GROWING UP WITH A SENSE of dramatic form, exposed to Father’s daily struggles with his writers to achieve sound continuity and structure, I thought of my departure from Grand Central Station for Deerfield as a significant fade-out, and new fade-in. At the platform, instead of embracing and kissing me, Mother became my intellectual cheerleader, sending me into the literary game to run up the score for Schulberg and Jaffe U. She was remorseless in her love. She did not bestow it on the unfit. Compassion for weakness was not her way. If Sonya was shy, frightened, and unable to show off her poems to illustrious guests, poor Sonya could stay upstairs in her room. For Mother, love was confused with enabling her to shine in reflected glory.
And yet a telegram sent to Father at this moment tells of “broken heartstrings” at this first extended separation from her children. She was like a fiercely loving bitch determined that every one of her litter win a blue ribbon at the show. Of course I was expected to win Best of Show.
From the window of the train I watched New York fall away behind me. Harlem, where I was born, was becoming Negro now as Jews moved south of 110th Street or north to the greener city limits. I stared down into long, narrow, forbidding streets, watched kids playing stickball or leaning over precarious fire escapes, and wondered how different I might have been if my parents hadn’t taken me west on the old Santa Fe Chief and planted me among the palm and citrus trees of rural Holywood.
As the train rolled into Connecticut, I began to enjoy the scarlet and golden leaves of October, unlike any I had ever seen before. Our hills at home were sunbaked brown. Although this new world appealed to me, the strangeness of it intensified my sense of transition from Hollywood insider to eastern outsider.
On the train were two Deerfield boys I had met in New York. Snooty and formal, they addressed me as “Schulberg.” In the Far West we were used to instant informality. These eastern boarding-school types acted like little old men. I wondered if everybody at Deerfield would be like that. What if I found it unbearable? I wouldn’t have Mother and her luxurious St. Moritz suite to return to. Even the innovator, Mother was off to Soviet Russia with Irma Weitzenkorn, pausing first to visit Latvian relatives in Dvinsk where it all began. This was in the days when Red Russia was not considered worthy of diplomatic recognition—that would come a year or two later with the new spirit of F.D.R. How did Mother arrange to travel through the Soviet Union before American passports were accepted? I could picture her marching past border patrols and insisting that the secret police guide her to her hotel in Leningrad. Maybe she used her gold Paramount pass or explained that her mission was to show my short stories to Maxim Gorky. If she had brought Gorky home to Hollywood to write screenplays for Father, it would not have surprised me.
Passport or no passport, Mother was ready for Russia. She had read Steffens on the Revolution—“I have seen the future and it works”—and the pioneer books of Maurice Hindus (Red Bread, Humanity Uprooted) and she didn’t have any qualms about coping with Stalin. In her mind, he couldn’t be any more difficult than Louie B. Mayer, whom she had eating out of her hand.
From the moment I arrived I loved the look of Deerfield, the aged-wood no-nonsense architecture of the 17th-century houses, the green meadows stretching to the great New England river, the Connecticut. Because my hometown Hollywood was so new—a beanstalk sprung up in the Twenties—I felt a reverence for the past, the old farmhouses, the village cemetery where old-fashioned homilies engraved in weathered stone stood over venerable Ebenezers and Abigails, and for the river that ran all the way from northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound, making New England history while our California was still an Eden for aborigines.
But of course I hadn’t come to Deerfield merely for scenery and tradition. There was a formidable headmaster and a demanding curriculum. I had never been exposed to that kind of tight-minded discipline; my natural response was to resist it and hate it. A loud morning bell brought rude awakening; we were herded (or so it felt to me) to group meals of what seemed prison fare, like porridge for breakfast and creamed beef on toast for lunch. I loathed having to make my bed and keep my room neat, and worst of all having to submit to the routine inspection of the house proctor. I had read enough Dickens to feel like an overgrown David Copperfield. Or Tom Brown at Rugby. No, I wasn’t caned, or hazed. But in those early weeks, feeling so far from home and out of place, I took a psychological beating that made me check off the ten weeks until Christmas vacation like a prisoner counting down to the end of his sentence.
