Hollywood (8 page)

“It’s easier for the bum who’s doing the lighting,” she said. “And what the hell? It’s my puss. So it’s better for me, too.”

Harry finished lighting and signaled to me that he was ready.

Carole checked her makeup and we were about to begin.

“Harry,” she said softly, “there’s a light out on the right side.”

“Hold it,” he said.

Some sixty or seventy lamps were focused on her from all directions, so finding the one that had blown, or was out, was not easy. Harry and his assistants began to check.

“No,” he finally reported. “Everything’s on.”

“Except one,” said Carole.

They looked again. Everything was on.

“All right,” said Carole. Just as the assistant called, “Roll ’em!” Carole muttered, “But there’s a light missing.”

“Hold it!” shouted Stradling. He went up to the catwalk himself. Sure enough, a small keylight was out. Two larger lamps had blocked it, making it invisible from the floor, and the man on the catwalk had been careless. Harry repaired the light and came down.

All of us were amazed.

After we made the shot, Harry and I sat around with Carole, talking it over.

“But how could you tell?” asked Harry.

“I could feel it. I could feel it wasn’t there. Holy Jesus, Harry, when you’ve done as many close-ups as I have, you get to know what the right close-up lighting
feels
like on your skin. And there was this whole little patch, right over my cheekbone that felt cool. So I knew something was out.”

Harry Stradling abhorred flat light. He did not like a picture that looked like a picture.

Much of the action of
They Knew What They Wanted
took place in and around the vineyards of the Napa Valley in northern California. Harry felt it important to retain a rural feeling. He ordered a truckful of branches of various sizes as well as twigs, flowers, and leaves. No matter what the shot was, he would see that it had the suggestion of foliage. If there were no trees or vines in the background, he would drop one in at the top of the frame in the foreground. If that did not seem practical, he would add a shadow of a twig or a branch. Even in close-ups, there it would be, on the back wall—the shadow of a twig.

As a rule, stars are not photographed with shadows on their faces.

One day, making a close-up of Carole, Harry asked, “Carole, would you mind this?”

“Mind what?”

“This.”

He was holding a twig in front of the key light so that its shadow fell across her face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What does it look like?”

“It looks like your face,” he replied, “with a shadow of a twig over it.”

“Well, do it,” she said, “if you think it looks okay. What the hell do I care?”

“Look,” said Harry, “I’ll make you a shot without it, but let me make this one with it.”

The one with it is the one in the picture. Harry was right. The film never lost the look and feel of the outdoors, of the country.

During the final week of shooting, there came a moment when we were about to break for lunch.

Carole asked, “Harry, would you come with me for a minute? I’ve got something for you.”

She led him to the door of Stage 8 on the RKO lot. Two stagehands, previously rehearsed, opened the great door, revealing a ten-ton truck. On the truck stood an enormous maple tree, with all its roots and with its branches in full bloom. From the tree there hung an outsized card that read:

FOR HARRY, SO YOU WILL NEVER BE WITHOUT. THANKS AND LOVE. CAROLE.

“Don’t be too hard on me,” Carole said one day, when we were having difficulty achieving the necessary effect. “I’m pretty tired. I’m getting on, you know.”

“Getting on, f’God’s sake. You’re what?” I asked. “Thirty-four? Thirty-five?”

“Why you son of a bitch no good dirty bastard,” she said. “Thirty-
one
. I’m thirty-
one
.”

“You’re thirty-two,” I said.

“Oh, you knew that, huh?”

“Certainly. I know
all
about you.”

“So if you knew I was thirty-two, why did you say thirty-four?”

“I wonder that myself, Carole.”

“I know why,” she said. “It’s because you’re nothing but a goddamn—
man
.”

“All right. So you’re thirty-two. So you have no right to be tired. You can be a little fatigued, but not tired.”

“Jesus, you sound just like Riskin. He used to horse around with words like that, too. What do you mean, tired, fatigued?”

“Well, fatigued means fatigued, worn-out, temporarily. But tired means sort of bored, sick of it.”

“You know what you’re full of?” she asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“What you don’t realize is that I’ve been doing this—what we’re doing today—since I was about twelve years old.”

“I remember,” I said. “That was before you changed your name from Shirley Temple to Carole Lombard.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“How did it happen? You’re not the screen-brat type.”

“Like everything,” she said. “Craziness. No sense to it. We had this neighbor, and he had a friend, Allan Dwan, who was some kind of movie director.”

“What do you mean ‘some kind of a’? He was a very
fine
director.”

