The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Nor did the Jewish army in World War II ever come to be. Peter Bergson would claim that the movement had been effectively and finally killed by the American Zionists, led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had tried to link the rescue of Europe’s Jews with the Jewish emigration to Palestine, thereby distracting attention from the mounting Holocaust. “The Zionists,” Bergson said, “fought the project not because they are against it, but because they are against us. Stephen Wise will not tolerate any other Jewish organization working for Palestine and stealing honors and publicity from him.” If true, this would constitute a sad irony. And yet, that there was an American government effort to save the Jews at all—that there was, for example, a War Refugee Board that sponsored the Raul Wallenberg mission to rescue the Hungarian Jews—was largely due to the efforts of Peter Bergson’s group. But, Bergson has added, “If the Jewish leadership [in America] would have acted, the number of survivors would have been double, triple, fourfold.” And, in his most chilling indictment, Bergson has said that if he were an American Jewish leader during the wartime period, “I would be turning in my grave.”

  This was a harsh judgment, perhaps too harsh. Bergson, after all, was an outsider, not an American, and, given hindsight, any judgment is possible. It was a curious and sinister confluence of forces—some logical and necessary, some mad—that was coming together in 1941. It was triangular, and could almost be diagramed. Britain was at war with Germany; Germany had embarked upon its systematic program to annihilate the Jews of Europe; in Palestine, Jewish guerrillas were fighting the British to establish a homeland for the Jews. The three forces seemed unconnected, except by time, yet disaster seemed inevitable somewhere along the way. It was small wonder that American Jews were faced with an almost numbing dilemma of choices, of priorities, of loyalties. And compounding the dilemma was the longing of the American Jews to be assimilated into the American culture, to be considered loyal Americans, and to forget the past.

  In California, one symbol of assimilation—or the extent of it—was the Hillcrest Country Club of Los Angeles. Prosperous Americans, the Eastern European Jews had discovered, enjoyed a country club society, and the East Europeans had eagerly taken up the popular American country club sports—golf, tennis, swimming, riding. In Hollywood, the joke was that the movie tycoons had gone “from Poland to polo in one generation.” But in Los Angeles, as in other cities, the leading Christian club, the Los Angeles Country Club, would not accept Jews, not even as guests of members, and an unwritten rule excluded anyone in the movie business (though an exception was made in the case of Walt Disney). So the Jews of Hollywood had formed Hillcrest, a country club of their own.

  Hillcrest, like other Jewish country clubs formed in the 1920s and 1930s, was not only designed to make the best of a poor situation. It was built out of Jews’ deep inner convictions that any attempts to join the Christian community, on a social level, were probably doomed to failure. And it was also built out of the belief that, since this was America, the prosperous Jew was entitled to his own separate but equal country club facility, where Jews could enjoy American pastimes in an American setting while not obtruding upon the established ways of the Christian majority.

  In the process, Hillcrest became far more separate from than equal to the Los Angeles Country Club. Since it was newer, its facilities were far more modern and luxurious than the Los Angeles Country Club’s, and its kitchens produced some of the finest food in southern California. It was just as exclusive as the Los Angeles Club and membership was rigidly closed to Christians, though many, including Joseph P. Kennedy, tried to join. Its initiation fee of twenty-two thousand dollars was the highest in the country, and when oil was discovered on Hillcrest property, it became America’s richest country club, with each member becoming a stockholder in the private oil company.

  Hillcrest gave the Jews of Hollywood something very American to be proud of; it confirmed their conformity to the American mode. At the same time, it became one of the few centers of Jewish identity in Hollywood, more important to the Jews of the movie industry than any synagogue or charity or political cause, or even the romantic legends of their own movies. It was the closest thing they had to a Hollywood Jewish community center. A great deal of business was conducted at Hillcrest, along with the golf and tennis and high-stakes games of poker, bridge, and gin rummy. Jokes and insults were swapped in Yiddish, a language never used in the office or on the set. Here, in fact, was one place in Hollywood where it was permissible to celebrate Judaism, and where Judaism was not treated as a guilty secret.

