Part 10

As a tribe, actors and actresses seldom know what’s good for them. They usually judge any script solely by the number of lines of dialogue they get. Greer Garson announced to one and all that she wouldn’t be playing in _Goodbye, Mr. Chips_, one of the finest pictures that came her way, because “I’m only in a few scenes.”

The day before she left town for England to make the picture, she poured out her woe to me. “I’ve sat here for months doing nothing,” she said, “and now I’m going back to my native land in a picture that gives me a very small part. When I left England, I was a star there; my friends will think I’m coming home a failure.”

I wrote the story, but before she stepped on the train the next day, she begged me to kill it: “What if the picture’s a hit? I’d look like a fool.” So I kept a friend by sitting on the interview. _Mr. Chips_ made her an international name.

Vanity takes all kinds of shapes. In one of his earliest pictures Gary Cooper played a location scene so well that it was shot in a single take. That night Coop went diffidently to the director’s tent. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do that scene over again in the morning,” he said. “I seem to remember at one point I picked my nose I was so nervous.”

The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures like _Saratoga Trunk_, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have to go back to my nose,” he said.

It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming, but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had set up his own antique shops.

Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days--he worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands--that they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F. Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”

Soon after the Steins moved to California--they now live in a beautiful Beverly Hills hilltop mansion--the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m going to be king of Hollywood one day.”

“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded, thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in short supply and desperate demand.

Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their clients.

The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with Judith Anderson in _Divided by Three_. The slice that MCA carved for him out of Universal-International’s _Winchester ’73_ brought him more than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.

With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal. After running up costs of $12,000,000 on _Spartacus_ in which Douglas starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten the anti-trust suit--it is concentrating on production and stripping itself of the agency business--millions more dollars will be invested in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.

Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well with _The Key_, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much better before that from _Bridge on the River Kwai_, which brought him millions. The producer of _The Key_ was Carl Foreman.

When Foreman had another picture in the works, _The Guns of Navarone_, he wanted Holden for his hero. “My price,” Holden declared, “is now $750,000, plus ten per cent of the gross.”

“But not with me, not after _The Key_,” Foreman said.

“With you or anybody else, that’s my price,” Holden replied.

Foreman had a few forceful words to say on the subject of gratitude, then hired Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn together for less than Holden demanded. To keep his bulging bank account safe from the hands of tax collectors, Holden moved his family to Switzerland, that temporary haven of fugitive American fortunes--temporary because I understand that President Kennedy has some fancy plans for correcting that state of inequity.

William doesn’t spend much time in his Swiss home, though his wife, formerly Brenda Marshall, does, together with their two sons. Her daughter by a previous marriage preferred staying behind in Hollywood as an interior decorator. When Brenda Marshall married, she was a happy, fun-loving woman. The last time I saw her, at a party Norman Krasna gave for me at Lausanne, Switzerland, her old contentment had gone bye-bye.

* * * * *

When Tony Curtis was fourteen, he wrote me a six-page letter from his family’s one-and-a-half-room flat in the Bronx, where his father worked as a tailor. The boy was then Bernie Schwartz, and he wanted to know how to become a movie actor. He’d beaten a path to Hollywood, but he wasn’t rated as much more than a curly haired pretty boy by most people when MCA started to steer him. No matter how hard he was asked to work to promote his career, he gave the same answer: “I’d love to.” He was eager and fun to be with, and I invited him to all my parties. There he got to know, among others, suave, immaculate Clifton Webb, whom he looked up to as the epitome of social form.

“You’re getting up there,” Clifton cautioned him as the months rolled by, “so you must dress better. That suit isn’t good enough for you, and your tie is awful.”

As soon as Tony could afford it, he bought himself a custom-tailored suit, which he christened at another party of mine where Webb was a guest. “Look, Hedda,” Tony said with pride, “isn’t it wonderful? All hand-sewn.”

“Lovely,” I agreed, “and that’s a good-looking pair of shoes, too.”

“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”

Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you can’t wear that tie with it.”

“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”

“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”

Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75, but her dad said no. When he died, she was on the French Riviera with Mrs. Dean Martin, guests of Joe Kennedy.

Tony and Janet bought an eighteen-room house in 1958. (“Did you ever believe I’d end up a country gentleman?” he asked me.) They had enough money left to furnish the dining room, but not enough to buy much else. He was around at my house when I mentioned that I had a handsome, carved oak chair down in the basement, which I couldn’t use. “If you want it, take it. Go down and see.”

He came back conveying the heavy chair in his arms. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll put it in my car.” He’d started the motor to drive straight home before I caught him. “Come back here. We’ve got a party going. Janet can see it when you get home.” It still sits in their front hall, bleached and upholstered in white brocade.

MCA maneuvered Tony’s affairs so astutely that he now owns his own picture company, makes millions, drives a Rolls-Royce. “I hope that in a few years I’ll have enough security so I can drive around in an old battered station wagon if I want to,” he says. He lost Janet Leigh after he made a picture in South America with Yul Brynner, which featured a girl named Christine Kaufman, to whose apartment in the Château Marmont, in the company of her mother, Tony would go to have coffee on his way home.

