OF COURSE, THE ONE STAR ON THE LOT I WOULD NOT HAVE INTERVIEWED if I had tripped over her was Sylvia Sidney. If I knew she was working on a set, even one I was eager to see, I would avoid it like the pox. A plague that would carry her off to the Hollywood Cemetery around the corner is what I wished for that little predator. While I didn’t exonerate my father, it was easier to focus my callow but bone-deep hatred on a stranger, an outsider, an intruder.
I took my problem to Felix Young, despite the fact that Mother always looked down on him as a poseur and a hanger-on with his fancy cologne, his raffish clothes, and his eppis-elegant speech. “Superficial” was Mother’s word for our friend Feel, and she may have been right that there was more style than substance in Father’s handpicked supervisor. And she may also have been right to assume that as a sycophant, without any noticeable qualifications except charm and panache, he would have to take Father’s side in the liaison. Mother even accused him of going further, of actually encouraging the affair and serving as a “beard” when Father and “the Sidney woman” appeared in public.
Nevertheless, Felix would listen, and so in his spacious office overlooking the studio quadrangle I poured out my feelings. In a few months I would be leaving Hollywood on my own for the first time since our arrival. (I had been accepted provisionally, at a far-off place called Dartmouth, but the consensus was that I was too young, emotionally unprepared for the great leap from Hollywood to Hanover; so, to ease the culture shock, I was to put in a transitional year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.) But, I told Felix, the tension between Father and Mother was now so intense—with constant bickering, open fighting, and Dad’s frequent disappearances—that I felt the family structure would tear apart if I weren’t there to hold it together. I simply had to make Father see the light. Otherwise, I pleaded with my Victorian morality, what would happen to Sonya, a gentle, introspective, and already somehow lost 11-year-old, and little Stuart, who was only seven, and needed his family to develop normally? Because B.P., married to his work, had never been a real father-father, I felt responsible for my only sister and only brother. Not that I ever spent much time with them. Hardly a better “father” to them than their actual father, I moralized about them far more than I actually helped them. But, in my mind at least, I had become the family linchpin. How could I go east, with our home life in such disarray? I’m afraid I had read too much Dickens. Without me, I could see Father disintegrating into a hopeless drunk, Mother thrown on the mercies of a heartless society, and poor Sonya and Stuart winding up in the county orphanage.
Suave and soothing, Felix did his best to reassure me. I was too young to understand these things. No one was as perfect as I thought they should be. Maybe the best thing for me to do was not to interfere, try not to take it so hard, concentrate on my own job of doing well at Deerfield and developing my writing. Did I know Father thought I showed signs of becoming a better writer than he had been at my age—when he was on the threshold of his own career?
Although Felix spoke with genuine concern, it wasn’t good enough. I begged him to talk to Father about giving up Sidney. Make him realize how he was destroying our family and my peace of mind. Otherwise, I warned Feel, I was determined to take things into my own hands. I would call Mother and Father together before I left, and if I did not succeed in getting them to promise to bury their differences and resume life together, I would cancel my trip east and stay home to keep them together. And also, I told Feel, I was considering going to Sylvia Sidney myself, telling her off, and—I added almost casually—threatening to kill her unless she left Father alone.
By this time my moral guide had switched from Dickens to Dostoevsky. Felix urged me not to do anything foolish and promised to help put our house back together.
Working hard at the studio, playing furious tennis on Malibu weekends, I was unable to take Felix Young’s advice not to worry so much about Sidney. Dad still took me to the Friday-night fights, but tension between us spoiled the old excitement when we rooted together for our Jewish champions. He was still living with us, technically, but Sylvia and her mother had rented a large house just outside the Malibu Colony, only a few miles south, and it was now an open secret as to where he spent his time away from the studio. It was a knife twist in the wound to have to pass her place on the Pacific Highway on the way to our once-peaceful Green Gate Cottage.
By this time, in place of my jazzy Model-A roadster, I had inherited Father’s Dusenberg phaeton. A notoriously poor driver, he found it easier to operate his Lincoln roadster. For some reason, maybe because of his erratic habits, he did not like to use the chauffeur. It made him self-conscious, he said, to have someone sitting in a car waiting for hours while he watched rushes, went off the lot for occasional luncheon meetings at Perino’s or Victor Hugo’s, stopped at the Clover Club, or (though he didn’t admit this) went on his nocturnal prowls.
