Speed Kings (31 page)

Billy's letters home also dwelled on his other great preoccupation, politics. The League of Nations had just published the Lytton report, an investigation into the causes of the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria. “It has caused much of a stir, as everyone seems to feel the absolute futility of it,” Billy wrote in a letter to Peggy. He returned again to one of his favorite topics—the ineptitude of American politicians. “Christ they make me sick . . . They are the goddamnest fools I have ever seen. They sit back for a century with their goddamn [isolationist] Monroe doctrine and let the rest of the world make suckers out of them and then they jump in all of a sudden at the only spot where it is entirely contrary to their interests.” Japan, Billy thought, “is entirely run on American capital,” and so it was in the United States' best interest to let Japan have Manchuria. Instead, they were siding with the Chinese. Peggy was convinced that Billy was planning a career in politics. Certainly he had a passion for it. “He cared far more about ideas and ideals than money,” she said. “And he had a keen sense of what he thought was the ‘right' thing to do.”

At that time in his life, though, Billy had other ideas. In fact, later that very same day he had
the
idea. “Must stop now,” he signed off his letter. “I am going to play golf in the Amateur Championship of China with Douglas Fairbanks, who is arriving out here in a couple of days, what a laugh! So long Snooks, Bill.”

Fairbanks, an old family friend from St. Moritz, had just been featured in Howard Hawks's
The Dawn Patrol
and Warner Bros.' smash gangster flick
Little Caesar
. His star had never burned brighter. He hadn't come to Shanghai just to play golf. He was planning an ambitious new film project, “a colorful history of China from Confucius to the present day.” Fairbanks figured his picture could be an international epic. It never happened. But while he was in the city, he spent plenty of time shooting the breeze with his old friends from St. Moritz. And that was when it dawned on Billy. Where was the one place a young, handsome man like him could go to make a lot of money and have a little fun? He was amazed he hadn't thought of it sooner.

Screenland
Magazine, May 1934

WHEN GILDED YOUTH

GOES CELLULOID!

And here is another American “Golden Spoon” youth, with the irresistible urge to do something with motion pictures! He is William Fiske, 3rd, the son of an American banker in Paris who was brought up abroad with the idea of following his father's footsteps in business. Instead he has decided to desert the counting room to count for something in the movies!

They called it Seven Seas Productions. Billy was the president. He'd earned the job since he'd sunk most of his money into the company. He was its public face too. The idea, as the smitten interviewer from
Screenland
explained, was to “make pictures with Garbo players in authentic settings.” They planned to travel “all over the world in interesting spots, with a small unit of Hollywood players, technicians, directors, and supplemented by native casts.” It was all inspired by Billy's time in Tahiti. He explained “quietly, but with bright eyes” that “in every country there are tales and superstitions based on fabulous characters that have at some time lived there. There are heroic figures living today in difficult and remote countries, doing great things unheard of in civilized centers.” At the same time, he admitted, they would be open to the idea of a movie made “on the spot in Monte Carlo,” since that would be “authentic” too.

In the end, they decided that their first picture would be set in Hawaii. A writer named Jim Bodrero was hawking a script about a romance set on the sugar plantations out there. Better yet, because Bodrero's grandparents owned one of those same plantations, he could help them fix up the locations. And that was what mattered to Billy. He wanted to make an authentic movie, one shot on location, not in a studio.

White Heat
, as it was eventually titled, is the story of a young socialite named Lucille who marries William, the foreman on her father's Hawaiian sugar plantation. William is really in love with his housekeeper, Leilani, but he can't be with her because she's a native. Cooped up all alone in the house, Lucille starts to go gaga. When her former fiancé, Chandler, arrives for a visit, she succumbs to his advances. William finds out and is furious. Then, in the grand set-piece
finish, Lucille, utterly potty by this point, sets fire to the crops and runs off with Chandler. William falls from his horse trying to fight the fire, but, just as he's about to be consumed, Leilani arrives to rescue him. All the extramarital love stuff was an old Hollywood theme. But an interracial affair was a new one.

