20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  It was a warm April afternoon in 1936, a full year after I’d arrived back in Hollywood again. Santa Ana winds had been predicted but only arrived late and at half-force. I, however, was a much stronger force, and without a doubt one to be reckoned with at the studio, having established a youth market for the Lion, solidified my and Sue-Ann Schiller’s joint stardom, and then produced very healthy box-office grosses for our six youth movies, the last of which had just opened to the best opening take of any of them. Slowly but surely, I’d taken on as much control as I could of the movies as one succeeded (in all ways) the previous one. First with the dialogue, then with providing stories, then writing the entire scripts, and even moving on to casting. As our names and reputations rose in the still quite little industry, as my box office increased, so had my grasp, which was more important to me than the money I was earning. These days, Rafferty, Seiter, and I were a team. I was an equal among equals inside the offices, and other executives who’d ignored me before now called me by name and greeted me. Rafferty had even recently reported that Mayer was overheard at an industry party boasting about his two wunderkinds: Irving Thalberg and Christopher Hall.

  Copies of my script sat all around the room, several on Mayer’s desk, others upon coffee tables, a few on people’s laps. None were being held closely—which I took as a bad sign: they were distancing themselves from it.

  There was a general murmur among the others. The director I’d been working with for all of my movies so far, William Seiter, even touched his script, as though acknowledging its existence. My usual producer at MGM, Thom Rafferty, tapped his script three times with stiff fingertips.

  “Well, I read it,” Goldwyn answered, as though daring the others. “Anyone else?”

  “I read it,” Thom Rafferty said. “It’s…very, very sad, Christopher, what it says about…this country…and all,” he trailed off, afraid to speak up.

  “It’s all completely accurate,” I defended. “Taken from life. Based on interviews with twenty-five boys and young men that were arranged for me by various physicians, thanks to Dr. Weissman, here at the studio.”

  “And then, after I read it,” Rafferty added, “I couldn’t get to sleep until four a.m.”

  “And of course I have to mention,” I paused, “that a few of the scenes are based upon what I myself witnessed and experienced as a youngster. But some of you may have already known that.”

  Rafferty and Seiter acknowledged with mumbling that they heard something.

  No one else spoke for a while and then Mayer burst out, “My wife read it before I got a chance to. She was intrigued by the title, she said, and she just grabbed it off the pile on my desk. She was in hysterics afterward. Crying for hours. I had to call in a doctor to sedate her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Mayer. But the truth is, I sugarcoated everything.”

  “Sugarcoated it?”

  “It made me cry, Christopher. Me? ‘Rhinestone Willy’!” Seiter said, using the nickname people at the studio had given him for directing any film for money. “The last thing I read that made me cry, I was six years old. Six!”

  “Does young Sammy have to die…?” Rafferty began.

  I quickly answered, “Yes. Boys out there on the road died.”

  “I was going to say, quite so horribly?” Rafferty asked.

  “They died more horribly than that,” I said. “What’s important is that our hero Joe lives. He makes it all across the country and here to Los Angeles,” I added, by way of amelioration. “He makes it to the Wonder City of the West.”

  “You didn’t give it to Sue-Anne to read?” Louis B. asked, suddenly concerned.

  “I did, Mr. Mayer. She reads all of my scripts. I want her opinion.”

  “I dread to think what that poor girl thought,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Well, Mr. Mayer, you know that Sue-Ann was also kicking around a bit on her own. Actually, she thought it was my best script ever, her exact words. And she also thought that if I got anyone else to play Lois, you remember her, the young woman who helps the boys at her own cost? Well, Sue-Ann said she’d never speak to me again.”

  “That role will ruin her career,” Rafferty said.

  “Her career as a teenage star, yes. She’s aware of that.”

  The look of consternation on the other’s faces was obvious: was this the death of a franchise?

