Eve of a Hundred Midnights Read Free

movie. Lasky was sufficiently impressed by the production, however, and he and DeMille agreed to completely take over the lease. They used the barn to finish Hollywood’s first feature, the unfortunately titled The Squaw Man . Released in 1914, the film was a success, and the partnership behind it led to the formation of Paramount Studios.
    DeMille’s and Lasky’s success as filmmakers might not have come as easily had they not crossed paths with a Jewish, German-born merchant named Jacob Stern. In 1889 Stern moved to Fullerton, a then-rural town in Orange County, California. There Stern and a cousin opened a general store. Stern soon had six locations and shifted his business interests to real estate.
    In 1904 Stern bought the property at Hollywood and Vine. It was a comfortable home where he and his wife Sarah could raise their four children: Harold, Elza, Helen, and Eugene. Eight years later, he leased out the barn that DeMille ended up using. It became one of the key sites around which Hollywood’s film industry grew, and Paramount Studios kept its lot at that corner until the company grew too large to remain there.
    Amid the hoopla of the movie business’s early days, the Sterns’ second daughter, Elza Stern, fell in love with a young man named Melville Jacoby, whose father, Morris, had come to Los Angeles from Poland and started a retail clothing business with his four brothers. Like the Sterns, the Jacobys emerged as one of Los Angeles’s first commercially successful Jewish families.
    Elza and Melville Jacoby were soon married. Their son, Melville Jack Jacoby, entered the world on September 11, 1916.A booming Hollywood glimmered around the boy and his family, who thrived in the burgeoning city.
    That is, until 1919. The First World War had just drawn to a close, leaving millions dead in its wake. An even deadlier scourge followed: Spanish influenza. The epidemic—believed to have originated in China—killed somewhere between 20 million and 40 million people around the globe. In the United States, nearly one-quarter of the population contracted the disease, including the elder Melville Jacoby. In January 1919, before his son was even two and a half years old, Jacoby died.
    Elza Jacoby had a nervous breakdown following her husband’s death. The Sterns swooped in and brought Elza back to their home at Hollywood and Vine, where together they cared for her and Mel. For the next four years, Elza’s parents, siblings, and household staff helped raise the boy. Elza eventually recovered from her depression, strengthened in part by converting to Christian Science.
    â€œAs young as [Mel] was, he seemed to sense how very much a young mother needed him,” Elza later told the writer John Hersey.
    When Mel was six years old, Elza purchased a house in L.A.’s Benedict Canyon, where she tried to care for Mel on her own. Elza was attentive, and her son was dutiful, possibly too much so.
    â€œMy chief difficulty was to get him to go outside and play, so long as there was as much as a wastebasket to empty inside,” she recalled, perhaps with a bit of motherly embellishment.
    Mel’s frequent visits to his grandparents’ home while he was growing up let him observe Hollywood’s early days. Despite the bustle around him, Mel seemed happiest in the Sterns’ swimming pool. Elza always fretted about his long dives beneath the pool’s surface. But Mel appealed to her newfoundreligion, insisting that “God’s under that water too. He’ll show me how to come up again.”
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    Melville Jacoby and Elza Stern Meyberg. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.
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    A few years after her first husband’s death, Elza fell in love with Manfred Meyberg, another member of Los Angeles’s tight-knit Jewish community. He had worked his way up from office boy to president at Germain’s Seed and Plant Company, one of the era’s largest agricultural supply