WHEN IT SEEMED as if I might stay sick indefinitely, Mother decided I was having a benign nervous breakdown. A family trip was prescribed, this time to Mexico. Once again we piled into connecting drawing rooms and went clicking along day after day through the sun-tortured Southwest and the state of Texas that threatened to stretch on to the equator. Again my parents played an incessant game of casino, which sometimes seemed to be their favorite medium of communication, while I raced back and forth through the train with Sonya and enjoyed the observation car.
At the disappointing, muddy-brown Rio Grande, in an elaborate hour-long maneuver, our Pullman car was attached to the Mexican version of the Super Chief—el Maximo Jefe, you might say. The first entry in my diary as we crossed the Mexican border was “I hate Mexico,” a lesson in humility since the day would come when Mexico would be my second home. The Revolution that had begun with the furious peasant armies of Villa and Zapata had fought itself out. The great haciendas had been broken up and the tyranny of Diaz had been overthrown. But although the songs of the Revolution and the heroes it inspired were the stuff of legend, all I could see through my young Hollywood eyes was a hunger that made the poverty of South Los Angeles look like Hearstian grandeur.
Rolling through the wilds of northern Mexico in the privacy of our drawing rooms, the family was drawn together in a ceremony of laughter as Father would interrupt the casino game (in which Mother seemed to lick him three hands out of four) to read us our Benchleys. Robert Benchley, the Life and New Yorker humorist, could make us scream and gasp and grab ourselves in laughter. Even when we knew the words of the sketches by heart, we wanted to hear them again. We wanted to, we needed to, laugh out loud.
When our train slowed to a stop at a village, its station platform seemed a fetid open-air version of my freak class at L.A. High, multiplied by hundreds. Mothers in black rebozos held up babies with swollen bellies and flies on their festered eyes, and extended gnarled hands palms upward in the attitude of the supplicant. Some of the children were mutilated and an American businessman in our parlor car asserted that mothers cut the fingers or toes off babies at birth to make them more appealing to affluent passengers. Was this true, or just another gringo canard? Certainly there were ragtag armies of the mutilated on those rural station platforms: pockmarked heads without ears, women without arms, men and women who stared blindly through eyes glazed with glaucoma.
Some were not beggers but merchants selling tomatoes and avocados, spiny green fruit and tortillas in a cloud of flies. The poor Mexican passengers who of course could not afford to eat in the dining car would buy this fly-encrusted mess and hurry back with it to their hard wooden seats. And I had been uneasy about Oscar the Bootblack! Compared to this company of the crippled and the blind, he was a king.
At one station, outside Guadalajara, I saw from my comfortable drawing-room window a creature more hideous than anything I had ever seen in a Tod Browning movie. At first it looked like some sort of awkward ball rolling over and over across the station platform toward our Pullman. But as I stared at it through the windows, I realized it was not a ball but a man, or what was left of one. The arms and the legs were gone but there were shoulders and knees, and on these it, or rather he, propelled himself forward in a series of somersaults. No one on the platform paid the slightest attention. He must have been a familiar sight, plying his trade like all of the other lost Mexicans drawn here to the station in the backwash of the Revolution.
When he reached the edge of the platform he stopped rolling and looked up at us. A little boy with enormous black eyes took off a tattered straw hat and held it out to us. I asked my father if I could go out and put some money in his hat. “I don’t think it’s safe to go out there,” Mother said. “And anyway, we’ll be pulling out any minute.” And as happened so often, in practical terms she was right. As I went to the end of our parlor car, feeling in my pocket for a twenty-five-cent piece to put in the straw hat of the little boy with the big eyes, the train suddenly lurched forward and began rolling south again. I didn’t think of it then as a single moment in a life of well-intentioned but futile gestures. I only remember the rolling stub of a man and the child with the big straw hat forever held out in front of him, watching without expression—or rather with a look of such historic resignation that it would haunt me all my life.
