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

by Mark Harris

  Warner was serious about going public if Wyler didn’t comply; he had already planted an item with the syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist Jimmie Fidler in which he threatened to take out newspaper advertisements listing the names of all showbiz luminaries who had failed to make donations. Wyler sent Warner a check for a hundred dollars, acknowledging that it wasn’t the “real generous contribution” he had requested, but explaining in almost pleading terms that he had to put his money to “more vital” use. “Due to the fact that my original home and all branches of my family are abroad, and the political situation as it is today, I have had to distribute my charities according to the dictates of my heart and blood, and I ask you to believe me when I say that my quota has been more than commensurate with my income.” Wyler went on to tell the studio chief that he had spent so much money that he had even been forced to renege on a pledge to the United Jewish Welfare Fund. Warner softened his tone and did not make good on his threat, but his reply was still stern: “I know your heart has been disturbed by what has been going on in this turbulent world,” he wrote back, “but the fact remains that we do have hundreds of thousands of people living right here in our community and we must all extend ourselves to help them.”

  As a director, Wyler was well compensated—a few months after he finished The Westerner, Warner would borrow him from Goldwyn to direct Bette Davis in an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s stage melodrama The Letter at a salary of $6,250 a week. But he had not exaggerated the severe financial strain he was under. Since 1936, he had been in ongoing correspondence with the State Department, trying to sponsor two dozen distant relatives and family friends, including the man who had been his parents’ personal physician, all of whom wanted to emigrate from Mulhouse to America. In each of the cases in which Wyler petitioned the government, he had to pay the application fees and agree to serve as the guarantor not just of their travel expenses but of their financial security if they were permitted to come to the United States. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew more dire, the tone of the letters he received became desperate. “Mein Lieber Willy, we will eternally thank you for this with all our hearts,” read one. “Please do not let me and my child go under,” read another. “Give me the chance to pull ourselves through.”

  In those months, Wyler seemed to want nothing more than to escape, either by throwing himself into work or by leaving the country. But there was little refuge to be found. In early 1940, he and Talli decided to plan their long-postponed honeymoon, driving from Lake Placid to Montreal and then planning a visit to a ski lodge in Quebec. When they attempted to make reservations, they were rebuffed by a hotel clerk, who told them, “I’m terribly sorry. Jews are not allowed.” The Wylers were welcome to ski and dine, but not to stay overnight. “We were stunned,” Talli said. “We had never run into anything like that. . . . It was so bald it was shocking.” After a few days at a smaller resort, the Wylers decided to end their ski vacation and take a cruise down to Cuba instead. The liner they boarded was painted with the Dutch flag—a sign of neutrality in case Hitler’s U-boats were in the vicinity. After a couple of weeks, the Wylers cut that trip short as well and returned home.

  At the end of February, Wyler attended the Academy Awards banquet at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. He had received a nomination for Best Director—his second—for Wuthering Heights, which was also up for Best Picture. His competition included Capra, who was in contention for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Ford, who was nominated for Stagecoach. To nobody’s surprise, they were all beaten by Victor Fleming, whose Gone with the Wind swept the awards. But in some ways the night also belonged to Ford, who had been on an unprecedented run during the last twelve months that had ended with three of his movies up for Oscars and a fourth opening just past that year’s voting deadline and bringing him the highest praise of his career.

  A year earlier, Ford’s Stagecoach had arrived in theaters to reviews that were not only positive but openly surprised. Westerns had long been an essential part of Hollywood’s output; as many as 20 percent of the movies produced every year were cowboy films, but most of them were ultra-low-budget “programmers,” generally running under an hour and used to fill out double bills in rural theater chains. Stagecoach, which Ford had made for Walter Wanger at United Artists, was something different: an “A” picture with a top-notch cast, a strong screenplay by Dudley Nichols (who had won an Oscar for writing Ford’s The Informer), and an unabashedly adult story that tested the limits of the Production Code by including the apparent endorsement of a revenge killing and sympathetic depictions of a prostitute and an alcoholic. Ford won considerable credit from critics for turning a lesser genre into something respectable and even challenging, and also for his work with the hitherto unremarkable John Wayne. Ford had known Wayne for years before casting him as the movie’s hero, the Ringo Kid; he thought the actor was able but lazy, and he upbraided him mercilessly on the set (“Why are you moving your mouth so much? Don’t you know that you don’t act with your mouth in pictures? You act with your eyes!”), but Stagecoach helped make Wayne a star and turned Ford into a first-rank director.

