American Experiment (244 page)

The earliest movies had typically been either ludicrous farces or stiffly filmed stage plays. Then films increasingly became rich in spectacle, allegory, and melodrama. The blazing power of huge battle was combined with close attention to detail in both these and domestic scenes. D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation,
with its pioneering film technique, was a landmark of art and of finance. Some viewers were furious over the film’s portrayal of idyllic life on an antebellum Southern plantation, villainous abolitionists, and the evils of miscegenation—and also because many of the blacks in the huge cast were played by white actors. But Griffith’s film went on making money, at the then-unheard-of price of two dollars a seat, with the producer proclaiming his audience to be the leisured elite, not the impecunious who had filled the nickelodeons.

As people demanded to see more feature films like Griffith’s, as big-name stars, better scripts, lavish sets and costumes became more expensive, the scattered film enterprises were transformed into a major industry. By 1920, studios were vast businesses, embracing real estate, production plants, towering sets, well-paid screen writers, film stock, animals, carpenters, electricians, cameras, laboratories, promoters and advertisers, and performers. As in all businesses, distribution was another huge expense, involving everything from posters and theaters to usherettes and popcorn sellers. It was also a key to domination of the whole industry.

This key was in the hands of entrepreneurial producers like Adolph Zukor. Under Zukor’s leadership, Paramount Pictures abandoned the old method of renting films to many theaters simultaneously and substituted a method of classifying picture houses. The first exclusive showing at a
prestigious theater would cost more than later runs. Following lavish promotion of a new film, Zukor insisted that a theater owner who wanted it would have to take his studio’s entire year’s output. After experimenting with three kinds of pictures—artsy, star-studded, and cheap-and-quick— Zukor discovered that the films with stars were the most popular. With actors like Mary Pickford and William S. Hart, he was in a commanding position.

Prestigious films with celebrated actors and actresses required fitting movie theaters. Fifty years earlier, the cathedrals of American business had been magnificent railroad stations; now they were “movie palaces,” the legendary master of which was Samuel L. Rothafel, known to the public as “Roxy.” In the mid-twenties he built in New York City his dream show-place, modestly called the Roxy. “Three hundred plasterers were gathered to work their rococo magic on every available inch,” according to a breathless report. “The Roxy also utilized Renaissance details of gold filigree and vivid red. The rotunda was supported by twelve marble columns, and rose five stories above a magnificent oval rug which weighed over two tons, measured fifty-eight feet by forty-one feet, and cost $15,000. Amber glass windows, crystal chandeliers, and enormous urns decorated the immense 6,214-seat auditorium.” Roxy and other impresarios built strings of rococo palaces across the nation, and Roxy reached his own pinnacle with the Radio City Music Hall. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, and William Randolph Hearst were among the celebrities attending the opening night.

Titanic battles were fought to control theaters, films, and stars. Theater owners, cut off from control by impresarios like Zukor, banded together to take over film production, contracting with stars like Chaplin. Zukor responded by building some six hundred first-run theaters for Paramount, including some of the rococo cathedrals. Film artists too sought to control their own product. Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists in 1919 to distribute their films. Each of them had a separate production unit, thus insuring their independence. United Artists survived, despite the power of the goliaths, and became a model for independent producers in later decades.

But the true czars were the producers who owned or controlled movie theaters, and America had never seen a group of entrepreneurs quite like the first generation of czars. Typically Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, with little formal education, they plunged into the American business maelstrom, sometimes running amusement parks where they converted their arcades into nickelodeons. As the movie business prospered, these producers typically built a few more theaters until they owned
a chain. One of the most famous was Louis B. Mayer, who as a child had emigrated from Minsk with his Russian family in the late 1880s. He bought his first nickelodeon with his last fifty dollars, then moved up the ladder to fame and fortune. Volatile, ruthless, melodramatic, Mayer was innovative in seeking an appealing story, rather than depending on the popularity of stars.

Temperamental producers often battled with their temperamental stars. “Remember it was I who first had the vision!” Zukor said to Chaplin. “Who swept out your dirty nickelodeon? Who put in your plush seats? It was I who built your great theaters, who raised prices and made it possible for you to get large grosses for your pictures.”

