ONE OF THE GOLD RINGS THAT MY FATHER REACHED OUT FOR MAY have looked like an extremely brassy alloy but it turned out to be eighteen karat. Her name—unknown when B. P. signed her—was Clara Bow. Every film decade seems to discover its own sex symbol: Theda Bara in the Teens, Jean Harlow in the Thirties, Jane Russell in the Forties, Marilyn Monroe in the Fifties, Raquel Welch in the Sixties, Farrah Fawcett-Majors in the Seventies, with the Earth Goddess Mae West embracing all the generations. I don’t think that even B.P., who had a well-developed instinct for star power in those days, would have predicted the impact that little Clara was to have on the Twenties. In 1922 she was a red-haired, minute, effervescent flapper whose beauty-contest crown had been awarded by the cartoonist Harrison Fisher, the illustrator Neysa McMein, and Howard Chandler Christy, creator of “The Christy Girl.” A bonus for Clara was a screen test, leading to a small part in Down to the Sea in Ships.
With his biggest star Katherine MacDonald in decline and L.B. deserting the doughty little Mayer-Schulberg ship, B.P. was on the lookout for new talent. When he saw Clara Bow in her film debut, he sent for her and promptly signed her to a long-term contract with Preferred Pictures. Clara couldn’t act, and she wasn’t exactly a quick study—of all the movie stars I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some famous birdbrains, Clara Bow was an easy winner of the Dumbbell Award. A lot of stars have come up so fast that they have had no chance to learn along the way. They flounder and flutter like wounded birds in the blinding and confusing light of their stardom: Olive Thomas, Mabel Normand, Alma Rubens, Barbara LaMarr, Mae Murray, Harlow, Carole Landis, Hedy Lamarr, Marilyn. … It demands intelligence and/or strength of character to cope with the pressures of excessive celebrity. Clara Bow was definitely not a coper. She was simply an adorable, in fact irresistible, little know-nothing. It was as if Father had picked out a well-made collie puppy and trained her to become Lassie.
I remember the first time I was introduced to Clara, in my father’s office at Preferred. She seemed very short, the top of her head barely reaching to his shoulder. She was wearing a tight cotton dress, and her Cupid’s bow of a mouth was constantly moving in the act of chewing gum. It seemed to me that she wore both bangs and spit curls. Her cheeks were round, in fact it was a pretty moon face that she presented, with bouncy, flirty brown eyes. She was no breathtaking beauty like Claire Windsor, and her features weren’t as pert and doll-like as Colleen Moore’s. But she gave off sparks, vivacity, a sense of fun. Since I had become a Los Angeleno with my ear attuned to the flat Midwestern accent spoken in southern California, Miss Bow’s unabashed Brooklyn-ese sounded raucous and funny. “Golly, Mr. Schulberg,” she said, still on a formal basis that would soon give way to a closer relationship, “Is this your little junior? Gee, he’s cute as a button!” She threw her soft little arms around me. “Where’d ya get all that pretty yellow hair?” To my embarrassment my hair was almost white, not the august white of sixty but the yellow-white of childhood.
“I had yellow hair just like that when I was his age,” my father said. At thirty-three he was already turning slightly gray.
Clara Bow ran her fingers teasingly through my hair. “Mmmmm. How wouldja like ta drive up to Arrowhead this weekend, Buddy? Just the two of uz!”
“Now Clara,” my father warned, as proper as Louie Mayer when his family was concerned. “He’s just a little boy.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll hafta wait a couple years,” Clara pouted. She toyed with her spit curls and seemed to be openly flirting—with both of us. I hung my head, almost physically suffering from shyness. There was something about the uninhibited affection with which actresses came at you. And except for my mother (and even she had once been offered a contract as a leading lady for Essanay), the only women I knew were actresses.
My father put a protective arm around me and ushered me toward the door. “I may not be home for dinner. I’ve got a story conference on The Plastic Age and then I’ve got to look at the rushes with Gasnier. But tomorrow night Jimmy McLarnin is fighting the rematch with Fidel LaBarba. Should be a great one.”
“See ya, Buddy boy,” Clara Bow patted my blond curly head. “C’mon ’n’ see me on the set. Sincerely, I’m very glad to’ve meetin’ yuz.”
