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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
For me it begins in such an ordinary way ... with a gorilla, a blonde, and a gun ... Mid- 20th century Hollywood; 'Raymond Chandler's LA before Pilates and cell phones'. Clancy Sigal (who would later be the inspiration for Doris Lessing's 'Saul Green') is just back from fighting in the Second World War and an abortive solo attempt to assassinate Hermann Goering at the Nurenburg trials. Charming his way into a job as an agent with the Sam Jaffe agency, Sigal plunges into a chaotic Hollywood peopled by fast women, washed-up screenwriters, wily directors, and starstruck FBI agents trailing 'subversives'. He parties with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Tony Curtis and an anxious Peter Lorre, who becomes a drinking buddy. But this is the era of the Hollywood Blacklist and Sigal, like many of his contemporaries, is subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC. Will he give up the list of nine names, burning a hole in his pocket, to save his own skin? Hilarious, touching, intimate and revealing: Sigal's memoir reads like a forgotten hardboiled detective novel and has all the makings of an instant classic.
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Seitenzahl: 324
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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BLACK SUNSET
HOLLYWOOD SEX, LIES, GLAMOUR, BETRAYAL & RAGING EGOS _____
CLANCY SIGAL
Contents
PART ONE
1
The Fugitive
Alright, listen up, people. Our fugitive has been on the run for ninety minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground barring injuries is four miles per hour…. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search…. Go get him.
—Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive (1993), based on TV series by Roy Huggins, whose successful television career begins when he hands over friends and colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee
MY HEART IS pounding, and I’m sweating in my Brooks Brothers blue pinstripe suit, broadcloth button-down shirt, Rep stripey tie, and buck shoes. A pair of twelve-inch, one-and-a-half-pound steel alloy bolt cutters in my jacket pocket feels as heavy as a .50 caliber machine gun base plate. The army taught me how to squeeze under wire to emplace Bangalore torpedoes, so it’s easy to slice through Universal Picture’s perimeter wire fence in San Fernando Valley where they’ve banned me for unethical, unscrupulous, underhanded behavior. I have earned the screaming purple-faced rage of the studio’s de facto ruler, story editor Ray Crossett, and his demonic rages at anyone like me who deals behind his back. Overfed and overbearing, Crossett’s bulge-veined tirades (“You pond scum! Cockroach!”) intimidate even Universal’s A-list producers, though technically he’s only a mid-level employee.
My crime? While negotiating for one of my screenwriter’s services I excused myself for a bathroom break in Crossett’s office, crawled through the transom window, and raced to a public telephone to trade his offer for more money down the road at Warner Brothers. In a fury Crossett has set the dogs on me. Like fighter pilots, studio security guards scramble all over the lot, locking the gates. Riot in Cell Block 11. All it needs is a searchlight and a machine gun blazing from the guard tower; I grew up on prison movies.
I do this stuff all the time, it keeps me alive. I love the con, crises are my fuel. It’s the best high … and anesthetic.
At such moments I take on false identities to make it through a tense day. Now I’m a Chicago Bears running back, nipping in and out of sound stages, bobbing and weaving behind equipment trucks, plunging into the maze of Universal’s false-front sets: from a cardboard Algiers Kasbah’s onion domes with rifle ports I make a flying leap onto a flat-roofed tower to slide down a standing plastic cobra to hide behind an Egyptian sarcophagus, tripping over a man-sized rubber tarantula and crashing through a straw-board wild wall straight into a cloth-wrapped mummy staring sightlessly at me. The studio’s Keystone Kops, fanning out, fail to spot the criminal crouching under a faro table in a Dodge City saloon when I sidestep into a shell-shattered World War I French village and dash across an alley onto a hot (closed) set where Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, real-world husband and wife, are arguing with the director over a close-up for The Black Shield of Falworth—they must be wilting in all that fake armor and damsel-dress. Gosh, it’s hot in the Valley. I’m dripping.
On Falworth the revolving red light freezes me like an army reveille: I snap to attention respecting the industry’s First Commandment, to never mess up a shot. But I must sneak off this lot to call my client at home about his new quote (money), nail the deal before I’m nailed. Truthfully, I like lurking in the dark shadows of movie sets, like the sleeper “deep cover” spy that the US government accuses me of being. And I admire Ray Crossett for taking me so seriously, Gang Busters minus the sirens, although the studio maintains a battery of those for Soviet air raids if they come, which most people assume they will.
