over the years carried fifty-nine varieties of sign-off greetings:
“Emphaticallergically” ... “Con amore-and-more” ... “Your sancrosanctly
devoted friend” ... “Deltavowedly” ... “Turkishbathetically.”
His first letter deserved a prompt reply:
Now you can brace yourself after that beginning. You’ve won me,
hands down. Don’t confuse that with the Church, however, as I’m
still a Quaker. You go ahead and make your contacts for our
voodoo meeting down there, even if you have to hold it in the
church, because Frances Marion and I are-a-comin’ ... God bless
the Irish!
He promised to “put the curse of the seven wet-nosed orphans on the
weatherman if he doesn’t behave himself while you’re here.” Somebody
must have had influence, because the February weather was fabulous,
and Mardi Gras turned out to be a long, nonstop ball. I didn’t miss
anything. We lunched with Mayor “Chep” Morrison, teaed with Frances
Parkinson Keyes, nibbled chicken legs alfresco with total strangers
squatting on the asphalt in the middle of Canal Street.
We had a magnificent four-hour luncheon at Brennan’s restaurant where
every dish had been prepared in wine, champagne, or brandy sauces.
Father Murphy religiously abstained from anything that came by the
bottle but ate heartily and conscientiously spooned up every last drop
of the sauces. “I’m not drinking,” he observed blandly, “but there’s no
rule against my not _eating_ these things.”
At six-thirty one morning I was up and off to see King Coal, the
colored monarch of Mardi Gras, land at the docks with his court off a
barge and parade their way through the streets on trucks. Their first
stop for a drink was at a celebrated local undertaker’s parlor, which
was always jammed with guests for the ceremony. One year a visiting New
York newspaperman discovered to his terror how they made room for all
the celebrants. In the middle of festivities he opened the door of the
men’s room. Three corpses, which had been stood inside upright behind
the door, tottered out at him, and he fled, screaming his head off.
My faithful new N’Orleans correspondent was writing more than some of
the liveliest letters I’d set eyes on. He has a long string of book
credits to his name, from _Yankee Priest_ to _Mary Magdalene_, which
was bought years ago by David Selznick, who retitled it _The Scarlet
Lily_ as a vehicle for Jennifer Jones. But by the time he gets around
to making it, I suspect we may all be ringing St. Peter’s doorbell.
The good father, too, is a fast gun with a news item.
And how about this front-page violent calm into which you and
Louella-la have flown? [he wrote during one Hollywood armistice
between us.] By what female magic has yesterday’s equine
_derrière_ become a bosom pal of today? Are you quite sure
that the embrace is not an _osculation de mors_ or a mutual
search for the most vulnerable places in each other’s anatomy?
Well, whatever the mystery, the moral shines clear: _Anything
can happen_. After this, I shall not flicker an eyelash if
Peace descends on the human race as a certified dove--not an
unmistakable bucket of bricks.
In his early days he used to serve as weekend assistant at St.
Michael’s in New York, where he met Eddie Dowling, and a bit of grease
paint rubbed off on Father Murphy’s Irish heart. He’s been an avid
follower of stage and screen ever since.
New Orleans was set on its ear when Elia Kazan went down for Fox to
make _Outbreak_, with Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Richard
Widmark, on location there. As supporting players, Gadge rounded up
six hundred local characters, from B-girls to skid-row derelicts, from
detectives to three extras whom police spotted in the crowd and dragged
off to prison.
My faithful correspondent kept his eyes peeled.
Well, [Elia Kazan] went the aesthetic limit the other day,
[he wrote,] using some genuine Orleanian streetwalkers. Of
course, the ladies were paid for their posing and the wear and
tear on their delicate constitutions. A bit later, when a
policeman was about to pull them in for loitering (what a name
for the world’s oldest profession!) they haughtily gave him the
brush-off. “We’re working for Twentieth Century-Fox now,” they
said, swishing their skirts.
He had a new sign-off for that note: “Kazanimatedly.”
