Moving Pictures (68 page)

Since she was all of 22 and I only 18, I thought of her as an older woman, and so I was surprised when, at the end of the interview, she asked me if I would like to go to a party at the Laemmle mansion in Beverly Hills. I was afraid of parties, but the winsome Miss Fox dropped the kind of names calculated to bring me out of my social shell: It was a party honoring the Ail-American football team, celebrating the wrap-up of a contemporary epic entitled
All-American.

Except for the parties my parents and the Rapfs had given—like the reception at our Lorraine house for Maurice Chevalier, at which Charlie Chaplin had gone into another room and pounded the piano to sabotage the attention being lavished on the French singer—this was the first real Hollywood party I had ever attended. It was a mob scene of gridiron celebrities, movie stars, and starlets, with saxophones blaring and bartenders serving the finest bootleg hooch. Sidney asked me to dance, but of course I refused. I had been taking desperate lessons in the box step from Sonya but wasn’t ready to make my debut on the dance floor in the arms of a movie star. Instead, I did what I did best—watched and listened. And what I saw and heard horrified me. My heroes, the beloved gods of my sports pantheon, were looped in the coils of Bacchus. “Those backfield stars, all those great linemen, they were all stinko, it was a drunken orgy!” the young Puritan reported to his diary. I watched, half in jealousy, half in horror, as vivacious little Sidney Fox was bounced around the dance floor by an uninhibited blond giant from Nebraska.

I was ready to go. Sidney said she was, too—the party was getting out of hand. But instead of being driven home, she asked if I’d come with her to Paramount where “one of her beaus,” as she called Jean Negulesco, the European painter now given a chance to direct, was shooting overtime on a low-budget picture. We watched a scene repeated over and over again, until Sidney said she had seen enough and suggested we move on. Again I expected to drop her off at her home, but instead she suggested a speakeasy off Sunset Boulevard. This was my first taste of Hollywood nightlife, a small, dark room full of film people who recognized us, invited us to join their tables, and seemed to take for granted that we were a new Saturday-night “item.” It gave me a racy, sporty feeling to be accepted at Sidney’s escort. Mickey Neilan was there,
with a snootful as usual, “between pictures” after a twenty-year career that had left him shipwrecked in the rough crossing from silents to sound. Teasing Sidney about robbing the cradle, Mickey drew suggestive laughter from Jack Oakie and Eugene Palette, the gravel-voiced character actor who seemed never to stop drinking or working, averaging half a dozen features a year, a pace he would continue for years to come. When Gene wasn’t on the set, the assistant director always knew where to find him: at Lucey’s, the speak across from Paramount, or in one of these Hollywood late spots where an animated piano player with a midnight pallor pounded out the happy songs of hard times, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” …

1932: Tin Pan Alley, whistling in the dark, with Depression just outside the door of that Sunset Boulevard retreat, soup kitchens downtown, and in the Ventura Valley on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, embattled farmers tearing down their foreclosure notices. But in the hideaway that Sidney Fox had whisked me to, the laughter, the music, and the whiskey created a mood of timeless escape. Sidney managed to down more than her share of highballs. In the dark I sipped at mine, still loathing the taste and smell, perhaps because I associated it with Father’s delinquencies, but doing my best to appear a man of the world, a Malibu Tom Sawyer trying to remember how Adolphe Menjou or Clive Brook had behaved in similar situations.

We stayed so long that not only was I getting sleepy, I was beginning to worry about an early-morning tennis date. On the way to Sidney’s house she sat disturbingly close to me and chatted away about film work and movie gossip, saying she knew my father, in a way that made me wonder
how well?,
and that she admired my mother as “a real
mensch,
the only studio wife I’ve met who can stand up to the Mayers and the Warners.” I was still too upset about my parents to talk about them, I told her; it was ruining my summer. Sympathetically, Sidney cuddled closer. Nervously, I edged away. When we reached her bungalow on a quiet Hollywood street, she turned her face to me for the expected kiss. I reached for the door handle on my side and ran around the sleek nose of the Dusenberg to open the car door for her. What I lacked in ardor I tried to make up in gallantry. She offered me her arm to walk her to her door in a way that left me no choice but to hold it, tentatively. The only girl I had ever walked with so intimately was my cousin Roz. At the door, as she fumbled for her keys, Sidney said she knew that Ad collected colored glass bells, and she had one she would like to give me for Mother’s
collection. A million 18-year-olds would have traded a whole month’s allowance for that invitation from the little beauty whose face had graced the cover of
Silver Screen.
But my only emotion was pure panic. I muttered a thank-you-some-other-time—I had to be on the court in five hours for a big tennis match. “What a strange boy,” Sidney said. “I wonder if your father was anything like you when he was your age?”

