WHEN I WENT BACK TO Father’s office with him, we talked for a few minutes about my summer job—instead of my working as a sports stringer for the Los Angeles Times, he thought it was time for me to take my first “regular” job. Maurice was going to work at MGM, so it seemed fitting that I should enroll at Paramount. B.P. suggested I break in with the publicity department, as he had with Adolph Zukor in the old Famous Players days. He had done the same thing for Zukor’s son, Eugene. “The old man,” as Zukor père was called, sent his son to B.P. for assignment in the minuscule publicity department of the New York office. “Do you know how to write a publicity release?” Father asked him. Young Gene wasn’t sure. “Well, here’s some paper,” B.P. said, “and there’s a typewriter. Sit down and write one.” Gene sat down in panic, not even sure he could type his own name. Then B.P. gave him some facts—the new Mary Pickford picture, the title, the featured players, the theater in which it would open. Years later Gene would say that he never forgot that experience, akin to Sam Goldwyn’s challenge to an aspiring scenarist, “So you’re a writer? Here’s a pencil. Write.”
As soon as I got my highschool diploma, I was given a week off to recover from graduation before reporting to Teet Carle, an experienced publicity man in the flourishing department headed by veteran newsman Arch Reeves. “It won’t be a snap job,” Father promised. “I’ve told Arch to work the hell out of you. And to fire you if you don’t pull your weight. Just the way I told Mr. Zukor I would fire Gene. It’s what I call ‘enlightened nepotism.’”
My literate old man, never at a loss for words or clever phrases, kept at me to enlarge my vocabulary, to read (all of Dickens, all of Melville and Twain …), and to “Here’s a pencil—there’s a typewriter—write!”
This was what I loved about my old man. You couldn’t dismiss him as a boozer, a gambler, a wencher. He had intellect, and at his best, in the good years, he used it well. I sat in that big office and one part of my mind despised him for what he was doing to my mother, and to my sister and little brother, with this Sidney thing. If only I could kill that part of him and keep intact the intellect, the literary bent, the filmmaking skill, the creative drive…
Burlesques and satires of Hollywood like Once in a Lifetime had reinforced the stereotype of the movie producer as an illiterate cloak-and-suiter who could say with the profane Harry Cohn of Columbia, “When my ass begins to itch, that’s what tells me there’s something wrong with the story.” As Mank liked to point out, “The trouble with this business is that people like Harry Cohn think the taste of the American public is wired to their ass.” But what the satanic Mankiewicz said about Father was quite the opposite. “The trouble with your old man,” he confided to me in his book-cluttered office at the studio, “is that he’s read too goddamn many books. That can get you in a lot of trouble out here. B.P. should have stayed in New York [where Mank had served as drama critic of The World], and if only he hadn’t sent for me out here, I might have been writing Once in a Lifetime with George [Kaufman].”
Poor Mank, Hollywood’s Ambrose Bierce, was a spendthrift in every way, including brilliant lines which he wasted on studio commissary quips, cocktail chatter, and story-conference ripostes. It was typical of a play Mank had written and submitted to my father, who passed it on to me, that the stage directions sparkled with witticisms that outdazzled the dialogue.
Sitting in on a story conference with my father and Mank was enlightening entertainment. I listened to Father and his other top writers analyzing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the language of cinema. These weren’t ignoramuses butchering the classics; they were men and women who knew their Stevenson and were serious about bringing his work to the screen as authentically as possible. “Don’t change Stevenson just for the fun of rewriting him,” Father was urging. “You can kill a classic with ‘improvements.’ A big, sprawling novel, say Bleak House, you have to pare down to a continuity that will hold an audience for ninety or a hundred minutes. But remember, Jekyll and Hyde already has a continuity. We don’t have to waste time hammering out a story line. What you have to do is visualize it, think of every scene as the camera will see it and not as you—or Stevenson—would describe it in prose.
