Our goodfriend Maxwell Bodenheim was a lovely human being, a distinguished poet and novelist, and an idealistic communist, in that order.
The third and final time I ran into Charles Lindbergh in the thirties was an affront to American democracy.
That sentiment was confirmed the last time I saw Lindbergh, at Madison Square Garden while covering an America First rally. When I got into the Garden and made my way to the press section, I could hardly believe that above our heads, where Jack Dempsey, Kid Chocolate, and Max Baer had had their slugfests, Nazi flags were unfurled. Throughout the crowd, people were waving small flags with swastikas. I was horrified, yet proud that I lived in a country where you could wave any goddamned flag you wanted.
Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the America First movement and onetime lieutenant of Huey Long, keynoted that unforgettable evening with a reactionary speech, a clever concoction of patriotism, pacifism, and racism. One after another, the America First rabble-rousers rallied the crowd with their extremist, pro-Nazi speeches. I was shocked that they called themselves "patriots" even though the bastards were desecrating the very principles underlying our nation. For cryin' out loud, they were spouting this racist crap in the very arena where great athletes won or lost contests based on their abilities and determination, not on their politics or the color of their skin. These people may have had the right to fly their flags, but the swastikas floating above our heads were an insult to Americans everywhere.
In the middle of the mass hysteria, the great newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson, wife of Sinclair Lewis, got up on the stage, walked to the podium, and demanded to speak. When she was refused, Thompson grabbed the microphone and shouted at the crowd, "What you stand for is the worst thing in the world ... !"
Before she could get another word out, some strong-arms lifted Thompson up and forcibly escorted her off the stage. She struggled and even kicked one of the guys with her feet. Holy mackerel, what balls on that lady! The crowd booed, drowning out the wild cheers from us in the press section. I'll never forget the courage and single-mindedness that night of Dorothy Thompson trying to speak the truth.
I went to the Garden rally to see for myself why the America First movement was gaining support during such tough times. What I found out was that their simplistic, hate-filled message got through because times were tough. People were struggling to make ends meet, so their fears and baser instincts could be thumped like a drum, creating the specter of an intolerant people ready to neglect the basic rights provided for in the Constitution.
Charles Lindbergh was the featured speaker at the rally. He was wildly cheered by the swastika-waving crowds that night. His antiwar speech was laced with esteem for the German war machine. Something turned inside my stomach that a national figure would allow himself to be used as a vehicle for the disgusting Nazi propaganda.
As Clare Boothe Luce once said about the thirties, "Anyone who isn't thoroughly confused isn't thinking clearly." It was a time of chaos and bewilderment that helped me discover in myself a profound and unwavering commitment to democratic principles. I felt deeply that America needed to be a leader, not hide its head in the sand. Our nation should have been showing the way to democracy, helping to maintain world peace and seeing that no one went hungry. It was utopian but feasible.
Dorothy Thompson. We cheered like hell when she tried to call a spade a spade at the America First rally in Madison Square Garden.
I love my country profoundly. But please, please, don't call me a patriot. The word has been used by so many hatemongers that I've grown to despise it. According to Mark Twain, "patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel."
Smack dab in the middle of the period's upheavals, Hollywood came calling again. Big-shot Broadway producer Boris Petroff asked me to meet him for drinks at the Plaza Hotel because he'd read Burn, Baby, Burn. He'd produced Mae West's variety shows on the Great White Way. Petroff asked me to write a treatment for a lighthearted comedy, no matter how preposterous. I accepted the challenge and concocted a yarn about two prehistoric cities who declare war on each other. The cities square off because each wants the services of one of the great showmen of the day to create elaborate musical numbers with beautiful girls diving into swimming pools. My yarn started two million years ago, when our ancestors, the cavemen, were defending their families against saber-toothed tigers. I figured people would laugh about the chaos of our own times if they could see how little our society had evolved since prehistory. Petroff cut out all the political aspects of my story, kept only the most absurd stuff, and made Hats Off (1937), with John Payne, a big star in those days. I got my first writing credit on a movie, even though the finished film had just about nothing to do with my original story. Petroff fashioned a movie that made people forget about their problems. I'd wanted to expose man's foolish belligerency.
