MY FATHER AND UNCLE HIRAM had an appointment with the elusive Charlie Chaplin, who was sometimes at the Alexandria, sometimes at the Athletic Club which he used as a sort of hideout from the mobs, sometimes at a large house he had rented far to the west of downtown Los Angeles—a genius in the studio, a troubled recluse away from his work, drawn both to intellectuals and empty-headed nymphets. B.P. and Uncle Hiram had sounded out his cronies and felt they were approaching him at the opportune moment when he was quarreling with First National and looking for new outlets for maturing work like The Kid.
Father and his partner spent a full evening with Charlie Chaplin, and Hollywood’s first authentic genius-performer was intrigued. He would have complete artistic freedom, he would make even more money from distributing his films through his own company than he was earning at First National, and he would have a sizable interest in the future of the company as a whole. Years after he retired, although he was then only 29, he would continue to be a major stockholder in United Artists.
He liked the idea well enough, Charlie said, to recommend it to his friends Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. Meanwhile, B.P. enlisted the support of D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s temperament was artistic and the idea of artists joining together to form their own company, make their own pictures, and distribute them through their own organization appealed to his desire for independence from the “money men.” If the other members of the Big Five came in, he was ready to be a United Artist.
Only the western hero William S. Hart had second thoughts. The plan was for each picture to be sold on its individual merits, with the star enjoying the producer’s profits, except for what Uncle Hiram and my father would charge for their services. Hart would have the same stock interest as his fellow-artists but his immediate profit would come from the release of his own pictures. He gave a tentative yes but then called my father to say he had thought it over and had changed his mind, deciding to form his own company. Over the years as my father refought his battles for, with, and against United Artists—sorties, skirmishes, and frontal actions that took on the drama and the significance of a Borodino or a Balaklava—I listened to his theories of William S.’s lack of heart for this project:
Bill Hart was still a national idol. Ten-year-old kids all over the country were saying, “Let’s play cowboys and Indians—I’ll be Bill Hart—bang, bang, you’re dead!” But the lean, unsmiling Hart had come from the stage to the movies when he was already over 40. He was now closing in on 50 and although he would go on making his Wagon Tracks and Wild Bill Hickoks for another half-dozen years, riding Pinto Ben, the horse as famous as he, Hart sensed that his star was on the wane and that he’d be overwhelmed in the company of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks. A victim of that unique American phenomenon, success in America, Bill Hart’s career had reached late autumn and was beginning to feel the first chill of oncoming winter.
Only slightly daunted by the defection of the old cowboy star, Uncle Hiram and my father went on to their key meeting with Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and Fairbanks at Doug’s new castle in Beverly Hills. It was, B. P. reported, a long and lively evening, with the four commanding figures of Hollywood’s rapidly expanding industry endorsing the Abrams-Schulberg concept. With their own company to produce and distribute their own pictures, they would become overnight the dominant factor in that industry. Neither Famous Players nor First National, let alone Fox, Metro, or Universal, would be able to compete with them. Hiram Abrams, who had backed into the business less than ten years earlier selling sing-along slides to nickelodeons, and who was now an acknowledged theater veteran, would handle the distribution, while B.P. with his creative experience under Porter and Zukor would supervise the studio operation.
It turned out to be one of those nights when a battle is won but the seeds are planted for a long and losing campaign. In the course of his extensive Liberty Bond tours and his access to the White House, Doug Fairbanks had become friendly with William Gibbs McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law and Secretary of the Treasury until his appointment to the key wartime role of Director-General of the railroads. McAdoo was on his way to Los Angeles in his special Pullman car for a much-needed rest, and Fairbanks was planning an elaborate reception for him. With due respect to Hiram Abrams and young Schulberg, Fairbanks said, he felt that such an array of stars as Mary, Charlie, D.W., and himself should have as president of their new company a figure of national prominence, a man of the calibre of Director-General McAdoo.
“How could we say ‘no’ to one of the most powerful men in America, who was at that very moment tasting the fruits of victory of what we were still calling the Great War?” my father said in defense of his and Uncle Hiram’s acquiescence. So a second meeting was scheduled in the luxurious bungalow that McAdoo and the President’s daughter had rented for the winter in Santa Barbara, where he planned to map out his political and economic strategy for the years of leadership awaiting him. There was considerable speculation that McAdoo might be the Democratic nominee to succeed his father-in-law in the 1920 presidential race. But at this moment Doug Fairbanks had put McAdoo’s name in nomination as president of United Artists, thereby threatening Uncle Hiram’s ambition, and my father’s as well.
