GOSSIP

I don’t read the books friends send me. I will give them a sentence or two, out of respect; but, my suspicions confirmed, I put them aside. Most of them are accompanied by the friend’s opinion that the subject should interest me. But I discard them not because of their subjects but because of the writing.

I’ll read the instructions for a hammer, if well written; and until the plague of social conformity, I never found a subject that didn’t interest me. Inequity, Gender Politics, Feminism, and like doctrines are like modern art: a first glance is sufficient. There’s no information to be gained from an in-depth study.

Shel Silverstein hipped me onto various treasures, endorsed not because of subject but because of their beauty.

He delighted to share with the unaccountably deprived. “What,” for example, “do you mean you’ve never heard of Bolitho?” He thought Twelve Against the Gods was the most magnificent of books, and so do I. And I, in my ignorance, had never heard of the Victorian writer Ernest Bramah, and his pee-one’s-pants funniest of accounts of Kai Lung, Bramah’s Chinese Storyteller: “The elder and less attractive of the maidens fled, uttering loud and continuous cries of apprehension in order to conceal the direction of her flight.”

Shel had read everything in the world. Like my friend the great Ricky Jay, on whom more later, he was a high school dropout.

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Anouk Aimée (born Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus) was the loveliest woman of her age, and one of the great (uncredited) Jewish Beauties. In Lelouch’s 1960 Chocolate Box love story Un Homme et une Femme, she describes her young son’s school report to Jean-Louis Trintignant, her lover (“Intelligent, mais paresseux”): intelligent, but lazy; proving the universality of the canard.

They said it of me, and likely of you; and after they’d said it Just Enough, Shel and Ricky dropped out of school.

I heard it again, at dinner one night, a school’s report of a friend’s kid. So, like Star Wars and the Vampire, apparently it just won’t die. But what can it mean, other than that the teacher is incompetent?

As he recognizes intelligence, isn’t he being paid to interest the student in it? He is.

It is a confession framed as an indictment, sic, “the kid should be intelligent enough to see that I am doing a fine job.” But in effect, he is sufficiently intelligent to perceive the reverse. His laziness might be a visceral inability to stand boredom. How might this intelligent inability be turned into education? By a teacher whose interest in his subject communicated itself to his charges.

Shel’s or Ricky’s “Wait, you’ve never heard of…?” sent me to the bookstore every time.

Likewise with movies.

Scott Rudin produced a bunch of wonderful films (No Country for Old Men, The Addams Family, School of Rock, and thirty more). Being a producer, he is my enemy. But as a snakebit film buff, he is my friend; we could sit for hours over what long ago had been lunch, trading movie lore and trivia. It seems he knows every film ever made. I could never stump him.

And now our orbits have diverged; he, still, wherever he is, and myself, now the Hermit of Santa Monica, shunning a world that has moved on, and to which his name is as the mention of Herodotus to illiterate youth.

From Squirrels (Mamet, 1973), “Ah, Time, Time, Time, you old pee-pee head.” The character is The Cleaning Lady (first played by Linda Kimbrough), the real brains of a Writers Room comprised of an ancient Hack (me), and a young Postulant (similarly).

She continues, “Though it is, of course, odd to speak of Time as being Old.” (Pause) “You young pee-pee head…?”

As racing drivers discuss compression-ratios, and lawyers their new watch, we buffs get high on arcana. “Hey, wait a second,” one might say after the second pot of coffee: “Did you know that Francis Lederer, the love-interest for Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929 Pabst classic femme fatale silent, in which Louise wore and created her signature Flapper Bob), made a fortune buying up The Valley…?”

