INSTEAD OF A JOYOUS reunion at the Lorraine house, that night the living room was full of anger as Uncle Sam Jaffe and Felix Young clashed in heated argument as to how the studio would run without Father at the helm. Felix thought the board of directors had made a tragic mistake and that Paramount would never recover from Ben’s demotion. Possibly because he was being kept on as studio manager, possibly out of loyalty to Mother, Sam blamed B.P. for losing control. “I begged him to listen to the people around him, and to learn how to delegate authority to his supervisors, like Irving. But Ben can be awfully stubborn. He wanted to be the boss.”
The pros and cons of Father’s new status were argued way past midnight. Sam was obviously feeling his oats. He had come up in the world from the nebbish brother-in-law who had had to room with his nephew at the Lorraine house. Now increasingly sure of himself, Sam began to see that he could survive without Father. Felix was more dependent, and therefore more defensive. Soon he would move on from studio supervisor to the town’s leading boniface, first with the Vendôme restaurant, then the Trocadero. Of course Father would lend him money to help him get started, just as once he had bailed him out of jail. Where the elegant Felix was loyal, Sam was righteous. Mother managed to be both sad and angry. And as for me, noting in my diary that “I was up till after 2 talking with Maurice about this mess of Dad and Mom,” I closed out the long day on a note of Chekhovian gloom: “I will never be really happy again.”
Tension increased as little Stuart kept wanting to be with Father, and would take off on his bike to visit the rival beach establishment. Mother objected on the old-fashioned, non-Freudian grounds that it was harmful to Stuey’s sense of morals to let him see his father living openly in sin “with his little hoor.” The ten-year-old was confused because he had seen so little of his father that he kept reaching out to him. And it was more fun at Father’s, where they made a great fuss over him and where our old man’s booming laughter encouraged Stu to deliver his droll, precocious monologues.
Meanwhile, Mother was setting up her agency office in the Taft Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She used her decorator’s touch to give the suite an unusually homey atmosphere, full of antiques and fine fabrics. It looked like an extension of the Lorraine and Malibu houses, but underneath the charm it was all business. To counter the tough studio lawyers in contract disputes, Ad was the first to cast around for a lawyer of her own and make him part of the agency. With her eye for talent, she picked a winner in Charley Feldman, a tall, handsome young man with diffident charm, recently out of law school. Her idea was to pay him a mere $100 a week, but a percentage of the earnings of the clients he brought in as well. An ideal combination, Ad and Charley were an almost overnight threat to Myron Selznick’s domination of the agency business. In time Charley would become an art connoisseur, a confidant of major Hollywood figures like Darryl Zanuck and David Selznick, and the producer of such films as Red River and A Streetcar Named Desire. Years later, facing a premature death in his tasteful mansion in Coldwater Canyon, surrounded by his Cézannes, Picassos and Renoirs, he would remember how much Ad had taught him. “She was really Hollywood’s first lady,” he said. “In different times, she would have run a major studio.”
But to my innocent eyes, her new profession and way of life were still a disgrace to the family. I dreaded to watch her fill her briefcase with scripts and contracts and drive off early each morning to the Vine Street office. I debated whether or not to take a job with The Hollywood Reporter because, even with several in help, I worried that the children would be left unprotected. And that 14-year-old Sonya would be led astray by Adela Rogers St. John’s wild daughter Elaine. And that little Stuey was going to hell on a bicycle spending so much time at that beach house with Father and Sylvia.
Actually, Mother was building a flourishing business that would in time support the family in the manner to which it had become accustomed. She had seized the reins just when B.P. was beginning to lose hold of them.
Again I tried to drown my sorrows in sports—my own, as well as the spectator track-and-field scene Maurice and I had cultivated so intensely. On our tennis court I played as if my life depended on winning.
Still virgins, still teetotalers, still babes in the holly woods, Maurice and I were increasingly concerned with the symbols of growing up. We strayed into a wicked San Francisco dance hall, and, terrified by what we saw, shyly withdrew. We assured each other that this summer we had to learn to dance. Our wallflowering had become ridiculous. Deciding to go to a “speak” we had heard about, we were rudely turned away. Still, we went to the grand St. Francis Hotel, mingled with the smart people until the late hours, and felt we were carousing.