My classmates, nearly all from eastern private schools, treated me with patronizing curiosity, making me feel like a pointy-eared Martian who had mysteriously materialized in their midst. They had never encountered anyone from Hollywood before; their questions were tinged with sexual curiosity mingled with haughty disdain: They assumed that I had been raised on orgies with uninhibited starlets. Walking blindfold on a high wire, I tried to conceal the ridiculous fact that I never so much as held hands with a wicked young would-be. I had to pretend to be an accomplished Lothario or they would have thought me even stranger than I appeared. As it was, being Jewish, a stammerer, from exotic Hollywood, a newcomer to a senior class that had been together for three years, I was an obvious target for schoolboy wit. If I were not actually persona non grata, I felt myself to be persona barely grata.
At night in my monastic cell I would confess in letters to Maurice my subterfuge and my panic when hallmates asked me why I didn’t have a picture of my girl, or of some of those movie kittens with whom I let them believe I frolicked. “When I come home for Christmas, I have to get a picture of a girl,” I wrote Maurice, who was caught in a similar dilemma among five hundred Stanford coeds.
The heart and soul and spine and sinew of Deerfield was Mr. Frank Boyden, always referred to, English-school fashion, as “The Quid,” a strong-willed, puritanical headmaster fanatical in his devotion to his school, having built it from a modest country school to a New England “prep” rivaling such long-established institutions as Hotchkiss, Choate, and Loomis. Revered as an outstanding example of New England scholarship, he considered himself a molder of young men. But in me he found unruly clay. The general attitude of the student body toward him was an amalgam of admiration, awe, and fear. Again I was made to feel strangely alone because, while others might grumble about the strictness of The Quid, I was the only one who really detested him.
Our first meeting was not exactly propitious. Father had suggested that if Deerfield lacked motion-picture equipment, he would provide projectors and a supply of Paramount films for weekend entertainment. Mr. Boyden was not overwhelmed by this offer. He would have to think about it, he said, because his time was too valuable to spend at the movies, and he did not regard them as healthy influence on the student body. I may have been hypersensitive, but in his contempt for movies I sensed a veiled, genteel anti-Semitism. But there was one thing movies could do, he acknowledged. If I could get my hands on a movie camera, I could photograph our football team in action. It might be helpful to the coaches and players to study their mistakes. And scenes of our games could be shown at the Sunday evening “sings.”
The Quid was an avid booster of Deerfield athletics. It was an open secret that along with our gentleman athletes he recruited players from the working-class neighborhoods of mill towns like Holyoke and Haverhill. Most of these “ringers” lived with me in the Old Dorm to which the sloppier members of the student body were consigned. The “good boys,” housed in the New Dorm, kept their rooms immaculate and were proud of the sharp creases along the edge of their beds. Visitors were invariably given a tour of the New Dorm.
Although The Quid was a stern disciplinarian, he clearly pampered the star football, baseball, and basketball players. That was fine with me, as I got along with them better than I did with the snooty aristocrats. It had been the caddies with whom I had gotten along best at Adolph Zukor’s luxurious estate. And back in Hollywood I had always felt most at home with the prizefighters, the mailroom boys, and the grips. I don’t know where I got my egalitarianism but it seemed deeply rooted, in ghettos where I had never lived, in pogroms I had suffered only vicariously through Mother’s vague accounts and her brother Joe’s painful memories.
My first Sunday at Deerfield triggered my first confrontation with The Quid. When I heard that religious services were mandatory, I went to Mr. Boyden and asked if I could be excused on the basis of my religious differences. He fixed me with a dour look, and then in a tight voice informed me that Sunday morning services were an obligation of every Deerfield boy, without exception. Deerfield, I was discovering—not unlike Hollywood at the opposite end of the spectrum—was its own world with its own law. Separation of Church and State, or Church and School, stopped at its campus boundaries.
