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

by Mark Harris

  Capra was nonetheless ready to serve. Conscious that his entry into the army would mean a greatly reduced salary, he had spent the fall of 1941 shooting Arsenic and Old Lace for Warner Bros. as a kind of insurance policy for his family; the $125,000 fee he received would tide his wife and children over for a while, and more money would arrive when the movie was released and his percentage of the profits started to roll in. (In an unusual arrangement that would eventually put a great financial strain on Capra, Warner had signed a contract pledging not to release the movie until the play on which it was based had closed on Broadway, never guessing that it would continue to run well into 1944.) As he shot the comedy in October and November, Capra seemed to be planning for two different futures simultaneously, playing Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox against each other in an attempt to secure a new contract that would pay him $250,000 per movie, and at the same time making plans that would allow him to walk away from Hollywood at a moment’s notice. In the army, his yearly salary would top out at $4,000.

  Days after Pearl Harbor, Capra was back on the Warner lot filming the last few scenes of Arsenic and Old Lace when he was visited by Sy Bartlett and Richard Schlossberg, who had come to Hollywood as a kind of good cop/bad cop team in an attempt to induce some of the industry’s biggest names to join up. Bartlett, a screenwriter who was now an army captain, believed strongly that the army could benefit from men of Capra’s skill; he also knew how to talk to directors and producers who wanted to serve but were not, in their professional lives, used to being so low in the chain of command. “I know only too well the standards by which you live and the necessity for giving your creative urge lots of elbow room,” he told Capra, promising him “an assignment . . . worthy of your excellent talents.” Schlossberg, a lieutenant colonel who was Bartlett’s commanding officer, was impatient with the cockiness and inexperience of movie people, but he understood their potential usefulness. The two men had reached out to Capra earlier in the fall, and the combination of Bartlett’s reassurance and flattery and Schlossberg’s all-business call to duty was every bit as effective as they intended it to be. When they returned, Capra didn’t need much more convincing. At the end of the conversation, he filled out an application to join the army.

  Bartlett and Schlossberg returned to Washington with a plan to carve out a special role for Capra. They took his application to General Frederick Osborn, a charming, patrician New Yorker from an old-money family who headed the army’s Morale Branch, which was then charged with overseeing all films intended either as propaganda for civilians or as training for new inductees. Osborn, who would become Capra’s patron and most powerful ally in the War Department, enthusiastically endorsed the idea of tailoring a position for Capra. “Since General Osborn is reputed to be such a swell guy,” Bartlett wrote to Capra, “I think you would be happy. . . . I would suggest a hurried trip to Washington. . . . General Osborn is anxious to know when you could report for active service.” A cable from Osborn himself promising that “you will at all times have free access to me and I will work closely with you” sealed the deal. Capra formalized his enlistment in early January, asking for and receiving a thirty-day deferral before he reported to Washington so that he could finish postproduction on Arsenic and Old Lace. Even as he edited, previewed, and reedited the movie, he was undergoing his army physical and preparing to report for duty as a major.

  Capra later wrote, “I suppose it was in my blood to resent arbitrary authority,” and claimed that on February 11, 1942, when Lucille drove him to the train station, her parting words to him were, “Darling, now please! Don’t go trying to direct the Army! Promise?” But in reality, he was eager to please and exceptionally worried about living up to the expectations of the men who had recruited him. “Do I have to wait for orders or can I come without them?” he cabled Schlossberg. “Should I or should I not come in uniform?” When Osborn met him, his first impression was that Capra “has a sincerity of purpose and a loyal simplicity of character which have enabled him to get the help of innumerable people in Government and in the army and in Hollywood; and he has an indomitable energy and belief in the cause.”

  Schlossberg, though, was still a skeptic, and soon became Capra’s first nemesis in the army hierarchy. Capra thought the lieutenant colonel “had the charm of a bag of cement,” and Schlossberg, who resented the mere presence of movie people on his terrain, returned the sentiment, telling him, “You Hollywood big shots are all alike, a pain in the ass. If you can’t get what you want, you cry. One Darryl Zanuck around here is enough.” The hidebound, bureaucratic Signal Corps, which was Schlossberg’s domain, had been in charge of army filmmaking since 1929; he told Capra that he simply “wouldn’t fit in with the Army way of producing films” and instructed him to await further orders.