By the time I drove the long, winding road home to Malibu, where a dawn mist was rising from the ocean just beyond our gate, I was too exhilarated to sleep. Those lies I had been forced to tell at Deerfield about dating “movie queens” had become truth at last. And if I had been just a little bolder, undoubtedly I could have carried back to Green Gate Cottage a colored glass bell as a symbol of conquest. Instead, I had escaped with virtue intact, eager to share this singular experience with Maurice, my brother in innocence and self-doubt. Did anyone truly like us for ourselves? Or were we simply teenage pawns in the ceaseless Hollywood power game? Too exhausted to go into detail on my “escapade” with Sidney Fox, I settled for a single question: “I wonder why she’s so nice to me?”

The “Baby Peggy syndrome,” as I thought of it, rankled deep inside me. Even if Sidney Fox had fallen madly in love with me, I would have interpreted it as an insidious effort to outflank Sylvia Sidney and wind up with star roles in Father’s new unit at Paramount.

That summer the sex education that my overactive Father and Freudian-minded Mother had totally neglected came to us from an unexpected source—Maurice’s cousin from New York, Al Mannheimer. Although Al was only a year older, in our eyes he was already a man of the world, debonair, sophisticated, and sexually experienced. Handsome, suave, self-assured, he was our Beau Brummel, our Don Juan, our Havelock Ellis. At the Rapfs’ that summer (because his mother had just committed suicide in New York), he moved in an atmosphere of what seemed to us romantic tragedy. We had become almost hardened to Hollywood suicide: “If I don’t get that job I’m going to kill myself!” was more than a rhetorical exclamation in our town. Suicide, including the prolonged form of alcoholism and drugs (Wally Reid, Jack Pickford, Mabel Normand, Alma Rubens, John Gilbert…), was an occupational hazard. But Al’s mother was different. Why would a prosperous Manhattan matron shoot herself? The details were obscure, we avoided painful questions, and Al’s way of coping with it was to assume the role of young roué for whom Hollywood provided erotic escape. He had
studied Casanova’s
Memoirs
with the devotion of a Hebrew scholar reading the Talmud. Like his 18
^th
-century mentor, Al believed that every young creature, no matter how much she demurred, was inevitably seducible.

A full, leatherbound set of Casanova beckoned from our library, where it had been placed unobtrusively on the highest shelf. A new world began to open up to us from the printed pages. We who still had not learned to dance or to know the feel of a girl in our arms now began to fantasize about obliging French mistresses and flirtatious Italian maidens. On movie sets and in studio dressing rooms our sandy-haired, self-appointed Casanova continued our sex education. According to Al, there was “a particular look in the eyes” of those who had recently indulged in sexual intercourse. “It’s a kind of a ‘fucky’ look—the eyes get lighter—as if they’ve been washed in milk,” our mentor explained. So we began to look into the eyes of ingénues and leading men for signs of the Mannheimer test.

We applied this test on the set of
Divorce in the Family,
a picture I thought of as Maurice’s because he had written the original story for it while working as a junior writer the summer before. The title reflected the near-divorce of Maurice’s own parents after the Joan Crawford affair. In the Rapfs’ case, his father suffered a heart attack, took a leave of absence from the studio, his family rallied around, and Harry and Tina were reunited—just like in the movies, indeed not unlike the movie Chuck Reisner, a holdover from silent days, was “megging” from Maurice’s idea.

Conrad Nagel played the would-be stepfather wooing little Jackie Cooper from his real father, Lewis Stone; somehow the three of us, Al, Maurice, and I, found ourselves in Nagel’s dressing room, where he was changing costumes for the next scene. Our junior Casanova whispered to us to be sure and look at Nagel’s penis. Dutifully, we did so, trying to make it seem accidental as our eyes dropped toward the floor.