So Sunday mornings I would sit in the rear row, huddled down in hope of escaping The Quid’s inquisitorial eye. Concealed behind my prayer book were the Saturday football results; I needed all the time I could get to study comparative scores and mail my predictions to Maurice so he would have them in time for our weekly competition.
When the congregation rose for the traditional hymns, the rebel in me refused to invoke the name of Jesus. Brazenly I would substitute the word “Amos.” And instead of mouthing “Amos” discreetly under my breath, the devil within me would increase the volume to make sure the worshippers around me knew I was not conforming. An obedient lad sitting next to me made a face at me and, by way of rebuttal, I pulled out his tie.
On the podium I saw The Quid staring at me in puritanical hatred. After the service he beckoned me to his side. “I know you don’t believe in our faith,” he intoned, “but at least you can try to be quiet so we can enjoy a solemn ceremony.” He had had his eye on me, he warned. If I could not measure up to the high standards of Deerfield, I would force him to write my parents; perhaps I would do better in a western school where students were allowed to wear sloppy clothes, with behavior to match. Like my classmates, he was too genteel to mention Jews as such. But when he referred to me as “you people in Hollywood,” the inflection was unmistakable. My resistance was guarded. His was the hated voice of authority, reminding me of my little war with Rabbi Magnin five years earlier. But this was different. With Mother in Russia and Father hardly even a part-time parent, I felt a need to put down new roots in this older, greener part of the world.
Three factors saved me from quitting or cracking those first ten weeks. Even though I couldn’t measure up to the football varsity, I played substitute guard on the second team. I made flying tackles with gusto if not precision. I boasted to my diary that I was so covered with bumps and bruises that it was painful to crawl into bed. At a magic show one evening I fell so soundly asleep that my classmates thought I was hypnotized and did not appreciate my condition until the mystified magician failed to bring me to.
In one game, against the bulky but slow Massachusetts Aggie freshmen, I had an uncanny experience that calls to mind an Irwin Shaw football story. A willing but uninspired lineman until that particular day, I got into the game earlier than usual when a first-stringer was injured. Suddenly I felt that I could read the mind of the opposing quarterback and anticipate every play. I would charge forward, lay back and wait, or move horizontally to the other side of the line, making tackle after tackle. As my confidence grew, I felt invincible, a one-man line, able to stop their lumbering fullback and their speedier halfbacks. When I trotted to the sidelines in happy exhaustion, the embraces and loving slaps on the rump from my teammates brought tears of joy. Here at last was the athletic acclaim for which I had hungered all through high school. I didn’t even mind waiting on table that evening because I was serving my peers in a new atmosphere of social acceptance.
On the following Friday afternoon our coach, convinced that he had discovered a new defensive star, put me into the starting lineup. The first play came right at me. I set myself, and let the ball-carrier slip away. The opposing quarterback decided he had found a patsy, and how right he was. Intuitive as I had been in the previous game, I was now a victim of every trap and feint. The superman of the week before was exposed as a one-day wonder. Halfway through the quarter I was benched. No more embraces, no more ego-stroking, shouts of “Attaway t’go, Schulie!” I was back where I belonged, a marginal athlete, reduced to writing anguishedly, “Why do we always come so close and always fail?”
The second factor that kept me at Deerfield was Mutt Ray. Mutt came from what was called “a good family,” which is how they described the inheritors of “old money,” but what was important to me was his all-around ability on the playing field. As our fullback he hit the opposing line with a ferocity that belied his size, dragging tacklers along with him yard after yard. In those hardier days when a single team played both offense and defense, he was a furious linebacker. In game after game the Deerfield line would bend or break, only to have our valiant captain plug the holes. Bulling his way to precious touchdowns, then saving the game with crushing open-field tackles, Mutt Ray was the consummate sixty-minute hero. At final gun he would often sink into unconsciousness, having survived the last quarter on guts and instinct. How I envied him as he was carried from the sidelines to the infirmary, to be treated for his weekly concussion.
