The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  Meanwhile, two more scandals convinced the producers they were lucky to have Hays in place. In February 1922, William Desmond Taylor, a natty, lush-living director, was murdered in his home on Alvarado Street. Taylor had been having an affair with two actresses—the ingenue Mary Miles Minter and the comedienne Mabel Normand, and possibly with Minter’s mother as well—when he was found dead of a bullet wound to the back of the head. Both the actresses were suspects for a time, but the crime was never solved.

  And in late 1922, the wife of the athletic young matinee idol Wallace Reid publically confirmed the rumor that Reid was addicted to narcotics. A month later, the actor died in a sanatorium where he was trying to kick the habit. Reid’s story, unlike Arbuckle’s or Taylor’s, was treated with some sympathy in the press. Mrs. Reid told reporters that her husband had become addicted after he’d been involved in a train accident while making a film in 1919. A doctor hired by the studio had plied him with morphine so he could go on working. Hers was a prescient attempt at framing addiction in a way that would make the addict sympathetic and vulnerable, in part because the confessor—here the wife on behalf of the husband—seemed to be speaking directly to fans. This is standard practice today for celebrities in rehab, but it was novel at the time. “I am being criticized severely by some of our acquaintances for having talked so much,” Mrs. Reid told an interviewer, “but I feel that if the public knows the truth, it will not condemn Wally any more than I have condemned him.” Will Hays visited Reid at his bedside and vowed to fight the scourge of narcotics.

  Will Hays, Hollywood’s savior?

  But if Hays was soon enjoying some success in remaking the image of the Hollywood colony, he was having much less in cleaning up what was shown on screen. In late 1929, he called in a prominent Catholic layman and a Jesuit priest to draft a new and ambitious Production Code to help the moviemakers behave themselves. The authors of the new Code informed their labors with an overarching theory: movies differed from other art forms, such as literature and painting, and could not enjoy the latitude they did, both because movies operated on the senses in a more visceral and all-consuming way and because they were seen by “the masses: the cultivated and the rude, the mature and the immature, the self-respecting and the criminal.”

  Despite its ambitions, though, the enforcement powers of the new Code were weak; in agreeing to accept it, in March 1930, the studios made sure they were. By 1933, Variety opined that “producers have reduced the Hays Production Code to sieve-like proportions and are deliberately out-smarting their own document.” Feeling now that they’d been hoodwinked by Hollywood and even by Hays, and angrier than ever, the morals troops mustered again, and this time, they won. In October 1933, a new organization called the Legion of Decency, an offshoot of the Catholic Church, announced that it would be launching a movie boycott. At masses across the country, priests urged their parishioners to take a pledge condemning “vile and unwholesome moving pictures” as a “grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and religion” and promising to boycott such films. Three million people signed the pledge in 1934.

  As the boycott grew—attracting Protestants as well as Catholics, shaking movie exhibitors, and triggering calls for federal censorship of films—the producers decided they’d finally have to take their medicine, not just pretend to. “When the protests began to mount and most of Hollywood ignored them, the New York men”—the investors and distributors—“found it necessary to assert themselves,” The New York Times reported. “They recognized, when the crisis arrived, that a single studio, with a single off-color picture, might plunge the $2,500,000,000 industry into a morass of political censorship and sectarian boycott, with bankruptcy for many the inescapable result.” So, in July 1934, the producers agreed to abide by a new regime, one that would reform the system and ensure that it stayed reformed. “Hollywood, when scared, is something like a herd of elephants having a simultaneous chill,” the Times went on. “Usually the chill passes quickly. Hollywood has found it easy in the past to meet criticism by enunciating, and later amplifying, a code of ethics—and then proceeding blithely to ignore the code.” More than once, the motion picture industry had “promised, with tears in its eyes (some of them later turned out to be of the glycerine variety), to be good.” But this time around, the moviemakers really were “a bit shocked, considerably bewildered, and openly contrite.”