That is not funny-paper talk, but really the way the gum-chewing 19-year-old sounded as she approached the threshold of international fame as America’s Number One Flapper.
When Clara started shooting her next picture for my father, I did go on the set and she ran over and kissed me and told everybody I was her secret boyfriend. Then the assistant director made sure the set quieted down because Miss Bow had a very difficult scene to play. It was a scene in which her leading man felt she had misbehaved with another man and was walking out on her. She was only flirting with the other man, the heavy, in order to make her suitor jealous enough to marry her. But the heavy had plied her with gin from his silver flask (the prop man had a trunk load of silver flasks in all shapes and sizes to accommodate the obligatory drinking scenes of Prohibition), and, unused to bootleg hooch, she had gone a little too far. But now that the man in her life had apparently abandoned her to her fate, she had to cry.
It takes a real actress to cry from the inside. The good ones reach in for a moving experience of their own, overlap it with the emotion of the scene they are playing, and cry for real. There are actresses who have to fake it: A makeup man squirts glycerine on their cheeks, then steps back behind the camera and our leading lady seems to have an eyeful of tears.
As I was to see for myself, Clara Bow’s tears came a little more naturally. First the set fell silent while the director explained the scene to her. She nodded. She seemed rather nervous. Then the assistant director called for quiet, and gave the cue for the three-piece orchestra to begin. They played a soft, tender, schmaltzy rendition of “Rock-a-bye, Baby …” Clara, now in front of the camera, was listening intently. Not breaking the quiet mood, the director said, “Action …” The little behind-camera trio played on. The violin cried. The portable organ wept: “On a tree top… when the wind blows… the cradle will rock…”
Clara Bow, the tough little jazz baby, began to rock a little. No longer did her face look happy and full of the devil as it had at our first meeting. She was pressing her lips together and her big round eyes were blinking. “When the bough breaks … the cradle will fall…” A little shudder passed through Clara Bow. Tiny clouds of mist began to float across her eyes. “Down will come cradle…” Photogenic tears welled in the eyes of Clara Bow, gathered like waves in miniature and began rolling down her cheeks. “Baby, and all…” Clara Bow was crying. Crying beautifully. Crying like a real actress. And when the director triumphantly cried “Cut!” Clara went on crying. The music stopped, a makeup lady powdered Clara’s moist cheeks and in a few moments the mood of the tragedy subsided.
My next memory of Clara Bow is associated with my first trip to a movie location—to Pomona College, about sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles, a two-hour journey in those days—for the shooting of The Plastic Age. Wesley Ruggles, one of the best of his time, was directing and the cast included Clara Bow as the wild flapper, a role she was making her trademark. This time “Cynthia” comes to the college prom and breaks the heart of the pure young hero, “Hugh,” played by Donald Keith, by coming on with the sophisticated college boy, “Carl,” a man of the world played by a newcomer, a 20-year-old son and grandson of Mexican bullfighters from Chihuahua. The newcomer’s name was Luis Antonio Damasco de Alonso. One of my father’s favorite office (and dining-room) games was to choose marquee names for the young players he signed. It was he who was said to have changed Gladys Mary Smith to Mary Pickford. In the case of young Sr. Luis Antonio, at first B.P. considered Antonio Alonso. But by this time he feared that there had been too many Latin competitors—Antonio Moreno, Ramon Novarro, and some long forgotten. So he went in the other direction. It was his theory that the name chosen should already have the ring of stardom. So he wrote down the names of stars then current, and experimented with phonic amalgams. Jack Gilbert was an established star, and Ronald Colman was just coming into his own. Put those two names into a mixer, whirl them around, and what do you come up with? Gilbert Roland.
The Plastic Age is one of my most vivid early memories of silent-movie making, for many reasons. For one thing I was away from my home and family for the first time, living in a rustic hotel with the film company. Everybody went out of the way to make me feel welcome, including my gum-chewing girlfriend Clara Bow, who kept telling everybody I was her steady fella.
