City of Nets (35 page)

But all this lay in the future, when Miss Bergman herself would be cast out of Hollywood on grounds of grave moral dereliction. Back on the mountain setting of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Wood presided over a rather happy band of Spanish guerrillas, cast as only Hollywood could cast Spanish guerrillas: the Swedish Ingrid Bergman as Maria, the Russian Akim Tamiroff as Pablo, the Greek Katina Paxinou as Pilar, and so on. It was an old rule in Hollywood that all foreign accents sounded the same. Even the authentic mountain landscape was fake, for that matter, not just because it was Californian rather than Spanish but because the California moviemakers decided that their own mountains looked too beautiful, so they started spraying gray paint in all directions. “We even uprooted wildflowers and greenery to prevent the harsh landscape from becoming ‘pretty' for the technicolor camera,” Wood recalled.

Miss Bergman was enchanted. “It was so primitive and romantic up there among the stars and the high peaks before the winter snows cut off the whole region . . .” she said. “I sat and laughed on the set. Looking at Gary Cooper, it was so wonderful.” In her diary, she noted: “What was wrong was that my happiness showed on the screen. I was far too happy to honestly portray Maria's tragic figure.”

It was not wrong, though. It was spectacular. During the famous scene in which Cooper and Miss Bergman made love in a sleeping bag, the one in which she said she felt the earth move beneath her, some enterprising reporter felt hot under the collar and decided to check on the temperature in the theater. He found that the temperature rose several degrees every time the scene was shown.

 

One major Hollywood star who made no effort whatever to take part in the war was Errol Flynn, an Australian by origin, though he became a naturalized American citizen in 1942. “He felt no loyalty to Britain and little to Australia,” said his friend David Niven. “He had no intention of being called to the colors.” There have even been allegations that Flynn acted as an Axis agent, but most of the evidence portrays simply an irresponsible hedonist, eager to smuggle drugs and to star in that international “high society” where Fascist sympathies were commonplace. “Jew bastard” was Flynn's standard term to describe his boss, Jack Warner. Now, at the age of thirty-three, Flynn had come to the end of his stormy marriage to Lili Damita, an actress.

To Warner Bros., he was the ideal war hero, handsome, muscular, debonair. The studio cast him in
Dive Bomber, Edge of Darkness, Objective Burma.
In the last of these, which proclaimed that U.S. reinforcements would soon save the beleaguered British in a campaign where no Americans actually fought at all, producer Jerry Wald had simply invented an American hero to be played by Flynn. This seemed reasonable enough in a war that was actually filmed on a Santa Anita ranch. Alvah Bessie, a Spanish War veteran who had been assigned to write the scenario, telephoned Wald with an objection: “Look, Jerry, there
are
no American troops in Burma.” Wald offered a characteristic answer: “So what? It's only a moving picture.” The British, however, were furious. The
London Daily Mirror
published a cartoon showing Flynn in battle costume in a director's chair, and the caption quoted a ghostly Tommy as saying, “Excuse me, Mr. Flynn, but you're sitting on some graves.” Flynn was pained. “Why blame the actor?” he protested. “He does not produce the picture or write the screenplay.”

Flynn's search for enjoyment consisted of endless drinking and fornicating, plus a certain indulgence in drugs. On the crest of a hill on Mulholland Drive, he designed and built a $125,000 house that embodied all the sensual fantasies of that time and place, from glass cases filled with guns to a cockfighting arena in the stable to bedrooms outfitted with black silk hangings, sable bed coverings, and two-way mirrors in the walls and ceilings, so that guests could watch the other guests at play. “Strange people wended their way up the hill to Mulholland,” Flynn observed. “Among them pimps, sports, bums, down-at-the-heel actors, gamblers, athletes, sightseers, process-servers, phonies, queers, salesmen—everything in the world. . . . They came by day and by night. Invited and uninvited.”

