For the Time Being (20 page)

He was not alone: at the same time almost every harassed Jew in Eastern Europe had the same dream, and as Schmuel started on his marathon trip to Hamburg other families were on the move.
The migration to the West had begun. The Mayers left Vilna, the Zeleznicks (Selznicks later) quit Kiev, the Warners got out of Poland, the Zukors fled Hungary and Carl Laemmle slipped out of Germany – all within 500 miles of Warsaw, all to meet and found a very different ghetto in the desert sun of California; a remarkable event which would change popular entertainment for ever.

However, before the Golden Ghetto could come into being, these founding fathers were forced to earn a living in their promised land. Louis B. Mayer became a junk dealer in New Brunswick, Zukor a furrier in Chicago, Selznick a jeweller in Pittsburgh, Laemmle a clothier in Oshkosh. The Warner brothers' father opened a bicycle shop in Youngstown and Sam Goldfish (as he was now called) went off to Gloversville, where he learned all you need to know about making, buying and selling gloves:
and
wheeling and dealing.

He prospered. They all prospered. None of them would ever look back. Rather, they looked ahead with glittering eyes at a new vision which had appeared before them: the penny arcade, the nickelodeon which would make their fortunes. But just for a time Goldfish had to trail about as a commercial traveller for Elite Gloves. In his journeys he met a plump-faced little fellow who had a cornet act in Vaudeville. His name was Jesse Lasky, he had a sister called Blanche. Sam, at thirty, married Blanche, twenty-seven.

It was a miserable marriage. He was later to say: ‘She couldn't stand the sight of me.' He was certainly no Donatello David: tall, balding, mean-eyed and mean-mouthed. However, they managed to have a daughter, Ruth, and struggled on. In time, with a more or less reluctant Lasky plus a new member of the group ‘who knew a bit about making movies', one Cecil B. de Mille, they secured the rights to a stage play,
The Squaw Man,
and began making movies in a rented barn in an orange grove in California. The barn was in the middle of an almost defunct housing development (homes for the retired) on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It was called Hollywood.

The Squaw Man
was not the first film to have been made in Hollywood, but it was the first time that a determined group of
people decided to settle there and found an industry. The place was ideal – almost constant sunlight (this was before lights were used), desert, jungle, mountains and the sea. Here they would remain, joined by a horde who heard the drumbeat of success and flowed from the East. The cinema had begun. The peasants employed peasants to amuse peasants.

A simple, outrageous formula, but it worked. The Golden Ghetto spread across the dusty flats and up into the canyons, and Samuel Goldfish was its leader. In a short time he dumped Blanche, denied Ruth until she was almost middle-aged, changed his name by swiping half that of one of his partners, thus becoming Gold
wyn,
and began to carve the career which secured him until he died a multi-millionaire, an avid collector of art, decorated by his President (in this instance, Nixon) with the highest honour his country could bestow, the Medal of Freedom, when he was well into his nineties.

Not bad for a ruthless, petty-minded, cunning, cruel, whining, semi-literate and ugly man whose patched-together name stood, amazingly, for elegance, breeding, glamour and good taste – what the Americans call ‘class'. He had little of these qualities himself, but he
knew
what they were, and he saw to it that they were put up on the screen. Goldwyn
was
style.

He imported the best writers from the East and Europe, wooed Chanel from Paris to design for him, almost invented the white-on-white of the thirties and, unlike many of his rivals, attempted always to employ ‘ladies' and ‘gentlemen' of the acting fraternity in his films. He made some stinkers, some astonishingly good films, and some ghastly malapropisms which became known as ‘Goldwynisms'. ‘Whatever happened,' he once asked Myrna Loy (one of his ladies), ‘to that little guy from Ethiopia? Hail Salesia?' And walking on a beach with William Paley, who had stopped to look at a flight of birds with an amazed cry of ‘Look at all those gulls!', he said: ‘How do you know they ain't boys?'

