A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Read online

  "Charles Sumner Tainter," said Brisbane.

  "When?"

  "1886."

  "Who started the New York Herald?"

  "James Gordon Bennett."

  "When?

  "1835. In his cellar. With $500 in capital. It was the first newspaper to use foreign correspondents, to illustrate articles, to print financial news from Wall Street."

  Brisbane's encyclopedic mind always amazed me. He never patronized me, even for the most ridiculous question. His answers turned into fascinating stories. He explained so much to me about so many different subjects, from sports and how he'd covered the Boston Strong Boy-Charley Mitchell fight in England, to philosophy and Charles Fourier, the French utopian, who created a sensation with his Four Laws to attain universal harmony, touching on the socialists, and stories about his own father and Brook Farm. i

  On one outing in Brisbane's big car, we started talking about the Civil War, one of my favorite subjects at school. Sitting next to me was a man born on December 12, 1864, the day of Stoneman's Raid, from Bean's Station, Tennessee, to Saltville, Virginia. Brisbane knew all about George Stoneman and told me more about the Civil War during that ride than I'd learned at school in months.' He dropped names of generals and politicians like old friends, and described battles like they'd happened yesterday. Brisbane had a gift for making you feel part of his colorful stories. I learned a helluva lot about storytelling from him. Most importantly, Brisbane gave me an enthusiasm to work hard at learning everything under the sun.

  Another time in his office, Brisbane asked me my birthday. When I told him, he started reminiscing about August 1912, when he'd been covering Pancho Villa's war against the Diaz government in Mexico. When I was only four, Brisbane was in Columbus, New Mexico, reporting on Villa's raid there, in which sixteen Americans were killed. Describing Villa, Diaz, Madero, and Huerta from firsthand experience, he spun a thrilling tale that had me on the edge of my chair, eyes bulging out of their sockets.'

  One Saturday night, I had to get Brisbane's okay on proofs for the Sunday edition. He was at Hearst's place on Riverside Drive, where a costumed ball was going on. Everyone was in disguise. The butler was dressed like Benjamin Franklin. He took me through the hallway to the kitchen. I got a gander of the goings-on. An orchestra was playing waltzes, and, dressed like counts, cowboys, and harlequins, some of the biggest celebrities of that period caroused in Hearst's noisy, smoke-filled living room.

  Marion Davies with William Randolph Hearst at one of those costume parties they loved throwing. I saw them at their luxurious place on Riverside Drive.

  Hearst's kitchen was like nothing I'd ever seen, a modern white-tiled room with little else but a stainless-steel table. The chef and his assistants were taking a break. Brisbane appeared, disguised as a chef himself, wearing a big white hat and apron. He looked damned funny, but I didn't dare laugh. He studied the proofs, initialed them "AB," then asked the real chef to prepare a chicken for me to take home. A button was pushed, and all the cooking utensils, even the goddamned stove, slid out of the wall. A tray full of roast chickens was taken from the oven. Brisbane himself wrapped one of the birds in wax paper. Gravy was put in a glass jar and a separate bag.

  "Here, Samuel," Brisbane said, handing me the two bags. "Now you won't get your clothes dirty. And don't talk about this to anybody at the office."

  "Yes sir. And thank you!"

  I rushed the proofs back to the journal and brought the chicken and gravy home to my family. The next day, I couldn't resist mentioning to a certain reporter, Nick Kenny, that I was given a roast chicken from Hearst's fabulous personal kitchen by Brisbane himself. My bragging was stupid, a sassy teenage urge to rebel against Brisbane's orders.

  "You're really in with the boss, Sammy," said Kenny. "You tell Brisbane that I'm a damned good newspaperman and I'll give you a dollar."

  I took the buck. It was more dough for my family. A couple of days later, I found an opening with Brisbane to praise Kenny.

  "How much did he give you to say that?" Brisbane said.

  "One dollar," I said.

  "Tell him it's not enough money." Brisbane grinned.

  Nick Kenny was furious with me when I told him what had happened. The young reporter chased me around the editorial room, cursing and threatening to beat me to a pulp.

  One of our most respected sports writers, Bill Farnsworth, used to corner me with questions about Brisbane, too. Did the boss ever make a crack about the sports pages, the cartoons, the columns? I shrugged.

