Moving Pictures (69 page)

A night of triumph! Elaine was graceful, tender and helpful. By the end of the evening I even took a few tentative steps
counter
clockwise.

Parked in front of her house, I rested my arm on the backrest behind her and with studied casualness let it slip down over her shoulder. Progress. It was not quite the seductive tactics Al Mannheimer had recommended: “Guide her hand gently toward your fly. If she doesn’t pull her hand away, put your hand over hers and say something romantic. You’ll be surprised how many girls can’t resist feeling it once you hold their hand to it. The stirring excites them even if they pretend to be shocked. If she pulls her hand away, don’t get discouraged. She may want you to think she’s not that kind of a girl. Wait ’til next time. But if
she doesn’t draw her hand away, surreptitiously begin to unbutton your fly. …”

Instead, while I draped my arm modestly around Elaine’s shoulder, I listened sympathetically to her long, sad story: She wanted to be a classical dancer; a fortune left to her in a grandparent’s will could only be claimed if she went to Sweden, a journey her parents refused her because she was too young to travel and live there alone—but unless she could claim that fortune, she felt doomed to a life of mediocrity.

The pale light of tragedy enfolding her seemed to make her more beautiful. At the door I asked her if she would like to have lunch with me at the studio next day. “Oh, that would be nice,” she purred again. Of course it never occurred to me that the beautiful Elaine might be a confirmed dullard. In ecstasy I gunned the big car back toward prosperous Windsor Square, and promptly ran out of gas. In the diary the crown prince of the Schulberg fortunes had his emotions under control: “What a swell girl! Her life story would make a great yarn. Putting my arm around her is a great step forward!”

At the studio luncheon next day I innocently invited “third brother” Leon. He seemed distracted, upset, and strangely quiet. While I signed the bill—sent to Father’s office—he asked if he could drive Elaine home. I was surprised, as Leon was working in the music department, writing out scores for background music, and I knew he was under pressure to get back to work. The head of the department, Nat Finston, was a demanding boss. Leaving abruptly during the middle of the day could cost Leon his job.

Later I drove down to Elaine’s to discuss this serious turn of events. She admitted she had been “seeing” Leon, but in her opinion he was overdramatizing the situation. So my first tentative romance had led to dramatic complications. In the overexcitement of finally asking a girl to the Grove, I had been insensitive to Leon’s feelings. In his martyrdom, Leon assured me that if Elaine and I were really serious about each other, he would step aside. But he was hurt. Underlying this drama, I knew, was his sense of inferiority. He, Maurice, and I played as equals, but there must always have been that gnawing feeling that we had been born to the Hollywood purple, while he, with all his musical culture, still came from the other side of the tracks.

T
O DISTRACT US FROM
this unexpected romantic triangle, the 1932 Olympic Games, the event Maurice and I had been eagerly awaiting for years, came to our own Los Angeles Coliseum. Further work on
The Hollywood Reporter
was out of the question. I asked for a leave of absence, so I could give full concentration to the Games.

The entire Hollywood community seemed almost as excited as I was. A meeting of film celebrities was held to choose hosts for the various foreign teams. Maurice Chevalier volunteered to give a reception for the French team and arrange a tour of the studio. Marlene Dietrich offered to serve in a similar capacity for the German contingent, not yet appropriated by the upstart Hitler. One by one each foreign group was spoken for. Finally it came little Latvia’s turn. Mother raised her hand. She, a daughter of Dvinsk in the heart of our homeland, would be proud to host the Latvian team. At the end of the meeting we were introduced to them, or rather
him,
for Latvia, we discovered, was represented by a single athlete, a marvelous-looking, ruddy-faced specimen bursting with muscles, energy, confidence, and handsome enough to be a leading man. In fact, Mother suggested half-seriously that after the Games she might get him a seven-year contract at Paramount. Of course Karl would have to learn English. He spoke and understood only his mother tongue. That gap was filled, barely, by the few words of English spoken by the small, paunchy trainer in a cheap double-breasted suit who accompanied our Latvian champion. From him we learned that Karl had become a
national hero, the only athlete in the whole country who qualified for international competition. His best event was the pole vault, but he was also the best runner and jumper in Mother’s motherland. Since Latvia lacked funds to field an Olympic team, sending Karl and his trainer from Riga to Los Angeles had become a national cause. Peasants had dropped their meager coins into milk cans to raise money for their “team.” Thousands of Letts waving little national flags had seen him off on his two-week journey by rail and sea to our distant shores.

