Based on a True Story, page 14
“Oneway andhay ashesway ethay otherway. One hand washes the other.”
“Allen, what could I possibly do for you? I’m just a screenwriter.” I paused. It didn’t seem like enough. Surely I could do worse. “A Negro, faggot, Commie, screenwriting hack.”
“Who went to Harvard.”
“They can put it on my tombstone. It’s not really much good otherwise.”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“You went to law school.”
“For a year.”
“Harvard Law School.”
“It doesn’t count unless you graduate, Allen. Then you’ve got to pass the bar. Without following through it was just an idea. My parents’ really. They thought I should be a credit to my race. In the end they got a son with credits in race movies. I wouldn’t have made much of a lawyer. Law school put me to sleep.”
“But you went to law school with people.”
Where was he headed? “That’s the way it usually goes, Allen.”
“I looked you up.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Harvard, class of ’33. Harvard Law, class of ’36.”
“Except I quit in ’34.”
“You said.” Sloane reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket—single-breasted, the coming style, precisely what I planned to go out and buy, his a soft, loosely woven tan. The hat beside him was dark brown, with a thin tan band. On his feet were artfully made white-and-brown oxfords. For a straight white man, he had style. “Let me give you some names. You tell me if they ring a bell.”
He started reading from a typed sheet in a curiously thin voice, maybe an octave higher than normal, as though he had rehearsed it and needed to succeed. I had seen actors do this at auditions when there was more than a role at stake. Immediately I recognized the names. He must have gotten hold of the list of the class of ’36. To each name he appended a title, or a description. It was easy to see how he was such a good handicapper of horses. He knew more about my former classmates than I did, maybe more than they did. Two were clerks to federal judges, about a dozen worked for the Department of Justice directly, one was with the FBI, one with Immigration, three were in the State Department, a dozen or so were in state government, including two in California. “The rest are in private practice or business,” he said. “One died—tuberculosis, that’s a killer. Larry, you Harvard Law guys, you are at the top of your profession. There isn’t a sweet spot you aren’t in.”
“Allen, I’m not a Harvard Law guy.”
“For my purposes, you are.”
“What purposes?”
He folded the paper slowly, slipped it back into his breast pocket and at the same time with his right hand pulled the gold cigarette case out, effortlessly extracted a Viceroy, and lit it with the gold lighter that appeared in his left. Magic. He took a long drag, sucking hard through the crude filter. That’s the way they made them, then. In the gay community—we didn’t call it that, then—we sniggered that we knew what it meant when a fellow sucked hard on a Viceroy. Of course, straights smoked them too. “Larry, maybe I don’t look like it, but I am a desperate man. I’m going to be kicked out of my own country. If that happens, and I don’t have Vitamin P, I’m going to end up in some jungle-bunny country, no offense, where the currency is coconuts. I got someone I love who wants to be with me, but it’s going to be hard for both of us in Bora Bora.”
“Allen, you lost me at Vitamin P.”
“Vitamin P. Protection. I need some help from people in a position. I’m well connected in certain quarters, but in others, like federal judges, you might say I’m a stranger. When I heard you are a Harvard man and went to Harvard Law School to boot, I concluded you are my ticket.”
“For the last time, Allen, I’m not anyone’s ticket to anything, much less Vitamin P. I’m just a colored queer.”
“Does it hurt you to try?”
“You want me to try?”
“That’s all I’m asking. I did for you.”
“You did, and I’m grateful. But I don’t know what I’m trying for.”
“You’re trying to help me out. I’m a friend. A friend tries to help a friend.”
I found myself sighing. Allen Sloane was right. I didn’t know what it was I was trying, but the least I could do was try.
Fritz slept on.
X
The next day, September 3rd, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany. Call me callow, but I recall the date because Fritz showed up at the Garden of Allah with a sheaf of papers he pulled out of his battered German briefcase.
