"If Hollywood is dead or dying as a moviemaker, perhaps the following are some of the reasons."

My first bosses in Hollywood (1925) were Jesse Lasky and B. P. Schulberg, heads of Paramount Studios. I wrote an opus for them called Underworld – the first gangster picture. Hector Turnbull produced it. George Bancroft, Clive Brook and Evelyn Brent starred in it. Messrs. Lasky, Schulberg, Turnbull, Bancroft, Brook and Miss Brent are dead.

When I look at Hollywood, I see chiefly a line of hearses carting off heroes and heroines, wazirs and earth-shakers. What a noise they made, and what fast exits. You saw them one day hopping around full of glitter and glory. Came another dawn and they were gone.

The illusion was they all died young. Half of them did. But the people of the movies don't grow old. They don't even mature. Whatever their years, when they keel over they all seem to fall out of the same lusty chorus line.

Lasky, dying, was the same fellow I had met thirty years earlier – pink-cheeked, popeyed, naive as a porpoise and quivering with the hallucination that the movies were a great art. The mighty Schulberg, brought low in his final years, was still the pipe-smoking, Byronic ex-newspaperman I had met on my first sortie into the celluloid capital.

I helped cast my first picture. Producer Turnbull showed me a hundred stills of possible heroines. I picked the one with the largest bosom. I was sure of my ground because there were no falsies in those days. In fact, there was an anti-bosom mania in the land at this time, not shared by me, which caused the Hollywood sirens to flatten themselves out like hoecakes. Why, God knows. It may have been the first wave of Lesbianism sweeping the republic. There was such a whooping for female purity going on in this silent-picture era that one felt something sinister must be at the back of it. But I am not certain.

For my gangster hero-villain I picked Bancroft. I watched him acting on the set of White Gold, a movie about sheep. William K. Howard was directing it. Howard was one of the first artistic souls driven to drink by the idiocies of moviemaking. My Chicago newspaper compañero, Wallace Smith, wrote for Howard. Wallace was a fellow of parts – artist, story-writer and fine journalist. He was also driven to drink. Howard and Smith both died young. Alcoholism.

I picked Bancroft to play Bull Weed, the gangster scourge of Chicago, because he looked like the gunmen I had known as a reporter. He turned out to be as unlike them as a Methodist bishop. Despite the strong, wicked look he could put on and the ruthless leer he had for the cameras, he was a childlike human, mild spirited and fanatically obedient. I learned later that most of the actors who specialized in villain parts were of this stripe, as perhaps were those who cooked up the bloodthirsty yarns in which they performed.

But I started counting hearses. Whoever has known Hollywood since its silent days and is still able to huff and puff and look around, can see as long a line of last chariots as can I. But I'll stick to my own litany, and beat my own drum. I count only the men and women who were involved in the seventy movies I have written for Hollywood.

I imagine that most of those connected with the silents and early talkies I wrote are underground. I recall chiefly Chester Conklin, who starred in The Big Noise; Erich von Stroheim, who starred in The Great Gabbo; Lionel Barrymore, who directed The Green Ghost; Myron Selznick, who was my first agent and horn-swoggled the studios out of great sums for my works. All dead.

Conklin and his whole tribe have disappeared. Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin, Charlie Chase, Fatty Arbuckle and a dozen more are dead. The survivors, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, are also out of play as comedians.

The talkies harpooned them all, for an obvious reason. Writers are not as funny as clowns. We can make up comic situations and amusing lines, but even with the Marx Brothers playing them they come out half flapdoodle.

There was another factor: when the talkies came the bosses took comedy making out of the comedians' hands. They "improved" it by putting in wailing tenors nobly in love with unhappy ingenues, and adding a chorus line of flying crotches. And laughter turned up its toes.

But it is one of Hollywood's brightest laurels – that during the great decades of its silents it made the world laugh as never before in history.

My first talkie director, Von Stroheim, was a rarity in the movies. He was actually what he pretended to be – an aficionado of wickedness. His bedside reading was the report of lurid sex matters by Krafft-Ebing. He dreamed of bringing all the fancy perversions to the screen. As they often say of dreamers, he was ahead of his time.

