by M. G. Lord
From an early age, Taylor saw close-up the difference between the starry-eyed, media portrayal of marriage and the reality of her parents’ business alliance. Francis had his own life and lovers; Sara, hers—including a brief affair in 1946 with Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, while he was making Life with Father, a movie that featured Elizabeth. But the Wedding-Industrial Complex, which arose in the 1950s alongside the Military-Industrial one, needed the shimmering myth of romantic love to unload its products. It needed to show people what to covet. And movie stars—whose lives were invented by studio publicists and embellished by fan magazines—made excellent teaching tools.
In the early years of Taylor’s career, Sara and Elizabeth played the press—and, in particular, power brokers like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—like a fine Stradivarius. If all the world loves a lover, mother and daughter made sure Elizabeth was perceived as such. In 1948, during the filming of Julia Misbehaves, Elizabeth met Glenn Davis—an all-American football player from West Point, so chisled and hunky that he seemed invented by central casting. During the filming of Little Women, she tantalized fans with their romance, announcing that they were “engaged to be engaged.” But when Davis shipped off to the Korean War, her attention strayed—to a richer if somewhat less hunky prospect, William D. Pawley Jr. Upon his return, Davis squired Taylor to the 1949 Academy Awards, but shortly thereafter bolted, much to the delight of Pawley, who immediately proposed.
Despite his wealth, Pawley had many shortcomings. Poolside photos reveal that he was intensely hirsute, not unlike the Neanderthals who informed his views of women. Pawley believed that wives should stay home and be supported by their husbands. While in earshot of the fan magazines, Taylor claimed to think this was a swell idea. But later in 1949, when director George Stevens came calling, Taylor did what actors are trained to do. She revealed her character through action, swiftly giving Pawley the boot. The couple ended their engagement.
Stevens wanted Taylor for a project unlike anything he had previously directed. For over a decade, he had whipped up first-rate mainstream fare—comedies, musicals, and adventure stories—with stars like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, and Katharine Hepburn. He earned an Oscar nomination in 1943 for The More the Merrier. But World War II changed him. From 1943 to 1946, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he headed a film unit that helped record the D-Day invasion. His unit bore witness to the horror of the Duben labor camp and the Dachau concentration camp—footage he later edited to prosecute war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. After he returned to Hollywood, his films examined aspects of American society that, unchecked, might permit a dangerous slide from liberty to fascism. He explored class prejudice, racial bigotry, and the injustices of capitalism.
On its surface, the part that Stevens proposed—Angela Vickers in A Place in the Sun—was one at which Taylor had excelled: a rich girl. But he needed her to be something more: the “dream girl,” every man’s ideal, a woman so poised, wealthy, and desirable that a wrong-side-of-the-tracks fellow like George Eastman had to view her as unattainable. In a memo to William Meiklejohn, head of casting at Paramount, Stevens explained why Angela’s perfection was essential to the plot. When George Eastman grasps that Angela Vickers is not beyond his reach, that he can, in fact, “have her, he is willing to commit murder and does to bring this about.”
Angela’s character, Stevens continued, is “the fundamental part of the machinery that goes to make the whole story work in relationship to its audience, and to keep the audience in a frame of mind that is sympathetic to all that it portrays.”
For the role of Alice Tripp—the factory girl whom George impregnates—Stevens made a list of thirty actresses to consider. For Angela, he could think of only one: Taylor.
“Angela is not bound by the need to follow her father’s grave conventions, because her own qualities would fit her for any world she chose to enter—be it rich or poor, bohemian or snobbish, pleasure-loving or serious,” Stevens and screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown elaborated in a later memo. She rebels against the conformity and self-importance of her social circle. Not because she is a budding communist, but because such rules and rigidity “spoil and limit the world in which she alone is able to move with complete ease.”