Trying to purchase the rights of
The Little Foxes
from Lillian Hellman (who detested him) he was assured that it was a very caustic story, but he shrugged and said it didn't matter what it cost: just buy it. (He did, and made a killing.) And once, poor Loretta
Young, disliking her right profile, said she would only be ‘shot' in future on her left, and good, one. Goldwyn agreed with dangerous cordiality: ‘You give me half a face, I give you half a salary.' He won.

He married again, a pleasant, Gentile woman named Frances, who bore him a son. This gave him infinite pleasure, but the boy was virtually ignored, or bullied, or suddenly lavished with weepy, loving letters. There was little fatherly love around. That was considered weakness, and weakness was abhorrent to the man. Late in her life he admitted the banished Ruth back to the ‘family', but he never forgave poor Blanche.

Eventually he won his coveted Oscar for perhaps his greatest film,
The Best Years of Our Lives.
This was based on a news item which Frances had read in
Time
magazine. He was discovered, late at night, sitting in his darkened study, weeping copiously, clutching his Oscar like a talisman. Which is exactly what it was as far as he was concerned.

It had been a very long walk from Warsaw to that moment. He was sentimental, harsh, a thief of other people's ideas, works, or even their employees if he needed them, snake-mean and childish. At croquet:

… he just wanted to win – to hit his ball through the wickets and smash his opponents' balls to kingdom come. He cheated by moving his ball whenever he thought no-one was looking … made up house rules that were to his immediate advantage.

If he got caught, he would bluster and shout like a frilled lizard. If seriously challenged, he'd weep copiously. I never played croquet with Mr Goldwyn, never dined at Laurel Lane, but I spent time with some of his contemporaries, sitting on the white shaggy carpets in sitting-rooms all across the Golden Ghetto among the Monets, Manets, Sisleys, Picasso blues, Bonnards and Cézannes.

I even hung my coat on the bronze, outstretched arm of Degas's little dancer in the net tutu. She was in the hall. One of my hosts, a good and kindly man, sat with me revelling in his loot. His first job, he told me, on arriving in America at the age often, was to
work on the pulp-barges removing hooks and eyes and buttons from rags before they were pulped.

Young Entry
by M. J. Farrell (Virago)

Someone who spent a great deal of his adult life interviewing people for one of those television hideous chat shows encountered, to his delighted astonishment, Molly Keane. Later he said to me: ‘Molly Keane is a blazing radiator; whereas most of the others I've had to deal with are drains.'

One sees instantly what he means merely from reading her work. Take any book by Molly Keane and I guarantee you will be delighted, charmed and sustained with pleasures. You will not be drained, bewildered or in constant need of a dictionary as you make your irritated way through pages of convoluted prose.

Young Entry
was written in 1928 under her pen-name of M. J. Farrell when Molly Keane was twenty-four. It is, as you will readily note, a ‘young book'; by that I mean it is full of things which the writer, wiser and wittier and harsher with herself, would probably have tidied up a bit, but it is a gentle delight nevertheless.

What I want to know, above all else, is how was she able to write so amazingly well? So confidently, so shrewdly? How did she manage her construction so brilliantly, set wit to her pages, life to her characters? How the hell did she
know
what to do?

Well: the point is that the woman is a born writer. It is something, I gather from Diana Petre's excellent new introduction, which causes Molly Keane a certain degree of discomfort if the fact is stated. Well, I suppose it might. The lady is modest and well brought up; she'd no more admit to being a born writer than she would to being a born lady. However, the marks tell equally.

This is a perfectly ordinary, good old-fashioned story, right down the line and, frankly, you must know the plot – they say that there
are only seven anyway, so you'll be familiar with it. But that in no way spoils the joy.

Ravishing Prudence, horsey-go-jumping, flirting madly, is an orphan in Anglo-Irish society, brought up by unfeeling, aged guardians, about to inherit a fortune (plus crumbling great house) at twenty-one; she is headstrong, delicious, feather-brained, a splendid horsewoman, with a perfect eye for a hound and a pretty wide open one for eligible gentlemen.

