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

  Hatred was also born of fear. For a real eye-opener, there was nothing that could surpass the Ku Klux Klan meetings I covered in Little Rock, Arkansas. My editor at American Weekly had sent me to the cradle of the Klan to write a firsthand report about their strange rituals. I got to Little Rock and was tipped off where the Klan held their secret meetings. One night I found myself surrounded by thirty KKK members wearing white sheets and parading around a burning cross. It was an overwhelming spectacle that left me depressed and disillusioned that this could happen in America. My mother had raised me to respect people of all cultures, to honor the idea that America was great because of its melting pot of peoples. Those KKK psychopaths proselytizing about white supremacy, lynching, and violence deeply disturbed me, shaking up my youthful idealism that all Americans loved and respected real democratic values.

  In my article about the KKK, I wrote about their hate-filled speeches, contrasting their rancorous words with the spectacle of a woman in a Klan costume nursing her newborn baby. The woman's face was hidden under that ridiculous pillowcase with holes cut out for her nose and eyes. She slowly opened the robe to put her breast into the mouth of the little baby, the Ku Klux Klan members screaming racial rubbish while the mother gave sweet sustenance to the infant. My editor at American Weekly cut the part about the woman nursing her baby because it sounded so far-fetched. When I saw the published version of my article, I was so upset that I called him to complain, making sure the operator reversed the charges.

  "The way I wrote it was just the way it was!" I said.

  "You should have taken photos of the woman with her baby," said the editor.

  "I'm a newspaperman, goddamnit, not a photographer!"

  My editor was right, though. A picture would have made my words believable. In fact, a photo of the Klan woman nursing a baby would have been more powerful than all my words. Then and there, I found a cheap camera in a pawnshop and began taking pictures to accompany my stories. I was beginning to realize that I could better convey emotions with words and images. And not just any image, but the precise image that captured a multitude of emotions in a frozen instant. Jean-Luc Godard's famous quip hit the nail on the head: "Ce n'est pas juste une image, c'est une image juste" ("It's not just an image, it's a just image").

  SAMMY FULLER

  A letter to my mother from Frisco during the General Strike.

  My travels finally landed me in San Diego. As usual, I took up quarters with the homeless at the edge of town. One day, the truckers called a strike protesting their wages and working conditions, stranding truckloads of fresh milk on the road. The homeless helped themselves to all the milk they wanted. We ended up filling barrels and taking milk baths like Marie-Antoinette. It was a unique moment of frivolity in a dark and disillusioned time.

  I got a job at the San Diego Sun covering the waterfront and stayed there quite a while. I tried my hand at writing editorials, too, rousing people with my natural idealism. I loved spouting off my opinions in print. There was so much misfortune and hardship, it wasn't difficult at all for me to pick issues and start shooting fierce criticism and bold proposals at them. I was intent on using words to make the world a better place, turning over the heavy stones of intolerance and prejudice into the warm sunlight of truth. I suppose it was youthful fervor, but it's never gone away. I still believe we must fight intolerance in every way possible.

  When I got the news that my twenty-seven-year-old brother Tom was very ill, I decided it was time to go back to New York. He'd contracted a rare kind of ulcer and died soon after I got back into town. It was a terrible blow to all of us, especially my mother. Rebecca was very brave, holding her head high and carrying on stoically, but inside she was heartbroken. We needed to mourn Tom's death together, as a family. I'd been on the road for a few years. Now I decided to stay home for a while, help out my mother, and re-plunge into the political and social turbulence of New York in the thirties.

  If only I had had a photo like this one of 'a KKK rally, my article about their hate-filled meetings and racist babble would have been more convincing.

  Chaos and

  Bewilderment

  9

  ''d changed. America was no longer a mystery to me. I'd traveled to the four corners of this country, met its many peoples, and observed the ugly fault lines that were looming just beneath the surface of our nation.