“It is the land of liberty, so I took it,” he said, and sat down heavily on the green leather sofa. He lit a Chesterfield. “Would you like to read?”
“Read?”
He handed me a folder. Neatly typed on a square, red-bordered, yellow sticker on the front page was this:
HOOFBEATS OF LIBERTY
an original film script by
Laurence Bellringer and Fritz von Blum
Someone had crossed out “film” and replaced it with the word “movie” in a delicate and formal hand. I flipped to the last page, one-twelve. “Who wrote this?”
“We did,” the little man said.
“We? I didn’t.”
“Certainly you did. We wrote it together. You and I. We sat, we talked, we worked, we plotted. We created.”
“We created?”
“I typed,” he said.
“This is a whole script, Fritz. I don’t know how good it is, but it is a script.”
“Larry, it is a marvelous script,” he said. “Full of history, romance, heroism. It resonates, if that is the correct word. Acta est fabula.”
“The story has been completed?”
“Perfect, my dear Larry. And they say all Negroes can do is play jazz music and tap-dance.”
“Apparently we can write entire scripts without putting one word on paper.”
“Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit.”
“Add a little...”
“Add little to little and eventually there will be a big pile.”
There remained the question: A big pile of what? I sat down in the easy chair opposite the green leather couch, upon which Fritz was already stretching out, and turned to the first page. By the time I got to the second Fritz was asleep. When I reached the end I went to make a pot of coffee. “I’ve never read anything like this,” I said, while the little man held a steaming cup in his hand and looked down into it as though it contained more secrets, more structure, more dialogue, more tension, more laughter, more tears, more... life. “Fritzi, how did you do it?”
He sipped from the coffee. “In magnis voluisse sat est.”
“In big...”
“In great things,” he said, “will is enough.”
XI
Looking back, 1939 was a hell of a year. A loaf of bread cost eight cents; Kate Smith, America’s sweetheart, was on the radio endlessly belting out God Bless America, which was written by an immigrant Jew who called himself Irving Berlin; Pan American started regular flights across the Atlantic; DDT was invented and so were nylon stockings; Gone With the Wind won the Oscar for best picture; the Spanish Civil War ended; the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and conquered Poland; London was bombed by the Luftwaffe; the World’s Fair opened in New York; and EZ Shelupsky burned down his own studio.
Maybe not. In Hollywood cynicism comes easy. But the timing was just too convenient. For weeks after, jokes flew around town about Jewish arson—“Hey, Izzy, you should get flood insurance also.” “Flood insurance? How do you make a flood?”—and were reprised when EZ announced he was not going to rebuild but sell to a real-estate developer. The jokes were more good-natured than anything else, because it was no secret that race movies did not have much of a future, and the only people who would miss them were the colored actors who would not find work in mainstream pictures. Aside from maids and chauffeurs, there were not a lot of roles for darkies: When Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar that year for her role in Gone With The Wind, it seemed not so much to refute this sad fact as to emphasize it. But change was also in the air.
In New York, a fellow named Barney Josephson opened a nightclub called Café Society that publicly welcomed racially mixed clientele; by 1940, there were three such clubs in Los Angeles—of course, the queer bars had been integrated for years. Some of this loosening up was an indirect reaction to the race hatred that came out of Germany like a stench—Confessions of a Nazi Spy was a huge hit at the box office. The crushing end of the Spanish Civil War as well as Stalin’s pact with Hitler hadn’t left many causes for the American left: Ending racial prejudice became a rallying cry.
For a long time it had been clear the country was not exactly hot to join the British and French in “their” war—icons like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford spoke out strongly against U.S. involvement, and they were listened to. And there was popular sentiment that went further than isolationism: on Washington’s birthday that year, the German-American Bund brought over 20.000 American Nazis to a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York where Roosevelt was booed and Hitler cheered. Despite this, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st and the other Western democracies entered the war two days later, there was no question where the U.S. was headed. Where I was headed was a meeting with EZ Shelupsky to determine the fate of a script.