  The Code’s enforcement regime, now under the auspices of the pugnacious Irish Catholic and former newspaperman Joseph Breen, acquired teeth. Decisions could no longer be appealed to a pliant jury of the producers’ peers, for example. Instead, those who objected to proposed cuts and other changes would have to take up their case with an appeals board in New York, not Hollywood. All the major studios and most independent producers would need to go through the review in order to release their movies with a seal of approval. Movies were first to be reviewed as scripts—well before they were actually made.

  Breen would stay in his post till 1954, embodying a fascinatingly contradictory role in Hollywood history. He was a domineering, dogmatic man, capable of nasty eruptions of anti-Semitism, and loyal to a nearly unreconstructed Victorian morality. Yet he helmed a censorship regime under which some of Hollywood’s finest films were produced. He had taught himself a great deal about movies. He knew how to suggest changes in language that producers understood. Though some in the industry resented the Code from start to finish, many others came to regard it more as a professional code of ethics than a form of censorship and to work with it and around it in fruitful ways. Certainly, their compromises did nothing to lessen the romantic charge of a Casablanca, the subversive daffiness of Preston Sturges comedies, the warm rush of civic feeling that was, somehow, not entirely platitudinous in Frank Capra movies, the existential heebie-jeebies of film noir. Appropriately for the era of America’s great enamorment with psychoanalysis, movies of the 1940s and 1950s found covert metaphors for desire and deviance. The Code was a kind of repression, a bureaucratic equivalent of the psychological version that allowed meaning to seep around the unspoken. Compelled to deal in displacement, ambiguity, and suggestion, many of the filmmakers of the Code era learned to do so brilliantly. Some, like Alfred Hitchcock, were better working within the strictures of the Code than they were later without.

  Still, the Code regime and Breen’s lace-curtain autocracy could not last forever. Buffeted by changing mores, by the postwar invasion of (more daring) foreign films, by competition from television, and by the willingness of directors like Otto Preminger (and his studio, United Artists) to defy Breen and release movies without the official seal of approval, the Code began to crack in the 1950s and to disintegrate in the 1960s. Elite public opinion had begun to shift against it, too. In 1952, the Supreme Court would hear a case brought by a New York film distributor who had been screening a Roberto Rossellini movie called The Miracle, to which Catholic groups objected. The Court sided with the film distributor. In so doing, it reversed its 1915 ruling that “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple,” and tossed out nearly forty years of laws and practices that excluded movies from First Amendment protection. In 1968, the Production Code would be replaced by the movie ratings system we still have today (although some of the classifications have evolved). The ratings system took as its premise the idea that you could differentiate among films on the basis of their appropriateness for certain age groups, rather than assume that any movie might be seen by any child and that all movies had to be crafted with that possibility in mind.

  In the meantime, the movies that had been made between 1930 and 1934 when producers felt much less constrained by the Code—all of my father’s first movies, as it happened—languished in obscurity. Breen had particularly hated Warner Brothers. He called them the “lowest bunch we have.” Of the sixty-three movies that the Legion of Decency had banned its members from seeing in the spring of 1934, twelve had been made by Warner Brothers. Only Pa
ramount had as many on the list, while MGM and Columbia had just five each. After 1934, when Warner Brothers began applying to Breen’s office for the right to reissue their pre-Code movies, they were routinely turned down. Some pre-Code movies were lost entirely—to studio fires and more or less purposeful neglect—and others remained only in expurgated form.

  Since the 1990s, though, pre-Code films have been rediscovered. Scholarship on Hollywood censorship and the films of the early 1930s has boomed. Turner Classic Movies began showing more and more pre-Code obscurities, some of which had hardly been seen since their first release, and soon they were less obscure. Archives and revival houses began putting on pre-Code festivals. DVDs of some of the films have been released with alluring packaging and titles, as with TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection. Blogs and websites have trained hipster tastes on pre-Code movies. The cynicism and raciness of these movies struck new viewers as fresh, even startling. Watching them, you felt you’d found a peephole into the early years of the Depression; the view was narrow but vivid. And the movies were intriguing because they seemed to reveal a secret lineage of licentiousness, a kind of curatorial stamp of approval for whatever transgressing we might be doing today.

