ONE DAY I WAS APPROACHING THE INTERSECTION OF OUR QUIET Lorraine and stately Wilshire Boulevards when the wail of saxophones attracted my attention to two white Pierce-Arrows cruising down Wilshire in tandem. In the rear seat of the chauffeur-driven lead car was the handsome, ruddy-faced, ever-grinning Mickey Neilan, with his arm around a dark-haired beauty, Father’s obstreperous Gloria Swanson. And in the motorized chariot behind them, another chauffeur drove half a dozen jazzmen of the Abe Lyman Orchestra, there to serenade the royal couple wherever they went, and believe me they went everywhere, from the raucous all-night Plantation Club to the decorous gingerbread castle of the Hotel Del Coronado.
I waved from my bike and Mickey, whom I had known all the way from the early Pickford-Famous Players days to those cross-country extravaganzas on the Chief, waved back with his broad, infectious Irish grin. The entire scene was over in a few ticks of the stopwatch I carried in my pocket, but the moment still shines like a diamond in the crown of memory. Did I know then, as I sat on my bike absorbing the splendors not of a mogul but of an irrepressible Irish king, that his silver train of Pierce-Arrows was doomed to sweep down Wilshire Boulevard until it reached the Palisades and plunged into the obscurity of the sea? There must have been something more than a casual wave to a famous director with whom I was only marginally acquainted to make that moment so memorable. A little bird of reality seemed to be cawing, “Too much … too soon … too good to last…”
The reality bird may have been the voice of my mother who never lost her ghetto sense of survival. Facing the gusty winds of Hollywood, she would bend but never break. She might spend sums of money on clothes and houses, American antiques, private schools, travel, and favorite forward-looking charities but she spent wisely, with care and taste, keeping a ledger of investments, determined never to return to the poverty of an impractical father and a trapped mother. While Father didn’t spend money so much as he flung it away by the fistful.
I went up to do the math homework I loathed, leaving Father at the card table with Zeppo Marx. Zeppo was the rather good-looking one who played the inane romantic leads in the Marx Brothers comedies: the only Marx brother who wasn’t funny. Whatever frustrations Zeppo may have suffered in front of the cameras, eclipsed as he was by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, he more than compensated for them with an aggressive card sense that made him the terror of the moguls. He could destroy the smartest of them, with a deck of cards in lieu of a pistol.
When I came down for breakfast next morning at seven o’clock, Father and Zeppo were just winding up the game and settling accounts. I watched as Father wrote out a check for $22,000. He was potted from all-night drinking (while cool-head Zep kept mental record of every card discarded), and I remember his hearty laugh. He loved laughing as much as he did living and losing.
I went off to school with a troubled mind. I wasn’t worried about our going broke. It never occurred to me that such losses could drain the plentiful Schulberg reservoir until it would be as dry as the Los Angeles River. At that time Father’s hold on the studio still seemed secure. I knew Hollywood was a roller coaster, but I was too busy or complacent to worry about the Schulbergs ever hurtling off the track. But over there on Western Avenue I had seen a lot of kids who were poor. South of Wilshire Boulevard, in the streets around Pico, I had seen Mexicans and Japanese who worked as gardeners, fruit-pickers, street vendors. I lay no claim to premature social consciousness. I could see that there were people on the bottom, in the middle, and at the top but I was too young, too rich, and too obsessed with my own activities to have much time left for social analysis. So it was less a process of thinking than of feeling that there was something not quite right in Mickey Neilan’s go-for-broke world of white Pierce-Arrows, and Father’s embarrassing and totally unnecessary custom-made town car, or $22,000 tossed away on a friendly game of chance. Something was rotten—whispered my little reality bird—in the state of Hollywood.
When I came down for breakfast on another school morning I found one of Father’s favorite writers, Herman Mankiewicz (a refugee from the New York World and the Algonquin Round Table, known later for his screenplay of Citizen Kane), winding up a casino duel with B.P. There was genius in Mank—“a spoiled priest,” Scott Fitzgerald would call him—but at the card table he was no Zeppo Marx. This time Mank was the loser, out $15,000, and since Father was making five times the salary Mank was earning as a screenwriter, he arranged to have installments taken out of Mank’s weekly paychecks for the next three months until they were even again.
Here were two of Hollywood’s more sophisticated intellects playing like kids with tens of thousands of dollars that never seemed real to them. It was like funny money you could buy in the ten-cent store. But Mother knew it was real, and although I was drawn to Father’s style, his unique combination of intellectual curiosity and robust joy of life, his superiority to the moguls I knew as tough, selfish, ignorant, and mean, I was shocked by the vulgarity of his mindless gambling. Not that I coveted the money myself. But the waste of it, seemingly for the sheer sake of waste, was not easy to understand. Maurice’s father may not have had the searching mind, the education, and the literary leanings of mine, but at least he didn’t drink as if the scotch faucet was being turned off in the morning, and he didn’t squander four-figure money on the flip of a card.
