by Howard Fast
‘Why?’Max asked.
‘Landscape. You just couldn’t have the kind of spread and scenery you want out there on Harry Culver’s property. Now here, going north, we got Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. Neither of them offers the space or scenery you need.’
‘What about down there in the south?’ Snyder asked.
‘Right through here, oil fields and tank farms. Over at Palos Verdes, hills and subdivisions. Inland, it’s flat and mostly pretty miserable country. I’m just laying it out now. Tomorrow, we can drive through those places, because I don’t want you to feel that I’m pushing you into some area out of self-interest. I know that if you bring your business out here, there’s going to be hundreds of people wanting homes and property, so if I deal with you right at this point, I got a lot of business coming my way.’
‘Makes sense,’ Max agreed. ‘You must have given this a lot of thought, Stanley. What’s your idea?’
‘All right. Now right here, there’s a range of hills they call the Santa Monica Mountains, and inland here, they call them the Hollywood Hills. They’re not really mountains, because none of them are much more than a thousand feet high, but they come up sharp and they look impressive. Now here, to the north of these hills, is an area called the San Fernando Valley. Most of it is flat or easily rolling, and practically none of it is subdivided, and the land is cheap. You can pick it up for two, three hundred dollars an acre, and up north for less than that. You got plenty of open space, and here, here and here’ – pointing to the eastern, western, and northern rims of the valley – ‘you got just the most spectacular mountain scenery you’ll see anywhere in the West. You travel west toward the Malibu canyon, and you’ll see some of the loveliest ranchland in California – cheap. You been talking about cowboys and Indians. Well, you can pick up a ranch of five, six hundred acres just for peanuts, and if you want some desert scenery that beats anything you ever dreamed of, you got Death Valley just a hoot and a holler away, a day’s drive. You got all that, and still can come up through the Cahuenga Pass and be in downtown Los Angeles in an hour and a half or so. Now my suggestion would be the eastern edge of the valley, where you got both a nice flat space and the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains practically in your back yard. So there it is, and tomorrow we can begin to look at it.’
The following morning, with the three men loaded into his big Pierce Arrow Tourister, well armed with cold drinks, beer, and sandwiches, Meyer warned them, ‘Don’t be put off by our local roads. It’s true that most of them are no better than cart tracks, but just remember that twenty years ago this city practically wasn’t here. Now it’s growing like no other place in these here United States. If you build a studio the city will build roads to connect you. Might cost a dollar or two in smearing, but what doesn’t. From what I hear about Tammany Hall, you’re no stranger to a little vigorish.’
‘It’s been known to happen,’ Max agreed.
‘I’m trying to be truthful,’ Meyer said.
‘Nobody ever made a buck out of the truth. Just show us.’
He showed them for the next four hours. They labored north on a dirt road to the village of Hollywood, then they turned west onto Hollywood Boulevard, another dirt road between an avenue of broad-branched pecan trees. They turned south at Fairfax, down into the Wiltshire Valley, where there were few houses, but many sweeping barley and wheat fields, many of them gone to seed and weeds, their only crop a veritable forest of oil derricks. A broad dirt road to the west was euphemistically titled Wilshire Boulevard, mostly oil-surfaced gravel, with here and there short stretches that appeared to be asphalt pavement. The farmers who owned the fields that surrounded the oil derricks, taking a river of black gold out of the ground, had given up farming and with it irrigation, and most of the fields were brown and lifeless. The farmhouses that one could see from Wilshire Boulevard were decaying, as were the roadside sheds where once produce had been loaded for shipping; only here and there, a newly installed gasoline station bespoke prosperity.
‘It looks pretty lousy,’ Meyer admitted, ‘but a feller called Burt Green has an idea that may change things. Right here, where we are now, used to be the Rancho Rodeo Las Aguas, and Green put together an outfit called the Rodeo Land and Water Company and bought up the entire old Spanish land grant, and they named the place Beverly Hills.’
‘Who’s Beverly?’ Feldman asked. ‘His wife?’
‘That’s the funniest part of it. You know, President Taft used to take his holidays at a place in Massachusetts called Beverly Farms. For some reason, Green picked up the name, and since the tract includes those hills to the north, he named it Beverly Hills. I was at a dinner a few weeks ago that Green put together for a group of real estate brokers, and he fed us like pashas and spent an hour and a half telling us what he intended to do with this tract. He wants to incorporate it as an independent city, even though it’s mostly surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, but he can do it if he can build the population to five hundred people, and he thinks he can do that in the next few months. Then he plans to subdivide into streets and lots and turn the place into one of the fanciest towns in America. He’s selling full-acre lots for fifteen hundred dollars and half-acres for a thousand, and it might be an interesting investment if you locate here. Not for the studio, of course, but for homes.’
They continued westward, the road becoming worse, the few houses even less prepossessing, what was euphemistically called Wilshire Boulevard becoming Orange Boulevard, the oil derricks increasing, the tart smell of raw oil filling the air. As they approached the sea, the air became sweeter, and at Santa Monica, they paused to change a tire at the edge of a high palisade-type bluff. It was quite pleasant here, cottages already fronting the road that ran along the top of the bluff. Meyer, pointing to the marshy wetlands below them, said, ‘When we clean that up, maybe another year, we’ll have one of the finest beaches in the country. What you got to realise is that this town is boiling. Come back in twelve months and you won’t recognise it.’
