Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  There was so much noise and confusion that it was hard to hear what Selkirk was saying as he set the ladder down at the edge of public property and climbed a couple of rungs to rev up the crowd. But it was clear who he was saying it about. He kept pointing at the Warner brothers and their lackeys and then at the other side of the street, where twenty or so beefy men were milling around on a grassy parkway, some of them not bothering to conceal their brass knuckles. They had been standing in groups of two or three, nonchalantly eyeing the strikers, but now began to congeal purposefully around a squat man with a placid Buddha smile on his face.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That Jew bastard Geist,” Jack Warner replied, rolling his eyes in annoyance when he realized he’d answered the question of a nobody.

  Harry, who read and spoke Hebrew, grimaced, “Jew bastard? I guess you’ve forgotten you were born Jacob Wonksolaser.”

  Then he relented: “Solomon Geist, a piece of shit criminal who muscled his way into the International Brotherhood of Technicians and Actors, the supposed union that’s been raping us for years that the commies now want to replace with their Association of Studio Employees so they can rape us harder. The Outfit sent him out here from Chicago before the war to give a pink slip to the Mustache Petes and other amateurs who’d been running the rackets in LA since God was a little boy. Now he’s the star of the show along with his psycho friend Bugsy Siegel.”

  “Don’t forget Siegel’s itchy trigger finger—that fucking dwarf Mickey Cohen,” Jack Warner added. “A couple of years ago Geist and Siegel and Cohen tried to organize a union for extras. Can you believe it? They wanted to make us pay a bunch of pisherkes for every day they don’t work!”

  Harry nodded dolefully: “Like my bother says, there’s a civil war going on in this town. Screen Actors Guild for Geist; Screen Writers Guild for Selkirk. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Commies and criminals—scorpions in a bottle. Shake them up so they eat each other.”

  By this time, Selkirk had stopped his harangue and was waving his arms like an orchestra conductor to lead the demonstrators in a booming takeoff on the Hoagy Carmichael song:

  You got to ac-cen-tuate the picket line,

  E-liminate the scabby kind,

  Latch on to that old picket sign

  Till the producers see the light …

  Right then, two buses pulled up and Jack Warner yelled triumphantly, “Sing your heart out, schmuck. The cavalry has arrived.”

  The bus doors hissed open and scabs armed with iron pipes and chains poured out. Like a pair of moiling peasant armies, the scabs and strikers met in a dense, compacted struggle while hand-to-hand clashes erupted on the periphery. In an instant I saw a man with blood sheeting down his face from a gash on the top of his head extracted from the melee by a squad of monitors wearing white air-raid warden helmets bearing the Association of Studio Employees logo. A woman in a Rosie the Riveter jumpsuit with her hair in a bandanna fell to the blacktop holding the skin on her leg around a compound fracture and screamed an aria of pain.

  Across the street, Geist nodded to his men and they began slowly advancing.

  “Watch this,” Harry Warner said. “Each of those goons is getting ten dollars a day and they’re about to earn their dough.”

  Their walk became a run as they charged into the battle, kicking up the violence by a quantum. Within seconds, blood was running down the side of Selkirk’s mouth and dribbling onto the shirt of the thick man he held by the throat with his left hand while methodically smashing his face with his right. Everyone was in violent motion except for Solomon Geist himself, who remained standing in the same spot across the street, hands in jacket pockets, placidly watching the battle as if it were a sporting event.

  Suddenly a series of explosions caused everyone to duck. The Burbank police had fired tear gas into the crowd and were advancing in formation to begin randomly beating people with their nightsticks.

  “About fucking time!” Jack Warner snarled. “Kick the shit out of every one of them! Don’t bother sorting them out!”

  Then he said, “I’m done with this,” and abruptly headed off toward some bungalow-style offices with his entourage trailing behind.

  Harry had mechanically followed his brother, but as an afterthought he stopped and walked back to us.

  “I know you guys came for the party. It’s over there at Sound Stage Seven.” He pointed at a huge structure a couple of city blocks away. “Take your time. It’s just getting started. I’ll see you there.”