  It took the intervention of General George Marshall to move Capra out from under Schlossberg and over to Osborn’s Morale Branch. More than any other senior official in the Roosevelt administration, Marshall had a vivid if still unformed vision of the critical role filmmaking could play in the war. He saw it as a medium that could help the army win the ardent confidence not just of civilians but of its own recruits. A decade earlier, as a leader of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, Marshall had projected movies on the sides of trucks for laborers, and he knew that they were a cost-effective and efficient way to motivate and inspire working men. Moreover, he was willing to deputize professional filmmakers, Capra first among them, to make almost every major decision regarding a program of war propaganda.

  In February, Marshall met with Capra and gave him his first assignment—a job that eventually resulted in a set of movies collectively known as Why We Fight, the single most important filmed propaganda of the war. In the fall before Pearl Harbor, the army had begun a program to educate new draftees and volunteers in a series of fifteen lectures that covered, in sequence, world military history from just after the end of World War I up through 1939. The lectures were intended not only as a crash course in recent history but as an inspiring assertion of the principles of democracy that were at stake. Only a few months after the lectures had gone into use, it was apparent that they were complete failures. Inductees were doodling, talking, even falling asleep. And the wildly outdated Signal Corps films with which the lectures were supplemented were even worse; they were frequently greeted with hooting and Bronx cheers.

  Within the Signal Corps, there was stiff resistance to any movie that would use plot or character, humor, animation techniques, or even nonmilitary music to drive home its point. One lieutenant within the corps spoke for many senior officers when he complained that anything that smacked of a night out at a Hollywood movie would be “a gross abuse of the principle of a training film. . . . There is no obligation on the part of a textbook to be amusing or ingratiating.” Marshall overrode the complaints. He wanted the lecture series and the old films scrapped and replaced by short movies that would be energetic and exciting enough to capture and hold the attention of young men. The general had seen the army films made by documentarians and, according to Capra, “didn’t like them. He didn’t think they were professional enough. They didn’t carry the kind of sock he wanted. . . . and so he said, ‘If I’m sick I go to a doctor. If I want a film made, why don’t I go to the guys who make films?’”

  Marshall told Capra he “wanted a series of films made which would show the man in uniform why he was fighting, the objectives and the aims of why America had gone into the war, the nature and type of our enemies, and in general what were the reasons and causes of this war and why were 11 million men in uniform and why must they win this at all costs.” And he wanted them made with a level of Hollywood professionalism rather than no-frills efficiency, even if that meant bringing in studio crews and screenwriters. Capra was elated, and ready to roll up his sleeves. Marshall and Osborn placed him under the supervision of a young, dynamic, and likable colonel named Lyman T. Munson, and when Munson asked him if he wanted a couple of weeks to get his
bearings, Capra replied that in a couple of weeks he expected to have half a dozen scripts written. He promptly started cabling Hollywood’s studio chiefs to tell them they were going to have to prepare to loan out some of their best writers for the month.

  As Capra began his new life in Washington, his enthusiasm in those first weeks was unbridled; he fired off proposals, budgets, idea memos, and letters urging his colleagues in Hollywood to join him. He reached out to Lowell Mellett with a proposition that President Roosevelt film a short speech that could be used to welcome all new inductees, and he wrote the draft himself. “I come to you with no salute, no goose-step, no clap-trap,” he had Roosevelt say. “No, I come to you man-to-man. . . . As other free men have done before you in time of danger, you have had to lay down your tools, your plows and your pens and take up guns, because our country and our people are in danger! . . . Whatever the reason, the great test has come. The chips are down. We either win this war or Hitler and the Japs meet in the White House to decide for us which manner of slavery will best satisfy their sadistic impulses.” The speech ended, “Go to it, men! Show these self-appointed supermen that free men are not only the happiest and most prosperous, but also that we are the strongest.” Capra modestly noted that he was sure the president or his speechwriters could do a better job, but he was thrilled to begin his war work not just by selling a war message, but by essentially scripting policy that was to be put in the president’s hands. Mellett liked his work enough to explain to Roosevelt that Capra was “one of our greatest movie directors” and that he thought his idea would be successful. Roosevelt, whose admiration for movies and moviemakers would keep the war filmmaking project alive for the duration, wrote back the next day calling it “a good idea” and telling Mellett to have the speech cut to four minutes and vetted for content by some younger army officers.