Overnight we became patriotic Latvians. Mother had said that she had been a babe in arms when the Jaffes were driven from their village by a pogrom, but now her memory of her Latvian childhood grew miraculously. I looked up our country’s history in the encyclopaedia. From the Middle Ages we had been dominated in turn by Poland, Russia, and Sweden, and by the German land barons. We had been badly mangled in the Great War. And the Germans had struck again and occupied us as late as 1919. But our little army had fought back, and with support from a motley alliance we had won our independence in 1920. Now the 12-year-old Republic had sent us Karl. He was our houseguest at Malibu, and I was proud to run with him on the beach as he underwent his early-morning conditioning. Mother gave a luncheon for him in the studio commissary, decorated with Latvian flags and attended by dozens of Paramount stars. Even though Father had been moved to his bungalow suite, the Schulberg name had not lost its magic, and we still had the run of the lot.

In his snappy blue blazer with the Latvian crest, Karl must have thought he had died and been reborn in a Baltic heaven. The famous of Hollywood rose to applaud him when he made his charming, halting thank-you speech, which Mother proudly interpreted from a pretranslated text. He spoke of his small Latvian village and of how he had learned to pole-vault by fashioning his own pole from a slender tree and soaring over the high fences of the local farms. His mother, he said, had bought her first radio so she and her neighbors could follow his progress in the Games. Hollywood has always been sentimental about this kind of “outside” celebrity: Movie stars flocked around our Latvian standard-bearer, inviting him to their beach houses and wanting
his
autograph. At Karl’s side, I basked in reflected glory.

On the day of the great event, the pole-vault competition, the Schulberg-Jaffe contingent was there to root the Latvian hope to record heights. The bar was put at 12 feet for warm-up jumps. At the head of the
runway, Karl paused, took a deep breath to expand his powerful chest, struck a heroic pose, then went pounding down the path to the uprights, went up on his pole to a height of ten feet, ten-and-a-half… and fell clumsily into the pit
under
the bar. We looked at each other. Apparently Karl’s hand had slipped on the bamboo pole, an accident that could happen to anyone. By this time he was pounding down the runway again. This time he rose to a mighty height of almost 11 feet, trembled there a moment, and then went crashing into the bar which fell humiliatingly on top of him in the pit.

Our Latvian cheering section was tense and silent as Karl went back for his final try. He expanded his chest at least four inches, ran with grim purpose down the runway, vaulted straight into the bar and fell on his back with the splintered bar draped across his mighty chest.

That was the end of Karl at the Los Angeles Olympics. For weeks we had been wining and dining an athlete who could not have made our L. A. High School track team. In fact, a boy on our B squad had cleared 12 feet! As the vaulters cleared 13 feet and on up to a record 14, Karl picked up his pole and trudged off into the tunnel on his way to the locker room and oblivion. He was too humiliated even to say goodbye.

My own connection with the Games—through my classmate at L.A. High, Cornelius Johnson—was a happier experience. He was the same skinny, barely literate Corny whose copy I had doctored in Miss Carr’s journalism class.

The first day he had come out for track, in the high jump, I had advised him to try for the Class B team because we already had two six-foot jumpers on the varsity. A little later I was taking my laps when I noticed an unusual crowd around the high-jump pit. I was told that Corny had just cleared six feet on his first try, by what looked like half a foot! The bar was raised two inches, and again Corny flew over it without really seeming to try. At that point an awed Coach Chambers told Corny not to go any higher—he wanted to keep him under wraps.

Now, in the Coliseum, my Corny Johnson was up there with the greatest jumpers in the world. By some magic transformation, the L.A.H.S. letters on his chest now read U.S.A. I, who had once cleared five feet doing the old-fashioned scissors, concentrated, took a deep breath, loped down the runway toward the bar, and—secreted in Corny’s body—cleared six-four without even trembling the bar. I turned and hugged my date, Maurice’s cousin Polly, a very pretty girl signed as an
ingénue at MGM, a warm, happy person with whom I felt safe. The bar went to 6 feet 5, and then to a fraction under 6 feet 6. The intense competition ended with Corny being edged out by a Canadian, a veteran from Southern Cal. Four years later, however, an athletically mature Cornelius Johnson would take the gold at the Berlin Games and go on to establish a world’s record.

