by Bruce Feiler
Unmoored from the Bible, Moses became a polemical figure in the great debates of the day, which is one reason he stayed relevant. America was once again in a period of spiritual realignment. Could a fictionalized Moses help lead the way?
METROPOLITAN ART STORAGE may have an address on Sunset Boulevard, but its entrance is on a side street, a block away. I was greeted there by Helen Cohen, a vivacious costume designer who for twenty-five years has been the caretaker of the DeMille estate and the public face of the very private Cecilia Presley, Mr. DeMille’s granddaughter and principal heir. I had to follow a meticulous protocol that seemed one step removed from Buckingham Palace to gain entry into this inner sanctum of Hollywood royalty. First Helen screened me, then I had to submit an application. In time I was invited to view the collection, then have an audience with Mrs. Presley, who had been on the set of The Ten Commandments in Egypt and had a much-discussed love affair with Yul Brynner’s chariot driver.
Helen turned a key and opened the door into a room a little smaller than a one-car garage. It had fluorescent lights and a concrete floor and was covered from floor to ceiling with Hollywood artifacts: dusty plumes, faded trapeze costumes, the occasional chariot wheel, and several Roman helmets. It was like walking into your grandfather’s attic, if your grandfather had directed seventy films, including some of Hollywood’s grandest spectacles—The Crusades, Samson and Delilah, and The Greatest Show on Earth, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1952. One of the first objects that caught my eye was a corroded Golden Globe that DeMille also won for his circus epic.
For the next hour, Helen pulled objects from the collection and told me about the man dubbed “the Barnum of the movies.” Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12, 1881, to Henry DeMille, an Episcopal lay minister and playwright from North Carolina, and Matilda Samuel, a Sephardic Jew who converted to her husband’s faith. In his autobiography, DeMille lingers over the $175 college scholarship his father received from a society to promote religion. “When I sign the contracts involving millions of dollars,” he wrote, for The King of Kings, about Jesus, or The Ten Commandments, “and still more when I receive letters from all over the world, witnessing the religious values of these pictures…I like to think the good men who voted that grant might not be displeased.” He fondly remembered his father teaching Bible classes in their home every Sunday and reading a chapter of the Old and New Testaments every night. But nowhere in his book does DeMille reveal that his mother was Jewish.
After dabbling in acting, DeMille joined with playwright Jesse Lasky and producer Sam Goldwyn in 1908 to enter the nascent film industry. They went on to pioneer a number of screen inventions, from indoor lighting to publicizing stars to the sneak preview. But DeMille became best known for using the big screen to promote biblical morality. His fifty-first film, the silent Ten Commandments, produced in 1923 for the staggering cost of $1.4 million, was his initial foray into religious spectacle. The film uses the story of Moses as a prologue to a modern parable in which two brothers have differing attitudes toward the Ten Commandments.
DeMille was part of a new wave of writers and artists trying to use the Bible to effect social change. As early as the 1890s, ministers began advocating the so-called prosperity gospel, which suggested that the Bible wanted you to be rich. Soon, biblical figures were turned into Horatio Alger–style models of success. In 1925 advertising honcho Bruce Barton published The Man Nobody Knows, depicting Jesus as the ultimate entrepreneur and Moses as a cunning executive. The Man Nobody Knows was the number four best-selling book of 1925 and the number one best-selling book of the following year. It earned Barton a coveted job as a consultant to Cecil B. DeMille. In 1927 the popular Notebook of Elbert Hubbard claimed that Moses was the ultimate adman. “Out of all the Plenipotentiaries of Publicity, Ambassadors of Advertising, and Bosses of Press Bureaus, none equals Moses.” That same year, the Metropolitan Casualty Life Insurance Company published the lavishly illustrated Moses, Persuader of Men, a book that called Moses “one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived.”
Yet capitalists weren’t the only ones to embrace Moses as their hero. Communists did, too. The left’s answer to the prosperity gospel began with the social gospel. It was based on the idea that in the exploding business climate many Americans were being left behind. In 1906, Charles Reynolds Brown, a Congregational preacher, wrote The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit, which presented Moses as the ultimate advocate for the poor against the robber barons. He even labeled John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil the “modern pharaoh.” Brown homed in on Moses’ line to the pharaoh; “Let my people go.” “The very heart of the whole industrial question is contained in that brief sentence,” he wrote.
The most extraordinary use of Moses during this time came from Lincoln Steffens, the celebrated muckraking journalist. In 1919 Steffens visited Russia and returned to make the infamous comment “I have seen the future and it works.” In 1926 he published Moses in Red, which identified the Exodus as the model for revolution and Moses as the archetypical revolutionary leader. “Think of Moses as the uncompromising Bolshevik; Aaron as the more political Menshevik; take Pharaoh as the ruler who stands for the Right, and the children of Israel as the people—any people. Read the book of Moses thus and they will appear as a revolutionary classic.” For a figure whom Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams once proposed to grace the seal to be a plausible candidate for the founding father of modern communism suggests he was the only one who could sell a new social movement to Americans. The Bible may have been under assault, but Moses was still the go-to figure of choice.
