City of Nets (29 page)

In this state of general havoc, the word spread on the
Casablanca
set that the grand ruin known as John Barrymore had just died, and this apparently inspired Peter Lorre to think of a lugubrious prank. Barrymore had spent much of his last year lounging around in the home of Errol Flynn, one of the few people who could put up with his drunken misbehavior, and Lorre thought it would be amusing to bribe the funeral home into letting him install the corpse in Flynn's house.

“I know he's shooting and gets home late,” Lorre said to Henreid, Bogart, and two others, according to Henreid's account of the affair, “and we arrange it [the body] in that chair in the living room he always used to sit in, then we hide and watch Flynn's face. Is that or isn't it fantastic?”

Henreid said they all laughed—“uncontrollable laughter”—and chipped in to provide the two hundred dollars that Lorre estimated he needed to pay bribes at the funeral home. Henreid said that he paid his share but backed out of actually taking part in the expedition. He said Lorre giggled as he reported the details. Flynn “came in, threw his hat and coat on a chair and walked across the room, past Barrymore's chair to the bar. He nodded at Barrymore and took about three steps, then froze. That moment was fantastic! There was a terrible silence, then he said, ‘Oh my God!' and he hurried back and touched Barrymore, then jumped. Barrymore was ice cold. ‘I think in that second, he realized what was happening,' Lorre said, ‘and he shouted, “All right, you bastards, come on out.” ' Lorre said that Flynn offered his visitors a drink, ‘but wouldn't help us take the body back.' ”

Casablanca
came to its end in about the same spirit. There was such indecision about the ending that the authorities finally decided to shoot both possibilities. “They were going to shoot two endings,” Miss Bergman said, “because they couldn't work out whether I should fly off by airplane with my husband or stay with Humphrey Bogart. So the first ending we shot was that I say good-bye to Humphrey Bogart and fly off with Paul Henreid. . . . And everybody said. ‘Hold it! That's it! We don't have to shoot the other ending.' ”

Even that ending, with Bogart and Rains walking off into the night, needed a closing line. One version was that Bogart would say, “Louis, I might have known you'd mix your patriotism with a little larceny.” Wallis claimed that he was the one who thought of something better: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And even then, they didn't know what they had achieved. At a sneak preview in Huntington Park, the audience seemed mildly pleased, but several viewers handed in cards that said the ending seemed unclear. Would Bogart and Rains be arrested? Wallis ordered a new closing scene written, in which Bogart and Rains escaped from Casablanca on a freighter. And somebody in the publicity department said a new title should be found, because Casablanca sounded like a brand of beer.

On November 8, an Anglo-American armada landed all along the North African coast, seized Tangiers, Oran—and Casablanca. Jack Warner was ecstatic: headlines about Casablanca, publicity for his new movie. And when Roosevelt and Churchill met there in January, Warner wanted a new ending shot to include the Casablanca conference. Somebody managed to dissuade him, probably for the wrong reasons. Perhaps it cost too much, and besides, the movie had been out for two months. Who today remembers anything about the Casablanca conference? Casablanca is where Humphrey Bogart ran Rick's Café, and where the ineffably beautiful Ingrid Bergman leaned on the piano and said, “Play it, Sam.”

Conflicts: Sex symbol Errol Flynn (
top
) turned his back on Betty Hansen, who accused him of having raped her. The glamorous Rita Hayworth (
middle
) of
Cover Girl
was a very anglicized version of Margarita Cansino (
bottom right
). And U.S. sailors led anti-Mexican rioting (
bottom left
).

5
Prejudice

(1943)

J
ust after dark, on a June evening slightly chilled by fog, a score of taxis loaded with U.S. Navy men poured into Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. The doors burst open and disgorged a swarm of sailors armed with clubs and weighted ropes. A crowd of bystanders cheered them on as they crashed into the Orpheum Theater and marched down the aisles, shouting for any Mexicans to stand up and fight. In the balcony, they found several victims, including a seventeen-year-old boy named Enrico Herrera, who was sitting with a girl. The sailors dragged them all downstairs into the street. Out there, the waiting crowd formed a ring, shouting and cheering as the sailors mauled the Mexicans, stripped off their clothes, and beat them bloody. Herrera's jaw was broken. Only then did the Los Angeles police move in and arrest Herrera and carry him off to a police station. His mother found him there three hours later, still naked and still bleeding.