  FOUR

  Jack and I watched the cops’ mopping-up operation a little while and then walked off toward the generic town the studio had built as one of its primary sets, a utopian midwestern neighborhood on a curving street with tidy lawns in front of façade houses with clapboard siding and wraparound porches. At the end of this pseudo block there was a pseudo business district with the shell storefronts of a bank, a five-and-dime, an ice cream parlor, and of course a movie theatre.

  “Everything we fought for,” Jack said as we peered into the windows. “All spic-and-span. No trash on the sidewalks. And best of all, no people to fuck it up.”

  The sounds of soft jazz were pulling us toward the immense sound stage looming up ahead when suddenly Jack stopped like a pointer and gaped. I followed his eyes to a picnic table a few feet away where John Garfield was sitting, his forehead earnestly wrinkled and his hands making robust circular gestures while he argued some point with Joel McCrea, who sat across from him and listened respectfully. Fredric March stood slightly apart, looking down at his feet with a scowl and shaking his head in disagreement. We were close enough to hear Garfield say testily to March, “… but if the U.S. keeps its head in the sand, Europe winds up living under the hammer and sickle, something you might not mind but not so good for the rest of us…”

  “Where do they get it?” Jack whispered, mesmerized by the heightened reality the three men were creating out of an inconsequential discussion.

  “Get what?”

  “It,” he frowned at me impatiently. “You know, the star thing. It. Look at them! They’re just three guys shooting the breeze. But they’re also bigger than life. Where does it come from? How do they make it work for them?”

  “They make it work by working at it,” I answered, aware even then that Jack had it himself, although he hadn’t yet located the on/off switch or the volume control.

  Sound Stage Seven looked to be three stories high with the square footage of a couple of airplane hangars. Jack was always a fan of Warners’ lean black-and-white films with their tight plots, liberal values, and fasttalking guys and dames like Cagney, Bogey, Bette Davis, and the wisest guy of all, Bugs Bunny. When we entered the elephant doors, as the building’s huge sliders were called, he gave a thumbs-up to a large glass case displaying the Best Picture Oscars the studio had received for The Life of Emile Zola and Casablanca.

  The war zone we’d left a half hour earlier now seemed as far away as the Eastern Front. Waiters balancing trays of champagne and canapés circulated as smoothly as ice skaters. Ingenues in pastel bloomed across the floor like hothouse flowers.

  I was scanning the crowd for stars when Harry Warner appeared arm in arm with a short, rumpled man with thick curly hair and a big-lipped floppy smile. Warner steered the man toward us, saying to him, “Here’s your target audience. Irish as corned beef and cabbage.”

  Then to Jack: “This is Yip Harburg. He’s a commie, but he’s a good one, unlike the dreck you saw out there on the street. We forgive him all his fucked-up political ideas because he’s the greatest songwriter around. He did “Over the Rainbow.” That’s immortality right there. Yip is working on a new show about the Irish called Finnegan’s Rainbow. I told him you speak leprechaun so he should try it out on you.”

  “Finian’s,” Harburg corrected Warner as he shook Jack’s hand. “It’s my take on the Emerald Isle and all its neverland enchantments. I’m trying to get Harry to put up some money for it, but
he’s a cheap bastard and playing hard to get.”

  “That’s because I’m not sure that there’s a pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow,” Warner gave a long-faced look. “Anyhow, I’m not cheap, I’m thrifty just like the Irish.”

  “I think you mean the Scotch,” Harburg said.

  “Whoever.” Harry watched Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr walk by with their arms flung over each other’s shoulders like tomboys.

  Harburg dug into his briefcase and extracted a vinyl .78 record in a paper sleeve, like the V-discs that families had used to record messages for servicemen during the war. He handed it to Jack along with a business card.

  “Here’s a rough run-through of the big song of the show. We’ll probably start working with a live orchestra sometime early next year and try to get it on stage maybe a year after that. Since you’ve got a touch of the Auld Sod in you, I’d be interested to know what you think.”