  Lyle fixing for a fight with Humphrey Bogart (actress Sheila Terry between them) in the typically lurid and still very watchable pre-Code Big City Blues.

  So I was lucky. By the time I started researching this book, there were movies of my father’s available to me that I had never been able to see before. I could immerse myself in the pre-Code world of harsh and jagged story lines, of lippy retorts and ethnic jokes, of men and women forever sizing each other up to see who “was on the level,” of gangsters and grifters and independent gals with sex on their minds and in the syncopated swing of their satin-clad hips. I could spend time in the company of actresses whose work I knew well, like Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis. And of those I knew much less about, in part because much of their best work had been pre-Code: Joan Blondell, Glenda Farrell, Kay Francis, and Ann Dvorak. I could see my father squaring off against a young and very menacing Humphrey Bogart. And I could catch glimpses of my father as a young man with an erotic charge to him, a man who was best at playing sexy but weak types, who projected a particular combination of tenderness and sensuality and a certain hollowness at the core.

  The female characters, and the actresses who played them, surprised me. It’s true that the representations of women are more complicated and contradictory in Hollywood films—even in the classic “women’s films” of the late 1930s through the late 1950s—than they are sometimes given credit for. As the film scholar Jeanine Basinger writes, those films often undermine the very stereotypes of women that they seem to embody. But it is also true that the pre-Code era gave us some images of women that are quite at odds with what came afterward and with our own stereotypes of the past.

  A few of my father’s pre-Code films, for instance, centered on the sisterly stratagems of gold diggers. The term “gold digger,” meaning a woman who married for money, first appeared in print around 1915, but it wasn’t widely used as slang until the late 1920s. And the 1930s saw the launch of a cycle of gold digger films, including the Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933 and its sequels. The characters—our heroines—were often astonishingly duplicitous and calculating. They weren’t like poor, sweet Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and they weren’t merely setting their caps for rich bachelors. In the pre-Code gold digger movies, the gals were often engaging in blackmail. They’d set married men up, for instance, making it look as though their hot-to-trot victims had been fooling around on the side when they hadn’t—at least not yet. But two things make these characters tolerable and even lovable: the movies were played for laughs by excellent comediennes, and these were gold diggers who really needed the gold. It was the Depression and they were sometimes in out-and-out danger of going hungry. “Chorus girls used to get pearls and diamonds,” says Joan Blondell in Big City Blues. “Now all they expect is a corned beef sandwich, and they yell if they don’t get it.”

  Take Havana Widows, a movie my father made in 1932 with Glenda Farrell and Joan Blondell. These two actresses, who were close friends in real life, made a great snap-crackle-and-pop pair on screen. Farrell played the tougher, more strategic, and sarcastic pal; Blondell, the sweeter though still sassy one. Glenda Farrell was a platinum blond with a wide mouth full of big square white teeth. When she talked fast, as she almost always did, it was like the strident clackety-clack of a typewriter; you half expected her to ring at the end of a sentence. She was slim and wore clothes beautifully. Blondell looked a little like Betty Boop—she was saucer-eyed, with bow lips, a curvy little figure, and a good-natured pep to her performances. In the early 1930s, she always seemed to be showing off a little more of her lovely breasts than the Code allowed, especially when she wore satin evening gowns. (“We must put brassieres on Joan Blondell,” Jack Warner pleaded in a 1933 memo to production head Hal Wallis, “and make her cover up her breasts because, otherwise, we are going to have these pictures stopped in a lot of places. I believe in showing their forms, but, for Lord’s sake, don’t let those bulbs stick out.”)

