WHEN ALL OF MOTHER’S psychiatrists and all of Father’s Hollywood vocal therapists couldn’t mend my broken speech, I was allowed to drop out of public school, where my peers never seemed to tire of the humor inherent in imitating a chronic stammer. At the Los Angeles Coaching School, run by a venerable monster by the name of Macurda, there were only five or six students to a teacher, and the faculty was better able to cope with problems like mine. The other students were either misfits of one sort or another, or professional working children who could benefit from the concentrated and abbreviated schedule. Instead of languishing in a thirty-student classroom until three P.M., we were out at noon. Inevitably, Maurice became restive at the most conventional public school. Meanwhile I found it difficult to fill in the three hours until our daily partnership was reunited. Over the usual objections of Grandma Rapf, Maurice’s parents surprisingly gave him permission to join me at the Coaching School.
After we dutifully put in our three hours, Maurice and I would grab a bite at a lunch counter and rush downtown to the theater district to see the current movies. Armed with our gold passes we would race from feature to feature, and since movies averaged ninety minutes in those days, we often managed to take in four in the course of a single afternoon. No daily film critic could have worked harder. Miles of celluloid streamed through our minds. We saw the godawful (30 percent), the passable (45 percent), the good (15 percent), and the better-than-good to excellent (that happy 10 percent), and we argued their merits with the knowledge if not the style of a Robert E. Sherwood, a pioneer of serious film criticism. Our heads were stockpiled with ammunition in the war between our fathers’ studios. I would argue that my father was smarter than Thalberg because Irving had given up on Von Sternberg while B.P. had made him one of our top directors. Maurice would counter by reminding me that my father had used Wallace Beery in routine comedies teamed with Raymond Hatton while his father had realized the dramatic potential of that grizzled alumnus of Mack Sennett slapstick. And indeed his old man’s Min and Bill comedies with Beery and Marie Dressier put the burly comic on the road to dramatic success in The Champ, The Big House, and Grand Hotel.
Seeing movies all afternoon, watching rushes and rough cuts in our fathers’ projection rooms, taking the Red Car (halfway between a streetcar and a short-line Super Chief) to the previews at Glendale, Burbank, and Pasadena, we couldn’t help becoming premature or self-appointed experts on the art of the cinema. We knew why Charlie Chaplin was almost as funny but somehow not as moving in The Circus as he had been in The Gold Rush. We traded names like picture cards of major-league baseball players. My father thought he might have “a blonde Clara Bow” in gum-chewing, wisecracking Alice White, who stole Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from Ruth Taylor. Maurice thought Alice White was a flash-in-the-pan compared to Sally O’Neill and that “my” Esther Ralston would never have the star power of “his” Norma Shearer. We argued the relative merits of two Jewish charmers, my Evelyn Brent and his Carmel Myers, and of two suave leading men, my Adolphe Menjou and his Ronald Colman. Seeing almost all of the four to five hundred pictures Hollywood was grinding out every year, we could name not only the top ten but the top one hundred actors and actresses, including names still far down the list like Janet Gaynor, Mary Astor, Lionel Barrymore, and William Powell.
Both studios managed each year to make a handful of classics and a truckful of turkeys. Often it seemed a dead heat as to which studio could make the worst pictures. I cringed for Hula, a carbon copy of a carboncopy Clara Bow story, where everybody gets drunk and Clara inevitably takes off her clothes and dances on a table. Maurice was unable to come to the defense of a weirdo Tod Browning picture, The Unknown, in which Lon Chaney cuts off his arms to prove his love for Joan Crawford and thinks this sacrifice will induce her to marry him. On the other hand there were honorable failures like Father’s Old Ironsides, in which Jim Cruze and the screenwriters effectively recreated the atmosphere of the three-masted U.S.S. Constitution, sailing into battle against the Tripoli pirates. I had crossed from the mainland to Catalina Island on a replica of Old Ironsides, and had spent an idyllic summer on location there. I watched the veteran Cruze maneuver those unwieldy sailing ships, took swimming lessons from the Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku, and received the obligatory attention of the cast: Wallace Beery as the burly bos’n, George Bancroft (hot from Underworld) as an embattled gunner, with Charley Farrell and Esther Ralston supplying the somewhat implausible “love interest.” The formidable black heavyweight George Godfrey, also aboard, talked fights and sparred with me. I was in a Paramount paradise.
Also with us on location was Dorothy Arzner, one of Paramount’s best film editors, whom Ad was urging Ben to promote to the ranks of directors. Soon she would get that chance—follow the path of the original, Lois Weber—and become one of the top directors of the Thirties and Forties.
It had been Father’s expectation that Old Ironsides would do for the canvas Navy what MGM’s The Big Parade had done for the doughboys of the Great War. He thought it had everything, the romantic involvement of our fledgling Navy in a war against pirates, a score so stirring that I could hum it all my life, and a dramatic technical innovation: the curtains on stage rolling back to reveal a superscreen more than twice as large as the standard 12 x 18.
Expecting the bows he had taken for Beau Geste and Underworld, Father was bewildered and angry when the picture was praised by the critics but ignored by the public. As self-appointed experts, Maurice and I knew what was wrong with Old Ironsides. It was too long. It was strong on history and production values but short on story and character development; it insisted on being an epic. Judicious editing by the incisive Dorothy Arzner would have helped, but Father had fallen into one of those prevalent Hollywood traps Mother kept warning him against: self-deception. Seduced by his own press-agentry, he persisted in overpraising Old Ironsides and was gallantly prepared to go down with the ship.