  Wanger, a committed progressive and interventionist with a sharp eye for publicity opportunities, used the opening of the movie to initiate an attack on the Production Code in particular and industry timidity in general, proclaiming at a press conference that Hollywood was America’s best hope against European totalitarianism and that “democracy depends on the easy and prompt dissemination of ideas and opinions,” which should not be “hobbled or haltered” by censorship. Wanger would have been happy to enlist his director to the cause, and Ford did use Stagecoach to score his own political points, making one of the movie’s villains a rapacious banker, a Hoover/Coolidge surrogate prone to rhetoric like “America for Americans!” and “The government must not interfere with business . . . what this country needs is a businessman for president.”

  But Ford wasn’t much interested in joining Wanger’s war of words. By the time Stagecoach opened in March, he was already back at 20th Century Fox directing Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda. The film, which was shot quickly and opened that June, didn’t make much of an impression with moviegoers, but Ford’s gentle, elegiac treatment of Lincoln confirmed for many critics that he was now, as Graham Greene wrote, “one of the best directors of the day.” Ford spent the summer of 1939 making Drums Along the Mohawk, a drama about the Revolutionary War that marked his first foray into Technicolor; although less elegantly wrought and finely shaded than Young Mr. Lincoln, the vivid, crowd-pleasing picture also offered history without politics, and high-spirited Americana with no attempt at contemporary allegory.

  Ford was preparing to shoot his fourth movie in a year when the war started; this time, the politics would be so overt that there would be no chance of avoiding controversy. When Fox’s Darryl Zanuck bought the rights to John Steinbeck’s just-published novel The Grapes of Wrath, Ford told Zanuck he would “leap at the chance” to make it, but some in Hollywood assumed he had acquired an unfilmable property. Even apart from a climactic scene in which a young woman whose child has died offers her breast milk to a starving man, the story of the Joad family’s agonizing displacement was an unremitting portrait of the plight of migrant workers amid Dust Bowl poverty that depicted exactly the kind of suffering most Hollywood movies were designed to help audiences forget. Zanuck and Ford planned to shoot the film in stark black and white, using many outdoor locations and working quickly—production lasted just six weeks in October and November. Fearful of leaks to the press, they kept Nunnally Johnson’s script under lock and key.

  Zanuck worried about attacks from the California Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Farmers of California, which were shown treating migrant workers as animals, and he kept the identities of those groups murky in the film, but there was no missing the fact that The Grapes of Wrath was domestic agitprop on a scale that Hollywood had almost never dared.

  In the movie’s most direct po
litical statement, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is in a work camp when someone reads him a headline about vigilantes running “Red agitators” out of the county. “Listen, what is these ‘Reds’ anyway?” Tom asks. “Every time you turn around, somebody’s callin’ somebody else a Red.” In Ford’s hands, the gentle, almost throwaway moment is hardly pro-Communist; it’s more an expression of contempt for the mob idiocy that Ford felt anti-Communist paranoia was fueling. But that, plus the movie’s implicit suggestion that a kind of benevolent, self-sustaining socialism emerged naturally from the work camps, was enough for some on the right to call Ford a Communist sympathizer. (It probably didn’t help that in the Daily Worker, Woody Guthrie announced that Ford had made “the best cussed pitcher I ever seen.”) The Catholic-run Motion Picture Daily huffed, “If the conditions which the picture tends to present as typical are proportionately true, then the Revolution has been too long delayed. If, on the other hand, the picture depicts an extraordinary, isolated, and non-usual condition . . . then no small libel against the good name of the Republic has been committed.” And Time magazine, its editorial pages all firmly in the grip of the fanatical anti-Communist Henry Luce, sneered, “Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies.”

