A PERSONAGE IN THE EYES of my mother, catered to by Father’s studio employees (including those “stupid” movie stars), made to feel important in my front-row seat at the Friday-night fights, I still suffered the miseries of a misfit at the Wilton Place Grammar School. The bullies wrestled me to the dirt of the schoolyard, threatened to beat me up, and imitated my stammering. I can still smell their clothing—a smell compounded of dirt and sweat and anti-movie hostility. Often I would try to avoid the yard and sneak out the front entrance of the school, longing to make it home to the security of the big house on Lorraine. Almost as often, the little cossacks of Wilton Place would scent their quarry and chase me down the block. I learned to run very fast. I didn’t know it but I was already in training for the highschool runner and tennis player I would become a few years later. Often I would make it safely inside the protective door of 525 Lorraine before giving in to tears, too upset to write poetry or to play in the backyard with its swings and rings and basketball net.
But there was a punching bag on the back porch outside my bedroom. Given my mother’s proclivities, it had been set up there more in the interest of child psychology than of physical culture. I was encouraged to work off my aggressions, frustrations, and hostilities by punching away at the light bag. Whether or not it was sound psychological theory I have no idea. But I became quite proficient on the light bag and have carried one with me through half a dozen different lives in Hollywood, on a Pennsylvania farm, a West Florida beach, a Beverly hill, and a Long Island retreat. Working out my angers on the punching bag with a “Take this, Duke Wayne!”, “And this, Dick Nixon!”, and “Right in the middle of your two faces, Sam Spiegel!”, it may be that I overdeveloped my capacity for absorbing emotional blows without striking back, for turning the other cheek until my head was spinning, turning instead to my punching bag with the ferocity of a Dempsey.
Although my mother was to add to her “credits” by cofounding our town’s first progressive school, none of those John Dewey-like experiments were tried on me. I was flipped from the frying pan of public school into the fire of the Urban Military Academy. This was an elite concentration camp on Melrose, not far from Paramount Studio, where Major Urban, supposedly a hero of World War I, dressed us up as miniature West Point cadets and marched us up and down the parade grounds every afternoon. There is a picture of me in my smart grey uniform, complete with puttees and Sam Browne belt, my cape thrown grandly over my shoulder to display its crimson lining. But I didn’t feel all that grand.
True, I wasn’t chased and ridiculed for my stammering or my high position as a Hollywood prince: The Urban cadets came from well-to-do families and were much better mannered than the poorer kids in the public school. And of course the strict military discipline imposed a rigid standard of behavior in which public fighting and humiliation were sternly punished. So the cadets were civil with me, and some were even friendly because they wanted me to show them through the studio. I had the power to enter the studio, past the imposing reception booth or through the big iron gate, whenever I wanted to and with whomever I wished. Since almost everybody wanted to meet the movie stars and see movies being made, I seemed rather popular. But I came early to the feeling that it was the producer’s son they were buttering up, not the stammering cadet.
I have no memories of any educational activities at Urban. What calls to me are the staccato military commands: “Fall in!” “By the right flank—march!” “Company—halt!” Those orders seemed easy to follow for everybody but me. I proved to be an incurable non-marcher. I was forever “falling in” a few seconds too late. And marching along, my mind would wander to other things—maybe the lyrics I was working on, as I added songwriting to my other accomplishments—and I would fail to hear the command and would step on the heels of the cadet directly in front of me. The drill instructor would shout “Company halt! That includes you, Schulberg!” When I had drained his patience he put me to the rear of the rear squad, where I comprised a squad of my own, inevitably marching out of step but no longer interfering with the rhythm and obedience of my fellow-marchers.
While I brought up the inglorious rear, our company was led by a dashing fellow on horseback, whose father was not only Mayor of Beverly Hills but probably the most famous man in America, Will Rogers. While Will, Jr., was high man on the Urban totem pole, and I the lowest, he never chewed me out like the other student officers. Junior was the sort of genial, easy-going, thoughtful fellow his old man pretended to be. Will, Jr., was a heroic figure, and I was the Good Soldier Schweik of Major Urban’s Military Academy. My punishment for inept marching, below and behind the call of duty, was to have to report to Urban on Saturday mornings and march for an hour by myself.
When finally I was able to convince my parents that Urban had nothing to offer me in the way of education, a cure for my stammer, or military demeanor, I was allowed to shed my uniform and return to civilian life.
