You Must Remember This (20 page)

Of all the courses I’ve played, the most memorable was Augusta. To walk that land, to walk over that bridge, following in the footsteps of the great men who have become legends there, was a great honor.

But if someone were to tell me I could play only one more round of golf, it wouldn’t be at Augusta, but at Bel Air. I caddied there as a boy, saw Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and Randolph Scott and Clark Gable play there, and even had the temerity to offer Gable some advice about his putting, which turned out to be helpful.

Fred Astaire and I played at Bel Air often, usually nine holes very early in the morning. Actors don’t practice that much, and Fred was no exception—his handicap was in the teens—but as you might expect he had a beautifully rhythmic swing. (There are some actors who practice a great deal; Dennis Quaid and Jack Wagner are scratch golfers, or close to it.)

These days, I usually play Bel Air with Mike Connors, Grant Tinker, and Steven Goldberg. I love the course, and I know it so well—each blade of grass is familiar. Maybe I love it so much
because
I know it so well. With golf, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, but satisfaction and tranquility.

Unless you shank an iron or blow an eighteen-inch putt. Then it produces rage. A fair trade-off for all the great times I’ve had on the golf courses of the world.

In the early 1990s, the producer David Wolper was making a film in collaboration with the USGA. We took the Warner Bros. corporate plane and traveled around the country, making sure to play every great course in America while shooting the documentary. To this day, I’m not sure which was the sideline—the golf we played or the documentary. Either way, it was one of the most pleasurable perks I’ve had in what I have to consider, on balance, a very lucky life.

Those people who didn’t golf often had boats—some of the most beautiful yachts were owned by the best and richest directors. I’m thinking of John Ford’s
Araner
and Cecil B. DeMille’s
Seaward
, both very impressive yachts. But even people who were much lower on the totem pole were serious sailors, like the character actor Frank Morgan, who kept scrapbooks about his yachting victories, which I believe included winning the Los Angeles to Honolulu race. Morgan loved to drink and sometimes did it at the Bel Air Country Club, where he was a member and where I knew him to say hello to. Other quality sailors were Errol Flynn (
Zaca
) and Humphrey Bogart (
Santana
).

Charlie Chaplin had a much smaller boat,
Panacea
, but it didn’t get an awful lot of use because Chaplin’s preferred recreation involved playing tennis on the court at his house.

Errol Flynn heading for the crow’s nest on his gorgeous yacht,
Zaca.

Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images

Out in Santa Monica were the Santa Monica Swimming Club and the Santa Monica Beach Club, whose members competed against each other in fierce volleyball games, seven men on a team. Joel McCrea and George O’Brien played for one team, Buster Crabbe for another. Cary Grant was around there at the time, too, working on the tan he always had.

Other people were interested in more earthbound hobbies. Racing, for instance. The comedy producer Hal Roach came up with the idea of the Santa Anita track, and Bing Crosby was president of Del Mar, near San Diego. Hollywood Park was organized
by Jack Warner, who was chairman of the board, along with Raoul Walsh.

Hollywood Park became such an entertainment mainstay for the studios that both
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
would print racing charts and results. If tourists were smart, they would usually head either to the racetracks or to the American Legion stadium in Hollywood, because they’d be sure to find a dozen or so stars there to snag for an autograph.

People with money to spend naturally look for ways to spend it, and horses are among the quickest ways to disperse a fortune. Harry and Jack Warner both had stables, as did Louis B. Mayer, whose stable was one of the top half dozen in the country for a number of years. It was Mayer who raised the standards of California stables to the point where they nearly achieved equality with their great counterparts in Kentucky. Others who had stables included Bing Crosby, Errol Flynn, Don Ameche, Myron Selznick, and William Goetz. Barbara Stanwyck and Zeppo Marx were partners in a stable called Marwyck.

Fred Astaire just loved the horses, and he owned a string of thoroughbreds that included a horse named Triplicate. Fred paid six thousand dollars for Triplicate and the horse went on to win over a quarter million dollars.

Walt Disney was a great polo enthusiast for a number of years, as were Spencer Tracy (a reckless player), Darryl Zanuck, Robert Montgomery, Gary Cooper, Hal Roach, Jack Holt, Leo Carrillo, and Charlie Farrell.

Polo necessitated owning a string of horses and having a total lack of fear of falling. The best of the polo players was probably Will Rogers, simply because he had the most experience with horses. Today Rogers’s polo field is part of Will Rogers State Park. For years I rode my own horses around the periphery of the field where Rogers and Darryl used to bang their horses and their heads.

