Hard Times (19 page)

Everything was important. If one man died, it was like a headline. Life was more important, it seemed to me. I remember a headline story of a
young golfer—he had on metal shoes and was hit by lightning. Everybody in the neighborhood talked about it. It was very important that this one man died in such a freak accident. Now we hear traffic tolls, we hear Vietnam … life is just so, it’s not precious now.

 

WHEN IT HAPPENED, I was in a boarding school which I loved. At Glendora. It was the best boarding school in California at that time. A beautiful school in the middle of orange trees. I was about to be president of the student body and very proud of myself. Suddenly I couldn’t get any pencils and went to the principal to find out why. She was embarrassed because we were old friends. She said, “I’m sorry, the bills just haven’t been paid.” She complimented me, saying, “Were there scholarships, you could have it.” And, “I couldn’t be sorrier.”

I was mortified past belief. It was hard for the principal. I called my mother and said, “Come and pick me up.” Which she did. I went back home which wasn’t much of a home because we were living with a stepfather whom I detested.

It was rough on me, the Thirties. I wasn’t aware of it being with everyone else. I thought it was just personal. I was in no way aware that it was a national thing. Having grown up in some affluence, I was suddenly in a small court in Hollywood with a stepfather who was drunk and ghastly.

My brother was still at Dartmouth, where he was fortunate enough not to know what was going on at home. Whatever money there was went to keep brother at Dartmouth. We were living on a form of relief. We had cans of tinned bully beef. And we had the gas turned off. My mother was an engaging lady who made everything a picnic. We cooked everything on an electric corn popper, so it was gay in certain aspects. (Laughs.) My
mother had humor and charm, so I didn’t know it was a desperate situation. When there wasn’t any money, she’d buy me a china doll instead of a vegetable. (Laughs.) She was an eccentric, and everybody stared at her. I was the little brown mouse.

My father was still holding up his pride. He had been successful, and then things went. Two houses with everything in it. His own career had nothing to do with the Depression. He blew it. Lots of times bills weren’t paid when there was no Depression.

I had come from this terribly wealthy family, with cousins who still had so much that, even during the Depression, they didn’t lose it. Suddenly I had four great white horses. They were given to me by my cousins. I was a very good horsewoman. (Laughs.) I rode at all the shows and steeplechases and all that. And went home to canned bully beef at night. (Laughs.)

My brother was socially oriented, a tremendous snob. While we were eating bully beef, he was living extremely well at Dartmouth. Nobody told him how bad things were. He lived magnificently, with a socialite friend, in a house with a manservant. He came back and found the truth, and the truth was ghastly.

He was five years older, a male, facing the fact that he had to go out and do it. It set for him a lifelong thing: he was never going to be caught in the same trap his parents were—never, ever going to be the failure his father was.

His first job was carrying rubber at the Firestone factory, and he got the white tennis clothes smelly and he violently hated the whole thing. He came home reeking of it and hating himself.

It was unbearable. He wouldn’t tell the people with whom he played tennis on the weekends. He had an old Ford with no door, but if you held on, there was a door. When he would take me out in the car, I would be the one that held the door on. It was that kind of Ford.

He was going to get somewhere and he fixed himself a little black book: what he was going to do by such and such a date. And he did it—to make up for his parents’ failures. He wished to be in color photography. He studied every night he came home from Firestone. Within a year, he was manager of the New York office of Technicolor. He had such determination….

Now it was necessary for me to make some money because the stepfather was drunk all the time and the father was pretending it hadn’t happened. Having gone to a proper lady’s finishing school, I didn’t know how to do anything. I spoke a little bad French, and I knew enough to stand up when an older person came into the room. As far as anything else was concerned, I was unequipped.

I heard there was a call for swimmers for a picture called
Footlight Parade.
At Warner Brothers. The first big aquacade picture.
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I went, terrified, tried out the high-diving thing and won. I couldn’t have been more stunned. I truly think this is where I got a lifelong point of view: respect for those who
did,
no respect for those who
had
… just because their father had done something and they were sitting around.

I loved the chorus girls who worked. I hated the extras who sat around and were paid while we were endangering our lives. I had a ball. It was the first time I was better than anybody at something. I gained a self-respect which I’d never had.

In the midst of my suddenly getting $7.50 a day for risking my life daily on the high boards and stunt work, falling out of wagons, and no overtime, I discovered what a good union could mean. I had spent most of my childhood alone. Now I came to respect those who worked for each other and for others. I got a great respect for the Screen Actors’ Guild, who were protecting us who were working under water for $7.50 a day.

It was the big thing in my life at that moment. I had been a brown wren in uniform in a lot of proper girls’ schools. My mother was an exhibitionist, and I wanted just that nobody ever look at me. I just wanted to disappear. I was fond of my mother, who was of no world. She could have lived in any era. I never got from her what was going on. I did from my brother, because he was undone by it.

Always having felt slightly rejected by Westhampton society, Greenwich society, Great Neck society, I had the feeling we weren’t “it,” whatever “it” was. I was sure my relatives were “it.” I knew my mother was a loon, wore fishnet and rode bicycles. We were odd.

