Bring on the empty horses Read online

  Bring On The Empty Horses

  David Niven

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  THE PLAYPEN

  HEDDA AND LOUELLA

  OUR LITTLE GIRL (Part 1)

  THE KING

  DEGREES OF FRIENDLINESS

  ERROL

  MR. GOLDWYN

  THE EMPEROR

  TWO QUEENS

  1. Connie

  2. Garbo

  SUMMIT DRIVE:

  1. Ronald Colman

  2. David Selznick: The Prisoner of Zenda

  3. Douglas Fairbanks

  4. Charles Chaplin

  MARY LOU

  BOGIE

  THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY

  THE ACE

  THE ENCHANTED HILL

  OUR LITTLE GIRL (Part 2)

  LONG SHOTS AND CLOSE-UPS

  1. Cary

  2. George

  3. Ernst Lubitsch

  4. John Huston

  5. Jack Warner

  6. Cecil B. De Mille

  7. Bobbie

  8. Eddie

  9. Winifred

  10. The 11th Commandment

  (Thou Shalt Not be Found Out)

  INTRODUCTION

  IF at this moment you are in a bookstore leafing through these early pages and wondering if the whole thing is worth a sizable expenditure, may I suggest that you keep your back towards the salesman and read on because, coming up, is a brief description of what this book is all about…

  To be an actor it is essential to be an egomaniac, otherwise it just doesn't work. The supreme act of egomania is to sit down and write one hundred and thirty thousand words about oneself. That I have already done in The Moon's a Balloon so you will be relieved to learn that this is not a book about David Niven… at least, it is not meant to be. Unfortunately, the actor's urge to take up a firm position at centre stage is a strong one and if, despite valiant efforts to remain in the wings, I have, on occasion, eased myself forward I apologise.

  This book is about 'Hollywood'; not the whole mishmash, because that has been done a hundred times and anyway, the canvas is too huge and quite beyond my mini brush-Work, so I have attempted to splash a little colour on just one corner — the twenty-five years between 1935 and 1960.

  I was there from 'Extra' on down (or up… it's for you to decide), but I have made little effort to keep things in chronological order; provided the people and events coincided with the allotted time-span, I have just described them as I saw them.

  The period covered in this book is often hailed as 'The Great Days of Hollywood': perhaps they were, perhaps not: but, with those 'days' gone forever, it is certainly not my intention to try and prove that they were superior to the 'Hollywood' of today.

  If now, Hollywood is booming and full of talent, but controlled by conglomerates, lawyers, bankers, computers and a handful of agents, then it was booming, filled with great personalities, but controlled by arrogant Moguls, overcrowded and smelling of despotism, nepotism and Black Lists.

  Hollywood was Lotus Land between 1935 and 1960 and bore little relationship to the rest of the world, but it was vastly exciting to be part of a thriving, thrusting 'first growth' industry — the greatest form of mass entertainment so far invented, and if exaggeration became the 'norm', it was hard to recognise the fact, when a 'Great Star' could confidently expect to receive 20,000 letters a week and newspapers all over the world daily set aside several pages for the news and gossip pumped out by the Hollywood self-adulation machines.

  There was friendliness, generosity, excitement, sadness, success, despair and no smog in that long-ago Hollywood, but 'high' on Lotus few of the inhabitants, when World War II shattered the calm, realised that all the old standards would be changed, including the public taste in canned entertainment, and like an out-of-condition heavyweight Hollywood was ill prepared to cope with the second onslaught which followed quickly on the heels of the first — the sudden advent of Television. By burying its head in its arms and hoping that The Enemy would go away, it very nearly went down for the count.

  But before Hollywood was forced to shift gears, the Moguls controlled the industry they had invented. They were master showmen; two hundred million people each week paid to see their product and among the names in lights above their theatres were Garbo, Gable, Astaire, Cooper, Dietrich, Grant, Chaplin, Bogart, Garland, Hepburn, Flynn and Davis. It was a fascinating canvas, there will never be another like it and I hope, by trying to add a little first-hand light and shadow, that I have not spoiled it.

