City of Nets (32 page)

White House officials later denied that any such meeting ever occurred, and so did Ambassador Davies, but Warner presumably had some kind of high-level Washington encouragement to undertake the project. He assigned it to Howard Koch, the chief writer of
Casablanca,
and to Mike Curtiz, who had directed that and almost everything else, and Davies himself oversaw the political perspectives. (“There is no man in the world I would trust more fully than Joe Stalin . . .” Davies said at a Warners lunch shortly before the movie was released.) The result of all this patriotic endeavor was a disaster. William Randolph Hearst personally denounced Warner for showing only “the Communist side,” and so did such anti-Stalinist liberals as John Dewey and Robert La Follette, who called it a “whitewash.”
*
Warner felt aggrieved. “There are some controversial subjects that are so explosive . . . that it doesn't pay for anyone to be a hero or a martyr,” he complained. “You're a dead pigeon either way. Unless, of course, you do it under orders from the President of the United States. Even then, you're just as dead.”

Warner's other big project contained no such booby traps.
This Is the Army
was a star-spangled affair derived from a show that the young immigrant Irving Berlin had written about the desolate Long Island camp where he had been stationed in World War I,
Yip Yip Yaphank.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, Berlin began writing an updated version, reserving a place for himself to don his old doughboy uniform and sing, “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning.” Warner paid nearly two million dollars to army charities for the film rights, and the army provided 350 servicemen, all on army salaries, as the cast. One of them was Lieutenant Ronald Reagan.

Reagan had managed to remain in the cavalry reserve ever since his college days, even though his eyesight was so poor that when he was called to duty one doctor said, “If we sent you overseas, you'd shoot a general.” A second doctor said, “Yes, and you'd miss him.” The army could find some use for almost anyone in those days, however, so Reagan was assigned to the staff at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, as a liaison officer responsible for the loading of convoys. And as a cavalryman, he still wore spurs. “I'm sure many people . . . have forgotten that spurs are a regulation part of the uniform for mounted troops,” Reagan happily recalled. The cavalry had other uses for the young lieutenant besides the wearing of spurs. It sent him back to Hollywood to appear at a fund-raising rally for the USO. His commanding officer, who was an admirer of Jeanette MacDonald, even got Lieutenant Reagan to make some telephone calls so that Miss MacDonald would come to Fort Mason to sing the national anthem as part of the fort's observation of I Am an American Day. And finally Reagan was sent back to Hollywood to help make training films, an assignment that his commander proudly described as “putting a square peg in a square hole.”

The Army Air Corps had taken over the nine-acre Hal Roach studio on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, and the First Motion Picture Unit now operated in what was unofficially known as Fort Roach. Since air corps regulations said that only a flying officer could command a post, the thirteen hundred assorted moviemakers at Fort Roach were put under the command of Paul Mantz, Hollywood's preeminent stunt pilot. Fort Roach made training films and documentaries; it trained combat camera units; it produced combat film segments for commercial newsreels; it even made films simulating flight over a city to be bombed, so that a pilot assigned to raid Hamburg or Yokohama could acquire some idea of what his target would look like from his cockpit. The one thing that Fort Roach didn't do, or didn't do very well, was to preserve the rituals of army ceremony.

Lieutenant Reagan apparently had to be taught that. On his first day overseeing basic training, according to one account, he disapproved of the haphazard way the men marched, so he began drilling them.

“We aren't going to do this, Ronnie,” one of the men rebuked him.

“What do you mean?” asked the nonplussed Lieutenant Reagan.

“You're an actor, and a lot of us are producers and directors. Right?”

“Right.”

“And after the war you're going to be an actor again and we're going to be producers and directors. Right?”

“Right.”

“So knock off with the marching around.”

Reagan was always a quick study. In his own account of those days, he portrayed himself not as a parade ground martinet but as an outspoken critic of such a martinet. “I was standing at the corner of a studio street,” Reagan said, “when they came swinging by, four abreast, our ex-cadet shouting orders like a true drillmaster. I shouldn't have done it, but on the other hand we should have been making pictures, not playing soldiers. When the column was just about halfway past me, so that my voice was audible to most of the men but not to their commander, I said, ‘Splendid body of men—with half this many I could conquer M-G-M.' The ranks dissolved . . .”

