WITH A CLASSMATE AND his parents in their black 1930 Packard, it took three hours to drive the last sixty miles on the old road from Deerfield to New York City, but it seemed a million light-years from the isolated green campus to Father’s suite in the Waldorf Towers. I was immediately enveloped in his atmosphere—the humidor of Upmanns, the Hollywood tradepapers and scripts on the coffee table, the phone calls, the telegrams from the studio, the familiar faces of Al Kaufman and Paramount lawyer Louie Swartz, and the team of writers B.P. had brought with him across the country for those obligatory nonstop story conferences.
Father may have been sitting on a shaky throne, but he knew how to hold court as if anointed for life. When his sister Val and her husband Charley arrived, I could feel the awe, the amazement that one of theirs had made it all the way to the top of the golden ladder. To the rest of his family, B.P.’s story of Rivington rags to Hollywood riches was the stuff of Yiddish fairy tales. The pauper had become a prince, and there was something truly regal in the way he received his courtiers and passed their hands with gold, for he always carried a pocketful of ten-and twenty-dollar gold pieces.
With Aunt Val and Uncle Charley, we made another million-light-year journey in a sleek Paramount limousine to Grandmother’s tenement, where we walked up the narrow, creaky stairs into the world she stubbornly still refused to leave, either for a “better neighborhood” or for a bungalow of her own in the Hollywood sun. On the liberal allowance that Father provided, she had not in the slightest changed her lifelong ways. Instead, she used her monthly fortune to rebuild the synagogue she loved to watch from her window, and to support (without her son’s knowledge) two poor families on the block. To spend all the money on herself seemed goyische waste. To eat, to sleep, to pray, to think, to talk with friends … what more could a person want? With a double generation-gap between us, I had never really talked to her. I had only heard the stories of how independent she was, like my own mother ahead of her time, and how she had coped with Grandfather Simon, the strapping six-footer with a red face and “the thirst for beer of an Irishman.” “Your grandfather was powerful but she’s the one in the family who was really strong,” Aunt Val said.
A feeling of sentimentality balanced a sense of repugnance at her stale breath as I kissed her. She patted me and muttered something in Hebrew. From the stoop we looked up and waved as she watched us from her window. Our limousine and liveried chauffeur had drawn a crowd of curious men with long dark beards, women with shawls, and ghetto kids laughing and pointing. A boy a little younger than I, in a worn jacket that was obviously a hand-me-down, its sleeves rolled up at the wrist, came up to me and shouted, “Whaddya doin’ down here—slummin’?”
Back in Father’s sumptuous suite lay our reality. Aunt Val accused her famous brother of supporting Sylvia Sidney, at a time when his own income was in jeopardy. Father defended himself with his customary eloquence. He was not supporting Sylvia. Ad herself had urged him to sign her to a long-term contract. She was not even being paid as much as his other stars like Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, and her pictures were outgrossing theirs. At that moment, as much as I resented his illicit affair, I felt a little sorry for him. It wasn’t easy having Ad and Aunt Val and Paramount’s new bankers on his neck.
After Val and her nice but nebbish Charley left, Father fixed himself a stiff highball, lit another expensive cigar, and told me what he had not wanted to say in front of them. “Sometimes I get sick and tired of all the critics in this family. I wonder what your Aunt Val would say if I told her that I’m paying Charley’s salary? Otherwise he’d be out of a job. I could have given the money directly to her but the poor sonofabitch is already pretty well beaten-down, and I didn’t want him to lose his self-respect entirely. This way he feels he can pay me back when things get better.”
How many people Father had on that secret payroll, I never knew. The way he handed money out to almost anyone who put the arm on him reminded me of openhanded prizefight champions. Was it an inability ever to say No—a weakness Mother had battled to correct over the years—or simply the flow of a generous nature, a genuine feeling for the less fortunate?
