Lillian and Dash (21 page)

“Myra.”

“Who?” Mayer knew, of course.

“Myra Ewbank. She will give you her very best.” This next was most important: “And you have absolutely nothing to fear. I assure you. She’ll do anything to work again for you, no questions asked. She’ll sign anything, any waivers under any conditions. And I’ll guarantee it. Make her this mitzvah. You won’t be sorry.” This last implied that at some future time the mitzvah would be repaid by Lillian.

“Tell me the name again, and I promise I’ll look into it.”

Lillian realized it was a good time to stand. She said, “
Zei mir metriach
, but not just for me but because it’s right, Mr. Mayer.”

“Louis.”

“Of course. Louis.”

“You’ll come back when you want to talk projects?”

She wanted to shake hands. He wanted to embrace. Upon parting she said, “
Zeit gezunt
, Louis.”

He said, “
Zol zein mit glik
.”

“Who couldn’t use a big dose of
glik
these days?”

Lillian had no idea if her impersonation was successful. Her inclination was to think not, too old, too shtetl, too sentimental by half. The New York critics would have had a field day ripping her performance apart.

E
SSENTIAL TO ANY
American Horatio Alger story—Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, L. B. Mayer, even Isaac Marx, you name it—was the ragamuffin beginning of the great success. Where would be the triumph, the drama, if the beginnings were not so very humble, even well below humble? After the wealth has come, the power and prestige, doesn’t something of that original poor boy remain locked away somewhere? For L.B., whose factory produced American dreams of the same pattern as his life, the sentiments Lillian stirred up in his office caused him to consider the favor she asked of him. If Lillian Hellman fooled L. B. Mayer it was because Louie Meier wanted to be fooled.

As he sat comfortably looking out over his back lot, Mayer thought about the last time he’d heard Yiddish spoken. With his father? No, with his grandmother, his
Bubbe
, who spoke
no English, to whom he was, even as a young American man,
Boychik
and
Bubbeleh
. His grandfather, an educated man, insisted the boy learn English even though he himself spoke it poorly. Mayer recalled how this old language filled the house with its melody, its pauses, its unexpected inflections and rhythms that made everything sound like a question to be pondered and parried with another question. Phrases he was certain he’d forgotten came back with context: his grandfather saying real business can only be done
oyg oyf oyg
(eye to eye), and if things went badly with the landlord, cursing him with
A choleryeh shtif der
(He should only get cholera).

For his father, almost everyone he had to deal with back in Haverill was either a
schmuck
or a
putz
. It was an evaluation even more true for the son in Hollywood. When his grandparents passed away, so did the Yiddish, except for a phrase or two between his mother and father when they didn’t want the boy to understand. Who spoke Yiddish anymore? Still, he could probably hold a conversation if he had to, as he almost had with the Hellman girl. Gone was not forgotten.

Business was business of course. Only a fool would allow himself to become vulnerable in this Ewbank situation. But look how much he paid for Clare Luce’s
The Women
, budget already over a million and a half, and the damned thing still creaked like a stage play. The Ewbank girl could make it feel like a movie in a week. Maybe a grateful Lillian Hellman would be good business all around. Before he called Elise,
Mayer said aloud, just to feel the pleasure of it,
“A mentsh tracht und Gott locht”
(A man plans and God laughs). Then he said, “
A zeit gezunt
” to the ceiling just in case God was listening.

I
N HER SWELTERING CAR
Lillian immediately rolled down the front windows and pulled off the foolish hat and that damned sweater. She threw her glasses on the front seat and opened her blouse to bra level. She ran her comb through stiff hair. Then she closed her eyes and simply breathed. There was only one review of her performance that mattered.

Before she started the car, Lilly thought back to New Orleans, to the aunts’ rooming house, to the last time she’d heard real Yiddish spoken. It wasn’t used often, usually when Hannah and Jenny didn’t want the help, the
Schwartzeh
, to know what they were saying, which was precisely why she was drawn to the language.