There was equally little reverence for military protocol at the old Paramount studio in Long Island City, which was Fort Roach East. Its Company B was a company in which, when the red-faced sergeant shouted names at roll call, the Cheever who said “Here!” was John Cheever, the Laurents was Arthur, the Saroyan was William, and the Shaw was Irwin. It was also a company in which PFC Carl Laemmle, Jr., heir to the founder of Universal Pictures, would start his weekend leave by taking a limousine to a Manhattan bank that was being kept open solely in order to provide him with whatever money he might need that weekend.

Gottfried Reinhardt, who had been a fledgling producer at M-G-M, was a sergeant in Company B, so he had to go to the major's office to get the telephone call from his father. Max Reinhardt was seventy years old now, and fat, and almost accustomed to living at the brink of disaster, but he was still determined to produce
La Belle Hélène
if he could just find somebody willing to provide the last twenty thousand dollars needed for a Broadway production of an Offenbach operetta in the year of Stalingrad. Max Reinhardt had gone to Fire Island to brood. It was late September of 1943, and after most of the summer cottages had been locked up, Reinhardt liked to walk along the windswept beach with his Scottish terrier, Mickey.

Wandering there, perhaps daydreaming, Reinhardt suddenly became aware of a wild barking and lunging at the end of the leash. He and his little terrier had encountered a solitary boxer, and the Scottie refused to concede an inch to the bigger dog. He yapped and growled and scurried in and out of the old man's legs. The boxer grimly advanced, preparing for the kill.

Alone on the stormy beach, Reinhardt looked around for help and saw nothing, except for a telephone booth standing alone in the wind. He lurched toward it, dragging the frantic terrier after him on its leash. He hauled the terrier into the telephone booth and slammed the folding door shut against the boxer, which sniffed and pawed and barked. Reinhardt may have thought that he had saved his pet, but the terrier was wild with rage. It turned on its aged master inside the closed telephone booth, and began biting whatever it could reach. It bit his shoes, through and through. It bit his legs, his arms, even his sides and chest. As the old man tried to defend himself from the terrier inside the telephone booth, he apparently suffered a stroke. He bit his own tongue, badly. Somehow, after the boxer had loped off down the beach, Reinhardt managed to struggle home, dragging the terrier behind him. “He came home with his face all out of shape,” a caretaker later told Gottfried Reinhardt. “And his talk—you couldn't understand a word. In the morning it looked like he was better again. Till I made his bed. He wet it in the night. Me, I'm not staying with this old man any more. I'm quitting.”

“When are you coming?” Max Reinhardt asked his son, on the phone in the major's office.

“Tomorrow, just as we said,” said Gottfried, who still knew nothing about the crisis.

“When are you coming?” Reinhardt repeated, haltingly, in the slurred voice of a man who must concentrate on the essentials and cannot make those essentials clear. Perhaps he knew that he was never going to recover, that he had just another two months to live.

“Anything wrong?” Gottfried asked.

The answer sounded “muddled,” Gottfried wrote later. “Only a single word is clear: ‘Come!' It keeps recurring and then the line is dead.”

Reinhardt apologized to the major, whom he had known slightly in Hollywood as an irregularly employed screenwriter. “Skip it, sergeant,” said the major. “I'm crazy for Kraut dialogue.”

 

Hollywood people who weren't in the army entertained the army. Touring military camps was one of the major productions in this midwar year of 1943. Perhaps it was pure patriotism; perhaps it was partly publicity for all those wartime movies that kept rolling off the assembly lines; perhaps there was even a touch of guilt that all the war movies (and nonwar movies) were making so much money. The armed forces had by now become Hollywood's biggest customer. Never before had there been such a captive audience as the twelve million servicemen, most of them idle and bored. And so, through this new evolution of its traditional monopoly, Hollywood became richer than ever. The least it could do in return was to send some of its celebrities on tours of military bases.

