Close up, p.24
Close-Up, page 24
They both laughed. Weinberger looked at his client, trying to see if the spell was broken. It was hard to decide. Stone shook his head. ‘It’ll be OK now, Viney, I feel fine.’ Already his voice was reassuming the reedy strength that his fans would recognize.
Weinberger patted Stone’s shoulder in the diffident way of a man not given to physical contact with other men. ‘Don’t worry, Marshall. You’ll do the Palace and it will be a great movie.’
Stone saw him to the door and hoped that he would say something about a rapprochement with Koolman, but he didn’t. Stone tried to imagine what Weinberger’s life was like. He worked hard all day arguing with executives and placating angry clients. Each night he drove out to the big house near Blackheath with a case full of documents to work on. He kissed his wife and they worried about whether his eldest would get into university or his youngest get pregnant. He cut his own lawn, watched TV, ate frozen food and sorted his stamp collection. The people he had there for dinner were likely to be local grocers and stockbroker neighbours, anxious to hear an anecdote about the glamorous world in which Weinberger spent his working day. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly like that, but a life even remotely like that was Stone’s idea of lingering death.
There was no need for Stone to put away the bottles of vodka and vermouth, stack the mixing jar and glasses in the tiny sink behind the bar, or empty the ashtray, but he did all those things without realizing that he was performing chores that he’d not done for a decade or more. His Rolls was in the garage and Jasper within call, but there was nowhere he wanted to go. His boat was ready to sail and his pilot on four-hour alert, but there was no one waiting for him. Generous hostesses, ambitious starlets, eager head waiters would have put their all at his disposal, but they had nothing that he required. The room contained many books, but the idea of reading them did not occur to him. He undressed slowly and went to bed.
In a world where superlatives were commonplace, tears were the ultimate superlative. Stone used the word frequently; he was often ‘moved to tears’, and, less often, he ‘laughed until tears came’. Sometimes he’d confess that he’d been unable to suppress a tear, as a way of expressing his gratitude for a gift or generous praise.
In his childhood Eddie Brummage had learned to produce tears to curtail a scolding or evade a beating. He had never cried when alone. He did nothing alone, which is why he dreaded that condition. But now, almost fifty years old, he cried. He sobbed into his pillow and left there a spidery pattern of mascara from the movement of his lashes before he went to sleep.
11
The more McCarthy yells the better I like him. He’s doing a job to get rid of the termites eating away at our democracy.
Louis B. Mayer
‘Leo Koolman, only twenty months ago you joined this organization as a parcels clerk in dispatch. You took over that department before becoming assistant to the personnel manager. In less than one year you had been promoted to a senior position in publicity and two months later we made you a vice-president. You are the youngest executive in charge of production that any of us can remember. Today you become president of this company. It’s a success story that can only happen in the dynamic free society that America has produced. What do you say, Leo?’
‘Thanks, Uncle Max.’
A mixture of cynicism and admiration, that joke summarized Hollywood’s attitude to the Koolmans and everything they did. The relationship between the old man and his nephew was the basis of endless show-biz jokes. Any vituperative exchange, liberally sprinkled with cuss words and blasphemy, was accredited to the two Koolmans and quoted by name-droppers.
In fact, few other capable men would have taken the tongue-lashings that Leo Koolman took from his uncle with relatively mild rebukes. Fewer still would have sieved the abuse to discover the good advice and experience that was almost hidden in it.
‘A Tribute to Mister Hollywood’, said the sign outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the industry gathered to celebrate the thirty-sixth anniversary of the Koolman Pictures Corporation.
Others had laid claim to that title, but none were granted it more willingly than the old man who celebrated the occasion by becoming chairman of the board so that his nephew could get into the president’s seat. The stockholders remained unconvinced, but there was no hint of the proxy fights that were to come a decade later. In 1947 anything that old Max wanted was as good as done.