Sneak, thief, sneak. Duck under the fo’castle planks of Yankee Pasha, sprint smack into Joan Crawford—this freckle-faced woman in a white terrycloth robe, her hair turbaned in a towel, bent at the waist vomiting. Ah, yes, she’s in Female on the Beach where my Jaffe Talent Agency, for whom I hustle, signed the director Joe Pevney but not the writer or Crawford. Pity, what a package. Even without makeup, her sickie soaking the ground, Crawford is a stunner. Those carved-in-marble cheekbones and large angry bloodshot eyes. She honors me with the immortal line:
“Get the fuck outta here!”
Mildred Pierce speaks! To me! My day is made.
Snaking in and out of the hangar-like cushioned doors of dark, cavernous stages, I trip over cables, flats, wild walls, hanging lights, and lynching-tree boom mics.
“LEGGO ME YOU PSYCHOTIC SONOFABITCH!”
“I’M CRAZY? I’LL SHOW YOU CRAZY YOU CUNT!”
… shit, I’m in a hot set in crisis.
Our rising Jaffe Agency client, Jack Palance ($65,000 per picture), is jumping all over our client Shelley Winters ($80,000), strangling her on a prop couch while her current boyfriend (unrepped by us) Tony Franciosa pounds on Palance’s broad Estonian back, pulling at his skullcap while Shelley gurgles a death rattle, and our client Earl Holliman ($20,000) is piling on with the help of grips and gaffers, hauling frantically at the combatants. Franciosa hammers his fists, crashing down on the neck of Palance, who is throttling his female co-star. They’re supposed to be starring in I Died a Thousand Times, a remake of Colorado Territory, a remake of our client Bogart’s High Sierra, a remake of something else.
Zoom, I’m gone; someone else will have to solve our Palance problem. Last year, as Attila the Hun—or was it the Mexican bandit El Tigre?—he tossed his leading lady out of a second-floor window—or was it his wife? My über-boss, Sam Jaffe, who named the agency after himself (and why not), sighed, “Jack, such talent, such insanity.”
Enough for one day.
Out in the clear, easy prey for mortars and studio guards, from experience I’m sure exit gates will be guarded so I belly flop under the wire fence. My dry-cleaning bills are astronomical on the days I infiltrate Universal, easy now, suck in gut, and away we go … up and away loping past Department of Water & Power pipe layers, over to my old Pontiac parked across the street and with a ticket in the windshield wiper, which I toss.
Flip the hood, twist the idle screw, check the baling wire holding up the engine, jump behind the wheel, pray … clutch, stick, and pray some more.
Westbound on Ventura Boulevard, a glance in the rearview mirror, can you believe that Ray Crossett? Two of his guys still chasing me in a late-model canary-yellow Chevy Club Deluxe, making no secret of it. When I speed up toward Laurel Canyon, they’re glued to my bumper. Crossett must be in some crazy mood.
YES, I AM an agent. Not Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent or a CIA agent or FBI agent. But a talent agent, flesh peddler, ten-percenter, shark.
I work from a three-story Streamline Moderne building on Sunset Boulevard between gangster Mickey Cohen’s haberdashery and the Villa Nova, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio have their first date.
This is my job, to sell, spit into the air and see it come down as money, make deals, spin webs of truth and deceit, cut more deals, close more sales, get caught in a lie, fall on my face, you’ll never work in this town again … until tomorrow … and move on …
Because I eat only what I kill.
I love it.
“By himself a writer didn’t stand a chance. It was all a matter of his agent…. But I despise agents.”
—William Saroyan
“Forty-five years I have been doing business with agents, as a performer and a director. As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I’ve never heard one say, ‘No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.’ They will always say, ‘You don’t like him? I’ve got somebody else.’ They’re totally spineless.”
—Orson Welles, in conversation with Henry Jaglom
2
Farewell, My Lovely
You know, I think you’re nuts. You go barging around without a very clear idea of what you’re doing…. I don’t think you even know which SIDE you’re on.
