City of Nets (59 page)

The physical structure of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo has changed considerably over the course of a half century. A series of photographs on the wall of one obscure corridor document the continual expansions and alterations: pillars appear and disappear, pine trees give way to palms, the roof rises, wings sprout, neon lights keep getting bigger and brighter. The present owners and managers do not advertise the founders of their hotel, but they are not unaware of the Flamingo's origins. Out in the back courtyard, not far from the swimming pool, there is a rather handsome rose garden. A plaque at one edge of the garden suggests in lugubrious tones its special quality.

“Not many people realize,” it says, “that besides all of Bugsy Siegel's professional activities, his wheeling and dealing with the underworld, he was also an accomplished gardener. . . . This is the original site of his famous rose garden. Roses have flourished here for over thirty years, and each year they bloom bigger and with a deeper red than the year before. Rumor has it that Bugsy used a secret formula to keep his roses so beautiful and richly red. . . . Remember Filthy Frankie Giannattasio? How about the notorious Big Howie Dennis? Perhaps you recall the scurrilous Mad Dog Neville? They were all associated with Bugsy at one time or another and coincidentally they all vanished into thin air rather suddenly. No trace was ever found of any of them. The rumor also says that if you stand on this spot at midnight under a full moon you can hear three muffled voices saying, ‘Bugsy, how do you like the roses, Bugsy?' ”

 

The HUAC Hearings (
from top down
): Dalton Trumbo was a noisily hostile witness, Bertolt Brecht dodged and equivocated, Jack Warner did his best to please Chairman J. Parnell Thomas.

9
Un-Americanism

(1947)

C
harles Laughton was so nervous during the last preview performances that he kept putting his hands in his pockets and rubbing his genitals. People in the audience could hardly help noticing. Some snickered. Nobody backstage dared tell Laughton the reason for the laughter. Everyone relied on Helene Weigel, Bertolt Brecht's wife, to do something. “Helli got his pants away on the pretext of pressing them,” said a young member of the cast, Frances Heflin, the sister of Van Heflin. “She wanted his hands out of his pockets, so she sewed them up.” Laughton was frantic when he found the pockets sewn up, and when he learned why, but though he insisted that the stitches be removed, he behaved himself better on opening night.

And it was quite an opening night. Charlie Chaplin was there, and Ingrid Bergman, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Boyer, Billy Wilder, Olivia de Havilland, John Garfield, Igor Stravinsky—all of these were among the people who crowded into the 260-seat Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard for what proved to be, in retrospect, one of the major theatrical events of its time, presenting Laughton in his first stage appearance in nearly fifteen years, the premiere of Brecht's greatest play,
Galileo.
In addition to being a splendid piece of theater,
Galileo
dug into two of the most troubling issues of the day, the responsibility of the scientists who had built the atomic bomb and the responsibility of intellectuals who were summoned for interrogation about their political beliefs. The audience viewed Brecht's probings with misgivings; it remained restless. The newspaper reviews also sounded somewhat dubious. The
New York Times
was reasonably representative in declaring that the play was “barren of climaxes and even sparse in stirring moments.” Hearst's
Los Angeles Examiner
called it “a fussy, juvenile harangue.”

That ambiguous night at the Coronet Theater had been an extraordinarily long time in coming. Brecht had originally written
Galileo
in Denmark, in one three-week burst of creativity during the autumn of 1938, and there had even been a staging in the wartime isolation of Zurich in 1943. By then, Brecht was enmeshed in the controversies over
Hangmen Also Die.
Despite the bitter end to those quarrels, he stubbornly went on hatching new ideas for movies. With Salka Viertel's son Hans, he discussed the possibilities of a film about Shakespeare's difficulties in getting financial support for the Globe Theater. He professed to see in this many similarities to contemporary Hollywood: “Collective writing, fast writing-on-order, the same motifs used over again. . . .” He wrote an outline entitled “Uncle Sam's Property,” which told the story of a bayonet being passed from one owner to another. He wrote a full narrative treatment, “The Crouching Venus,” about a museum curator in occupied Marseilles who saved a famous statue from a German official who wanted to acquire it. He wrote an outline for a film version of one of his most moving poems, “Children's Crusade 1939.” He discussed a modern version of
Lysistrata.
He worked on more than fifty film projects in all.

