West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  My father was then a different kind of man entirely, a struggling young guy who got on well with everyone. I don’t think he had developed the attitude that everybody wanted something from him, which governed his life later. Success ruined my father. Right after The Jazz Singer earned all the money, that’s when it happened, the metamorphosis.

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  RICHARD GULLY: Jack wasn’t fond of having employees at the house. So many of the people who came didn’t work at Warners. He felt much safer with them. He was nervous about people from the studio taking advantage of him. Once, at a sneak preview, I said to him, “Jack, couldn’t you be a little more considerate?” He said, “In my line of business, you can’t have friends. You obviously can’t have friends.” If you want to run your business in sort of a tough orthodox way, you just can’t do favors for people. It’s that simple.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: My father loved to play tennis. He was a pretty good player, but he’d always make sure that his doubles partner was either a pro or someone who was very, very good so that he always won. A long time before we met, my husband, Cy, had written a film for my father and was invited to play tennis there. Cy used to be an excellent player, and he beat my father. Richard Gully said, “That’s a no-no. You’ll never be invited back.” And of course, he wasn’t. My parents had their tennis parties every Saturday and Sunday and wonderful buffets. And no one could start to eat until my father did. The people around my father were a little scared of him. I didn’t realize as a child that people usually didn’t act that way, that it was not normal behavior for people to say, “Yes, of course, what time would you like to eat?” when they were starving or always to ask him, “What would you like to do?” and say, “Of course, you’re right and everything is the way you see it.”

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: The studio lot had this big black monstrous tower, and whenever my father had an argument with someone and he wanted to end it, he’d go to the window and point outside, saying, “Whose name is on the water tower?” Of course, his name was never up there—it said “Warner Bros.” Harry Warner or even I could have said my name was up there. But this was my father’s way to shut up people who disagreed with him. He wanted to stress that he ran this company and by god, he did. Not so much when his brother was alive, but when his brother was gone, he ran it. Supposedly at some point Warren Beatty climbed up the tower—which is a hell of a thing, you’ve gotta have a death wish to do it—and signed his name. I admire him for that. I would never have dared do it.

  Credit 2.2

  Jack Warner, astride a lion, surrounded by yes-men.

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  RICHARD GULLY: Jack Warner’s dining room at the studio was really like Buckingham Palace. He’d sit at the head of this great table and was really something to see. He was like a monarch. In his office in story conferences or meeting with producers, you never saw the grand manner, but in his private dining room at the studio, Jack Warner would sit there as the king of all he surveyed. The table could seat about twenty people on each side. By comparison, the dining room at his house was big, but you could only put ten or so on each side. The food in the dining room at the studio was superb. He had a French chef, and it was like a gourmet restaurant. He sat at the long table and everyone deferred to him. You would talk when you were given permission to speak.

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  ARTHUR MILLER: The night I met Jack Warner, he reminded me of no one so much as Victor Moore, a comedian in things like Of Thee I Sing—he played in musicals where he could wear a high hat and act absolutely stupid and dopey. The mixture of vanity and gross vulgarity in that man Jack Warner was something to behold. He really had the world in his hands, you could feel it. We laughed. It was terrible, really. But everybody was beholden to him. He sat in a high-backed chair in the sitting room, and everybody was treating him like he was the king of England. That was an education.

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: When Albert Einstein visited the studio in 1931, my father—who would speak up to anyone even when he didn’t know what he was talking about—said, “Doctor, you have your theory of relativity and I have mine: Never hire a relative.” I always wanted to add, “Where would you be, Pop, if your brothers hadn’t hired you?”

  They took Einstein to the process department, where they had a Ford set up on a scaffolding. He and Mrs. Einstein sat in it and the cameramen filmed them while, unbeknownst to the Einsteins, projecting an aerial film of New York, Niagara Falls, Chicago, and Los Angeles behind them. Then they developed this film of the Einsteins flying over America in a Ford and showed it. Einstein stared at it and kept saying in German, “My god, what have they done? I don’t understand.” My father said, “Relativity he understands!”

  I started working in my father’s production department when I was still in college. I’d ride a bicycle around the lot and look for problems. I once wrote a fifteen-page critique and gave it to him and to Steve Trilling, his right-hand man at the time. Then the phone rings, and my father says, “Who did you give this to? Find all the copies and destroy them.” I’d found fault with certain things that delayed pictures—nothing earth-shattering, too much dependence on committees and so on. I guess I was showing off a little, and he resented it. He never went past the fifth grade, so he wanted me to have a great education, but then once I got it he’d say, “You and your college talk….” I always felt, what the hell, he’s a cum laude in his field, he doesn’t have to feel negative about it. But he did have a great inferiority complex.

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  BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: Harry took care of the family, and if anybody had a problem they came to him. But he was also very domineering. It was “Do it my way or else.” He knew what was right and what was wrong, and he expected everybody to live up to his code. Jack was constantly rebelling, and everything he did was just shocking to my father. He treated Jack as if he were a bad little boy, and they were constantly at odds. It wasn’t that their relationship deteriorated—it was always bad. My grandfather Benjamin Warner, who the brothers had moved to Beverly Hills with my grandmother, tried to keep peace in the family: “One for all and all for one” was his credo. But Jack and Harry came from two different planets.

