COMING BACK FROM the Games to The Hollywood Reporter, I found that my routine items—who was cast in what picture, what director had been assigned, when the next production would roll—had become boringly easy. I asked the managing editor for a chance at something bigger, like covering a sneak preview. Grumbling, Billy Wilkerson assigned me a Columbia meller sneaking in Glendale. Feeling as important as a first-night reviewer, I went alone so I could concentrate. Conscientiously, I took notes in the dark on the formula stuff I was to appraise, then raced back to the Sunset Boulevard office to bang out my review. I gave the picture no stars. Feeling righteously honest, I tore it apart sequence by sequence. Long after midnight I drove home tired but happy, congratulating myself on a hard job well done.
Next morning I couldn’t wait to see my review in print, the first real chance I had had on the paper. I turned to the third-page banner over the review and read—an out-and-out rave! Socko programmer! Smart megging and first-rate cast more than make up for formula story! Here and there, toward the end, they kept a line or two of my original critique. But sometime after I had slung on my cap and hopped into my Dusenberg phaeton, little goblins had crept in and completely rewritten me to please a muscle-minded Harry Cohn who otherwise would have threatened, “No more fuckin’ ads!”
Lincoln Steffens had opened a window, a whole houseful of windows, on municipal corruption. My brief career on The Hollywood Reporter added a local footnote: District Attorney Buron Fitts had just been caught taking bribes and at last was losing his sinecure. The dull Los Angeles Times and the lurid Herald-Examiner published nothing objectionable to the Hollywood powers. And of course the Industry “trades” religiously read at thousands of studio desks every morning carried only the news and reviews that Louie B., Jack L., and the rest of the moguls thought fit to print.
I wanted to quit. I wanted to stand up to Billy Wilkerson. But with millions out of work, and hundreds of local writers hungry for jobs, I had a strong case of the Ad Schulberg guilts. And when I dropped in at Father’s new quarters, he urged me to swallow my pride, keep on working, and not alienate Wilkerson. He admired my principles, but reminded me that I was still serving my journalistic novitiate: Covering the Hollywood beat and meeting deadlines were invaluable training for the work ahead. Father’s outspokenness had already alienated L.B., Sam Goldwyn, and other Hollywood rivals. But he was always ready to give sound conservative advice he was never able to follow.
That Sunday at Malibu I was bailed out of my moral dilemma by a timely visit from Dave Selznick. He and Irene—lively, loyal friends in those days—had stopped by for tennis, brunch, and local gossip. When David, ever-curious, ever-working, asked me what I was doing, I told him a story I was outlining: A Negro cook and her young son live on a Bel Air estate where her little boy and the white owner’s son, of an age, become inseparable. Both sets of parents try to break up what they consider an unhealthy relationship. The cook, modeled on our own irrepressible Lucille, is as determined a segregationist as her white employers. “When us black folks mess with whites, who do you think gets the short end of the stick?” she warns her small son, then sings the old saw, “Stay in your own backyard.” But the boy won’t listen. When the young white master invites him to the pool and teaches him how to swim, they hold a diving contest in which the white boy is injured; the black boy tries to save him and drowns in the attempt. Of course the dead child is blamed by the white parents for challenging their son to take unnecessary risks. The mammy, obviously Hattie McDaniels, is left with her drowned son in her arms, crooning, “Stay in your own backyard.”
This was not exactly Langston Hughes, or Jean Toomer, or even DuBose Heyward. But the young, enthusiastic Selznick enthused. He saw a kid’s picture, a Skippy or Sooky, with a new touch of Negro pathos (or was it bathos?) thrown in. With feelers always out for new material, he was ready to buy it on the spot. My mother the agent made the deal. I was to be paid $1,500 on delivery of a ten-page outline. At that point, if David liked what he read, I would go to work at RKO for $50 a week to develop the story until I had to leave for Dartmouth.
With a flourish, I signed my first writing contract, Budd Wilson Schulberg (for we all had to have three names in those days), shook the mighty hand of David Oliver Selznick, and was assigned an office in the writers’ wing of the studio. My immediate supervisor was an old friend from Father’s staff, Benny Zeidman, whom David had brought with him to RKO. On the first day I discovered that I would not be working alone. David had decided that I should be teamed with an older, more seasoned writer. He turned out to be a published mystery writer, Stuart Palmer, a sympathetic and congenial fellow who took a rather patronizing view of my story and was more involved in the serious business of finishing his next mystery novel on company time.
Assigning two total strangers to collaborate on a film story was a bizarre but familiar Hollywood practice. It had never been clear to me why an established Broadway playwright or a published novelist could not sit down and write alone as he had done before. Hollywood believed in safety in numbers. Not just a single team but often a series of teams would be used to turn out a single screenplay. What the studio bosses failed to appreciate was the impossibility of two strangers closeting themselves in a small office and plunging into instant collaboration. First we had to break the ice.
Stuart Palmer and I talked about my father and his complex relationship to David Selznick, about mystery-writing and fiction-writing in general, about the general low I.Q. of supervisors and the specific mental deficiencies of little Benny Zeidman, and about gambling. Father’s addiction was common knowledge. When I said I had developed such a loathing for the subject that I did not even know how to play poker or shoot craps, my new collaborator produced a pair of dice and rattled them against the wall of our office to begin my education.
A few days later I would enter in my ledger: “Did little work on my story. Lost $2 at craps. But we have a swell angle on the story. A Green Pastures touch.” This was far different from being allowed to sit in on Father’s conferences, indulged, flattered, and encouraged to make a suggestion now and then. I was on the other side now, waiting for conferences always late in being called. When Benny Zeidman liked our Green Pastures approach, our stock rose. Back to work, between crap games and bull sessions, our confidence grew. A few days later, when we heard that Zeidman—in the familiar game of Hollywood musical chairs—had been fired, and that David O. would assign a new supervisor to Your Own Back Yard, our stock plunged. Up and down the halls, and across at Lucey’s, we found fellow-writers in the same predicament. Everybody seemed to be waiting for Selznick. And young David seemed to shuffle film projects the way Zeppo Marx shuffled cards. One of the reasons David had given for walking out on Father was B.P.’s inability or refusal to delegate authority. Now the underlings of RKO were voicing the same criticism of David. The intense D.O.S. simply wasn’t geared to turn out the forty to fifty pictures a year the RKO program demanded. He wanted to concentrate on his own class production, A Bill of Divorcement, starring George Cukor’s young Broadway discovery, Katharine Hepburn; The Animal Kingdom; Topaze… My little story, and low-budget pictures like it, were neglected as young David indulged ever-bigger dreams.