Authors: Jerry Stahl
Imagine! At the one fight Mrs. Willard sees fit to attend, her hubby gets his hind end handed to him in three rounds. My idea was to play Willard, trying to explain to his wife that this wasn't how things usually went. "Honestly, hon, this never happened before!" Show me the man who denies ever serving up
that
bit of palaver, and I'll show you a liar. But Dempsey's manager thought movies would lower his boy's real estate and took a Pasadena.
Of course, when it came to spire climbing, I got the laughs, but Fairbanks got the sighs. Still, once people in Front Porchville saw me doing all the stunts Douglas did, I earned a new kind of respect. Minta, who'd become somewhat of a Freud nut since we split up, told me Herr Shrinker would say I was trying to get kudos from my father by getting it from the audience. I might have bought this, but she also said Freud thought throwing a cream pie was a "symbol for ejaculation." Don't think I didn't mull on that the next time I caught Mabel in the face with a custard.
Duck!
What with the war and all, it was incumbent—that's a Joe Schenck word, "incumbent" (he was a college man)—it was incumbent on all of us to do what we could for our country. (The only thing my country ever did for me was dun me till my eyes bled for back income tax, but I don't want to sound like some kind of Red.) Uncle Sam may not have wanted want me in uniform, but, by gum, he wanted me on celluloid. Naturally, I was happy to donate my humble talent.
Alongside Mabel, George M. Cohan, Mary Pickford, Elsie Ferguson, my liquid-lunch buddy Fairbanks, plus Pauline Frederick, William S. Hart, and a smack-happy Wally Reid, I showed up in a morale booster and money raiser with the catchy title
The United States Fourth Liberty Loan Drive.
Not much story, but plenty of stars.
The stars, of course, worked for free. We made a million dollars for the US of A. It was a Famous Players-Lasky setup, and I couldn't help but wonder how much old Jesse was skimming off the ammo money. Then the Armistice was signed, and 10 minutes after Buster got off the train I picked him up and brought him back to Alessandro Street to play a theater rat in
Backstage.
That was the first time we tried for color-tinting the film. Buster said we both looked like we'd been force-fed peaches. We didn't bother with the color gimmick after that.
By now I was pulling down $7,000 a week, and not a day went by without some company or other sniffing round, waving cash in my face, to see if they could "extract" me from my current contract. Loew's, through Joe Schenck's brother Nicky, wagged one-and-a-quarter-million per, plus a cut. Even that hotbed of melodrama, Universal, came at me. Didn't matter to them if I did comedy, they just wanted the name. Oddly enough, one of Universal's biggest stars was Earl Schenck, baby brother of Joe and Nick. I tell you, those people bred like
minks.
The money I made at Comique never ceased to amaze me. And getting creative control! The whole deal was positively unprecedented. But between you, me and that six-foot sidewinder I've been hallucinating on and off since my padded-cell vacation, I was just happy not to be robbed outright . . . When I was five years old, Daddy gave me a teddy bear for Christmas. I remember, 'cause it was the first and last one I ever got. Right away, I loved that bear. Then I hugged it to my chest, and I noticed a little tear in its tummy. Some stuffing was coming out. So I stuck in my finger and
SNAP
—just like that, something bit it. I screamed so loud Mama woke up from her morphine nap. Then I pulled out my hand and—I could faint thinking about it—there was this baby snake swinging from my forefinger. It had its fangs stuck right under the nail, and what I recall even now is how calm it looked. If snakes had eyebrows it would have probably waggled them. With its shiny little eyes, the snake seemed to be saying,
"Well what did you expect from your Daddy?"
That's how I felt about all these companies coming up with their fantastic offers. And that's how I felt about the deal I had. Sooner or later, the teddy bear would turn out to have a snake in it. Until you got bit, all you could do was keep an eye on your fingers.
Zukor and I had formed Comique on a handshake in New York. But now Adolph wanted something solid. So he offered the one thing none of the other studios even thought of. I'm not talking about money. He promised more than three million in three years, but I was already making a mil a year. So what does Zukor offer, that conniving son-of-a-gunstein? Features. That's what. The one dish nobody else slapped on the table.
