When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  And Hollywood was Wasserman. There were other contenders to become head of MCA, all older and more senior in the company than he. Sonny Werblin, in the New York office, expected that he might become president; and Taft Schreiber, who had started out with Stein in Chicago, and was close to him personally, believed he surely would be president. But Schreiber had opened the L.A. office in 1930 and it had remained a backwater for eight years; Wasserman had arrived and within a year was laying siege to every agency in town. And it was not just that he managed to swallow so many, by dint of muscle and money. He was, as Leland Hayward put it, “the best agent I ever saw.”

  So in early December 1946, Wasserman and Schreiber traveled by train to Chicago. It was ten years, almost to the day, since Stein had hired Wasserman, with his warning it might not last. Now, the thirty-three-year-old was to be named president. But it was, not surprisingly, a secret. Stein wanted to announce it in Chicago, in the offices of the First National Bank, where a Jewish banker, Walter Heymann, had backed Stein early, and where important company meetings would continue to be held for decades. Schreiber and Wasserman had an uneasy relationship; Wasserman was careful to be deferential to him (he had, after all, offered Hayward any office but Stein’s and Schreiber’s) but he knew that Schreiber did not like him, and would like him far less once he learned that Wasserman was to supersede him and become president. So, during the long trip, Wasserman said nothing about it. Walking down the street in Chicago, the two men ran into Petrillo. “Jimmy said, ‘Lew, what the hell are you doing here?’ ” Wasserman recalled. “And then he said, ‘Oh, I remember, you’re going to be named president!’ ”

  MCA president Lew Wasserman in 1958. Corbis-Bettmann

  Chapter 2

  MONOPOLY POWER

  When Wasserman took the helm of MCA, Hollywood was engulfed in one of the most bitter, violent battles in its long-running labor war. Labor in the band business had been powerful, but that power had come to rest in the hands of one man—and a man with whom, as Stein had found, he could do business. Labor in the movie business was far more complicated; in fact, it was more complicated than anything in the labor world. There were no fewer than forty-three crafts and talent unions—which meant there was endless fodder for jurisdictional disputes. On the crafts side, the IATSE (recently the fiefdom of Bioff and Browne) was the behemoth—a fifty-three-year-old union with sixty thousand U.S. members, ten thousand of them in Hollywood, ranging from photographers to florists to camera crane operators to makeup artists; opposite the IATSE, in the current struggle, was the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a five-year-old group of twelve unions, with close to ten thousand members, primarily carpenters and painters. On the talent side, there were the actors, writers, directors, and musicians; they were weighing in from the sidelines on the IATSE-CSU battle.

  Perhaps one reason the management-labor struggles in Hollywood were historically so fierce was that labor essentially held the key to the viability of the business; not only could a strike in the midst of a production cause it to be aborted, with all the millions spent to that moment lost, but labor costs were generally between 70 and 80 percent of the overall cost of a movie. Studio bosses like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer viewed labor as a force to be vanquished, and their approach was to fight bitterly over every penny they gave in negotiations. They were much hated in turn by many of the workers. (Jack Warner’s daughter, Barbara Warner Howard, would recall that during the forties strikes, “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.”) Wasserman was a relative newcomer to this violently antagonistic scene, and he, like Stein, viewed it differently than the patriarchs of the business did. Labor wars hurt both sides; in times of peace, everyone made money. And one way to achieve peace was to establish relationships with those labor leaders who were strong enough—and complaisant enough—to deliver it. Petrillo had done this for Stein, and (thanks to Stein’s machinations in ensuring he would not be ousted in his fight with Weber) continued to. Bioff and Browne had done this for the studios in a far cruder, less effective way, which had ended badly, with a black eye for Hollywood. But with the right kinds of leaders, who had at least a semblance of legitimacy but could be properly cultivated, a new era of labor relations in Hollywood might be ushered in.

  Herbert Sorrell, chief of the CSU, was unquestionably the wrong man for the part. A brawny onetime fighter, rough-looking, with a bashed-in nose and a general readiness for both verbal and physical confrontation, Sorrell had started working in a factory at the age of twelve and, after holding a string of jobs, became a painter at Universal Studios in 1923. Two years later, the painters in the studios were organized; Sorrell, whose father had been a diehard union man, quickly joined the union, only to be fired when he was asked by his boss if he held a union card, and he responded that he did. He began to recruit union members, and was fired from jobs at other studios as well. But when an agreement was reached in late 1926 that the studios would no longer discriminate against union men, Sorrell returned to work there. He eventually became a union leader. However, unlike many of his more autocratic counterparts, particularly at the IATSE, who had little use for the will of the rank and file, he was a passionate believer in trade union democracy. He often referred to himself as a “dumb painter,” apparently self-conscious about his lack of formal education; but he was, in fact, very keen, and capable of a raw eloquence. He had denounced Bioff and Browne early on (according to Sorrell, Bioff tried to appease him by offering him $56,000), and fought to oust them for years; they, in turn, had called him a Communist. Even after Bioff and Browne were incarcerated, Sorrell continued to speak his mind in ways that won him no friends among the studio bosses. He charged that they had been Bioff’s and Browne’s collaborators, not their victims, and that the IATSE leadership was still corrupt, since virtually all its top hierarchy had served with Bioff and Browne. And in July 1946, in the flush of victory after leading a two-day CSU strike that won every wage and hour demand, including a 25 percent increase in base pay, from the studios, Sorrell had struck a decidedly noncomplaisant note. “From now on,” he had declared, “we dictate.”