Armed with the movie camera Father had provided, I was allowed to record the game from the sidelines, my third bridge to Deerfield acceptance. There was one glorious moment in the Loomis game when Ray went hurtling out of bounds, slamming my camera against my forehead and knocking me over. My head was pounding but I jumped quickly to my feet, proud to have a hand in pulling him back to his, unforgettably involved in this moment of violence. Ray winked at me and I said, “Way to go, Mutt!”
Ray’s heroics weren’t limited to the football field. While the housemaster—pink-faced, bespectacled, Harvardian Mr. Allen—scrupulously saw to it that lights were out and the Old Dorm locked for the night at ten, presumably safe against the shades of Mohawk Indians left over from 17th-century raids, Mutt would be out on the prowl in search of warmhearted farm girls. Early in the morning he would creep back through a main-floor window left open for him. A genuine folk hero, he could float through space when he wanted to, and see in the dark. Of course part of his bravado was the confidence that even if he were detected, he would not suffer the punishment awaiting the ordinary Deerfield boy. The Quid loved his Deerfield eleven, and without Mutt Ray we would have been the doormat of the Mohawk Valley.
Maybe because I was such a sorry workhorse of a football player, maybe because there was something titillating about my unlikely Hollywood background, maybe because I worshipped him even more fervently than did my eastern classmates, Mutt would do me the honor of dropping in to bull in my room. Inevitably, other hallmates would appear. I began to feel a grudging acceptance. I was still teased about my stammering, my name, my life in Hollywood, and—without their ever daring to give it a name—my Jewishness. But after a month or so I did not seem quite as ludicrous or as untouchable and they in turn did not seem quite as reserved and unreachable.
There had been one early breakthrough. On the first day of school we had been encouraged to introduce ourselves to our dormitory-mates. Passing a tall, earnest-faced young man in the hall, I did my best. “Sch …Sch…Sch …oolberg, La …La …La …Hollywood” (like all stammerers, when I couldn’t make it with one consonant I tried another), I offered; to which my classmate responded, “Eee …Eee …E … ton T-t-t-Tarbell, B …buh …buh …BANGor!” I had been teased that way all my life, and was ready to strike Master T-t-Tarbell. Until I realized that here was a schoolmate who stammered even more convulsively than I did.
Since misery welcomes company, we would spend hours in our rooms at night speculating on why we couldn’t talk like normal people. Why did we never stammer when we sang? Or when we were alone together? Years later Eaton Tarbell was to become one of New England’s more distinguished architects. But I still see him with his earnest face twisted into verbal spasm. Strangely, it was the same look he would have at the end of the mile run when he performed on the same track team where I ran my dogged 880s. At the end, grasping for breath, we also discovered that exhaustion was a cure for our affliction. We never doubted that our disability was psychological. But there did seem to be physical solutions. Why, when we were unable to sound the opening word of a sentence, did it help to pound our feet on the floor like a jazz musician working himself up to the beat? Or similarly, to slap our hands against our thighs until the desired word broke through the barrier? And why, when no other words came out at all, were four-letter cries of frustration so easy to release?
Eaton Tarbell and Mutt Ray and my mouth-drying confrontations with Mr. Boyden gave form and substance to those first ten weeks. I would confide to my diary exactly how I felt about the self-righteous Quid. “All the athletes around here pull some awfully raw stuff, but I, for only trivial wrongs, have to be called down every day or so. Boyden wants boys to be subdued—the only-answer-when-spoken-to types of the old Mayflower days. Go to hell, Frank!”
