3

Assaulting Ibsen

Early Saturday, two weeks after the demise of Joey Jouet, I lay on my living room floor confronting the ceiling’s jagged crack—sinister some mornings, today a bolt of lightning—and began the tantric exercises everyone was doing for digestion, muscle tone, eternal youth, the optimistic Southern California compound then and now. “I am monarch here,” I said aloud. “No one can top or stop me because I am the march of my generation. A monarch who rules his fate.”

Such a fool. I am. Better to know or not know you’re a fool? I’m the sucker who tells the story because the rest are gone. Or, like Mossy, ageless, now refusing to read books, especially if they’re about him. Doing the exercises I wondered if Joey, motorcycling into the Pacific, had died of fright. No, that wasn’t Joey. He was dead on impact then, with a broken neck, as if he’d hanged himself? Or did he drown, like a fisherman swept off his lobster boat by a wave he hadn’t seen coming?

I was catapulted into an obsession by Joey’s suicide as effectively as if he’d hurled flaming branches at my walled castle, igniting every chair and curtain inside. Because Pammy asked me for a favor I surmised I had her favor. The hope that plants a seedling of itself in a young breast is as much curse as blessing since it drains every moment of contentment. Potential is always rearing its greedy portentous head. The joke was that she hadn’t even made use of the favor I did, speaking no words at the funeral.

My castle was a shack, tucked on Sumac Lane in Santa Monica Canyon. A closet of a bedroom, bathroom with a stall shower, kitchen with a card table in it, and the tiny, dark living room with two wooden chairs, an empty crate for a coffee table, and a secondhand couch I kept doilies on to avoid having to look at the stuffing that leaked from either end. It wasn’t as though I had visitors. Yet when I looked out at the sycamores and eucalyptus climbing the hill to where associate producers and car dealers lived who could afford much more than my prewar forty dollars a month, I was happy.

By prewar I mean pre-prewar because in 1934 only the most prescient—Winston Churchill and a smattering of hypersensitive Jews—thought we’d ever be fighting the Germans again. The booming Twenties of my teens had passed quickly, hollow though the boom was, while the Depression Thirties were dragging ponderously. But for me at twenty-four, there was already a job in pictures, this compact shelter, and Palmyra. Mine was a love all the more precious for being unknown to its object.

Nor was it only Palmyra. It looked as though I was getting on in the world. I’d been praised for my idea about two sets of robbers coming to knock over the same bank unaware of each other; Gable and Cagney, as polar opposites, would be perfect for the two gang chiefs, or try Eddie Robinson if we couldn’t get Cagney. I’d been invited to Mossy’s big party, I’d had lunch with Trent Amberlyn and Fred MacMurray, everyone had seen Palmyra Millevoix—yes!—blow a grateful kiss to me as I left the commissary, and I’d been assigned A Doll’s House, which four other writers had failed to lick.

At this time, early 1934, I was disguised as a blank page on which other people wrote orders, urgent entreaties, or merely a list of chores. A writer, yes I was that, but a derivative, complaisant sort who wanted only to oblige, not to express a self at least as hidden from me as from others. Watch what I do with my treatment for A Doll’s House, I said to my estranged self, never mind Ibsen: I didn’t need approval from the dead. I’ll give them a Nora tougher and more lovable than he had.

The kiss from Palmyra, blown across two tables and observed by a squadron of my betters, was the result of my providing her a stanza she meant to use in a song she was writing for a picture she wasn’t in and hadn’t even been set to score. Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields had been writing the melodies and lyrics for a musical with a kid in it who was always being teased by taller boys. The producer felt that if the kid, played by Mickey Rooney, had a song of his own it could literally beef up his character. When McHugh and Fields, who Hollywood said ripped up the Depression and threw it away with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” returned to New York for a show that meant more to them than this movie, it was natural for Palmyra Millevoix to be asked to fill in with a couple of numbers. We were kind of a family at Jubilee—larger and more loving than our original families in many cases, if also more contentious—and it was just as natural for Palmyra, who was busy starring in two other pictures, to reach down and ask a junior writer if he had any quick thoughts for a song Rooney might sing. The next morning I handed her assistant these lines: “Please don’t call me Shorty anymore:/ I find it nasty and it makes me really sore;/ If you must talk about my height,/ Be prepared for me to fight/ Until the day comes when I’ve left you on the floor.”