Driving back from the studio in midtown Hollywood, once I reached the two-lane Coast Road I would gun that fifteen-thousand-dollar toy until the murky ocean on my left and the sunbaked palisades on my right were falling away behind me at a speed of almost one hundred miles an hour. That was a real Duzie. Sold later to a professional antique-car collector, it turns up occasionally in movies trying to recapture the look of luxury in the early Thirties.
I felt I was paying for that car pretty dearly by having to drive it past Miss Sidney’s beach house in order to reach our two-story “cottage.” Sometimes I would slow down, stare at the forbidding fence of the Sidney house and think dark thoughts about what was happening within. There must be some way I could put death into that house! Like using the tomcod I caught off the pier, lacing them with strychnine and leaving them at the gate with a clever note: “Dear Dad, I was thinking of you when I caught these fish, and …” Or I would wonder if I could sneak something lethal into the groceries being delivered from the Malibu store. Or should I simply barge in and drag my father out? If Father thought he could buy me off with a Dusenberg… I gunned it to the floor and raced on into the Colony. Mother was there, taking a tennis lesson. I felt sorry for her. I told her how well things were going at the “Stude”—at least my little corner of it.
She said she was anxious about Father. Careful not to mention Sidney, she went on: “I’m worried about his concentration.” Not since he entered The Industry was he in greater need of it. No longer was moviemaking the carefree carnival it had seemed in the Twenties. The invisible intrigue of finance capital was setting in. Until now, Famous Players-Lasky, despite its Wall Street backing, had been a personal company, with Zukor in New York and Lasky in Hollywood maintaining almost as much control as when they had founded the company some twenty years earlier. But the innovation of sound, plus the delayed pinch of the Depression, was throwing The Industry into its first convulsion. Soundproofing the giant stages, investing in new equipment both for production and exhibition sent costs soaring, while profits were pinwheeling down like a fighter plane crashing in Wings. The hundred shares of stock that Father had given me for my fifteenth birthday when it was selling at 75, and that he had been sure would be worth more than twice as much by the time I finished high school, had plunged to 1. Insiders who were backing it on margin—like the free-spirited Lasky, one of the more lovable of the moguls—were losing much more than their shirts; they were losing their oceanfront mansions.
Overexpansion and the pressure of the times had led to a vicious power fight for control of the Company. In the early days, when Hodkinson and his Paramount chain had tried to absorb Famous Players-Lasky, Zukor and his henchmen had turned the tables and swallowed Paramount instead. This time the opposition was tougher—Sam Katz, of Balaban and Katz, the Chicago theater chain, was moving in on the Company, through his (and Paramount’s) subsidiary, Publix; so was Sidney Kent, the self-made ex-boiler stoker from Lincoln, Nebraska, whom Zukor had put in charge of distribution in the early twenties. The battle for control of the stock between Katz and Kent made pawns of the patriarchal Zukor and the flamboyant Lasky, while Father was at the mercy of them all. In this internecine struggle, the cautious Zukor would survive, if never again the power he had been, and poor Jesse, overextended and outmaneuvered, would come crashing down, forced out of the Company that had mushroomed from the amalgamation of his Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company with Zukor’s Famous Players. When Sam Katz had outfoxed (or, as B.P. said, outkatzed) rival Sidney Kent, Lasky lost his champion. But tough little Zukor hadn’t been a banty East Side fighter for nothing. Exiled to South America for a while, he was kicked upstairs as chairman of the board.
As a studio politician, Father was more like Lasky than like Zukor, more impetuous and partisan, less cautious and shrewd. He had a disturbing habit of saying what he thought and, on his third or fourth highball, of saying it a little too loudly. Mother, on the other hand, was battle-tough like Zukor. She was a lady now, but she knew the “gracious living” to which she had become accustomed demanded gelt, as her poor relations would have put it. And to make, keep, and expand gelt demanded self-discipline and forethought—hers.
