One day in 1938, Salka Viertel was lunching at the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Mrs. Viertel was Austrian, and married to Berthold Viertel, a director. They had come to Hollywood in 1928 and lived in a house on Mabery Road in Santa Monica that was a salon for creative people, especially refugees. Salka Viertel was very close to Garbo; she had worked on the scripts of several of her pictures, including Queen Christina and Anna Karenina.
That day at the Brown Derby, she saw an old friend in the restaurant, Melchior Lengyel, an Hungarian playwright. She told Lengyel that M-G-M had come up with a new sales tag: they wanted to make a movie they could advertise as “Garbo Laughs” in just the way Anna Christie had been sold on “Garbo Talks.” All they needed was the film. Do you have any ideas? she asked Lengyel. He said he’d think about it. Next day he called Mrs. Viertel and told her, yes, he did have something. “Come over to the house and tell her,” said Mrs. Viertel.
By the time Lengyel got to Mabery Road, Garbo was swimming in the pool. She stroked over to the side and put her elbows on the tiling. She was naked. “Well?” she asked.
And Lengyel said, “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all.”
In a few days, the studio had paid $15,000 for those three sentences. Months later, Lengyel was nominated for the original story of Ninotchka, a picture that would not have been possible but for a quartet of Europeans who, one way or another, had come to the land of restaurants, pools, and fanciful money. As Ninotchka got under way it was agreed that Ernst Lubitsch, a Berliner, would direct it. Lubitsch had only lately returned from a visit to Moscow. He had gone there with high hopes, for in the late 1930s there were many in America, and among the Mabery Road crowd, who felt optimistic about the Soviet Union. But in Moscow, Lubitsch had been soured on the whole venture. He tried to meet Eisenstein, but was refused. He came home early, and though he never talked about the experience publicly, he was not the same man politically.
A small group of writers took over from Lengyel to do the script, including Walter Reisch (another Austrian) and the team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. Samuel Wilder had been born in Sucha, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1906 and trained for the law. But he never pursued that career. He became a gigolo, a journalist, and then a screenwriter, and in 1934 he came to America. (He sailed on the Aquitania because he wanted to practice his English.) He took the Twentieth Century Limited and the Super Chief to Los Angeles, his English getting sharper by the mile, and he soon found work as a screenwriter. He was drawn to Lubitsch, not just because of their similar histories, but because Wilder loved Lubitsch’s bittersweet tone. And so they made Ninotchka together, and Wilder was part of the collective wit that allowed for this exchange. As Ninotchka arrives in Paris, the three trade delegates she has been ordered to investigate meet her at the train station.
“How are things in Moscow?” they ask.
“Very good,” she answers. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer—but better—Russians.”
You may wince at that. (Taste is going to be Billy Wilder’s tightrope.) And it is likely that in 1939 not many in the American audience knew what it meant. (Ninotchka opened in October 1939.) You may say it is no fit way to deal with the millions who died in Soviet Russia on the orders of the nation’s leaders. And Lubitsch and Wilder and the others on the picture felt that Communists, no matter their intellectual integrity, lacked humor. But then you might consider the estimate of Maurice Zolotow, who wrote in the first real book on Wilder (in 1977) that “This movie is the most sublime and passionate political picture ever made in Hollywood.”
1930s Hollywood
It was the best of times and the worst, and movies were the spit that was meant to hold the whole show together. The year 1933 saw the first speech by Chancellor Hitler (February 10) and the union of Astaire and Rogers in Flying Down to Rio (December 29). The movies assumed that the times would get better, but that might depend on Fred outlasting Adolf. It is a moment of crisis in which entertainment cannot be separated from politics, no matter how hard the business leaders tried to ignore the link. So there was an extensive and high-minded attempt to make pictures (and their viewers) more patriotic, while most viewers guessed that survival was the pressing test. So diversions were in order. In King Kong (it opened in April 1933), Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) is broke and starving, but the picture tells her the real thing to be afraid of is an enormous (though well-intentioned) ape.