The nightmare train rolled on into the Mexican darkness. There was a man aboard with the hard fat muscle of a plainclothesman. He wore a brown double-breasted suit with a flowered tie, high black shoes, and a tan stiff-brimmed hat to prove he was middle-class. He had an important black mustache and a way of walking and sitting that was intimidating. He was, we learned, the man who had killed Pancho Villa. I regarded him with awe. I had known actors like George Bancroft, who played killers on the screen but were marshmallow-soft under their makeup and their costumes. And I had met Jack Dempsey when he came calling on Estelle Taylor, the sultry brunette actress who was Mother’s friend. The champion who had been so fierce, even vicious, in the ring turned out to be a friendly and easygoing guy who spoke in an unexpected falsetto, and who didn’t seem to be mad at anybody except his ex-manager Jack Kearns. Movie heavies and famous pugs had nothing in common with the man who had murdered Pancho Villa. When he looked at you he was not interested in you. He wanted nothing from you except your life if he was paid to take it. He didn’t act menacing, or try to be menacing. He just sat there. Intact. He was.
There were two Mexican ladies on our train who were dressed in black. Not because they were in mourning as I first thought, but because they were highborn and rich. Two elderly sisters. Their only ornaments were black ebony crucifixes trimmed in silver and hanging from silver chains. We knew they were upper-upper-class because they were so snooty you could almost hear them sniff as Mexicans with brown skins (mestizos with Indian blood) passed them in the corridors. For the first day they sniffed at us just as they did at all the others. But when they heard that Father was the grand jefe of a Hollywood movie studio, they decided to strike up a conversation. It began in the dining car when we happened to sit at tables across the aisle from each other.
“Dolores del Rio?” asked the elder of the two sisters. She spoke the name in Spanish with an air of infinite refinement. We all looked at each other in astonishment. Father responded with the social charm that was one of his trademarks. “Yes, Señora, we know Dolores del Rio.”
The ladies nodded to each other and the conversation continued.
“Lupe Velez?”
How many times had we seen the tempestuous Lupe in the front row at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, pounding on the blood-stained canvas of the ring and screaming profane Mexican incantations at brown-skinned countrymen who were failing to live up to her high standards of combat? One night we had seen her stand up and cup her hands to shout some words of pugilistic wisdom to a light, handsome, Mexican-Indian lightweight named Rojas. Rojas turned to look at Lupe. Lupe was easy to look at. In fact he had been openly flirting with her between rounds. Even I, who professed to hate girls, and who was surrounded by young women whose profession it was to be pretty, often found myself staring at Lupe. So Rojas turned his head and looked down the better to hear Lupe’s advice. It was the last thing he heard for several minutes as he lay unconscious on the canvas, his head so close to Lupe’s that she could have reached out and cradled her fallen gladiator in her arms. Instead she was screaming “Hijo! Get up, you son-of-a-beech… !”
“Yes, Señoras,” my father smiled his most ingratiating smile, “we also know Lupe Velez.”
The aged sisters shook their heads and made polite clucking noises of disapproval.
“Dolores del Rio, si,” said the elder. “Lupe Velez, no!”
“Del Rio, si, Velez, no!” her sister seconded the verdict.
There was no more to be said on that subject, or indeed any other, for those were the only words we had in common. Later that afternoon when we passed each other in the Pullman corridor, our new Mexican friends rewarded us with the slightest of bows, the faintest of smiles, and their considered opinion of life in Hollywood: “Dolores del Rio, si! Lupe Velez, no!”
We felt we were selling poor Lupe short but, after all, this was a long journey down through the cactus country and the parched plains of Sonora and one had to be sociable. So we nodded in agreement. Next morning at breakfast we greeted each other like old friends.
“Dolores del Rio, si!” said the elder sister. “Lupe Velez, no!” said the younger. Poor, hot-tempered, lovable Lupe didn’t get a single vote all the way to Mexico City.
