EVEN GRAND MASTERS of motion-picture trivia who know the names of the second unit director of Gone With the Wind and Humphrey Bogart’s stand-in on Casablanca draw a blank on this question: “Who was George Bancroft?”
It happened again the other day. My niece, a bright avant-garde movie producer, wanted to know about the stars her grandfather had discovered before she was born. Clara Bow she’d heard of, vaguely. But George Bancroft? Not a clue. And yet there was a time when that name had risen like a surfer’s dream-wave and then had come pounding down across America and on around the world. “You mean you never heard of George Bancroft?” I pressed her. “Never,” this member of the Wertmüller and Scorcese generation confessed.
“He was the world’s number-one box-office star, bigger than Gilbert and Colman, Beery and Barthelmess and all the rest of them!”
I had been more involved with him than with any of Father’s other stars. I had been there at the birth of George Bancroft as a world figure and I had traveled with him at the height of his fame.
Underworld, which brought George Bancroft overnight acclaim, was an example of Father’s filmmaking at its best. He was proud to have bought a gangster story—he claimed it to be the daddy of them all!—by Ben Hecht. Underworld was to be made on a low budget, starring Bancroft, then considered a mere feature player, and Evelyn Brent, a sultry, dark-haired heroine of a dozen Paramount melodramas. To direct the picture Father turned to Joe von Sternberg.
The vicious, unrelenting, but loyal lord of the underworld, treated not as the conventional heavy but as a new kind of cult hero, made Underworld an overnight sensation, creating national and even international life-styles. In big cities, box offices opened an hour earlier and stayed open an hour later to accommodate the unexpected demand. All but forgotten now, Underworld was then as much of a milestone as The Great Train Robbery, The Birth of a Nation, and The Big Parade. The moment that Underworld hit the screen, gangster movies were in. Big, bumbling, rugged-faced George Bancroft became the forerunner of that immortal backfield of good baddies, Jimmy Cagney, Eddie G. Robinson, John Garfield, and Bogie. George was the first of the anti-hero heroes to walk curly-lipped into machine gun fire and who died not only oozing blood from his noble mouth but with epigrammatic fade-outs like “Mother of God, is this the end of Ricco?”
Father knew he had a gold mine in Bancroft, and the imperious, inscrutable Joe von Sternberg was now established as a star director. So B.P. assigned them to further explorations and exploitations of the underworld in The Drag Net, The Docks of New York, and Thunderbolt. Father often said that Von Sternberg was as impossible with success as he had been in his years of struggle for recognition. Of George Bancroft, on the other hand, to say that fame went to his head is understatement. Like fire down a cotton suit it spread to his chest, his pelvis, and down to his toes. As Underworld drew rave notices and lines around the block from New York to Rome, George Bancroft began to talk differently, walk differently, eat differently, think differently. I could see it in the way he drove through the main studio gate to his redecorated dressing room. When he waved at old Mac, the gateman who had been there forever, George’s little flip of the hand was not so much patronizing as what one would expect of a British monarch acknowledging the salute of a loyal subject. Fame not only turned Bancroft’s head, it seeped into his acting, as I would see for myself when Von Sternberg was directing Parmount’s king of the underworld in The Drag Net.
Von Sternberg had a way of talking to his actors as if they were slightly retarded children, and in his approach to Bancroft we should strike the adverb. “Now George, this is a very simple scene. We should be able to get it in one take. All you have to do is walk up that flight of stairs. You think you’ve thrown your pursuers off the track so you are relatively relaxed. But they’ve been tailing you. Now, the camera is going to be on your back, but when I say ‘Bang!’ that’s when you get it. You grab the banister and twist around, until you’re facing the camera. As you slip down the steps you try to reach for your gun. But I’ll say ‘Bang!—Bang!’ again, and that’s it. I don’t think we even have to rehearse it. Just give it to me as real as you can. Now George, are you sure you understand what I’m saying?”
George looked at his director with his expressive St. Bernard eyes. “Yes, Joe.”
So the commander-in-chief cracked the order to his aide-de-camp, the assistant director called “Quiet!”, Joe told his head cameraman—Hal Rosson, one of the best—to start filming, and at the crisp command, “Action!”, Father’s overnight number-one box-office star started up the creaky stairs of a realistic-looking boardinghouse. It was an impressive sight, the hulking George Bancroft, all six-foot-two and two hundred pounds of him, charging up that stairway. At the third step, Von Sternberg’s voice rang out. “Bang!!” But George didn’t fall. In fact, he didn’t even flinch. He kept right on going. “Bang!!” Joe shouted again. George Bancroft paused a moment, as if distracted by a random thought, and went on climbing the stairs.
