Whatever Happened to Hollywood?

By Jesse L. Lasky Jr.

Screenwriter Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. tells his Hollywood tales as an insider, with stories and insights sparkling with poetry, humor and the heat of first-hand observation. The son of the man who produced Hollywood’s first feature film, Jesse’s book is the history of the film industry, the birth of an art form and a compelling personal memoir. There are revealing portraits of Lasky, Sr. and his partners Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. De Mille (for whom Jesse wrote 8 films, including The Ten Commandments)—and friends and colleagues such as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Alfred Hitchcock, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Nick Ray and Sam Fuller. From dating Jean Harlow to writing for Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson and Yul Brynner, here are the artists and the conmen, the breathtaking creativity and the destructive treachery, described by a man who knew everyone and saw everything.

New edition with 353 exclusive photographs and Foreword by Lasky’s stepson, Dr. Richard Niles

“Jesse Lasky, the son of one of filmland’s great founders, has written a bitter-sweet memoir of his life as a Hollywood screenwriter. It evaporates the mist of fantasy surrounding the Hollywood dream factory to reveal the realities that built the fairy-tale image.” —Joan Crawford

“It is certainly many notches above most of the other books on ‘Hollywood’.”
—Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

“One of the best books I’ve read of Hollywood for a long, long time—maybe ever”
—Pola Negri

“... a nostagic, romantic and frequently hilarious account... impressive!”
—Variety

“... a good, honest, readable, funny book. I loved it!”
—Larry Adler, New Society

“...one of the best books about the growth and decline of Hollywood... written with insight, wit and an unusual lack of vanity.” —Films In Review

“Hollywood at its best—and worst... something special, an insider’s view, robustly witty, enlightening and full of charm, The next best thing to having been there!” —Cosmopolitan

“Lasky’s portraits of the greats with whom he has worked are razor sharp... his style is captivating.” —Films Illustrated

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Richard Niles
• Release date: Jul 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005658878

Jesse L. Lasky Jr.

Jesse Louis Lasky, Jr. (September 19, 1910 – April 11, 1988) was an American screenwriter, novelist, playwright and poet. He was the son of film pioneer, producer Jesse L. Lasky and his wife, painter and Bessie Ida Ginsberg.Jesse was born on Broadway in New York City where his father was a successful producer of vaudeville and musicals. When Lasky produced Hollywood’s first feature film, The Squaw Man in 1913, Jesse and his mother were brought west. Jesse grew up in Hollywood’s dusty streets with friends who were the sons of other moguls, such as Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was educated at Blair Academy, the Hun School of Princeton and the Grand Central School of Art. He traveled extensively in Europe with his parents and was painted in Paris by Tsuguharu Foujita in 1927. He published three acclaimed books of poetry in his teens and attended The University of Dijon, France, where he was awarded a degree in literature.His father’s bankruptcy forced Jesse home to Hollywood where he wrote ‘potboiler’ novels and became a ‘reader’ for Sol Wurtzel. At this time, Jesse briefly dated Jean Harlow. He co-wrote a play with Gladys Unger, Private Beach, which became a film, Music Is Magic (1935).In England he worked for Gaumont British adding dialogue to films by various directors including Alfred Hitchcock. On his return he wrote a number of ‘B pictures’ in Hollywood and became a founding member of the Writer’s Guild. In 1938 his father’s former partner, Cecil B. De Mille, hired him as one of the writing team for Union Pacific. He wrote a further 7 films for De Mille including Samson and Delilah (1949) for which he won the Box Office Magazine Award and The Ten Commandments (1956) for which he won the Christopher Award and the Box Office Award.During World War II, Lasky served as Captain in the Combat Photographic Unit of the US Army Signal Corps during four campaigns in the South Pacific, and was decorated by General Douglas MacArthur. He organized the Army School of Film Training at the Signal Corps Photographic Center, where writers were instructed to script training films for every branch of the military service.In total, Jesse wrote eight novels (including Spindrift and Naked in a Cactus Garden), five plays and more than 50 screenplays in Italy, Austria, Denmark, Spain and France. He worked with Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Nick Ray and Sam Fuller.He lectured on creative writing and Hollywood history at many American and British institutions, including the Oxford Union. He also served as Vice President of the Screen Branch of the Writer’s Guild of America. He was a member of the Company of Military Historians and The Garrick Club in London.In 1962, Jesse and his 3rd wife, writer Pat Silver, moved to London. Together they wrote 7 films, 3 films for TV and many scripts for TV series including The New Breed, The Avengers, The Saint, Space 1999 and Danger Man.Jesse Lasky, Jr. died in London in 1988 of pancreatic cancer.His autobiography Whatever Happened to Hollywood? was originally published in 1973 and was republished in 2021 in a deluxe edition by his stepson, composer and author Richard Niles.

