8

New York to Hollywood

This time my wheeze continued for two days until a doctor came to my grandmother’s apartment and had me breathe from a tube. My father, gray in the face now, carried on. He said, “We must be stoic, Owen.” I thought he meant something about a stick, we must be like sticks. I may not have gotten that too far wrong.

Owen’s father had no funeral for his mother, so Owen cannot describe the scent of lilies and lilacs in a crowded church, the musky perfume of maiden aunts as they dabbed their eyes, the sonorousness of the minister, the feeling of abandonment as he stood outside the church afterward in the new knickers his mother had bought him, while his father let go of his hand to greet fellow mourners and thank them for coming, telling each of them he or she had a special place in his wife’s life. Because none of that happened. What his father did do was to put an engraving on his mother’s simple stone in the old graveyard in Litchfield, Connecticut, which can be seen there today: “The earth’s of her, not she of it bereaved.”

Observing my life now from the outside, I wrote in my diary, the diary she had started me keeping, that I felt Owen had been taken to a railway station by his mother—we’d traveled so much that way—only to watch her board the train and leave without him. “I’m not little Owen any more,” I wrote three days after she died, “I’m on my Owen now, my Owen self. I’m not the me I was but some other he. And the rain came crying down upon us, again.”

A self-pitying attempt at lyricism by a nine year old. But what did I mean by “again”? When had it ever before rained in my life, rained in the metaphorical way young Owen was using here? Were there problems between my parents? Possibly, but he—I?—may be referring to some other problem that afflicted but did not originate within the family, related only in that both difficulties happened to Owen himself. Is there such a thing as a reverse premonition? Could he be recalling subsequent misfortunes that had not yet occurred? The “us” is ambiguous. Surely he is not using “us” as the royal we.

Yet Owen now sees himself as both I and he. He has subjectified himself, that is myself, with a new identity, a boy whose mother has died, while also objectifying himself into a character he is free to write about. “Us,” then, may be his two mirrored selves. The possibility also exists that “us” is Owen and his father, two males facing an uncertain future deprived of the female they love, or even, telescoping all time into the present tense, Owen and his mother and father, the original trinity still extant though shattered by the physical if not psychological removal of the mother.

The character he was free to write about, however, lasted only a few sentences. The next entry in the diary is fairly scary, at least to the diarist. A silence lasted two weeks, two weeks when I stayed away from school, after which I dumbly scratched out:

TSO RMLA VA VA VA SHAAAH URZ VEBM SIM SIM FAK RUP RI TOT SHIGAH. TOT TOT EK EKR EKROP VA.

‘RIMMA METTNUP KLIW.’

‘MYAWKI NUPPA.’

SILVE MEK VA VA WIKL URZ RMLA TOT.

RAHYOZHOY!

After such silence, such sounds. Ending in the middle of a diary page. On the following page was written:

OKRABRU SULEE.

And then: “You break rules. Rules break you.”

With the remark about rules, the boy has found recognizable words after weeks of nothing since the phrase about the rain crying again. He is learning speech, not a speech, speech itself, having been deprived of it for a space.

Ashamed, I couldn’t show my diary to my father, nor my grandmother who had now begun to mourn the defeat of the natural order of death between her and her daughter. But I was lonely to share. One day I decided to show my diary to Mrs. Daniels, my teacher at Horace Mann. I held my breath while she read the entry about being left at the train station, then the gibberish, then the recovery of normal language. She took hold of me with a hug that smelled like warm toast. “Sometimes nonsense is the best sense,” she said. “Just observe. Watch. Watch and remember. You’ll be all right, Owen.”

In later decades I have endured the analyst’s couch for tenures approaching those of Latin American dictators, but I’ve never been helped more than by Mrs. Daniels’s hug and her few words. She didn’t understand what I wrote. She only understood me.

I recalled watching my mother as she was inching away from us day by day. After her death my mother remained present to me in certain ways for some time. I could still hear her voice singing to me in her summer sounds even as these were growing dimmer.

After the one semester at Horace Mann, we were off west, to Minnesota first, then to Chicago where the Standard Varnish Works had its headquarters, and after that down to San Antonio, which was having a little building boom. Without forming friendships in my new schools, since we rarely stayed anywhere more than half a year, I got along well enough. My father, it was clear to me, had enough grief for both of us. I didn’t want to show sorrow since his own was so evident in his change from garrulousness to silence. In a certain way a silent tyrant can be tougher to live with than a loud one because he seldom lets you know what he feels or wants. You know you can’t produce what he wants. I was his last connection to her, I had come from her body; therefore, I should produce her as she had once produced me. But even then, ha, I was no producer.

Barnett Jant kept an upper lip so stiff I didn’t see how he ever curled it around a morsel of food. Meals were taken without the exchange of a word. A tongue spends most of its life in the dark, and Barnett would let his out, rarely, to say not what he wanted but what he thought his son ought to want. This put me in a triple bind. I would think about what my father wanted, what my dead mother might have wanted, and finally, as a muted afterthought, what I myself might conceivably want. I blundered along through the fog of what I took to be others’ judgments.

One evening before we left San Antonio, Barnett let it be known that it had popped into his head he should have been a doctor. “That way, I might have saved Syrilla. With your future before you, Owen, I wonder if you might consider becoming a physician yourself.” I wanted to laugh at being so thoroughly misunderstood. My father should have asked me to become a spiritual medium. It was too late for a doctor, but a medium might at least bring my mother’s voice back to us. We could get up a séance. As for becoming a doctor, I hated the sight of blood, ran from needles, was repulsed by the very idea of surgery, and couldn’t stand anything stronger than aspirin that came from the medical profession. Years went by.

