The Englishman’s Boy

as a hawk, he smiled. The Englishman knew him if nobody else did.

4

I have a face and a name. With these, my pursuit of Shorty McAdoo can begin. But the first business I have to take care of the morning after my meeting with Chance is my mother. I telephone the director of the Mount of Olives Rest Home and order her moved to a larger room, one with plenty of sun and plenty of windows she can spend her time cleaning. Thanks to the miraculous doubling of my salary, I can afford to do it.

My mother had a hard life and one of the hardest things in it was my father. Because he was a labourer in railroad construction, we saw almost nothing of him from the time the frost went out of the ground until it went back into it. That suited me just fine, but in the winters we paid for it, having a lantern-jawed bully to contend with day after day, the three of us trapped in a cramped apartment where my mother and I went around on tiptoe so as not to provoke him. The only time I ever saw his hardness shaken was when he was drunk. Then he would sometimes go terribly maudlin, cry and beg for forgiveness after he hit my mother, or take me up on his knee, rub my face raw with a two-day growth and blubber about my lameness.

At last, one winter when I was ten, he neglected to come home to Saskatoon for the winter. We had been abandoned. My mother took this very badly; worry about money always made her desperate. She took work cleaning houses and we stumbled along from one financial disaster to another, often rescued by municipal relief, or church charities. All this took its toll, and during the next four years her behaviour became increasingly erratic and odd. Often, when she should have been at work, I would come home from school to find her lying despondent on the couch, all the curtains in the apartment drawn, the place cloaked in stale darkness. If I talked to her, she wouldn’t answer; if I coaxed her to eat, she refused. I began to spend more and more time away from home, mostly in the public library where it was warm and the old-maid librarian treated me kindly. In the beginning, I read biographies of poor boys who had made good like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie, seeking to discover the key to the money that would rescue her. But in time, like her I too lost hope, and as an escape turned to reading Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.A. Henty.

By the time I turned fourteen, the writing was on the wall. My mother was no longer remotely capable of holding a job and I quit school to help support us. I started as a stock and delivery boy in a grocery, gradually working my way up to clerk. I liked school and resented leaving, but my despair was not total. Queen Victoria had not been dead so very long then, and the nineteenth century had wrapped a warm muffler of sentiment around the hearts of school-marms, Dickens having made cripples touching and lovable. I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn’t mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. Maybe that’s what Chance’s intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle.

In 1914 war broke out. If a bum leg ever had a silver lining, my luck was that being crippled preserved me from the slaughter in Flanders, probably saved my life. There seemed to be no luck that could save my mother. With every year that passed, her condition worsened, apathy and depression now alternating with periods of wild, frantic activity. Returning from work, I would find all the furniture in the flat piled in the middle of the floor while she “house-cleaned,” scrubbing everything in sight with a crazy, fixed determination. One day I came home to discover the building in an uproar; she had let herself into a neighbour’s unlocked apartment and “house-cleaned” that, too, going so far as to burn some of Mrs. Kenzie’s dirty laundry in a barrel out back. The police were called, she was brought before a magistrate, and committed to the North Battleford Hospital for the Insane.

A year later, I left Saskatchewan, the doctors telling me her case was hopeless. On my final visit, as she sat on a ward surrounded by forty other female lunatics, she asked one thing of her son. To buy her a new dress so if I happened to lose the memory of her face I would be able to pick her out by her clothing the next time I visited.

