Girl of My Dreams (40 page)

20

Cuts

Mossy charged home from New York with murder in his heart. He called a meeting of everyone at Jubilee on the largest sound stage, where the interior and part of the exterior of a mansion had been constructed to service a comedy featuring the idle rich of Newport and the daughter of one of their butlers. The set was littered with faux-mink stoles, horse trophies, Persian rugs, crystal chandeliers, and even two authentic Bentleys in an adjacent garage where both a romantic scene and a little class-war showdown were to be shot. Yeatsman and Elena Frye gave me details of this meeting, not because I wasn't invited—we all were press-ganged—but because they knew things I didn't. Elena said she'd never seen her boss in a worse mood.

Folding chairs had been arranged to accommodate several hundred Jubilee personnel. The studio workers did not arrange themselves hierarchically—actors in front, then producers, on and on—but simply and democratically according to who arrived first at the sound stage. Cy Henscher, who had so abused the starlet Race Honeycut, was at Jubilee to see about a job. He seated himself next to Teresa Blackburn, who immediately moved elsewhere. I happened to be near Trent Amberlyn, whose star continued to rise after his quashed arrest, and between us were two set builders and a secretary. Pammy was with Simone Bluett, her costume designer. That couldn't have happened, I reflected patriotically, at General Motors or, for that matter, at MGM. This was the Jubilee atmosphere either because Mossy set a tone of relative equality among people who worked on his pictures or because he regarded everyone who was not him a trained seal, which amounted to the same thing. I considered sitting next to Pammy. I didn't dare.

It had just occurred to me to consult Yeatsman on my cowardice when Goddard Minghoff arose to call the assemblage to order. On his way to the podium he stopped to whisper to Mossy and Edgar Globe, Jubilee's lawyer. A plan or a plot?

Yeatsman was preoccupied. I saw him trying to be casual as he edged over to the busty script girl, Binney Deems, whom he had seen laughing with some grips. Binney, a devotee of peroxide and dime novels, had a racy book open on her lap. Yeatsman read over her shoulder. He saw one line, “Can we be sure no one else is at your place? Rod panted. Meg put her hand on … ” That's all Yeatsman saw when Binney looked up to ask how she could help him. The grips moved off to flirt elsewhere. “All the girls in the writers building are tied up,” Yeatsman said, “and I was wondering if you could type some pages for me by tomorrow morning. I can stay late and decipher my scribbled changes for you. Bernie Sugarman wants … ”

“Oh poor Bernie,” Binney said with a gravelly chuckle as if the producer were an intimate. “Bernie thinks he has Mossy's and Eddie Globe's balls in his pocket just because he knows someone's phone number in New York. She shifted her legs and Yeatsman saw the flex of a smooth calf while she gave her foot a little shake as if to rid it of pins and needles.

“Can I count on you for the pages then?”

She ignored the question, noticing Yeatsman noticing her calf. “Bet you've seen your fill of pussy, Yancey.”

Yeatsman gulped. Two, he reasoned, could play this crude game. “Well, Binney, I suppose a fair share of pork has passed your way.”

“Some. I happen to prefer pork that thinks.”

“Ah, one order of brainy pork then.” Yeatsman was in uncharted waters.

“We'll just see, won't we? After I type the pages of course.”

Was this what Yeatsman meant by responsible infidelity?

Binney wasn't through. She was going to make Yeatsman pay. “I'd hate to be married to a writer,” she said.

Already feeling guilty, the very married Yeatsman asked why.

“Half the time he's writing and he's miserable,” she said. “The other half he's not writing and miserable because he's not, and half of both those times he's chasing tail. You're the wife, you get the rest. No thanks.”

Goddard Minghoff was at the podium. A stately man with the bearing of a senator, the loyalty of a satrap and the principles of a hangman, Minghoff was called upon to deliver bad news in the most diplomatic fashion. Since he was no hatchet man for Mossy—that was Dunster Clapp or Seaton Hackley—he could be even more sinister in the way of a courtier who has the king's ear and a ring through everyone else's nose.

“As you're all well aware,” Minghoff cleared his throat, “the Jubilee family has been experiencing exceedingly tough times along with so much of the country.”