Everything was happening at once. The movies were central in the crisis, and in crisis themselves as a business, but now radio was breathless with the simultaneity. Between 1930 and 1932, the price of a radio in America fell by half. Four million receivers were purchased, and by 1934 the medium reached 60 percent of the country. Census figures had nearly half the U.S. population living in rural areas, where the dark ruled at night. There were movie theaters within reach, but the small light in the radio was their rival, even if reception fluctuated in the remote places.
Not even rural distance could escape the outer world. Adolf Hitler was a voice on radio before most citizens in the United States knew what he looked like. Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4. A few days later he put the banks on compulsory holiday. And the new president immediately seized on radio: the first fireside chat, on March 12, 1933, was about the banking crisis. Two days later there was a 6.4 earthquake in Long Beach that killed 115 people, and for those impressionable storytellers in Southern California show business, it could not be missed as a metaphor. If this seems like ancient history, we still have crises that resonate with symbolic meaning. As earthquake, tsunami, and radiation struck Japan in 2011, America was hearing about its own fiscal downfall. But in 2011 there were so few movies that dealt with our troubles, or offered a delightful distraction from them.
In the 1930s the movies shared in the nation’s troubles. Thirty-four million Americans were officially without income in 1933. From 1929 to 1933, national income dropped by half. Average weekly movie attendance in the United States sank as follows: 1930—80 million; 1931—70 million; 1932—55 million; 1933—50 million. And in 1933 the population of the country was 125 million. (Today the population is close to 300 million, and weekly attendance at movie theaters is 30 million—in a good week.) Ticket prices were lowered: the average went from thirty cents to twenty. But the production cost of movies doubled, if only because of the heavy investment required to soundproof studios, to equip theaters for sound, and to pay the new generation of talent who could make talking pictures. This entailed composers, songs, and music. But it meant the introduction of a generation of great stars who are still household names: Astaire, Bette Davis, Cagney, Bogart, Dietrich, Laughton, Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Shirley Temple, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant, and the talent that could write their best lines.
Nearly every movie studio suffered in the impossible equation of costs and revenue. From 1930 to 1932, Paramount went from a profit of $18.4 million to a loss of $21.0 million. That was characteristic. Even Loew’s Inc. (the parent company of M-G-M), the only operation to avoid serious failure, had its profits drop from $15.0 million to $4.3 million from 1930 to 1933. Every other enterprise suffered bankruptcy, or major reconstruction. Fox disappeared, to be replaced as Twentieth Century–Fox. The damage was done at the local level, too. From the late 1920s until 1933, the number of theaters in America fell from 23 thousand to 18 thousand.
This history puts a spotlight on the success at M-G-M and the reign of its two chiefs, Louis B. Mayer and Irving G. Thalberg. The two men were very different. Mayer was older by fourteen years, and he would outlive Thalberg by another twenty-one. Neither had had a higher education, though Mayer had learned to survive the power of the tsar, migratory poverty, and the brutality of his own father. For Thalberg the worst threats were the fragility of his constitution and overattention from his mother. Mayer’s name wa
s in the logo for M-G-M movies, but Thalberg was reluctant to be credited up there on the screen. Neither man thought of himself as an artist or a creator, because each believed there were more important tasks. And no student of film should overlook that assumption just because we don’t have men like Mayer and Thalberg anymore.
They were bosses, for sure, though beholden to the authority of Nick Schenck in the East, the head of Loew’s and the man who would eventually get rid of Mayer. They were editors, if you like, akin to the overseers of newspapers or magazines. Thalberg had the talents of a screenwriter and an editor, and Mayer was known as the most habitual actor on the Metro lot—to deal with him was to be caught up in a scenario where he was always right. And “rightness,” or family, social, and patriotic propriety, were at the heart of the movies he wanted to preside over. Thalberg was more enlightened, but only marginally. Still, he was smart or self-conscious enough to see that he was in a position to permit himself some risk-taking in the overall programming of M-G-M films—averaging more than forty pictures a year in the time of their partnership (1924–36).
