Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Capra’s infatuation with Mussolini soon subsided, but his sympathies remained maddeningly difficult to track, even for those who knew him. He supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War while most of his Hollywood colleagues were raising funds for the Loyalists. And when it came to domestic affairs, his politics were described as “reactionary” by Edward Bernds, a sound engineer who worked with him several times and who wrote in his diary in 1936 that Capra was a “bitter Roosevelt hater” who couldn’t stop complaining about the income tax.

  At any given moment, Capra’s passions could be inflamed by populism or by distrust of the working class, by loathing for Communists or contempt for capitalists, by economic self-protection or New Deal generosity. Throughout the 1930s, his politics had been defined more by his quick temper than by any ideological consistency. His conflicting impulses were manifest in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a comedy about an eccentric young New England poet who inherits $20 million and learns what it’s like to have the whole world reach into his pockets. Capra’s left-wing screenwriter Robert Riskin brought an unmistakable progressivism to the film, especially in an episode in which a farmer is driven to madness by his inability to feed and clothe his family in the Depression; his plight moves Deeds to a quasi-socialistic resolve to spread the wealth. But the movie’s ideas, and its ideals, are highly mutable. In one scene, Deeds can sound like a people’s cry against the greed of entrenched financial barons; in the next, it turns into a near-Fascist rant against big-city sophistication, with both positions expressed in a kind of one-size-fits-all anger (“Salesmen, politicians, moochers—they all want something!” Deeds complains). Still, few in Deeds’s audience would have guessed that its director was an Alf Landon supporter who shunned practically every Hollywood organization as a potential hotbed of Communism. While Ford and many of Capra’s other colleagues worked to found the Screen Directors Guild in 1936, Capra refused to join for eighteen months. When he did, it was only because his growing interest in the fight for directors’ rights finally overtook his deep scorn for unions.

  In 1937, Capra took a trip to Russia with Riskin; he was treated as royalty by apparatchiks who were convinced that his movies were anticapitalist, and he was said to have reciprocated their hospitality by expressing great enthusiasm for Stalinism and contempt for “the bosses of cinema” in America. But he also made his antiwar views plain; when he was invited to watch a military parade in Red Square, he asked to be excused, saying, “I can’t stand the sight of so much war paraphernalia. . . . Just imagine what will happen when all these tanks, guns and rifles begin to shoot. No, I definitely don’t want to see this. We Americans are a peaceful nation. We don’t intend to fight.”

  All of his contradictory perspectives were even more apparent in You Can’t Take It With You, which he started shooting in early 1938. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy about the eccentricities of a large and chaotic New York family whose elderly patriarch has for years refused to pay any income tax allowed Capra (with Riskin’s considerable help) to combine his various economic and social hobbyhorses into something approaching a unified semiphilosophy. In the film, the grandfather opposes the tax system in part because of his belief that the money he would pay is likely to be spent on armament. One of the movie’s villains is a rapacious millionaire who serves as a mouthpiece for the then-popular contention that profit-obsessed tycoons would eventually manipulate the United States into entering a war: “With the world going crazy,” he practically cackles, “the next big move is munitions, and [we] are going to cash in on it! . . . There won’t be a bullet, gun, or cannon made in this country without us.” Kaufman and Hart’s play had also included some pointed jabs at anti-Communist paranoia, but those lines may have hit too close to home for Capra; the movie stripped them away and replaced them with a virtually indecipherable monologue that begins, “Communism, fascism, voodooism—everybody’s got ‘ism’ these days! . . . When things go a little bad . . . go out and get yourself an ‘ism’ and you’re in business!” The speech then goes on to praise (but not define) “Americanism,” and concludes, “Lincoln said, ‘With malice toward none and charity to all.’ Nowadays they say, ‘Think the way I do, or I’ll bomb the daylights out of you.’”

  Critics and the public loved the madcap homilizing of You Can’t Take It With You—at least in America. Overseas, there was considerable dissent, much of it along the lines of Graham Greene’s assertion that Capra “emerges as a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels—vaguely—that something is wrong with the social system” but cannot come up with a better solution than for Wall Street magnates to “throw everything up and play the harmonica.”