  When The Grapes of Wrath opened in January 1940, those dissents were soon drowned out. New York Times critic Frank Nugent—who after World War II would change professions and become Ford’s most prolific screenwriter—praised its “resoluteness of approach to a dangerous topic. . . . If it were any better, we just wouldn’t believe our eyes.” Variety, rarely moved to praise topicality in its bottom-line, give-the-people-what-they-want reviews, called it “a shocking visualization of a state of affairs demanding generous humanitarian attention. . . . It took courage, a pile of money, and John Ford” to tell the story. The New Republic wrote with astonishment, “There is no country in the world where such a film of truth could be made today . . . and the public is going to this picture.” And even Time grudgingly conceded that “The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book.” Ford didn’t do many interviews to promote the movie, allowing only that he was moved by the story’s similarity to the Irish potato famine, “when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve. That may have had something to do with it . . . part of my Irish tradition.”

  Suddenly, Ford was threatening to unseat Capra as the populist conscience of the movie business, a role he couldn’t have been less interested in taking on. As The Grapes of Wrath continued to open around the country in the spring of 1940, his mind was not on Hollywood at all. Back in 1934, Ford had attempted to rekindle his twenty-year-old dream of joining the navy by buying a 106-foot boat he named the Araner, as a tribute to his Irish mother’s Aran Islands heritage. The ketch was a perfect fit for Ford’s romantic conception of himself as a roving seaman always ready to light out; it fit right in with his founding of what he first called the “Young Men’s Purity, Total Abstinence, and Snooker Pool Club” and then the “Emerald Bay Yacht Club,” a dues-paying members-only group of high-powered Hollywood friends who would meet to drink and talk and take steambaths and sometimes go out on the water, and whose mission was, Ford said, “to promulgate the cause of alcoholism.” His jocularity wasn’t far from the truth: Ford was a blackout drunk whose long, brutal, self-obliterating benders, which always occurred when he was between movies, could last for days or weeks and sometimes ended with friends rescuing him from soiled sheets in hotel bedrooms. By that time, he would often be gaunt, malnourished, and sometimes ill enough to require hospitalization. “Drinking,” said John Wayne, “was one way Jack could really relax and shut off his mind.” But the Araner was another means of escape, and the navy commission Ford had secured for himself in 1934 meant a great deal to him.

  After The Grapes of Wrath finished production, Ford and some friends, including Wayne, had boarded the Araner and sailed down from San Pedro to Guaymas harbor, a Mexican port sheltered from the open sea by Baja and the Gulf of California. While there, Ford did some semiofficial reconnaissance for the navy, looking for Japanese trawlers off the coast and filing, with almost boyish eagerness, a report to the navy’s chief intelligence officer in San Diego. “The Japanese shrimp fleet was lying at anchor,” Ford wrote. “The most striking point concerning the fleet is its personnel. This has me completely baffled. The crew came ashore for liberty in well-tailored flannels, worsteds and tweed suits. All carry themselves with military carriage. . . . For want of a better word I would call them the Samurai or military caste. . . . During three trips to Japan I have studied this type very closely. I am positive they are Naval men. . . . They constitute a real menace. Although I am not a trained Intelligence Officer, still my profession is to observe and make distinctions. . . . I will stake my professional reputation that these young men are not professional fishermen.” The pro forma letter of commendation Ford received from the navy seemed to mean more to him than any movie could. In March 1940, when Ford learned that his Emerald Bay Yacht Club pal Merian C. Cooper was leaving his job as an executive at RKO to help form the Flying Tigers, a fleet of American pilots who would work with the Chinese air force to help defend China against Japanese attacks, he was, wrote his grandson Dan Ford, “green with envy.”

