Chris Samuels, nine years old and not particularly big for his age either, was writing a poem. Bicycling home from school, even while he was riding no-hands, Chris was composing a poem about motherhood. “Mother mine so good and true …” is the way it started. Pumping home through the sunlight of Wilshire Boulevard, turning left into Windsor Square with its rows of date palms and box hedges—fashionable then, in the early 1920’s—he went on composing.
The poem was nearly complete by the time he pedaled up the driveway of the Samuelses’ relatively modest mansion. It rhymed and had a beautiful sound to it when he said it out loud. It gave him a feeling that was unlike anything he could remember.
As soon as he had finished his milk and graham crackers he hurried to a special place to write down his poem. This hideaway was under the piano in the living room, as far back under the piano and into the corner as he could crawl. There he felt safe, alone and cozy, a feeling summed up in his own word guzzy. He liked the idea that nobody knew where to find him. What made it even more exciting was that his mother had warned him not to go into the living room unless a grownup was there. That was because of all the breakable valuables around. One of Mrs. Samuels’s talents was interior decorating; the living room was full of precious hazards in Bristol glass and Staffordshire china.
Under the piano Chris worked hard on his poem. First he wrote it down and then he thought of some better words to put into it and he did some erasing. Then he made a clean new copy, but soon that became smudged. Finally he made a nice, neat, finished copy with the fanciest writing he could do.
Chris had been working so hard that he did not hear his mother come into the living room. She was a pretty woman whose sturdy peasant origin had been modified by a wistful preoccupation with refinement, a consistent devotion to self-improvement. She had gone forward from Coué to Brill, she attended regular classes in psychology at the university and she was the founder of a local child-study group. A procession of visiting lecturers had bent a knee to her tea table. She was busy improving her mind and Chris’s mind and all the minds she could get hold of.
She had come into the living room to “steal a cigarette.” The coy sense of admitting the vice was a throwback to Victorian restrictions only recently lifted, even here in Hollywood. As she sneaked a cigarette from the palm of a glass hand she noticed Chris’s feet under the piano.
“Chrissy, I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been in here, Mom.”
“How many times must I tell you not to come into the living room when no one is here?”
“I wrote a poem, Mom. It’s a poem for you.”
Her pleasure at this artistic development overcame her anger at disobedience.
“Why, Chris, how nice! Will you read it to me?”
Chris crawled out from under the piano and straightened himself as he did at school when he was called on to recite. He read his poem with proud emphasis on every syllable. It contained six unabashed couplets in praise of his mother and of motherhood in general. Before he was halfway through, Mrs. Samuels’s eyes had become soft and shiny.
When Chris finished he looked into his mother’s eyes and there was a long and delicious pause. Then she said: “Chrissy, did you write that? Did you really write that?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Why—why I think it’s beautiful.”
She put her arms out and Chris went to her for an intimate celebration of hugging and kissing.
“Simply beautiful,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “Why, I had no idea—simply no idea you could write a poem like that. Such a beautiful poem!”
She took the sheet of paper from Chris and read it to herself, shaking her head in awe at this sign of genius in her own flesh and blood.
“Chris, I’m going to save this. When you’re a famous, grownup writer I will always remember hearing your first poem.”
“Is Daddy coming home for dinner?”
“I imagine so. He hasn’t called.”
“I want Daddy to read it too.”
“Oh, you must read it to Daddy. Daddy will be so proud of his little writer.”
“Gee, I wish he could come home early.”
His father was the head of a motion-picture studio. The kids at school told Chris they wished their fathers could be the big cheese of a Hollywood studio because then they could get to see free movies and meet all the movie stars. “Boy, would that be keen!” they said. Chris pretended that it was. He had never been able to tell them that it wasn’t so keen having your father a famous motion-picture executive. For one thing, the hours were awful. Chris would go days and days without even seeing his father, who had to stay at the studio having conferences and running rushes until long after Chris’s bedtime. And while the stars had always been nice to Chris, his low opinion of them was a mild reflection of his father’s. According to Mr. Samuels, they were a selfish, ungrateful, stupid and difficult lot. Chris was used to hearing his father say, “To become a movie star you have to be a bitch and what kind of a man wants to be a movie actor except a damned jackass.”
