20th Century Un-limited Page 12

“I’ll call him tomorrow. First thing.”

  16

  Larry Allegre didn’t answer the phone for the next few days, at least not whenever I called. The following week I called again and some kind of secretary answered the phone, saying she came in once a week, handling the calls for several desks, and that she would convey my message to Mr. Allegre.

  Several weeks and then several months would go by before Allegre and I finally connected and actually spoke on the phone, and then, because he said his job had him on the road so much, it would be months longer before we could make a solid plan for dinner: My treat, as I’d said before. Although by then, much would have changed for me, and it would no longer have to be the “cheap dinner” that I’d first promised him.

  Meanwhile, we five Alsop House pals continued to meet for breakfast at Anderson’s Diner, no matter what else we were doing. It was there that Hank finally asked me about Sue-Anne and I said I thought she was very interested in him. It was there too that Sid Devlin told us that he had come up with this neat idea to rig up an old car to go over a cliff and burst into flames for the one gangster movie that MGM was planning to release that year. Sid said he would drive the rig himself. Within a year he would be heading up a new Stunts department and reviving a moribund Special (FX) Effects department. It was also at Anderson’s that we celebrated Ducky Deutsch making the team of the Bulldogs, to play in September’s first game, and also there that Jonah told me on “the q.v.” (whatever that meant) that he’d gone to a “legit doctor” and gotten blood tests, and when those luckily came back negative for “The Syph and etcetera” that he’d “gotten together” with Frances Wannamaker. He’d be the first of us to spend nights outside the Alsop House too.

  Still we were there Monday through Friday mornings come what may, hell or high water: it was our hangout, our clubhouse, our meeting ground, and people knew we could be found there every morning.

  Hey! Hay Fever! opened and did great business and Different Curfews was written with a great deal of back and forth and because “those kids” were writing it, with almost daily interference by seemingly everyone at the studio but the janitor. Actually he might have been giving his opinion too, given how ignorant and illiterate most of them were. That film was then shot, went into post-production, opened in September, in more theaters than its successful predecessor, and it did even better business.

  This meant that all of a sudden, one early fall day, Sue-Anne and I were “recognized” going about what had been our usual casual and easy-going day around downtown Hollywood, where, after all, we both lived.

  The first time this happened, we were at the newly opened Citizens Bank of Hollywood, a sort of credit union that had opened in response to the crashing closure several years before of so many long-established banks. One of the fellows in Scripts—Rafferty declared they were “all Commies!”—had suggested that this was a “relatively conscionable place” to put our earnings, and so we had both gone and begun savings accounts there. We were standing in line, the two of us, heaped with various parcels, since I’d been book shopping and she had been stationery buying again, right across the street. I was trying to balance those parcels, my bank book, my bi-monthly check from MGM, a pen and deposit slip, and some scripts that had been tossed at me “for possible improvement” earlier that day when Sue-Anne said in a tight voice, “Don’t look up too quickly.”

  “Because?” I whispered.

  “Because I think we have a half dozen fans staring at us,” she managed to get out, almost entirely without moving her lips.

  I slowly looked up and directly ahead, and I did exactly as I’d been taught by the assistant at George Hurrell’s photography studio a few days previous. I’d looked up and at his enormous and flattering camera lens, my eyes huge and “softly glowering” a bit, and even fluttering a mite. As I now did, I spotted three teen females inside the bank against the far end windows, and another six or so girls behind that window, and they were all saying something, communicating despite the glass, and pointedly staring at us. Sure enough, the ones inside headed right at us and those outside hastened indoors.

  “Too late!” Sue-Anne declared and then we were surrounded and autographs were demanded, and compliments flew at us, and then other patrons in the bank recognized or pretended to recognize us and they too circled us and asked for autographs and I thought this might become very weird. Two executives from the bank approached and extricated us. They took us into a private room and sat us down while girls gathered outside the office doorway, and one of them banked our checks for us, and the other fellow said, “This can be done directly from your agent’s office, you know.”