They are all lithe-limbed, grey-eyed, impeccably dressed good riders, and the hero has what she calls ‘blocky' eyelashes, so we know that he's ready for the picking. The story is strewn with the familiar Keane characters: the elegant dowagers, the shuffling crone casting spells in dark cabins on the bog, the lunatic girl with a secret child, the house servants all a little more than barking mad, and above all, the superb descriptions of the hunt itself. The hunt, hounds and horses are really the main characters in this tale anyway.

All in all, a delightful book, almost shocking in the way that it reminds you of a time lost to us for ever.

Sunday Telegraph,
24 September 1989

A year crammed with splendours: Sybille Bedford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, A. Scott Berg. What a spoiling! But I think I have to decide on Bruce Chatwin and
What am I Doing Here
(Cape). It gave me intense pleasure in the very spareness and beauty of its prose, its astonishing, and deceptive, simplicity and the detailed pictures which it set before my eyes.

Daily Telegraph,
25 November 1989

At Home and Abroad
by V. S. Pritchett (Chatto)

It would be absurdly presumptuous of me to try to criticize this collection of glorious articles by, perhaps, the greatest writer of pure English prose alive, thank goodness, today.
¹

All that I can do is to recommend it to you urgently and to consider the delights set before us – and persuade you to enjoy the words which, over the years, have become so hideously debased but which here are offered to us fresh-minted, as it were, so that once again one can read the beauty of the English language intact, glittering, clear and simple, as if nothing appalling had ever happened to our mother tongue.

These articles, which date from the late twenties through to the late sixties, range from South America to London, Greece to the Seine, and, most wonderfully, the Appalachian Mountains.

Here you will never read that someone has ‘washed down his meal' with wine; no one ‘opines', no one ever reaches ‘the end of the day', no sun sinks ‘into the wine dark sea like a giant orange/ball of fire/flaming sphere'.

Food, when described, is never ‘lashings of', nothing ever happens ‘at this moment in time', and no one ‘oozes' with charm – or anything else for that matter – nor does anyone or anything ‘drool', and nothing is ‘pricey'. Nothing is vulgar, nothing debased, every word refreshes and offers us the most vivid picture, unclouded by excess.

Oh! the relief. The joy of rediscovering what Mr Fowler has always said with such force: ‘Shortness is a merit in words … they are more powerful in effect.' And they are in V. S. Pritchett's writings.

As you will discover from reading him in the Appalachians, he hunts and chases words in very much the same way that one used to chase tadpoles and sticklebacks to tip into jam jars and carry home in triumph.

But these essays are not only about places: rivers, mountains, jungles and savannahs. They are about the people who inhabit these places. Pritchett, the shrewd, friendly, aware observer, knows them well. Try him with the Americans, for example.

For more years than I care to remember, the Americans have constantly eluded me as a race. Although I am amazed and delighted by their wonderful country, they have often bewildered, irritated and bemused me, save for the closest and most beloved friends. I return to shabby Europe in relief, but, sadly, always aware that I have somehow failed in my journey towards comprehension.

Consider this extract: ‘…generalising about the American character or temper is a perennial international game … I have read more books by Americans on the American scene and character during this time than by writers of any other nation about themselves; and one thing has struck me immediately … what for generations we Europeans have called the boastfulness of Americans was really the self-dramatisation of a lonely people, an acute and often painful consciousness of themselves.' And there you have it. Now tolerance and awareness will take the place of irritation and sometimes, I confess with head hung low, stifled anger in my breast.

Pritchett has worked, and lived, among the people he writes about. He has not merely, as most of us have, stayed a little time and come to an often too hasty decision. In this book I can take his hand and run with him along the Seine, from the source of the Thames to the mouth, across Exmoor, about London, and in and out of the many towns and cities which he mentions in his essay on the Mediterranean. That is a shared joy. I have been there too.

But I don't know the people he knows, or why they behave, live and fight as they do. I have not seen them in such detailed dissection as he has. I read with dawning awareness: why have I been such a bigot? So unaware so often?

Pritchett approaches his people in much the same way as he
approaches his towns, cities and countries. In the same way that he hunts his ‘words' like moths and strange beetles. With curiosity, with dignity, tolerance and, above all, with love and the deepest understanding of a completely unprejudiced mind.