New York City,

Sept. 23rd.

Dear Bunny:-

I will not apologize for this typewriter stationery invention of mine (freely adapted from the original Yale paper), but I have used my last sheet of legal cap so-called for monthly installment of hokum for Fashion-Art.

I arrived here about a week ago after a delirious summer in California and Canada, where I picked up twelve more pounds and a winter's supply of health. I did a good deal of swimming, engaged in some light amours which taught me very little but strengthened some of my growing suspicions about modern women, did a prodigious lot of plain and fancy drinking with my glorious old father, and wrote four articles. No more. Oh yes, I acted Mr. Roland Young's part in "A Successful Calamity". I did it the better to pursue a fair hot wench in flame colored taffeta but her mother unfortunately blew her brains out one evening during rehearsal and the lady went back to Michigan.

But I digress. What I wanted to write you about is concerns where and how to live this winter. Don Stewart said he had heard from you and that you had suggested we three get an apartment together. That would suit me beautifully, since I am very anxious to get free of the uptown underworld and in closer contact with the rising young spirits of this generation of intellectuals. Don suggests one obstacle: that his mother would have to live with us but he assumes me that she is an extraordinary person who would not cramp our style at all, save for the rougher and harder sort of parties that might be thrown on special occasions. Now that may be all right but I would like to have your opinion on it. I am going to stay here at the Club until I hear from you and if you have nobody else in

mind and think Mrs.Stewart an obstacle more or less insurmountable, we could still get an apartment for two.
Let me know immediately if not sooner your ideas on the subject.

I acknowledge the receipt of a lewd French post card, fullfilling, as far as I can see, the conditions of ideal Arabian beauty: "a high-breasted virgin, with great firm hips, and a navel one could put an orange in". I regret that I have nothing very interesting to report. I spent the week end with the F.Scotts in St.Paul, however, and have to report that Zelda is 8 months and 3 weeks in a state of pregnancy and likely has an heir by now. Scott appears to have swallowed Mencken whole and declares that he is out for the money even if he has to sell bonds to get it. That, I do not need to warn you, is what marriage does to every promising young man. Heywood Broun and Walter Lippmann, so I am told, have gone over to the World.

Well, I must fall to and fashion a dramatic poem for John Bishop. It is to be high "Pippa Passes Out".

2020W

1612 Vista del Mar St.,

Hollywood, Calif.

Jan. 4, 1924.

Dear Bunny:-

To begin with, my conduct in not answering your letter and
making my report on the delusions, errors, lousiana and Tartufferie now
being held and practised in this part of the world, is shameful and
without defense. It is a straight piece of horses-asserie which I can
only stone for by repentance and reform. I offer this ... a concession to
the nasty Catholic dictum that an honest confession is good for the soul.
I had intended to make my report in the form of a movie continuity (whose
technique, I am told by the leading scenarists, is as difficult as counter-
point, but which is actually of a piece with the limericks written in
the back of St. Nicholas by Abel F. Dornick, aged six), but I was restrained
by the fact that my adventures were running into ten or twelve reels, and
by the hope that I would be able to get enough money to return to New
York and tell it to you over a bottle of Scotch. So I must be content with
just a synopsis.

I came out here in June, as you know, my pockets lined with a bait
of $200 from the Famous Players-Lasky factory, commissioned to adapt a
fourth rate English sentimental novel for the screen for Thomas Meighan,
that sterling he-man of iron jaw and irreproachable family habits. I
lost most of the bait to card sharpers on the train at draw poker, drooped
the rest with sundry troblops and bootleggers in San Francisco, and
plunged into my dismal task in Santa Barbara, turning out a fifty page
"treatment" and a 150 page continuity. The adventures of these manuscripts
(which one must call "scrip's" or "brain children" in Hollywood) will
give you an idea of business efficiency in our fourth largest industry.
Lloyd Sheldon, scenario editor of the Lasky Long Island studio, told me
to write the "treatment" and send it to him, but not to bother any of

the "West Coast" men about it since it was distinctly an "Eastern problem"--
much as if Crownie were to tell you: "Don't ask Montague Glass to help you
figure
MARK out any wise cracks in Pasadena; it isn't ethical. You know all those
little problems in humor must be worked out at the Algonquin."

