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

World of

  Nevertheless

  7

  M y attitude about success was influenced by the brilliant and notorious Gene Fowler. "Success," he wrote, "is a whore. I can't afford her asking price." A gutsy, gorgeous human being who made you feel good just by being in his presence, Fowler had a vibrant, cavernous voice and an explosive laugh that resonated throughout any bar, boxing arena, or bordello he was in.

  Gene Fowler had come to New York from Colorado in 1918 as a protege of Damon Runyon after successful stints at the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, where his brazen prose had set him apart.' He'd befriended one of America's greatest heroes, William F. Cody, known the world over as "Buffalo Bill." Cody was an aging demigod for whom Gene developed a fondness devoid of worship. Cody died in Denver in 1917. Fowler covered his passing this way:

  Indiscreet, prodigal, as temperamental as a diva, pompous yet somehow naive, vain but generous, bigger than big today and littler than little tomorrow, Cody lived with the world at his feet and died with it on his shoulders. He was subject to suspicious whims and distorted perspectives, yet the sharpers who swindled him the oftenest he trusted the most.

  Runyon encouraged Fowler to leave his native Rocky Mountains and try the big time in New York by inviting him to New York to visit the Journal and meet Hearst himself. When Hearst asked what Fowler would like as a starting salary, the audacious young journalist from out west answered $ioo a week, a huge amount of money in those days. Hearst said that a fellow who placed such a high price on his talents might just have what it takes, so he hired Fowler to work at the New York American as a reporter, copyreader, and headline writer.

  After conquering Park Row, Gene Fowler took his pungent prose and wry sense of humor out to Hollywood to make a pile of dough as a screenwriter.

  "I expect great things from you, young man," said Hearst.

  He got them. Only a few years later, Fowler would become the managing editor of the American. In his years on Park Row, Fowler became a legend, "easily the most colorful and adventurous newspaperman of our time," according to the prestigious Silurians Club, a select group of crusty newspapermen named after a paleontological age when some of its members started their careers.

  Fowler went on to become a prolific author, producing four novels and a half-dozen biographies of his famous, rakish friends like John Barrymore (Good Night, Sweet Prince), Mayor James "Jimmy" J. Walker of New York (Beau James), Jimmy Durante (Schnozzola), and that charming pair of bandits named Bonfils and 7ammen (Timber Line), a speculator and a bartender who teamed up to make the Denver Post a financial and political powerhouse. During the thirties, Fowler moved out to Hollywood to become a screenwriter and script doctor.

  When I first met him, Fowler was in his late thirties, one of the most well-known journalists on Park Row. There were plenty of prima donnas on the street, but Gene was sociable with everyone and generous with his time. I was sixteen, still a copyboy, and he took me under his wing. Hell if I know why. Maybe because he saw in me his own early passion for the newspaper business. He was a great mentor. Together we attended prizefights, baseball games, benefits, political rallies, parades, and floating crap games. Gene knew everybody and everybody knew Gene, be they statesmen, cops, priests, heiresses, pimps, or bartenders. Especially bartenders.

  Gene was a faithful patron of any saloon that sold alcoholic beverages. He took me to my first speakeasy. We were accompanied by three of the greatest writers and all-around good guys of that era, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and Bill Farnsworth. The joint was in a basement somewhere near Times Square, and was owned by an entrepreneur named Lew Walters. Lew had a daughter named Barbara who became a journalist herself. The bouncer looked through a hole in the door, recognized Fowler, and let us in. I was bringing up the rear when I felt the bouncer's hairy paw on my shoulder stopping me dead in my tracks. The big palooka glanced at Gene with a raised eyebrow. Fowler swore that I was much older than I looked. The bouncer bought it. But the bartender didn't. I had to sip seltzer water through a straw while my elders knocked back whiskey. At least I could smoke cigars with them.

  Walters's speakeasy was a fairly ritzy place. There were tall mirrors and paintings of nude women on the walls. There was a dance floor with a three-piece band and some beautiful hostesses whom you tipped generously if you wanted to be welcomed back a second time. A dollar changed hands, like Fowler said, in the blink of a pretty eyelash. It all seemed very exciting to my teenage eyes.