Why did Palmyra pick on me in the first place? Out of gratitude for my funeral oration she hadn’t used? Maybe she wanted to help an eager beaver or didn’t want someone more established whose work she couldn’t discard. She wound up using only my first line, but when she threw the kiss at me in the commissary, I levitated. Having seen her in a couple of places, I now saw her everywhere, including all the places she wasn’t. I became a fantasy factory, a miniature of Hollywood itself.

Elsewhere on the lot I looked for approval from any quarter—an illiterate producer, lazy actors, a short-order cook of a director. If the approval, in other words, came from morons, I valued it just as highly. I didn’t consider the vacuum where my moral conscience was supposed to be any more than I did the desert where my creative impulses, such as they may have been, lay starved and gasping.

I will meet a girl at Mossy’s party who will change my life tonight, I thought as I jounced along to work in my Essex coupe, and her attentions will entice Palmyra to take notice. This morning I’ll make A Doll’s House, my first shot at an A picture, accessible to the unwashed and, more important, acceptable to Amos Zangwill. Other writers will observe enviously when I deliver my treatment to Gershon Lidowitz, husband of the daughter of movie pioneer Abraham Fine. Mossy disdained the ungifted Lidowitz but he needed Abe Fine, still trusted in semi-retirement by the New York bankers who financed Jubilee. Mossy knew that Fine knew Gershon’s limitations and was grateful he was retained as a weak-handed Jubilee producer. Lidowitz, said to be the original butt of the quip that the son-in-law also rises, was known by his many detractors as Littlewits.

We reported irritably for typewriter duty every Saturday morning at nine and tried to leave by one. The other writers on A Doll’s House had all listened to Littlewits and like leashed dogs had Nora decide to stay with Torvald in the end, destroying the play. Mossy knew this was wrong but he didn’t know how to get around the puritanical mood of the new Motion Picture Code that was beginning to be enforced. No more loose morals or broken homes. The Roaring Twenties, the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal, onscreen flaunting of Prohibition, freewheeling lives of the stars themselves—all this offended the religious core of America, which called for theater boycotts. Hollywood trembled. Movie executives, often Jews yearning to be accepted by Christian America, decided to police their industry before the offended Bible Belt and the inflamed Catholic hierarchy declared total war on their products and, by extension, themselves.

The early screen versions of A Doll’s House had been reasonably faithful to Ibsen, complete with the overacting that nineteenth century European theater brought into the motion picture’s silent decades. I knew Nora had to leave Torvald; the story was Nora’s coming of age, not her relationship with her stuffed-panda husband who deserves abandonment. Littlewits fretted a hint of divorce would annoy the censorious new Code-keepers, and he insisted the movie not end with the door shutting behind Nora. That last part had to be attacked this Saturday morning before my other triumphs could follow.

“Where you been, Ownsie?” Mr. Royal said, welcoming me just before seven, long before any other writers had pulled onto the lot. “Don’t you know this third act needs more wrinkles before you can turn it in even to someone as dim as Littlewits? Can’t do it all by myself much as I’d like to.” “Shut your trap,” I ordered, “let’s see if we can light the fuse.” “You think you can cold-cock this mess in a couple hours and then amscray?” That was the way even typewriters talked in those days. “Won’t get the girl if I don’t give her chocolates,” I said. “That’s all you know,” said the Royal.

“Page thirty-two, third act,” the Royal warned, “we need eight pages to the mark Littlewits likes to see in his treatments. What’s Nora gonna do?”