Book preview

Foreword to the

New Edition

by Richard Niles

In 1959, when I was 8, my parents (musician Tony Romano and actress Barbara Hayden) divorced, and my mother married Jesse L. Lasky Jr. Knowing this situation was difficult for a young boy, Jesse sat me down quietly and said, I know this is tough for you and it’s natural that you should love and miss your father. And I understand that you would feel uncomfortable living with a stranger. But all I ask is this: Don’t judge me because I’m not your father. Judge me by how I treat you.

Jesse and I at a Lasky retrospective at the British Film Institute (1978)

Following his request, I learned that Jesse was a kind and generous stepfather who made me laugh every day with his use of language. A scholar of history and literature, a cartoonist, novelist, screenwriter, and a gifted poet, he inspired me with the magic and power of words. I introduced him to Bob Dylan, and he showed me where Bob got his stuff, introducing me to Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot.

Born in 1910, Jesse had an ‘old-world’ view. He explained that manners were not simply useless rules of behavior invented to instill conformity, but a way of making life ‘more gentle’, and a little less dog-eat-dog. Things like place settings at a table and how to hold a knife and fork were developed out of practicality. Opening doors for others was simply being generous.

If I got into an argument, he asked me to consider that the only choice for a cornered tiger is to attack. Always leave them a doorway to escape. He helped me develop respect for those who deserved respect.

In short, he taught me, by example, to be a gentleman.

Jesse in full flight!

Perhaps most of all, he was a spellbinding storyteller. We often had glittering dinner parties at our London flat at 57 Green Street, full of actors, writers and directors. The wittiest person I have ever known, Jesse regularly entertained the guests with fascinating stories of his amazing life in Hollywood. He held the room with superb timing, mimicking the voices and facial expressions of colleagues such as Cecil B. De Mille and Gary Cooper. His performances became legendary, and many said he should have been and actor.

Jesse signs copies of Whatever Happened to Hollywood on its British release in 1973.

But it would be more accurate to say he could have been a stand-up comic, a TV host or a talk-show guest. Through the years, everyone urged him to write down all these wonderful stories and turn them into a book. We eventually nagged him into doing it and, finally Whatever Happened To Hollywood was published in 1973.

Out of print, and the original publisher gone the way of the dodo, I decided to republish this new edition with rare, ‘new’ photographs, colorized to bring to life the unique world Jesse grew up and worked in – a Hollywood that is gone forever and is likely to be utterly alien to the contemporary reader.

Lasky in an early publicity still

The story of the Lasky family is both the history of the film industry and the birth of the art form — an important part of our collective cultural heritage. But, as Jesse’s sister, film historian Betty Lasky lamented, Jesse L. Lasky was co-founder of Paramount, but now he’s a forgotten film mogul. To right that wrong, and to put this book into context, I offer some background. Who were these two Jesses?

Jesse Louis Lasky (1880-1958) was Hollywood’s earliest, and most visionary film pioneer. Choosing Cecil Blount De Mille as a first-time director, and his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) as a partner, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (1911) produced the first full-length film in Hollywood, The Squaw Man (1913).

Lasky, De Mille & Goldfish (1913)

Lasky was not a typical ‘mogul’ in many ways. An educated, soft-spoken, refined man, he dressed fastidiously and wore a gold pince-nez. Lasky was the only studio head to have been a second-generation Californian. His great-uncle had been a court musician to a Prussian king. His grandfather was a pioneer, crossing America in a covered wagon to settle in San Francisco. His personality was a mixture of dreamer, businessman, gambler and showman. And the dreamer seems to have always been dominant. As Adolph Zukor said, He’s a wonderful man, but he’s almost too nice. He would never hurt anyone. He’s a gentleman.

He began his career in vaudeville as a cornet player in a duo with his sister Blanche, and music was always close to his heart.

Blanche and Jesse

The Musical Laskys

In the often coarse, profit-oriented showbiz community, Lasky was a sophisticated enthusiast who was excited by the artistic potential of the new medium of motion pictures to tell compelling stories. Although he enjoyed the hotels, fast cars and even faster women of his time, he was an elegant man whose excesses were always in service to the art of filmmaking he helped develop.