  I'd frequent a fair number of speakeasies with Gene. There was Andy Horn's Bridge Cafe, Lipton's, Mike's, near the American, and Hesse's allnight saloon, down the street from the World. The layout was generally the same: a bar, spittoons, tables, and plenty of teacups to serve the booze. Glasses were taboo because they were incriminating if the police decided to raid the place, which they did frequently if bribes weren't paid on time. The gin was called "Prohibition Dew." A tough bouncer was a must for customers who got out of line, which meant drinking yourself senseless, failing to have the cash to pay the last round, or getting into a brawl with the other customers.

  Brawling was a regular feature of bars before Prohibition. Speakeasies were milk dens in comparison, the discreet atmosphere more peace-loving. But booze and conflicts went hand in hand. Fowler never looked for a fight, but when the occasion presented itself, he threw himself into the mayhem with unmatched joy. I can personally attest to Fowler's strong, clean punches and quick feet. On a couple of our outings, he belted obnoxious guys to the floor with one nifty, surprise swing. Unfortunately, when the oaf got back on his feet, Fowler would end up sprawled on the floor. It was all over pretty quick because, in a flash, the bouncer would jump in and break the ruckus up. Fowler would slowly stand up, shake his big head, smile, and apply a handkerchief to the bleeding cuts as he asked for another drink.

  There was one establishment-Perry's Pharmacy-I'll never forget, unorthodox in its normalcy. Perry's was a drugstore on the ground floor of the Pulitzer Building, near the entrance to the highly respected World. If you look closely at the set we built for Park Row in that long tracking shot at the beginning of the film, you'll see we included Perry's Pharmacy, because I wanted to honor the place that Fowler and his colleagues used to call the "Pot of Glue."

  They'd meet up at Perry's at the end of a hard day of newspapering for a glass of "Brown Ruin," a special pick-me-up that chemist Tim O'Brien served in the back of the shop. Among the "fellows of good minds and limber elbows," as Fowler called them, I remember Nunally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay for The Grapes of Wrath, Walter Davenport, who became editor of Collier's, Charles Somerville, a protege of the great O. Henry, and Ross Duff Whytock, an old-timer who'd scooped everybody for the Evening World with an article about Germany's submarine campaign in World War I. I thought I was the luckiest teenager in the world, hanging out in the Pot of Glue listening to those wizened reporters' tales as they knocked back glasses of Brown Ruin.

  See, in my day park Row was the undisputable center of the universe for journalists. Like Fowler, they'd come from all over the country to make a name for themselves. They worked hard, then retired to their favorite saloons to get drunk, exchange outrageous stories, and laugh about the whole goddamned grab bag of humanity that they had to cover. Thanks to Fowler, I not only rubbed shoulders with Runyon and Lardner, but also with social commentator Lucius Beebe, Kenneth C. Beaton, who had a popular column called "Ye Towne Gossip," humorist James Thurber, and Winsor McCay, the cartoonist who created the enormously successful comic strip Little Nemo. From editors to reporters, photographers, and cartoonists, right down to lowly copyboys, we all prided ourselves on having been part of Park Row's golden era in the twenties.

  One night Fowler and some buddies from the Herald Tribune were carousing in a speakeasy in the West Forties affectionately called "The Artists and Writers Club," run by a guy named Jack Bleeck. Fowler, Beebe, an old-timer named Houghton, and I'm not sure how many others, were having a helluva good time when a panicked messen
ger ran into the joint with an urgent message from the Tribune's angry publisher, Ogden Mills Reid.' Reid had discovered that there was no lead editorial for the morning edition. He was kicking the shit out of his desk in frustration. Houghton volunteered to rectify the oversight, even though his judgment may have been a little blurred by all the gin. He went back to the newsroom and laboriously typed out a page on his typewriter in about twenty minutes. Houghton handed the paper to a copyboy and returned to his chums at the speakeasy. Typesetters, makeup editors, printers, pressmen, hell, everyone at the Tribune was waiting for Houghton's seven column inches of prose to put the paper to bed. The copyboy rushed the proof copy to Mr. Reid. The furious publisher could hardly believe his eyes. The entire goddamned editorial was just one word, typed over and over and over again: "Nevertheless, Nevertheless, Nevertheless...."

