The Property of a Lady (57 page)

Zev stared back at him without replying, and Schroeder glanced away again uncomfortably. “Tell you what I propose,” he said quickly. “If I don’t get back to Philadelphia by next week, you’ll be following my coffin, I guarantee it. Now I’ll help you, Mr. Abramski, if you’ll help me. I’m offering you the whole package—the land, the studios, the five cameras, the film stock, contacts with distributors—the whole business as a going concern. And don’t forget the sum of seventy-five thousand dollars still owed on the
books that’ll be in your pockets before the end of the year.”

Zev raised his eyebrows skeptically. “How much do you want?”

“How much? I’ll tell you straight, money is the last thing on my mind right now. A problem like this gets right to the guts. When it’s life and death, what does money matter? For a quick sale, I’m ready to take twenty-five thousand and no questions asked. Cash on the barrel and a handshake, right here and now.”

Even his bulging blue eyes seemed to be sweating as he stared eagerly at Zev. “That seems a great deal of money,” Zev said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and tracing a line in the dust with the toe of his shoe.

A flicker of anxiety crossed Schroeder’s face. “Well, maybe for a good man like you … shall we say twenty?”

“Show me again the accounts,” Zev said suddenly.

Schroeder handed them to him nervously. “It’s all there on paper….”

Zev folded them carefully and put them in his pocket.

“Hey,” Schroeder said, grinning, “you ain’t bought the place yet! What about the twenty thousand?”

“I am offering you, firm, the sum of one hundred and seventy-five dollars for the ten acres you
really
own,” Zev said in his low guttural voice, “and that is fifty dollars more than you paid. I’ll give you seventy-five for the camera and the reels. The rest is crap. A total of two hundred and fifty dollars in all, and a fifty percent profit on your outlay. A fair deal, I think, Mr. Schroeder?”

“Pshaw, what d’you know, you little
kike?”
the man shouted angrily. “Two hundred and fifty bucks—it’s probably all you’ve got in your pocket!”

Zev’s eyes narrowed. His face was even paler than usual as he said quietly, “Two hundred more than is in your own pocket, Schroeder. Take it or leave it.” He paused and then, touching the phony accounts in his
pocket, added, “If it’s no, then I will take these accounts to the Los Angeles Police Department and ask them to take the necessary steps to indict you for fraud. I am not the first one you have sold your studios to, Schroeder, but I am going to be the last.” He smiled grimly. “All in all, two hundred and fifty dollars is a very generous offer.”

Schroeder’s shifty eyes shot daggers at him, but he held out his hand and said, “Okay, then, so give me the two fifty.”

Zev took a piece of paper from another pocket. “This is a bill of sale drawn up by Milton Firestein, a lawyer with offices on Vine Street. I explained the circumstances to him and he said to get your signature right here.” He pointed to the spot and held out a pen. “He is a well-respected member of his profession and no doubt his word would prevail against yours in court, should you ever try to claim you have not sold to me.”

Schroeder glared at him and signed the paper, pocketing the bills Zev handed him without counting them. He stormed back to his flashy automobile, shouting over his shoulder, “Since you’re so goddam clever, you can make your own way back to Hollywood, smart-ass!”

Zev smiled as he watched him tear away in a cloud of dust and squealing tires, then he strolled back to his ramshackle barns and gazed around. He paced out their measurements and inspected the wood for rot. He picked up his camera and stroked it wonderingly: He hadn’t the faintest idea how it worked, but it fascinated him. Half an hour later he heard the
phut-phut
of the car he had ordered to pick him up as it struggled up the dirt track, and he smiled as he turned to survey his acres. Notice had been posted with the city council only last week that Universal Pictures were buying more acreage along Cahuenga, and with it would come new roads, water, power and telephone communications. He had gone out immediately and arranged to purchase thirty more acres of land surrounding Schroeder’s lot, and he knew it
would be relatively cheap to bring the road up here and tap into the power and water supplies.

He smiled as he drove away. He had been willing to go as high as five hundred if necessary, but it had cost Schroeder that extra two fifty for calling him a kike. And now he, Zev Abramski, was the owner of a studio.