Vaudeville was the prime theatrical entertainment of the 1900s. It featured a variety of specialty acts, comedy song and dance. Lasky became a successful vaudeville producer with companies touring the U.S. He also produced two Broadway musicals, Hello Paris and A La Broadway. His brother-in-law, Sam got him interested in the ‘flickers’, pictures that moved with flickering lights.

The Famous Players-Lasky Corporation was founded when the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company and Paramount Distribution in 1916. They became the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation when they purchased the Robert Brunton Studios at 5451 Marathon Street in Hollywood in 1927. They then became Paramount Pictures, the first major Hollywood film studio.

Lasky produced over 1000 films and discovered (and sometimes named) many stars including Maurice Chevalier, Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Clara Bow, Spencer Tracy and Joan Fontaine. He amassed a fortune estimated at $20 million, only to lose it all in the Wall Street Crash. He was sabotaged by his personal assistant and ousted from Paramount. Ever resilient, he came back an independent producer for Warner Brothers thanks to the only Hollywood friend who stood by him, Jack Warner. He continued to make many outstanding pictures including Sergeant York, The Adventures of Mark Twain and Rhapsody in Blue.

Moguls on holiday,

Palm Beach, Florida, (1933)

Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky and

Winfield Sheehan of Fox

Lasky’s personal relationships with his fellow moguls is fascinating. They seemed to genuinely respect his endless creativity and fearless optimism that energized his productions. The art was always more important to Lasky than the money. He wrote, do the things you believe in and keep believing in them even when the going gets tough. But in some ways, perhaps the other studio heads also resented him. They all came up together, with Lasky as their leader, mentor and friend. But now that each had created their own empires with armies of sycophants, they wanted to believe their press. They didn’t want to be around people who ‘knew them when’ – especially the man who had started many of their careers. And yet, this possible resentment seemed to co-exist with genuine friendship.

Family was very important to Lasky, and he spent what time with them his incredibly hectic schedule would allow, constantly traveling to business meetings to raise finance and to Europe to discover stars like Archie Leach (Cary Grant) and Maurice Chevalier.

His wife Bessie had studied to be concert pianist and became an acclaimed painter and poet, her paintings often exhibited. She was an ethereal presence who avoided Hollywood types, instead serving as hostess to many writers, poets, musicians and painters in their 30-room Santa Monica beach house.

Bessie Lasky in her studio. Contemporary postcard of the Beach House

The Lasky home at 1818N.Saltair Jessie & Bessie playing tennis at the beach house.

Jesse Louis Lasky Jr. (1910-1988) was Lasky’s eldest son. About 10 years older than his brother Bill and sister Betty, Jesse experienced the early days of Hollywood first-hand, growing up in a mansion with 27 servants and 5 Rolls-Royces in the garage. They were a very close and loving family, as can be seen by the many pictures in this book. Here is a rare opportunity to see Hollywood from the point of view of a child who grew up playing with tin soldiers in its dusty streets, racing carts with young Doug, (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), and accompanying his father on his dangerous trips to far-away places.

Jesse Jr. (1915)

He was short because of a bout of polio as a child, cured by rigorous tennis, swimming and horseback riding, activities he enjoyed throughout his life with friends such as Anthony Quinn, Paul Henreid and director Charles Schneer.

Jesse riding in the Malibu hills ca. 1925

Jesse went to the finest schools, his father encouraging him to explore the worlds of literature, art and music— and film-making which would encompass all three! While ill and spending so much time resting in bed, he exercised his mind by writing. His career began at 16 when, without his father’s help, he published three well-received books of poetry: Songs From The Heart of a Boy, Listening in Silence and Singing in Thunder.

Jesse’s first review in trade paper Exhibitors Daily Review

and his three books of poetry published as a teen

Jesse went to Blair Academy, Princeton and was attending the University of Dijon in France when his father’s bankruptcy meant Jesse had to come home to find work in California as a lowly reader for the low-budget Fox Studio.

During World War II, he served as a Captain commanding Combat Photographic Units of the Signal Corps in four campaigns in the South Pacific, and was decorated by General MacArthur. He organized the Army School of Film Training at the Signal Corps Photographic Center, where writers were instructed to script training films for the entire military service. Jesse’s notes:

"Signal Corps Photo Center – Long Island, NY, April 1942. Reported for duty as 2nd Lt. at the Barrage Balloon School. The barracks were cozy and homelike – as an unfinished coffin."