There was more. Four Mexicans emerging from a pool hall at Twelfth and Central were ordered into police cars. When one of them asked why he was being arrested, a policeman hit him three times on the head with a nightstick, then kicked him in the face as he lay on the sidewalk. “Police had difficulty loading his body into the vehicle because he was one-legged and wore a wooden limb,” according to a bystander named Al Waxman. “Maybe the officer didn't know he was attacking a cripple.” At the next corner, Waxman saw a Mexican woman, who was carrying a baby, protest against the arrest of her fifteen-year-old son. “He did nothing,” she cried. “She was struck across the jaw with a night-stick,” Waxman said, “and almost dropped the . . . baby that was clinging in her arms.”

And more. A seaman named Donald Jackson, twenty, was attacked by four Mexican youths, who blackjacked him and slashed him across the abdomen. A band of servicemen dragged a black man off a streetcar and gouged out his eye with a knife. A policeman named C. D. Medley stopped to help a Mexican lying in the street—a decoy. A carload of Mexicans deliberately ran down the policeman and broke his back. The man who had been lying on the pavement scrambled into their car, and they all drove off.

These were the
pachuco
or zoot suit riots that roiled downtown Los Angeles throughout the first week of June 1943. They are largely forgotten now, partly because much worse rioting broke out between blacks and whites in Detroit two weeks later. Thirty-four people died there, and about seven hundred were injured, before the national guard restored order. To anyone who is young enough to think that American race riots involve gangs of black marauders attacking frightened whites, let it be recalled that in the race riots of the 1940's (Harlem and St. Louis suffered major outbreaks too), blacks fled for their lives from pursuing gangs of whites. In Los Angeles, though, where there were still very few blacks, just beginning to immigrate to work in the arms factories and to occupy the abandoned tenements of Little Tokyo, the victims were the Mexicans, and the attackers were the United States armed forces.

The irony was that Los Angeles prided itself on the Spanish heritage implicit in its very name, and on the few blocks around Olvera Street that the
Los Angeles Times
liked to call “a bit of old Mexico.” As for the Mexicans who actually lived in Los Angeles, about 250,000 of them, roughly one tenth of the city's population, they were largely degraded or ignored. More than half the city's substandard housing was occupied by Mexicans, and the area known as Mexican Town, in an unincorporated section of the county, didn't even have paved streets. It was not clear whether Mexicans were legally white or colored, but schools were unofficially segregated, and so were many public swimming pools. Chicanos and blacks were allowed to swim only on Wednesdays, the day before the pools were cleaned and refilled.

That was because the Mexicans, like many oppressed people, bore the additional curse of appearing to be sexually threatening. Nathanael West caught the image perfectly in
The Day of the Locust,
when a Mexican named Miguel not only moved into Faye Greener's garage but brought along his fighting cocks. When the Hollywood director, Claude Estee, came to see the cockfight, he stayed to watch Fay dancing erotically with the Mexican. “He held her very tight,” West wrote, with a certain gloating, “one of his legs thrust between hers, and they swayed together in long spirals that broke rhythmically at the top of each curve into a dip. All the buttons on her lounging pajamas were open. . . .”

The reality was much less glamorous. The reality was rats and police nightsticks. One of the ways the young Mexicans defended themselves was to form neighborhood gangs—the White Fence Gang, Alpine Street, El Hoyo. Another was to wear the strange costumes known as “drapes,” which the newspapers took to calling zoot suits. They had immensely long jackets and immensely wide trouser legs, pegged at the ankle, and often a key chain dangled from the vest almost to the ground. Zoot suits were ugly, impractical, even absurd, but they announced as loudly as any costume could that the wearer was a defiant rebel, and sexy too. Respectable society reacted accordingly. When a gang of sailors attacked some zoot-suited Mexicans in Venice that May, the police, as usual, arrested the Mexicans. And though Judge Arthur Guerin dismissed the charges for lack of evidence, he warned the victims that “their antics might get them into serious difficulties unless they changed their attitudes.”

