Moving Pictures (8 page)

In a few minutes Dad was rushing off to the studio. To another big, exciting day, another hit movie for “America’s Sweetheart,” whose curls were as yellow as butter and whose skin was as white as snow. All the movie stars were snow-whites. The Pickford sisters and the Gish sisters, and Florence Lawrence, “The Girl of a Thousand Faces,” every one of them white.

I went out on the balcony and stared at the river. Why was it bad to mention Wilma’s color? Especially when it seemed a prettier color than pale white or pink. It seemed exactly the right color for skin to be. Hadn’t we spent the summer in Far Rockaway where my own very white skin had finally tanned and my mother had announced happily, “Look at little Buddy—he’s brown as a berry!” Why was it nice for me to be brown as a berry, but not nice for me to mention Wilma’s coffee-and-cream color?

When my mother saw me brooding on the balcony, not playing with my tin soldiers (I had a big set of American doughboys and they were always destroying the rival set of dirty Huns), she asked me what was the
matter, and when I told her, she did her best to explain, in the limited vocabulary of 1918. She said it might offend Wilma because white people considered Negro people their inferiors. They had come over from Africa as slaves and did not have the advantages of education or the cultural background that we enjoyed. Of course Wilma was something of an exception. Her father had been a minister or a teacher or something and she seemed to be far better educated than “most of them.” We were very lucky to have someone like Wilma to take care of Sonya and me, Mother said. And this whole color thing—I was much too young to worry about it. My mother knew a great deal about psychology from books (I think she was then in her Behaviorism period, a disciple of Watson), and for her age and time she was unusually well-read in this field, but I don’t think even Ad could comprehend the deep impression that Wilma and her color and the “problem” of her color were having on me.

I finally went to the source that day, to Wilma herself. When I asked her what I had said that was wrong, she took me up on her lap and kissed my cheek and I held her smooth coffee-colored earlobe. “Buddy, you’re awfully little to understand this. But maybe some people can understand things at four that other people can’t understand when they’re a hundred-and-four. There’s nothing wrong with saying what color a person is. I don’t mind my color. I think it’s a nice color, just like you said. The reason why your daddy said it isn’t nice to mention it is because most people are glad that they’re white and most of the colored people know it would be a lot easier for them if they were white. But there’s nothing wrong with being my color, or chocolate brown or coal black. The only thing wrong is the way some people feel about it.”

“But w-why do they f-feel that way about it?”

Wilma hugged me. “Maybe the time will come when people will all be just
people
and won’t pay no mind as to whether they’re white or brown or peppermint stripe.”

That made me laugh. Peppermint stripe would be fun.

Wilma kissed me again. “Children just seem to start out knowing all the things that big people forget.”

A fire in the middle of the night! My father and mother jumped up and threw their clothes on. I heard frantic cries: “My god! We’ll be ruined! We’ll lose everything!” I can still remember the fear, the sense of a terrible threat to our existence. No, the fire was not in our Riverside
Drive apartment, but at the studio: the old Famous Players studio, a four-story building on 26
^th
Street and Eighth Avenue where all my father’s hopes and dreams, current activities and professional future lay. While B.P.’s salary was still a relatively modest two hundred dollars a week, the shrewd and benevolent Mr. Zukor also paid his key young employees one share of stock per week, so that we had an equity in the company. An equity that was literally going up in flames.

The Famous Players Film Company had not been using the entire building, only the top two floors, and the roof where sets had also been constructed. It was a rundown neighborhood with a junk shop and a Chinese laundry across the way. Twenty-sixth Street was very narrow, and cumbersome horse-drawn wagons parked along the curb made access by the huge firetrucks extremely difficult.

Father and Mother stayed there until dawn, inside the police barricade, while the firemen fought a losing battle against the flames. Actually the building was a firetrap, a jerry-built renovation of an old armory. As the disaster was reconstructed, it had started in a braid or rope factory on the second floor and had raged upward through the Famous Players offices on the third floor and the flimsy sets and cutting room on the top floor. Film companies were uninsurable because of the flammability of their product. So the entire assets of Famous Players were seemingly being consumed in that flaming inferno of a “studio.” However, since insurance was not available, Frank Meyer, the studio manager, had installed a fireproof vault on the third floor; in it, seventeen completed but still unreleased features had been deposited.

