How long Japan will survive the virus of Western civilization is a moot question. Her people’s appreciation of those simple moments in life so characteristic of their culture – a lingering look at a moonbeam, a pilgrimage to view cherry blossom, the quiet meditation of the tea ceremony – seems destined to disappear in the smog of Western enterprise.
My holiday was at an end, and although I had enjoyed many aspects of it, some had been depressing. I saw food rotting, goods piled high while people wandered hungrily about them, millions of unemployed and their services going to waste.
I actually heard a man say at a dinner that nothing could save the situation unless we found more gold. When I discussed the problem of automation doing away with jobs, someone said that the problem would solve itself because labour would eventually be so cheap that it would be able to compete with automation. The Depression was deeply cruel.
twenty-four
WHEN I arrived home in Beverly Hills, I stood in the centre of the living-room. It was late afternoon and a carpet of long shadows lay across the lawn and streaks of golden sunlight streamed across the room. How serene it all looked. I could have wept. I had been away eight months, yet I wondered whether I was happy to be back. I was confused and without plan, restless and conscious of an extreme loneliness.
I had had in Europe a vague hope of meeting someone who might orient my life. But nothing had come of it. Of all the women I met, few fitted into that category – those that might have done were not interested. And now back again in California I had returned to a graveyard. Douglas and Mary had separated, so that world was no more.
That evening I was to dine alone, something I never liked doing in that big house. So I cancelled dinner, drove to Hollywood, parked the car and took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard. It seemed that I had never been away. There were the same long lines of one-storey shops, the stale-looking Army and Navy stores, the cut-rate drug-stores, Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, all of it depressing and lacking sophistication. Hollywood had not outgrown the look of a boom town.
As I walked the boulevards I began to deliberate whether I should retire, sell everything and go to China. There was no further incentive to stay in Hollywood. Without doubt silent pictures were finished and I did not feel like combating the talkies. Besides, I was out of circulation. I tried to think of someone whom I knew intimately enough to phone and invite for dinner without feeling embarrassed, but there was no one. When I returned to the house, Reeves, my manager, had called up to say that everything was okay. But no one else had called.
It was like jumping into cold water, putting in appearances at the studio to attend to irksome business affairs. However, I was delighted to hear that City Lights was doing extremely well, and that we already had $3,000,000 (net) in the kitty, and cheques of more than $100,000 were still coming in every month. Reeves suggested that I should go to the Hollywood bank and meet the new manager, just to get acquainted. Not having entered a bank in seven years, I declined.
Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the Kaiser, called at the studio and later we dined at my house and had an interesting talk. The Prince, charming and very intelligent, spoke of the German revolution after the First World War as being comic opera. ‘My grandfather had gone to Holland,’ he said, ‘but some of my relatives remained in the palace at Potsdam, too terrified to move. When at last the revolutionists marched on the palace, they sent a note asking my relatives if they would receive them, and in that interview assured them that they would be given every protection and that, if they needed anything, they had only to telephone the Socialist headquarters. They could not believe their ears. But when later the Government approached them about a settlement of their estates, my relatives began to equivocate and want more.’ In summing up he said: ‘The Russian Revolution was a tragedy – ours was a joke.’
Since my return to the States something quite wonderful was happening. The economic reverses, although drastic, brought out the greatness of the American people. Conditions had gone from bad to worse. Some states went so far as to print a fiduciary currency on wood in order to distribute unsold goods. Meanwhile the lugubrious Hoover sat and sulked, because his disastrous economic sophistry of allocating money at the top in the belief that it would percolate down to the common people had failed. And amidst all this tragedy he ranted in the election campaign that if Franklin Roosevelt got into office the very foundations of the American system – not an infallible system at that moment – would be imperilled.
However, Franklin D. Roosevelt did get into office, and the country was not imperilled. His ‘Forgotten Man’ speech lifted American politics out of its cynical drowse and established the most inspiring era in American history. I heard the speech over the radio at Sam Goldwyn’s beach-house. Several of us sat around, including Bill Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Joe Schenck, Fred Astaire, his wife and other guests. ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ came over the air like a ray of sunlight. But I was sceptical, as were most of us. ‘Too good to be true,’ I said.
No sooner had Roosevelt taken office than he began to fit actions to his words, ordering a ten-day bank holiday to stop the banks from collapsing. That was a moment when America was at its best. Shops and stores of all kinds continued to do business on credit, even the cinemas sold tickets on credit, and for ten days, while