As Minghoff knew, everyone was
not
well aware of anything of the sort. Jubilee movies had been successful even during the Depression, and salaries had been climbing (including Mossy's though that was secret). Recently, Teresa Blackburn had her salary doubled for her first starring role, and Mossy had more or less raided Fox for both a director and a star, each of whom was handsomely rewarded. But Minghoff went on.

“Mr. Zangwill has a few words to say about what I can only call our sour pickle, but before he does I want to let all of you know we in the front office are doing everything we can to keep hard times away from the gates of Jubilee. We're going to need your help, but we ourselves are not asleep at the switch. This week, in the face of declining grosses in Minneapolis and Detroit, we're putting five theaters up for sale in those two cities. That's to keep the cameras rolling here on the lot. Sacrifices are painful but essential. Furthermore … ”

“That'll do, God, I'll take it from here,” Mossy said, rising from his chair to stride to the podium, humbling his lieutenant. God Minghoff was not popular at Jubilee (though not as hated as his brother, the infamous union buster and strikebreaker Boris Minghoff), and Mossy would know that as he had just used Minghoff to soften us all up, he had also used him to curry favor with the masses. The king overruling his nobles to commune directly with his grateful peasantry.

“Certainly, oh, the floor is yours, Boss, along with everything else, heh heh,” said the startled Minghoff, trying to salvage a scintilla of dignity. “Take it away, Mr. Z.”

Or had they planned it, Mossy driving the unloved yes-man from the stage?

“Thank you, God,” Mossy repeated as he looked over at Minghoff, never tiring of the pun and basking in his own positon as superior even to the almighty. Mossy's eyes could have been onyx, disclosing nothing of his mood, indicating only that he was impenetrable. “But the last thing I want to do,” he said, “is take it away, not any of it. What I want most, what we all want I'm sure, is to keep the Jubilee family together, all of us. To get to the point, as I want us to do in our pictures, does anyone here have an idea of what the national unemployment rate is?”

Silence. Actors and directors were scratching their heads. I looked around and writers were scowling. Jubilee's screenwriters: some were notable, some notorious, some permanently disappointed, others permanently hopeful, most with a suspicion they'd be better people if they were doing something else. Directors were itchy, irritable, wanted the meeting to be over so they could get back to their sets or sessions with their cutters or at least their mistresses. Over a dozen pictures were currently being shot at Jubilee. Producers were eager to be helpful, as if their jobs depended on this, which they might have. “Hmmm,” said Gershon Lidowitz, “must be around ten percent now, isn't it?”

“Wouldn't that just be wonderful, Gershon?” said Mossy. Littlewits was a straight man here, whether he was conscious of that or only willing to play the role. “No,” Mossy said, “try twenty-five percent. One out of every four working people isn't working. And in factory towns it's often half or even more who have no jobs. We're a factory town ourselves, aren't we folks? You all do know that MGM and Warners have made mandatory cuts, Paramount's worried about receivership, Fox is frightened of bankruptcy, and those are the majors. The little guys are long gone in this Depression. I knew things were serious but I didn't know how serious until I reached New York last week. Jubilee's board of directors wants a fifty percent pay cut—for everyone.”

An avalanche of groaning rolled over the sound stage. Pammy booed loudly.

“I said nothing doing,” Mossy went on, ignoring Pammy. “They could have my head first, that's what I told them. But we have to do something, and I'm asking for half of what the board wanted, and I'm asking it only for salaries above a comfortable living wage. Twenty-five percent for everyone making over $150 a week.”

Deeply pulmonary sighs from the secretaries and office boys. Since none of them made anywhere near $150, none would be cut.

Everyone else was silent. Then the grumbles started, especially among the writers. “Why should we bail out Jubilee?” Poor Jim Bicker wanted to know.

Mossy furrowed his brow and nodded his head. His lips tightened.

Largo Buchalter to the rescue, a director who was also a producer. “Because, Bicker, we don't want to chop off the head of the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Buchalter was such a known ass-kisser that no one fell in line behind him.

“Sounds like the goose is goosing us,” said Tutor Beedleman, unable to resist a chance to get a crowd's chuckle, which was all he got. Pammy's silence was audible.