Parental love at 525 Lorraine was expressed not in terms of physical touching—embraces and kisses—but in educational and artistic prodding. Perhaps influenced by Grandpa, an austere man, and Grandma, withdrawn in unhappiness, Mother was physically undemonstrative. Cultural achievement was stressed over personal happiness. I have read somewhere that “passion for learning is for the Jews one of the ways to God.” Consciously and determinedly, Mother had struggled upward and outward from the ghetto. She never forgot the teaching of one of the early leaders of immigrant Jewry, Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward: “You must try to be an intellectual.”
There were no pushcarts on Lorraine Boulevard, no synagogues, no frayed laundry hung out from tenement window to window. The great houses were set back from the street by spacious lawns. But the ghosts of Abe Cahan and the Daily Forward still breathed in our elegant Hollywood home, exhorting me to write, learn, improve, achieve, make something of myself that could be measured in something more valuable than money. To this day the Cahan-Ad Schulberg ethic clings to our shoulders like Grandpa’s prayer shawl. If we do not write something every day we greet the darkness with an uneasy conscience. There is time off only for good behavior—if we have done enough to appease those Jewish gods or muses.
But to leave an impression of a driven child forever hiding under a piano composing poetry to please and appease his mother is to deal in half-truths. Another relationship was to dominate my youth, my friendship with Maurice Rapf. Maurice’s father, as I have mentioned, was the first studio manager of Warner Brothers, then at a small lot on Sunset Boulevard. When Maurice’s family bought a house on Lorraine, we began creating a busy and imaginative world of our own within the big-studio world around us.
In many ways we were conventional kids playing our games on the studio backlots or the Hollywood side streets. Instead of saying, “My pop c’n lick your pop,” we literally used to say, “My father’s studio c’n make better pictures than your father’s.” We would get into heated arguments as to which was the better movie, The Vanishing American with Richard Dix and Lois Wilson (mine), or His Secretary with Norma Shearer and Lew Cody (his). It wasn’t easy to top the great Big Parade with Jack Gilbert and Renée Adorée (his), but I would put my best foot forward with Ralph Forbes, Neil Hamilton, Ronald Colman, and William Powell in Beau Geste. Maurice would say, “My father discovered Joan Crawford,” and I’d say, “Well, my father discovered Clara Bow and she’s even bigger than Joan Crawford.” We compared comedy teams. He had Karl Dane and George K. Arthur. I had Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. We compared directors. I had Vic Fleming and he had King Vidor. I had Greg La Cava and he had Robert Z. Leonard.
We even compared bootblacks—the only blacks I remember on the lot in those backward days of the total flour face. I had Oscar and he had Kid Slickum. Oscar the Bootblack, as he was known to thousands of white employees on the Paramount lot, had his stand just outside the main studio gate. Part of his job was shining shoes and part was serving as a squealing, supposedly good-natured target for the passersby who would sneak up behind him and goose him outrageously. He knew the names of everybody on the lot and he’d chuckle, “Now, Mr. Sutherland” [Eddie, the comedy director]—or “Mr. Holt” [Jack, one of the stars]—“You stay ’way from me, heah? You stay ’way from me!” Sometimes they’d flip him a quarter or half a dollar just to hear his exaggerated squeals. Oscar probably earned more money every day than the average extra. And he presided over his stand rain or shine. I thought he was happy, when I was twelve. It was not until I grew into my teens that I began to think more about him and to wonder why he was the only Negro in that whole thriving studio.
In those days Windsor Square was still full of vacant lots, and the large lot on the corner of Sixth and Lorraine became a favorite playground, where Maurice and I built an elaborate underground clubhouse expertly camouflaged on the surface. Influenced by movies on the Great War—from Shoulder Arms to The Big Parade—we developed a labyrinth of hidden passageways. With Buddy Lesser, who lived around the corner and whose father Sol produced the Jackie Coogan movies, we were a little gang without a rival gang. If we were not toughened in street combat, at least we were active.
Our favorite indoor game was to take over the projection room that the Rapfs had built behind their house, invite our neighborhood friends, turn off the lights, and fight a battle royal in the dark. This was the way we celebrated all our birthdays. We would fight until we were exhausted, or until one of Maurice’s parents decided we had had enough and came to turn on the lights. We were probably not nearly as physical as we thought, because with the exception of a young visitor’s broken arm, I remember no serious injuries. But I do remember the surprise when a new boy came to the party, all dressed up and undoubtedly advised by his mother that he was attending a glamorous children’s party at the home of an important Hollywood producer, only to be thrust into a blackout free-for-all in which his tie was yanked off, his party shirt torn, and his scruffed face pushed into the projection-room floor. Occasionally a novice would begin to cry, but most of the newcomers joined spiritedly in our battles of bloody noses and twisted elbows.
