Moving Pictures (7 page)

Even when Griffith brought his four-reel film east, hoping its impact would soften the hearts or strengthen the minds of the Patents Company executives, they insisted on clinging to their antique ways.
Judith of Bethulia
was released one reel at a time, like a serial. They could not recognize the genius of the filmmaker who was on the threshold of making the film that is the second great landmark in the history of American cinema:
The Birth of a Nation.
He had to leave Biograph and the Trust, and form his own independent company to make that film on a scale—
twelve
reels—that horrified and outraged the Trust mentality.

Half a dozen times during the making of that unprecedented film,
Griffith ran out of money. He begged and borrowed to keep it going. Its final cost was unthinkable for its day: one hundred thousand dollars. But when it finally opened, in 1915, its reception was so overwhelming that controversy over the “multiple film” became academic.

The picture was screened at the White House for President Wilson, a symbolic first. There were special screenings for the Supreme Court and for the diplomatic corps. And when it opened in New York, seats were priced at an unheard-of two dollars, as high as for a Broadway play. Blacks, then called Negroes, protested the blatant bigotry of the film, adapted as it was from a popular novel,
The Clansman,
extolling the virtues of the K.K.K. The film was a cultural schizoid, as backward politically and racially as it was advanced cinematically. But in vain did Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, Dr. Charles Eliot of Harvard, and Oswald Garrison Villard protest “the humiliation of ten million American citizens.” Blacks and liberals were swept aside as the public lined up across the country to see “the greatest motion picture ever made.” The gross reached fifteen million dollars, more than ten times what this supposedly spendthrift picture had cost. Once an audience had experienced
The Birth of a Nation,
how could they ever again be satisfied with the stilted one-reelers of the Trust?

The lawsuit of the Independents against the Trust was being fought all the way up to the Supreme Court. The fact that the motion picture, through the work of Griffith and the vision of men like Zukor and Porter, had established itself as an art form that could hold an audience spellbound for an hour and a half or even two hours—that fact undoubtedly affected the judgment of the Hughes Court. Its decision: that the patents of the Trust were invalid, and that the motion-picture camera and projection machine could not be dominated by one small group. “That was the first Declaration of Freedom of the Screen,” my father told me. “None of us who fought that antitrust action against the Patents Company will ever forget it.” For Zukor and Griffith, for Porter and Schulberg, for Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldwyn, and all the rest of the rebels, this was their Yorktown. The Trust that had held on like a bulldog, threatening Zukor, inhibiting Griffith, blasting opponents for daring to make longer and better pictures, was forced to retire from the field.

The decision came in 1916, when I was two. Porter was now at work in Rome on a spectacle,
The Eternal City,
starring one of the great actresses
of the day, Pauline Frederick. Porter had never attempted a film on such a scale, costing as it did more than a hundred thousand dollars, and he found it difficult to stage this lavish production in a foreign country. When he came back from Rome he sat down and talked over his problem with my father. He had been a poor boy with little education, though with a strong social conscience in the tradition of his contemporaries, novelists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London. His mechanical inventiveness and sense of social realism had enabled him to make his ground-breaking films. But now he felt that the art form he had originated was passing him by. His cinematic inventions looked crude alongside D. W. Griffith’s, J. Stuart Blackton’s, Allan Dwan’s…

Though he was only middle-aged, and could have remained as Director-General of Famous Players, Porter told my father that he thought it was time for him to quit. He did not feel equipped to direct talented actors in the subtleties of the craft. In another few years, he predicted, other Griffiths would come along who would put his efforts to shame. Porter was proud of his position as the father of the American story-film. In a single decade he had seen the American “moving picture show” develop from the primitive
Life of an American Fireman
to the complexity of
The Birth of a Nation,
followed by an even more ambitious Griffith project,
Intolerance,
telling the story of man’s intolerance to man on four different historical levels, from Rome to modern times, with sets as grandiose as the ones which would soon become synonymous with the prototypical megaphone-wielder C. B. DeMille. “I know when I’m licked,” Porter told my father. “I can’t compete with these new fellers D.W. and C.B. I’ve had my day.”

