West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  I learned about the tremendous intrigues that went on in Hollywood at the time: the battles for success. The plunders were so great if you succeeded. Jules Stein busting in on the agency business and grabbing movie stars—he got hold of Bette Davis at Warner Brothers. Jack was outraged and barred MCA from the lot.

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  HARRY JOE “COCO” BROWN, JR.: All the players of that generation of the thirties—Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck—were people who came with a burst of energy from nowhere and founded a business nobody had heard of before.

  Barbara Warner was my age, and we lived in a world of governesses and nannies. It was a society within a society. Now, because we’re second-generation Californians, we’re looked down on as the old aristocrats.

  But when our parents arrived, there was no tradition. When I think of that generation, I think of a style that’s gone: a style that went with large houses and invisible children and gaiety of some sort. The rest of the country was in a depression, but in Hollywood after 1930 everybody was rich.

  The Warners were always the mythic family. You had normal, run-of-the-mill people, and then you had the Warners. Their gardens were like something out of Versailles, and the projection room was extraordinary. All the up-and-coming actors would have to come over and make an appearance. After dinner, there would always be movies, and everybody would joke about them if they weren’t Warner Brothers movies. Sometimes Jack would get up in the middle of it and say, “I have to go to bed, and everybody has to go home.” It was just feudal, that kind of power.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: My father’s butler was named Rocher. Before working for my father he had worked for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. He was French and was with my father from the 1930s until the 1960s. When my father would travel, he would always take Rocher with him, even to the South of France, where he was also supposedly on vacation, but then he would want to run the house there, too. He was impeccable, a little severe and rather formal, but I liked him. He and my mother had a running battle, a war of place cards. Mother would have the table set a certain way, and he’d find a way to change it at the last moment when it was too late to change it back. He’d always change the flowers when she put roses on the table. She’d go upstairs to dress, and when she’d come back the roses would be gone. He couldn’t stand them; they smelled too strongly to be on a dining room table. He ruled the place with an iron hand. The last time I saw him, he was retired and living in Brittany. He showed me pictures of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., on an elephant in India. He was lovely.

  FROM LADY DIANA COOPER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

  We had been asked to stay in Los Angeles by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Warner….The house was beautiful, so was the hostess, and our own Rolls Royce had a better Ronald Colman at the wheel. Our rooms, bathed in sunshine, had a private terrace furnished with sofas, tables, cigarettes, books, and gin. Lying on my bed, I had only to press a button to find my room flooded by a Beethoven or Tchaikovsky symphony, not presented to me by Wrigley’s chewing gum but coming from the tennis court where Jack Warner was playing….The walls are covered in Chinese paper, the twin Chippendale beds are under a single Chippendale canopy, the carpet is rich and white, every piece of furniture is a museum piece. The lamps are Ming and sheets embroidered from hem to hem….

  Duff’s fiftieth birthday. He never groans at the passage of time. I can’t think why. The night before the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr. David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European’s peasant dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life. The morning after, being woken bedside by Ann Warner’s enchanting child of five singing, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Cooper,” I feel fine. “The climate looks after you here,” as George Gordon Moore used to say as he gulped down another demijohn of alcohol. We had lunch with the adorable Vivien Leigh in her caravan. There had been galaxies of kisses the night before, and now we had a birthday bottle of champagne, and more kisses, and back to pack for we must leave these flesh-pots of Ming and jade, these layers of Chippendale and asphodel and moly, for the desert and the war. I witnessed a fine battle between very “sound” Elsa Maxwell and a hideous Hitler agent, who turned up at Elsa’s hotel to book a room and got an avalanche of insults from Elsa in front of the manager and clientele. “I’ll have you run out of the state of California,” she said. I never hoped to hear the phrase. She’ll be as good as her word.

  Duff and I agree we could live in California. It has a radio quality of having the world in this little space. You can tune in and live your day in whatever country, art or grade of intelligence or idiocy you feel inclined for.

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  RICHARD GULLY: I remember around 1940, Jack and Ann gave a fabulous dinner party for Duff Cooper. As you know, Sir Duff Cooper was married to Lady Diana Cooper, who was one of England’s greatest beauties, and he would become the British ambassador to France. He himself was a very brilliant and good-looking man. Well, Jack gives this wonderful dinner for him, and afterwards Duff Cooper gets him in a corner. All of a sudden I see Jack beckoning to me, and, of course, I come over. And he says, “Oh, Richard, I want you to join in this conversation, because Duff is telling me all about Talleyrand.” And sure enough, Duff Cooper had the biography he’d written on Talleyrand under his arm. He wanted Jack Warner to buy it and produce the picture. Jack had never even heard of Talleyrand. This is what happens. Here you have a famous man—he comes to dinner, and he has a script idea under his arm. And that’s the story of Jack’s life. It happened to Jack all the time. I mean, never fail.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: When I was a child, there was still quite a bit of wilderness in the garden. The property was fourteen acres, and it had not yet been bricked over and bordered up and down. One side of the garden went down onto Angelo Drive: it was steep and full of weeds and trees, and I could disappear in there. One small part of the garden was landscaped into three tiers, with two bridges going over the tiers and a waterfall with pumps to recirculate the water. My mother must have had it built. During the war we kept chickens in little huts, little apartments really—twelve flights up and a chicken in each one. I thought it was very cruel: all they could do was lay eggs, and they’d be in these cages all day. I let a few of them out at one point. My dream was to have a cow there, too. I did get some little ducks, which lived in a pond at the bottom of the waterfall, and I had a rabbit hutch. The fountain outside the front of the house had goldfish and glass balls made out of Venetian glass.