“What about our contracts?” several people said. “We have contracts, you know.”

More silence, especially from Mossy, as people all waited for someone with authority to respond. After the longest, quietest minute I ever spent in the midst of several hundred people, Trent Amberlyn walked up to the podium where Mossy stood waiting. “Gimme the goddamn cut, Chief,” Trent said. “What helps you helps us all.”

The applause rippled from the back of the audience and worked its way forward. Shouts: “All right, Trent!” “You're the man, Amberlyn!” “That's what makes a star a star!”—by the time the yelling reached the actor he was in Mossy's grateful arms.

Trent Amberlyn was still under a cloud, of course, following his arrest for picking up the boy, about which most of the studio knew nothing. This was how he repaid Mossy for keeping him on, keeping him out of jail, keeping him rich, keeping him a star. Possibly he also hoped he could get Mossy to countermand the order that he get married.

What else we didn't know, which Elena Frye didn't tell me until much later, was that the board of directors did indeed ask Mossy to prune the studio budget, but their memos to him showed an entirely different set of priorities. They meant production and front office costs. They wanted Mossy to have pictures shot in fewer days, use the same sets for three or four films, and cut down on crowd scenes so the studio wouldn't have to pay so many extras. The front office cuts they wanted had to do with executives and their assistants. Millions of dollars could be saved. Like all studios, Jubilee was top heavy. The board of directors was not thinking about cutting talent salaries. Several of Mossy's executives hadn't supervised a production for months; they played pinochle in the morning and were on the golf course or at the race track after lunch. But since the executives and their assistants were like household help to service the master's whims, as opposed to the field hands who planted and harvested the produce but were less controllable, Mossy cut salaries instead.

Mossy did one other thing in New York. He warned his board they'd have to raise him to twelve thousand a week or else he'd go run Fox whose own board was at the moment disenchanted with their choice of Darryl Zanuck. His daring
coup de chutzpah
—as he described it to Elena—resulted from the backing he knew he had from Walter Winchell combined with the board's gratitude for Jubilee's immediate capitulation to the new Motion Picture Code. He was the first studio chief to officially and fussily bar anything resembling sex or profanity from his productions. Mossy came home with his twelve thousand a week and his determination to cut almost everyone else. To keep his raise quiet so that even studio accountants didn't know, he delayed taking it for ten weeks, then had it paid to him as a lump sum for a script he hadn't written and hadn't sold to his story department. He titled the imaginary project
All This Is Mine
.

Where in this was Pammy with Mossy? She certainly hadn't joined the cheers for Trent Amberlyn. She'd hissed the big cut. But she also fell before Mossy's charm, as she'd admitted to me. Was it professional with her, or personal? Was there a difference?

“Not enough gas, boy,” Colonel DeLight told me about my earthquake treatment. “This here earthquake feels too much like a deus ex to the fellas upstairs. We're shelving it for now, but Littlewits and Sugarman both like it and want to work with you.”

Was that supposed to be a compliment? It didn't matter. The earthquake was somewhere in the Hollywood ozone because a couple of years later Anita Loos wrote
San Francisco
as a musical melodrama for MGM. Loos smartly kept virtuous motivation out of her script and set it in the old Barbary Coast with Gable as a rowdy saloon keeper who thumbs his nose at the city's bluebloods until the quake more or less levels everyone.

My strike treatment went as far as Janny van Moylan, a new producer whose family was actually part of the San Francisco establishment but who had rebelled against them. “We have something here,” he said, thrilling me with his use of the first-person plural, indicating he wanted this property. “But we need more conflict and more resolution. I mean, there's a strike going on, isn't there? Fine, give me a Harry Bridges type but a homegrown American, very anti-Red, in fact let's have no Reds except a nasty European agitator who runs back and forth between the fat cats and the union guys, sowing trouble everywhere—he may be Red or fascist, all we know is he's foreign and bad. So what happens? I'd love to infuriate my family. Do the guys win anything or are they crushed, or let's leave it up in the air as the former deckhand and the department store girl go off into the sunset. As long as love wins, the rest doesn't matter.” My sentiments precisely.