They ate their sandwiches and drank their beer at Santa Monica, and then, swinging southward, they made their way back to the hotel. Meyer arranged to pick them up again bright and early the following morning.
Before dinner, Max spent an hour on the telephone, speaking to New York, and at the dinner table he announced, ‘I telephoned Cliff Abel. I told him to get his ass out here, so I’ll be here for another week, and I guess both of you will be here too – a week at least, maybe more.’
‘Do you think he’s the man for it?’ Snyder wondered.
‘Aren’t you moving a bit fast?’ Feldman wondered. ‘This is a strange place. Max, and to tell you the truth, it kind of gives me the creeps. What do we know about it? We’re a million miles from anywhere.’
‘You’re right. We don’t know a damn thing about this place, but I can smell it. It’s crazy as hell, but it’s right. It’s right for making moving pictures. We can’t go on cooped up back there downtown and up in Harlem, and every time it snows and rains we got to pull our cameras out of the streets and with the goddamn telephone company and Edison every Montag and Dunnershtick slapping an injunction at us for some piece of equipment Sam here puts together, and we’re ready to film and none of the cast can get there on account of the weather. This place is new and open. It makes sense for us even if it makes no sense any other way.’
Feldman looked at Snyder, who nodded and said, ‘Max is right. I know how you must feel, Freddy, because you got all that family back in New York. Me and Alice, we’re from Milwaukee, so it’s no great shakes for us to pick up the kids and move out here. But Max is right. We got to get out of New York. Maybe someday Eastman will come up with film that lets us shoot pictures out of doors without sunlight, but right now we’re going crazy trying to meet our schedule.’
‘You got to understand, Freddy,’ Max said gently, ‘what a moving picture is. I’m only just beginning to understand it myself. It moves. The writers keep giving us wonderful scenarios we can’t
shoot because we got to stay indoors. If we stay in New York, Lasky and Ince and Biograph and even a bum like Lunberg are going to makes us look like bums. No, sir. Absolutely not. As soon as we decide with Meyer where to start building, I’m leaving Sam here with you and I’m going back to start things moving. I’m going to have a company shooting out here next month, so you might as well accept it. You got to find lodging and all the rest. Meanwhile, Cliff Abel starts building the studio.’
‘Max, that’s crazy,’ Feldman protested. ‘You can’t move so quickly. We got three studios back east, not to mention the Hobart Building and the theatres. You don’t liquidate something like that overnight.’
‘Who says anything about liquidating? We’ll keep the studios and keep making pictures there. Bert Bellamy can run the operation there. But meanwhile, we’ll build one big studio here, one studio big enough to take care of everything, a place where we can shoot twenty-five, thirty pictures at one time.’
‘I give up,’ Feldman said hopelessly.
The following morning, Meyer loaded them into his big Pierce Arrow again, and like the canny salesman he was, having shown them the dismal oil fields and tank farms of West Hollywood and West Los Angeles, drove them north through the Cahuenga Pass into the San Fernando Valley. ‘It’s not like we’re that far out of town,’ he explained to them, pointing to one of the big red interurban cars that was careening through the pass alongside them. ‘These cars will put you in downtown Los Angeles in half an hour. A great transportation system. But also, we’ll have a paved road into the valley by the first of the year.’
Max stared, fascinated, as they swept down into the valley. This was as close to a Garden of Eden as he had ever come – the air as sweet as honey, orange groves, pecan and pear and peach groves, as far as the eye could see – no oil derricks here – but a valley fruitful and lovely and succulent, ringed with high and splendid mountains, unspoiled and marvelous. No doubt, this was why he had come here. This was the place.
‘I can get you a hundred acres for twenty-five thousand dollars,’ Meyer told him.
‘Three hundred acres,’ Max said. ‘I want three hundred acres,’ thinking of the only poem he knew by heart:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round.
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
‘Mama,’ Max said, ‘it’s not a wild place filled with Indians. Nobody walks up to you and shoots you. Believe me, I swear to you.’
‘Freida was crying her eyes out. You realise that? Or maybe you’re too busy running around with shiksas to remember you got a sister, she’s thirty-four years old and she ain’t married. What will she find out there, cowboys?’
‘We should be that lucky.’
‘Yeah? That’s a way to talk?’ Sarah began to weep. ‘Kill me. Then you got no responsibilities.’
‘Mama, don’t cry. Please. I can’t stand it when you cry.’
‘All my life I slaved my heart out for my children. I worked my fingers to the bone. And what do I get –’ She submerged herself in her tears.
‘Mama, please.’
‘First,’ she sobbed, ‘you pull me out of my home in Henry Street and drag me uptown, I don’t know a soul. So now I make myself a little life here, now I got two married daughters and my sons are married, with grandchildren, what a woman dreams about, and you tell me I should leave this and be killed by Indians.’
‘There are no Indians in California, Mama. I swear to you.’
