I Lost My Girlish Laughter
Page 1
Jane Allen
I LOST MY GIRLISH LAUGHTER
Silvia Schulman Lardner (1913–1993) was born in New York City, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. She left Hunter College for a job at RKO Studios and later worked for MGM and Selznick International as producer David O. Selznick’s personal secretary. In 1935, she cowrote a play with fellow Selznick staffer Barbara Keon, and she worked on A Star Is Born (1937) and preproduction for Gone with the Wind (1939). She married Ring Lardner Jr. in 1937, quit her job, and began writing I Lost My Girlish Laughter, a fictionalized memoir of her years with Selznick. In 1938, she published her novel in collaboration with Jane Shore under the pseudonym Jane Allen. After divorcing Lardner in 1945, she raised their two children and worked for many years as an interior designer and building contractor in California. She died of cancer.
Jane Shore came to Hollywood from New York City in 1928 to write a film for Nancy Carroll, which was ultimately not produced. She collaborated with Silvia Schulman on I Lost My Girlish Laughter and continued to write under the pseudonym of Jane Allen for “A Girl’s Best Friend Is Wall Street” (adapted for the screen in 1941 as She Knew All the Answers). Her novel, Thanks God! I’ll Take It from Here (1946), written in collaboration with May Livingstone, was later adapted for the screen and retitled Without Reservations (RKO, 1946).
J. E. Smyth is a professor of History at the University of Warwick (UK) and the author of several books about Hollywood, including Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (2018).
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2019
Introduction copyright © 2019 by J. E. Smyth
Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 1938.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781984897763
Ebook ISBN 9781984897770
Author photograph, this page, courtesy of Ann Waswo and David Lardner
Cover design by Evan Gaffney
Cover photograph © Old Visuals/Alamy Stock Photo
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.4
ep
To
J. P.
To remind him that Boy still
meets Girl, and anyway it’s a good
paying business
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Principal Characters
1
I Become a Proletarian
2
What a Terrible Way to Make a Living
3
I Meet the Boss
4
Sinners in Asylum
5
I Become a Female Angle
6
It’s Wonderful to Be a Mother
7
We Can’t Get Gable
8
Holy Night! Silent Night!
9
Girl Meets Boy
10
We Go on Location
11
Sneak Preview
12
Retakes
13
Premiere
Introduction
In early 1937, when film producer David O. Selznick was putting the finishing touches on his classic Hollywood Cinderella story A Star Is Born, his former secretary was writing her own version of the film business. The result, I Lost My Girlish Laughter, is the most important Hollywood novel that most people have never read.
Though Selznick’s place in popular memory has endured thanks to the continued popularity—and notoriety—of his production Gone with the Wind (1939), Silvia Schulman is a footnote in Hollywood history—even among mavens and cinephiles. But without Schulman, Selznick arguably would not have bought Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind or acquired his respectable reputation as an innovative producer of women’s pictures. In 1936, Schulman read Mitchell’s hefty galleys and, along with her friend and colleague, Selznick’s New York–based story editor Kay Brown, badgered the producer to purchase the screen rights for $50,000. Schulman had worked in the film business since the early 1930s, when she left Hunter College for RKO Pictures. She later joined Selznick’s MGM production team as his personal secretary and moved with him when he formed his own company in 1935.
Schulman was one of thousands of women who worked for the American film industry in the 1930s. Industry leaders and journalists of the time claimed women made up nearly half of all studio employees and argued that Hollywood was one of the few places where women could earn as much money as men. Actresses such as Carole Lombard, Constance Bennett, and Katharine Hepburn netted salaries higher than President Roosevelt. The public fascination with the lives of Hollywood stars dominated the pages of fan magazines such as Photoplay and Modern Screen, fueling a popular literary and film genre focused on the highs and lows of “making it” in Hollywood. Most of these stories, perhaps predictably, were about the lives and loves of stars, not secretaries like Miss Schulman, nor the legions of female writers, directors, editors, designers, researchers, agents, journalists, and producers who made their living at the studios. In Selznick’s A Star Is Born, for example, film-struck aspiring actress Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) heads west to Hollywood, and with the help of a glamorous, self-destructive legend (Fredric March) and a paternal producer (Adolphe Menjou), transforms into star sensation Vicki Lester.