Feature Me
The idea, if I signed, was that my two-reeler days would be over. Zukor wanted seven features a year—with no one but me saying what we do and how we do it. I had to let that sink in. Starting in October 1920, I'd be making 22 features in three years. Chaplin didn't crank out a feature until
The Kid,
in 1922.1 might have felt the snake wriggling in the teddy bear when Adolph said Famous Players-Lasky would be producing all of them. But I've always been a simp at negotiations. I started out in vaudeville because I was hungry. I hate this business stuff. Mack always used to say, "You can't trust anybody in Hollywood, so relax."
Balanced on a couple of bar stools on Zukor's boat, nursing a fistful of martini, I tried to let the proposition sink in. We'd spent the weekend at Catalina, and he'd insisted on bringing me back to Los Angeles himself, so we could talk. I didn't know if I should I be jumping up and down screaming "whoopee!" or covering my tender orifice and diving for shore. I should have known something was up when he insisted on feeding me a tureen of drink before taking advantage of me. What was I, a starlet?
Adolph, plainly, thought I was playing "confused" to grind him, biting my lip and scratching my head full of cornsilk hair like a rube in a melodrama. I
was
confused, but if you're an actor, producers just assume you're acting. From where Zukor stood, I had all the power, I just didn't know it. So when it looked like I was having second thoughts—or worse, trying to make him cough up more money—he swung into double-hand action.
But allow me to interrupt myself. Until Buster pointed it out to me later, I did not even realize what Zukor was really going for. Namely, getting me to do more work for the same amount of money. The feature bait was a way of getting my eyes off salary details.
Misdirection.
Keaton's godfather was Harry Houdini, so he knew these things. Buster was a great man in a poker game, unless you liked your money.
Zukor, smart as he was, was a terrible poker player. He had an expressive face, and he was fidgety. When you got to know him, you got to know which twitches meant what. As Buster said, Adolph had more ways of telegraphing his next move than Western Union. But his hands were the biggest tell. Whenever he was trying to sell you on something, Adolph would hold your hand. He didn't squeeze it or anything. Just held it. Looked you dead in the eye. The message was: Adolph Zukor was so tough he could hold your hand like a prom date. Who else could do that?
It's hard to march out a bunch of niggling doubts about a man's veracity when he's fondling your palm. Especially if the man is the most powerful studio head in Hollywood.
"Roscoe, one little thing . . ." Palm squeeze. He's selling me something. "You do understand that Comique will have to fold. Go the way of the Mohicans."
"You said that, but—"
What's he doing with his other hand? No! He's going to
sandwich
me. Now he's got my one hand in two of his.
"All your pictures will be produced under Famous Players-Lasky."
So, I'm still wondering,
Is this good? Is this bad?
Generally, I'd hire a guy to tell me what a contract meant, then I'd have to hire another guy to tell me what the first one said. But I'm out here on the Zukor yacht. Mano a mano. A captive on the high seas.
Zukor gave me a day to "roll the offer around in my brainpan and see how it feels." While I was deciding whether to hop on the Famous Players train or not, Mabel told me that Zukor, the sneaky Semite, had signed up another jumbo comedian. A human tuba named Walter Hiers. In other words, Zukor already had a Plan B.
So I guess you could say half of me finally went with Famous Players 'cause the idea of features was thrilling. Half because the idea of being unemployed still scared the rind off my bologna. And another half cause the idea of having to go through the nightmare of contracting with another company was too much. That's three halves, but I'm a big man.
I figured hiring Hiers was Adolph's way of saying "Everyone's expendable." It was an open secret that all producers thought actors were idiots. The only bigger idiots, of course, were the public, who were stupid enough to believe we were what the mags and studios said we were. If it weren't for the public wanting to see a few particular idiots in their movies, the studio heads would have probably used each actor once, then shot him, ground him up, and fed him to the next expendable thespian.
Thespy Chow.
Come and get it!