The silents were as void of sex as a tomato-can label. The villain was always trying to seduce the heroine, but missing by a mile. Occasionally, an unfaithful husband appeared in a plot. He invariably ended up a raving alcoholic with his business shot and his collar undone, crawling back on hands and knees to a forgiving wife.

A British visitor named Elinor Glyn tried to awaken Hollywood to the possibilities of sex – on the screen, of course. Outside the realm of art, the town could have shown Madame Glyn cards and spades on the subject.

La Glyn had written a novel, Three Weeks, in which a high-minded but glandularly disturbed London girl lay in a clinch with a Russian duke for twenty-one days. They favored a polar-bear rug for their arena d'amour. The authoress was imported at great expense as an expert.

I never worked with Madame Glyn but my bride, Rose Caylor, did. They collaborated on an opus called Ritzy for the It Girl, Clara Bow. Though lacking a polar-bear rug, it was a good picture and in the right direction. It made the bold statement that a girl who went to bed with a man before marrying him did not have to commit suicide or enter a convent.

I was less successful as a sex emancipator. In the hearses I count is my first movie collaborator – Michael Arlen. He was another London import. We worked on a story called (by us) American Beauty. In it, we advanced the theory that a bright young woman could emerge from three sex affairs and still be fit to marry our hero. But we had gone too far. The script startled the sultans in the front office.

"We can't afford to alienate our movie audiences by telling them the truth about themselves," said Schulberg.

That's the way things were in the Twenties. Ninety percent of our functioning citizens were leading impure lives but were firmly on the side of the ten percent who weren't. The only thing you could get away with on the screen was murder. The same American who organized societies to keep the screen free of sex hanky-panky sat happily chewing his butterscotch bars and applauding a picture in which the cast exterminated one another with guns, knives, poisons, hand grenades and brutal torture devices.

One of the oddities I found in the movies of the Twenties was the male star known as a screen lover. He did all the kissing and women swooned over him – on the screen. Millions of women in the audiences also swooned over him and cuddled his image in their lonely minds.

Top man among the screen lovers was Rudolph Valentino. As a reporter, I had interviewed him in Chicago. Dorothy de Frasso (Countess) told me his story when I got to Hollywood. She had fished him out of a New York dance hall where he was one of the "ten-cents-a-dance" male partners. They had everything in the early days of the century, including a first-rate World War.

Unable to get him a job in movie town, De Frasso engaged him herself as an extra waiter at her black-tie shindigs. Director Fred Niblo, one of her guests, spotted the soup server and invited him to the studio for a screen test.

"It made him a great man, in a way," said De Frasso, "the cute bastard went up and up. There must have been a hundred million women in the world of assorted ages all dreaming of going to bed with Valentino. And the poor boy used to cry on my shoulder over his miserable love life. The woman he loved didn't love him. He confessed it was partly his fault. All the publicity hoopla about his being the greatest lover of the screen had raised hell with his nervous system so that he was fast becoming a washout in the hay."

As Epictetus said, you can't have everything.

This was and still remains one of the occupational hazards for movie actors. Off-screen sex in Hollywood is usually in the hands, so to speak, of the town's agents and producers. Having no talent to confuse or sidetrack their glands, nor fame enough to stun them, they are creditable bedroom performers.

A bevy of actor names, living and dead, cry "foul" to these findings. Chief among them is dashing Leslie Howard. My apologies to Leslie. And to Tommy Meighan, Norman Kerry, et al. (continued on page 130)Hollywood(continued from page 57)

Lionel Barrymore, who directed my second murder offering, was one of Hollywood's unusuals. He was a first-rate mind trapped in his talent as an actor. His was among the first anti-Hollywood sneers I heard. To wit – his favorite pet was a vulture whom he had nursed and fed since its nestling days. If I remember correctly, he called the bird McGillicudy. Lying sick one day, Lionel looked out of his bedroom window and beheld McGillicudy wheeling and hovering above the house.

"Look at that ungrateful sonofabitch," Lionel wheezed – he had pneumonia – "happily waiting for me to croak. After all we've been to each other. There's a symbol of Hollywood for you."