When a member of the actor’s union led a cavalcade of stars to New
Orleans and they were tendered a banquet at Arnaud’s, Father Murphy
outdid himself. He gave an invocation to end all invocations. It went
something like this:
O Lord God, Creator of the Cohens, the Kellys, and the Murphys;
Author of the scenario of reality, from which we all play our
parts, some of us so badly that we get hell for our performance
and others brilliantly enough to achieve stardom;
Director of the drama of the ages, which begins with the
sublime curtain-raiser called Genesis, unfolds with the dreams,
sighs, and sins of mankind, culminates with the Atonement on
Calvary and ends endlessly with the unspeakable visions of the
Apocalypse;
Source of the silver screen of existence, which Hollywood
ingeniously reflects with a silver screen of its own on which
appear the animated shadows of thespians, whose fine art
makes fiction seem truth, so differently from many of us poor
preachers who succeed only in making truth seem fiction;
We thank you, O Lord, for this occasion that brings some of
the best representatives of Cinemaland into our midst. Help us
to honor them fittingly. Bless them for shedding the gleams of
their gifts into our darkening times. Save them--tonight--from
Bourbon Street. Inspire the mighty industry that sponsors
them. And, in fine, smile beneficently on the box offices of
the land, breathe into them a second spring and let there be
the financial flow that is so vital to the maintenance of an
enterprise without which our daily lives would be so definitely
drabber. Amen.
The one man who could hold a candle as a letter writer to Father Murphy
was Gene Fowler, another friend of many years. I loved him as much as I
loved Agnes, his wife of nearly half a century. Gene and I knew each
other well when the urge remained, but the ability in both cases had
departed. I doubt whether he put a dull word on paper, whether it was a
book, a three-thousand-word letter, or a post card.
After a dinner party for Gene and Agnes, for instance, he wrote:
My dear Handsome:
It doesn’t require the prompting of Emily Post or that other
authority on etiquette, Polly Adler, to cause me to write a
note of appreciation.... As I dined and sat beside two of
my beloved women, I forgot my white hair and certain other
elements of my physical decline. For the moment I was once
again in the saddle (figuratively of course) and Life seemed
new. Upon shaving this morning, I _had_ to see the realities
once again, and I must confess that I abhor all mirrors.
He gave the years a run for their money, slowed down sometimes by
illness but stopped only once, by a final massive heart attack.
I am in fine shape, [he concluded,] except for a faulty motor.
I have led such a clean life that I can’t understand it (I mean
I can’t understand the clean life).... But I still carry the
torch for you. The torch, alas! is becoming an ember, but it is
all I have.
Did anybody ever write such letters?
He spent an evening with Gene Buck, a true friend of ours, dating back
to the days when I commuted from Long Island to play on Broadway in
_Six-Cylinder Love_ in the evenings and make a movie in New York with
Jack Barrymore by day. A letter from the Fowlers’ home in Los Angeles
told about the two Genes’ meeting:
He tried to get hold of me for four days, a thing that Sheriff
Biscalis always does within an hour, and if it hadn’t been for
you, the mighty squire of Great Neck would have gone without
paying his disrespects to me.
I suppose there are just as many great people now as there ever
were, but it does not seem so to me. Possibly I am thinking
of my own youth when I recall the wonderful troupe who were
knocking down bottles during the early part of this century.
Jesus Christ, Hedda! What a wonderful tribe it was!
Gene and I enumerated them all and drank a toast in milk (not
toast and milk) to the many memories. I do not want to classify
you as an aged alumna, for you were just a baby ... I wish to
God you had been there. We would have called you, busy as you
are, but you were at some damned glamorous but uninteresting
party to a movie magnate....
If this sounds like a love letter, make the most of it; but,
note well, you will have to hurry, for Forest Lawn is sending
me literature.
Gene used to say: “The important thing is to see that friends, big or
little, famous or otherwise, have a sincere send-off.” He wrote the
send-off for Red Skelton’s son Richard, for Jack Barrymore, for Fred
MacMurray’s first wife, Lillian, and a dozen other people. “Maybe you
will do this kind of thing for me when my own time comes--and may I not
keep you waiting too long at that,” he told me.
After his last heart attack two years ago, I did my best, such as it
was, in my column: “He was as near heaven as any mortal can get. I feel
the loss more every day and will for the rest of my life.”
If, nostalgically, I learned something about how to love from Gene
Fowler, I got some advice on how to live from Bernard M. Baruch. I was
visiting Hobcaw Barony, his South Carolina plantation, hundreds of
acres of pines and live oaks, draped in Spanish moss with the King’s
Highway running through the middle of it. The soil’s so rich you can
throw a seed down one day and have a plant two inches tall the next.
