Pieces of My Heart (2 page)

The beret indicates a certain theatrical bent,
n’est-ce pas
? (
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

B
ecause my father had money and belonged to the Bel-Air Country Club, I had entrée to a life most people couldn’t dream of, and I never took it for granted. One fortunate by-product of the private schools I was attending was that I was cheek by jowl with a lot of kids with famous parents.

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife’s career had begun to slowly deflate.

Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other’s houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before.

Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making
Marie Antoinette
at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: “To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer.”

Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg’s. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn’t need makeup, didn’t need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees.

Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—“the stud ski instructor,” that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

Another classmate was Peter Potter, Fred Astaire’s stepson. Peter and I were both at the Hollywood Military Academy, which was located on the corner of San Vicente and Bristol. Peter and I would have playdates at his house, and Fred would pick me up from the school in a cream-colored convertible—a Packard, I think. Even though I was just a small kid, Fred was always very kind to me. It’s one of those strange twists of fate that thirty years later he’d be playing my father on
It Takes a Thief
.

When I was eight years old, there was a preview of a Paramount picture called
The Biscuit Eater
at the Village Theater in Westwood. It was about a white kid and a black kid who take the runt of a litter and try to turn him into a champion bird dog—a sweet, lovely little picture that, because of my passion for dogs, moved me terribly.

At the end of the movie I was crying, and when I came out of the Village Theater still sniffling, there was the dog from the movie! The trainer had brought him to the screening for some publicity, and I was so thrilled to see the dog that I ran right up to him and threw my arms around him. Luckily, he was a well-trained dog and didn’t bite me or shy away. Well, the photographers who were there were just delighted—a picture of a sobbing child with a dog is guaranteed to get good placement in any newspaper at any time.

As the photographers were shooting and the flashbulbs were going off all around me, I distinctly remember thinking,
Gee, this is pretty good!
I was the focus of a circle of light, the center of everybody’s attention, and I liked it. It was one of the key moments of my life.

T
he years of my early adolescence were tough for me. I was something of a jock, excelling in baseball, swimming, and tennis, and I was also good on a horse. Academics were another thing entirely. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the aptitude, although I’m sure some of my teachers would have insisted otherwise. It was that I was bored and rebellious and didn’t try to conceal it.

In retrospect, my parents had a lot of trouble with me. I was always with tutors; one time, at Harvard Military School, I got caught with a girl, and there was a point when I went from being kicked out of Black Foxe to getting kicked out of Harvard to being at Cal Prep—which I liked—and then it was St. Monica’s and living at home.

These years were lightened only by my increasing addiction to the movies. When I was at Black Foxe, RKO came to the campus to shoot some scenes for
Best Foot Forward
. Our company of cadets marched by, and the Hollywood crew photographed us. I was fascinated by the trucks, the crew, the way the shoot and the extras and all the paraphernalia of moviemaking were organized.

Everything seemed to contribute to my passion for the movies. One of the kids I went to school with was the son of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose ranch, dubbed Tarzana, was later developed into an entire town. Mr. Burroughs would invite a bunch of the kids out to his ranch, and believe me, in the days before freeways Tarzana was a trek. Of course, we were all nuts about Tarzan, so we knew who Edgar Rice Burroughs was. It wasn’t just another trip to a parent’s house.

It turned out that Burroughs had wired his gardens for sound, and there was a profusion of jungle noises coming from the trees. We’d hear monkeys gibbering and ask “Who’s that?” and Mr. Burroughs would say, “That’s Cheetah.” And then we would hear Tarzan’s yell, and he would nod and say, “That’s Tarzan.” We’d all stare wide-eyed at the vegetation waiting for Johnny Weissmuller to show up. Burroughs was a gracious, wonderful gentleman, and we all loved to visit him.

As momentous as my commitment to the world of the movies was my discovery of sex, which happened just around the time I saw Astaire, Gable, Scott, and Grant at the Bel-Air Country Club. I was about twelve and a half, in junior high at Emerson. This wonderful, sweet girl sent me a note: “I would like to make love to you.” She didn’t have to ask twice. I folded up the note and went right over to her desk and made a date.

Afterward, I thought I had discovered the greatest thing on earth. Certainly, it was a lot better than masturbation. Someone must have broken the girl in awfully early, because she wasn’t a virgin. She told her friends about me, because I soon had easy access to some of the other girls as well.

Some of my first official dates were with Alan Ladd’s daughter Carol, Harold Lloyd’s daughter Gloria, and Joan Bennett’s daughter Melinda. It was around this same time that I went to a pool party and met Roddy McDowall, who was already part of Elizabeth Taylor’s group of teenagers. Roddy was then as he always was—immensely kind and decent, with a caring, empathetic quality that made him one of the most beloved members of the Hollywood community. Roddy and Elizabeth would be the most intimate of friends for the rest of his life, but then one of Roddy’s great gifts was that all of his friends felt that they were on the most intimate of levels with him.