Our major obstacle to innocent laughter and bruises at the Rapf residence was Maurice’s paternal grandmother. So unlike the meek, accepting ancients my grandmothers were, this fierce, proud, domineering lady from Colorado ruled the household with the absolutism of Catherine the Great. Harry Rapfs marriage to Tina—a small, very pretty woman—had been predicated on the understanding not only that Harry’s mother would live with them but that she would be in charge. From the beginning it had seemed as if Tina had willingly abdicated. She lived the pampered life of a mogul’s wife, enjoying her massages, her card games with the other “girls,” and golf at the luxurious Hillcrest Country Club, formed by the new Jewish establishment in self-defense against the Los Angeles country clubs where Jews were blackballed—as they still are fifty years later.
Lord knows Grandma Rapf was a survivor. But it sometimes seemed that her son Harry’s success as an important producer at MGM had gone to her head. She would yell at us for the slightest infraction. Her warning cry of “Moooor-eece!” would freeze us. Only a bathroom separated her room from Maurice’s and if we played his radio too loudly or laughed too heartily at the jokes we were writing, her voice would come booming through the double doors, “Moooor-eece, stop that racket! I have a terrible headache! I’m going to tell your father when he gets home from the studio!”
Actually, Harry Rapf always seemed like a nice easygoing fellow who had inherited none of his mother’s field-marshal authority. Writers may have sneered at his enormous nose, his malapropisms, and his lack of literary finesse, but he was bringing in the bread-and-butter pictures on schedule while Irving Thalberg was establishing himself as a perfectionist with expensive retakes. From his days as a vaudeville booker, Rapf had an eye for talent. He had signed Joan Crawford when she was still Lucille Laseur, a chorus girl at the Winter Garden in New York City. Now Harry was supervising the picture that would establish Crawford as one of Hollywood’s major stars—Our Dancing Daughters.
But at 621 Lorraine he was still Grandma Rapf s little boy. He would scold and punish Maurice not of his own inclination but out of fear of that indomitable old tyrant.
Early on, Maurice and I developed the habit of keeping a written record of all our activities. With cyclometers on our bicycles we would clock the exact distance to Paramount Studio, the new lot on Marathon Street. We not only played Foreign Legionnaires on top of the abandoned desert fort in Beau Geste, we also wrote out the scenes we were enacting. We accumulated a shelfful of those primitive scenarios. One of our favorite playgrounds was the fantastic set for Ben Hur, a film that was to dwarf in size and cost even Griffith’s colossal The Birth of a Nation. In fact, my father believed that Ben Hur added “super-colossal” to Hollywood’s growing list of hyperboles. Begun by the original Goldwyn Company, Ben Hur had been inherited by MGM, with Mayor and Thalberg reluctantly allowing the spendthrift production to go on shooting in Italy. But production costs doubled and tripled, a new script was ordered, along with a new star (Ramon Novarro replacing George Walsh), and the multi-million-dollar production was thumbed home from Rome and the Italian seacoast to our other playground in Culver City.
Maurice’s Studio, as we called it, obliged us by rebuilding the Colosseum in an open field on Venice Boulevard, a few blocks down from the MGM lot. Inside the studio, behind the huge white-stucco silent stages, realistic Roman galleys floated in battle array in an enormous tank. Of course it was fun to see this extravaganza actually being shot. We could see Ben Hur’s excruciating chariot race against Messala, and we could visit young Ramon Novarro in his dressing room as he was assisted into his dashing costume as a Roman charioteer.
In those days my red-leather autograph book went with me everywhere, and there on a faded pink page is a florid inscription by the then-latest successor to Valentino. (Even studio brats raised in the shadows of the bustling front-office buildings and the towering stages were not too blasé to be autograph hounds.) Our albums were all-inclusive: With the two biggest studios in our pocket and with many of our friends’ fathers at First National, Fox, and Universal, we had every star in town. Unfortunately, almost every inscription was a one-two punch to a tender ego. Although there were a few affectionate exceptions (“May you always be a Buddy to me!!—Yours forever, Clara Bow” and “To Buddy—whose buddy? Mine!—Love and Kisses, Sally O’Neill”), the principal theme running through that dog-eared little album is “Hoping you’ll grow up to be as great a man as your father.” In one sycophantic voice they urged me to “Follow your dad!” (Adolphe Menjou); Emil Jannings wrote exactly that sentiment in German, and Gilbert Roland in Spanish—messages clearly intended for the eyes of my father rather than for mine.