  “She made me promise to not offer the role to anyone else. Of course, I’ll play Joe,” I added. “And,” to Mayer and Goldwyn, I added, pointedly, “naturally, I’ll defer my salary as screenwriter and actor until the film opens and earns it back.”

  No one had ever said that to Louis B. Mayer before and he gawked at me, simply sat there open-mouthed.

  “Wannamaker and Wolff will contact you with the details of what we’re asking to be deferred,” I added.

  “It won’t be cheap to make,” one of the other suits in the room said. An accountant named Wilberson, who had signed off on the increasing expense of the Schiller and Hall movies. “It’s got locations. It’s got a big cast. Costumes. Vehicles. It’ll be double the budget of the last two.”

  “I’ll be exec producer on it,” Rafferty surprised me by saying. “If we make a realistic cost-out, I’ll bring it in within budget.”

  A shark with a heart? Or just very canny?

  Goldwyn now turned to Seiter. “You wouldn’t want to direct this, Will? Would you? It really doesn’t seem your kind of thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not really. It really is Christopher’s project. But I’m willing to try my hand on something different. For the first time, as I read the script I was suddenly seeing scene set-ups, two-shots, even some lighting cues. If you want, I would do all the expensive stuff in the movie. Then Christopher and I can work out the more intimate scenes together.”

  “Really, Will?” Mayer asked, surprised.

  “Really, L.B. In an ideal world, George probably would direct it. Or Victor Fleming. Couldn’t you talk to one of them about it? What are they doing, anyway?”

  “Fleming’s up to his ears with projects and Cukor’s over in Liverpool shooting exteriors for that film with Hepburn and Brian Aherne.”

  “Camille? I thought that was Garbo and Taylor?”

  “It is. And that’s another one Cukor is signed up for.” Turning to Wilberson, “What is it, Walter? That’s right, Sylvia Scarlett!” Then to Thalberg, who’d snuck into the room, unobserved until then, “Irv, what’s the status on Romeo and Juliet?”

  “It’s in post-production, L.B. It looks great!”

  “And Rathbone worked out?”

  “He’s great. Norma, of course, will carry it!”

  “Sure, she will, Irv.” A pause and then Mayer turned to me: “Is that what you want, too, Christopher? Co-directing? On top of everything else?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you rather wait for Cukor? He’ll be done with everything by the middle of ’37.”

  “Mr. Mayer. I think the time for this movie is now. So we can get it out at the end of the year. The choice of Will as director is fine with me. We proved that we work together well. But as he said, I’d really like to be there for every scene.”

  “By the way, Chris,” Goldwyn asked, “is that a dolly shot? You know, when the boys begin jumping out of the darkness at the moving train? Is that a four-minute dolly shot?”

  “Three minutes and ten seconds. For two hundred and twenty feet,” I said. Letting him know I’d done the technical preparation too. “It will be twenty-six boys jumping for the train. Jumping for their lives, really! It could look amazing at thirty feet high on a movie screen.”

  Louis B. stood up and faced the window. We all waited.

  He began mumbling and the rest of the room was quiet enough that I heard some of it.

  When he turned to face us, I thought for sure American Boys was dead.

  “I’m a Republican. Damn it. I’d have to be completely out of my mind to approve this picture.”

  “Then why do it?” the n
ervous Wilberson asked.

  “Because my wife’ll never let me into the house again if I don’t.”

  *

  American Boys opened in early December 1936. We had targeted the same audiences that had come to the six previous Schiller and Hall movies by handing out at those shows advance theater cards for the new movie. We showed lengthy coming attractions to them, with just enough footage of what the film was really going to be about to make an impression.

  We then checked our “impression cards” at the end of that week of coming attractions, asking what they thought of this new movie they had not yet seen. The kids’ comments were extremely favorable. At last, the real deal! someone had written. I’ll go if it kills me a girl had neatly printed.

  Finally, by Halloween, we had most of the film shot and put together and Rafferty said it was now or never: we had to have an MGM executives-only showing.