Thus, in one year, 1932, Thalberg personally produced and encouraged Freaks and gave the go-ahead to Tugboat Annie. The first was a criminal melodrama set in the circus and peopled by unseparated twins, bearded ladies, dwarves, giants, and other “handicapped” creatures—the material of the film’s blunt title. The actors came from the circus itself. The film was directed by Tod Browning (who has a high reputation in suspense and horror). It was never more than sixty-four minutes (though it was often abbreviated further for taste) and it cost only a little over $300,000. But it was made at the studio of sunshine and domestic order.
Another producer at the studio, Harry Rapf, warned against the film. When they have seen it, he said, “people run out of the commissary and throw up.” Thalberg took responsibility. He said he should be blamed—and he held to that when the film never made its money back. He added that he felt Metro should not dodge the new horror genre, launched at Universal with Dracula and Frankenstein, both of them big hits, but adroitly set up to frighten and reassure the public. Freaks, by contrast, is still honored as a Hollywood movie that defies every concern for comfort in the factory system. I doubt it could be made today—there would be protests at the exploitation of the disadvantaged cast members.
But there it is, side by side with Tugboat Annie, produced by the same Harry Rapf, as a continuation of the unexpected screen chemistry established between Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery in Min and Bill from the previous year. Dressler was sixty-five in 1933, and she is the outstanding example in movie history of an actress being not just a star but also the object of public adoration, when she was beyond glamour or conventional attractiveness. Beery was only forty-eight, but as he said himself, “Like my dear old friend, Marie Dressler, my ugly mug has been my fortune.”
Of course, it’s easier for a man to be “ugly.” Beery had a long history already: he could be a villain, a figure of fun, or a weary survivor—he had played Magua in the 1921 Last of the Mohicans; he had won the Oscar as the battered boxer in The Champ (1931); and down the road he would play Pancho Villa and Long John Silver for M-G-M. He and Dressler had been paired in Min and Bill as lowlife waterfront types with hearts of rough gold. It was for that film, a hit, that Dressler won the Oscar.
Beery and Dressler were contract stars, just like all the others. They were signed up by M-G-M and expected to make the pictures offered to them. Most of the contracts lasted seven years, with clear-cut raises in salary as the years passed. Some of the stars called this servitude, and Bette Davis worked as furiously as a Davis character to escape her Warners deal. But the studios looked after their preferred properties, and many stars built their reputation on the scripts, the camerawork, and the supporting players provided by the studio. Part of what Davis got out of Warners was Marked Woman (1937), Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid (1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Letter (1940), Now, Voyager (1942), and Mr. Skeffington (1944).
The reunion of Beery and Dressler in Tugboat Annie exceeded expectations. The film is about a married couple who run a tugboat, but it’s really about the liberated humor and ham in the players. It’s a vehicle, like most Hollywood pictures of the 1930s—they would not have been made except to showcase their stars. One reason directors felt their power or authorship was modest was knowing most of the audience never read their names. Mayer and Thalberg were happy to run the show that way, and they regarded directors as figures to be assigned, along with other craftsmen and technicians, studio space and budgeted funds. Tugboat Annie cost just over $600,000 and it made twice that sum in profits.
No one was fonder of Dressler than Louis B. Mayer; she was an ideal recipient of his sentimentality. She was the epitome of the amusing yet trouble-free old age that Mayer and Hollywood idealized. It assists the total stress on youthfulness if old people are uncomplaining “characters.” In fact, Dressler looked older than her real age. In the 1930s, Americans (even well-paid stars) were not as healthy as they are now. (Clark Gable was only thirty-eight when he played Rhett Butler, roughly the age of Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, but they might be father and son.)