Writing for the movies was a kick, a whole new world that seemed to have little to do with the truth as I understood it. The only truth that mattered in the movie business was selling a helluva lot of tickets to see your finished film. As a screenwriter, I was like one of those saber-toothed tigers in my story, burdened with the stripes of a reporter's instinct for facts, encumbered with the long teeth of social consciousness. If I really wanted to write scripts for a living, I needed to evolve into a more agile, streamlined creature, wising up to the ways and means of making movies. What better way to find out if I could survive than to throw myself smack-dab into the middle of the Hollywood jungle?
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M y next book was called Make Up and Kiss, about the beauty-products industry and its enormous profits. It was another piece of pulp fiction, a tale about a young man who inherits a successful cosmetic firm only to uncover that the business is a high-stakes financial scam. There was the obligatory love story that allowed my hero to discover that the best beauty products are still water and soap.
After the publication of Make Up and Kiss, an important New York publisher called me into his office. I thought he was going to offer me a multibook contract. He did, but not for my novels. See, they had a bestselling author under contract who couldn't produce as many books as they could sell. So I was offered the job of ghostwriting books for him. I was happy to have the work. The publisher would give me a snappy title, a paragraph with the premise for the novel, the principal characters, and the required length. The rest was up to me. The books usually ran anywhere from fifty to seventy-five thousand words. Deadlines were tight, maybe three, sometimes four weeks to deliver the completed manuscript. The tales were usually murder stories, pretty easy for me to knock out. I really didn't give a damn about my writing being published under another author's byline. I was getting valuable experience and being paid for it. The money allowed me to move my mother into a more comfortable apartment. Who was the famous author I ghosted for? I'll never say. That was part of the deal.
Offers to write original stories for the movies also started to come my way. Hell, studio development executives were willing to pay a couple thousand bucks for a twenty-page treatment. With a few published books under my belt, not to mention the ghostwritten books that I could never take credit for, scriptwriting seemed the next logical step. I had plenty of yarns up my sleeve, so I decided to take a trip out to the West Coast and finally take a serious dip in Hollywood's seductive waters. I was being drawn out there like one of those Pullman cars I boarded with my trusty Royal at Grand Central Station, bound for California. I planned on staying a month. That month would last about three years.
A cross-country train trip back then took three nights and four days. It was hard to believe that only a couple years before, I'd made the trip in a cattle car on a freight train. Now I had my own compartment. I propped my typewriter up on the seat and typed away on the ghosted manuscript I needed to finish for an upcoming deadline. After a full day of writing, I walked to the dining car. In those days, they had steaks, linen tablecloths, heavy silverware, the works. After dinner, you could go out on the
little deck at the back of the train and smoke a cigar. The great American countryside swept past you. Mountainous clouds overhead were turning orange then violet as the sun set behind the Rockies. When the tracks took a bend, you could catch a glimpse of the powerful locomotive at the head of the train, chugging relentlessly toward the Pacific, pulling me toward a new stage of my life.
A few days after my arrival, I had a little walk-up apartment in West Hollywood and an invitation to have lunch with Gene Fowler at RKO. It was great seeing Gene again. He was tanned and cheerful. Sitting in the studio canteen, we exchanged news of our journalistic pals back east. Fowler noticed me staring over his shoulder at Bette Davis, Victor McLa- glen, Paul Muni, Louise Rainer, and Cary Grant. I couldn't believe all that talent was sitting there under one roof, almost like factory workers, having a quick bite to eat before resuming a normal workday on the assembly line.
Fowler didn't waste any time getting to the point. He motioned with his head at the actors and actresses, each of them stars.
"They need lines to say up there on the screen," he said. "That's why they pay guys like you and me, Sammy."
Gene took an envelope out of his breast pocket. Inside was a check. He unfolded the check and wiggled it under my nose.
"Watch the moving finger," he said.
