The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  “Louder, Please?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I don’t know. You said to take a scene from a comedy and—”

  “Well, you didn’t say you were going to do that comedy!”

  Lyle stammered something about how he wasn’t thinking about the content of the play so much as he was about the rhythm of the scene, how fast-paced and funny it was.

  Schreiber said “What the hell!” He was sputtering now, ready to wash his hands of Lyle right then and there. Then his voice grew calmer, but it was an ominous calm, and he told Lyle he’d really done it, screwed them both. And he hung up.

  “I was terribly upset,” my father recalled, “so I went to the office on the corner of Vine and Sunset. Mr. Landau was in and I went to him and I was really low. I told him the story.

  “He was such a sweet man. He said, ‘Lyle, don’t worry. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to Paramount, to other studios.’” Landau must have figured Warner Brothers was a lost cause now, but with any luck, word of Lyle’s accidental chutzpah wouldn’t get around to the other studios.

  What happened next back at Warners, Lyle heard about only after the fact. Zanuck had gone in to see the screen tests. He was in a good mood, striding in wearing riding britches, swinging the polo mallet he sometimes carried around the lot since he’d taken up the sport. When the test came on, Zanuck watched it all the way through—and, as my father heard it told later, he laughed. He didn’t say a thing about the play the scene was from; he just laughed. “Maybe,” my father used to speculate, “he thought, here was this actor who was naive enough or stupid enough or something enough to do that kind of scene for his screen test, for gosh sakes, and for whatever reason that particular day that struck him as funny.”

  Lyle had another lucky charm that day: the presence in the screening room of the director William Wellman. Directors and producers would often stop by when screen tests were being shown to check out the new prospects, and that day the visitor happened to be Wellman, a gifted director who in 1927 had made Wings, the first film to win an Academy Award for best picture, and who would go on to make the original version of A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, Beau Geste, and The Story of G.I. Joe, among many other films in a long career. At Warner Brothers, in the early 1930s, he was one of the masters of the taut, socially conscious little dramas for which the studio was famous. He was also notoriously tough, allergic to authority, a man whose bluster and cussedness had earned him the nickname “Wild Bill.” When World War I broke out, Wellman had volunteered for the Lafayette Flying Corps, a squadron of American pilots who flew missions for France before the United States entered the war. They were, to use the kind of language he would have, brave sons of bitches flying rickety-ass biplanes. Wellman earned the Croix de Guerre, was shot down by antiaircraft fire, and ended up more or less patched together, with a serious limp and a metal plate in his head. While working as a flight instructor in San Diego after the war, he’d made up his mind that he wanted to get into the film business. His plan, according to his biographer, Frank Thompson, was to don his uniform and medals, fly his plane up to Los Angeles, and land on the polo field at the Pickfair estate. He’d heard that the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., whom he’d met by chance some years before, was hosting a party with this wife, Mary Pickford, that day. The stunt worked; Fairbanks was so impressed with Wellman’s nerve that he got him a job in pictures, first acting, which Wellman hated, then directing.

  Though he was a handsome man, Wellman reminded one young actor who worked with him of Popeye the Sailor—scowling, pipe-smoking, with a wild shock of hair. Yet for all his gruffness, he had a soft side: he doted on his wife and seven children and spoke with warm emotion of the men he’d flown with in World War I. As scrappy as he was in his attitude toward studio bosses and toward actors he thought of as prima donnas, he was also intensely loyal, especially to people lower down in the pecking order. Once, when the studio installed a coffee machine on the set of one of his movies, obliging the crew to pay for coffee that had formerly been free, Wellman went on a mad tear and rolled the offending machine off the soundstage and into the men’s room. He told a studio official who came down to investigate that he’d throw his ass in there, too, and Jack Warner’s next. The crew got their free coffee back the next day.

