Moving Pictures by Schulberg

because I didn’t know what they were laughing at. Then he picked me up and affectionately bounced me up and down. “No hard feelings, Buddy. You’re a good-looking kid. A helluva lot better-looking than your old man. How’d ya like to be in my next movie?”
    “N-n- no !” I said. And everybody laughed again.
    D. W. Griffith and C. B. DeMille may have been greater directors, but when you seek a prototype of the carefree movie days of the Teens and Twenties, Mickey Neilan was the man. Think of the Twenties and you think of Valentino, Greta Garbo, Mae Murray, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, of Irving Thalberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Von Stroheim, John Ford…. Those were the gold-dust days, and in his prime nobody had more gold dust in his hair or in his laughing eyes than the Mickey Neilan who lifted me up on the set of Amerilly of Clothes Line Alley.

5
    A T FOUR YEARS OF age I would seem to have been in kiddie’s heaven, with prosperous parents who doted on me, a nurse who loved me—a child who had been kissed by America’s Sweetheart, who could go with his father to the studio whenever he wished to see movies being made, and who had been assured by his studious and well-meaning mother that he could do anything he really wanted to do. When epidemics hit the city—influenza and infantile paralysis—I was quickly motored upstate to the safety of Schroon Lake. My mother read me the best children’s literature available to develop my mind. I learned to read before I went to kindergarten. The famous friends of my parents kept telling them how precociously intelligent I was. In other words, it would have seemed to the objective observer that the little Schulberg boy, whose papa was getting to be such a big shot at Famous Players while still in his mid-twenties, had the whole big world for his toy balloon.
    I could run, I could jump, I could read, I was well coordinated, I could remember every detail of the stories that were read to me, I loved my mother and father, even was surprisingly fond of my baby sister, I was a friendly little tyke, gentle with animals. Yes, I seemed to have been favored by the gods all right. They had lavished everything on me. Except for one slight oversight. The gift of speech.
    Another child would ask me my name and I’d try to say,
    “B-b-b-b,” then run home sobbing, “I c-c-can’t t-t-talk…” When I opened my mouth to speak I stammered and stuttered and lisped. To saya word, I would squeeze my eyes together until tears leaked from the corners.
    My frantic mother took me to the doctor to see if there was anything wrong with my oral equipment. The doctor put a stick on my tongue and I even stammered my “A-a-ahs…” Nothing wrong that Dr. Jellyhouse (what a deliciously unforgettable name for a pediatrician) could see, but he passed us on to a specialist. The specialist could locate no physical disability.
    So Ad tried a psychologist, a friend of hers, one of the early practitioners in that virgin field, explaining that I had been a nervous child. Colic. Crying all night. When she had taken me to Schroon Lake with Lottie Zukor and son Eugene and others of the Zukor clan, they had complained because the walls of the old resort hotel were anything but soundproof and my wailing kept them up all night. Ad and the mind doctor discussed my affliction in terms of my father. B.P. also stammered. Not all the time but when he was under stress. One theory is that your mind is working too fast and the tongue can’t keep up with it. Another is that stammering or stuttering is an attention-getting mechanism although it seems to me that little Buddy was being smothered in attention.
    Then Mother took me back to her favorite hunting ground, Columbia University. If I had not come along so soon (nine and a half months after their marriage, she always delicately insisted), she would have liked to try for a degree there. At Columbia we entered a speech therapy class for afflicted children and their parents. A