  New York had changed too. It was still a fabulously diverse city, capital of finance, disburser of information, platform of opinion, showcase of artists, leader of style, hotbed of crime. But the jazzy, frivolous breeze of the twenties had been knocked out of New York's sails, replaced by the harsh winds of the Great Depression blowing through its cavernous thoroughfares, its genteel parks, and its bustling boroughs, bearing the same disenchantment that I'd experienced elsewhere in the country.

  The economic strife and social conflicts of the thirties swept not only across America but around the world, offering power-mad leaders the opportunity to serve up appealing yet virulent "isms" to people faced with hunger and hopelessness. I was about to run headfirst into the two ideologies-fascism and communism-that were to mark my life and times so deeply.

  Although I was offered regular reporter jobs on big dailies, I'd gotten accustomed to working freelance during my travels. Thanks to my editor at the American Weekly and some friends on Park Row, I only took on special assignments for in-depth articles on subjects that intrigued me. What I really wanted to do was turn out a book. I'd started writing fiction while I was on the road. I was about twenty-two when I finished my first novel, called Burn, Baby, Burn.

  The yarn kicks off with a pregnant woman condemned to die in the chair. I must have been so obsessed with the electric chair that I used it as a fictional hook, finding a release for some of my nightmarish memories of prisoners getting fried at Sing Sing. Is it moral to execute a condemned woman and her innocent, unborn child? My hero is a hotshot New York reporter, named Bradagher, who covers the story. The young wise guy accepts an offer from a Hollywood bigwig to go out to the West Coast and develop his articles about the case into a movie script. The brash, fasttalking, whiskey-drinking Bradagher thinks he's got the world by the tail. Then he falls for a gorgeous blonde who happens to be a reporter-turnedscreenwriter, too. She's developing a similar script for a rival studio. Bradagher discovers he's in way over his head, and all his shrewdness causes him to land flat on his face. Only by digging deep into his heart does he find love and fulfillment in my closing chapter.

  I got a big kick out of spinning that tale, weaving in tributes to Park Row mentors like Gene Fowler, knocking out an unrepentant love story, shifting scenes from Manhattan to Hollywood and the world of studio screenwriting. The Hollywood stuff in Burn, Baby, Burn came from my brief visit to see Fowler in la-la land during my hobo period. Gene had a sumptuous setup out there, though he never took any of it very seriously. He and his pals were cheerfully cynical about the fast bucks and shallow nature of the movie business, calling Louis B. Mayer, chief of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, "Louis B. Manure." Fowler let me camp out on the couch in his luxurious Beverly Hills home and bought me some new trousers. Most importantly, he introduced me to some of the renowned writers who were doctoring scripts in those days. My most memorable encounter was with Dorothy Parker, whose reputation as a caustic wise gal didn't prepare me for her warmth and wit. Sitting around Gene's living room one evening with some of his pals, knocking back one martini after another, Parker recounted that some pompous studio executive was mangling one of her screenplays.

  "Don't wave your finger at me," she'd advised him. "Remember when it had a thimble on it."

  Parker took a liking to me and told me to write her from the road and tell her about my travels. She gave me her card and asked me for mine. I didn't have one then or ever. I'll never forget how she scribbled my Manhattan address inside the hem of her dress. There never was any exchange of correspondence. I lost her card, and she must have gotten the dress cleaned.

  My
editor at American Weekly liked Burn, Baby, Burn enough to serialize it. Then it was picked up by Phoenix Press, a small publishing house that brought it out in 1935. Rebecca was so proud of her son, "the author." I was thrilled to be a published novelist even if my book was what we called "pulp fiction" in those days. It got one printing run, and I got a check for a grand or two. That was that, no reprints or backlisting. I dedicated Burn, Baby, Burn to Perc Westmore, "the only man God can sue." Out in California, I'd become pals with Westmore, one of the most impor tant makeup artists of the day. Perc had been very helpful by showing me around the studios, giving me an insider's look at Hollywood.