“God damn it, George!” Von Sternberg screamed. “What’s the matter with you—are you deaf?” His voice filled the cavernous set. “Bang!—Bang!”
Still George didn’t fall. Instead he stopped and turned those expressive brown eyes on the Napoleonic Von Sternberg. Then he spoke in the quiet voice of the ultrareasonable. “Don’t shout at me, Joe. Of course I heard you. But just remember this: One shot can’t stop Bancroft.”
It became one of our favorite Schulberg family lines. At home Sonya and I would take turns playing the domineering Von Sternberg shouting “Bang!” while the other took over the swaggering gangster idol: “One shot can’t stop Bancroft.”
When I went to the preview with my father, there came that desperate moment on the stairs. In the picture it turned out exactly as Von Sternberg had planned it. George could keep on walking up those stairs with all the sense of invulnerability that his gangster roles and the powers of stardom had invested in him, but Joe had the final say. All he had to do was establish George on the stairs, cut away for a moment, and then cut back to Bancroft on the decisive “Bang!” that made him grab the banister and twist forward. Thanks to judicious cutting, one shot did indeed bring down the mighty Bancroft. The audience would never know that their rugged hero up there on the silver screen was a muscular presence who had come to believe in his own invincibility.
When I saw it on the screen, with George reacting to the first shot, I tried but was unable to choke back my laughter. Father tried to shush me. I was destroying one of the most dramatic moments in the picture. People were looking around at me. I held my hand over my mouth until the fit passed.
As George’s fame kept mounting to tidal-wave proportions, so did his pretensions. Von Sternberg’s defense was simply to ignore the antics of his star. Nobody could acquire instant deafness more quickly than Joe. They made a remarkable pair, Bancroft whom fame had transformed into an impregnable fortress, and Von Sternberg whose artistic arrogance regarded all actors as empty-headed puppets to be jerked this way and that in the firm grip of the puppeteer.
Frustrated by the Von Sternberg freeze, George would invariably turn to my father as a higher court of appeal. A vital part of B.P.’s job was to cope with his box-office stars, keeping them happy or at least content enough to show up on time for their eight o’clock calls, charming them without surrendering to their often unreasonable demands or complaints. Those were still the days of block booking, and “four Bancrofts” had been sold in advance to movie houses all over the world. So B.P. had to baby George, humor him, and hear him out. Whenever George asked him to fire “that little monster Von Sternberg,” Father would play for time. Why didn’t they think about it and meet over the weekend to discuss it further? Then Father would turn around and say to his director, “For Christ’ sake, Joe, if George wants to do one more take, once in a while give in to him. Sure, we know he’s a moron, but after all his popularity is helping to pay our salaries.” And if George kept coming, as he came constantly to Father’s royal chambers, with ideas for future roles he wanted to play—for now he was convinced that his dramatic range was boundless, from Ahab to Zoroaster—B.P. would smile, offer George one of his Upmanns, and say, “Interesting idea, George, why don’t we think about it…”
A blue-eyed tower of charm and patience at the studio, Father let go at home in his ritual walk around the dinner table with scotch highball in hand. “That stupid sonofabitch George is driving me out of my goddamn mind!” he’d shout in a voice that must have been heard from one end of Windsor Square to the other. Sometimes I was afraid that our genteel neighbors would think my parents were fighting when Father was only crying out at his studio tormentors. There were some who were vicious and some who were openly defiant and some who were secretly conniving and conspiratorial, but that season George was the worst of all: as ever-present and persistent and noisy as an overgrown horsefly. At school, kids who marveled at his powers in Underworld, The Drag Net, and Thunderbolt would say, “Gee, you’re lucky, you actually know George Bancroft!” And while I was admitting “Y-y-yes I do,” I was thinking to myself, “If you only knew!” Their idol had feet of clay that went all the way up to his head.
One evening Father came home saying, “Ad, if I don’t get away from George for at least a couple of weeks, I’m going to crack. I’m not exaggerating—his stupid ideas for new bits of characterization, new scenes, new pictures to make are driving me out of my mind.”
Since there was a slight lull in the frenetic fifty-picture-a-year schedule and since Father had put together what he considered a dependable team of supervisors (the fancy new name for associate producers), he thought this would be an opportune time to take a vacation. Although Ad didn’t agree with Ben’s estimate of his producing staff—she thought they were mostly sycophants whose greatest talent lay in their knowing how to play up to Father’s weaknesses, which were wide-ranging, rather than to shore up his strengths, which were impressive—she welcomed the idea.
“Let’s go to Europe,” Mother suggested, “and take the children.” What she had in mind was a cultural holiday, museums and art galleries, Shakespeare at Stratford, the Louvre, the sea- and history-soaked wonders of Venice, the Italian opera and the Caesarean splendors of Rome. Over dinner they talked out the elaborate itinerary, from the Tower of London to the Tower of Pisa, from the English Channel to the Adriatic, from the Savoy to the Adlon to the George V to the Excelsior—our version of that most spendthrift and splendiferous British institution, the Grand Tour.
