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

by Mark Harris

  That was enough for Wyler, who wrote back, “I must ask that in matters of taste, you limit your interference. I am frightened of your attack on this script since you of course have the last word . . . but you and I have entirely different styles of telling a story and I honestly think that for this one mine is better. Before I started to work for you I was greatly encouraged by your apparent eagerness to get for the picture all that I could possibly give it. [But] I am not a good director in the sense that I could direct scenes as instructed.”

  Wyler was never told that he had been fired; one day while he was on the lot, he ran into an executive who informed him that the picture had been canceled. He was stunned, since he felt the screenplay was finally in good shape, but he returned to Goldwyn to resume work on The Little Foxes. Soon after the Academy Awards, he heard that Zanuck had decided to go ahead with How Green Was My Valley after all; John Ford would be directing it. Philip Dunne was called into a meeting at which Ford, “chewing on his handkerchief,” told him his screenplay was terrible. He went on to film it with virtually no further changes.

  Talk of war pervaded that Oscar night at the Biltmore, and for the first time, Hollywood was ready for the discussion. The honorees represented a commitment to engagement, not escape. The evening had begun with a radio address to the Academy by President Roosevelt, who praised the industry for its social responsibility and leadership in defense fund-raising—a welcome endorsement for a business that had recently endured a barrage of attacks—and then urged everyone to support the Lend-Lease Act. When the incendiary Arise, My Love, with its stentorian plea that America pay attention and get involved, was awarded Best Original Story, one of its two honorees, Benjamin Glazer, announced from the podium that his cowriter John Toldy could not be present because he had done his work under a pseudonym; he was actually an Austro-Hungarian Jew named Hans Szekely who was presently in hiding from the Nazis. A special Oscar was awarded to Nathan Levinson, a sound engineer, for his work in marshaling the resources of Hollywood to assist in the making of army training films. And expressions of Anglo-American solidarity were everywhere—in the short-film nominee about Britain under siege, London Can Take It, in the Best Picture award to Rebecca, and in the three Oscars—the most for any film that year—that were given to producer Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad. The visually spectacular Technicolor fantasy-adventure had begun production in England but was forced to shut down and relocate to Hollywood when the Blitz began. Its young star, John Justin, had just entered the RAF as a flying instructor.

  By the time Frank Capra summoned the nominees to the stage for the presentation of Best Director, he was already beginning to fear that the still unfinished Meet John Doe, the movie he had hoped would be the next Grapes of Wrath, was instead poised to become, in his words, “The Great American Letdown.” He and Riskin had finished production more than four months earlier, but they had never been able to crack the ending. Riskin had argued that the main character played by Gary Cooper should go through with his threat to commit suicide, a final scene that Capra dismissed out of hand as too bleak, saying, “You just don’t kill Gary Cooper.” Instead, they tried an ending that stopped just short of that, with a scene in which Cooper’s microphone is cut off during his attempt at a stirring final speech and the crowd turns against him. In that version, Meet John Doe ends on a sympathetic newspaper editor’s sardonic line, “Well, boys, you can chalk another one up to the Pontius Pilates.” Preview audiences hated it.

  Capra had more at stake than his self-esteem. He had mortgaged his new home to collateralize the loan for his company’s debut movie and he complained, not for the first time, that he was nearly broke because the government had taken 80 percent of the $300,000 he had earned last year for income tax. He couldn’t afford to have Meet John Doe fail, so in January 1941, he called his cast back in front of the cameras and shot a new ending in which the movie’s chief villain, the fascistic publisher with designs on the White House, sees the error of his ways and recants. It was Capra’s return to an old trick—an uncomfortably close rewrite of the breakdown of the corrupt senator played by Claude Rains at the end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It was also exactly the kind of last-minute sentimental reversal that Capra thought gave his critics permission not to take him seriously. On Oscar night, that version of the movie was just days from its first press preview.

