City of Nets (36 page)

 

Q: Did you let him get in bed?

A: No, sir.

Q: Did he get in bed?

A: Yes, sir. . . .

Q: Did he say anything at that time before the act of intercourse?

A: Not that I recall. . . .

Q: Did you fight him then?

A: Not very much, no, sir.

Q: Did you fight with him at all?

A: No, sir, I cried.

 

Giesler made it clear that Miss Satterlee had not only not resisted Flynn's advances but that she had spent all of the next day swimming and chattering and posing for pictures with Flynn aboard the yacht. That evening, she made some remark about the moon shining upon the sea, and Flynn lured her belowdeck, she said, by saying that the moon could best be viewed through a porthole. Giesler pursued every possibility. Had Flynn carried her downstairs? No. Pulled her downstairs? No. Had he taken her arm? “He might have taken hold of my arm on the way down the steps,” Miss Satterlee said. Did she know where they were going? Flynn had led the way. Had she followed him? Yes. Why? “Because I wanted to see the moon through the porthole.” And so she had looked through the porthole, on the right side of the ship, and then “Mr. Flynn . . . said since he had possession of me once, naturally why wouldn't I let him do it this time?”

Giesler had an exquisite sense of detail.

 

Q: Did he direct his privates into you?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: How did he do it, do you know?

A: No, sir.

 

Giesler kept questioning her about her resistance or lack of resistance. “You did not want to protect your honor, did you?” he demanded at one point. The prosecutor objected that the question was “argumentative” but the judge overruled him. “Did you?” Giesler insisted to Miss Satterlee. “After that I did not count my honor,” she said, “because I had no honor anyway after he was finished.”

All this melodrama, which the press treated with headlines worthy of the fall of France, was just a preliminary hearing, a dress rehearsal. At the end of November, Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Walters ruled that Flynn should go on trial on three counts of statutory rape. So the crowds stood in line for hours, in January of 1943, for a chance to watch Flynn defend himself in Los Angeles Superior Court. Giesler took pride in getting nine women on the jury—would the same assumptions apply today?—for he was confident in their judgments of Flynn's accusers. He made Betty Hansen tell her implausible story all over again and then insisted on even more details.

 

Q: Miss Hansen, the act itself lasted, how long, please?

A: About fifty minutes.

Q: About fifty minutes?

A: Yes, that is right.

Q: And during the entire time he was on top of you?

A: That is right.

Q: Did it pain you?

A: Yes, it did.

Q: You did not scream?

A: I did not. . . .

Q: Did it hurt very much?

A: No.

Q: Did you take part in the performance of the act yourself?

A: Explain that some to me, please.

Q: I am asking you if you took part in the performance of the act yourself. Did you respond to him in his performing the act with you?

A: I did.

 

Peggy LaRue Satterlee was even less plausible as a rape victim, not only because she willingly boarded Flynn's yacht, not only because she was now a nightclub dancer, but because Giesler had discovered from an anonymous telephone tip that she had engaged in some weird antics with a Canadian pilot named Owen Cathcart-Jones, who called her, among other things, Scrumpet and Bitchy Pie. Miss Satterlee had lived with her sister in the Canadian's apartment during the summer of 1941, and she had gone with him to a funeral parlor. Giesler demanded that Cathcart-Jones provide the details.

 

Q: And she was kind of playing hide-and-seek around the corpses, wasn't she? Do you remember that night?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you remember she showed you—opened it up and showed you—the body of an elderly lady?

A: Yes.

Q: And pulled the sheet down in the mortuary on a Filipino who had been crippled across his center?

A: Yes, I remember that.

Q: And then went back to where they inject the veins of corpses and there looked down at an elderly man lying there, and her head was pushed down against the man's face. Do you remember that?

A: Yes, I remember that.

 

Could any Los Angeles jury, whether it included nine women and three men or nine men and three women, hear testimony like that and then convict Errol Flynn of rape? Giesler was nothing if not thorough. Having heard Peggy LaRue Satterlee testify that Flynn had led her belowdeck to look at the moon through a porthole on the starboard side of the yacht, he put a federal meteorologist on the stand to testify that the moon by which Miss Satterlee had been seduced was actually shining on the opposite side of the
Sirocco.
There remained then only the testimony of Errol Flynn himself, who took the stand and presumably lied as he denied everything. He swore that he had never had sex with either one of the girls.

Two of the three male jurors wanted to convict Flynn, but what did their views matter? After a day of arguing, the jury announced its verdict: Innocent. A little girl rushed forward and handed Flynn a bouquet of flowers. And Flynn declared, as every exonerated criminal has always declared, “My confidence in American justice is completely justified.”