  I began zigzagging between journalism and fiction, with the two usually overlapping. One of my freelance assignments was writing a piece on Dr. Alexis Carrel, the Frenchman who'd won a Nobel Prize in 1912 for the development of a technique for suturing blood vessels. At the time I met Carrel, he was working on an artificial heart pump. When I was walked into Carrel's office for my first interview, I was surprised to see none other than the tall, handsome Charles Lindbergh walking out. Lindbergh was, of course, a national hero since his historic flight across the Atlantic in 1927 in the Spirit of St. Louis. Carrel and Lindbergh, an engineer in his own right, were collaborating on the artificial heart and would coauthor The Culture of Organs (1938). That was the first of my three memorable encounters with Lindbergh in the thirties that would totally change my opinion of the man.

  Meanwhile Dr. Carrel had pioneered research on artificial insemination, developing all the ideal conditions for conceiving an "ectogenetic baby" in the mother's uterus by laboratory means. My article painted a portrait of the brilliant doctor and discussed his groundbreaking studies. It also gave me an idea for my second novel.

  Fascinated with the idea of a baby being cultured like a pearl, I came up with a tale about a mother who fervently desires her son to be perfect, only to see her beloved creation turn out terribly flawed. Entitled Test Tube Baby, my second novel was published in 1936 by another pulp fiction house, Godwin. My hero, Jimmy Garrison, is conceived scientifically, then brought up by his mother to be the ideal son. Things go awry when Jimmy falls in love with the wanton Peggy and commits a very imperfect murder. He is caught and brought to trial. The final melodramatic scene describes Jimmy's acquittal and his mother's remorse and apology.

  No doubt about it, some of my anger against my own mother was allowed a healthy outlet in Test Tube Baby. With her abundant yet overbearing love, Rebecca was always urging me to better my station in life, driving me crazy with her good intentions. At the time, she was on a campaign to match me up with a certain young lady whose parents owned the Altman Department Stores, for no other reason than to see her dream for me-marrying a rich girl-fulfilled. Nothing could have been further from my ambition. Writing Test Tube Baby was therapeutic, because it allowed me to vent my frustration as well as to forgive my mother. The novel's troubling theme of human perfection resounded far deeper than one family's misguided idealism. I'd been closely following the political movements of the thirties, with both the left and the right trying to sell people on their flawed ideologies as the only way to a perfect society.

  The rise of Nazism in Germany and its leader, Adolf Hitler (born Adolf Schicklgruber), was very troublesome. Hitler never tired of spouting that goddamned trash about an Aryan superrace, claimed that providence was on their side. No self-respecting Nazi would ever use the word "God," but that's what the sonsofbitches meant. It was the zenith of arrogance, twisting the perfection scheme that dated back to Aristotle into an incredibly perverse and destructive system. See, Aristotle taught his students, among them Alexander the Great, that all beings in the world aspire to be perfect because God is perfect. In old Greek, however, "perfection" means "arrogance." Aristotle's arrogance was a forerunner of the Nazi's superrace madness. The ancient philosopher condoned slavery and excluded women, children, non-Greeks, and manual workers from his perfection scheme. I've always been skeptical about any bastard, whether his name's Adolf or Aristotle, who claims that God is on his side, that certain races are superior to others, that people need to be subdued or brainwashed for the betterment of society. For Chrissakes, give people the truth! They can figure out what the hell they want to do all on their own.

  By the early thirties, Mussolini had already imposed fascism in Italy. The Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1935. After attempting to resist the fascists, then pleading unsuccessfully for help from the League of Nations, Haile Selassie went into exile in England. I respected Selassie and rooted for that small, vibrant man whom they called the "Lion of the Desert," even if he sometimes seemed more concerned about his own power than his people's destiny.

  The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. Franco and his band of generals seized control of the country and turned the Spanish armies against the elected Republican government. The Germans and Italians were sending troops and arms to Franco. He accepted their aid-as well as their fascist ideas-all too eagerly.