He sent me another letter after I’d criticized him in the column last year over the postponement of _Lady L._ “I wonder,” I’d asked, “if actors realize they’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and are ruining their careers.”

“You might well have asked whether the studios realize what they are doing to actors,” Tony wrote back. “Because of the delays and stalling on this project, I have not made a film for eight months. True, I was paid a salary for part of that time but money alone can never make up for the fact that I might have two films during that period, that I could have been working in my chosen profession, could have been improving in the only way an actor can improve--by working.

“As a star, I have the right to pick my own parts, to decide whether or not a script is right for me. That is clearly understood by everyone who seeks to employ me.

“If the final script does not meet my requirements, the burden must remain with the company and not with me. The studio did submit a script I liked, which is why I signed to do the picture in the first place. Before we could get into production, they began making changes and the script they were finally ready to shoot bore little resemblance to the one I had approved.” He was right, the picture has never been made.

* * * * *

When press agents nudge an actor hard enough, he imagines he can write, produce, direct, and act simultaneously, as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. That was a delusion Clark Gable avoided.

“Why don’t you want to direct, like everybody else?” I asked him not long before he died.

“It’s hard enough to act without going into all those monkeyshines,” he said. “I just want to act and get the money. Let them take the grief.”

Clark loved money all his working life. I don’t remember that he ever gave a party. He nursed a grievance against Metro from the time Mayer loaned him to David Selznick to make _Gone With the Wind_. Clark thought he should have received an extra bonus for that, not simply continue on his salary of $7000 a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

When he cast off from Metro in 1954 and entrusted his business affairs to MCA, he boasted that he had “never really made any big money” until then. Like the rest of the monarchs of the movies, he wanted what they call “the most”--highest salary, biggest percentage.

“Why do you fight so hard for those enormous salaries?” I asked him, as I’ve asked them all. “Why can’t you put back some investment in the industry when it’s done so much for you?”

“I want the most because you’re only important if you get it.”

Money helped kill Clark Gable. That and his refusal to acknowledge that he was growing old. He couldn’t resist earning the most he’d ever get, when the offer came along for _The Misfits_; $750,000 plus $58,000 for every week the picture ran overtime.

On location in the Nevada desert, where the heat jumps to 130 degrees, he roped and wrestled with wild horses to prove to everybody who watched, including me, that he still had his old virility. “This picture will prove he is America’s answer to Sir Laurence Olivier,” said the ever-present Mrs. Paula Strasberg. He was encouraged by John Huston, a director with no qualms about making actors sweat. And he was outraged by the behavior of Marilyn Monroe.

He was habitually early on the set, ready to work at 9 A.M. Some days she wouldn’t show up until lunch time, sometimes not at all. Though he seethed inside, Kay Gable told me, he curbed his feelings by iron self-control. Clark was not a pretty sight when he blew his top, as he did when _The Misfits_ was completed, but Huston wanted one more retake.

The retake was never shot. Huston was still working the final cut of the picture when Clark died, nearly a million dollars richer, leaving a beautiful widow in Kay Gable and a handsome son he never saw.

_Seven_

Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the children.

They came like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their pushing, prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” I used to wonder if there wasn’t a special, subhuman species of womankind that bred children for the sole purpose of dragging them to Hollywood.

Most of the women showed no mercy. They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak and, like buck sergeants, drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in the hair, the pleats in the dress, the pink polish on the nails. I’ve had hundreds of them passing through my office asking for help.

Stage mothers are nothing new. I remember as far back as the Tartar we lovingly called “Ma” Janis, who took care of all the cash her daughter Elsie earned. When “Ma” died, Elsie got so lost in the tangle of her financial standing that she wondered whether she had $100,000 or a million in the bank. She found she had little left except a note signed by “Ma” certifying that she owed Irving Berlin $10,000. Elsie had never made out a check in her whole life, never had more than $5.00 in her pocketbook.

What motion pictures did was to encourage the breed and give them better opportunities to ruin their children while they were beneath the age of consent. Peg Talmadge, mother of Norma and Constance, was a sweetheart. Anita Loos wrote her book _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ from choice bits that fell from the lips of Peg, but even she ruled with a whim of iron. We all laughed at Peg when she said these things but didn’t have the wit to write them down. Anita did.

Jackie Coogan’s boyhood earnings were so scandalously dissipated by his family that the law was changed to protect child actors--but Jackie was left penniless.

When I worked for Metro, stage mothers lingered outside the gates at the Culver City studios, waiting to catch some dignitary’s eye or for a chance, which seldom came, to slip past the guards into the maze of narrow streets that wound between the big barns plastered with stucco which were called sound stages.

Some children made it, though not by waiting like beggars at the gates of paradise. Louis B. Mayer needed appealing youngsters for the all-American family pictures which this Russian-born Jew from New Brunswick delighted in making because they earned fortunes for him. There were two children in particular, a boy and a girl, who captured the imaginations of all.

The boy had once had his hair dyed black by his mother so he could get a job in two-reel silent comedies. She wanted to change his name to Mickey Looney, but the “L” became an “R” when he was signed on at Culver City.

