Hard Times (60 page)

 

 

No, we didn’t have that here in Chicago, that I know of.

 

I DIDN’T get hurt too bad. I didn’t own any stocks. I didn’t believe in the market then, I’m not too crazy about it now, if you know what I mean. (Laughs.) The stock market is like shooting craps or playing horses. You hear about the ones that win, but you never hear about the ones that lose. There’s more losers than winners, I promise you.

Any time you’re guessing, you got to lose. The only way to win is to have the other fella guess. That’s my theory: never be a guesser. Never take a position in life. You give the other guy the first guess, and you always come out best. You can’t make a mistake that way. You always wind up the winner. I’ve proved that on many, many occasions. Many occasions.

All the people around me in them days—successful businessmen—the stock market just knocked ’em right out of the box. Oh, do I remember the panic. Bedlam.

I never worked, always went in business for myself. I was lucky. You got to have that Guy Upstairs with you. You got to have his arms around you. I made a buck.

From an orange juice stand to a hotel, I branched out into a bowling alley. Made some investment in real estate. And here I am, with nothing to do. Call it semi-retired. But I’m always interested in a new proposition. Action.

I got no reason to be discontented. It’s just lookin’ fer somethin’ that I don’t think I’m gonna find. You just can’t call your shots any more. Everything is regimented today. Understand? Maybe it’s from the Depression
days, who knows? So what I’m lookin’ fer don’t exist, strange as it may seem. You follow me? But I have no complaints. I’d be the last guy in the world to complain. Because, like I say, life’s been good to me. God has been good to me. You gotta have Him.

 

THE DEPRESSION hit that prison pretty bad. We were practically not eating. We really scratched. One time they wanted us to eat some kind of fish. They called it halibut. This had black skin all around—didn’t have that little white side, you know. This was baby shark they tried to feed us. It smelled so the entire building was stunk up. (Laughs.) So they all threw it on the floor and refused to eat it.

If you know what it was like for you, just multiply. The quality of food was low to begin with. We would get some kind of meat once a day. It was kind of scraps you wouldn’t even keep in a butcher shop. Just tiny pieces all boiled up in a pot. It was rich enough so one man would get about a fourth of what his system needed. More people died during that Depression there than they ever did at any other time.

It wasn’t starvation. They called it malnutrition. It woulda been starvation if they died quick from malnutrition. They just barely gave you enough to keep you alive. You lost weight. They made you lose weight until the doctor got after them and said they have to get at least one meal a day. A thousand men woulda died if it hadn’t been for that doctor.

 

 

They were as bad for it as we were. A lot of them was eating in there on the sly. I’ve even actually given to them a piece of corn bread to take out. Nearly all of ’em were family men.

You wouldn’t know there was a Depression as far as the talk was concerned. There was nothing to say. We at least had a place to eat and sleep. The prison itself was a protection from the outside. The people outside, they had to hustle. We were just down almost as low as we could get. We had to dig a hole in low to get any lower than we was. (Laughs.)

We fared lots better when the war was on. Food and more food, during the war. Yeah, the fellas talked about it. They said, “Long live the war!” That was our attitude: Long live the war. ’Cause we were eating pretty good.

 

I WAS seven, eight. My mother was holding up the New York
World Telegram
. It had to be like 1937. With this huge headline across the front: Shanghai Falls. I remember the bitterness of my mother. I remember her bitterness about Ethiopia, too. Bubble gum cards about the Ethiopian War, I remember them. You had Ethiopians in ghost suits, sheets. And the Italian soldiers, they were always stabbing these guys in their ghost sheets.

I stayed with my grandmother that summer. She lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. It was suburban Allentown, if you could believe it. She was one of the two people in town who subscribed to
The New York Times
. She was considered a Socialist—which she was.

We had relatives, Peter and Millie Gore. Millie was a wonderful fat lady, and she’d sit on the front porch and she gave everybody food and beer all summer long. Uncle Peter would talk about World War I. He told this story about the black guy in his company, and he ran away from the Germans. He said he shot the nigger, killed the nigger. I was just absolutely petrified. I mean, I was really smashed! It was the first time I had ever heard that word. But I knew what it meant. And I never liked Uncle Peter again.

And this family, the Stahls, they moved next door. And they were really Nazis. They had this little girl who I hated. Who was a little female Nazi. And the second Joe Louis fight….

 

 

Yeah, but they didn’t know that, see? They invited us over to listen to it, my grandmother and me. On the radio. And they had all this stuff, they’d gone over to Bethlehem to get it, the knackwurst and bratwurst and all the other kind of wursts you can get. And they had it on big plates. And we’re all gonna sit around and we’re gonna eat liverwurst and watch this kraut beat the shit out of this black man, see? And they were gonna rejoice. All I can remember was praying to God that
somehow
Joe Louis would win.
Somehow
he would win. (Laughs.)

I can remember the faces, how they looked when Joe Louis came out and just
creamed
him. I mean, like in forty-five seconds.
¹⁵⁰
They couldn’t get the knackwurst in their fat faces, that’s how they looked. They couldn’t even swallow beer. I was screaming and jumping up and down and my grandmother was whispering to me: “I know how you feel, but you shouldn’t show it. You’ve got to be polite.” (Laughs.)

She dragged me out that night, saying, “You’re rude, you’re rude.” She pulled me out of that place, because I was jumping up and down screaming, “It serves you Nazis right, it serves you Nazis right.” She said, “You’re right, but you can’t talk that way.” And I said, “If I’m right, why can’t I talk that way?”

Oh God, I remember a couple of other things. I remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I remember his voice. It was a great voice. And I loved it. But some of us have learned that he was full of shit, too. That he was a fucking liar, that he was no good.