Darryl Zanuck at Howard Hawks’s East-West croquet match in Beverly Hills in 1946.

Getty Images

Darryl was a very tough polo player, with a large stable of ponies, but when I went to work for him after the war, he became more involved with croquet, which made the Fox stockholders much happier.

Croquet was the postwar sport du jour for the upper echelon in Hollywood, whose particular nature as an enclave became apparent with the enthusiasm for such a genteel sport, which up to then had been confined to places like Palm Beach or Newport. Also contributing to its fashionable aspect were requirements that held a certain snob appeal, for very few people could qualify—you needed a very wide, perfectly flat, expertly manicured grass field cut to the length of a putting green.

Croquet is reasonably entertaining to play, even though it takes
forever to complete a game—a competition can go on all day and into the night, so you need a lot of stamina. At its most competitive, it’s not unlike playing thirty-six holes of golf.

My only problem with croquet is that it’s deadly dull to watch. I think its appeal was primarily to a group of people who were getting a little old for the hell-bent-for-leather aspects of polo but had to have something equally competitive—and croquet can be utterly vicious.

The first impetus for croquet had come from the East Coast in the 1920s, with the Algonquin Round Table crowd. Herbert Bayard Swope and Alexander Woollcott had croquet courts, and other people who played included Averell Harriman, Harpo Marx, Richard Rodgers, and Vincent Astor. I seem to recall that it was Moss Hart who brought the sport to the West Coast during World War II and introduced it to Darryl Zanuck, who regarded him very highly as a writer. Soon Zanuck introduced the game to all of his friends: Howard Hawks and Hawks’s brother Bill, Sam Goldwyn, Gregory Ratoff.

Croquet courts suddenly began appearing all over Beverly Hills, and Zanuck and Goldwyn would play for as much as a thousand dollars a game. Goldwyn was something of a fanatic about physical fitness, which may be why he lived into his nineties. His natural enthusiasms were for long walks and handball, but the latter became difficult after he broke an ankle. His second love, golf, simply made him too upset—one bad shot would lead to four more, which would lead to a ruined afternoon and, as the man said, a good walk spoiled.

Harpo Marx and Alexander Woollcott introduced Goldwyn to croquet, and his wife Frances built a court for him. The simple
house rules were printed on a blackboard by a scorekeeper’s hut, which was actually a bar:

1. Don’t get excited.
   
2. Correctly remember balls you are dead on.
   
3. Have patience with fellow members who are not as good as you are.
   

Croquet is usually a sedate sport, although nothing was sedate when Sam Goldwyn played it. It was his court, so he felt entitled to ignore his own rules when he felt like it.

The addicts, the people who were always at either Darryl’s court in Palm Springs or at Sam’s court in LA, were Louis Jourdan—who I believe was the best player of them all—Joe Cotten, Clifton Webb, Ty Power, and Cesar Romero. If the game was in Palm Springs, William Powell would act as the official cheerleader.

The high point of the craze for croquet was probably in July 1946, when Howard Hawks hosted a best-of-three East-West croquet championship. Moss Hart, Ty Power, and agent Felix Ferry played for the East, against Darryl and Hawks for the West. Floodlights were installed so the matches could go on far into the night. Zanuck and Hawks won the first game, but I was told that they got overconfident and proceeded to lose the second and third games, giving the victory to the East.

For the rest of us who went to Darryl’s Santa Monica house, there were other games. I recall marathon poker sessions among a round-robin that included Robert Capa, Constance Bennett, Lew Wasserman, and Howard Hawks’s wife Slim Keith. Sometimes, if Darryl wasn’t in the mood for poker or croquet, he’d play board games such as Labyrinth.

Restaurateur Mike Romanoff, right, playing croquet with film producer Samuel Goldwyn.

Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images

Others enjoyed hunting and fishing; Clark Gable and Robert Taylor were among this crowd. Gable particularly enjoyed the Teal, a club south of Bakersfield where I was also a member, or the La Grulla Gun Club in the Baja Mountains near Ensenada. For fishing, Clark would head to the Rogue River in Oregon.

A much smaller subset enjoyed flying, but that was nearly as expensive as sailing. Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels were among the first stars to pilot their own planes; others included Ray Milland, Wallace Beery, George Brent, and Jimmy Stewart, who, as I’ve
mentioned, was a superb pilot from his missions in World War II. Robert Taylor also flew his own plane, and there were some successful directors who flew as well, among them Henry King and Clarence Brown. As a matter of fact, Brown would fly his plane to work—he’d land at the Culver City airport, take a car to MGM, and at the end of the day fly back home.