After thirteen hours down the twisting Coast Road, running out of gas and suffering flat tires as usual, we finally reached the old homestead in the Malibu Colony, only to find a drunken party in progress, including Nancy Carroll, her hard-drinking boyfriend, and a writer I had objected to as “an old souse,” who seemed to be Mother’s “date.” A solemn entry in the diary: “Sonya and I felt sad to think how things have changed.” And the following morning, after four vicious sets of tennis and a long swim out to the raft, “That guy is still there this morning. God what riffraff! It seems that now I find failure and wretchedness at every corner.”
These notes of despair were sounded in a lovely tower room overlooking our private beach, with those still-unspoiled meadows rising to the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, with Father announcing a promising program of B. P. Schulberg releases for Paramount, and Mother launched on a meteoric agency career, with my Dusenberg parked at the gate, a staunch group of friends (mostly the sons of other Hollywood producers), a good summer job on the leading Hollywood trade paper giving me entry to every studio, and matriculation at Dartmouth set for the fall.
I threw myself into the Reporter job, whipping my Dusenberg all the way from Universal City in the Valley to the walled fortress of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, where Maurice was now working as a junior writer. Harry Rapf’s Joan Crawford, having made the transition to sound that Father’s Clara Bow had sadly failed, was seducing Walter Huston in Rain, but now Maurice and I were no longer barred from the set. Now we were passing for young professionals, and instead of shyly asking for her autograph as I had half a dozen years before, I was the eager young reporter taking brisk notes on Miss Crawford’s burgeoning career.
She had just surprised her critics by holding her own in Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery. She was moving up from the racy but rather stereotyped jazz-baby roles of the late Twenties. Having started at the bottom, in a stag movie that had become a Hollywood collector’s item, Joan had the drive that separates stars from feature players. She was mastering the art of big-studio success. It involved much more than sleeping with Harry Rapf or other MGM producers. We could see how hard she worked at stardom, in front of the camera, between takes, in her dressing room, and away from the studio. The commissary, the main studio street, the Vendôme, her limousine—these all became sets where the driven Lucille Laeseur acted out the fantasy that had become Miss Joan Crawford.
Joan Crawford may not have been the greatest actress who ever played Sadie Thompson, but no one exposed to her portrayal could ever forget that powdered, rouged, and lipsticked mask of seduction and sin. Her face was like a sensuous canvas on which were drawn come-hither eyes larger than life and a full mouth painted even fuller as if by an artist consumed by sexual hunger. As Greta Garbo represented sex repressed and subtle, Joan Crawford was sex at the ready, her dancer’s figure threatening—promising—to burst from the tight silk that barely held it in. The poor Reverend Davidson had about as much chance of standing up to the onslaught of Joan’s wanton Sadie Thompson as the little Pomona College eleven had to stop the Trojans of U.S.C. And yet when one talked with Joan, it was not the physical but the mental power that came through, the mind of the superachiever. No matter where you think I came from, her will imposed itself on you, I recreate my life story as I live it. She had convinced one fan-magazine writer that she had been raised in a convent and had a degree from Stephens College, where she had majored in science and studied drama. That she had been a tough little hoofer at the age of 14 had less reality for her than all the convent school-Stephens College window dressing. If movie fans escaped into their tinseled dreams, why shouldn’t the movie stars who floated through those dreams? Now that the former taxi-dancer was Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and reigned over a castle in Brentwood, how could she be anything else but a convent-bred Stephens graduate?
An old vaudevillian turned master Broadway actor turned offbeat movie star, Walter Huston also made good copy on the set of Rain. I had first met Huston when he was playing bad guy to Gary Cooper’s soft-spoken nice guy in The Virginian, one of Father’s early hit talkies. Having seen Huston on the New York stage as Dodsworth, and having heard my old man praise him as one of the few actors he knew incapable of giving a bad performance, I approached the Reverend Davidson with considerable awe. To my surprise he wasn’t interested in talking about his own career, or what choice role he was after next. Instead, he was worried about his young son Johnny. “Johnny’s got talent,” he said, “I know he’s got talent. Trouble with Johnny is, he’s got too damn many talents.” John Huston first had wanted to be a fighter; even had a couple of pro fights at the Hollywood Legion. He could ride as well as any Western stuntman and had put in some time with the Mexican cavalry. He had worked in New York as an actor, he had set up a studio in Paris and decided to be a painter, had turned to short stories which he sold to The American Mercury, and thought he’d be a novelist, a reporter, a screenwriter, a movie actor. …
“He could be anything he wants to be, and what worries the hell out of me is that he could also be a bum,” brooded the famous father of the future famous director. He was confiding in me because he knew my parents and was aware of their confidence—virtually amounting to a decision—that I would become a writer. There was something rather feudal about it, as if I had been apprenticed at the age of fourteen. Mr. Huston wished young Johnny would settle down to a single career. “I hope to hell it isn’t acting,” he said. “I think it’s writing. But nothing would surprise me about Johnny—he could wind up winning the Pulitzer Prize—or robbing a bank!”
