The chief problem was that the box office dollar was now much smaller, but there were other factors. Foreign films had become increasingly popular. Before the war most moviegoers had never seen a European picture; the few to come over were mostly British, tedious, and dull. J. Arthur Rank changed that. Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, and Michael Redgrave became as familiar to American audiences as American actors. The Italians sent Anna Magnani and Gina Lollobrigida, the Austrians Maria and Maximilian Schell, the French Brigitte Bardot and Yves Montand, the Japanese Toshiro Mifune, and the Swedes whole troupes whose performances suggested that Paris really wasn’t the sexiest place in the world. In the late 1940s Hollywood pressure had kept these actors off neighborhood screens; to see them one had to seek out what were called “art theaters” in large cities.
Then, in February 1950, a federal court in New York dissolved corporate articles binding producers and distributors of films to local exhibitors. Exhibitors no longer showed what they were sent, sight unseen. They bought features one by one, and they could buy from anyone. All America was an open market for enterprising Europeans. The ruling had broad ramifications. Hollywood had been built on the assurance that every picture would have its chance with the public. To get Shirley Temple or Robert Taylor, exhibitors had had to buy a quota of B movies and experimental films. The result had been the double feature and “selected short subjects”; the unknown was shown with the known, and if it caught on, a star was born. No more. Improvisation was too risky after 1950. Exhibitors were free to turn down the obscure picture, making it a dead loss. As a result, the moguls on the Coast began sinking everything into super-spectacles which, if they failed, entailed losses in the millions.
Altogether, it was to be a wretched decade for Hollywood. Month by month the film industry’s once massive role in the national economy declined. Grimly refusing to open their treasure of old movies to the television networks, and as yet unable to interest them in using movie lots for TV production, the moguls watched the film capital decline until it had become all but a ghost town.
The film makers were caught in a wrenching transition. The nation’s mores still proscribed the showing of sexual acts, or even nudity; of the harmless Baby Doll, Time said that it was “just about the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited.” Producers continued to be attuned to generalized entertainment. The notion that a film might appeal to one group in society was yet to come. Its first success was to be Rock Around the Clock (1954), and even then American youth was largely indifferent to it. The movie’s breakthrough—and the emergence of rock ’n’ roll as a worldwide phenomenon—came first in Britain, where upheavals dating from World War II had first created an autonomous teen-age class. After the film had triggered rioting by three thousand Teddy boys that September, councils in a dozen English towns met in special session to discuss banning it, and police cordons were thrown around theaters where it was still being shown. The Teds’ hair was of special interest. At a time when adolescent males in the United States remained faithful to the crew cut, the Teds wore theirs long, combing it in the back in a style which can be traced to wartime Los Angeles. It was called—not in mixed company, of course—the DA, or Duck’s Ass. The Teds did not let it hang loose on their shoulders, to be sure; that would come later.
Before the transition, motion pictures had served as a social unifier. Appealing as they did to all ages and slighting no class—except blacks, who remained unnoticed even by themselves—films had strengthened familial ties and reminded moviegoers of values they shared. Wartime films warmed the melting pot by showing WASPs, ethnics, and minority Americans working together. In addition, Hollywood served as a social mentor. Consciously and unconsciously, fans modeled their behavior after that of the stars. By ruling that couples in films must not be shown sleeping in double beds, for example, the Hays Office, later the Breen Office, had altered styles in the entire bedding industry, and by excluding even the mildest profanity it helped keep the language, as was then said, clean. Moreover, to an extent unappreciated at the time, the generalized pretransition movies provided the country with a common lore. Even in the 1970s middle-aged strangers could relate to one another and find a meeting ground by references to The Philadelphia Story, Mutiny on the Bounty, or any other of a hundred films remembered and cherished, over thirty years later, by virtually an entire generation. Their children lacked that; no motion picture of the early Nixon years knitted itself into the American experience.