  We moved back to California from New York in 1936—largely so that my father could keep an eye on Jack. My dad bought a thousand acres in the San Fernando Valley and built a ranch there. But after a few years he decided to sell it to the studio. They were using part of it for location shots anyway. Jack said, “Look, can you give the studio a break?” So my dad said, “Sure, you can have it for ten thousand dollars.” About a year later, he found out that Jack had bought it for himself and turned it into a housing development. I guess he made money on it, but he had no hesitation about lying to my dad.

  My dad lived well, but it wasn’t important whom he saw socially. He didn’t like actors’ parties, and he never really connected the faces to the names. There’s a story about him going to the Coconut Grove and noticing a beautiful teenager at the next table. Before anyone could stop him, he went over and said, “Young lady, you’re really beautiful. You should be in films.” She said, “Well, how do you do, Mr. Warner. I’m Shirley Temple.”

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: My father built the house on Angelo Drive while he was still with my mother. There was one feature in the house that I’ve always been sorry about: it had a central-heating system with big vents, and if my parents had a battle at the other end of the house—because she’d found out that he wasn’t at the studio that night—I’d hear the whole damn thing coming through the vent. And my father stayed out a lot of nights. I’m surprised I’m even able to think about it without getting all tightened up. A successful producer in that early period was the worst marriage risk in the world: there were so goddamn many temptations, and my father was exposed to them willingly and happily.

  One day he sent his masseur, Abdul, over to pick up all his clothes and then he disappeared from our lives for a year. My
mother knew he’d had affairs—Ann wasn’t the first—but she hadn’t known he wanted a divorce. And suddenly she and I had to pack and leave. Part of my parents’ divorce agreement was, strangely, that neither of them could remarry for one year. As soon as the year was up, my father and Ann got married in upstate New York. We found out because the newspapers reported on it and it was all over town. My mother was very upset because she hadn’t yet adjusted to being divorced. She’d been Mrs. Jack Warner and had lived in a mansion, and suddenly she was living in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

  I was still working at the studio every summer, and there was no real friction between me and my father at that point. He kept saying, “I want you to get to know Ann.” All I knew was that she had broken up our home, and it took a while to get my mother to let me meet her. “That woman” and “that bitch” were interchangeable terms in our house.

  Then the first time I met Ann she said, “When were you born?” I gave her the date, and she said, “What time?” I said, “My mother says it was at eight in the evening.” My father said, “Yeah, that’s right, you broke up a movie I was looking at.” Ann said right away, “You and I will never get along. My sign is in conflict with yours.” I’ve heard from other people who knew her that she was ruled by astrology. My father looked a little surprised, but what could he say? You’d better recheck your stars?

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  BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: My father had this unrealistic idea that the Warners should always be dignified and avoid scandal. So when Jack came to him and said, “I want to marry this girl, and she’s been married, and we have an illegitimate child,” and so on, my father went bananas. He said, “Absolutely not. How dare you marry a woman like this?” Ann was not exactly a nice Jewish girl.

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  GREGORY ORR: My grandmother Ann Warner was born in Ferriday, Louisiana, where her father had run a dry goods store, and he also had a movie theater for a while in the silent-movie days. Then they moved out to California when Ann was twelve.

  She met her first husband, the actor Don Page, later Don Alvarado, when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one. She was finishing high school, trying to figure out what to do, when this very good looking young actor came along, and he was her ticket to the exciting life of young Hollywood. It was not the greatest match. She needed someone who could provide a bigger life for her, and he was just a struggling actor. They didn’t have much money and lived in a little house near Carthay Circle. Then he didn’t do well when sound came in. My grandmother and Jack Warner started having an affair in the early thirties, and she got divorced from Don pretty quickly then. Don ended up leaving acting and becoming a very good assistant director at Warner Brothers. They all knew each other. Jack Warner even supposedly changed Don’s name, telling him that since he looked Latin, he should have a Latin name, a “Rudolph Valentino knockoff.” They were driving past Alvarado Street one day, and Jack said to him, “Alvarado, that’s a good name.”

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: My father first saw my mother when she was dancing the tango at the Coconut Grove. She was very beautiful—she looked like Dolores del Rio—with amazing blue-green eyes and a great sense of rhythm. She loved to dance. And she had an incredible presence, great charm and wit. But they didn’t actually meet until later because she was married to her first husband then.

  My parents got married in 1936. Years later, when I was about thirty-seven, I met Mae Brussell, the daughter of Rabbi Magnin, who had been the chief rabbi of Los Angeles. She said, “Barbara, the last time I saw you, you were three and it was your adoption party. At least that’s what everyone was told, but I said to my father in a rather loud voice that I could tell you were Jack and Ann’s daughter because you looked so much like them. And he told me to shut up.”

  I tried to find out what had happened. I spoke to my father’s secretary and a cousin of my mother’s, and they both told me that I had been born before my parents were married so they had had to hide me. I was shunted off to the gatehouse at the edge of our property, where I lived with a close friend of my mother’s, and then when I was two and a half I was “adopted” and moved into the house.

