While working on the Mirror, I kept in touch with the Swopes, and it was the well-connected Herbert Bayard Swope, Sr., now a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, who greased the wheels for my entry into the movie business. At a party he gave in Sands Point in the summer of 1935, Swope introduced me to his producer-friend David Selznick, who sounded me out about working Hollywood. Some of the most important writers in the New York newspaper world had already made the leap, and when Selznick came through with a job offer a few months later, the insignificance of my work on the tabloid made the decision an easy one for me. That November, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life on what was supposed to be a twenty-four hour flight to Los Angeles.
Air travel was certainly not for the masses in those days. Our propeller-driven biplane carried fourteen passengers, its full complement; they included the playwright John van Druten and the movie star Miriam Hopkins. At St. Louis, the second stop, we were informed that because of rough weather ahead we would proceed to Denver by overnight train. About twenty-four hours later, in Denver, we were put on another plane and flown to Los Angeles with, I believe, just one stop on the way. Our pioneer ancestors would never have believed it. We had crossed the continent in less than three days.
Southern California was a strange and remote territory in 1935, and a very appealing one to a twenty-one-year-old who had grown up in the Northeast. In that relatively traffic- and smog-free era, the climate and the sense of open space came as a happy shock to the system. The Depression was far less visible than it had been in New York, and a comfortable life was well within the means of a single man on a Hollywood payroll, even a junior publicist, as I was to become. But the main attraction, of course, was the movie business.
Almost all the pictures being made at the time were produced, distributed, and initially exhibited by one of six major studios within a few miles of each other in Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, and Culver City. Only Samuel Goldwyn had set himself apart, making one movie at a time and fussing over it. Now David Selznick, at the age of thirty-two, was going to follow in Goldwyn’s footsteps by leaving Metro Goldwyn Mayer and launching a production company of his own.
As a teenager, David had apprenticed with his father, Lewis, a silent-movie mogul, before working as assistant to B. P. Schulberg, the head of production at Paramount, and, most recently, as a producer for R.K.O. and M.G.M.
In his new venture, he would be moving a mile east to Culver City, where his financial backer, the wealthy John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney, had leased a whole studio for him. The main building, at one end of which David settled his production staff of four women and three men, was a large, colonnaded colonial structure resembling George Washington’s mansion at Mount Vernon. Its image became the company logo.
In assigning me to the publicity department, David probably had two thoughts in mind. One was to make use of my newspaper experience. The other, since my duties would require me to spend a lot of time on the set of the production of the moment, was to give me an incidental education in the basics of moviemaking. The department was quartered in a small cottage of its own. The personnel consisted of publicity director Joseph Shea, whom Selznick had recruited from Fox Films (merging that year with a new company called Twentieth Century), a secretary, and Shea’s assistant—me.
David’s way of making movies was far different from anything we know today. A few years ago, a critic ruminating in the New York Times on the ever-popular subject of who deserves to be considered the true author, or auteur, of a motion picture, triumphantly announced his discovery that several old pictures he had liked from the 1930s were the work of the same director, John Cromwell, among them The Prisoner of Zenda, starring Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Madeleine Carroll. Reading still further, however, the critic learned that “the front office” had been dissatisfied with two important sequences in Zenda and had ordered them rewritten and reshot, one by George Cukor, the other by Victor Fleming. Nevertheless, the critic continued, “The result is nothing less than a first-class miracle; the many cooks hadn’t spoiled the fun, the whole tasty conceit still hangs together. It is difficult, however, to see how Mr. Cromwell could be called the work’s regisseur, its auteur, its daddy.”
Difficult indeed, for, as he failed to notice or omitted to mention, “the front office” on that 1937 production was David O. Selznick, and Zenda evolved through a style of filmmaking that not only doesn’t exist today but existed then only in pictures produced by Selznick himself and, to a lesser extent, by Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg, and Hal Wallis.