However I took my work to Tom Geraghty, a Lasky continuity man who
writes movies in his sleep for $35,000 a year, and he said he would take
it up personally with Meighan who was then working on a George Ade picture
in Hollywood. After waiting two weeks for him to read it, I went to see
him and he said: "Oh yes, I remember this story, I turned it down about two
years ago, but Meighan always liked the idea of it. I'm sorry but Meighan
went East before I had a chance to talk to him. "He agreed that it was
an impossible story, suicidal to attempt, since it contained an indispen-
who
able illigitimate child MARK could never shake her curly blonde locks
in Ohio or Pennsylvania. But he advised me to give the story to Ralph Block,
who was very clever at circumventing the improprieties. I did so.

Three weeks later Block wrote me that they had definitely decided not
to do the story and on the same day I got a telegram from Sheldon asking
"where and the hell is that treatment?" Baffled, I went to Hollywood from
Santa Barbara and showed the telegram to Block, asking him if I should
mail my "scrip" at once. He said: "No, give it to old Al Kaufman here; he
nandles all Meighan's stuff and is leaving for new York to see him to-
morrow." I gave the story to old Al and waited for a month. Al never showed
up or wrote me a word. I inquired daily at the Lasky "lot" (studios are lots
if you want to be de rigeur, au fait, au courant, comme il faut) for news
but nobody seemed to know anything about it. Finally, one day I got the low
down. The production manager of Lasky told me that Meighan was not consider-
ing any story but mine. This was a little ambiguous but hopeful. I waited
three weeks.

One evening, going into the Christie hotel for a hair cut, who
should I see but old Al Kaufman. He did not remember me. I explained that I
was the guy that wrote a story for Tom Meighan. I nursed his memory along

until he recalled that there was such a story in existence. "Oh sure,"
he said airably, "I remember. Whatever became of that story?" He had
all XXX bogus cordiality of a street walker whose obligation is to
be agreeable to strangers. I told him I thought he had charge of all
Meighan's stuff. "Oh no", he said as if I were trying to flatter him, "I
had someone to do with an Ade story of his but I don't know anything about
what he's up to now. Here, I tell you--(confidentially, like a race track
tout slipping you the real hid McCoy on Rose Queen in the jumping race)
why don't you write to Sheldon about it?" I am still waiting to hear
from Sheldon.

Next I fell in with a wise cracker by the name of Mel Brown,
Mack Sennet director and snowman, with whom I wrote a story for Harold
Lloyd. It wasn't so bad and had some pretty good cracks and I peddled it
from studio to studio like an old scissors grinder. It was a flop. Mel
is an enthusiastic, optimistic, go-getter, with a fertile imagination
for gags and tricks, and the energy of caged squirrel. He builds a story
like a pool shooter with an uncanny ingenuity for getting the proper
balls in the pockets. As he says: "I can't sling English for a damn but
I understand all about story construction. With your ability to write
and me giving birth to my ideas, we ought to make a knock out team."
We wrote another story about a fortune teller which was a worse flop than
the other one. But Mel was undismayed; he was as confident as an oil
driller and kept promising me jobs at the rate of three a week. I tramped
from Jew to Jew, from upstart to hooligan, with the assiduity of a Dreiser
heroine in the big city. It is now seven months since I arrived and I
aint havent had an offer to sweep out offices XXX even, Mawruss.

Next I adapted Yukon Jake for Larry Semon. I left the manuscript
with his scenario editor expecting to get my rejection in three or four
weeks. An hour later he and the business manager called on me and said my
story was wonderful--even the stenographer laughed. (As if that were a
proof that it was funny.) They would take it up with Semon that very

afternoon. Four days later the scenario editor, an effete little grappler
with aesthetic problems (Garrett Fort, Princeton 1919), with an engaging
amiability, a placid contempt for the movies, and the hips of a homo-
sexualist, called at my apartment to make his report and drink a high-
ball.

"It was a complete flop", he said. "I started reading it to Semon
and after I had covered about five pages he said 'say, is this supposed
to be funny?' 'Sure', I said. 'Well, when do the laughs start?' he asked.
'They're supposed to have started four pages ago', said I. Semon grunted.
'We used to get ten or twelve a day like that when I was working over to
Metro's' he said. And we didn't finish reading the story."

And so, my dear doctor, I am to date a failure as a scenarist. For
the which, perhaps I ought to be profoundly thankful. I had hoped to make
a few thousand dollars, which would relieve me of the necessity of writing
pot boilers, and then return to New York to write a novel and be about
my Fahher's business in earnest. Instead I am marooned among the lice where
there is neither spiritual nor intellectual comfort, but only a handsome
opportunity for collecting clinical data on these curious human excrescen-
ces. I do not see any immediate prospect of working myself out of bondage,
unless I can sell some of my fiction and enough wise crackery to pay for
my release, which brings me to another subject.