Selznick saw a lot of himself in fictional producer Oliver Niles, the Hollywood grandee who shepherds the starlet to fame. Played by Menjou, Niles was considerate and discreet, a man of impeccable taste—certainly not the Hollywood mogul #MeToo advocates love to hate these days. Oliver Niles would never be caught pinching any secretary’s behind. Selznick did care about helping women’s careers. His production What Price Hollywood? (1932) was part tribute to silent star Clara Bow’s struggles with fame; he gave Janet Gaynor a job when Twentieth Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck fired her for growing out of her girlish screen image; he worked with female screenwriters, including Jane Murfin, Sarah Y. Mason, and Wanda Tuchock; and he launched Hepburn’s career.
But Silvia Schulman had a different perspective on her boss. Selznick may have liked working with women, but not always in the best way. His clumsy romantic passes, pats, and lunges at female employees were a normal part of the workday in his organization. Early on in her job Schulman had dodged his wandering hands, but she subsequently managed to maintain a respectful working relationship with her boss. Other colleagues willingly said yes to Mr. Selznick.
Like many secretaries, Schulman had a sharp gift for satire honed over many hectic years in the business. She knew where all the bodies were buried—or bedded. But rather unusually, she was also a gifted writer. In 1935, she and friend Barbara Keon cowrote a play with the cheeky polygamous title Adam Had Three Eves. Although her boss liked it enough to buy it, Selznick never went forward with the film version. Schulman was not promoted to screenwriter. Instead, the producer kept her busy with dictation and reading “serious” potential properties for production—by real writers. Schulman may have fumed, but she wasn’t one to waste time. If Adam Had Three Eves was just going to be shelved while Selznick
took credit for her production advice, Schulman would get even by secretly writing her version of the great American novel. She certainly had enough material, but not much time. As she joked to her friend, the columnist Sheilah Graham, she was “so enamored of her job as confidential secretary” that she worked “sometimes as late as 5:00 a.m.” Schulman confided in her boyfriend, publicist and screenwriter hopeful Ring Lardner Jr., but it wasn’t until they married and went on their honeymoon in early 1937 that she had time to put everything on paper. The family story goes that they spent their honeymoon in some Laguna Beach hotel writing. He worked on a script; she wrote a novel.
At this point, Schulman’s former writing partner was too busy to collaborate on a novel; Keon was managing Selznick’s stable of male writers in their numerous failed attempts to script Gone with the Wind. So Schulman asked another woman with a grudge against the system, Jane Shore, to help shape and polish the manuscript. Shore had come to Hollywood from New York back in 1928, wrote Broadway Sally for star Nancy Carroll, and had to watch Fox executives shelve the picture when too many Broadway- and Sally-themed films glutted the new sound-era market. In addition to Sally’s Shoulders (1928), Beau Broadway (1928), and The Broadway Melody (1929), Warner Bros. released Sally (1929), an adaptation of the classic stage hit, starring Marilyn Miller (the original Broadway Sally). Shore had been out of steady work ever since and had tried joining the new Screen Writers Guild in 1935 in a last-ditch effort to get some decent assignments. The opportunity to help Schulman write a gossipy takedown of Hollywood, and then to sell it for a killing to the very people they were satirizing, was too good to pass up. At night, down at the Lardner-Schulman abode, she helped organize the sequence of stories, gags, and nightmares Schulman had collected from years of working at the top of the picture business.