—From Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk and written by John Paxton, both blacklisted
SUNSET BOULEVARDIS the second longest street in Los Angeles and one of the longest in the world. From downtown Union Station it curves west toward the Pacific Ocean recapping much of my life’s history. Let’s imagine we’re a helicopter movie cliché that opens on a crummy old car speeding west on Sunset from Chinatown, Jake, through Echo Park up past Schwab’s Pharmacy where William Holden jumps out of Gloria Swanson’s Isotta Fraschini to buy his aging mistress a pack of cigarettes; on to The Strip and today’s Viper Club but yesterday’s Sherry’s Restaurant where hired assassins who doubled as Los Angeles policemen put a hit on gangster Mickey Cohen, killing his bodyguard but only wounding him; and on through tree-shaded Beverly Hills where Howard Hughes, then dating Yvonne de Carlo, crashed his FX-11 experimental plane into two private homes; just across from the tourist shrine of 810 N. Linden where mobster Bugsy Siegel was rubbed out in his own living room by either Murder Inc. or the Mafia or his girlfriend’s brother or Meyer Lansky’s gunmen (choose one); up past the broad green lawns of UCLA where as a GI Bill student I made all the right enemies; around Dead Man’s Curve into Bel Air-Brentwood and finally the beach and Pacific Ocean where my two constant companions, FBI agents working from out-of-date Bureau file cards, are sure I’m still a “ComSub” (Communist Subversive), ramming my wonderful old Pontiac two-door off a Malibu cliff. Even today, to pacify my restless soul I still drive down Sunset to watch the sun-god die over the palisades.
Now bank that helicopter shot over Topanga, Pacific Palisades, and down the south slope of the Santa Monica mountains to my own little corner …
… and ZOOM IN to a three-story white stucco Ocean Liner Moderne building, at 8553 Sunset Boulevard, tel. Crestview 6-6121, between Ciro’s and Mocambo nightclubs.
Hey, Head Grip, light this up in big sparklers:
THE SAM JAFFE TALENT AGENCY
I CAN’T PARK in the company lot because the three agency partners—Sam Jaffe, Mary Baker, and Sam’s brother-in-law Phil Gersh—are embarrassed that my 1940 Pontiac—which I keep as a badge of honor—will disgrace their Eldorados and Chrysler Imperials. “Presentation of self” is vital for an agent, and my car, its backseat piled visibly high with political leaflets and radical junk, is an FBI agent’s wet dream.
Until now, because I bring in business and am the agency’s ace “fireman,” a one-man high-pressure hose to extinguish unhappiness in fretful clients, the bosses tolerate my old wreck and me. But for now I circle up Londonderry Place in the hills above Sunset, past Mickey Cohen’s exclusive whorehouse, and park under a jacaranda tree, and—mustn’t be late for my own going-away party!—jog down in the hot sun. But when I get to Sunset Boulevard, those bastards from Universal Pictures, the security guards who’ve been chasing me all the way from Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, are parked brazenly right in front of the office sending their unmistakable message.
Except, they’re not studio bouncers. Not with those government-issued fedora hats. I know who they are, and they have an even better idea of who I am.
SHOULD I INVITE them to my farewell party? No, they’d only eye-strip the guests, half of whom have just barely evaded the blacklist by quietly testifying or paying off the right people.
This job, for all its ethical contradictions and moral dilemmas, saved my life. But now Hollywood’s Golden Age is dying, and with it a whole way of making movies. Soulless and educated like me, the New Smooth Men are replacing the old-style, vulgar, ungrammatical hucksters with their floral ties and ponies running at Santa Anita who made the deals who made the pictures that ruined and raised me. I’ve been breaking my ass to get assignments for sixty-four writers, and some actors and directors, policing their studio contracts, counting their commissions, listening to their complaints and threats to leave me, fighting (sometimes physically) to keep rival agents off my turf, and from time to time even rewriting their scripts. Maybe it’s time to go and try to do for myself what I’ve been doing for them. Where and how is a wide-open question.
THE ROOFTOP PARTY’S in full swing.