Marie Dressler had cancer at the end, though apparently she was unaware of this. Mayer encouraged that ignorance and told doctors to keep the news from her. But on location in Seattle, shooting Tugboat Annie, the actress saw a little cottage and told a publicity man she loved it. Whereupon, the story goes, Mayer had the studio buy the cottage and transport it down to Santa Barbara where the actress lived. So that the dying actress could sit in it during her last days! The screen can become your world, your residence.
It’s a lovely story, good enough for a Dressler picture, but is it true? Such questions are a necessary response to the influence of the Hollywood system, out of which publicity and promotion passed into folklore, leaving legends so hard to confirm or deny that they undermine proof itself. It was regular practice for the studios to run articles, photographs, and interviews on their stars that were essentially fabricated. “Events” were fabricated. The atmosphere and values of a certain kind of movie story and its publicity have seeped into American culture as a whole, along with the overall hope that stories might be true. There is a moment common to two John Ford pictures—Fort Apache (1948) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)—at which characters surveying the “history” of the West say, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Some Ford enthusiasts rejoice in that despairing attitude and may have to come to terms with an America in which people know and trust less and less. Suppose the legend says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? It is a dangerous resignation, and it may sustain deplorable educational standards in the land of the free. The chief source for the Marie Dressler house story is Samuel Marx, a pleasant man and the author of the book Mayer and Thalberg (1975), who was himself employed for decades at M-G-M—as a story editor.
The pact Mayer and Thalberg made was in identifying their audience. For that they had to be a mixture of showmen, businessmen, and discreet political leaders such as had never existed before. In other words, their provision of a light for the masses is a part of national history (and the eclipsing of true history) and a thrust that would be reproduced in other countries. Adam Curtis’s polemical documentary series The Century of the Self (2002) tracks the dire history of publicity with vigor and wit; it was made by the BBC.
Mayer and Thalberg came from humble origins, though Thalberg’s family had a modest import business, and he graduated from high school in Brooklyn and considered going to Columbia. Within a few years of their alliance (in 1924), Mayer was said to be the highest-salaried man in America ($800,000 a year by 1927—in the same year, Garbo, signed up by Mayer himself, was on $3000 a week), while Thalberg had a high income and responsibility for a package of movies that had a profound influence in America. Still, Mayer was the senior of the two and the better paid. Others would have said Thalberg was the more
enlightened and the easier to work with, which only spurred Mayer’s feelings of rivalry. They were partners, but they watched their backs, and Mayer relied on Irving’s dying young—for that reason he told his two daughters not to entertain romantic thoughts for the slender, dark, very attractive, and very smart Thalberg. Irving was never well, and his death in 1936, at thirty-seven, may have been the first notable occasion on which enough people said that Hollywood was dying, too.
Mr. Mayer would not admit it to himself, but he was not handsome, or ingratiating. He survived much longer (he died in 1957), by which time he had lost his job and his illusions. But his plainness was something he had in common with Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery and with those millions of customers who lived out of the light.
As the Depression set in, it was clear that the studios were making their money from increasingly impoverished people by selling them a dream of infinite success and remote happiness. They could tell the world and themselves that the movies preached the gospel that anyone could make it in America, and Mayer was generous with uplifting stories of his own journey. But that message was akin to the promotion that would come out of the Las Vegas casinos twenty years and more later: anyone can win. Exactly right, but only with the corollary that nearly everyone will lose. Except the house.
So it’s instructive to clarify the creative character of the house, and to spell out the ways in which it defied or excluded the thing we call art. An example of this is the relationship between M-G-M and Thalberg and the director King Vidor, who is one of the most appealing talents in American film from the 1920s through to the 1950s, and someone interested in the issues that held a mass medium and a modern society together.
Vidor—he was actually named King—was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1894. His family was of Hungarian descent, but his father was a successful cotton factor in Galveston. So King was in the city on September 8, 1900, when winds of 135 miles per hour struck. About eight thousand people died (four times the number lost to Katrina), and the six-year-old King saw how “All the wooden structures of the town were flattened. The streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out. On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.”
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