“Yah, I guess so. Anyway, he was a friend of this neighbor of ours, and he was doing a picture, and the name of it was
A Perfect Crime
and he needed a kid. So one day, the neighbor said to him, ‘There’s a cute kid lives next door.’ I was the cute kid. So he sent for me and talked to me, and I got the job. And from then on, I had a lot of jobs. I guess I was good. But I didn’t get a contract till later. With Mack Sennett and all. Till I was about sixteen. And that I didn’t get from acting. That I got from dancing. I was in this exhibition ballroom contest at the Coconut Grove? And some guy from Fox saw me and tested me, and I’m not going to tell you the rest of the story.”

“Clark’s a wonder,” Carole said to me one day. “I’m really nuts about him. And it isn’t all that great-lover crap because if you want to know the truth, I’ve had better.”

“Shut up, Carole.”

“What’d I say? Somethin’ wrong? I’m just tellin’ you a couple of facts. You’re not interested in facts?”

“Go on,” I said, embarrassed. “You were telling me how you’re nuts about your husband.”

“Yeah. What I was tryin’ to tell you was that I’m nuts about
him
. Not just nuts about his
nuts
.”

“Carole!”

“What?”

“Take it easy.”

“We didn’t have too simple a time getting going—me and Clark—because when we first started messin’ around, he was tied up elsewhere and so was I, sort of. So we used to go through the goddamndest routine you ever heard of. He’d get somebody to go hire a room or a bungalow somewhere. Like on the outskirts. A couple of times the Beverly Hills Hotel but that could only be at night. Then the somebody would give him a key. Then he’d have another key made, and give it to me. Then we’d arrange a time and he’d get there. Then I’d get there. Or I’d get there, and he’d get there. Then all the shades down and all the doors and windows locked, and the phones shut off, and then we’d have a drink or sometimes not. He’s not much of a bottle man. And we’d get going. And that’s how it went on for quite a time. Finally, he got unglued and I did, too, and we thought what the hell, we might as well get married. But would you believe it? After we were married, we couldn’t ever make it unless we went somewhere and locked all the doors and put down all the window shades, and shut off all the phones? Even now, swear to God, we’ve been married all this time, he still goes around putting down window shades and locking doors. Don’t you love it?”

“I love
you
,” I said.

Shortly before
They Knew What They Wanted
was to open at the Radio City Music Hall, Russell Birdwell called a luncheon meeting to be held in a private dining room at the RKO studios. Birdwell was Carole Lombard’s personal press agent and she adored him. She always referred to him as Boz (for Boswell) and delighted in his highly imaginative publicity schemes.

Birdwell invited me to join him and Carole, along with Erich Pommer, the producer, and Perry Lieber, the head of studio publicity. The luncheon was scheduled for two-thirty, when there would surely be no one else around.

Birdwell outlined his scheme. Carole Lombard would fly to New York for the opening. However—“Now, get
this
!”—somewhere across the country, the plane would go down and would be reported missing. Birdwell assured us he could keep it missing successfully for at least twelve hours.

“And in those twelve hours, fellas, we’re going to be on every goddamn front page in the United States of America. Not only Carole Lombard’s name, but the name of the picture and the name of the theatre it’s going to open at and how would you like to foot the bill for
that
kind of advertising?”

“And then what?” I asked.

“And
then
what? Well, somewhere—she and her pilot and whoever else come straggling out of the woods, because, see, they had a motor conk out or something—I’ll get Paul Mantz to figure out technical stuff—and they were forced down and the radio
went on the blink and that’s why they couldn’t—well, you know, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I? This is
great
!”

Carole began to slap her thigh, yelling, “I’ll die! I’ll die! Isn’t that something? I’ll die!”

She expressed herself as perfectly willing to go through with the mad scheme.

I objected.

“Now, look!” I said. “You’re assuming the whole thing goes off like clockwork, but a lot of people, especially newspaper people, are going to be pretty suspicious. And what if something happens? And it
doesn’t
come off? What if it comes out the whole thing was a hoax?”

“Well, you’re not supposed to know about it,” said Birdwell. “So what do
you
care?”

For a time it looked as though they were going to go through with it. Eventually, someone put the kibosh on the scheme, only because it was too costly.

Two years later, when I saw the extra with its startling headline on a corner newsstand in Washington on that awful day of her death, I could hear Carole’s voice and the sound of her hand slapping her thigh, her voice yelling delightedly, “I’ll die! I’ll die!” I remembered Russell Birdwell’s notion of the fake crash for publicity. I stood there hoping against hope that perhaps this was a postponed version of his scheme. For a minute or two, I convinced myself it was—it
must
be—it could not be otherwise. Carole Lombard, the lovely Carole, so vital, so imbued with the love of life, simply could not be dead at thirty-five. But she was.