 

If Bertolt Brecht couldn't get a job in a movie colony filled with successful German refugees, what hope could there be for the greatest film director from Spain? Luis Buñuel, dismissed as a leftist from his minor job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, managed to get another job, dubbing movies into Spanish for Warner Bros. Too late. “As a dubbing capital, Hollywood was finished,” Buñuel later recalled, “since it was being done in every country where the film was to be shown.”

So the creator of the surrealistic classic
Un Chien Andalou
just wandered around, observing the southern California landscape. It naturally fascinated him in ways in which only Buñuel could be fascinated. “One day while I was out driving,” he recalled, “I discovered the enormous two-mile-long Los Angeles garbage dump, with everything from orange peels to grand pianos to whole houses. Smoke from the fires rose here and there; and at the bottom of the pit, on a small piece of land raised slightly from the piles of garbage, stood a couple of tiny houses inhabited by real people. Once I saw a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, emerge from one of the houses, and I fantasized her involved in a love affair in this infernal decor. Man Ray and I wanted to make a film about it, but we couldn't raise the money.”

Boris Karloff (
top
) as the Frankenstein monster was a substitute for real horrors. Charlie Chaplin (
middle
) had boldly ridiculed Hitler, but moralists made him a villain. Shortly after marrying young Oona O'Neill, he had to stand trial for fathering Joan Barry's daughter (
bottom right
).

6
Reunions

(1944)

T
he Hollywood people who had gone off to war returned home from time to time, and sometimes they lurched into unexpected battles with the Hollywood people who had stayed home. Lieutenant John Huston, back in California on a visit, went to one of David Selznick's parties and encountered Errol Flynn. When Flynn said what Huston called “something wretched” about Olivia de Havilland, Huston snapped at him: “That's a lie! Even if it weren't a lie, only a son of a bitch would repeat it.”

Flynn, the movie hero who disdained military service, asked Huston if he wanted to make something of it. Huston said he did. Huston had once been a semiprofessional boxer, but Flynn was also an experienced fighter, and twenty-five pounds heavier. Besides, Huston was half drunk. Flynn led the way to a dark corner of Selznick's garden, and both men took off their coats and started swinging. “I was knocked down almost immediately, landing on the gravel drive on my elbows,” Huston later recalled. “I was up right away, and I was down again.” When Huston fell, he rolled away from Flynn because he expected Flynn to kick at him in an effort to finish him off, but Flynn, to Huston's surprise, held back. “The fight was conducted strictly according to Queensberry,” said Huston, “for which I take my hat off to Errol Flynn.”

Unlike the brawls in Hollywood movies, real fights between two strong antagonists do not end in quick knockouts. Flynn's first assaults had broken Huston's nose and opened a cut over his eye, but the lieutenant was in good physical condition, and sobering up by now, and determined to keep fighting. As a veteran of the ring, he knew that the main target was not the enemy's chin but his body, so he kept pounding at Flynn's ribs. Flynn began to clinch and wrestle, to hang on to the smaller man, and they both swore furiously as they fought. “The language . . . although not heated, was about as vile as it could get . . .” Huston said. “And those were the days when ‘mother-fucker' was not a term of endearment.”

For the better part of an hour, they flailed away at each other, out there in David Selznick's dark garden. When the party finally began to break up, the headlights of the cars emerging from the gravel driveway illuminated the two men still struggling. Selznick, the host, came running out to see what was happening. Half drunk himself, and pugnacious by nature, he assumed that Flynn was the aggressor and tried to join the fight on Huston's side. Then the usual chorus of bystanders managed to separate and restrain the combatants, as well as the would-be combatants. Both Flynn and Huston had to go to the hospital, Huston for his broken nose, Flynn for two broken ribs. Flynn later telephoned Huston to ask about his condition. “I said that I had thoroughly enjoyed the fight,” Huston said, “and hoped we'd do it again some time.”

 

The war was clearly drawing to an end. The Allies landed in Normandy that June, and on the Riviera in August; Paris was liberated; General MacArthur staged his melodramatic return to the Philippines. Soldiers were dying every day, but there was nonetheless a sense that the great struggle was ending, and already some of the lucky ones were coming home.

Darryl F. Zanuck inevitably saw to it that he was one of the lucky ones. Actually, he was pushed somewhat. A Senate investigating committee headed by Harry Truman of Missouri, which devoted most of its time to checking reports of waste and corruption in military spending, announced that it wanted to look into the army commissions that had been so easily granted to so many Hollywood notables—Colonel Zanuck, Colonel Capra, Colonel Roach, and the rest. Zanuck, for reasons never fully explained, flew to Washington to see General Marshall, and then announced his resignation.