  "If you hear anything about our department, let me know," said Farnsworth, slipping me a couple of tickets to a big fight at Madison Square Garden.

  By then, I was attending the large, modern George Washington High School on 192nd Street, the first racially mixed institution in the city. But my heart just wasn't in it. I was burning inside to be a crime reporter, only going through the motions of school to please my mother. One day, I pleaded with my illustrious boss to put me on the street and let me cover crime stories for the Journal.

  "You're much too young, my boy," Brisbane said. "You have to be at least twenty-one for that kind of job. It would be irresponsible for me to let you hang around precinct stations or go to prisons to interview criminals. Samuel, crime reporting is tough work. You're far too young for it."

  "But I've tagged along with reporters, been to murder scenes, to the morgue. I've watched how they talk to the police, to witnesses, how they get their stories. You know how fast I am, Mr. Brisbane. I can learn. I'm ready to start now. Please!"

  There was no changing his mind. Still, I wasn't about to give up on my dream of becoming a crime reporter. Not even Arthur Brisbane could make me do that. T1 1 •.i 1 1 T

  Then, on an outing to a speakeasy with journal reporters, I met Emile Henri Gauvreau, editor in chief of the New York Evening Graphic, a daily that had been launched in 1924. Gauvreau was a short, spirited man, proud of his remarkable resemblance to Napoleon. He combed his hair in the same way as Bonaparte so the resemblance was even more pronounced. Gauvreau had come to New York from the Hartford Courant.

  "I know all about you, Fuller," said Gauvreau. "You're Brisbane's copyboy. You make fourteen bucks a week. I also heard you've worked in the Journal's morgue. Sammy, why don't you come to work for me at the Graphic. How'd you like to be chief of our morgue for eighteen a week?"

  "I want to be a reporter, Mr. Gauvreau," I said. "A crime reporter."

  "You're a little young for that, aren't you, Sammy? I could use a bright kid like you to build up our morgue."

  "I'm only leaving Brisbane and the Journal if you let me be a real newspaperman. With a crime beat."

  "Look, Sammy, it's 1928, goddamnit," said Gauvreau. "We've got to contend with Prohibition, anarchists, fascists, Al Capone, gangland killings, God knows what else, and you want to be a newspaperman. I can't let you do that, not at sixteen."

  "Sixteen and a half!" I corrected him. Nevertheless, I saw I wasn't getting anywhere, so I proposed a deal. "If in six months, when I turn seventeen, Mr. Gauvreau, you let me be a reporter, I'll come to work in your morgue now.

  "It's a deal," he said.

  We shook hands on it.

  It was hard to tell Arthur Brisbane that I was leaving him and the journal. It was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. We were in the backseat of his Lincoln when I explained the agreement I'd made with Gauvreau to work at the Graphic. Brisbane sat there silently. It was one of those moments that seemed to last forever. I had to bite my lip not to cry. Brisbane's face was grave. If he was upset, he didn't show it.

  "Samuel, the Graphic won't last," he said. "What do you want to do in life, my boy?"

  "I want to become editor in chief of a great newspaper, like the Journal!"

  "Working for the Graphic will never get you hired as editor in chief anywhere."

  "Maybe not, Mr. Brisbane," I said, "but I've got to grab this opportunity. I want to be a reporter, and the sooner the better."

  "Then
go be one, my boy," said Brisbane.

  Having been Arthur Brisbane's personal copyboy for two and a half years would forever be part of my very fiber. Brisbane had become an essential father figure for me. Now I had to move on. I got out of his big car for the last time. We shook hands through the open window. He told me that I could call on him whenever I needed his assistance. I thanked him for the offer, though I never took him up on it.

  Cut to twelve years later. Christmas morning, 1936. Hollywood, California. Corner of Hollywood and Vine. From that day's early edition, I learned that Arthur Brisbane had died. I stood there and cried unashamedly. The newsboy who'd sold me the paper asked me if I needed a doc. I told him I was sick with sadness and no doctor could help me.

  "You go ahead and sell your papers," I said sorrowfully. "That's why they're printed."