Years later, I would remember this conversation as I watched them win their historic father-son brace of Oscars for performance and direction in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Johnny would be flamboyant and unpredictable all his life. Sometimes his restlessness and versatility would affect his concentration and derail his progress as a film director. But the time when he would come into his own with The Maltese Falcon, and then move on to the African Queen and other film classics, was still years ahead of him.
On my rounds of the studios, I met what may be considered my first Hollywood date. Perhaps because I didn’t think of her as a member of the opposite sex but instead as potential copy for the Reporter, I found myself able to talk with Sidney Fox about her career, to ask her about her role in Strictly Dishonorable, then being adapted from Preston Sturges’s risqué Broadway hit. She was small, pert, pretty, bright, Jewish, and had given up law school for a Broadway stage career.
Since she was all of 22 and I only 18, I thought of her as an older woman, and so I was surprised when, at the end of the interview, she asked me if I would like to go to a party at the Laemmle mansion in Beverly Hills. I was afraid of parties, but the winsome Miss Fox dropped the kind of names calculated to bring me out of my social shell: It was a party honoring the Ail-American football team, celebrating the wrap-up of a contemporary epic entitled All-American.
Except for the parties my parents and the Rapfs had given—like the reception at our Lorraine house for Maurice Chevalier, at which Charlie Chaplin had gone into another room and pounded the piano to sabotage the attention being lavished on the French singer—this was the first real Hollywood party I had ever attended. It was a mob scene of gridiron celebrities, movie stars, and starlets, with saxophones blaring and bartenders serving the finest bootleg hooch. Sidney asked me to dance, but of course I refused. I had been taking desperate lessons in the box step from Sonya but wasn’t ready to make my debut on the dance floor in the arms of a movie star. Instead, I did what I did best—watched and listened. And what I saw and heard horrified me. My heroes, the beloved gods of my sports pantheon, were looped in the coils of Bacchus. “Those backfield stars, all those great linemen, they were all stinko, it was a drunken orgy!” the young Puritan reported to his diary. I watched, half in jealousy, half in horror, as vivacious little Sidney Fox was bounced around the dance floor by an uninhibited blond giant from Nebraska.
I was ready to go. Sidney said she was, too—the party was getting out of hand. But instead of being driven home, she asked if I’d come with her to Paramount where “one of her beaus,” as she called Jean Negulesco, the European painter now given a chance to direct, was shooting overtime on a low-budget picture. We watched a scene repeated over and over again, until Sidney said she had seen enough and suggested we move on. Again I expected to drop her off at her home, but instead she suggested a speakeasy off Sunset Boulevard. This was my first taste of Hollywood nightlife, a small, dark room full of film people who recognized us, invited us to join their tables, and seemed to take for granted that we were a new Saturday-night “item.” It gave me a racy, sporty feeling to be accepted at Sidney’s escort. Mickey Neilan was there, with a snootful as usual, “between pictures” after a twenty-year career that had left him shipwrecked in the rough crossing from silents to sound. Teasing Sidney about robbing the cradle, Mickey drew suggestive laughter from Jack Oakie and Eugene Palette, the gravel-voiced character actor who seemed never to stop drinking or working, averaging half a dozen features a year, a pace he would continue for years to come. When Gene wasn’t on the set, the assistant director always knew where to find him: at Lucey’s, the speak across from Paramount, or in one of these Hollywood late spots where an animated piano player with a midnight pallor pounded out the happy songs of hard times, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” …
1932: Tin Pan Alley, whistling in the dark, with Depression just outside the door of that Sunset Boulevard retreat, soup kitchens downtown, and in the Ventura Valley on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, embattled farmers tearing down their foreclosure notices. But in the hideaway that Sidney Fox had whisked me to, the laughter, the music, and the whiskey created a mood of timeless escape. Sidney managed to down more than her share of highballs. In the dark I sipped at mine, still loathing the taste and smell, perhaps because I associated it with Father’s delinquencies, but doing my best to appear a man of the world, a Malibu Tom Sawyer trying to remember how Adolphe Menjou or Clive Brook had behaved in similar situations.
