City of Nets (44 page)

Hughes had in fact suffered a kind of breakdown in the late summer of 1944. Under the pressure of various problems connected with his inability to produce airplanes for the war effort, he began dictating repetitious memoranda that spiraled around into nowhere. Thus: “A good letter should be immediately understandable . . . a good letter should be immediately understandable . . . a good letter should be immediately understandable.” From this, he moved on to a memorandum entitled “Notes on Notes,” which dealt at great length with the punctuation in the latest version of his will: “A dash, or two, shall be used to denote words preceding, or following a quotation. Two dashes shall be used to denote the deletion of words when a group of words are quoted . . .” And so on. Toward the end of that August, Hughes simply disappeared. Not until thirty-odd years later did a former Hughes Aircraft mechanic named Joseph Petrali finally disclose that he and the boss had spent months shuttling around from Las Vegas to Palm Springs to Reno, checking in and out of various hotels under various assumed names.

Hughes recovered, partly, and in his own way, and indeed went on to acquire control of RKO. But now, for a time, he simply let Sturges make one film on his own. It was a very funny picture, entitled
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.
Then Hughes began telephoning and interfering. That was how Sturges, who yearned for independence, found himself writing a melodrama called
Vendetta
for one of Hughes's protégées, Faith Domergue. That was also how Sturges eventually found himself called on the telephone at seven o'clock one morning in 1946, called on the telephone at the apartment of Frances Ramsden, a young fashion model whom Sturges had insisted on casting as the heroine of
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock,
called on the telephone at seven o'clock in the morning at the apartment of Frances Ramsden and awakened out of bed and told by Hughes that his partner, Hughes, was taking over control of their joint production company, and that he, Preston Sturges, was fired.

Herbert K. Sorrell (
top
) led a leftist strike that ended in street violence and failure (
bottom left
). Bogart and Bacall (
middle
), in
To Have and Have Not,
represented romantic fantasy.

7
Breakdowns

(1945)

W
hen David Selznick fell in love, he did so with all the elegance of a wounded elephant trumpeting in the canebrake. Ever since his marriage to Irene Mayer back in 1930, there had periodically been little adulteries—that was almost expected of a Hollywood producer—but Selznick remained true to Irene, in his fashion, and she did to him, in hers. When he threw his clothes on the floor and stamped on them, to demonstrate something or other, she would order him to pick them up and put them away neatly. “If I were married to Irene,” her father, Louis B. Mayer, once remarked, “I'd hit her.” But while Mrs. Selznick bossed her husband around, she also took care of him and his household, and he needed her for that.

Now, one night in February of 1945, as they lay awake in the darkness, Mrs. Selznick fumbled in a drawer of the night table to get another sleeping pill.

“Why aren't you asleep?” Selznick asked. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Selznick. “I was just thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.” There was a pause. Then, Mrs. Selznick later recalled, her voice came welling up “out of nowhere” and saying: “The jig's up.”

“What do you mean?” Selznick asked.

“I want out.”

“You can't do this to me!” cried Selznick. “My God, explain!”

She really couldn't explain. It was just that after fifteen years of living with Selznick, she was sick of living with Selznick—and that baffled him. So he assumed that the explanation must be the obvious one, that she had heard about his latest affair. He decided to confess yet another self-indulgence, to plead for understanding, sympathy. Mrs. Selznick was surprised, or so she later claimed. She said that she hadn't known and didn't want to know. Selznick kept on explaining and explaining, and none of it did any good.

Phyllis Walker had originally seemed a girl of no great importance. After Selznick first met her in the spring of 1941, he couldn't even remember who she was. In a memo to Kay Brown in his New York office, he confused Phyllis Walker with Phyllis Thaxter, a pleasant-looking and rather tweedy actress he was considering for a movie version of the Broadway hit
Claudia.
Then he added: “Is this the big-eyed girl we saw in the office who had two children . . . ? Incidentally, if it is the big-eyed girl I certainly think she is worth testing no matter when she would be available.” A few days later, though, Selznick was indignant that one of his aides had offered the big-eyed Mrs. Walker too much money. “Here is a girl who has done nothing, or next to nothing, and we think of starting her at $200,” he scolded. “This isn't bad enough, but at the end of her contract she gets up to $1,500. . . . I think we are losing all sense of proportion.” An afterthought: “Incidentally, what is the husband like . . . . ? We ought to preserve his pride.”

