Some Faces in the Crowd (27 page)

Glover looked on in horror and futile anger. “Foul. Foul,” he said. “He hit him low. I saw it. He hit him low.”

There were others around him who saw it that way too and they took up the cry, “Foul, foul, foul …”

Dempsey was standing right next to me but his laughter sounded far away, as if the wave of voices breaking over us were carrying it off. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” he said, and his face was distorted with terrible joy. “Foul, hell. Look at him dogging it. He wants to quit.”

The referee had disregarded the cries of foul and taken up the count. Gans was fighting his sickness down, reaching out for a strand of the rope and clinging to it to keep the floor steady so he could rise from it again.

“Look at him dog it,” Dempsey hollered. “He’s yella. If that’s a foul, he’s got his crotch where his heart is.”

A few people laughed and Dempsey winked at them. His sense of humor was coming back. He was feeling on top again. He looked over at Glover. Glover was badly shaken. Some of the strain of the Negro’s torturous ascent had come into his face. “Well, wise guy, how do you like your nigger now?” Dempsey poured it on.

“All right, Gans,” Glover pleaded, “coast through this round. You’ve won it on a foul anyway.”

“Come on, Sailor, kill him, kill him, kill him!” Dempsey cheered.

The Negro was on his feet but he wasn’t dancing around any more. It plainly hurt him to move now. His skin was a curious chalky color and his eyes turned toward his corner in distress.

Dempsey was laughing. “Look at him! he’s so scared he’s white! You’re making a white man outa him, Sailor.”

Gibbons rushed the crippled fighter into a corner and opened his cheek with a hard left hand.

“Ha ha ha. One more, Sailor. One more and he’ll quit.”

Glover was too full of injury to speak. Dempsey grinned over at him. “Wha’samatter, pal, lost your voice? Why, you was just full of chatter a minute ago.”

Glover did not seem to hear. He sat back in his seat and looked straight ahead. His fighter leaned wearily against the ropes, too weak to hold his man off any longer.

“Let him drop,” Dempsey was shouting. “Stand back and let the boogie drop!”

Then there was a loud laugh, even louder than usual, and the Negro crumpled in the corner and lay still.

Dempsey stood up and pulled the seat of his pants away where it had creased into his buttocks. “What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you he’d dog it if he got hurt? I never saw a boogie yet that could take it in the belly.”

The ring was being cleared for the next bout, the band was rendering
Stars and Stripes Forever
and the next pair of fighters was coming down the aisle. But Glover didn’t seem to be hearing or seeing. He just hung his head and held his hands together in his lap. How long would it take him, I wondered, to recover from this pain in Young Gans’s groin?

T
HERE’S QUITE A GANG
of us hangs out at Stage One. The moment the director says, “All right, wrap it up,” and the assistant director (that’s me) calls out, “Tomorrow morning we move over to the night-club set on Stage Seven, nine
A.M
. on the button,” most of the company hightails it across the street to our favorite watering place. Stage One isn’t a dive, but it isn’t Ciro’s, either. We hardly ever get a big star in the joint and that’s okay with us because we’ve seen enough of those so-and-so’s from nine till six. Now don’t get me wrong I’ve got nothing against the glamour department and a couple of those gals, Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard for two, were real good joes in anybody’s league. It’s just that in Stage One we kind of have our own crowd, assistant directors, second cameramen, juicers, grips, mixers, cutters, you know, the guys who actually do the work. I suppose if Frank Capra or John Ford came in, we wouldn’t toss ’em out exactly. It’s just that we feel more relaxed by ourselves, you know how it is, we get a couple of drinks, unwind a little and pretty soon an assistant is telling us something extra-stupid his director did that day, and then maybe I chime in with my story of how much trouble a certain star gave me when I knocked on her dressing-room door to tell her we were ready to shoot and then the second cameraman gives us his peeve about what a prima donna the head cameraman is getting to be.

Making pictures is nothing but hard work, all of it under pressure, and since we have to keep our yaps shut all day there’s nothing like bending an elbow at Stage One and blowing off a little steam.