  Although there were exceptions, the typical speakeasy eliminated frills and got straight to the business of tanking up the patrons with bootleg liquor.

  The crazy piece was never printed. Fowler wrote that Houghton's effort might have been the most apt description of that era: "It was the `World of Nevertheless,' a rosy time, the complexion of which now has faded like a clown's face in the rain."i

  Fortunately, Fowler was there for me when I made reporter. I desperately needed another father figure. Home had become hell. My mother and I were in constant conflict about my lifestyle and career choice. As if my abrupt dismissal from high school hadn't been enough for her, my coming home night after night looking less and less like a reporter and more and more like one of the criminals I'd been covering was a continual source of anxiety and disappointment for the poor woman. I'd been hanging around the morgue so much that my clothes stank of formaldehyde, the fragrance of death clinging to my threadbare suit. And to make matters worse, I was usually in need of a haircut.

  "Why can't you get a job with a more respectable paper, with normal working hours?" my mother asked. "Why do you have to be out all night, chasing around after criminals, following the police, hanging around the morgue?"

  "Because this is my work, Mother," I said curtly, unable to contain my fury.

  "You're like a vulture!"

  "I like being a vulture!" I said, slamming the door on my way out.

  Rebecca didn't overlook the fact that I'd gotten a raise at the Graphic and brought home every penny I earned. To her, though, I was still wasting my life at a sordid job. To me, I was fortunate enough to spend my days and nights at the most scintillating profession on Earth and get paid for it, to boot. I figure that all mothers want their sons to succeed in a "respectable" profession, while the sons are trying to be true to their passion. Conflict is inevitable. In my case, Rebecca saw that I was far too infected with the writing bug to ever be cured. She had no choice but to leave me to my disreputable pursuits, hoping against all odds that I'd grow out of reporting. God bless my mother for loving me so much that she thought she could save me.

  Fowler was a revelation for me, the real McCoy, an irreverent, hard living, lusty newspaperman from the Nothing Sacred School of Reporting. He gave me so much, but one of his greatest gifts was introducing me to Jack Dempsey himself, heavyweight champion of the world. Holy cow, what a thrill to meet one of my childhood idols in person!

  Dempsey and Fowler had been friends since their Denver days when Dempsey was starting out and Fowler picked up extra money by not only reporting on the fights but serving as the referee as well. I met the Manassa Mauler at Toots Shot's place one night, where Fowler and Farnsworth had organized a dinner for their boxing cronies, with plentiful T-bone steaks and an unending supply of Mr. Shot's private stock of ale. That night, Fowler recounted for its his elopement with Agnes, his fiancee, in a rushed service in Red Rocks Park, fifteen miles outside Denver. Dempsey had loaned the groom an expensive brown overcoat just for the ceremony.

  "Dempsey didn't want to part with that coat," said Fowler. "I begged him to let me wear it so I'd remember my wedding day the rest of my life. And all I can remember is the goddamned coat!"

  Gene was not only giving me firsthand lessons in his incorrigible zest for life, he was giving me valuable pointers on being a good reporter. "Writing is easy," he used to say. "All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." He'd read my articles published in the Graphic and give me potent criticism.

  "You're on the right track now, my lad," Fowler said. "But when you cover a murder case, give your articles more spice. Spend some time alone with the criminal, get some personal stuff, a story from his childhood, anything that connects to the reader. No matter how violent the crime, the bastard has a pet canary or sends love poems to his mother. Some humaninterest angle. Then follow the trial step by step, never letting up on the heart-tugging details. If the guy ends up frying in the chair at Sing Sing, then write it so strong that the reader can smell his flesh burning. Even if the criminal is a woman."

  Fowler spoke from personal experience. He'd covered the sensational Ruth Snyder case, which had titillated America, knocking the SaccoVanzetti murder case off the front pages. The Snyder case had split America right down the middle into two camps, for or against the young woman they called the "Iron Widow," who'd killed her husband so she could be with her lover, Judd Gray. Ruth Snyder got the chair on January 12, 1928, the only woman ever to be electrocuted in New York State, providing Fowler with one of the biggest stories of his career.

