I found Goldfish’s confidences both baffling and irresistible.
‘As a man of the world, Max, you know what I mean?’
I assured him I understood him most profoundly. His sentiments, I said, were an exact version, almost word for word, of my own. Only he had phrased it better. I congratulated him on his extraordinary literary turn of phrase. He said in all modesty that he was, by and large, a self-made man. ‘Reading is the answer. Travel, like I did, in gloves, and you get to reading a lot. And seeing movies, of course. Bit by bit you understand how ignorant you are. Bit by bit you start to remedy it. That’s me now, Max - remedied. Though they stole every idea, every property, every star and every hour of every hard-working day I put in for them - Art for Art’s sake remedied me. Quality, now, is what we do here. Small but prodigious, like in gloves. That way you make more profit for less work, believe me.’
I not only believed him, I said, I applauded him. We parted very cordially.
Mrs C. was Gloria Cornish now, of course, and in some ways the instrument of my success (or diversion, if you like). While Goldfish had been impressed by my writing and had commissioned a draft script with a view to ‘putting me on the strength’, it was Lon Chaney, the great character actor, who saw my drawings one evening and suggested immediately that I should be designing whole storyboards. I had until then been working as a part-time apprentice to Poldark. Chaney introduced me to a pleasant Scot called Menzies, a student of the great Grot, who was primarily known for his delicate children’s illustrations. Menzies was at that time trying to work with Valentino’s wife, who claimed to be some sort of Russian aristocrat, a painter, stage-decorator and haute couturière whose ideas were so extravagant that even when the sets were built they could hardly be filmed. The colour of the sets was important, since they tended to show up in certain pronounced ways. In her designs for Monsieur Beaucaire she had ignored all considerations of cost or technical capability and produced Valentino’s first failure. The sophisticated comedy was scarcely appropriate material for that elevated lounge-lizard, who looked exactly like the Italian gigolo he had been in real life and whose taste and manners continued to reflect his origins. Later Bob Hope far eclipsed him in the role. Some of us Hollywooders were able to rise above our humble beginnings. Valentino sank beneath the weight of his own unfounded self-esteem. Mayn schvitz der spic gonif trenken!
My natural skill as a draughtsman, the basics of which I had come by, of course, at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, impressed Menzies. He said I had the kind of imagination that was best suited for movie work. I thought big, he said, but more importantly I produced designs which could be built and used. He was a great believer in the fluid camera and while he admired his master, Grot, he felt that Grot’s particular talent produced a beautifully static set. It was from Menzies that I learned most about designing for the films.
When I heard he was out at Korda’s studios during the War I tried to contact him. He was not very far from where I was living in Hammersmith at the time but even though I explained I was calling from a pay box at enormous cost I could not get anyone to bring him to the telephone. He was a fellow spirit. In the late thirties he would be the guiding hand behind a picture that came closer to the spirit of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation than anything I have ever seen.
The title was not to my taste and the thing was spoiled a little by the inclusion of that insipid halbjuden ‘Howard’ with his dyed blond hair, but Gone With the Wind was a wonder to me when I saw it at the Kilburn State soon after arriving in England in 1940. In its silent predecessor Gloria Cornish played the part of Nellie and now another Englishwoman, Vivien Leigh, reminded me so much of my Esmé, and yet she also had the determination of Mrs Cornelius. Of course, Clark Gable was magnificent. A flyer, in real life, like myself. With Fairbanks (and myself) he represented the American virtues of manly courage and rugged good-humoured honesty. Now save for John Wayne such virtues have all but disappeared from the screen. I remember Goering, also a flying man, in that jocular but at the same time deeply serious way of his, saying, ‘What are we going to do about America?’ This, I need hardly say, was at a time when Hitler had not been goaded into war by those interests most resistant to his ideals. Wohin gehen wir jetzt? I could have told him then.
At first Menzies gave me a few individual scenes to develop for Schenk’s comedy Her Sister From Paris with Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. This did not require any great imaginative efforts, especially for the scenes Menzies entrusted to me, but it got me work on The Eagle, Valentino’s next film, in which we could indulge our lavish fantasies. We designed and built some of the screen’s most gorgeous sets.
They were romantic, extravagant (though not especially costly) and were the very spirit of everything I had ever demanded from the moving picture play. Unfortunately, although our designs were made and used, the script was lightweight and the film was not a particular success. I can, incidentally, be identified in several scenes as Valentino’s stand-in. Valentino chose to blame me for his failure, since the studio had refused to let his ludicrous spouse work on another picture. Not wishing to make an overt enemy of the more powerful Menzies, she took against me. Menzies however proved a good friend and by then every studio in Hollywood knew what Valentino and the pseudo-aristocrat were like. I did not, in the end, work with Menzies on the remaining Valentino picture, but he did give me scenes for Graustark and What Price Beauty? in which Mrs Cornelius had an important role but in which my only featured scene was cut. Gradually I grew to love my new medium. I became familiar with every creative and practical function. I built palaces, monuments, whole cities, I even populated them - sometimes as hero, sometimes as villain - and, for a while at least, my genius was satisfied. Lon Chaney became my patron - possibly because I did not condescend to him as some of the parvenu starlings did. He had been a professional most of his life, which had not been an easy one, and like me had begun his career as a travelling player. Perhaps he recognised in me some version of his younger self. Whatever it was, he took me in hand and for a while was my guiding light through the hazardous maze of Hollywood. Though he himself nursed an abiding love for a legless married woman and was frequently in despair, he yet found time to advise me on matters of etiquette, on brothels and their inmates, on drinks and their various properties. While he did not introduce me to the pleasures of opium and hashish, then undergoing a small vogue with the fad for things Oriental freshly stimulated by the discovery of the treasures of Tutenkhamun, he had excellent advice about the properties of the drugs and the character of those who dealt in them. Together we toured Chinatown. Menzies enjoyed such drugs. With their help he created two of the most memorable Arabian Nights fantasies ever seen by an awed public. One was for Fairbanks, the other for Korda. Both were called The Thief of Baghdad. (The nickname was enjoyed by Samuel Goldfish for a while, though he was not of Mesopotamian Jewish origin. Neither Goldwyn nor Goldfish is an Iraqi name!) Though Chaney advised me to stay away from such people, to sign a contract with one of the smaller studios and got me a screen-test with DeLuxe, there was hardly time to think. I was being given design and acting jobs as fast as I could say ‘yes’. It would have been foolish to say ‘no’ since there was no telling when it might not suddenly end. As a freelance I was frequently paid in cash. But a studio contract, as an actor and director, would bring me all kinds of security and that was, after all, what Esmé so keenly desired. It offered decent security and steady weekly money. I would accept it. Meanwhile I was saving my dollars. I had them in the Bank of Southern California earning 11 per cent interest. I was becoming for the first time in my life a citizen of material substance and responsibility. Increasingly I had the company of Esmé whenever she could get away from G. W. Meulemkaumpf, who had become her official sponsor in the US, and could withdraw his patronage if he discovered she was already engaged. While I understood the difficulties of her position the situation remained painful, even with the resourceful Jacob Mix as a reliable intermediary. In my worst moments I remembered that she was after all virtually my own creation. Had she not been Esmé Loukianoff’s half-sister, she would still be in Galata contracting diseases and earning pennies from a hundred nations’ sailors.