The first semester at Deerfield was a useful lesson in hypocrisy. For while I was giving Mr. Boyden the humble Yes sir and No sir treatment, going through the motions of the apologetic penitent, I was seething inside, wishing I could use his smug ministerial face as my punching bag. It is what we call manners. We had manners in Hollywood, too, but these were more genteel (and gentile) and more sophisticated—in other words, more full of sophistry and hypocrisy. It was one of the things I had been sent to Deerfield to learn: how not to walk hard or talk loud, how to drop a scrim over my feelings.
My most serious confrontation with The Quid had come just before the Christmas vacation, when I was feeling a little giddy at the thought of being released from Deerfield discipline and joining Mother, who was returning from Russia, on the four-day journey home. Mutt Ray had suggested that after lights-out we sneak over to the mess hall and raid the huge icebox in the pantry. I was already in Mr. Boyden’s black book, but how could I resist this clandestine invitation from the great Mutt Ray? Making our way into the pantry in the dark, we gorged ourselves on illicit muffins and jams, ice cream and cake. But climbing back into the Old Dorm, disaster struck. Mutt made it through without difficulty, but just below the window I dropped a jar of orange marmalade and a box of saltines I had hoped to squirrel away for after-lights-out feasts. The delay and my scurrying in the bushes brought to the window a most unhappy Mr. Allen. As much as he tried to meet us halfway, this time he would have to send me to Mr. Boyden.
The Quid was terrible in his wrath. “He was so sore he was black in the face,” I reported to the diary. His voice wore a long dark robe as he sat in judgment. “After the first few months I had hoped you might become more accustomed to our ways. If there is no improvement in your deportment after you return from vacation, I will not be able to recommend you for Dartmouth.” I had retreated to my monastic room and added a cryptic note to my diary: “The Quid—GDHBH,” which stood for God Damn His Bastard Hide, the ultimate epithet in Maurice’s and my lexicon.
It was maddening to think that my fate, or at least my chances of moving on to Dartmouth, depended entirely on his judgment. Because no matter how well I did scholastically—and I was beginning to hold my own—The Quid had the power to bury my application. And now, despite Mr. Boyden, I felt a strong attraction to New England as a place and as a culture. Indeed, even Mrs. Boyden herself was a refreshing counterbalance to her Calvinistic mate. Attractively homely, in the style of Eleanor Roosevelt, she was an outgoing spirit, with a tolerance for others that made me wonder how she and The Quid ever got together. Because my mind was stubbornly resistant to algebra, or any other form of mathematics, a subject she taught, she offered to tutor me in her spare time. When I told her how useless I knew algebra would be to my life, she didn’t lecture me about my Hollywood sloppiness of mind. Instead she took an eminently practical approach. Even if it made no sense for Dartmouth to demand that I get high marks in mathematics in order to be accepted, that was their rule and if Dartmouth was my choice I would have to make it my rule as well. “It’s a little like taking castor oil,” she insisted. “You open your mouth, Mother spoons it in, you make a face, and in a minute or two it’s all forgotten.” Mrs. Boyden was determined to spoon in enough algebra, geometry, and trig to get me by the College Boards: “Even if you forget it the next day as you probably will. For years I’ve been coaching students who hate math. I happen to love math, but it’s like cauliflower or turnips—lots of people hate them, too.”
“I can’t swallow turnips,” I said.
“I’ll teach you to swallow math.” Her smile came through to me encouragingly. In helping me feel I could cope with math, she also encouraged me to think I could cope with Deerfield. I was on the school paper, and while I looked down on the weekly Scroll as an overly sedate weekly compared to my jazzier Blue-and-White daily, I was proud to have made the staff. But the contrast between West Coast and East Coast journalism threatened to end my New England career almost as soon as it began. A football game between Fordham and Bucknell had resulted in two fatalities—Murphy, a former Deerfield star, dying of internal injuries a few days after the game, and his substitute Zymanski succumbing from a brain injury two days later. Two other Fordham players had been seriously injured. The Bucknell line had been recruited from the hard-muscled mining towns of western Pennsylvania, and the contest had been what present-day commentators like to refer to as “physical,” for which read downright vicious. The two deaths had brought the fatalities for the season to 29! Although I still loved the feeling of trying to drive my body between opposing linemen to get at the ball-carrier, the neophyte writer in me, as well as the moralist, came up with a fiery editorial in which I compared the football stadium crowd to the bloodthirsty hordes in the Roman Colosseum rooting for the lions against the Christians.
