Girl of My Dreams (27 page)

“Proust overdid the Cattleyas,” said Shumway, straining to flatter his boss and impress his future sovereign simultaneously, “you're much better off with Phalaenopsis.”

Mossy paid no attention to him. “It happens, Your Highness, we have several pictures shooting this afternoon, and I'd be delighted to take you around to any of them.”

“What's so extraordinary,” the Prince said, “is that with your Fairbanks and Chaplins and Pickfords, and now your Ronald Colmans and Joan Crawfords, you've achieved a pantheon of royalty in a few years that took us ten centuries to incubate.”

“We're mostly ordinary people,” Mossy said, “who the public happens to smile on for a precious few moments, but stars can fall fast if they make a few lousy pictures.”

“But tell me, old chap,” the Prince went on, “what does Jean Harlot's bosom really look like?”

“Oh, that's quite funny, Your Highness, heh heh. Miss Harlow's measurements are classic, almost as perfect as a rose. I wish we had her here at Jubilee, but she spends most of her time at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.”

“Yes, of course,” said the Prince to the monarch, “but tell me, really, how does one manage to live with all the Mayers and Cohns and Goldwyns and whatnot?”

Ah, thought Mossy, the disquisition on the Jews. A Jewish orchid, he inferred, would be a parasite species, wouldn't it? Shumway squirmed, realizing the Prince of Wales had either not heard his introduction to Mossy or had not understood the likely background of a person called Zangwill. One of the whatnots was sitting right there in his royal presence, and Shumway's job might be on the line. Which way would Mossy go, defiant indignation or subservient submission to Edward P.?

“Well, now, you become accustomed,” Mossy said. “The gentlemen I do business with are filled with imagination and positive energy, honorable people as long as they don't try to affect the airs of a true aristocrat such as Your Highness.”

“Ah, quite right, quite right,” said the Prince.

But Mossy wasn't dropping the subject. “Do you know any Jewish people yourself, sir?”

“Well, there's old, ah, soanso, something-berg or -stein. I forget his name, good man though in the War, capital. But one hears they're full of push, you know.”

“Push, if I may say so, Your Royal Highness, is what built the British Empire.”

The Prince of Wales blinked, focusing directly at Mossy for the first time and possibly understanding he might well be talking to a whatnot. He hadn't quite caught the name, though it sounded German. “Quite so,” he said. “What kind of picture are you making today?”

When I heard about this, I thought at first the Prince of Wales had confused the name Zangwill with Zanuck. Since Zanuck wasn't Jewish, Edward P. could have thought he was speaking to a fellow Christian. On the other hand, why would an aristocratic Englishman, much less heir to the throne, ever have heard of him or, if he had, have any idea whether Darryl Zanuck was anything at all? The Prince of Wales would neither know nor care whether an obscure (to him) motion picture maker called Darryl Zanuck was or was not a Jew. Mossy had installed his Empress Joséphines to angle the P of W away from his own origins and then, provoked, led the discussion right into the Prince's teeth, attempting to blunt, if not convert, the Nazi-sympathizer's anti-Semitism.

The typewriter errand over, another was begun. I wended my way across the lot to Nils Maynard's set with a publicity release I drummed out for Stanny Poule. I was to wait until the director wasn't shooting, give the release to an actor, wait for his comments, then rush it back to Poule. Would I be doing this ten years from now, twenty? The mask of servility loomed as my life's prospect. I'd been a star in the ascendant that morning. Now I was a factotum, no more, perhaps less. Invisible. My head whirled.

Shorter than the Prince and trim, Mossy led him and Percy Shumway around the lot to the same sound stage where I was heading. “Jolly,” the Prince was saying, “jolly indeed to be putting all this imagination onto cinema screens round the globe. Must take rather a good deal of effort.”

“It does,” Mossy said, “rather a very great deal of effort, Your Highness.”

“And a world of bother.”