  As the opening of his movie approached, Capra was rocked by a personal tragedy. While he was at the first Los Angeles press screening of You Can’t Take It With You, he received an emergency call summoning him to the hospital, where he learned that his severely disabled three-year-old son John had died after what was supposed to be a routine tonsillectomy. As he and Lucille grieved, he again turned his attention outward and quickly returned to work. In late 1938, after Cohn told him he couldn’t make Valley Forge, Capra visited Washington, D.C., with the notion of making a sequel to Deeds. He had in mind a film, wrote one reporter, “with a political theme. He wants to show one of his honest people—say, a cowboy Senator in the guise of Gary Cooper—against the artificial background of the two august bodies of government we know as the houses of Congress.”

  Capra’s original notion for the new movie, which he was then calling Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, won Cohn’s approval, which meant that almost alone among his peers, he would have the chance to make a film that commented directly on contemporary American politics—whether or not he could figure out exactly what he wanted to say. In a 1938 interview, he tried, for the first time, to explain where he stood on various issues, but what emerged was an awkward laundry list of tenets from a man who saw himself as an embattled patriot surrounded by enemies even within his own industry. “Capra likes American institutions,” the sympathetic reporter wrote, clearly paraphrasing him. “He doesn’t regard the men who made the country as a lot of fools. He is against dictatorship. He believes in things like freedom of the press. All this makes him a marked man in Hollywood, where so many of the intellectuals are sound, orthodox American-haters.”

  Capra had long been a pacifist, but on a trip to Washington to research his new movie, that began to change. He had always been susceptible to the charisma of powerful men, and when he met President Roosevelt for the first time, he was surprised to find himself dazzled; the president’s “awesome aura” made his “heart skip.” Capra, who had twice voted against Roosevelt, couldn’t quite come around to supporting him for a third term, but soon after his visit east, he broke with many of his fellow Republicans by becoming a publicly committed interventionist. He returned to Los Angeles, and on November 18, 1938, he attended an Anti-Nazi League rally titled “Quarantine Hitler” at the Philharmonic Auditorium. Before an audience of thirty-five hundred, he stepped to the microphone and spoke in support of a trade boycott, endorsing a statement that “capitulation to Hitler means barbarism and terror.” Capra never looked back. Like Ford, he was about to become one of the movie industry’s strongest advocates for America’s involvement in what he now believed was a rapidly approaching world war.

  The “Quarantine Hitler” rally was held a week after the rampage of Kristallnacht, which had made most studios realize with dismay that their days of releasing movies in Germany were probably numbered; in the wake of so much destruction, many in the Hollywood community (though by no means everyone) also came to grips with the fact that complacent silence was no longer a moral option. The beating of Jews and the burning and looting of thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in Germany and Austria might have galvanized the nation and moved Washington to action more quickly if Americans had been able to see the mayhem and cruelty unfold on movie screens. But the producers of newsreels were dependent
on footage they received from overseas, and all they had to present to moviegoers were some photographs of the aftermath. The inability to show Americans an unfiltered version of what was happening overseas was of great enough concern to spur an unusual summit meeting the day of the rally among the five major producers of newsreels (which included Fox, Paramount, and Universal) to discuss pooling their resources in order to better educate the public about Nazi atrocities.

  For the many émigré Jews in Hollywood’s creative class, Kristallnacht marked the moment when the oppression they or their families had fled Europe to avoid could no longer be forgotten or ignored. William Wyler had not been back to his hometown of Mulhouse on the French-German border since 1930, when he had traveled there during a vacation. At the time, he had described Berlin as “the most interesting and most pathetic city in Europe . . . torn by groups of radicals and reactionaries, each fighting for a different government. . . . The people . . . seem to be hopeless in all this chaos.” In the decade since, he hadn’t gone home again, nor did he do much to identify publicly with his Jewish or his European roots. Jewish filmmakers in the 1930s were easy targets—for anti-Semites, for anti-Communists, for xenophobes. Wyler, whose English was impeccable but unmistakably accented, had worked hard to become an American; as the situation in Germany worsened, he had shown little interest in activist engagement. When Jack Warner would press the point in a letter, he would write a hundred-dollar check to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; when the Motion Picture Artists’ Committee—whose rallying cry was, “Watch for the Ambulance from Hollywood to Spain!”—would nudge him, he would donate two hundred dollars to a relief fund. But more than anything, he simply wanted to be left alone to make pictures, preferably without having to infuse them with any topicality or political resonance.

