The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution by Stephen Heyman & Stephen Heyman

Author:Stephen Heyman & Stephen Heyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-04-13T23:00:00+00:00

Bromfield spent much of Malabar’s first year in Los Angeles, barking directions via letter and telegram to Drake and Lamoreux. The fortune Fox had invested in The Rains Came made the Bromfield name hot, and Hawkins stoked the fires. Within months, Bromfield had four more film projects in production at three different studios and was being described as “America’s best-selling author in Hollywood.” For Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox, he was writing a biopic of Brigham Young and a drama about the origins of the Salvation Army, Marching as to War. He had also sold Jack Warner the rights to his 1936 short story “It All Came True.” And MGM had given him a check for $50,000 to option his next novel, Night in Bombay, a tawdry rehash of The Rains Came set in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. When that book came out, in the spring of 1940, Harper reported that advance sales exceeded that of any other title published by the house in the previous decade. Bromfield’s career had by now progressed to the point that he could sell his novels to Hollywood based only on a conversation and a handshake. He pitched an executive at Columbia Pictures his idea for a Civil War novel about New Orleans—Wild Is the River it was eventually called—and was given another $50,000. The easy money produced in him a kind of smug cynicism. “Every line I write is sold to Hollywood before I write it,” he bragged to a journalist. “They want my name on the story. Even if I should make a hash of it and a couple of Hollywood writers rewrote it, my name would still appear on the screenplay. That’s all they want.” He looked at the movie business as little more than a bank; he was only in Hollywood to raise money for Malabar, and maybe to have a little fun on the side.

Bromfield and Hawkins usually based themselves in a rented villa at the Garden of Allah, a complex of Spanish bungalows on Sunset Boulevard that was the address of choice for literati like Robert Benchley and John O’Hara. An English actress remembered spending the afternoon with Bromfield poolside. “He stayed under so long we were becoming alarmed about him. Just as we were about to do something, he came to the surface, spouting like a porpoise. ‘My bathing trunks came off!’ he stuttered, ‘and I didn’t dare come up.’ ” Hawkins and Bromfield attended parties in Palm Springs and the Hollywood Hills, met Bette Davis, went sailing between Catalina and the coast on Humphrey Bogart’s thirty-six-foot boat, Sluggy. Bromfield was often seen with beautiful actresses: relaxing on-set with Myrna Loy, waltzing with Patricia Morrison. He seemed especially keen on Kay Francis, with whom he spent so much time that gossipmongers like Hedda Hopper and Ed Sullivan began to hint that they were romantically involved. “I get a kick out of that magnificent laugh,” he told the columnist Sheilah Graham. He and Francis went everywhere together:

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