Moving Pictures (70 page)

With a flourish, I signed my first writing contract, Budd
Wilson
Schulberg (for we all had to have three names in those days), shook the mighty hand of David Oliver Selznick, and was assigned an office in the writers’ wing of the studio. My immediate supervisor was an old friend from Father’s staff, Benny Zeidman, whom David had brought with him to RKO. On the first day I discovered that I would not be working alone. David had decided that I should be teamed with an older, more seasoned writer. He turned out to be a published mystery writer, Stuart Palmer, a sympathetic and congenial fellow who took a rather patronizing view of my story and was more involved in the serious business of finishing his next mystery novel on company time.

Assigning two total strangers to collaborate on a film story was a bizarre but familiar Hollywood practice. It had never been clear to me why an established Broadway playwright or a published novelist could not sit down and write alone as he had done before. Hollywood believed in safety in numbers. Not just a single team but often a series of teams would be used to turn out a single screenplay. What the studio bosses failed to appreciate was the impossibility of two strangers closeting themselves in a small office and plunging into instant collaboration. First we had to break the ice.

Stuart Palmer and I talked about my father and his complex relationship to David Selznick, about mystery-writing and fiction-writing in general, about the general low I.Q. of supervisors and the specific mental deficiencies of little Benny Zeidman, and about gambling. Father’s addiction was common knowledge. When I said I had developed such a loathing for the subject that I did not even know how to play poker or shoot craps, my new collaborator produced a pair of dice and rattled them against the wall of our office to begin my education.

A few days later I would enter in my ledger: “Did little work on my story. Lost $2 at craps. But we have a swell angle on the story. A
Green Pastures
touch.” This was far different from being allowed to sit in on Father’s conferences, indulged, flattered, and encouraged to make a suggestion now and then. I was on the other side now, waiting for conferences always late in being called. When Benny Zeidman liked our
Green Pastures
approach, our stock rose. Back to work, between crap
games and bull sessions, our confidence grew. A few days later, when we heard that Zeidman—in the familiar game of Hollywood musical chairs—had been fired, and that David O. would assign a new supervisor to
Your Own Back Yard,
our stock plunged. Up and down the halls, and across at Lucey’s, we found fellow-writers in the same predicament. Everybody seemed to be waiting for Selznick. And young David seemed to shuffle film projects the way Zeppo Marx shuffled cards. One of the reasons David had given for walking out on Father was B.P.’s inability or refusal to delegate authority. Now the underlings of RKO were voicing the same criticism of David. The intense D.O.S. simply wasn’t geared to turn out the forty to fifty pictures a year the RKO program demanded. He wanted to concentrate on his own class production,
A Bill of Divorcement,
starring George Cukor’s young Broadway discovery, Katharine Hepburn;
The Animal Kingdom; Topaze…
My little story, and low-budget pictures like it, were neglected as young David indulged ever-bigger dreams.

A
S THE DAYS OF SUMMER
marched and then broke ranks to race us into fall, the pace of our family drama accelerated. Mother’s overnight agency success was the talk of the town. Of course, as a woman wronged, a loyal Hollywood wife cruelly abandoned, she had martyrdom going for her. No matter what sexual tricks the moguls might perform behind closed doors, they were all devoted followers of Will Hays, champions of decency. While W. R. Hearst dallied with his adorable, tipsy, stuttering Marion Davies, his newspaper editorials inveighed against sin, adultery, and divorce and came out bravely for the sanctity of the home. As for Louie B., if there were adulterers in his pictures, they had to be punished for their misconduct. The threat of divorce had to be countered by domestic reconciliation neatly timed to the final fade-out. Louie truly thought of his company not just as an entertainment factory, but as a mighty pillar of society holding up the House of Rectitude that was America. In his Byzantine mind, God, Country, the GOP, and MGM had become a holy quaternity.

When Mother made her first official call on L.B., the mogul of moguls had her admitted immediately. Instead of sitting behind his enormous desk to impress visitors with the power of his authority, he had hurried across his great office to greet her as she entered. Here were two old friends who went back to the Mission Road days of a dozen years earlier, when L.B. and B.P. had shared a primitive studio for shoestring productions. What a pivotal dozen years those had been: L.B. rising
from his Anita Stewart formula pictures to the pinnacle of Hollywood success, the confidant of Hoover and Hearst, the admiral of the Industry flagship; B.P. becoming a household name, at least in Hollywood households, directing MGM’s major rival for more than half a dozen years, but now being pushed from his catbird seat.