  Outside the club, and to the world at large, the facade the movie men projected was that of non-Jews. Once, at MGM, a disgruntled director muttered that Louis B. Mayer was a “Jewish son of a bitch.” He was sternly reminded by an associate that “in this business, there’s no such thing as a Jew, so there’s no such thing as a Jewish son of a bitch.” Hollywood’s films were laundered of Jewish themes, as well as of themes having to do with any form of racial or religious prejudice. The whole idea of “message movies” was anathema, on the theory that audiences went to films to get away from their troubles and not to be lectured on what was wrong with the world. “If you want to send a message, go to Western Union,” Sam Goldwyn had said. But of course Goldwyn often broke his own rules, and the closest thing to a Jewish movie prior to World War II was his Earth and High Heaven, based on a novel by Gwendolyn Graham. Even so, the film’s underlying theme of religious intolerance was so muted as to be nearly imperceptible.

  Just as Samuel Bronfman preferred to hide his company’s ethnic identity under the mantle of the Seagram name, and David Sarnoff preferred the grandly chauvinistic name of Radio Corporation of America even after he himself had moved to the head of it, so the motion picture companies gave themselves names that were either patriotic (Columbia, Republic) or ethnically innocent but portentous (Twentieth Century, Paramount, Universal, United Artists, RKO). Only Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contained a recognizably Jewish name (who remembered Sam Goldfish, much less Gelbfisz?). And only Warner Brothers announced its founders’ names in its corporate title. Though the four brothers were Polish Jews, the name Warner sounded properly American.

  But none of this is to say that Hollywood’s Jews in the early 1940s were too preoccupied with matters of style and status and American assimilation to be philanthropic. In Los Angeles, the movie men contributed millions to create the magnificent Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the second-largest Jewish house of worship in the world. They gave generously to Mount Sinai and Cedars of Lebanon hospitals. They sent large checks to United Jewish Appeal and, less enthusiastically, to B’nai B’rith, which they thought of as “too militant.” They also gave to non-Jewish causes like the Boy Scouts of America.

  Russian-born Louis B. Mayer had his own idiosyncratic ways of giving. For one thing, he said that he preferred to give to Catholic charities rather than to Jewish ones, explaining that the Jewish philanthropies always published the size of his gifts, whereas the Catholic ones did not. (This is not true; one can give as quietly and anonymously to a Jewish cause as to any other.) Was Mayer flirting with conversion to Catholicism? Some people thought so. One of his good friends and frequent traveling companions was Francis Cardinal Spellman. But a more practical explanation was that the Catholic Legion of Decency had been coming down harder than ever on the issue of “morality” in Hollywood films. The word God could not be uttered in a movie, nor could the word breast; a pregnant woman could not be shown, and even when a man and woman were married in a film story, they could not be shown on the same bed, even if they were merely sitting side by side, fully clothed. To Mayer, it was simply good business to have friends among the princes of the church. Mayer had also been criticized for publicly wining and dining the openly anti-Semitic Henry Ford, Sr., and for posing for a photo with him on a bicycle built for two. On the other hand, Mayer wanted to film Young Edison, and the Edison Museum, which he wanted for a set, was on Mr. Ford’s property.

  Mayer liked to boa
st that he was a one-hundred-percent patriotic American, and claimed that he had been born on the Fourth of July. (True or not, no one knew.) And he could produce a rationale to demonstrate that he was one of the principal benefactors of the American public at large. By the early 1940s, Mayer’s salary was the largest of any individual in the United States. And a high official of the Internal Revenue Service, so he claimed, had congratulated him on his generosity to himself. After all, this unnamed IRS man had said, if he paid himself a lower salary he would pay less in taxes. And those big taxes of his, Mayer said proudly, were caring for widows and orphans all over America, and were helping American soldiers fight the war against the Nazis.

  Sam Goldwyn’s philanthropies were sporadic, and of course he never forgave a personal slight. He presented a gruff, hardhearted exterior, and was never able to forgive his first wife for divorcing him. When their only daughter, Ruth, long estranged, wrote to him many years after the divorce—as a married housewife living in New Jersey—saying, “You will probably think it strange to hear from me,” she went on to tell him that she was going to have a baby, his first grandchild. In the margin of Ruth’s letter, Goldwyn scribbled angrily, “Ignore this letter!” At the same time, however, he continued to send regular checks to relatives in Europe. An uncle in Warsaw got a hundred dollars a month, and a distant unmarried cousin named Lily Linder got the same monthly stipend. Even more distant relatives got annual gifts for Hanukkah. To be sure, he often scolded these people in the letters that accompanied their checks. One sister, Nettie, was a particular problem. Nettie suffered from “nerves,” and from a husband who couldn’t seem to hold a job. “Please stop crying!” he wrote to Nettie. “I didn’t marry your husband—you did!” Still, over the years, he had raised Nettie’s allowance from fifty dollars a month to sixty-five, and eventually to one hundred. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Nettie’s letters became less frequent. Then they stopped altogether. What became of her can only be imagined. Sam Goldwyn refused to speak of her.