"One of my roommates was studying to be a mess officer, the other to be a mess.

They both achieved their goals!"

While training, Jesse made friends with Lt. Roger Amiot who rigged me for tennis in his wife’s blouse, his shoes, and bathing trunks of unknown origin. He wore moccasins – note how the toes curled! We got a hot doubles match with a 12 year old and his grandfather – and we lost!

Jesse describes the postwar struggles of finding work in Hollywood beginning as a co-writer of ‘potboiler’ novels. He eventually began working with his fathers’ partner, eventually writing eight films for De Mille including Sampson and Delilah (for which he received The Box Office Award) and The Ten Commandments (for which he received The Christopher Award). Jesse’s unique relationship with De Mille is a feature of this book. It began in his childhood, knowing De Mille as his father’s friend and partner, and developed into a professional collaboration as an adult that mixed exhaustion, fear and emotional torture with a deep mutual respect. Jesse suffered the tyranny of his rages, the sting of his insults and yet could still be surprised by his occasional kindnesses.

In a world that views De Mille’s films as hopelessly outdated, Jesse mounts a surprising defense for the simple values that made them so successful. The Ten Commandments is one of the biggest box-office hits of all time. As a poet and observer of the subtle hues and shadings of existence, Jesse could also appreciate the need for the primary colors of De Mille’s work.

In all, he wrote screenplays for 37 films, four with my mother. From the 1950s he wrote many scripts for TV in Hollywood. When my mother began co-writing with Jesse on cop shows in the late 1950s (The Naked City and The New Breed), she had to change her professional name to Pat Silver - a woman writing a police drama was simply not unacceptable in those less liberated times.

Brought to London in the 1962 by a slick German con-man (producer), Jesse and my mother, left high, dry and broke, decided to stay, working on classic British TV series such as Danger Man, The Avengers and The Saint.

I learned ideal work habits for any artist by watching Jesse and my mother work to a schedule: breakfast – three hours at the typewriter – lunch - three hours at the typewriter – dinner. In those days before computers, I would proofread their work. (Great writers, but they really couldn’t spell!)

I’m so happy for you, dear reader, to have the opportunity to experience Jesse’s unique personality. He tells his Hollywood tales joyously, as a knowing insider, with stories and insights that sizzle with the heat of first-hand observation. His use of language is that of the poet, and it is well worth reading slowly to savor his metaphors, similes, allusions and jokes. Even when he writes about a period of his career where he had to churn out hack, formulaic ‘crap’, he writes about it with self-deprecating style (my work was going from bad to positively mediocre).

He passionately describes Hollywood’s ambivalent climate of sin and sanctity, public morality and private license that ruined many careers and lives, some the lives of his friends. But on every page we see a wry smile that sees the humor as well as the tragedy.

The cover of the 1973 edition

Whatever Happened To Hollywood is more than a dry history written by a researcher or superficial glamor from a fan more concerned with the costumes than the creative, desperate, crazy people wearing them. Jesse describes Hollywood as it gasped for the oxygen of hope and breathed the fire of greed in the great mousetrap for dreamers, madmen, prophets, and fools. And he writes tellingly of old Hollywood’s demise at the hands of television in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He once told me, The show doesn’t necessarily go on, you know. Sometimes, it just stops.

It’s easy to look at the past though contemporary eyes, laughing at odd customs from the lofty heights of a ‘more evolved time’, as one might when watching a costume drama. But Jesse not only tells you whatever happened to Hollywood, but also what happened to him. He lets you feel his emotions and thereby the emotions felt by people of the time, sharing their dreams, their frustrations and frame of reference.

It was a world where people regularly communicated by writing letters, even if they were in the same town. Jesse and his father were very close. Though Lasky Sr. was always traveling, he kept in touch with his son through weekly letters from the time Jesse was 10. My mother, Pat Silver-Lasky explores these letters in Hollywood Royalty: A Family In Films to provide a rare look into the birth of Hollywood, the creative process, and the nuts and bolts of film production.

Father and son on a High Sierra’s camping trip, 1916

Boxing at the beach house, 1926

Jesse’s relationship with his father is another feature of the book, a mixture of profound love and underlying apprehension. In an interview for the original launch, he told a story, explaining, "I didn’t put in the book: it seemed too intimately involved with my feelings. You see, at 18, I had no idea of going into films—I didn’t want to. I was worried by the terrible flamboyance, exaggeration, gambling and throwing about of large sums of money. Just before I went to university, I was riding to the studio with my father in one of our Rolls Royces. He agreed with me that a good career might be as a diplomat.