  I used to go for walks with my father after dinner. He always carried a flashlight and a big cane with a rubber end to it, not because he limped but because he used it to kill snails. He hated snails. Another time he had a gun, a .22, and he shot a rabbit. He said it had been eating the lettuce and carrots in our victory garden. I was very disappointed in my father. It took me a long time to trust him again.

  During the war, our bomb shelter was behind the projection room. It must have had at least twelve bunk beds, because you couldn’t let the servants die—they were hard to find during the war. My father was terribly patriotic, and he was a lieutenant colonel in the air force.

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: During the war, I wound up as General Bradley’s assistant photo officer as a lieutenant colonel. When I got back, I commanded a reserve unit here in Hollywood and was promoted to full colonel. One day I went to the studio in uniform and went into my old man’s office and said, “Hey, you were only a lieutenant colonel, you’ve got to salute me.” He said to me, “Around here, I make the jokes.”

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: We had a golf course at our house, and at the end of the course near a little bench was a memorial to someone named Doc Salomon. The memorial had originally been at the studio, but it was moved to the
house eventually. It was a large piece of stone, about four feet square, perched on a pedestal and with a beautiful inscription that read, “In memory of Doc Salomon, who served Warner Brothers faithfully for many years and died in the service of this company in the Blitz in London on July 5, 1944.” I never knew who he was, but I loved that plaque. My husband, Cy, made up a wonderful story about how Doc Salomon was the studio accountant who kept a double set of books and had been killed trying to get them out of the office during the Blitz. Much later, Jack Warner, Jr. told me the real story. Doc Salomon wasn’t a doctor, but his father was and he had been the one who delivered Jack Warner, Jr. The doctor’s son was later called “Doc” because in the early days they had to have someone on the set who knew about first aid, and he did. So he became “Doc.” During the war, Doc Salomon had a position at the Warner office in London. One night he came home and found his wife with someone else. As Jack Jr. said, “He forgot to knock.” Very disturbed, the poor man left to sleep at the office, where he received a phone call from America saying they needed someone to tape the sound of the German bombers for a movie. So he and a whole sound crew went up on the roof, and they were all wiped out. A nightmare.

  Not long after that, there was a labor strike at the studio. Joy’s father, Don, was working at Warners at the time and was involved in fighting the strikers and turning the water hoses on them. A note was sent to my family threatening to scatter our bones all over our golf course; a map was enclosed to show where the different pieces would be buried. After that, I always looked at the golf course differently, wondering exactly where which parts would be. Children have a certain cruel streak.

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  RING LARDNER, JR.: The Conference of Studio Unions, or the CSU—led by Herbert Sorrell and the rival of the IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—started a strike in 1945. A man named Roy Brewer came into the picture as the local leader of the IATSE and was the one trying to help the studios break the strike. Brewer was also a main organizer of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and he was pretty fanatical. I had no contact with him, really, but he may have had something to do with bringing people round from the liberal fold.

  During the war, we communists opposed any strike because everybody was supposed to be concentrating on the war effort, so there was a no-strike agreement. We were sympathetic to the cause but not to the strike at that time. But as soon as the war was over we supported the strike, as did most of the liberals in Hollywood. This was the issue that really got Jack Warner. He had been a fairly liberal man, a supporter of Roosevelt, but the strike was particularly nasty at Warner Brothers, with the studio police beating up picketers. A lot of us went in sympathy in picket lines outside of Warners. That was the big issue in Hollywood that year, and we were very much in opposition to what Brewer stood for. Those strikes helped lead to HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee], certainly.

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  ROY BREWER: I reshaped Reagan’s life, though I don’t brag about that. He was on the other side, a liberal Democrat, and he was playing right into their hands. They called the strike while he was high up in the guild and I was head of the union. I belonged to the IATSE, really a wonderful organization guided by the principles of the old American Federation of Labor. I took the position that people like Reagan and others in this movement were honest people who were deceived. If they were seduced by a clever program to get them in, and the communists wouldn’t let them out, we had an obligation to help them because they were just as much a victim as anybody else was. See, the great tragedy of our day is that we completely underestimated the power of the communist enemy. I really want to make you understand that the real problem is that nobody hardly understands the real nature of the enemy we had.

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  SETH ROSENFELD: There was a union dispute between the Conference of Studio Unions, Herbert Sorrell’s upstart group, and the older IATSE. Reagan was part of a Screen Actors Guild committee that looked into it, and they decided to side with the established IATSE. Reagan viewed Sorrell as under communist influence, and he concluded that the communists were using what he called a “jurisdictional dispute” over which unions would have which territory as a way to disrupt Hollywood—essentially, as part of a communist plot.