  The rushes had been powerful as they’d come in and the first full edit was, as I had hopefully predicted, amazing, even without all of the music. The scene with all the boys suddenly coming out of hiding and leaping into the open boxcars as the train takes off, leaping from darkness and into almost bleached-out light while Joe fights off the railroad yard guards to distract them, was gorgeous, and it packed a real punch.

  I had talked Sid Devlin into playing Sammy as the wisecracking, over-mature young man he actually was, and I’d annoyed and harassed him personally before each of his scenes. As a result, Sid had come across onscreen at his prickliest and most entertaining. But even to me, not to mention to all who knew the script, the death of his character in the last fifteen minutes of the movie came as an unexpectedly emotional surprise. It provided the sense of personal loss that I hoped every audience member would also experience.

  We shot Sue-Anne like an Angel of Mercy, and her murder was equally horrifying; she was left lying in the barn like a discarded doll, like a Christ without his cross, sunlight burning down through the open hayloft.

  The other boys’ safe but filthy and bedraggled arrival into a transcendental Pacific Coast sunrise was done in extreme close-up, hair and shoulders cropped close to concentrate on their faces in harsh light. We slowly panned each individual face, so they resembled a gallery of portraits you would never forget.

  Joe’s last speech to them, almost a minute long, set against the newly built Broadway bridge from Chinatown over Sunset Blvd. and then into downtown L.A., sounded to me like a sermon and a rallying cry combined. Seiter had backed me on its length at this late place in the story and he’d outdone himself with every angle and every shot. In an interview later on, he would say that until this production, he’d merely been “moving people around a set,” but that having to deal with all of the challenges of American Boys had turned him into a movie director.

  All sixteen of us at the executives screening filed out of the studio room after the film without saying a word.

  Outside everyone lighted cigarettes and pipes. I chewed gum. No one said a word for a long time.

  Then Goldwyn turned to me: “I’ll say this for you, Christopher, and you, Seiter, and Rafferty, too: You’re not in the junior league anymore.”

  “I think we’ve got a monster hit!” Seiter said, enthused.

  “Frankenstein and King Kong were monster hits,” Goldwyn assured him. “This could just as easily be a monster, period.”

  Despite that sobering estimate he managed to convince Mayer to open the film as big as possible, with every bit they could harness of studio support. That of course told me that they wanted me to remain a featured actor under contract no matter what happened to what I believe they considered an “experiment” of mine.

  At the premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre several weeks later, everyone was dolled up and sparkling, no one more than Sue-Anne and me.

  We arrived last, in a gigantic, two-toned Pierce Arrow Brougham limousine, dressed in the highest of formal wear. She wore her hair up, signaling that her youth was over, as well as a diamond choker and a white ermine chubby. I wore a shiny ebony tuxedo with lapels sharp enough to maim, and white tie: my accessories were eighteen karat gold, signaling I was grown-up and successful. All of what would later be called “re-imaging” of us former teen stars was Frances Wannamaker and Thom Rafferty’s idea (with a little help from me), and the actual costuming and accessorization took two days to complete.

  Everyone came to meet us, from Louella and Hedda to George Burns and Jack Benny. On the red carpet in front of hundreds, we spoke into giant radio mikes and it was neat, a lot of fun. There had been no previous audience full-film screenings and so there was only an indication of what we were going to see. Some word had leaked out of the studio that this film would be different and superior to the usual Schiller and Hall picture, but that too had been carefully controlled, and just enough had been leaked to titillate the gossip mavens, who fell beautifully into line. Louella asked Sue-Ann, “Don’t you think that after this movie screens you’ll be compared to Virginia Grey and Paulette Godard now?” And to me, “Rumor has it, Christopher, that now that they’ve lost the late and great Irving Thalberg, the Lion’s top brass believe you might be able to take over some of his projects at the studio.” All of which we very graciously denied.