Of course, none of this had anything to do with art. Judged by that yardstick, the best movies of the 1960s and 1970s outshone almost everything before them. By then the transition was complete and it was possible to explore emotions and relationships which had been freed from the old taboos. Films had attained maturity; high seriousness on the screen had become possible; brilliant directors were using celluloid in ways undreamed of before. Still, something had been lost. Pictures had become divisive. Small children went to weekend matinees, teen-agers to movies made for them by stars their own age, and adults to films rated for them alone. Hollywood’s old unifying force was gone.
The signposts, too, were different, and the possibilities for misunderstanding greatly increased. One misleading word was “nonconformity.” In the 1950s some teen-agers began warning parents that they had decided to stop conforming to the rest of society. But within their subculture, conformity was absolute—“How,” Irving Howe asked pointedly, “can a bobby-soxer admit to not enjoying Vaughn Monroe?”—and some examples of it were unconsciously entertaining: “Join the beat generation!” cried an ad in an early issue of Playboy. “Buy a beat generation tieclasp! A beat generation sweatshirt! A beat generation ring!” That subcult was swiftly forming in the early 1950s. Money had become more plentiful for it in the prosperity accompanying the Korean War, and in 1955 it acquired its first martyr with the flaming death of James Dean, who had just starred in Rebel Without a Cause.4
The social sciences were rising in prestige. There was an immense curiosity about all the media—what they were doing, their influence, their meaning, their potential. David Riesman at Harvard and Reuel Denney in Chicago were investigating their role in the shaping and socialization of people, instilling in them a sense of what it meant to be an American man or woman, boy or girl, mature or old. At the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan was defining “the visual, linear, older generation” and “the aural, tactile, and suffusing younger generation,” and in Baltimore H. L. Mencken had completed his documentation of the growth of a national speech, “standard American,” and the accompanying decline in regional speech.5
In these same years the publicity business grew from a cloud no larger than a handout to the vastness of Marlboro Country. In 1948, when the Public Relations Society of America was founded, there were about a hundred PR firms in the country, many of them operating out of hole-in-the-wall offices, and fewer than fifty PR departments in industry. The number of public relations companies in Manhattan alone swiftly expanded to a thousand, and it was a rare business—or an impoverished governmental bureau—without its complement of mimeograph machines and amiable men eager to plant plugs and puffs. Very soon ranking PR advisers rose to the vice-presidential level in industry and, in Washington, became members of the subcabinet. With their arrival, images often came to supersede truth. They wrote commencement speeches for heads of corporations, cajoled newspapermen with free rides on company planes, subsidized the new call girl business, and, with Robert Montgomery’s coaching of Eisenhower, made PR skills indispensable to political campaigns.
Meantime advertising had begun to move in subtler patterns. During the 1940s it had continued with straightforward appeals to vanity, sentiment, ambition, greed, and fear—Listerine’s “Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride,” “I Was a 98-lb. Weakling,” “Your Best Friends Won’t Tell You,” and “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano.” Hyperbole had made superlatives so ordinary that R. H. Macy & Co. ran a six-column ad in the New York
Times to taunt the rest of the industry with a glossary of “Unfamiliar Words & Phrases—As Used by Advertising Writers to Describe Female Apparel and Appurtenances.” Included in it were “gossamer: the nearest thing to nothing—and better in black”; “lush: anything softer than stone”; “glamorous: anything plus a sequin”; and “fabulous: we haven’t seen anything like it for an hour.” By the time the 1950s were well under way, Madison Avenue’s hacks had been shouldered aside by brighter account executives. The bark of the television auctioneer and the specter of B.O. had been replaced by “Cloud Nine, Calling Earth,” “Bendix Starter Drive Puts 20 Million Women in the Driver’s Seat,” “A Bacardi Daiquiri Has Less Calories Than a Glass of Skim Milk,” and “Steel Is As Big As All Outdoors!” Motivational advertising research had arrived in all its Day-Glo splendor. For a while there was even scary talk of something called subliminal advertising—slogans flashed on TV screens so rapidly that they eluded the conscious eye and embedded themselves in the subconscious, whence, presumably, they would emerge at the crucial shopping moment.
