Later, after a prolonged discussion of Charles Boyer’s acting, Charles Boyer’s reading habits, and Charles Boyer’s intelligence, someone said that Charles Boyer, together with several hundred other stars, had signed a statement protesting that the Thomas Committee investigation was unfair and prejudiced.
“What about that, Peter?” Greene asked. “A lot of people in your business feel that a man’s politics has nothing to do with his work in pictures. Why, Scott and Dmytryk made Crossfire for you on a shoestring—five hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. Took them twenty-two days. You’ll gross three million on that picture. For heaven’s sakes, why fire the men?”
“I sure hated to lose those boys,” Rathvon said miserably. “Brilliant craftsmen, both of them. It’s just that their usefulness to the studio is at an end. Would you like to go out on the terrace and look down on the lights of Hollywood?” Everyone said yes, and we all went out on the terrace to look down on the lights of Hollywood.
On our way home, Greene said that his social evenings were becoming more and more of a strain. “Everyone spends the night looking at those goddam lights,” he said unhappily. “I think I’ll go to Lady Mendl’s tomorrow.”
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The Screen Writers Guild a while back voted to intervene as amicus curiae in the civil suits that five of the ten blacklisted men have brought against their studios for breaking their contracts. It also decided to decline an invitation of the Association of Motion Picture Producers to cooperate in eliminating subversives from the studios. The Guild agreed, in addition, to oppose the blacklisting of writers because of their political views, as long as those views do not violate the law. On the other hand, the Guild turned down a proposal by some of its members to give financial and public-relations support to the ten men in their trials for contempt. The Motion Picture Association of America, which voted with the Producers’ Association to blacklist the ten men and not to employ or re-employ any one of them until he is acquitted of contempt of Congress or swears that he is not a Communist, not long ago addressed a communication to Adrian Scott, one of the ten. From it, Scott, who had then been out of work about two weeks, learned that the 1947 Humanitarian Award of the Golden Slipper Square Club, a philanthropic organization in Philadelphia, had been given to Dore Schary, R.K.O.’s executive vice-president in charge of production, for having made, among other pictures, Crossfire, which Scott produced and Dmytryk directed. According to an inscription on the award, it was made for Schary’s “contribution to good citizenship and understanding among men of all religions, races, creeds, and national origins.” The award was accepted for Schary by Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, who told the Philadelphians, “In Hollywood, it’s ability that counts.… Hollywood has held open the door of opportunity to every man and woman who could meet its technical and artistic standards, regardless of racial background or religious belief.” “We’re not supposed to be useful any more because they say the public has lost confidence in us,” one of the ten blacklisted men said to me. “But they’re not withdrawing any of the pictures we worked on. Ring Lardner’s name is thrown on the screen in front of the public seeing Forever Amber. Lester Cole’s name is up there on High Wall. If the public has confidence in these pictures, the public still has confidence in us.”
An exceedingly active Hollywood agent, a woman, claims that since the start of the Congressional investigation the studios have been calling for light domestic comedies and have been turning down scripts with serious themes. “You might say the popular phrase out here now is ‘Nothing on the downbeat,’ ” she said. “Up until a few months ago, it was ‘Nothing sordid.’ ” The difference between “Nothing sordid” and “Nothing on the downbeat,” she explained, is like the difference between light domestic comedy and lighter domestic comedy. After the investigation got under way, the industry called in Dr. George Gallup to take a public poll for the studios. Dr. Gallup has now submitted figures showing that 71 percent of the nation’s moviegoers have heard of the Congressional investigation, and that of this number 51 percent think it was a good idea, 27 percent think not, and 22 percent have no opinion. Three percent of the 51 percent approving of the investigation feel that Hollywood is overrun with Communism. The studio executives are now preparing a campaign to convince this splinter 3 percent, and the almost as bothersome 97 percent of the 51 percent, that there is no Communism in the industry. There is some disagreement about whether the industry should tackle the unopinionated 22 percent or leave it alone.
In the midst of the current preoccupation with public opinion, many stars are afraid that the public may have got a very wrong impression about them because of having seen them portray, say, a legendary hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor, or an honest, crusading district attorney, or a lonely, poetic, antisocial gangster. “We’ve got to resolve any conflicts between what we are and what the public has been led to believe we are,” one actor told me. “We can’t afford to have people think we’re a bunch of strong men or crusaders.” At the Warner Brothers studio, some time ago, I accepted a publicity representative’s invitation to watch the shooting of a scene in Don Juan, a Technicolor reworking of the Don Juan made in 1926 with John Barrymore. Filming of the production has since been called off, owing to the illness of the star, Errol Flynn, but he was still in good health the day I was there. “I want you to meet Errol,” said the publicity representative. “Just don’t discuss anything serious with him—politics, I mean.” Being a publicity man out here seems to have taken on some of the aspects of a lawyer’s and an intelligence agent’s duties and responsibilities. Studio visitors who are suspected of having ways of communicating with the public are always accompanied by a publicity man, or even two publicity men. The present-day importance of the publicity man is indicated by the fact that a member of the trade at M-G-M now occupies the office of the late Irving Thalberg, Thalberg still being to Hollywood what Peter the Great still is to Russia. I asked Flynn, who stood glittering in royal-blue tights and jerkin, golden boots, and a golden sword, how his version of Don Juan compared with Barrymore’s. “That’s like comparing two grades of cheese,” he said moodily. “The older is probably the better. But I’m trying to make my Don Juan as human as possible. Jack’s was a tough Don Juan. Mine is human. The script calls for one of the Spanish nobles to tell me that Spain is going to war. ‘You’re not afraid?’ he asks me. ‘Yes, I am afraid!’ I reply. I added that line to the script myself. I don’t want to be heroic. This picture is definitely non-subversive.”
