What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [24]
On his way out the door, Harry asked Fadiman if he could help him find work. “Are you looking for a job?” the surprised editor said, then asked Harry if he liked to read. “Does a duck swim?” Harry responded. Fadiman picked up the phone and called his brother, Robert, who was a story editor at Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios. Harry soon had a job reading novels and scripts for the movies. MGM paid him five dollars for a novel, five for a play, and two for a short story. “I read some awful things,” he recalled. “The first was tripe, something to do with a spoiled heiress who was wangling for a handsome architect, who in turn loved a shopgirl.”
When he turned in his first synopsis, the story editor was amused by Harry’s negative critique. He had already asked someone else to read the book, and that reader thought it would make a good movie so the editor planned to recommend it to the studio. He suggested that in the future, if he received another book to read, Harry should write a longer synopsis. The next one Harry wrote was ten pages. The editor was not entirely satisfied and told Harry some readers commonly wrote fifteen- or twenty-page synopses. From then on, Harry wrote that much and more. “They took up more of my time than I expected. In fact, I was not getting any time to write my book. But I thought, What the hell. As soon as I break in I’ll be able to ease off. My book would wait, my epic.” Harry read his “guts out”—novels, romances, mysteries, short stories, travelogues, even books on the Canarsie Canal. Assignments usually had a twenty-four-hour deadline, and he would frequently have to read until midnight and then write twenty to thirty pages. He rarely made more than twenty-five dollars a week.
One story editor gave Harry a lesson in analysis: “Don’t look for Shakespeare. A piece might be literary crap, but it can make a first-rate picture,” he wrote in The Dream. None of the plays he read ever made it to the screen, but a few novels did, including Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and the autobiography by Margaret Landon upon which The King and I was based. Over time he met other movie readers, and many, he said, were, like him, “failed writers who hadn’t yet given up and were just in the reading job as a stopgap until they finally made it.” Back then, he said, sardonically, he was going to write a novel entitled Books of Wrath that would deal with migratory manuscript readers in America. “The work as a reader for the movies held me back and hurt me a great deal as a writer,” he said. Despite the incessant demand to read and report on books, Harry still found time to work on his own fiction. But the material was creatively toxic to his imagination. “It’s like trying to speak in a room with a lot of other voices. There’s only so much room in a human being’s mind. I would have accomplished much more if I had not become bogged down in reading all those worn-out movie plots.”
When Harry’s son, Charles, was born in 1940, the Bernsteins moved from Manhattan to Laurelton, an emerging neighborhood being developed from farmland at the far end of Queens. Harry was rejected from the army for service in World War II because he had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child. Meanwhile, Ruby took a job as a school secretary and continued to earn the family’s steadiest paycheck. “Ruby liked her job. She liked her home. She liked taking care of the kids. I never heard one word of complaint,” Harry said. And, of course, she never stopped being supportive of Harry’s writing.
His children had to be, too. “My bedroom was his office during the day, and all day you’d hear the typewriter booming,” Charles recalled. Money was usually tight,