Highballing it back to Chicago on the 20th Century, we traveled in style with a silky black porter constantly fetching ice with lots of yassuhing and practiced smiles. His counterpart served our dinner—whisked with mysterious efficiency from the dining car. This was the first time I could remember traveling alone with Father. Through Europe, to Mexico, back and forth across the country, there had always been either an entourage or the rest of the family. Now we played casino and B.P. was delighted that he had found a pigeon he could beat. By the time we pulled in to Chicago, I was down seven dollars and Father was urging me to up the stakes.
After dinner that evening I asked him about the problems at the studio that Aunt Val had mentioned. He prefaced his explanation by urging me not to worry. Then he admitted that Mother’s fears had been realized. Now that Jesse Lasky was gone and Zukor no longer in control, he was being pushed out of his job as vice-president-in-charge-of-production. It had—he assured me—absolutely nothing to do with Sylvia Sidney. So far his record had been just as good as in the previous year. He had been a victim of a palace revolution. Manny Cohen, who had been Lasky’s assistant, would soon be taking B.P.’s place in the big sunken office from which the studio was run. But crafty, tough-minded little Manny knew nothing about running a studio. “In six months I’ll lay you a hundred dollars to five they’ll be begging me to come back and bail out that snake-in-the-grass!
“In the meantime,” he went on with his infectious optimism, “I won’t be exactly on Poverty Row. I’m getting a new contract for my own independent unit. I’ll make a little less every week, but I’ll have a much larger percentage of the profits. In the long run I can end up with more money, and I won’t have to spread myself so thin. You know, I never really disagreed with David about the merits of independent production. But as long as I had the responsibility for the entire program, I couldn’t let myself admit it.” Now, Father continued in that same cheery vein, he was looking forward to making six personally produced pictures a year. With the pick of the Paramount players and directors to choose from, it would be more like the good old days of Preferred Pictures back in the Mayer-Schulberg Studio era.
If Mother was a chronic worrier, Father was a congenital optimist. To put it bluntly, he had just been fired from one of the biggest jobs Hollywood had to offer. For seven years he had run a production company whose only rival was the ever-expanding MGM. Now, at the age of forty, when most executives are reaching their prime, he was being shunted aside. Somehow Father was able to herald this demotion as a personal triumph. It had been a ball to run the Stude in the silent days. But now with the Depression tightening its grip on The Industry, and A.T.&T. and RCA closing in, Father insisted he was lucky to be out from under. Now he’d be more like DeMille, with his own bungalow headquarters and his own staff.
With each scotch highball, Father’s mood grew merrier. He filled the drawing room not only with expensive smoke but with an air of festivity. When I finally aroused him in the morning to tell him we’d be pulling into Chicago in an hour, he groped his way to the bathroom in his silk monogrammed pajamas and was soon singing his habitual shaving songs, “H—A—Double R I…” and “Somebody’s Been Aroun’ Heah (Givin’ Yuh Lessons in Love),” along with a raucous rendition of “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” which we had just heard Ethel Merman proclaim in George White’s Scandals. As I listened to Father’s gargled imitation of the Broadway star, I watched the ugly outskirts east of Chicago and thought about the sermon for our times he was singing so gaily.
The Hub City, once so proud of its muscle, had just reported its fortieth bank closing—a fitting setting for the Democratic Convention. There a new figure on the national scene, Franklin D. Roosevelt, inspired by a “brains trust” of Columbia professors, would call for “a New Deal” and voice his concern for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
In the three-hour layover between trains, Father bought me a new portable phonograph as a graduation present. I picked hit records from the Broadway musicals I had seen, Libby Holman torching “Something to Remember You By” and other Gershwin showstoppers from Girl Crazy, like “Embraceable You” and “Bidin’ My Time.” Just beginning to hear the difference between true jazz and the pop orchestras I listened to on the radio, I bought Red Nichols and his Orchestra (Red’s sidemen were Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Dorsey, and Jack Teagarden). Then, stopping at a speakeasy Ben Hecht had recommended, B.P. drew around him a group of Hecht’s newspaper cronies, each one of them ready to sell him a gangster yarn that would top Underworld. Drinking, laughing, enjoying the attention, Father suddenly realized the Chief was about to leave. We jumped in a taxi and raced through traffic while the manager phoned ahead to hold the train.