The awful irony of the situation was that only a few weeks earlier, in December 1941, Clark Gable had been appointed chairman of the Hollywood Victory Committee. In this post, he had assigned Carole Lombard to go to Indiana and open a bond drive in Fort Wayne. She had had a great success and was returning to California with her mother. On January 16, 1942, at 7:23 P.M., the plane crashed into Table Rock Mountain, about thirty miles southwest of Las Vegas.

There were other cruel circumstances. When Carole’s plane crashed, Gable was in the middle of filming
Somewhere I’ll Find You
, which was being directed by Wesley Ruggles, the director who had done the only picture Gable had made with Carole Lombard.

The part he played was that of a war correspondent whose brother dies in action. Consequently, there was much dialogue regarding heroism and death. Ruggles arranged for some of it to be cut.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had always given the impression of being just another movie couple, married for the time being.

When the tragedy struck, something more became known. The depth of feeling in their relationship was revealed. Clark Gable risked his life trying to find the plane—in the slim hope that his wife had survived. He might easily have been killed himself, but Spencer Tracy, who was with him during the search, reported that he did not seem to care. It was almost as though he wanted to be killed, too.

Filming on
Somewhere I’ll Find You
stopped for a time. There were rumors the picture would be shelved, but Gable came back and finished it. Then, although forty-one years old, he enlisted in the Air Force and stayed in the service until the end of the war.

The news of Carole’s death hit me hard. She had been a rich part of my life. Had she been one of the reasons I had wanted to come to Hollywood when I did? Or was it in the hope of meeting, of coming to know, Barbara Stanwyck? Katharine Hepburn? All three?

The boys of America had wild dreams, too.

Through Carole Lombard, I came to know Carl Laemmle, Jr., and through Junior, I met the legendary Carl Laemmle, Sr.

The elder Laemmle was seventy-five but seemed as venerable as the Grand Lama. He was to die the following year, but when I met him, he was bright and cheerful and funny and loved to talk about movies and the movie business.

“You know,” he said, “somebody should write a book about me, someday.”

“Somebody
did
,” his son reminded him.

“That Drinkwater thing? By John Drinkwater?” He waved a deprecating palm. “That was a press release. That was not a book. What kind of book is a man going to write when you hire him to write it? We hired him to write it. For money. So he wrote it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean a real book. About how this whole thing started. And how it is now. And about what’s going to happen to it. It’s very interesting. It would be interesting.”

His speech retained traces of a German accent. He was a tiny man. Now, in age, he had shrunk even more.

I had been anxious to meet him because he seemed to me, from the record, one of the most fascinating and imaginative of the motion-picture producers.

He had been responsible for
Show Boat
,
The Good Fairy
,
Back Street
,
My Man
Godfrey
, and hundreds of others. Although he was primarily a businessman, he was among the few important executives who were equally interested in the technical and artistic growth of the medium.

He had a great deal to do with promoting the careers of Erich von Stroheim and Lewis Milestone and Gregory LaCava.

He had had a profound effect upon the development of Hollywood as the film capital of the world.

I sat looking at him with admiration.

“One of the reasons I wanted to meet you, Mr. Laemmle, is because of curious coincidence.”

“What coincidence is that?” he asked brightly.

“Well, when did you start Universal Pictures?”

“In nineteen-twelve,” he said immediately.

“Well, there you are,” I said. “Nineteen-twelve is the year I was born. So your company and I are the same age.”

“I wish my company looked as young as you do,” he said and laughed. “You don’t think that would be a good idea?”

“What idea?”

“That somebody should write a book about me? Not about me as a man but about me and the movie business.”

“I think it would be a
great
idea,” I said.

“Maybe one of the reasons I would like to see it is because I already have a good title for it. A good
name
for this book.”

“What is it?”

“I think they should call it ‘The Long Store.’ ”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t see why that would be a good title.”

He laughed merrily and said, “Read the book, then you’ll see.”

I noticed, in our time together that day, and two subsequent meetings, that Laemmle was a joyous little man.

He seemed to see humor in everything, including himself.

“Tell him, Pop,” said Junior. “Tell him why you want to call it ‘The Long Store.’ ”

“You think he’d like to hear it?”

“I’m sure of it,” said Junior. “He’s crazy about the movies. He used to work for Goldwyn.”

“Goldwyn,” said Laemmle. “Sam Goldwyn is a great man. He has great courage. We are competitors. We’ve always been competitors, but I respect him.”

“ ‘The Long Store,’ ” I prompted.