"I asked him how rich we were and he said, as rich as we needed to be and we’d be richer! He told me, ‘I’m going to retire in a couple of years and I’ve put a million dollars in the name of each of you children.’

"I asked, ‘Put it? HOW have you put it?’

He said, Why, in stock! You each have a million in stock.’

"’Dad, do me a favor: take $200,000 from each of our stock and put the money in a trust that nobody can touch, not even us.’

"’You coward!’ he said. ‘You ridiculous coward! That’s your mother talking through you again! What do you want to do? Go down and collect a few dollars once a month? With stock, you’ll make more money than I ever dreamed of!’

Shortly after that, the Stock Market crashed and the Laskys lost 14 million dollars, their cars and their home. Jesse had to look for work.

An early Lasky company logo.

Our recent past is a very different world, an alien culture to today’s readers. Strict segregation was not only a fact of American law but it was the policy of the Armed Forces. Jewish soldiers were often made captains of black American battalions. Pre-liberation, the subordinate position of women was unquestioned by all but a very few such as Marlene Dietrich.

The word Sir was used by sons, daughters, students and professional employees such as waiters, shopkeepers… and screenwriters. There was a commonly shared moral compass that will be downright extraterrestrial to readers in the 21st century a time when it seems that right and wrong have become what anyone says they are.

The traditional virtues of apple-pie, flag-waving patriotism were the accepted norm. The educated knew it was hokum but the reassuring, simple homespun morality expressed in movies was the very reason ordinary American audiences bought their tickets at the box office. And Jesse’s employer C.B. De Mille, narcissistic tyrant, extravagant showman and blockbuster director, was all about box office.

And for those interested in the craft of screenwriting, it was a pre-computer world where, without an Underwood typewriter, an army of secretaries to retype, and a mimeograph machine to churn out copies, scripts could not be written, revised or used by a production company—and films could not be made without scripts detailing every word, shot and angle, .

With a discerning eye and a wicked sense of humor, Jesse takes you to this world as only an insider can. Here you will see the inner workings of the ‘glory days ‘of Hollywood, the icy cruelty, the breathtaking creativity and the destructive treachery. Removed as we are from this 20th century culture, we may still recognize our own and agree with Jesse when he writes that the world kept changing, yet some patterns remained the same.

You want to feel how it felt to learn that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor? You want to know what it was like to date Jean Harlow? Would you like to sit on the Via Veneto with a slippery producer and a strong espresso watching how Hollywood migrated to Europe at the birth of the international film scene? You like the idea of having meetings with formidable producers like Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck and the man they called ‘God’, Cecil B. De Mille? Keep reading.

You can dress for dinner and have your chauffer drive you to a ritzy nightclub where you can sip correctly chilled champagne, down a few oysters and see Hollywood’s glamorous glitterati sitting right next to you, cracking jokes, sharing secrets and telling lies.

Or imagine yourself sitting in our Mayfair, London living room in the 1970s, drink in hand, surrounded by amazing friends, being entertained by Jesse’s stories of his own journey through a fabled land populated by dreamers and accountants, con men and marks, sparkling talents and successful idiots, the hopeful and the hopeless. All is told with his mastery of language, his depth of feeling, his sparkling wit and his inherent kindness.

Jesse was a man with an explosive imagination. But he didn’t need that particular gift to tell these stories – he was there!

Dr. Richard Niles (Mission Viejo 2021)

Jesse Lasky Jr. ca. 1973

ONE

IN THE OLD SILENT MOVIES, the passage of time used to be indicated by a riffling of leaves on a calendar. This could take you backward or forward. Summer could plunge into instant autumn, or if you were meant to leap from time present to time future, a wind machine could blow a confetti of fake leaves off the branches of a prop tree. But to flash back into the past was even easier. It required only a Dissolve To wherever you wanted to be

Dissolve To, then, a scene in medieval France. The year 1429, to be exact. We are in a long valley watching an earthshaking charge of armored knights. The dust is terrible. The thunder of hoofs roars nearer through whirling, powder-yellow clouds as they come on, riding stirrup to stirrup, wave upon wave, the long ranks representing the flower of French chivalry. Beneath bone-dry hills, clattering shields ricochet the sun's blaze from an assortment of mythological heraldry-griffins, unicorns, golden falcons crested above steel helmets. A forest of spears leafed with pennants descends. Harsh curses blast the water-blue dome of day. What could halt such a storm of magnificence? What force on earth could break this charge of panoplied power?