In 1923, DeMille viewed Moses as a perfect vessel to restore America’s values. His was not Moses in Red, it was Moses in Red, White, and Blue. Moses had been a film favorite since the earliest days of the medium. In 1907 the Pathé company made Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, and in 1909 the Vitagraph Company spent fifty thousand dollars on a five-reel version of Moses’ life. At a time when theaters were still considered places of sin, the film industry embraced biblical story lines to show that they could be virtuous and should be allowed to have screenings on Sundays. DeMille got the idea for his film from a contest Paramount Pictures drummed up to solicit subjects. An oil manufacturer from Michigan wrote and suggested a tribute to biblical values. His letter began, “You cannot break the Ten Commandments—they will break you.” As DeMille recalled, “Here was a theme that stirred and challenged in me the heritage of being Henry DeMille’s son, a theme that brightened memories of his reading the Bible aloud to us and teaching his sons that the laws of God are not mere laws, but are the Law.”
Filmed in black-and-white, the 1923 Ten Commandments is presented in two parts. The first relates the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, their trek across the desert, and their receipt of the Decalogue. The Exodus scenes were filmed in the sand dunes of Guadalupe, California, and DeMille transported hundreds of Orthodox Jews from New York, because he believed that “in appearance and in their deep feeling of the significance of the Exodus, they would give the best possible performance as the Children of Israel.” But on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner.
The bulk of the film focuses on a modern family. One brother keeps the commandments and is rewarded; the other is a cheat, has an adulterous affair, and listens to jazz on the Sabbath. When his mother reprimands him, he announces, “We’ll break all of your old Ten Commandments, we’ll finish rich and powerful with the world at our feet!” But when he builds a church with cheap materials, the church crumbles and kills his mother. Her dying words could have come from Henry Ward Beecher: “It’s all my fault. I taught you to fear God instead of love Him—and LOVE is all that counts.”
At the height of Jazz Age flamboyance, Cecil B. DeMille tried to reclaim the importance of law and morality. His Moses was not a radical figure, nor was he a beacon of antiauthoritarianism as he had been for the Pilgrims, slaves, and im
migrants. Instead, he was an authority figure. Gone was the emphasis on the liberation of Exodus; now the focus was on the stern dictates of the Ten Commandments. As the film’s opening cards put it:
Our modern world defined God as a “religious complex” and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter, came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blooddrenched, bitter world—no longer laughing—cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together.
THE FURTHER WE dug into the shelves at the back of Metropolitan Storage, the more interesting the items became. Helen Cohen directed me to two black, 1950s-style snap-ring binders that looked like the ones my mother uses to collect recipes. They were DeMille’s personal casting books in which he chronicled every film he watched, every screen test he viewed, and every interview he conducted. His secretaries typed up his whims in different-colored ink, at a time when that meant changing ribbons on their typewriters.
“James Stewart: 9 August 1950, Screened Winchester ’73, originally Mr. DeMille had discussed him for the part of Coco in The Greatest Show on Earth, but after seeing him in this thought he could play Brad.” (Stewart was eventually cast as the clown.)
“Natalie Wood. 21 September 1950. Screened Our Very Own. You thought the little girl, about 11 years old, was very good and wanted to be reminded of her.”
“John Derek. Tested for the part of Joshua. He knows nothing about the Bible.”
“Audrey Hepburn. Not pretty but a very cute personality. Very expressive eyes. Gives the impression of being smaller on screen than she is.” DeMille tested Hepburn for Nefretiri, Moses’ love interest, but her breasts were deemed too small for the voluptuous costumes, and the part went to Anne Baxter.
DeMille’s analysis of Charlton Heston was especially tough. “Has a sinister quality,” he wrote in 1950. “He’s sincere. You believe him. But he’s not attractive.” He goes on, “Find out if he has some humor. Everything I’ve seen him in he’s dour. He has a funny way of speaking. It’s an artificial way.”
“When Heston did get the part of Moses,” Helen said, “DeMille invited him up to the house every Sunday for acting lessons. DeMille would put pebbles in his mouth to get him to talk naturally.”
On a nearby shelf, she pointed to another gem, a script from DeMille’s remake of The Ten Commandments in 1956. It opened with a manifesto: “All these things are as I have found them in the Holy Scriptures, the Glorious Koran, the ancient Hebrew writing, and in the annals of modern discovery. CBM.” To give his film the veneer of authenticity, DeMille had his personal researcher, Henry Noerdlinger, spend years reading all the midrashic retellings of Moses, as well as every known volume of biblical archaeology. Noerdlinger’s research was later published, which gave DeMille great pride, though the seventy-three-year-old showman never seemed to hesitate about tossing out the findings when it suited him. Noerdlinger reported, for instance, that camels had not been domesticated at the time of Moses, but DeMille insisted that the audience expected camels, so camels he gave them.
