Moving Pictures (66 page)

How could I explain at the oh-so-respectable reception following the graduation exercises that my father was probably at a Manhattan speakeasy, drinking bootleg whiskey with his movie-star mistress while Mother was busy in Hollywood setting up an agency business that soon would represent Claudette Colbert, Maurice Chevalier, Nancy Carroll, Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins—practically the entire list of Paramount marquee names?

Before leaving Deerfield, I took a final walk through the village cemetery. Under those weather-beaten stones lay the bones of the pioneers who had dared move on from Boston and Springfield to clear their own fields and build their strong, no-nonsense houses intended to protect them against the dual attacks of violent winters and the Indians who believed that the Earth Mother had provided this land for them alone. So much of what Deerfield had meant to me had been learned in this cemetery, and its defiant Old Testament names and its simple New Testament determination to conquer the wilderness. Here were the tiny graves of infants who could not survive terrible winters, the mother worn out in their middle thirties, an old, old man of 62 surrounded by his series of wives and the eight children he had given back to the earth…

Still in the spirit of the place, I said goodbye to old Mrs. Sheldon, who was now waiting to die in her 17
^th
-century house with its secret door to an escape tunnel and hiding place. My Uncle Joe had described the attacks of the Cossacks back in the years when our family had clung to its
shtetl
on the banks of the Dvina, but somehow Mrs. Sheldon’s ancestors and their martyrdom had become more real to me. These ties now drew me to New England. In Hollywood even the great studios and the palatial homes of the movie stars along Sunset Boulevard were made of stucco. Glorified impermanence. Here I felt the stability of old beams that had stood against the centuries. Taking a farewell walk along the river with Eaton Tarbell, my comrade-in-stammering and in general roughhousing, I realized that almost without my knowing it I had become a part of this old world. I now felt ready for Dartmouth; the outdoor ballads of her son Richard Hovey called to me, as did the downright orneriness of Robert Frost’s “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by.”

On my first trip east I might have accepted those lines from the New Hampshireman’s poem as a neat little rhyme. But now I had seen his mountains, his rocky fields, and the independent cusses who insisted on working them. I was beginning to sense what Frost meant by “And that has made all the difference.” Speeding to Chicago in high style on the
Santa Fe Chief with
the lowbrow Sol Wurtzel, I had been exposed to a different kind of poetry in the drawing room, which might be paraphrased: “Who the hell wants t’ follow a road nobody uses? That’s a road to a box office with nobody at the window! Fuck that!” I didn’t need Frost or his New England to tell me what to think of Sol Wurtzel. “You’re going from bad to Wurtzel,” Father had commented on one of our scenes for
Bughouse Fables.
Reading Frost had given me a new frame of reference in which to judge the Hollywood experience. It made me think about our own seekers of the road less traveled: Chaplin, King Vidor, Eisenstein, Tod Browning, the obsessed Von Stroheim, the ego centric Von Sternberg…. We might teach Mr. Boyden something about tolerance, but the best of New England, from Roger Williams to our own New Hampshire laureate, could teach us something about the hard choices that make for freedom.

W
ITH A CLASSMATE AND
his parents in their black 1930 Packard, it took three hours to drive the last sixty miles on the old road from Deerfield to New York City, but it seemed a million light-years from the isolated green campus to Father’s suite in the Waldorf Towers. I was immediately enveloped in his atmosphere—the humidor of Upmanns, the Hollywood tradepapers and scripts on the coffee table, the phone calls, the telegrams from the studio, the familiar faces of Al Kaufman and Paramount lawyer Louie Swartz, and the team of writers B.P. had brought with him across the country for those obligatory nonstop story conferences.

Father may have been sitting on a shaky throne, but he knew how to hold court as if anointed for life. When his sister Val and her husband Charley arrived, I could feel the awe, the amazement that one of theirs had made it all the way to the top of the golden ladder. To the rest of his family, B.P.’s story of Rivington rags to Hollywood riches was the stuff of Yiddish fairy tales. The pauper had become a prince, and there was something truly regal in the way he received his courtiers and passed their hands with gold, for he always carried a pocketful of ten-and twenty-dollar gold pieces.

