Mr. Faulkner Goes to Hollywood
Good morning, it’s May 7. On this day in 1932, William Faulkner moved to Hollywood. Hijinks ensued, as they say in the movies.
At 34 years of age, and with four acclaimed novels to his credit, including The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner would have been content to stay in Oxford, Miss., with his new wife and recently-acquired antebellum plantation. But his change in lifestyle had left Faulkner tapped out.
As professor Steve King has noted, Faulkner’s disinclination to capitalize on his fame in La-La Land “were unmatched by a bank account so overdrawn that the clerk in the local sporting-goods store had just refused to honor Faulkner's three-dollar check.”
As the proprietor of the store frowned at that signed, but valueless, check, Faulkner harrumphed: “That signature will be worth more than three dollars.”
In response, the unimpressed owner instructed his staff, “Don’t let that Faulkner boy charge anything.”
And so he was off the Los Angeles, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was paying him $500 a week, a nice sum back then. Faulkner’s first day on the job wasn’t an auspicious one, however, as he showed up on a Saturday, as the workday was ending, apparently quite drunk.
“We’re going to put you on a Wallace Beery picture,” MGM executive Samuel Marx told him.
“Who’s he?” replied Faulkner, referring one of the studio’s great stars – and Gloria Swanson’s real-life leading man. “I’ve got an idea for Mickey Mouse.”
Unfazed, Sam Marx had his office boy usher Faulkner to a screening room to view “The Champ,” a picture in which Beery played a prizefighter. Evidently bored by the film, Faulkner struck up a conversation with the office boy instead.
“Do you own a dog?” he asked the kid (who didn’t).
“Every boy should have a dog,” the famous writer rejoined, adding that anybody who didn’t own a dog should be ashamed of themselves.
Although Faulkner did eventually get around to writing screenplays – mainly adaptations of other novels – his assimilation into Hollywood was an adjustment for both sides.
Sam Marx later told a Hollywood biographer that Faulkner and director Howard Hawks were once discussing literature when Clark Gable asked Faulkner who he considered the best contemporary writers. “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Dos Pasos, Thomas Mann, and William Faulkner,” said William Faulkner.
Gable did a double-take, and asked, “Do you write, Mr. Faulkner?”
“Yes, Mr. Gable,” he replied. “What do you do?”