Going Continental
My living room at West Adams sat 24, but more than that squeezed in for my bon-voyage party. Lou Anger had the bright idea we should do a little continental touring at the end of 1919. So, before heading for New York, from where we would sail to London, I invited over a few of my closest reprobates. (Another Schenck word, the man was a dictionary of 25-cent jawbreakers.) All I really wanted was a chance to rest. But somehow it didn't work out that way. In Manhattan, I kipped at Minta's for a few days. Funny how much I missed her, until we were under one roof again, and then I missed myself. The boat wasn't much more relaxing. Every 20 feet some pipsqueak with a rich Mommy and Daddy would ask me to do a somersault. So of course I'd have to.
Once we hit London, though, I thought I'd expired and gone to heaven. If heaven was a place where hordes of fish-and-chips eaters followed you around like Moses' flock. In Piccadilly Circus, when word spread I was waddling around playing tourist, a spontaneous cheer went up on the street.
Hip hip hooray!
It startled me so badly I dropped the Guinness I'd hid under my coat.
Ker-splat!
My nerves still felt stripped raw from the heroin withdrawal. That gave the alcohol a much bigger job to do.
How popular was I? Claridges had to hire extra doormen and a gaggle of press agents. Ever try to nosh with a mob of strangers smashing their faces to the window, itching for a glimpse of you chewing your dinner roll? After a couple of days I began to feel lonely when a few hundred people weren't shouting my name.
France was even louder. A pack of wined-up Pierres decided to sneak up behind me on the Champs-Elysees and swoop me into the air. I guess that's a thing they do there. Probably started with Napoleon. But a couple of kids could've tossed Pee-Wee Bonaparte up and down. The merry monsieurs who tried to hike my thighs skyward made it about five feet, then buckled. I cracked the sidewalk and my shoulder at the same time.
Ever since the leg thing, my pain tolerance was pretty low. So the rest of the trip, along with icing the bruise, Anger kept me supplied with morphine. The bad part was, the French don't believe the mouth is the place to administer medicine. They weren't big on needles, either. They have their own peculiar notions. A key one, I soon learned, involved something called a suppository. Bottoms up!
The rest of the Paris trip, I am embarrassed to say, was spent keeping my cakes clenched, trying to stop those little butt-bullets of painkiller from leaking out. On what should have been one of the greatest days of my life, when I was bending to place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, all I could think was,
Please, God, don't let that morphine shoot out of my caboose.
For the occasion I was wearing white ducks.
Still, nobody had ever shown me that kind of respect before. I was honored. Some general shook my hand and they played their national anthem. "The Mayonnaise." Then every man in the crowd saluted me. What do you think about that? This was a situation of the gravest dignity, and I was truly touched. I didn't pretend to fall down until five minutes after the ceremony, when I had the driver step on the gas right before I got in the car. We did that three or four times. I'd open the Renault door, take a step, then the coupe would lurch forward and I'd fall on my face. It sent the frogs into a frenzy. As a race, when they laughed they snorted.
It's one thing to know people like your films, but when they treat you like the King of Hollywood, you come back home thinking,
Yeah, maybe I am royalty!
Until, say, you have lunch with Schenck and he calls you "Bubby" and stiffs you for the check. But, even though I wasn't away long, something else had changed while I was gone. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on—until it laid a finger on me.
Cleaning Up the Business
I
'D NEVER heard a word about "reformers" before I went abroad. I hadn't heard the word "normalcy" at all. But by the time I came home from Europe it's all anybody was talking about. President Harding—a fellow fat man—peppered every speech with calls for a "return to normalcy." Whatever
that
was. But everywhere you looked things kept getting
less
normal.
A lot of it kicked off with the Black Sox Scandal. The World Series—
fixed?
Kiddies' baseball heroes really a bunch of grif-ters? You can't imagine what that did to this country.
You could not pick up a paper or ride an elevator without some pasty-face yammering about moral decline. Then, thanks to Billy Sunday, a screaming evangelist, and the schoolmarms in the Women's Temperance Society, Congress voted in the 18th Amendment. Prohibition. And don't think half of them weren't snockered at the time! An Irish bootlegger friend of mine, Joe Kennedy, told me the Senate was full of lushes—all sipping bourbon and branch water. He knew 'cause he's the guy what sol'em the bourbon. I can hear Billy Sunday yowling now,
"Once the demon Alcohol is banished, all men will walk upright. Hell will be forever to rent . .
."