At that meeting in McAdoo’s spacious bungalow, the former Director-General of the railroads declined Doug’s nomination. Instead he deferred to his press secretary, Oscar Price, suggesting that Price occupy the presidency, with McAdoo serving the new company as general counsel. And where would the originators of the concept, Abrams and Schulberg, fit into this new organization? Well, McAdoo strongly objected to the twenty percent for Abrams and Schulberg that had been part of the original plan. He thought two percent was more like it, with Abrams to receive that amount as general manager. Since Price had had no previous motion-picture experience, they would need Abrams’s know-how to keep the distribution and exhibition wheels turning. And where did that leave my old man, on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday? Without a single percentage point in the company he had dreamt up so enthusiastically with “Uncle Hiram.” And since he was damned if he’d be a hireling, B.P. was out of a job.
After the Defeat of Santa Barbara, as my father would look back on it like a battle-scarred Napoleon, his efforts to launch United Artists were doomed to wind up as a footnote to the history of motion pictures. Indeed, a description of his role as the true father of United Artists is to be found in authoritative histories of American film. But as Samuel Goldwyn is said to have remarked, a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. B.P.’s verbal agreement with the man for whom he had forsaken his favorable position with Adolph Zukor turned out to be the most elastic of rubber checks.
On that unhappy drive back to Los Angeles there were the inevitable recriminations. B.P. accused Hiram of selling him out. Abrams protested that Doug Fairbanks had sold them both out by turning to McAdoo and Price instead of accepting the two of them as the deal had been presented originally. (This was all the more ironic, B.P. would remember, because in a crucial earlier meeting at the Alexandria Hotel, between an alarmed Adolph Zukor and an intimidated Doug Fairbanks—a meeting called to head off Doug’s rumored defection from Famous Players—Fairbanks had hurried off to study B.P.’s manifesto, “Eighty-nine Reasons for United Artists,” to reinforce his stand.) It was Ben’s educated guess that there had been meetings between Abrams and the McAdoo group behind his back, and that a compromise had already been worked out in which Abrams would receive a liberal salary as general manager, and a token two percent in return for not opposing the McAdoo-Price-Fairbanks ploy.
Abrams denied the accusation, but when my father urged him not to go along with McAdoo and Price and instead to stand up and fight for their rights and take the usurpers to court, Abrams demurred. They might have a chance against a Richard Rowland (then head of Metro), a lone eagle like Sam Goldwyn, or even a determined organization man like Zukor. But this was William Gibbs McAdoo, the man to whom most Democrats looked as the successor to Wilson’s national leadership. What legal weapons could they muster against such artillery? They had simply been outsmarted and outmaneuvered, and Hiram Abrams argued he had no choice now but to accept the crumbs from the McAdoo table. Father stared at him and then turned to look out at the ocean as they drove on in silence.
Soon we were back on the Santa Fe Chief again, heading east. But the Schulbergs and the Abramses were no longer traveling together. In fact they weren’t even speaking to one another. No longer could I have Miss Abrams to turn to if I grew lonely or frightened in my upper berth. No longer would there be a guiding hand to steady me as I made my way down the lurching aisles on the long walk back to the observation car. Nor do I remember ever seeing Uncle Hiram again. Or even thinking of him as my lost uncle.
The loss of an honorary uncle was to become a familiar casualty in the motion-picture wars. It came to me at a tender age that the world of the motion picture, depending as it does on personalities and those quicksilver moments of fame and power, is particularly vulnerable to opportunism. Love knots quickly become hate knots, and oaths of personal loyalty, with rare exceptions, are made to be broken and rationalized.
Of course I claim no omniscience at the age of five. Even without Miss Abrams to sit with me out there on that wonderful observation car as I watched the sagebrush and cactus country of Arizona and New Mexico fall away, I was still having fun waving to a lone cowhand or to a few dusty travelers waiting at the little stations where the engine paused to catch its smoky breath. I didn’t know that our long journey had succeeded only in surrendering an original and profitable idea to McAdoo and the screen’s Top Four.
I heard but was not fully cognizant of the lectures being delivered by my mother to my father on the subject of his guilelessness in a world of cutthroats. Escaping “I told you so's, I was now well enough acquainted with the Santa Fe to be able to wander from car to car alone. I would come back to find my parents playing casino, Father with a big cigar jutting from his rather delicate face, Mother frequently returning to the same sore subject. Never trust anybody in this business. It was still too volatile and crawling with phonies. The only protection was to get something on paper. When would B.P. learn not to be so trusting? How many times had she warned him not to place such blind faith in Hiram Abrams? They would all take advantage of his youth and his naiveté and steal his ideas.