He returned to 20th Century–Fox and found it somewhat changed. His cofounder, William Goetz, the inept producer whose career was based largely on his marriage to Louis B. Mayer's older daughter, Edith,
*
had dared to assert his own authority. He had dared to order Zanuck's office repainted. It had always been a lurid shade of green known as “Zanuck green,” which the producer applied not only to his office but to his house, his private sauna, his limousines, even his telephone. (Zanuck green turned out, on investigation, to be the shade of green that Zanuck's mother used to paint her fingernails.) Goetz had repainted Zanuck's office blue and decorated it with photographs of baseball players. Zanuck called in the studio painters to restore everything to Zanuck green.

Goetz had also bricked up the back entrance that Zanuck had used for his four o'clock rituals. (“Every day at four o'clock in the afternoon some girl on the lot would visit Zanuck in his office,” said Milton Sperling, a young Fox writer who had made a reputation of sorts by concocting those ice-skating epics for Sonja Henie. “The doors would be locked after she went in, no calls were taken, and for the next half hour nothing happened—headquarters shut down. Around the office work came to a halt for the sex siesta. It was an understood thing. . . .”)

Zanuck did not reopen the bricked-up back door—perhaps his army life had taught him to be slightly more discreet—but concentrated his fire on the “crap” that Goetz had approved. Some of the films in production, Zanuck said in a formal memo, “make me vomit—and will make the public vomit too if we make the mistake of showing them.” Goetz tried briefly to defend himself. At one meeting, he accused the five-foot-five-inch Zanuck of bullying him and declared that he refused to be a doormat, but then he fled from the room, near tears. He went to seek counsel from his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, who advised him to abandon Fox and offered one million dollars to finance the move. And so it was announced that Goetz was moving to Universal as the head of an autonomous operation named International Films. Zanuck resumed full control at Fox.

Zanuck saw something that Mayer and the Warners never saw—that the war was changing American attitudes and perceptions, and that the sprightly little movies of the 1930's, the B pictures, the cheap Westerns and detective stories, would never again support the Hollywood studios. “The war is not yet over, but it soon will be,” Zanuck declared to a meeting of his chief producers and directors on his first day back in command. “And when the boys come home from the battlefields overseas, you will find they have changed. They have learned things in Europe and the Far East. How other people live, for instance. How politics can change lives. . . . Oh, yes, I recognize that there'll always be a market for Betty Grable and Lana Turner and all that tit stuff. But they're coming back with new thoughts, new ideas, new hungers. . . . We've got to start making movies that entertain but at the same time match the new climate of the times. Vital, thinking men's blockbusters. Big-theme films.”

Brave words, and basically true, but Zanuck didn't really have the judgment to carry out the mission he was proclaiming. The most important event in this last full year of war, apart from the battlefields on the road to victory, was the first revelation of the incredible things that had been happening in Poland. There had been reports of massacres of Jews ever since 1940, but it was only in the spring of 1944 that the holocaust reached its unimaginable climax in the shipment of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and only in the summer of 1944 that the Soviet army liberated the first of the Polish death camps, Maidanek, and discovered the great heaps of bone and ash that had once been a whole people. Hollywood can hardly be blamed too harshly for failing to grasp what was happening, since President Roosevelt and a lot of other people failed in much the same way. But when one of Zanuck's lieutenants suggested that he should consider making a movie about the Nazi concentration camps, Zanuck briskly scorned the idea. “Any story about Germany or labor slaves appalls me,” he declared in a memo to Kenneth MacGowan, the director. “Every picture yet made dealing with occupied countries including [John Steinbeck's]
The Moon Is Down
has laid a magnificent egg with the public. I can imagine no subject less inviting to an audience than the subject of slave labor at this time. . . . Show me how I can make a good story out of the life of Ernest R. Ball, and the great Irish songs he wrote.”