Made it, Ma. Top of the world. From here I can almost see my mother Jennie way out toward LAX airport near where she operates this small diner in a not-so-super supermarket. Sometimes, on weekends, I’ll give her a break as a fry cook; it’s a toss-up which of us is the more deadly Salmonella Chef. Her working-class neighborhood is a universe away from where I now stand on the pebble roof of the Jaffe Building with its near-views of Beverly Hills and Bel Air, doing what Mary Baker and Sam Jaffe trained me for: circulate and schmooze with clients like Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, Donna Reed, and Gloria Grahame—the latter a grateful gift from director Nicholas Ray for finding him a writer, a young Battle of the Bulge veteran, to start over from scratch and save Rebel Without a Cause, which Jack Warner was sabotaging because he hated its supposed attack on middle-class values. Jack Palance, Matthau, and Steiger are here, too. Steiger, whom I’ve wooed for months, half-forgives me for lying about getting him the unfilmable Mailer novel TheNakedand the Dead, and Lorre forgives me for trapping him in ghoul roles because he needs the money to feed his new baby and morphine habit. Casablanca’s “Victor Laszlo,” Paul Henreid, is sweet to come say goodbye; he’s one of the few clients who shares my condition of “star astigmatism,” a mild mental disorder that confuses actor with role. I wish Dorothy McGuire were here, but I messed with her at lunch thinking she was the role she played as an anti-Semitic shiksah in Gentleman’s Agreement.
I’ll miss the daily craziness of serial phone calls, half-true deal memos, spun lies, doors slammed in my face.
Alas, our biggest money star, the very sick Bogie, is off making a boxing movie The Harder They Fall with our client director Mark Robson, currently under such blacklist threat that he’s obliged like most of the tainted to make an anti-Communist film (Trial) to “clear” himself. The Bogart boxing movie is based on a novel by Sam Jaffe’s nephew Budd Schulberg, a “friendly” (informer) witness in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee who named former friends, lovers, and comrades; the credited screenwriter on The Harder They Fall was Philip Yordan, the all-purpose “front” for banned writers. Who knows? In the blacklist game of disguises, the writer may be someone that Budd named.
And over there is my own coven, the poor schmucky screenwriters, well maybe not so poor at $1,000 a week, twelve weeks guaranteed when an average Ohio factory guy makes $100 a week with overtime if he’s lucky. Here tonight is ever-reliable Danny Fuchs (Love Me or Leave Me), happy to work in sunny Southern California away from his cockroachy New York tenements; he made his reputation immortalized in the wonderful Williamsburg Trilogy. And Charlie Lederer (Kiss of Death), great western writers Frank Davis (Springfield Rifle) and Frank Nugent (The Searchers), and Ernie Lehman (North by Northwest), what a pride of high-wage talent! My seriously favorite clients, though, are the hard sells, the mutts like Nelson Algren, John Fante, Horace McCoy, and Jim Agee absent tonight, but over in a corner comparing quotes are the even lower-wage guys whom I tutor on mitzvah Saturdays.
All hands on deck, the thirteen other agents (most exmilitary like me) plus secretaries and stenographers; the black janitor “Washington” (nobody knows his real name); the balebos himself Sam Jaffe, my savior bursting with ruddy baldheaded health; his partner and brother-in-law Phil Gersh (Third Infantry, Italy campaign); and my boss, teacher, guide, and personal “rabbi” Mary Baker, head of the literary department (and so much else) who is, not coincidentally, the older, married woman I have a crush on. She’s my personal Florence Nightingale, that is if Flo wore Chanel suits and a rakish-angled Hattie Carnegie soft-brim hat. Mary’s nursed me through so many of my costly mistakes. Tonight she looks more beautiful and butchier than ever in an open-neck Balmain silk shirt and houndstooth skirt, short at the knees, no New Look for her.
“Can I kiss you?” I ask.
“No,” she walks away.
“You never give up, do you, Kid?” Our most patrician agent, tall and lean “Jonathan Buck,” is watching us. “Your first day I warned you she’s got a husband and kids and bats for the other team.” Almost alone of Jaffe agents, Jonny—Princeton, Colonial Club, Office of Strategic Services (“Oh So Social”), face scarred by shrapnel or a childhood pox, nobody asks—is never seen juiced. Like everyone else he boozes hard, but the only visible clue is when his facial eczema, or whatever it is, blushes a little redder. Of all of Mary’s “platoon guys”—her military trope—he’s the most elegant agent trusted with the Big Kahuna studios, Metro and Fox.
“How do you do it, Jonny?” I wonder.
“Good breeding.” He saunters away.