Her family story wasn’t, after all, so very different from the junkman’s. She imagined Isaac Marx trudging through rural Alabama on his horse cart, if it really
was
a horse cart—probably he owned an ass—decades before the American Civil War. This lone, itinerant Jew from Chemnitz, wandering the back roads, landing finally in godforsaken Demopolis. It was a mule cart, she recalled now with something close to certainty. Why didn’t she know these important things about her remarkable progenitor? Why in the world hadn’t
she taken a greater interest in Isaac? It wasn’t the old man’s fault his children and his grandchildren coveted his wealth, took his power, and then erased him.

She remembered seeing a tintype of a little old man sitting rigidly under a willow tree, dressed in stiff clothes a size too large. Bearded, yes, definitely bearded. And wearing a skullcap. This was Isaac Marx at the end, a boy who came with nothing and amassed a fortune, who came speaking Yiddish and left a family that was ashamed of Yiddish, ashamed to have their “Newhouse” Julia married to an itinerant Yid like Max Hellman.

How the hell did that little man converse with those salt-of-the-earth Bible belters? With numbers, of course. How, almost one hundred years ago now, did he even find his way around Alabama safely? Find places to stay? How much English could he have had? He must have been brilliant. How in the world did he defend himself in that dangerous place? With a gun, of course. My god, he must have been brave. This was a genius of a little man. Lillian had never before given Isaac Marx this much continuous thought or the consideration he had earned and deserved. She spoke to him then: “You must have been charming as hell, too, little Isaac.” Did she look like him? Where was that photograph now?

The great Victorian house in Demopolis was still there. Cousins lived in it now. She should go visit, she really should, with Hammett next time they went back East. While sitting there in her car envisioning the Demopolis house, she
allowed in the generation of Newhouses and Marxes she grew up with, remembered anew how hateful they were, how selfish and cold and how, apparently unlike Mayer, at least today, without sentiment.

Lillian pulled her notebook out of her bag. She wrote the description that would become, with few changes, the stage setting for her next play:
The living room of the (family name needed) home, in a small town in the Deep South, the spring of 1900. Upstage is a staircase leading to the second floor. Upstage, right, are double doors to the dining room. Upstage, left, an entrance hall with a coatrack and umbrella stand
. She stopped and saw it clearly as she wrote.
There are large lace-curtained windows on the left wall. The room is lit by a center gas chandelier and painted china oil lamps on the tables. Against the wall is a large piano
.

That was indeed how the room was furnished; but it was not what the room was.
The room is good-looking, the furniture expensive; but it reflects no particular taste. Everything is of the best and that is all that can be said for it
.

Lillian’s decision to write a play using her mother’s family did not come only because of her meeting with Mayer. Hammett’s accumulation of family stories had already got her thinking about those Marx and Newhouse lives. What had activated the process today was her discovery that the family’s rejection of Yiddish Isaac and his language were the first family betrayals that made all subsequent betrayals possible and probably inevitable. Since Mayer had become such
a demonstrably patriotic American, such a prominent and public Republican, Lillian doubted there could still be much of a connection back to the immigrant junkman days. Her hope rested on the dramatic insight that not every betrayer was willing to betray that last true part of himself. And by so doing betray the memory of his father and mother and grandparents. The second generation of Marxes did precisely that in the blink of an eye.

That day Lillian had her setting for
The Little Foxes
. She had her characters—her grandmother Sophie and her two older brothers. She had the situation—an actual business deal she recalled as a child: the acquisition of vast cotton fields partially through marriage and partially through political manipulation and bribery. The construction of the necessary cotton mill and the purchase of mill equipment were done with money borrowed on nonexistent collateral. This is what the Marxes talked about openly in little Lilly’s presence. When her mother, Julia, indicated these were not matters a girl of eight ought to be exposed to, Grandma Sophie said, “Don’t be silly. You’re never too young to learn how the world really works.”

Part of the play’s drama would be the appalled fascination of the audience watching betrayers at work for whom no betrayal was beyond consideration and execution. Multiple betrayals would be like mounting bets in a no-limits poker game. There was continual drama in that. None of the Marxes, to her certain knowledge at least, had ever murdered
for personal gain. Lillian decided her drama would explore even that possibility of “how the world really works.”