By September, Selznick had already taken over all professional aspects of his new protégée's life. He sent a memo to his publicity director saying that he wanted to “get a new name for Phyllis Walker,” that he didn't particularly care about names but he thought Phyllis Walker “particularly undistinguished,” and that he “would appreciate suggestions.” A week after that, he was worrying about the corrupting effects of Hollywood. “I am terribly afraid the girl is going to get spoiled,” he wrote to Kay Brown. “Already she has lost some of that eager, blushing quality that made her so enchanting when we first saw her.”

She had been born Phyllis Isley, and she was twenty-two when she met Selznick, who was then thirty-nine. She came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her parents managed a touring theatrical stock company. She was quite pretty, in an apple-cheeked, chipmunky sort of way, but hardly a great beauty, and she was almost morbidly shy, insecure, withdrawn. In the make-believe of acting, she found a kind of release, a way to exist, so she went to Northwestern and then the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. There she met another student much like herself, shy, lonely, anxious. His name was Robert Walker, and she married him in 1939 and bore him a son in 1940 and another in 1941, the year she met David Selznick.

The Walkers had recently been living in Greenwich Village, and job-hunting. Walker found occasional work in radio soap operas. His wife decided to take a chance and just walk into Selznick's New York office and ask for an opportunity to try out for
Claudia.
In the midst of her reading, she nervously burst into tears. Selznick was charmed. His contract offer broke up the family for a while, but then Walker also got a lucky break. A part in M-G-M's
Bataan
reunited him with his wife in a little house in Pacific Palisades. “All we have is three beds, a dining-room table and a refrigerator,” Walker cheerily told Hedda Hopper. “We're going to furnish it like we want it.”

It had been several years since Selznick had actually produced a film (he fretted that he could never surpass
Gone With the Wind
), but he lived well on his stable of stars. He justified his usurious profits by portraying himself as a master packager. He cast a newcomer named Gregory Peck in A. J. Cronin's
The Keys of the Kingdom,
for example; then instead of making the movie, he sold the whole project to Fox. He talked of filming
Mein Kampf
and even tried to lay claim to the title. But mostly Selznick just kept loaning out his stars, just as all the other producers did, and his deals were extravagantly profitable. On one loan of Joan Fontaine, he collected $150,000 and gave her $30,000. For loaning out Ingrid Bergman, who liked to work as much as possible, Selznick cleared $425,000 in one year alone; she got $60,000. So when Selznick heard that his brother-in-law Bill Goetz was looking for an unknown actress to star in
The Song of Bernadette,
he sent over Phyllis Walker, whom he had decided to rename Jennifer Jones.

“This girl
is
Bernadette,” said Henry King, whom 20th Century–Fox had assigned as director. Selznick didn't seem to mind that his discovery would become a star under the aegis of somebody else. He still owned her; he was still working on her. He hired an ex-model named Anita Colby to advise him on how his various actresses should dress and behave, and she had to devote special attention to Mrs. Walker. Miss Colby had to teach her not only what clothes to buy—sending back any wrong choices—but even how to look back into people's eyes when they were speaking to her. But the success of Jennifer Jones in
Bernadette
was probably what inspired Selznick to go back to producing a real movie. He bought a rather sentimental novel about the wartime home front,
Since You Went Away,
by Margaret Buell Wilder, and he decided that he would write the script himself. As he wrote, or rather dictated, and rewrote and redictated, the part for Jennifer Jones, as the older daughter in Claudette Colbert's husbandless household, kept getting larger and larger.

There was also a substantial part for Robert Walker, not only because he was Jennifer Jones's husband but because his recent success in an innocents-in-uniform comedy called
See Here, Private Hargrove
made him almost as big a star as his wife. It was nonetheless important that he was also Jennifer Jones's husband. These complexities were all more than the young Mrs. Walker could bear, particularly the love scenes that Selznick had written for her to play with her husband, and the farewell scene in which he went off to war (from the same railroad station that had once served Selznick for
Gone With the Wind
). Mrs. Walker burst into tears in the middle of that scene and fled to her dressing room. Selznick had to be summoned to the set, and to that dressing room, to quiet her down and lead her back in front of the camera to bid farewell to her husband. Not long afterward, the day after she won the Academy Award for
Bernadette,
she announced that she was suing Walker for divorce.

Walker never recovered. He had always been somewhat unstable, but now he began drinking ferociously, and smashing things, and telling anyone who would listen his accusations against Selznick. “My personal life has been completely wrecked by David Selznick's obsession for my wife,” he told another young newcomer, June Allyson. “What can you do to fight such a powerful man? My life has been hell. . . .” M-G-M officials persuaded Walker to go to the Menninger Clinic, where he started getting psychotherapy six days a week. “I hated myself and blamed myself all my life for things I shouldn't have blamed myself for,” he later said. “I felt that everybody was against me, hated me. . . .”