With Aunt Val and Uncle Charley, we made another million-light-year journey in a sleek Paramount limousine to Grandmother’s tenement, where we walked up the narrow, creaky stairs into the world she stubbornly still refused to leave, either for a “better neighborhood” or for a bungalow of her own in the Hollywood sun. On the liberal allowance that
Father provided, she had not in the slightest changed her lifelong ways. Instead, she used her monthly fortune to rebuild the synagogue she loved to watch from her window, and to support (without her son’s knowledge) two poor families on the block. To spend all the money on herself seemed
goyische
waste. To eat, to sleep, to pray, to think, to talk with friends … what more could a person want? With a double generation-gap between us, I had never really talked to her. I had only heard the stories of how independent she was, like my own mother ahead of her time, and how she had coped with Grandfather Simon, the strapping six-footer with a red face and “the thirst for beer of an Irishman.” “Your grandfather was powerful but she’s the one in the family who was really strong,” Aunt Val said.

A feeling of sentimentality balanced a sense of repugnance at her stale breath as I kissed her. She patted me and muttered something in Hebrew. From the stoop we looked up and waved as she watched us from her window. Our limousine and liveried chauffeur had drawn a crowd of curious men with long dark beards, women with shawls, and ghetto kids laughing and pointing. A boy a little younger than I, in a worn jacket that was obviously a hand-me-down, its sleeves rolled up at the wrist, came up to me and shouted, “Whaddya doin’ down here—slummin’?”

Back in Father’s sumptuous suite lay our reality. Aunt Val accused her famous brother of supporting Sylvia Sidney, at a time when his own income was in jeopardy. Father defended himself with his customary eloquence. He was not
supporting
Sylvia. Ad herself had urged him to sign her to a long-term contract. She was not even being paid as much as his other stars like Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, and her pictures were outgrossing theirs. At that moment, as much as I resented his illicit affair, I felt a little sorry for him. It wasn’t easy having Ad and Aunt Val
and
Paramount’s new bankers on his neck.

After Val and her nice but
nebbish
Charley left, Father fixed himself a stiff highball, lit another expensive cigar, and told me what he had not wanted to say in front of them. “Sometimes I get sick and tired of all the critics in this family. I wonder what your Aunt Val would say if I told her that I’m paying Charley’s salary? Otherwise he’d be out of a job. I could have given the money directly to her but the poor sonofabitch is already pretty well beaten-down, and I didn’t want him to lose his self-respect entirely. This way he feels he can pay me back when things get better.”

How many people Father had on that secret payroll, I never knew. The way he handed money out to almost anyone who put the arm on him reminded me of openhanded prizefight champions. Was it an inability ever to say No—a weakness Mother had battled to correct over the years—or simply the flow of a generous nature, a genuine feeling for the less fortunate?

Highballing it back to Chicago on the
20
^th
Century,
we traveled in style with a silky black porter constantly fetching ice with lots of
yassuh
ing and practiced smiles. His counterpart served our dinner—whisked with mysterious efficiency from the dining car. This was the first time I could remember traveling alone with Father. Through Europe, to Mexico, back and forth across the country, there had always been either an entourage or the rest of the family. Now we played casino and B.P. was delighted that he had found a pigeon he could beat. By the time we pulled in to Chicago, I was down seven dollars and Father was urging me to up the stakes.

After dinner that evening I asked him about the problems at the studio that Aunt Val had mentioned. He prefaced his explanation by urging me not to worry. Then he admitted that Mother’s fears had been realized. Now that Jesse Lasky was gone and Zukor no longer in control, he was being pushed out of his job as vice-president-in-charge-of-production. It had—he assured me—absolutely nothing to do with Sylvia Sidney. So far his record had been just as good as in the previous year. He had been a victim of a palace revolution. Manny Cohen, who had been Lasky’s assistant, would soon be taking B.P.’s place in the big sunken office from which the studio was run. But crafty, tough-minded little Manny knew nothing about running a studio. “In six months I’ll lay you a hundred dollars to five they’ll be begging me to come back and bail out that snake-in-the-grass!

