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Budd Schulberg ainda está vivo!

There’s a piano in the living room at Budd Schulberg’s old home in Hancock Park, just as there was 75 years ago when Schulberg was a boy, living there with his family, right around the corner from the Barrymores and Louis B. Mayer, his father’s old business partner. The Schulbergs were Hollywood royalty back then. Budd’s father, B.P. Schulberg, was head of Paramount Pictures, which meant that a cavalcade of stars often lighted up their living room, the piano getting quite a workout. As a young Hollywood prince, Schulberg had a front-row seat. Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” flirted shamelessly with him; Cary Grant and Gary Cooper cracked jokes; Marlene Dietrich arrived, just off the boat, with her Svengali, Josef von Sternberg.
Schulberg uses a cane to slowly navigate his way around his old house. While his hair is snowy white, his mind remains razor sharp, unclouded by the sentimentality of nostalgia. Being so close to Hollywood gave Schulberg a chance to see the flaws people farther away couldn’t notice. Bow, it turns out, was sleeping with everybody in town, including his father. Dietrich, Budd recalls, “looked very mousy,” not at all the sleek siren we saw on screen. One night, B.P. gave a party for Maurice Chevalier, who was new in town. Charlie Chaplin, a family friend, was there too. As needy as any comedian, Chaplin couldn’t stand having to share the spotlight. “So he went over to the piano,” Schulberg recalls, “and whenever Chevalier would sing, Charlie would pound away at the keys, as loud as he could, trying to drown him out.” (…)
But it’s Hollywood that runs deepest in his veins. Watching him ramble around this stately old house, a documentary crew led by Albert Maysles close behind, you get the tingly feeling of what it might have been like to hear Civil War stories from one of the last surviving Confederate soldiers. (The house’s current resident has owned it since the 1960s.) At 91, Schulberg is one of the few living links to the early days of Hollywood — who else is still around who can say he wrote a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald, yakked about movies with Sergei Eisenstein and is still owed $100 by Harry Cohn? When Fitzgerald opens “The Last Tycoon” by saying “Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party — or so I was told,” he’s using an anecdote Schulberg told him about his own childhood.

Bom artigo.