Maurice and I turned ourselves into a pair of abbreviated Ben Hurs and galloped heroically around the enormous oval of the set, managing to portray both the horses pulling the chariots and the intrepid Ramon Novarro snapping his whip over the backs of the high-spirited steeds. Although we were both desperately afraid of girls (was it despite or because of the fact that we were surrounded by starlets and would-be starlets?), we indulged our fantasies with imaginary Esthers in the stands cheering us on as we overturned the chariot of the overbearing Messala. These phantom heroines represented our shared and secret lives. They were more real to us than the flesh-and-blood young ladies who challenged and intimidated us.
Walking toward the main entrance to Paramount, I had been approached by good-looking young girls who obviously belonged to the company of hopefuls waiting for lightning to strike. And in those far simpler times, sometimes it did. There was no Actors Guild, or Extras Guild, to serve as a go-between. A producer, director, casting director, or a self-important assistant would pick a face out of the crowd—“Just the type we’re looking for!” Sometimes it was true and one of the thousands of girls in town to “break into the movie game” would get lucky and find herself a star. Sometimes the studio powers and demi-powers were merely on the make, or looking for kickbacks. It was a chancy, ever-hopeful, and corrupt little world. Outside the gates all those good-looking have-nots, inside so many imperious but vulnerable haves. Big kings and little kings who could whimsically touch you on the head with their magic wands and change your rags to cloaks of gold.
There was a kind of frenzy to the outs yearning to get in. Once two young men stopped me at the entrance to the reception area and greeted me as if we were old friends—“Hi, Buddy, how’d ya like to meet a hot little flapper who’ll really knock yer eye out?” All of fourteen, I hesitated, stammering that I was going in to see some rushes with my father. This only served to incite them further. “This’ll only take a minute. She lives right here in this apartment.” Facing the studio was a pseudo-English apartment house full of eager beavers who watched the lot from their windows, living the moviemaking life vicariously. Carried along by their aggressive charm and never too proficient at saying “No,” I found myself hurried up a flight of stairs and down a dark, uninviting hall to the door of a room overlooking the studio.
My two guides knocked happily on the door, continuing to assure me that I was going to meet someone who was really the cat’s pajamas. The door opened and a wistful young redhead with bangs and spit curls, dressed flapper-style in a skirt showing off her pretty round knees, smiled at us.
“Jackie,” one of the young men said, “guess who we brought to meet you. Buddy Schulberg. The boss’s son!”
She smiled at me as if I already had her contract in my hand.
“ What’d I tell you?” asked the other young man. “Isn’t she a lulu? And who does she look like? A dead ringer. They could be twins!”
I didn’t have to answer because Jackie was eager to volunteer.
“Do I really look like Clara Bow?” She fed me my lines, batting her false eyelashes at me, and going into the little vamp step identified with the It Girl. “Everytime I go out, people ask me for my autograph and call me Clara. It sure gives me a funny feeling.”
The It Girl vs. the If Girl. So tantalizingly near, so desperately far. On the other side of that narrow street, somewhere over the rainbow, a pot of gold was waiting for Jackie, she thought. You didn’t have to be smart, you didn’t have to be an Ethel Barrymore. You just had to look cute and know your onions.
For that moment it must have seemed as if fate had served me up as Jackie’s onion. Suddenly, to my extreme embarrassment, I found myself alone with her. Her friends had muttered something about having to go down to the coffee shop on the corner. Jackie sat down on the frayed couch and invited me to join her. I did but I didn’t know what to say to her. She asked me if I knew Clara Bow and I said yes. She said it must be wonderful to know all the big movie stars and I said yes it was. I didn’t say what my father thought of most of them and I didn’t tell her what a low-down no-good common tramp my mother considered Clara Bow. She said it must be wonderful to be able to walk into the studio whenever I wanted and to be close to great people like the famous directors and my wonderful father. She edged so close to me that I could smell her perfume—or maybe her ambition. My mouth felt dry as I edged away. “You know, you’re not at all the way I pictured you to be,” she said. “I thought the sons of the big producers would be real shieks—real cavemen. Why,” she said, puckering up and looking like Clara, “I’ll bet you never even kissed a girl.”