  To the end of his life, Capra insisted publicly that Meet John Doe had in the end won him the respect he had long sought. It was not the case. The film had the phenomenal misfortune to go before critics who had just gotten their first look at Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Capra’s depiction of a newspaper tycoon with a rotting soul could not help but look sketchy by comparison. But aside from the poor timing, Capra’s filmmaking and his thinking took a beating even from those who liked aspects of the movie. For the first time, Variety wrote, “the director is more zealot than showman . . . the synthetic fabric of the story is the foundation[al] weakness of the production.” The New Republic shrugged it off as “holy hokum” that “talks too much to no purpose” and marked an unwelcome return to “Capra’s familiar and favorite American type, the easy shambling young man . . . a loveable innocent but don’t tread on him.” The New York Times approved of the film’s anti-Fascist message but called it “overwritten.” Time thought the picture threatened to “topple artistically from sheer pompous top-heaviness.” And critics hated the new ending almost as unanimously as test audiences had hated the old one.

  Capra still thought the movie could be saved, and took an extraordinary step to save it: Nine days after it opened at two theaters in New York City, he shot yet another new ending. This time, Doe would be heartened by some kind words from one of the lads in a local John Doe Club who tells him that he’s sorry that he and the other boys “acted like a mob.” The new, generically cheerful last line of Meet John Doe would be “There you are . . . The people! Try and lick that!” a brazen pilfering of Ma Joad’s “They can’t lick us, ’cause we’re the people!” speech from The Grapes of Wrath. Capra had the new ending spliced onto all prints of Meet John Doe before the movie’s national release, and withstood a good deal of public mockery; one columnist ran an item that joked, “Do you know why today is so refreshing? . . . This is the day Capra isn’t shooting a new ending for Doe.” But the latest fix did nothing to clarify the film’s muddled arguments; Doe was a failure with the public, and Capra’s first attempt at an independent production company was soon out of business.

  On March 23, 1941, the day after shooting the new scene, Capra made an appearance on the radio show I’m an American!, a program in which every week a different immigrant would express his or her patriotism. The Justice Department, which oversaw the series, had asked Capra to “give a defense of Hollywood and its people, showing their strong sense of Americanism and loyalty to democratic ideals,” and Capra complied. Despite his wealth and success, he knew that his status as an immigrant made him a second-class citizen to millions of Americans. Just that week, Ladies’ Home Journal had published a profile of him in which the writer remarked that he looked “like any youngish, likable Italian who might beam at you across a fruit stand.” Given the prevalence of that kind of stereotype, it is unsurprising that Capra felt that the invitation to speak on the air was a thinly veiled request for a public loyalty oath. In a carefully prepared script, he equivocated about war, calling it “abhorrent” but warning that it might be inevitable, and he declined to make the case for message movies, saying, “Personally, I refuse to believe the American public needs educating in democracy.”

  Until recently, Capra had toyed with plans to make a sequel to Meet John Doe. Now he had to abandon them; the making and reception of the movie had been so disheartening that, just a year after his statement to the New Yorker that films could become even more powerful than Hitler and Roosevelt, he seemed ready to give up on using the medium to say anything at all. In an interview that April, he told a journalist that he had recently decided ag
ainst directing a drama about a mobster tasked with assassinating Hitler. “Can you make a million people sit still while you editorialize at them in pictures? I don’t think so,” he said. “With the world in its present state, what’s the good of a message?”

  On May 19, a couple of months after the Oscars, Capra relinquished the presidency of the Screen Directors Guild after several terms during which he had increased the group’s bargaining power so effectively that he probably could have continued to hold the post indefinitely had he wanted it. Instead, he accepted the tribute of an honorary lifetime membership—a proposal made by Wyler—and handed the reins over to George Stevens. It was an apt passing of the torch since, a year earlier, Stevens had essentially replaced Capra at Columbia, and his ascension in the SDG’s leadership was, in a way, official recognition that he was now a major filmmaker.