Father liked his culture too, but for him the ideal vacation was sneaking over the Mexican border to the gambling casinos at Agua Caliente. Traveling with Ad, the children, and their nurse was not his idea of getting away from it all. But he’d go along with anything if it spelled temporary relief from the agony of daily exposure to the ever-expanding ego of George Bancroft.
Our trip was planned like an official journey of state. Steamer trunks and suitcases were packed with changes of clothing for the five of us for every possible occasion, from formal affairs to beachside picnics, and duly labeled: The Santa Fe Chief—The Ile-de-France—The Hotel Savoy … Our itinerary, the size of a movie script, arrived from the studio Transportation Department, complete with the name of the head of the Paramount office in every one of the eight foreign capitals we would be visiting. The studio even provided us with books from Research so that we could read up on the histories and cultures of the cities and countries we’d be visiting. With our minds and our steamer trunks overpacked, the Schulbergs were ready for their European invasion. Mother kept telling Sonya and me, and even little Stuart, how much we would profit culturally and intellectually from the long journey, and Father’s home-from-the-studio mood lightened dramatically as we reached Departure Day minus one. Then it happened.
Fifteen hours before we were to board the luxurious Santa Fe Chief, George Bancroft came shambling into Father’s throne room. “B.P.,” he announced, “I’ve got great news. We’re going with ya!”
Father began to stammer, as he frequently did under pressure. “G-G-George, that would be great, but I’m afraid it’s a little late—w-w-we’ve got a complicated schedule—thirty different reservations…”
“Don’t worry, we’re all set!” George talked through B.P.’s protestations with his wide-screen smile. “I just checked with Transportation. We’re on the Chief with you, in the same car! And we’ve got a stateroom on the Ile-de-France, in the same corridor. We couldn’t get on the same floor with you at the Savoy, but we’re in the suite right above yours. All you have to do is open the window and call ‘George’ and I’ll pop right down. Isn’t that swell? We’re booked with you all the way, the Blue Train, the George Sank, right down to the Excelsior in Rome and back on the Da Vinci. That’s how it’s gonna be for the rest of our lives—the Bancrofts and the Schulbergs like this!” George held up two long thick fingers pressed together in a gesture of inseparability.
The next day as our trunks and bags were being loaded onto the Chief, a truck drove right across the station platform and parked alongside our Pullman car. Two men began unloading several dozen heavy wooden cases wrapped in brown paper. We watched from our three connecting drawing rooms, having already settled in for our four-day train ride to New York. The Bancrofts, we had begun to learn, were habitually late. The pride of the Santa Fe line had to delay its departure a few precious minutes while the mysterious cases were handed up to the Pullman platform.
“George, what the hell have you got in those boxes?” B.P. wanted to know.
“My scotch,” George said.
“George,” Father spoke to him softly as he might to a five-year-old child, a five-year-old with a bottle-a-day habit. “All you need is half a dozen bottles. In less than a week we’ll be on the Ile-de-France. Five days later we’ll be in London. The home of scotch whiskey, George. Not bootleg stuff. The real thing.” Father looked at the half-dozen cases still waiting to be unloaded from the truck. “Tell them to take that back and keep it for you. I just can’t let you bring all that bootleg booze to England.”
“Now Ben,” George said with those box-office brown eyes, “I don’t care what you say about the scotch over there, I trust Eddie Kaye.”
Eddie Kaye was our studio bootlegger. He was a marvel of offbeat casting, jockey-size at five feet two, a hundred and ten pounds, with a falsetto voice. Legend had it that Eddie had been castrated by rival gangsters who resented his muscling in on their lucrative studio bootleg preserve. He always expressed deep devotion to me, which he begged to prove by offering to “take care of any enemies I might have. “Anybody gives you a hard time—just tell me who ya wanna hit, Buddy—I’ll get ’em in a dark alley—I’ll break their legs—I’ll …” Tiny Eddie Kaye represented the real Hollywood underworld, but audiences would have rocked with laughter if they had seen him on the screen. They wanted George Bancroft who looked every inch the killer. They would never believe that under that formidable exterior beat the heart of a marshmallow, while under the child-size hairless chest of Eddie Kaye beat the heart of your friendly neighborhood sadist.
“I trust Eddie Kaye” became another Bancroftism. Big George was loyal to his trust. He not only drank Eddie Kaye’s finest throughout the four-day journey to New York, but made sure that it was installed in his spacious stateroom on the Ile. He drank Eddie Kaye all the way across the Atlantic and right into his suite at the Savoy. I’m not sure whether or not he brought his trusted bottle of Eddie Kaye to the captain’s table on the Ile-de-France, but I’m sure he would have if he could. George Bancroft, my father used to say, had the courage and the simple faith of profound ignorance.