We stayed so long that not only was I getting sleepy, I was beginning to worry about an early-morning tennis date. On the way to Sidney’s house she sat disturbingly close to me and chatted away about film work and movie gossip, saying she knew my father, in a way that made me wonder how well?, and that she admired my mother as “a real mensch, the only studio wife I’ve met who can stand up to the Mayers and the Warners.” I was still too upset about my parents to talk about them, I told her; it was ruining my summer. Sympathetically, Sidney cuddled closer. Nervously, I edged away. When we reached her bungalow on a quiet Hollywood street, she turned her face to me for the expected kiss. I reached for the door handle on my side and ran around the sleek nose of the Dusenberg to open the car door for her. What I lacked in ardor I tried to make up in gallantry. She offered me her arm to walk her to her door in a way that left me no choice but to hold it, tentatively. The only girl I had ever walked with so intimately was my cousin Roz. At the door, as she fumbled for her keys, Sidney said she knew that Ad collected colored glass bells, and she had one she would like to give me for Mother’s collection. A million 18-year-olds would have traded a whole month’s allowance for that invitation from the little beauty whose face had graced the cover of Silver Screen. But my only emotion was pure panic. I muttered a thank-you-some-other-time—I had to be on the court in five hours for a big tennis match. “What a strange boy,” Sidney said. “I wonder if your father was anything like you when he was your age?”
By the time I drove the long, winding road home to Malibu, where a dawn mist was rising from the ocean just beyond our gate, I was too exhilarated to sleep. Those lies I had been forced to tell at Deerfield about dating “movie queens” had become truth at last. And if I had been just a little bolder, undoubtedly I could have carried back to Green Gate Cottage a colored glass bell as a symbol of conquest. Instead, I had escaped with virtue intact, eager to share this singular experience with Maurice, my brother in innocence and self-doubt. Did anyone truly like us for ourselves? Or were we simply teenage pawns in the ceaseless Hollywood power game? Too exhausted to go into detail on my “escapade” with Sidney Fox, I settled for a single question: “I wonder why she’s so nice to me?”
The “Baby Peggy syndrome,” as I thought of it, rankled deep inside me. Even if Sidney Fox had fallen madly in love with me, I would have interpreted it as an insidious effort to outflank Sylvia Sidney and wind up with star roles in Father’s new unit at Paramount.
That summer the sex education that my overactive Father and Freudian-minded Mother had totally neglected came to us from an unexpected source—Maurice’s cousin from New York, Al Mannheimer. Although Al was only a year older, in our eyes he was already a man of the world, debonair, sophisticated, and sexually experienced. Handsome, suave, self-assured, he was our Beau Brummel, our Don Juan, our Havelock Ellis. At the Rapfs’ that summer (because his mother had just committed suicide in New York), he moved in an atmosphere of what seemed to us romantic tragedy. We had become almost hardened to Hollywood suicide: “If I don’t get that job I’m going to kill myself!” was more than a rhetorical exclamation in our town. Suicide, including the prolonged form of alcoholism and drugs (Wally Reid, Jack Pickford, Mabel Normand, Alma Rubens, John Gilbert…), was an occupational hazard. But Al’s mother was different. Why would a prosperous Manhattan matron shoot herself? The details were obscure, we avoided painful questions, and Al’s way of coping with it was to assume the role of young roué for whom Hollywood provided erotic escape. He had studied Casanova’s Memoirs with the devotion of a Hebrew scholar reading the Talmud. Like his 18th-century mentor, Al believed that every young creature, no matter how much she demurred, was inevitably seducible.