  As he got to work, Capra started to see himself, and describe himself, as the lead character in one of his own movies, a determined outsider ready to go up against any number of government cynics. When the columnist Drew Pearson invited him to a stag party one night, he walked into a house full of “generals, senators, cabinet members, J. Edgar Hoover and Brazilian ambassadors and lots more.” The talk was pessimistic and anxious; the prevailing sentiment was one of uncertainty about whether the Pacific fleet could rebuild in time to prevent another attack or major loss. “I couldn’t stand it any longer,” he wrote to Lucille, “so I made a speech in which I told them as leaders they certainly stunk, and it was about time for the people to take over because they seemed to have sold out. . . . I told them America was much bigger than they knew. . . . Well, a major in uniform telling them that certainly surprised them. . . . As a matter of fact I forgot all about the uniform and was just talking to a lot of scared old men. When I got out I thought maybe I had gone too far. . . . I may end up in the brig or out on my tail. . . . But . . . I’m getting things done.”

  As he set up an office, he told Lucille that he was looking for a four-bedroom house in the D.C. suburbs and that she should prepare to move east for an extended stay: “This is beginning to look like a day and night job, but it’s new and interesting. Don’t talk to anybody about what I’m doing as it’s all supposed to be undercover right now.

  “I’ve presented enough propositions to keep making pictures for a year,” he told her. “I’ve got six writers coming from Hollywood right now. I’ve got a project for each one of them. I’m up to my ears in professors, psychologists and experts who want to give their views, but I’m not interested in anything but action. . . . The Japs won’t wait while we debate. . . . Please kiss the kids for me darling and the next letter will be a lot different. I’ll talk about nothing but us.”

  SEVEN

  “I’ve Only Got One German”

  HOLLYWOOD, DECEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  The Academy Awards ceremony that was held on February 26, 1942—the “austerity Oscars,” some called it—was Hollywood’s first collective attempt to recreate its own public image to befit a country at war. Two months earlier, some on the Board of Governors had talked seriously of canceling the evening altogether. After Pearl Harbor, a bitter divide had opened between those who protested the unseemliness of staging a lavish banquet while bombs were dropping and American servicemen were risking their lives, and those who believed that the show must go on as grandly and noisily as possible as proof of national resiliency. The Academy’s newly elected president, Bette Davis, came up with an intriguing compromise: She proposed that the annual celebration be turned into a fund-raiser for war relief and, for the first time, opened to the ticket-buying public. Her idea was met with vehement opposition from industry columnists and from several senior members of the Academy’s board. When Davis’s plan was shot down, the actress, who was then at her most exhausted and volatile, told the Academy she had no intention of serving as a figurehead president and angrily resigned her post just weeks after taking it. The traditionalists had won the round: The Oscars would still be the Oscars, although there would be no dancing, formal wear was discouraged, and guests were asked to give money to the Red Cross in lieu of spending it on lavish accoutrements.

  That night, the industry audience at the Biltmore participated in an odd mixture of festivity and solemnity; the room was at once gung-ho about the war and haunted by it. A week earlier, many of the attendees had gone to the Los Angeles premiere of To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch’s biting satire about a troupe of Polish theater actors outsmarting the Nazis. The movie’s reception had been subdued; its star Carole Lombard, one of the country’s most popular actresses, had been killed along with fifteen army flyers in January when the plane that was bringing them back to Los Angeles from an Indiana war bond rally crashed into a mountain. Watching her final performance, critics and audiences found themselves trying to shape new rules about what was permissible and what was tasteless. Lombard was, in some ways, the first famous casualty of World War II, and her loss cast a pall over Oscar night. The show, like all of Hollywood, was caught in a struggle to sound the right note; it alternated uneasily between Bob Hope’s throwaway gags and the robust declamations of the industry’s new hero Wendell Willkie, who lauded the assembled studio chiefs for being in the vanguard of attempts to expose “the vicious character of Nazi plotting and violence” to the public.

