L.A., HOW DO I LOVE THEE? (UNDATED)

L.A., how do I love thee? Let me count the ways, or, perhaps, let me count one all-encompassing way.

Los Angeles as incubator of forlorn talents. Let me go back to 1934. Hand me my roller skates. With them I skated through life in Los Angeles when I was fourteen.

Seated at an Al Jolson radio broadcast, I was stunned when Jolson leaped off the stage and seized the roller skates off my lap. He jumped back onstage and started putting them on. I jumped after him and tore the skates from his hands. I then spun around, lifted my skates to the audience, and protested, “My transportation!”

Later that month I encountered W. C. Fields in front of Paramount Studios. I skated over to him and asked for his autograph. He handed it back to me and cried, “There you are, you little son of a bitch!”

And there I was, outside Paramount Studios, staring at the wall over which I hoped one day to climb to become part of motion pictures.

At that same time, I encountered George Burns in front of a theater in downtown L.A. where he and Gracie Allen broadcast their Burns and Allen Show every Wednesday night. In those days there were no audiences. I asked George to take me into the broadcast, and, not noticing, or pretending not to notice the roller skates under my arm, he took me and my friend Donald Harkins into the theater, and Burns and Allen performed their radio broadcast for an audience of two in an otherwise empty theater.

During the following weeks, I wrote and gave to George Burns some primitive radio scripts, and he praised them even though he secretly knew they were terrible. He pronounced me a genius and told me I had a great future as a writer.

In the following years, I stood on a street corner selling newspapers, and when friends passed by and asked me what I was doing, I said, “Becoming a writer.” They said, “You don’t look like one.” I replied, “But I feel like one.”

When I was nineteen, I went to confront the actress Larraine Day, who had put together a little theater group at the Mormon church. I wanted to write plays and act in them. Larraine Day looked at me with a cynical eye and was on the verge of turning me down when I cried, “You’ve got to let me in! I’ve told all my friends you would accept me!” She accepted me, and I ended up writing a musical with her and playing in that musical.

Over the years I continued writing, and in my twenties I wrote stories and sent them to Bill Spier, who directed and wrote and produced Suspense Radio for CBS. He invited me up to his house on Bellagio Road and never asked where I came from or where the stories had been published; they had been published in Weird Tales for a half cent a word. He accepted me for the quality of the stories, and I became a writer for Suspense in the following years.

Finally, with a single short story that John Huston read, “The Foghorn,” I was offered a chance to write the screenplay of Moby Dick.

All of this, over a period of time, with no one questioning where I’d come from or where I was going, nor did they notice the invisible roller skates on my shoes.

A day came when I went to the premiere of Moby Dick and noticed, standing in the rain outside the theater, two people who had once collected autographs with me outside Paramount Studios on that day when I met W. C. Fields. I ran over to them and introduced myself. They had long since forgotten the crazy kid who had roller-skated around Hollywood with them in 1934. When they asked me what I was doing at the premiere, I was totally embarrassed but finally admitted I had written the screenplay. In the crowd around my two old friends, there were twelve autograph collectors, and suddenly their hands reached out on the air with their autograph books. I signed them with tears in my eyes, knowing that at long last I had climbed over the wall carrying the roller skates under my arm.

At a banquet years later, I was giving an award to Steven Spielberg when I noticed George Burns over at a table in the corner of the Cocoanut Grove. I stopped the proceedings and said to the audience, “I’ve got to give my own award to George Burns, who treated me so kindly and told me that I was terrific when I wasn’t back in 1934.” When the program was over, George Burns ran up to me and shouted, “Was that you?! Was that you!? I remember you.” We embraced for the first time in forty years.

I guess the answer to all this is that I was someone who skated through Hollywood with no money whatsoever but some ideas between my ears and wound up very late in the day with roller skates in hand and my memories of these people who accepted me without question, because the ambience of Hollywood in those days, and still in many places, was open and gratifying.