In one reasonably typical week in September of 1943, Judith Anderson was declaiming high drama in Hawaii and Ray Bolger was dancing in the South Pacific, Al Jolson was performing at bases in the Middle East, and so was Larry Adler, the harmonica virtuoso, and so was Jack Benny (but without Eddie Anderson, who regularly played the part of Benny's scapegrace black chauffeur, Rochester, for the U.S. Army of 1943 was a segregated army). The king of all these wandering jongleurs was Bob Hope, not because he was exceptionally talented but because he devoted his whole existence to these tours. He was an odd man for the mission. Originally christened Leslie, the sixth child of a hard-drinking English stonecutter, Hope seemed to have little natural humor and relied heavily on a large team of gagwriters for his weekly radio show. The gags consisted of endless variations on a few crude themes—Hope's nose, his cowardice, his failures in pursuing girls, his rivalry with Bing Crosby—but crowds of lonely soldiers greeted every one of his vaudeville turns with wild applause. They loved Hope for coming to see them, and he loved them for loving him. In Korea, later, in Vietnam, even in Beirut, he would go on spending Christmas with the troops for half a century.

Hope began simply enough as part of a fund-raising show called the Hollywood Victory Caravan. The three-hour production included bigger movie stars than Hope—Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Groucho Marx—but Hope was the master of ceremonies, in charge of keeping everything moving. The tour, which started with a garden party at the White House in April of 1942, was a huge success. Thousands of people waited to greet the stars at Boston's South Station, and thousands more welcomed them to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas. At the end of the journey, most of the stars wearily headed back to Hollywood, but Hope couldn't stop. He organized a tour of sixty-five military bases in a month. He took with him the main figures on his radio show—an attractive blond singer named Frances Langford, a manic clown with huge mustaches named Jerry Colonna, his bandleader, Skinnay Ennis—and began broadcasting from his travels: New Orleans, Quantico, Mitchell Field.

A friend urged Hope to take his troupe to Alaska, but the military warned that he might get snowed in. “
FOUR DISAPPOINTED THESPIANS WITH SONGS AND WITTY SAYINGS ARE ANXIOUS TO TOUR YOUR TERRITORY
,” Hope wired the commanding general. “
PLEASE GIVE US YOUR CONSENT AND LET US TAKE OUR CHANCES WITH THE WEATHER.
” The general wired back: “
YOU LEAVE TUESDAY.
” In the spring of 1943, Hope took his show to England. “I've just arrived from the States,” he announced in his first appearance at a bomber base called Eye Aerodrome. “You know . . . that's where Churchill lives. . . . He doesn't actually live there . . . he just goes back to deliver Mrs. Roosevelt's laundry.” Funny? Hope's rudimentary comedy always had some of the quality of the neighborhood fat boy trying to ingratiate himself on the street corner, but none of that mattered now. “We soon discovered,” he recalled, “that you had to be pretty lousy to flop in front of these guys—they yelled and screamed and whistled at everything.”

Hope became a man possessed. He did three or four shows a day, all across western England, through Wales, in Northern Ireland, then back to London. He made a special effort at hospitals, clowning through ward after ward. “All right, fellas, don't get up,” he would say as a greeting to the bedridden. “Did you see our show—or were you sick before?” Dumb jokes like that, and more dumb jokes like that, repeated over and over, and the homesick soldiers kept whistling and cheering. “The most wonderful thing about England right now is Bob Hope,” Burgess Meredith wrote to Paulette Goddard. “The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can't breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility, too, although he carries it lightly and gaily.” “When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered,” John Steinbeck cabled from London to the
New York Herald Tribune,
“Bob Hope should be high on the list. . . . He has caught the soldier's imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter.”

By now, the Allies had invaded North Africa, so Hope flew south to follow them. “We're off on the road to Morocco,” he sang at a farewell appearance at Prestwick, Scotland, and then the star of
The Road to Morocco
was actually in Morocco, spieling and spieling. “Hiya, fellow tourists!” he cried in what he himself cited as a typical routine. “Well, I'm very happy to be here [boos]—course
I'm
leaving as soon as I finish the show. But this is a great country, Africa . . . this is Texas with Arabs. . . . And I tried to find a few Lamours over here, but they all wear their sarongs a little higher . . . under their eyes. And, boys, don't ever lift one of those napkins. I did, and . . . what I saw! A B-bag with legs! Anyway, I'm happy to be here. But hey, isn't it hot? Is it true the scorpions take salt tablets?” And so on.