With the collapse of the old Paramount, with heads as high as Lasky’s rolling into the basket, she was convinced that only her own highly developed art of survival could keep Ben’s head from tumbling after Jesse’s. Concerned for him because she loved him with the fierce devotion of Ruth for Boaz, she was also dedicated to the preservation of that half-a-million-dollar annual income on which she was determined to build a family dynasty.
“Schulberg has the best mind in the whole industry,” Mother would say to me, using the surname as a First Lady might in lieu of saying “The President.” “He’s much better-read than Irving [Thalberg, our patron saint]. But Irving knows how to protect himself, even against Louie [Mayer]. Schulberg is reckless. He loves to take chances. He goes out of his way to make enemies of powerful people who might be helpful to him later. I know he doesn’t like to hear it, but right now Schulberg needs me more than ever.”
From the beach house a few miles south of us, the one I had marked in my mind with a scarlet A, I could almost hear “Schulberg” saying, “Buddy, your mother is right. But she’ll say the same thing nine straight times, until comes the tenth, you’re so sick of hearing yourself say, ‘You’re right, Ad, you’re right!’ that you want to do just the opposite!”
Once they had been two prongs of a tuning fork producing a single sound. Now the prongs had been pried apart.
At this critical moment in his personal and professional life, Father had to make a key address at the Company’s convention in Denver. Over at MGM, Louie Mayer—with the chestbeating and crocodile tears for which he deserved an Oscar—had begged his employees to accept a 50 percent cut to keep the studio solvent. Secretaries and office boys complained in private (to avoid the wrath of hatchet man Eddie Mannix) that L.B.’s cutting his salary from a million to half a million a year was not the same as cutting theirs from forty dollars a week to twenty. At Paramount, New York (now becoming Chicago) was in favor of a similar cut. Father resisted the cut not only for himself, but for the army of employees at the bottom of the ladder. Instead he advocated shutting down the Astoria studio where Walter Wanger reigned as his opposite number. There was wasteful duplication, Father charged, and the eastern studio had not justified its existence.
“Dad will be back tomorrow,” read my Malibu diary. “Everything turned out fine. He won’t have to take the cut (or all the others either) and Walter Wanger is out. I believe the Eastern Studio is to be closed, so Dad must have enjoyed great success at his Denver confabs.”
Despite Mother’s fears, he had held on to his room at the top. While admitting that the recent product had not lived up to expectations, he had held out rosy prospects for 1932, with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Dietrich, Lubitsch, Powell and Lombard, Cary Grant, and another important discovery, Sylvia Sidney…. From the divided convention, he had received a standing ovation and a nearly unanimous vote of confidence. His studio court circle had met his train at Pasadena and in the traditional sleek black limousine had driven him back to Paramount in triumph. So, according to Father, Mother’s alarums had been only another example of her overprotectiveness. She had to feel that she was in command, the power behind the throne, “what every woman knows,” and that without her he would fall from his high wire.
Too busy cranking out publicity releases to cope with my diary, I returned to it on my last payday at the “Stude”: “Quit work today. Hated to leave the old place. Mr. Reeve said I had made good. Played tennis all day in preparation for the tournament… the best Saturday tennis of my life….”
Next day’s entry: “WON THE CUP! An all-star audience of actors, actresses, producers, and directors filled the pavilion. Father arrived alone, looking both dapper and slightly hung over in his Sunday whites, waving his impressive Upmann like a royal wand as he greeted famous employees and guests from rival studios. Mother was coolly correct. I felt ashamed at this public acknowledgment of their separation, at the first gathering both had attended since the rupture. Still I was grateful to them for being there rooting for me.”
Winning the silver Capra Cup in doubles was a major challenge to this marginal athlete who would have traded three Freddie Marches for one Ellsworth Vines. With the seriousness of a Wimbledon finalist, I had turned in early, jogged and wind-sprinted the length of the beach before breakfast, cooled off in the ocean rolling up toward our fence, run through calisthenics, and knelt in the quiet of my bedroom in desperate prayer.
The shy exterior of the child stammerer hid a fierce if largely frustrated competitiveness. Now that I had proved in the Paramount publicity department that I was no mere “producer’s son,” I wanted—oh, how I wanted!—that cup: my Holy Grail. Proof that I was not a flawed but a true knight of Malibu.