Skipping to another hearse, it was drink, chiefly, that landed agent Myron Selznick in his. But before the organ played for Myron, he took a large bite out of cinema town, and not for himself alone. He ran our salaries up from a hundred to a thousand percent. Neither greed nor philanthropy drove him. The Schencks, Mayers, Goldwyns, et al., had tumbled his father, the puissant Louis Selznick, from his high moviemaking perch. Myron was out to avenge the deed. He dedicated himself to looting the enemy's cash boxes. He was the only ten-percenter I've known who stood four-square beside the artist against the boss.

In this long ago, Walter Wanger and I were sitting in a nightclub watching the floorshow, headed by Jimmy Durante. "Jimmy would be marvelous in the movies," said Walter. "Can you write him into the script by Wednesday?"

The script was Roadhouse Nights. On Wednesday morning, Durante made his debut in it as a movie actor. Helen Morgan was the other star. Hobert Henley was the director. Henley and Morgan are out of play. Henley was a handsome fellow who had shown some talent in the silents. The talkies embittered him. I think he died out of irritation at hearing actors talk.

Miss Morgan was a chorus girl who had parlayed a talent for drinking into stardom. Liquor hoarsened her voice, gave her a mysterious sound and increased her allure for men. Lady drunks were a novelty in her time. She was also a witty girl. George Jessel was among her conquests. She was bawling him out one night, charging neglect and possible infidelity. Jessel interrupted and pointed to a pair of men's shoes, three sizes larger than his own, lying under the bed.

"For God's sake," cried Jessel, "whose shoes are those?"

"Don't try to change the subject," said Miss Morgan.

I wrote a slew of movies under the MGM batons of Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapp, Bernard Hyman, Sam Zimbalist and Paul Bern. All dead.

Jack Conway, who directed Viva Villa!; Wallace Beery, who starred in it; Victor Fleming, who directed Gone with the Wind, of which I wrote the first nine reels in a week; Thomas Van Dyke, who directed It's a Wonderful World; Victor McLaglen and Frank Morgan, who emoted in Let Freedom Ring – these are in the collaborator hearses I count.

Gene Fowler and I hatched an opus for W. C. Fields and Marie Dressler called Farike, the Guest Artist. We also toiled with director John Stahl on a thing called (I think) Back Street. Felix Bressart performed in Comrade X, which I concocted with Charles Lederer. Jack Gilbert starred with Garbo in Queen Christina, another chore shared with Fowler. I "did" Design for Living with Ernst Lubitsch; worked on a Jean Harlow saga with Paul Bern, and plotted frequently with Edmund Goulding.

Also Lydia for Alexander Korda; Convict Lake, in which Ethel Barrymore starred; Foreign Correspondent, that held what was perhaps the best performance of Albert Basserman. I plotted The Shop Around the Corner with Lubitsch. Margaret Sullavan starred in it.

Of these names, Lederer – a hardy fellow – is still on the census-taker's rolls. The rest are underground.

Ethel Barrymore stood for a dying tradition in Hollywood – the tradition that you had to be a good actress before you could become a movie star. Margaret Sullavan was another member of that tradition – smiling Maggie, with her light snuffing out at its brightest.

There were two Alex Kordas – the elegant gent of London society and the slippery dealmaker of Hollywood. I knew the latter. We admired each other, he because he felt certain he could cheat me; I because I never minded being cheated in Hollywood, particularly by literate fellows. This was because I always felt I was being five or ten times overpaid for the easy chores I did. It's difficult to get outraged with the boss who pays you thirty thousand instead of sixty for two weeks' work.

Louis Mayer stuck it out for quite a time. He might have lived forever had "they" let him sit on his Metro throne and fan the air with incomprehensible pronouncements.

He once said to me, about a Spencer Tracy movie that I had been called in to salvage after a disastrous preview, "Here's what I want you to do to this picture. Watch me closely." It was one A.M., in his Kubla Khan office at Metro. He rose, walked gingerly to the grand piano at the other end of his domain, picked up a small silver vase containing a single rose and moved it to his desk.

"You see," said Mayer, "what I have done. I have brought that flower from darkness into the light. That's what I want you to do to this picture. Exactly what I have shown you." Tears filled his eyes. "We can all go home now," he said, "I think I have solved our problem."

Mayer was not only a gifted double-talker but a man of eerie power. He gave. And he took away. If he didn't seem to make much sense, neither, I'm sure, does the Grand Lama of Tibet. He, Louis, was a force. Nevertheless, "they" kicked him off his throne, and into his hearse.