With his office destroyed and his studio in ruins, the producer had me come to his home in the San Ysidro Canyon, next-door to Pickfair, which Douglas Fairbanks had bought for Mary Pickford, and where she still lived with her second husband, Buddy Rogers. You couldn’t see Pickfair from EZ’s property. Too much of EZ’s property was in the way. It looked like the Alhambra, but with less restraint—and many more palm trees. The pool alone was as big as a lagoon and feverishly decked-out with boulders, ferns, flowers, parrots and macaws—neither the rocks nor the plants nor the tropical birds any more real than a backlot set.
“Alive birds,” EZ told me from the chaise where he was smoking a six-inch cigar behind sunglasses so dark they seemed black. “They shit all over the pool, and in the morning they wake you up like Polish roosters. When it comes to nature, we got people in Hollywood can give you nature by the yard and even better than the original. This is some script, Larry.”
“Just something Fritz and I tossed off,” I said.
“When you told me New York, New Amsterdam, whichever, I figured dark, dark houses, dark furniture, big Pilgrim hats, but it turns out the story of the Jews in America is cowboys and Indians and horses. I swear, Larry, you got so many ponies in this script they might get credits. I’m not going to obfuscate you. This is one hell of a script.”
“It was important to get it right.”
“You want coffee?” He picked up what looked like a telephone receiver. “Adelphia, bring out a pot of coffee and some little sandwiches.” An electric squawk emanated from the loudspeaker in reply, as though someone had shouted back, overloading it. “She’ll never learn,” EZ said. “Been with us for years. Faithful as a dog, but not good with modern devices.” As quickly he switched to the subject at hand. “You like working with him?”
“Him?”
“The refugee.”
“A treasure,” I said. “One of the most educated people I ever met.”
“Yeah, I know. Speaks Greek.”
I considered. Maybe Fritz spoke Greek to EZ Shelupsky and Latin to me. No, I thought. “And Latin.”
“That, too.”
“Really helpful, EZ. I’m glad you paired us.”
He puffed on his cigar, the smoke dissipating into the California air as though it had never been. “I had to. Some Jewish group comes to me, ‘Do something about these poor Jews in Germany. Sponsor one for a visa.’ First I said, ‘Why? I’m not a Jew—I’m an American.’ So this fella says, ‘You’re a Jew, Mr. Shelupsky. Everyone knows that.’ I tell him, ‘My friend, in America, what you want to be, you are.’ So he says, ‘Let’s make a scientific experiment. We’ll call up three people, you pick the names, and I’ll ask them, ‘What’s EZ Shelupsky?’ You know what, Bellringer? All three said, ‘He’s a Jew.’ Then I thought, If I hadn’t come here as a kid, I’d still be in Poland today, and you know who just took over Poland. So I said why not? A couple months later the refugee actually shows up and he wants a job. Not just a hand-out. Got a wife and two kids in Germany. I say to him, ‘Dr. von Blum, why are you here alone without the wife and kids?’ Daughters, I think, little ones. And he says, ‘You only sponsored me.’ Poor guy, he is so worried about them he starts to bawl, right here where you’re sitting. And now with the war especially. But they’ll be OK. That Hitler is nothing but a big bag of wind.”
“He never mentioned he was married,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we all got our cross to bear. He got a Star of David.”
Whether this was meant to be funny, I didn’t know, and still don’t. But just the thought of Fritz having a wife and kids gave me a creepy feeling. Suddenly I wanted to get away, jump into my newly repaired Ford and drive. But instead a kind of fierce independence welled up in me. “Are we going to make the movie or not?” I asked.
“What movie?”
“Hoofbeats of Liberty.”
“Yeah, sure. It happens I don’t have a studio at the moment, but that doesn’t matter, because the last thing I need to make a Jewish movie is colored actors. And this is a big movie. We’re talking location, we’re talking stars, we’re talking livestock, we’re talking major promotion. It’s going to cost three quarters of a million bucks. Easy. Maybe more. But it’ll pay. Jews are a big topic today. If it wasn’t for that Hitler, probably not. But every day we get our promotion right out of the headlines. I been talking to some people. How would you feel about Doug Fairbanks as the Jewish priest?”