Did Taylor know what she was getting into? Kitty Kelley thinks not. MGM’s Little Red School House did not serve its child actors well. In 1949, Kelley says, Taylor was barely educated and understood little beyond the price of a cashmere sweater. Taylor mostly took the part, Kelley suspects, to interrupt her servitude at MGM. But whatever propelled Taylor—instinct, intuition, maternal prodding, or escape—hardly matters. When the reviews came out, the Taylor brand soared. “Elizabeth Taylor is a joy to watch,” Hollis Alpert wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature. “One had somehow never conceived of the glamorized creature as an actress.”
Time magazine applauded Taylor’s “tenderness,” and the motivation her portrayal of Angela provided for George’s behavior. But its reviewer was not blind to the film’s underlying message, which involved reproductive rights. In its “boldest scene,” Time writes, Shelley Winters, as Alice Tripp, “gropes, on the choked-up brink of tears, for a tactful way to ask a doctor for an abortion.”
4
A Place in the Sun, 1951
Your problem is this: You have no money, no husband, and you don’t dare tell your parents—perhaps—the truth. In relation to these difficulties, Miss Hamilton, I have but one duty—to see that you give birth to a healthy child.
—Doctor Wyland addressing Alice Hamilton (precursor to Alice Tripp) in A Place in the Sun. (This draft by Michael Wilson is dated November 23, 1949.)
You understand that the foregoing suggestions are made merely in the hope that we can be helpful to you in salvaging what we realize is a very tense and dramatic scene. We must again say, however, that we cannot accept any suggestion of the subject of abortion.
—Joseph I. Breen, Vice President and Director, Production Code Administration, in a letter to Luigi Luraschi, Director of Censorship, Paramount Pictures
BEFORE WE EXTEND our thumb and hitchhike with Montgomery Clift into the opening scene of A Place in the Sun, we need to look at the obstacle that George Stevens—or any director with integrity—faced in telling a nuanced story before 1968. Film is a mass medium. It can open the eyes of people to things that powerful institutions might prefer them to ignore. By the 1930s, one such institution, the Roman Catholic Church, realized that it needed to protect its flock from ideas that might challenge its primacy. And it did. For more than thirty years, a group of zealous American lay Catholics successfully connived to control and distort the content of American cinema.
Hollywood has never been a Protestant universe. In his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, historian Neal Gabler explains how in the early twentieth century, recent immigrants, such as Taylor’s boss, Louis B. Mayer, used films to invent an America so wholesome and “American” that it couldn’t possibly exist. Then they colonized the imaginations of less recent immigrants—the moviegoing public—with what they made up. Mayer was no fan of communists or intellectuals, but he cared more about entertainment than ideology. In 1934, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency and The Commonweal, a Roman Catholic publication, threatened the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America with a massive boycott of all Hollywood’s so-called immoral movies. They organized not just Catholics, but churchgoers of many denominations. A boycott of this magnitude would never have been good for the studios, but during the Great Depression it would have destroyed them. To avert certain disaster, the MPPDA caved.
The censors instituted a set of guidelines known as the Production Code, or the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, a former U.S. postmaster general and Republican National Committee chairman, who became president of the MPPDA in 1922. This was not a shining moment for Hollywood. A year earlier, comic actor Fatty Arbuckle had allegedly raped and murdered a wo
man while he was on a drinking spree in San Francisco. The tabloids had a field day—speculating on what foreign objects Arbuckle might have used to perpetrate the alleged rape. Although Arbuckle was later acquitted, the illegal boozing (Prohibition ran from 1920 until 1933) and sordid details led to an outcry against the film industry.
The Hays office was ostensibly secular; Hays was not a Roman Catholic. But his chief enforcer, Joseph I. Breen, was an ardent, Irish-American lay Catholic. Before 1934, Breen was also an open anti-Semite, making him an odd choice for a liaison with Hollywood. “These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,” Breen wrote to Reverend Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., the editor of the Jesuit magazine America, after a visit to Los Angeles in 1932. “People whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out there and wax fat on it. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”
In 1932, however, Breen’s slurs were not “eccentric utterances,” wrote his biographer, Thomas Doherty. Such remarks—and worse—were commonplace among some gentiles until “Nazi genocide made outspoken anti-Semitism déclassé in polite conversation.” Regardless of how Breen may have felt in private, he repudiated such prejudice in public, joining both the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Committee of Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism. And the Code itself forbade mocking all religions, not just Breen’s.