The nice thing about the fellow who runs the joint, Larry White, Cecil B. himself could come in that place and Larry wouldn’t pay him any more mind than he would one of us hundred-a-week guys. Not as much, probably, because Larry is pretty partial to us regular customers, runs the place more like a club than a commercial saloon and most of us who live at Stage One from the time our company breaks for the day until closing time are privileged charter members. Larry used to be quite a boy in the movie game himself, back in the silent days. He was a popular leading man for First National when Jack Mulhall and Dorothy Mackail were going great guns. If you don’t believe it, just look at those stills behind the bar, that’s Larry with Sue Carol, and Phyllis Haver and Sally O’Neill. He had a nice head of hair in those days. Larry got a tough break when sound came in. He had the same kind of voice as poor Jack Gilbert, a funny little squeak of a voice and overnight he was out of the money.

But Larry’s done a lot better than most the old-timers. The way we flock around that bar, he’ll never have to check in at the Motion Picture Relief Home like a lot of old kids I know who were pulling down five thousand a week without taxes twenty years ago.

I was saying a little while ago that we didn’t have any celebrities in Stage One, but that isn’t 100 per cent God’s truth. We have Matty Moran, all right. Some of us aren’t sure if Matty has any other address besides Stage One. He’s there when we come in for a quick one at lunch and going strong when we come back at six and going even stronger when Larry finally starts locking up around one. Matty is a fixture, all right. I don’t think any of us would feel the same way about the place if he should ever leave it.

Now maybe I’d better stop right here and take a reading on how many of you ever heard of Matty Moran. Because it’s a funny thing about fame in this screwy business. One day you’re recognized if you show up on a side street in Calcutta and the next day or the day after you can walk right down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard and nobody knows you from the street cleaner.

It sure was that way with Matty Moran. It wasn’t so long ago that Matty was one of the biggest directors in the business. You said Griffith and you said De Mille and then you usually said Moran. Yes, sir, I can remember—I should, I was his assistant on a dozen pictures—when Matty was good for ten thousand clameroos a week. I’ll bet Matty would like to have a dollar now for every grand he threw away.

Matty was the original star-maker in those days. I swear, kids would be willing to work in his pictures for nothing because he seemed to have a kind of magic when he touched them. This Sue Carol and Phyllis Haver I just mentioned, those kids weren’t nothing till he sprinkled a little of that special Moran Stardust on them. And a lot of them who are still going can thank Matty for the start. Gary Cooper for one, Claire Trevor for another.

Matty gave Larry White his chance, too. And more than that, I guess he dug down and helped Larry over those bumps back in twenty-seven or eight. Then when things were on the other foot, Larry seemed to have an unlimited cuff where Matty was concerned. So you’d never guess that Matty was, well to put it harshly, a dead-broke bum from the way he’s treated around Stage One. The city’s finest may be looking for him for that last rubbery check, but he’s strictly Special People once he steps inside Larry’s place. And to look at the dapper way he keeps himself, you’d never know he was half a step ahead of the law and just as apt as not to spend that night as a guest of the county for drawing on a bank that has no relation to any actual bank either living or dead, as we say in those forewords.

One of the things that always got us about Matty is that he’s managed to look just as prosperous these last few years as when he was sporting not one but two white Rolls Royces, one for himself and his lady love (of the moment), the other for his own private five-piece orchestra. The only reason it wasn’t a ten-piece orchestra or a symphony-sized orchestra is that they wouldn’t fit into that Rolls. Well as I was saying, Matty still managed to show up in a flashy double-breasted (maybe not this year’s but still mighty sharp) and he’s always sporting a jaunty bow tie and if he didn’t have that fresh red carnation in his buttonhole we’d think it was some impostor. Another thing Matty always brings into Stage One with him is that mischievous red face and that cocky grin, just as if he had come straight from the Paramount lot where he was directing the most expensive production since
Ben Hur.
Is that amazing, a guy who hasn’t had a real job in maybe fifteen years and he doesn’t change a peg in looks or behavior? All the hard knocks and he’s had them plenty can’t stop him from acting like he owned the town. No kidding, Orson Welles in his cockiest moments (and that is something to see too) can’t compete with Matty Moran down and out and every studio door slammed in his face.

