My Autobiography (46 page)

It appears that after Marion left me she had gone straight to Hearst and upbraided him for being so rude and told him to go and apologize. Marion knew when to choose her moment and when to keep silent, as she sometimes did. ‘In his ugly mood,’ said Marion, ‘the storm comes up like th-th-thunder.’

Marion was gay and charming; and when W.R.’s business called him to New York, she would gather all her friends at her house in Beverly Hills (this was before the beach-house was built), and we would have parties and play charades into the small hours. Then Rudolph Valentino would reciprocate at his house and I would do the same at mine. Sometimes we hired a public omnibus and stacked it with victuals and hired a concertina-player, and ten or twenty of us would go to Malibu Beach, where we built a bonfire and had midnight picnics and caught grunnion.

Invariably Louella Parsons, the Hearst columnist, would come along, escorted by Harry Crocker, who eventually became one of my assistant directors. After such expeditions we would not get home until four or five in the morning. Marion would say to Louella: ‘If W.R. hears about this, one of us is going to lose his job, an-an-and it won’t be me.’

During our merry dinner party at Marion’s house, W.R. telephoned
from New York. When Marion returned from the phone she was furious. ‘Can you imagine?’ she said indignantly. ‘W.R. has had me watched!’

Over the phone Hearst read her a detective’s report of what she had been doing since he had been away, saying that she had been seen leaving subject A’s house at four in the morning and subject B’s house at five, and so forth. She told me later that he was returning immediately to Los Angeles to settle up all his affairs with her and that they would part. Of course Marion was indignant, because she had done nothing but enjoy herself among friends. The detective’s report was true in effect, but distorted to give the wrong impression. At Kansas City W.R. sent a wire: ‘I have changed my mind and will not return to California because I cannot face going back to those places where I have had so much happiness in the past, so I am returning to New York’. But soon after he sent another wire saying that he was arriving in Los Angeles.

It was a tense moment for all concerned when W.R. returned. However, Marion’s interview with him had a salutary effect which resulted in an enormous banquet to welcome W.R. back to Beverly Hills. Marion built a temporary dining-room on to her rented house to seat one hundred and sixty guests. It was completed in two days – decorated, electrically lit, including the building of a dance floor. Marion had only to rub the magic lamp and it was done. That evening she appeared with a new $75,000 emerald ring – a present from W.R. – and, incidentally, nobody lost his job.

As a change from San Simeon and Marion’s beach-house, we occasionally spent a week-end on Hearst’s yacht and cruised over to Catalina or south to San Diego. It was during one of these cruises that Thomas H. Ince, who had taken over Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Film Productions, had to be carried off the boat in San Diego. I was not present on that trip, but Elinor Glyn, who was aboard, told me that Ince had been gay and debonair, but during lunch had been suddenly stricken with paralysing pain and forced to leave the table. Everyone thought it was an attack of indigestion, but he became so ill that it seemed advisable to put him ashore and get him to a hospital. There it was discovered he had suffered a heart-attack, and he was sent to his
home in Beverly Hills, where three weeks later he had a second attack and died.

Ugly rumours began to spread that Ince had been shot and Hearst was implicated. These rumours were completely untrue. I know this because Hearst, Marion and I went to see Ince at his home two weeks before he died; he was very happy to see the three of us and believed that he would soon be well.

Ince’s death upset Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions’ plans, so they were taken over by Warner Brothers. But after two years Hearst Productions moved over to M.G.M., where an elaborate bungalow dressing-room was built for Marion (I called it the Trianon).

Here Hearst transacted most of his newspaper business. Many times I saw him seated in the centre of Marion’s reception room, with twenty or more newspapers spread all over the floor. From his chair he would scan the various headlines. ‘That’s a feeble set-up,’ he would say in his high voice, pointing to one paper. ‘And why is so-and-so featuring that story?’ He would pick up a magazine and thumb its pages, weighing it appraisingly with both hands. ‘What’s the matter with the
Redbook’
s advertising? – pretty light this month. Wire Ray Long to come here at once.’ In the midst of this scene, Marion would appear in all her finery, having just left the movie set, and in her
moqueuse
way deliberately walk over the newspapers, saying: ‘Get rid of all this junk, it’s cluttering up my dressing-room.’

