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As an idea man, however, he is probably unsurpassed in Hollywood. His mind is a storehouse of plots, story angles and gimmicks, and with an extraordinary, freewheeling inventiveness he reworks them endlessly into different patterns. He is also a merciless story critic. Respecting talent, he has a knack for channeling it and knows when to leave it alone. For all his autocratic belligerence, he can quickly drop an idea of his own when someone else comes up with a better one.
Love Points the Way. Darryl Zanuck made his movie debut playing an Indian maiden on an early lot at $1 a day. That was just eleven years after his birth on Sept. 5, 1902, in Wahoo, Neb. (pop. 3,300). Worried about his health, his Methodist parents—Frank Zanuck, an Iowa-born hotel clerk of Swiss parentage and Louise Torpin Zanuck, a Nebraskan of English stock—moved to Los Angeles when Darryl was six. His mother cut his early movie career short as soon as she caught sight of him in Indian costume.
Not long after their arrival in California, his parents were divorced. When his mother remarried unhappily, Darryl began spending his summers back in Nebraska with her father, Henry Torpin, a well-to-do grain processor and landowner who could spin eyewitness tall tales about an Indian massacre. In letters to his grandfather, the scrawny boy soon outdid the old man's stories with lurid imaginings of what might be seen from his train window.
Not quite 15, Darryl enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard after taking the braces off his teeth so that he could lie more convincingly about his age. He spent almost two years in service, on the Mexican border and in France, dispatching more letters to his grandfather. A veteran at 17, he lost patience with school and determined to be a writer, like O. Henry. Meanwhile, he sold shirts and newspaper subscriptions, worked as a rivet catcher in the shipyards and a poster tinter in a theater lobby. Writing furiously, he sold a story called Mad Desire to Physical Culture. (The subtitle: "Determined to die in a futile effort to make amends, love points him a better way and rekindles his desire to live.")
Living in Glamour. At 20 (and looking younger), unrestrainedly ambitious and insufferably cocksure, Zanuck set out to conquer Hollywood. He quickly became the nuisance of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which was then home to such important personages as Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle. "I'd have given my right arm to be in the picture business," he recalls. "Living in the glamour of it, hearing stories about it all day long and not being a part of it, hurt."
What also hurt was the snubs and ruthless practical jokes with which most of the club members liked to torment him. Zanuck, who has never lost the fervor for practical joking that he acquired as a constant victim of it, recalls that the pranks were "not always too pleasant, too nice."