Hollywood (7 page)

“Would you like one with a little juice?” he asked.

“Juice?” I repeated, confused.

“Juice,” he said. “A little eye juice?”

“Oh,” I said, “I wouldn’t have thought so. I always think that when the actor cries the audience probably doesn’t. It’s when the actor seems to be holding back tears that the audience is more likely to supply them. They like to cry
for
him, in a way.”

“Oh,” he said. “Very well.”

I could see he was disappointed. I went on. “Still, no harm in trying. Let’s do one.”

“Good,” he said, brightly. “Then you can decide.”

We rolled again. He recited once more. To take best advantage of the effect, I had arranged for the camera to dolly in toward him very slowly. As the camera approached him, the tears began to flow, splashing off his cheekbones.

“Cut!” he shouted, waving his palm at the lens.

I thought for a moment that the camera mechanics had disturbed him. Not at all. He looked at me. “Too much juice,” he said. “I’m sorry. I apologize for my excess. May we do one more, please?”

“Of course,” I said.

Another take. This time there were tears but they were discreet tears, one small one falling out of the right eye and when that was halfway down his face, a large one from the other eye. I watch him, agape, and forgot to say “Cut.” The scene ended somehow. Applause.

“What did you think?” he asked.

“It looked fine,” I said. “Surprisingly fine.”

He frowned. “Did you like that little one first and then the big one or would it be better with that big one first and then the little one?”

I was content with two satisfactory takes in the can but I confess that by then I was riveted by this display.

“Yes,” I said. “That would be
much
better. First the big one and
then
the little one.”

“All right,” he said. “But for that, you better move in a little quicker.”

The camera operator nodded and said, “Okay.”

The next take. We all watched, no longer interested in the scene or in the shot, not even concerned about the face. We were concentrating on the trick of the tears.

“Roll ’em.”

He did not disappoint us. First the big one, then almost at the end, when we had given up hope, the little one melted out of his other eye.

Later, I discussed it with him.

“Oh, Christ!” he said. “It’s nothing. Don’t confuse it with acting. It’s a trick, like being able to blush.” He blushed. “Or wiggling your ears. You can wiggle your ears, can’t you?”

“No, I can’t,” I said.

“Funny,” he said, “they look to me like the kind that wiggle.” He wiggled on his own. “The crying thing is nothing. All women can do it.
Can
do it? Hell, they
do
do it! And kids. Kids bring on tears to get what they want. And when they’ve got what they want, they stop. That’s how I learned to do it. When I was about seven, I watched Ethel do it, and Lionel, and that gave me the idea. I went off into the bathroom for an hour or so every day and practiced. When you’ve been doing something for fifty years, you’re bound to get pretty good at it. But it isn’t acting. It’s crying. Doesn’t mean a damn thing. When I was in India, I saw some of those yogis do things involving physical and mental control that you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t believe what I saw. Staying under water for half an hour. Remaining absolutely motionless in dreamlike meditation for hours, and some people, you know, can fart at will.” He looked troubled. “I’ve never been able to learn to do that. I’m very disappointed in myself.” He laughed his booming laugh. “Did you ever hear of Le Pétomane? The great French cabaret performer? That was his act. Farting. He was a tremendous hit. I saw him once when I was a kid. He’d come on and give a
sort of dissertation on the subject and illustrate the different kinds. I remember that for a finish, he farted La Marseillaise. How could I forget it? But I mean to say, I wouldn’t call that acting, would you?”

Actors, by and large, especially stars, do not often acknowledge their director’s contribution. In my case at least, John Barrymore overdid it. From the time we finished our film, until his death, he remained kind and generous and helped to propel my career.

The truth is that I had directed him hardly at all. Most experienced directors learn finally that the best direction is the least direction. But I was not an experienced director at that time, and was given to overdirecting, except in the case of John Barrymore. My principal contribution was casting him. After that, I left him pretty much alone. I think it is fair to say that he directed me more than I directed him.

A year or so before his death in 1942, John Barrymore was clowning away the last of his days in some foolishness in Chicago when he collapsed on the stage shortly after a performance began.