That location trip may have marked the beginning of my sex education, for despite the advanced Freudian theories of my mother, and my growing childhood awareness that Something was going on behind the doors of the studio offices and those Spanish stucco homes in the Hollywood hills, I was painfully naive. Girls of my own age were to be avoided whenever possible. I remember being in a rowboat at Arrowhead Lake with the child star Baby Peggy, and people teasing me about our big romance—suggesting that the pint-size actress was playing up to the boss’s son so he’d talk his father into buying her a particular story. I remember trying to stay as far away as I could from Baby Peggy after that. Somehow sex and commerce, even innocent childhood attraction, were inextricably woven into the pattern of ambitious careerism. So—and Maurice Rapf’s recollection overlaps with mine—instead of being thrust into a titillating pool of sexuality as might be expected of sons of Hollywood moguls, we regarded sex as something culturally corrupt. Back in those days of Jazz Babies and Dancing Mothers, sex was our own personal Watergate. We sensed the cover-up, the bald-faced lying of the front men, and the backroom payoffs.
It’s true that I could feel on my skin Clara Bow’s gum-chewing sex appeal. Even then I think I sensed that she communicated sexually because she had no other vocabulary. She had to flirt with me, as she did with everyone, because she simply didn’t know anything else to do.
My awareness of sex on that location grew not only from my proximity to Clara Bow but from the content of the film itself. I had read The Plastic Age; in fact, Percy Marks’s novel was the first book with an “adult” theme I had ever read. At least in those days when Victorian morality had not entirely surrendered to the new freedoms of the Twenties, it seemed like an adult theme. It was considered an ultraliberal act on the part of B. P. and Ad to expose a kid still in elementary school to a book as suggestive, downright naughty, and full of sex appeal as Marks’s treatment of college life in those days when Youth was allegedly Flaming.
Partly because of my stammering, still so severe that I could not complete a single sentence, or sometimes a single word, partly because of my father’s literary leanings and his hope that I’d follow in his footsteps not as a movie producer but as a writer, and partly thanks to my mother’s intellectual ambition (she had begun a practice which would continue into my highschool years of paying me twenty-five cents—the rates advanced as I got into more serious literature—for every book I read and reported on to her), I had become a precocious reader. I could escape from my tormentors at the public school who imitated my stammering, led the jeering laughter, and bullied me against the schoolyard wall by retreating into a corner of my own room and losing myself in a book.
B.P. had read The Plastic Age for pleasure, because Percy Marks, a Dartmouth professor, was considered one of the better novelists of the day. His work dealt with the Prohibition generation born at the turn of the century. Father had thought I would get more out of my trip to the Pomona location if I were acquainted with the novel and able to compare it with the scenario, then with the actual shooting, and finally with the rushes and the first assembled cut: a crash course in moviemaking.
There is a nervous moment in the book when our hero Hugh fears he has been caged with a roué whose self-control has lost a shameless battle to Eros. But his roommate reassures him:
“I’m a bad egg. I drink and gamble and pet. I haven’t gone the limit yet—on account of my old lady—but I will.”
The hottest scene, both in the book and in Father’s movie, is when Hugh takes the uninhibited jazz baby Cynthia to the prom, the wettest in the history of once-staid “Sanford College”:
“The musicians played as if in a frenzy, the drums pound-pounding a terrible tom-tom, the saxophones moaning and wailing, the violins singing sensuously, shrilly as if in pain, an exquisite, searing pain.”
The band in the book is playing a song with which I could identify because we had it on a roll on our player piano, “Stumbling all around, stumbling all around, so funny / Stumbling here and there, stumbling everywhere—”
“Close-packed,” Percy Marks wrote with knowing lubricity, “the couples moved slowly about the gymnasium, body pressed tight to body, swaying in place … boom, boom, boom, boom—the drums beating their primitive, blood-maddening tom-tom … I fell and when I rose I felt ashamed” / I said I’m stumbling along, stumbling along…”
The climax reeked of forbidden fruit. As the saxophones, the drumbeat, and the nearness of Hugh drive Cynthia wild, she entices him to borrow a friend’s room. Fred interrupts them just in time to save them from Going All The Way. Fred is disgusted, and Hugh is so full of self-loathing that he contemplates cutting his throat with a razor blade or blowing his brains out. Next morning, Cynthia wakes up older and wiser: “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking….” She’s too fast for him, she explains, what he thought was true love was just… “sex attraction.”