He had done his homework and knew how the movie business worked. He knew about the importance of distributors and how a few companies had already formed their own chains and cut out the independents, and he saw that was the future. There were just two major problems: He didn’t know a single person in the business, not even an extra, and his ten thousand dollars, his savings and the money from the sale of his business, was not enough to achieve what he wanted.

The Hotel Hollywood was filled with movie folk, and there was a constant flow of gossip and rumors and inside information. Zev hung about in the dining room or on the veranda, sipping a glass of orange juice and keeping his ears open, hearing things he wished he hadn’t, like which director was bedding which star and which star was bedding the waitress, as well as the price of a Sennett two-reeler and what Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms
had cost. He knew the amount of Pickford’s latest contract—more than a million—and that a day’s pay for an extra was five bucks. He scanned the trade papers and hung around the studios, waiting in casting offices and listening to their talk. He became a professional eavesdropper, he saw every movie in town, and he heard on the grapevine that there were two bankers sympathetic to moviemakers: a young Californian by the name of Motley Flint, head of First National Security, and Amadeo Giannini, head of the Bank of Italy.

Zev chose Giannini because he was used to dealing with Italians on the Lower East Side and he liked them. And also because he had heard that Giannini’s childhood had been as tragic as his own—an immigrant’s son, he had
seen his own father murdered by a neighbor. A successful produce broker, Giannini had retired at the age of thirty-one. He had become a banker and in 1901 he opened the Bank of Italy. Zev heard it said admiringly that Giannini always played his hunches, betting on the individual when he gave out his loans, and that “character” was his collateral.

They assessed each other silently in Giannini’s office. Zev saw a shrewd, middle-aged Italian; he had known dozens like him in New York. The only difference was this Italian was a very successful man and now he held power over his life. The banker saw a slight, pale intelligent young Jew, still looking like a
landsman
in his black funeral suit.

Zev quickly explained his position and that he wanted his studios to turn out product eighteen hours a day with the actors, directors, and cameramen working on a rota basis. Cheap and cheerful, he said earnestly, the stuff to take people out of their own drab and miserable lives for five or ten minutes at a time. A volume business to finance the real core of his plan, his own distribution system and his own chain of picture palaces. And then he would make
real
movies.

“Tell me, what do you call
real
movies, Mr. Abramski?” the banker asked, smiling.

“Spectacle, glamour, history. Showing ordinary people things they could never dream of seeing in their whole lives….” He looked at Giannini and said simply, “Magic.”

The banker laughed. “And how much is it going to cost me to finance ‘Magic’?”

Zev gulped and then said boldly, “I have ten thousand dollars of my own and I am asking you for fifty.”

Giannini turned a pencil up and down in his fingers, staring at him silently. “And what makes a man like you think he can succeed in a business where so many have failed?” he asked finally.

Zev looked at him, astonished. “I just know it, that’s all.”

Giannini laughed and said, “Right, Abramski, the fifty thousand is yours.”

Zev stared back at him, stunned. “But why are you lending me the money?”

“First, because you’ve got a potentially valuable piece of real estate there on Cahuenga. And second, because I like a man who believes in himself the way you do, Mr. Abramski.”

He had gone back to the Hotel Hollywood with sixty thousand dollars in an account at the Bank of Italy, more elated by the fact that the banker had trusted his word than the fact that he had got the money.

Within weeks his toppling barns were rebuilt, a small set of flimsy wooden shacks added as administration offices, and cameras and film stock purchased. With the help of a casting agency he selected cameramen whom he promoted to directors, struggling walk-on artists, who he thought had something special and whose pay he jumped from thirty bucks a week to three hundred with star status, plus a changing cast of extras and assistants. He sat at his desk in the hot wooden shed, drumming up new ideas and plots based on the old popular formats he knew audiences liked, and as he wrote the cameras turned day and night.

It was a one-man operation. He controlled everything; no detail was too small to escape his nervous eagle eye. Consequently his product was good quality as well as entertaining and was soon picked up by the distributors. And when he wasn’t busy at the studios, he kept an eye out for any opportunity to get Magic Distribution into the marketplace.