His only sale came by accident. During 1942 and '43, he collaborated with Lion Feuchtwanger on an unsuccessful play about a modern Joan of Arc in the French resistance,
The Visions of Simone Machard.
When the two collaborators inevitably quarreled and split, Brecht took all theatrical rights to the project and Feuchtwanger all rights to a prospective novel he planned to write. Sam Goldwyn rejected Brecht's play but bought Feuchtwanger's novel for fifty thousand dollars, hoping to star Teresa Wright as the saintly heroine. Feuchtwanger needlessly but graciously gave Brecht twenty thousand dollars. Goldwyn never produced the film.

Brecht knew perfectly well that all these movie projects were secondary to his vocation in the theater, and after the dispute over
Simone Machard,
he settled down to work on his major new play of these Hollywood years,
The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
But the writing of a play was only the first step in the long series of maneuvers that might or might not lead to a stage production. Brecht already had a whole portfolio of earlier work in various stages of negotiation. He had updated his 1928 version of Hašek's
Good Soldier Schweik
into
Schweyk in the Second World War,
for example, in the hope that Peter Lorre would star in it. He explored the possibility of his old collaborator Kurt Weill setting the play to music. He got Berthold Viertel, Salka's husband, to direct four scenes from
The Private Life of the Master Race
in New York in German in 1942 (a complete English version only very belatedly reached the stage in June of 1945).

The most important of these maneuverings began in Salka Viertel's salon on a Sunday afternoon in March of 1944, when Brecht first encountered the elephantine figure of Charles Laughton. He had seen and admired Laughton's best prewar films—
Rembrandt
and
The Private Life of Henry VIII
—so he was ready to treat the actor seriously, and, of course, to make use of him. Laughton was still earning a star-worthy $100,000 per picture, though several of his recent films had been undistinguished failures
(The Tuttles of Tahiti, Stand By for Action, The Man from Down Under),
and he felt a hunger to be taken seriously, even to be used. Brecht showed Laughton the manuscript of
Schweyk;
Laughton was suitably impressed. They became friends. Brecht even wrote a poem entitled “Laughton's Belly”:

 

Here it was: not unexpected, but not usual either

And built of foods which he

At his leisure had selected, for his entertainment.

And to a good plan, excellently carried out.

 

Laughton's acerbic wife, Elsa Lanchester, was less impressed with Brecht. “He smoked awful cigars . . .” she observed. “Or perhaps the passing through Brecht made the smoke come out with the sourest, bitterest smell. . . . He hadn't many teeth and his mouth opened in a complete circle, so you'd see one or two little tombstones sticking out of this black hole. A very unpleasant sight.” But Laughton was charmed by his new discovery. “Often L would come and meet me in the garden,” Brecht wrote long afterward, “running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass, and would show me some changes in his flowerbeds, for his garden always occupied him.”

Laughton was proud of his garden, overlooking the ocean from the heights of Pacific Palisades. Brecht wrote a poem praising its giant eucalyptus trees, its lemon hedge, its ferns and fuchsias and bright anemones and “the lordly lawn.” Laughton was deeply upset that autumn when eight or ten feet at the edge of his garden suddenly broke away and slid down the hillside. Brecht ended his poem on that note of dismay: “Alas, the lovely garden . . . /Is built of crumbling rock . . . /There is not much time left in which to complete it.”

Laughton and Brecht were the most implausible partners, aliens from two countries at war: one fat, one thin; one rich and famous, the other penniless and obscure; one a guilt-ridden homosexual, the other a shameless philanderer; one a connoisseur, indifferent to politics, the other a radical in all things. What bound them together was
Galileo,
which Brecht was now determined to rewrite with and for Laughton. Brecht had wanted from the start to portray Galileo as the father of modern physics, the apostle of a “new age.” Even then, in Denmark, Brecht had known a physicist who worked for Nils Bohr, so he was fully aware of Bohr's efforts to explain to the world Otto Hahn's success, late in 1938, in splitting the atom. But the central fact about Galileo, apart from his great discoveries, was that he had recanted them under the threat of torture by the Inquisition. Brecht's original idea was apparently the conventional one, to portray Galileo as the supreme rationalist, who cunningly feigned acquiescence to authority so that he could go on with his life and his work. It was thus that Galileo survived to write his celebrated
Discorsi.
As his disciple Andrea later said: “We cried: ‘Your hands are stained!' You say: ‘Better stained than empty.' . . . And: ‘If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line.' ”