Even more unusual, DeMille poured his research, along with plentiful quotes from the Bible, into a handful of scripts for close aides. The result, never published, is one of the most ornate depictions of the Moses story I’ve ever seen. Each line of dialogue is accompanied by an individual frame of celluloid from the final film. When the voice of God calls out from the burning bush, the Bible simply says Moses hid his face, “for he was afraid to look at God.” DeMille, the master of overstatement, thought this wasn’t enough, so he flushed out the scene. “Moses makes a subconscious move to comply with the order but is awe-smitten. Eyes look down. And beads of sweat start from his brow. The scene subfuses with light of unearthly, vibrant quality. From within the corona of flame, spectrum rays are pulsating like an Aurora Borealis.”
The scene in which Moses parts the Red Sea is particularly vivid:
As the thunderheads grapple in the darkened sky, Moses raises his staff and turns to the turbulent sea. He stretches his rod above the waters, the voice of God speaking through him. “Behold His mighty hand!”…From the darkening sky comes the rumbling howl of a hurricane that strains the robe against Moses’ body. A second seething rush of air screams over the surface of the waters. The two cloudbanks collide with a thundercrash in a titanic impact that fuses them for instants before detonating downward in a maelstrom’s swirl.
That DeMille recorded these descriptions in a handful of private scripts suggests how committed he was to the Bible. He was using the power of cinema to reach large numbers of people who otherwise might not read the text. In church, his mother once said, his father could reach thousands of souls; in theater, hundreds of thousands; then a new form came along, “the motion picture, and I was able to reach hundreds of millions.”
Moses’ robe, worn by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, including photographs of Heston splitting the Red Sea and Heston with director Cecil B. DeMille; the actor wears the robe in both. From the private collection of the Cecil B. DeMille Estate. (Photograph courtesy of the author’s collection)
The last item Helen pulled from a shelf was a white box labeled “MOSES ROBE.” She opened the top as if it contained the Shroud of Turin. Inside was a museum report: “Overall clean excellent condition. Five intact tassels on hems, slightly matted, cotton tule stripes have been intentionally distressed, spot of black paint 22.5 inches from hem.” She unfolded the tissue paper and there was the burnt-orange robe with the vertical tan-and-brown stripes that Charlton Heston wore during the splitting of the Red Sea. The fabric had the burlappy feel of African mudcloth, and Noerdlinger’s research claimed the colors, white, black, and red, represented the Levite tribe, a detail not in the Bible. More likely DeMille chose the color because he knew darker colors would prevent the actors from blending into the sandy background.
At Helen’s suggestion I slid it on and found that at nearly six feet two, I was roughly Heston’s height. I resisted the temptation to spread my arms. My first impression was how well made the garment was. Fifty years later, it seemed ready for another grueling desert shoot. But my next impression was how quaint it was. DeMille may have boasted that every aspect of his film had been taken from ancient sources, but those sources were written over a millennium after Moses would have lived. The pretense of accuracy seems very Hollywood, but it also reflects the self-confidence and reliance on science that dominated America in the postwar era. DeMille didn’t believe he was making an interpretation of Moses’ life. He was making the definitive account. In the process he made a film that says more about America in the 1950s than it does about Egypt in the 1250s B.C.E.
THE IDEA THAT Moses might help promote American ideals abroad did not begin with Hollywood. In the country’s formative centuries, Moses was most often used as a role model for outsiders’ claims that they were escaping oppression and trying to create a new Promised Land. The Pilgrims, patriots, and slaves all used Moses in this way. But by the twentieth century, America began to change, and so did Moses’ role in the country’s imagination. As the country secured its strength at home, it increasingly began to project its influence abroad. Once again, Moses provided the narrative.
As early as 1850, Herman Melville called Americans “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of Liberties of the world.” During World War I, Woodrow Wilson was hailed as Moses for his efforts to covenant the world under the League of Nations. Later Franklin Roosevelt was compared to Moses for leading Europe out of fascism.
Using Moses as a counterweight to Nazi Germany was particularly popular during World War II. Thomas Mann wrote a novel about Moses in 1943 as part of the anthology The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code. The anthology’s editor hoped to turn it into a film modeled on DeMi
lle’s 1923 Ten Commandments. A similar idea colored Brigham Young, the 1940 biopic of the Mormon leader known as “America’s Moses.” The connections between Moses and Mormonism run deep. The religion was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a Mason who published The Book of Mormon and other scriptures that he claimed augmented the Bible. A central feature of Smith’s theology describes how Jesus visited the Americas after his resurrection and preached to descendants of the Lost Tribes. Smith had a fascination with Moses and stated that the Hebrew prophet appeared to him in 1836.
Brigham Young tells the story of Smith’s mob assassination in 1844, after which Young leads an exodus of Mormons from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake. To help get the controversial film made, producers played up the parallels between Mormons in America and Jews in Germany. As one of the filmmakers put it, Brigham Young could be “an antidote to the increased spread of fascism and anti-Semitism.” The film repeatedly links Mormons with the Israelites. Smith’s dying words anticipate a deliverer who will “lead my people as Moses led the children of Israel across the wilderness.” Young later declares of the exodus, “I doubt that there’s been anything equal to this since the children of Israel set out across the Red Sea.” And when the people complain about the barrenness of Utah, Young says, “I don’t claim to be a Moses, but I say to you just what he said to the sons of Levi, ‘Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come unto me.’” The quote is from Moses after he discovers the golden calf.