There certainly was an auteur on a Selznick picture, and it was not the director or the writer. At the age of thirty, Selznick had been given an independent production unit at M.G.M., the domain of his father-in-law Louis B. Mayer. At M.G.M. and again two and a half years later as president of the grandly named Selznick International Pictures, he perfected the method of handcrafting one movie at a time. To him, producing meant shepherding every step of the process: the choice of subject, scriptwriting, casting, designing, shooting, scoring, editing, and marketing. Not a detail in any one of these areas escaped his close attention.
When a writer had written and rewritten a scene to Selznick’s specifications, David would tell him what he expected to find in the next scene, and dictate final corrections in the scene he had just okayed. Each costume, each set, each choice of location was only tentative until he approved it. The director and film editor could express a preference from among what might be dozens of takes of a single shot, but David had the ultimate say. Customarily, he would edit parts of his current picture at night, while preparing his next picture during the day. These editing sessions often went on until morning. Zenda was just one of a number of picture that, as a result of some pre-dawn inspiration of David’s for improving a particular scene or sequence, went back into production long after the regular shooting schedule had ended. Even after the release prints had been shipped to the warehouse and theaters, he would be approving or rewriting advertising copy. There was no field of expertise in which he considered anyone else’s judgment equal to his own.
Why didn’t he direct the pictures himself? When people raised that question with David, his matter-of-fact reply was that he was too busy with more important matters. He found it more efficient simply to tell the director how to shoot the movie, and then, if the results left him dissatisfied, hire another director. That’s what he did with his close friend and closer collaborator George Cukor on Gone with the Wind. Together they had made A Bill of Divorcement, Dinner at Eight, and David Copperfield, which rank among the great achievements of the early talking-picture era. Cukor was the only director under contract to Selznick International, and he had given a year of his time to the preparation and casting of what our little band of hype artists had convinced an anxious public to regard, long before its completion, as the greatest picture of all time.
Some years after David’s death, George maintained that he still had no idea why he was fired, and David always avoided any explicit statement on the subject. Rumor had it that Cukor, known as a “women’s director,” was not doing justice to the film’s male star. His dismissal was said to have been the result of pressure from Clark Gable and his home studio, M.G.M. But there is also evidence that David himself felt some vague dissatisfaction with what he was seeing on screen—an instinctive reaction springing from a lifelong experience with film. In any case, he summoned George to his home to tell him that he was being replaced by Victor Fleming, and the two, who had been identified professionally for a decade and bore such a physical resemblance that they were sometimes mistaken for each other, never worked together again.
Fleming had a very different reputation, as a director of adventure films and a rugged man’s man. Just the same, David’s brand of oversight soon drove him into a hospital with nervous exhaustion, and a third director, Sam Wood, was called in to take over for four weeks. At least two more directors also filled in for brief interludes.
Seventeen writers, in all, had worked on the screenplay. Scott Fitzgerald numbered among them, along with a succession of the most experienced and highly paid craftsmen in the movie business and five prominent playwrights—Sidney Howard, Charles MacArthur, John van Druten, Edwin Justus Mayer, and John Balderston. Nevertheless, when Fleming took over, he and Selznick decided on a drastic rewrite, and David turned to his old friend and standby, Ben Hecht.
David and Ben had known each other for about fifteen years, and each recognized the talents and shortcomings of the other. Ben was stupendously bright, with the wit, verbal dexterity, and capacity for intense concentration to write superior novels, plays, and movies. He was known also for working fast—a big plus with production costs on the suspended opus running at fifty thousand dollars a day. His screenplays include The Front Page, Twentieth Century, and Notorious. But he also had an insatiable mercenary streak that prompted him to make deals for no obvious motive other than money. In the case of Gone with the Wind, time was at such a premium that Ben, according to the best of my recollection, never even bothered to read the book; nor could he afford the luxury of inspecting more than one of the many accumulated versions of the script. Ignoring the other sixteen attempts, he went back to Sidney Howard’s initial draft and used its structure to work out revisions in three-way (Selznick-Fleming-Hecht) conferences, with Ben sitting down at his typewriter after each session and pounding their decisions into screenplay form. It took him two weeks.