“In the meantime,” he went on with his infectious optimism, “I won’t be exactly on Poverty Row. I’m getting a new contract for my own independent unit. I’ll make a little less every week, but I’ll have a much larger percentage of the profits. In the long run I can end up with more money, and I won’t have to spread myself so thin. You know, I never really disagreed with David about the merits of independent production. But as long as I had the responsibility for the entire program, I couldn’t let myself admit it.” Now, Father continued in that same cheery vein, he was looking forward to making six personally produced pictures a year.
With the pick of the Paramount players and directors to choose from, it would be more like the good old days of Preferred Pictures back in the Mayer-Schulberg Studio era.

If Mother was a chronic worrier, Father was a congenital optimist. To put it bluntly, he had just been fired from one of the biggest jobs Hollywood had to offer. For seven years he had run a production company whose only rival was the ever-expanding MGM. Now, at the age of forty, when most executives are reaching their prime, he was being shunted aside. Somehow Father was able to herald this demotion as a personal triumph. It had been a ball to run the Stude in the silent days. But now with the Depression tightening its grip on The Industry, and A.T.&T. and RCA closing in, Father insisted he was lucky to be out from under. Now he’d be more like DeMille, with his own bungalow headquarters and his own staff.

With each scotch highball, Father’s mood grew merrier. He filled the drawing room not only with expensive smoke but with an air of festivity. When I finally aroused him in the morning to tell him we’d be pulling into Chicago in an hour, he groped his way to the bathroom in his silk monogrammed pajamas and was soon singing his habitual shaving songs, “
H
—
A
—
Double R I
…” and “Somebody’s Been Aroun’ Heah (Givin’ Yuh Lessons in Love),” along with a raucous rendition of “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” which we had just heard Ethel Merman proclaim in George White’s
Scandals.
As I listened to Father’s gargled imitation of the Broadway star, I watched the ugly outskirts east of Chicago and thought about the sermon for our times he was singing so gaily.

The Hub City, once so proud of its muscle, had just reported its fortieth bank closing—a fitting setting for the Democratic Convention. There a new figure on the national scene, Franklin D. Roosevelt, inspired by a “brains trust” of Columbia professors, would call for “a New Deal” and voice his concern for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

In the three-hour layover between trains, Father bought me a new portable phonograph as a graduation present. I picked hit records from the Broadway musicals I had seen, Libby Holman torching “Something to Remember You By” and other Gershwin showstoppers from
Girl Crazy,
like “Embraceable You” and “Bidin’ My Time.” Just beginning to hear the difference between true jazz and the pop orchestras I listened to on the radio, I bought Red Nichols and his Orchestra (Red’s sidemen
were Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Dorsey, and Jack Teagarden). Then, stopping at a speakeasy Ben Hecht had recommended, B.P. drew around him a group of Hecht’s newspaper cronies, each one of them ready to sell him a gangster yarn that would top
Underworld.
Drinking, laughing, enjoying the attention, Father suddenly realized the
Chief
was about to leave. We jumped in a taxi and raced through traffic while the manager phoned ahead to hold the train.

Entering the oak-paneled dining car that evening for the first meal of the journey, Father was recognized by the attentive captain from previous crossings. Satisfied travelers tipped at the far end of the trip, but Father liked to hand out his gold pieces at the beginning as well. In return, the smiling maître d’ reserved Father’s favorite table for him and served specially prepared dishes that were not on the menu. I don’t think Father really cared that much about three-star dishes. It was simply his way of maintaining the status to which he had become accustomed.

Over his drinks before dinner (a supply of imported scotch laid on at Chicago), I would offer him for criticism descriptive paragraphs I had sketched in the observation car, invariably getting more than I bargained for. If he liked one line in half a dozen, I was encouraged. Tough criticism was helping me. The flattery I almost invariably heard from Mother was balm for the wounds. But I knew I needed the sting of the stick as a racehorse does if it is not to bear out. Already he had told me he thought I was hopelessly over my head with
Judge Lynch.
And the scenario Maurice and I had written for
Bughouse Fables
had not changed his earlier opinion that putting the Marx Brothers in charge of a lunatic asylum was a self-defeating idea. Stung, I insisted that I had just read their
Horsefeathers
screenplay and thought ours was better. Father admired my spirit, but warned me that if I were to repeat that cockiness to Mank, he’d make us the laughingstock of the town. “Cockiness is helpful
while
you’re writing,” he advised, “but humility is the ticket to rewriting.”