I earned some extra money on top of my Fox wage from a man named Smee, Monroe Smee, whom I met at the Anti-Nazi League meetings. Smee was an unfortunate-looking fellow with receding hair and chin and yellow equine teeth with large gaps between them. He said he ran a small production company and I acted as a freelance script reader for him at twenty-five dollars a script. I read seven before I asked to be relieved of the job. The scripts were absurdly bad, quite appalling. I had been expecting earnest, liberal-minded tracts, but what he sent me was the worst sort of trash — turgid thrillers with creaking conspiracy theories and cloying romances with a strain of positively nauseating sentimentality, as far as I recall. Smee had great hopes for these scripts and I was reluctant to dash them as wholeheartedly as I felt they deserved, but I did. He was paying me for my honest professional opinion, I reminded him.
For a few weeks we saw a fair amount of each other. I didn’t dislike Smee, but he just wasn’t my type. He had only one joke, which he employed endlessly. If, as you left a coffeeshop, say, you asked, “Are you coming?” he would respond, “As the Actress said to the Bishop.” If you said, “Shall I stay inside?” he would pipe up with “As the Bishop said to the Actress.” I became almost maddened by this jocular tic. It was astonishing how the most innocuous question could be turned in Smee’s mind into a Bishop/Actress gag.
I handed the last — the seventh — script back to him one night after a league meeting and told him I was quitting. I apologized.
“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said.
“As the Bishop said to the Actress.”
“No, seriously, Monroe, wherever you’re getting these screenwriters from, I’d dump them. They’re useless, worse than useless. You must be able to find some better ones. Ask the first person you meet outside.… I mean this is crap. Really. And that Falling Snow, I think that’s probably the worst script I’ve ever read. The guy should be locked up. What was his name?”
“Falling Snow? That was, ah, Edgar Douglas.”
“Well he ought to have his brain examined. There was something actually rather disgusting about that story.”
Smee grinned. “Well, anyway, I’m grateful to you, John. At least you’re honest.” His face was damp, Smee sweated easily. “But I should level with you now that you’re quitting. I’m Edgar Douglas. I wrote Falling Snow. I wrote them all.”
“Jesus Christ! Monroe! God, why didn’t you—”
“No, no. Don’t worry. I’m grateful.” His grin was now distinctly cheesy. “I’d never have known. I can’t judge my own stuff. I needed an honest opinion.”
“Jesus.… I’ve got to give you your money back.”
“Nonsense, you earned it.”
“But I feel such a prick.”
“As the Actress said to the Bishop.… No, really, John, I needed to hear it. I respect your honesty. So I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter. Now I know. Once a loation manager, always a location manager.”
“Monroe, I—”
“No hard feelings.”
We shook hands. “I owe you one,” he said. “I mean it.”
I felt bad about it and continued to apologize when we met at league meetings. He kept telling me to forget it and eventually I did. I held on to the money he had paid me, though. He was right: I had earned it.
And so I drifted through 1938 and into ’39. On the day of my fortieth birthday (I looked ten years younger) I was invited to a tennis lunch-party at the Bel Air home of an English director called Cyril Norman. Norman was a North Country homosexual who took his sport seriously, and the day was mapped out with a series of round-robin competitions of singles and doubles. I was scheduled to start proceedings off with a doubles match: me and Clive Brook against Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. I had left my racket in the office and drove there to pick it up before going to the party.
I parked in a vacant reserved space and ran upstairs. I came out two minutes later to find a large Chrysler coupe partially blocking me in. Its driver, a small red-faced man in a light-gray suit with a yellow silk display handkerchief stood beside it. I was in white flannels, white shirt, navy cotton jersey. I was carrying my tennis racket. It was Wednesday, 11 A.M.
“Sorry,” I said. “Won’t be a second.”
“You work here?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
He looked me up and down. “Could have fooled me. What do you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. I didn’t like his tone.
“Oh yeah? Chances are you can read, then.”
I looked at him, then at my watch. “Look, I’d love to stay and chat but I’m pressed for time.”
He pointed. “What the fuck you think that sign says? ‘Please park here’?”
There was a sign: PRIVATE, RESERVED, and a name I couldn’t read from that distance.
“If you move your car,” I said patiently, “you can have your space back. I was in a hurry.”
“I don’t give the steam off my shit if you’re in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be there in the first place, dork.”
I got into my car.
“Hey! Jerk-off. You English?”
“Scottish.”
“What’s your name?”
“Todd.” I started the engine.
“Todd? Todd?…” He thought. Then his eyes widened. “J. J. Todt! You’re the fuckin’ German writer. What do you mean you’re Scottish? We don’t hire Scottish writers here! There are no fuckin’ Scottish refugees!”
“You’d better move your car, you little prick, or I’ll hit it.”
“You’re fired, asshole! I’m going to sue you for fraud.”
“So sue me!” I contemplated getting out and laying into him with my tennis racquet. But instead I backed out fast and took the front fender neatly off his new car. For good measure I ran over it as I drove off.
I was fired. The very next day. I don’t know who the man was, some self-important junior executive, I suspect, but somehow word got around that it was Darryl Zanuck himself. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the rumor circulated anyway, and even made some gossip columns. “Hapless German writer J. J. Todt clipped D. F. Zanuck’s fender on the Fox lot last week and promptly got himself fired.” “Writer J. J. Todt left his car at the curb in the Fox lot and dropped by the office to pick up his tennis racket. But the rookie writer had parked in the Vee Pee’s place and got himself blasted out of court with a Zanuck ace! Nein, nein, J.J.!”
In the way these things happen, I even started dining out on it myself. It may have made a good story at a cocktail party, but it also meant it proved almost impossible to get another job.
“God. So you’re the guy Zanuck fired.”
“No,” I would say, “it wasn’t him. I’ve never met him.”
“But I read about it. Didn’t I read about it? Jeez, what did you say to him, for God’s sake?”
My remonstrations had no effect. None of the major studios would hire me. I was not only burdened with the Zanuck misapprehension, but I was now irrevocably associated with the émigrés. People would often congratulate me on my excellent English, and there were too many Europeans looking for too few jobs. I realized then the extraordinary tenacity of first impressions. From then on I ceased putting such trust in my own.
I was out of work for two or three months. Of the two hundred or so émigrés in Los Angeles, I suppose thirty or forty were regularly employed. Among the others there was fierce competition for the available jobs. I had to take my chances with everyone else.