  That day in the screening room, as he watched my father charge through the lines from Louder, Please, Wild Bill turned to Zanuck and said, “Hey if you sign this guy, I want him for my next picture.” “Yeah,” Zanuck replied. “We’re gonna sign him. If you want him, you got him.” The film Wellman had in mind was called Love Is a Racket. It was Lyle’s first Hollywood picture, and in it he played a suave gangster—the kind of role he would go on to do often—opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Directing a languorous, appraising gaze at a young woman he’s just met, Lyle delivers the best line in the picture: “If I felt half as good as you looked, I’d go out and kill myself while it lasted.” About a week into the shooting, Wellman ambled over to Lyle and clapped him on the back. “You know, Talbot. You’re really something. You’re terrific.” Lyle was flattered, thinking Wild Bill was referring to his work in the film. “Thanks, Mr. Wellman,” he said eagerly. “I’m enjoying working with you, too.”

  “Oh,” said Wellman, with another bearish swat. “You’re okay in the part. But you’re really something. You guys from the theater. You know what I mean.” He went on in this vein, as Lyle nodded politely, ever more puzzled. “That test of yours.” Oh, thought Lyle, that. “You really gave it to Zanuck. Good for you.” Wellman, the indefatigable tweaker of authority, loved the idea that Lyle was the same breed. The fact that Lyle was not was no discouragement.

  My father would go on to work with Wild Bill on two other films. They got along, though Wellman couldn’t resist setting him up, as he often did with actors, in the interest of filming a good manly brawl. On a football movie called College Coach, shot at the Rose Bowl in the middle of a hot summer, Wellman had brought in football players from USC, UCLA, and Stanford. In one scene, the opposing team was meant to tackle Lyle, playing a cocky college football star who was supposed to emerge out of the pileup triumphant, holding the football. Wellman, my father said, took the football players aside and told them, “Don’t worry about tackling Talbot, because he used to play football in Nebraska”—not true, of course. “He was a helluva player there, so he can take care of himself.” The trouble was, said my father, “these real football players can’t pull punches anyway. How are you going to get a big tackle to pull his punch? He’s in there showing off, getting paid to play football for a picture. So when this scene comes, they tackle me, and I don’t come up. I’m out cold. Wellman’s yelling, ‘Hey Talbot, Talbot, goddamn it, Talbot, get up.’” Talbot did, but only after being carried off the field in a stretcher and having his ribs taped.

  For a fight scene between my father and the actor George Brent, rivals for Barbara Stanwyck’s favor in a movie called The Purchase Price, Wellman took each man aside and conspiratorially told him to give it all he had. Lyle was a new guy on the lot, he reminded Brent, and might not even be around that long. Brent was a big star, he told Lyle, but that was precisely why Lyle had to clock him, show what he was made of. Brent and Lyle compared stories and decided there’d be no unnecessary roughness that day. Maybe Wellman’s psychological manhandling paid off anyway: it’s a good fight scene, with both men reeling in convincingly punch-drunk fashion, and Lyle ended up with a bleeding scalp when he slumped against the set’s plywood wall where a nail head was sticking out. “Wellman, of course, loved it,” recalled my father. “Real blood.”

  Through it all, Wellman continued to insist that Lyle had done the Louder, Please screen test on purpose to stick it to Zanuck. One day, after Lyle felt a bit more comfortable with Wellman, he tried to level with him: “Bill, look, you don’t think I would be stupid enough to do that, do you? I was broke, I d
idn’t have a sou. I could have been blackballed in Hollywood the rest of my life.”

  “Sure, Lyle, have it your way,” Wellman said, smiling.