One word, called through a megaphone:

''Cut!''

Dust subsides on crested headgear. Chargers revert to sweating hacks. All eyes swivel to the wooden tower of scaffolding where the shirt-sleeved young man with pink bald pate stands in polished puttees and flared riding breeches, surveying the mounted lank-shanked cowboy-knights who are finding ''extra work'' far more profitable than cowpunching.

''Is there such a thing as an assistant director on this location?''

The Director-General’s voice is an angry bark through the megaphone.

''Yes, Mr. De Mille!"

Three harassed individuals rush to the foot of the wooden platform. Cowboys in armor shift lazily in their unfamiliar chair-shaped medieval French saddles. Sweat scars dust-caked cheeks beneath vizored helmets. Their chain mail (woven string, painted silver) would be more comfortable in an arctic blast than in this sun-gorged valley of San Fernando.

Actors Wallace Reid and Hobart Bosworth trot their mounts over to get an earful of the rapid-fire corrections being given by the director to his assistants. Almost nothing had been right about that first charge!

''I want to get that shot again-from the beginning! If they can't sit horses better than that-get me someone who can! A schoolgirl with a spitball could unseat the whole army! And I don't want to see any more of those knights chewing gum!''

''Yes, Mr. De Mille . . . ''

''And don't let me catch a glimpse of another wrist watch!''

''Yes, sir. That is, no, sir.''

The assistants scurry away to relay instructions through the mounted ranks. Wranglers check tanned wrists above painted silver gauntlets and trot back up the field to their starting positions.

Somebody get Joan of Arc over here!' barks the director.

When he speaks, people jump and obey. A cameraman, cap worn backward so that he may peer more conveniently through his view finder, signals the adjustment of one of the great silver reflectors capturing the last strength of the waning sun.

A mustang bucks off a marshal of France to the delight of the cowpokes. A look from the director general and their rasping chortles subside.

Geraldine Farrar speaks to husband Lou Tellegen

on location for Joan the Woman (1916)

The Maid of Orleans clanks over to the foot of the tower in her new suit of Hollywood mail, custom-built and authentically heavy. Real metal for the star. It is Geraldine Farrar, Metropolitan Opera diva, who had been lured to Hollywood's infant film industry two years earlier to star in the 1915 Carmen. She turns like a silver peacock for the director general's approval.

''How does it feel, Gerry?''

''A bit tight in the thigh, C. B. '' she complains.

He considers her critically from above.

''Could you defeat the English army in it?'' The question is dead serious.

''If I can mount my horse. But I'd hate to have to hit a high 'C.' ''

''Of all the sins our films record, the human voice is not one of them.'' He finger-snaps a sweaty assistant to the foot of the tower.

''I trust it won’t require a kingdom to produce Miss Farrar's horse?'' De Mille inquires, dangerously quiet.

''Right away, sir. And…" The assistant hesitates.

''And what ... ?'' Definite menace.

''The French army is ready when you are, sir."

''I've been ready since five o'clock this morning,'' growls the boss.

He takes a step higher up the ladder, making a box with his hands to cut out the light, surveys the field. All wait. A few more minute corrections, then at last De Mille appears almost satisfied.

All right, we'll try it again. Quiet, everyone!

Not that there was any sound recording to be quiet for, but the director would be shouting instructions during the filming.

''Positions, knights!"

Assistants dart among the formations for final instructions. Silence. The people who have come to watch this spectacular location filming stand up on the seats of giant touring cars that have brought them out. There is a long moment. Then the director's shout, ''Camera . . . !"

Geraldine Farrar in Joan The Woman (1916)

De Mille's gimlet glance spots him.

Hold the charge! he roars.

A diminuendo of voices relays the order across the field. The knights rein in a few feet from the boy, who by this time is bolting for cover with his prize. The shot is ruined; some hundred feet of film up the spout.

''How the hell did that damned kid get out there?''

Nobody knows the immediate answer. The culprit has bounded away out of sight among the touring cars.

Kids have ever been fashioned to slide under circus tents, up trees, over fences, into holds of ships - anywhere they can get themselves into a bit of trouble. But this particular kid, had he a modicum of wit, could have spared his legs - and the director's temper - for the enormous dusty car top, folded back like an accordion from which he peers out, belongs to his father, and De Mille's partner, producer Jesse L. Lasky.