  Havana Widows is a wised-up, sharp-elbowed little comedy. Farrell and Blondell play Sadie and Mae, two hardworking chorus girls dancing in a burlesque show whose headliner, “direct from Russia,” is called “Iwanna Shakitoff.” The opening scene, where the women in their skimpy polka-dot costumes are duly shaking it (though not quite off) and exchanging wisecracks, carries a whiff of earthy realism. The girls look bored, overheated, and out of breath. That night, the show’s manager tells Mae he’s sending her over to Passaic to entertain at a smoker. “After it’s over, I want you to do a dance, you know, show ’em something.” “Is it a benefit?” she asks. “Yeah,” he fibs slowly, figuring she’ll say yes if it is. “It’s a benefit.” “Then I’m out,” Mae snaps back. “My conscience wouldn’t let me. What I’d show ’em wouldn’t benefit any of ’em.”

  Mae is fired for insubordination and Sadie gets herself sacked in solidarity. Broke but resourceful, Sadie and Mae haul themselves to Havana, where, they’ve heard, there’s money to be made by fleecing men who can be entrapped in compromising positions. Their first target is the married Deacon Jones, played by Guy Kibbee, the fat and foolish, or sometimes fat and kindly, old man in many, many Warner Brothers movies. The fact that Mae’s new love interest is Jones’s son—a debonair young fellow played by Lyle—gives her a twinge of conscience, but only a twinge. With the help of a false story and a drunken chiseler of a lawyer, Mae and Sadie lure Deacon Jones to an inn outside town. There, a couple of hired thugs strip him of his clothes down to his union suit (a sight that’s always good for a laugh in these movies, especially if the man in question is portly). Mae arrives, boobs sloshing around in her sexy black satin gown, prepared to seduce Jones into the blackmail-worthy pose in which he’ll be photographed. The poor duffer runs around shouting hoarsely for help and clutching a gingham tablecloth as a cover-up, while Mae chases him, and a crowd gathers below, hooting and howling.

  The peculiar thing is that this sadistic little spectacle is soon tied up with a cheerful ending in which our gold diggers, far from being punished, are enjoying their spoils. Deacon Jones’s wife is grateful to the blackmailing women because she’s been trying to get a divorce from him for years and now can. Sadie marries her boyfriend, a gangster’s gofer who crows, “Nobody’s been married legal in my family for the last three generations!” And Mae marries Lyle’s character, the son of the man she framed, who promises her, in lieu of eternal love, “caviar and champagne three times a day.”

  It would all feel a bit sour if it weren’t for the central relationship—which is between Sadie and Mae. Female friendship was the heartbeat of these gold digger pictures. The lead characters can be snarky about other women in their general orbit, especially those who get too hoity-toity. (“Why, that moth-eaten little
skirt!”) But to each other, the gals at the center of these films are unfailingly loyal. They strategize, commiserate, make each other laugh, buy each other drinks, dress each other up and admire their handiwork, refuse to let their friendships be torn asunder by cops, boyfriends, or producers. Surprisingly, to today’s audiences, they are often shown sharing a double bed.

  The late 1920s and early 1930s were a heyday for female comedy teams: in addition to Glenda Farrell and Joan Blondell, who went on to make five more movies together after Havana Widows, there were Marie Dressler and Polly Moran, ZaSu Pitts and Thelma Todd, and Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly. What’s striking about these partnerships and their films, as the cinema scholar Kristine Brunovska Karnick observes, is that the humor in them “is not primarily at the women’s expense.” Though the gal pals are sexy and (often) blond, they are not dumb-blond characters; they’re smart and they can talk their way out of a whole lot of trouble. They’re also independent and resourceful and they work for a living, even if their line of work is often the chorus line, with its convenient opportunities for dressing room scenes and thigh-baring high kicks. In a movie called Girl Missing, another female-comedy-team picture with Lyle as the male eye candy, Glenda Farrell’s friend warns her at one point not to get tough. “I don’t have to get tough,” she replies, “I am tough.”