A Paramount man informed me that he had the perfect solution for both the split-personality problem and the Thomas Committee problem. “Make your pictures more of a mish-mosh than ever!” he said, glowing all over with health, well-being, and the resolution of a man who has at last found inner calmness. “Confuse the enemy—that’s my technique. Confuse them all!” He has apparently confided his formula to Ray Milland, a Paramount actor whom I came across while he was working on Sealed Verdict. “My picture is politically significant,” Mr. Milland said to me. (Paramount publicity men, like the Warner men, warn visitors not to discuss politics with stars, but Mr. Milland brought up the subject himself.) “This is a picture about political justice,” Milland went on. “I play Major Robert Lawson, a brilliant young American prosecutor in the American-occupied zone of Germany, where I am closing my case against six Nazi war criminals, including General Otto Steigmann, whose war crimes against humanity were most revolting. I get Steigmann condemned to death by hanging, and then I am visited by a beautiful French model named Themis Delisle, and I fall in love with her. No, first Themis Delisle tells me that Steigmann is innocent, then I fall in love with her. My young aide, Private Clay Hockland, has been having an affair with a seventeen-year-old German girl, who is pregnant and shoots Private Hockland and then becomes seriously ill, although Private Hockland is also seriously ill after the Fräulein shoots him.” Milland was interrupted by a man who wanted to comb his hair. “Late
r,” Milland said to him, and firmly continued telling me about Private Hockland’s death, the assorted difficulties of the ladies in the cast, and the problem of getting penicillin in the black market for the Fräulein. He was interrupted periodically by the man who wanted to comb his hair, but he proceeded unswervingly to a castle, for the hanging of General Steigmann. “I tell the General his mother has snitched on him,” Milland said, “but he boasts that Hitlerite Germany will rise again. I knock him to the floor and take a vial of poison from a scar on his cheek, for Themis Delisle has revealed his last and most dramatic secret. Steigmann confesses his guilt, and Themis returns to France to defend herself, but she leaves with the promise that a certain brilliant young American lawyer—me—will be fighting on her team.” Milland beckoned to the man with the comb. “Now,” he concluded belligerently, “I’d like to see the Thomas Committee find anything in that.”
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Walter Wanger, head of Walter Wanger Pictures, Inc., maintains that the public has an unjustifiably poor opinion of Hollywood, and one day, trailing the inevitable publicity man, he took me to his studio commissary to tell me about the progress the industry has made since he got into it, twenty-five years ago. “In those days, we couldn’t even have an unhappy ending,” he said. “Today, pictures are different. Pictures have made great and wonderful contributions to the country and to the world.” Wanger ordered coffee. Then he said that pictures had helped raise our standard of living, had encouraged understanding among men, and had, because of their merit and integrity, contributed to social progress. Wanger drank his coffee. I mentioned the last two Wanger pictures I had seen—Arabian Nights (love in a Bagdad harem) and Canyon Passage (Technicolor on the prairie). “I made those pictures because I wanted to be a success,” Wanger replied. “If you want to stay in this business, if you want to make pictures that contribute to the country’s welfare, you’ve got to make pictures that make money.”
Some producers express the interesting point of view that there are no Communistic pictures, that there are only good pictures and bad pictures, and that most bad pictures are bad because writers write bad stories. “Writers don’t apply themselves,” I was informed by Jerry Wald, a thirty-six-year-old Warner Brothers producer, customarily described as a dynamo, who boasts that he makes twelve times as many pictures as the average producer in Hollywood. “Anatole France never sat down and said, ‘Now, what did a guy write last year that I can copy this year?’ ” Wald assured me. “The trouble with pictures is they’re cold. Pictures got to have emotion. You get emotion by doing stories on the temper of the times.” The Congressional investigation, he said, would have no effect on his plans for this year’s pictures on the temper of the times. These will include one on good government (with Ronald Reagan), another about underpaid schoolteachers (with Joan Crawford), and an adaptation and modernization of Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo (with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore). “Bogart plays an ejected liberal,” Wald said, “a disillusioned soldier who says nothing is worth fighting for, until he learns there’s a point where every guy must fight against evil.” Bogart, who two or three months before had announced that his trip to Washington to protest against the methods of the Thomas Committee hearings had been a mistake, was very eager, Wald said, to play the part of an ejected liberal.
