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Two of the club members, William Russell and Raymond Griffith, who were big stars of the day, treated Zanuck tolerantly. Russell called his attention to a play that Eager-Beaver Zanuck was able to buy, rewrite for the movies and sell to Universal for $525—his first movie sale. After that, he flourished briefly at selling his stories to the films until, in 1923, the studios suddenly decided to have no truck with writers unless they had literary reputations. Getting nowhere, he turned for advice to Griffith, who casually counseled: "Do a book."
Cloth-of-Gold Style. Zanuck did. In his first real stroke of Hollywood genius, he persuaded the manufacturer of a hair tonic called Yuccatone to pay for the job-printing of a volume called Habit, which is now a collector's item. Zanuck sent engraved cards to the studios announcing the publication of his "novel." Actually, Habit consisted of three of his rejected scenarios in narrative form, plus an elaborately disguised, 100-page testimonial to Yuccatone. Filled with hopheads, gunrunners, the U.S. Cavalry, good women and bad grammar, the stories were written, as one discerning reader put it, in "the cloth-of-gold style and unbending grand manner of a half-educated adolescent." In all four stories, the heroes were dwarfed by the villains, invariably men of uncommonly larger size. The heroes had to endure extreme abuse before they triumphed in a burst of vengeance and vindication.
Ever since Habit, there's been no stopping Zanuck. He sold every story in the book, and, though the long Yuccatone blurb somehow defied efforts to put it on the screen, the other three pieces were eventually filmed. He also used the book to impress petite Virginia Fox, an actress he met at about that time on a blind date. He sent her a copy the next day, followed it up daily for six months with flowers until she consented to marry him. Hollywood, pro-and anti-Zanuck, knows Virginia Zanuck today as an unusually gracious woman without airs, who has a strong influence for the best on her husband.
The $4,875 Raise. In 1924, Zanuck settled at Warners' as a writer assigned to Rin-Tin-Tin, the dog star. After twelve pictures, he frantically set up a special department to devise new and more astounding things for the dog to do. "He was the most brilliant bloody animal that ever lived," says Zanuck, who managed nevertheless to keep a jump ahead of the beast. Zanuck graduated finally to pictures with human stars, piled up 19 screen credits in one year until exhibitors protested that the Warners were charging too much for their movies when they had only one writer—"this" Zanuck"—on their payroll. At the Warners' instructions, he began writing under three pseudonyms as well, including "Melville Crossman," a writer M-G-M admired and tried, without success, to hire. He also found time to haunt the cutting rooms ("That's where I really learned the business") and to berate directors so shrilly for ruining his scripts that they had to bar him from their sets.