I watched the two-shot as Cynthia/ Clara tells her young leading man:
It was more my fault than yours. I’m a pretty bad egg, I guess; and the booze and your holding me was too much. I’ve spoiled the nicest thing that ever happened to me…
It was time for that unobtrusive three-piece orchestra to slide into “Rock-a-bye, Baby” again. The script described Cynthia’s lips as “trembling, her eyes full of tears.” Rock-a-bye, baby… on the tree top… when the wind blows … the cradle will rock…. No more sexual saxophones moaning and tom-toms drumming. For the 20-year-old redhead with the flirty eyes, bee-stung lips, and dimpled knees, the midnight madness has given way to a mother’s lullaby.
I stood behind the camera, watching the jazz baby from Brooklyn crying like the lost child she was. I didn’t know it yet, but I would soon learn that Clara wasn’t crying because she’d almost enticed her 20-year-old virginal leading man to “go all the way.” She was crying for the little girl living in poverty in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn with a hard-drinking, unemployed father and a psychotic mother who beat her savagely for the slightest infraction, screamed that she would put her out of the house if Clara entered that Brooklyn movie-theater beauty contest when she was only sixteen—and, when she won the chance at a screen test, threatened to kill her if she ever went into the movies. Later, Clara explained that when she was a child she had a friend on the block whose mother would sing her to sleep to the soothing strains of “Rock-a-bye, Baby …” That’s where her mind went whenever the screen asked her for tears. The high-kicking All-American Flapper was the little girl lost.
While Wesley Ruggles was setting up the establishing shot of Cynthia and Hugh walking down the college hill to the railroad station for their tearful farewell. I sat with Clara in the red roadster she had just bought to celebrate her raise in salary. (Acknowledging her growing popularity, B.P. had volunteered to tear up the old contract and write her a new one. That was generous of him, and there’s no doubt that Father was genuinely fond of his discovery. But L.B. probably would have made a similar gesture. It was considered shrewd studio tactics to anticipate the demands of a rising star. In those days of block booking, a star’s films were sold to the theaters before they were made, frequently before the producer had even decided what films he would make with his box-office attraction. Paramount would sell in advance four Swansons, four Pola Negris, three Valentinos. … Of course the 20-year-old Clara wasn’t a temperamental superstar like the trio who were trying the well-known patience of Jesse Lasky on his Famous Players lot. Clara Bow was reckless, impulsive, naive, and vulnerable. She wasn’t designing; if you wanted to be unkind you might say she was too stupid to try to manipulate the studio management. But she was also generous and trusting, and at that strategic moment in her career, my father was the closest friend she had.)
When Clara asked me how I liked school, I told her about my stammering problem; she was sympathetic and I found myself stammering a little less than I usually did—especially with people I didn’t know very well. When I told her I hated school, in fact dreaded the mornings when I had to enter that enemy camp, she stroked my head—she really seemed to like my blond curly hair. And she told me again that I reminded her of what my father must have looked like when he was my age. She sympathized with me because she had hated school too: Most of the kids had been smarter than she was, better-dressed, and came from nicer homes. And, she confessed, she used to stutter, too! Oh, not a terrible stutter like Marion Davies’, but enough to make it embarrassing when she had to recite in school. It was a swell piece of luck when she won that beauty contest. Even though she had really flunked her first screen test. The part she won in the beauty contest was so small and she had been so nervous doing it that when she went to see her first picture, she wasn’t in it at all!
“I thought that crack about ‘a face on the cutting-room floor’ was just a lot of hot air,” she said. “But there was little Clara all over the cutting-room floor. Then I got to play a stowaway in Down to the Sea in Ships, not a very big part but at least they couldn’t cut me out of it, and your father sent for me and put me under contract for fifty a week. He was very polite and he made me feel better about myself. That’s what I like about your father. He doesn’t try to grab you right away like a lot of fellas out here. I don’t read much of anything except True Romance and stuff like that. But he made me read this book we’re shooting. He said, ‘Clara dear, I think if you read it you’ll understand the part of Cynthia better.’ And when I did read it—well, most of it—I told Ben, I mean Mr. Schulberg, ‘Heck, I ain’t afraid t’ play Cynthia.’ I mean she’s just like me—comes from New York and likes her smokes and her drinks and runs with a fast crowd…”
I must have looked shocked. In those days I was as puritanical and straitlaced as Hugh Carver in The Plastic Age. I would try to take cigarettes out of my mother’s hand, I objected to my father’s taste for highballs and, like a Billy Sunday in knickers, I thought petting was for perverts. I had been relieved to read how Hugh had cast the wicked Cynthia out of his life and had promised his college adviser that never again would he (almost) give in to temptation.