The proximity of the movie business to my life only increased my hunger. One day I was hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard when it started to rain. A car stopped for me, I hopped in, and when I turned to thank the driver my mouth stopped working. He looked just like Errol Flynn. Dear God, it
was
Errol Flynn, and I had just seen
Objective, Burma!

I gulped and said, “You’re Errol Flynn!”

“Yes, I am,” he said, and the nearness of Errol Flynn was so staggering that that perfectly innocuous exchange is all I can remember of the entire ride.

Another time Alan Ladd was shooting some scenes on an estate in Bel-Air, and I snuck onto the set to watch. He was standing behind some bushes waiting to make an entrance, and I got a chance to watch him work. He was a powerful screen actor—that great voice, that blond hair, that sense of stillness. And yes, he was small, but not that small—about five-foot-six, with a terrific swimmer’s body. The problem was that his image was not that of a guy who was five-six. On screen, he was six-three, so when people saw him they were always surprised, which made him insecure.

Years later I did a magazine layout with Alan at his ranch in Hidden Valley and got to know him. Alan Ladd was an extremely kind man, and a good horseman who knew how to handle an animal. Unfortunately, he had a complicated series of disappointments involving his marriage to Sue Carol, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and got hooked on booze, which greatly affected his looks and his career choices. At the end, his family was watching him closely, but not closely enough.

Throughout these years I never had any career goal other than acting, and I see no need to apologize for it. I thought then and I think now that making people smile and taking them out of their problems for an hour or two is a wonderful way to spend a life. I know that because that’s what the movies did for me. When I would come home from an afternoon at the movies, I would go to my bedroom and act out the best scenes from whatever I’d seen that day, and my problems with my father were forgotten. That era provided a profusion of wonderful actors and actresses to admire—and not always the ones remembered by posterity. Take Joel McCrea, for instance, a real cowboy and a good actor who could excel in westerns like
Union Pacific
or
The Virginian,
but who was also wonderful in comedies like
The Palm Beach Story
for Preston Sturges—and comedy is the hardest thing an actor can do.

I was always trying to turn my passion from the theoretical into the practical. When I attended the Hollywood Military Academy, we did a production of
The Courtship of Miles Standish,
and I played a female character—Priscilla Alden! I also played Tiny Tim in a production of
The Christmas Carol
and kept up with the amateur theatricals, thankfully in male parts. I was coming up in the world!

One of my close friends in school was named Noel Clarabitt. Helena, his mother, had a little tearoom, and I would work for her, polishing the antiques and crystal and busing the tables. I would be over at their house a great deal, and she became a big influence; she was Russian, and they drank wine and played classical music, which was a different environment than I was used to.

Southern California was paradise in this period. For one thing, there weren’t that many people, which meant there weren’t that many cars, which meant there was no smog at all. The air was so clear that when the smudge pots were lit in preparation for a freeze in the orange groves, you could smell them all over town. There was a superb transit system in the Red Line, which went from downtown L.A. all the way to the ocean. One of the main routes was down San Vicente Boulevard; what’s now the large grassy divider in the middle of the road was the trolley track. In more congested areas, the Red Line took back routes, but when the cars got to Hollywood, there would still be stops at Highland and La Brea. People would take the Red Line all the way to the beach, where the car was turned around on a large turntable before it headed back downtown.

You could stand on a mountaintop in Malibu or Santa Monica and see all the way to Catalina. Literally. On top of Sepulveda, you could look out into the San Fernando Valley and see nothing but chicken and avocado ranches. The primary industries were movies and aircraft, which had boomed during the war.

The old Los Angeles I grew up with is all gone now, except for a couple of places that are entirely commercial. If you want, you can go to the Huntington or to Olvera Street, but those are museums, each in its own way. The Red Line disappeared because the rubber and fuel companies wanted the trolley cars out so they could make more money. But that’s the way of the world; when I was at Cal Prep, I used to fish for steelhead in the Ventura River up near Ojai, and now the Ventura River doesn’t even run there anymore.

I finally began to get some serious traction when I began caddying at the Bel-Air Country Club. One of the admirable by-products of my father’s value system was a belief in hard work. He always wanted me to be earning my keep, and since it got me out of the house, I was all for it.

Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been a lot of competition for those caddy jobs at Bel-Air and I would have gotten shut out because I was too young. But after Pearl Harbor, all the older caddies went to war or got more lucrative jobs in the aircraft factories as they ramped up production, so I was able to nab a spot I wouldn’t have gotten for at least a couple of more years.

The Bel-Air Country Club gave me a matchless opportunity to meet and watch people, but it also gave me a primer in some of the less palatable personalities in the business. Most of the extremely right-wing members of the Motion Picture Alliance frequented the Bel-Air. Adolphe Menjou was often there, prissy and slightly effete, the sort of man who never read a novel, only the
Wall Street Journal
. When Lew Ayres claimed conscientious objector status during World War II, the right-wingers at Bel-Air thought he was a coward and ostracized him. Lew was a strong man, a good man, and went his own way, eventually serving with distinction as a medic, which is more than the people who felt entitled to condemn him ever did.