  By 1938, Wyler was so fully assimilated that it almost came as a surprise when his background became a subject for discussion—which it did a month before Kristallnacht, when he married. The future Talli Wyler was a tall, attractive Texan with a calm and gracious demeanor, a graduate of Southern Methodist University who had come to Hollywood with some minor acting ambitions, which she would quickly abandon after her marriage. She met Wyler that September; they married a month later. Not until that December did he meet Talli’s concerned parents, who had come from Dallas to Hollywood to spend Christmas with their daughter and the man she had impulsively wed. By then, Talli was pregnant (they would name the baby girl Cathy, after the heroine of the new movie Wyler had just started directing, Wuthering Heights). Talli had told her mother and father that Wyler was Jewish, and she remembered later that they arrived for the holidays worried about what their daughter’s new life would be like “because of all the terrible things happening in Europe.” Wyler, as a new husband and expectant father, shared their distress. As a private citizen, an emigrant, and a Jew, he was profoundly troubled by the news he was reading and determined to do what he could to fight back. But as an artist, he was relieved to report for work every morning freed from the burdens he carried in the rest of his life. On the set, he could be a director; not having to be anything else for those hours was a kind of luxury.

  One of the few men in Hollywood who was close enough to Wyler to understand how hard he had worked to forge a new identity for himself was John Huston. When Wyler decided to marry, he and Talli had resolved that the ceremony would be private; he called Huston, who arranged for the wedding to take place at the home of his father, the actor Walter Huston. Aside from Wyler’s brother, lawyer, agent, and his aged parents (whom he had helped emigrate from Alsace and installed in a house near his), the only guests Wyler invited to the wedding were John and his wife, Lesley, who provided the cake. The friendship between Wyler and Huston, one of the deepest and most enduring bonds between two directors in Hollywood history, was in some ways a marriage of opposites. Huston was tall, brash, sybaritic, and reckless; Wyler was a compact five foot eight, quiet, and so meticulous that he earned his lifelong nickname (“Forty-Take Wyler” or “Fifty-Take Wyler,” depending on who was doing the complaining) before he had directed even a single major success. Huston’s romantic dalliances, which included but were not limited to five marriages, were wild, public, sometimes simultaneous, and almost always impulsive. Wyler, after a stormy early marriage to Margaret Sullavan and a serious affair with his most famous leading lady, Bette Davis, married Margaret Tallichet, the woman he called “Talli,” in 1938, and at thirty-six settled into a life of contented domesticity that lasted until his death more than forty years later. Huston, thirty-two when he helped his best friend plan his wedding, was just beginning to get past what had amounted to a destructive and anarchic adolescence that had seemed to stretch through his twenties.

  But the two men were more alike than they appeared to be. Wyler, despite the buttoned-down reticence that would lead one columnist, just a few years later, to call him “an iron gray man in a gray flannel suit,” was, under the surface, something of a thrill seeker who loved downhill skiing and outdoor adventure; before he married Talli, he could often be seen at the end of a shooting day tearing through the studio gates on his Harley-Davidson, frequently with an actress holding on for dear life. And Huston, a last-call bon vivant who liked to present himself as a disheveled renegade (the New York Times called him “The Great Unpressed”), was painstaking and focused when it came to his work, a quality he deeply admired in Wyler and sought to emulate.