The police attitude was best expressed in a report by Captain Ed Duran Ayres, head of the so-called Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles police department, which suggested that Chicanos were inherently criminal. According to a bitter summation by Rodolfo Acuña of California State University, “Ayres stated that Chicanos were Indians, that Indians were Orientals, and that Orientals had an utter disregard for life.” As Ayres himself put it, Caucasians fought with their fists, “but this Mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife . . . In other words, his desire is to kill.” This police report urged that all Chicanos over the age of eighteen be compelled to get jobs or join the armed forces. In actual fact, though the Los Angeles press spread the image of idle zoot-suiters shirking the national war effort, the Chicanos who formed one tenth of the city's population not only joined the armed forces in droves but suffered one fifth of the combat casualties. But when Sergeant Macario García, who had won a Congressional Medal of Honor, tried to buy a cup of coffee at a “white” restaurant in Richmond, California, the owner chased him out with a baseball bat.

Against that background, the specific origins of the 1943 riots hardly matter. In fact, nobody really knows exactly how they started. The neon-lit streets of downtown Los Angeles were fairly rough. Sailors on leave assumed that Mexican girls could be had for the asking; Mexican boys defended their territory. It is silly, of course, to assume that all the Chicanos were innocent victims. There were plenty of muggings and robberies of young sailors who meant nobody any harm. One of these ruckuses occurred on the night of June 3, when a band of eleven sailors apparently tried to pick up some Mexican girls on a slummy stretch of North Main Street. The sailors later said they had been attacked for no reason by a gang of about thirty Mexicans. One of the sailors was badly injured, the others bruised and bloodied. The police roamed around the neighborhood but found nobody to arrest.

The next night, June 4, about two hundred sailors from the naval Armory in Chavez Ravine hired a fleet of about twenty taxis and cruised along Whittier Boulevard, on the east side of Los Angeles. Every time they spotted a young Mexican in a zoot suit, they piled out of their taxis and beat him up. They were determined, according to the
New York Times'
s typically jingoistic account of the raid, “to accommodate any of the zoot-suiters who thought Uncle Sam's fighting men were not just that.” As in a czarist pogrom, the police pretended to be helpless. They did arrest nine sailors but soon released them without any charges filed. A nameless petty officer who seemed to be unofficially in command of the sailors declared that there was more violence to come. “We're out to do what the police have failed to do,” he said. The next night, he added, “the sailors may have the Marines along.” The Los Angeles press was thrilled.
SAILOR TASK FORCE HITS L.A. ZOOTERS
, cried the headline in Hearst's
Herald & Express.

The next night, just as the petty officer had predicted, soldiers and marines joined the marauding sailors. They marched through the streets four abreast, stopping anyone wearing a zoot suit, beating some, threatening others. The only people arrested were twenty-seven Chicanos, who were booked “on suspicion” of various offenses. The press warned of savage Mexican retaliations.
ZOOT SUIT CHIEFS GIRDING FOR WAR ON NAVY
, cried the
Daily News.
But it was the navy that kept attacking, abetted by the police. On the night of June 6, a half-dozen carloads of sailors cruised down Brooklyn Avenue, caught and beat up eight Mexicans, smashed up a bar on Indiana Street, attacked eleven more Mexicans on Carmelita Street. The police followed in the sailors' wake, arresting their victims. That night, they jailed forty-four Mexicans, all badly beaten.

The press kept warning of Mexican revenge.
ZOOTERS PLANNING TO ATTACK MORE SERVICEMEN
, said another headline in the
Daily News,
adding that the Chicanos “would jab broken bottlenecks in the faces of their victims.”
ZOOTERS THREATEN L.A. POLICE
, said the
Herald & Express,
which claimed that an anonymous telephone call to police headquarters had said, “We're meeting 500 strong tonight and we're going to kill every cop we see.” Such stories served mainly to attract crowds of would-be spectators to downtown Los Angeles on the night of June 7, when a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians rampaged through Main Street and Broadway.