On that ocean voyage George and I had many serious conversations. That was the only kind of conversation George knew. He liked to talk and he had a favorite word: facsimile. I don’t know where he had picked it up, and clearly he had never looked it up, but there was something touching about the loving way he rolled it around on his tongue before delivering it. “You know, Buddy,” he’d say, leaning on the ship’s railing and squinting his eyes at the horizon, “that sunset is a facsimile… of the first play that Tava [his wife] and I ever did together. An absolute facsimile …”
I would nod. I had learned to nod and half-listen to George. “You know, Buddy,” he said, always with that thoughtful squinting of the eyes, “this trip to Europe is a facsimile of the wonderful relationship I have with your father. And that I’m going to have with you as you grow older. An absolute facsimile.”
Father and Mother had encouraged me from childhood to look up any word I didn’t understand. I was to drag that growing list all the way to prep school with me, and beyond, until I had compiled what amounted to my own personal dictionary. So I knew what facsimile meant. And I knew that poor, world-famous George didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. At times I had an impulse to tell him. But there were at least three reasons for resisting the temptation. I had learned enough of studio politics to know that the boss’s son doesn’t offend his father’s bread winning stars. In the second place I knew that George Bancroft was basically harmless. And finally I was too timid to correct him even if I had wanted to. With my stammering, my natural form of expression was to write things down.
George didn’t know it but I was working on my first novel on the Ile-de-France. I had invented a brilliant plot, about a murderer who leaves no fingerprints because he has only one hand, and his weapon is the hook fitted on to his stump. Every afternoon I would retire to the desk in my stateroom and add a few more pages. I thought “The Hook” was bound for greatness because it drew on scenes that had most impressed me in the works of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Stevenson, and some of the other masters Father had read to us in those Sunday sessions. In addition, my central character inevitably resembled George Bancroft. In my walking dreams, my novel would be published—naturally to critical acclaim—and then would be snapped up by Paramount for a film starring George Bancroft. I even considered adopting Father’s nom de plume from his days as a fledgling short-story writer, and calling myself Oliver P. Drexel, Jr.
This dream of artistic collaboration was in Bancroft’s mind too. “Buddy,” he said to me on the morning of our landfall on the English coast, “this is a momentous day, the arrival of the Bancrofts and the Schulbergs in England. In fact it’s a facsimile of an idea I had when I was trying to get off to sleep last night.” Stardom had made George so sensitive, his wife Octavia confided to us, that she lulled him to sleep by stroking his cheek with peach fuzz. “Peach fuzz!” Father exploded.” His head is so thick I don’t think Gene Tunney could put him to sleep with a straight right to the jaw!”
Despite his intellectual shortcomings, there was something consistently affecting about George Bancroft. He was so predictably and vulnerably full of himself. Even though at fifty he was more than ten years older than Father, having achieved his fame at an age when most stars had already begun to fade, our box-office hero had total faith that he would outlast B.P. as a Paramount power, unto the next generation when I would be ready to take over the studio. Oh, we were a potent team as we leaned on the railing of that luxurious ocean liner and stared out at the blue-green vastness full of whitecaps and facsimiles.
George, incidentally, was not the only celebrity to hold forth on the Ile-de-France. There was also Young Stribling, the heavyweight contender from Georgia, “the King of the Canebrakes,” one of the fistic phenoms of the day. Only 25, he was already a nine-year veteran of well over two hundred professional fights. Now he was on his way to London to fight an Italian giant seven inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, at that time an unknown freak discovered in a traveling circus, but soon to become world famous: Primo Carnera. After we met together at the Captain’s table, Young Stribling offered to spar with me on the deck and to teach me some of the finer points of the Manly Art.
George Bancroft looked on thoughtfully, observing that Young Stribling was a facsimile of an idea he had for a motion picture in which he would play the Georgia Peach when Stribling went on to win the championship of the world. By that time, in another facsimile, I would be out of high school and ready to write and produce this epic fight film.
Young Stribling showed me how to place my left and tuck my chin in behind my cocked right hand, and promised to get us ringside seats for his battle with the Italian strongman known affectionately as The Ambling Alp. Father’s spirits rose considerably. If he had George Bancroft on his back, at least he had the celebrated Young Stribling at his side.