Jonny, ultra–WASP, does little to conceal his not-so-subtle anti-Semitism and is therefore amazingly successful with mainly Jewish studio executives who perversely share his prejudice and hence respect him all the more for it. Mary has three literary agents under her: Jonny, me, and “Zack Silver” (Navy minesweeper, Atlantic), my closest office friend, who has hunting and fishing rights, with rod and sometimes crossbow, on his Native American wife’s Klamath reservation up by the Puyallup River. He, too, strolls by: “Our boss is way too old for you. Remember Jennings Lang.” Lang was a Jaffe agent who had an affair with actress client Joan Bennett, who was producer Walter Wanger’s wife, whereupon Wanger shot Lang’s balls off in the parking lot of our competitor MCA. (A sympathetic jury slapped Wanger on the wrist for a brief term in county jail from which he emerged with the story for his Riot in Cell Block 11. Never waste material.)
Secretaries pass among us serving martinis on Mary’s private Georgian silver salvers, and Zack and I are on about our fifth or sixth. I show it; he never does except for a slight nose blush. In the fading light Mr. Washington goes around checking to see if anyone has drunkenly tumbled over the parapet onto Sunset Boulevard. He’s busy setting up metal folding chairs to face east toward the San Gabriel Mountains where, 300 miles away across the state line at Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site, the Atomic Energy Commission is getting ready to blow up a 28 kiloton above-ground nuclear bomb. In Las Vegas the tests are a tourist draw; casino operators print calendars with the dates and times of explosions.
Tonight I’m second banana to General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project.
I peer over the flowerpots down on the street where my ComSub crew should be passing out leaflets as planned, missing only one player, me. We call ourselves what the FBI tags us as, “Omega, alias Cell Without a Name,” which sounds pretty sinister for a bunch of guys and one woman bickering over five-card draw.
DOWN THERE SOMEWHERE “Barney,” Dorothy, “Jimmy,” Irwin (sometimes), “Sparky,” “Pete Pakulski,” and “Joe Ferguson,” but no longer “Ray Kovacs,” lost to me forever, are running around slapping up No NUCLEAR WAR—STOP THE TESTS! posters. I’m probably too drunk to help anyway.
As the blood-red sun sinks over the Pacific, a cool breeze doesn’t do much to sober us up on the Jaffe roof. After all, it’s Friday night and most of the client calls are rolled up, it’s all gemütlich because my going means one fewer agent to share the all-important end-of-year bonus, so there’s real feeling behind the handshakes, hugs, secretarial lip kisses including tongues—see-what-you-missed-all-this-time? Mr. Jaffe grips my elbow emotionally. “A glick ahf dir—good luck, go be bohemian, but stay away from my daughters.” Ah, so he knows?
My personal secretary Addy-with-a-y smiles glassily from a distance. She’s a former Ziegfeld Girl with legs to match, can’t type or take shorthand but like Mary Baker has been my crutch in the worst times. She’s a single mother twice the other secretaries’ age, uses way too much makeup, easily weeps (for me, herself), and is loyal above and beyond. On my first day we did it in the supply room because, as she explained, “All the agents sleep with their girls so let’s get it over with and we don’t have to obsess where and when, I’ve got enough worries, my son is an alcoholic at thirteen.”
Up front there’s a wooden table and metal chairs set up with a portable Zenith radio tuned into the KNX live broadcast of the bomb test. It’s like a Hollywood premiere for us; will it be box-office boffo or a flop?
“Ten … nine … eight …” the on-site radio reporter counts down.
We sip our martinis. “… seven … six … five … four … three … two … one …”
The night sky over the Sunset Strip and the whole city beyond flares up, glaring red then whiteish white. The radio sprays static over us. Overhead, thin clouds reflect the furnace glow.
As one we raise our glasses to the east.
Someone cries: “It’s a hit!”
We love winners.
3
Where This Story Takes Place
IN MID-20TH-CENTURY Los Angeles—Raymond Chandler’s LA before Pilates and cell phones. Vernacular architecture (diners shaped like hot dogs, gas stations like UFOs), earthquake-defying wraparound-window hill houses on fragile stilts, drive-in theaters. Cars with rocket-shaped grills and tail fins, gas is twenty cents a gallon, women like my secretaries (I have two plus a receptionist) wear petticoats and girdles. A brand-new Hollywood Freeway along the Old Spanish trail of Cahuenga Pass cuts my daily commute to the San Fernando Valley studios.
The Korean war, into which I’m nearly drafted, has just ended in a stalemate that costs over a million civilian and military lives including 45,000 dead or missing Americans. The three-year-long bloodshed juices up the Cold War between the two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, who have just fought by proxy in the Korean peninsula. A permanent state of “national emergency” is declared.