Yes, Matty still swaggers in and if he happens to spot me he says, “Evening, Red,” and I say, “Evening, Mr. Moran,” just as if I was still working assistant with him. And then maybe I say, “Will you join me in a little hair of the dog?” and the truth is probably that his tongue is hanging out for it, but he’ll say, “Well maybe just one so you won’t spread the word through the Junior Directors’ Guild that Moran’s gone high-hat.” And then after we’ve had three or four, all “forced on him,” like that first one, Matty will say, “Now I insist, young man” (I’m chasing him into the fifties but he’s called me that from the time we were making Beery-Hatton comedies) “the next one is on me.” And then you should see him order, like the King of England or L. B. Mayer, instead of a joker who couldn’t buy his way into a dime movie on Main Street. “I say, Larry old boy, a spot of whiskey for my friend Farrell. And I might have just a touch myself to keep him company.” Then he’d give me that wink, the wink that had charmed Pola Negri and Lya de Putti and Norma Talmadge out of their temperamental tantrums.

You’ve heard of this word “irrepressible”? That’s the word for Matty Moran, all right. You probably wonder how a fella with Matty’s reputation and talent and personality and energy-plus ever hit bottom. Well, one reason might be that the town got sort of scared of Matty’s crazy ways. For instance, one time to celebrate the wind-up of a Jack Gilbert-Renée Adorée picture he gave a party on the set that lasted—I swear to Zanuck—five days. He had one orchestra from the Coconut Grove and another from the Plantation Club and a Hawaiian orchestra for in between. He’d been to a
louou
in the Islands the year before (had an ocean-going yacht in those days, natch) and he just decided to reproduce it in the studio. As I said, that party went on for five days and five nights and the boys and girls were so thirsty that Matty’s bootlegger, Jerry Faye, had to send up a special boatload from Lower California. That party set Matty back somewheres in the neighborhood of ten thousand fish, ten thousand fish he should have salted away.

But that probably wouldn’t have given Matty squatter’s rights behind the eightball if he hadn’t been such a wild man when he was shooting. Like D.W. and C.B., he came up out of the old school where the director was the whole cheese. For instance, one time he was telling Barbara La Marr how to play a scene and she said something under her breath and Matty heard it and bounced her right the hell off the picture. Matty’s producer came crying that the picture was already sold as a Barbara La Marr starring vehicle and shooting her scenes over would cost an additional ninety thousand, but Matty couldn’t hear him. That’s the way he was. The greatest guy in the world off a set, more laughs than a barrelful of ass-holes, but on the set it had to be done strictly Matty’s way and no fooling. He didn’t care what it cost or who it hurt. For instance one time he was directing a million-dollar cast with Wally Beery, Vic McLaglen, Charley Farrell and Buddy Rogers in one of the first big war epics. The cast got fooling around the way they will sometimes, clowning and getting sloppier and sloppier. Finally Matty said, “Look, sweeties, mess me up like that once more and I’ll hop a boat for China.”

Well, the next take they still hadn’t settled down to business, so Matty just puts his megaphone down and walks off the set. The next morning he didn’t show up at all. Or the next. I called his valet and he said Mr. Moran had packed a small bag and left without saying where he was going or when he’d be back. Two weeks later we get a cable from him and where do you think he is? Right the first time. Shanghai! And when he finally gets back, he’s married to a gorgeous Russian-Chinese girl who turns out to be Sari Sanine, and of course Matty develops her into the most exotic foreign star since Dietrich.

But the all-time topper, until recently, I should add, was the time Matty was directing Sari. Sari was the hottest thing in pictures by this time and Matty was on the skids. In fact, it was general studio talk that the only reason Metro was keeping Matty on was because they were afraid of losing Sari. So what does Matty proceed to do? He gets into a knock-down-drag-out with Sari on the set as to how a certain love scene should be played. Sari wants it subtle. Matty wants it sex on the line. Sari says after all, she is a great dramatic actress. Matty says baloney, if she had to depend on her acting she wouldn’t be worth five dollars a day. Well, they get going round and round in more and more of a hassel until finally Matty pulls the classic. He fires her off the picture! Bounces his own wife and Metro’s biggest drawing card right off the set! I was right there when it happened or I wouldn’t of believed it. Twenty minutes later Matty is taken off the picture. And this plus the trip to China plus a hundred-and-one other hotheaded stunts and Matty is just about washed up with the majors.