Disembarking at Southampton was a madhouse. The sporting fraternity was there to receive and interview Young Stribling. And all the rest of England had turned out to surround and embrace George Bancroft. He needed a police escort to clear the way for him to get off the gangplank and onto the train for London. His fame was such that custom inspection was waived, and the Bancrofts reached their drawing room in the style of royalty. Even their cases of Eddie Kaye scotch moved along with them without mishap. When we reached the London terminal, the crowd scene was repeated. English reserve was forgotten as fans closed in and tried to lay hands on him, crying “Go’ge! Go’ge, gimme a kiss!—Sign this!—Shake me hand! Go’ge… !” As we moved into the lobby of the Savoy, wild-eyed fans jostled with photographers and reporters. One of the latter managed to get in a question, “Mr. Bancroft, now that you’re in England, what are you most looking forward to seeing?’ After one of those dramatic pauses—“Bancroft pauses” we had come to call them—George said, “I have come here to see your underworld.”
I exchanged looks with my family. Father was wearing his “I’m going to murder George Bancroft” look. The look on the British reporters’ faces reflected studied self-control. But when George looked into the faces pressed around him, all he saw was a mirror reflecting his own.
On our first night in London, the noted actress Peggy Wood, a close friend of Ad and Ben’s, was opening in Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were to be her guests, both for the performance and for dinner afterward. Aware of George’s chronic unpunctuality, due in large measure to that steady flow of Eddie Kaye’s finest, Father had forewarned him as he would a child, in a tone that even I found myself adopting, “Now George, here’s what you should do—stop drinking at five and take a nap, as I want you to look well in the pictures they’ll be taking of you and Peggy. At six o’clock start dressing. Remember it’s white tie. You and Tava meet us in the lobby at seven. Seven on the dot. Peggy’s been nice enough to give us her house seats. Now let’s be in them ten minutes before curtain. Are you listening to me, George?’
George smiled the big, open smile beloved on all five continents. “Gotcha, B.P.”
At seven, Father phoned upstairs to say we were leaving our suite and heading for the elevator. Were George and Tava ready? B. P. was sure he could hear the familiar tinkle of ice in the highball glasses as George boomed, “Yup, we’re just about ready. Tava’s putting the finishing touches on her makeup. We’ll be down in five minutes, B.P.”
In the lobby, with my young, slender father elegant in white tie, Mother looking like a doe-eyed movie star in her chiffon evening gown, Bancroft’s five minutes ticked on to ten and to fifteen. Father strode to the house phone.
“George, for Christ’ sake!”
Gurgle, tinkle. “On our way down, B.P.”
Seven-thirty brought Father’s ultimatum that we were leaving without them. At seven-thirty-three, just as we were on our way to the revolving door and the waiting limousine, George and Octavia emerged serenely from the elevator.
“George, this is unforgivable. As one star to another, you owe it to Miss Wood to be punctual. It’s the height of professional discourtesy. How could you do this to her?’
Again the big brown innocent eyes begged understanding while the resonant and now well-oiled voice spoke these words: “Now Ben, I’ve only been in this country a couple of hours. How do you expect me to know their customs?”
For Bancroftisms there were no answers. That evening Peggy Wood, always a gracious lady, held the curtain for fifteen minutes, the additional time required by George Bancroft to adjust himself to the strange customs of his English cousins.
Next day the head of Paramount’s London office showed us some of the principal sights of the city. We began with a lovely view of the Paramount emblem, stars forming a graceful circle around an impressive mountain over the company’s “flagship” theater and office building. Eventually we worked our way to Westminster Abbey. The Bancrofts had declined this sightseeing trip, preferring to sleep late. When Father reprimanded George gently at the end of the day, George defended himself on the grounds of privacy. It was no fun being mobbed wherever he went. The night before, he had been pushed and pulled and had bits of his expensive full-dress suit torn off for souvenirs. So Father assured him that for their visit to the Tower of London next morning he would make special arrangements through the Paramount office; a team of English bobbies trained in crowd-control would be provided, as well as a special approach to the rear of the Tower.
Father told George we were leaving the hotel next morning at nine, while advising our Paramount guides to pick us up at ten. George was instructed to lean back in the middle of the rear seat of the limousine, so as to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Thus we drove uneventfully toward the Tower without inciting any local pedestrians. So far, so good. But as the Tower came into view a few blocks ahead, George began to stir and lean forward, peering out into the street over my shoulder. At that moment, a young pedestrian, happening to glance into the car, could not believe his starstruck eyes. “Go’ge! That really you, Go’ge? Blimey… ! Hi, Go’ge! Go’ge!”
His cries attracted other passersby until soon there were a dozen faces at the window. George leaned forward, presenting that famous face to them. It was like honey to flies. Now there were twenty, fifty, a hundred … you could see them buzzing with their revelation: “It’s Go’ge! Go’ge Bancroft!!” The limousine was surrounded, a spontaneous Limey version of a Hollywood opening. The narrow street was clogged and tight-lipped bobbies tried to push back the crowd to clear a way for our car. Suddenly a large hand reached down over my shoulder and found the handle of the door. The rear door of the limousine swung open, and George Bancroft flung himself out of the car and into the midst of that churning human sea.