Chris respected his father and although—or perhaps because—he didn’t see him as often as he wished, he was always eager for his father’s approval of whatever he was doing. On the occasional Sunday when there were no dinner guests from the studio, his father would read aloud to him. Mr. Samuels admired Melville, Twain, Dickens, Conrad and Galsworthy. Chris almost fell asleep on Galsworthy but he liked Omoo and Typee and Huck Finn and Youth; and The Old Curiosity Shop made tears in his eyes. His father had started out as a writer. He had won a prize in a city short-story contest and then he had written scenarios for the early movies. Then he had worked his way up to being a producer and finally the head of the studio. Chris had heard the story several times from his mother. Although his father was a producer of silent pictures he liked to talk about the sound of words and Chris knew from his mother that “Daddy has excellent taste.”
Now that he had written his first poem, Chris got all jumpy inside, wondering what his father would think of it. Would the poem make Daddy cry the way it had Mom? Maybe his father would give him a gold piece after reading it. He had a habit of keeping gold pieces to hand out on special occasions.
Chris didn’t know what to do with himself while he waited for his father to come home. He went outside and watched his pigeons circle the house for a while, he played with his dog Bunk, and then he got into an argument with Julian, the boy next door. Julian was the son of another movie producer at a smaller studio.
Across the hedge Julian began a ritualistic debate.
“My father makes better pictures ’n your father makes.”
“He does not.”
“He does too.”
“He does not.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Sometimes they would elaborate this stylized dispute by challenging picture for picture, but this afternoon Chris’s heart wasn’t in it. With a token intraindustrial sneer, he broke it off and went into the house. He looked at his poem again and got his crayons out to frame it in a border of red and blue. If his father wanted to take it to the studio, to show it to his stars and directors, it had to look right.
He was just finishing it when he heard someone in the hall.
“Dad?”
His mother called, “No, Chris, it’s just a chauffeur dropping off a script.”
Chris groaned. Chauffeurs were always dropping off scripts. Scripts that people, all sorts of people, were trying to sell to his father. “Chris, I’d love to go out and see your new squabs, but I promised someone I’d read this script right away,” his father would say. When he saw a script Chris could almost smell the cigar smoke that curled around his father as he rapidly turned page after page. After the last page his father would almost always throw the script down and say, “God-damn it, the lousiest script I ever read.” Chris would wonder why his father kept on reading them if each one was worse than the one before.
Poem in hand, Chris sat in the living room, waiting for his father.
“Do you think Daddy will like my poem?” he said to his mother.
Her answer was what he wanted to hear: “Of course, he’ll like it. It shows unusual talent. Chris, I can’t tell you how proud I am.”
“It was easy to do,” Chris said. “Lots of times I make them up to myself when I’m falling asleep.”
“I had no idea,” his mother said. “You know, your father used to write poetry when he was a young man. I’ll show you some of it, when you’re a little older. It must run in the family.”
“I am going to write a poem every single day until I grow up,” Chris announced.
“Songs from the heartstrings of a little boy,” his mother said softly. “Why, perhaps Father could have them published. Wouldn’t that make a lovely title?”
“Oh, I wish Daddy would come home,” Chris said.
“Poor Daddy has to work so hard at the studio.”
“I wish he was in a regular business,” Chris said. “Like Jimmy. Jimmy’s father has a store on Pico and he comes home for dinner every single night.”
“Your father is a very successful man. A very famous man.”
“Gee, I know,” Chris said sadly.
James, the butler, came in to announce dinner.
“We’ll wait just a few more minutes,” his mother said, “and then if Mr. Samuels isn’t here we’ll sit down without him, James.”
“Darn it, I wish he didn’t have to stay so late with those bitch movie stars,” Chris said.
“Christopher!”
It wasn’t his fault. He had heard his father come roaring in from the studio so often that he could never think of movie stars without putting the other word on in front. Stupid bitches—ungrateful bastards—in the Samuelses’ home these were mild terms for movie stars.
“Well, Mom, you know what Daddy says.”
His mother rose, smiling in a polite, lonely way. “I suppose we might as well start. Your father may not be here for another hour.”
“He’s gotta read my poem before I go to sleep, he’s just gotta.”