  Then Harburg looked into the crowd and grinned at Harry: “I see your brother over there. You’ll have to excuse me so I can go tell him he can outflank you if he ponies up an investment right now. I’m sure that will cinch the deal.”

  As Harburg cut through the crowd like an icebreaker, Jack said to Harry, “By the way, I forgot to tell you mazel tov on your fortieth.”

  Harry raised an eyebrow: “When people of your tribe say mazel tovI always wonder if they think it means Go Fuck Yourself.”

  “It’s a big achievement,” Jack said. “High Sierra, Key Largo, Maltese Falcon—that’s immortality right there.”

  “Actually, we cheated a little when we picked 1905 as the start date,” Warner smiled. “That’s when we began exhibiting other people’s pictures. We had a lot of other beginnings after that. If we were being accurate our birthdate is probably 1923. That’s when we stopped being Warner Brothers and incorporated as Warner Bros., drop the t-h-e-r, but my brother Jack says who wants to celebrate a twenty-second birthday? He likes to inflate things. He thinks life’s all about perception. If he were standing here right now he’d probably be telling you how he was an Army colonel who should have been a general and how he singlehandedly brought victory into our grasp, though the only thing he did was head a film unit that made educational movies for the GIs on how to keep from getting the clap. He thinks forty is a historic number because it makes us older than Paramount and Universal. So we celebrate our fortieth. Anyway, end of the war, getting what we fought for, teaching all those other chickenshit countries how to live like human beings—that’s reason enough to have a party.”

  Then Warner spied a woman with green eyes and a pretty heart-shaped face.

  “Gene Tierney, cutest girl in the building,” He called out to her, “Come over here, gorgeous, and meet a war hero.”

  Tierney came so close to Jack that I thought she’d bang her forehead into his chin.

  “I’m deeply in love with Laura Hunt,” he said, and then crooned the opening words of the Johnny Mercer song: “Laura is the face of the misty night …”

  Tierney blushed with pleasure, and Harry Warner growled, “He’s right. You were great, Gene. But I still don’t know how Fox ever got Laura. It looks like a Warners movie. It sounds like a Warners movie. It feels like a Warners movie. Why the hell wasn’t it a Warners movie?”

  “Because you couldn’t stand Clifton Webb, remember?” Tierney said archly.

  “Right,” Harry rolled his eyes. “How am I supposed to work with some meshugener who checks himself into the loony bin for three months every year in the hopes that the head shrinkers will teach him how to say no to his monster of a mother when she picks out his clothes every morning?”

  “A girl like you should be wearing expensive jewelry,” Jack examined Tierney’s unadorned fingers, which he had kept holding after the handshake was over.

  “A girl like me sometimes does,” she returned his flirt.

  The two were making deep eye contact when Sidney Greenstreet walked by in a three-piece suit with a watch fob stretched across his jutting gut.

  “You’re a fat hypocrite,” Jack growled under his breath.

  Tierney gasped, but then realized he was imitating Bogart’s snarling insult to Ferrari, the black-marketer that Greenstreet played in Casablanca, and she giggled, causing Warner to stage-whisper to Jack, “You’re on the right track, my friend. Scientific studies have shown that making a woman laugh is the best way to gain admission into her fun park.”

  While he was charming Tierney almost out of her panties, Jack’s eye was snagged by a woman leaning indolently against the quilted soundproofing on a wall about thirty feet away.

  She stood out even in a room of stars. Absently scratching at her left forearm and looking out blankly at the crowd, she was tall and had lustrous black hair that shone like a crow’s feather. Her face was a remarkable construction—eyes perhaps a little too close together and the suggestion of a bump interrupting the line of her nose, but full sensuous lips and cheekbones that looked handcrafted. Her Modigliani neck was accented by a big-collared white blouse open far enough to reveal a sensual bone breastplate. High heels flexed her calves, and a simple black A-line skirt rebuked the sea of pastel party dresses.

  A slender middle-aged man with a matador’s face and dark hair graying at the temples stood a few feet away from her in a posture of ownership. He swept the room with a haughty vigilance, then shot his cuffs and gave an almost imperceptible head gesture that caused the woman to nod and obediently follow him toward an exit.