In a rebuttal of her boss’s current rags-to-riches star romance, Schulman gave the secretary’s view of the film business in I Lost My Girlish Laughter. Like Schulman, protagonist Madge Lawrence is a native New Yorker, an ex–college girl on the lookout for a decent paying job in Hollywood. When a letter of introduction from her newspaper contacts does not open any studio gates, she heads out one evening, depressed and dateless, for a consoling drink or two. It’s then that she meets a genial director (likely modeled on Selznick’s employee John Cromwell), who, impressed with her college education and the fact she’s not just another bleach-blonde on the make, gets her a job as producer Sidney Brand’s secretary.
The legendary Brand is, of course, Selznick, who was known for putting his personal “brand” on every aspect of his productions—often to the chagrin of his staff. But readers soon discover that, rather than being one of the young “geniuses of the system,” Brand is the comic villain of Madge’s story. He’s a bumbling, narcissistic hypochondriac with a “flabby mouth and wide, feminine hips” who can’t mix his own highballs, holds production meetings in the hospital where his wife is giving birth, and has tantrums when MGM won’t loan him Clark Gable (another reference to Selznick’s real-life woes over casting Gone with the Wind). Told in a series of letters to her girlfriend and aunt (who was based on Schulman’s favorite relative, her aunt Ceal Weiss), journal entries, Western Union telegrams, and studio production memos, I Lost My Girlish Laughter fuses the perspective of the spunky American girl next door with the insider gossip of Louella Parsons and Sheilah Graham. In the process, Madge gleefully punctures every golden PR myth about Hollywood in circulation. Readers familiar with the so-called greats of the Hollywood novel genre—from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) to Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949)—will feel like they’re in new territory with the heroine of I Lost My Girlish Laughter. Her free-spirited, first-person narration is reminiscent of the best of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories, but there’s also something of Edna Ferber’s popular workingwoman heroine, Emma McChesney, in Madge Lawrence’s down-to-earth charm. And though plenty of Hollywood fairy tales dealt and continue to deal in feminine heartache and betrayal, there’s no time for tears or melodrama in this story, as the novel sets up its gags like the best of Leo McCarey’s and Frank Capra’s screwball comedies. But comparisons and context go only so far: I Lost My Girlish Laughter has a style, pace, and content all its own.
Industry bigwigs would later have ulcers just wondering if they were parodied in the text, but Schulman and her cowriter had just as much fun sending up overrated foreign stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Cocoanut Grove snobs like Paulette Goddard. Schulman’s hero, the dashing agent Leland Hayward, (recognizably renamed Hayworth Lord in the novel), royally screws Brand over in a contract hire, getting $1,500 a week for an unknown Broadway actor (at the time, $300 would have been the going rate). Friend Kay Brown was renamed Frances Smith, and, as New York story editor, responds to her boss’s frantic and illiterate memos with bland efficiency (readers can view some of Selznick’s memos, edited for content by Schulman and other studio secretaries, in Rudy Behlmer’s classic Memo from David O. Selznick, 1972). Another humorous touch was giving a rival MGM producer “Blank” for a surname—presumably because, in real life, Selznick called this rival every imaginable foul word in private. Columnist Louella Parsons became Stella Carsons, or, according to Brand’s new high-toned, non-acting foreign star, Sarya Tarn (a version of Dietrich rather than of Samuel Goldwyn’s Ukrainian failure, Anna Sten), “that fat peasant.” A smart-mouthed if occasionally charming publicity agent, Jim Palmer, was the cover for Schulman’s new husband, Ring, who had joined the Selznick empire in 1935 and was immediately smitten, as he wrote to his mother, by “this mad Jewish girl” in the office. Schulman would dedicate the book to him as “J. P.” (Jim Palmer) in order to protect his anonymity.