The news reached Hollywood quickly. There were rumors of a stroke, a few claimed to have heard that he was dead. I tried to reach him by phone, first at the Hotel Blackstone, where I knew he was staying, next at the Passavant Hospital where he had been taken. Unable to do so, I sent a telegram of enquiry. The next morning, I had a message from him. It read: DON’T WORRY. FOR A MAN WHO HAS BEEN DEAD FOR FIFTEEN YEARS I AM IN REMARKABLE HEALTH. LOVE, MR. BARRYMORE.

Ever since I can remember, the girls of America have shared a dream: To be a movie star. To be in the movies.

“You ought to be in pictures.”

“Anybody can be in the movies. It’s how they photograph you.”

“You think Bette Davis is better looking than me?”

“My legs are as good as Elizabeth Taylor’s.”

“All you need is one good break. Look at Lana. Just happened to be sitting at the right soda fountain, the right time. If not, where’d she be today?”

By what other means of magic can you be a nobody one day; but rich, admired, adored, famous, and having a good time the next? The only question is, does the slipper fit? If not the slipper, how about the sweater? Consider the Lana Turner story. There are various versions. Here is one.

Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the
Hollywood Reporter
, walked into Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor one day. Sitting at the fountain was a seventeen-year-old blonde, wearing a sweater that outlined a miraculous bosom. Wilkerson walked up to her and said, “I’m Billy Wilkerson.”

“Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner,” she said.

“How would you like to be a movie star?” he asked.

She sucked up the last of her soda, noisily, and looked up. “Okay.”

“Come with me.” He took her to see Mervyn LeRoy, who was looking for a certain sort of girl to play a part in
They Won’t Forget
. It was a tough picture, an indictment of prejudice in the South, based upon the notorious Leo Frank rape case that shook Atlanta in 1933. To make it effective and believable, LeRoy needed a girl to walk down the street and drive everyone crazy. Eventually she is raped and the crime is pinned on the wrong guy because he is from the North.

It is said that when Wilkerson brought her in, LeRoy looked at her in that tight-fitting sweater, and not only did he think she was good, he thought the sweater was good, too.

Thus began the era of the sweater girls of 1937 and 1938. It was never chic or elegant but it was sexy and show-business and inexpensive. Any high-school girl could afford a sweater and did. The trick was to go into a shop and buy a sweater at least two sizes too small.

Could this go back to Louisa May Alcott? She once wrote about girls with poor posture who were admonished by the new gym teacher, “You must do this exercise, girls—otherwise you won’t fill out your jerseys.”

It is doubtful that Lana got the idea from Louisa.

In any case, stories such as Lana’s captured the imagination of girls everywhere.

They would read about Shirley MacLaine, a chorus girl in
The Pajama Game
, understudying Carol Haney. One afternoon Carol Haney was ill. Shirley MacLaine went on. It happened to be the afternoon that Hal Wallis, a movie producer, was in to see the show. He saw Shirley MacLaine, signed her, and—a movie star!

What the dreamy girls forget is that Shirley MacLaine is a gifted actress, singer, and dancer.

But the legend of You Too Can Be A Movie Star is one of the myths of our time. David O. Selznick understood it and so did the writers, Robert Carson, Alan Campbell, Dorothy Parker, and William Wellman, when they did
A Star Is Born
.

They took this myth and turned it into a glittering fiction. A little bumpkin, Esther Blodgett, comes to Hollywood from a small town, wants to get into the movies, goes to Central Casting. They refuse even to register her as an extra.

A kindly man there looks at her and says, “Honey, it’s a tough thing you’re trying to do because a thousand people a day try it and maybe only one out of a thousand can even get in.”

Esther Blodgett looks up at him and says, “Maybe I’m that one.”

She becomes a movie star. Vicki Lester.

The legend is not entirely spurious. Oddly enough, many outstanding American actresses—Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, Maude Adams, Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley—did not become “movie stars.” Apparently, talent is a less important attribute than some special quality—and we all believe we possess
that
.

The power of the dream is largely generated by the fact that every now and then it comes true.

It came true for a slightly chubby, very peppy blonde from Indiana named Jane Peters, later known as Carol Lombard, and later still as Carole Lombard.