Beginning with the postwar vogue of Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters, sophisticated Americans had been giving Madison Avenue and its works the sort of spellbound attention once invoked by Emile Coué and Howard Scott. By the end of the Truman era almost everyone in Winnetka or Bel Air could describe the difference between the hard sell and the soft sell; the significance of Roper, Nielsen, and Hooper; and what it meant to say, “Let’s run this one up the flagpole,” or “Put this on the train and see if it gets off at Westport.”
The most beloved creatures of the soft sell were probably the Piel Brothers, though serious students of modern advertising honor above all others the name of Henry Morgan. An eccentric figure during the last of radio’s great days, Morgan was capable of doing almost anything on the air. Once he auctioned off his entire staff for $83. He frequently interviewed himself, and on the assumption that Hollywood’s Coming Attractions were more exciting than the features they were hawking, he would devote a full half hour to running off their sound tracks. Advertising a breakfast cereal—“Snap! Crackle! Pop!”—Morgan would put on earmuffs to muffle the deafening racket. One infuriated sponsor after another fired Morgan. Eventually he wound up in a dull, unimaginative hard-selling job, a talented casualty in the endless war for the consumer dollar.
Advertisers were spending ten billion dollars a year—2.2 percent of the Gross National Product—to manipulate the public, creating ever larger wants for ever more ingenious products. By stimulating the economy, the theory went, commercials were striking blows for the American way. Thus the glib adman came to occupy roughly the same place in the firmament which, in Coolidge’s New Era, had been reserved for the financier. Nearly everyone believed in them; even Joseph Stalin bought two thousand transmitters to jam Free World electronic spiels before they could corrupt his people. Sports fans accepted without protest TV’s fake rest periods, fake injuries, and “two-minute warnings” in the last period of football games, knowing that all of them were merely excuses for commercials. The Billy Graham Crusade invested in a special survey on the habits of subway straphangers to ascertain the best strategic location for Crusade ads; God, too, believed in motivational research.
Less than a quarter-century had passed since the Roaring Twenties collapsed in 1929, and the country was off on another binge in another bull market. The Fat Fifties, some were calling it. The New York Stock Exchange reported that one out of every nine Americans owned stocks, but most of the rest seemed to be debtors; Eric Goldman wrote that department stores were advertising plans under which customers could spend the rest of their lives owing a specified balance—$500, for instance—and for a fee “debt counselors” would give you a living allowance in exchange for your pay envelope, which they would then distribute among your creditors.
Automobiles were growing wider, longer, and lower. Each autumn’s new models were hooked up with more junk, more chrome, and bigger tailfins. The dashboard on Cadillac’s $13,074 Eldorado Brougham included lipstick, a Kleenex box, and four tumblers finished in gold. Outside Detroit the market offered those who had everything solid gold toothpicks, whiskey-flavored toothpaste, and His and Her submarines. The Wall Street Journal discovered a thriving mail-order business which offered life-size plastic replicas of famous models equipped with real hair, real fingernails, and real toenails; bachelors bought them and took them to bed, and some had invested thousands of dollars in wardrobes for them. Living women, meanwhile, were emerging from hairdressers with coiffures tinted Champagne Beige, Autumn Apricot, Fire Silver, Golden Cinnamon, Apple Green, Peacock Blue, and Sparkling Sherry. On weekends their husbands were exploring the possibilities of new radar-equipped fishing rods which sent out an electric impulse, found fish, and reported their bearings. At parties businessmen were showing curious friends little rectangles of plastic issued by the Diners Club. Ahead, for middle-class America, lay the wonders of credit card living.