Hammett’s interest in the Song of Solomon eventually brought her to the verse that gave her a larger idea into which she could grow her drama:
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. For our vines have tender grapes
 … The process may have started before that moment in the M-G-M parking lot; that day it became the first words put to paper.

When Lillian returned to their Santa Monica house from her meeting with Mayer, she was excited that something good and important had begun. She told Hammett about how suddenly and unexpectedly the echoes of the Yiddish exchange with Mayer called up the theme and much of the structure of a new project. “There I am, sitting, dressed like a yenta, begging the man for a personal favor, and it all comes together for me. It was completely impossible.”

“That’s why it happened.” Hammett wreathed himself in cigar smoke.

“I said
impossible
.”

“I’ve lived with you long enough to know
impossible
is your SOP.” She tipped her head. “A military term, dearie: Standard Operating Procedure.” Hammett had been writing a Secret Agent X-9 radio script he thought was going pretty well until Lillian burst in with her “impossible” news. The National Broadcasting Company was interested in bringing X-9 to the airwaves, although Hammett could not for the life of him imagine why.

A few years earlier Hammett had been contacted by Sol Gewirtz of King Features, who told him they’d like Hammett to write a comic strip about spies. King had already hired the artist Alex Gordon, who had also just begun
Flash Gordon
with great success. Gewirtz told Hammett he only needed the new strip’s concept and story line.

“Only that? Imagine.”

“You’re who we want, Mr. Hammett.”

“Then I must be your first call?”

“Absolutely. We went right for the top.”

“Mr. Gewirtz, I have to tell you the
liar
signal on my phone is blinking.”

“Mr. Hammett, I can assure you …”

“Let’s do this. Call me sometime tomorrow and I’ll have an idea of what I’d like to do. If you like it, maybe we can do business. If we don’t do business, you’ll steal the idea and say it’s your own.”

Sol Gewirtz got it, laughed, and said, “Tomorrow.”

When finally they connected Hammett offered his idea. “Secret Agent X-9. An operative so secret he doesn’t even have a name. Working for an agency so clandestine it doesn’t exist officially. X-9 has the authority to track down and liquidate anyone who wants to do dirt to the United States of America.” This structure, or lack thereof, would make X-9 a truly free agent and allow him to do anything Hammett could possibly imagine for him.

Gewirtz said, “Secret Agent X-9, I like it. Where’d you come up with that?”

“That’s secret too.”

“Sounds good. Daily strip. No weekends to start with. Six panels. Interested?”

“That’s why we’re talking, Sol.”

“We pay by the word.” There was just the suggestion of tentativeness in his voice.

“You are saying, I assume, you
usually
pay by the word.”

“Actually
always
.”

“Sol, I’m sorry but my pay-by-the-word days are over. Flat rate or I’ll have to pass.”

“Fifty dollars.”

“A panel?”

“My god, no. A strip. Daily.”

Hammett had calculated a bit. One hundred dollars a day would bring him about twenty-five thousand a year. That became his bottom number. “Let’s say two hundred a strip, Sol.”

“Mr. Hammett, we don’t pay anyone anything like that.”

“
Anyone
hasn’t writ
anything
like Spade or the Op. You know what the Hammett name on the strip would mean.”

The silence was charged and extended. “We can offer perhaps seventy-five.”

Since Gewirtz had upped his offer, Hammett knew there was no
we
at the other end. Gewirtz alone had the authority. “I’m afraid nothing less than one fifty will win my heart.”

“We can perhaps see one hundred. Tops.”

“Sir. Let’s split the difference. One twenty-five and we have a deal.”

“Mr. Hammett, I’m going to have to go over the numbers. See if this can work at our end.”

“Understood, Sol. I do hope it works out. Sounds like something I’d very much enjoy doing.”

And Hammett did enjoy doing it the first year. The strip was story-driven. Hammett mailed Alex Gordon what was essentially a segment of a chapter—the equivalent of a movie scene. That scene became the day’s script. When Hammett knew what would appear in each panel, he gave Gordon the specific dialogue over the phone. He was trying and almost succeeding in recapturing the sheer fun and adventure of the old
Black Mask
days. Except back then his tongue was not so completely in his cheek as with X-9.