Among the many unverifiable legends about Flynn's pleasure dome, there is one that tells of a paunchy Central European diplomat who was determined to investigate the wild rumors of wild orgies. Flynn was elusive, and irritated, but the diplomat kept making hopeful inquiries among Warners executives until finally his cajoling brought him an invitation to dinner on Mulholland Drive. Black tie. When the diplomat descended from his limousine and rang the bell at Flynn's mansion, the door was opened by a young blonde wearing nothing but a small apron and a pair of high-heeled shoes. She smiled. He smiled. She invited him to follow her to what she called “the disrobing room.” When he had taken off all his clothes, she said, he should go through the door at the far end of the room to join the other guests. The diplomat was happy to follow her instructions. Stark naked, quivering with excited anticipation, he marched through the door. He thereupon found himself in Flynn's dining room, where everyone else was fully clothed in evening dress.

It was to this palace that Flynn welcomed John Barrymore, not realizing (or perhaps he did realize it) that Barrymore's alcoholic ruin and degradation provided a forecast of his own future. Flynn was impressed by Barrymore's scandalous reputation, and by his intermittent charm, so Barrymore simply moved in and started pouring himself drinks. “Jack thought it was a waste of time to go to the bathroom if there was a window close by,” Flynn recalled. “During his visit he took all the varnish off one of my picture windows that overlooked the San Fernando Valley. One day I complained bitterly, ‘For God's sake, look at the varnish here. Your piss has eaten away the paint. Can't you do it somewhere else?' . . . He immediately went to the fireplace and let go there. The smell through the room was atrocious. . . .”

When Barrymore died a few months later, his friends took him to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary on Sunset Boulevard and then gathered in a nearby bar called The Cock and Bull. There was much morose drinking and telling of Barrymore stories, according to Flynn. One celebrant who left early was Raoul Walsh, a former actor whose accidental loss of an eye had made him turn into a director. Walsh went from the bar to the funeral home, accompanied by two friends named Bev Allen and Charles Miller, and persuaded the undertakers, for a couple of hundred dollars, that they had to take away the corpse for one last viewing by Barrymore's crippled aunt. Then they took it to Flynn's house and propped it up in his favorite chair. Flynn returned home drunk and lurched into the living room. “The light went on and—my God—I stared into the face of Barrymore!” Flynn reported in his memoirs. “His eyes were closed. He looked puffed, white, bloodless. They hadn't embalmed him yet. I let out a delirious scream. . . .”

But haven't we already heard this same story with quite different details? Yes, all the best Hollywood stories have several contradictory versions. Paul Henreid, in the memoirs written with Julius Fast in 1984, reported that it was Peter Lorre who had spirited Barrymore's corpse into Flynn's living room. Flynn, in his supposedly unassisted memoirs,
My Wicked, Wicked Ways
(1959), described exactly the same event as a prank organized by Raoul Walsh.

Fun, fun, fun—that was the height of it that year for Flynn, until his doorbell rang and two Los Angeles detectives told him that he faced a charge of statutory rape.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Flynn said.

“It concerns a Miss Betty Hansen,” one of the detectives said, according to Flynn's account, “—and we are holding you.”

“I've never heard of her. Betty Hansen? Who is she?”

Betty Hansen was a girl of seventeen who had come west from Nebraska to visit her sister, and then wandered off into the wilderness of Los Angeles. After worrying for a while, the sister reported her absence to the police and asked them to find her. The police soon discovered her in a Santa Monica hotel. In the course of their questioning about what she had been doing, she said she had gone to a party where she had met Errol Flynn and, as she later testified, “I had an act of intercourse.”

This must have impressed any Los Angeles police officer as a matter of supreme insignificance, but according to California law, an “act of intercourse” with a girl less than eighteen years old constituted statutory rape and could be punished by five years in prison, even if the girl was a willing partner. This law was not very vigorously enforced. For some reason, however, the authorities decided to take Betty Hansen's accusation to a grand jury in October of 1942. The grand jury understandably declined to indict Flynn. Instead of abandoning this inconsequential affair, the authorities then decided to investigate further, and so they unearthed the case of Peggy LaRue Satterlee, whose mother had appeared at the sheriff's office the year before and complained that her fifteen-year-old daughter had been seduced by Flynn aboard his yacht, the
Sirocco.
At the time, the sheriff's office had shrugged off the mother's complaint, but now the Satterlee story was resurrected and added to the Hansen story.

