IN THE COURSE OF righteous curiosity, I was to learn more about Sylvia Sidney. Her Hollywood debut, ironically, owed more to Mother’s talent-scouting abilities than to Father’s. On a trip to New York, taking in all the plays, Ben and Ad had seen the 20-year-old Sylvia in the risqué hit, Strictly Dishonorable. Mother prided herself on her ability to spot upcoming actors, directors, and writers who were still “unknowns.” And so that evening, it was Ad who raved about young Sidney’s promise and urged that they go back to her dressing room to introduce themselves. It could have been a scene from one of Father’s movies: the stylish matron in her middle thirties and the elegant, prematurely grey, articulate tycoon at the height of his power and confidence, going backstage to introduce themselves to the fetching ingénue.
Now that the Pola Negris and the Clara Bows were giving way to a new breed who could both dazzle and speak, B.P. was anxious to keep his studio abreast of L.B.’s, and so it was logical that he would back Mother’s judgment and sign young Sylvia before Mayer and Thalberg or the Warner Brothers snapped her up.
I watched Mother’s new rival on the set of City Streets, sitting close to my father while one of his new favorite directors, the brooding Rouben Mamoulian, put her through her paces. I sat with Father, Sylvia, and Mamoulian in the intimacy of the projection room, never sensing that the drama going on around me was more intense than the acting on the screen.
I must say, for both Father and Mother, that until the night their shouting brought me to my bedroom door, their public behavior had been so “correct” that even a greater sophisticate than their firstborn would have been deceived. Whenever I saw Father with Sylvia Sidney, or with any of his other glamorous leading ladies for that matter, he was always a model of decorum. And Mother, no matter what the provocation and humiliation, never took her children into her confidence, or tried to enlist our sympathies against our wandering “Pate,” as my sister now insisted on calling him. With a courage bordering on hypocrisy, Mother went sweetly on, pretending that Father’s habitual and now extended absences from home were due simply to the intense pressure of work at the studio.
My diary continued to be as evasive and self-protective as Mother’s daily cheerfulness. An occasional “worried about Mom and Dad” is as much as I would permit it to reveal of what was happening to our life.
But it was festering inside, so deeply that I could not share the pain of it even with Maurice, although we had shared every other experience from the age often. This time, when Father left home, I knew the reason and, as the dutiful elder son—and dedicated prude—I was determined to do something about it. It never occurred to me, of course, that my father and his young protégée might be in love. I loved our dog Gent and I loved to watch our homing pigeons circling high above their loft. I loved to watch the graceful half-miler, Eastman of Stanford, breeze toward the finish line, and I loved to watch a director who knew what he was doing—like King Vidor or Ernst Lubitsch—take control of his set. I loved to reel in a ten-pound bass from the Malibu kelp and I loved to “sleep over” at Maurice’s and talk about everything we liked or hated and feared until the tropical morning light began to creep under the window shades. Of loves we had many but of love we knew nothing. “Love” was what an actor professed to an actress on the movie screen. Clara Bow with Buddy Rogers in the big fade-out smooch. But that my 40-year-old father and the 20-year-old gamine could be physically, romantically, passionately, and even tragically in love was something my mind was as closed to as the big studio gate was to outsiders peering in.
I would give Miss Sidney no quarter. In my eyes there was nothing she could do to redeem herself, nothing to modify my preconception that Sylvia Sidney was simply the latest (and in Father’s case the most destructive) of the pretty little vampires who sucked his blood to fatten their studio careers. I had no idea how long Father’s liaison with Sidney had been going on, but I knew that discretion on Mother’s part would not protect us from the country-club gossip and the wits who held forth in the studio commissary. If I had been living in a small midwestern town—well, maybe that’s what our Hollywood was—I could not have been more “mortified” by the public scandal that I knew was spreading from one end of the principality to the other, from Malibu to Culver City. I was a palm-tree Puritan.
From the sound of the midnight battle in the bedroom, I knew that Father’s studio cronies were in on It, and that of course Ad’s brother, Uncle Sam the studio manager, knew about It, as did his wife Milly, who loved to check in every morning for a detailed exchange of the news of the day with Poorsarah Mankiewicz, Herman’s wife. For Poorsarah and the ubiquitous Mank, no matter how much they owed to my father, also had a responsibility to their reputation as gossipmongers of a high order. So I could imagine those daily Aunt Milly-Poorsarah shovel-sessions. I could hear Milly’s stylized outcry, “I don’t be-leeve it!” Mildred Jaffe, Mother’s little protégée, who matriculated at Ad Schulberg University and eventually (inevitably) challenged her as our local Queen of Arts. We lived among orange groves that were really poison trees. I would even hear forked-tongue gossip that Aunt Milly had succumbed to the undeniable charms of my father.
Open Modern Screen, say, for the period when I was feeling the first shock waves of Father’s intrigue with Sylvia Sidney, and all on one page we read: “Garbo has a new girl friend—an exotic, amazing person” (Mercedes Acosta); “Latest inside facts about the suit the ex-Mrs. Sternberg is bringing against Marlene”; “Fast and furious rumors about Joan and Doug (Jr.)”; “Betty Compson and Hugh Trevor tell the world they’ll never marry”; “Wedding of Paul Whiteman and Margaret Livingston took place last month but as we go to press rumor has it that there is a rift between them.” I dreaded the issue that would blazon the Schulberg rift.
I went to my punching bag and hit it hard, seeing the provocative little face of Sylvia Sidney bobbing in front of me. Or I would belt her Mamma for good luck. For I had heard—rightly or wrongly didn’t matter to me then—that her mother Sophie was with them, encouraging the affair. It was all part of the obscenity, it seemed to me: Mrs. Kosow serving as madam for her dewy-eyed siren, both on the make for big studio success.
From my mother I had learned to take everything hard, the working and the playing. Pleasure was to be earned and life pursued with Mosaic zeal. Working for A’s in Taking It Hard, I took the stone of Sylvia Sydney to bed with me, swallowed it for breakfast with my cornflakes, felt it stick in my throat as I went through the big studio gate. It didn’t help at all that I found Sylvia painfully appealing, with a New York waif-like quality that was coming into style with the Depression—a kind of female John Garfield. Or that she could play a working-class role like Roberta in An American Tragedy with exciting sexuality. I watched the scene in which her socially ambitious lover, Clyde (Phillips Holmes), takes her for a boat ride on the lake (our studio tank), and decides to drown her so he can marry the debutante (Frances Dee) who represents high society and, for him, upward social mobility. In the famous Dreiser scene, premeditated murder is ironically avoided when the boat tips over accidentally and Roberta drowns.
How good it felt to watch that drowning scene and to see Sylvia pitched into the “lake,” floundering and going under. What an ideal solution! If only I could take Sylvia rowing in Westlake Park, tip the boat over, watch the little homewrecker go down for the third time, and swim to shore insisting it was an accident. The perfect crime. The family saved. I not only watched that scene being filmed, but studied it again on the screen when Father ran the rushes a few doors down from his big office. I listened to Father and Von Sternberg dissect the scene, which take was best, and how to intensify suspense through intercutting—Sylvia nagging about her “condition” and Phillips nervously trying to work himself up to the act of desperation. Father was blowing smoke from his big cigar and insisting that while Sylvia should of course look pregnant and haggard, she must still look sexy and beautiful; after all it was she—and not lovely but somehow “too nice” Frances Dee—who was on her way to stardom.
I listened, sucking it deep into myself, living Phillips Holmes’s role vicariously. But the would-be murderer was careful to keep these feelings to himself.