They hired Lois Weber as director, a cheap and inspired choice. Weber had been Hollywood's first great female director, but she hadn't made a movie since
The Angel of Broadway
, for Cecil B. DeMille back in 1927. Only six years ago, but it was also in the silent era and a bomb besides.

Mona Maris, who was Argentine and spoke English with an utterly unintelligible accent, played the Hawaiian housekeeper. They had David Newell, a young up-and-comer, as the lead man. Hardie Albright, an old vaudeville ham, was Chandler. For Lucille, Billy wanted Virginia Cherrill, the pretty blonde twentysomething who had played the blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin's hit
City Lights
. And he got her, even though she was contracted to Twentieth Century Fox.

Cherrill came with baggage. Chaplin, another old friend of the Fiskes from St. Moritz, warned Billy that he had fired her from
City Lights
because she had walked off the set to get her hair done. Worse still, she had a wildly possessive fiancé, who hated the idea of her being away working with Billy in Hawaii for however many months. The fiancé's name? Cary Grant. At the time, Grant was at a particularly low ebb. He'd just finished work on what he described as “a grotesque version of Alice in Wonderland,” in which he'd played the mock turtle.

He had spent the entire shoot encased in a suffocatingly hot papier-mâché shell, topped off with a large head with little false eyes. He wasn't feeling great about the place his career was in. And Billy, well, as his friend Patsy Ward wrote, “In those roving years, wherever he went and among whomever he moved his gaiety, warm-heartedness, and quick intelligence won him instant popularity; his natural ability to excel in whatever form of sport he tried his hand at, his complete lack of arrogance, and his unfailing sense of humor brought him not only admiration but love among many different classes of people in many different lands.” His pal Neil Cleaver was a little more to the point: “Billy, was short, 5ft 8in,” said Cleaver, “but the women found him wildly attractive.”

Cherrill always denied that there had been anything between the two of them. “After a day's shooting in the heat and the dust, we returned to the ranch exhausted,” she told her biographer. “I had a long bath and then my supper and retired early for the next day's shooting. Billy and his co-producer would sit and talk about the next day's shooting. Those few times I was involved in after-dinner talk, Billy would tell the most amusing stories.” That was her story, and
she stuck with it. Even if she changed the details a little over the years. “Virginia remembers both the unpleasantness of the film-making and the intensity of Cary's jealousy,” wrote a biographer of Grant's. “She had to work day after day on a sugar plantation, covered with red dust blown by a savage wind. At night, she would return to the boarding house to be scrubbed by a housemaid in an effort to remove the dust from her hair, pores, and nails. Fiske, accompanied by his co-producer, would disappear to a local brothel; the director went to her room; and Virginia was left completely alone.”

Grant didn't buy it. “He hated the fact that he couldn't keep an eye on her during the many weeks of shooting. He would telephone her in Kauai, or try to check up on her with the switchboard at her Japanese boarding house, a difficult task in those days of comparatively primitive telephone services. He was maddened by an unfounded belief that she was having an affair.” Grant got to be so paranoid about it all that even after shooting was over and Cherrill had moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel, he bribed the switchboard operators there to eavesdrop on any calls between Billy and her.

Cherrill's recollections of life on set, all “red dust blown by a savage wind,” didn't exactly tally with everyone else's. But then, she was the star. The two things everyone remembered about the production were how much fun it was and how little work they got done. Progress was slow because so many of the crew were injured, cut, bruised, and sprained playing a game Billy had invented. There was a spot where the sugar cutters worked, a plateau high above the plain. From up there, they delivered the cane down to the lowlands by bundling it up and tossing it into two small streams, separated by a foot or so, which ran side by side down to the bottom of the hill. Billy thought it would be a sport to stand, one foot on each bundle, and water-ski down the slope. “It was dangerous and difficult,” wrote Patsy Ward, “and he excelled at it.”

It turned out they had a lot more fun making the movie than anyone did watching it.
White Heat
, as it was now called, had its premiere in New York on June 14, 1934. The reviews were awful. “White Heat is a humorless account of the amorous difficulties of a young sugar planter,” began the
New York Times
. It got worse. The themes, the paper conceded, were “by no means trivial,” but the film cheapened them by “resorting to rotten and predictable clichés.” Worse, its critic found the grand finale of the fire in the cane fields to be a “completely foolish episode.” Whispers were that Billy had spent $400,000 on it and made only $125,000 back. Certainly all plans for their next film,
Moro
, set in the Philippines, were quietly shelved. As for Weber, she never worked again.