I have written three stories which would have been available for
the Smart Set--stories after the manner of Chekov and De maupassant. Are
there any magazines now in existence which buy such wares?

Another notion is this: Do you think that Crownie would be in-
terested in starting a department of movie criticism in Vanity Fair?
Being quartered in the main factory here, I would have access to the
feature pictures from two to three weeks before they reach New York,
since they are shown in pre-views and can often be seen before the
final cutting is made. Sometimes they are released simultaneously in
New York and Los Angeles, but New York has only four big movie houses

where openings are shown--the Rivoli, the Rialto, the Capitol, and the Strand--whereas there are seven or eight in Los Angeles and Hollywood.
Seventy-five per cent of the pictures are made here and if I were accredited to Vanity Fair I could easily become privy to all the plans of the producers, the histories of pictures in the making, the gossip and gaucheries of stars, the invisible conflict between censorship and free production, the strategy of the people who want to make so-called "better pictures", the politics of success, the machinery of monopoly and discrimination which sustains the old feudal movie magnates in power, not to speak of being able to study these strange folk in the flesh; in short, I would be able to get the low down much better than someone who is not actually on the ground. Not that I would write about these things, for I believe the department should be criticism and not gossip or muck-raking, but such knowledge would be invaluable as background.
The trouble with movie critics who know the anatomy of the thing is that they are hopeless harlots, sold out like Esau for a mess of shredded wheat, venal and dishonest to the marrow of their bones. Sherwood of Life stands almost alone, the only critic who is worth his salt, and who refuses to fall for the most transparant hokum. For the rest, the best things written on the movies have been written by amateurs whose real forte is another field like Broun, Nathan, etc. I except Seldes, who, I think, doesn't know a thing about it. His stuff on the movies is nothing but the trick of ingeniously intellectualizing a popular amusement.
Dramatic criticism has been emancipated from press-agenting, why not movie criticism? If Vanity Fair has a dramatic page which is of necessity devoted to the theatre in New York, why not a movie page for the citizen of Omaha struggling on the fringe of gentility with Vanity Fair as textbook? Movies concern your entire subscription list while the theatre is limited to a New York audience.

The form of the article could be devised so as to include say the six best pictures of the month with a paragraph of warning against

the rubbish. I wish you would speak to Crownie about it and let me know what he says.

and also would you send my rather any old copies of Yukon Jake you have about the office? He wired Vanity Fair for two hundred some time ago, but there was no response. He wanted the page if you had it set up.

What has happened to your play? I had a letter from Zeila, the other day saying that her play had flopped in the Atlantic City bone yard. I was forced to sell my Victrola catalogue to the Detroit Athletic club News to restall the catch polls: do you think that Crownie would fall for another one? And what has happened to Vanity Fair's wise crackers. In the last three years, ever since Don Stewart left, they have had nobody to play the light reeds but George Chappel who is getting terrible. Where are the bright young Princeton and Yale boys who should be stepping into the shoes of the master?

Have you baptised your daughter yet? I would like to enter my formal candidacy for godfather, promising the people and the government to teach her the Lord's Prayer, the catechism, the apostles' creed, the Communist Manifesto, Mother Goose, the constellations of the zodiac, the secrets of alchemy, the art of making good gin, and Descartes Law of Signs, as befits a responsible and self-respecting godfather, aware of the seriousness of life, the need of sound morals, and the pitfalls that await a maiden unpanoplied with the armor of faith and holy grace. In case I am elected, I promise to give a baptismal party in any city ward not jerrymandered by Tammany, which shall include a punch evolved by countless experiments with are liquors and forbidden spirits and dedicated to her. I nominate Dr. and Paramore, the People's Choice or Godfather!

And now, my dear doctor, I must return to my vomit. I have three lice to see today who have scrip's of mine that they haven't read but "will be glad to consider when they are not so busy".

My next installment will treat of Love. My regalus to Mary.

1612 Vista del Mar St.,
Hollywood, Calif.,

Jan 2, 1924.

Dear Bunny:--

Your letter arrived this morning and threw me into a con-
vulsion of excitement. What mysterious errand is this, my lords and masters,
that brings Frank Merriwell 2300 miles across the Great American Steppes?
The America-Japanese raprochement, the quest of the Hope Diamond, a
bishopric in the Los Angeles diocese given in gratitude for past favors
by the Pope, a big deal with the Lasky Trust, or the establishment of an
outpost of the Nast interests in the very heart of the City that has no
Heart?

