AFTER ELEVEN HOURS’ SLEEP and a hearty Jewish breakfast at Uncle Dave’s modest flat in the Bronx—he was another of Ad’s brothers—I was ready with my appraisal of New York: “As bad as ever. People busy dodging cars and outsmarting each other. A city of wise guys. I never saw a town like this, where everyone is trying to put something over on you. Felt like a real hick. A shampoo, shave, and facial made me feel like a new man.” That evening I took my cousin Rosalind—“prettier than ever”—out for supper and a movie, and as we walked up Fifth Avenue “I felt a little hamed [our private word for ashamed] because I had to take her arm in mine—first time I’ve ever done that. But I’m still here so guess it didn’t kill me.” On pretty cousin Roz I was able to practice my callow social graces, learning how to hold a girl’s arm and how to help her into a taxi, modest beginnings to sexual contact I somehow had managed to avoid all my years of growing up in Hollywood.
Late that night I had an important long-distance call from Mom and Dad. They were relieved that I had made it safely and that I (having inherited Father’s myopic sense of direction) had been able to locate New York City all by myself. Even in my naiveté, I knew that their calling together was merely a show of matrimonial convention, to shore up their anxious son on the eve of his Eastern Adventure.
There was a long weekend at the Zukors’ Mountain View Farm (three large houses, a huge swimming pool, private golf course, tennis and handball courts, a great projection room, and their own river to fish in). I swam with Maurice Chevalier, played tackle football with the caddies, and walked the golf course with Primo Carnera, in training for his big fight with Jack Sharkey.
The Zukor family and their friends seemed to have a sublime faith that with a little encouragement from the Hoover Administration, the economy would eventually pull out of its doldrums. But a long talk with Mr. Zukor himself was not about the current state of the world but about the current state of the picture business, and of Paramount in particular. He admitted that these were troubled times for Paramount, and that The Industry was going through growing pains. But he recalled the early-morning fire that had almost destroyed his Famous Players in its downtown New York infancy. Apparently if deceptively still ruler of all he surveyed, he was able to maintain a stoic confidence: “This too shall pass.”
I was relieved to hear him speak so well of Father. If he had any criticism of B.P.’s indiscretions with Sylvia Sidney, or of Father’s box-office record for the past year, he was too polite to voice them. Having discovered young Ben before I was born, when Father was a teenage prodigy, a natural writer and idea man, he seemed proud of Father’s progress, and pleased to hear that I also had begun to write.
Monday morning, I was awakened at dawn because Mr. Zukor, still the little furrier working a 12-hour day, liked to be at his downtown New York office by nine A.M. I returned to my busy waiting-for-school-to-open life, seeing two movies a day, visiting what seemed an endless round of Schulbergs from downtown Manhattan to the Upper Bronx (“I suppose it sounds cynical but a guy gets kinda hardened, kissing 2 or 3 Schulbergs 4 or 5 times a week”), and discovering a world I had only heard about at a distance—the Broadway theater:
“Grand Hotel a great show, a new idea. Sam Jaffe—not our Sam Jaffe—steals the show…. Barretts of Wimpole Street, starring Katharine Cornell as Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the tragic family life of the dreamy Wimpole Street poetess. Payment Deferred, a great show. Charles Laughton gives a powerful portrayal. To watch him sit at the window and gaze at the spot where he buried the lady in the garden was enough to give anyone the willies.” Not exactly Burns Mantle, but for all my Hollywood provincialism (“finally tracked down an L.A. Times and devoured it”), my eastern education was beginning.
As if drawn back to the scene of the crime, I couldn’t resist using my gold pass at the Paramount Theater to see An American Tragedy again. I had seen the picture half a dozen times from the studio projection room to the sneak previews to Grauman’s Chinese and on to Broadway. Dreiser’s story had held a fascination for me ever since I had read it two years earlier, when Father first began thinking of doing it as a picture. Dreiser himself had come out to discuss the project and had turned out to be a terrible disappointment, not at all the literary god I had imagined but instead a difficult drunk who literally chased Mother around the dining-room table. How could the book be so real when its author was a pompous, alcoholic ass? Dreiser had turned on the picture and had even brought suit against Father and Paramount for distorting his work. But the film, for its day, was an honest effort to bring the raw, tough, searching novel to the screen. I was so proud of what I thought of as “Father’s picture” that I tipped the cabdriver a quarter instead of my usual dime when he told me it was the best picture he had ever seen and that he was going back to see it a second time. To me, An American Tragedy reflected Father’s interest in American literature, an attempt to bring to the screen the feeling for good writing he had brought to our Sunday morning reading sessions. Tackling a radical Dreiser theme was his way of reminding himself of the writer he might have been.
Of course the film had an ambivalent fascination for me: How many sons have an opportunity to stare at their father’s mistress on the screen of a darkened movie palace? Watching Sylvia Sidney crinkle her face in a provocative smile, first sexually aroused, then socially rejected, watching her pout, suffer, plead, “You’ve got to help me, Clyde/ Ben,” I could understand her attraction for Father. Clara Bow had been cute and saucy, but Sylvia had a sensuous Jewish quality that reached out to me and troubled me. In that vast audience held under her spell, I knew that I was the only one involved in personal drama with her, the only one who actually wanted to kill her as Phillips Holmes was mustering his courage to do in the movie. Nor was there any release or therapy in watching her drown again.
For by this time I had heard from Father’s studio friends that the enforced reconciliation had broken down. He had gone back to the other Malibu house and my mother with her sad eyes had decided to come east with the Viertels, ostensibly to see me off to Deerfield, but also to put space between herself and Father.
Homesickness induced a recurring dream of entering Grauman’s Chinese to attend an opening of one of Father’s pictures, or of being ushered to the studio-reserved section of an out-of-town movie house for a sneak preview, only to wake up just as the movie was beginning. I felt let down to find myself back in Uncle Dave Jaffe’s apartment in the Bronx, even though they treated me like a visiting prince, lavishing lox and cream cheese, fresh bagels, and all manner of Jewish goodies on me. Warm and supportive, they were proud to show me off at the social club where they went almost every evening to play cards and schmoos with their neighbors. The son of the wealthiest and most glamorous of all the relatives, I was asked questions tinged with envy—what was Hollywood really like? What was it like to know Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant? How could I explain to them that what I really missed were track meets, tennis games, homing pigeons, and parents as devoted to each other as our feathered thoroughbreds?