“Did you see John Qualen (he who played the Swedish Immigrant in ninety films, unforgettable as the dust bowl farmer, confronting the sheriffs in The Grapes of Wrath: ‘Doesn’t anyone know what a shotgun is…?’), as an extra in The Last Command?” (Sternberg’s silent 1928 film of a Russian field marshal reduced to playing bits in Hollywood.) “Yes,” one would respond, “and, who plays the film dir—” Response, “Yes, yes, yes, Bill Powell; and did you know that he and Jean Harlow…” “Yes, yes, and did you know that she did not die of a Christian Science Mother who refused to have her operated on, but…” And so on, addictive and inexhaustible.

Those things shared might be described as culture, that is, the dedication, out of love or conviction, to a common endeavor, which endeavor might be identified by its title, but accurately understood only through its shared myths.

There’s George Sanders, an extra, asleep in a jeep in I Was a Male War Bride; there’s Cary Grant, in drag, which is the joke within the joke of Tony Curtis playing him in Some Like It Hot; and did you remark that it was always Cary who was the Pursued in his sex comedies? And how could Hedy Lamarr have come to such a sad end? Likewise her legion of Thespian Sisters; and Karen Morley blacklisted, and Pert Kelton bounced from her spot as the original Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners because her husband had been blacklisted; and I know a guy who knows a woman who was in the FBI back then, and here’s who she said actually killed Marilyn… And what do you make of all these post-facto exposés by this or that pimp slandering those beyond legal redress…?

So many films are lost. At least two-thirds of all movies made are gone, withered on the acetate stock or pulped in World War II for the nitrates to make gunpowder.

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Trivia is gossip without malice.

I introduced myself to Sylvia Sidney in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont in 1980. The Chateau was the studios’ barracks for Englishmen and New York writers whoring around Hollywood. It was an atrocious fleabag. Nothing worked, the shower handles and the doorknobs came off in the hand, it was filthy.

Miss Sidney was, most apparently, waiting to meet a director who might have a job for her. Other waiting womenfolk were mostly the call girls, their lower-rent sisters prowling the sidewalk across Sunset.

Two blocks down Sunset was Schwab’s Pharmacy, apocryphal site of Lana Turner’s discovery. Next door to the Chateau was the Imperial Gardens, which had been Preston Sturges’s restaurant, wherein he went broke and was shepherded from failure and poverty by Jimmy Conlin, who played the bug-eyed convict in Sullivan’s Travels and was a comic staple of Sturges’s troupe.

Sylvia was, at one point, married to Luther Adler, of the great Yiddish theater clan. He was a Broadway star and a featured player in the movies. His sister Stella, a noted teacher, had been married to Harold Clurman, the Broadway director dear to me because of this exchange: “Mr. Clurman, a director has such responsibilities, what do you do when you’ve done something unforgivable?”

Harold: “Forgive yourself.”

Contemporary swine have trotted out the old anti-Semitic canards: that the Jews control this or that. If only. Further, the indictment doesn’t specify in what ways Jews exercise this supposed control, and how it injures the ranters who, universally, seem to have done right well in Show Biz whoever controls it; and, should this prove to be “the Jews,” perhaps thanks are more appropriate than invective.

Well, the Boys controlled boxing, betting, Vegas, and so on. But one never heard the winner complain; and the cries of the losers were curiously only directed against the Fates, the Cards, or the Spread, Italians being exempt.

Q. Do/did the Jews control Hollywood?

A. Kiss my ass.^I

The call for equity is a demand for reward without achievement; and the Studios that heed it are, consequently, turning out garbage.

But there was Sylvia Sidney, probably seventy years old, with her svelte body and the cat-face so beloved of male movie fans.

I introduced myself and she looked right past me or through me and I saw that her problems, in that lobby, were greater than mine; and that, although I had a Theatrical Pedigree, she, quite rightly, didn’t give a damn.

I also burbled over Robert Mitchum one year at Cannes, which burg was probably undergoing a booze shortage since his arrival. But I have been drunk myself.

As part of the Jewish cabal of Broadway-Acting Studios and Hollywood, I was friendly with Herbert Berghof^II and Uta Hagen—HB Studio. Stella Adler, HB, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Actors Studio were all Jewish Pushcarts. That is, like Donald Hall’s great kids’ book Ox-Cart Man, the immigrant Jew sold everything on his cart, then sold the cart, then sold the ox.

