Moving Pictures (65 page)

“And so,” I heard Mother saying, “I’ve decided not to depend on Father—for anything. In all these years he has practically nothing to show for the millions he’s earned—a few apartment houses, some acres in Palm Springs, his Paramount stock, insurance—I don’t think he’s got ten thousand dollars saved—he lives in that dream world of his, with people like Felix and the Sidney woman telling him how great he is—”

More serious pacing and thoughtful inhaling. Time for decisionmaking.

“—So I’ve decided to go into the agency business.”

“The agency business!” I could not have been more shocked if she had told me she was going to join the fallen ladies at Madame Frances’s notorious home-away-from-home for the Hollywood famous. We knew producers and movie stars, big directors, and high-paid writers. Agents—this was forty years before they took over The Industry—were just a cut above the wantons who referred to themselves as “actresses” when they were booked for soliciting on Hollywood Boulevard. The only
agent
we knew was David Selznick’s maverick brother, Myron. Foulmouthed, hard-drinking, irreverent, looking and acting more Irish than Jewish (like my mysterious Grandfather Simon), Myron would turn the business around. Until he began storming into front offices, stars were merely incredibly high-paid slaves, their three-to-five-thousand-dollars-a-week salaries not protecting them from producers who could shove them into any sort of role or picture they chose and give them an arbitrary starting date. It was standard procedure to finish one
picture, take a week’s or ten days’ rest, and plunge into the next. If they rebelled, as some of the more independent or idealistic did, put them on suspension! No more money coming in, and no competing studio allowed to touch them.

When he began to change all this, Myron Selznick was somehow accepted as the son of a pioneer getting back at The Industry for what he and his brother felt was the shafting their father L.J. had gotten. But agents in general were still at the bottom of the Hollywood barrel. And a
woman
agent! What would people think? It would be a reflection on Father, on all of us!

O
N THE TRAIN
rolling through the southwestern desert, I jotted a note in my diary to call on the overworked Being in whom I claimed not to believe: “Oh God, please don’t let Mom become an agent!” And if He had time, I had a further request: “And help me finish my book on lynching.”

At my last meeting with Mrs. Stanton, my patient counselor at U.S.C., she had been more impressed with my industry than with the creative future
of Judge Lynch.
Even with a feeling for the subject, and a thick file of searing N.A.A.C.P. statistics, I was like a social engineer who knew both sides of the river but didn’t know how to build the bridge. In the year I gave to
Judge Lynch
(along with its loony opposite,
Bughouse Fables
) I was learning a healthy lesson: In writing there could be success in failure. I was learning to write and rewrite, and I was also learning that all the rewriting in the world won’t help the poor scribe who doesn’t know what he’s rewriting about.

Going east, I walked the train looking for Hollywood familiars and fell in with Sol Wurtzel, a prototype of what outsiders thought a Hollywood producer should be. A burly cloak-and-suiter who had never read a book and who had his scenarios synopsized for him by more literate assistants, Sol was known in Hollywood as The Keeper of the B’s, the penny-pinching minor mogul who ran the old Fox Studio on Western Avenue that specialized in oaters and mellers. The trouble with The Industry, he lectured me, was experimentation. In these difficult times, he felt that he—and not the sainted Irving Thalberg or young upstart
Dave Selznick—had the answers. “If you got a good story, stick to it. The public loves to see the same goddamn story over and over again. They feel comfortable with it. To hell with unhappy endings, offbeat material. I hear these directors bitching about what they really wanna make. Fuck ’em. What they wanna make, maybe five thousand highbrows in the whole country will pay their four bits t’see. I don’t give a shit about art. It’s a business—and anybody who doesn’t think so oughta get out of it!”

Maybe because he knew B.P. looked down on him as an illiterate and an ignoramus, he stared at me as if challenging me either to agree with his lowbrow approach or get off at Omaha.

In those days Hollywood was such a small town that Mr. Wurtzel felt obliged to look after me in Chicago, during the long stopover to change trains from the
Chief
at the Dearborn Street Station to the La Salle Street Depot, where we caught the
20
^th
Century
to New York. But having been locked into those Pullman cars for three days and nights with the stolid chieftain of Western Avenue, I muttered something about having friends to look up in Chicago, and slipped away.