In accepting Swope’s recommendation of me, Selznick was hardly making the kind of major gamble associated with this image. Sure, he had agreed to pay my plane fare to California and, if the experiment failed, back to New York. But in case of success, he invoked a standard Hollywood practice of the day, a long-term contract with options available to the employer only. He was bound for the first three months to pay me forty dollars a week, followed, if he so chose, by three more months at the same wage; only then would the price of my services be raised to fifty dollars. In my seventh year of servitude, I would be making two hundred and fifty a week. Not very attractive terms by present-day standards, but perfectly satisfactory when contrasted with my reporter’s salary of twenty-five dollars a week.
When he hired Joe Shea, David had emphasized that he was not seeking publicity for himself personally; it was the new company, Selznick International, and its product and stars that were to be sold to the American public. Joe, who took these words literally, was summarily replaced about a month after I arrived by Russell Birdwell, to whom David gave the same self-effacing instructions. The shrewder Birdwell didn’t take him seriously for a moment, and we spent a large proportion of our time contriving ways to get items about David into the gossip columns and generally helping to convert him into one of Hollywood’s leading celebrities. About the time I was moving out of his department, Birdwell conceived the greatest promotional stunt of his career and movie history: the vast, closely reported and entirely synthetic search, among established stars and complete unknowns alike, for the ideal actress to play Scarlett O’Hara.
But the ploy of Birdwell’s that I remember most fondly, because it illustrates both the creativity and utter phoniness of the publicity craft, began in a casual conversation with Carole Lombard on the set of another Hechtscripted picture, Nothing Sacred. It was income tax time back in the days, incidentally, when there was no such thing as withholding, and whatever was owed had to be paid in a lump sum. Miss Lombard, like most highly-paid people, was complaining about the burden. “No, no,” Birdwell said with sudden inspiration, “You enjoy it! You’re happy to pay your taxes. That’s the man-bites-dog variation.” Carole, who was much smarter than most of her consoeurs and confreres, readily fell in with his scheme, and soon front pages all over the country were reporting that the co-star (with Fredric March) of the latest David O. Selznick Production considered it a rare privilege and an act of pure joy to make her proper contribution to the treasury of the greatest country on earth.
I was on the set of that particular picture the day the final shot was completed, no longer as a publicity man but as a co-author of its ending. An instant party materialized to celebrate the event. While champagne corks popped and gifts were exchanged, Carole and I renewed a conversation we had been having about an idea of mine for a movie. She broke it off when two men appeared with a present she was giving to the director, William Wellman. I thought it was odd that there were two of them since the package didn’t look heavy enough to require more than a single bearer. The reason for the extra man, however, soon became clear.
“Here it is, Bill, Darling,” Carole announced as they unwrapped the package, “what I’ve always wanted to see you in.” In a quick and practiced movement, her aides installed the garment on the person of the recipient. It was a straitjacket.
Carole was at the height of her career, Hollywood’s leading film actress measured by either salary or box-office draw. She was also the smartest and funniest female star around. And the most profane. Fred MacMurray, after his first day working with her on a movie, was asked by his girlfriend (later his wife), “How did it go?”
“I have never heard such profanity from anybody, man or woman,” he replied.
“Other than that, what’s she like?”
“Wonderful.”
Myron Selznick, David’s rich older brother, was the agent for Carole and dozens of other movie stars. Once, when he sent her a contract to sign with his agency, Carole noticed that he hadn’t signed it yet himself. So she drafted a new contract, entitling her to ten percent of his income, and sent it back to Myron. He signed without reading it.
During the remaining five years of her life, my contacts with Carole were mostly over the phone and mostly on the subject of a movie idea of mine about a woman alcoholic. Carole loved the subject and the story as much as I, but practically no one else did. Maybe the success of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend would have helped our project, but that came only three years after her fatal plane crash in 1942 on a tour selling war bonds.