  The week Stevens began his yearlong term as the SDG’s president also brought the opening of his new movie, the first he had made since signing with Harry Cohn. Stevens had not adjusted easily to life at Columbia, where he had discovered upon his arrival that his new bosses were no more interested in having him make a political movie than RKO had been.

  Capra later took credit for Stevens’s arrival at Columbia, claiming that “because my way had produced five home runs in a row, other committee-hating directors were attracted to the studio.” But in fact, Columbia interfered with Stevens almost from the moment he started there, first asking him to develop a romantic comedy titled This Thing Called Love and then abruptly taking it away from him and moving him onto a bigger project. The studio had bought the rights to a piece of short fiction from McCall’s magazine titled “The Story of a Happy Marriage,” which it saw as a property that could reunite two major stars, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who had already proved irresistible to audiences as a romantic couple in the comedy The Awful Truth (1937) and in the recently released hit My Favorite Wife. Stevens’s new picture, which he retitled Penny Serenade, would be a departure for both actors—a shamelessly manipulative tearjerker in which Grant and Dunne would play a husband and wife who learn they can no longer have children after she miscarries during an earthquake. They then adopt a little girl, only to lose her as well.

  The story strained credibility, and its framing device—each memory of the marriage was triggered by a different song—threatened to make it even more contrived. Stevens himself later admitted that he may have been attracted to Penny Serenade as an overreaction to the “light, frothy comedy” that had been his stock-in-trade. “I guess I was in a mood by this time, and so these poor [actors] became involved in my indulging myself,” he said. “But they became wholeheartedly engaged in it.” So did Stevens; as filming proceeded through the fall and into the winter of 1940, Cohn became alarmed at the amount of footage his director was shooting. But Stevens kept him at bay, holding him to his promise to stay away from the set while he strove to find a tone that would somehow keep the story from becoming too mawkish.

  On his sets, Stevens was famously unreadable, “taciturn, always grave-looking, even when he was cracking jokes,” his friend Irwin Shaw said later. When he was trying to solve a storytelling problem or figure out a scene, he would walk back and forth endlessly, meeting nobody’s gaze. He liked to tell people he had Indian lineage, and “he looked very much like an Indian chief,” said Joseph L. Mankiewicz. “Stoic. He couldn’t talk. Suddenly, he wouldn’t talk. His remoteness! He’d sit there and listen, with that look, and you could go mad.” His friends referred to it as “the chill.” On Vigil in the Night, his frustrated star Carole Lombard finally called her agent in the middle of the night and told him, “I just [realized] what that pacing and thoughtful look of Stevens’ means—not a goddamn thing.” But Stevens was also capable of intimate and precise communication with his actors, and on Penny Serenade, he encouraged his two stars to dig deeper than they had before. “I have often humbled actors, creating stories that will bring a kind of humility out of them, rather than letting them come forth on the screen in their established aura,” he said. That was his goal this time, especially for Grant; the actor had begged to be let out of a part that he was sure was too serious for him, but Stevens had directed him in Gunga Din and believed that he was capable of more than the affable romantic charm that had become his signature. He also felt that audiences would be all the more moved to see a star who was usually all smiles experience anger, grief, and loss.

  The Penny Serenade shoot lasted for four months—a long schedule for any studio, but especially the brisk and budget-conscious Columbia. In January 1941, Stevens was just days from wrapping when tragedy struck. Grant was working on a soundstage on the lot when he received news that the Luftwaffe had bombed Bristol, the hometown he had left twenty years earlier. Five members of his family had been killed: his aunt and uncle, their daughter and son-in-law, and their grandchild. Grant was still a British citizen; when England had declared war, he had thought of going home and enlisting, but his stock in Hollywood was rising, and he had decided to stay in the United States, donating half his salary for some movies to British War Relief. When he learned of the deaths, he was shattered, but he refused to let the studio cancel a day of filming.

