City of Nets
Authors: Otto Friedrich
To Liesel and Molly
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. . . .
â
ADAM SMITH
Â
Every morning, to earn my bread,
I go to the market where lies are bought.
Hopefully
I take up my place among the sellers.
â
BERTOLT BRECHT
Â
It is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths.
â
FORD MADOX FORD
Contents
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* A page of photographs introduces each chapter
I
was born in Hollywood in 1964 at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Although intended for civilians, Cedars was funded by industry titans Will Rogers, Joseph Schenck, and Jack Warner back in the 1920's. Apparently my birth was made a little easier by a fund-raising campaign started by Al Jolson, who was specifically interested in expanding the maternity ward. The man had a lifelong thing for the word
mammy
, it turns out.
Marilyn Monroe had her appendix out there, and soon after, the slightly spoiled patient Elizabeth Taylor ate meals sent to her from Chasen's while being serenaded by violinists hired by Richard Burton.
Later, courtesy of a check from Max Factor, Cedars moved west, where it expanded to include the Burns and Allen Research Institute. My old birthplace became the Church of Scientology, the emergency entrance located on a cross street now called L. Ron Hubbard Way. See, in Hollywood, even where you're born is part of the cult of celebrity. The town's urban history is indistinguishable from the visions generated by the power of movies. I was born into
City of Nets
.
Little else has been written about cinema that's like Friedrich's classic book. Assured, scholarly, gossipy, omniscient, intimate, Dickens filtered through Kevin Starr, Friedrich knew exactly when to take the trivial seriously and vice versa. The narrative isn't easily described except as that Trojan horse “it's about Hollywood in the 1940's.” It's so much more than thatâit's a genuine epic in the sense of its being a creation myth, with sex and violence and humor and, above all else, resonance. You can't read this book without seeing the hidden rooms of the 1940's that gave us the culture we have today, Cedars of Lebanon included.
I cannot wait for you to read about Brecht writing musicals for M-G-M. Or the tragedy of Gene Tierney and the Hollywood Canteen. Or Jack Warner collecting for the United Jewish Appeal with a rubber truncheon. Those are little moments in a much larger opera about the strange relationships among reality and art and desire and fear. In these pages I learned that America became America because Hollywood led it to its future, taking its hand in the dark, the smell of popcorn in the air, palm trees fifty feet tall on the screen, the promise of a pretty girl's kiss yet to come, all seduction and all as real as light penetrating celluloid.
But that's big-screen stuff. Now, as movies are once again under siege, this time not from television but from what we're now calling digital media, we can turn to Friedrich to help us figure out what's nextâno doubt something transformative and greedy and hilarious and strange. We know the past isn't dead. But thanks to
City of Nets
, Ronald Reagan is eternally bedridden and delirious before a grim Knute Rockne,
Sunset Boulevard
is always a grimy thrill, and the fire just about to consume the city, the match that's been waiting to ignite since Nathanael West struck the tinder in 1939, is still waiting for the perfect light.
Â
Glen David Gold is the author of the novels
Sunnyside
and
Carter Beats the Devil
.
I
n 1939, the year of
Gone With the Wind
, of
Ninotchka
, of
Wuthering Heights
and
The Wizard of Oz
, the leading moviemakers of Hollywood could with some justification regard themselves as conquering heroes. The assorted film studios, which really produced nothing but a series of flickering images, had by now become the nation's eleventh-largest industry. They created some four hundred new movies every year, attracted more than fifty million Americans to the theater every week, and grossed nearly $700 million annually. Just a decade later, Hollywood was in a shambles, its biggest studios losing money, its celebrities embroiled in charges of Communist influence, its audiences turning to television. And a community that had once taken in newcomers as diverse as William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, and Thomas Mann now drove away anyone who disturbed its conventions or aroused its fearsâaway with Charlie Chaplin, Ingrid Bergman, Orson Welles.
This is the story, then, of a great empire built out of dreams of glamour, dreams of beauty, wealth, and success, and of that empire's sudden decline and fall. It is a social and cultural history of Hollywood during the decade of upheaval from the start of World War II to the start of the Korean War. Some marvelous movies were created during these years:
Citizen Kane
, for example,
The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, All About Eve.
And not only movies; Mann's
Doctor Faustus
was written here, and so was Brecht's
Galileo
, Stravinsky's
Rake's Progress.
And then, scarcely ten years after David Selznick had triumphantly opened
Gone With the Wind
, he was walking along a deserted street at dawn and saying to a companion, “Hollywood's like Egypt. Full of crumbling pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.”