At Wald’s suggestion, I had lunch one day with several members of the Key Largo cast, its director, John Huston, and a publicity representative at the Lakeside Golf Club, a favorite buffet-style eating place of stars on the nearby Warner lot. The actors were in a gay mood. They had just finished rehearsing a scene (one of the new economies at Warner is to have a week of rehearsals before starting to film a picture) in which Bogart is taunted by Robinson, a gangster representing evil, for his cowardice, but is comforted by the gangster’s moll, who tells Bogart, “Never mind. It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.” Bogart had not yet reached the point where a guy learns he must fight against evil. Huston was feeling particularly good, because he had just won a battle with the studio to keep in the film some lines from Franklin Roosevelt’s message to the Seventy-seventh Congress on January 6, 1942: “But we of the United Nations are not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last world war.”
“The big shots wanted Bogie to say this in his own words,” Huston explained, “but I insisted that Roosevelt’s words were better.”
Bogart nodded. “Roosevelt was a good politician,” he said. “He could handle those babies in Washington, but they’re too smart for guys like me. Hell, I’m no politician. That’s what I meant when I said our Washington trip was a mistake.”
“Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician,” said Huston, who went to Washington with him. “Bogie owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide for her upkeep.”
“The Great Chief died and everybody’s guts died with him,” Robinson said, looking stern.
“How would you like to see your picture on the front page of the Communist paper of Italy?” asked Bogart.
“Nyah,” Robinson said, sneering.
“The Daily Worker runs Bogie’s picture and right away he’s a dangerous Communist,” said Miss Bacall, who is, as everybody must know, Bogart’s wife. “What will happen if the American Legion and the Legion of Decency boycott all his pictures?”
“It’s just that my picture in the Daily Worker offends me, Baby,” said Bogart.
“Nyah,” said Robinson.
“Let’s eat,” said Huston.
After a while, Bogart began to complain about the iron curtain that separates the stars from the public. “There’s only four rips,” he said glumly, “four outlets through the iron curtain—Louella, Hedda, Jimmy, and Sheilah Graham. What can a guy do with only four rips?”
“Nyah,” said Robinson.
Hollywood has various ideas about what the iron curtain is and where it is. Twentieth Century–Fox is making a picture called The Iron Curtain—about Communist spies’ stealing atomic-bomb secrets in Canada—around which there is an iron curtain keeping visitors from everyone and everything connected with the picture. A Los Angeles newspaperman tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate it. He was investigated by a man from Twentieth Century–Fox. A lady named Margaret Ettinger, who is generally credited with being “everybody’s press agent” and who handles vaseline, diamonds, and Atwater Kent as well as many movie and radio stars, says there is an iron curtain around Louella Parsons. “Louella is my cousin, but I have a tougher time breaking into her column than into Hedda’s,” she says. Sheilah Graham, whose syndicated column appears locally in the Hollywood Citizen-News, in writing a few weeks ago about a certain star’s red sweater and a certain singer’s flashy red car, remarked that the color was still popular in Hollywood. The newspaper received a lot of letters calling Miss Graham a Communist. One of them suggested that an iron curtain be set up around her.
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A few weeks ago, many people in Hollywood received through the mails a booklet called “Screen Guide for Americans,” published by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and containing a list of “Do”s and “Don’t”s. “This is the raw iron from which a new curtain around Hollywood will be fashioned,” one man assured me solemnly. “This is the first step—not to fire people, not to get publicity, not to clean Communism out of motion pictures but to rigidly control all the contents of all pictures for Right Wing political purposes.” The Motion Picture Association of America has not yet publicly adopted the “Screen Guide for Americans” in place of its own “A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures,” which advances such tenets as “The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment” and “The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.” Although it is by no means certain that the industry has got around to followi
ng these old rules, either to the letter or in the spirit, there is a suspicion that it may have already begun at least to paraphrase some of the “Screen Guide’s” pronouncements, which appear under such headings as “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System,” “Don’t Deify the ‘Common Man,’ ” “Don’t Glorify the Collective,” “Don’t Glorify Failure,” “Don’t Smear Success,” and “Don’t Smear Industrialists.” “All too often, industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers, or exploiters,” the “Guide” observes. “It is the moral (no, not just political but moral) duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.” Another admonition reads, “Don’t give to your characters—as a sign of villainy, as a damning characteristic—a desire to make money.” And another, “Don’t permit any disparagement or defamation of personal success. It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.” The booklet warns, “Don’t tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an American kind of man, for a change.” The “Guide” instructs people in the industry, “Don’t let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler and Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin, and Edison.” Still another of the “Don’t”s says, “Don’t ever use any lines about ‘the common man’ or ‘the little people.’ It is not the American idea to be either ‘common’ or ‘little.’ ” This despite the fact that Eric Johnston, testifying before the Thomas Committee, said, “Most of us in America are just little people, and loose charges can hurt little people.” And one powerful man here has said to me, “We’re not going to pay any attention to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. We like to talk about ‘the little people’ in this business.”
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 37