All of a sudden I found another group with whom I belonged. The ex-Olympic stars who were diving and swimming and the chorus girls who worked like mad. Suddenly I didn’t care about my brother’s friends, the socially important. He kept saying, “When they ask what you’re doing, don’t say you’re a chorus girl.” I said, “I’m proud to be a chorus girl.” That used to destroy him.

In Westhampton, Greenwich and Great Neck, my only knowledge of what people do about anything was to keep Polacks from moving in. I truly believed, as a child, the bridge across the canal from Southampton was to keep Jews out of the country club. (Laughs.) Suddenly I’m a wild labor enthusiast. I’m here with the chorus girls and the grips.

 

MY FATHER spent two years painting his father’s house. He painted it twice. It gave him something to do. It prevented him from losing all his—well, I wouldn’t say self-respect, because there were many, many people who were also out of work. He wasn’t alone.

He belonged to the Steamfitters’ Union. They were putting up the old Equitable Building at the time. But I guess they ran out of steam, just around ’29.

He never forgot it. I guess it does do something to somebody to be out of work so long. It can affect your confidence in yourself. Not that it destroyed my father’s self-confidence. But I could see how it affected his outlook on life, his reaction towards success. He was inordinately impressed by men who had made it in business. It’s my feeling the Depression had something to do with this.

 

I STILL PLAY a little game with myself, shaving. To get shaved before I’m picked up by the cops. Once I was picked up and I had a two-day beard
on my face, and three days in a-hundred-degree weather in a Kansas City jail, I developed a terrific rash on the neck. It still comes back once in a while. So that’s just a little gimmick you work … if they’re gonna get you this time, you’re gonna go to jail clean-shaven. When I want to entertain myself now, I still think: I’m gonna get shaved before the knock on the door.

The brutality in the jails, the treatment of the unemployed, especially Negroes—I remember this cursing crash of some new arrival. They were dragging a big Negro into a cell next to ours. The din and the hell-raising we made to try to get him medical attention. We assumed, because nobody came, and he was taken out pretty stiff the next morning, that he died in the cell.

In those days, Chicago was quite a place to be arrested in. They had a system of moving you from precinct station to precinct station, so that it might be two or three days before your lawyer could find out where you were at. It was rougher than I had been accustomed to in Kansas City. Police stations at the time had these gimmicks, like seats with electric shocks. We were kept six or eight to a cell. Arrests of this sort were common enough for people who were organizing.

Unemployed councils, in my opinion, laid the basis for much of the New Deal legislation… . They attracted people who subsequently became labor organizers, particularly in the CIO. They were youthful in character and in ideas. They were not hidebound as left-wing political parties were in that period, although Communists and Socialists took part. They sort of threw away the rule book and just organized people to get something to eat.

The unemployed council people out in St. Louis were responsible for the first strike I ever saw—a tiff
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miners’ strike in southern Missouri. The housing was primitive. It was a miserable existence—literally, digging one out from the ground. They were trying to get better prices, so there was a strike. They tried to withhold their product from the market. I watched the meeting of the miners broken up by the local police and vigilantes.

Like most strikes of that period, it made more of a political than an economic point. There was a lot of publicity in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
and other papers. It pointed up the miserable conditions of the miners. It put into focus right on Park Avenue and Grosse Point and Winnetka … what was really going on. All the left-wing groups had a part in dramatizing it. And this reflected itself later in Roosevelt’s New Deal measures.

One of the mosi common things—and it certainly happened to me—was this feeling of your father’s failure. That somehow he hadn’t beaten
the rap. Sure things were tough, but why should I be the kid who had to put a piece of cardboard into the sole of my shoe to go to school? It was not a thing coupled with resentment against my father. It was simply this feeling of regret, that somehow he hadn’t done better, that he hadn’t gotten the breaks. Also a feeling of uneasiness about my father’s rage against the way things are.

My father was very much of an individualist, as craftsmen usually are. He would get jobs he considered beneath his status during this period. Something would happen: he’d quarrel with the foreman, he’d have a fight with the boss. He was a carpenter. He couldn’t be happy fixing a roadbed or driving a cab or something like that. He was a skilled tradesman and this whole thing had him beat. I think it bugged the family a lot.

Remember, too, the shock, the confusion, the hurt that many kids felt about their fathers not being able to provide for them. This reflected itself very often in bitter quarrels between father and son. I recall I had one. I was the oldest of six children. I think there was a special feeling between the father and the oldest son.

We had bitter arguments about new ideas. Was Roosevelt right in making relief available? Was the WPA a good idea? Did people have the right to occupy their farms and hold them by force? The old concept that there was something for everybody who worked in America went down the drain with the Great Depression. This created family strains. A lot of parents felt a sense of guilt, a feeling of shame that they had to be rescued by WPA and building a dam. A craftsman like my father felt pretty silly pouring concrete for a wall on the bluffs around the K.C. railroad yards … when the nation needed houses and his craftsmanship could have been used. Men like him suffered indignity, working at projects they considered to be alien to the American concept of productive labor.

My father led a rough life: he drank. During the Depression, he drank more. There was more conflict in the home. A lot of fathers—mine, among them—had a habit of taking off. They’d go to Chicago to look for work. To Topeka. This left the family at home, waiting and hoping that the old man would find something. And there was always the Saturday night ordeal as to whether or not the old man would get home with his paycheck. Everything was sharpened and hurt more by the Depression.