  It may have been at that heady moment that Sorrell’s fate was irrevocably sealed. It had long been evident to the producers that it would be far easier to deal with one group of unions, not two, on the crafts side—and, certainly, with the IATSE, not the CSU. During the last couple of years, the studios had maneuvered to weaken the CSU by helping to promote jurisdictional confrontations between the CSU and IATSE; indeed, the CSU had been provoked into a strike in 1945—one that had depleted its treasury and caused its workers to go without paychecks for nine months. But the union had endured, and Sorrell had just emerged from these most recent negotiations stronger, and perhaps even more intemperate, than before. If he and his union were to be eliminated for good from this unmanageable triangle, what was required was not a desultory fueling of jurisdictional disputes, but a fully concerted, covert plan of attack, two (the studios and the IA) massed against one.

  It would be a tricky and unlawful business—management conspiring with one union to destroy another. But Roy Brewer, the head of IATSE in Hollywood, seemed peculiarly suited to the task. After Bioff and Browne had been deposed, the new president of IATSE, Richard Walsh—who had been a vice president and member of the executive board during the Bioff-Browne regime, and who had publicly defended both men and castigated their critics—sent Brewer from his union post in Nebraska to present a fresh face in Hollywood. Upon his arrival there in 1945, Brewer sought out the opinions of some of his colleagues, and he quickly became convinced that the most insidious influence in Hollywood was not the mob’s, but, rather, the Communists’; and he decided that Sorrell (just as Bioff had charged) was indeed a Communist, and his CSU a Communist hotbed. His view was unequivocal, and sweeping. As he would subsequently testify at congressional hearings, “We have a very sincere and positive convic
tion that a substantial portion of the trouble that has existed in Hollywood during the past ten years arises out of the efforts and the activities of those persons who are Communists, Communist-dominated, or influenced by Communists.” Whether his conviction derived from genuine belief or ambition or, more likely, some mix of the two, it certainly enabled him to present his desire to destroy the CSU as principled rather than craven. He was the studios’ perfect proxy.

  Opportunity quickly presented itself. In the aftermath of the 1945 CSU strike, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) executive council had appointed a three-man committee to define jurisdictional lines in Hollywood in an effort to eliminate this perpetual source of conflict among the myriad craft unions; and the three men (from postal worker, barber, and trainmen unions, respectively) were given thirty days to master the arcana of labor in Hollywood that tended to confound those who had been immersed in it for decades. When they produced their directive, it was, unsurprisingly, ambiguous. One section in particular—which addressed the issue of construction work on sets—provided an opening for the IA. Despite the fact that this work had historically been done by the CSU carpenters, the IA’s Walsh interpreted the opaque language of the directive to mean that these jobs had now been given to his union. The CSU carpenters protested, and in August 1946, the committee issued a clarification—making it clear that they intended the construction to continue to be done by the carpenters, as it had been in the past. The IA and the producers, however, ignored the clarification; the producers continued to assign construction work to the IA.

  One day in late September, the producers put a match to the smoldering conflict. CSU workers were taken off their customary jobs and ordered to work on the hot sets where IA men were performing the contested work (sets from which the CSU had resigned in protest). The CSU men refused. Picket lines went up, and other CSU workers refused to cross them. Technically, it was a lockout, not a strike—but the effect was the same: nearly ten thousand people out of work. Production, however, continued virtually uninterrupted; the IA moved in to cover all the CSU jobs, and strikebreakers were transported through the picket lines in buses driven by the Teamsters, whose muscle in such situations was indispensable.

  The strike dragged on for months. Picket lines were forcibly broken; hundreds of the strikers were arrested, jailed, and tried in mass trials. Repeated proposals for arbitration met a uniform response: Sorrell and the CSU would accept the suggestion and agree to abide by an arbitrator’s decision; the IA would ignore it; and the producers would express their regret at being unable to interfere in a dispute that was, they said, between unions. In early 1947, Father George Dunne, a Jesuit professor of political science at Loyola University in Los Angeles, began trying to find a resolution to the conflict. Dunne had been requested months before to write an article about Hollywood’s labor troubles for The Commonweal, a publication of the Catholic Church. Thus, in August, shortly before the lockout occurred, he had interviewed both Sorrell and Brewer. As Dunne would later testify in congressional hearings, Sorrell had been quite sanguine at that time. He had told Dunne that in light of the just-issued clarification by the AFL committee, he thought the last major problem had been cleared up; the carpenters would be restored to the jobs they had been performing before. He also said that he thought the CSU and the IA could coexist peacefully in Hollywood. Brewer, however, fervently disagreed, Dunne would recall. Brewer had expounded at length on the allegedly Communist origins of the CSU, and “made it clear that the IATSE was engaged in a war, and he said a war to the finish, with the Conference of Studio Unions. . . . He said, ‘The Conference of Studio Unions was born in destruction and it will die in destruction.’ ”