  We hadn’t known, and we were very apologetic for the hubbub we had caused. The bank executive assured us that the Citizens Bank was thrilled with our business and they would even get us out safely through a side door, if we didn’t mind waiting a few minutes until the crowd had thinned out.

  “It’s going to be even worse next week, when that story in Screen Gems runs,” Sue-Anne declared wistfully once we were out on the side street, headed away from the bank. “And then there’s the one of us in Photoplay too,” she moaned. “With Mr. Hurrell’s completely gorgeous picture of you, Chris. I’ve already got a copy on my dresser. I’ll bet not a single issue will remain intact,” she added, in an oddly predictive statement.

  Those articles and the photo sessions had come about because of the greater success of our second movie and the success of Hey! Hay Fever! in the British Isles. That all had also meant that suddenly we began to have meetings with the Lion’s large Publicity department. In no time Schiller and Hall had obtained our own very own publicity assistant, a young man named Sergio Hawkins. He was a soigné fellow with a Southern drawl who had worked with various other MGM starlets before and who said to us when meeting us for the first time, “You kids are moving faster than my granddaddy’s chestnut did at the Preakness.”

  Our regular co-breakfasters at Anderson’s Diner soon became aware of this evolving Schiller and Hall situation too, and they nicely enough ensured that autograph seekers never got in, or if in, at least not close to me. Nice guys, they protected me. Even so, we five friends moved from our usual table in the window back into the most hidden and secure corner, close to the lavatory and the rear door for a hasty getaway.

  Shooting on the second film went a lot better than the first, partly because the script was about eighty percent Blaine Anthony. Billy and Milly returned for a special skit-like “comedy dance number” that me and Sue-Ann had worked out on our own, and on our own time. They were pleased to be in the movie. I played a “swoonier” role with Sue-Anne, aware that this would up the ante on my glamour outside the studio, with all the complications that would no doubt ensue.

  So we set to work on film #3, Traditions, in which I would play an Italian-American Catholic kid romantically involved with Sue-Anne, who came from a strict Anglo-Methodist Midwest upbringing.

  We’d managed to get marketing to pull in several “focus groups” of teens already loyal to our “franchise” to discuss this third movie. We fed them sandwiches and soda pop while Sue-Anne, I, and several adult actors listened to their comments of the story I’d written and which we’d read to them.

  Later on all of them and their friends too were invited to the nearby Hollywood Playhouse on Vine St. to see the film acted out before it was filmed. We played out all the key scenes from the script that I had ended up pretty much writing myself—with the usual comments from Mr. Hermann’s office and this time from Seiter and Rafferty. At the last minute, I’d decided to end the film sadly, with the young couple not getting together. He would join the Navy, and she would secretly come to see him off as he left, despite her parents forbidding her. This would leave open the possibility that they might get together some time later on. It was taking a chance, we knew, to not have a happy ending, and we might have to change it. We were already prepared to reshoot the scene to a stupid, upbeat one, if necessary.

&nb
sp; Our teen audience adored the staged reading of the script and they loved the ending as it was. Two girls mentioned similar experiences among people they knew.

  They remained talking about it with the cast and producers, et al, for over two hours after the sneak preview. Finally someone was taking them seriously, they said. The adult actors had been about to leave but they remained out of fascination with the entire process. Afterward, Seiter said to me, “You’ve tapped into something important here, Christopher. Something we’d all do well to pay attention to.”

  And of course I would mention this and script ideas to Hank or Sid or anyone, to get their opinions, which I wrote down. Ducky said “put in sports,” naturally, and added that he could tell me some stories—and he did. Hank finally opened up one night about his leaving home, and I asked if he would mind if we put in a character with his story in the fourth movie. I remember him looking at me so oddly that I said, “What you did was courageous, Hank. Look at your life now! Great friends. Good job. You’re doing what you love to do and you are headed up in the world. You have a terrific girl interested in you. You could help some other kid who’s wondering if he or she should stick around and take all the abuse, or wise up and get out of town, like you did.”

  Naturally enough, Jonah got into the act: finding me alone, he wise-assedly asked if I’d consider a story about a young fellow and an older dame (his words).