The photographs show a grinning little gnome in his bright neckerchief, baggy white suit and Stetson. The cinema histories have recorded some of old Max’s more absurd utterances from the time he was regarded as a doyen of Hollywood’s right wing. But the young rowdy, who first came to Hollywood in 1909 when it was a sunny rural backwater, was a fugitive. He’d made a dozen one-reelers in a New York loft, but his crews had been beaten up more and more regularly and his last two films had been locked up by a court injunction from ‘the trust’. Max was down to his last eight dollars.
The trust was the Motion Picture Patents Company, a pool of patent-holders who were the only people able to buy raw film. They made movies, and cinema owners paid a dime a foot for them whatever the length, the story or the stars. And cinema owners could lease the patented movie projectors only if they agreed to show trust films exclusively. To break this total monopoly Max had to get a movie camera from Europe, buy raw film on the black market and then find a place to make films where trust agents, process servers, sheriffs or strong-arm men couldn’t find him. New York had proved not to be that place.
Hollywood attracted Max for a number of reasons. It had sun almost every day of the year, and in those days films were lit by sunlight. The ‘interiors’ were half-rooms, built outdoors and swivelled to follow the orbit of the sun. Most of his films were Westerns, and there was a convenient settlement of Red Indians living in shacks at the Santa Monica end of what is now Sunset Boulevard. There was nearby Griffith Park with lakes, forests and canyons. But the greatest attraction for Max was that when the trust agents were prowling around, or a gang of goons were in town breaking up pirate equipment, he could load his two cameras into the back of his Ford and drive like hell for the Mexican border. Perhaps they’d not admit it nowadays, but many other Hollywood pioneers who followed old Max to Hollywood frequently raced with him to the Mexican border.
Europe’s film industry was far ahead of America’s until the beginning of the First World War. In America the trust prevented the showing of any film longer than one reel, but France had produced a four-reel film starring Sarah Bernhardt as Queen Elizabeth, and the Italians did Quo Vadis in eight. Hollywood might have remained just another American village had not the First World War diverted Europe’s cellulose to the manufacture of explosives. Thus Europe’s supply of films came to an abrupt end, and the cinema owners had to buy American productions. When, in 1917, America came into the war, the East Coast movie industry was wiped out in the same way as Europe’s had been. There was a shortage of manpower, electricity and raw materials. Thus Hollywood became the world’s movie centre by a process of elimination. Asked the secret of his success in 1935, Max said, ‘Stay as far away from any war as you can get,’ but he threatened to sue a paper that quoted that in 1942.
Max led the movie world with new ideas, especially forbidden ones. When long films were forbidden by the trust, he made a six-reel Barnaby Rudge. When it was banned in trust cinemas, he rented a Chicago theatre and screened it there. The trust insisted that actors be anonymous, lest they demanded more than the ten-dollar-a-day contract that was so common. Max lured them away with fees of five hundred dollars a day plus big screen credits not only for producers but for stars and directors too. And it was Max who demanded to see his costly stars in big big close-ups at a time when most cameramen were determined to include the actors’ feet in every shot, lest the audience think they were watching people who’d been cut in half.
Max realized that films from the classics could attract the middle class into cinemas which until then had relied upon a working-class audience. To help make cinemas respectable, he furnished his with fitted carpets, chandeliers and soft lights to replace the nickelodeon’s board floors and spittoons.
But life was still dangerous for Max. Like de Mille, he wore a six-gun when he was at work. Even so attacks on his employees continued, but they were becoming rarer. His enemies realized that Max was here to stay. Driving along Santa Monica Boulevard now, it’s difficult to believe that every day, even into the late ’twenties, old Max rode from here to the studio on horseback. When it was no longer practical to do that, Max sold his house and five-acre lot for close on a million dollars and bought a house in Cahuenga Pass. Each morning he could breakfast on his balcony – frequently with an unidentified young female companion – criticizing his crews as they shot Westerns at the bottom of his garden.
Old Max’s real-estate dealings alone had made him a multi-millionaire by the ’thirties. His bright-red custom-built Mercedes-Benz – even bigger than Valentino’s cream-coloured one – could be seen outside the Garden of Allah, the Brown Derby and the dozens of little nightspots that catered to the film colony. He used the car to commute between his town house and his vast ranch in the San Fernando valley.
