City of Nets (16 page)

The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1883 started a great real estate boom in Los Angeles. The fare from Kansas City dropped to as low as one dollar, and land sales to the immigrants from the Middle West soared to thirteen million dollars a month. When the boom collapsed at the end of the decade, the city's entrepreneurs faced disaster. General Harrison Gray Otis of the
Los Angeles Times
decided that he had no alternative but to cut all his employees' wages by 20 percent. The unionized printers objected; Otis refused to negotiate; the printers went out on strike in August of 1890; Otis began importing strikebreakers from Kansas. Otis continued publishing, and as the depression of 1893 began ruining both farmers and bankers, Otis became the vociferous champion of economic growth based on low labor costs. “Los Angeles wants no dudes, loafers, and paupers,” the
Times
declared, “people who have no means and trust to luck, cheap politicians, failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerks. . . . We need workers! Hustlers!”

The midwesterners who had been lured to California by promises of cheap houses and sunshine were now trapped there in their little houses. Otis helped organize the Los Angeles Merchants and Manufacturers Association, generally known as M & M, which not only opposed unions but threatened and even cut off bank credit to any business that hired union labor. The unions, in turn, organized strikes; the merchants broke them, often with violence. During the whole period of 1890–1910, Los Angeles wages averaged 20 to 30 percent lower than those in San Francisco. And business flowed in. One October night in 1910, a bomb exploded in the main plant of the
Times,
and twenty employees were killed. “O you anarchic scum,” Otis declared in his newspaper, “you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims. . . .” Otis hired the William J. Burns detective agency to catch the bombers, and when the detectives produced two Irish toughs, who confessed, on the eve of a hotly contested mayoralty election, Otis stood triumphant. And more business kept flowing in. Among the newcomers were those buccaneers who founded the movie industry.

In the prosperous 1920's, when it seemed easy for anyone to make money, there was little thought of labor unions in Hollywood, but even then, Louis B. Mayer had an interesting idea. As host at a dinner party in his house, Mayer was entertaining himself by playing solitaire, but he also eavesdropped on two of his guests talking about the need for an organization that would include all elements of the industry and would act for the common good. “Why don't you get together, then, and try it out?” said Mayer. They did, but it was Mayer's invitation that summoned thirty-six notables to a private dinner at the Biltmore Hotel, where Mayer explained the idea of a Hollywood organization that would make it unnecessary for anyone to organize any unions. And so was born, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It included producers, directors, writers, actors, technicians, anyone who “contributed in a distinguished way to the Arts and Sciences of Motion Picture Production.” The distinguished contributors promptly began giving each other prizes, Academy Awards—to Emil Jannings for
The Way of All Flesh
and Janet Gaynor for
Seventh Heaven,
and to Paramount for
Wings,
best picture of the year.

This convivial system seemed to work admirably until 1931, when a spokesman for the producers blighted an Academy Awards dinner by announcing that because of hard times, all wages would have to be cut by 10 to 25 percent. Paramount and Universal had already imposed 25 percent reductions on people earning more than $150 per week. The Academy's directors made a fuss about the general cut, though, and the producers postponed their maneuver. Until March 8, 1933. Then, in the midst of the financial collapse that President Roosevelt ended by the temporary shutdown called a “bank holiday,” the movie producers couldn't meet their payrolls. Three days later, appropriately enough, Hollywood trembled and shook from the thrusts of a major earthquake.

The studios were all determined now to cut their payrolls by 50 percent, regardless of any previous contracts or agreements, and Mayer took the lead by summoning his employees to a pay-cut meeting in the Thalberg Projection Room. He kept his victims waiting for twenty minutes before making his entrance. “His face [was] stubbled and his eyes red, as if his nights had been as sleepless as his days were unshaven,” M-G-M story editor Sam Marx recalled. “He began with a soft utterance: ‘My friends . . .' Then he broke down. Stricken, he held out his hands, supplicating, bereft of words.”

Lionel Barrymore knew a cue when he saw one. “Don't worry, L.B.,” he said huskily. “We're with you.”