‘What then? Wild Buffalo Bills?’
‘It’s a place like any other place.’
‘What does Sally think about all this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘Nobody told you?’ Max said uncertainly.
‘What should they tell me?’
‘Sally and me, we’re separated. We’re going to be divorced.’
‘What!’
‘Don’t get excited, Mama,’ Max begged her.
‘Oh? Sure, I shouldn’t get excited. Only my home is taken away from me and my grandchildren are taken away from me, and I shouldn’t get excited.’
‘Mama, I’m not taking away your home. You can live here with Freida, if she wants to, only she told me she wants to go to California. Ruby and Benny are both going to California. I gave that bum Esther is married to a job mismanaging the Bijou, but Sheila’s husband seems to like the idea of moving to California –’
‘So I should stay here!’ Sarah snapped. ‘Then you’re rid of me, and I’m left with that cold-fish stuck-up wife of yours, thinks she’s better than anybody in the world. So why bother? Kill me! Throw me out in the street to die from the cold! That’s better.’
‘Mama, nobody’s getting rid of you. I told you, I bought this lot in Beverly Hills, and Clifford Abel’s designing a house for us. It’s a seven-bedroom house, with plenty of room for you and for Freida. And there’s no hurry, because the house won’t be ready for another six months at least, and maybe a year.’
Actually, it was a year and a half before Max’s Beverly Hills home was complete, and during most of that time, Max lived in a tiny cottage that had been part of the three-hundred-acre tract he purchased in the San Fernando Valley. During that time, he made five two-way train trips between Los Angeles and New York, but it was after his return from his first trip to Los Angeles that he spoke to his mother and Sally. Even though his mother’s house and Sally’s house stood side by side – his own living quarters having been transferred to a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria – he could not take the few steps from Sarah’s house to Sally’s. The door was barred to him, and Sally’s response to his voice on the telephone was to slam the receiver down on its cradle. Finally, after several discussions with Fred Feldman, Sally agreed to see him, and for the first time in months he went up the steps of the brownstone that had once been his home. The date had been made for two o’clock in the afternoon, when the children were still in school, but Max had every intention of prolonging the visit until they returned. It could not be said that he actually missed his son and daughter. Richard and Marion were far too much strangers for him to feel any real pangs of separation, but he had a gnawing sense of duty combined with guilt.
Sally answered the door herself. She was wearing a white, lace-trimmed blouse of cambric and an ankle-length gray skirt of fine, thin wool. Her hair was drawn back and held by a ribbon at the nape of her neck, and there was just the faintest touch of rouge on her face and lips. Except that her face had become somewhat more severe, her mouth tightened and held in place by tiny lines at the corners, she looked no different than she had when Max married her twelve years before. She had gained little if any weight, her figure trim and tight; yet, looking at her now, Max could not find any response in himself, any emotional quiver that would explain to him why he had been so compulsively driven to her years before.
Sally, on the other hand, did give evidence of an emotional response; she regarded Max coldly, almost with loathing, and told him evenly that she had set aside a half-hour for his visit, which would mean that he would not see his children after all. He didn’t contest that immediately, but simply nodded and went into the house.
Seated stiffly in the parlor, Sally said without preamble, ‘I suppose you’ve come to talk about the settlement. I have agreed to Feldman’s proposal about the stock for myself and twenty thousand dollars a year support as well as this property and your mother’s house. But I also want five percent of the company stock for each of the children.’
‘Why?’ Max was taken aback by
this. ‘When I die, the kids get everything.’
‘When you die is a long time off, and with that wolf-pack family of yours, they’ll fight for every penny, Also, God only knows what low creature you’ll be living with then.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Max said tiredly. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Sally. I just don’t understand why you hate me so much.’
‘Hate is not the word. I despise you.’
‘Yeah. I don’t know as many words as you. I still don’t know why you hate me. What did I ever do to you?’
‘Aside from making me the laughingstock of this city, aside from going to bed with every actress you employ –’
‘That’s crazy. What do you mean, every actress I employ? That’s a lot of crap and you know it.’
‘I love your elegant English. Are you going to deny that you had an affair with Della O’Donnell and were practically living with her all those years while we were still married? And that slut, Etta Goodman. And Alexa – that bitch you call Natalie Love. Oh, why go on?’
‘Because there’s no place to go. So I did it. Why in hell don’t you ask yourself why? Going to bed with you was like going to bed with a goddamn iceberg, and since the kids came, your high-class cunt is locked as tight as the vault at the Chase Bank!’
Sally leaped to her feet and snapped, ‘I won’t have that kind of filthy talk in my house! I think you should get out!’
‘Damn it, Sally, what did I do to you? Why do you hate me?’
Sally stared at him, her face quivering with rage. ‘You had better go, Mr Britsky. I don’t want you here.’ Her voice shook, and she appeared to be fighting to get the words out. ‘I don’t want you here at all. You disgust me. You’re a dirty, nasty little man, and you disgust me.’
Sighing, Max rose and said, ‘I’m sorry, Sally. I didn’t want anything like this to happen. Sometimes I think I’m going nuts because I just don’t know what happened. We loved each other, didn’t we?’
