BETWEEN THE STRONG-MINDED (“pigheaded,” the studio bosses called them) directors and the new front-office authority, the tension grew. Mickey Neilan openly defied those he despised as “the money men.” With his penchant for happy endings, L. B. was soon insisting that Tess not be hanged as she is at the end of the Hardy novel, but instead receive a last-minute reprieve. Mayer’s Law: Never mind the logic, send ’em home happy. Later, Mickey was to tell me, he complained to Thomas Hardy himself when he was in England shooting his next picture, and the novelist protested that his contract had promised fidelity to the book as written. But the power-minded hierarchy argued that Hardy’s and Neilan’s contracts had been with the old Goldwyn company that MGM had inherited. Legal or not, they insisted on ending Tess of the D’Urbervilles their way.
It was the beginning of a bitter struggle between the profit-oriented, conservative front office on one side, and the writers and directors on the other. But a one-sided battle it was. One by one the Neilans and Von Stroheims, and other so-called “troublemakers,” were weeded out. The important directors who stayed on began to get the message. Either play the game and shoot the picture the front-office way or go their own road. Rex Ingram, riding so high with The Four Horsemen, chose Europe. Mickey Neilan tried to set up his own productions at First National but became one of a host of high-paid silent directors washed away in the tidal wave of sound. As for the incredible Von Stroheim, brilliant, driven, uncontrollable, Maurice Rapf and I had front-row seats watching his struggle at MGM over Greed, and later over The Merry Widow. And when Thalberg gave up on Von Stroheim again as he had earlier at Universal, and Von moved on to Paramount, my father took over the front-office struggle to keep the inspired wild man from bankrupting the studio.
While Mayer, Thalberg, and my friend’s father, Harry Rapf, were weeding out the uncontrollables and building the first great film factory, the thorny feud between L.B. and my father was beginning to grow. Its roots are buried in forgotten film history. I’ve talked with my own family and with L.B.’s wife Margaret and his daughters Irene and Edith, and have yet to uncover all. But I believe the breach went back to L.B.’s secrecy about his negotiations with Rubin and Loew. The tradition of Sunday brunch at our alternating homes, ours on Gramercy Place, theirs on Kenmore, had brought the two pioneer producers together on a basis of friendly exchange of professional problems. If L.B. was having troubles with Mickey Neilan, B.P. would tell him how he thought that burr under L.B.’s saddle could best be removed. And, in turn, L.B. would listen sympathetically to B.P.’s tales of woe concerning the headstrong Katherine Mac Donald or his battle to get better distribution deals from the major companies, a campaign in which these two independents had been natural allies.
But for many months, it seems, L.B. had been carrying on secret negotiations to sell his Mayer-Schulberg Studio assets to the emerging Metro-Goldwyn Company, along with his own services as chief executive. When Mayer pulled out, according to my father, B.P. was left holding the bag with half a studio, half the equipment, and half the technical pool they had been sharing. It placed B.P. and his Preferred Pictures in a precarious financial position. Without warning, he was left with responsibility for the entire rent of the Selig lot. When the Rubin-Loew negotiations began, and apparently they had continued over a long period, L.B. should have leveled with his studio partner, B.P. reasoned. So Mayer’s departure from their joint studio and his becoming the third capital letter in MGM was preceded by a quarrel. And over the years, that quarrel was to develop into a feud of Old Testament proportions. At least that was B.P.’s story.
Mother had a different version. L.B., in those more innocent days, was a stickler for morality, both on and off the screen. Not only B.P.’s movies, which had been more sophisticated than Louie’s, but also Father’s private life, had begun to offend the staid Louie B. There was gossip of wild parties at the home of Ben’s French director, Louis Gasnier, parties which would begin at the end of the week’s shooting and would mount to a riotous climax by Monday morning. I have a faint remembrance of this, for one night after we had seen a particularly good fight at the Legion—I was still underage but could attend fights regularly now, since in Hollywood B.P. enjoyed special privileges—the chauffeur dropped Father off at Gasnier’s home in Hollywood Hills.
For a moment, as B.P. approached the door, it was held open, and from the hallway came the blare of saxophones and wild laughter. A couple appeared on the stoop, still dancing to a jazzy fox-trot. The dapper casting director I recognized from the studio came out to greet my father with a tall glass in his hand. I could hear Father laughing with the others.
That moment obviously made a deep impression on my ten-year-old mind. Of course I had heard Mother complain about Louie Gasnier and his weekend parties. Gasnier, it seemed, was French and decadent, kept a number of mistresses, and his wicked ways were a temptation to my hardworking but easily distracted father. According to my mother, Gasnier maintained his position at the studio not because of the quality of his pictures but because of the merry social life he created for my father and other business associates. This morals charge Father heatedly denied. Louis Gasnier had an impressive list of silent-picture credits. It was an insult to B.P.’s intelligence to suggest there was any other reason for choosing a director.
Besides, in those years three-day binges were the weekend sport. Small-town Hollywood had to make its own entertainment. There was no television, no outdoor barbecues, no theater or opera or art, except the one they were creating in their silent studios. There was a lot of pent-up energy among those primitive talents. The whole country—if you believed Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Carl Van Vechten—seemed to be going off on one prolonged toot of bathtub gin, dance crazes, and a newly liberated sense of sex. It was fun to drink because you weren’t supposed to, to fornicate because Dr. Freud had now informed you that it was time to let your id take over from that puritanical superego. If the whole country was going to the party, why should Hollywood be any different? And if the Hollywood party was excessive, it was only because Hollywood had always been an excessive, speeded-up, larger-than-life reflection of the American Way. So even after the Fatty Arbuckle debacle, and the scandals the studios had learned how to hush up, the wine flowed and the sexual laughter mounted through my growing years. The effect on me and my “brother” Maurice Rapf was to inhibit rather than liberate us.
On Monday mornings the wild parties were often the talk of the little town where everybody still knew everybody. Mickey Neilan had celebrated the wrap-up of his picture by throwing a three-day party for five hundred people, with Abe Lyman’s Ambassador Hotel Orchestra to welcome the daylight. We heard that scores of couples danced and drank themselves into oblivion and were still sleeping on the lawn. The police had come but the twinkle-eyed Mickey had bought them off with hundred-dollar bills. This little celebration was said to have set Neilan back $20,000. It’s only money, was the Mick’s philosophy, and at the rate he was earning it in those days all the party had cost him was a few weeks’ salary. In those easy-come days before taxes, accountants, business managers, and tax shelters, the make-it-and-spend-it philosophy ruled the town. Americans were going to the movies by the millions. They had caught the habit. Entire families went at least twice a week. The ticket total was half the population of the United States. Mickey Neilan, as well as B.P. and the other early winners, felt secure astride their bobbing steeds on the merry-go-round.