SCHWAB'S SYNDROME

The Hollywood drugstore is closed, but the legend lives on

CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

JUDITH MARTIN

America has lost a mythological landmark. Schwab's Pharmacy is out of business.

Schwab's was a butterscotch drugstore on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Its clientele included a high proportion of aspirants to film stardom (even if you consider that the American population at large consists chiefly of aspirants to film stardom), because the owner was known to be sympathetic and generous to them.

But that was only the Schwab's of the physical world. People also went there because of what Schwab's represented in the existential realm: a seductive alternative to the traditional American work ethic, which prescribes a course somewhat slow and dreary for modern taste. Let us call this alternative ethic the Schwab's Syndrome. It replaces the Horatio Alger model and suggests that success need not be the result of brains and application but can come from less rigorous intrinsic qualifications, which need only be discovered in order to propel one from idle obscurity to glory, riches, and universal adoration.

The facts of the event that put Schwab's Pharmacy into the national consciousness are disputed by the alleged principals. But mythology is, after all, not history. (When, as a Washingtonian, I once pedantically protested to filmmakers who took such liberties with my city as calling the back of the U.S. Capitol its front and constructing geographically impossible motel-room views of the national landmarks, I was told: "Hollywood's Washington is what everybody knows and believes in. To everybody in this country except you few who happen to live there, that is the real Washington. Anything different would be seen as a fraud." It was, in its way, a convincing argument.)

According to the legend, a truant teenager from Hollywood High was sipping an ice-cream soda at Schwab's soda fountain one day in 1936 when a certain quality, having to do with the way she wore her sweater, inspired another customer to make her a legitimate offer to become a movie star, which, indeed, she did.

The heroine of this tale is Lana Turner, and she states in her autobiography that she was actually discovered sitting at the now defunct Top Hat Cafe sipping a Coke, and that the tight-fitting sweater was issued to her later by the wardrobe department of Warner Bros, studio. "I doubt that anyone was ever discovered there, but Schwab's should give me a percentage of their earnings," she wrote in Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth.

Leon Schwab, the retired owner of the drugstore, who now sells discounted French perfume from his house, says the event did happen at Schwab's and that he was a witness to it. He also claims that film stars Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Ann Miller, Linda Darnell, and Hugh O'Brian, among others, were similarly discovered at Schwab's.

No matter. The concept of "discovery" had been discovered.

Hitherto, in the irresistible daydream of being unexpectedly catapulted to worldly paradise, discovery had been connected with the indefinable personal quality of lovableness. This is the Cinderella Principle. "Cinderella" has always been a popular story, and not only with children and other naifs. This winter, in Washington alone, you could see it as a farce at the Folger Theatre and at the Kennedy Center in Rossini's opera by the Washington Opera and Mikhail Baryshnikov's new ballet by the American Ballet Theatre. In no version, however, is it Cinderella's hearthscrubbing ability that gains her a kingdom. Not even her looks or gentleness ultimately determines her fate: she is chosen for her shoe size by a lover who obviously does not trust himself to remember her face.

Explanations of the enduring attraction of the story never seem to mention the most practical outcome of Cinderella's discovery. Bruno Bettelheim, in his The Uses of Enchantment, offers a cornucopia of "Cinderella" interpretations—Oedipal disappointments of both father and daughter, ambiguous feelings about the mother, resentment of parental socialization, virginity, sexual envy, guilt about sex as something dirty, penis envy, the prince's castration anxiety—but not the obvious fact that being Princess Charming means no more hard work (the current Princess of Wales's complaints about her job notwithstanding).

The Schwab's Syndrome, in applying the Cinderella Principle to careers, also puts value on looks, manner, and personality, shoving aside such tediously acquired attributes as learning, application, and perseverance. The person who has "it," whatever it is, does better than the striven (But that old Horatio Alger heritage is not entirely forgotten, and so we now have the amusing phenomenon of the self-help book or course to help strivers achieve those supposedly intrinsic qualities.)

The immediate application of the Schwab's Syndrome was, of course, to the acting profession. Earlier, Hollywood theatrical tradition was not different from that of other fields in valuing talent only in combination with diligence and experience. In modern Japanese and British theater, the idea persists that years of training produce the best actors. A Kabuki Living National Treasure, stung at having been asked "what kind of roles" he did, replied, "I do everything—demons, old men, young men, the elements, old women, young women, animals, spirits; I'm an actor!" He then confessed his amazement that Americans who admitted to waiting until their "types" came along could consider themselves in the same profession.

If the Schwab's Syndrome has gone beyond acting to the workaday world in general, it has been helped by modern theories of education and of mental health. Psychotherapy has set a value on spontaneity as expressing greater truth than that which is puzzled out consciously, and education has defined its job as taking something out of the child ("creativity") as opposed to putting something in ("mere facts"). We hear of whiz kids in industry and government, of architects who know no engineering, writers who are innocent of literature and even grammar, and singers who were relieved by technology of the need to learn voice technique.

Consider, however, another Schwab's story about a teenager who was discovered for the movies. This is less well known than Lana Turner's, and Mr. Schwab could not have witnessed the event, because it occurred outside the drugstore, at the entrance. But its literal truth is not under dispute, and it has a different ending and possibly another moral.

Steven Muller was a thirteen-yearold peddler of magazines in Hollywood in 1941. His parents, refugees, had had to leave their assets in Germany, so he and his brother helped support the family by selling The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and Liberty from big bags, door-to-door. One day, hot and thirsty and thinking the same thought that Lana Turner claims was on her mind just before her discovery—whether to indulge in a Coke—Muller sold a five-cent Saturday Evening Post to a man who gave him a dollar. As he reached for the change, the purchaser indicated that he should keep it and disappeared into Schwab's. It occurred to Muller, in what he now claims was his sole contribution to this career-advancement step, that the entrance to a store attracting people of such largesse would be a good place to do business. Mr. Schwab's contribu-tion was that even though he sold the same magazines inside, he did not chase the boy away.

One day the boy was approached by a British screenwriter from Warner Bros, and asked whether he would like to be in the movies. Like Lana Turner, Muller said he would ask his mother. Like Mrs. Turner, Mrs. Muller—although first expressing outrage that her boy had been accosted by a pervert—checked the man out with someone in the film business and found that he was who he claimed to be.

Here the two stories diverge. Muller was in eight or ten films and attended the MGM studio school, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O'Brien, Jane Powell, Linda Darnell, and others of that era, but did not approach stardom, unless you count being a mainstay on The Hollywood Smarty Party, a short-lived imitation of the popular Quiz Kids. By the time he enrolled in UCLA his career was in abeyance.

But in 1946 Muller was offered a good role as a German lieutenant in Battleground, starring Van Johnson. He turned it down because he was running for student office and was active on the college newspaper, and considered those activities more important. "All my friends said I was nuts," he remembers. "And I wonder myself now at the brass of a eighteenvear-old kid turning down a $300to $450-a-week job that would have launched him back into the movies." Muller's guess is that he could not have done that had he been born in America—had he, in other words, been subject to the Schwab's Syndrome. "I was too European to understand what it meant culturally; so were my parents, who said fine." He ran for student representative instead, then for president of the student government, and went on to a career in political science.

"In retrospect, I'm not sorry. I didn't want to be an actor," he says. "Now, of course, I am one." Muller is currently president of the Johns Hopkins University.

Lana Turner's autobiography details a life of mental anguish and professional and personal misery before she found peace through religion. Who knows what her career might have been had she left Schwab's to return to class in the belief that education and hard work were the surest ways to success?