The Production Code was written by Martin Quigley, Chicago-based editor of an obscure magazine about the movie industry, and Daniel Lord, a Jesuit, also from Chicago. Both were dedicated to preserving the foundations of a tidy, authoritarian society: the church, the government, and the family. (No, Lord is not a relative—though I did check since my extended family numbers several priests.) Lord and Quigley saw no need to regulate books or plays. If you were literate enough to read an idea-driven book or see a thought-provoking play, you likely were already lost—on the dangerous path to intellectual autonomy. But they feared the ubiquity—and persuasiveness—of movies.
The Code took a three-pronged approach. It forbade sympathetic portrayals of “sin”; it forbade ridicule of the law; and it required films to depict “the correct standards of life.” Lord and Quigley never specified what those standards included, but they did detail what they didn’t: nakedness, drug use, irreverence (to religion or the flag), adultery, sexual “perversion,” and “miscegenation.”
Although the Code has come to be associated with purging sex from movies, improper display of the U.S. flag was as severe an infraction as sodomy. In fairness, however, the Code had at least one good idea. Lord thought movies should be vague about criminal methods—lest they serve as a how-to manual for crooks.
Breen loved to put his fingerprints on all studio products, even innocuous ones like National Velvet. In a letter to Mayer, he bristled at Velvet’s allusion to puberty: “Please omit the action of Velvet tapping her chest and the line ‘I am flat as a boy.’ ” He also objected to Velvet’s sister rushing through grace after dinner: “This prayer must not be garbled but must be delivered straight.” And he opposed showing Velvet in a locker room with “semi-nude jockeys.” If the scene “is to be retained at all,” he wrote, “all concerned will have to be fully clothed.” Happily, Brown and Berman ignored the last directive, which would have made for an implausible locker room. They permitted some jockeys to change their shirts.
The Production Code Administration worked assiduously to remove all substance from A Place in the Sun. But Stevens overcame many of its efforts through the performance that he obtained from Taylor. The censors held sway over scripts. But A Place in the Sun conveyed more on screen than it did on paper because of all the nonverbal, primitive things that Taylor expressed, both subliminally and overtly.
Taylor spoke directly to our ancient aft-brain—our amygdala—the repository of love, hate, fear, and lust. On paper, in a love scene, having Angela whisper, “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all,” would have seemed inane. In the film, the line, which was modified by Stevens during shooting, overrides our prefrontal cortex. Like a heat-seeking missile, it hones in on that aft-brain. Scan the brain of a viewer during that scene, and you would likely see the amygdala light up.
I doubt Stevens planned to short-circuit the audiences’ prefrontal cortex. As an artist, he was operating from a place deep within his primal brain, accessing a palate of emotion, struggling to arouse certain feelings in the viewer. This was, of course, precisely what the Church feared—the power of music and image to provoke an emotional response. A power it knew well and drew upon in its rituals.
Color movies were commonplace in the 1940s. But for A Place in the Sun, Stevens wisely chose black-and-white. Censors see the world in polar opposites: good and evil, right and wrong, black and white. But the beauty of a black-and-white movie is that its frames are rarely all one tone or the other. Like life itself, the film unfolds in shades of gray.
To read the thick file of correspondence between Joseph I. Breen and Luigi Luraschi, Paramount’s Director of Censorship,* you would think A Place in the Sun had only two characters, Alice Tripp and the doctor who refused to give her an abortion. In Theodore Dreiser’s novel, the doctor is merely cold and unhelpful. But with Breen’s guidance through several drafts of the script, the doctor becomes first callous and judgmental, then sanctimonious and punishing.