That evening I was honored with a visit from the editor of the Scroll, the 250-pound “Mac” MacConaughy. Although his father was president of Wesleyan University in nearby Middletown, Mac did not at all resemble the snooty, upper-class easterners who looked down their Aryan noses at me. He enjoyed ribald jokes and Latin double entendres. The strict discipline of the school, a constant irritant to me, was to Mac merely a source of cynical amusement.
Mac flopped down on my bed, threatening to collapse it, and tossed back to me my white-heat editorial, blithely titled “Roman Holiday.” “Afraid we can’t use it, Schulie. Nice piece of writing. But God almighty, if I ran this in the Scroll, The Quid would pee in his pants. We have to write it like this: All Deerfield mourns the untimely passing of one of her outstanding sons, Robert Murphy, etcetera etcetera. All quiet and dignified. Make it sound like an unfortunate accident that could happen in any activity. Not like a lynching—the way you wrote it—or as if the entire Bucknell team should be indicted for premeditated murder. I wish I could run it. It would be a hell of a lot of fun. But The Quid would get my old man on the phone, and the next thing I know I can’t even make it to Wesleyan.”
I was discouraged. “Roman Holiday” was the strongest piece of writing I had ever done. It combined my fascination with American football with my growing awareness of American violence. If I couldn’t score with a piece on a Deerfield boy dying for Fordham … “Look, Schulie, stop worrying about staying on the staff. Hell, you are the staff. You see the drool we get from all the others—” It was true that I had begun to rewrite all the limp leads and stodgy pieces in which whatever feeble news there was lay buried three or four paragraphs into the story. Mac turned to me more and more until he and I basically edited the paper together. But I had to be careful to keep a tight rein on my style, or Mac would be on my back for writing “Hollywood.”
Words and writing had begun to share equal time with football and track and the compulsion to make a team. Mac delighted in using words he thought others would not comprehend. “Schulie, I think your piece would be more efficacious if it were a little less polemical, as well as less quixotic,” he would say. I would nod wisely, and then secretly hurry to my dictionary to see what in hell he was talking about. Any word heard or read that I did not instantly recognize would be entered in my handwritten dictionary. In my first ten weeks at Deerfield it had grown to a thousand words I had not known on arrival. Instead of counting sheep to invite sleep I would mumble, “Salacious … euphemistic … diaphanous …” I began to realize that I had been talking and writing with a kindergarten vocabulary. Even with all the reading my parents had exposed me to, somehow I must have skipped over the words I did not know. Now they jumped up from the page and challenged me to understand them, and make them my own.
Later I would begin to understand the difference between English and American writing, learning how Mark Twain and Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson had prepared the ground for Ernest the Strong. But in those early months at Deerfield I was happy with my elegiacs and anomalies. Already I had begun publishing short stories in the Deerfield monthly Stockade. A story about an old prizefighter and one about the ghosts of the victims of the Deerfield Massacre interviewed in the local cemetery established me as the school’s most distinguished author, an honor not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe’s winning the mayoralty of his island.
Heady with success, I decided to plunge on in the literary world. Before I left home, Mrs. Stanton, who taught English at U.S.C., had been sufficiently impressed with my story “Ugly” to suggest I try to write a book. And my parents, with their quite different styles of enthusiasm, had agreed. The pressure was on me. And time was running. I was closing in on eighteen. If I was to be a book writer, I had better get going.