The Lasky Family

Below is a description of the Lasky family by screenwriter Harold Sherman (The Adventures of Mark Twain) after a visit to their home at 181 Saltair in Brentwood while working on the script in Hollywood in June 1941. Sherman wrote to his wife in New York:

. . .The Lasky car picked me up [at the Canterbury Apartments in Hollywood] at 6:30 and took me to their lovely home in West Los Angeles, near Beverly Hills. It is a beautiful drive from here which takes about a half hour. I found a Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Bergh (he’s a composer) there; also Jesse Lasky Jr. and his wife, whom I like very much; and Betty Lasky, the daughter, about [daughter] Mary’s age, who is very quiet and retiring. The most unusual personage of all was Mr. Lasky’s mother, 82 years of age, who lives at the Ambassador Hotel, and who always spends her Sunday evenings at the Laskys—has been doing it for years—and who is touchingly fond of her son and daughter-in-law.

I think this Lasky menage is the most extraordinary I have ever been in. It seems that every member of the family is on fire with creative talent in some direction, and whatever else may be said about Mrs. Lasky, she keeps so creatively busy that one hardly sees how she can be up to escapades at the same time. She had done six new paintings since two weeks ago, and some of her work is really beautiful. The quantity of it is enormous—an entire room filled with literally hundreds of canvases. Now she is doing a mural which has to do with the creative forces in the universe, and which she has tried to express in a prose poem, set to music by Mr. Bergh, which actually forms the basis for an unusual ballet. I suggested as much last night after hearing it and Jesse Jr. joined me, the whole family getting so excited they are going to get Nijinksy (wife of the famous Nijinksy) out to hear it soon and arrange for its being done in the Hollywood Bowl. This idea of mine proved a ten-strike, I having made an especial hit with Mrs. Lasky, who is delighted at the prospects.

You will like Jesse Jr., who is a marvelous mimic and who entertained with his impressions of Cecil B. DeMille, for whom he has worked, and who apparently is a dual personality, acting all over the place when he wishes to impress people with his authority, bawling actors and writers out for no reason at all—and being very sweet when no one else is around to see him blowing off.

From Mrs. [Sarah] Lasky, the mother, who took me home in her car, I learned much, since she is most talkative, all in praise of her son and talented daughter [Blanche], who died seven years ago. It seems that Jesse and this daughter both were brilliant musicians and had intended to make their careers in music. They came East and there Jesse got an idea for unusual musical acts in vaudeville of a high class nature. They became so successful that he soon became the biggest producer of them in America. And later, when movies came in, he had a chance to found Famous Players-Lasky, utilizing his developed stars—practically a who’s who of the industry at that time. This led to Paramount-Lasky and ownership of 1500 theatres throughout America; and finally, after a series of successful pictures and all kinds of showmanship, wherein Lasky brought the biggest stars from Europe, including Maurice Chevalier, etc., the crash came, then the Depression which kept theatre managers from paying their rentals; and, in one terrible week, Lasky found himself wiped out, with a loss of $7,000,000.00 in cash!

“But it didn’t faze him a particle,” said Mrs. Lasky. “Nor his wife. She just said to him, ‘Jesse, we’ve had fourteen servants and five cars and all that sort of thing, but that’s never meant real happiness to us—it’s just each other and the work we are doing and our family.’ And so they moved to humble quarters and he went to work harder than ever. And, since everybody in Hollywood loves him and he is known as the man without an enemy, everyone wanted to give him a chance to come back—which he is now successfully doing.

“My husband died years ago and Jesse said to me then that I would never have to work, though I wanted to; that he would always take care of me—and he has, despite all he has gone through. Oh, I tell you he is a wonderful son; he sends me flowers every year on the anniversary of his father’s death, and he’s had me go with my daughter-in-law and himself to every opening with him of all his pictures, and he says, ‘If mother doesn’t like it, never mind what the critics say, it won’t go.’ And I used to say to him, sometimes, when he was working so hard, ‘Oh, Jesse, I’m afraid you’re not going to make a success of this, it’s too much,’ and he would say, ‘Mother, you mustn’t say that. It must be a success. We’ll keep working at it till it is,’ and this is just the way he’ll be on Mark Twain. He’s like a bull dog; when he wants to do something and believes he can, he never gives up, and when he believes in people, he backs them up and inspires them and gets more out of them than anyone else; and when someone in some other studio does something good, he sends them a wire of congratulation, which few people do in Hollywood, which tries to drag the other person down rather than build them up.”

I think this is enough of Mrs. Lasky’s running-fire comment to give you an idea of what she thinks of Jesse, who is still “her boy.” But there is something fine about real Jewish family life—their loyalty and devotion.

Oh, yes, her other son, Billy, is assistant director at Warners and was away on location. I understand Betty is quite musically inclined, that Mrs. Lasky is herself a fine pianist, and Jesse, her husband, a fine all-around musician. Jesse Jr. is a linguist, who speaks five languages. How do these Jews do it? You have to give them credit.