In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir

Chapter 1

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3 It was a rainy, chilly January afternoon in 1969, at the elegant campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. My office as Regents Professor looked out on an uninspiring picture of dripping shrubbery and somber redwood trees. I was feeling despondent as I had given up hope of obtaining access to the most legendary of lost movies: Orson Welles’s It’s All True, a Latin American epic, left unfinished in Hollywood vaults from 1942. Hazel Marshall, head of the editorial division and stock footage department at Paramount, which now held the surviving reels, had told me that many more had been dumped off Catalina Island as useless stock and that I could not, ever, see the extant material as she had no idea who owned the rights. I was within inches of scoring a major coup in movie history scholarship and had been thwarted at the very last minute. The phone rang and without enthusiasm I picked it up. To my amazement , Hazel Marshall was on the line. She addressed me as “Mr. Hyams,” which didn’t surprise me as my name is often mispronounced in America. She told me to come to Hollywood at once; the movie would be ready for me to see at 9 a.m. the following day. I called the airport; no planes were flying in a storm. But late that night a plane suddenly became available and I left on it, bucked about through lightning and thunder for hours as the plane made several stops. Soon after dawn, I was at last in Hollywood. I was at Hazel Marshall’s office at exactly 9 a.m. She showed me an old, creaky, pedal-operated Moviola beside which stood a stack of small metal reels stamped I’ A T. Armed with notebooks, I spent the next eight hours without a break, writing down details of the remarkable footage , pulse racing, aware that in movie terms this was the equivalent of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fifth gospel, or the Rosetta Stone. The footage included a single reel, edited by the great Mexican editor Joe Noriega, of a completed segment, “Bonito the Bull,” about a boy who saved his animal from slaughter in the corrida in Mexico City by making a direct appeal to the president. Exhilarated, I flew back to Santa Cruz. The next day, Hazel Marshall was on the line. She said she had made a serious mistake: she had confused me with a stock footage buyer named Hyams in San Jose, near Santa Cruz, and that I must forget all I had seen. I told her she had signed a clearance with my name properly spelled and my identity as professor made clear. She threatened legal action, and I hung up on her. The discovery made me famous, and all because of her error. Such luck, a million-to-one example, has marked my whole life, including my years in Hollywood for the New York Times, and that luck began at a very early age. I was ten years old. It was a windy day, and I was out on a long run in light rain through fields near our family home, the Mount, in South Godstone, Surrey, England. I had my head down, looking for wet mud that might cause me to slip and fall, and my school cap had blown away in the tempest that blew the russet autumn leaves in scudding confusion, that swept away the last ghostly “clocks,” or heads, of dead dandelions. I had lost my way, but I saw in my mind the ground that lay ahead: a low, sloping hill and clumps of sodden gorse, with rabbits and hares about, and I could hear crows cawing in trees blackened by a recent fire. Suddenly , I heard a voice: the voice of my late father, who had died three years earlier, telling me to look up. I did. Just a foot from my face was a long, sharp spike, protruding from a stone wall, which could have killed me instantly . I gave thanks and, looking up now, changed direction, my heart drumming loudly, every sense alert. I was aware of a world around me that the eye couldn’t see, where those who have crossed over survive, and I have had much evidence since of its existence, which I will describe in these pages. 4 5...