I wanted to know why the ladies felt so strongly about the respective qualities of our two leading Mexican actresses. Dolores, my father explained, was a daughter of the Mexican aristocracy. Her father was a wealthy banker. Her mother was one of the Asunsolos, distinguished in the arts. But Lupe’s mother had been a walker of the streets. (With all his vices, Father refrained from the vulgarisms commonly associated with Hollywood speech.) Lupe herself had made her theatrical debut in the raunchy burlesque houses of the city. Stagedoor Juanitos panted for her favors and Mama Velez would sell her for the evening to the highest bidder. Her price soared to thousands of pesos. Hence, Dolores, si, Lupe, no!
Another flash of memory of that primordial journey to Mexico: In Durango, when we stopped at nightfall, our American businessman know-it-all tour guide explained that an armored car was being added to the train, with a detachment of soldiers, because the Yaqui Indians were on the warpath (just like a John Ford movie!) and had been swooping down on horseback, stopping trains, making the passengers line up outside their cars, then taking all their possessions and sometimes even their clothes. Everybody in the first-class cars became very friendly, drawn together in a communion of fear. Passengers sat up through the night, waiting for the Yaqui attack. But the Indians never obliged. They were up there in their mountains, waiting, perhaps for another Revolution. We could see the glow of tiny fires or perhaps candlelight from the paneless windows of the distant one-room adobe huts in the foothills.
In the armored car, soldiers in sloppy uniforms dozed over their rifles inherited from the Great War. I watched the killer of Pancho Villa snoring in his parlor chair and as his broad chest hunched up his coat jacket I could see the silver holster of the .45 he carried on his hip.
As we pulled into the big station in Mexico City, we saw two men of swarthy complexion, wearing serapes over their business suits, hug each other tightly while pounding each other’s backs. That, Mother explained, is how Mexican men greet one another. When we stepped off the train, one of the backpounders turned to greet us. He was the Paramount representative in Mexico, he said with a bow as he presented his card, “Bienvenido a Mehico!”
In the limousine on our way to the hotel, our host pointed out various sights of the strange and, to me, filthy-looking city.
“Were you born here?” Mother asked.
“Born here? Whaddya think I am?” Our host lapsed into perfect New Yorkese: “I’m a landsman. My name is Kaplan. I came down seven years ago and married a Mexican girl—from an old Jewish family. Did you know the oldest shul in North America is right here in Mexico City? Before you leave I’ll bring you home for a nice kosher meal. Even the chili peppers are kosher!”
That night after dinner we took a walk with Sr. Kaplan. Turning off the main street, the Paseo de la Reforma, which Maximilian and Carlotta had built to resemble the Champs Elysées, we looked into the open doorways of ancient houses where candles were burning before small altars. We saw women on their knees praying to the figure of a dark Madonna. We had arrived, our Jewish-Mexican guide explained, at a tense and historic moment. The assassin of President-elect General Obregón—a young Catholic fanatic named José de Léon Toral—was to be executed at sunrise. Although the Catholic Church had been banned by the Revolutionary Party now ruling Mexico, and priests were not allowed to wear their cassocks in public, the Church still had millions of adherents, especially women, who considered Toral a martyr to the cause of the Cristeros. Sr. Kaplan did not think the Toral affair would touch off a new insurrection. The provisional President, Portes Gil, had the Army behind him and even though there were organized bands of Cristeros, especially in the back country, Sr. Kaplan was not too worried.
“Every couple of months we have a little revolution, but I think we’ve seen the last of the big ones,” he assured us. “The generals who led the old Revolution are mostly interested in getting rich now. There may be some shoot-’em-ups on election day, but no Pancho Villas: Too many people died. They say the Mexicans are in love with death but even they get sick of dying. No, this Toral thing will blow over. But the trouble is, a situation like this knocks the hell out of our business. The Mexicans are great movie fans. They love our Westerns and the costume pictures and you should hear ’em laugh at the slapstick comedies. But when they set up army patrols like tonight, it’s murder at the box office.”
