Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Saturday Evening Post, December 7, 1929
EVERYONE who is fond of authors—and, except for Pekingese, there are no domestic pets more affectionate and lovable—must have noticed how scarce these little creatures have been getting of late in the Eastern States of America.
At one time, New York was full of them—too full, some people used to think. You would see them frisking in perfect masses in any editorial office you happened to enter. Their sharp, excited yapping was one of the features of the first or second act intermission of every new play produced on Broadway. And in places like the Algonquin Hotel and the Coffee House Club you had to watch your step very carefully to avoid treading on them.
And now what do we see? Just an occasional isolated one sniffing at his notices, and nothing more.
Time after time I have had fanciers come up to me during the past year with hard-luck stories.
“You know that novelist of mine with the flapping ears and the spots on his coat,” says one. “Well, he’s gone!”
“Gone?”
“Absolutely vanished. I left him on the steps of the club, and when I came out, there were no signs of him.”
“Same here,” says another. “I had a brace of playwrights to whom I was greatly attached, and they’ve disappeared without a word.”
Well, of course, we took it for granted that they had strayed and had got run over, for authors are notoriously dreamy in traffic and, however carefully you train them, will insist on stopping in the middle of the street to jot down strong bits of dialogue just as the lights are changing. It is only very recently that the truth has come out.
They are all in Hollywood, making talking pictures.
The Tragic Tale of Captive Writers
WITH the advent of the talkies, as might have been expected, radical changes have taken place in Hollywood. The manufacture of motion pictures has become an infinitely more complex affair. You know how it was in the old days—informal, casual. Just a lot of great big happy schoolboys getting together for a bit of fun. Ike would have a strip of celluloid, Spike a camera, and Mike a friend or two who liked dressing up and having their photographs taken, and with these modest assets they would start the Finer and Supremer Films Corporation De Luxe and clean up with orgy scenes and licentious clubmen.
For talkies you require much more than that. The old, simple era has passed. You can't just put on a toga, press a button, and call the result The Grandeur That Was Rome or In the Days of Nero. An elaborate organization is needed. You have to surround yourself with specialists—one to put in the lisps, another to get the adenoid effects, a third to arrange the catarrh. And, above all, you must get hold of authors to supply the words.
The result has been one of the gravest scandals that has ever afflicted the body politic. And, to correct this scandal, it is time that some fearless square-shooter stepped forward and spoke in no uncertain voice.
In the first place, Hollywood is no fit spot for an author. The whole atmosphere there is one of insidious deceit and subterfuge. In Hollywood, nothing is what it affects to be. What looks like a tree is really a slab of wood backed with barrels. What appears on the screen as the towering palace of Haroun-al-Rashid is actually a cardboard model occupying four feet by three of space. The languorous lagoon is a smelly tank with a stage hand named Ed wading about in it in a bathing suit.
Imagine the effect of all this on a sensitive-minded author. Taught at his mother’s knee to love the truth, he finds himself surrounded by people making fortunes by what can only be called chicanery. He begins to wonder whether mother had the right idea. After a month or two of this sort of thing, could you trust that author to count his golf shots correctly or to give his right circulation figures? Answer me that. Or, rather, don’t. It is not necessary.
In the second place, if motion-picture magnates must have authors, they should not keep them in hutches. In every studio in Hollywood there are rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a walk. And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be very callous not to be touched by such a spectacle as this.
After all, authors are people. They are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It cannot be right to keep them on the chain. Surely some sort of an honor system would be possible.
I do not say that all these authors, or, indeed, a majority of them, are actually badly treated in Hollywood. Indeed, in the best studios kindness is the rule. Often you will see Mr. Warner or Mr. Lasky stop and give one of them a lettuce. And the same may be said of the humaner type of director.
In fact, between the directors and these authors there frequently exists a rather touching friendship. I remember Mr. King Vidor telling me a story that illustrates this. One morning, it seems, he was on his way to his office, preoccupied, as is his habit when planning out the day’s work, when he felt a sudden tug at his coat tails. He looked down, and there was his pet author, William Edgar—Strikes a New Note—Delamere. The little fellow had got him in a firm grip and was gazing up at him, in his eyes an expression of dumb warning.
Well, Mr. Vidor not unnaturally mistook this at first for mere playfulness, for he had often romped with his little charges. Then—he does not know why—something seemed to whisper to him that he was being withheld from some great peril. He remembered stories he had read as a boy—one of which he was even then directing for Rin-Tin-Tin—where faithful dogs dragged their masters back from the brink of precipices on dark nights. Scarcely knowing why, he turned and went off to the cafeteria and had a small malted milk. And it was as well that he did. In his office, waiting to spring, there was lurking a foreign star with a bad case of temperament, whose bite might have been fatal. You may be sure that William Edgar had a good meal that night.
Why Authors Leave Home
BUT this is an isolated case. Not all directors are like Mr. Vidor. Too many of them crush the spirit of the captives by incessant blue-penciling of their dialogue, so that they become listless and lose ambition and appetite. Neglect is what kills an author. Cut his stuff too much, make him feel that he is not a Voice, give him the impression that you think his big love scene all wet, and you will soon see the roses fade from his cheeks.
They tell me there are authors who have been on salary for years at Hollywood without ever having a line of their work used. All they do is attend story conferences. There are other authors on some of the lots whom nobody has seen for years. It is like the Bastille. They just sit in some hutch away in a corner somewhere and grow gray beards and languish. From time to time somebody renews their contract, and then they are forgotten again.