  Both men were among the first filmmakers who could legitimately be called second-generation Hollywood. Huston was the son of the highly regarded actor Walter Huston, and Wyler was a distant cousin of the man Time magazine labeled “Famed Nepotist Carl Laemmle,” the head of Universal whose propensity for hiring relatives led Ogden Nash to quip, “Uncle Carl Laemmle has a very large faemmle.” It was Laemmle who had paid for Wyler’s emigration from Alsace to America and had given him his first apprenticeship as a studio shipping clerk in 1920.

  A decade later, it was Wyler who gave Huston his first job on a movie, rewriting dialogue for one of his earliest talkies, a loose adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms called A House Divided. Wyler hired him to please Huston’s father, the film’s star, and he never regretted it. “Willy was certainly my best friend in the industry,” said Huston. “We seemed instantly to have many things in common. . . . Willy liked the things that I liked. We’d go down to Mexico. We’d go up in the mountains. We’d gamble.” Wyler was the teasing older brother/mentor who would mock Huston as a “long-legged, lobster-nosed, shark-livered, mutton-fisted, pernivorous Presbyterian landlubber”; Huston was the devil on his shoulder, his barstool comrade, and his eager pupil in the ways of the movie business.

  After A House Divided was finished, Wyler and Huston cemented their comradeship by taking an unlikely road trip together, dressing as hobos and sleeping in boxcars, all in the name of research for a movie they didn’t end up making. It may have been a lark for Wyler, but for Huston it was one more symptom of a life that was careening out of control. His first marriage, to an alcoholic he had wed when he was just twenty, had fallen apart. In 1933, he was involved in a drunk-driving accident in which a starlet was injured. Soon after that, a young actress was killed when she stepped in front of a car Huston was driving on Sunset Boulevard. Huston, who insisted he had not been drinking, was cleared of any wrongdoing by a grand jury, but the case generated harsh headlines across the country (“Why Should Auto Murderers Go Free?” asked a Los Angeles Herald Examiner editorial) and he was branded a spoiled, irresponsible wreck. “The experience seemed to bring my whole miserable existence to a head,” he said. Almost broke, he exiled himself to Europe. “Whatever I turned my hand to, nothing seemed to work,” he recalled. “I’d pull myself out halfway and slide back in again.”

  When Huston returned to the United States in 1935, he had done little to change the perception that, as James Agee wrote, he would “never amount to more than an awfully nice guy to get drunk with.” He was, said producer Henry Blank
e, “hopelessly immature. You’d see him at every party, wearing bangs, with a monkey on his shoulder. Charming. Very talented, but without an ounce of discipline in his makeup.”

  It was Wyler who rescued Huston, giving him a writing job and, more important, the chance to reinvent himself. He saw a kindred spirit in Huston—“we were both young and adventurous and we did a lot of things together, everything, from girls to skiing, God knows what,” he said—but he also saw nascent talent. “He was a good writer,” he said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lasted together.”

  While Huston had been away, Wyler’s stock had soared thanks to well-received adaptations of Lillian Hellman’s Broadway play The Children’s Hour and Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End. He had also stayed close to Walter Huston, directing him in Dodsworth and winning his first Best Director Academy Award nomination for the movie in 1937. Now Wyler was behind the camera again, working with Bette Davis in the Civil War melodrama Jezebel, Warner Bros.’ attempt to jump in front of Gone with the Wind, and he was unhappy with the screenplay. A week into production, he urged the studio to hire Huston not only to do rewrites but, in Blanke’s words, “to sort of represent him in preparing the last half of the script.” Blanke told Warner production head Hal Wallis that Wyler “apparently knows Huston personally, spends a great deal of time with him and will see him at night, and he maintains that Huston knows exactly his feelings and thoughts about the script. . . . Huston apparently will be a sort of a go-between operating between the writers, and you, and himself. . . . [I] told Wyler we would try it out.” Wyler’s faith was repaid when Jezebel, which was released in early 1938, became a hit and won Davis her second Oscar. Warner rewarded Huston by hiring him as a full-time contract writer who would move from one project to another depending upon where he was needed.