Hearst could be extremely naïve. When going to a première of one of Marion’s pictures, he would invite me to drive with them, and before arriving at the entrance of the theatre he would get out so as not to be seen arriving with Marion. Yet when the
Hearst Examiner
and the Los Angeles
Times
were embroiled in a political fight, Hearst attacking vigorously and the
Times
coming off second best, the
Times
resorted to a personal attack, accusing Hearst of leading a double life and maintaining a love-nest at Santa Monica beach and mentioning Marion. Hearst did not answer the attack in his newspaper, but came to me a day later (Marion’s mother had just died) and said: ‘Charlie, will you be a principal pall-bearer with me at Mrs Davies’s funeral?’ And, of course, I accepted.

In 1933 or thereabouts, Hearst invited me to take a trip
with him to Europe. He had engaged the whole side of one of the Cunard liners for his party. But I declined, for it meant trailing along with twenty others, lingering where Hearst wanted to linger, and hurrying where he wanted to hurry.

I had had a taste of that experience on a trip to Mexico with him, when my second wife was pregnant. A parade of ten cars followed Hearst and Marion over bumpy roads and I was cursing the whole outfit because of it. So impassable were the roads that we had to abandon our destination and put up at a Mexican farmhouse for the night. There were only two rooms for twenty of us; one was graciously allotted to my wife, Elinor Glyn and myself. Some slept on tables and chairs, others in chicken coops and in the kitchen. It was a fantastic scene in that small room, my wife in the only bed, I propped up on two chairs, and Elinor, dressed as though going to the Ritz, sleeping on a broken-down couch, wearing her hat, her veil and gloves. She lay with her hands folded across her chest like a supine figure on a tomb, and slept undisturbed in that one position. I knew, for I did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning, from the corner of my eye, I watched her get up as she had lain down, with everything intact, not one hair out of place, her skin white and enamelled, as ebullient and spry as if she were walking through the tea-room of the Plaza Hotel.

On the trip to Europe, Hearst took Harry Crocker, my former assistant director, with him. Harry had now become Hearst’s social secretary, and asked if I would give W.R. a letter of introduction to Sir Philip Sassoon, which I did.

Philip gave Hearst a very good time. Knowing that Hearst had been flagrantly anti-British for many years, he arranged for him to meet the Prince of Wales. He got the two of them closeted in his library, where, according to Philip’s story, the Prince asked Hearst point-blank why he was so anti-British. They were there for two hours, he said, and Philip believed that the Prince’s interview had a salutary effect.

I could never understand Hearst’s anti-British feeling, for he had valuable holdings in England and enjoyed large profits from them. His pro-German tendencies dated back to the First World War, at which critical time his association and friendship with Count Bernstorff – then the German Ambassador – verged on a
scandal. Even Hearst’s immense power could hardly suppress it. Then, too, his American foreign correspondent, Karl von Wiegand, always wrote favourably of Germany up to the very edge of the Second World War.

During Hearst’s trip to Europe, he visited Germany and had an interview with Hitler. At that time no one knew much about Hitler’s concentration camps. The first intimation of them came from articles written by my friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had, on some pretext, got into one and written of the Nazi tortures there. But his stories of degenerate brutality were so fantastic that few people believed them.

Vanderbilt sent me a series of picture postcards showing Hitler making a speech. The face was obscenely comic – a bad imitation of me, with its absurd moustache, unruly, stringy hair and disgusting, thin, little mouth. I could not take Hitler seriously. Each postcard showed a different posture of him: one with his hands claw-like haranguing the crowds, another with one arm up and the other down, like a cricketer about to bowl, and another with hands clenched in front of him as though lifting an imaginary dumb-bell. The salute with the hand thrown back over the shoulder, the palm upwards, made me want to put a tray of dirty dishes on it. ‘This is a nut!’ I thought. But when Einstein and Thomas Mann were forced to leave Germany, this face of Hitler was no longer comic but sinister.