One of my favorite instructors in the ways of the movie business was Val Lewton, who had been David’s story editor at M.G.M. and performed the same function at the new company. Val’s attitude toward his boss and all the other studio potentates he had encountered, notably Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer, was a wonderful blend of servility and contempt. The former quality came from a military school education that hopelessly addicted him to the habit of addressing as “sir” any male older than or superior in status to himself. Selznick, who was about the same age as Val, was always “Sir” or “Mr. Selznick,” although twenty-one-year-old Budd Schulberg, then a lowly reader in Val’s department, called him David simply because Selznick had once worked for his father. Beyond mere terms of address, Val was invariably a sorry sight in the presence of his boss, cringing and scraping and apologizing, while suffering more indignities than the rest of us in the form of abruptly cancelled meetings and long waiting periods in Selznick’s outer office.
After a session with Selznick, however, Val would regale Budd and me with biting accounts of life at the top, saving his most withering language for descriptions of and quotations from our common employer. Val, incidentally, went through another five years of subservience to Selznick before emerging at R.K.O. as a producer of superior low-budget horror films like The Cat People, Leopard Man, and I Walked with a Zombie.
Since the function of a story department is to cover all written material which might be appropriate for a particular company to translate into film, you might think that Val, Budd, and two erudite women, Jere Knight and Elizabeth Mayer, would have more than filled the needs of Selznick International which, for all the attention it generated, produced on average less than two pictures a year. But Selznick also felt the need for a story editor in New York, a bright, confident woman named Kay Brown, whom Val viewed as his enemy in a jurisdictional struggle. It was she who sent Selznick the unpublished typescript of Gone with the Wind with an urgent recommendation. Far too busy to read such a long book, Selznick delegated the task to three people: Val; David’s personal secretary Silvia Schulman, an intelligent, attractive young woman whom I married the following year; and me. We passed around the pages of the single carbon copy available and came up with a split decision. Val found it poorly written and not worth the money it would cost to produce. I, in my debut as an appraiser of movie material, cast another no-vote, mostly because I objected on political grounds to the glorification of slave-owners and the Ku Klux Klan. But Silvia was so enthusiastic and so persistent that David agreed to read a synopsis and began to consider it seriously. Jock Whitney, chairman of the board of Selznick International, clinched the matter. He had read the book in New York and assured David that he would buy the rights himself if the company didn’t.
So, against my better (or worse) judgment, the decision was made to meet the then-sizeable price—fifty thousand dollars as I remember it. I didn’t have an opportunity to make an assessment of comparable significance again until thirty-five years later, when I declined an offer to write the pilot and be head writer of the television version of M*A*S*H. I didn’t think it had much potential as a series.
During the year of my apprenticeship with Birdwell, one of my main duties was to hang out on the sets of the two pictures in production in 1936, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Garden of Allah; the latter, which starred Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, was a rare Selznick mistake in his otherwise triumphant decade. I was supposed to pick up little items for the syndicated movie columns (which ran in almost all newspapers at the time) and for the trade papers, whose contents were almost wholly provided by studio publicity departments. Conversing with the actors and other participants in the process was considered a crucial part of the job, for we were always trying to cook up feature stories we could plant somewhere. Actually, I probably spent more hours with less to do on the soundstage (or, in the case of Allah, the desert location) than anyone else connected with these productions. So I had plenty of time to observe how the various craft departments functioned in cooperation to produce a movie, which was one of the reasons I had been given the job.
The director of Allah was Richard Boleslavsky, who had been a theatrical giant in the Moscow Art Theater before the Russian revolution along with his fellow director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Afterward he had been an eminent director and acting teacher in Warsaw, Paris, and New York before Hollywood called. His book Acting: The First Six Lessons was a classic of the craft. He has been signed to a contract at M.G.M. with great fanfare and then assigned in typically inappropriate Hollywood studio fashion to a series of low-budget potboilers. The only exception was Rasputin and the Empress, starring Ethel, John, and Lionel Barrymore, a commercial failure. Then Columbia Pictures borrowed him to do a charming and profitable comedy, Theodora Goes Wild, starring Irene Dunne. But its success had no effect on studio heads Mayer and Thalberg; it was back to B-pictures for poor Boley.
Allah, with its big-name stars, sent his hopes soaring. They descended back toward earth during a shooting schedule with more than its quota of mishaps and setbacks. The location itself, a desert area near Yuma at the California-Arizona border, was dispiriting; we lived there for weeks, shooting love scenes at one hundred-and-twenty degrees in the shade, if you could find shade.