All these were part of the tenor of the time. Throughout the decade tastelessness and vulgarity shrieked out from billboards and TV screens—wherever the peddler opened his pack and hawked his wares. If there was one moment which summed up the rest, it came on CBS-TV at the climax of Judgment at Nuremberg, a brilliant piece of theater produced by the network’s Playhouse 90. The theme was the injustice of justice in Nazi Germany. Claude Rains, the American judge, confronted Paul Lukas, a German jurist. “How in the name of God,” Rains asked, “can you ask me to understand the extermination of men, women, and children in—?” His lips moved soundlessly. The missing phrase was “gas ovens.” It had been cut at the insistence of Playhouse 90’s sponsor, the American Gas Association.
***
It was the age of Lawrence Welk and of Suzy Parker, of Lavrenti P. Beria and of Albert Schweitzer, of the Superbomb and the Salk vaccine, of Orwellian despair and Reutherian hope. In the Kremlin sat a victor of World War II with a stubborn jaw and little sense of the comic; in the White House sat a victor of World War II with an equally stubborn jaw and just as small a sense of the comic. To the inhabitants of each country it was clearer than crystal that the rulers of the other must be humbled soon, probably by armed might. Both believed that the state of their own internal affairs had, in general, been fixed forever, and would be little changed by the passage of time. Neither trusted their own intellectuals, each worried about its children. Washington smiled on technology; so did Moscow. Fundamentalist preachers of state-approved faith were enjoying a vogue in the U.S.A. and in the USSR also.
Dr. Herman N. Sander, forty-one, of Candia, New Hampshire, was acquitted of first-degree murder in Manchester; he had been charged with the “mercy killing” of Mrs. Abbie Borroto, fifty-nine, an incurable cancer patient, by injecting air in her veins. The year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifty-one was succeeded by the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty-two. In Akron a convention of sheriffs deplored the lack of law and order. Officials of the 1950 census reported that the new population center of the United States was just outside Olney, Illinois. Puerto Rico became the first commonwealth of the United States, and William Randolph Hearst, dead at eighty-eight, was mourned in a requiem service at the Orphans of the Storm Shelter for Homeless Pets in Chicago.
Greek-born shipping tycoon Aristotle Socrates Onassis, forty-eight, was indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States while buying surplus ships. Dore Schary told the Harvard Club of Los Angeles, “America is a happy-ending nation.” Tornadoes in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Alabama killed 236. Deploring the country’s lackluster youth, a social critic in New York declared, “I am old-fashioned enough to think that the young should break ground, heave rocks, smash idols, even create a perceptible amount of damage.” He concluded that if undergraduates “don’t revolt in the name of sense, they ought to do it in the name of style.”
Uranium mining began at Beaver Lodge Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada, reportedly the largest deposit of the metal in
North America. Visiting Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois, President Sukarno of newly independent Indonesia was heard saying to himself over and over again, “I love Americans!” Newark Airport was closed following three fatal crashes in two months, but Britain’s De Havilland Comet flew the 6,724 miles from London to Johannesburg in less than 24 hours, opening the world’s first jetliner passenger service. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, remaining faithful to propeller-driven aircraft, crossed the Atlantic in fourteen hours aboard the Sacred Cow and called it “a magnificent aircraft.” Acting on CIA reports that Russians planned to spike the cocktails of American diplomats with the compound lysergic acid diethylamide, which was said to cause strange behavior, Dr. Louis Lasagna administered the drug to several Boston volunteers in 1952 and confirmed accounts of its remarkable properties. The more unstable an individual’s personality, he found, the greater his sensitivity to LSD. Captured in Brooklyn after a clothing salesman spotted him, Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks. He said, “Because that’s where the money is.”
In Cairo a junta of army officers led by General Mohammed Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed King Farouk and proclaimed Egypt a republic. The Dionne quintuplets, living near Callander, Ontario, turned sixteen. Connie Mack turned ninety-two. In the Soviet zone of Austria copies of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe were confiscated as “fascist literature.” A House subcommittee headed by Representative Ezekiel Gathings of Arkansas opened an investigation of obscene literature and was inundated with letters and packages containing pornography. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz confessed to Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg that aboard boats “I always get seasick.”
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