  “I was thinking of calling it Twenty into Thirty-Five,” he said.

  “You mean,” I shot back, “because ‘How many times does Twenty go into Thirty-Five?’ And the answer is ‘As many times as humanly possible’?”

  “Geez, Junior! You know everything!” he complained, but he seemed pleased.

  Everything seemed to be going well, “peachy keen” in Sid Devlin’s only half-ironic words.

  So it was with some surprise that one morning I began hearing diners beginning to “grouse”—a term I’d only recently learned. I’d always thought it meant some kind of small land bird.

  I looked around and realized suddenly that no food but only coffee and juice had been served for maybe fifteen minutes.

  “Hey, Andy, what gives?” Ducky asked the diner’s owner. You could hear the big guy’s stomach growling all the way over in Glendale.

  “Cookie took offense and left. Gotta close up, boys.”

  Now, Andy and Cookie were the most argumentative unmarried pair I’d ever come across, so the fact that Cookie had actually taken “offense” was odd, to say the least.

  “You mean there’s no food?” Ducky asked.

  “There’s plenty of food. There’s no one to cook it.”

  A giant hubbub began in the place at this news. The spectacle of watching a dozen grown men sitting around threatening to riot because no one could fry an egg was utterly ridiculous. Then I recalled that I was living in an era in which the genders had and, more importantly, were expected to have very different kinds of competences, and that the only men who would or did cook in 1935 were professionals. Even backyard barbecuing wouldn’t come around until suburban life after the Second World War. Seven decades after, in my time, those differences had merged. Women drove trucks and men embroidered. And I was sure I could do both of those activities with a little guidebook. I did know I could cook breakfasts. So I grabbed Anderson and dragged him into the kitchen.

  “What’s your breakfast menu? Eggs, ham, bacon, toast, griddle cakes, French toast, what else?”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “Omelets? What else?” I probed.

  “Biscuits.”

  I checked the flour. “You’re a little low here.”

  “Why that, darn Cookie! He said we had plenty.”

  “There’s plenty of corn meal and enough flour, so listen, Andy, let me talk to my boys. Maybe we can help you here.”

  “Whaddya mean? You can cook?”

  “Breakfast stuff? Yeah! Easy! But instead of biscuits I’ll make cornbread.”

  “Holy moly! Cornbread?!”

  “I was in the Merchant Marines.” I trotted out the old-serves-anywhere-in-this-time-and-place excuse. “Get me an apron.”

  “Ya mean I don’t have to close down and lose money?”

  “Not this morning, you don’t.”

  Anderson was about to hug me, bad-smelling, cheap cigarette and all, so I shook his hand and propelled him forward again saying, “I’ll start on the cornbread, which will take maybe fifteen minutes to be ready. Send my guys in.”

  Ducky immediately picked up what I was aiming for. “I can help. But we get to eat too, right?”

  “Right. You can nibble while you work. What can you do?”

  It turned out Ducky used to help his mother with breakfasts back in Altoona, P.A., and he could do a lot with things like toast and cereal and even oatmeal, not to mention arranging plates.

  Hank was amused but game. He said, “I’m a carnivore. Bacon and ham’s my specialty.” So I put him in charge of grilling those.

  Sid Devlin said he was lowering himself but he admitted that he’d actually done some table waiting in his dissolute youth back in Brooklyn. I found aprons for all of us and we set to work. At first it was bedlam, and I had to keep telling Sid to keep filling up those coffee cups. But soon enough I had my cornbread in the oven and simple orders of ham and eggs and toast were actually being plated and served, and then the loud rumbling outside in the diner settled into more localized grumblings. In about two hours we managed to put together and serve some thirty-five breakfasts before Anderson locked the doors and pulled closed what passed for curtains and we leisurely cooked for ourselves and sat down to eat breakfast.

  “You guys is princes!” Andy assured us. “And who would have thought, a big movie actor like you…?” He looked at me with what might have been tears in his eyes, speechless.