This was the one Selznick International picture with a rival auteur to David himself. But it was not Boley, and it was certainly not the two men whose names appeared on screen because, among a succession of writers, they were judged to have contributed most to the eventual hash of a screenplay. The force moving in on both the producing and directing functions was Miss Marlene Dietrich, whose many talents, I was to find (because it encroached on my own duties), included retouching her publicity skills. Her assumed jurisdiction also extended to the script, casting, sets, costumes, and the composition of every shot in which she appeared. Her impressive arsenal of weapons for getting her way included cajolery, tantrums, blackmail, boycott, and sexual seduction. I was the third party present at an exchange between Marlene and Joseph Schildkraut, a distinguished actor and the son of an even more distinguished one, who played her obsequious servant in the picture, which seemed but a continuation of the role he had assumed with her off-camera.
“Miss Dietrich,” he said in his humblest voice after the first couple of days of shooting, “do you think there’s a scene somewhere in the script where I could turn more than just my profile to the camera?” After a moment or two of concentrated thought, Marlene replied that, yes indeed, she foresaw just such an opportunity in the schedule ahead.
“It’s the shot at the station,” she went on, “where you’re following me carrying my bags. I suddenly see the man I’m trying to avoid and I turn and walk off quickly in another direction. I don’t see any reason why the camera couldn’t hold on you for a moment, in full face, reacting.”
Marlene made herself most unpopular at that location, at least among those of us who were not invited into her bed, but I came very close to forgiving her because of a performance she put on for half a dozen of us enjoying the comparative coolness of a desert evening. It was an imitation of Greta Garbo and her restless, acutely sensitive screen presence as superb and devastating as anything of the kind I have ever witnessed.
In the end, neither Dietrich nor Selznick, from their separate command, could do anything to save the picture from the fate it deserved. Boley proved phlegmatic on that subject. The disaster he began to scent, he assured me, would make little or no difference at his home studio. “Whether it’s a flop or a hit,” he told me, “it will be the same thing when I go back to Metro. My next picture will be—what is that thing you keep under the bed when there is no toilet?”
“A piss pot,” I suggested.
“Murder in a Piss Pot, that’s what they’ll give me, with a twelve-day shooting schedule.”
During my first months in Hollywood, I reconnected with two family friends from my childhood days, Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. I had seen Dottie, as she was known, a number of times socially before she and her husband, Alan Campbell, came to the studio to write the screenplay of A Star is Born. It was a mixed blessing, therefore, when David asked Budd Schulberg and me to read the script as it emerged and see if we had any thoughts to contribute. But when he invited us to incorporate some of our suggestions into the script, we insisted that Dottie and Alan be consulted first. To our surprise and gratification, they professed to be delighted with the setup, maintaining that they were under too much pressure to get the work done in time.
Bill Wellman, who had written the story, was also going to direct the picture. He was an engaging fellow and knew his craft well, but it was a mistake to cross him, as I soon learned. We were having a conference in Selznick’s office—David, Bill, Budd and I—when I ventured to criticize a scene in which a studio publicist (Lionel Stander) treated the troubled star (Frederic March) with what struck me as an unmotivated extra edge of hostility.
“He’s drunk,” Wellman said, as if that explained everything.
Someone that nasty when drunk was probably also nasty when sober, I countered.
“I’m nasty when I’m drunk,” Wellman said.
“That proves my point,” I replied.
Our relations were noticeably cooler after that.
With the production well underway, Selznick turned his attention to the ending, enlisting half a dozen prestigious and highly paid writers in the search for one. Budd and I, being on salary and close to hand, were also instructed to apply ourselves to the problem. We came up with a brief final fadeout at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in which Janet Gaynor—the young star recovering from the suicide of her husband—introduces herself to a throng of admirers as “Mrs. Norman Maine.” The truth is, we had rejected that bit as too corny when we first thought of it, but after fiddling with several lame alternatives, we decided it was better to submit something than nothing. To our surprise, the results were enthusiasm all around, promotions from reader and publicity assistant to screenwriters, and the use of our ending in the 1937, 1954, and 1976 versions of the movie.
