City of Nets (6 page)

The interminable “search,” orchestrated by a former Hearst police reporter named Russell Birdwell, featured all the major stars of the day. Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis campaigned fiercely for the part, and the gossip columns chronicled each rise and fall in their prospects. Paulette Goddard nearly won, but various ladies' clubs noisily protested that she was not really married to her supposed husband, Charlie Chaplin. Though she claimed they had been married in Singapore harbor by the captain of an Oriental cruise ship, the lack of any wedding certificate drove Selznick back into his customary state of indecision. Meanwhile, his adjutants wandered across the countryside, interviewing various high school prom queens and other local talents. One girl in crinolines, quite possibly acting on instructions from Birdwell, had herself shipped to Selznick's home in a large packing crate. All in all, fourteen hundred “discoveries” were formally interviewed, and ninety of them were actually tested before a movie camera. The tests totaled 162,000 feet of film, amounting to more than twenty-four hours' running time, all of it worthless. The cost of the famous search was estimated at $100,000, and its value as publicity was priceless.

As the beginning of 1939 drew near, however, some actual work had to be started. The designers had already drawn their plans for the construction of Tara, and Twelve Oaks, and the Atlanta Bazaar, but before the building could begin, some space had to be cleared on the cluttered back lot of Selznick's studio. This studio, set among slatternly bars and apartment houses on Washington Boulevard, had been operated at various times by Sam Goldwyn, Pathé, and Joseph Kennedy's RKO. Its forty acres had served as both English countryside and African jungle. Sets of all kinds were built and then abandoned: a village from
The Last of the Mohicans,
a street from
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
even the giant gateway that once guarded the entry to the domain of King Kong. Eventually, these dilapidated ruins would have to be dismantled, but William Cameron Menzies, who had been hired to design the sets for
Gone With the Wind,
conceived an inspired idea. Why not put a few false fronts on the relics, enough to make them look like an approximation of Atlanta, and then set the whole tumbledown mess on fire?

Cautious M-G-M executives argued that it would be cheaper and simpler to work with models, and local fire officials worried that the conflagration might easily break out of control, but Selznick was adamant. Let it all burn, like the original Atlanta, like London, like Rome. He assigned the technical problems to Lee Zavitz, a special-effects man known as an explosives expert, and Zavitz rigged up an elaborate network of pipes throughout the assembled buildings. Zavitz built his conduits at three levels—on the ground, at the second story, and along the roofs. Throughout this network, he installed two different kinds of pipes that ran alongside each other, with sprinklers at fixed intervals. One set of pipes contained a highly flammable mixture of 80 percent oil distillate and 20 percent rock gas; the other contained water and a fire-extinguishing solution. All of these pipes, designed to make the fires burn more fiercely or to wet them down, led to a kind of keyboard console, where a row of push buttons could regulate the flames in various parts of the holocaust. It was an arsonist's dream. Selznick insisted on operating the console himself.

Though the night of December 10, 1938, was cold, Selznick was determined to make a party of the great fire. He had built an observation platform for his guests. His widowed mother, Florence, was there, wrapped in a shawl, but Myron Selznick was delayed at a dinner party. Selznick waited for more than an hour, and so did twenty-five officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, and fifty firemen, and two hundred studio employees pressed into service as volunteers to man the five-thousand-gallon water tanks. So did three white-suited doubles for Clark Gable, ready to rescue three different Scarletts on three different buckboard wagons. So did seven different camera crews trained to use the new and unpredictable Technicolor process; there would, after all, be no way of correcting mistakes.

When nervous aides finally persuaded the nervous Selznick that he could wait no longer, he started pushing buttons. Suddenly the night was on fire. Selznick pushed a button, and one of the sets from
The Garden of Allah
exploded into flames; he pushed a button and the great gateway from
King Kong
collapsed in ruins. Only now did Selznick's publicity man, Russell Birdwell, telephone the Los Angeles newspapers with anonymous tips that the whole lot was on fire, and when skeptical editors looked out their windows, they could see the sky reddening miles away.