  “First and last time!” I declared. “And if you ever tell anyone I helped here, Andy, you’re a dead man,” I said in my best Jimmy Cagney impersonation.

  “Now, go apologize to Cookie. Because we are not making lunch,” Sid said, then filled his mouth with cornbread slathered over with marmalade.

  We toasted each other with orange juice and I said to Ducky, “You were terrific!” He’d not only made toast and cereal and plated the food, he’d helped make eggs and had helped serve. He’d seemed comfortable in the kitchen. All of us told him so.

  “That was my mother’s dream. You know, to open a roadside diner. Never happened, of course, not once the Crash came along. She’d saved up for it. But we had to spend all that just to get by, once my father lost his job and all.”

  “Maybe she’d want to move out here?” Hank suggested. “Plenty of areas out here could use a good diner. Around the studio, for one,” he said and the rest of us agreed.

  So we all hoisted our coffee mugs and toasted Ducky’s mother’s diner.

  That day’s shooting on Traditions had begun late and it went on into evening. I got home about nine p.m., and as no one was around at the Alsop House, I nipped up the corner on Hollywood Blvd. to the new Sardi’s for a light dinner.

  Jonah, Sid, and Hank were there, finishing meals, and as I came in they raised up a cheer, “Hip, Hip, Hooray,” for me.

  This brought me to everyone’s attention, which had not been my intention at all, and the manager came out and, recognizing me, asked if I would present a signed photograph for the back wall of booths. For the first time I was embarrassed by all the attention. “Really, Anton? Do I have to?”

  “We want this to be the place all the stars come when they’re in Hollywood,” he assured me.

  That wouldn’t happen as long as the Derby was still around, but I agreed to it.

  “Is there anything you can’t do, Junior?” Jonah asked once I sat down.

  “Apparently I can’t shut you up.”

  “No, you can’t. I meant, anything in the world you can’t do.” To the others, he announced, “I present Mr. Christopher Hall, aged twelve. He sings, he dances, he act
s, he writes scripts, he cooks breakfast.”

  I wanted to say, “and I seduce movie stars half my age,” but I desisted. The fellows might ask for names. Instead I said, “That was a group effort! To all of us!”

  Later on I said, “You know, guys, there’s no reason why a fellow shouldn’t be able to cook breakfast. Or in fact do anything,” I said. “Anything.”

  “You mean Hoovering too?” Sid asked. He meant vacuuming.

  “Hoovering too!”

  “Head surgery?” Jonah asked.

  “Well, that’s a bit much unless you’ve studied how. But say piloting a small plane. Or racing an automobile or one of those speed boats they have. You know. Stuff like that.”

  “I can do that,” Sid allowed.

  “You’re my hero,” Jonah declared. “If I was a girl, I’d marry you!”

  “Who said I’d ask you?”

  “You would,” Jonah said, and I had to admit, at that moment I probably would too: his confidence had been restored with work and steady sex, and he seemed better-looking, sleeker somehow. I knew that I would soon have to have a talk with Frances about taking him on as an assistant agent. She had too much to do now that Sue-Anne and I were in such high demand.

  Late that night, Hank knocked on my room door, in his shorts and singlet, bare-footed, hair messed up, blanket under one arm, a pillow dangling from a hand.

  “You don’t mind?” he asked, groggily. “I can’t sleep.”

  I gestured for him to come in. He zipped in and right into my bed, where he put himself under the sheets, a pillow under his head, blanket atop.

  “Would you read to me, Chris? I’d like that a lot. Your voice is so calming.”

  Great! I had a gorgeous young guy in bed with me and all he wanted was a soporific!

  “Move over, Seattle. How about some Lawrence of Arabia?”

  “I don’t care what,” he said, and he was already yawning.

  17

  Finding the Scott-Grant house on Malibu wasn’t too difficult. Unlike 2010, when houses there were four feet apart and formed an almost unbroken residential line from one end of the city at the ocean end near Sunset Blvd. to the other, some twenty-one miles up the coast beyond Point Dume, in 1935, the place was a lot more spottily built up.