At the end of a triumphant day the would-be jock (rather than the would-be Melville) recorded: “First set, marched through them 6-0. Then tired and lost 6-2. In the last set they led 3-1 and 40-0 and things looked black. I played my best here, driving every serve. Even at 4-all, we went on to win. What a match. Three times today we won games after trailing 0-40. That’s what I call fight!”
Back in the Schulberg beach house, a victory party was in progress. There was a supper buffet with the gleaming silver trophy, surrounded by flowers cut from our garden, as the centerpiece. The finest whiskey our studio bootlegger could supply inspired alcoholic laughter. Couples were dancing to the current hits as played by our local favorite, Abe Lyman and his Orchestra.
The redheaded Irwin Gelsey, our studio tennis-champ, “drank a lot and was a riot.” Gelsey entertained with imitations of the eccentricities of “our crowd,” drawing screams with his impersonation of our Hungarian star Paul Lukas, who invariably cried “Out!” the moment his opponent’s racket met the ball. Looking around at our Beautiful People, vintage ’31, laughing it up, drinking it up, there to make merry in the house of the influential forty-year-old hostess, a familiar sound was missing: the hearty laughter of my father. He could outlaugh all the professional laughers at the party, Jack Oakie, Frank Fay, and Eddie Lowe (from whom he won $800 that day, betting me to win at 5 to 8). Exulting in athletic victory while feeling trapped in our domestic triangle, in adolescent dismay I watched Mother dancing with Gelsey and her other admirers.
Next day, my sober diary reports: “Drove into town to the Studio. Said goodbye to the publicity department again.” Since I had said my goodbyes to everyone I knew, from publicity chief Arch Reeve to the lowest mail clerks, what more was there to say two days later? But the “Stude” had been my nest ever since I could remember. Now I was going off alone into the Eastern Unknown. At lunch I said goodbye to the commissary—to the stars and the Writers’ Table, to the cutters and the cameramen, to the grips and the secretaries, to eager mailroom boys, some of whom I would know later as producers and hot-shot agents. From the world-famous to the lowly, my extended family. Was I over-dramatizing these goodbyes, like Sarah Bernhardt’s ceremonies of farewell? Or was it the realization that I was finally taking leave of my Hollywood childhood, still innocent but no longer an Innocent?
Back in the office of our unofficial family counselor, “I talked to Felix Young again. More trouble brewing—I’m not even putting it in here—that’s how important it is. Felix has been nice about it and is trying to help—but it is almost too late—Jesus Christ! Got all choked up when I spoke to him. Oh my God. Why is there so much dissension in this God-damned world?”
That evening Mother, Sonya, and I picked up the Viertels, Mother’s kind of people: Berthold, a poet-dreamer who had been a distinguished German stage director before he became an unlikely Hollywood movie director when B.P. signed him for a series of pictures; Salka, a former actress for Max Reinhardt, a strong, assertive personality, definitely the wearer of the pants in that family, soon to become Garbo’s confidante, favorite film writer, and—some whispered—lover.
Next day I went to MGM with Maurice—now set for Stanford—for another round of farewells. Metro had been our other playground from grammar-school days; we had roughhoused with George K. Arthur, joked with Slickum, Metro’s answer to Paramount’s Oscar the Bootblack, gaped at Greta Garbo. I had exchanged stutters with Marion Davies and had been privileged to sit at the long executive dining table where the eloquent, illiterate L. B. Mayer presided with an unctuous authority I despised. Around him were his court, tough men like ex-bouncer Eddie Mannix and agent-pimp (with a touch of Little Caesar) Frank Orsatti.