  It made sense that the first role Lyle would play in Hollywood was a gangster. Warner Brothers, the studio where he had, to his surprise, landed on his feet, the studio that would be his home for most of the decade, was also the home to more gangster movies, prison pictures, and topical social dramas than any other studio. In 1932, Darryl Zanuck drafted an article for The Hollywood Reporter in which he described the Warners specialty as the “headline type of screen story. . . . Somewhere in its makeup it must have the punch and smash that would entitle it to be a headline on the front page of any successful metropolitan daily.” The studio run by the four feuding brothers, the sons of a Jewish cobbler from Poland, secured its future by becoming the first studio to embrace sound. And the sound that the studio gloried in was that of the modern city and its rougher streets: squealing tires, drumrolls of gunfire, the wisecracking, sped-up dialogue of shyster lawyers, smart-ass newspapermen, gangsters, molls, chorines, chiselers, chanteuses, and street kids. All the studios could turn out a little of everything, but each had its signature style, too. MGM was the glossy, prestige studio, celebrated for its adaptations of plays, its women’s pictures, and its firmament of highly paid stars. Paramount had a particular flair for comedy, from the Marx Brothers to Ernst Lubitsch. Universal was the specialist in horror films like Frankenstein and Dracula. And Warner Brothers was the studio that turned out movies like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Five Star Final, Wild Boys of the Road, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing.

  A Warner Brothers screenwriter named Jerry Wald remembered being called in by his bosses and given the instructions that “we could not compete with Metro and their tremendous stable of stars, so we had to go after the stories, topical ones, not typical ones. The stories became the stars. . . . We would say, ‘t-t-t: timely, topical, and not typical’—that was our slogan. . . . We were all searching frantically, looking through papers for story ideas.”

  With marching orders like these, Warner Brothers became the studio that most often depicted working people and underdogs, and that dealt—especially in movies such as Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale—the most forthrightly with the pain of the Depression. Neal Gabler in his book An Empire of Their Own argues that the distinctive Warner Brothers amalgam of “energy, suspicion, gloom, iconoclasm and liberalism” grew out of the particular experience of the brothers themselves. They saw themselves as restless outsiders in American culture and, furthermore, were fiercely divided—by profound personality differences and by their very different commitments to Judaism. Of all the Jewish movie moguls, the Warners, Gabler contends, offered the version of America that was the “least assimilative. Reflecting the divisions within the family itself, what Warner Brothers films acknowledged was that there were deep divisions—divisions of class, of roots, of style, of religion, of values.”

  Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, 1935.

  The Bruce Torrence Hollywood Photograph Collection

  It was a vision that depended on directors like Wellman and Mervyn LeRoy, who could make pictures that were fast-moving and blunt, without a lot of close-ups, and with a flair for fight scenes. Or like the Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz, who was at ease with a shadowy, menacing aesthetic that anticipated film noir. It depended, too, on actors like Cagney and Bogart, because they were so good at embodying city-boy characters who were, as Gabler describes them, “low-born, cocky and self-sufficient,” and showed “what one can accomplish against all the odds and outside the traditions.” And it depended on a group of writers the studio kept on the lot in the early 1930s, many of whom were raffish types who’d kicked around Chicago or New York and gotten an earful of urban argot and cynical storytelling.

  John Bright, for instance, was a young reporter who had written a muckraking, Menckenesque biography of a spectacularly corrupt Chicago mayor. Soon thereafter, he teamed up with a friend named Jacob Glasmon, a Polish-born druggist ten years his senior in whose store Bright had once worked as a soda jerk. Glasmon had picked up a lot of stories at the drugstore—it was on the west side of Chicago and frequented by gangsters—and he had a keen memory for incident and a good ear for street talk. But he couldn’t write a lick. For his part, Bright was a gifted if somewhat purple writer, with a fierce social conscience. One day Glasmon rigged a fire at his pharmacy, collected $500 in insurance, and with Bright took a monthlong journey by ship, through the Panama Canal, to Los Angeles. Along the way, they enjoyed themselves thoroughly at various ports of call and arrived in L.A. on Black Thursday 1929 dead broke.

  Mining their knowledge of the Chicago underworld, they immediately went to work on a novel they called Beer and Blood. “In the ensuing months,” Bright later wrote, “it became a rough go—desperate Grubb Street with the unremitting California sunshine as mockery. We learned the bitter pragmatism of hock: suits and suitcases, wristwatches, my new wife’s dresses and shoes; we even found a hole-in-the-wall to pawn socks if they didn’t smell. Almost everything went but the precious second-hand typewriter.” They couldn’t find a publisher for their novel, but through a friend, they managed to sell the screen rights for Beer and Blood to Warner Brothers, who paid them $1,800 and offered them $100 a week to work for the studio. They “leaped like spawning tuna” at the chance, Bright recalled.