Only a handful of servants were left when I was there; the rest went
north years ago. I urged Bernie to hand over the estate to the Negro
people as a memorial, to see what they could make of it by building
schools, churches, a community center. But he says no: “They’d think
I was showing off.” He’s left it to his daughter Belle and built a
small house some fifty miles away, where he spends his winters with his
devoted hostess-companion and nurse, Elizabeth Navarro.
I was running up Hobcaw’s great sweep of stairway when Bernie stopped
me. “Let me show you how to do it,” he said. “I know you’re not sixteen
any longer. Do what I do. Go up to the first landing, take five deep
breaths. Then go up to the next landing and take five more, and so on
until you’re at the top.”
I’d arrived bone-weary from a lecture tour. Jimmy Byrnes, former
Secretary of State to Harry Truman, was there with his wife to dinner.
I’m a sort of middle-class Republican, while Bernie’s an intellectual
Democrat. He’s fond of conducting his own private polls of politics,
and I’m counted on to give him an opposition point of view. So while
Baruch, Byrnes, and other guests stood in a group in front of the
fireplace debating the affairs of the nation, Hopper sat on a sofa,
ears tuned in until my head began to nod. The next thing I knew was
Bernie’s tap on my shoulder. “Come now, it’s time for you to retire.”
“But you haven’t finished your discussion,” I protested.
“No, but you have.”
I fell asleep hours later in a huge bedroom with four picture windows
in two of its walls. Through each of them I could see and hear the
breeze ruffling through the moss on the live oak in the moonlight so
that it danced like a _corps de ballet_. Bernie believes in plenty of
rest, including a nap between the sheets every afternoon. The next
morning I had breakfast in bed, served by Bernie. He’d been up long
enough to have read all the newspapers, so I got bulletins along with
my coffee.
With a chauffeur and one other servant, the three of us went off on
a fishing expedition in a station wagon loaded to the hubcaps with
equipment. At the selected spot at the mouth of a narrow river lined
with oyster beds, the two helpers set out folding chairs and steamer
rugs for Bernie and me and wrapped us up like mummies. Then they
baited our hooks and left us to it, while the chauffeur took himself
with his line off to his own favorite fishing spot.
Bernie and I waited and waited for a nibble. At last he snagged a
hard-shell crab. I followed suit. “Do you want to go on?” he asked.
“Sure, I love it,” said I. Only crabs were biting that day. I went on
hauling them out like sixty, but Bernie turned his back on the whole
undertaking, got up, shook himself, and sat in the sun. “FDR came out
to this same spot,” he noted dryly, “but he managed to catch fish.” So
did the chauffeur perched out on the pier.
If he’s in town, Bernie is the first man I call when I visit New
York. I took myself one day to his house on East Sixty-sixth Street,
and there hanging over the mantelpiece in his drawing room was a new
portrait of him. I gave it one good, hard look, then asked: “Have you a
stepladder, please? I want to take that down.”
“Ah, it’s not that bad,” he protested.
“Have you really looked at it? Whoever painted it has made your head
too small, your shoulders too narrow, and stuck you on a park bench
outside the White House. Whose idea was that?”
“Well,” he explained, “Clare was having her portrait done....” He has
the greatest regard for Clare Luce; years before he arranged with a
single telephone call to have her play _The Women_ staged on Broadway
after the script had been lying around producer Max Gordon’s office for
months. And this for a play that Bernie told her was “the most cynical
satire on your sex ever written.”
I said no more against the picture, but on my next visit a year
later, the portrait had been replaced by another, by Chandor, a
wonderful likeness, complete to Bernie’s hearing aid. He autographed a
reproduction of it for me. With pen in hand, he looked up: “How do you
spell gallant--one ‘l’ or two?”
“Never could spell,” I said. “Use a different word.”
“No. Gallant is the word for you,” he said, and waited until the butler
found a dictionary. Bernie is a loyal friend. If our top governmental
officials had listened to him, we shouldn’t be in the mess we’re in
today.
I once worked for another Democrat, not in politics, to be sure, but
making two silent pictures at the studios of the old Film Booking
Offices of America, called FBO for short, before it was acquired by
Howard Hughes and renamed Radio-Keith Orpheum, or RKO. Joseph P.
Kennedy, father of our President, had just arrived from Boston as a
sharp, up-and-coming businessman to see if he could make a fortune in
Hollywood.