 

Why do you say that
… ?

 

Because he just didn’t deliver. Let’s face it, let’s talk about Munich. Let’s talk about all those things that were just words when I was a little kid. And he and Churchill and Daladier and Laval, they built up the Nazis so they could kill the Communists. And that’s what they really did at Munich, that’s what Munich really meant. And all this appeasement myth is just a myth.

It’s just that they thought they could use the Nazis against the Communists, and that’s what it really got down to. And they killed forty million people to find out how fucking wrong they were. And they have plunged us all, my
whole
life, my
whole
generation into an
endless, terrible
misery. And they were all stinking, fucking, no good shits.

They put us into that God damn war which they could have stopped in the 1930s. They could have walked in, they could have killed that Hitler. But they preferred that Hitler, they really did, they preferred him to the Communists. And no matter how rotten the Communists were, at least, in some vague, triply removed sense they represented the principle of life. No matter how distorted. As opposed to these other bastards, who represented nothing ever
but
death. And promised nothing but death. And my whole life has been cursed by these men.

I’m slightly drunk, but I don’t retract anything I’ve said, because I would say it when I’m sober…. I can’t make any distinction between the war and the Depression and the Thirties. It all kind of merged, and you were growing up and all that….

 

MUNICH, that was ‘38, wasn’t it? I was at Malibu, down at the beach. I heard Jan Masaryk on the radio, speaking from London. It was about four o’clock in the morning there. I was so moved by this man. I was upset by the sell-out of Czechoslovakia. On an impulse, I sent him a cable. It was the first one he had received from anyone in the world.

Later on, he came to this country and he looked me up. It had meant so much to him. He said it cheered him in the darkest hour of his life. That was Munich. He said one of the reasons he broadcast to his country was that if he could reach me out on the Malibu coast six thousand miles away….

My wire was published in the London
Times.
Then it got to Prague. And then to Berlin. As a result, my pictures were banned in Germany. I didn’t know that until 1939. In Amsterdam, I met a man who had fled Germany. He said I was on Mr. Hitler’s blacklist. (Laughs.) “You’re on the second page,” he said. (Laughs.) I said, “My God, I didn’t know that.”

Some months later, one of the men at MGM
¹⁵¹
came to me very, very upset. “I have something here that I am ashamed to give you.” It was a call-down about having mixed my politics with my work: How about watching out for this? He said, “What do you want me to do with this?” I said, “Tear it up.”

When the Depression came, I had a very good job in Hollywood. It was just at the beginning of my career. It was really distant to me. Everybody
around me was working. You get up at five-thirty. You’re in the studio at seven. You’re made up and ready at nine and work until six. They now call those The Golden Years of the Movies. Perhaps they were. People needed films, needed some diversion. I wasn’t deeply involved in politics myself. I kind of dialed out. I didn’t come to life until Roosevelt….

I was told I was F.D.R.’s favorite actress. I had never met him. Later on, when I was in Washington, at a cocktail party, Henry Morgenthau
¹⁵²
said, “The old man thinks we’re keeping you away from him. You’ve never come to see him. Tomorrow morning, put your hat on the dresser, and I’ll call for you.” The next morning he called to tell me the President had gone to Canada.

Later on, they sent for me to attend his birthday celebration. I bought myself a John Frederick hat. I came tootling into the White House with a big bunch of violets and this black hat. I looked down the hall and I saw Mrs. Roosevelt. I walked up to her. She said, “Oh, my dear, my husband is going to be so distressed.” He had gone to Teheran. (Laughs.) Here was this glamor girl all done up. I fell in love with her then and there. I was very lucky to have spent quite a lot of time with her. I miss her very much. There aren’t too many people you miss that way….

At sixty, he is an established Broadway actor. Much of his time, whether “at liberty” or while engaged in a play, has been spent on the Council of Actors Equity
.

 

I LEARNED in the Twenties that you could exist on very little. To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, you can depend on the kindness of strangers. When the Depression actually began in ‘29, I was just on my way to New York. It wasn’t any demarcation point in my life. There were no stocks to be lost, ’cause we didn’t have them.

There were no jobs in New York. I worked in summer stock and touring companies. In 1931, I played a season in Newport, Rhode Island. It was as if the Depression had never existed at all. All the functions were duly reported as going on at the Viking Hotel and the Casino Theater. Sitting in the middle of the Casino, covered with flowers, were Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Moses Taylor, arriving in their limousines. I hadn’t seen men in panama hats, blue blazers and white shoes since. There was discreet drinking in china cups during Prohibition in all the best hotels in Newport. One could sit there nursing a teacup filled with bootleg gin or whiskey. But it was all elegant. In teacups, china cups.

It was rock-bottom living in New York then, it really was. Cars were left on the streets. There were no signs about restricted parking. (Laughs.) If somebody had a jalopy—a few friends you know would have some old car—it would sit there for months on end neither molested nor disturbed. It would just fall apart from old age.
¹⁵³

You didn’t count your possessions in terms of money in the bank. You counted on the fact that you had a row of empty milk bottles. Because those were cash, they could be turned in for a nickel deposit, and that would get you on the subway. If you took any stock in yourself, you looked to see how many milk bottles you had, because that counted. Two bottles: one could get you uptown; one could get you back.

I remember being employed once to stand in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, Easter morning. With a clicker in each hand. A fashion woman had engaged me to note the acceptance of patent leather purses and white hats. Each white hat I saw, I clicked my right hand. And each patent leather purse I saw, I clicked my left hand. Then I had to go home and tote up what the clickers said. White hats were in that spring, patent leather purses were out.