doesn’t include meals and tips…”

In Mother’s head there always seemed to be a kind of double-entry bookkeeping: one emotional, the other economic. She was able to weep for the loss of her first and, as it turned out, her one true love—and the breakup of the family she over-romanticized—and, with eyes still moist with domestic rue, she could figure out to the penny what everything was costing.