Whereupon Mr. Porter sold all of his stock back to Famous Players, and returned to his first love, tinkering with machines. Joining the Precision Machine Company, he continued to perfect cameras and projection machines. He was a wealthy man, although he would have been considerably wealthier if he had grown with Famous Players as it expanded in partnership with the Jesse Lasky Film Company, which in time would become Paramount Pictures.

B.P. never saw him again—was never able to track him down. Mysteriously, he dropped completely out of sight. None of the notables he had worked with, Zukor, Pickford, or Griffith, ever heard from him. The only rumor was that he prospered until the crash of 1929, when he lost the savings of a lifetime. When he died in 1941 he was working as an
obscure mechanic, still tinkering, totally forgotten by the industry he had virtually created.

Fifty years later I happened to mention Porter’s name to one of this country’s most famous directors. “Edwin S. Porter?” he said. “I never heard of him.” “Pal,” I said, “if there hadn’t been an Edwin S. Porter, there might never have been a you.” One of these days the motion-picture industry, which never has had much respect for its history, failing to set up a museum, burning historic negatives, and neglecting its founders, will suddenly have an attack of conscience and offer a posthumous award to the first American filmmaker. But until that moment, this tribute from the son of his scenario editor: To the Granddaddy of us all.

O
NCE THE TRUST WARS WERE
behind us and Zukor's policy of big stars in big pictures had put the old giants of the one-reel days out of business, the growth of Famous Players was reflected in the personal geography of the Schulbergs. Starting from 120
^th
Street and Mt. Morris Park and moving to the larger apartment on 110
^th
Street overlooking Central Park, we advanced to an even grander apartment near Zukor’s and Pickford’s on Riverside Drive, with a balcony where I could play and watch the ships go up and down the Hudson.

My memories of those New York days before the move to Hollywood are haphazard and piecemeal, the chance groupings and color patterns a child sees in his kaleidoscope. I remember that balcony on the river, remember making paper airplanes that would spiral down toward the toylike trees and the little cars far below. I remember collecting tinfoil, rolling it into balls and giving them to my mother for “our boys over there.” I didn’t know what war was, but it was fun to see how much foil I could gather and press together into a silvery ball. While we were singing cheery war songs like “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and while millions of young men were dying in the war to end wars, the movies did their bit by cranking out propaganda films like
To Hell with the Kaiser
and
The Woman the Germans Shot
and sending such glorified patriots as Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks across the country selling Liberty Bonds.

More important to me was that the Irish immigrant maid was
replaced by a beautiful and soothing woman called Wilma, who was slightly darker than the rest of us, like my cocoa after she had poured a little warm milk into it. I loved my mother and my father, but I don’t remember them in those years as vividly as I do Wilma. One of my earliest senses of pleasure was of her
color,
as she would lean over my crib and over the small yellow bed with the elaborately carved headboard into which I was graduated when my sister Sonya arrived. I was four years old then, and in that short period from 1914 to 1918 it had become bad taste for babies to be born at home. Home births were for immigrants and peasants, for the poor. I remember my mother returning to Riverside Drive from the hospital with Sonya, and Wilma paying a great deal of attention to the little intruder, and my worrying that I was going to lose her to the homely little thing in the cradle that everyone thought was so cute.

Wilma must have handled this well, for Sonya remembers her lovingly, while I also felt reassured that Wilma had not deserted me. Mostly I remember her gentleness. I remember my mother and father telling me they were going off on a trip—I think it was to Atlantic City to a motion-picture exhibitors’ convention—and my asking, “Is Wilma going, too?” And when I was assured that Wilma would stay right here with us, I said something like, “Then I don’t care when you come back.” I remember Wilma’s face, gently disapproving, and my mother’s tears.

One day when Sonya was nearly two, Wilma set her on the park bench and began to chat with some other nurses. I was busy feeding a squirrel. Suddenly Wilma ran up to me: “Isn’t little Sonya with you?” When I shook my head, Wilma raced around looking around bushes and begging the other nurses to join the search. She was crying and that made me want to cry, too. We searched for half an hour, with Wilma becoming more and more hysterical.