L. B. Mayer was not of the Hollywood royal handful whom only death could demote. Louis, for all his royal purple, was a hired hand, like the rest of us.

In Hollywood, only puppet kings reign. A handful of vaguely known leading stockholders do the crowning and uncrowning. There are a few notable exceptions in my hearses – Harry Warner and Harry Cohn. I'll save Cohn for later.

About Warner – he was a naive and stubborn old boy. Although he went to his studio every day for forty years and more, he knew less about movies than the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. He knew only about money. And he had one charming side: he thought everybody he saw was rich and happy.

Just what this movie king did in Hollywood I never knew, except once. He summoned the FBI agents to have me run out of town for my activities as a pro-Palestine propagandist. I was whooping it up for the Irgun, who were known as the Terrorists. A few years later, he beamed on me as a luncheon companion in his commissary. Either he thought I had reformed or, more likely, he never was quite certain I existed.

Irving Thalberg was not a force but a talent. A frail fellow, large-eyed, naive, unlettered, Irving could plot like Dumas and Dickens. The town produced only two other such Roman candles, David O. Selznick and Darryl Zanuck.

After having guided MGM into existence almost singlehanded, Thalberg took a first holiday in ten years. He went to Europe. When he returned to Metro, he found that he had been deposed as the magician ruler of the realm. A few months later he caught a cold and died.

Paul Bern, remembered for having committed suicide as the impotent bridegroom of Jean Harlow, the great cinema sexpot, did no such thing. His suicide note, hinting that he was sexually incompetent and had therefore "ended the comedy," was a forgery. Studio officials decided, sitting in conference around his dead body, that it was better to have Paul dead as a suicide than as the murder victim of another woman. It would be less a black eye for their biggest moviemaking heroine, La Belle Harlow. It might crimp her box-office allure to have her blazoned as a wife who couldn't hold her husband. It was a delicate point of the sort that is clear only to the front office theologians of a great studio. The weird details of this "suicide whitewash" are in the keeping today of director Henry Hathaway, who was Paul Bern's protégé.

Harlow's death was also an odd one. She had had polio when a girl of fourteen, and had recovered from the disease, but it impaired her cough reflex. She was unable to cough up anything foreign that drained into her system. While working on a movie, an infected tooth dripped its poison into her body. She died from it.

Miss Harlow was the first big sex-symbol of the talkies. Her platinum blonde coiffure launched the hair-dyeing industry in the U.S. She also brought the female bosom back into vogue. Jean took her fame seriously. She wore no brassiere under a white satin blouse. Before making a public appearance, she would rub ice on her nipples to improve her appearance.

Wallace Beery, a Metro Salvini, was one of the few actors with whom I ever quarreled. It was on the Viva Villa! set. He was acting Pancho in a German accent.

Jack Conway, the Villa director, was one of the best of the town's unsung talents, like his friends Victor Fleming and "Woody" Van Dyke. Unlike today's directorial marvels, they were long on talent and shy on publicity handouts. Drinking, fornicating, gambling were their basic diversions. They scorned press build-ups and found their fame in their salary checks and in the eyes of their own kind. Oddly, fame wasn't what they were after, no more than were Sam Zimbalist, Bernie Hyman, Irving Thalberg and the others of that gone-to-rest galaxy. Moviemaking was an end in itself. Everything else, including marriage, infidelity, riches, headlines, was secondary. They "made" movies in restaurants, at dinner parties, in swimming pools, in bed, in bathrooms, on love hegiras, hunting trips, in theatre lobbies and in Doctor Menninger's Clinic for the Disturbed.

Most of them were fun to work for or with. One of the exceptions was Cecil B. De Mille. Agent Fefe Ferry, also in my hearses, had sold me to De Mille to work on a circus story he was preparing, The Greatest Show on Earth. I was employed for three weeks. My work consisted of sitting in De Mille's office five hours a day and listening to him talk. He said nothing that made any sense. He seemed like some excited child amazingly misinformed on all subjects. I'm sure he thought the world was flat and that the sun circled the earth.

At the end of my third week, I broke my long silence.

"I was once an acrobat in a circus," I said. "I did a trapeze single in the Harry Castello Shows."