World War III has begun. It is in the opening skirmish stage already
—Headlines of Life magazine.
Nike missiles, armed with nuclear warheads, protect sprawling Los Angeles from a Soviet attack expected any minute. The glow from the Yucca Flat blasts can be seen from my office window. Nearby businesses have installed bomb shelters, but Sam Jaffe refuses, “What can Khrushchev do to us that Selznick hasn’t?”
FULL DISCLOSURE:
This is the story of my time as a young agent in Hollywood. I’ve taken liberties to compress time or hide some identities. Memory is fallible, so I’ve done due diligence by checking in with coworkers, accomplices, helpers, buyers, and sellers. Also with the “Omegas,” our little subversive cell. I’ve consulted a diary I kept, and have used the archives at the American Film Institute and other libraries. A word about the Omegas: under different names I’ve listed all I can remember and those who have contacted me. Not all were present at the same time, although the core group remained remarkably stable under fire. In a world of betrayal there’s absolute trust among us.
At this distance of time I’ve had to reimagine dialogue except when taken verbatim from contemporary notes, but have tried to avoid putting false words in the mouths of real people. I hope it rings true to the experience as lived.
The story is told in the present tense because it’s how I lived it. Some names in quotes (“”) have been changed; this is especially true of the women, some of whom are today respectable grandmothers and may not want to be reminded of a time when they “leaped over the wall” of repression.
BLACKLIST BLUES; BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO WHAT IS WRITTEN ABOUT NOW OR HOW THE MOVIE VIRUS HIT ME
I’ve been a movie balcony bug since age five when I ran screaming from the theater because the heroic German Shepherd dog Rin Tin Tin crashed through the silver screen to grab my throat. Ever since I’ve been unable to tell the difference between a movie image and what’s real. But mostly I blame UCLA, where I was a post–World War II student, for what is a full-blown disorder. The Westwood campus, with its manicured lawns and manicured Breck-girl sorority girls (saddle shoes, bobby sox) is like going to class in the middle of a Busby Berkeley musical. Halfway between the beach and Hollywood, UCLA functions as the eighth sister of the nearby film studios known as the “Seven Sisters”—Metro, Fox, Paramount, Universal, Warners, Columbia, and RKO. Students burn to be actors, screenwriters, or directors. My steady date, an MGM ingénue, plays Jane in a Tarzan movie, and in my campus red group the children of the jailed Hollywood Ten of blacklistees invite me into their homes—a swanky Malibu house and a San Fernando Valley ranch—and let me ride their expensive Indian motorcycles up and down the beach. What a life it is to be a rich radical!
“I walked with a Zombie. Had anyone said that to me a year ago, I’m not at all sure I would have known what a Zombie was. I might have had some notion—that they were strange and frightening and perhaps a little funny. But I have walked with a Zombie … It all began in such an ordinary way …”
—From I Walked with a Zombie (1943), written by Curt Siodmak
For me, too, it begins in such an ordinary way … with a gorilla, a blonde, and a gun …
4
Bride of the Gorilla
BANG! POW!! THE Detective Special recoils in my hand. Bang, bang!! I haven’t held a weapon since packing it as a GI while being mesmerized by the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal. Today, on the Bride of the Gorilla set, in the old Mary Pickford–Charlie Chaplin studio at the tacky end of Hollywood, my blank bullets slam into the husky actor Raymond Burr who, yes indeed, resembles a version of the fat beast Goering. Burr crumples to the studio’s jungle floor, play-dead.
Curt Siodmak, the writer-director behind the camera, yells in his guttural accent, “More shooting, Sigal! Nach, nach! Sie schiest! Rat-tat-tat. Crack crack crack! He’s a verrickter ape! Fertzig! Crazy!”
Bride is shooting inside a small studio leased for cheap setups in a seedy Hollywood neighborhood miles away from the glamour. Siodmak is shaping his story around an overgrown plastic jungle left over from an old Tarzan picture. A year out of college, captivated by my first movie job, I’m a twenty-five-year-old gofer, boy Friday, to the Assistant Director’s assistant. Lucked into it, just by trolling side streets and asking. Thank you, Jesus, I’m on my way, hallelujah. Forgive me, Ma, it’s nonunion, I couldn’t pay the $1,000 bribe IATSE demanded for a union card.