  In a burst of sentimental nostalgia for his Jewish family, Glasmon changed his first name to the Yiddish diminutive Kubec. The title of their story was changed somewhere along the way, too. Darryl Zanuck got very enthused about the project, and though Bright regarded him as “vain and imperious, a tin-pot Mussolini,” he admired the fact that Zanuck, “indigenous to Hollywood, and with no baggage from any other art form,” knew “movies must move.” Wild Bill Wellman was pegged to direct. The tall, boyish actor who was meant to play the lead was replaced by the pug-faced, wound-up James Cagney. And the movie that emerged in 1931—The Public Enemy—turned out to be remarkable then and now for its harshness with its characters, its iconic lines and moments (the scene in which Cagney shoves a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face; Cagney muttering, “I ain’t so tough,” after he’s been fatally shot; the final scenes in which his gauze-wrapped corpse topples through his front door), and its willingness to poke around in the sociological seedbed of crime. At Warners, especially under Zanuck, “the writers were respected,” John Bright once said. “Treated like shit, but respected.”

  Another writer on the lot whose own story was more colorful than any he concocted was Wilson Mizner, a singular character who’d done a little of everything, very little of it reputable, on his way to a screenwriting gig at Warner Brothers in the early 1930s. With his brother, Addison, Mizner had swindled miners during the Klondike gold rush, bilked wealthy investors during the Florida land boom, and sold overpriced Guatemalan relics. On his own, he’d married a millionairess nineteen years his senior, written plays, and run a hotel in New York (a sign he hung in the elevator read “GUESTS MUST CARRY OUT THEIR OWN DEAD”). He had been an opium addict and a prizefight manager and in Hollywood had ended up as a co-owner and manager of the Brown Derby restaurant. Through it all, remarked his biographer, Alva Johnston, “his hope of finding new suckers to trim never deserted him.”

  A friend had gotten Mizner a job as a writer during the first flush of sound films. Though employed by Warner Brothers, Mizner was, in Johnston’s words, “a writer who never wrote.” Not that he didn’t contribute. It was just that his “method of collaboration was unique. At the studio he slept most of the time in a huge red plush chair, which so closely resembled an archiepiscopal throne that he was called the Archbishop. When Mizner’s literary partners needed some lines or ideas from him, they would shake him gently and start him talking. After half an hour or so, they would order him back to sleep while they sat down at their typewr
iters and worked up his conversation into script form.” And his conversation was worth it. Among the bons mots attributed to Mizner: “Be nice to people on the way up because you’ll meet the same people on the way down,” “Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore,” and “Faith is a wonderful thing, but doubt gets you an education.” Actually, my personal favorite is his assessment of his job: “Working for Warner Brothers is like fucking a porcupine: it’s a hundred pricks against one.”

  At Warner Brothers in the early 1930s, Darryl Zanuck’s modus operandi was to move quickly to buy hot properties, stories that were talked about and controversial. In 1931, the studio bought the rights to I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the memoir of a World War I veteran, Robert E. Burns, who had been caught up in a minor robbery and dispatched into the hell of Georgia’s prison-gang system. The studio lost no time turning it into a fine, and very bleak, movie. My father remembered that Warners hid Burns on the lot—he was still a wanted man—ordering in meals for him while he consulted on the film. Zanuck snatched up Warden Lewis Lawes’s bestselling account of the progressive reforms he’d introduced at Sing Sing prison in upstate New York, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. And by the end of the 1930s, Warners was on to the most topical story of all: the rise of Nazism. In 1939, the studio bought the rights to a book called The Nazi Spy Conspiracy in America, written by an FBI agent who had helped crack a Nazi spy ring within a German-American organization. The Warners took a drubbing for it: the German chargé d’affaires in Los Angeles issued a formal protest; isolationists in Congress sputtered about the malign influence of immigrants in Hollywood; Nazi sympathizers burned down a theater in Milwaukee where the movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy was playing.