“But it's all worthwhile when you enter a crowded theater a thousand miles away and you join hundreds of people in the dark, all looking at what you've done.”

In those days Mossy didn't normally patrol the Jubilee lot. It scared people. Some of the fear came from the Depression itself, which increased anxiety everywhere, but mostly it was the way he squinted at his workers. With Mossy in charge of each line that was spoken, every blade of painted grass on every artificial lawn, he was seen to be swaggering around his domain even if he was only sauntering. Since Mossy's hand was in everything, he didn't need to show himself. He preferred to be everywhere present, nowhere visible, as Flaubert instructed for an author, comparing him to God in the universe. Mossy was the author of Jubilee.

“That street mise en scene you showed me,” said the Prince of Wales as they strolled through the backlot, “quite like Covent Garden, you know, yet not.”

Father Junipero Serra was said by Yeatsman to have sanctified the Jubilee backlot, as he may have the Zangwill estate a few miles inland, with a mission as he marched north from San Diego to Carmel. Before that, before the Europeans, the land had been contended for by the Chumash and Cahuilla peoples, later by the Mojaves and the Yokuts. Now it was Mossy Zangwill's mission, to be defended against any invaders.

From Yeatsman, a memorandum typed by Comfort O'Hollie: “Chief Seathl to Governor, Oregon Territory, 1855: ‘To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the ship, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.'”

“Stage Eight we're heading for,” said Percy Shumway, “just round the corner.”

I had already delivered the publicity release to the actor when Mossy came onto the hangar-like sound stage and introduced the Prince of Wales to Nils Maynard, who was waiting for a small fill light to be set so he could shoot his film's final scenes. Nils's first question, after bowing, was whether the Prince had been afflicted with the hemophilia that ran in his family. Shumway, toady more to the crown suddenly than to the studio, criticized Nils for asking an appalling question. Mossy stiffened and glanced across the sound stage to the small exit door he had just entered, preparing to swiftly escort the Prince off the set. Nils explained that he himself had hemophilia, that his pain and bleeding had markedly lessened since he became an adult, and that he was hoping to make a picture about Queen Victoria, some of whose heirs had the disease.

“Never bothered by it,” said the Prince. “Several great uncles were, as you say, afflicted.” Mossy was distracted by an actress going by in a hoop skirt.

“The royal disease,” Mossy said, returning to his duties. “Our Nils here should be at least a duke himself, shouldn't he?”

Edward P., to everyone's relief, was amused.

Nils ran his fingers through his hair. He knew better than to think hemophilia struck only royalty, and he had no interest in small talk. “This picture is called
The Boy from Boise
, sir, and I'm afraid we have to shoot, film a scene. Please excuse me.”

“I already have,” said the Prince with a smile. When Nils had hurried over to his cameraman, the Prince added, “Good chap, very fine chap.”

The Prince watched the lighting, which interested him more than the actors. The scene was a tense dinner with a nineteenth-century banker, his wife, and their son, who wanted to move farther west against his parents' wishes. After the first take, the Prince, naturally enough, expected to see the following scene. Shumway explained the scene had to be shot again until the director, Nils, was satisfied, and that even then they would push on to another scene using the same set but not the scene that would actually follow in the finished movie. The Prince seemed moderately annoyed by that, and then visibly lost interest when the same scene was filmed again. For the third take, the lighting was changed slightly to favor an actress's eyes, and this revived Edward P.'s interest, but only momentarily. Mossy, Shumway, and the Prince of Wales left quickly after the fourth take. Despite his denials of hemophilia himself, the Prince may have been afraid that he was a carrier of the sick gene; he never permitted himself an heir.

Nils's next scene was a large family gathering where an argument would take place. Never a commander, Nils was more of an usher, letting the actors know where he wanted them to move and doing it in a way that also let them know the mood he wanted, which in turn gave the actors the idea of how to say their lines. Whenever tension did arise he could always disarm everyone with a sleight-of-hand or two. Everyone but the cameraman. Cameramen were not diverted by Nils's tricks and tried to take advantage of him by lighting scenes either their own way or the way a certain actress wanted so she would request them on her next picture.