Over the years this would become a familiar family theme song, my increasingly suspicious and self-protective mother attacking my self-deceiving, vulnerable father for his lack of armor in the lists of business. Because Ad had an irritating tendency to be right, Father’s vulnerabilities were stung to the swelling and bursting point. The Santa Fe Chief racing us back to the Midwest and on to Chicago arouses my first memory of bitter quarreling. Subsequent arguments were more harshly focused on Ben as a babe in the woods who would be lost without her instinct for self-preservation. Typically, the more Ad was determined to protect Ben from himself, the more he was determined to assert his independence.
In 1919, basically a happy child, with only my persistent stammering to worry about, constantly encouraged by my parents, I was pleased to be reunited with Wilma and little Sonya in the comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive. Ad was glad to be back in New York too, back to her Godmothers’ League and her self-improvement courses at Columbia.
While Ad kept one eye on Freud, Jung, and Brill, and the other on my father’s dreams of independent production, B.P. was preparing himself for the seminal role he would play in the 1920s. He had sued United Artists, but as ex-Uncle Hiram had predicted, his resources had proved no match for McAdoo, whose powerful firm was prepared to fight a delaying action all the way up to the Supreme Court. After a modest settlement, B.P. decided to do what so many of the first wave of movie pioneers were doing: start his own company. Too young to understand how he managed to do it, I still remember his partners, his old school-friend Jack Bachman, a serious, pipe-smoking, bookish accountant who became treasurer, and the ubiquitous Al Lichtman, “the best film salesman in the business,” also leaving Zukor and Lasky to help launch the new company. It was called Preferred Pictures, with B.P.’s slogan built into its very name, suggesting that his were the movies the public preferred.
In the style of L. J. Selznick, W. F. Fox, L. B. Mayer, and the other less-educated but equally high-flying producers, B.P. announced his new company with a flourish and opened an impressive suite of offices in the heart of the theater district on Broadway. Now he needed a star. Selznick had made his name by swiping Clara Kimball Young for World, and Fox had taken a Jewish tailor’s zaftig daughter named Theodora Goodman and transformed her into an Arabian vampire, Theda Bara (which was Arab spelled backward); Mayer had virtually shanghaied Anita Stewart from Vitagraph. B.P. in turn wooed eminently bankable Katherine MacDonald, in those days a major flutterer of masculine hearts and the envy of distaff moviegoers for her well-bred sophistication flavored with just the right degree of “naughtiness” in films like The Woman Thou Gavest Me, The Beauty Market, Passion’s Playground, and The Notorious Miss Lisle.
A strawberry blonde with limpid blue eyes and the sensuous but classy high-bridged nose that gave character to the leading ladies of the silent screen (vide Constance Talmadge, Florence Vidor, and Barbara LaMarr), Katherine MacDonald had completed her contract with Famous Players, and would soon be free of First National as well. B.P. went after her with all his boyish charm, wit, and intelligence. He wined her at the Waldorf, dined her at Delmonico’s, and showed her his elaborate offices, with an Italianate boardroom featuring a long cherrywood conference table and chairs which Ad considered pretentious and needlessly costly.
Katherine MacDonald must have been impressed with that Venetian boardroom, which doubled as a projection room, and my father must have been persuasive in his promises to make her more than a leading star of the day. In his young but knowing hands she would become as much of a household word as Mary Pickford. Miss MacDonald would be known from coast to coast, he promised, as “The American Beauty Rose.” Like America’s Sweetheart, the American Beauty Rose had a mother who seemed to know her way around a contract, and again like Mary who always saw to it that sister Lottie was also signed, there was another flower in the family, the patrician Mary MacLaren, who would also be Preferred. After extended negotiations, during which Miss MacDonald threatened to form her own company under the Famous Players banner, or to defect to Universal, Metro, Goldwyn, or Fox, a deal was finally consummated, toasted in champagne in the grandiose boardroom, with the film press of New York on hand to wish their erstwhile colleague well.
Soon Ben and Ad were reading novels and magazine stories and going to plays to find the ideal vehicles for the first jewel in the diadem of Preferred Pictures. Meanwhile the high-living, fast-talking Al Lichtman was out in the field selling the rights to “four great new Katherine MacDonald pictures” soon to be made by The Industry’s youngest and brightest producer, Adolph Zukor’s own protégé, B. P. Schulberg.
Those were busy days. B.P. was writing reams of publicity for his own company and working on scenarios, banging away at his typewriter. All his life he clung to his old Underwood as an aging matinee idol clings to his toupee. In 1920 that Underwood was zipping. So was the movie business. So was the country. The Golden Age was upon us.