Holding the check up directly in front of my eyes, he playfully hid the dollar amount under his thumb. Then he slowly slid his thumb to the right. Gradually, Fowler uncovered a "s," then a "o," then another "o," then, gleefully, another "o."
"That's spending money every week, my lad!"
I took a hard look at that check. I could hardly believe that five thousand bucks was nothing unusual for a week's worth of scriprwriting in Hollywood. Gene explained that it was no great shakes, that plenty of writers made more. Outside, the palm trees nodded invitingly, the sun was shining, the lawns were green and well tended. I envisioned my mother in white tennis shorts, tanned and enjoying herself. I saw myself driving a big convertible with Bette Davis in the front seat, discussing her next picture. Of course, I'd never actually written a screenplay, but with my enthusiasm and naivete, there were no obstacles I couldn't overcome. Fowler reassured me that it was a cinch writing movies, as easy as "the twinkle in a starlet's eye." Why not give it a go?
That was a terrific time to be in Hollywood, the so-called Golden Age. Studios were enormous entertainment factories teeming with writers, actors, technicians, musicians, and editors, churning out movie after movie, their coffers overflowing with monies flowing back from the hundreds of movie houses they owned across America. They had another twenty years of good times before they'd be divested of their theater chains and contract players in the fifties, turning the gold to tinsel.
After lunch, Gene shoved a Montecristo No. i in my mouth and took me for a walk around the studio lot. He turned to me, as irreverent and playful as ever, and asked, "How'd you like to make a few hundred bucks right now?"
"How?" I said.
"By drawing a couple of cartoons."
"Okay."
He took me into one of the big soundstages at RKO, where they were shooting a picture with a script he'd doctored. It starred two well-known actors at that time, Eric Linden and Arlene Judge, to whom Fowler introduced me. The set designer needed some ink drawings for an insert in the next day's scene, something with a couple of arrows there, a pierced heart here, and a few drops of blood oozing from the heart. It took me about ten minutes to do them. The producer was pleased and told me to come by the production office the next day for my money. I'd earned my first Hollywood paycheck, and I hadn't been in town more than seventy-two hours.
Fowler showed me his office in the writers' wing. "You're going to do fine around here, Sammy," he told me, always my adviser. "We'll have a lot of laughs. But after you've made a little bundle, you've got to scram before you become like one of them." Gene pointed out the window at a couple of studio executives passing on the sidewalk.
As we chatted, the writer/producer Myles Connolly walked in. He was a wonderful man, and we hit it off immediately. Gene praised my writing skills, so Myles invited me over to Columbia to discuss a movie project. The very next day, Myles was showing me around the studio. He introduced me to a young director named Frank Capra. Born in Palermo, Sicily, Capra came out to Hollywood as a writer for Mack Sennett. He was warm and good-humored, with a winning smile and an unpretentious manner. When I met Frank, he'd already won an Oscar for best director, for It Happened One Night, in 1935. I'll never forget how encouraging he was to a novice screenwriter. Frank would always remain the same sweet gentleman.
Myles and I started throwing around ideas for his picture. It was supposed to be about a character based on Toni Mix, the cowboy star of silent films who'd made scores of Westerns. Then came the talkies, and Mix didn't make the transition successfully. Myles and I came up with a story about a silent cowboy star who doesn't want to play a gangster role in a talkie because he wants to be loyal to his fans. He doesn't want to disappoint the kids who are crazy about his Westerns. We called it Once a Hero, but after the movie went into production, they gave it the more commercial title of It Happened in Hollywood.
Harry Lachman, who'd been a successful painter in Paris, directed the picture. Lachman is forgotten today, but he made over thirty movies before he stopped directing in the early forties. Fay Wray played the female lead. This was after King Kong (1933) distinguished her from all the pretty blondes of the day as the one who could scream the best. The Tom Mix character, Tim Bart, was played by Richard Dix. It Happened in Hollywood was my first real credit on a picture.