  The Wylers and the Hustons had decided to attend together. Wyler’s adaptation of The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman’s southern gothic about a greedy family on its last legs fighting over a dwindling fortune, was nominated for Best Picture; he was also up for Best Director and had, for the third time, steered Davis to a Best Actress nomination. But making the movie had been miserable for both of them and marked the last collaboration of their careers. Davis had seen Tallulah Bankhead play the part of Regina Giddens on Broadway as a smiling demon who relished watching her husband collapse and die before her eyes; Wyler looked for every opportunity to humanize and complexify the character. The rapport that had sparked their romantic involvement and energized their collaborations on Jezebel and The Letter disintegrated within days of the start of filming, and their interaction on the set was so acrid that they could not even bother to hide it from visiting journalists. Wyler complained that Davis “was playing Regina with no shading”; Davis, spiraling into a nervous breakdown, walked off the set for three weeks while Wyler shot scenes with other actors. When she returned to work, nothing had been resolved between them. A New York Times reporter witnessed their tense rapprochement and wrote that “Miss Davis seemed intent . . . on interpreting her role with gayety and daring; Wyler wanted subtle repression. . . . Miss Davis was icy in deferring to his wishes, and each was monstrously patient with the other. When one scene reached its eighth or ninth take, Mr. Wyler told Miss Davis she was rattling off her lines. Her response was cool enough to make the set suitable for a Sonja Henie skating spectacle. She said she found his statement remarkable because it wasn’t her habit to waste film. Their careful politeness never varied.”

&
nbsp; Davis finished The Little Foxes certain that she had given one of her worst performances, and when Wyler went public with his veiled critique of her mannered acting style in an interview with the New York World-Telegram (“Are you thinking what the character is thinking,” he asked, speculatively discussing her approach, “or are you wondering, ‘Shall I give them a bit of the old profile?’ or ‘Shall I wave my arm a little?’”), she swore they would never work together again. Her affection for him was gone, but her respect was not. When Wyler moved on to his next film, Mrs. Miniver, his star, the thirty-seven-year-old British actress Greer Garson, bridled at his characteristic desire for multiple takes and vainly insisted that she looked far too young to play a woman in her forties; surely she would have to wear padding and gray her hair in order to be believable as the film’s title character. When she sought counsel about how to bend Wyler to her will, Davis warned her to stop complaining and follow her director’s instructions to the letter, telling Garson, “You will give the great performance of your career under Wyler’s direction.”

  Wyler started shooting Mrs. Miniver on November 11, 1941. Unlike Capra and Ford, he had not yet considered going into military service; that would change immediately after Pearl Harbor. But he did see Mrs. Miniver as a welcome chance to step away from period pieces and into a story that felt contemporary and relevant. The Miniver script was based on a series of British newspaper columns—brief, breezy, anecdotal glimpses into the life of what was meant to represent a typical English family during wartime. In 1940, the columns had been gathered into a book that was acquired by MGM, which enlisted half a dozen writers to shape what was little more than a loose series of vignettes into a story. Draft by draft, they managed to turn the screenplay into a narrative of sacrifice. The first half of Mrs. Miniver establishes the fundamental, complacent comfort of a secure family living in upper-middle-class ease in an English village that is made to look like any small, prosperous American town. An opening title tells the audience that they’re about to meet “a happy, careless people who worked and played, reared their children and tended their gardens in that happy, easy-going England that was so soon to be fighting desperately for her way of life.” The second half brings the war home to them, robbing the Minivers of peace of mind, safety, food, family members, and even the roof over their heads. The Minivers and their fellow villagers respond by growing in character and courage, meeting the Nazi threat by forgetting their own petty squabbles and abandoning the class distinctions that had defined their world. War ennobles them, and the unity of a family and a town in the face of grave peril and loss becomes symbolically the unity of a country under siege.