A Hungarian scriptwriter named Ernest Vajda ventured to disagree. “I read the company statements, Mr. Mayer,” he said. “I know our films are doing well. Maybe these other companies must do this, but this company should not. Let us wait. There's no reason to cut our pay at this time.”

Barrymore recognized another cue.

“Mr. Vajda,” he said, “is like a man on his way to the guillotine, waiting to stop for a manicure.”

Dutiful laughter and applause rippled through the Thalberg Projection Room. But would all the M-G-M employees who had contracts allow Mayer to renege on those contracts?

May Robson, who had been a star for Vitagraph back in 1916, rose to her feet and said, “As the oldest person in the room, I will take the cut.” A now-forgotten child actor echoed her: “As the youngest person in the room, I will take the cut.” Mayer beamed paternally at his employees and asked if they would all vote to accept lower pay until “this terrible emergency is over,” and they all shouted their approval. As Mayer left the meeting, Marx heard him gloat to one of his lieutenants, Benny Thau,
*
“How did I do?”

The technicians were the only workers who had a union contract, so they didn't have to take the cut. Their union, IATSE, was not strong in its pregangster days, however. When the inevitable conflict broke out, between M-G-M and a crew of sound men, the studio called in strikebreakers, and when IATSE pulled out all of the six thousand members it then represented, the other studios hired still more strikebreakers. “We expect to keep on the job every man and woman who wants to be,” said Mayer.

The most unorganized of all the studio employees were the writers. They liked to think of themselves as creative and independent. They were also the most vulnerable to competition from every young newspaperman or novelist who yearned to become a success in Hollywood. The producers hired these neophytes as “junior writers,” the literary equivalent of starlets, at thirty-five dollars per week, or less, or assigned them to write scripts on speculation. One studio, Republic, achieved a certain notoriety for firing all its writers the day before Thanksgiving so that they could be rehired on Friday without being paid for the holiday. Other than Louis B. Mayer's Academy, the writers had no organization except the Writers Club, which occupied a pleasant house with a fireplace and a billiard room on Sunset Boulevard. Though it had been officially connected with the Authors League of America since 1920, it was a social club and nothing more.

Early in 1933, even before the general wage cut, ten writers met at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel to talk about reorganizing their lives. They were easterners, for the most part, liberal to leftist in politics, and with some record of accomplishment on the New York stage. John Howard Lawson had achieved a considerable reputation in 1925 with his play
Processional.
Samson Raphaelson had written in that same year
The Jazz Singer,
on which the first sound movie had been based. Among the others were Edwin Justus Mayer, Lester Cole, and John Bright. They decided not only that a new writers' organization should be founded but that it should be allied with the Dramatists Guild in New York, so that if the predictable conflicts reached the point of a strike, the writers' organization would cover the whole field of dramatic writing.

The studios' wage cuts provided a powerful inducement to the writers to start a union, and in April of 1933, they founded the Screen Writers Guild. A total of 173 charter members paid one hundred dollars each. John Howard Lawson was elected president. He was not then a Communist, but he publicly announced a year later that he had joined the party. Such things were not secret in those days. “As for myself,” Lawson wrote in
New Theatre
magazine, “I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position and to do so in the most specific manner.”

Lawson's politics were not of critical importance, since the producers made it perfectly clear that they would not recognize the SWG as a union or negotiate with it under any circumstances. The movie industry was not an industry, the studios argued, and its writers were not employees. Since the new National Recovery Act forbade this line of argument, however, there now began the long and ugly process of forcing the producers to come to terms. The whole thrust of the New Deal supported the writers, and so did the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, but the producers fought back with every weapon they could find. They threatened, they delayed, they cajoled, they delayed some more, they sued, they appealed, they even sent Nicholas Schenck to Hyde Park with a large donation for President Roosevelt, and then they delayed some more.

In 1936, the period central to
What Makes Sammy Run?,
the two sides clashed over the issue of the Screen Writers Guild joining forces with the Dramatists Guild in New York. The producers, who still didn't recognize the SWG, raised shrill cries of warning that the writers were trying to subject Hollywood to the domination of New York Communists. And since the Guild was asking all its members not to sign any contracts extending beyond May of 1938, so that they would then be legally free to go on strike, every writer was subject to all the pressure that the producers could apply, which was considerable. “If those guys set up a picket line and try to shut down my studio,” cried Darryl Zanuck, “I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow them down.”