“Yes,” said Laemmle, and took a deep breath. “Sometime, when I think back on the whole thing, I wonder what would have happened to my life, and to so many other lives, if I hadn’t happened to rent that long store. I mean to say, what if I’d rented a
different
store? The one across the street. Or the one next door. Well, there never would have been a Universal Pictures—and listen, there never would have been a Carl Laemmle, I mean not
this
Carl Laemmle…What happened was, I was then in dry goods. I was born in Laupheim. Have you ever heard of it? It’s in Germany.”

“No, I can’t say that I have, Mr. Laemmle.”

“It was a good little town, and my people there, they were always merchants, so when I came over here that’s what I did, in Oshkosh. That’s all I
knew
how to do and I had different kinds of stores, and finally, I heard there was a good spot in Chicago. A big dry-goods store there—
too
big, maybe—went broke, and it seemed a good chance to open a branch of
our
store. So I went there to look over available space. I looked at all kinds of places, on the main streets and on the side streets, and finally, it came down to about two or three places. And after thinking it over, I decided on this one store on Milwaukee Avenue because it was very long and it seemed to me it would be a good shape for a dry-goods store, because you know how in a dry-goods store, you like to have long counters where you can pile things up. So I took that one. The Long Store…

“The whole thing to move to Chicago with the branch was good because for a while there, we were the only dry-goods store in the neighborhood. You have to remember I’m talking to you now about maybe nineteen-oh-one or oh-two. And one day a fellow came in and he started looking around, and finally he said to me, ‘How would you like to make ten dollars tonight?’ I said to him, ‘I’d like to make ten dollars
any
night.’ So he said to me, ‘I would like to come in here tonight and show some moving pictures.’ Well, I didn’t know what he was talking about but then he explained it to me. How he had this machine and would hang up a white sheet, and then show these pictures that moved. He charged a nickel admission. And people came in and watched the moving pictures.
So I said to him, ‘But how come you want to do it here? In my place?’ And he said, ‘Because for the best results you have to have a long store.’ Well, I made the arrangement with him, and pretty soon he was coming down about once every two weeks and people would come in for a nickel and he would show these pictures that moved. And they got to be more and more popular and I got to know this fellow. And the more people that came, the worse it was because they had to stand. And sometimes they leaned on the merchandise. So I looked around, and I found
another
long store with nothing in it. We put in some benches, and then he started coming every week, and we began developing it into a nice little business. And by nineteen hundred and six, I formed a company, and we made up a name for it. It was—”

“The Nickelodeons,” I said.

“You know that?” said Laemmle delightedly. He turned to his son. “Say, this fellow’s all right.” He turned back to me. “The Nickelodeons. Yes. And that was a real success. Well, then we started buying more and more pictures. Renting them, I mean. Pretty soon, I began to have trouble with the suppliers. So the next thing, I looked into it and I decided why have trouble with the suppliers? We’ll make our own. And we started making our own. So you probably know already, after a while that led to the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Then, when everybody started moving out here to the sunshine, we did, too. It’s been—the whole thing—a very interesting business. A very interesting life. And I sometimes think that it must have been God who pushed me into that long store.”

“Mr. Laemmle,” I once asked, “what do you think is the most important element in the success or failure of a picture?”

The answer came back at once. “The right actors in the right parts or the wrong actors in the wrong parts.”

It is sometimes said that a star makes a part, but by and large, the opposite is true. Further, audiences have demonstrated that they are interested in their favorite stars only if the stars play parts they want to see them in.

When Clark Gable was known as The King and was as powerful a box-office attraction as the American film business had ever known, his pictures were sold in advance simply as Gables.

“We’ve got three Gables this year,” the salesman would say to the exhibitors, and book almost the whole Metro program on the strength of this pitch.

Gable was a superstar. At the peak of his career, it was decided at Metro to make a film of the play titled
Parnell
. It had been a great success on the London stage, but had failed in New York. Still, the story of the Irish patriot attracted someone, and that someone proved to be persuasive.
Parnell
was under way. It was planned as an expensive prestige picture.

“Prestige pictures,” so-called, were an element of Metro production left over from Irving Thalberg’s regime. Thalberg believed it was incumbent upon the industry to make a certain number of pictures each year without thought of profit. They were to be class pictures that would appeal to the theatergoing public and the book-reading public, the academic world, the professionals, the upper middle class. Thalberg believed such films broadened the base of the audiences and dignified the industry.

Parnell
was made, then launched with an outstanding campaign.