"I'm not interested in that side of you," De Mille answered. "What I want is a writer."

Fefe called me the next morning with the news that I was "off the picture."

Ernst Lubitsch was another problem-boss to work for. He put a dozen writers into the hospital. Knowing his record, I avoided working with him for years. I finally took a job with him that I was sure even Lubitsch couldn't make difficult. It was to write a screenplay for Noel Coward's Design for Living. It was a comedy, full of correct plot turns, bright characters and good jokes. It would be child's play to chop it down to movie length and throw in a few "exterior" scenes to add a look of action.

"I can't stand this fellow Coward," said Lubitsch, as we sat down to work in my Nyack home. "He writes like a cheap vaudevillian." Ernst had picked up this information from critic George Jean Nathan, who was conducting a pogrom against Noel. "I don't want to use a single line, or scene, or character, or whatever he has in that lousy play." All this in a broad Viennese accent which Ernst thickened year by year. He thought it made him stand out as a thinker. "So I want you to write me everything brand new. And ve vill show up this Mister Coward for vot he iss – a nobody."

I learned later that Coward had insulted Lubitsch by refusing to see the great director when he came calling backstage.

One of my biggest Hollywood victories is that I didn't go to the hospital writing the Design for Living script. Lubitsch went. I had figured out a way to confuse him. I always handed him four or five versions of each scene. Having to tear into these sapped his strength. He sneaked off to the Harkness Pavilion, pretending he had the flu. While he was laid up, I finished the scenario. I also struck a blow for Coward. I stuck a number of his bright lines from Hay Fever and The Vortex into the script.

Jack Gilbert was knocked off by the talkies. They broke his heart, because he couldn't talk. He lingered in his several palaces for a few years, collecting his ten thousand dollars a week, and suffering. He threw thousand-dollar bills at whores, waitresses, scrub-ladies, at almost any female who smiled at him between his suicide tries.

Jack Conway had "invented" Gilbert. He had pulled him out of the extra-ranks and made him a star. When Conway started slipping as a Metro topnotcher, Gilbert was at his own glittering peak and intended to stay there.

"If you'll play in my next picture," Conway said to him, "it will restore Mr. Mayer's confidence in me."

"I couldn't, possibly," Gilbert answered. "I need a top director."

Conway, who could fist fight two Gilberts with one hand, contented himself with a phrase. "Ungrateful pup," he said, and walked away. A few years later, Gilbert and Conway both died, after lying around heartbroken as movie discards.

Vic Fleming and Van Dyke had the satisfaction of dying before they were booted out of their glory-seats.

Fleming was a tall, handsome male with fine muscles. He had some Indian blood in him, and a lot of poetry. And he was five times more sexually attractive to women than any of the Gables and Tracys he directed. I remember him once at lunch at the writers' and directors' table in the Metro commissary. There were a score of high-salaried geniuses on hand. The topic under discussion was, "how many great lays have you known?" A half-dozen semi-spavined experts had had their say. They had offered figures from fifteen to forty-five.

Come Fleming's turn, he said, "I've only known one good sexual female type – the woman I love and am married to."

Van Dyke was the fastest of the directors in the Metro genius-stables. He could shoot a reel of film while such colleagues as Willie Wyler and George Cukor were still trying to get a properly spoken single speech out of an actor.

Jimmy Stewart once asked permission to leave a Van Dyke set. "I have to go to the bathroom," he said. "Go ahead," Woody said, "we'll shoot around you."

Our picture Farike, the Guest Artist didn't get made for two reasons – Dressler and Fields died. Fields was Fowler's favorite self-destroyer. No man ever worked so patiently at wrecking his soul and body as did this prince of comedians. A Mississippi of gin sluiced through him in his declining years.

Fowler visited his ailing crony shortly before his death. He found Fields sitting in the garden reading the Holy Bible. "I'm looking for loopholes," Bill explained, shyly.

A last look at the old Metro salt mines before I resume counting more hearses. Fowler and I were a "writing team" in the Selznick unit. Boss David's office was downstairs. He insisted Gene and I have a secretary, like Irving Thalberg's writers had. We were against it, explaining to David that we were sensitive about women and didn't like to see them enslaved. Selznick was adamant. And thus Bunny appeared. She was our secretary, but she quickly became a Metro highlight.