  DAVID NIVEN Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

  THE PLAYPEN

  WHEN Gertrude Stein returned to New York after a short sojourn in Hollywood somebody asked her… 'What is it like — out there?'

  To which, with little delay and the minimum of careful thought the sage replied… 'There is no "There" — there'.

  To try and describe to the reader the self-styled 'Glamour Capital of the World' it seems best to do so as it appeared just before the outbreak of World War II, because although this book describes some events between 1935 and 1960, that particular upheaval caused the number of inhabitants and automobiles in Los Angeles to double. Up until then there had been plenty of room and fresh air for everyone — one square mile for every four persons to be precise—very little industry, the worst transportation system of any major U.S. city, and clear blue skies without a hint of 'smog' — not a word invented by a local wit, but borrowed from the City of Glasgow where it had justifiably been in constant use since the turn of the century. Later, the reader will find a list of the actors and actresses who were in 1939 under contract to just one of the seven major studios, giving him an idea of the investment the Moguls had in talent and the problems they must have had in keeping that talent gainfully employed.

  There were four ways to approach Los Angeles from the East Coast:

  (1) By automobile, which took ten days of fast driving and entailed facing red dirt roads across large tracts of Arizona and New Mexico with no prospect of a motel at the end of the day.

  (2) By train, leaving New York on the 20th Century Limited at 6 p.m. and standing respectfully aside while famous movie stars smiled for the New York papers as they were escorted by railroad officials along a red carpet to their sleeping compartments. On arrival at Chicago the following morning, the sleeping cars were shunted around the marshalling yards and by noon, were tacked on to the rear of the Santa Fe Chief (steam locomotives until 1939) which two days later puffed to a stop at the Union Station, Los Angeles where the famous movie stars perched on piles of matching baggage, and smiled for the Los Angeles papers.

  (3) By plane, which was not for the faint-hearted — a minimum of eighteen cramped and often nerve-racking hours flying in unpressurised and largely unheated twin-engined machines at low altitudes through sometimes appalling weather with the nasty possibility of thudding into either the Alleghenny or Rocky Mountains at one end of the trip, or —

  (4) As I did it — by sea, an endless voyage of fluctuating comfort in a 'dry' ship via Cuba and the Panama Canal.

  The whole Los Angeles area was subject to frequent earth tremors accounted for by an ill-advised proximity to the San Andreas Fault and on the very day of my arrival in San Pedro I had noted from the deck of S.S. President Pierce that people at dockside beneath a swaying water tower were scurrying about looking nervously upward, wondering which way it would fall. It didn't, as it happened, and the next morning the Chamber of Commerce routinely reassured us that there had been no cause for alarm. But it was perhaps an early warning that I was heading for the breeding ground of stresses and strains.

  The 'Film Folk', I discovered, unwound at their favourite playgrounds, the beaches, the mountains at
Arrowhead and Big Bear, and the desert at Palm Springs — a tiny colony in the middle of Indian-owned land which boasted a main street and two hotels. Santa Anita Racecourse was also very popular with them and there were various Country Clubs which dispensed golf, tennis, and an extraordinary degree of segregation. Not one had a black member and several refused to have Jewish members, which prompted the Jewish community to start their own Country Club and to take in no Gentiles (they also found oil in satisfactory quantities beneath their fairways which provided them with a splendid opportunity for nose-thumbing): but the 'topper' was the prestigious Los Angeles Country Club which adamantly refused to have anything whatever to do with anyone in the motion picture industry irrespective of race, creed or colour.

  Greater Los Angeles, a city which grew more quickly than the city planners had planned, was not remarkable for its beauty and it was necessary to disregard the largely temporary appearance of the buildings and the unsightly forests of poles and overhead wiring and concentrate on its truly remarkable setting in the horseshoe of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the sunsets.

  In Hollywood itself, a place of dusty Baroque charm, one important thoroughfare, La Cienega Boulevard, separated with great subservience on either side of an oil derrick pumping slowly like a praying mantis, and in the scrub-covered hills above, underlining its claim to fame, was a forty-foot-high wooden sign — HOLLYWOODLAND.