Dottie is often remembered for the cutting things she had to say about people she found pretentious or otherwise distasteful. But she had warm and generous feelings for those she cared about. I benefited from the start by being associated in her mind with my father who ranked particularly high in her esteem. (Lillian Hellman has reported that they had an affair, which I have several reasons for doubting. But her attachment to Dad was obviously strong. Years later, I spent time with her during a hospitalization for alcoholic delusions shortly before her death; one of those delusions was a tendency to confuse me endearingly with Dad, who had by then been dead for a couple of decades.) In her on-again, off-again marital and screen-writing alliance with Campbell, it was Dottie who made all the decisions. Now she wanted Budd and me to get screen credit for our contributions to A Star Is Born. This Selznick properly declined to do; we hadn’t written enough to deserve it. He did, however, assign us over the next few months to prepare a number of stories and proposals that, as best I can recall, he never got around to reading.
Nineteen thirty-six was also the year of my screen test—a non-event, ordered by Selznick, which helped define my career possibilities and limitations. He assigned the task to Cukor, who delegated it to an assistant. The only evidence I ever received that David had reviewed the test personally was a secondhand report: It demonstrated, he said, that I was definitely slated to be a writer. I saw the test myself about a year later, when, much to my discomfort, Budd treacherously sneaked it out of the studio film vaults and presented it at a party as “a special short subject of interest to everyone here.”
Early in 1937, there was another ending crisis, this time involving Nothing Sacred. Ben Hecht had left town after delivering the screenplay with an ending David pronounced inadequate. The picture was a madcap comedy about a tabloid newspaper hyping the story of a young woman, Hazel Flagg, doomed by a supposedly fatal illness. With shooting almost complete, the situation was so desperate that David airmailed the script to a battery of highly-paid writers in the East including George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Robert E. Sherwood, simultaneously distributing copies by messenger to a selection of top screenwriters in Hollywood. Budd and I were also given the chance to compete with this mass of talent, but when Budd fell sick on the first day of our effort, I was re-assigned to collaborate with George Oppenheimer, a contract writer for M.G.M. Of all the new endings submitted, David selected the one that we had devised, and it was shot almost precisely as we had set it down.
We suggested that the film conclude with a shot of the misdiagnosed young woman (Carole Lombard) heading off on a round-the-world cruise with the newsman who has fallen in love with her (Frederic March again). They are escaping the effects of the revelation that she is actually in fine health. When a fellow passenger tells Carole she reminds her of Hazel Flagg, Carole’s response is a scornful, “That phony!”
As a result of these two episodes, I found myself hailed as an ending specialist—a decidedly premature characterization. (I don’t think I’ve had a writing project of my own since then in which I wasn’t stumped for an inordinate amount of time by the ending.) Later that year, however, Budd and I reached the conclusion that we deserved more than our sixty dollars (me) and seventy-five (him) a week. The sum we had fixed upon as equitable was, I recall, a hundred and twenty-five apiece, but in a series of meetings on the subject, the man in charge of contracts, Daniel O’Shea, insisted that the struggling new company, still absorbing its losses from The Garden of Allah, could not afford to pay us that much. A debate on this point was interrupted by Selznick’s voice on the intercom demanding to know whether Sidney Howard had agreed to write the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. O’Shea replied that Howard wouldn’t do it for two thousand dollars a week; he was demanding three. “Then for God’s sake, give it to him!” Selznick ordered and hung up.
O’Shea picked up the thread with Budd and me: “What was I saying? Oh, yes. We’re offering you a hundred a week apiece, and that’s as high as we can go in a shaky year. After all, how many kids your age are making that much?” And he refused to budge. We countered by saying it wasn’t so much the salary that mattered to us as it was their insistence that we sign new, long-term contracts. We agreed to work for a hundred dollars apiece as long as we were free to move elsewhere if the boss continued not to read what we wrote. We had observed him long enough to know that letting us work on scattered scenes in an established script was one thing, but he would never launch one of his grand productions without the insurance of established, highly-paid people doing the writing, directing, and principal acting. To get a screenplay read, no less produced, we needed auspices more open to new talent.