“Now, Chris, I know how anxious you are, but you have to be patient.”
They went into the big dining room together. His father’s place was very empty at the head of the long mahogany table.
“I know what I’ll do,” Chris said. “I’ll put my poem right on his plate so it’ll be the first thing he sees when he sits down.”
“My, you anxious authors,” his mother said, smiling.
They were finishing the main course when they heard the car roaring up the drive and then the heavy, hurried tread of Sol Samuels’s feet running up the steps to the porch. Then there was a long, loud ring and James went quickly to the door.
“Hello, dear,” his mother called. “You forgot your keys?”
“Flo, do you think I’d ring if I hadn’t forgot my keys?” his father shouted. He was a dynamic, ruddy-faced man in his early forties, an age that would have made him a prodigy in any business but this prodigy field he had chosen to pioneer.
“Sit down, dear, you must be tired,” his mother said.
“First I’ve got to have a drink,” his father said. His voice carried to the dining room as he disappeared into the den. “Of all the goddamn days, the idiots I have to put up with. An hour ago Larry wants to walk off the picture, the part is only going to make him the biggest thing in Hollywood and the damn fool thinks he’s miscast! Well, just let him try and walk out—I’ll suspend him, I’ll run that ham out of the industry, the ungrateful son of a bitch.”
Sol Samuels had reappeared with a highball glass in his hand. The jaw that was a favorite target for caricaturists was thrust forward in characteristic defiance.
“And then Mary comes in weeping those goddamn phony tears and says she doesn’t want Joe on her next picture. Joe is the one director in town who can hold her down and get a performance out of her. But she wants some third-rate punk she can push around. I know my little Mary. I should, I discovered the bitch, so—”
“Sol, will you please sit down and eat your dinner.”
“Now, Flo, just let me have one more drink. My nerves are jumping like sand fleas tonight.”
Chris watched his father disappear again into the den. He got up and went to his father’s place and straightened the poem a fraction of an inch. Then he went back to his seat. His mother smiled at him. His father returned with a refill, paused at his wife’s chair to brush her cheek with a distracted kiss and rustled Chris’s hair as he strode to his place.
“What the hell is this?” he said, picking up the paper.
“Sol, Chris has written a poem,” his mother said. “A beau tiful poem, Sol. I had no idea he could do anything like that. He could hardly wait for you to—”
“All right, now let me read it,” his father said.
There was a silence. It could not have been a long silence, for it was not a long poem. But it was a terrible silence. His mother kept looking at his father with a motherly smile, a kind of tentative smile, waiting to share with him their mutual pride. Chris kept his eyes on his father’s face, waiting for the praise and the gold piece.
After a few seconds his father put the poem down, drained his highball glass, and said: “I think it’s lousy.”
Chris looked at his father, then at his mother, through a glaze of tears.
“Sol, how could you? His first poem. After all, he’s only nine. And to use such a word. Such a tactless, cruel word. What’s happening to your judgment, Sol? Your—your perspective?”
Chris heard the fight as if from a great distance through a roar of disappointment.
“Goddamn it, I believe in being honest about writing, anybody’s writing, even Chrissy’s writing. How the hell will he ever improve if you don’t level with him?”
“But, Sol, do you really think it makes sense to talk to him as if he were a professional writer on your payroll?”
Sol Samuels tried, as he often did when his wife had him cornered, to make a joke of it.
“Look, Flo, I just got finished telling a team of two-thousand-a-week writers their stuff is lousy. I pay Chris only fifty cents a week, so who has a better right to tell him his stuff is lousy?”
Chris Samuels’s pride was being rubbed into the word the way his pup Bunk had his nose rubbed into the spot on the carpet when he forgot to scratch on the door. His lips began to tremble and the color drained from his face. He hated his father, he hated the studio, he hated the scenarios, he hated the bitch movie stars, he hated the lousiness of lousy. To keep his father from hearing him give in to it, he ran from the table with his hands held over his mouth.
He held himself in until he was upstairs in his own bedroom with the door slammed behind him. He could still hear the angry voices of his father and mother. What frightened him now was not that his father was cruelly and stupidly wrong, but that he might be cruelly and terribly right.