Hollywood was full of new moviemakers and the competition was stiff. Zev—or C. Z., as he was now known—made a point of doing the rounds of the movie houses, and when he heard that
Journey of a lifetime
by a new
young director called Francis Pearson was to be premiered at the old Woodley Theater, he made a point of going to see it. Pearson was an unknown and the movie was big-scale but made on the cheap. It showed in the rough quality of the film, but somehow the graininess just added reality to the strong saga of the immigrant nation’s trek out West in covered wagons in search of a new life. It had humor, pathos, tragedy, and hope.

As the movie ended and the lights went up Zev wiped away a tear, deeply touched. As an immigrant himself he understood the dramatic life-and-death struggles of that not-too-long-ago generation and he knew instinctively that the rest of America would too.

The movie had attracted little attention, and the Woodley had been three quarters empty. He waited about in the lobby until the producer and the director emerged looking disconsolate and then he introduced himself and offered them forty thousand dollars for the distribution rights. They stared at him as if he had gone mad and then jumped at the offer.

He was in Giannini’s office the next day, asking for a new loan of forty thousand to finance Magic Distribution’s first venture. The banker looked at his first six months’ figures and grinned. “Okay,” he said, “you got it. But it’s sink-or-swim time, C. Z. You’d better know what you are doing.”

“I do,” he promised confidently.

It was a hard sell but he got
Journey
into a major New York theater. Word of mouth soon had lines around the block, and he found himself inundated with requests for the film. He personally made more than a million from
Journey
and promptly bought up several of the small independent chains of distributors. Magic Distribution was a reality and he was a millionaire.

Francis Pearson joined Magic’s roster of directors and made his next film, on a bigger budget this time and with spectacular sets and effects, and Magic Movies moved
into the major leagues. Product rolled out and money rolled in; more acres were bought, the studios expanded, and new offices were built. C. Z. Abrams was a man to be reckoned with in Hollywood. He had his big house and his servants, he worked all hours that God sent, his social life was nonexistent, and his private life was his own.

As he waited for Dick Nevern to appear with the day’s output of film, he ran his fingers idly over the keys of the beautiful Bechstein grand, recalling those lonesome nights in the dark back room behind the pawnshop. He rarely dreamed of the past anymore, though his mother’s silver candlesticks were still displayed proudly on the dining-room sideboard. He lived for the present, each day for itself, but as he stared around at his lovely house and his tasteful possessions he would have traded it all just to feel the way he had when Missie O’Bryan first came into his life; to have his heart jump at the sight of her, to stare out of the window waiting for a glimpse of her passing by, to have the clock ticking away the hours and then the minutes on Fridays until she would fling open the door and, smiling, hand him her two dollars. And he thought he would have given ten years of his life to be sitting opposite her again at the Ukrainian café and see her smile at him with those violet eyes.

“Hi, C. Z.,” Dick called, startling him from his dream. He patted the reels of film under his arm. “Just the usual. But later I’ve got somethin’ real special to show you.”

C. Z. nodded briskly. “Let’s go,” he said, leading the way to the basement projection room.

A table with brandy, beer, and sandwiches was set up next to the comfortable armchairs and Dick helped himself as C. Z. threaded the first reel. They watched the shorts first, commenting on the lead players and the camera angles and making notes, and then they did the same with the rushes from the two big films in production.

“Pretty good,” C. Z. said in his newly acquired accent
less American. “Raoul’s doing a great job on
Imperfect Pair
, and as usual you’ve got it spot-on with
Broadway.”

Dick wound back the reels and said eagerly, “C. Z., I reckon films are gonna have to get more realistic, now that talkies are here to stay. There’s got to be a new look about them as well as a new sound, fresher, lighter, a different style of acting. We’re gonna need some new faces, C. Z., and I think I may just have found us our first new star.”

Zev smiled. Dick’s enthusiasm was one of his greatest assets. He could carry you away with it if you weren’t careful. That’s why they were such a good team: one the crazy, artistic creator and the other the down-to-earth pragmatist. “So? Show me,” he said, pouring himself a brandy.