  Of course, not all wealthy American Jews turned a deaf ear to the cries for help from Jews across the Atlantic. In 1939, for example, on a visit to Cuba to oversee his extensive gambling operations there, Meyer Lansky learned that a boatload of Jewish refugees had entered Havana harbor. The Cuban government had refused to let them ashore, had ordered them deported, and a number had been so desperate that they had jumped overboard and swum to shore. Lansky, who had no shortage of influence with the Cuban government (his casinos and hotels were among the island’s principal employers, and the Cuban president collected a share of the casinos’ take), simply went to the immigration inspector and demanded a change of policy. He also promised to pay five hundred dollars for each refugee admitted, and offered his guarantee that if any refugee became a burden on the Cuban state he himself would be responsible.

  And in Montreal, increasingly wearied by continued rebuffs from the Canadian establishment, Sam Bronfman had begun shifting more and more of his philanthropic energies to Jewish causes. If the Christians did not want to accept him among their leaders, then he would work for the Jews. He and his brother Allan headed a fund-raising drive to build Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. Their initial goal had been to raise eight hundred thousand dollars. Before they finished, they had raised twice that amount. Mr. Sam had then been elected to head the Canadian Jewish Congress, a post he would hold for twenty-three years. And, in 1940, in response to what was happening in Europe, Mr. Sam created the congress’s Refugee Committee. One of his committee’s accomplishments was persuading the Canadian government to pass an act permitting twelve hundred Jewish “orphans” to enter Canada from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Then, with a certain amount of élan, Mr. Sam and his committee demanded—and got—permission from Ottawa to accept the Jewish orphans’ parents and grandparents as well. All told, Mr. Sam’s efforts saved some seven thousand lives.

  Still, sad to say, impressive as these individual accomplishments were, they were not enough; although the Jews saved numbered in the thousands, those who perished numbered in the millions. And as the war with Germany progressed, and as the ultimate ends of Hitler’s anti-Semitism became ever more nightmarishly clear, a disturbing phenomenon was taking place in the United States. The process of de-Semitization that had been noticeable primarily in the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s, where it had been treated as something of a joking matter, now appeared to be spreading inexorably into every area of American life. It was as though Jews were going underground, or were being forgotten or overlooked, or were being written off by—and out of—history, and it was no longer funny. In the Catskill resorts, Jewish comics were dropping their Jewish peddler and Jewish tailor routines. Sophie Tucker no longer closed her act with “My Yiddishe Mama,” but with Irving Berlin’s stirringly patriotic “God Bless America.”

  Back in 1939, Danny Kaye had met his wife-to-be, the composer-lyricist Sylvia Fine, at an “adult summer camp” on the Borscht Circuit called Tamiment. Together, they wrote and performed a number of Jewish-parody songs like “Stanislavsky” and “Pavlova” at Tamiment, and that year Kaye got his first Broadway role in The Straw Hat Revue, with Imogene Coca. In 1940, he opened at a New York nightclub called La Martinique, and became an overnight sensation using much of the Tamiment material. But by 1942, when Sam Goldwyn hired him for his first film role in Up in Arms, the mood had already begun to change, and Up in Arms was not going to contain any Jewish-parody material, nor was Kaye to play a Jewish character.

  Goldwyn, furthermore, who had made a special trip to New York for just one night simply to catch Danny Kaye’s act at La Martinique, had been so entranced with the comic’s performance that he had signed him to a starring contract without the usual precaution of having him screen-tested.

  It was not until several months later, when the script for Up in Arms was finished and a number of sequences around Kaye had already been committed to celluloid, that Danny Kaye actually arrived in Hollywood to do his scenes—and to be screen-tested. When Goldwyn looked at the first test, he was horrified. “Danny’s face was all angles,” Frances Goldwyn recalled, “and his nose was so long and thin it looked like Pinocchio’s.”

  “He looks too—too—” Goldwyn muttered, unable to bring himself to say “Jewish.”

  “Well,” his wife reminded him, “he is Jewish.”

  “But let’s face it,” Goldwyn said, “Jews are funny looking.”