When we hurried back to the Riverside Drive apartment to break the news, Mother screamed at her, then phoned B. P. at the studio to call the police.

“How could you let our little girl out of your sight?” Mother was accusing Wilma. And Wilma was sobbing, “If they don’t find her I’ll kill myself! I swear I’ll kill myself!”

A few minutes later Father came rushing in. Movie people were looked on as overnight millionaires, and he was terrified that Sonya had been kidnapped. The cops questioned Wilma and me but we were very little help. Sonya simply had vanished into thin air. I pressed my head
against Wilma’s heaving breast and sobbed, “I’ll never see that little face again!” It sounded like a subtitle from one of Father’s photoplays. But what I was really crying about was the fear of losing Wilma. For Father was angrier than I had ever seen him before, and the more he shouted at her the more she cried out that it was all her fault and she wanted to die.

If Wilma died, who would take care of me? I wanted to die too.

Then one of the policemen looked up from the phone. “One of our boys just found her—at the edge of the park!” My parents rushed out. There at the 125
^th
Street police station was little Sonya, perched on the sergeant’s desk, quietly licking an ice cream cone.

At home the distraught Wilma rocked Sonya in her arms and bathed her with grateful tears. Father went back to his studio, and Mom went back to her meetings. And I had Wilma back again.

Mother loved us, and expressed that love through her determination to improve us, but she was
busy.
The winds of social change blowing through the middle Teens bestirred her wavy blonde hair. A suffragist since before I was born, an active member of the Godmothers’ League for unwed mothers, she continued to support the socialism-tinged Educational Alliance. When Emile Coué, the French psychotherapist, was all the rage, we had to recite at bedtime, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better…” Night after night I slipped off to sleep drugged in self-improvement. No doubt about it, Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, our frail little flower of the East Side ghetto, the would-be librarian, was reaching up for every intellectual branch she could close her little hands around. She attended lectures the way the masses who were gradually making us rich lined up for their moving-picture shows.

With Wilma as our full-time nurse and companion, we naturally came to depend on her emotionally. Mothers and fathers were for getting presents from and saying goodnight to. It was through Wilma that I learned, inadvertently, that there was something difficult in having a dark skin in a white world.

I saw very little of my father—as publicity director of Famous Players he was out most nights, dining and drinking with movie stars and directors and visiting firemen—and I suppose I was trying to ingratiate myself with him so he would take more notice of me. I asked him if I could pour the cream into his morning coffee. He had been out late with his company cronies, Al Lichtman, Al Kaufman, and Frank Meyer, the studio manager—they called themselves “The Four Hoarsemen” because in their cramped offices at the studio on 26
^th
Street they had to
shout their business to each other over the din of the Model T’s and the heavy clop-clopping of the horses pulling delivery wagons. Anyway, B.P. had been a little late in rising and he was in a hurry to get to the day’s work. Picturemaking was a passion with him, and Mary Pickford was finishing one of the films he had written. I wasn’t interested in Mary Pickford, nor was I aware that her phenomenal success was helping him to pay for this airy apartment. My personal star was Wilma, and as I poured the cream into his coffee, I said, “L-l-look, D-Daddy, I’m m-making a Wilma c-color.”

My father glanced nervously at Wilma, who was beginning to clear the table. He had exceptionally pale skin, almost porcelain in quality, his fine features and his sandy hair and his high white collar all seeming to blend together. I thought of my mother as pale pink, with faint roses glowing from her cheeks and a pretty mouth that was much redder than the rest of her. Wilma was the only person I had ever seen who looked like rich cream stirred into black coffee. My father turned back from Wilma and his voice was scolding. “Buddy, I want you to remember this. You must never,
never
mention Wilma’s color again. We are all very fond of Wilma. She’s become like a member of the family. It isn’t nice to talk about people’s color.” This was half a century before “Black Is Beautiful.” It was back in the know-nothing days of “Black Is Invisible,” or “Black Is Unmentionable.”