  Dunne followed the gripping events that unfolded that fall, as Brewer’s war-mongering words became prophecy; and in January 1947, when Dunne was invited to address a meeting of CSU members, in their fifth month out of work, he told them that he believed theirs was a fight for justice. He expressed the same view in a radio interview a few days later. He said, moreover, that he believed the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) held the key to the conflict’s resolution—because the IA could fill in for the CSU jobs, but no one could replace the actors and actresses. If they refused to cross the picket lines, the strike would be settled in twenty-four hours. Dunne added, too, that he considered such action the performers’ “moral obligation,” inasmuch as “their careers, highly successful careers, and financially remunerative careers, would not have been possible without . . . these people [striking workers], and if these people had justice on their side they [SAG] ought to refuse to cross the picket line.” Dunne’s remarks had considerable impact. He was told by the manager of the radio program that the producers and the IATSE had reacted with “bitter anger,” and had brought such pressure to bear on the owner of the radio station that this program was canceled for the time being. As for the Screen Actors Guild, it was an executive vice president, Ronald Reagan, who rose to Dunne’s challenge.

  Reagan had been one of Wasserman’s first clients, and Wasserman continued to play an important role in Reagan’s life. In 1941, Wasserman had sought to extend Reagan’s deferment from active military duty by writing a letter for Jack Warner to sign. Shortly before Reagan was drafted, Wasserman had obtained a new seven-year contract for him with Warner Bros.—one that tripled the salary Reagan had been earning under his original contract. Just after Wasserman had concluded this deal, the movie Kings Row (in which Reagan uttered his famous line, “Where’s the rest of me?”) opened. Reagan received such praise for his performance that Wasserman succeeded in renegotiating Reagan’s just-signed contract with Jack Warner. This time, it had one peculiarity; it covered forty-three weeks, not the standard forty. As Reagan later told the story, “When all the commas were in place, J.L. [Warner] said to Lew, ‘Now will you tell me why I’ve given him the only forty-three-week deal in the whole industry?’

  “Lew grinned like a kid with a hand in the cookie jar. . . . ‘I’ve never written a $1 million deal before—so three extra weeks for seven years makes this my first $1 million sale.’ ”

  Their relationship, however, went beyond the usual symbiosis of agent and client. From the time Wasserman had arrived in Los Angeles in 1939, Reagan and he had socialized together, often joined by Sidney Korshak. And Wasserman had also guided Reagan through the political thickets of Hollywood. Upon his return from military service in late 1945, Reagan—along with Helen Gahagan Douglas, who would be a Democratic senatorial candidate in 1950 and who was the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas—had agreed to appear at one of Hollywood’s first anti-nuclear rallies. Jack Warner, whose politics were hard right, sent a telegram objecting to Reagan’s participation. Wasserman quickly took command; he told Reagan not to go to the rally, and he assured Warner that Reagan would not attend. Reagan, no doubt mindful of his career, followed Wasserman’s instructions. And now, some months later, in this strike situation—volatile, high-stakes, with Hollywood’s spotlight fixed upon it—Reagan no doubt received Wasserman’s blessing before taking center stage.

  The night after Dunne’s radio interview, Reagan arrived at Loyola to see him, Dunne would recall many years later. Reagan was accompanied by his wife, actress Jane Wyman (also a Wasserman client), the actor George Murphy, and Jack Dales, executive director of SAG; but it was Reagan who was the spokesman. The group sat and talked in the parlor of the Loyola residence until the early hours of the morning. Reagan’s message was twofold. First, he told Dunne he had recently traveled to Indianapolis to meet with the AFL committee that had issued the directive, and he insisted that the committeemen had told him that it “was definitely their intention that this work should go to the IATSE union.” (That statement, Dunne added, would be directly contradicted by those three committeemen in the subsequent congressional hearings.) Second, he sought to persuade Dunne “that Herb Sorrell and the CSU and all these people were Communists, and this was a Communist-led and -inspired strike, and that I was simply being a dupe for the Communists.r />
  “He was very aggressive, of course . . . and very articulate,” Dunne continued. “I remember very distinctly that when it wound up I had the very definite impression, this is a dangerous man. . . . Murphy was totally harmless . . . but Reagan, I had a definite view, this is a dangerous man, because he is so articulate, and he’s sharp. But he can also be very ignorant, as he clearly was, in my judgment, interpreting everything in terms of the Communist threat.” (Several years after his meeting with Reagan, Dunne would write a lengthy article about the strike in which he said that Reagan’s “Rover Boy activities helped mightily to confuse the issues.” What he meant, Dunne later explained, was Reagan’s “running back to Indianapolis to see [the committeemen] and then coming back and saying that he had the answer to all the questions in the strike. . . . I think I called it ‘Rover Boy’ because it seemed to me . . . the night I met with him here, that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He had his facts all wrong both as to the alleged Communism of Herb Sorrell and the CSU union and as to the rectitude of the jurisdictional issue. He was all wrong.”)