In contrast to “my” studio, the atmosphere of the ruling circle at Metro was oppressively totalitarian. The most heinous crimes could be committed and covered up. Mannix was the studio’s hit man; Irving Thalberg, vice-president in charge of quality at MGM, was as much of a tyrant as L.B., though he ruled his half of the studio with a softer touch. Maurice’s father Harry, the program-picture maven, lacked the drive for power that kept Mayer and Thalberg at the top—and also at each other’s throats. A favorite victim of the cruel wit of the Writers’ Table, because of his enormous nose and his Goldwynlike malapropisms, Harry was a crude but gentle man who knew his show business, from Joan Crawford musicals to Wallie Beery-Marie Dressler-Polly Moran comedies. My parents, and the Hollywood literati in general, looked down on him as an ignoramus, but I thought of him as a warmhearted father-figure who may have lacked my father’s erudition but was more dependable domestically. I didn’t know at the time that Joan Crawford had been Harry Rapf s “Sylvia Sidney” and that a second domestic crisis was brewing on Lorraine Boulevard. The Crawford affair was a fairly well-kept secret while Father and Sidney, with their provocative Malibu arrangement, invited the attention of the gossipmongers.
At Metro, L.B., with the elocution he had developed so doggedly, told me to give his good wishes “to Ad, a wonderful woman and a fine mother.” Although it was an open secret that Orsatti and the casting directors fed him a regular supply of starlets, Mayer seemed to be running on a platform of Motherhood and Family Togetherness. As if my father did not exist, L.B. suggested that if there was no place for me at Paramount when I came back from prep school, I could always join Maurice at MGM.
In his paternalistic tyranny, there seemed to be not the slightest doubt in Mayer’s mind that we would return for grooming as eventual producers. It even struck me as a form of bribery, to lure me away from his enemies, B.P. and Paramount. I doubt that L.B. had ever read a book, but he knew his Machiavelli: master of on-cue emotionalism, of threats sweetened with flattery, of divide and rule. Sharing Father’s contempt for him, I treated him like a dangerous enemy, promising to drop in on him and his wife Margaret (of whom I was fond and for whom I felt sorry) when I returned.
Then I recrossed undeveloped West Los Angeles to have my first shave at—where else?—the Paramount studio barbershop. I had done my first boxing in the studio gym, and when I broke my arm at L.A. High in a frenzied effort to clear five feet in the high jump, it had been to the studio clinic that I rushed, to Dr. Strathern, who obligingly set my left arm without lining up the palm of my hand with the inside of my elbow. I would carry the twisted arm with me all my life, but as with so many Hollywood flaws, no one ever seemed to notice. In the barbershop, head barber Bill Ring boasted that he would remind me of my first shave when I returned from college to take over the studio. Even in those troubled Paramount days, no one on the lot entertained any doubts about the rights of divine succession. I was the Prince of Marathon Street, shyness, stutter, and all.
I called my parents together for a farewell showdown. It took place, with great solemnity, in the library of the Lorraine house. How could I go east with any peace of mind, I challenged them, if Father was still living away from home? Unless they gave me their promise to reconcile, I would cancel my trip.
Mother cried a little and Father stammered that they both were proud of me, hoped I would concentrate on my studies and writing at Deerfield, and try to worry less about their personal differences.
After an hour, I went up to my room with a sinking feeling that I had failed. The best I was able to get from Father was that he loved all of us and would do his best to work things out. In my bedroom I punched my bag lackadaisically, looked out at my flock of pigeons, fingered my old long-distance Superheterodyne, and cryptically confided to my diary, “Spoke to Dad and Mom but somehow couldn’t tell them in just the words I had chosen previously.”
That night, after packing the four books I had chosen for the long drive east—Famous Russian Short Stories, Emil Ludwig’s Genius and Character, Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, and Francis Wallace’s football novel, Huddle—overexcited and deeply upset I indulged in dreams of glory as to how I would settle the Sidney affair. If I could not bring myself to poison or drown her, there must be some other way.
The next day was ritual: The Last Swim. The Last Talk with Maurice. The Last Talk with Mom. The last of the last farewells. One would have thought I was leaving for Darkest Africa with slim hope of survival. I took my Dusenberg out for a Last Spin because I would be driving a democratic Chevy across the country to New England. I did some farewelling along the beach mansions of Santa Monica, including Margaret Mayer, whom I found alone in their big house, painting a crude still life.
On my way back the Duzie was racing along when suddenly, as if with an impulse of its own, it braked to a halt at the Sidney house. In a kind of trance, the young driver got out of his chariot and strode toward the gate. To his surprise it was open. As if sleepwalking, he followed the wooden walk until it brought him to a side porch. Slowly he walked up the steps and through a screen door. There on an oversized couch facing the ocean sat Sylvia Sidney, with her mother. And pacing, scotch highball in one hand, a big cigar in the other, was Father, apparently just returned from the studio.