  Flash Like

  a New Comet

  6

  The New York Evening Graphic was financed by Bernarr Macfadden, a crazy Irishman with a mane of long hair who'd made millions with a string of magazines exploiting physical fitness, true romance, violence, sex, or whatever else was the hot topic of the day. Macfadden was haunted by the specter of his parents' deaths from tuberculosis. He'd become a bodybuilder and general health nut, ate only raw vegetables, drank water and fruit juices, and took cold showers to jump-start his circulation. Here's how crazy Macfadden was about physical fitness: He'd regularly walk to the Graphic office from his home in Nyack, New York, an eight-hour stroll on hard pavement. And he did it barefoot!

  Macfadden chose Emile Gauvreau to be his editor in chief because Gauvreau had already made a name for himself as a headline hound. When he was running the Hartford Courant, Gauvreau hid a murderer in his office who'd come to plead for mercy, then published a firsthand account of the crime. The scoop was nifty, but it got Gauvreau in hot water, indicted for complicity to a murder, a rap he eventually beat. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur turned the incident into the Broadway play The Front Page. The play became a movie in 1931, directed by Lewis Milestone, with Pat O'Brien playing the role of an editor who stashes a murderer in his rolltop desk to get a big story. Gauvreau's career was also the inspiration for Mervyn LeRoy's Five Star Final, starring Edward G. Robinson as the headline-hunting city editor.

  Macfadden and Gauvreau had the unprecedented idea of taking out large ads in all the dailies to announce their exciting endeavor in enormous headlines:

  A NEW EVENING NEWSPAPER FOR NEW YORK CITY. A NEWSPAPER WITH A NEW IDEA.

  NOT A PICTURE PAPER BUT A REAL NEWSPAPER WITH ALL THE NEWS IN TABLOID FORM.

  Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of the New York Evening Graphic, circa r93o, was in great shape for his age and liked to demonstrate it.

  The publisher added a ballsy personal message that concluded with "I intend to publish a newspaper that will flash across the horizon like a new comet. "

  The first issue of the Graphic appeared on September 19, 1924. Across the front page was the headline "TWO FOIL DEATH CHAIR." The rest of the page was taken up by a huge picture of two men in prison uniforms, their arms wrapped around elderly women. The caption read: "Convicts Cling To Mothers As They Await Fate-Would Have Kicked Off With Grin." On page two was a story about one of the mothers with the banner headline "I CRIED FOR JOY AT NEWS FROM SING SING." Under a picture of a third convict was the caption: "I'm Guilty. Only God and I Can Understand." Decidedly, Macfadden and Gauvreau came from a different school of journalism than Joseph Pulitzer.

  The Graphic carved out a unique niche for itself with its coverage of the 1926 death of Rudolph Valentino (born Rodolfo Guglielmi), the gifted silent-screen actor whose dark, intense eyes made millions of women swoon. It's difficult to understand today the fame and passion that Valentino acquired in a career that spanned just six years and produced only six films of any consequence.' His death at age thirty-one was a national tragedy. The front page of the Graphic that day was simple yet stunning: a full-face close-up of Valentino with just one word printed across the top in enormous type: DEAD!

  By 1928, when I joined the Graphic, its reputation was well established. By covering crime and sensational happenings, Macfadden had found a way for the Graphic to survive in New York's very competitive daily-newspaper market. Gauvreau had invented the "composograph," a composite photo in which the heads of real people were superimposed on models posed in startling situations. Once they needed a kid's body for a young pilot who'd died in an airplane crash. Gauvreau asked me to pose, and of course I'd do anything he asked. Next day there was my body on the front page of the Graphic superimposed onto a head shot of the dead pilot, steering the doomed biplane with a scarf round my neck blowing in the fake wind. I was tickled pink to be part of the stunt. My mother was appalled with the sensationalism, irate that I'd participate in such trickery.

  Hell, any break from the monotony of filing clippings in the Graphic's morgue was welcome. Before I could join the ranks of real reporters, as Gauvreau had promised, I had to sweat out my six months working in the archives. While the days and weeks dragged by, I'd use my spare time to draw characters in silly situations with one-liners inside bubbles coming out of their mouths. I'd sell my best cartoons to the Graphic for a buck, extra dough for my family. I even flirted with the idea of becoming a cartoonist. After all, my brother Ving, who was already drawing full time, encouraged me to hone my skills. Once, Ving introduced me to some of the greatest cartoonists of the day at a memorable dinner that he and his pals organized in the famous Chinatown eatery Lum Fong. They were great cartoonists-in a league of their own, each with nationally syndicated columns-and great guys. That night, we had a helluva good time together. However, drawing would never be more than an amusing pastime for me. What I wanted to be more than anything else was a reporter. My seventeenth birthday was approaching, and I was counting the hours and minutes until I could get out on the street and start writing articles under my own byline.