Cecil B. De Mille, Geraldine Farrar and Jesse L. Lasky on the set of Joan the Woman (1916)

De Mille directs Wallace Reid and Geraldine Farrar in Carmen (1914)

Hollywood hadn't looked like the capital of anything when the Lasky Company arrived in 1913. Just an orange grove where they could rent a barn. Actually, my father and De Mille hadn't even come out together.

My father had some reputation as a moderately successful producer of vaudeville shows on Broadway. He had started in show business with his first cornet lesson. Although never good enough to qualify for a position in Sousa's famous band, my father and his sister Blanche formed an act called The Musical Laskys.

Blanche & Jesse, The Musical Laskys

Much later he’d worked up to producing vaudeville acts. As these acts grew more ambitious, my father began to search for talent further afield. He made trips to London to import music hall artists to America. One young acrobat eventually changed his name from Archie Leach to Cary Grant.

Around 1910, the year I made my first entrance, my father had bounded back from a Broadway failure called The Folies-Bergère with a big idea. He would produce an operetta based on the history of his home state. California - a musical pageant of Franciscan missions, Spanish dons, gold hunters and railroad builders. To write it, he set out to hire the greatest New York playwright o the day.

William De Mille had prodigious Broadway hits to his credit. But the famous playwright's agent announced, was much too busy to write vaudeville acts. This theatrical agent – who happened to be William De Mille's mother - also happened to recall that the busy William had a younger brother, Cecil.

If William was a success, Cecil was quite the opposite. Still struggling to gain his spurs on Broadway, but equally talented, insisted his agent-mother. Which was a way of saying that Cecil was almost a total disaster. A has-been actor, a would-be writer, a sometime assistant to theatrical manager David Belasco. The dynamic Cecil was young, prematurely bald and currently unemployed. Motivated by her dual capacity, his agent-mother pleaded with my father to consider Cecil, in place of the unavailable William.

Dad wasn't very enthusiastic. The few brief meetings with Cecil had not resulted in mutual admiration. But agents can be persuasive, and one had to be nice to the mother of the important William. So my father interviewed Cecil, and Cecil talked himself into a job.

Eventually, the two young men gave up trying to impress each other and began exciting each other's imaginations. They seethed with projects and dreams, mostly impractical, and one that De Mille brought along seemed the most impractical of all. There was a revolution going on in Mexico at that moment, and De Mille, who had begun to feel ''stale" and restless, declared his intention of heading south of the border in quest of adventure that might stimulate new story material.

My father, a shade conservative, perhaps because he was better established in show business at the time, was not anxious to part with a good friend and associate. He hastily proposed an alternative which might supply equal excitement at a bit less personal risk. He suggested that they go into the movie business. Actually the suggestion had come to Dad from a third young man, his dynamic brother-in-law, Sam Goldfish, a glove cutter and born salesman who worked in my mother's uncle's factory in Gloversville, New York.

The ironic part of it was that my father's sister, Blanche, had married Sam to get out of show business! She had become increasingly weary of the ups and downs, the heights and depths, the feasts and famines. She thought Sam would be a stable businessman husband, far removed from the hectic dream stuff of theater folk. She'd had her fill of ‘tours’ and ‘sleeper jumps’ and one-night stands in seedy hotels and tank towns, sleazy managers miscounting the house and backstage dramas. Most of all, she was tired of the big, big ideas that never stopped being talked about at the dinner table. She could not have chosen a worse escape hatch than young Sam Goldfish - who would later change his name to Goldwyn.

He had seen a two-reel Western movie, Broncho Billy's Adventures. That was in 1911, and two years later Sam hadn't stopped trying to push Jesse, his vaudeville producer brother-in-law, into taking the plunge in the newest show-business medium.

It can almost be said that the impetus that led to the birth of Hollywood was based on my father's wish to tempt his new best friend Cecil away from the gun play of the Mexican revolution. That, and the persistent Sam, who never would learn to take no for an answer.

It was the beginning of the end of Sam and Blanche's brief marriage - and the beginning of the adventure that would make a village in California the show business capital of the world!

Lasky, De Mille, Goldfish

Still, as a beginning, it could scarcely have been more modest. The three young men, Lasky, Goldfish, and De Mille, formed a company capitalized at twenty thousand dollars from assorted brothers-in-law. Fifteen of this they promptly squandered on purchasing the screen rights to Edwin Milton Royle’s play, The Squaw Man.