  I still have Gene Fowler's wonderful coverage of the Ruth Snyder trial and execution at Sing Sing. Ruth's life inspired James B. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as well as a play and two movie versions adapted from Cain's book. The case made a lasting impression on me. Over sixty years later I was going to direct an original movie called The Chair vs. Ruth Snyder, coproduced by Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, before my stroke put me and the picture out of commission.

  The first execution I witnessed at Ossining's famous prison is engraved forever on my brain. Only a handful of people were allowed into the observation room. Since I was pretty small, the prison warden, Louis Lawes, put me in the front row. The condemned man came in, having walked "the last mile," and sat down in the big wooden chair. Electric wires were attached to his head and to one of his legs. One guard made a brief, set speech, another threw the switch. Three powerful shocks hit the man's body like a runaway train. His body began to shake, his skin turned purple, then blue, and smoke started coming off his flesh. For Chrissakes, he actually started to burn right in front of our eyes! The odor of charred human flesh is something right out of hell. I shudder to remember it.

  To watch such a gruesome spectacle turns all your insides upside down. When my mother found out I'd been an eyewitness to an execution, she really raised hell about my professional pursuits. She said that I was heading for something worse than Dante's Inferno and she had no intention of being my Beatrice. That first electrocution was followed by one after another until, after a half-dozen more of those revolting state-approved killings, I couldn't take it anymore. I begged Gauvreau to send somebody else to Sing Sing.

  "You wanted to be a crime reporter, didn't you?" he said. "This is how society makes murderers pay for their crimes. You've got to cover them, Sammy."

  "Give me anything else, even a hanging," I pleaded.

  Adulterer, husband killer, seductress, or victim, depending upon your outlook, Ruth Snyder was one of the biggest stories of the twenties.

  I watched too many people die in this macabre chair at Sing Sing. Hundreds of convicted murderers, including Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, paid the supreme penalty to society here.

  "Get a job in another state. Here, the bastards get the chair."

  During my years at the Graphic, many fledgling writers worked at the paper. It was a talent incubator, giving cub reporters like me a fabulous opportunity to acquire valuable skills, experience, and moxie that would serve us well in years to come. Several Graphic alumni went on to outstanding careers.

  Walter Winchell had hi
s first column, called "Your Broadway and Mine," at the Graphic, honing the zesty language that, a few years down the line, would make Walter one of the most powerful syndicated columnists in the country. Ed Sullivan joined the Graphic staff as a junior sports reporter. Within a couple of seasons, Ed was sports editor, then developed a Broadway gossip column. From there, he got into radio, doing programs on personalities from the sports and theater worlds. By the fifties, Ed Sullivan had become a national television figure with enormous influence. Jerry Wald was seventeen when he convinced Gauvreau to let him write a radio column called "Not on the Air." Jerry went on to produce over fifty movies, including three respected Joan Crawford vehicles, Mildred Pierce (1945), Humoresque (1946), and Possessed (1947). For me, Wald's Johnny Belinda (1948), with Jane Wyman, was one of his best. His mercurial career was supposed to have been one of the inspirations for Budd Schulberg's famous novel What Makes Sammy Run. Norman Krasna joined the Graphic as a theater critic at age twenty He'd write more than twenty-five original screenplays, among them the Oscar-winning Princess O'Rourke (1943), which he also directed.

  All of us worked our asses off at the Graphic and learned a helluva lot. It was a great time to be a reporter in New York. Notwithstanding my mother's carping, I knew that the Graphic, for all the opportunities it had provided me, was only a way station. Long before the paper went out of business in 1932, I had a deep urge to go after stories with greater social and political implications, travel to new places, meet different people. West of the island of Manhattan, there was a big country out there I knew precious little about. I was itching to discover it for myself.

  Starting out on the staff of the Graphic like me, Ed Sullivan became a force to be reckoned with on radio, then on television.

  Westward Ho

  8

  What reporter didn't get a hard-on from New York, with all its roundthe-clock action, fast-paced banter, whiskey-drinking philosophers, glittering talent, and daily Greek tragedies played out on an ever-shifting stage of street corners, glowing skyscrapers, all-night bars, cheap tenements, Broadway theaters, and sports arenas? Manhattan was manna from heaven for a wordsmith. Hell, I loved the place. But now I needed to find out about the rest of the country.