The acting studios had the Ashkenazi flavor of Talmud Study, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, mixed to taste and reconstituted as Emotional Memory and confession.

It was a lot of blather, but I do not indict the teachers’ sincerity—they were trying to impart a vision. Unfortunately, the vision’s actual name was Talent, and it cannot be approached through doctrine masquerading as technique.

After the Golden Age and World War II, Hollywood’s stars came not from the streets, diners, and high schools of this great land but from the New York Stage, and the New York studios with which they were intertwined. Notable among the Jewish schools (identified here as such for the first time) was Juilliard.

Juilliard was the upscale (read: supposedly non-Jewish) École Polytechnique of Acting Schools. It taught voice, diction, singing, dance, posture, and the odd acting class. It was the Oxbridge to the others’ Storefront Shul versions of instruction. Its vision was that of John Houseman, its director. He’d been the producer of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, Citizen Kane, On Dangerous Ground, The Blue Dahlia, and other great films. He was born Jacques Haussmann, in Bucharest, Romania, but always appeared and sounded like a British gentleman (read: goy).

I knew him well.

Reported previously: I’m asleep in Chicago in 1976. Five a.m., the phone rings, I answer it.

Me: “Hello…?”

John (English Aristo voice): “Mamet?”

Me: “Hello, John.”

John: “Mamet, I have a confession to make.”

Me: “Alright.”

John: “I’m queer.” (Long pause.) “For your writing.”

He was great friends with Norman Lloyd, of the Mercury Theatre and Hitchcock’s films (the title role in Saboteur).

Norman died in 2021, at 106. He lived around the corner; I got to hear many of his stories. He was in the cast of Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and was arrested and hauled off to jail with the cast and crew—those in the studio were among the sole Americans unaware the Martians had landed. “We were puzzled,” he said.

John was staying at Norman’s house some years back. He went out in his bathrobe and slippers to pick up the paper. He bent over, revealing his bare behind.

Norman: John, you shouldn’t do that, somebody driving home drunk might mistake it for the Holland Tunnel and drive up your ass.

John was married to the gorgeous Zita Johann, who was the love interest of Boris Karloff in The Mummy, the 1932 film. She was Jewish too, what are you going to do about it?

1. I. We Jews, though very active in Hollywood, do nothing to promote either Judaism or our co-religionaries. We would sooner be caught dead, as, to our minds, nothing would more easily identify us as despicable than group solidarity. We have a two-thousand-year-long horror of being singled out. But with the exception of mass extermination (Europe, 1940–45), we understood that our enemies could only kill some of us. Whom would they target? Those who were conspicuous and disavowed by their more powerful brethren.

   Gays, Lesbians, Blacks, and Hispanics take pride in promoting their like. But we Jews will advance the visible of our kind only after a sort of baptism. Ira Grossel becomes Jeff Chandler; Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, Mike Nichols.

   A rare example of interfaith philo-Semitism:

   Joe Mantegna was for years the voice of Mercedes-Benz.

   I asked him, “Joe, do they treat you well?”

   “You bet, Dave.”

   “Give you a new car every year?”

   “Top-of-the-line.”

   “Joe, do you get the leather upholstery?”

   “Of course.”

   “Joe,” I said, “how can you drive a car, knowing the seats may be made from the skin of my grandfather?”

   “Dave,” he said, “they give me the car, I look over every inch of that leather; and if I see THEM LITTLE FUCKING NUMBERS…”

2. II. Herbert grew up in Vienna. He told me that when the ’31 film of An American Tragedy opened, he and his friends watched every showing through the week, entranced by Sylvia Sidney’s XCU smile. She played the discarded factory girl, the part played by Shelley Winters, another of my people, in George Stevens’s masterpiece retelling, A Place in the Sun, 1951.