Unfortunately, after the glories of the high bar, there was nowhere for him to go but down. Lost in alcohol, he’d be carried off a merchant ship during World War II, a wreck of the genius highschool athlete who had soared like a black angel almost seven feet above the ground.

C
OMING BACK FROM
the Games to
The Hollywood Reporter,
I found that my routine items—who was cast in what picture, what director had been assigned, when the next production would roll—had become boringly easy. I asked the managing editor for a chance at something bigger, like covering a sneak preview. Grumbling, Billy Wilkerson assigned me a Columbia meller sneaking in Glendale. Feeling as important as a first-night reviewer, I went alone so I could concentrate. Conscientiously, I took notes in the dark on the formula stuff I was to appraise, then raced back to the Sunset Boulevard office to bang out my review. I gave the picture no stars. Feeling righteously honest, I tore it apart sequence by sequence. Long after midnight I drove home tired but happy, congratulating myself on a hard job well done.

Next morning I couldn’t wait to see my review in print, the first real chance I had had on the paper. I turned to the third-page banner over the review and read—an out-and-out rave! Socko programmer! Smart megging and first-rate cast more than make up for formula story! Here and there, toward the end, they kept a line or two of my original critique. But sometime after I had slung on my cap and hopped into my Dusenberg phaeton, little goblins had crept in and completely rewritten me to please a muscle-minded Harry Cohn who otherwise would have threatened, “No more fuckin’ ads!”

Lincoln Steffens had opened a window, a whole houseful of windows, on municipal corruption. My brief career on
The Hollywood Reporter
added a local footnote: District Attorney Buron Fitts had just been
caught taking bribes and at last was losing his sinecure. The dull
Los Angeles Times
and the lurid
Herald-Examiner
published nothing objectionable to the Hollywood powers. And of course the Industry “trades” religiously read at thousands of studio desks every morning carried only the news and reviews that Louie B., Jack L., and the rest of the moguls thought fit to print.

I wanted to quit. I wanted to stand up to Billy Wilkerson. But with millions out of work, and hundreds of local writers hungry for jobs, I had a strong case of the Ad Schulberg guilts. And when I dropped in at Father’s new quarters, he urged me to swallow my pride, keep on working, and not alienate Wilkerson. He admired my principles, but reminded me that I was still serving my journalistic novitiate: Covering the Hollywood beat and meeting deadlines were invaluable training for the work ahead. Father’s outspokenness had already alienated L.B., Sam Goldwyn, and other Hollywood rivals. But he was always ready to give sound conservative advice he was never able to follow.

That Sunday at Malibu I was bailed out of my moral dilemma by a timely visit from Dave Selznick. He and Irene—lively, loyal friends in those days—had stopped by for tennis, brunch, and local gossip. When David, ever-curious, ever-working, asked me what I was doing, I told him a story I was outlining: A Negro cook and her young son live on a Bel Air estate where her little boy and the white owner’s son, of an age, become inseparable. Both sets of parents try to break up what they consider an unhealthy relationship. The cook, modeled on our own irrepressible Lucille, is as determined a segregationist as her white employers. “When us black folks mess with whites, who do you think gets the short end of the stick?” she warns her small son, then sings the old saw, “Stay in your own backyard.” But the boy won’t listen. When the young white master invites him to the pool and teaches him how to swim, they hold a diving contest in which the white boy is injured; the black boy tries to save him and drowns in the attempt. Of course the dead child is blamed by the white parents for challenging their son to take unnecessary risks. The mammy, obviously Hattie McDaniels, is left with her drowned son in her arms, crooning, “Stay in your own backyard.”

This was not exactly Langston Hughes, or Jean Toomer, or even DuBose Heyward. But the young, enthusiastic Selznick enthused. He saw a kid’s picture, a
Skippy
or
Sooky,
with a new touch of Negro pathos (or was it bathos?) thrown in. With feelers always out for new material,
he was ready to buy it on the spot. My mother the agent made the deal. I was to be paid $1,500 on delivery of a ten-page outline. At that point, if David liked what he read, I would go to work at RKO for $50 a week to develop the story until I had to leave for Dartmouth.