Zanuck did produce a film on Ball,
Irish Eyes Are Smiling,
but the project that really captured his imagination, that struck him as a “thinking man's blockbuster,” was a biography of one of America's coldest and most unloved presidents, Woodrow Wilson. Zanuck labored long over the script, struggling to convert the complexities of America's relationship to the world into the kind of scenes that his audiences would applaud. As President Wilson bade farewell to a group of departing doughboys, for example, one of them recited the traditional litany that appeared in so many World War II pictures: “Mike yonder's a Bohunk, this guy's Irish, Tex here claims he's just from plain Texas, and my name's Vespucci, Mr. President, but I'm just an American too.” The only additional element needed to guarantee the failure of
Wilson
was to assign the title role to an obscure actor who actually resembled the frigid president, Alexander Knox. When Zanuck showed the final print of his patriotic pageant to his dutiful wife, Virginia, she dutifully said, “I'm proud of you.” Zanuck was impressed. “I'm kind of proud of myself,” he said. “I think it will win the Oscar.”

Zanuck characteristically decided to stage the premiere not in Washington, not in Wilson's home town, but in his own, Wahoo, Nebraska. He took there a trainload of his highly paid captives—Betty Grable, Tyrone Power, Joan Fontaine, Gene Tierney—plus the usual contingent of the kept press. To the guests at a civic luncheon, he announced, “If my movies have reflected the spirit of America, the inspiration came from my boyhood days in Nebraska.” The Wahoo movie theater was crowded at the premiere that October day in 1944, but the next day it was embarrassingly empty. One of the local citizens had to explain the spirit of America to Zanuck. “The people of Wahoo wouldn't have come to see Woodrow Wilson if he'd rode down Main Street in person,” he said, “so why in hell should they pay to see him in a movie?”

Zanuck already had another vital, thinking man's blockbuster on his schedule. Like many self-made executives of his time, he had been mesmerized by the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie, and Willkie's loss of the election did not disillusion him. When Willkie wandered around through all the regions of conflict and then produced a hopeful book titled
One World,
Zanuck glowed. He paid $100,000 for the movie rights, assigned the project to one of his favorite writers, Lamar Trotti, and spent nearly a year of his own time working with Trotti on the screenplay. When that was done, he tried to hire Spencer Tracy to play Willkie; Tracy was not interested. He tried to hire John Ford to direct the film; Ford was not interested. “If they aren't successful,” he said of his blockbusters,
Wilson
and
One World,
“I'll never make another film without Betty Grable.”
Wilson
lost a stunning two million dollars;
One World
was never filmed at all; Betty Grable went on supporting Zanuck's studio.

 

Another one of the unpleasant surprises that Zanuck discovered on his return from the wars was that Bill Goetz had somehow been persuaded to rehire Otto Preminger, a man Zanuck thought he had banished from the studio forever. Preminger was an ambiguous figure, very bright, very ambitious, very assertive, but somehow limited, conventional even in his most belligerent attempts to be unconventional. His father had been attorney general of Austria, a remarkable achievement for a Jew in a profoundly anti-Semitic society, but Preminger abandoned his own legal studies to become an actor on the Viennese stage, to become a director, to become an aide to the great Max Reinhardt and then his successor. He was only twenty-nine when Joe Schenck heard about him and signed him up during one of his talent-hunting tours of Europe. On his arrival, a chauffeured limousine took Preminger to a suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where flowers and champagne awaited him. Schenck welcomed him with a grand party. “Otto, this house will always be open to you,” Schenck said. “Any time you want to come to dinner, don't even bother to phone. Just arrive. There will always be a plate for you on my table. As though you were my own son.”

Zanuck, who was more directly in charge of things at Fox, told Preminger to spend his first weeks at the studio watching other directors and seeing how films were made. “When you think you're ready, just let me know,” Zanuck said. When Preminger duly announced that he felt ready, he was handed a disaster, a stalled film entitled
Under Your Spell,
starring Lawrence Tibbett, a Metropolitan Opera baritone whom Zanuck had decided he should never have hired. Preminger somehow turned this disaster into a modest success. Zanuck was surprised and pleased. Preminger got better assignments, a new contract, a raise, invitations to dinner at Zanuck's palace. (It was perhaps during this phase of his success that Preminger encountered a group of his fellow expatriates, all talking Hungarian. “Come on,” he protested, “we're all in America now, so talk German.”)

Then Zanuck handed him one of the studio's biggest projects, one of Zanuck's personal productions,
Kidnapped.
Preminger had never heard of the Stevenson novel, had never been to Scotland, didn't want to make the movie. One of Zanuck's aides persuaded him that Zanuck could not be refused, but the first rushes did not look good. Zanuck summoned Preminger to scold him about a scene in which the boy said farewell to his dog. Once Zanuck had approved a script, no director was supposed to make any changes.

“I don't like the cuts you've made in that scene,” Zanuck said, according to Preminger. “That's a very touching moment in the script. I am the producer. You have no right to make cuts.”