It’s been said again and again by historians and journalists that Hollywood during its big bad studio days was strictly a man’s world, where women were just decoration for casting couches or secretaries getting the great men coffee (or highballs). In this novel, the truth is far more interesting. Sidney Brand may think he runs his studio, but women are working everywhere in Madge’s Hollywood. The first place she lives in Hollywood is a women’s “dorm” for Hollywood employees (a fictionalized Hollywood Studio Club). While many are “extra girls on the break for the big chance, frighteningly young for the most part and devastatingly pretty,” she notes that there are also “an odd sprinkling of stenographers, script girls, assistant cutters, designers, a librarian or two and one honest-to-goodness writer who has actually had her name on screen credits but is very Scotch in makeup and is saving her money against a rainy day.” The novel’s penny-pinching writer is particularly apt, given that writers were struggling to secure union recognition and that it was well-known that the average Hollywood writer made less than a secretary during the 1930s (and this includes Shore and Lardner!).
So, does this mean I Lost My Girlish Laughter offers a rare feminist view of the film business way back in 1938? The opening pages reveal a surprisingly frank perspective. Although, as Madge admits in one letter to her girlfriend back in New York, “I still have something in me of the old guard feminists who broke out in bloomers and smashed windows,” she keeps her subversiveness to herself and a few trusted girlfriends. Sidney Brand may claim he wants to know the “female angle,” but, as readers soon discover, that respect and commitment to equality is unreliable at best, for I Lost My Girlish Laughter goes on to parody the studios’ devotion to female audiences. Though Brand changes the name of his next big film project from Sinners in Asylum (an adaptation of a recent New York play by a writer who vehemently and repeatedly denies being a communist—to great comic effect) to Lady in a Cage, Sarya Tarn’s failure to win over audiences at a disastrous preview precipitates yet another change. The producer quickly renames it That Gentleman from the South and recuts the footage to emphasize Tarn’s unknown male costar. The incident was loosely based on Schulman and Lardner’s terrible experiences with Marlene Dietrich during the production of The Garden of Allah (
1936). Demanding divas often spelled financial catastrophe for film companies. As Lardner fumed at the time: “This whole picture has been a frightful mess from the beginning…a lower, more underhanded woman never existed than Marlene Dietrich….She has a pernicious influence on the morale of the whole organization.”
But the novel’s chaotic production history for Sinners in Asylum/Lady in a Cage/That Gentleman from the South also generates wider questions about Selznick’s intent in making a film such as Gone with the Wind. Was it intended and marketed as a women’s picture because it focuses on protagonist Scarlett O’Hara’s experience—or because the gorgeous Mr. Gable plays Rhett Butler? Schulman knew the score: the studio producers understood that sexy male stars were even more important than strong female content in attracting female filmgoers.
Madge is equally skeptical about women’s own lack of solidarity in Hollywood’s competitive marketplace. The film business may have offered women the best chance of earning professional respect and a decent wage in Depression-era America, but all women certainly didn’t treat one another equally. In I Lost My Girlish Laughter, actresses, unless they are in supporting roles or are bit players, are self-obsessed snobs and won’t talk to lowly secretaries like Madge. Sarya Tarn is hired for Brand’s next picture after they meet while he’s at “a conference” in Palm Springs. When Madge comes to work on her first day, she finds that she has displaced another secretary (likely based on workplace rival Marcella Bannett Rabwin) who allegedly slept with Brand in hopes of a promotion. Women in Brand’s organization are sometimes hired for their college educations but, just as often, use the casting couch to get ahead. This certainly isn’t Madge’s way, but it’s a strategy that works for some. It’s to Madge’s credit that, though she loses her “girlish laughter,” she doesn’t become a total Hollywood cynic. In the end, she keeps both her feminism and her sense of humor. She pities the other secretary, banks rejected “Christmas” negligees intended for Mrs. Brand (a swipe at the industry’s efforts to mask its Jewish heritage), admires the self-serving verve of a young supporting actress, and watches the downfall of Ms. Tarn with equanimity. If she has to stage a riot at a movie theater in order to prevent film critics from seeing Lady in a Cage or fantasizes newspaper headlines about attacking her boss when he won’t give her a lunch break or is asked about the “female angle” in script meetings by clueless male writers—well, it’s all in a day’s work. And Madge’s workdays are sometimes sixteen-plus hours.