  Stevens finished Penny Serenade in the spring, test-screened it, cut it from 165 minutes to just under two hours, and won some of the best notices of his career. His work with Grant paid off with the actor’s first Academy Award nomination as well as with praise for the restraint Stevens brought to a story that, as one critic wrote, “employs not one but six or seven of the recognized sob-story tricks . . . take along a couple of blotters and a sponge . . . you might even take along a washtub.”

  Stevens moved on quickly, agreeing to extend his deal with Columbia from two pictures to three if the studio would consent to loan him to MGM, where he planned to reteam with his Alice Adams star Katharine Hepburn for Woman of the Year. His desire to make movies about war had been thwarted so many times that it seemed, finally, to have abated altogether; the Hepburn movie would mark a return to the safer ground of romantic comedy, the genre in which he had most frequently distinguished himself. That spring, the rest of the industry seemed to be in retreat as well. The day Stevens took over the Screen Directors Guild, the New York Times published a widely discussed story that essentially reiterated Frank Capra’s recent dismissal of message movies, contending that propaganda movies had “proved to be a costly mistake. . . . Not one of the several films devoted to arousing America against Germany has been more than a casual success.” Citing the modest box-office returns for movies like Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Mortal Storm, both of which had initially looked like hits only to peter out quickly, the Times concluded that “audiences were convinced of the depravity of the Nazis and were bored by the constant reiteration on the screen . . . the necessarily hopeless endings [are] depressing and . . . there [is] no money in preaching.”

  That verdict, reinforced by any number of anxious producers and bottom-line executives, had in the spring of 1941 become the newest article of faith for an industry whose brief flirtation with boldness appeared to be ending. As interventionist as many of Hollywood’s leaders were in their private lives or their philanthropic efforts, they were convinced that if they ever allowed their politics to spill onto the screen, audiences would inevitably turn away. But just a few weeks later, Warner Bros. released a movie made by John Huston and Howard Hawks that completely upended that conventional wisdom. The resulting showdown would change the balance of power between Hollywood and Washington for the duration of the war.

  FIVE

  “The Most Dangerous Fifth Column in Our Country”

  HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY–DECEMBER 1941

  Alvin C. York was, at least in theory, ideal movie material. For twenty years, Americans had known of him as an exemplar of personal bravery during World War I, a simple, religious, dirt-poor Tennessee mountain man who read the Bible, loved his country, and prayed for peace on earth. York had entered the war only becau
se his status as a conscientious objector did not exempt him from military service. He had gone on to defend himself and his troops by killing two dozen German soldiers and capturing 132 others; reverent home-front newspapers nicknamed him “the one-man army.” When he returned to the United States, he refused to profit from his battlefield heroism. Instead, he traveled the country giving lectures in which he advocated nonmilitary solutions to world problems, and then returned home to Tennessee, where he used his renown to champion the construction and funding of an agricultural school. Even when he went broke and had to mortgage his farm, he declined offers to sell his life story to the movies.

  When producer Jesse Lasky flew to Nashville to try to get York to change his mind, he knew that what he was attempting to purchase was not the narrative of York’s life but rather his consent to be used in the service of a case for war, and then, ideally, to be quiet about it. By 1940, the fifty-three-year-old York had become a somewhat problematic figure. At 275 pounds, he was no longer the image of a lean, strapping American warrior, and although he had turned into a polished public speaker after years working the national lecture circuit, on home turf he could easily slide into unreconstructed racism (he liked to say that Negroes never stayed in his farm’s county for long because the field work was too hard for them). Lasky, one of the founders of Paramount Pictures, was a wily and persistent veteran of the trade, and a man not easily rattled. He didn’t flinch for a moment when York, who soon took to referring to him as a “fat little Jew,” told him the language in his proposed contract was too fancy, insisted on a stipulation that he be played by Gary Cooper, and, to cap off the negotiations, announced, “I don’t like war pictures.” Fifty thousand dollars later, they had a deal.