Entering the oak-paneled dining car that evening for the first meal of the journey, Father was recognized by the attentive captain from previous crossings. Satisfied travelers tipped at the far end of the trip, but Father liked to hand out his gold pieces at the beginning as well. In return, the smiling maître d’ reserved Father’s favorite table for him and served specially prepared dishes that were not on the menu. I don’t think Father really cared that much about three-star dishes. It was simply his way of maintaining the status to which he had become accustomed.
Over his drinks before dinner (a supply of imported scotch laid on at Chicago), I would offer him for criticism descriptive paragraphs I had sketched in the observation car, invariably getting more than I bargained for. If he liked one line in half a dozen, I was encouraged. Tough criticism was helping me. The flattery I almost invariably heard from Mother was balm for the wounds. But I knew I needed the sting of the stick as a racehorse does if it is not to bear out. Already he had told me he thought I was hopelessly over my head with Judge Lynch. And the scenario Maurice and I had written for Bughouse Fables had not changed his earlier opinion that putting the Marx Brothers in charge of a lunatic asylum was a self-defeating idea. Stung, I insisted that I had just read their Horsefeathers screenplay and thought ours was better. Father admired my spirit, but warned me that if I were to repeat that cockiness to Mank, he’d make us the laughingstock of the town. “Cockiness is helpful while you’re writing,” he advised, “but humility is the ticket to rewriting.”
Leaving Albuquerque, that calculated tourist stop, where the squatting Navajo vendors had become familiar faces, Father made notes in the screenplay of Madame Butterfly, his next big production; it would star Sylvia Sidney, in kimono and clogs, as Cio-Cio-San. There had been an unspoken truce about the Sidney problem all the way out. It had been a congenial, stimulating trip in which both of us had repressed the urge to anticipate the future that waited so threateningly at the end of the journey. While Father studied and tried to cut a script he goddamned for being so long, I tried to write a short story about a young Navajo whose crude bow-and-arrow is rejected by a prosperous young passenger. “Only twenty-five cents,” says the Indian boy. “I’ll give you a quarter to keep the damned thing!” says the callow traveler, and flips him a coin. As the conductor calls “All aboard!” the traveler is on his way back to the comfort of his Pullman car when he feels a sharp pain between his spine and his shoulder blade. One of the rejected toy arrows has found its mark. I could feel the arrow in my own back as I wrote. I handed Father the short-short, a popular form at the time, and he pronounced it one of the better things I had done.
That night in the dining car there was a banquet suggestive of a farewell feast on a transatlantic crossing: fresh venison from the Reservation, prepared in illicit red wine, accompanied by articulate toasts from Father and other distinguished travelers.
At Needles on the Arizona-California border, the heat brought back to mind the trip a dozen years earlier: Again it was 110 in what was euphemistically called “the shade,” but outside the dry, stucco houses there was no shade. The Mojave Desert was relentless: hour after hour of scorched sagebrush and sand. The drawing room was stifling. The railing on the observation car was too hot to touch. I thought of Greed: McTeague the simpleminded dentist and his envious rival Schouler, dying of thirst with no water within a hundred miles, as they staggered after their gasping mule loaded with gold. What would it be like to fall off the observation platform and crawl through that alkali wasteland?
And then, modestly at first, followed by an abundance of groves, came mile after mile of orange trees. A whole country of festive oranges to welcome us home. At the old station in the Mexican backwater, the entire tribe was there to greet us—Mom, Sonya, Stuart, Maurice, and Father’s loyal followers from the studio. For a few minutes there was jubilation. Then my parents drove off in separate cars.