When, in the middle of July, 1924, I called on Mr and Mrs Tom Mix, their French furniture and suits of medieval armour, their Scottish shields and claymores shared the same rooms as Indian headdresses, his collection of silver-studded saddles and other elaborate mementoes of the West. They were a gracious, modest couple. Mrs Mix took to me with great warmth. She said I was ‘the image of Valentino’. It was true that I somewhat resembled the star, having similar eyes and colouring, but I was anxious to point out that I did not possess a single drop of Italian blood.
John Hever preferred the company of movie people (I believe he never got over his worship of the screen) and would frequently ask me to go somewhere for dinner or for a weekend. I think he had mixed motives, for he was anxious to prove even to this easy-going world that his relations with Mrs Cornelius were perfectly respectable. I was a kind of chaperone (though, naturally, I found myself prey to the usual disgusting gossip). Thus I at last entered the portals of Pickfair. That unpretentious tribute to good taste, influenced chiefly by a ‘mock Tudor’ style popular in England, never proclaimed itself a palace, nor advertised its wealth. There were touches of the Swiss chalet, tributes here and there to the Spanish adobe dwelling settlers, but in the main Pickfair, in its fifteen acres of landscaped grounds, resembled everything an English country estate should be; even its huge swimming-pool did not seem grandiose. At dinner I got into conversation with the charming athlete, who did not recall our earlier meeting. ‘Dougy’ was a perfect host. Learning of my relish for oceanliners he produced the family photograph album. His favourite trip, he said, ‘because it was our honeymoon’, was on the S.S. Lapland with Mary. He was at that time completing The Thief of Baghdad, perhaps his most exotic film. The house was piled with drawings. Minarets, domes and crenellated walls reminded me of Constantinople. Here was Asia as it should have been. Fairbanks never spared expense on his sets. He made full-sized cities and towns, castles and mountains. This is what convinced the moviegoer of the reality of the stories. Mary Pickford was at that time turning her back on childhood and attempting a more fashionable ‘jazz-baby’ part with Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. I had seen her Rosita and been deeply disappointed. On behalf of all her fans I begged her to return to her more innocent roles. She responded sweetly and began to explain what she was attempting to do when her husband interrupted us with a display of obvious jealousy which silenced, for a moment, the whole party. There had been no question of my ‘making a pass’ at his wife; even had there been I saw no call for the stage-whisper, nor the reference to ‘some yiddisher lounge-lizard’, particularly since almost half our company were of the Jewish persuasion.
This fact had originally startled me. The Jews who settled in the hills around Hollywood were not at all what I recognised from Ukraine. Samuel Goldfish, for instance, was a man of exceptional elegance and education. He told me in confidence how much he admired Shakespeare when he was a boy. His only real ambition was to translate those great plays for the silent drama. ‘They are stories,’ he told me soberly. ‘And stories are stories, no matter how you look at it.’ He and Mucker Hever had already been co-producers of two successful films, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Tower of Lies. Mucker Hever had told him I was the author of a successful piece, which had been touring to packed houses for over a year. When I described the plot he nodded approvingly. He had a soft spot, he said, for the subject and with the right leading actors it could work very well. He suggested I have the synopsis typed and sent to him. ‘Though if Mucker’s already happy, then I guess I’m happy.’ Then, to break the slight chill which had descended, Mary Pickford clapped her hands and suggested we all file in to another room ‘to watch a flicker’. We saw Merton of the Movies with Glenn Hunter and Viola Dana, both of whom were with us in the audience! It was an amusing comedy, what today would be called a ‘satire’, about the industry itself. Some of its references were obscure, but the movie people found the scenes which baffled me the funniest of all. Though I was to become much more familiar with Hollywood’s aristocracy, I look back on those first few weeks of heady glamour as amongst the most wonderful of my life. I will never recapture the surprise at meeting Theda Bara and finding her a sweet, well-mannered lady whose home had a comfortable, almost old-maidish atmosphere, save for one room decorated with memento mori, Oriental tapestries, tiger skins and mummy cases. This, she explained modestly, was where she was photographed. She had wanted to play Gish or Pickford parts, but the public insisted she remain always a vamp. I understand these pressures. We are all, to some degree, caricatures of what society demands of us.
One of the few Hollywood Yehudi I found vulgar was, in fact, from Kiev. I recognised this type instantly. We knew the likes of Selsnik in Podol, swaggering in loud suits, displaying rings and gold watch chains, smoking the largest cigars they could find, parading their wealth with appalling braggadocio. It was no wonder that occasionally the ordinary people of the city would round on them. Selsnik boasted to me he had sent the Tsar a telegram in 1917. He was full of his own atrocious joke, sprawling in the powerfully scented velvets and satins of Clara Bow’s living-room where Mrs Cornelius and I (without Hever for a change) had been invited for tea. Miss Bow herself was a lively, solicitous hostess. ‘I heard, see, the Tsar is abdicated. So I think to myself, what the hell? I’ll send him a telegram. Know what I said? You and your police weren’t kind to me when I was a boy in Kiev, I said, so me and my people come America. Here we did very well. Now they tell me you’re out of a job. No hard feelings about your cossacks. I’m willing to offer you a position acting in pictures. Name your own salary. Reply at my expense. Regards to the family.’
The others found it funny. I did not. I made an excuse and left.
The Cornelius boy is always asking me about the Hearst place. It was not finished in 1924 and very few people saw it going up. Hearst kept changing the size of the pool, adding new wings before the first ones were completed. Later I was invited to his ‘Enchanted Castle’, with a lot of dull industrialists, engineers and newspaper editors. Marion Davies was charming. Hearst was a Zeppelin, with a wren’s peeping little voice, largely oblivious to the world around him, even the one he had built. At Hearst’s you were never allowed to drink alcohol, but a good many of the movie people used cocaine in secret. By that time I had my own excellent suppliers, of course. In certain circles you were judged by the quality of your ‘stuff very much as a French nobleman would be judged by the quality of his cellar. Mir ist warm. Vifl iz der zeyger? Far more exciting to me was my meeting with the reserved old Southern gentleman, that world-genius, resembling a soldier rather than a showman, the soft-spoken First Lord of Tinsel Town, David W. Griffith. He happened to be at the Lasky studio when Hever and I accompanied Mrs Cornelius there to make her screen test.