None of Max’s money went into any bank. He started a chain of cinemas with his own capital, and sank every penny he could find into sound-recording equipment at a time when most of the industry predicted doom for the new gimmick. After he sold his ranch in the valley to his own company, it became the elaborately equipped Koolman International Studios, bigger and more valuable than Universal City nearby.
During the ‘thirties Koolman Studios had the keenly contested reputation of being the meanest employers in Hollywood. Writers had less say in the movies than did the waitresses in the executive dining-room, and they clocked in considerably earlier. Actors and directors did half a dozen films a year on the notorious seven-year contracts by which they could be suspended without pay, and the lost time added to the other end of their contract. Thus a ‘difficult’ actor could stay under contract for life. Old Max enjoyed the rows and the tears and the champagne reconciliations. He managed his stars like a madam in a whorehouse, which in several other ways the studio resembled.
‘Jesus Christ, tell those stupid college bastards to give me some pictures where the good guys get the dough and the broads once in a while, will you. Goddamn! I’m sick to the stomach with slumps and Okies turning into hoodlums.’ Old Max’s remark was transcribed into a written memo by Phil Sanchez. It created the pattern for Koolman films in the ‘thirties. The memo said, ‘Above all, gentlemen, American films. Ones that entertain while showing the youth of our great nation that the values of God, truth and loyalty, hard work and talent, result in success and happiness.’ It was a philosophy that Koolman employees found difficult to reconcile with their day-today experience, but ‘American films gentlemen’ signs were tacked up in the studio.
It was tough to be on a Koolman production. Accountants scrutinized every budget, and a producer who went over by even a few dollars had a lot of explaining to do before he got another deal. Leo Koolman was just a child during the ’thirties, but he spent most of his spare time in the studios with his Uncle Max. By the time the Second World War began, young Koolman had become an unofficial assistant and courier for old Max, who was now over sixty and still had a peasant’s mistrust of the Santa Fe railroad and the newfangled aeroplanes that hopped to New York in easy stages.
The nineteen-forties brought the draft and shift work. Wives, girlfriends, mothers and lonely soldiers had money in their pockets and no one to stay at home with. It was a bonanza for the industry. Every year brought the Koolman Pictures Corporation bigger profits. Peace, the returning soldiers, the housing shortage and Europe’s cinemas meant even more money for movie-makers. Perhaps the effortless way in which every picture made money lulled the industry into a false sense of security. There was no reason to believe that young Koolman was inheriting anything but a mint. But old Max, with a cunning that never deserted him, had chosen exactly the right moment to step down.
Fiscal 1947 showed that the war boom and its subsequent echo was now not even a whimper. Stockholders hoping that their previous $3.6 million might be bettered heard that the Koolman Pictures Corporation profit was $493,928.
Purring stockholders could become wild animals, and moguls like Mayer, Schary, Schenk and Zanuck sometimes got mauled. No longer did Leo envy mighty MGM, with its great Loew’s chain of movie theatres, for the Supreme Court had invoked the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and ordered all movie companies to sever connexion with cinemas. No longer would Koolman Pictures make films on a production line and feed them to their own cinema chains. Selling the cinemas was young Koolman’s primary and most complex task.
The ’fifties saw the closing of a quarter of all US cinemas, while TV sets increased tenfold to fifty million. Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theatre kept cinemas empty every Tuesday evening, and other performers were hellbent on doing the same every other night of the week.
Hollywood’s embargo on the new medium was broken when Columbia sold their old movies to the networks. Koolman immediately did the same with two hundred old Koolman feature films. As part of the deal, he made two million dollars’ worth of fifty-minute TV films. He financed his new TV subsidiary by selling a recording company in Manhattan and some downtown real estate. He adjusted the earnings from his TV deal to bolster KPC quarter returns, which might otherwise have been in the red. He fought off an attempt to sell pieces of the big studios in the valley by persuading the stockholders that the land was worth more in one piece and agreeing to look at the situation again in 1955. By that time he’d renamed the company Koolman International Pictures, pulled the profits back up to two million and found both profit and prestige in films starring Marshall Stone.