Our journeys took us to North Dakota, down to Nevada, back east to New Hampshire, then out to Coeur d’Alene, where my father had been when my mother first became ill. We were visited by a fair-skinned woman who came to our door in a veil, which one might have seen in New York or Chicago at that time but was mystifyingly out of place in Idaho. Over her shoulders she wore a dark shawl and when she removed her accessories I saw she was quite pretty with dark eyes that took in everything. She and my father talked while I made dinner—by now I was in high school—and I heard him laugh with his whole throat for the first time since New York. I was glad. The woman laughed too, and I was less glad. After dinner my father said he would see Mrs. Roark home. Over the next few weeks my father went out several evenings, returning after I was asleep. When Mrs. Roark came over a second time there were only puzzled looks, no laughter.

We left Coeur d’Alene for Casper, Wyoming, where we stayed at a ranch for two semesters before moving on to Seattle. One night we named as many schools as we could that I’d been to and stopped counting at twenty-two. I was inhibited and dutiful in my classes but at home dreamed of adventures with presidents. Jackson and TR my standbys.

I went east for college and thought I’d stay there. Three years at Harvard, a transfer to Yale for the writing program with George Pierce Baker, who had left Harvard in a snit of some kind. Wishing me well, Baker cracked that since I now had a Harvard education and a Yale degree, my future was assured. I didn’t dare ask my father for money for the year in Paris, so I kicked around New York. The Depression had hit by then and my father was less comfortable. “The paint I sell is as wet as ever,” he joked, “but the demand for it has dried up.” He moved to Chicago where he could ride out the Depression in a safe office job for Standard Varnish.

I couldn’t get started on a play I hoped to write, but I pinched a few stray assignments for the New York Post and the Herald Tribune. I was eating peanut butter twice a day. My Jim Bicker period, with similar aims but without Poor Jim’s rail-riding moxie. Two pieces for the American Magazine and McCall’s, the first an assigned article on the Kentucky Derby, which I peopled with enough of the characters I met in Louisville during race week so that the social circus became far more compelling than the matter of which horse poked its nose across the wire first. McCall’s published my short story about a New York party where everything went so disastrously, dramatically wrong that the host couple decided to divorce and went to bed in separate rooms.

These two pieces warranted a call from Jubilee. “One hundred and seventy-five a week for ten weeks,” Colonel DeLight hummed. “If things work out, young fella, you could become another Rupert Hughes or Yancey Ballard.” I’d never heard of either of them, though Yancey—Yeatsman himself—became my pal and mentor.

I arrived at the wrought-iron entrance to the studio in the dismal fall of 1932, thrilled to have a job. The double gates were intimidating with their look of impregnability, as was the molded starburst at the center of each along with the giant ornate lettering: J U B I L E E. Colonel DeLight was out sick so I showed myself around the lot. The stages loomed like large warehouses for precious cargo, and I didn’t have the nerve to enter any of them. The backlot intrigued me with its fake trees and lawns, housefronts and storefronts, and streets of either concrete or imitation cobblestone. The New York street looked wrong, yet also right. The great city of stone where I’d been so awed as a boy, where my mother was born and died, was here pulverized to beaverboard and papier-mâché. There were New England, Chicago, and New Orleans streets as well. Rome and Jerusalem were façaded for, I supposed, a historical or Biblical epic.

Although it was a sunny day, staggeringly huge lights were mounted on the outdoor sets where shooting was under way both in a French village and the exterior of an Iowa farmhouse. I recognized no actors. Neither the action nor the lines I heard were as interesting as the sets themselves.

Back among the sound stages, I made my way toward the executive offices, two-story pink buildings in unremarkable Spanish stucco with red-tiled roofs. I’d heard of Amos Zangwill, of course, and knew he was the all-powerful studio head. Yet I was unprepared for the sight—tableau really—I suddenly encountered. An imperious figure emerged from the commissary, reminding me of a king or colonial officer as he strode through a throng of menials who fawned over him. He proceeded with a gray velvet cape thrown on his shoulders, looking down upon his attendants as they pressed around him. His hair swept back in a pompadour, he affected a showy ring that I half expected one of his servitors to kiss. Each was trying to get his attention with a query, a problem, a joke. Hollywood instantly disgusted me: the potentate of a studio with an entourage he clearly required to remind him every second how wise and omnipotent he was.

“You don’t have to stare,” a friendly voice said to me. “He hardly needs any more of us gaping at him.” It was Colonel DeLight’s secretary and typist for the writers, who introduced herself as Comfort O’Hollie. With a soft Irish accent, she apologized for her boss’s absence and the fact no one had been available to give me a guided tour.

I told her I’d had a fine time on my own until I came upon the emperor.

“We make allowances,” she said. “This one may be riding for a fall though.”

I looked at her with alarm. How dare she even whisper that? How could a mere secretary speak that way about the mighty Zangwill? “Riding for a fall?” I said. “You sound like a revolutionary.” I laughed a little to let her know I was kidding.

“That’s me grandmother, not me,” she said. “I’ll tell you sometime about the infamous Grandmother O’Hollie. People are starting to resent this man, though. Funny thing, he used to be a regular party, always liked the writers. Then these suck-ups started to treat him the way they do, and he found out he likes it. He makes four times what anyone in his department gets.”

“His department? Isn’t the whole studio his depar—”

“Sure, always eats lunch with the others who work for him, but he makes them draw straws to see who has to pay for him. Has the power of life and death over them.”

“Over everyone, I guess.” One of his retinue had just stooped to pick up the velvet cape that had fallen from the potentate’s shoulders.

“Well, I mean in his department.”

“His department?” I asked again.

“Oh, I forgot you don’t know anyone on the lot. That strutting gamecock is Hurd Dawn, head of scenery design and set construction.”

“Of course,” I said.