  Goldwyn then summoned Kaye to his office. “Do something about your nose,” Goldwyn ordered. But Kaye declined. If Goldwyn wanted him, he would have to take him nose and all.

  More tests were made, and still more. In each of them, new lighting was tried, and new makeup. But none of the takes seemed to draw the focus of Kaye’s face away from the nose, and Goldwyn continued to be dissatisfied with his star’s appearance. Meanwhile, the rest of the Up in Arms company stood idle, waiting for its star, and a number of the people at his studio whom Goldwyn most trusted and respected began—at first hesitantly, then with increasing insistence—urging Goldwyn to accept the loss in pride and money and call the picture off, to forget about doing anything with Danny Kaye, to buy out his contract, and cast someone else in the part. Danny Kaye would never “look right” for movies. He might be fine for Broadway and nightclub acts, but he would never be a film star.

  Goldwyn could accept, albeit with difficulty, the loss of money. But swallowing his pride was impossible. He had “discovered” Danny Kaye. He had brought him to Hollywood. To lose face in the eyes of his peers, to admit a mistake, was not in Sam Goldwyn’s nature. “In dealing with my husband,” Frances Goldwyn would recall later, “there was one thing you had to remember. You could be right. But he could not be wrong.” One night late in 1942 Sam and Frances Goldwyn sat up until dawn; Goldwyn paced the floor of the Laurel Canyon house, arguing with himself, and with his wife, about ways in which it might be possible to make Danny Kaye photograph-able. In the morning, having had no sleep, the Goldwyns drove d
own to the studio to run through, in the projection room, the long series of Danny Kaye screen tests one more time. After perhaps the third test, Goldwyn suddenly yelped, jumped to his feet, and cried, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He seized the studio telephone and asked for the hairdressing department. “Expect Danny Kaye in ten minutes,” he shouted. “He’ll be having his hair dyed blond.” It was done. And Danny Kaye’s wavy mane of blond hair—it had been a dark, reddish brown—became his most enduring trademark, the one caricaturists would focus on for years. The blond hair drew the camera’s, and the audience’s, eye away from the telltale nose. It gave him a Nordic look. He looked like a jaunty Dane. He went on to such fame and popularity that, when he was at his peak, his daughter Dena recalls, and fan letters from abroad, addressed simply “Danny Kaye, U.S.A.,” arrived in the United States, the post office delivered them to his door.

  The hard-to-please film critic Pauline Kael has named Up in Arms, the musical that almost didn’t get made because of a Jewish nose, as one of the dozen or so best movie musicals ever made. Sam Goldwyn’s brainstorm about the hair has been cited, in Hollywood, as an example of Goldwyn’s production genius.

  But in the process Danny Kaye, the Jew, had disappeared.

  In an article for Commentary called “The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture,” Henry Popkin wrote of this strange trend, observable during the war and immediately afterward. The Jew in popular culture, he noted, had become “the little man who isn’t there,” and he offered a few very trenchant examples. In Irving Shulman’s best-selling novel The Amboy Dukes, two characters had been named Goldfarb and Semmel; for the paperback reprint, they became Abbot and Saunders. Similarly, in the reprint of Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the character Meyer Babushkin became transformed into Michael Babbin, and one Mr. Pulvermacher became Mr. Pulsifer. When Ben Hecht’s own play The Front Page—co-written with Charles MacArthur—had been first produced on Broadway in 1928, and made into a film in 1931, a comic character had been named Irving Pincus. In a second movie version, called His Girl Friday, in 1940, Pincus was renamed Joe Pettibone. In George S. Kaufman’s Butter and Egg Man, another comedy character had been named Lehman. He was still named Lehman in the first film version, under its original Broadway title, in 1928, and also in a second movie version in 1934 called The Tenderfoot. But by 1937, when the Kaufman story was resurrected in film for the third time as Dance, Charlie, Dance, Lehman, which was the name of a prominent Jewish banking family, had become Morgan, the name of a great Christian banker. And in yet a fourth incarnation of the same story in 1940, An Angel from Texas, Morgan became Allen. Prior to the war, the popular columnist Walter Winchell had been having periodic fun with a comic Jewish-dialect character he called Mefoofsky. Mefoofsky had disappeared from Winchell’s columns by 1940, and Winchell had begun piously inveighing against the poor taste of dialect humor. Popkin went on to cite many more examples of ethnic revisionism, or ethnic evasiveness.