The girl’s mother had seen her child walk out onto a vaudeville stage when she was two years old to join her two older sisters in a song-and-dance act. Mrs. Ethel Gumm took her three children slogging through West Coast theaters for years. Frances, the youngest, developed the hungriest drive of them all, battling to show her big sisters that she could sing louder and longer than either of them.

It was a cheap act, and it made very little money for anybody. One Christmas saw the traveling Gumms chewing on tortillas at a corner drugstore near the theater they were playing. Frances Gumm had been rechristened Judy Garland when Lew Brown spotted the trio playing The Lodge at Lake Tahoe and decided she might have something.

In the typical Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance switching that usually makes it possible for half a dozen people to claim they “discovered” a star, Brown put Judy and her mother in touch with an agent named Rosen, who knew Jack Robbins, a music publisher with offices in Culver City.

With Rosen, Judy was in Robbins’ office when he telephoned down to Ida Koverman, who made a point of hunting for fresh talent to keep the wheels turning at MGM. Judy was twelve; round as a rain barrel; stringy hair; dressed in an old blouse, blue slacks, dirty white shoes. Ida heard her sing with a zing in her heart, and she flipped. She called Mayer, who grudgingly came up to see what was causing all the excitement. Ida had got hold of the words to the Jewish lament “_Eli, Eli_” and coached Judy in the pronunciation. That’s what she sang for Mayer, but he wasn’t impressed. He tossed the ball right back at Ida. “If you want her, sign her up.”

But Ida was too knowing about the foxy ways of Mayer to fall for that. She needed a second opinion, or else if Judy failed, Mayer would never let Ida forget it. She had Judy sing again, this time for Jack Cummings, a producer who just happened to be Mayer’s nephew.

Jack was called one of the “Sons of the Pioneers,” a walking testimonial to the fact that it never hurt to be somebody’s relative at Metro. “A producer produces relations” was a stock gag. Later on, however, in pictures like _Seven Brides for Seven Brothers_, Jack proved that he could fly when they gave him wings.

Long before that, he made a picture with a young girl named Liz Taylor and a collie dog: _Lassie Come Home_. The picture was sweet, sentimental, and I went all out in praise of it. A loyal friend in Metro’s New York office wired me after reading the review: YOU SURE STUCK YOUR NECK OUT THIS TIME HOPPER STOP IT’S NOTHING BUT A POTBOILER. But the picture made a fortune, got Lassie a lifetime contract, helped get Liz _National Velvet_.

Cummings could see the potential appeal of Judy, a roly-poly girl with eyes like saucers and a voice as clear as a gold trumpet “This kid’s got it,” he told Ida. “Let’s sign her up.” While he went off to set the legal wheels in motion, Ida took Judy to the commissary for some ice cream.

She tried to introduce her there to Rufus Le Maire, head of casting, but she got the brush-off. Mr. Mayer hadn’t given the little new girl the nod, so she wouldn’t receive any favors. He was starry-eyed over another schoolgirl MGM had signed. Deanna Durbin was the real talent, in his book. The two children made a musical short together, _Every Sunday Afternoon_, but Deanna was the one given the big build-up. After that, Judy had nothing to do but hang around the lot--and get some education at the school Ida had established with academically qualified teachers to meet the requirements of California law.

Mayer had decided to let Judy go and keep Deanna, but the plan turned sour. Universal, looking for a youngster to play in _Three Smart Girls_, wanted Deanna. By a fluke, Metro had let her contract lapse. Mayer was away on one of his many trips to Europe. He knew nothing of this until he returned and found his prize pigeon had been allowed to fly the coop. He went berserk.

For days he ranted and raged at everybody in sight until some anonymous prankster won revenge. In Mayer’s exclusive, private bathroom one morning, Louis found that on every sheet of toilet paper the face of Deanna had been printed overnight.

Deanna got stardom and the royal treatment from Universal with _One Hundred Men and a Girl_, which followed _Three Smart Girls_. There was a fancy premiere, and she planted her footprints in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a pastime which was one of the glorious bits of nonsense in those days. Deanna is now quite plump and leading a happy married life with husband and children in Paris. Once a year newspapermen descend upon her home, but she won’t receive them or allow photographs to be taken. She’s had her fill of Hollywood and you couldn’t lure her back for a million dollars. The only singing she does is with her children.

Judy was living in a little rented house with her mother. Her father, Frank Gumm, was not in Hollywood. Judy’s mother telephoned Ida the morning after Deanna’s big show: “I can’t do a thing with Judy. She’s been crying all night. What shall I do?”

“Bring her right over,” said Ida. With no children of her own, she was a mother hen to everyone who needed her. Judy was as close to her as a daughter. She fell into Ida’s lap and buried her head on her shoulder, sobbing: “I’ve been in show business ten years, and Deanna’s starred in a picture and I’m nothing.”

Frustrated ambition has to be treated gently. “You’ll get your feet in cement, too,” Ida soothed her. “You’ll be starred, you’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve told you so.”