I spent most of the day with my golden pass, taking in
The Roar of the Crowd
with Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell, followed by a brace of the formula movies in which Sol Wurtzel took such pride. On my way to still another movie in the Loop, I passed a burlesque theater. Glancing around as if in fear of being followed, I lowered my head and snuck in. The strippers—“specialty dancers” in my prim diary—provoked desires that had been repressed or sublimated in sports since my middle teens. One statuesque lady so demonstrated the art of titillation, to the steamy music of “Stairway to Paradise,” that I suddenly realized I might miss my train.

Racing to La Salle Street, I made it to the Pullman platform on the final
All aboard!,
watched the familiar old station fall away behind me, and then realized that I had left my wallet with all my money at the newsstand where I had grabbed a
Chicago Trib
on my way to the gate. The kindness of strangers to whom I stammered out my plight provided dinner and breakfast money. Meanwhile, with another small loan, I wired Western Union to please search for my wallet and send it on to me at Deerfield. A few days later it reached my mailbox at school, my seventy-one dollars intact. In my innocence, and that of the times, I accepted this miracle of integrity with not even a cry of surprise. I didn’t even consider it a news item for the
Scroll.
Times were hard, and dollars
scarce, but we had a quaint attitude toward money: If it wasn’t ours, we gave it back.

Spring at Deerfield should have been a happy time, but I was tortured by old ghosts. I managed to make the A list in tennis, but so far down that I lived in terror of tumbling into the humiliating B’s every time my service failed. “Tomorrow is my last chance!” I suffered through an entire season of Last Chances, playing life-and-death two-hour matches in which scores like 8-10, 10-12—always on the narrow edge of winning, and always losing—punctuated my dreams.

I took out my frustrations in reading and writing, wrestling in the hallways, and heckling the dreary Sunday sermons. In what must have seemed an obviously losing cause, I continued to exhort my parents by mail and occasional long-distance calls to conform to my conception of how they should conduct their marriage.

I seemed to be living my life in a kind of righteous rage, storming against hypocrisy, from Hollywood to Scottsboro to Deerfield. I was inclined to take the positives for granted: my letter of acceptance by Dartmouth, praise for my stories and book reviews in
The Stockade,
literary encouragement from Mrs. Stanton, a growing feeling of belonging in the Old Dorm. But the hypocrisy of the more snobbish of the student body, and of The Quid himself, continued to agitate me. When B.P.’s controversy with Von Sternberg over the choice of story material for Marlene Dietrich made the New York papers, I noted: “Dad’s argument with Von Sternberg has made a lot of fellows greet me who have never done so before. What hypocrites!”

Repressed violence and simplistic idealism played tug-of-war with my emotions. Headlines on the Lindbergh kidnapping prompted this outburst: “There was an extra out that the Lindbergh baby was found dead in the woods. What a lousy country this is! Those kidnappers ought to get hung up by their balls.” The same week brought news of the shooting of the President of France. Retreating from a sermon in church, I was ready with one of my own: “The newspapers carry the story that the assassin of Paul Doumer was a Bolshevist. More trouble. I wonder if there will ever come a time when all nations shall scrap all armies, all armaments. Not until that time will we be fully civilized.”

But my real war was still with Mr. Boyden. On his way to New York, Father requested by wire that I be permitted to come down to meet the train. “The weekend is all set!” I assured myself.

The following entry strikes a different tone: “God damn fucking bastard son-of-a-bitch! [While I had heard profanity in Hollywood, I had had to come to an eastern prep school to learn how to use it.] Jesus I’m sore tonite. Dad wired the Quid (GDHBH) to let me meet him tomorrow. Boyden refuses because it is too near finals and ‘no one is having a weekend.’ Now I find out that half a dozen fellows I know have permission to leave. Sons of presidents of colleges and big companies get special treatment. What a hypocrite!” The month of May was neatly summed: “Improved in tennis. Had two short stories in
The Stockade.
Acquired deep bitterness against Mr. Boyden.”

I vented that bitterness by raiding the school pantry (“drowned my sorrows in orange marmalade tonight”), reading until dawn (“
Chocolate,
a new Soviet novel Mother brought me from Russia”), boycotting Mr. Boyden’s beloved semipro baseball team, and checking off on my wall the days until I would be free of what had become for me a Dickensian reformatory.

