There was no sense in correcting him, especially when he was right. “So we should branch out,” I said.
“We?”
“If I’m right, we. If I’m not, not.”
“You’re offering me a partnership in my own company? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Is that too uppity for you, EZ?”
Shelupsky did not like being on the wrong end of the racial stick. He was a big contributor to Negro colleges, Negro hospitals, everything Negro but the NAACP, which to EZ’s mind was just another way to say “Commie.” That year we had sent a delegation to the World Conference Against Hate in Moscow. “I think you’re a disgusting cock-sucking, homosexual faggot, Larry. But as a colored man, I don’t condemn you. You were born the way you are.”
“I was also born a disgusting, cock-sucking, homosexual faggot, EZ.”
“You mean to say that kind of thing ain’t a matter of choice?”
“Is this about who I fuck or movies about Jews?”
“Neither,” he said. “You know I don’t care about your personal life. You’re a terrific writer. An artist. Even Michelangelo, I heard this somewhere, was queer as a lead penny. Most painters, in fact. It’s an artistic disease. If God was to strike dead every poof in Hollywood, we’d be down to one feature a year and it would be terrible. But your idea that Racetrack should make Jewish films, that’s…”
“Laughable,” I said. “Like what, talkies?” This was a low blow. Shelupsky had been late making the transition from silents. He was sensitive about it. He saw himself as an innovator, but he had missed that one. “Start a new company. No relation to Racetrack. There’s a lot of talent here. Jewish talent.”
“The refugees? Larry, they don’t even talk English.”
“Billy Wilder?”
“A exception.”
“Joseph von Sternberg?”
“Two apples don’t make a fig tree.”
“I’ll write the dialogue. We’ll get the refugees for story, for structure. The whole German movie industry is here, and they’re all Jews.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they should write movies for Jews. Let them write for everybody, like the rest of the industry. You know how many Jews there are in America? Two percent of the population. I looked it up.”
“You’re doing pretty well with ten percent of the population, and most Negroes don’t have two nickels to rub together. And don’t forget Europe. That’s sixteen million more Jews, at least.” I allowed myself the luxury of a wink. “I looked it up.”
“Jews go to movies? Who knows if they do?”
“You think they don’t?”
“Yeah, they probably do.”
“A couple or three titles a year, something big that other people will go see as well. Gone With the Wind, but for Jews. Or maybe just about them.”
“I got no distribution. What am I going to do, show it in Selma, Alabama? Philadelphia, Mississippi? If it’s a picture that’s appealing for Jews, then it’s got to be shown in houses in Jewish neighborhoods. In L.A., I wouldn’t even have distribution in Boyle Heights, the biggest ghetto east of Warsaw. I got three screens in Watts, but I don’t got Boyle Heights.”
“The Big Five will fight to give you distribution. They’re your friends.”
“They’re my friends because I’m not a competitor. And they’ll take half the gross. And all the popcorn and candy.”
I was waiting for this. Shelupsky’s internal adding machine was already computing cash-flow, negotiating gross versus net, figuring angles. That was his job, and I trusted him to do it well. If the deal didn’t make money then it wasn’t a deal, but there was something I could do to nudge it ahead, like a player at a pinball machine supplying a bit of body-English to drop the steel sphere into the right hole. “With all you’ve done for the colored people, EZ, don’t you think it’s time to do something for your own?”
He smiled. “To the Jews I give already plenty. I gave a wing to Cedars of Lebanon. There wouldn’t be a Cedars if not for EZ Shelupsky. You can’t die of cancer in L.A. without reading the name EZ Shelupsky. Don’t make me out a cheapskate for the Jews.”
“Anyone can give money, EZ. You can give your talent, your skill, your heart.”
“Larry, I thought you was one hell of a writer, for a colored man or even a white man, but now I see you are a topflight bullshit artist also. I take off my hat to you.” One beat, two, three. “There was Jews then, in New York?”
“That’s when they arrived. In 1654.”
“They had immigration? Then?”
“Immigration?”
“Ellis Island.”
“No,” I managed to get out, forgetting in my excitement with the way the conversation was going that I had to be careful in presenting facts. “Only Peter Stuyvesant. The mayor, the head of the colony. And he didn’t like Jews.”
“Who does? So what happened?”
“Ah,” I began.
“Don’t ah me — what am I, a ear-nose-and-throat? Do I look like a doctor to you?”
“EZ, you look like a man on the verge of something really big, really — ”
“Then hold the ahs in your overworked tuchis and tell the story. I admit: You got my interest.” Shelupsky turned a look on me that probably had been invented by Stalin. “So far.”
II
The problem was that in my excitement at having his ear, I ended up telling EZ Shelupsky not one story, but three. More or less I had figured out the central tale, but I was having trouble stitching the plots together: the package eluded me. At $500 per for six weeks, I could write bang-up dialogue — alcohol and the occasional stick of weed helped — but when it came to structure and plot, I was compelled to fall back on the Hollywood concept of character that derived from the patented personality of the actor playing the part: a David Niven type was thus suave, English, polite and selfless, so he never got the girl; an Errol Flynn buckled swash, so he did; a Cary Grant, though born Archie Leach, a lower-class Brit, became the soul of blue-blooded American charm, swinging from debonair to flaky, and would always come through in the end, so his bipolar personality dictated the plot as well. At Racetrack I had my own stable of similarly type-cast stars, practically members of the family to Afro-American moviegoers, but here I was out of my depth: with no actors attached — Racetrack had no stable of white players — I had to invent real characters; with only the rudiments of history, I had to invent a story — and then structure that over a hundred minutes of screen time. However brilliant I was at dialogue, EZ was not paying me $500 a week to learn someone else’s job. Enter Fritz von Blum.
Blum may have been his real name — why would anyone make that up? — but I never bought the “von,” which seemed of a piece with the shamelessly ersatz nobility of a Mortimer de Rosenne [Marvin Rosen], a Hayward Sigalle [Howard Siegal] or a Clarence LeVigne [Charley Levine]. These producers, talented as they were, managed to undercut their own legitimacy by claiming a pedigree that was clearly wishful, the kind of who-are-you-kidding I was later to witness among my own people when they named their children Percy 23X or Shaquila. Sure, John Garfield had started out in life as Jacob Julius Garfinkle, Kirk Douglas as Isser Danielovitch Demsky, and Sylvia Sydney was born Sophia Kosow, but they were freshly christened according to the demands of a studio system producing movies for an American audience that the studio heads sincerely believed was mono-cultural. Of course it wasn’t; Hollywood’s Moishe-come-latelies saw only us and them. But why change your name when as a producer or a writer it never appeared on a marquee? Von Blum? Unlike his fellow kraut Jo Sternberg, who became Josef von Sternberg in California, Fritz had added on the noble von while still in Europe, where he was a mainstay at UFA, the MGM of Germany, having written twenty-two films before Hitler came along and declared the German film industry judenrein. So it was something of a surprise that Fritz’s first words to me were, “You know, Mr. Bellringer, I have never before worked with a nigger.”