  That April, Ford decided to devote a greater part of his life to the navy. He had been moved by letters from friends in England predicting “heavy bloodshed if the [Germans] start air raiding” and testifying to the “great unity of purpose” in England and France. As he began production on the seafaring drama The Long Voyage Home, he worked with Merian Cooper and Frank “Spig” Wead, a World War I navy pilot who had become a successful screenwriter, to draft an official proposal for a new “Naval Photographic Organization.” Ford did not entertain any fantasies of further spy missions or glamorous postings abroad; he knew that most of the men in what came to be known as Field Photo would be, as his wife, Mary, unsentimentally put it, “over-age and rich, people who could never have been drafted.” Instead, his proposal emphasized the potential value of Hollywood professionals in creating propaganda that would show “the Navy’s weight, prowess, power, high morale, and striking force.” Ford had been impressed by the success of German propaganda and wanted to “show that a Democracy can and must create a greater fighting machine . . . than a dictator power.”

  The armed forces did not yet have any cohesive plan to assemble an organized unit of filmmakers that could be widely deployed during a coming war; nobody in the navy imagined at that time that a group of middle-aged civilian filmmakers would ever find themselves anywhere near a battlefront. Ford’s proposal simply seemed like a good way to boost the navy’s image through public relations, and with surprisingly little bureaucratic impediment, he quickly won approval from the 11th Naval District Command in San Diego to oversee photographic personnel for the Naval Reserve and was told to recruit up to two hundred volunteers along with his Grapes of Wrath cinematographer Gregg Toland and sound engineer Edmund Hansen, each of whom were to bring in specialists in their own areas of expertise. They combed lists of employees at studios and processing labs, looking for electricians, film developers, publicity photographers, assistant cameramen, lab technicians, and cutters, contacting anyone with valuable experience, and many who had little more to offer than enthusiasm. The men would meet on Tuesday nights on the Fox lot, often training with props and using costume uniforms. It was, wrote Dan Ford, “a ragtag little band that looked more yacht club than navy. . . . From the very outset, John loved the theatrical side of the military . . . and if nothing else, everyone in the [unit] learned all the drills.” One early recruit recalled Ford’s decision that “all the officers were going to wear swords. . . . I was always afraid that he was going to kill someone the way he waved his sword around.” (Ford, who had an arthritic thumb, would often need help with the resheathing.)

  Ford was se
rious about his passion for the navy, but initially Field Photo was a part-time indulgence—little more than an extension of the director’s love of pageantry, his fondness for uniforms, and his desire to spend as much time as possible in the company of like-minded men in a sort of fraternity where he could indulge a vision of himself as an admiral manqué. That changed on May 10, 1940, just weeks after Field Photo was approved, when Germany invaded France. The unit was no longer a wealthy man’s unpaid hobby. Ford was now in charge of a part of the Naval Reserve that was just eighteen months from being called up for active duty.

  THREE

  “You Must Not Realize That There Is a War Going On”

  HOLLYWOOD, JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1940

  In 1940, 60 million Americans—more than half of the adult population of the United States—went to movie theaters every week. What they got, for the price of a twenty-five-cent ticket, was usually a double feature, a cartoon or two, a historical or musical short, and ten or twenty minutes of newsreels—narrated weekly reports from Fox or Hearst or Pathé or The March of Time that served as one of the primary means by which Americans saw and heard their news before and during the war. Theaters in the 1940s were more likely to advertise what time they opened their doors—and, far more crucially, the fact that they had air-conditioning—than the actual starting time of the main feature. People would straggle in, take their seats in the middle of a picture, and watch until a full cycle had been completed. The programs were often seamless, without long breaks or sharp dividing lines between information and entertainment, documentary, reenactment, and fiction. For some, theaters were a place to shelter from the troubles of the world, but they were also where most Americans were first confronted by vivid images of the troubles themselves, brought home in footage that was more immediate and overwhelming than newspapers or radio broadcasts could ever be.