This was the night they broke the jaw of young Enrico Herrera, but he was only one of countless victims. The sailors broke into several theaters—the Rialto, the Tower, Loew's, the Roxy, the Cameo—demanded that the lights be turned on, and then attacked any Chicanos they could find. They invaded bars, tore apart the stools, and used them as clubs. Mexicans were the main victims, but blacks and Filipinos were also attacked and stripped of their clothes. There was a peculiar sexual element in all this, as though the wearing of zoot suits was a sexual affront that had to be sexually punished—and this by young men in sailor suits. “So our guys wear tight bottoms on their pants and those bums wear wide bottoms,” complained one battered twelve-year-old Chicano in a hospital. “Who the hell they fighting, Japs or us?”

The Los Angeles police did what they conceived to be their duty. They jailed six hundred Chicano youths as a “preventive” measure. And the navy finally did what it conceived to be its duty. It declared all of downtown Los Angeles off limits to all sailors. But Rear Admiral D. W. Bagley, commander of the district, insisted that the sailors had only acted in “self-defense against the rowdy element.” And when the Mexican government protested to Washington and asked for damages for injuries to Mexican citizens, Mayor Fletcher Bowron insisted that “there is no question of racial prejudice involved.” He appointed a committee to “study the problem.” He also ordered the police to stop using “cream-puff techniques.”

Other authorities applied similar wisdom. The Los Angeles City Council voted to make it a crime to wear a zoot suit, punishable by thirty days in jail. And Senator Jack Tenney of the California state legislature announced that he was investigating “a possible connection between the activities of the juvenile gangsters and Axis agents.”

 

The anti-Mexican riots of 1943 were embarrassing to Washington because President Roosevelt took a personal interest in what he called his Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. This policy was partly an attempt to recruit the Latin Americans into the still perilous struggle against the Fascist states that many South Americans regarded as home: Italy, Germany, and, to some extent, Spain. Just that April, Roosevelt had journeyed to Mexico to visit President Avila Camacho and to salute him as an ally. “Our two countries,” Roosevelt said, “owe their independence to the fact that your ancestors and mine held the same truths to be worth fighting for and dying for. Hidalgo and Juárez were men of the same stamp as Washington and Jefferson.”

The riots were hardly less embarrassing to Hollywood, which had been trying to replace its lost revenues from Europe, once nearly a third of its income, by increasing its sales in Latin America. Hence the appearance, in some otherwise innocuous musical, of Xavier Cugat and his rumba band. Hence the implausible stardom of Carmen Miranda, with her swirling skirts and fruit-topped hats, in
Down Argentine Way
(1943). Hence the equally implausible phenomenon of José Iturbi, a Spanish pianist of limited talent, who usually played himself and performed such trifles as “Clair de Lune,” occasionally adding an outburst of boogie-woogie.

Washington was eager to help. The State Department sponsored a South American tour by Walt Disney, which resulted in a concoction titled
Saludos Amigos
(1943). Nelson Rockefeller, who had long taken a proprietary interest in Latin America, now held the post of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, so he was especially cooperative. He gave Darryl Zanuck forty thousand dollars of Washington money to reshoot some of the more unlikely sections of
Down Argentine Way,
which audiences down that way had greeted with jeers. Rockefeller had also been a sponsor of Orson Welles at RKO, and now he hoped to recruit Welles to the Latin American campaign. As it happened, Welles was already shooting a story called “My Friend Bonito,” a tale of a Mexican boy raising a bull for the
corrida,
which was a segment of a four-part film to be called
It's All True.
Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney, who was acting as one of his deputies, urged Welles to reshape his project and start by filming the carnival in Rio. Rockefeller offered a guarantee of $300,000 against any losses. “It will be a polyglot movie,” Welles announced as he flew south (leaving a rough version of
The Magnificent Ambersons
to be edited and botched by other hands), “by which I mean we are designing it to be completely understandable, no matter what the language of the audience. Some of it will be silent, part will be in color.”