  Beverly Hills, another suburb, had gone against the haphazard planning of greater Los Angeles and when the Rodeo Land and Water Company decided to develop their gently sloping acreage they had the great good taste and foresight to send for an expert from Kew Gardens who planted a different species of tree for every street, and thereafter a fascinating variety of architecture proliferated beneath maples, magnolias, palms, corals, pines, sycamores, flowering eucalyptus, elms, olives, jacarandas and oaks. A home in Beverly Hills was the status symbol of success in the pre-war motion picture industry and the area boasted more private swimming pools and detectives to the square mile than anywhere else in the world. Everything in Southern California seemed to me to be an enlargement — the bronzed and sun-bleached girls and boys of the beaches were representatives of a master race bred in freedom, sunshine and clean air, but if the robins were the size of pigeons and the butterflies had the proportions of bombers, the diminutive honey-hunting humming birds brought things back into perspective as they whizzed merrily about with their tiny waistcoats of turquoise, vermilion and gold flashing in the sunlight.

  The relaxed village-like atmosphere of Beverly Hills was very catching and at the hub of the movie social wheel in 'The Brown Derby' restaurant, the men wore loafers, open neck shirts and sports jackets, while the girls, lately liberated by Marlene Dietrich's earth-shaking appearance in a man's suit, appeared enthusiastically in slacks and the waitresses were pretty, would-be actresses in varying stages of disenchantment.

  The two tennis clubs most highly regarded by the movie colony were the Beverly Hills and the West Side. The Beverly Hills was by far the better club and the tennis there was of a much higher standard with Fred Perry giving points and taking on all corners, but I myself joined the West Side because the committee had wisely decided that beautiful girls were a more digestible ingredient than perspiring professionals, and I will never forget a fancy dress party on the premises at which a young lawyer named Greg Bautzer arrived, on his face a grin so wide he looked like a Hammond Organ and on his arm, aged seventeen, ridiculously beautiful and dressed as Bo Peep, Lana Turner.

  The Home of the Phoney Phone Call was the over-chlorinated pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel around which little-known agents reclined, red-eyed and sweaty, waiting for the loud-speaker to relay messages which they themselves had carefully arranged to be broadcast…

  'Mr. Bleepburger please be good enough to call Mr. Darryl Zanuck and Miss Claudette Colbert when you have a moment — urgent.'

  Written-out gag writers were also present keeping their ears open for any anecdote that could be twisted to their advantage. 'Fun-ee!… Fun-ee!' they would nod sagely without a glimmer of a smile, then hasten away to make notes, and all the time the long-legged, high-bosomed, tight-assed girls in swimsuits and high heels hopefully ebbed and flowed around the recumbent denizens of the water hole.

  In the late thirties the twice-weekly programme presented by most theatres consisted of a newsreel, a cartoon, a 'short', The Second Feature and The First Feature. The whole show lasted for a bum-numbing four hours, but as a result Hollywood was booming with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, one of the seven major studios, boasting that it alone turned out one feature film each week.

  Edmund Lowe was famous for many films but chiefly for the ones he made in partnership with Victor McLaglen; he and his secretary befriended me soon after my arrival in Hollywood because she decided that I looked like her employer. She had noticed this resemblance when I had been standing outside the main gate of Paramount Studios watching for the stars in their fancy automobiles, and had stood out, apparently, from the curious throng of sightseers and out-of-work 'extras' because in my mouth had been a large cork. This cork and the likeness to Edmund Lowe had so intrigued the lady that she had ordered the chauffeur to return and bring me before her master. Eddie Lowe was a friendly, smiling man; he explained that he was looking for a 'double' and asked if I would be interested in the job. I thanked him and told him that I was hoping to become an actor myself, not mentioning that I thought he looked like my father.

  'Why the cork?' he asked. I explained that E. E. Clive, an elderly character actor from the theatre who had cornered the film market in butler and judge roles, had given me a valuable hint on how to increase the resonance of my voice, which he had decided was negligible.