Ah, well. Billy's career as a producer was a bust, but he was still having a high time in Hollywood. And as Peggy said, he never cared too much about money. He had a house on Lookout Mountain Avenue, off Laurel Canyon. He lived there with an old pal from his Cambridge days, Paddy Green. The two of them used to run around town with David Niven, who lived just around the corner. Niven was still working bit parts then, looking for his big break. Billy and Paddy even took flying lessons together out at Burbank. They'd been inspired to sign up after going to see
The China Clipper
, the latest Warner Bros. picture—starring, in a supporting role, a new player by the name of Humphrey Bogart. It was all about a man's obsession with building a flying boat capable of crossing the Pacific. And Billy could still dream of those fighters he saw over the US fleet on his way to Tahiti.

In those days, Billy was dating Alice Faye, a platinum blonde with a singing voice so sweet that Rudy Vallee signed her up as the vocalist on his hit radio show after hearing her perform at a party. (Vallee's wife thought there was a little more to it than that, and named Faye as a co-respondent when she sued for divorce in 1934.) Faye was tougher than she looked in her china doll makeup. She had grown up in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen and quit school when she was thirteen to try to join the Follies. She had a hard edge, which appealed to Billy. And to Darryl F. Zanuck too: he gave her the lead in the 1934 film
George White's Scandals
, then cast her opposite Spencer Tracy in
Now I'll Tell
. She soon shot to the top of the bill, and dropped Billy on her way up.

While Billy was pining after Faye, he fell in with another hell-raiser, the actor William Boyd, a man who drank a lot, and gambled more. In 1935, Boyd was offered a six-picture deal for a series of Westerns based on hit pulp stories about Hopalong Cassidy. Boyd persuaded Billy that the series would be a good investment. Billy agreed, and became the vice president of Western Pictures Corp. Boyd retooled the character, took the hard-drinking hell-raiser described in the books and turned him into a teetotaler who didn't smoke or swear. “He was part philosopher, part doctor, part minister,” reckoned Boyd. “He was everything.” Everything that Boyd was not. So that was one of the few deals Billy struck in Hollywood that worked out well. Though by the time the Hopalong films got really big—by 1938 Boyd was one of the best-paid actors in Hollywood—Billy's involvement was already over. He only ever made piecemeal change from the early films in the series. So he continued to look for the next big thing, an investment that would give him a better return on his money than Hollywood had done.

—

E
arly in 1936, he found it. The way T. J. Flynn tells it, it all started at a cocktail party in Pasadena. T.J. was from Aspen, Colorado. In the thirties, Aspen was a one-horse town, and the horse was dead. The mining boom was long since over, and the population had slumped from a peak of twelve thousand to just seven hundred in the space of three decades. With a background like that, T.J. didn't have much to say about polo, which seemed to be all anyone at the party wanted to chat about. Apart from this one guy, off on his own, evidently equally bored with the small talk.

“Are you more interested in any sport than polo?” Billy asked.

“Yes,” T.J. replied, “I like horseback riding in the mountains.”

Billy lit up. “What mountains?”

“The High Rockies,” T.J. told him. “Back where I grew up.”

“Do they have skiing out there?”

“They do.”

And from then on, Flynn said, “Billy became more and more interested, and plied me with more and more questions about the mountains.”

Well, T. J. Flynn always did like a good story. Another of Billy's friends, Ted Ryan, remembered it a little differently. T.J. was out in Los Angeles trying to find someone to invest in a silver mine back in Colorado. “And he kept trying to sell it to Billy. And Billy was just not at all impressed.” But he insisted on sending over some photos of the mine's location, high in the Rockies. Billy saw then “the terrain, the heights, the altitude.” He had no idea such country existed in America. Billy called T.J. back, told him that maybe he wanted to invest in Aspen after all. T.J. was delighted, said, “I told you so.” And Billy replied, “But it's not the mine I'm interested in, T.J. It's the mountains.”