Casting director Ben Piaza had produced her for us. We had assigned him to find the most voluptuous, non-intellectual blonde in the cinema world.

Bunny was all that. We then costumed her, removing her brassiere and lingerie and wedging her into a skintight red satin ball gown, with practically no bodice. We put a vase containing two dozen American Beauty roses at her dimpled elbow.

We also redecorated our office, fitting it out like a fine brothel with red drapes over the window, erotic pictures on the walls, and drenched it each morning with perfume.

Bunny couldn't type or answer the phone. She sat in lovely silence reading movie fan magazines, skipping all the hard words. Our office filled up with sightseers. Producers, directors, writers, actors, choked the anteroom for a glimpse of our secretary. With the studio stages, dressing rooms and offices teeming with sirens, our Bunny was the only girl in town. Under instruction, she spoke to none of the pilgrims. We asked only one service of her which she performed with fine efficiency. At four o'clock each afternoon, she arose from her chair and moved languidly down the stairs to boss Selznick's office. Arriving at its side door, she pressed the secret button that opened it, and addressed our harassed chief.

"Mr. Fowler and Mr. Hecht would like to know what time it is, Mr. Selznick, if you don't mind," she said. We had written her dialog.

Bunny ended a bit mysteriously. Louis Mayer, in his robes of state, came to our office to listen to a reading of the movie Gene and I had written. I did the reading. Bunny sat at my side, holding a dozen American Beauties in her lap. We thought it would soften the great man's mood.

At the end of the reading, Mayer said, "A very interesting story you have there. I appreciate your reading it to me." His face was kindly but his voice was abstracted. Mayer left. And so did Bunny, it being way past her bedtime. And that was the last we saw of Bunny.

I don't understand the association, but another Louis Mayer incident comes here to mind. It was the day before Christmas. There was a tradition at Metro that at three o'clock on this day all the MGM males ran out of their offices and grabbed and kissed all the females who had the temerity to show themselves. The corridors became full of squeals and mating cries.

I was escorting Helen Hayes back to her Metro dressing-room when this pre-holiday whoop-de-do erupted. A score of moviemakers came galumphing out of their lairs, with their lips pursed. A few of them espied Miss Hayes and a foot race developed between Louis Mayer and Charlie Lederer. Mayer won. He seized the astounded Helen (she was not up on Metro traditions) and kissed her, hammer and tongs. Helen responded oddly to the great man's caress. She sank her teeth into his neck and drew blood and a roar of pain out of the wounded kissing bug.

To my hearses again, carrying off my moviemaking collaborators – Irving Pichcl, who directed The Miracle of the Bells; Gregg Toland, who photographed Wuthering Heights; Charles Vidor, who directed Farewell to Arms; Leo Spitz, who produced Gunga Din; Don Hartman, who presided over Roman Holiday. And Harry Colin, under whose fe-fi-fo-furn banner I wrote, directed and produced one of my favorite scripts, Angels Over Broadway.

Cohn was the most unloved of the Hollywood grand sultans. An unusually large crowd attended his funeral services. Sam Goldwyn explained the phenomenon with the now classical utterance, "Everybody wanted to make sure he was dead." Bosley Crowther, in his book Hollywood Rajah, quotes Sam for this comment on L. B. Mayer's funeral. Having heard Goldwyn make the observation in his home on the evening of Cohn's burial, I correct Mr. Crowther. On second thought, Sam wasn't above using a good joke twice.

Cohn, despite the rages he inspired, was a likable man. There was a straightforwardness and simplicity to his skulduggeries. He put up no hypocritical front of being a gentleman, as did nearly all the rest of his co-potentates. He was descended from the little boy who liked to pull wings off flies, and a leg or two off a spider. But he bore his victims no ill will. Malice was unknown to him. He loved life, which was moviemaking, and he diverted himself by outwitting the greeds and crooked ambitions of all who came smirking into his office thinking they could make a monkey out of him. That was Harry's version of all callers and employees at his Columbia Pictures Studio.