“We’ve got the makings of a great picture. A great story, a great director [Rouben Mamoulian], a great cast [Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins], and a great cameraman in Karl [Struss]. But take it from an old scriptwriter, every one of us is only as good as our script. You can build the most beautiful building in the world, I don’t care if it’s Monticello or the Taj Mahal—but if it doesn’t have a solid foundation, down it falls.”
Father didn’t deliver this from behind the big mahogany desk, but on his feet pacing as was his habit, twirling the gold chain of his diamond-studded watch clockwise around his index finger, then counterclockwise in what seemed a hypnotic perpetual motion.
He wasn’t stammering now. He was eloquent. His face was slightly flushed. His eyes, always bulging a little, gleamed with excitement. A lot of boiler-plate comedies and “mellers” had to be ground out by the majors to fill the public hunger for at least one new movie a day. Television was still almost twenty years away and America went to the movies virtually en masse. But Jekyll and Hyde was different. Here was a chance to please Bob Sherwood, make the coveted Ten Best list, and still bring Paramount the profit it needed to keep its head above water in these tricky Depression days.
Watching B.P. send his scenarists back to the Writers’ Building all fired up to do or die for Paramount, I was reminded of Pat O’Brien playing Knute Rockne in that jockstrap classic, The Spirit of Notre Dame: “Men, you’re going out there in the second half and win it for the Gipper!”
Sometimes when one story conference was over, I had a few moments alone with my father before the next began. He did work deep into the night. It wasn’t all booze-time and poker and play with Sylvia. A studio head functioned in a pressure cooker of unrealistic starting dates, impossible demands from New York, and the vicious competition of the rival “majors.” In the early Thirties, Hollywood was still working a six-day week—the long weekend had not yet become a way of life. But even before the unions won the five-day-forty, the mogul reminded me of a hamster in his cage running in place to keep up with himself. There was no way that a man in charge of a schedule geared to producing movies on the average of one a week, year in, year out, could have time for family or friends who were not also his working associates, or for creative diversion away from the movie machine. With rare exceptions like Irving Thalberg, who was a mama’s boy with a weak heart, the demands of the dream factory drove the studio heads to manic behavior. In the wenching or gambling or drinking of Jack Warner, Dave Selznick (only a junior mogul then), Harry Cohn, and B.P., there was a fevered quality, an unquiet desperation. The casino tables, the casting couch, the studio bootleggers, and the private bars more lavish than the best of the speakeasies offered swift surcease to these pressure people. The gaming rooms of the Clover Club were a study in ten-thousand-a-week anxieties.
Graduating from L. A. High was like adolescent menopause. Somehow I had survived my tennis disasters, my traumatic exposure to the half-mile on the track team, my stammering breakdown in English debate, my dread of having to take girls to school dances or squire them to parties. I had learned to write declarative sentences for the daily, and to run it efficiently. I had quietly fought my way up through a teeming interracial high school to become a member of the various status groups that ran it. As a first-rate editor and a third-rate athlete, I had become a campus figure. If my poetry was at a standstill, my short stories seemed to be improving. Even my hard taskmaster of a father, when I could catch him between rushes or conferences or drinks, would mutter an occasional, “Not bad. Better than the last one. But still not quite De Maupassant.” At least he wasn’t slamming it down on the dining-room table and pronouncing it “Lousy!” Mother, on the other hand, was her consistent Coué self. I had started on a level somewhere between De Maupassant and Tolstoy, and “Day by day in every way you’re getting better and better!”
Somehow I had managed to get through high school without a single serious date, coping with the graduation dance by being the first to volunteer to rush down to the basement for extra floor wax, and to provide whatever auxiliary services a veteran wallflower could invent. In that last week before we headed off to our respective studios for our summer jobs, Maurice and I were still talking late into the night, determined to solve our “girl” problem. In a later day we undoubtedly would have been marked as queers. But we knew that we felt no sexual attraction to each other or to other boys. We had simply—well, not so simply—built a fear of the opposite sex into a cult. Just as we had once run from the house and camped out under a tree on our pastoral Hollywood block if a girl our age arrived with our parents’ friends, so now we clung to our companionship and all the games of our youth. But the growing pains were setting in.