Old Max died in 1956 after a tiring cross-continent train journey. He was sitting in a New York hotel suite holding the hand of his wife and swearing at Leo for calling a doctor.
‘You stupid little bastard. Is that what I taught you. Don’t you know what that will do to Koolman stock when the news gets out.’
‘Shut up,’ said Leo. ‘Everyone knows I run the company.’
When he spoke again Max Koolman’s voice was so weak that Leo Koolman had to bend low to hear him. Thus Max’s wife did not hear the obscene word that was her husband’s last.
Even by 1947 Max had grown weary of the journey between Los Angeles and New York. Distrustful of aeroplanes, Max found four days on the Superchief to be almost beyond endurance. But the scheduled air services were opening California to new faces and new thoughts. Until that time Hollywood designers and writers fed upon previous Hollywood examples of their craft. Now, many cinema-goers had seen what Europe and the Far East looked like, and they wanted realism. European film makers – lacking money enough for sets, lighting or costume – made startling use of real locations. Unless Hollywood was prepared to make films solely for its domestic market – as the British industry had always done – it had to beat European film-makers at their own game.
When in 1947 the House of Representatives Committee of Un-American Activities – HUAC – renewed its probing into Hollywood, old Max dismissed them as ‘a bunch of anti-Semitic nuts’, and congratulated himself upon keeping his name unchanged, for an anglicized name was enough evidence on which to bring a charge of subversion against many of his friends. But the Committee had chosen well. Not only was their new victim guilt-racked and histrionic, it was also recriminatory to a point of hysteria. As an added bonus, the members of the Committee had only to whisper a famous Hollywood name to get headlines and TV coverage around the world. It would have been a temptation to even the most retiring of politicians.
At first, no one took it seriously. Dorothy Parker said, ‘The only ism that Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.’ But then came a reaction from the banks. They told Max that the film colony was going to come under great pressure, and no one in US Government had the power and the inclination to save them. Once convinced, Max became a virulent anti-red, arranging that Leo play the part of the young liberal conscience.
Thus, while Leo placated the progressives, Max went before the Committee and shamelessly apologized for a couple of films that had portrayed the Russians as shaved and laundered. It would never happen again, he vowed, and it never did. Old Max was at the famous meetings at the Waldorf Astoria after which the ‘Waldorf Declaration’ announced that the ten men who had defied the Committee would not again be employed.
‘What’s all this pleading the First Amendment: either a man is an American or he’s a gonif. Send these reds back to Russia,’ said Max Koolman, who had been born in Odessa.
So well did Max do his job that Leo was not called to the hearings, and when in 1951 HUAC renewed their hearings, Kagan Bookbinder was the only Koolman employee blacklisted.
Not that there was any blacklist! Max and Leo would put their hands on the place where their hearts were reputed to be, and swear to that. There was no blacklist, for a list is a piece of paper. The agreements that they made were little more than nods and winks. The previous attentions of HUAC had shown the industry that there were advantages in being unified. Unified not against the Committee but against directors, writers, producers and stars. Leo pointed out that it was to their mutual advantage to be rid of fellows suspected of communism. For with them could go fellows suspected of sarcasm, ‘arty ideas’ and sleeping with the wrong wives.
In all those respects Bookbinder was a candidate for the mythical blacklist, but the guard at the main gate had only his instructions and a drawerful of Bookbinder’s personal effects. An hour of talking failed to get him past the gate and his phone call didn’t even get past the switchboard.
But that was in 1951. When Leo Koolman first took control of the company the situation was quite different. In that first year of his reign the new president needed a project that could be widely publicized in a way that would influence stockholders as much as the audience. The company had grown rich on Westerns and their singing, whistling, roping stars, but now other companies had surpassed them in this genre. Koolman liked Westerns and so did Uncle Max, and so did two of the most important, and more troublesome stockholders.