The casualty rate at Columbia Studios was rather high. It was Harry's closest friends who seemed to go first. Among them was another collaborator of mine, Henry Sylvers. He produced Her Husband's Affairs, in which Lucille Ball got all the laughs. Lederer and I had written all the jokes for the male lead, played by Franchot Tone, but a Phi Beta Kappa key (Franchot is the only movie actor who sports one) is no match for a comedienne.

An incident that illumines Mr. Cohn's odd likableness, in the midst of his depredations, is the Marilyn Monroe incident. Miss Monroe was not yet out of her chrysalis. Disasters and defeats were still assailing her. She had weathered one suicide try, been found hopelessly unpromising by Twentieth Century – Fox and dropped from its bit-player payroll. Nearly every time she managed to get an audition for a small part, the thing ended in a hundred-yard dash or a wrestling match. Marilyn, a sturdy young girl, always won these events, but not the parts.

Suddenly hope filled the fine Monroe bosom again. Her friend Joe Schenck had persuaded Harry Cohn to put her on the Columbia payroll and try to use her in some small part. Two weeks later, a call came from Columbia Casting. Mr. Harry Cohn wished to see Miss Monroe, personally.

An hour later, a shined-up Marilyn entered the Cohn lair. Harry emerged in silence from behind his desk, circled his visitor once, picked a photograph from under a blotter and handed it to her.

"How d'you like that?" Harry asked.

Marilyn looked at the picture of a hundred-twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser.

"It's a beautiful boat," said Miss Monroe.

"How would you like to come with me for a two-day cruise?" said Harry. "We leave in a couple of hours and be back Monday morning."

"I would love to join you and Mrs. Cohn on a cruise," said Marilyn.

Cohn's face filled with anger.

"Who said anything about Mrs. Cohn?" he cried. "How dare you bring up her name! That's the goddamnedest presumptuous thing I ever heard. Who do you think you are, I should invite you on a trip with my wife. Get out of here, you dumb blonde and learn some manners."

Miss Monroe paused in the opened door and said, a little confusedly, "I hope you invite me again sometime, Mr. Cohn."

This was too much for the great movie chieftain.

"You're fired," he cried. "And don't ever come in this studio again."

Miss Monroe walked out in silence. With her walked some fifty million dollars worth of grosses-to-be.

Here's another bevy of performers in movies I wrote who are underground – first, Al Jolson, who played Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. In taking me to meet Jolson in Miami thirty years ago, George Jessel said, "Be careful about mentioning the names of any singers or comedians. In fact, to be on the safe side, don't mention anybody who's in show business, in whatever capacity. Even if he's selling umbrellas in the lobby. This will ensure a sociable pinochle game."

And Tyrone Power and Laird Cregar, who played in The Black Swan; Carole Lombard and Walter Connolly, who played in Nothing Sacred; Ronald Colman, who played in The Unholy Garden; Robert Benchley, who was in Foreign Correspondent; Michael Chekov, who played in Spellbound and Specter of the Rose; Mario Lanza, who didn't get to play in the picture I wrote for him a few months before he died. And the best of them, John Barrymore, who played in Topaze and Twentieth Century.

There's no reason to exclude Alexander Woollcott and Alice Duer Miller from my cortege. They weren't actors quite, but they played in The Scoundrel. And there was Fuller Mellish, who died on the set of Crime Without Passion. And others with whom I plotted stories that were never finished, among them Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, John Garfield.

Barrymore was the best of the crop not because of his acting. He was a great actor, but behind his acting was a maniacal lust for life, a dedicated explorer's interest in sex.

I liked him most for his vagueness and his wit. He had not the slightest idea of himself as a man of success or talent. Publicity bored him. Fame was the only bawd he ever despised. He had no interest in politics, wars, economic systems. People, and people alone, fascinated him. And the sound of bright words and bull's-eye epithets. He lived a sort of headlong love affair with life. Its greatest events were a woman's arms or a friend's comradeship.

The wit I liked in him was usually rueful. Lovers are seldom very mirthful people. I remember once attending a cocktail party with Barrymore. He had been forbidden to drink. His doctors and his friends had all convinced him that liquor was fatal.

Barrymore was on the wagon and to ensure his staying there for a bit we had hired a powerful athlete to be his bodyguard. Barrymore sat at the table, the bodyguard on the alert beside him, and in his hand an empty highball glass. Facing us was a young woman who was downing drink after drink. Barrymore watched her with envy and admiration. A parched look gathered on his face. Suddenly, the young woman arose, a little unsteadily, and looked around, evidently for the bathroom.

