For me, Hollywood was a way of life, indeed the only way. Except for the Armistice Parade, the day of my sister Sonya’s disappearance, the Great Benny Leonard-Richie Mitchell fight, my stammering classes at Columbia, and my first visit to the Pickford-Neilan movie set, my New York days quickly receded into a vast fog of forgetfulness. For me it was Home Sweet Hollywood, a lovely place to play with lions and alligators, to ride my bike down lanes of palms and pepper trees, and to make lemonade from my own lemon tree. But by the time I was in the third grade I had learned the hard lesson that filmmaking was anything but glamorous. Not only was it hard, tedious work, with the same scene shot over and over again until a temperamental director decided it had achieved perfection, it was also a place inhabited by demoniac film producers and conniving movie stars. It was a hit-or-miss town where little film factories like Mayer-Schulberg had to grind out their dozen Katherine MacDonald movies a year, and where Anita Stewart had to be led, scolded, or dragged to her commitment of a movie a month.