Soon after that movie was released, a big executive at one of the studios called me into his office and offered to give me a job writing scripts adapted from famous books. It was very much like my gig ghostwriting novels. An established screenwriter would get credit for my work. The money was good, but I had to promise never to discuss my participation. I must have written a half-dozen scripts without my name appearing anywhere in those pictures' credits, some of them major productions.
That was my personal screenwriting school. I needed to get the hang of this unique craft. Being a ghost screenwriter was more amusing than being a ghost novelist. After all, my work ended up on the big screen. I didn't really care about the credits. Fowler and my other writer friends in Hollywood used to try to guess the name of the movie I'd worked on. It was one of their favorite games over martinis at Musso & Frank's. I puffed contentedly on my cigar and smiled like a Cheshire cat, never revealing whom I ghosted for. The steady pay would allow me to begin writing my own scripts.
I can talk about Otto Preminger, the last director for whom I wrote anonymously, because he mentions it in his autobiography. I enjoyed working with Otto, who looked like a mean old bulldog but was a complex, lovable guy. Preminger was especially criticized when Jean Seberg got singed during the shooting of the final scene for Saint Joan (1957), but Otto wasn't the only director who pushed actors hard for great performances.
Born in Vienna, Preminger got a law degree to please his parents. But his heart was in the theater, working as an actor and director with the great Max Reinhardt. To escape the Nazis, Otto emigrated to the States in 1935. Before coming out to Hollywood, he directed the Broadway hits Outward Bound (1938) and Margin for Error (1939). I used to go over to Otto's house with my Royal and work alone with him on a script, never once meeting the official studio screenwriters who'd been assigned to the project. Preminger paid me out of his own pocket so that there wouldn't be any record of my participation on studio accounts.
Otto was then having a top-secret affair with one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, his Austrian compatriot Hedy Lamarr. As I was leaving his place one day, Otto asked me to take a little box to Miss Lamarr on the set of her new movie and instructed me to be extremely discreet. I was on my way to the studio, so I said okay. But I was feeling a little roguish that day, probably miffed that Preminger was treating me like a messenger boy. I got the ur
ge to play a practical joke on Otto the Great. So I took a pair of scissors and carefully opened the box. Inside was a very expensive diamond bracelet and a card that said: "I will love you forever, your Otto."
Otto Preminger, with whom my relationship was productive but sometimes bumpy
I cut off the bottom of the card with some scissors and signed it "G." I figured there was a Gary, a George, or a Groucho in Hollywood who might have been just as happy to send Lamarr that strand of ice as a memento of his affection. Even now I chuckle when I imagine Hedy L.amarr opening the box and wondering who was the mysterious "G." Neither Lamarr nor Preminger ever made the slightest comment to me about the incident. Years later, when I was directing my own movies at Fox, I ran into Preminger and confessed to him that I'd tampered with his precious consignment for Hedy Lamarr. Otto laughed heartily. He and Lamarr had vowed to never show the faintest distress, thus having the last laugh on the rascal I'd been that day.
It may seem like I just slipped into screenwriting. Hell, it was damn hard work. As a novice in Hollywood, I took every assignment that came my way, no matter whether I was getting any credit or not. By doing it day in and day out, I learned the basics from the ground up. If you're any good at this racket, you have to know your story, the beginning, middle, and end, then allow your characters to act on their emotions. You set the scene, and the characters take over, moving the audience along with them. In journalism and fiction, you rely more on description to propel your story forward. Movies are about action, conflict, and sharp dialogue. I banged away at it until I felt comfortable with the form. Eventually, screenwriting would become second nature to me.
I learned that a screenplay must be a very personal vision of what a movie is going to look like. It's only a working model, not the movie itself; it's a means to an end, not a finished piece of art. Your characters respond to each situation according to their personal background and psychological makeup; otherwise their emotions look phony. A script isn't written in stone. You work like hell until you've got the best script you can write. It can always be improved. Still, don't let any sonofabitch weaken it by diluting what you know is genuine. All this is easy to say, but believe me, it took many years and a helluva lot of trial and error to learn how to create a movie from a blank piece of paper.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 10