There is a theory, most strongly argued by Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher, that Brecht's account of the struggle between Galileo and the church was at least partly inspired by the Soviet purge trials of 1936–38, that Brecht, never the most orthodox of radicals, had “some sympathy with Trotskyism,” and that “the Galileo of his drama is Zinoviev, or Bukharin or Rakovsky dressed up in historical costume.” There may be some truth in this, for
Galileo
is a complicated play, with subtext buried beneath subtext, but the idea of saying or doing anything for the sake of survival ran deep in Brecht's work. It was the guiding principle of both Mac the Knife and Jenny, of Mother Courage and Schweyk. In a time of extreme crisis, this hunger for survival can lead to ugly collaborations, but it can also lead to the very reasonable alternative chosen by the refugee, to the folk wisdom implicit in the saying that he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.

The first thing to do with
Galileo,
though, was to produce a working draft in English. Brecht, who still knew little English, offered Laughton, who knew no German, a literal and rather Germanic translation that he said had been done by “a secretary.” Apparently dismayed by that, Laughton hired two young writers he knew at M-G-M, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker, to produce something readable. These two also knew relatively little German, so the version that they produced in November of 1944 was quite free. Laughton and Brecht both professed to like it, but that was only the beginning. Laughton yearned to write, and Brecht liked to keep rewriting, so they met regularly in Laughton's study to rework the whole play. Laughton had to break off in February of 1945 to film
Captain Kidd,
and again in August to make
Because of Him,
but the work continued. Brecht wrote a poem about that too: “Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we/Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking/Up words in dictionaries, and time after time/Crossed out our texts . . . /Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating/A character's gestures and tone of voice, and you/Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you/Stepped outside his profession.”

Brecht's journal of this period showed no entry concerning either August 6 or August 9, the dates of the American atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Brecht later claimed that everyone had been appalled. “The day the bomb was dropped will not easily be forgotten by anyone who spent it in the United States . . .” he wrote some years afterward in his preface to the German edition of
Galileo.
“The great city arose that morning to an astonishing display of mourning. I heard bus drivers and women in markets express nothing but horror. It was a victory but it was received with the shame of defeat.” Though this was a recollection strongly discolored by both politics and hindsight, Brecht clearly believed that the public view of Galileo would never be the same. “Overnight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently,” he wrote. “The infernal effect of the great bomb placed the conflict between Galileo and the authorities of his day in a new and sharper light. . . . Galileo's crime (his abjuration) can be regarded as the ‘original sin' of modern natural sciences.”

Galileo's crime? Just a few years earlier, Brecht had portrayed it as a shrewd evasion, justified for several good reasons. Now he, Brecht, recanted all that.

 

“
ANDREA:
You gained time to write a book that only you could write. Had you burned at the stake in a blaze of glory they would have won.

“
GALILEO:
They have won. And there is no such thing as a scientific work that only one man can write.

“
ANDREA:
Then why did you recant, tell me that!

“
GALILEO:
I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.

“
ANDREA
: No!

“
GALILEO:
They showed me the instruments.”

 

When Andrea still tried to argue that the higher good of science had been served, Brecht forced Galileo to repudiate that too. The only purpose of science is “to ease human existence,” according to Galileo, and science for its own sake would lead only to “a progress away from the bulk of humanity” until “some new achievement would be echoed by a universal howl of horror.” In his recantation, Galileo insisted: “I have betrayed my profession. Any man who does what I have done must not be tolerated in the ranks of science.”

Part of this was Brecht's self-laceration over his own flight from Europe, his sense, as he had written in that poem to Salka Viertel, of self-hatred over his own survival; part of the self-laceration was also slightly self-indulgent, as in the twisted proverb,
Qui s'accuse, s'excuse.
In addition to all these complexities, Brecht, as a matter of principle, never wanted his heroes to be heroic. He declared repeatedly (and in vain) that Mac the Knife was not to be portrayed as romantically attractive, and Mother Courage was not courageous.

But Brecht was not the only creator of
Galileo.
Laughton, who would have to go out on stage and
be
the scientific renegade, had no intention of making himself despicable. So Laughton resisted all Brecht's efforts to condemn Galileo, and if Galileo had to condemn himself, then Laughton would make him heroic in doing so. “Laughton . . . has a kind of devil in his head,” Brecht complained in his journal, “that has transformed scorn for himself into empty pride—pride in the greatness of his crime, etc.”