  The big day finally arrived. True to his word, Gauvreau called me into his glass-enclosed office, pulled out his own press card, and crossed out his name. Then he wrote my name onto the card and handed it over. It wasn't much of a ceremony, yet I'll always remember that moment as one of the most glorious rites of my life. The name of Joseph P. Warren, police commissioner of the city of New York, was printed on the bottom of my press card. The smile on my face must have stretched from one ear to the other.

  "Your salary," said Gauvreau, "is going to be thirty-eight fifty a week, plus a couple bucks for expenses, as long as you can justify them. You're going to meet a lot of shady characters from now on, Sammy, so you'd better be damn careful."

  "When do I start, Mr. Gauvreau?" I asked.

  "About five minutes ago," he said. "We've got a double suicide to cover."

  A guy and his girlfriend had been found dead in a cheap hotel upstate. A note next to their bodies said that they'd wanted to die together. The town's sheriff was sticking to the double suicide theory. Gauvreau had received a tip that made him want to dig deeper. He was sending me up there to get the dope on a possible crime story as well as find some juicy information on the dead couple's past problems. Gauvreau probably had the big type already set for a screaming headline that said "DOUBLE SUICIDE, DOUBLE TROUBLE."

  Since I was greener than a Martian, it was wisely decided to send an experienced reporter with me on the story. Rhea Gore got the assignment. Rhea wasn't the only female reporter on the Graphic. Jean Campbell and Lois Bull, terrific ladies and great writers, also worked on the paper. But Rhea was a real gem, a tall and slender brunette, smart and sassy. Holy cow, was I lucky to fill in with this fast-talking, savvy mentor!

  One of those drawings I knocked off when I was on the staff of the Graphic

  Left: My big brother, Ving, at his drawing board. Unlike me, he was a talented, committed cartoonist.

  Below: The big cartoonist dinner in Chinatown with (left to right) my brother Ving, Charlie McCadam of McClure Syndicate, Ham Fisher of Joe Palooka, Ken Kling of Joe and A
sbestos, restaurateur Lum Fong, Bud Fisher of Mutt and Jeff, Bill Gould of Red Barry, and me. Billy deBeck ofBarney Google was next to the photographer, cracking jokes. My heart and mind was in reporting, not drawing.

  All I knew about Rhea was that her marriage to actor Walter Huston had produced a son, John, but had ended in divorce. Then she'd gotten hitched to a guy named Stevens, president of the Chicago and Altoona Railroads. Unfortunately, he'd died. She had more than enough money and never needed to work again. But Rhea loved the newspaper business and got back into reporting at the Graphic. "Gore" was the pen name she'd chosen for her byline because she didn't want to ever be tagged as "the wealthy widow," preferring to be judged on no other merits than her work.

  That was how I first met John Huston. Rhea got him hired as a Graphic reporter, but John's heart was never really in journalism. In covering one of his first murders, he described an innocent man as the murderer. All hell broke loose, and John was fired on the spot. It turned out to be a big break, because it liberated him to go out to Hollywood, where he met William Wyler and cowrote A House Divided (1931). The rest is movie history.

  To cover the double suicide story, Rhea and I headed upstate. We got into this little town late at night. The taxi driver let us off at the cheap hotel where the ill-fated couple had supposedly taken their lives. No one was around. We snooped around the joint until we found their room. The local sheriff had put an official seal on the door. That wasn't going to stop Rhea. There wasn't a seal on the window, so she opened it and we quietly slipped into the motel room. She figured the town didn't have a morgue. For chrissakes, right there on the floor waiting to be picked up by the county coroner were the corpses of the young man and the young woman laid out under sheets! We lifted the sheets. The two naked bodies took my breath away. The man's head was a bloody mess, but the woman looked unscathed except for her bruised neck.