As charges of rape, these stories were so absurd that it is hard to imagine why the authorities pursued them. The least plausible explanation was that of District Attorney John Dockweiler, who had been elected just two years earlier in place of Buron Fitts, the heavily subsidized friend of the movie business. “I must let the public know,” said Dockweiler, “that all men and women are equal when they come before our courts and that no one can violate the law and escape punishment because of wealth or position.” A more interesting explanation—though quite undocumented—appeared in Kenneth Anger's
Hollywood Babylon.
Anger, a onetime child actor and later an “underground” film director, wrote that when Flynn returned home after being bailed out on the original charge, his phone rang. “An unknown voice said: ‘Tell Jack I want $10,000,' and hung up. The entire affair might have been dropped then and there, if Jack Warner, Flynn's boss, had returned the extortionist's call.” In this version, Flynn was simply a victim of a system in which the movie industry paid off “corrupt Los Angeles politicians” in exchange for protection. “These payoffs had been habitually turned over to the ‘bosses,' who would make sure that the police got its take of the cut,” Anger wrote. Just before Miss Hansen told her story, he added, “some changes had been made in the chain of command at L.A. City Hall. When Jack Warner had failed to cough up to the new bosses, the first rape charge against Flynn had been brought up as a warning. When that could not be substantiated, the second chippie was pushed forward by the cops to chirp her year-old charges.”

Florabel Muir, a reliable reporter who covered Hollywood for the
New York Daily News,
also saw political manipulation in the case, but she was more sympathetic to the authorities. She believed that Warner Bros. was intervening from the beginning and “pulling strings like crazy to keep Flynn from being indicted.” When the studio maneuvering succeeded, she added, the embarrassed police complained angrily to Dockweiler, whom she described as “an honest and religious man.” Flynn had little choice then but to call in the man whom all Hollywood stars called in when they were threatened with imprisonment: Jerry Giesler. A potbellied and rather courtly attorney with a high-pitched voice, meticulous in his preparations for each case and exhaustive in his questioning, Giesler managed to turn his newest defendant into a kind of folk hero. His basic approach, he said later, was to portray the two young accusers as “not as unversed in the ways of the world as the district attorney's office would have the public believe.” An army of reporters savored every word. In a time of worldwide war and devastation, the prosecution of Errol Flynn for fornication with two eager adolescents was treated as a news story of major importance, often worthy of front-page headlines.

Betty Hansen claimed that after meeting Flynn at a party, she had felt sick and wanted to go upstairs to lie down, that Flynn had pursued her and taken advantage of her. Flynn denied everything, so it was up to Giesler to make Miss Hansen's perfectly plausible story sound ludicrous.

 

Q: When he told you to lie down on the bed, did he tell you what he wanted you to lie down for?

A: No, he did not.

Q: Did you have any thoughts of what he wanted you to lie down for?

A: No. . . .

Q: What did you think was going to happen—just going to take a nap?

A: Yes.

 

Even when Miss Hansen's story had the horrid ring of truth, Giesler made it sound ludicrous. He insisted on asking every detail of who took off which pieces of clothing, and thus elicited the fact that Flynn had kept his shoes on throughout the episode. And when it was all over, what did Flynn do? He went into the bathroom and doused himself with hair oil. “What else do you recall that happened there?” Giesler prodded. “I think he asked if I ever used it and I said no,” the wretched girl testified.

If Betty Hansen's night of romance sounded squalid, Peggy LaRue Satterlee's cruise on Flynn's yacht sounded, in Giesler's own term, “preposterous.” She had gone aboard at midnight and repaired to her cabin and taken off most of her clothes. Giesler wanted to know every detail.

 

Q: So you took your socks off too, and you wear those—What do you call those things? . . . Brassiere?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Did you take that off?

A: No, sir.

Q: You did not take that off?

A: I mean yes, sir.

Q: Which was it?

A: I took it off.

 

And so on. Miss Satterlee, who was now a nightclub dancer, claimed that Flynn had entered her cabin and she had protested that “You should not be here, because it is not nice to come in a lady's bedroom when she is in bed.” She quoted Flynn, who was already outfitted in striped pajamas, as saying that he just wanted to talk. “He said, ‘Let me just get in bed with you and I will not bother you. I just want to talk to you.' ” Giesler, perhaps remembering Miss Hansen's testimony, wanted to know about Flynn's shoes. “Did he have anything on his feet?” Miss Satterlee said she “did not notice his feet.”