“Douglas Fairbanks?”
“He was my neighbor, right over there behind the jungle. Then him and Pickford broke up. Her, she’s a little tra-la-la. But Dougie is solid like a rock. Very distinguished.”
“I was thinking more like John Garfield. Douglas Fairbanks doesn’t look particularly Jewish.”
“Exactly,” EZ said. “You don’t want Jews in movies to look Jewish, otherwise people who aren’t won’t identify. If I can’t close with Doug, what do you think about Gary Cooper? I could probably borrow him from Universal. Barney Balaban owes me a favor. I mean, it would cost, not just for Cooper but to Universal, but they’d distribute. That’s a plus. Gary Cooper, that would be one dynamite Jew.”
“I don’t know, EZ.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re new at this end. But I’ll show you the ropes. Larry, you’ll be my pertejay.”
“Your...?”
“Pertejay. I’ll take you under my wings. You wanted to be a partner?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then you got it.”
“I do?”
“Sure,” EZ said, waving his cigar. “How much you want to put in?”
“Put in?”
“Put in. Larry, we’re talking heavy investment, heavy profits. I’ll put in half a mil. You?”
“EZ, I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You made a quarter mil on one bet, Larry. Don’t tell me you spent that already.”
“How do you know how much I made?”
“What do you think, I’m stupid? I’m on the board of Hollywood Park. If I don’t know who’s betting what, who does—the ponies? Also, it was my horse.” He smiled. “Allegedly.”
I waited. “Allegedly?”
“Do me a favor and give me a little credit, Larry. You think I don’t know one gray beast from another? I got close to fifty animals in my colors, and I know every one of them like I fucked them an hour ago. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be a horse owner, I’d be a would-be. I appear like a would-be to you? Look around.” He motioned with the cigar so expansively that its aroma could have smelled up the horizon. “Wrong I have been. You make a lot of bets—on women, horses, pictures, people, okay, some you lose. But stupid? Stupid I’m not. You want to be a partner with EZ Shelupsky, Larry, you got to put in cash. You know what I want from you to make this Jew movie? Two hundred thou. You drive that crappy Ford to keep people off the scent, but I know you got it.”
Just then EZ’s maid came up with the coffee, and poured it while looking directly at me.
“Adelphia,” he said. “You ever meet Mr. Laurence Bellringer? He’s going to be an important man in this town. Hell, maybe he’s going to be the most important colored man in the whole movie business.”
Adelphia looked at me with undisguised loathing. It was bad enough being a maid, the look said, but worse to have to serve another Negro and pretend he was something else.
“Nu, Larry?” EZ said. “You wanted it? Here it is on a plate. Try these little sandwiches, smoked whitefish. Flown in from Chicago. Really delicious.”
XII
EZ Shelupsky never held it against me for not putting my money into a Jewish movie, and I suspect this is because for him the simplest way to judge whether something was worthwhile was whether other people would risk it. Besides, it turned out EZ was already involved with other things.
The script Fritz wrote, which cost $3,600 in writing fees to both of us, EZ sold to Universal for $20,000, which after the war dumped it on Paramount for $12,500. Paramount, which was releasing a movie a week, actually made it, with Dan Duryea as the priest, but by this time the priest was no longer a secret Jew, and there was no continuing story of the first Jews arriving in Nieuw Amsterdam or the priest’s grandson who grows up to supply horses to the Revolutionary Army. I saw it in London, where it played in Piccadilly on a double bill with a Danny Kaye musical, after which it disappeared completely. They did get in the business about the priest teaching the Apaches how to ride and breed horses, but it was hardly Fritz’s script. Did Fritz ever see it? I would have asked him if I’d had the chance.