One Monday morning after Father had played through a weekend poker game with a motley group of Reno professionals and Hollywood high rollers, I asked him in their presence how he could bear losing almost $10,000. Maybe I could understand it if he won, I said, but losing that kind of money—or more—week after week (when he could have bought San Fernando Valley or given it to the poor) was beyond my comprehension. “Buddy, you don’t understand,” Father tried to define it: “Winning and losing is the same thing. It doesn’t matter. It’s the excitement of playing.”
I felt baffled and frustrated. But the daughter of Nick the Greek—somehow she materialized like one of those unbelievable/believable creations of Lewis Carroll—spiritedly seconded B.P. “Your father’s so right!” she shouted at me. “If you’re a real gambler, you never care if you win or lose. It’s the excitement, the thrill, everything riding on how you play your hand—and then the turn of a card!”
I had heard a lot about Father’s gambling, mostly through laments from Ad, but I had never thought about it deeply before. Ad’s theory was that Father was basically a sensitive and serious man who knew in his heart that nobody was worth $11,000 a week, that he was wracked with guilt and self-doubt about earning that kind of money when his father had been lucky to make five or six dollars a week and when his own brothers Louie and Arthur were struggling to keep a small toy business alive in The Bronx. Father’s sisters were also married to men whose lives ran on the rim of failure. Only Ben had broken through the money barrier into a stratosphere shining with dollar signs instead of stars.
Whatever the explanation, Father was from his premature grey hair to his pedicured pink toenails a gambling man. One Sunday evening after a disastrous Saturday night at the Clover Club, the fever was still in him. Sometimes, in need of action, he would play (and lose) to Mother. But this time in desperation he offered to flip me for half a dollar. I lost. Double or nothing? I lost again. To make the confrontation more bizarre, it all took place—for some reason I can no longer remember—in the bathroom. What I do remember is that I kept losing. I might win an occasional flip, but it seemed as if three out of four times I was on the wrong side of the coin. Suddenly B.P. was doing to me what Zeppo Marx and the pros from Reno to Caliente had been doing to him for years.
When I got too far behind he gave me a chance to get even by raising the bets to a dollar. And when I still came up a loser, he offered to double the ante again. After all, I reassured myself, sooner or later the law of averages would have to assert itself. So I accepted. But nervously. I was betting to win. The Jaffe side of me was worried about losing so much money. I didn’t think in terms of Father’s eleven-thousand-dollars-a-week, although I would have to think about it later as I tried to find my own place in society. All the fathers of the boys I played with in Windsor Square were making thousands of dollars a week. When I heard my father mention someone as “only making” a thousand a week, I associated the figure with actors, directors, or writers in the lower brackets.
Still, my sense of values was attuned to my own five-dollar-a-week allowance, and what I could earn from my soft-drink business with Maurice, and the extra payments (or cultural bribes) I’d get from Mother for reading the classics. So as this bathroom gambling session with Father escalated from the innocent flip of the coin with which it had begun, I suddenly heard Father telling me I was out two hundred dollars. “How about it, Buddy. Double or nothing?”
“N-n-n-n …” I shook my head NO. I was still thinking like a non-gambler. In terms of real money. How could I pay back $400? It would take me six months of self-deprivation. I went on losing until my debt reached $250. Father was flushed with victory. Like a losing fighter who finally finds himself in the ring with someone he can lick. I was flushed, too, but with fear of losing. It never occurred to me that Father would say, “That’s all right, Buddy, forget it, we were only playing.” That was the human side of him, and when he was human he was extremely human. But when he was gambling he was as crazed as Dostoevsky at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden.
Dostoevsky was in that bathroom with us. Father had read aloud to me and urged me to start reading myself the short novels of the Russian master. All his life he dreamt of doing The Eternal Husband as a film, and while I was still in high school we made some stabs at breaking it down together into screenplay form. So I felt a kinship to Dostoevsky, not only through his work (though the major novels were still in store for me) but through his life as Father revealed it to me in bits and pieces. That’s how I knew that our Feodor had gone to Wiesbaden to make a fortune on the turn of the wheel, had lost stake after stake until he was virtually pauperized again, and had gone away not defeated and suicidal but strangely exhilarated. No wonder Father and Feodor, in my young mind, became a single image of paternity. “Five hundred rubles,” Dostoevsky was saying with that mad glint in the eye. “Double or nothing!”
I managed to mumble “Double” and won. On the next toss of the coin I would either owe or win a thousand dollars, a modest weekly paycheck at the studio but a towering fortune to the young man Ad had taught the difference between Hollywood money and the real thing. When I looked up at Father-Feodor, and felt him almost trembling with anticipation of the next toss, something within me cracked, and I cried out, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to play anymore. Let’s stop! Can’t we stop?!”
The outburst had an immediate effect. It was able to reach Father and bring him back to sanity. “I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t be teaching you to gamble. Ad would kill me.”