As Mother came in, a smartly dressed woman of thirty-nine, looking rather like Irene Rich crossed with Eleanor Boardman, Louie threw his arms around her and began to cry. His tears, Louie explained, were for her unfortunate predicament. A disgraceful photograph of Father and Sylvia on the dance floor of the Coconut Grove had just appeared in the local paper. How Ben could do such a thing to a wonderful woman like Ad, a model wife and mother, Louie would never understand. Gallantly he led her to the couch where they wept together, two grown-up street urchins who had clawed their way to the top, he through elocution lessons, Ida Koverman lessons, and a nose for power; she through Coué, Freud, and a gift for survival. She would never have to worry about her agency business, Louie assured her, because his door would always be open to her. She could bring her clients directly to him and he would see to it that she would be treated with generosity and the respect she deserved.

It was no accident that the source of L.B.’s power was celluloid dramatics. A man of extremes, he could sob, laugh, strike out at enemies, or fall on his knees in fervent humility, on cue. Power has always been sexual. And when he wanted to exude them, L.B. could send forth waves of warmth and reassurance. On the couch he stroked Mother’s shoulder consolingly, his hand slid down to her breast, and when she expressed the demurrer expected of her, “Why, Louie!” he went to his knees—a familiar position when he wasn’t at one’s throat—and confessed his love. He had been too much of a gentleman to express his true feelings while she had been married to Ben. But now that they had separated and she was contemplating divorce, he had to tell her that he had been smitten with her for years.

As the entreaties, and the groping, increased, Mother may have calculated what effect the rejection of this home-lover would have on her agency business. Benevolent despot to those who favored him, malevolent to those who dared cross him, L.B. could be either ardent lover or dangerous enemy. Mother admitted that she was attracted to Louie. In a scene that must have sounded like a holdover from one of Father’s old Katherine Mac Donald movies, she protested that they couldn’t do this
to Louie’s wife, her dear friend Margaret. And in dialogue familiar to triangle situations, Louie countered that he and Maggie had drifted apart, that she lived in isolation from his needs and problems, and indeed that her mind had begun to wander. He needed a strong woman in his life, someone he could respect and appreciate. Ben had been a damn fool not to realize what a gem he had. Together King Louis and Queen Adeline could rule the Hollywood kingdom for years to come. It was virtually a proposal of marriage.

Mother had always been fond of Margaret, a sweet, plain-looking woman who somehow had remained the simple daughter of a struggling kosher butcher from Boston. But it would be more accurate to say that her attitude was one of patronizing sympathy. There were very few women in Hollywood on whom Mother did not look down, mostly with good reason. To her credit she tried to live with her peers and to cultivate and learn from her superiors. And she had thought of herself as a surrogate mother, having to take the Mayer daughters in hand because Margaret could not provide them the intellectual guidance and stimulation they needed. From the beginning, this Mayer-Schulberg interrelationship had been incestuous.

To give L.B. his due, Margaret had failed to keep step with him as he boldly climbed the ladder. And Mother must have seen in Louie the strength she had looked for in vain in the man she loved. At any rate, either during that first visit to Louie’s office, or in subsequent visits, this tryst of middle-aged Montague and Capulet was consummated, on what was vulgarly called “the casting couch.”

Of course, at the time I did not hear even the breath of a whisper of such an affair. I knew only that Mother returned from her meeting with L.B. greatly encouraged that her new list of clients would find an open door at the busiest studio in town. And that L.B. had been courtly, sympathetic, and helpful. Even this receptive attitude struck me as a vicarious slap in the face. No matter what I thought of Father’s behavior—and my thoughts were still murderous—I had inherited his attitude toward L.B. as our archenemy. Obviously, Mother’s turning to him for invaluable professional assistance handed him the ideal weapon with which to shoot Father down. I couldn’t help feeling that she had betrayed the man she still professed to love. And yet, what was she to do? She was a free woman now, or almost, still extremely attractive, and challenged through no fault of her own to establish her identity. While she had a strong
in
at Paramount through connections inherited from
Father, and enjoyed the friendship of the Warners, the Laemmles, and the Cohns of Columbia, the stamp of approval from L. B. Mayer gave her exactly the leverage she needed to become Myron Selznick’s major competitor overnight.