  'Get a long cork, my boy,' he had ordered, 'out of a hock bottle preferably — though I doubt if many people drink hock in this backwater — shove it lengthwise between your teeth and, when you have nothing better to do, repeat the Lord's Prayer half a dozen times it'll work wonders.'

  Eddie Lowe taught me much about Hollywood in the weeks to come. He tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to arouse the interest of his producer friends in my stagnant career and personally gave me a conducted tour of one Dream Factory in which he worked. He drove me around the cosily-named Back Lot, a two-hundred-acre spread, upon which stood the permanent 'sets', including New York streets (some smart, some brownstone), New England, French, and Spanish villages, medieval castles, a railroad station complete with rolling stock. Lakes with wave-making machines and rustic bridges, a university campus, an airliner, a section of jungle and another of pine forest, a Mississippi steamboat, a three-masted schooner, native canoes, a submarine, a stretch of desert with ruined fort and in case anything was missing, several acres of carefully dismantled, docketed and stored, streets, villages, cathedrals, mud huts, dance halls, skating rinks, ball parks, theatres, vineyards, slums, southern plantations, and oriental palaces. Lowe also took me to the Studio's Western ranch; several hundred acres of rolling hills in the San Fernando Valley upon which stood the permanent townships and Indian habitations. Huge tracts of make believe were necessary to Hollywood because air travel was in its infancy and if, for instance, a film was set in Venice, canals, churches, palazzi, gondolas and bridges would soon be conjured up locally. Small wonder then that Gone With The Wind was filmed in Culver City, Mutiny on the Bounty just off Catalina Island, The Charge of the Light Brigade in the San Fernando Valley, The Hunchback of Notre Dame adjacent to Vine Street, The Ten Commandments behind the Western Costume Company, The Adventures of Marco Polo a hundred yards from the city gasometer, and Scrooge's breath in A Christmas Carol imaginatively photographed in a vast refrigerator near the Ambassador Hotel. Under Eddie Lowe's sponsorship I spent days wandering about the Back Lot, and also the main studio at the heart of the Dream Factory where for some reason the buildings, car park and streets were uniformly white or pale yellow thus extracting the maximum amount of glare from the cloudless California sky, and where the whole place rese
mbled a mixture of the business district of a thriving small town and the maintenance area of a busy airport. Twenty or thirty towering, hangar-like, sound stages clustered together, dominated the centre, surrounded by the Fire Department, the generator turbines, the electrical grid, the transportation, construction, carpenter and plasterer departments, camera and electrical stores, wardrobe departments, legal departments, acres of dismantled 'sets' and furniture repositories, 'tailoring' and 'dressmaking' shops and ever widening circles of photographic studios, painters' stores, cutting rooms, make-up, hairdressing and sound departments, projection rooms and theatres, rehearsal halls, orchestra recording theatres, accommodation for set designers and set dressers, the story department, accounting offices, publicity offices, casting offices, fan-mail departments, greenhouses, restaurants, a hospital, a gymnasium and a shoe-shine parlour.

  An outer circle was rather stately by comparison and green lawns softened the over-powering glare of the producers', directors' and writers' buildings, the barn-like dressing-rooms allotted to the swarming 'extras' and the double-decker rabbit warrens which housed the 'small part actors'. Shaded by trees, connected by paths and surrounded by flowering shrubs, the bungalow dressing-rooms of the stars gave an outward impression of an enclave of peace and tranquillity but inside, as I was to learn, their walls bore the scars of countless exhibitions of temperament, noisy moments of triumph and far too many lonely heartbreaks.

  I was also to learn that writers got drunk, actors became paranoid, actresses pregnant, and directors uncontrollable. Crises were a way of life in the Dream Factories: but by some extraordinary mixture of efficiency, compromising, exuberance, gambling, shrewdness, experience, strong-arm tactics, psychology, blackmail, kindness, integrity, good luck and a firm belief that 'the show must go on'… the pictures came rolling off the end of the production lines.