Conditions being as I have described, it may be asked, Why do authors go to Hollywood? The answer can be given in a single word—coercion.
In fairness to the motion-picture magnates, I must admit that they very seldom employ actual physical violence. Occasionally a more than ordinarily obdurate author will be sandbagged in a dark alley and shipped across the Mohave Desert in an unconscious condition, but as a general rule the system is more subtle.
What generally happens is this: A couple of the great film barons—say, Mr. Lasky and Mr. Zukor—will sight their quarry in the street and track him down to some bohemian eating resort. Having watched him settle, they seat themselves at a table immediately behind him.
For some moments there is silence, broken only by the sound of the author eating celery. Then Mr. Lasky addresses Mr. Zukor, raising his voice slightly.
“Whatever was the name of that girl?” he says meditatively.
“What girl?” asks Mr. Zukor, taking his cue.
“That tall, blond girl.”
“What tall, blond girl?”
“The one in the pink bathing suit at that Beach Club party.”
“You mean the one with the freckle in the small of the back?”
“A freckle? A mole, I always understood.”
“No, a freckle—just over the base of the spinal cord.”
“Well, be that as it may, what was her name?”
“I forgot. I’ll ask her when we get back. I know her intimately.”
Here they pause, but not for long. There is a sound of quick, emotional breathing. The author is standing beside them, a rapt expression on his face.
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he says, “for interrupting what was intended to be a private conversation, but I fancy I overheard you saying that you were intimately acquainted with a tall, blond girl in the habit of wearing bathing suits of just the type I like best. It is for a girl of that description, oddly enough, that I have been scouring the country for years. Where may she be found?”
“In Heaven’s Back Garden—Hollywood,” says Mr. Lasky.
“Pity you can’t meet her,” says Mr. Zukor.
“If you were by any chance an author,” says Mr. Lasky, “we could take you back with us tomorrow.”
The Trap Snaps
“Prepare yourselves for a surprise, gentlemen,” says the victim. “I am an author. J. Montague Breamworthy. ‘His powerfully devised situations’—New York Times. ‘Sheer, stark realism’—Herald-Tribune. ‘Not a dull page’—Woman’s Wear.”
“In that case,” said Mr. Lasky, producing a contract, “sign here.”
“Where my thumb is,” says Mr. Zukor.
The trap has snapped.
When this plan fails, sterner methods are employed. The demand for authors at Hollywood has led to the revival of the old press gang. Competition between the studios has become so keen that nowadays no one is safe, even if he merely looks like an author.
I heard of one very interesting case. It appears that there was a man who had gone out West hoping to locate oil. He was, indeed, one of those men without a thought in the world outside of oil. Give him oil, and he was happy. Withhold oil from him, and the sun went in and the bluebirds stopped singing.
The last thing he had ever thought of doing was to be an author. With the exception of letters and an occasional telegram of greeting to some relative at Christmas, he had never written anything in his life. But, by some curious chance, it happened that his appearance was that of one capable of the highest feats in the way of dialogue. He had a domelike head, tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and that rather cynical twist of the upper lip which generally means an epigram on the way.
Still, as I say, he was not a writer, and no one was more surprised than himself when, walking along a deserted street in Los Angeles, thinking about oil, he was suddenly set upon by masked men, chloroformed, and whisked away in a closed car. When he came to himself, he was in a hutch on the Fox lot with a pad and a sharpened pencil before him, and stern-featured men were telling him to get busy and turn out something with lots of sex in it, but not too much, because of Will Hays.
Advice to Author Fanciers
The story has a curious sequel. A philosopher at heart, he accepted the situation. He wrenched his mind away from oil and scribbled a few sentences that happened to come into his head. He found, as so many have found, that an author’s is the easiest job in existence, and soon he was scratching away as merrily as the oldest and highest-browed inhabitant. And that is how Eugene O’Neill got his start.
But not every kidnaped author accepts his fate so equably. The majority endeavor to escape. But it is useless. Even if the rigors of the pitiless California climate do not drive them back to shelter, capture is certain, for the motion-picture magnates stick at nothing. When I was in Hollywood, there was much indignation among the better element of the community over the pursuit of one unfortunate whom the harshness of his director—a man of the name of Legree—had driven to desperation. He ran away, and, if I got the story correctly, they chased him across the ice with bloodhounds.
The whole affair was very unpleasant and has shocked the soft-hearted greatly. So much so that a Mrs. Harriet B. Stowe, of 3410 Sunset Avenue and Beverly, told me that, if she could fix up the movie end with Metro-Goldwyn, she intended to write a book about it which would stir the world.
“Boy,” she said to me, “it will be a scorcher!”
And there the matter rests.
Such are the facts. As to what is to be done about it, I confess I am a little vague. I can only recommend author fanciers to exercise from now on incessant vigilance. When you take your pet for a walk, keep an eye on him. If he goes sniffing after strange men, whistle him back. And remember that the spring is the dangerous time. In the spring authors get restless and start dreaming about bathing parties. It is easy to detect the symptoms. The moment yours begins muttering about the “Golden West” and “God’s sunshine” and “Out there beyond the stifling city,” put sulphur in his absinth and lock him up in the kitchenette.