He signed up a scad of stars--Joel McCrea; Constance Bennett; Fred
Thompson, the cowboy Adonis who’d been a Presbyterian pastor in the
Valley until Frances Marion married him on a bet with Mary Pickford.
Heading Joe Kennedy’s contract list was Gloria Swanson, who was always
quite a gal.
She’d been married to Wally Beery and Herbert Somborn, who started the
Brown Derby restaurant chain, when producer Mickey Nielan entered her
life. He rapidly hired Somborn to go off on a nationwide promotion
tour plugging a movie Nielan had made. To make sure that his wooing of
Gloria would not be interrupted, he had Somborn telephone him every
evening at eight California time from whatever city he was in that day.
When Somborn hung up, Nielan would have the operator check back to
verify where the call had originated.
I met Joe’s wife, Rose, at a luncheon Frances Marion gave, where Polly
Moran stared at Colleen Moore’s straight boyish bangs and said: “Look
at her--makes $10,000 a week and has a lousy haircut.” Rose adored her
husband.
Gloria was Joe’s number-one star. He hired Laura Hope Crews as her
coach, and she practically lived day and night with Gloria, including
sessions at Laura’s home overlooking the beach at Santa Monica. He made
some good pictures before he started _Queen Kelly_, with Gloria as
star, which began as a silent, then ran into the monster called Sound.
He never forgot he was a businessman. He had notes for $750,000 signed
by Gloria to help finance the picture. The question was: What to do?
Finish _Kelly_ as a silent, scrap it, or take time off to see if Sound
became important?
He suggested a trip to Europe for Gloria, accompanied by Joe and Mrs.
Kennedy. It must have been a mighty trying trip for all three of them.
The picture was never completed, but on their return Joe sold his FBO
holdings for a $5,000,000 profit, to make the first big financial
killing of a career that later sent him to London as a wartime
ambassador. Mrs. Kennedy’s father, the legendary “Honey Fitz,” onetime
mayor of Boston, had a hand in getting Joe out of Hollywood.
Joe and I saw each other occasionally over the years. If I’d taken all
the advice he gave me, I’d be rich today. He was one of the first on
FDR’s bandwagon when Herbert Hoover was the man to beat. In the lobby
of a New York theater Joe told me: “Beg, borrow, or steal all the money
you can and put it on FDR, because he’s going to be the next President
of the United States. You don’t have to vote for him, but make sure you
bet on him.” Did I? Not on your life.
I saw him last not long before he had his stroke. I was sitting at a
table in Van Cleef & Arpels, New York, waiting for a package. He came
bustling in, as spry as ever then. “Hi, Joe! Buying _me_ a present?”
He paused in mid-stride. “What--Oh, it’s you. I might have known.”
He threw me a hard look and went on into the back room. The senior
assistant in the place came up, shook my hand, and said: “I didn’t
think anybody in the world could do that.”
“Why not? I knew him when he was a Hollywood producer and had a
stableful of stars,” I said. “Besides, I have a mighty retentive
memory.”
_Eighteen_
His voice was the making and the breaking of him, a blessing and a
curse. He could melt your soul or shatter mirrors when he set it free.
One night, all over the hearthrug in my den, there lay the chunks of
broken glass to prove his point. In his fevered love affairs he was a
stallion, with a body as strong as an animal’s, and he called himself
“The Tiger.”
Mario Lanza roared upward to fortune and fantastic fame like a
Fourth of July rocket, then fell back to earth, a burnt stick, lost
in darkness. For a moment, while he lit the sky, he brought back to
incredible life the archaic days of madness, romance, depravity, and
glory. But there had never been anybody quite like Mario, and I doubt
whether we shall see his like again.
It was easy to be captivated, though often hard to tell exactly why.
His smile, which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits
of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak. He was the last of the great
romantic performers, born in the wrong century--maybe there could never
be a right one for him. “Reality,” he believed, “stinks most of the
time. It’s a star’s duty to take people out of the world of reality
into the world of illusion, and a motion picture is the ideal way to do
that.”
He ate too much, fought too much, drank too much, spent too much. He
could no more handle success than a child can be trusted with dynamite.
So many of the themes of this story met and merged in Alfred Arnold
Cocozza, from Philadelphia’s Little Italy, who borrowed his mother’s
maiden name, Maria Lanza, as a ticket to destruction.