At any rate I shall prepare for your strange progress, guarantee
you police protection, and provide you with the necessary pleasures of
flesh. You can stay with me in my Hollywood lair and spend the week ends
with me in Santa Barbara, and I will carry the Fiery Cross to all the
best bootleggers and most voluptuous trollops. Not that I know many here--
having been chaste and sober for the past month (on the wagon lit you
might say)--but I will cultivate them assiduously in your behalf.

Regarding the subject mentioned in my last letter be further ad-
vised:

I spent last night with Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Firtheman of
the Universal and Fox Studios and they are all "hopped up" and "sold"
on the idea of>Vanity Fair> running a movie page. Firtheman told me that
the Los Angeles Times increased their circulation 60,000 (20,000 in Los
Angeles alone) by running a mid-week movie section called the Pre-view.
He agreed with me as to Chaplin that every movie critic but Sherwood
of Life was sold out, and that the public hungered for honest stuff about
the screen. He said that all the Studios would co-operate with me (pledging
the Fox, Universal, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin studios) in securing the
best first hand data, and that I could see the pictures from four to eight

weeks before they were released, be provided with "Thumb-nail synopses" of all the stories, and have my pick of the "stills". He further said that among the movie people and their home town fans alone there would be enough response to justify the venture as a circulation dodge. He claimed that Sherwood's department had enormously increased the circulation of Life, but that would bear looking into since Masson told me that Sherwood, Benchley, et al had improved the quality of Life but ruined its popularity. Out here I have access to the material, the people, and the machinery of seventy-five per cent of all the pictures produced in America: all I ask is $100 a month and a fairly free rein. I wish you would put this up to Crownie in a big way.

Margaret has gone to San Francisco to get a divorce, following an unusually lively fracas in which her husband slammed a glass door at her and broke a vein in her foot. I permit myself some skepticism on the success of the venture as she is a glutton for punishment. However keep this secret until it actually takes place; I have cried wolf too many times as it is.

Keep me advised upon Christ's work in the East.

Ever thine,

1612 Vista del Mar St.,

Hollywood, Calif.

March 10, 1924.

Dear Bunny:-

I have just returned from a weeks pilgrimage to San Francisco which was a mixture of happiness and disaster. For a couple of days what with being harrassed (justly in the main) by the women folk and the champagne and absinthe I was knocked cold with the whoops and jingles, the heebie jeebies, the fan tods, and all the ills that nerves are heir to. However I have now recovered and my morale is better than it has been in several months. I have definitely made up my mind to leave Hollywood as soon as I can free myself. (Don't tell this to anyone on Vanity Fair for if they make me a good offer I will stay long enough to get a good stake). I shall return to my vomit in New York for there is nothing else I can do and I might as well "make good" as the phrase goes ag the humor and short story game. I had hoped to accomplish three things in California. I wanted to spend a summer with my father before he died, but his trouble instead of being acute seems to be chronic and he may live for several years. Secondly, I wanted to pick up a few thousand dollars so that I could go about My Father's business without being forced to do pot boilers all the time. Third, I wanted Margaret. It may be difficult for you to realize or believe the seriousness and importance of this but it is absolutely true. XXXXXXXXXXXX I do XXXXXXXXXXXX seriously, I desire to do anything

But let us have done with this woman argument. What I wanted to ask you is to send me a copy of our diplodocus play and, if you can possibly get it, a copy of the libretto of any musical comedy hit that I can use as a model. James Gruen and I are planning to write a musical comedy embodying all our wise cracks and songs. We are at present constructing it synthetically and want some practical model for technical direction. Of this more as soon as our idea has incubated a while.

You made a tremendous hit with Paula, whom I suspect of having amorous designs on you. It is too bad you could not have stayed longer and studied this extraordinary woman at closer range. I got to know her much better while I was in San Francisco and I admit she baffles me, upsetting many of my preconceived notions about the entire sex.

By the way, was it Marc Connolly who got up the idea of the death of Cleopatra, Stonewall Jackson, and General Lee? I evolved my own interpretation of these epoch making incidents in the world's history for the edification of the San Francisco Bachelors' Ball and they went over big. I must have told them forty times while I was there and now all the flappers are saying "You know what you can do with it", and thumbing their noses at one another and shouting out "Oh General Jackson!". I should give Connolly a credit line but you told me the stories while I was half asleep and I only remembered the points.

I ordered your books sent just before I went north but when I got back to Santa Barbara they were still there. I will ship them at the end of the week.

Will Rogers still has my Yukon Jake. I await his decision with cynical imperturbability.

My best to Mary and my god-daughter.

As ever,

P.S. Tully is showing all the symptoms of advanced paranoia. He went absolutely cuckoo the other night.