And that’s how it turned out. They finally accepted our counter-proposal and when, a couple of months later, I was offered a job in the B-picture department at Warner Brothers Studio, I took it. Budd left Selznick International the following year, after collaborating on a script David professed to need so urgently that he raced it to him in Palm Springs by motorcycle courier and then, typically, didn’t read.
While we were still on the payroll, however, David intervened in our personal lives in unsuccessful attempts to dissuade Budd from marrying a gentile woman and me from marrying a Jewish one. His opposition to mixed marriages seemed strange in a man who kept rejecting Ben Hecht’s requests for contributions to the cause of the Jews under British control in Palestine. They were not his cause, he maintained, since he was a thoroughly assimilated American who just happened to come from a Jewish background.
Silvia, who had worked for him at M.G.M. before switching to the new company, had much closer contacts with Selznick than I did, and she provided me with intimate glimpses that added significantly to my developing portrait of him. She alone was present, for instance, when he burst into tears over the news of King Edward VIII’s abdication in order to marry the woman he loved. David was crying, he told her, “because it’ll wreck the Empire.”
She also had the job of transcribing her boss’s legendary dictation. A magazine profile of him some years later was titled “The Great Dictator,” and more recently a book was called Memo from David O. Selznick. Both dealt with his lifelong habit of dictating at great length the thoughts about every aspect of his business that seemed to flow into his mind every waking minute at such a speed that it had to be emptied at regular intervals to make room for further inspiration. He had a gadget on his bedside table that was fed from a huge roll of adding-machine tape so that he could tear off as many feet of notes as he had made during the night. These he would take into the studio as a basis for the morning’s dictation.
His standard secretarial staff consisted of an executive secretary, who would take dictation when she was handy, a stenographer who doubled as executive secretary when the principal one was off duty, a straight stenographer, and a file clerk who could fill in when the memo volume rose high enough to require it. Silvia served in the first two categories at various times. But it took a shorthand expert to keep up with his machine-gun-style dictating pace and Silvia had never really mastered the technique. What she did instead was take notes and type out his messages in his style but in her own words. Since almost all of his memos went out under the heading: “Dictated but not read by David O. Selznick,” he never became aware of the differences between his texts and hers.
Memo writing was by no means a substitute for oral communication. David was a steady and usually a stimulating talker, and he probably spent six hours or about a third of a typical working day in conference, reviewing or changing the work of all his departments down to the minutest detail. But he seemed to feel that the written word had a more positive effect and was less subject to misunderstanding. Also, the memos gave him the opportunity to express himself fully without having to pause and listen to what he considered less relevant contributions by others.
Various movie moguls had different ways of ensuring that their opinions received the attention they merited. Darryl Zanuck would have at least one full conference on every script, with the associate producer, writer, director, and anyone else prominently involved in the project, all invited to engage in a full, free discussion of the movie-to-be. There would also be a stenographer present, and the next day every participant would receive a transcript of Mr. Zanuck’s remarks at the meeting, but not a word of anyone else’s.
Occasionally, David would change his mind while dictating and insert the words “Disregard the above.” The memo would be transcribed and sent along anyway, on the theory, apparently, that there was value to be found in any thinking he did out loud.
There were never any set hours of work in his office, nor any moment of an employee’s time that David didn’t regard as his. Since he was apt to be working at ten o’clock at night or three in the morning or on a Sunday mid-afternoon, he felt free to summon anyone he needed at any hour to get involved in the task that happened to have engaged his attention. In those days before long-distance dialing, he often called Silvia at home on a Sunday morning and named, say, three people in the East he wanted to talk to. As soon as she had one party on the line, she would instruct the operator to transfer the call to David’s home and let her know when the conversation was over, so that she could proceed to the next one.
It would be an overstatement to say that he showed no appreciation for this round-the-clock service. Once, after a trip to New York on which Silvia took dictation for three days on the train en route, he bought her a present at Cartier’s. It was a sterling silver combination flashlight-pencil, for recording his comments in the darkness of a projection room.