The Guild called a meeting on May 2, 1936, for a vote on the alliance with New York. Shortly before that meeting, a half-dozen well-established screenwriters, to whom the studios had offered new contracts as writer-producers, announced that they were forming an opposition movement to fight the Guild leadership and the alliance with New York. In Schulberg's version, one of these half dozen was naturally Sammy Glick. “I'm catching the express now, baby,” he told Mannheim. “I'm getting off at my station in one stop.”

On the day before the Guild vote, the new producers summoned all their employees to a series of meetings in each studio. At M-G-M, for example, Thalberg arrived with Eddie Mannix, the ex-bouncer who now served as general manager. “The scene,” said Schulberg's friend Maurice Rapf, “was similar to one you might find in Tammany, or even in the gangster movies—the hard guy and the so-called Little Czar, whom everybody loves.” Thalberg was now just as tough as Mannix, according to Rapf. “What he said, in effect, was ‘You've all gotten a great deal out of this industry. It's been good to you and what you're proposing to do is to give it away and turn it over to outside interests, and we are not going to tolerate it. . . . We have a lot to protect here, and we are going to protect it with everything we've got.' ”

When the meeting was finally held, the Guild leaders, rather surprisingly, tried to compromise. They proposed to enlarge the executive board to take in several of the conservative dissidents. The dissidents announced their agreement, and as Schulberg's narrator put it, “Suddenly everybody was loving everybody else.”

But that was only a tactical move. Three days after the Guild meeting, the dissident members resigned from the Guild board and announced that they were forming a rival group called Screen Playwrights. The studios looked on the new organization with warm favor and increased their pressure on anyone who remained with the Guild. Within a week, 125 writers had abandoned the Guild and joined the Screen Playwrights. “You've got to resign from that union,” Zanuck told one of his writers, Milton Sperling. “Look at all I've done for you.” Sperling sensed that a blacklist was already beginning to grow. “More of a graylist, really,” he said, “a hesitation about hiring. It was emotional rather than institutional.” Dalton Trumbo heard much the same from Harry Cohn. “You will hear a lot of talk about there being no blacklist in this town,” Cohn said. “But now there
is
a blacklist and you are definitely on it, and you have your chance of signing or staying out of the business.”

The studios' strategy was extremely successful. The Guild had claimed nearly a thousand members at the time of its May meeting. By the end of that summer, the number had shrunk to about a hundred. Only ninety-two appeared at the organization's last meeting, in a grimy office building on North Cherokee, just off Hollywood Boulevard, to hear Guild President Ernest Pascal announce the union's death. “There's no point in going on,” said Pascal. “We can't even pay the rent.”

Schulberg's version of the story ended about there. The blacklist drove his narrator, Al Mannheim, back to New York. He returned only much later to observe Sammy Glick becoming the head of his studio, and marrying the chairman's beautiful daughter, who forecast Sammy's future by defiantly committing adultery on her wedding night.

Schulberg published a short story entitled “What Makes Sammy Run?” in
Liberty
magazine in 1937, but when he told his colleagues in the Communist Party that he planned to expand the story into a novel, they disapproved. “The reaction . . . was not favorable,” Schulberg later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “The feeling was that this was a destructive idea; that . . . it was much too individualistic; that it didn't begin to show what were called the progressive forces in Hollywood.” Another screenwriter named Richard Collins urged Schulberg to confer with John Howard Lawson and submit an outline of his plans. “I decided I would have to get away from this if I was ever to be a writer,” Schulberg testified. “I decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice . . . to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.” Schulberg went to Vermont in 1939 and wrote his novel and returned to Hollywood the following year to find both Louis B. Mayer and the Communist Party mad at him. Though he felt that he had quit the party, he did go to a meeting with Lawson, who sharply criticized him, and then to another meeting with the party's cultural commissar, V. J. Jerome, who criticized him some more. “I remember being told that my entire attitude was wrong,” Schulberg testified, “that I was wrong about writing; wrong about this book; wrong about the Party.”