As in other industries, the Hollywood studios could always fall back on mergers. Marcus Loew’s ailing Metro studio, Sam Goldwyn’s heavily indebted Goldwyn Company, and Louis Mayer’s thriving studio combined in 1924 in a lasting merger. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer billed itself “The Home of the Stars,” proving it with such big names as Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, and Lon Chaney. Much of MGM’s success was due to a shy, talented young businessman from Brooklyn, Irving Thalberg, whose instinct for film, for the right scene, gave him the reputation of defining the quintessential “MGM film.”

But what Americans saw was not the industry but the stars, and during the twenties they were flocking to watch the mishaps of Charlie Chaplin, the acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the antics of Harold Lloyd, the licit sex appeal of Clara Bow, the brooding, heavy-lidded eyes of Theda Bara, the dark passion of Rudolph Valentino. A host of movie magazines told in intimate detail, issue after issue, of the working lives and good times and tragedies of such stars, of their romances, marriages, divorces, of their clothes, hairdos, cars. A nation of spectators watched a handful of stars.

The censors also were watching. Hollywood had taken on the flavor of sin after comedian “Fatty” Arbuckle’s involvement in the death of a starlet, the mysterious murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and Cecil B. De Mille’s
Male and Female
—the film version of James M. Barrie’s
The Admirable Crichton
—which had allowed a fleeting glimpse of Gloria Swanson’s breasts. Several states had passed censorship laws by 1920. More ominously, the United States Supreme Court had held that prior censorship of motion pictures was within the constitutional authority of the states. The guarantee of free opinion and speech, the Court ruled, need not encompass the profit-making business of exhibiting films.

With their usual resourcefulness, the Hollywood moguls hit upon a winning formula in the face of these threats—films that were paeans to the resistance of temptation, yet showed in lurid detail the temptations
resisted. But the industry’s main defense was to form a new trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. Chosen as first president was a man of impeccable moral and political credentials, Will H. Hays, former Postmaster General under Harding, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Presbyterian elder from Pennsylvania. Functioning as a glorified press agent, Hays managed, through speeches, articles, and committee sessions, both to placate the guardians of morality and to celebrate the role of film in American life. Although movies still depicted nudity and debauchery, with Hays at the helm the studios were able to persuade the upright that the films were purer than ever—chiefly by rewarding virtue at the end of the film.

This myth—Hollywood as virtuous—was only one of the illusions manufactured by the magical image-makers of the film industry. By the end of the decade, Hollywood had become a worldwide symbol of the lights and shadows cast on the silver screen, avidly followed by a nation of voyeurs.

Entertainment as spectatorship reached its apogee in the 1920s with the confluence of two great forces—nationwide media and professional athletics. Newspapers had been paying more and more attention to big-league baseball; a New York editor commented that “no single classification of news … sells more papers than sports,” Film and the set-piece sports event seemed made for each other, as evidenced in the Pathé and other newsreels that preceded the feature film in theaters; the feature itself might deal with a sports hero. And the graphic broadcasts of Grantland Rice, Graham McNamee, and others sometimes made the play sound better over the radio than it looked on the field.

Few aspects of American life were changing so fast as sports participation and spectatorship. During much of the nineteenth century American sports had been palpably class-oriented. The social elites, city and country, had gone in heavily for individual and often expensive recreation: riding, yachting, rowing, billiards, and later, tennis, polo, golf. The urban rich grouped together in country clubs and athletic clubs that set them apart from the sports-minded masses. The New York Athletic Club was founded in 1866, the Westchester Polo Club in the late seventies, the Amateur Athletic Union in 1888, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1905. As usual, the elites had their internal squabbles. The New York Athletic Club was rent by conflict between the Old Guard, who believed in sports for sport’s sake, and an element that was suspected of using the club as a stepping-stone to high social status. Some of the old sports gaffers resigned when they lost this battle.