Clara Bow offered me a stick of gum. “I don’t know why I’m tellin’ ya all this. I guess I just feel like talkin’ my fool head off today. My old man and my goddamn—excuse me, my mom, they never talked to me much. All they did was yell at me and punch me around. That’s why I actually prayed I’d win that beauty contest. I was only in my second year of high but if I could get into the movies I could get away from home. It wasn’t a nice home like yours with parents who like ya and take care of ya. It was a dump. Your father has really been swell to me. It’s like having a special teacher ya like in school. He has such nice manners and he’s so smart and he never shouts at anybody. I never met anybody like him before in my whole life. You must be awful proud of him.”
I said I was. Although I really didn’t see that much of him. Except for Sundays … the Friday-night fights … and the sneak previews. We’d drive or we’d take the train to San Bernardino or Glendale, and the theater manager would hand out cards asking for the audience comment on the movie. The impromptu sidewalk conference outside the theater became an institution.
“Y’see, that’s what I mean,” Clara said. “At least he takes you with him to the sneaks. Someday you’ll grow up and be a big producer becuz of all the things he’s teaching ya. I know he’s awful proud of ya. He’s even showed me some of ya poetry.”
As another outlet for the stammering, I had begun trying my hand at little rhymes that were not quite in a class with Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I was surprised to hear of Father’s reaction because, while my mother had been encouraging me to write more, he had seemed rather noncommittal.
“I know yuh gonna make me awful proud of ya, too,” Clara said as we sat in the roadster shoulder to shoulder and chewed gum intimately together. “Y’know I feel about ya almost like ya my little nephew. Like we’re all one big happy family.”
Like innocent Hugh in The Plastic Age, I didn’t know anything about sex attraction and all that stuff. It was amazing how little I knew, considering my father’s profession and my mother’s early fascination with Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis. But I sensed that same Something that hung over the studio lot like incense, Something intimate in Clara Bow’s relationship to our family.
Of course what I did not learn until some years later was that B.P.’s secretary, Henrietta Cohn, who had accompanied us to Hollywood, had written an anonymous letter to Ad alerting her to “the B.P.-Clara Bow situation.” Henrietta was a small, intense, rather homely, extremely able and intelligent woman who spent more time with Father than Ad did, and who felt she was doing this out of loyalty both to mother and to her own boss. His career was in the ascendancy, he was considered one of the brightest and most inventive producers in the competitive town, and Henrietta was afraid a rash move might impede his otherwise inevitable climb to the top.
It seems my mother accepted this bit of intelligence from the studio philosophically. Although I didn’t know it at the time, she was already resigned to his philandering. A curious mixture of old-fashioned and new-fashioned, she believed in the family with a capital F, had become disillusioned but unshaken in her love for my father, and believed he needed her steadying influence to build his career.
