Dad in Reel Life

I didn’t really think about my father after his death in 1986 until the day I read a review of Samuel Goldwyn’s biography, published in 1989. And then I realized that I missed him. Goldwyn was MGM, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, when Hollywood was defined by its studios. My father was Columbia Pictures International.

The make-believe world of Hollywood pervaded my childhood even though Dad was not a hotshot producer or studio head. He was in foreign distribution–Foreign Traffic Manager was his title which I always found amusing, picturing him at a crossroads waving a white glove at oncoming cars. But he often brought home glossy publicity photos of Columbia’s stars, personally autographed. “Best wishes,” signed “Rita Hayworth.” “Good luck,” signed “Glenn Ford.”

Because he could speak several languages, though his education was limited, my father rose to be head of the department for Columbia Pictures. A long way from the scared twenty-year-old who left his home in Izmir, Turkey in 1919.

His first job after he landed in New York was at a film laboratory where he stayed only three days before finding work in import-export. He was back in films soon after, in a Columbia Pictures laboratory, starting as a “cutter,” as film editors were called. In those days, film editing was a matter of cut and paste. He worked with scissors and cement, customizing feature films to suit individual clients. If the film contained an “objectionable” scene (e.g., an unmarried couple in a bed) a couple of sharp slits did the job and never mind the continuity. Panama found the movie too long? Chop a few pieces out of the talky scenes. If sequences were reversed, no one complained. The stock was nitrate film, highly flammable. Good thing he wasn’t a smoker.

Though my mother was a rabid moviegoer, he avoided going to the movies. The only screenings he went to were the ones that were mandated by his bosses at Columbia Pictures when he himself became a manager. I know that the mere sight of the Columbia logo, a sexy dignified woman draped in white and holding a torch aloft, moved him deeply. His lack of firsthand viewing didn’t keep him from lavishing praise on every Columbia picture that was released. I thought some of the movies were junk. “It may be junk to you,” he’d say, “but it’s our bread and butter,” paraphrasing a less elegant saying.

The world of make-believe was not only our bread and butter, but that of my father’s entire family. They all believed in happy endings. Trouble was glossed over, dissension in the family was stifled, bad news never conveyed to children (children! At 50, I was “spared” the death of a dear family friend because my parents didn’t want to upset me). My father’s favorite saying was, “Everything is going to be all right.”

He was a tyrant at home, a true patriarch, a product of his Near Eastern upbringing. Family was holy, ties of blood sacred even if some relatives went for years without speaking to each other. Women were expected to stay home and wait on their men. His view of my future was that after college I would find a job as a secretary, or a schoolteacher, the most that could be hoped for while marking time before I was married and safely in another man’s keeping. In the meantime I was treated to a weekly reading of the secretarial ads in the New York Times despite my objections.

His tyranny did not extend to the office where he was a milquetoast, fearful of all authority except his own. He did keep his “girls” on their toes, however, and complained bitterly when they took coffee and bathroom breaks. But he cowered before the bosses, especially the new generation, the young “punks” whose fathers he used to address by their first names. He’d become enraged when my mother and I derided him for his timidity. His response–justified, I realize now–was, “You don’t know anything about business.” What he meant really was that he was devoting his life to keeping bread on the table. Having grown up in near poverty he was always fearful of it.

Through the vicissitudes of the company, the changing of the guard, the wheeling and dealing, the bribes in exchange for information, my father refused all offers of special favors, like an occasional little job on the side. He was absolutely incorruptible. His loyalty was to that lady in white. Nothing would be done behind his bosses’ backs, even though, as he acknowledged, some of them were “a bunch of racketeers.”

For 45 years my father was a devoted employee at Columbia Pictures and all he talked about at the dinner table was Columbia, the deals that had been made, the box office returns on a given movie, the expanding or shrinking market in Peru or Brazil or Cairo, and, if he had a little wine to drink, the “mistresses” that the bosses introduced shamelessly at company functions. My mother and I would look at each other and pretend to yawn. Business again, we’d drawl, rolling our eyes. It bored me to death.

Years later, when he was forced into retirement at 70 by “the young punks” who gave him a gold watch for his troubles, I began to appreciate his life as a corporate cog, having become one myself. “For 45 years,” he said, “they gave me the works. Now they give me a watch” (this was pre-battery days). Now when it was too late, I understood his struggles to survive office politics, the need to coddle obnoxious bosses, the necessity of dealing with incompetents, some of whom were his new bosses, the lazy sloppy office workers who could barely read–not that his English reading skills were any great shakes, but he did read the New York Times from the first page to the last.

Not only was there a disconnect between the glamorous fantasy world of the movies, which did indeed sustain us, and the down and dirty corporate dealings in his office. My father’s view of America as paradise remained untainted despite my efforts to open his eyes to politics, to discrimination, to neglect of the poor. “America is the land of the free,” he’d say with tears in his eyes, even though his sacred New York Times was filled with articles depicting local and global troubles. And what about the myth of family? The so-called happy endings? (“Everything is going to be all right.”) The wayward children, philandering spouses, embezzlement of funds in a family-owned business, the occasional divorce always whispered about, never spoken of directly?

Desperate to work after he was forced out of Columbia he took a job as a messenger in midtown Manhattan, dressed as always in a suit and tie. He wasn’t proud and was willing to take on any kind of work, so long as he was able (especially since the thought of my mother working even a few hours was anathema to him). But his ideal world was too fragile and he succumbed to the illnesses that beset those without a purpose in life. Now his tyranny at home was circumvented easily through female wiles, my mother’s and mine. I believe it was at this time that he read his first book, other than the obligatory Torah. I gave him a best seller detailing the scandalous downfall of a prominent producer for Columbia Pictures. He relished it, especially since he had known many of the principals involved. “A bunch of racketeers,” he said, acknowledging what he had known all along: There was no goody-goody world, no silver screen in real life.

About the author: Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer is the author of a novel, Amalie in Orbit, and a short story collection, Goodbye, Evil Eye. She is also co-author of a nonfiction book, We Were So Beloved: Autobiography of a German Jewish Community.Her fiction has been published in The Antioch Review, Kansas Quarterly, New Letters, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, and other magazines. Nonfiction has appeared in several journals, including Music & Vision, The Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine, and Perceptive Travel. For over twenty years she worked as a translator and editor for nonprofit and academic organizations in New York City. Visit her website: gkirchheimer.com.