Barrymore held out the empty highball glass he was holding and cooed softly, "In here, my darling, in here!"

There are more hearses with the finest of passengers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom I first stormed the town in its silent era. Fitzgerald was doomed from his first pay check. Hollywood terrified him. "God save us," he said one night, "it's like being in the midst of a bank robbery." Years later, he said to me, "I'm a bum in this town. A bum who can't even hang onto his waistline."

And Herman Mankiewicz, who first whistled me into Hollywood. When Herman died, half the wit of Hollywood vanished. Good Lord, with Mankiewicz, Hoffenstein and Benchley gone, who was there left in Hollywood to caricature and castigate the town? Herman was the comic Isaiah of moviedom. He cried its flaws to the wilderness of its phonies, and his victims winced and roared with laughter simultaneously. For Herman was always twice as funny as he was mean. He hit out with jokes. What was Herman's wit like? Here is a single sentence of it.

Metro had offered a prize of five thousand dollars to anyone in its employ for the best slogan to increase a dwindling attendance in the movie theatres of the land. Herman submitted a thought, "Show the movies in the streets and drive them into the theatres."

There are two composers in my line of hearses, George Antheil and George Gershwin. Antheil wrote the music for the pictures I did on my own, including the last one, Actors and Sin, in which my young daughter, Jenny, starred with Eddie Albert.

Antheil was not only a composer, he was also a genius. He was an expert in endocrinology, psychoanalysis, paintings and literature. He worked never less than twelve hours a day, slept almost not at all, and remained until his death as merry and eager for fun as a child.

The other George – Gershwin – wrote the music for my only musical-show script, The Goldwyn Follies. I remember him at the piano, pensive, pink-cheeked, black-haired, with a shy, archaic look. He spent the last few months of his life on a psychoanalyst's couch trying to talk himself out of a brain tumor, not yet diagnosed.

What a Mardi Gras of names rides away in these hearses – the sprightly poet Samuel Hoffenstein. who wore a monocle and preferred to talk with a heavy Irish accent. And what they did to this deft and genteel troubadour in our celluloid jungle! And Constance Collier and Fanny Brice, whose Hollywood roosts were oases of friendship and loyalty; Errol Flynn, Roland Young, C. Aubrey Smith, Lewis Stone. Robert Walker, Jimmie Dean – and Dr. Sam Hershfeld, whose grin and good counsel kept half the town from committing hara-kiri on the bosses' doorsteps.

In the last wagon, my friend and collaborator, Charles MacArthur. In Hollywood's most glamorous days, Charlie was a hefty portion of its glamor. He toiled and capered and filled the town with an air of wit and adventure. Men and women, including his bosses, Thalberg among them, followed him like the Pied Piper.

We wrote a dozen movies together. And would have kept on writing together, except that Charlie exploded. As Fitzgerald, Hoffenstein, Benchley and many others did. They were not meant for the roughhouse esthetics of Hollywood. They never learned the trick of feeling no pain when nitwit bosses kicked their dialog in the belly and mangled their plot turns.

That's my little parade of the dead ones. I offer them as a possible explanation of what's wrong with Hollywood. They are gone.

New geniuses have muscled in to replace them. New producers, stars, directors, writers, fill the empty shoes. They have the look to me of a second team taking over. Not that there is less talent in them, less know-how, or even less ego. But there is small mania in them.

The mania that kept the first and second flowering of moviemakers working till they dropped; that turned every dinner party, drinking bout and love hegira into a story conference: that gave no hoot for politics, patriotism, global disturbances or anything else on earth except the making of a knockout movie; the mania that believed in movies as if God had sent them; that put the movies unblushingly beside Shakespeare. Shaw, Dostoievsky and Euripides; that regarded New York, Paris and London as bourgeoise suburbs of Hollywood; the mania that buttonholed a billion of the earth's inhabitants and held them spellbound with the zaniest, goriest and most swivel-headed swarm of humpty-dumpty fables ever loosed on mankind – that mania is almost gone out of today's moviemakers.

I'll not go into what has taken its place. Those who rode off in my hearses took most of Hollywood with them.