AT FOUR YEARS OF age I would seem to have been in kiddie’s heaven, with prosperous parents who doted on me, a nurse who loved me—a child who had been kissed by America’s Sweetheart, who could go with his father to the studio whenever he wished to see movies being made, and who had been assured by his studious and well-meaning mother that he could do anything he really wanted to do. When epidemics hit the city—influenza and infantile paralysis—I was quickly motored upstate to the safety of Schroon Lake. My mother read me the best children’s literature available to develop my mind. I learned to read before I went to kindergarten. The famous friends of my parents kept telling them how precociously intelligent I was. In other words, it would have seemed to the objective observer that the little Schulberg boy, whose papa was getting to be such a big shot at Famous Players while still in his mid-twenties, had the whole big world for his toy balloon.
I could run, I could jump, I could read, I was well coordinated, I could remember every detail of the stories that were read to me, I loved my mother and father, even was surprisingly fond of my baby sister, I was a friendly little tyke, gentle with animals. Yes, I seemed to have been favored by the gods all right. They had lavished everything on me. Except for one slight oversight. The gift of speech.
Another child would ask me my name and I’d try to say,
“B-b-b-b,” then run home sobbing, “I c-c-can’t t-t-talk…” When I opened my mouth to speak I stammered and stuttered and lisped. To say a word, I would squeeze my eyes together until tears leaked from the corners.
My frantic mother took me to the doctor to see if there was anything wrong with my oral equipment. The doctor put a stick on my tongue and I even stammered my “A-a-ahs…” Nothing wrong that Dr. Jellyhouse (what a deliciously unforgettable name for a pediatrician) could see, but he passed us on to a specialist. The specialist could locate no physical disability.
So Ad tried a psychologist, a friend of hers, one of the early practitioners in that virgin field, explaining that I had been a nervous child. Colic. Crying all night. When she had taken me to Schroon Lake with Lottie Zukor and son Eugene and others of the Zukor clan, they had complained because the walls of the old resort hotel were anything but soundproof and my wailing kept them up all night. Ad and the mind doctor discussed my affliction in terms of my father. B.P. also stammered. Not all the time but when he was under stress. One theory is that your mind is working too fast and the tongue can’t keep up with it. Another is that stammering or stuttering is an attention-getting mechanism although it seems to me that little Buddy was being smothered in attention.
Then Mother took me back to her favorite hunting ground, Columbia University. If I had not come along so soon (nine and a half months after their marriage, she always delicately insisted), she would have liked to try for a degree there. At Columbia we entered a speech therapy class for afflicted children and their parents. A group of us would walk around in a large circle, like performing seals, first singing lines that the therapist would give us, then repeating them in a singsong voice. Ludicrous as it may sound, there was more method than madness in the system. The most extreme stammerer can sing the lyrics of a song without difficulty. Even if you try to stammer a song, you can’t. It has to do with breathing. Stammerers and stutterers do not have enough air in their lungs when they begin to talk. Inhaling deeply, as when preparing to open one’s mouth in song, allows the words to flow out smoothly. Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst’s gift to Hollywood, was a chronic stutterer. When she became hopelessly stuck in the middle of a sentence, the golden-haired pixie would break into song.
This cure for stammering worked beautifully—in the therapy sessions. Within the halls of Columbia my stammer-stutter magically disappeared. But as soon as I was on my way home again, I would try a sentence and hear myself saying, “M-m-mommy, c-c-can I-I-I …” Sometimes she would cry in frustration. What had she done wrong? What was the matter with me? Was I imitating my father? What was I frightened of? I stammered my way from therapist to therapist and in and out of special schools. The most expensive advice proved unavailing. I didn’t even learn to sing. Of course there were compensations. From childhood on I loved to listen to people talk. Becoming a good listener was a natural development. Years later when I found myself having to speak in public, with the old stammer still reflected in prolonged hesitations, I enjoyed an extra flow of adrenalin when I finished my talk, a sense of having faced up to a maddening defect and overcoming it.
My stammering also had a productive side effect for my mother. Already intrigued by Freud and the early stirrings of psychoanalysis, she continued to search the reason for my speech defect in the works of Brill and Jung and other disciples who were beginning to spread and develop their own theories. But the stammering little light of her life went right on stammering.