Presenting: The Missing Mogul

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MOVING PICTURES: MEMORIES OF A HOLLYWOOD PRINCE by Budd Schulberg; Stein & Day; 501 pages; $16.95

In his early 20s he helped to create United Artists; before he was 30 he formed his own Hollywood movie company. In the next decade he became Paramount's head of production. The job paid $11,000 a week before "the age of taxes, accountants, business managers and tax shelters [when] the make-it-and-spend-it philosophy ruled the town." He discovered the "It" girl, Clara Bow, and the German character lead Emil Jannings; he promoted the careers of people as diverse as Director Ernst Lubitsch and the Marx brothers. Yet, by his mid-40s he had flamed out. His son began in movies by collaborating with an alcoholic writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom he later commemorated in the novel The Disenchanted) and wrote several film classics, including On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd. Today neither Benjamin Percival ("B.P.") Schulberg nor his son Budd is precisely a household--or Hollywood--name. But that odd obscurity is what lends Budd's memoir Moving Pictures its poignance and fascination.

Even for his son, it is hard to say what separated B.P. from his more illustrious peers. Certainly his ghetto credentials were as impeccable as theirs, his cigars as long and omnipresent. And he shared their legendary capacity to booze, wench and gamble the nonstop nights away--and to appear at the studio next morning with a clear eye for the main chance.

Maybe B.P. was too much the gambler, more excited by the flow of the play than by the final totals. Maybe his long-running affair with Sylvia Sidney, then one of his most winsome discoveries, diverted attention just as the coming of sound and the Great Depression led to bitter executive battles at Paramount. And maybe he needed to prove that Ad was right after all.

Ad was his wife, founder of the Malibu colony, half-baked advocate of Freud, Dewey and Marx, full-time heckler of B.P. as too trusting, too irresponsible, likely to come to a bad end. "I've decided not to depend on Father--for anything," she told Budd as her marriage wound down. "In all these years he has practically nothing to show for the millions he's earned . . . he lives in that dream world of his, with people like . . . the Sidney woman telling him how great he is." The solution: Ad became one of Hollywood's top agents, a status she solidified one afternoon on the casting couch of the mightiest mogul of them all, Louis B. Mayer. She paid Budd 25-c- and up for every certified classic he read as a kid, and he acted out her cultural aspirations. But he seems to have vaguely disliked her meddling ways, just as he seems to have vaguely liked his always distant father. Plainly, he wanted to know him better, and her less well.

If, finally, this vagueness about his own deepest feelings mars the author's memoir, it does not diminish its enter tainment value. For Los Angeles was still a garden, and the movie industry was not fully industrialized, when young Schulberg was growing up there. His fa ther's first studio shared space with a zoo, there was a race track where the Bev erly Wilshire now stands, and Gilbert Roland pressed Budd into service as a note carrier when he was trying to win Clara Bow's favors. Budd's best friend was Maurice Rapf, whose father was keeper of the Bs at Metro, so they had the run of two studios. They could play in Ben-Hur's galley or hide in the lot's fig tree, shying its overripened fruit at passing stars; even Garbo was not immune. When the kids wanted to peddle magazine subscriptions, a chauffeur drove them to their street corners; if they opened an orange-juice stand, their maids pressed the fruit for them. Later, when they required sex education, they could watch the greatest swordsman of them all in action. His name was Fredric March.

If Schulberg cannot quite manage to bring his parents into a well-composed closeup, his long views of their world have the nostalgic charm (and the well-researched historical accuracy) of a good documentary. And the shy, stammering boy who went on to Dartmouth, Communism, anti-Communism and a career as a bestselling novelist has the good sense to understand that his childhood principality was not so far removed from common experience as its critics, both moral and literary, have liked to pre tend: "Hollywood, after all, was only a picture of America run through the projector at triple speed." If that were not so, it could never have taken such hold of the national imagination, permitting B.P. and Ad to define the American dream with their work--and to caricature it with their lives.

--By Richard Schickel

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