  I didn’t ask Mother about it then. But, about a year later, the night after my father died, I slept over in my mother’s room, so she wouldn’t be alone. In the middle of the night she forgot I was there and pushed the button to make the automatic bed sit up and woke me up. I thought that was probably a good time to ask about this story. Mother was very touched. She said, “Oh, you should have asked me before. You were a love child. We really wanted you.”

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  JOY ORR: I was Ann’s first child, and we were alone together a lot. Before she met Mr. Warner, I was all she had, and she was all I had. We used to have picnics together at Laguna Beach. She was so young and adventurous. I was in love with her. But, of course, she changed. She became a lady of the world.

  I first met Mr. Warner when he came with my mother to visit me at the Sacred Heart Academy in L.A., and I loved him on first sight, even though he had a gruff manner. I didn’t know anything about him, but I thought, If you make my mother happy, I’ll kiss you. I was attracted to him. He was a big polar bear. Then, when I came home, I thought, If I stay out of sight I won’t get in trouble. But I had this love for him. I used to wait at the gate for him. Then he started taking me to tennis and polo matches. Still, I never called him “Father” or “Daddy.” Finally, when he was passing away, I was just over sixty, and he said, “I am your father, am I not?” And I said, “Yes!” I had always been afraid to say it, but he was sitting there almost blind, and I said for the first time, “I love you.” And he said, “We love you, too, baby.” Whatever people say about him otherwise, Mr. Warner was a wonderful father. He could have walked away from a lot of things, and he didn’t.

  Of course, I knew that Barbara wasn’t really adopted. One Sunday afternoon, my mother showed me a picture of a little girl and asked, “Would you like a sister?” The minute I saw the picture, I knew she was my mother’s daughter. So I said, “She has to come home right this minute. This is where she belongs.”

  Life in that house was a fairyland at times. We were protected; we knew nothing of the outside world. I remember looking out my window and seeing all the way down to Benedict Canyon—nothing but trees blowing in the wind. My room was in the upstairs corner of the house, and later, when I was grown up, I’d go back and sit in the dark and pretend no one knew I was there. I wanted to stay there until I left the earth. But my mother would say, “We have to stop this. You have to grow up.”

  In 1942, when I was seventeen, I went into Mother and Mr. Warner’s sitting room to get the funny papers or whatever was around to read, and he handed me a script to look at. I read it and I thought, Oh, it’s kind of cheap, but I don’t want to say anything, because I don’t want to be on the outs. So I said, “Yeah, it’s okay.” Then he said they wanted to test me for it. It was Casablanca. When I first read it, it was just Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and it sounded kind of corny. It turned out, because of Ingrid Bergman, I guess, to be something unique. Bergman couldn’t be cheap, no matter what she did. My scene was done in half a day and Bogart directed it.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I think I never heard Joy say what she really felt about anything. Usually she just loved everything; it was all wonderful and great: her past, our mother, everybody. Especially living at the house. She always said how happy she was there and how she never wanted to leave it. She glorified it all. It was part of her character—and her problem, too.

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  RICHARD GULLY: I tagged along to Hollywood in 1936 with my cousin Lord Warwick, who had gotten a fabulous contract to act at MGM: $750 a week. In the thirties, going to Hollywood was not considered the most distinctive thing to do, but it turned out to be a stroke of genius on my part, because I certainly became a far greater success in Hollywood than I would have been in the House of Lords. I was the son of a peer; my father was Lord Selby, and his
father had been speaker of Britain’s House of Commons. I was never brought up to do a day’s work. I always thought that I was going to be a peer of the realm. But when I was sixteen, my father died, and I found out that I had been born out of wedlock, and so I could not succeed to the title. I suddenly had no title, no money, nothing, even though my parents got married a year after my birth. I only found out about it through reading my father’s obituary in the newspaper. And that’s the reason I left England and came to America in the first place. And Fulk Warwick helped me move to Hollywood. I knew from the day I arrived that I had come to the right place. People have asked me, “How could a man with your upbringing like a place like Hollywood?” But when I looked at the people here, I looked at them as talented people. I’m sure Ginger Rogers never went to school. But what the hell! I watched her dance cheek to cheek with Fred Astaire, and that was all I needed.

  Before I started working as Jack Warner’s chief of protocol, the three social figures were Jack, Darryl Zanuck, and Sam Goldwyn. They were the inner circle. Jack Warner completely outclassed Louis B. Mayer. Mayer had no social prestige, but at the same time he had the most fabulous roster of stars: Garbo, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, all the glamour people. Warners was a more intellectual studio. We had brilliant writers and the greatest musical staff in the world—Selznick had to borrow Max Steiner from Jack Warner to score Gone with the Wind—but we couldn’t compete where the stars were concerned. Jack took it all in stride. He borrowed people, and he could always get John Wayne or Cary Grant, because they didn’t want to be affiliated with one studio. Jack would have friends like Gary Cooper and Greer Garson at the house, but he very rarely invited Warner Brothers’ stars over. There were so many disputes with them—they were always on suspension. Bette Davis, for instance, was a real problem. She sued Jack and was disruptive in every way.