In due time, Walker persuaded the clinic to release him, and so he returned to Hollywood and again began drinking heavily. The nurse who kept house for him called his psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist came to give him an injection of sodium amytal. Walker resisted, so various friends were summoned to control him. They held him down while the doctor prepared the injection. “Don't give it to me,” Walker pleaded while the friends held him. “I've been drinking. It will kill me. Please don't give me that shot.” The doctor knew better, of course. Walker had often been injected with sodium amytal (and a subsequent autopsy declared that this last dose was not in any way abnormal). There, there, this would calm him down, and while the friends held the squirming actor in place, the doctor administered his soothing injection. A few minutes later, Walker collapsed, and in two hours he was dead. At thirty-two. All very sad.

That was in 1951, part of the future, but the breakup of David Selznick's marriage probably went back well into the past, far beyond his encounter with Mrs. Walker, back to the breakup of the marriage of Irene Selznick's father, Louis B. Mayer. As the head of the largest and most successful movie studio, Mayer had long imposed his own social code on much of Hollywood (and, it could be argued, on much of the United States). That social code was one of rigid conformity to the ideals of paternalistic respectability, come what might. Back in 1904, when Mayer first courted Maggie Shenburg, the daughter of the cantor of the Emerald Street Synagogue in Boston, she was pretty and a high school graduate and socially far superior to the semiliterate junk dealer from New Brunswick. Thirty years later, when Louis B. Mayer was one of the highest-paid executives in the United States, his wife had become a self-effacing
hausfrau,
ill at ease outside her own front door in Santa Monica. Success made Mayer increasingly tyrannical over his family as well as his employees (the two tended to merge in his mind). When his two daughters grew old enough to go to college, Mayer forbade it; he didn't want their minds or morals corrupted. But by all accounts, Mayer remained “faithful” to his wife, in the technical meaning of that word, until she had to have a hysterectomy late in 1933.

It was a psychological disaster for the whole family. Mrs. Mayer sank into what was officially termed “involutional melancholia,” a postoperative condition that is now routinely treated by hormone therapy. She moped tearfully around the house and complained of vague pains that no doctor could diagnose. Finally she was sent off to a mental institution, the Riggs sanitarium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For Mayer, this was both a condemnation and a liberation. He had been told, as doctors often told their victims in those days, that Mrs. Mayer must never again have sex after her operation. He didn't want it anyway. He confessed to a surprisingly large number of people that his knowledge of her hysterectomy made the very idea of sex with her repugnant.

So now that his poor wife was confined in a mental hospital, Mayer felt free, for the first time in his life, to explore all the possibilities. The richest and most powerful man in the world capital of temptation was ready to be tempted. Aides and adjutants arranged parties for him and invited willing girls, but Mayer always seemed to spend his time asking them about their families. One of Mayer's new friends, a Detroit gambler named Lew Wertheimer, said of the would-be adventurer, “He couldn't get laid in a whorehouse!”

Mayer explained to a solicitous assistant that he didn't really want any girl unless he knew her and liked her. On his own, he apparently attempted various fumbling advances toward some of his stars. Both Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy, according to studio gossip, had to make it clear to him that they were not interested. But more girls kept appearing, and getting screen tests, for this was M-G-M's business, after all. One of these newcomers was a twenty-four-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer from Texas named Jean Howard. Her screen test went well, so she was taken around to meet various producers. When she met Mayer, he asked her, characteristically, “Do you have a dentist if you have a toothache? Do you know any doctors if you need one?” She said no. Mayer said she should call him if she needed any help of this kind. She smiled. Mayer fell in love.

All that spring of 1934, Mayer pursued his new discovery. He took her to lunch, he asked her about her family, he stared at her, but nothing more. “I'm sure I would have gone to bed with him if he had asked me,” Miss Howard later said of her admirer, but she thought of him as “a mental adolescent in perpetuity.” And, of course, ugly as a toad. And fifty-two years old. And married. None of this deterred Louis B. Mayer, the lord of M-G-M. His wife duly returned home from Riggs and remembered a promise that he had once made, to take her to Paris. Well, why not? Mayer had heard (mistakenly) that it was easy to obtain a quick and quiet divorce there. So he decided to embark for France, taking along his wife, who would learn there of her destiny, and his girl, who would marry him there, and the girl's best friend, Ethel Borden, whom Mayer was paying to serve as a kind of confidante and intermediary in his awkward courtship. For good measure, Mayer also took along his chief publicity man, Howard Strickling.