Later we would laugh about it, the crowd-shy George Bancroft literally throwing himself to the wolves of fame. But at that moment we watched in amazement and horror as George’s head bobbed along like a loosened buoy in an angry sea. It was half an hour before we found him again, in the Tower of London where the intrepid bobbies had rescued him from the crowd. He was battered and torn and flushed with victory.
“George, goddammit, you could have been killed out there,” Father scolded him, promising us that this was the last time he would ever urge the Bancrofts to join us in our sightseeing.
“I’m sorry, B.P.,” George was still panting, “but after all, they’re my public. I owe that to ’em.”
The London leg of the Grand Tour was full of turmoil. It led to the first real fight I’d ever had with my father. It had to do with another theater evening. The Stratford Theater was doing Twelfth Night and Father had a ticket for me. I told him I couldn’t go because I had to pick the college football games coming up that Saturday for my weekly contest with Maurice. We picked the scores of a hundred college football games, all the way from the Trojans of Southern California and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame to struggles involving Slippery Rock and Bowling Green. It was hard work at best, with all the available sports sections to provide vital intelligence. But all I could find in London was the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune, and so I was under a great deal of pressure, especially since my predictions had to be postmarked before the day of the game.
My usually permissive father began to raise his voice. An evening like this was exactly why we had come to Europe, to see all the good things that never came to Hollywood. He had had to use his influence to get these seats. The theater had been sold out for weeks. It would be a dramatic experience I would remember all my life. I was to put away that silly list of football games, he insisted, and open my mind to Shakespeare. When I tried to explain that if I did not get my football picks in the mail that night I would break a vital link in the continuity of my gridiron competition with Maurice, he tried to lift me bodily out of my chair. I squirmed out of his grasp and suddenly he slapped me across the face. My eyes smarted with tears, falling upon the paper on which I was inscribing those thoughtful numbers: “Washington State 21—Idaho 7 …” I shouted at him: “Leave me alone, you sonofabitch! I never wanted to come on this crazy trip anyway!”
He tried to drag me down the hallway to the main door of the suite but I fought back. There was another terrible scene at the door. “All right, Buddy, I’m sorry I hit you. But for the last time—you’re coming with us to Twelfth Night.”
“I’m staying here and picking football games!”
“You know what’s going to happen to you?—you’re going to grow up to be one of those typical, stupid Hollywood kids who collects autographs from morons like George Bancroft and sings ‘Fight On for Old S.C.!’ Your mother and I may have been poor, but we knew what was important in life. We would have saved up all year to see something like the production we’re seeing tonight.”
“Dad, you don’t understand. I’ve got to pick these football games.”
Father’s bulging, sensitive eyes would have destroyed me if I had not been armored in self-righteousness. “All right, be an idiot,” he said. “It’s that goddamn California sunshine. It makes everybody football and tennis crazy.” The last word I heard was “Idiot!” Then the door slammed with what seemed to me at the time a tragic finality.
But in time, family relations were repaired by the tribulations we suffered in common from the Bancrofts. Father forgave my cultural lapse sufficiently to take me to the Young Stribling-Primo Carnera bout, which attracted great attention at the time. Sandwiched among the English fancy, I saw the largest fighter I had ever seen win an awkward and unsatisfactory decision on a foul in the fourth round. Father had bet on Stribling because he had watched the Georgian train. In the gym he had looked stylish and hard to hit, and Father had made one of his casually reckless wagers—a thousand pounds, he admitted later. The ungainly stray from a small Italian circus had been awarded a most peculiar decision, claiming he had been hit low by what seemed to us at ringside to be an invisible punch. They repeated their act again a few weeks later, in Paris, this time with Stribling winning on a foul. By now I had seen enough fights to learn one of the sad realities of the sweet science: Every so often the fix was in.
In the case of hapless Primo Carnera, as we would learn in time, the fix was always in, right up to the championship of the world he would win from Jack Sharkey. But when the mob who owned him had made their point, and the handcuffs were removed from his opponents, he was defenseless, thrown to lions like Max Baer and Joe Louis.