Thinking back on that entrapment, I realize that Jackie could not have been more than two or three years older than I was. But I was still a child while Jackie, physically at least, was a pocket-size adult, a sex object, an almost-It Girl on the wrong side of Marathon Street. I knew I should have invited her to accompany me into the studio. I sensed the power I had to introduce her to Vic Fleming or Eddie Sutherland—or even to the great B. P. Schulberg himself. But what I really wanted was to escape from Jackie and never see her again.
One day when I was being driven through the studio gate in the family town car to pick up my father, I glanced up through the rear window and caught a glimpse of Jackie at her second-floor lookout staring at the entrance as it stood open for the little prince whom all the sycophants accepted as Father’s logical successor to the throne.
I felt a twinge of guilt about Jackie, for not having swept her into my arms and into the studio. But, like my sidekick Maurice, I was a curious mixture of emotional immaturity and professional insight. I could have told Jackie that the studio would not welcome a “dead ringer” for Clara Bow, with the same shade of red hair combed into the same bangs and spit curls, the same dimpled cutie-pie face, the same provocative Cupid’s-bow mouth. Clara wouldn’t welcome a double Charlestoning along in her shadow, and neither would her public. There was room for one It Girl, one ladylike Shearer, one mysterious Garbo, one saucy Mae Murray, one soulful Lillian Gish….Each star was a special personality with her own inimitable identity. Each had the star quality that set her apart from a hundred imitators. There were ten thousand Jackies, luscious girls with photogenic if forgettable faces and figures perfectly proportioned if interchangeable. In time Jackie would become a carhop, an usher, a call girl, or take the bus home to North Platte and settle for marriage to an insurance salesman or the local plumber, or, if she kept her looks, a small-town politician. I could have told Jackie that Clara Bow, for all her brainlessness, was an original. She hadn’t tried to be Billie Dove or Mabel Normand. And little Jackie, back on the Greyhound for the long ride home, or up at Madame Frances’s luxurious bordello still passing herself off as Clara’s look-alike, would never know the difference.
Meanwhile, back at the Ben Hur set, Maurice and I pursued our childishly elaborate fantasies. There was a current of benign sexual masochism to our scenarios. In the bowels of the Roman galley we strained at the heavy oars while an imaginary breast plated Simon Legree drove us to exhaustion with his snakelike whip. We flinched and groaned, our naked shoulders bending to the oars. We had projected ourselves so deeply into this violent hallucination that we were not even aware of intrusion until a harsh voice cut through our reverie. “Hey, you kids—what you think ye’re doin’ out here?”
The old watchman, who had a boring day patrolling the valuable standing sets on the backlot, obviously thought he had a couple of hot fence-jumpers on his hands. Sometimes kids would scale the walls to roam the studio. Today a studio like Universal is patrolled with Waffen-SS security measures. In those days, everything was much more relaxed. But even then our captor was marching us off the set and threatening to turn us over to the chief of the studio police.
“You damn kids c’n be arrested for trespassing,” he said. “You’re comin’ with me!”
I can’t remember if he had us literally by the collar but that’s the way it felt. And we did something slightly perverse, although it stemmed more from a severe case of modesty or insecurity than from a wish to turn the screw. We walked along silently and quietly. We let the poor old codger think he had us in his power. And then, just as we were approaching the studio police office, Maurice identified himself as the son of Mr. Rapf.
The guard stopped, turned pale, frowned, scratched his head. “You have some identification—a studio pass?”
“We don’t need them. They all know us at the gate. You can ask them. Or we can go to my father’s office if you don’t believe me.” Maurice pointed to the big white building near the gate. “It’s right down there.”
Our captor was becoming our captive. He could see his soft job going out the window, not because he failed to collar a pair of trespassers but because he had foolishly collared the boss’s son.
“So ye’re Mister Rapf’s boy, huh? Great fella, your dad. You should’ve told me right away. Y’see, if some kids jumped over that wall ’n’ drowned in the tank, their parents could hold the studio responsible and I’d lose my job. But I’ll know ya from now on. Yes suh, I’ll keep an eye on yuh.”
Of course that is exactly what we didn’t want. A number of times we were humiliated in the middle of our romantic agonies by looking up to see a studio cop or a stray carpenter staring at us as we writhed, moaned, or swore undying devotion to our invisible beloveds.