  That's when I wrote a piece for American Weekly about the Lincoln Brigade, the regiment of American volunteers who were recruited to fight alongside the Republicans in Spain. I interviewed their leaders and talked to some of the men who were enlisting. Abraham Lincoln was one of my heroes. To use his name for a military squadron was magic for me. Lincoln was no innocent, but a shrewd politician and war strategist. The brigade's volunteers were working-class men, sensible and mature, not youngsters drafted into a war that they didn't understand. They thought they would make a difference by stopping the spread of fascism in Europe. Hell, I almost joined the Lincoln Brigade myself, writing a series of articles from the front lines in Spain. However, my first responsibility was to stay home and support my mother.

  Even as events demanded that America play a leading role on the world's stage, the isolationist movement, led by conservatives like Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, became more powerful. The supposed free press in this country was leaning further and further right. Robert Rutherford McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, made speeches asking Americans to overlook what was happening in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Ethiopia. More and more papers, including Hearst's, were veering further right in their coverage of the news. Something was very sick in our nation when big money and press barons hooked up to keep America aloof from the rest of the world. Holy shit, it was tantamount to giving fascists a green light!

  To find out what was happening on the opposite side of the political spectrum, I visited the Park Row newsrooms of the Daily Worker and People's World, real papers back then, with linotypes, editing rooms, and a place on newsstands. I enjoyed their spirited slant on events, but I had enormous doubts about communism as an ideology, much less as a workable system. Thank God there was still a little room on that street to print diverse opinions! Many of America's finest writers and poets were published in the lefty papers.

  Since 1918, communism had been called Bolshevism in the United States. The Soviet Union had only been officially recognized by President Roosevelt in 1934. I'd covered some communist meetings in Greenwich Village and sold some cartoons about Bolshevists, comically drawing them as men with beards and bombs. The communists I interviewed were intellectual dreamers and do-gooders, certainly not the dangerous revolutionaries that the conservative press invariably portrayed. I was lucky to be able to discuss communism with Maxwell Bodenheim, a fine poet and writer who was very close to John Reed, author of the best-seller Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), a firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. Bodenheim was a good friend of my mother's, and we both cherished him. A lovely, warm guy, Max often came to dinner at our apartment, and our animated discussions lasted late into the night. I was very pleased that Warren Beatty paid homage to Max in his film Reds (1981). I'll never forget how, back when I was still a copyboy at the journal, Bodenheim had been invited to the newsroom to recite his poetry in front of scores of busy journalists. They were a noisy lot, but soon everyone fell absolutely silent, listeni
ng wordlessly to Bodenheim's remarkable voice. One of his best novels is Blackguard (1923). Max died in 1954. As a private tribute, I named the mad nuclear scientist in Shock Corridor Boden.

  Some of our finest writers in the thirties were deeply influenced by Marx. I remember a photo of the prominent playwright Lillian Hellman kissing Stalin on the cheek. I'd read Marx and found him tedious. My travels across America led me to believe that communism was a fantasy that would never supplant democracy among ordinary folk unless they were coerced. In succeeding years, it became clear to everyone that Stalin was a totalitarian who, like Hitler, resorted to shoving his "ism" down his own people's throats as well as those of his neighbors. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 proved conclusively just how much those two self-serving demagogues admired each other.

  My second encounter with Charles Lindbergh was at the Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, where he'd touched down in a small airplane on one of his goodwill tours. I was standing with a small group of newspapermen who were covering the event. Lindbergh had recently traveled through Europe, where he'd accepted a decoration from Hitler and praised the German air force. When Lindbergh asked for some help turning his plane around on the runway, not one reporter would give him a hand. I remember Lindbergh's face that day, stung by the resentment that his proGerman statements had provoked among the press. Sure, everybody felt sorry for him because of the great tragedy he and his wife had suffered in 1932, when their baby was kidnapped and killed. Yet Lindbergh had become an embarrassment for America and democracy.