A full, leatherbound set of Casanova beckoned from our library, where it had been placed unobtrusively on the highest shelf. A new world began to open up to us from the printed pages. We who still had not learned to dance or to know the feel of a girl in our arms now began to fantasize about obliging French mistresses and flirtatious Italian maidens. On movie sets and in studio dressing rooms our sandy-haired, self-appointed Casanova continued our sex education. According to Al, there was “a particular look in the eyes” of those who had recently indulged in sexual intercourse. “It’s a kind of a ‘fucky’ look—the eyes get lighter—as if they’ve been washed in milk,” our mentor explained. So we began to look into the eyes of ingénues and leading men for signs of the Mannheimer test.
We applied this test on the set of Divorce in the Family, a picture I thought of as Maurice’s because he had written the original story for it while working as a junior writer the summer before. The title reflected the near-divorce of Maurice’s own parents after the Joan Crawford affair. In the Rapfs’ case, his father suffered a heart attack, took a leave of absence from the studio, his family rallied around, and Harry and Tina were reunited—just like in the movies, indeed not unlike the movie Chuck Reisner, a holdover from silent days, was “megging” from Maurice’s idea.
Conrad Nagel played the would-be stepfather wooing little Jackie Cooper from his real father, Lewis Stone; somehow the three of us, Al, Maurice, and I, found ourselves in Nagel’s dressing room, where he was changing costumes for the next scene. Our junior Casanova whispered to us to be sure and look at Nagel’s penis. Dutifully, we did so, trying to make it seem accidental as our eyes dropped toward the floor.
When we withdrew from Nagel’s dressing room, Prof. Mannheimer gave us an improvised lecture on what might be called “penisology.” Had we noticed, he quizzed, the way Nagel’s seemed to be bunched up with little wrinkles and how it looked somewhat reddened at the tip? Those were the symptoms, Al explained, of recent sexual intercourse, either that morning or late the night before.
Armed with this potent insight into the carnal mysteries that both fascinated and frightened us, we continued our study in the locker room of the Hillcrest Country Club and the Paramount gym and dressing rooms. Thanks to Al, we were also beginning to study the anatomy of the opposite gender in a way we had not dared to before. In our library I read the spicy stories of Colette and also Mother’s Krafft-Ebing, although that ponderous work preferred to mask the best parts in Latin. Now I wished I had learned a little more of the language that was not quite so dead as MacConaughy and I had thought at Deerfield.
As we had since we were ten, Maurice and I still took turns sleeping over at each other’s houses. But now our intimate all-night talk-fests took a different turn. We were ready to take the plunge, which in our case did not go as far as Mannheimer-Casanova seduction, but merely to work up the nerve to invite a date to the Coconut Grove, or better yet—since we wouldn’t have to dance but merely feel romantic under the stars—to an evening concert in the Hollywood Bowl.
Divorce in the Family featured a luscious 16-year-old being groomed for stardom, Jean Parker. No ordinary starlet, Jean was the ward of Ida Koverman, former secretary to Herbert Hoover, proudly acquired by L.B. not only as a sign of class but as a means of moving up the Republican ladder to the lofty appointments for which he panted. The ultraconservative Mrs. Koverman, who served as L.B.’s storyteller—saving him the irksome chore of reading treatments and scenarios—was determined to keep her protégée as pure as an ingénue in an Andy Hardy movie. Mrs. Koverman had to approve Jean’s dates; she had to be properly chaperoned and, like Cinderella, home before midnight. This made Jean an ideal first date for Maurice, removing the pressures of the livelier Sidney Foxes. Through the musical prodigy my parents hoped to develop into a second Paderewski, Leon Becker, I met the fair Elaine Rugg, “very pretty with clean blonde hair and an unusual smile, the kind of girl that is restful to be with.”
We had first met Leon at the Coaching School, where he appealed to us as a romantic figure, with his bare little knees pumping masterfully beneath the keyboard of the grand piano on which he played everything from Chopin to Beethoven. When we learned that his father had died and his mother was working as a seamstress, my parents were so moved by his plight and his talent that they virtually adopted him, paying his tuition at the Coaching School (he was there on a limited scholarship) and offering to underwrite his musical education. He had become a “third brother” we proudly showed off at parties, where he held the guests spellbound with precocious performances of études and sonatas.