There must be, she was determined, no reflection of domestic turbulence within the home. The children (the third and ultimate issue, Stuart, had just arrived, our first Hollywood native son) must be raised in an atmosphere of culture and security. Furthermore, all of the producers had mistresses. If Irving Thalberg was faithful to Norma Shearer, the starlet L.B. had signed in the Mayer-Schulberg days, it may have been due as much to a weak heart as to a strong morality. Some of those back-street companions were full-fledged stars and leading ladies. Some of them were pretty bit-players carried on the company payroll at the insistence of the studio boss. “It was a terribly decadent society,” my mother passed judgment. “The producers had so much more power than they do today. Anybody with a pretty face and a good figure could pass the test in silent pictures. Of course girls like Clara Bow and Colleen Moore and Blanche Sweet had some special appeal. But thousands of pretty girls were pouring into Hollywood from all over the country hoping to be discovered and the men in power could really take their pick. The ones who failed to catch on in pictures became courtesans. They’d spend all of their time making themselves beautiful and glamorous for the men who kept them: sleeping late, beauty treatments, all kinds of faddist massages after bathing in perfume, milk, scented bath oils. It was like the Middle East, like sultans with their harems. They even had their eunuch yes-men who would pimp for them, front for them, appear in public with them to avoid bad publicity. I used to feel sorry for the wives of all the big producers, because most of those women had no resources with which to fight back. They just played cards with each other, or vied with each other as to who had the most expensive jewels and clothes. Nearly all of them had started out at the bottom and now that the business was becoming a billion-dollar industry, they were living in big houses surrounded by servants and seemingly everything they wanted—except a happy home life.”
Ad felt superior to these luxuriously protected domestic prisoners because she had found an outlet in her studies at the local branch of the University of California, her activities in behalf of child-study and birth-control groups, and her ability to set up what was probably the first Hollywood salon, where the visiting intellectuals and artists—a Theodore Dreiser, or a Count Keyserling—would be invited to meet those members of the movie community who in Mother’s rather snobbish opinion were among the less culturally retarded. She succeeded in establishing herself as an intellectual and cultural force in the Hollywood of the Twenties when those forces were sadly wanting both in supply and in demand. She was the first to bring Early American furniture, child psychology, and progressive education to Hollywood; John Dewey was more of a god to her than John Gilbert.
Her only rival was Bessie Lasky, who painted, encouraged her young son to write poetry, and drew around her an effete gathering of painters, sculptors, and aesthetic hangers-on. Ad’s group seemed more oriented toward the real world and its problems.
Hollywood had been culture-conscious before. The Hollywood of the 1910s, the provincial Hollywood that had been envisioned by its pious founders as the New Jerusalem, had been determinedly cultured, though its taste ran to the precious and pretentious. The preeminent artist was Paul De Longpre, who specialized in painting beautiful flowers. The annual Pilgrimage Play was organized with the Chamber of Commerce boast, “What Oberammergau was to Europe, Hollywood is to be to all the world.” There was the MacDowell Circle of Allied Arts and a natural bowl in the hills became the romantic setting for classical music. There was the Easter Sunrise Service with tens of thousands climbing those brown hills to immerse themselves in the religious music. The original Hollywood of Midwestern teetotalers and God-fearing Christians liked to boast that their Hollywood was “The Theosophical Capital of America.” Hollywood was a cultural schizophrene: the anti-movie Old Guard with their chamber music and their religious pageants fighting a losing battle against the more dynamic culture of the Ad Schulbergs who flaunted the bohemianism of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the socialism of Upton Sinclair. But there was one subject on which the staid old Hollywood establishment and the members of the new culture circle would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low-life and a disgrace to the community.
My relationship to Clara Bow was affected neither by sexual jealousy nor by cultural superiority. As we sat there in her red roadster waiting for the assistant director to summon her for the next scene, I found her easier to be with than the girls of my own age. For all her Juicy-Fruit flamboyance, there was something wounded about her—the Rock-a-bye-Baby bit, we’d call it today—to which I could relate.
When the A.D. called over to us, “Ready for you, Miss Bow,” and I followed her out of the car to watch her play the scene, a curious thing happened. It was so casual, and yet I have never forgotten it. Gilbert Roland came up to me shyly with a small folded note in his hand, pointed to Clara, and asked me if I would hand it to her. I don’t know why he called on me to play Cupid. I don’t even know what was in the note because I was too conscientious to read it, especially when I could feel his strong Latin eyes drilling into my back as I caught up with Clara and delivered it. She mumbled, “Oh thanks, Buddy, sweet of ya,” and took a quick glance over her shoulder at the young bullfighter turned actor.
That evening they came into the local hotel dining room together, two head-turning 20-year-olds whom my father had put together from such totally different worlds—Chihuahua and Brooklyn. For the next year or so they were what Hollywood liked to call “an item.” But, as a host of ardent suitors were to discover, Clara was too capricious—or too promiscuous, or vulnerable—to be ready to settle down with one.