“Burn, baby, burn,” was a cry heard only thirty years later, in Watts, and one can only imagine what reverberated inside the head of David O. Selznick as he pushed the buttons that spread the flames through the sham buildings of Atlanta. Burn, Atlanta! Burn, Hollywood, and all of southern California! Burn, Louis B. Mayer, and all the bankers and lawyers and dealmakers! Burn!

The flames were beginning to die down, according to legend, when Myron Selznick finally arrived, half drunk as usual, with some of his dinner guests, among them a relatively obscure young English actress named Vivien Leigh. She had just come to Hollywood because she was following her lover, Laurence Olivier, who had signed to play Heathcliff in Sam Goldwyn's production of
Wuthering Heights.
When drunk, Myron Selznick often addressed his younger brother as “Genius.” Sometimes, they got into fistfights. “Hello, Genius,” Myron Selznick said now. “I want you to meet your Scarlett O'Hara.”

“I took one look,” David later declared in a ghostwritten account that sealed the legend, “and knew that she was right.”

 

God never meant man to live here, as Thornton Wilder said, but man had tortured the desert into giving him sustenance. Wilder was only slightly exaggerating the ugly history of Los Angeles' long struggle to provide itself with water. The region was not totally a desert, of course, for the original pueblo was built alongside the Los Angeles River, which meanders southward out of the San Gabriel Mountains to debouch in what is now Long Beach. This river was dammed and used for irrigation in the early nineteenth century, but it was never considered capable of supporting a city of more than 250,000 people. By the turn of the century, the population had already passed 150,000 and was growing rapidly. “The time has come,” Water Commissioner William Mulholland declared in 1904, after a survey of the river, “when we shall have to supplement its flow from some other source.”

Mulholland was a tall, rawboned Dubliner, a former seaman and lumberjack, who had wandered into Los Angeles in 1877 and found himself a job as a laborer on a pipe-building project alongside the Los Angeles River, which he later recalled as “a beautiful, limpid stream with willows on its banks.” Mulholland was a man of large and irresistible vision. The “other source” that he discovered for Los Angeles water was the Owens River Valley, some 250 miles to the northeast, fed from the snows of the High Sierras. President Theodore Roosevelt had already brought the federal government into the field of large-scale reclamation, using the sale of western lands to finance irrigation, and the officials who arrived to buy up water rights in the Owens Valley told the ranchers that they were planning an irrigation project for the valley. By the time the ranchers realized their mistake, their betrayal, Mulholland had floated a $1.5 million bond issue and embarked on his great aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. It was an engineering marvel that extended 233 miles across the Mojave Desert; it had 142 separate tunnels and twelve miles of inverted steel siphons and three large reservoirs, the largest of which could store more than nineteen million gallons of water. “There it is!” said Mulholland when he opened the spillway to the San Fernando Reservoir in 1913. “Take it!”

The new aqueduct could supply a city of two million people, Mulholland figured, and Los Angeles would not reach that size for many years, so the water commissioner used the surplus water to begin irrigating the arid San Fernando Valley just north of the city. Annexed by Los Angeles, it grew green at the expense of the Owens Valley ranchers, whose fertile lands were now doomed to revert to desert. The ranchers fought back with lawsuits and even gunfire. They temporarily seized part of the aqueduct, and even blew it up in 1927. Their protests were futile. Their last outcry was a Los Angeles newspaper advertisement that said: “We, the farming communities of the Owens Valley, being about to die, salute you. . . .” The newspaper ad seemed appropriate enough, for General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
was one of the oligarchs who had anticipated Mulholland's benificence in the San Fernando Valley by buying up large tracts of land there. His syndicate paid $3 million for 62,000 acres, which duly became worth about $120 million. Among the other foresighted land-buyers were the railroad magnates E. H. Harriman and Henry Huntington. They also did very well for themselves.

Robert Towne apparently drew inspiration from these half-buried scandals when he wrote the screenplay for
Chinatown,
for the millionaire land speculator played by John Huston boasted happily that there were only two choices: “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water.”

“Why are you doing it?” asked the detective played by Jack Nicholson. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?”

“The future, Mr. Gittes, the future!” cried Huston.