Sr. Kaplan spoke politely in his perfect Mexican Spanish to sinister groups of soldiers at various intersections of the broad and silent boulevard. I pictured the young assassin—a cartoonist for a Catholic paper, Kaplan had told us—praying on his knees in his dark prison cell as he waited for dawn and the firing squad. I had seen things like this in the movies, but somehow the movies made it seem glossier and more melodramatic than it really was. There was something casual, almost matter-of-fact in the way the brown-skinned soldados fingered their old old-fashioned rifles or leaned against a lamp post to smoke a cigarette. What history would record as a critical counter-revolution put down by an aggressive government dictatorship was for us a quiet stroll through the dark streets of an ancient city a million miles from the laundered estates of Windsor Square.
After the execution, when the authorities were satisfied that the Cristeros were not taking to the streets, the people poured out into the parks and onto the sidewalks filled with vendors selling newspapers, cheap candies, lottery tickets… With his happy blend of Bronx and Latin enthusiasm, Sr. Kaplan took us on the round of tourist attractions. We drove out to Teotihuacan to marvel at those architectural improbabilities, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. I was not yet a quasi- or would-be archeologist, but the seeds were planted as I sweated my way up the largest pyramid this side of Cheops’.
Dutifully we boated through the floating gardens of Xochimilco, another marvel of pre-Columbian ingenuity. At Sr. Kaplan’s urging, we even submitted ourselves to our first bullfight. But even our many nights at prizefights had not prepared us for this bloody spectacle. As the first scrawny horse was toppled over and the cruel spear of the picador brought forth a gushing well of blood from the shoulder muscles of the bull stubbornly pushing against the pain, Mother looked away, I stared at my clenched fingers trying not to faint, and Father chewed on his big cigar and grew very pale. With an unannounced but unanimous vote, we all rose and started up the wide aisle toward the exit. Aficionados voiced their resentment of gringo queasiness as we hurried toward the safety of the tunnel. Years later, when I came to embrace rather than reject Mexico, I would learn to accept the corrida as the ultimate expression of her orgiastic culture. But on that initial escape from what seemed to me the butchery in the arena, I was simply reinforced in my dread of Mexico as a country of vicious extremes where the people were dedicated to blood-lust and death was a way of life.
When Sr. Kaplan took us to the famous House of Tiles, the palatial sixteenth-century home of the Marquis del Valle—now transformed by American ingenuity into Sanborn’s, a flourishing restaurant, gift shop, and drugstore—I was distracted by the human carpet of beggars sleeping on newspapers in the entranceway. Our indefatigable Sr. Kaplan nimbly stepped through them, waving us to follow. It was unnerving to try to find room to set down first one foot and then another among the faces, arms, legs, and ragged bodies of old men, women, and children. By the time we had managed to gain entrance to the brilliant, high-ceilinged interior, entirely decorated in colonial tile, Sr. Kaplan’s description of its history and architectural elegance was tainted by the reality of the homeless lying outside. As we looked at the expensive menu, I could not get them out of my mind. But Sr. Kaplan chatted on about theater grosses and the rosy prospects for Paramount distribution if only the Mehicanos would put their pistolas away and settle down to business.
As our Mexican holiday drew to a close, it was still beggars rather than box office that said Mexico to me. It was still sad-eyed mothers in dusty rebozos, with one baby at the breast and another swelling in the belly, squatting outside the massive cathedral, palms reaching toward us for a pinch of the gold they pictured in our pockets.
I hated the relationship: Walk rich among the poor! I blamed the Church for flaunting all that gold and leaving its children to starve in its very courtyard. In Hollywood I had seen many who were hungry for fame and the main chance, and at L.A. High there were Negroes, Mexicans, and a few Japanese dressed shabbily in what were probably hand-me-downs. But raised in my celluloid cocoon, I had never looked into the eyes of the truly hungry.