*

I first met Einstein in 1926, when he came to California to lecture. I have a theory that scientists and philosophers are sublimated romanticists who channel their passions in another direction. This theory fitted well the personality of Einstein. He looked the typical Alpine German in the nicest sense, jovial and friendly. And although his manner was calm and gentle, I felt it concealed a highly emotional temperament, and that from this source came his extraordinary intellectual energy.

Carl Laemmle of the Universal studios phoned to say that Professor Einstein would like to meet me. I was thrilled. So we met at the Universal studios for lunch, the Professor, his wife, his secretary, Helene Dukas, and his Assistant Professor, Walter Meyer. Mrs Einstein spoke English very well, in fact better than the Professor.
She was a square-framed woman with abundant vitality; she frankly enjoyed being the wife of the great man and made no attempt to hide the fact; her enthusiasm was endearing.

After lunch, while Mr Laemmle showed them around the studio, Mrs Einstein drew me aside and whispered: ‘Why don’t you invite the Professor to your house? I know he would be delighted to have a nice quiet chat with just ourselves.’ As Mrs Einstein had requested it should be a small affair, I invited only two other friends. At dinner she told me the story of the morning he conceived the theory of relativity.

‘The Doctor came down in his dressing-gown as usual for breakfast but he hardly touched a thing. I thought something was wrong, so I asked what was troubling him. “Darling,” he said, “I have a wonderful idea.” And after drinking his coffee, he went to the piano and started playing. Now and again he would stop, making a few notes then repeat: “I’ve got a wonderful idea, a marvellous idea!”

‘I said: “Then for goodness’ sake tell me what it is, don’t keep me in suspense.”

‘He said: “It’s difficult, I still have to work it out.” ’

She told me he continued playing the piano and making notes for about half an hour, then went upstairs to his study, telling her that he did not wish to be disturbed, and remained there for two weeks. ‘Each day I sent him up his meals,’ she said, ‘and in the evening he would walk a little for exercise, then return to his work again.’

‘Eventually,’ she said, ‘he came down from his study looking very pale. “That’s it,” he told me, wearily putting two sheets of paper on the table. And that was his theory of relativity.’

Dr Reynolds, whom I had invited that evening because he had a smattering of physics, asked the Professor during dinner whether he had ever read Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
.

Einstein shook his head.

Said Reynolds airily: ‘He has an interesting theory about dimensions, a sort of a’ – here he hesitated – ‘a sort of an extension of a dimension.’

Einstein turned to me quickly and mischievously whispered ‘An extension of a dimension,
was ist das?’

Reynolds got off the dimensions after that and asked Einstein
if he believed in ghosts. Einstein confessed that he had never seen one, and added: ‘When twelve other persons have witnessed the same phenomenon at the same time, then I might believe.’ He smiled.

At that time psychic phenomena were rife and ectoplasm loomed over Hollywood like smog, especially in the homes of the movie stars, where spiritualist meetings and demonstrations of levitation and psychic phenomena took place. I did not attend these affairs, but Fanny Brice, the celebrated comedienne, swore that at a spiritualist meeting she had seen a table rise and float about the room. I asked the Professor if he had ever witnessed such phenomena. He smiled blandly and shook his head. I also asked him whether his theory of relativity conflicted with the Newtonian hypothesis.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘it is an extension of it.’

During dinner I told Mrs Einstein that after the opening of my next picture I intended going to Europe.

‘Then you must come to Berlin and visit us,’ she said. ‘We have not a big place – the Professor is not rich although he has access to over a million dollars for his scientific work from the Rockefeller Foundation – but he has never used it.’

Later when I went to Berlin I visited them in their modest little flat. It was like something you might find in the Bronx, a sitting-room and dining-room in one, covered with old worn carpets. The most expensive piece of furniture was the black piano upon which he made those historical preliminary notes on the fourth dimension. I have often wondered what became of the piano. Possibly it is in the Smithsonian Institution or the Metropolitan Museum – possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis.

When the Nazi terror came to Germany, the Einsteins took refuge in the United States. Mrs Einstein tells an interesting story of the Professor’s ignorance of money matters. Princeton University wanted him to join their faculty and wrote about terms; the Professor submitted such a modest figure that the heads of Princeton replied that the terms he asked would not be adequate for living in the United States, and that he would require at least three times the amount.