He was in mid-sentence when he saw me. Undoubtedly reciting the tribulations of the day, which had been mounting as company enemies kept sniping, and other stars complained that B.P. was picking the choice roles for Sylvia at their expense. Now, as I materialized in this alien place, the eyes of my father bulged in disbelief. Sylvia and her mother stared, waiting to see what I would do.
I was waiting, too. I have never known a sensation like this, before or since. I must have been, quite simply, possessed. I could feel a trembling all through my body. When I finally spoke, it was with a new voice—and words I had never used before, certainly not to my father:
“You son of a bitch! You’re coming home with me. Right now, you son of a bitch!”
I was grabbing Father by the arm and pulling him toward the door. My body and my spirit were stronger than his. I pulled him out through the screen door, down the wooden walkway, and out to the Dusenberg. At the running board he resisted, but I had the door open and pushed him in. The Duzie sprang forward like a trusty steed and I, in my own mind, must have been Malibu’s Galahad, strengthened by ten because my heart was pure. I dragged Father out of the car and up the walk to Green Gate Cottage. At the entrance to the house he tried to pull away. “Buddy, I can’t! I can’t!”
I was merciless: “Go on, get in there, you yellow son of a bitch!”
As possessed in his way as I was in mine, Father walked through the doorway and into the house.
I ran ahead of him to alert Mother.
“Mom, he’s home! I brought Dad home!”
If Dad had wanted to walk out now, I would not have had the strength to stop him. But he stayed. He asked where Sonya and Stuart were. Sone was down the beach with Adela Rogers’s precocious daughter, Elaine, and Stu was up the beach with Maurice’s little brother, Matty. Mother and Father sat facing each other, making polite conversation about my imminent drive east. Mother urged me to write down the numbers of all my traveler’s checks, and Father warned me not to pick up strangers. There were so many people out of work now, on the bum, and possibly dangerous. “What I’m worried about,” I said, “is what’ll happen to you.”
There was an awkward silence and I decided to leave them alone. Upstairs, I stared out at the ocean that had been our front yard since Ad first discovered Malibu. To the south I could see the rickety pier where Maurice and I had caught hundreds of tomcod. Then I looked out at the manicured Japanese farms that stretched behind us all the way to the green foothills. I wondered if I should pack my tennis cup, decided that would be ostentatious, reread the latest version of “Ugly” that my U.S.C. mentor Mrs. Stanton thought “almost ready for a ‘little magazine,’” and gazed at my favorite print of Washington Irving’s ivy-covered castle on the Hudson. I would rather have his life, I thought to myself, than that of a Hollywood mogul. I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if my father had persevered as a writer and never moved up through the ranks of Famous Players to his glamorous but precarious sunken office. Would his drinking and gambling and Sidneying have been this excessive? Knowing nothing but Hollywood, having been exposed all my life to its opportunists, sycophants, pimps, and “hoors,” and wanting to absolve my father as much as possible, I was inclined to shift the blame to the impersonal amalgam we called “Hollywood.”
At dinner that evening there was forced gaiety as Lucille showed off with her rare roast beef, popovers, glazed sweet potatoes, and chocolate souffle. Father was sober, very sober. I was too self- or family-absorbed to wonder how he had explained to Sylvia his continued absence from her hearth.
Already caught up in his story conferences and rushes, he didn’t accompany me to the railroad station—but I went in style in the chauffeur-driven Lincoln gold bric-a-brac town car, with Mother, Sonya, Uncle Sam, and of course Maurice to see me off on the crack overnight Lark to San Francisco. There I would hitch up with Rudy Pacht, the husky, easygoing all-city fullback from Hollywood High who was driving east with me, he to Dartmouth, where I would follow if I made good at Deerfield. Heading north through miles of orange groves that were still the landmark of outer Los Angeles, I wrote in my diary with solemnity: “I am going through a great deal before I see them again. After the train pulled out I cried—just a bit. Then I read quite late.”