The future of Los Angeles had seemed assured by Mulholland's foresight, but the two million people to be served by his aqueduct were already in sight by the early 1920's, and the population was growing by 100,000 a year. Mulholland began planning for yet another aqueduct, this time to reach still farther east and drain water from the Colorado River. Mulholland was not to see the completion of his last great scheme. One of his lesser projects, the St. Francis Dam in the Santa Clara Valley, suddenly gave way on March 12, 1928, and sent a wall of water cascading down on the homes of Mexican citrus workers. Some 385 people drowned, and 1,240 homes were destroyed. Mulholland, by now seventy-two, acknowledged full responsibility for the disaster and resigned, saying unhappily that he “envied the dead.” Seven years later, he suffered a severe stroke and died in his sleep.

By then, the New Deal was in full flower, and the harnessing of the Colorado River was one of its major projects. Just two months after Mulholland's death, President Roosevelt voyaged out into the desert southeast of the former Mormon outpost of Las Vegas and dedicated what he called “a twentieth century marvel,” then known as Boulder Dam, originally and now again Hoover Dam. It was indeed a marvel, 726 feet high, built out of 6.5 million tons of concrete, but it was built at a cost. Temperatures in the desert climbed as high as 140 degrees, and when some of the laborers attempted a strike against the brutal working conditions and the four-dollar daily wage, the strike was broken by force. Only after the dam was built did the government fine the builders $100,000 for 70,000 violations of the eight-hour-day law. All in all, some 110 workmen died from various accidents during the two years of construction. “They died to make the desert bloom,” reads a plaque in their honor. The builders—a Western consortium that included Bechtel, Kaiser, and Morrison-Knudsen, who called themselves the Six Companies, after the group that ruled San Francisco's Chinatown—made a profit of more than ten million dollars.

The aqueduct from the Colorado to Los Angeles was hardly less a marvel. Construction had begun in 1932, and some thirty thousand workmen labored on it throughout the Depression. When the $220 million project was finished in the fall of 1939, a network of canals, tunnels, pumping plants, and reservoirs could carry nearly one billion gallons of water a day nearly three hundred miles across the desert from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. “It is a dream of empire coming true before our eyes,” said W. P. Whitsett, chairman of the Metropolitan Water District.

 

Hollywood was not particularly interested in water in the fall of 1939, or in the Los Angeles megalopolis that the new water would make possible. Hollywood was largely preoccupied, as always, with itself, with making movies and making money. As a whole, the industry invested $170 million to make 530 feature pictures that year, among them some of the most popular movies ever made. This was the year in which Greta Garbo did not win an Academy Award for starring in
Ninotchka,
and Judy Garland did not win one for
The Wizard of Oz.
Neither did Laurence Olivier for
Wuthering Heights,
nor John Wayne for
Stagecoach,
nor Jimmy Stewart for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
not to mention
Destry Rides Again.
This was the year in which a million people crowded into Atlanta—still alive despite the ashes to which David Selznick had reduced it—for the ceremonial opening of
Gone With the Wind.
Confederate flags flew everywhere, and hawkers peddled Rhett caramels and Melanie molasses and Tara pecans, and when Vivien Leigh heard a military school band bleating “Dixie,” she said, “Oh, they're playing the song from our picture.”

There was a grand unreality about all the festivity, this celebration of defeat in a war long finished, as though nobody could understand that a much larger struggle had already begun. That September, a group of Selznick's technicians had been carrying out one of their last tasks, filming the title itself—
Gone With the Wind
—pulling the camera along on a dolly so that each word could be framed separately, when Fred Williams, the head grip, turned on his radio and heard that Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany.

 

War had been inevitable ever since German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow the previous week to sign the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression treaty. Hollywood's small but noisy troop of Communists, like Communists everywhere, insisted up to the last minute that what was happening could not be happening. On the night before the Hitler-Stalin treaty was proclaimed, someone asked Herbert Biberman, a writer-director who was acting as chairman of yet another anti-Fascist meeting, about the rumors that such a treaty was impending. Biberman, later to become one of the Hollywood Ten, pounded on the table and denounced the rumors as “Fascist propaganda.” That was perfectly appropriate, for Earl Browder, secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, had recently told a gathering in Virginia that “there is as much chance of agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the Chamber of Commerce.”