The night of the fire all of the Famous Players “family,” my father included, had gone to a lightweight boxing match between two great Irish fighters, Packy McFarland and Mike Gibbons. (Irish fighters were then the dominant performers, with the East Side Jews getting ready to battle them for supremacy. There were some marvelous Negroes—Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, Joe Gans—but the great Black tide was still to come.) All the Famous Players crowd were ardent fight fans, maybe because their leader, Mr. Zukor, had implemented his meager earnings as a fur worker with five-dollar purses as a flyweight. The entire staff had gone to the big fight that night, with one exception: Frank Meyer. He had decided to pass up the event to finish cutting the latest Mary Pickford film. Apparently he was trapped up there in the cutting room and my parents, along with the rest of the “family,” were terrified that he would be burned alive in his cubbyhole. But suddenly he
appeared. It was a scene as melodramatic as anything he had been working on. He had been trapped on a fire escape but had finally managed to jump across to an adjoining roof. To keep the fire from spreading, firemen had been pouring powerful streams of water onto that roof and instead of burning to death, Frank had almost been drowned. He was soaked to the skin and shivering, but quite alive.

To my parents and their friends waiting outside, it was miraculous to see him emerge from a building now totally ablaze. But they were movie people and after being reassured of Frank’s safety, their first question was: Did the Pickford film burn? And what about the cans of film on shelves in the cutting room? Frank said he had fought through the smoke to throw as much footage as possible into the cylinder vault. This was heroic but only partly reassuring. If the walls fell in as they threatened to, it was doubtful that the precious vault would survive. And even if it did, the intensity of the fire might be so great that enough heat would be generated inside the cylinder to melt their completed films. They had been trying to turn out fifty feature films a year, or one a week, to satisfy the aroused appetite of the American public—with a new Mary Pickford picture promised every month—and the loss of their product plus the loss of a huge investment in equipment could mean the end of Famous Players.

While watching his first studio engulfed in flames, Adolph Zukor remained incredibly cool, according to my father. He never lost control of himself, never cried out, but simply waited for the smoke to clear. “I never admired him as much as I did during those hours when we were waiting to see if the roof was—literally—going to fall in on us,” my father told me. “The rest of us were hysterical, but Mr. Zukor, who had the most to lose, stood there like a general watching his army go into a crucial battle. If the fire resulted in total loss, I’m sure he had no idea how he would meet his next payroll. But he assured us that come what may we would all be paid at the end of the week.”

By morning the building had been reduced to smoking rubble. The fireproof vault had come loose from the wall but was found in the wreckage, too hot to open. For three days, B.P. paced with Zukor and the rest of the staff, waiting to know whether or not they were still in business. On the third day a safecracker was employed to open the vault: The lock had melted or jammed in the intense heat. Not only were those seventeen film negatives intact, but the Pickford film and the other cans of material that Frank Meyer had frantically tossed into the
fireproof container could be sent out to the theaters waiting for them across the country. Famous Players was saved.

Zukor wasted no time renting an abandoned riding academy across town, on East 56
^th
Street. There a new studio was quickly set up and the hectic pace of turning out what were then super films with Zukor’s illustrious company of star names continued. But every one of Zukor’s famous stars of the stage—John Barrymore, James K. Hackett, Minnie Maddern Fiske—had to play second fiddle to the movies’ first Cinderella girl, Mary Pickford. Little Mary’s movies were grossing more than all the others put together.

The midtown livery stable was my first studio. Four years old, a towheaded kid dressed up for the occasion in a new sailor suit, I held tightly to my father’s hand as we entered that strange, enormous room, dark in the back and very bright in the front, with strong lights shining into the faces of the actors. What struck me most was that there were so many people standing around in the dark watching so few people in the light. A young man seemed to be in charge because he was busy telling everybody what to do. He would say “Action!” and the people in the bright lights would begin acting funny. A young girl with long yellow hair suddenly began to cry. “W-w-why is she c-crying, Daddy?” My father raised to his lips a long tapering index finger. “Shhh,” he whispered. “They’re shooting.” Then he bent over and put his mouth to my ear. “That’s Mary Pickford. She’s not crying. She’s just
acting
that she’s crying.”