Mr. Burr plays a plantation manager in Brazil who lusts after, then marries, busty, brassy actress Barbara Payton, Cloquet, Minnesota’s gift to Hollywood. In the script she is married to an elderly husband whom Burr murders; Burr then drives himself so insanely jealous suspecting Payton is fooling around with the young village doctor that he morphs into a killer gorilla. The gorilla, in insert shots, is a redheaded Irishman named Russell wearing a hairy, moth-eaten rented suit; he moonlights as a bartender at Ciro’s nightclub up on Sunset.
My kind of movie. With its movable wild walls, sweetish scent of sawdust and fresh plaster, snakelike tangles of black electric cable, portable generator’s hum—everything schnell schnell—it’s a perfect apprenticeship. Siodmak himself smears black Kiwi shoe polish on my face for me to play a “native boy” in a sarong skirt. A skirt?
Woody Strode, the bone-handsome African American UCLA athlete who along with Jackie Robinson helped to break the color bar in college football, is the story’s native policeman. Since we’re both Bruin alumni, on breaks I chum up with the big guy—but he takes one look at my blacked-up face and turns away in disgust. Hey, Woody, not my idea.
Barbara Payton, the cause of all this deadly jungle heat between Burr and the suave village doctor—bang bang!—is real-life tabloid meat. According to the wildly popular Confidential magazine that my mother Jennie swears she doesn’t read, Barbara is sleeping with (at least) two lovers, ex-cop actor Tom Neal and aging star Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford’s ex.
Mirroring the dark violent plot of Bride of the Gorilla, the two actors, Tom Neal and Franchot Tone, one a lowlife, the other a theatrical aristocrat, are poisonously jealous of each other. My duty, director Siodmak commands, is to intervene if by some mischance the two toxic actors collide on the set: nichts, nil, nix must slow down a skin-tight shooting schedule. I feel so honored to be working for a distinguished Hitler émigré like Siodmak I’d clean the toilets if asked (which he does). He got out of Berlin in ’33, just in time.
I’d say yes to anything, even at 75 cents an hour, on a movie directed by one of the brilliant Siodmak brothers, Curt who wrote I Walked with a Zombie and The Wolfman and who adapts German expressionism into American horror pictures. I know this stuff because I’m a Wunderkind of screen credits, go ahead, ask me who are Perc Westmore, Leo Forbstein, Edward Willis, Tom Gunn? Ha, gotcha. The heart never has to be lonely in a dark movie house.
On set Mr. Siodmak’s accent is often impenetrable to his actors and some crew, but my Blitz German from duty in Germany gets me by. I’m his useful idiot, quick and obedient, jawohl, jawohl, Herr Direktor! He’s passionately practical on the set and wastes nothing, not even breath on me, whom he calls Wunderknabe, wonder boy, definitely not a compliment.
“You, Wunderknabe,” Mr. Siodmak points, “I zay more geschossen. And you, Herr Gorilla, crazier. Die crazier!”
Herman Goering, I mean Raymond Burr, slumps over deader than the green plastic foliage he topples into.
Everybody works fast and relaxed, it’s not art but hard-core moviemaking. Yes, this is where it’s happening, and I’m part of it.
Around our leading lady Barbara Payton, in tight jodhpurs and a deep-cleavage, half unbuttoned silk blouse, I’m all thumbs when the A.D. hands me a hair dryer to crouch behind Payton, out of camera range at crotch level, to blow-dry her hair for a dramatic, typhoon-tossed close-up. Oh sweetheart.
One of my other duties is to rap softly on actor Lon Chaney Jr.’s dressing room—a sort of Portapotty on wheels—to alert him to hide the Old Grandad bottle when he’s due on set. Lon, son of the silent’s immortal Man of a Thousand Faces, plays a native police commissioner investigating the strange behavior of Burr whom the jungle spirits are driving mad, mad I tell you, mad.
My kind of movie, my kind of actors.
Anxious about delays, Siodmak tells me to “Zuhören! Zuhören!” (listen!) for the stage telephone if it rings to report that Mister Franchot Tone has arrived at the front gate when Mister Tom Neal is with Payton in her tiny dressing room, or if Mister Neal shows up while Mister Tone is with Miss Payton. I’m to drop everything and somehow keep them apart. Neal is a former boxer and will within days of the picture’s wrap nearly kill the older man in a fistfight.