I went through final exams with a chip on my shoulder, daring them to flunk me, reading novels and my own bible, the Steffens autobiography, when I should have been studying. Perhaps that attitude relaxed me, for I sailed through with high grades. Mrs. Boyden, that fine-spirited antidote to her puritanical husband, somehow had managed to brainwash me into knowing all I needed to know to get through the math final and on to Dartmouth, where I would never again have to wrestle with that wretched subject, and simply could count on my fingers for the rest of my days.

After the Latin final, a troop of rowdies, led by the first-born of the production head of Paramount, the son of the president of Wesleyan, the son of a former governor of Massachusetts, and other young eminences, gathered all their Latin books—Cicero, Caesar, the
Aeneid,
Ovid—and raucously marched with them across campus to the banks of the Connecticut. There, in a spontaneous combustion of adolescent joy, they ripped out the pages, set them on fire, and cheered as they watched the classic lines that had tortured them all semester burn to ash. The son of Ben and Ad, taught to love books and already trying to write one, applauded with the others as his Latin texts floated downriver in flames.

When Mr. Boyden called the senior class together to discuss the baccalaureate ceremonies, and emphasized the importance of our parents’ attendance, I felt he was looking directly at me, as if challenging me to produce a Respectable American Family. But back in Hollywood,
Mother was getting ready to launch her agency business. And though Father was in New York, it was simply not his style to board the uncomfortable Boston & Maine, or take a six-hour motor trip along a narrow, winding road into what seemed to him an alien wilderness. If I had been in the big city, he would have squired me to George White’s
Scandals,
the big fight in the Garden, and on to “21.” But the Pocumtuck Valley and making polite talk with the Boydens and the Deerfield faculty were not for him. He phoned me from the Waldorf, with the charming sincerity that was his trademark, pleading the pressure of meetings with the Paramount board of directors and telling me how proud both he and Mother were of the way I had mastered a new environment—academically, on the school publications, and on the football and tennis teams. He thought I had done especially well in view of my involvement in his and Ad’s squabbles. He praised Mother, as he always did, as an admirable and progressive woman. But he reminded me again that there are two sides to every argument and while he did not want to undermine my loyalty to Ad, he hoped that someday I would come to a better understanding of his position.

There was something both sad and affectionate about that strained conversation. I could see him in his lavish suite at the Waldorf, full of expensive cigar smoke and the fumes of fine scotch, possibly attended by Sylvia Sidney and a few of his studio cronies, while I stood at the pay phone in the campus post-office-store. Each of us calling out for the sympathy and understanding of the other: B.P. doing everything possible (for him) not to lose his son, while the son was trying to hang onto his father…

In the graduating class, surrounded by secure young men from the best eastern families, with their proper parents in the audience in their proper dress, with their proper manners, kissing or shaking hands with their proper sons receiving diplomas from the proper Mr. Boyden, I felt like an orphan, the Hollywood outsider, the Jewish beggar at the feast of the gentiles.

Sitting next to my school paper sidekick, Mac McConaughy, I listened thoughtfully as his father, the eminent president of Wesleyan, delivered a typically New England address on the beauty of commonplace things. It was a nice talk, I noted, and yet far removed from the hard realities of the Depression that was changing the face of America. While we were sitting there in the peace and sunshine of the Connecticut River Valley, snug and smug in our isolation, dwelling on the unique
beauty of the wild violet in the lovely woods surrounding the peaceful little campus (the subject of Dr. McConaughy’s thoughtful little talk), Hoovervilles were spreading around every city in America, once-respectable heads of families were literally fighting for the garbage outside restaurants, and stocks like my parents’ RCA, which had plunged from over 100 to around 25 in the infamous Crash, had gone down and down and now were hovering at a fraction over 2.

Thinking about all this as the kindly Dr. McConaughy talked on, I wondered what set me so apart from my classmates. I was probably as affluent as any of these rich boys and probably lived what seemed to them a far more glamorous life. Yet I worried about the shuttered factories and the foreclosed farms in a way they could never understand. I didn’t delude myself that I had a kinder heart. I think my stammering, my father’s teetering on the high wire between the poles of success and failure, my Hollywood Jewish background in the exclusive world of the eastern gentile all fed a sense of alienation that made it easier, maybe even inevitable, for me to identify with the underdog. Maybe the underdog was simply me, three thousand miles from home, ashamed for having to apologize for the absence of my father and mother.