  Several other MGM actors of the day (the studio’s motto was “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven”) had already arrived, including the young Eleanor Powell and Spencer Tracy and the older favorites Edmund Gwenn and W.C. Fields. They welcomed us warmly in a special section of the lounge as we entered. Expectation misted the air.

  Once everyone had found their assigned seats, Sue-Anne got up in front of the crowd before the lights went down and before the movie would begin.

  First, she explained that there would be no cartoons or coming attractions or shorts at this showing, which earned her restrained boos. Undaunted, she read my little introductory speech.

  “Seven years of the worst depression in modern times has broken families, torn children from their parents, ripped apart homes and dreams, and ended promising lives. It has also left a large unformed army of children wandering the great American land, from cities and villages to deserts and swamps, and across mountain passes. Hungry, ill, abandoned and in need, innocent prey to every wrong that is possible in human life. This is the story of several of them. This is American Boys.”

  Ten minutes into the film, I got so nervous I had to leave my seat.

  Even that wasn’t enough to calm me down, and I left the theater altogether.

  I wandered among all the parked limousines, chatting with the drivers. I was far too nervous to think about what was going on inside that hall where nine hundred people were experiencing the first piece of art I had made here and now, back in time.

  I knew the film was good, I knew it was true. I also knew I had pandered to the taste of the time somewhat by making my boys heroic and their persecutors diabolical. And I also wondered if Sammy’s death would be viewed by later times as sentimental mawkishness.

  And then, just as suddenly, I knew the entire thing was a disaster. It had to be. No one could accept this vision of America.

  I’d been a fool, a fool filled with hubris yet, to even begin it. What had possessed me to think anyone could care? That anyone would want to share this horror? My career was over. My new name was eternally besmirched. My new life was over only a year and a half after it had begun. Where could I hide? How could I get away? Maybe, if I turned and walked calmly, the opposite of what I actually felt, up San Vicente all the way up to Wilshire Blvd.…? All those empty nighttime streets! I could see the newly installed tall lights on Wilshire from here, and I could calmly remove my white tie as I went along and I could mess up my sleeked and pomaded hair and then take off my tux jacket, and maybe toss it casually over one shoulder, and maybe, just maybe I could pass for anyone else coming out of one of the two or three theaters located up there.

  Who would think to stop me? There was enough traffic there at night that I could find a cab
and pay to get me the hell out of town as far as my money would go. How much cash did I have with me, anyway? $100, $110? How far could that get me? To a train station and then maybe up to San Francisco and beyond. Why stop there? Why not Chicago? New York, even!? I began walking away.

  “Mr. Hall! Mr. Hall!”

  I turned, about to say, you’ve got the wrong guy, buddy. Lay off. Leave me alone.

  It was Wilberson, the accountant for our movie from MGM. He looked confused.

  “Where are you going? The theater’s this way.”

  He circled a fleshy arm around my shoulders and turned me around and firmly walked me into the outside circle of the theater where news and magazine photographers had huddled, and where a spate of flashbulbs suddenly went off all at once, photographing me, and thus confirming my last moments of any remaining grace or style or dignity. Then another Suit found us and together the two of them all but dragged me into the theater lobby.

  Not a soul could be seen. Where was all the theater staff?

  The two all but dragged me over to the porthole-windowed double doors that led from the lobby into the orchestra section of the theater, and at last I understood that I could not escape, that I must in fact undergo an utter public humiliation.

  They each opened one of those double doors into darkness and flickering light from the screen. The ushers and all the rest of the theater staff were there, popcorn and soda sellers hidden by the doors under the overhanging loge, closely packed into the upper aisle, all watching the movie.

  It was the last frames: Joe on that bridge, with the sunrise behind him, as he looked up, a sun-drenched statue in Seiter’s bleached-out, almost Graeco-Roman photography, defying the black universe as Joe had come to know it.

  The music rose and rose, and then Joe turned away, and he walked along that bridge and into the big city just coming to life at morning, and he became smaller and darker and darker and smaller until he was gone.