Years later, an executive in Metro’s sales department told me, “I want to tell you, the picture went out, and when the gross reports started to come in, I swear to God we thought something’d gone wrong with the telegraph keys. You couldn’t believe the grosses that were coming in on
Parnell
. We kept telegraphing back, asking for confirmation, because we figured these had to be typographical errors. I mean, you couldn’t
have
grosses like that, not with a Gable. It would be like, say, you did a play on Broadway today, and the cast was Lunt and Fontanne and Al Jolson, and you’re going to open them in a show by Kaufman and Hart with music by Irving Berlin. And you open the box office Monday morning and nobody comes over to buy a ticket. What would you say? You would say, ‘Well, they didn’t get it, they didn’t see the ads.’ So you take the ads again, and five people come up the next day to buy tickets. I’m trying to give you an idea of what it was like with
Parnell
. We took a terrible beating with that whole picture. Nobody at the studio could understand what happened. Me, I still don’t understand. The only thing I could figure out is they didn’t want to see Gable in that kind of part in that kind of a story. That’s it.”

As long as I had him on the subject, I asked, “And what about
Crisis
? You remember that?”

“Do I
remember
it? I wish to Christ I could
forget
it.
Crisis
. Oh my God!”

“What happened?”

“Well, Cary Grant, you remember what hot stuff he was? I mean, in some ways, he was as hot as Gable. He’d had a string of hits you could hardly believe,
The
Philadelphia Story
,
Suspicion
,
Once Upon a Honeymoon
,
Destination Tokyo
,
Mr. Lucky
,
None But the Lonely Heart
,
Arsenic and Old Lace
,
Night and Day
,
Notorious
,
The
Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
,
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
. I mean I’m talking about a string of hits. So this story comes up and it’s a beaut. Everybody at the studio is jumpin’ up and down. It’s about a terrific brain surgeon, see? And about this South American dictator, a Fascist or a Communist or something, and he’s threatening the peace of the world. And what happens? He develops a brain tumor. So they send up to the States and they kidnap the brain surgeon and they bring him down and they make him perform the brain operation on the son of a bitch. What a spot, huh? If he pulls it off, maybe he screws up the peace of the world. And if he doesn’t do it, I mean the brain operation, they may think he’s screwed up on purpose and they’ll probably remove
his
head, right? A very strong story. I forgot how it came out. But we had José Ferrer around, who was also hot as a pot at the time, and, of course, perfect for the South American dictator, right? But he wasn’t all that kind of a box-office attraction. So, for insurance, they started looking around for the brain surgeon and somebody came up with the idea of Cary Grant. So everybody thought, ‘Oh, sure, Cary Grant. Great. But how do you get him?’ Well, a lot of pressure, a lot of money, a lot of conditions. Next thing you know, we’ve got him. And everybody thought the whole quarter was saved, just with that one picture. So they made it. And what happened? It went out and e-g-g. I’m talking about capital E, capital G, capital G. And this was when Cary Grant couldn’t make a wrong move. They didn’t care who the other people were, or who the leading lady was, just give ’em Cary Grant. Except give ’em Cary Grant in
Crisis
. I want to tell you we could’ve made more money with that picture if we’d cut the film up and sold it for mandolin picks. It was a full disaster. So what does it prove? It proves that no matter
how big a star is, the public is only going to accept him in certain kinds of parts. In the kind of parts they want to see that guy in. Cary Grant, they wanted to see him with a broad. They didn’t care what broad, so long as it was a broad. I mean—now—looking back on it, when I tell you that Cary Grant played the part of the greatest brain surgeon in the world, I can hardly keep from laughing myself. And that’s what the public did. They bust out laughing. They thought it was ludicrous. So here’s another question: Why did we go with him? All right, here’s the answer: If you can get Cary Grant to say, ‘Yes, I’m going to come over to your studio and make a picture,’ you don’t say, ‘No’; you say, ‘Yes.’ In fact, you say, ‘
Hooray
, yes.’ And here’s a last question: How come that public that’s supposed to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, how come they knew more than all these six-thousand-dollars-a-week executives at Metro? Can you answer me that?”

Once, in the middle of a Goldwyn casting conference, when any number of leading ladies had been suggested and rejected, I suddenly jumped up and cried, “I’ve
got
it!”

“You have?” asked Goldwyn eagerly. “Who?”

“Anna Sten,” I said.

The joke laid an egg, as it should have done.

In the early 1930s, Goldwyn was considering a production of
The Brothers
Karamazov
. He heard about a German film, called
Der Mörder Dmitri Karamazov
, and arranged to screen it. Although he did not respond favorably, he was forcibly struck by its star, Anna Sten. He arranged to meet her, was further impressed, and soon had her under contract.