As Nils gathered his cast together before they had their final makeup touches, he told the actors to shake all the friendliness out of their systems now because in a few minutes they had to loathe each other. Over the years, Nils had developed if not a philosophy at least an antihero patter he would deliver to actors, who found the message reassuring. “A director is a necessary evil,” Nils intoned, “sometimes more necessary, sometimes more evil. Get it right the first time and you won't have to see my diabolical side. I have two and only two functions. I serve the actors, and I serve the story. So tell me, my darlings, how can I help?”

No director today could say what Nils said because the Directors Guild virtually has the word “vision” as a membership prerequisite. Nils would have to start with, “My vision of this film has less in common with Kurosawa than with Steven.” If anyone had to ask who Steven was, he'd be off the picture. The director is frequently such a rooster he confuses vision with strategy with ambition with grosses with points in his contract as he looks down at his tailored scruffy corduroys. Mr. Spielberg, you have a lot to answer for; you have entertained us vastly, but you have infected a generation of your fraternity with so much advanced narcissism you can't escape a just cinematic god somewhere.

We can still look at Nils's best wartime pictures,
Angels with Broken Wings
, for instance, or
Seven Came Home
, with no embarrassment at all. Nominated several times, he never took home the chicken, as he called it, until finally the Academy threw the Hersholt Oscar at him. The French accorded him Chevalier thises and thats, but he knew these were consolation prizes in his dotage. Nils confessed to me, “I once left a heavier footprint in this town. There were consequences, real or feared, for not returning my calls.” By the Eighties the people who returned his calls, if they were returned at all, were secretaries whose twenty-seven-year-old bosses were always at lunch. At least the old magician meant what he said, serving the actors and the story, and in his way in his day, which I was present for as the sun rose, he made pictures that moved and delighted.

Nils had a sly contempt for actors who were more photogenic than talented, but when he had to use them he tried to make them into graven images of themselves. “I'll let her just be a statue,” he said to me about April Devereau, the actress who had stalked off his set in the morning and had to be talked back by Mossy, “and have her do a slight grimace, that'll be okay in a close-up. As little talk as possible, no moving, no having to relate to the other actors. Even with the good ones I tell them don't act, just think and feel. The camera will do the rest. With a real movie actor like Gary Cooper, he uses his eyes like swords. The closer the camera is, the smaller the performance needs to be. The camera sees all, knows all, and, unfortunately for some actors, tells all.”

Unlike some European directors who made fierce, asphyxiating class distinctions, Nils was collegial on his sets. It happened that his director of photography on
The Boy from Boise
, Dirk Straker, was more at home with tyrannical directors, and when he wasn't given explicit orders did things to irritate Nils. Shouting at the camera operator while being overly fawning to Nils himself, Straker said, “I'll let you know where to move the camera, Barney, as soon as the maestro informs me what the hell he wants from this scene!” Nils got around him by doing a rope trick—he cut a rope four times into small pieces, then pulled it whole again out of his pants—that so awed the entire company the DP simply shut up for the rest of the day.

Nils tried to avoid being one of the directors who cravenly treated a star like a cross between a priceless jewel and a retarded child. Directors could forget to take their sons on promised fishing trips if a star wanted them at a meaningless photo session; they could leave their wives for them, try to gain control of them, and have tantrums when a star left them or preferred another director. The stars had their own tantrums of abandonment if they weren't cast in something they felt they deserved. The whole community could enter a state of rejection. A writer was replaced, a director put in a vise between the star and the producer, the star not wanted for the next picture after her grosses sank on the last one even if it had been a picture the studio forced her into against her will. Fear stalked the town like a gargoyle who knew everyone's address.