He developed a god complex a mile wide. “I’m the humble keeper of
a voice,” he used to tell me in all seriousness, “which God has
entrusted to me. This is not easy. There are sacrifices you must make.
I love champagne--I can’t drink it. Red wine I love--I must refuse
it. I must not smoke--it is bad for the voice. I am the fortunate and
unfortunate guy it passes through.”
He couldn’t be called a liar, because he found it increasingly hard to
distinguish between the facts and the fables he wove around himself. He
could boast of his abstemiousness and, a few hours later, wander into
a bar on Sunset Strip like The Players, a favorite haunt of his, which
Preston Sturges used to run. They could hear Mario coming by the slap
of laces in the handmade, elevator shoes he imported from New York to
add a couple of inches to his own natural-grown five feet seven. The
fancy footwear must have been uncomfortable; the laces were seldom tied.
He turned up at The Players one morning fifteen minutes before the
2 A.M. curfew which California law demands, awash from the red wine
he guzzled after dinner. Closing time arrived, but Mario and Sturges
lingered at a table with two girls, killing more wine. Two state liquor
inspectors stopped by for a friendly, after-hours drink. They were off
duty and well acquainted with Sturges, but Mario hadn’t been told that.
One of them walked up behind him, grabbed the bottle, and, as a joke,
grunted: “Okay, you’re all under arrest.” That was the last thing he
knew until long after dawn broke. Mario snatched the bottle from the
inspector. With a fist hard as a rock, with a seventeen-inch biceps
behind it he sent him flying against a far wall, cold as a mackerel,
with seven teeth knocked out of his head.
The other officer tried to tackle Mario. For his trouble, he was picked
up bodily and hurled against the same wall, dead to the world, slumped
on the floor beside his companion like a second sack of broken bones.
Sturges was aghast. Before he called an ambulance he shoved Mario
out the front door. “Start running and get lost,” he grunted. The
now-terrified tenor put on so much speed he shed one of his shoes
in his flight to the apartment of a friend, who lived close to the
Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. At 4 A.M. Sturges telephoned
Mario’s press agent to report the massacre. “Keep that maniac away from
me,” he said. “He’s likely to kill us all in our sleep.”
The press agent made a beeline for the nearest sheriff’s sub-station,
on Fairfax Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard. Standing in full view on
the desk was Mario’s shoe, as distinctively his as a fingerprint, but
nobody had any idea who owned it. “Have there been any charges filed?”
the agent asked. There had not. “Well, my client would like to have his
shoe back.”
“Who’s your client?” asked the desk sergeant.
“That’s neither here nor there. No need to identify him until charges
have been filed.” After some persuasion the law accepted that viewpoint
and handed over the shoe. Mario got it back the following morning,
along with a lecture from his agent.
Lanza was contrite and, as always, willing to pay. The inspector with
the missing teeth received a $4000 job of expert dentistry. Both he and
his colleague were given $200 cashmere suits by the agent as balm to
their wounds. To this day they don’t know what hit them--or who.
Mario may have been on to something with his claim that his voice was
a gift of God; he certainly didn’t owe a thing to formal training. He
simply taught himself by listening to his father’s collection of opera
records, including one Caruso disk that he once played twenty-seven
times in succession, matching his voice to the great Enrico’s. He
was a blubbery fat boy, an only child, spoiled rotten by his mother,
who was the only working member of the Cocozza family. She was up at
five-thirty every morning, to sew uniforms in an army quartermaster
depot as the sole support of Mario and his father, a pensioned veteran
of World War I.
The studios later had a hard time inventing jobs that Mario was
supposed to have held down as a young man. The handouts pretended he’d
been a piano mover or a truck driver. But he used to sprawl in bed
until lunch time, hadn’t done a lick of real work until he was drafted
in the Army.
He had one other hobby in his Philadelphia era besides singing, and
that was girls. “I can’t help it if I was born in heat,” was the way he
put it. “I am always the lover--I never stopped. I spend ninety-nine
and ninety-nine one hundredths of my time in a romantic mood. That
accounts for my high notes.”
Women mobbed him every step of his career. Wherever he showed his
face in public, they ripped at his clothes, grabbed him, hugged him,
smothered him in lipstick from the top of his curly head down. It was
impossible for him to escape them. They followed him to his home, rang
his doorbell in the middle of the night, and some of them were the
biggest stars in our business.