Wisdom would seem to have dictated a trip across the Hudson River to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where most sensible one and two-reel Westerns were then being ground out. But wisdom has never been the better part of showmanship or showmen. They decided on the radical idea of producing their first feature-length Western in the real West! There, cowboys and Indians could be hired who could ride and supply their own horses!

The novitiate film makers didn’t originally plan on going all the way to the Pacific however. There was plenty of authentic ‘West’ much nearer - places on the map with authentic names like Flagstaff, Arizona.

One likes to think of these starry-eyed young prophets envisioning a new world of fame and fortune in the potentials of the film business. But from their own verbal recollections, this seems not to have been the case at all. They got excited - then cooled off!

Dad got cold feet. But Cecil had no reputation to protect. Again, they ignited each other; or perhaps Dad's ever-abundant, if sometimes short-lived enthusiasm, resold Sam on his own idea.

The new company, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, almost went under when they tried to cast a Broadway star in that first film project, The Squaw Man. Dustin Farnum, matinee idol of the day, positively refused to accept one fourth of the profits of the company in lieu of payment to star in the film. They had to raise another five thousand dollars. Brothers-in-law had to dig deeper.

Eventually the money was raised and De Mille led the first film company west by train to Flagstaff, Arizona. Why Flagstaff? It sounded romantic. Since The Squaw Man involved cowboys and Indians, where better?

Where better? Anywhere! De Mille and his little film company arrived at Flagstaff to find themselves in the middle of a cattleman-sheepman war. Shooting a film was one thing. Being shot at by drunken wranglers was something else.

The first telegram back to worried company president Lasky said:

FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE. HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA. WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE CALLED HOLLYWOOD FOR SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A MONTH. REGARDS TO SAM. CECIL.

Lasky was not happy. A native-born San Franciscan and the son of a native son from Sacramento, he had a natural suspicion of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. Besides, he didn't like the change of p1an. If Cecil was off on a wild goose chase with the company's minute funds, perhaps he should not have been dissuaded from the Mexican Revolution?

The young vaudeville producer weighed this extravagance. He had tried to exert a practical guiding hand on the venture, but this young madman De Mille was drunk with power. Thank goodness he had at least taken the precaution to impose one restraint. Since De Mille had never actually directed anything before, Lasky had sent Oscar Apfel, an experienced director of one and two-reelers, to oversee the production.

But barns…? In unknown places…? Lasky bit hard on his cigar and telegraphed back:

AUTHORIZE YOU TO RENT BARN BUT ON MONTH-TO-MONTH BASIS. MAKE NO LONG-TERM COMMITMENTS. REGARDS. JESSE.

On this economical note the most lavishly extravagant industry in history was launched in Hollywood. And with it: The Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company. One barn. One truck. One camera.

The truck, De Mille seated on the buckboard with practical footwear, Dustin Farnum standing mid-truck with the neckerchief and white shirt with assorted local Indian extras

Dustin Farnum and Red Wing in The Squaw Man (1913)

June, 1914 - The Lasky Studio at Selma and Vine Street. CB DeMille’s The Virginian

Lasky stands with the Portable Generator necessary for location shooting.

From the beginning it was my father's credo that the play was the thing. The play, not the player, the story, not the star. Perhaps it was unfortunate that this concept was later eroded by the star system, but another showman, a pint-sized Hungarian-born Jewish boxer with flat ears and a talent for survival, had a stronger conviction.

Adolph Zukor

Adolph Zukor's company, Famous Players, set out to sell the artist instead of the art, the diva instead of the drama.

Lasky and Zukor (1916)

And because Famous Players had already starred such an immortal as Sarah Bernhardt, and also because little Adolph Zukor was ten years senior to the tall, blue-eyed, pince-nezed ex-vaudevillian Lasky, the marriage of the two companies in 1915 produced Famous Players-Lasky, with Zukor as President, Lasky as First Vice President, in Charge of Production. Their company would for years hold an important place in the crazy world where I grew up, the place called Hollywood.

TWO

HOLLYWOOD HAS VARIOUSLY BEEN REFERRED TO as a state of mind , a dream factory, and entertainment capital of the world. Perhaps it was something of all these and more; but to me it was, quite simply, a home town.

I bicycled through its pepper-tree-lined streets, trapped rabbits and skunks in its then-wild hills, and resided somewhat impressively near the top of La Brea in a palatial old house with a billiards room and a projection room over the garage.

Hot, languid California summers, with skies breeding the drone of insects, and heat waves you could actually see. The dry eucalyptus clashed saber-like leaves. Sunflowers nodded enormously in the empty