Hollywood has survived, of course, but everything has changed since the decay of the great studios. Filmmaking is taught in universities now, and the white-haired survivors of the golden age are cajoled into telling their stories to young interviewers with tape recorders. Is this book then just another exercise in nostalgia? No, I would like to try something quite different, starting with an unorthodox new rule: No more interviews. Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been interrogated over and over again. And in no other field of history, not in Hitler's Berlin or in Roosevelt's Washington, have so many interviews grown into so many ghost-written autobiographies. These works include not only major figures like Chaplin or DeMille but even such ephemeral talents as Jackie Cooper and Veronica Lake. In other casesâBarbara Leaming's
Orson Welles,
for example, or Mel Gussow's life of Darryl F. Zanuckâa favored biographer has been granted such extensive interviews that the result is just as authoritative, for better or for worse, as an autobiography. All in all, just about everybody has spoken.
What is needed now, I think, is not more tape-recorded interrogations but rather a new effort to synthesize what has already been said, to combine, to interpret, to analyze, to understand. I have read about five hundred books on Hollywood, ranging from scholarly studies of the Holocaust in films to exhaustive analyses of Raymond Chandler's screenplays to the lubricious memoirs of Hedy Lamarr, which she has formally denied writing, dictating, or confessing. The most remarkable aspect of all these books is how isolated from one another they all are.
Survivors of the 1940's freely recall that Paramount writers generally talked only to other Paramount writers, and that a $500-per-week writer would not be welcome at a party given by a $1,500-per-week writer. As this self-segregation of the 1940's becomes ossified in the memoirs of the 1970's and 1980's, it seems astonishing that Billy Wilder, say, and Igor Stravinskyâand, yes, the future President Ronald Reaganâwere hardly aware of each other's existence. “The only way to avoid Hollywood,” Stravinsky once remarked, “is to live there.”
Hollywood really is an imaginary city that exists in the mind of anyone who has, in his mind, lived there. My Hollywood is different from your Hollywood, just as it is different from Rex Reed's Hollywood or Aljean Harmetz's Hollywood, not because they know more about Hollywood than you or I do but because they are different from us, just as we are different from each other.
We are different in time, for one thing. I lived in the Hollywood of the 1940's when I was a student outside Boston and went to the movies two or three times a week. I loved Ingrid Bergman above all others, but I also loved such half-forgotten people as Betty Hutton and Ida Lupino, even Diana Lynn. I know and care much less about the 1950's and 1960's because I spent those years raising five children, too poor to go to movies.
No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one's own mental furniture along. In the 1940's, I cared passionately about sports. That's why tears came to my eyes at the death of Ronald Reagan as George Gipp. The war was very important too, and so was Hollywood's version of itâRobert Taylor defending Bataan, Humphrey Bogart steaming across the North Atlantic, Errol Flynn conquering Burma, all that. Like Reagan himself, I still feel a tightening of the throat at seeing the death of the Gipper, but I really don't care very much about football anymore, and I dislike military heroics.
So the Hollywood that I have been inhabiting once again for the last few years is not only different from anyone else's Hollywood but different even from the Hollywood that I myself inhabited when I was young. Bertolt Brecht, whom I had never heard of when I admired George Gipp, now seems a far more interesting character than many big stars like, say, Cary Grant or Betty Grable. So Brecht plays a fairly large part in my re-creation of Hollywood in the 1940's, while Grant and Miss Grable play almost none. It is astonishing to me, in fact, how a book of this large size could leave out so much about so many celebrities. There is very little here about Jimmy Stewart, for example, or Tyrone Power, or Spencer Tracy. These are all commendable people, but I find that actors seem to me less interesting than writers, gangsters, musicians, tycoons, and sex goddesses. And since Hollywood produced about five thousand movies during the 1940's, one can pick and choose what to write about. Indeed, one must.
There remains a basic question about the mountain of Hollywood's reminiscences: Are they true? Well, perhaps partly true. Remember that Hollywood people lived and still live in a world of fantasy, and they are accustomed to making things up, to fibbing and exaggerating, and to believing all their own fibs and exaggerations. Remember, too, that they all had press agents who made things up, and that fan-magazine writers made things up, and that ghostwriters still make things up, and that the celebrities who sign these concoctions no longer remember very well what really happened long ago. In a few cases, I have offered several contradictory versions of some much-told tale. If the late Jack Warner and the late Darryl Zanuck both claimed to be the one who found William Faulkner working at home in Mississippi rather than at home in Beverly Hills, for example, who am I to decide which one was right? And if all this is true of the printed word, must it not be equally true of the improvised interview?
But if all the details in this book have already been published somewhere or other, then what is new in this portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's? Why, the portrait itself. If you already know a lot about Rita Hayworth, you may not know a great deal about Arnold Schoenberg, or vice versa, and if you know a lot about both of them, you may not know a great deal about Bugsy Siegel, or the aircraft industry, or Herbert K. Sorrell. And even if you know a lot about President Reagan, you may not know a great deal about how he got to be what he is today. Or how, in many ways, we ourselves got to be what we are. This is a portrait of a special place in a special timeâan imaginary city, as I have suggestedâand yet it was the dream factory of the 1940's that created much of what Americans today regard as reality.
Â
Fire: Nathanael West (
top
) imagined a painted “Burning of Los Angeles.” David Selznick set Atlanta ablaze in
Gone With the Wind.