“I think that ‘e’ made the whole fuckin’ difference,” she said to me one day, during the time I was directing her in
They Knew What They Wanted
. (It should be noted that
this was Carole’s normal style of speech. She used the full, juicy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; yet it never shocked, never offended because she was clearly using the language to express herself and not to shock or offend.)

She was the only star I have ever known who did not want a dressing room on the set. What little makeup she used, she put on herself. She preferred to look after her own hair. All she asked for was a chair and a small table. There she would be, twenty minutes or half an hour before she was due, ready and able. I never knew her to fluff a line. She liked everyone and everyone adored her. She was happy.

On days when she was not required, she would drive in anyway, all the way from the Valley. The first time she turned up on one of those days, I panicked, certain there had been a mistake.

“What’re
you
doing here?” I asked. “You’re not called today.”

“Piss off!” she said. “I’m in this picture.”

She wanted to be around, to stay with the feel of things. She did not want to lose the momentum of work. On these days, she would hang around the set, watching; come along and look at the rushes; talk to various members of the cast. She was valuable.

I thought her a fine actress, one of the finest I had ever encountered. She was completely untrained, had never appeared on the legitimate stage. She came to Hollywood from Fort Wayne, Indiana, became a child actress, and later went to work for Mack Sennett as one of his bathing beauties. But the movies were growing, the business was burgeoning, and there was room at the top for a beautiful, talented girl.

Tremendously versatile, one of her successes was
My Man Godfrey
, a so-called screwball comedy, in which she struck new and original comic notes. But she was equally comfortable in serious drama. I remember an early talkie called
Ned McCobb’s
Daughter
, from the play by Sidney Howard, who also wrote
They Knew What They
Wanted
. Her performance in
Twentieth Century
, opposite John Barrymore, is one of the best ever seen on the American screen. I once complimented her on her admirable range.

“It’s the guys. It’s all those goddamn, different studs I’ve knocked around with. You know how it is. You always try to get in solid with the son of a bitch by playing his game. So when I was around with Bob Riskin—the prick never wanted to marry me, can you feature it?—I started in reading books. I don’t mean just bullshit. I mean book books. Aldous Huxley and Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. William Faulkner. Because Bob, he was an intellectual. My first. Brainy as a bastard. And I felt I had to keep up. You know how it is. And then with Russ Colombo, he—Jesus Christ, he was a handsome hunk— with him, I got to know all about music and songs and songwriting and publishers. And about records and recordings and which was the best key and big bands and sidemen and drummers. I even started writing songs. Sometimes with him. We’d be in the hay and in between we’d make up songs. Can you imagine it? Listen, there were a few times there we got so interested in the songs we forgot to get our ashes hauled!” She laughed.

Has there ever been such a laugh? It had the joyous sound of pealing bells. She would bend over, slap her perfect calf, or the floor, or a piece of furniture. She would sink into a chair or to the ground. She would throw her head back. And you would be riveted by that neck. That throat.

“And not only music. With Russ, I became just about the best goddamn Italian cook there is. I can do anything in that line because I used to do it for him. Learned it. Chicken Cacciatora. Eggplant Parmigiano. Veal Marsala. Squid. Anything. You name it. Now, with Philo it was different. Because, after all, Philo. It was legitimate. We were married.” (Philo was her name for William Powell because he had once played the detective Philo Vance.) “With him, it was wife stuff. That’s when I learned how to put a house together, and have everything supplied. And how to take care of his clothes. And what had to be dry cleaned and what not. I mean, I was the best fuckin’ wife you ever saw. I mean a ladylike wife. Because that’s how Philo wanted it.

“And now with Clark, it’s the ranch and the horses and the fishing and the shooting. The only trouble is—about the shooting, I mean—I’ve gotten to be so much better than he is that I’ve got to hold back. I can shoot like a sonofabitch, y’know. Anything. So when you say ‘versatile’—well, I owe it all to the boys. They made me what I am today.”

“Isn’t it crazy?” Carole said one day over coffee in my trailer. “I just think about that husband of mine all the time. I’m really stuck on the bastard. That’s
something
, isn’t it?”