“IF YOU HAVE TO,” the A.D. says, “beat the shit out of both of them. You look in pretty good shape.” Comes of weight-lifting sessions with my blood brother, Radovan (Ray) Kovacs, where we drain off the evil fumes of drinking sessions.
“You, college boy!” barks Siodmak. “Spritzwasser on Mister Burr’s Stirn! Schnell!”
What’s a Stirn? Ah, yes. Forehead. I spray water from a plastic bottle onto our lead actor’s brow, and he politely thanks me. What a professional.
Russell in the simian suit removes his head and sprawls in a canvas chair beside me.
“No complaints but do you get the plot?”
Simple. Voodoo tweaks Burr into a mad gorilla.
He broods. “Mostly, on other jobs, I just rape the girl and then clock out, but the Kraut says no, just lay there dead, get my reflection in a pool of water, and no sex, I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go, right? I rent this rig per diem and my kids get a charge from seeing me goin’ nuts on screen. Incidentally, I like your getup, Western Costume like mine?” He appraises me.
My thick wavy black hair is slicked straight back with goo, and my face is caked with Kiwi mud-brown shoepolish.
I doubt they’ll use me, I say, because I look too “European.”
The gorilla waves his paw dismissively. “That just means Jewish and Jews make good native whatevers. That old witch in the picture who puts the curse on me? She probably makes great matzo ball soup. They run the business.”
This is the life, a native boy and an anti-Semitic gorilla shootin’ the shit.
After the day’s setups, still in makeup and skirt, I sweep up, empty trash bins, scan for Barbara whose crotch I’ve been looking up all day, no luck, so I’m off through the front gate onto the brilliant—real—sunlight of Formosa Street.
How I wish the gorilla was with me.
Parked curbside is an unmarked Los Angeles police car with its telltale four-way roof antennae—some disguise—and two of them inside. A uniformed cop is shooting me through the eyepiece of what seems to be a Keystone 8mm turret lens. Sparkle, Shirley, you’re on camera.
That’s the good news.
The cop with the camera lowers it so he and his partner can gape at me still in costume, skirt and mud shoepolish-makeup.
The cops exchange looks.
Mystic gods of chance, Mister Franchot Tone chooses this moment to be dropped off in a chauffeur-driven Alfa Romeo 2500 at the studio gate, and who should be lounging inside the guard booth chatting up the security guard but Barbara Payton’s other lover, Mister Tom Neal.
By rights I’m off duty, but if there’s an incident—Neal must outweigh a frail-looking Tone by a good fifty pounds—Mr. Siodmak will blame his Wunderknabe.
Just then the cop in civvies gets out of the LAPD car and folds his arms in a relaxed style on the roof while calling over to ex-cop Neal:
“Hey, Tom, none of that crap on my shift.”
Tom Neal, throwing a smirk at Tone, ambles over to chat with his police chums. Franchot, whom I carry in my movie heart as the chignon-wearing aristocrat in the first Mutiny on the Bounty, the most expensive movie of its time, wisely retreats by summoning his chauffeur in the Alfa and smartly whisking away. Good thinking, old man. Situation nil, nichts, nul.
“Say there, beauty queen!” the uniformed cop in the car yells at me. “How about a date?” He throws me a girly kiss.
Mr. Siodmak sir, I swear I did my duty, no blood spilled.
But alles ist kaput. Across the street is a different unmarked car, this one a canary yellow Chevy Club Deluxe coupe, with two other guys, suits and fedoras, none of this LAPD-Hawaiian-aloha-shirt-concealed-weapon shit. The yellow Chevy carries an invisible PROPERTY OF US GOVERNMENT sign.
“Hey, fellas!” I trot across the street with a big hello to the Chevy, but my surveillance doesn’t like being surveilled and they gun their car out of sight. In a skirt and feeling stupid, I’m absurdly alone, vulnerable, on a sun-baked Hollywood sidewalk. This past year I lost perfectly ordinary jobs, in a glassware factory and a record store, when the Chevy guys or their brothers dropped by to chat with the boss. It’s 99 percent predictable they’ll go see the Brideofthe Gorilla’s producer Herman Cohen to ask their usual questions and that’s it, I’m out. Poor Mr. Siodmak, a Hitler refugee doesn’t need this trouble. What will he do without my Blitz German? Who will spray sweat on Raymond Burr’s gorilla face? Can anyone fan the bride’s crotch as conscientiously as me?