Thanks to Leon’s introduction, I was able to take Elaine to the Hollywood Bowl where, moved by the sensuous music of Ravel, we shyly held hands. Then on to the Brown Derby, the original one on Wilshire Boulevard, built Hollywood-style in the shape of an actual bowler. Elaine was lovely, gentle, sweet, passive, and over a steaming plate of tamales I wondered if the unfamiliar flush I was feeling came from the spicy Mexican dish or from my first experience of falling in love. She lived downtown in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a modest frame house with an old-fashioned front porch. Getting out of the Dusenberg I knew I hadn’t earned, I forced myself to take Elaine’s arm and walk her to the door. There was a tantalizing moment when we almost kissed. It was comforting to find someone as demure as I. In my diary is an entry suitably restrained: “Elaine is liable to become my first ‘crush.’”
Early next morning I called to ask if she would go with me to the Coconut Grove. “Oh, that sounds very nice.” Her voice was a gentle purring, almost a whisper. I talked so softly myself that we could barely hear one another. As I made my rounds of the studios that day, I was too distracted to take proper notes. At the end of the afternoon, the 14-year-old Sonya, with a dance style slightly this side of Adele Astaire’s, put some records on the Capehart and offered last-minute instructions on my command of the box step. It seemed I only knew how to move in one direction, clockwise. Not only did that become monotonous but it tended to induce vertigo. Whenever I tried counterclockwise, my partner’s feet had an annoying habit of tripping me.
It was almost time to pick up Elaine. Sonya could do no more. “I guess you’ll just have to keep on doing that one step and try not to get dizzy,” was her sisterly advice.
A night of triumph! Elaine was graceful, tender and helpful. By the end of the evening I even took a few tentative steps counterclockwise.
Parked in front of her house, I rested my arm on the backrest behind her and with studied casualness let it slip down over her shoulder. Progress. It was not quite the seductive tactics Al Mannheimer had recommended: “Guide her hand gently toward your fly. If she doesn’t pull her hand away, put your hand over hers and say something romantic. You’ll be surprised how many girls can’t resist feeling it once you hold their hand to it. The stirring excites them even if they pretend to be shocked. If she pulls her hand away, don’t get discouraged. She may want you to think she’s not that kind of a girl. Wait ’til next time. But if she doesn’t draw her hand away, surreptitiously begin to unbutton your fly. …”
Instead, while I draped my arm modestly around Elaine’s shoulder, I listened sympathetically to her long, sad story: She wanted to be a classical dancer; a fortune left to her in a grandparent’s will could only be claimed if she went to Sweden, a journey her parents refused her because she was too young to travel and live there alone—but unless she could claim that fortune, she felt doomed to a life of mediocrity.
The pale light of tragedy enfolding her seemed to make her more beautiful. At the door I asked her if she would like to have lunch with me at the studio next day. “Oh, that would be nice,” she purred again. Of course it never occurred to me that the beautiful Elaine might be a confirmed dullard. In ecstasy I gunned the big car back toward prosperous Windsor Square, and promptly ran out of gas. In the diary the crown prince of the Schulberg fortunes had his emotions under control: “What a swell girl! Her life story would make a great yarn. Putting my arm around her is a great step forward!”
At the studio luncheon next day I innocently invited “third brother” Leon. He seemed distracted, upset, and strangely quiet. While I signed the bill—sent to Father’s office—he asked if he could drive Elaine home. I was surprised, as Leon was working in the music department, writing out scores for background music, and I knew he was under pressure to get back to work. The head of the department, Nat Finston, was a demanding boss. Leaving abruptly during the middle of the day could cost Leon his job.
Later I drove down to Elaine’s to discuss this serious turn of events. She admitted she had been “seeing” Leon, but in her opinion he was overdramatizing the situation. So my first tentative romance had led to dramatic complications. In the overexcitement of finally asking a girl to the Grove, I had been insensitive to Leon’s feelings. In his martyrdom, Leon assured me that if Elaine and I were really serious about each other, he would step aside. But he was hurt. Underlying this drama, I knew, was his sense of inferiority. He, Maurice, and I played as equals, but there must always have been that gnawing feeling that we had been born to the Hollywood purple, while he, with all his musical culture, still came from the other side of the tracks.