“Not so remarkable,” I said, “considering he’s Clark Gable, and sixty million other women are stuck on him. Now, if you happened to be stuck on
me
, that would be news.”

“And what’s ridiculous is that we made a picture together for Wesley Ruggles, over at Paramount. Pretty good picture, too.
No Man of Her Own
. And we worked together and did all kinds of hot love scenes and everything. And I never got any kind of a tremble out of him at all. “You know, he was just the leading man. So what? A hunk of meat. Of course, it didn’t help that I was on my ear about a different number at the time.”

“Who?”

“None of your business.”

“I know, anyway. I was only asking to be polite.”

“Polite, my ass!”

“So then what?”

“Well, about three years ago, Jock Whitney gave this party, and it said you had to wear white. Everybody. You know those society mucky-mucks. They think of all kinds of craziness. So what I did was I figured white? What’s white? And the first thing struck me was a hospital. So I got my doctor to get what somebody in a hospital would wear. One of those white things that ties in the back, you know, with your ass out and a white mask over my face and a bandaged head. Everything white. And I even got a white stretcher and a white ambulance and I drove up in the white ambulance and I had myself carried in to Jock’s party on a white stretcher, by two dressed-in-white interns. I was a smash. And for some reason, this got to ol’ Clark. He thought it was hot stuff. Who knows? Maybe with all that white he thought I was a virgin or something. Believe me. I wasn’t. If you want the truth, I don’t think I
ever
was! And he started coming on. Clark. And he called up and called up and we started seeing each other and the more I got to know him, the more I saw there was more there than M-G-M was letting us see, but the tough thing was, he couldn’t get a divorce. So we managed the best we could till last March when we went legal. I’m really stuck on the son of a bitch.”

“You ought to make another picture together.”

“Yeah. We talk about that sometimes. But I don’t know. We also talk about chucking the whole thing. He’s nuts about the ranch, the whole twenty acres. We bought it, you know, from Raoul Walsh. He did all the work on it. It’s really terrific. And it turns out we like it. I mean we both like it. The horses and the animals. You ought to see Clark run a tractor. And we shoot. I think maybe we
could
give it up. Of course, I don’t know if we’ve got enough dough. I know
I
haven’t got much. I wonder if
he’s
got any?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Yeah, I think I will. Tonight.”

If Carole did six takes they were six
different
takes. Each one had some small development, some sense of growth. A nuance that had not appeared before. There was always something going on inside of Carole.

Technically, she was a phenomenon.

One of the most difficult things film actors and actresses have to do is hit their marks. The assistant cameraman puts marks on the floor, and the players must hit those marks accurately. Should they fail to do so, the assistant cameraman in charge of focus may run into difficulty. Stage actors complain about this, but there is no way out.

With Carole Lombard, it was possible to stage a scene with three or four different sets of marks. She would look at them, hard, for a time, fix them in her mind, and never look down again. Yet, without fail, she would always be on her marks perfectly.

“How do you do that?” I once asked her.

“By breaking my balls, that’s how,” she replied.

Carole had a scar on her face that had to be taken into account when a shot, especially a close shot, was being planned or lighted.

“Shows you how things go, huh? Another inch, half an inch maybe, a turn of the head and my whole fuckin’ career could’ve been over. There was this nice kid. A rich kid. Harry Cooper. His father owned a bank or something. And he had this sonofabitchin’ Bugatti roadster. And I was out with him one night, and he was showing off his goddamned car. You know how it is with some guys. They think a car is like a part of their body and they want to show you how hot it is. So all of a sudden, wham! And I remember how I thought it was just beautiful, like a fireworks explosion, glass in a terrific pattern, and I passed out. It took a while. They finally got all the glass out of my puss and the doctors were great. So I only got left with this. I could have got left with more. Or with no head. And if I had been, Jesus, who do you think would be playing my part now?”

Then there was the matter of the missing light.

Harry Stradling was the cameraman on
They Knew What They Wanted
. An admirable craftsman.

One day, he was preparing an important close-up of Carole. She had a stand-in, but for important shots, she preferred to stand in for herself. A tedious business of standing or sitting under the lights for half an hour or more, directly before playing the scene—but Carole would have it no other way.