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  HERBERT SORRELL (FROM HERBERT KNOTT SORRELL’S “SCRAPBOOKS ABOUT LOS ANGELES AND THE HOLLYWOOD STRIKE, 1945–1947”): The Conference of Studio Unions was a group of unions, most of whom were organized by us, who started with the painters and others who joined us to benefit in the better working conditions that we had been able to negotiate….

  In March 1945, the strike was on in earnest. The producers began to hire scabs. There was a lot of violence, but not enough, and they began to try to make pictures without us. The strike ran into weeks and months, and something had to be done….We decided the next move would be a mass picket line on one of the studios. Just pick out one studio and hammer it good….We finally decided on Warner Brothers.

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  ROY BREWER: The CSU called a strike. This was not the first penetration of labor by the Communist Party. The communists were behind it all, and Sorrell was the front man. Sorrell said he wasn’t a communist and that was technically true, but whether a man has a card in the Communist Party is beside the point because the real communists are hidden. I said to my boss Richard Walsh, the president of the IATSE, “This is a communist strike. The only way you are going to win is to destroy them before they destroy you. And there is no use in trying to do it piecemeal because they will just whittle away at you. So we have to take a stand against the communists in this.” I rented a home across the street from Warner Brothers, and I was in communication with the people on the inside. We took our people through that picket line. It was a rough time. The communists planned the violence. About 150 people went to the hospital in one day. The strike never ended really, though there was a settlement made in the latter part of 1945. See, I studied the communist movement and that is how I won this strike.

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  RING LARDNER, JR.: I saw people who were picketing being beaten and hosed. They were mass picketing, not actually blocking the entrance to the studio but just trying to discourage people from going in. There was quite a lot of violence. The head of the Warner studio police, Blayney Matthews, was an American fascist type, very much against unions, and he led this business of attacking the picket lines when there was no real cause for it. That made Warner Brothers a particular target of liberals and radicals.

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  HARRY JOE “COCO” BROWN, JR.: During the strikes, there were stories about the unions throwing acid at the cars of studio executives as they drove through the Warner Brothers gates. The strikes were very bitter. This was a different era, one of industrial America where the two sides were still fighting it out.

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: My father more or less volunteered to testify; he wasn’t subpoenaed. He wanted to be a friendly witness. I think someone got to him and said, “They’re going to jump all over Warner Brothers for making Mission to Moscow and Action in the North Atlantic,” which were pictures that portrayed Russia—our ally at the time—in a friendly light. So he went to Washington with a prepared speech, but he got nervous and fell apart. You could see the sweat running off his face. The cameras and the lights were on him, and he knew he was making a fool of himself. He volunteered names—some of which he retracted at a later hearing. He just grabbed at names. He named the Epsteins, Julie and Philip, maybe because they were bald; I’m surprised he didn’t name Bette Davis as a communist. We walked out together afterward with a couple of our lawyers, and he said to me, “I didn’t do good, did I? I shouldn’t have given names. I was a schmuck.” I was tempted to say, “Yes, you were,” but I didn’t. He was taken for one hell of a ride.

  It was so easy to look back and say, “We shouldn’t have made those movies.” But Warners made Mission to Moscow because Franklin D. Roosevelt had called
my father into the Oval Office and said, “Our allies the Russians think we hate them. We’re doing all we can, but can you make a picture that will show them in a light the American people will be friendly toward?” And that’s what they did. And Warners led the way in that kind of gutsy, visceral picture. They made Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which was almost prematurely anti-Fascist, and finally had to close up all their offices in Nazi-occupied areas. Their head of distribution in Germany was murdered on the street. And this was before we had even entered the war. You would never have seen Louis B. Mayer making Confessions of a Nazi Spy. He was making Grand Hotel and frothy things like that. Harry Warner was violently anti-Nazi. His father had taken him and Albert out of Poland/Russia—the countries were mixed up then—because the Cossacks were doing the things the Nazis did later. It was the same feeling.

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  ARTHUR MILLER: Mission to Moscow was made to warm up the American people toward the Russians. Everybody I knew thought it was terrific, because for the first time the Russians were seen in a sympathetic light. Without that sympathy, of course, we never could have collaborated with them in the war, and Hitler would have loved that. I think the movie had an important influence. I’m sure the instructions came from Washington to make that film. The studios normally steered clear of any contentious stuff like that. It was absolutely unprecedented; Hollywood never made films like that. It was unheard-of. We were in never-never land, and if you got out of never-never land with one toe, it would be an amazement.

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  JACK WARNER, JR.: Harry Warner was an honorable man who did what he could do. He tried to get Roosevelt to open up America to the refugees coming from Europe and he talked to him about opening up Alaska: if they couldn’t let them into this country, Alaska was empty, let the Jews settle there, they can adapt to any kind of weather. Nothing happened. The State Department was occupied by a bunch of your average Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale Ivy League types. I won’t say they were anti-Semitic, but they weren’t anti-Nazi at that point.