Middle-class men and women had shared in some upper-class sports activities, but to a limited degree. Genteel women were not expected to be physically active or participate in games; they often shunned dancing or even card-playing. The working classes, in factory and field, had more than enough exercise on the job, but they might hunt or fish, or repair to a secluded livery stable to watch a cockfight, goat fight, or “ratting”—wagering on how long it would take a dog to kill a pit full of rats. But late in the century “urbanization, technological innovations, rising per capita incomes, and the new social and cultural milieu combined in complex ways to trigger a sports revolution and a new era of American sport, ‘The Age of the Players,’ ” according to Benjamin Rader. The players “took the initiative in organizing, managing, and financing” the sports of the upper and middle classes. And these sports were still player-centered.

Many were still excluded from this tight circle, but the “outsiders” found points of entry or, more often, developed their own sports events. Caledonian Scots put on contests in footracing, tug-of-war, hurdling, pole-vaulting, throwing the hammer, and other games brought over from the old country. The Turner Societies held gymnastics competitions modeled after festivals in Frankfurt and other German cities. As usual, blacks encountered the worst exclusion. Marshall W. “Major” Taylor, acclaimed as the “Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World,” encountered rivals who together sought to knock him off his cycle, box him in, or attack him.

The 1920s brought, in Rader’s terms, the “age of the spectator”—the heyday of the modern sports hero, celebrated teams, big-time promoters, athletic specialization, expert coaching; in short, the triumph of mass spectator sports. This did not mean the end of participatory sport, of course. For a time, indeed, it seemed possible that hosts of new players might match the number of spectators. Over a million persons were playing tennis by the end of the decade, and 2 million had taken up golf. But the most popular sports were organized for the watchers rather than the players. Never before had sports in America offered such an array of spectacles, or been so lucrative for their promoters.

The age of the football hero began. The game in a single decade was transformed from a college pastime to a national fascination. In the first thirteen minutes of one game against Michigan, “Red” Grange scored four touchdowns for Illinois in four carries. One hundred thousand persons gathered from throughout the nation to watch Grange play his last game for Illinois in 1925. Thereafter, as a professional, he earned as much as $35,000 a game, netting himself a million dollars and enabling him to retire while still in his twenties. What Grange was to playing, Knute Rockne was to coaching. Piloting Notre Dame to football greatness, he promoted
the forward pass, which broke up the old static defense formations, boosted scores, and brought new excitement to the game.

Tennis had its own hero, in the versatile stroking machine known as Big Bill Tilden. After years of tirelessly practicing the mechanics of each shot and return, he won the singles championship at Wimbledon as an unknown, and for the next six years he dominated the game. Golf too had its brilliant technician in Bobby Jones. Dubbed “Robot, the Mechanical Man of Golf,” Jones first mastered his own self-destructive temper and then perfected the loveliest swing in the game. On the links, thousands of fans pursued him, chanting “Bobby! Bobby!” between strokes.

But the hero of heroes, in part because he played in the game of games, was George Herman Ruth, Jr. He had risen to fame and fortune out of adversity: given up by his parents at the age of nine as incorrigible, raised in a Catholic reform school, he moonlighted as a bartender and bouncer in his father’s saloon during his first season on the diamond. Benefiting from the abolition of the “spitball” and the development of a more resilient baseball, he hit fifty-four home runs in 1920—twice the previous record—and batted a smashing .376 for the season. The Ruth legend was born. Guided by his personal manager Christy Walsh—“the first modern athletic business agent”—the Babe lent his name to newspaper articles, clothing, sports products, even automobiles.

There was plenty of money to go around. In Ruth’s first year with the Yankees, attendance at their games doubled, topping the 1 million mark. Through the twenties, a team could expect to take in around $10 million a year in gate receipts and concessions, of which nearly 20 percent was profit. The owners were able to build huge ballparks in the hearts of the major cities. Yankee Stadium, the “House That Ruth Built,” cost nearly $2.5 million and seated more than 60,000 spectators. City bosses and businessmen rushed to invest in this newest and most lucrative of urban franchises. It was better even than the stock market. Ruth himself picked up the rags-to-riches theme. “The great thing about this country,” he said, “is the wonderful fact that it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks you were born on, or whether you’re homeless or homely or friendless. The chance is still there….”