Happily, Shelley Winters, like Taylor, had the acting chops to convey what was going on in Alice’s head, despite Breen’s revisions. Her stricken eyes, her swallowed tears, and the catch in her voice alert us to her anguish. As does her bitter sarcasm when George asks what the doctor told her: “I’m going to have a healthy baby.”
These nonverbal messages are key, because at one point Breen wanted Alice to fix her makeup, straighten her clothing, and deliver a lecture on the sociological implications of unwed pregnancy—not something a bewildered girl would be likely to do. “We feel this story needs a voice for morality, between George and Alice,” Breen wrote. “We think that, at about this page, either one of them, preferably Alice, should take some cognizance of the moral wrong of their predicament, as well as its social implications.”
Breen also muzzled Clift: “George’s line, ‘I’ll think of something,’ together with the action indicated on page 65, will be unacceptable if it suggests George is thinking about consulting an abortionist. This entire element of contemplated abortion is unacceptable and could not be approved.”
Breen seemingly wanted the actors to convey details about pregnancy to the audience through telepathy: “Please rewrite the following speech by Alice. ‘The first night you came here … remember? You said I wouldn’t have to worry. You said nothing would happen, remember?’ Please omit the underlined words in Alice’s line: ‘Well—it’s happened.’ ”
A rich girl in Alice’s “predicament” would likely not have had a predicament. Such a girl’s parents could at least afford to offer her a medical way out. But Breen strove to perpetuate Alice’s misery, her tragic lack of options: “Please omit the following dialog—the last line being definitively suggestive of abortion: ‘Oh. No change at all? Oh. Just the same? No, I haven’t thought of anything yet.’ ”
Reading Breen’s letters makes clear Stevens’s directorial choices. He had to find symbolic ways to convey, for example, gnawing sexual desire because Breen would nix anything explicit. A neon sign—VICKERS—pulsates outside George’s window; such a sign might well exist in a town where Angela’s father is a captain of industry. Likewise, George’s seduction of Alice is a tour de force of implication. Stevens conjures, through the urgent beat of a radio song, the moment when Alice’s love and loneliness overcome her restraint. As Time magazine explained, “The players, barely visible as dim silhouettes, are no less Stevens’ raw materials than the sounds, shadows and camera movements. And he molds and shapes them into probably the frankest, most provocative scene of its kind yet filmed in Hollywood.”
Stev
ens doesn’t cut nervously between actors. He plants the camera at a distance, and lingers. Still, his choices leave no confusion about which character we should observe. When, for instance, Alice tells George that she’s “in trouble,” we see the back of her head—the better to focus on George, whose turbulent feelings pass across his face like the shadows of clouds.
Stevens uses close-ups sparingly, heightening their effect. When Clift embraces Taylor, they fill the screen. We cannot turn away. She whispers, “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.”
When I first tried to watch A Place in the Sun, I couldn’t view it all the way through. Stevens had gotten to me. I felt his characters’ pain. I also felt powerless against a vague, inexorable evil to which only now have I been able to put a face: Joseph I. Breen’s.
This has not made watching easier. When George stretches his meager budget to buy a tweed business suit, I always cry. I know he will arrive at his rich uncle’s house and find all the other men in dinner jackets. When George meets Alice, I cry again. She is so unbearably innocent. I even sob when he meets Angela, because I see what Stevens wanted me to see: not a spoiled heiress, but George’s other half.
By the time Stevens gets to the fatal boating accident, events race by like scenery past a speeding car. Stevens ratchets up the stress with sound. At George’s murder trial, the loons, witness to the drowning, fill the courtroom with their eerie calls. In real life, a conviction is not a juggernaut. It is followed by appeal after time-consuming appeal. But this is a movie, and to maximize its drama, Stevens stages a swift death-row reunion with Angela—a scene that is as powerful as it is implausible. Through tears, Angela tells him, “I know I’ll go on loving you for the rest of my life.”