I headed for the States in the winter of 1919, hungry for a future. For the next couple of years I drifted around the Pacific Northwest doing odd jobs, the longest of which was working on a weekly newspaper in a small town in Washington. Then The Sentinel went under and I hit the road again, making my way to Los Angeles. It was there that Rachel Gold tossed me a life jacket. I was living in the YMCA and limiting myself to one meal a day, bacon and eggs, the cheapest hot meal on the lunch-counter menu, when a woman climbed up on a stool beside me and struck up a conversation about the book I was reading, Jack London’s The Iron Heel. That in itself was unusual; back in those days, even in the Babylon which the American public presumed Los Angeles to be, women didn’t strike up conversations with strange men. It wasn’t long before I learned just how unusual a woman Rachel Gold was. She was the first “new” woman I had ever met, a woman on the pattern of Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, wittily cynical, tough, intellectual, and very pretty. She came right out and asked what I thought of the book, a novel that predicted the destruction of the labour movement and a takeover of the United States government by a fascist organization. I said I found it farfetched. In seconds, she was contradicting me, squirming restlessly on the counter stool, tugging and twisting fistfuls of her lacquer-black hair, cut short in the Clara Bow style, looking like a woman trying to shake, to wring ideas out of her brain. I didn’t argue, only laughed and shrugged. Who else did I read? she wanted to know. What did I think of Mencken? In minutes, we found common ground in an admiration for Dreiser and Norris. As she talked she radiated a kind of alertness, an electricity that made it impossible to take your eyes off her. She was small, quick in speech and gesture; her dark brown eyes were quick too, flashing her judgements a split-second before she spoke them. She was vulgar and funny; she made me laugh. Of Dreiser she said, “He’s the greatest American novelist not writing in English.” She mentioned her second husband, “A guy,” she said, “who always looked good spending somebody else’s money at the race-track.” She had no conception of privacy and when she asked me what I did, her charm prompted me to tell her the truth. I said I was out of work. At the end of an hour, she butted out her last cigarette, hopped down off the stool, and thrust a tiny white hand at me. “Rachel Gold,” she said. I gave her my name and we shook hands. She wanted to know where I was staying; I told her. “Well, be seeing you,” she said as she swung out of the lunch room, a little woman of five feet, owner of bewitching hips.

The next morning there was a note for me at the desk of the YMCA with an address – if I was interested in a job. This is how I became a junior scenarist at Zenith Pictures. As impossible as it sounds, things like this happened in Hollywood in those days. The whole business was shaking down into what it was to become, and while it did, everything was provisional, raw, sketchy. Plumbers like Fatty Arbuckle and laundresses like Mabel Normand became overnight stars. People learned on the job; there were no such things as qualifications, except knowing somebody. The person I knew – scarcely knew – was Rachel Gold, a scriptwriter who I had no idea was as respected, as sought-after in Hollywood as Elinor Glyn, Frances Marion, and Anita Loos, women who then wielded more power behind the scenes than any women in Hollywood have since.

On Rachel Gold’s say-so I got hired. But as she said, “Around here you get one kick at the cat and you better hit it square in the ass, or you’ll be out of here tomorrow.” I became a protege of hers, an unofficial assistant. It is often said of men that they divide women into virgins and whores and I believe Rachel Gold did something similar with men; to her they were either mensches or gigolos. A mensch was a man you could talk to but wouldn’t sleep with, and a gigolo was a man you could sleep with but wouldn’t want to talk to. Her first husband, a Jewish optometrist, whom she had married when she was seventeen, was a mensch. Her second husband, a Gentile from South Carolina, the man who impressively and caddishly decorated race-tracks and gambling dens, had been a gigolo.

In Rachel’s eyes, I definitely fell into the mensch category and that made it possible for her to work with me. A lot of my time was spent vetting books for her scenarios, horrifically bad melodramas she couldn’t bring herself to read. If I said a novel had potential, then she would read it. The rest of my time I wrote titles, the cards flashed onscreen to help the audience follow the plot of the movie. My first day in the writing department Rachel Gold gave me her crash course in the art of scenario-writing, delivered in the Menckenian rhetoric she often affected when talking about the movie business and the Booboisie it catered to. “There is only one principle of successful comedy-writing – Kick Authority in the Ass,” she declared. “When the Posterior of Power is clutched in agony, all the little people from Mobile to Minneapolis are convulsed with hilarity. So kick him, My