Her first encounter with Father’s successor at Paramount, Manny Cohen, was less crucial, less traumatic for me, but in its own way almost as memorable. Because Ad’s feelings toward Ben were so ambivalent, and because she found it painful to go down that familiar hall, confront a new secretary, and enter a domain so long identified with B.P., she felt herself choking up, with a large chip on the shoulder of her small, sturdy figure. She was, after all, still Mrs. B. P. Schulberg, proud of the name and of what it had represented, and she had built up a head of steam against the usurper, both for the cold-blooded way he had eased out her friend Jesse Lasky, and for the way he had weaseled himself into the good graces of the new bosses of Paramount at Father’s expense. As Mother made her entrance at the top of the steps leading down to the splendid office that had been for so many years her husband’s second home, she cast a withering look at the diminutive mogul squatting behind the imposing desk like a watchful toad.

“Mr. Cohen,” Mother said in her
grande-dame
manner, “when a lady enters your office, I would expect you at least to have the courtesy to stand up like a gentleman.”

“Madame,” her adversary assured her, “I
am
standing up.”

Manny Cohen was barely five feet two. But he was a calculating little giant who knew how to capitalize on Paramount’s difficulties that summer. Cohen brought to mind all the small darting, predatory animals—ferrets, weasels, rats. Rats thrive and fatten on disaster, which is exactly what made Manny Cohen. Until that fateful summer of discontent, Paramount had been thought of as a family, extending from the princely Zukor to the kindly Lasky to the gracious Schulberg, with C. B. DeMille running his own show under Jesse’s gentle rein. Now that the studio had fallen on hard times, it turned to hard men. Sam Katz was a business monster, and as his production chief, Manny Cohen walked—or rather ran—in his mentor’s tracks.

In Father’s bungalow compound there was much laughter at Cohen’s expense. Writers, directors, and actors loyal to B.P. began telling Manny Cohen stories as they had told Sam Goldwyn and Harry Rapf stories. “The nice thing about having a story conference with Manny Cohen is that you don’t have to see the little sonofabitch—unless you look under
the desk,” Herman Mankiewicz would say, and everybody would roar. “I tell you, Mank, he’s riding for a fall!” Father would happily prophesy. To which Mank would be ready with: “How do you fall off a six-inch footstool?” In Father’s office, amidst the scotch highballs and the evening card-playing, the work went on with
Madame Butterfly,
while Father’s favorite writers prepared another vehicle for Sylvia and his latest discovery, Archie Leach, soon to become a name familiar all over the world—as Cary Grant.

A cockeyed optimist, Father refused to sulk in his bungalow and give in to depression, personal depression that is. “Manny is a master of the double cross, but not the art of making pictures,” he insisted.

Not long after that, Manny Cohen was on his way to Chicago on the
Santa Fe Chief
for a meeting with his Paramount-Publix masters when an angry telegram fired him out of hand. It seemed that as the contracts of various Paramount stars expired—Mae West’s, Bing Crosby’s, Gary Cooper’s—instead of resigning them to studio contracts, the ferret-minded Manny signed them to personal contracts. These he could resell to the studio at a profit, or take with him if he left the lot. Henry Herzbrun, the conservative studio attorney and Lasky-Schulberg loyalist, had discovered this sleight of hand and reported it to his superiors. Manny Cohen was driven in disgrace from the sunken office. But Father was not invited to resume his old position. Instead, he was warned about going over budget on
Madame Butterfly,
and ordered to have some surefire low-budget pictures ready for the crucial ’33 season.

Even Father’s infectious laughter could not survive the chill of his reception at the Malibu Colony house when he came to see Mother for what was supposed to be “a civilized discussion of their problems.” While Stuart played outside with our dog Gent, and Sonya cowered in her tower-room refuge, the meeting between my parents quickly degenerated into tense confrontation and ugly accusations.