In Paris, George repeated his London performance. When the attentive but cynical French press asked him what he most wanted to see in the City of Light, he told them he wanted to see its underworld. In overflowing press conferences in Prague and Budapest, he was a great block of consistency: Take me to see your underworld. In Budapest this particularly infuriated my father. Budapest, of course, was one of the flourishing centers of European theater. Again the Schulbergs and the Bancrofts were invited to the homes of the leading playwrights, the Vajdas, the Zilahys, the Biros, and to the openings of their plays in a theater world that rivaled London’s and New York’s. Again Big George was late for those openings, and failed to catch the names of Hungarian stars who considered themselves as famous in their smaller but highly artistic world as he was in his global fishbowl. George was a constant embarrassment, and we even blamed our growing family tensions on his overbearing presence. In one luxurious wagon-lit drawing room there was an un-Schulberglike chain reaction of face-slapping that began with Sonya’s striking little Stuart, my striking Sonya, Father reacting against my reddened cheek, and Mother making some Freudian observations to Ben as to how intrafamily trauma could scar our emotional life, triggering a parental shouting match. When our nurse Ruth, who had replaced Wilma, burst into helpless sobs, the Schulbergs focused their frustrations on her.
The prospect of seeing Europe for the first time had flushed Ruth with an enthusiasm that waned quickly once we disembarked. As insensitive to Europe as the Bancrofts, she had spent most of her time with a long face sending postcards home and wishing she hadn’t come. Little Stuart was fidgety, Sonya was moody, and I was just old enough to resent having a nurse along at all—especially a clod who cared nothing about football games, or reading Robert Benchley, or meeting Young Stribling, or even listening to the records I had brought along. My favorite was an English hit that went, “I lift up my finger and I say ‘Now now tweet tweet come come …’” By now everybody was begging me not to play it, and Ruth went so far as to threaten to break it.
Mother and Father, momentarily united, turned on Ruth with the accusation that if she had been doing her job instead of moping, if she had taken little Stuart off to play somewhere so that he and Sonya could be peacefully separated, this family explosion never would have happened. To which Ruth answered, perhaps with more reason on her part than any of us appreciated at the time, that she was up to here with little Stuart and moody Sonya and crazy Buddy, sick of all of us, fed up with Europe in general and ready to go home to some place that made sense, like Oxnard, California. She was put off at the next depot, and walked contemptuously out of our lives.
Things were a little more peaceful without Ruth. But Father’s number-one star was still breathing down our necks, still dreaming of the future partnership of Bancroft Schulberg, Jr. In Vienna the Bancroft style drove Father to the wall of ultimate exasperation. Once again George had told the press he was not interested in seeing their famous St. Stephan’s Cathedral, he really had no interest in palaces and opera houses and art museums and all the other cultural wonders of which Vienna was so proud. “What I’ve come here for is to see your underworld.”
That did it. Father decided on a desperate ploy. The next stop on our itinerary was to be Venice, but he canceled that leg of the journey and instead we took off for Biarritz without letting George and Tava in on the secret. There was jubilation in the Schulberg drawing rooms as Bancroftless we sped our way to the French coast. Father’s mood soared as he pictured the Bancrofts finding themselves on the train to Venice. He and Mother even played casino without arguing over the cards. She invariably won, a canny and cautious player, and he played with his usual unmathematical abandon, a trait that had made him one of the favorite pigeons at the big games in Hollywood. (I would watch with a sense of wonder and unease as fifteen and twenty thousand of his dollars went flying off to shrewder pockets at a single sitting.) It was a hilarious trip to Biarritz as we exchanged our favorite Bancroftisms, which seemed to improve with each retelling, like listening to Father read Robert Benchley out loud.
The Bancrofts finally caught up with us again in Rome, where we made an official tour of the Paramount facilities, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and some of the other interesting sites of that old, provincial city. Always a great convincer—who else could run a big movie studio?—Ben expressed indignation that their travel plans had been fouled up. When Transportation had changed the itinerary at the last moment, he had assumed that the Bancrofts had also been informed. As always, George was understanding. I have never known anyone who could look so thoughtfully understanding.
Back in Hollywood the Bancroft parade marched on. Another film—The Docks of New York—another success. With Humphrey Bogart still playing the clean-cut WASP juvenile complete with white flannels and tennis racket, George Bancroft was riding high as the world’s favorite tough guy. At a wrap-up party on the set, I watched as George singled out a lowly bit-player hovering in lonely anonymity near the bar. “Well, are you enjoying the party, young man?” George asked with professional affability several sizes larger than life.
“Yes, Mr. Bancroft,” muttered the awestruck unknown. “Been in pictures long?” George kept the conversational ball rolling. “No sir,” said the neophyte. “In fact, this is my first one.” “Is that so!” George seemed delighted to hear it. “Well, that’s why I came over. I just wanted you to know that George Bancroft talks to everybody.” And I had a new Bancroftism for our collection.
Bancroft continued to star in tough-guy movies through the early Thirties, but now the gangster film was hitting its stride and Warner’s had begun to take over the field with Cagney in Public Enemy. After Paul Muni scored in Howard Hughes’s Scarface, they would make super-tough guys of Bogey and John (né Jules) Garfield. Now every studio was in the Underworld business and George was no longer Mr. Underworld.