These Peeping Toms brought Maurice and me even closer together. We would retreat to another exotic standing set even further removed from the center of studio activity and commiserate with each other about the intense embarrassment we had just suffered. Undoubtedly these inadvertent voyeurs simply thought of us as a couple of crazy kids. But we felt something far more personal, a sense of guilt because our games had grown to be more than games, more than childhood imitations of our fathers’ movie scenes played on the same sets where they had just been filmed. We were acting out, for our eyes and ears alone, our secret lives.
Both our ids and our muscles, our inhibited passions and the physical mischief inherent in fourteen-year-olds were expressed through the facilities of our fathers’ studios. Just inside the MGM auto gate, for instance, was an enormous fig tree, a relic of the days when the whole western basin of Los Angeles was fragrant with fruit orchards. The old tree was a studio ornament now, for no one ever seemed to pick the fruit. The figs would ripen to squashy black missiles, ideal weapons for us to hurl against moving targets. Our fig tree was strategically placed facing the second-floor cutting rooms and small projection rooms which were reached by a metal staircase. Up those steps went not only cutters but directors and stars eager to see their work in progress.
Maurice and I would crouch behind the thickened trunk of the giant tree, under the dark-green protection of its heavy branches, rear back with juicy figs in our hands, and throw them with all our small but considerable might. Black fig skins and pinkish-white pulp would splatter against expensive sports jackets and famous profiles.
When our victims stopped and whirled around we would either freeze in the far reaches of the tree, or race down narrow alleys behind the projection room, through a maze of walkways and alcoves we knew as well as an Algerian sneak-thief knows the Casbah.
There was an inverse caste system to our target priorities. We didn’t really want to splatter the hardworking cutters, their assistants, and the apprentices who toted the film cans. We only fell back on them for want of a bigger game. What we were really after was a John Gilbert in a dapper ascot, a chic Billy Haines, a strutting Erich von Stroheim, a swashbuckling (or swish buckling) Ramon Novarro. Nor were the glamorous ladies neglected. There was no gallantry in the heart of a studio prince. Once one’s hands closed around a ripened fig, the happy-go-lucky Marion Davies could be a target. Or her pal, the bright comedienne Aileen Pringle. The fact that the ladylike Norma Shearer was known to be under the protection of Irving Thalberg provided no shield against the rotting figs that came flying mysteriously from the depths of our leafy barricade. The wicked Mae Murray offered a luscious target. And Maurice and I hold a unique place in Hollywood history. Who else can boast of scoring a direct hit with a ripe fig on the most luminous star in the Metro heavens? Greta Garbo!
Movie personnel were not our only targets. We were democratic enough to fill a brown paper bag with fig ammunition, go out the studio gate to Washington Boulevard, and let fly at the passing motorists. If they stepped on their brakes, ready to jump out of their cars and chase us, we’d race back through the gates, taking sanctuary under our friendly fig tree.
We might have continued waging our ripe-fig war if it had not been for our friend the mailboy Maurie, only a few years older than us. Passing along on his bike delivering scripts and memos, he happened to catch us unawares as we were firing our light artillery. He seemed to enjoy our assault on studio dignity. But we soon learned never to trust the mail-room boy. He would turn his own mother in to the studio cops if it meant a step up the ladder. So our mailroom Judas ratted on us, revealing us as the perpetrators of the soft-fig massacre. We were called to Harry Rapf’s office and lectured severely. It was a privilege for us to have free run of the studio, and we were abusing that freedom. How could we possibly splatter Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo with overripe figs? (Very easily, we thought to ourselves, but we hung our heads, a little frightened, if not intimidated.)
I do not say that Maurie the Mailroom Boy earned his promotion as a direct result of his betrayal of our youthful figging. It was simply a symbol of his readiness to please the stronger by turning on the weaker.
It was hardly an accident that the MGM lion was the presiding symbol of the lot. MGM was even more of a jungle than “my” studio—and a jungle is a system of survival in which the top lion intimidates the lesser lions who in turn intimidate the smaller animals, from supervisors all the way down to writers and mailroom boys.
Thus Maurie the finger-boy hustled his way up through the jungle pecking order, to become a go-fer, then a second assistant to an associate producer, and finally an associate producer himself. He may have had talent but that was a second virtue. You had to impress somebody at least one rung above you, scramble to get an in, and then use that in to climb up over the back of your benefactor if you could. Horatio Alger would do no less. You might call it the American way of life, to gnaw and claw your way to the top, like the Rockefellers and the Morgans and all the robber barons who aced themselves into the American aristocracy. Hollywood, after all, was only a picture of America run through the projector at triple speed.