  “That was something,” Tierney said without resentment after the couple had gone.

  “Who is she?” Jack asked.

  “She just got here and I don’t think they’ve given her a name yet,” Tierney answered.

  “Oh yes we have,” Harry Warner had rejoined us. “It’s Delphine LaReve.”

  Jack chuckled.

  Harry shrugged. “I know, a little much but we think it might work for her. In real life, to the degree that it matters here in Tinseltown, it’s Valentina. Valentina Morelli or Moselli or Moretti, or something like that. Whatever it is, it’s too fucking close to Mussolini. After ten years of that big-lip clown strutting around in the newsreels, the last thing we need is more Italians. The French didn’t do much during the war, but at least they were more or less on our side. So she gets a French name. Anyway, Italians, French, who even knows the difference? The French are just Italians in a bad mood.”

  “She’s unbelievable,” Jack said with an enthusiasm that caused Tierney—who would become one of his random conquests a couple of years later—to drift toward a nearby knot of people surrounding Farley Granger.

  “And who was that guy with her?” Jack asked. “He looks familiar. Where have I seen him before?”

  “Maybe on a wanted poster,” Warner replied dyspeptically. “It’s Fortunato.”

  Jack was suddenly alert. “Niccolo Fortunato?”

  “Yeah. Nicky Fortune to his crime buddies and the rest of us. Rumor has it that he was sent out here by Chicago because Geist was in danger of getting beat by Selkirk. He’s this girl’s whatever you call a guy who has a protégé. Fortune and I are far from friends, but he’s someone you want to do a favor if it doesn’t cost you too much. So I said yes when he asked me to take a look at her test. It’s homemade but interesting. Sold us on her. Want to take a look?”

  “Sure,” Jack said eagerly.

  Warner signaled for a page and told him to set up the film, and then led us to one of the sound stage’s side exits.

  We walked a block or so to a squat stucco structure with vermillion bougainvillea crawling up its walls and descended an outside stairway to a basement screening theatre the size of a city movie-house balcony.

  “My earliest memory of Hollywood is sitting in a room like this with my dad and my brother Joe watching a Red Grange movie,” Jack said as we sank into plush loge seats. “I was maybe eleven years old.”

  “Red Grange,” Warner smiled wearily. “Your old man had the smarts to see that a
famous football star could also become a famous cowboy movie star. None of our gang would have thought of that. When he first set up out here—some mick picaroon who’s doing the dirty with Gloria Swanson—we laughed. Another pussy hound from the world of high finance out here to show the pants pressers how to do their business. But pretty soon he’s got that little studio Film Booking Offices or whatever he called it over on Gower. A chickenshit operation at first, but he’s always on the move, and the next thing we know he’s used it to help form RKO and is playing in the big leagues.”

  “I remember that first office,” Jack nodded.

  “Hole in the wall,” Warner said. “The first time I met your dad he told me that his idea was to shoot a movie in a week and get it into the theatres in a month so he could get his money back right away. Nobody else in the business thought like that. I still remember the names of some of his epics. The Dude Cowboy. Red Hot Horses. No budget over twenty thousand. You never saw them in New York or Hollywood, but in Iowa and Nebraska they were bigger than Stagecoach.”

  Then the house lights went down and there was a clicking sound from the speakers. “The sound was so bad that we just turned it off,” Warner whispered. “Maybe you can lip-read.”

  The broken numbers of the test pattern flickered in reverse order on the screen, leading to a gauzy closeup of the woman we’d just seen at the party. She was wearing a sliplike shift whose transparency acknowledged her sleek body as she walked alongside a bullet-pocked Italian wall, brushing the bricks with her fingertips.

  Projecting the smoldering charismatic sexuality of Loren, Vitti, Verna Lisi, and other great Italian actresses to come, she stared directly at the camera without trying to ingratiate herself with it. The longer you looked at her, the more strongly she held your eye.

  She wasn’t Jack’s type really. Too dark and serious; too much of a game played for keeps. But I watched him push all that aside as he stared at her without moving, his lips slightly parted.