I was confused and frightened. “But w-why?”

The director looked around, pained. “B.P., please! This is a tough scene.”

Another man standing alongside him called out loud as if he was talking to everybody but stared sharply at me, “Quiet, everybody!” Again the director said “Action!” and again the young girl in the white dress and white stockings said a few words and then began to cry. She kept on crying until the man in charge said “Cut,” and then she stopped, just as suddenly as she had started, and asked in a businesslike voice, “How was that?” “Better,” said the young man with the megaphone. Then she started crying again and everybody watching her seemed very pleased, and then they turned off the big bright lights. It was very dark in there, and a bunch of men started taking the furniture away and moving the walls around. Two men could lift them like cardboard. My father led
me toward the young girl in white who was now sitting in a chair while a woman fixed the long yellow curls that hung down almost to her waist. A man was dabbing some white stuff on her face with a powder puff. The young man with the megaphone, with a handsome ruddy face and wavy hair, was kneeling in front of her.

“Mary,” my father said, “I’d like you to meet my little boy Buddy.”

The people working to make her pretty stood back a moment while she drew me toward her and kissed me on the forehead. “Buddy,” she said, “I hope you’ll always be a buddy to me.”

I don’t actually remember blushing when Mary kissed me, but I remember the embarrassment caused by all the fuss that was made about it. The man with the megaphone, whom I was later to know as Mickey Neilan, a matinee idol before he succeeded D. W. Griffith as Mary’s film director, this ruddy-faced stranger shouted at me, “Hey! Cut that out, Buddy boy. Don’t you know I’m jealous?” Everybody laughed and my face felt very hot because I didn’t know what they were laughing at. Then he picked me up and affectionately bounced me up and down. “No hard feelings, Buddy. You’re a good-looking kid. A helluva lot better-looking than your old man. How’d ya like to be in my next movie?”

“N-n-
no
!” I said. And everybody laughed again.

D. W. Griffith and C. B. DeMille may have been greater directors, but when you seek a prototype of the carefree movie days of the Teens and Twenties, Mickey Neilan was the man. Think of the Twenties and you think of Valentino, Greta Garbo, Mae Murray, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, of Irving Thalberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Von Stroheim, John Ford…. Those were the gold-dust days, and in his prime nobody had more gold dust in his hair or in his laughing eyes than the Mickey Neilan who lifted me up on the set of
Amerilly of Clothes Line Alley.

A
T FOUR YEARS OF
age I would seem to have been in kiddie’s heaven, with prosperous parents who doted on me, a nurse who loved me—a child who had been kissed by America’s Sweetheart, who could go with his father to the studio whenever he wished to see movies being made, and who had been assured by his studious and well-meaning mother that he could do anything he really wanted to do. When epidemics hit the city—influenza and infantile paralysis—I was quickly motored upstate to the safety of Schroon Lake. My mother read me the best children’s literature available to develop my mind. I learned to read before I went to kindergarten. The famous friends of my parents kept telling them how precociously intelligent I was. In other words, it would have seemed to the objective observer that the little Schulberg boy, whose papa was getting to be such a big shot at Famous Players while still in his mid-twenties, had the whole big world for his toy balloon.

I could run, I could jump, I could read, I was well coordinated, I could remember every detail of the stories that were read to me, I loved my mother and father, even was surprisingly fond of my baby sister, I was a friendly little tyke, gentle with animals. Yes, I seemed to have been favored by the gods all right. They had lavished everything on me. Except for one slight oversight. The gift of speech.

Another child would ask me my name and I’d try to say,

“B-b-b-b,” then run home sobbing, “I c-c-can’t t-t-talk…” When I opened my mouth to speak I stammered and stuttered and lisped. To say
a word, I would squeeze my eyes together until tears leaked from the corners.