George had been signed to a seven-year contract that began at one thousand a week, with each year’s option raising his salary an additional thousand. But his weekly salary for the seventh-and-final year under the original contract called for a raise from $6,000 to $7,500. By this time he was still a “name” but far from Number One. Responsible to Lasky and Zukor and the awesome power of New York, whence the banking capital flowed, Father felt he could not recommend picking up George’s option at a cost of $380,000 a year. But George was still a valuable property, and so B.P. suggested that George be kept on at his present salary of $6,000 a week, or $312,000 for the coming year.
When George heard this from Father, he grew red in the face. He couldn’t believe that Father would insult him like that. He insisted that rival studios had offered him $10,000 a week if he could get out of his contract but he had felt a loyalty to B.P. and the Company. Now, where was their loyalty to him? It wasn’t a question of loyalty, Father argued, but of hard dollars and cents. In fact, he offered to show George the box-office receipts on all his pictures from the beginning. Then he could see for himself how far grosses had fallen off. But Bancroft refused to look or listen. Father begged him to take the six thousand. “George, please listen to me, you’ll never make more money in your life.”
George looked at him with those big, brown, hurt, and now angry eyes, “Ben, I can’t believe this—I thought you were my friend.”
“George, now I’m going to level with you. Lasky and Zukor don’t want me to keep you on even at six thousand a week. I know it hurts but it’s a fact. I’ve been fighting for you.”
George drew himself up to his full six feet two and squared his broad shoulders. “I don’t need anybody to fight my battles. I can walk over to Metro right now and double my salary! I’ll be bigger over there than Wallie Beery.”
“George, for your sake, I hope you’re right,” Father said. “But this is a nutty business. It’s not a facsimile of anything, George. It’s its own crazy world. You’re not Number One any more. And you never will be again.”
George Bancroft turned on his heel and walked out of Father’s office, cleaned out his deluxe dressing room, went home to Tava’s soothing ministrations, let all the other studios know he was now open to their offers, and waited for the telephone to ring. But Hollywood was a cluster of small but powerful feudal states run by half a dozen men. While constantly conspiring against each other, these feudal lords met at least once a week around an apparently congenial poker table. In a room filled with the smoke of the finest Havana cigars and the aroma of the most expensive scotch that could be smuggled in, a casually pejorative comment could make or break a star’s career. So the word was out that George Bancroft refused to budge from his self-appraised salary of $7,500 a week. Teeth clenched to the soggy end of a giant Upmann, a man who was a hundred times tougher offstage than George Bancroft could ever simulate on camera raised the ante another five hundred and said, “Fuck ’im! He’s washed up! who needs ’im?” That’s the way Eddie Mannix of MGM talked, and Harry Cohn of Columbia. The glamour capital of the world was as tough a company town as could be found in the coal fields of Pennsylvania or West Virginia. The men behind the movies carried brass knuckles and never hesitated to use them in the crunch.
When George Bancroft had been off the screen for six months, a studio felt they had a good all-star role for him and offered him $25,000 for a six-week guarantee. Nothing doing, said George. His price was $7,500 a week, take it or leave it. When he had been off the screen a year, he was offered $20,000 for a five-week job. No deal, said George, my price is seventy-five hundred a week. Sulking, stonewalling, peach-fuzzed, he was finally forced to accept bit parts that gnawed at his pride. When he finally came back to work for my father again, in Wedding Present, A Doctor’s Diary, and John Meade’s Woman, starring B.P.’s new find, Eddie Arnold, in a role that would have been considered tailor-made for Bancroft five years earlier, George accepted $250 a week. But when he finished his last scene, on a job that began on Monday and wound up on Friday, he asked if he could come to Father’s office. “Ben,” George said, “I think I’ve got an interesting idea for an entirely different kind of screen credit. Instead of putting my name in the cast list, how about putting just a big question mark and then we’ll run a nationwide contest on ‘Guess Who’s Playing This Part?’ People who may have forgotten me will scratch their heads and say, ‘My God, that’s our old favorite, George Bancroft! They should bring him back in a picture of his own!’ And then, Ben, we’ll find a great story, maybe get Ben Hecht to write it, maybe Eddie Arnold and I could co-star, we’ll play two brothers who become rival gangsters in love with the same girl, one hit picture, B.P., that’s all it takes, and then I’ll be right back there on top again.”
Father had to tell George, as gently as he could, that the “Guess Who?” contest would be laughed out of theater lobbies. It would only remind the public of how precipitately the great George Bancroft had tumbled from the top of the mountain. George Bancroft had become George Who? and all the promotional horses and all the publicity men couldn’t put the Underworld superstar together again.