When we withdrew from Nagel’s dressing room, Prof. Mannheimer gave us an improvised lecture on what might be called “penisology.” Had we noticed, he quizzed, the way Nagel’s seemed to be bunched up with little wrinkles and how it looked somewhat reddened at the tip? Those were the symptoms, Al explained, of recent sexual intercourse, either that morning or late the night before.

Armed with this potent insight into the carnal mysteries that both fascinated and frightened us, we continued our study in the locker room
of the Hillcrest Country Club and the Paramount gym and dressing rooms. Thanks to Al, we were also beginning to study the anatomy of the opposite gender in a way we had not dared to before. In our library I read the spicy stories of Colette and also Mother’s Krafft-Ebing, although that ponderous work preferred to mask the best parts in Latin. Now I wished I had learned a little more of the language that was not quite so dead as MacConaughy and I had thought at Deerfield.

As we had since we were ten, Maurice and I still took turns sleeping over at each other’s houses. But now our intimate all-night talk-fests took a different turn. We were ready to take the plunge, which in our case did not go as far as Mannheimer-Casanova seduction, but merely to work up the nerve to invite a date to the Coconut Grove, or better yet—since we wouldn’t have to dance but merely feel romantic under the stars—to an evening concert in the Hollywood Bowl.

Divorce in the Family
featured a luscious 16-year-old being groomed for stardom, Jean Parker. No ordinary starlet, Jean was the ward of Ida Koverman, former secretary to Herbert Hoover, proudly acquired by L.B. not only as a sign of class but as a means of moving up the Republican ladder to the lofty appointments for which he panted. The ultraconservative Mrs. Koverman, who served as L.B.’s storyteller—saving him the irksome chore of reading treatments and scenarios—was determined to keep her protégée as pure as an ingénue in an Andy Hardy movie. Mrs. Koverman had to approve Jean’s dates; she had to be properly chaperoned and, like Cinderella, home before midnight. This made Jean an ideal first date for Maurice, removing the pressures of the livelier Sidney Foxes. Through the musical prodigy my parents hoped to develop into a second Paderewski, Leon Becker, I met the fair Elaine Rugg, “very pretty with clean blonde hair and an unusual smile, the kind of girl that is restful to be with.”

We had first met Leon at the Coaching School, where he appealed to us as a romantic figure, with his bare little knees pumping masterfully beneath the keyboard of the grand piano on which he played everything from Chopin to Beethoven. When we learned that his father had died and his mother was working as a seamstress, my parents were so moved by his plight and his talent that they virtually adopted him, paying his tuition at the Coaching School (he was there on a limited scholarship) and offering to underwrite his musical education. He had become a “third brother” we proudly showed off at parties, where he held the guests spellbound with precocious performances of études and sonatas.

Thanks to Leon’s introduction, I was able to take Elaine to the Hollywood Bowl where, moved by the sensuous music of Ravel, we shyly held hands. Then on to the Brown Derby, the original one on Wilshire Boulevard, built Hollywood-style in the shape of an actual bowler. Elaine was lovely, gentle, sweet, passive, and over a steaming plate of tamales I wondered if the unfamiliar flush I was feeling came from the spicy Mexican dish or from my first experience of falling in love. She lived downtown in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a modest frame house with an old-fashioned front porch. Getting out of the Dusenberg I knew I hadn’t earned, I forced myself to take Elaine’s arm and walk her to the door. There was a tantalizing moment when we almost kissed. It was comforting to find someone as demure as I. In my diary is an entry suitably restrained: “Elaine is liable to become my first ‘crush.’”

Early next morning I called to ask if she would go with me to the Coconut Grove. “Oh, that sounds very nice.” Her voice was a gentle purring, almost a whisper. I talked so softly myself that we could barely hear one another. As I made my rounds of the studios that day, I was too distracted to take proper notes. At the end of the afternoon, the 14-year-old Sonya, with a dance style slightly this side of Adele Astaire’s, put some records on the Capehart and offered last-minute instructions on my command of the box step. It seemed I only knew how to move in one direction, clockwise. Not only did that become monotonous but it tended to induce vertigo. Whenever I tried counterclockwise, my partner’s feet had an annoying habit of tripping me.

It was almost time to pick up Elaine. Sonya could do no more. “I guess you’ll just have to keep on doing that one step and try not to get dizzy,” was her sisterly advice.