City of Nets (60 page)

At the end of a year's work, the two of them finally agreed on their script. Laughton read it aloud to Orson Welles, who happily agreed to direct it. Contracts were signed early in 1946, Mike Todd was brought in as producer, and rehearsals were scheduled for August. There must be some predictable limit, though, to the length of time four grandiose egos can work together on a project. Welles was the first to go. “Brecht was very, very tiresome today,” he wrote to Laughton, “until (I'm sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. Then he behaved. I hate working like that.” As for Todd, when he told Brecht that he planned to acquire some leftover Renaissance furniture and other props from a Hollywood studio, Brecht promptly brought the curtain down on him.

Other angels could always be found. John Houseman had founded an organization called Pelican Productions, and one of his friends had happily discovered what Houseman called “certain underworld elements that . . . were trying to divert some of their Las Vegas profits into Hollywood show business.” The producer rented the little Coronet Theater and set out to bring Culture to Los Angeles. He worried about opening with
Galileo,
however, and decided to precede it with Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth.
And finally, it was Laughton who put up $25,000 of his own money, half the production costs, to underwrite a four-week run of
Galileo.
He had a deep emotional commitment to Brecht's play, which was by now partly his play. He had again been forced to interrupt his collaboration with Brecht to make a film,
The Paradine Case,
for Alfred Hitchcock and David Selznick, and then again for that marvelous Kenneth Fearing nightmare about Time Inc.,
The Big Clock.
In June of 1947, with Joseph Losey hired as a director who would defer to all of Brecht's wishes, and T. Edward Hambleton recruited as a backer who would pay Brecht's bills,
Galileo
finally went into rehearsals.

Brecht, as usual, was impossible. He insisted on controlling everything and quarreled ferociously with anyone who disagreed. He wanted the costumes just so and the sets just so, and he kept rewriting the script, adding new characters, and then ordering the costumes changed again. Part of all this was perfectionism, part was pure temperament, but the most important reason for all the controversy was that Brecht totally opposed—hated—all the prevailing fashions in the American theater. He hated the idea that the stage represented “reality”; he wanted the theater to remain always a scene of spectacles. He hated the idea that actors should try to “be” the characters they were playing; he wanted them to be themselves, players, performers. In trying to impose his ideas of how he wanted his work produced, he had to deal with people who often couldn't understand what he was talking about. His views contradicted everything they had been taught, everything they by now took for granted. The problem was epitomized in an exchange with Abe Burrows, whom Laughton had recruited to rewrite a song that Brecht had assigned to a wandering street singer. “I kept trying to find out what was to be the tone of the song I was going to write,” Burrows recalled. “Our conversation went something like this:

 

ME:
Is this fellow praising Galileo?

BRECHT
: No.

ME:
Is he knocking him?

BRECHT
: No.

ME:
Well, Mr. Brecht, how does this fellow feel about Galileo?

BRECHT:
He feels nothing.

ME:
Well, why does this fellow stand up there and sing a song?

BRECHT:
Because I want him to.”

 

That kind of dialogue, repeated over and over again, might have driven anyone to the point of fury, but Brecht, even at the best of times, was rude and domineering. John Houseman had heard “horror stories” about Brecht's behavior, and now he found them all true. “His attitude was consistently objectionable and outrageous,” Houseman recalled. “In his determination to impose the precise style and interpretation he wanted . . . he was harsh, intolerant, and, often, brutal and abusive.” One of the main victims of this abuse was the choreographer Anna Sokolow, who had ideas of her own about how to stage the street scenes. Brecht told her, in front of the assembled cast, that he would not allow “a lot of Broadway commercial shit.” When she didn't quit, he got her fired. The only participant he accepted without arguments was Hanns Eisler, a fellow refugee and fellow leftist, who had written the music for
Hangmen Also Die
and who had now composed for
Galileo
a fascinating accompaniment for harpsichord, small orchestra, and a cappella choir (Stravinsky came to several rehearsals to hear it). But Losey, the director, survived only by doing exactly what Brecht told him. Only once, in fact, was Losey so goaded and provoked that he threw the script at Brecht and went home. He was working in his garden when Laughton telephoned with the inevitable plea that he return to the theater. “ ‘I will,' I said, ‘if Brecht apologizes to me,' ” Losey recalled. “Laughton hung up, and after a while he called back saying, ‘Brecht says please come back, and he also says you should know Brecht never apologizes.' I went back.”

So it was Laughton, the great blubbering baby, famous for driving other directors to fury with his self-indulgent fits of temperament, who, having become involved with someone even more temperamental than he, now had to play the unfamiliar role of diplomat and conciliator. To everyone's pleased surprise, he did. He guided and soothed and encouraged, and all this on the troupe's top salary of forty dollars per week, yet the prospect of his first opening night in more than a decade terrified him. He resorted to the peculiar satisfactions of narcolepsy. “Not catnaps but deep, heavy slumber,” Houseman recalled, “into which he would sink at strange and unexpected moments—in the midst of making up, while going over lines and sometimes even between scenes—and from which it became increasingly difficult for our stage managers to arouse him.”

Then there came that inevitable moment when he exploded. It happened, as usual, on the pettiest pretext. Ruth Berlau, the Danish actress, translator, collaborator, mistress, who had accompanied Brecht and his family all the way across Russia, now considered herself a photographer, so she was flitting about in the balcony of the Coronet Theater, photographing the last rehearsals for some vague publicity purpose. Click, click, click. Suddenly something in Laughton snapped. “Laughton broke off in the middle of a scene,” Houseman recalled, “and came slowly down to the edge of the stage. He glared up at the balcony, his face twisted into a strange grimace that made him look as though he were about to burst into tears. Then he started to howl at her. He accused her of violating him as an artist, of trying to ruin his performance and to destroy him as a man. The more he raged, the wilder he became: he threatened to smash her camera; he said he would kill her if he ever saw her again in the theatre. He was still yelling long after she had fled into La Cienega Boulevard.”

Galileo
finally opened in the middle of a July heat wave so intense that electric fans had to be installed on both sides of the stage, with buckets of ice in front of them. Though the reviews were “mixed,” every seat had already been sold for the four-week run, and Laughton was determined to move the production on to New York. The American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) offered a limited engagement opening December 7. Maybe, then, there would be more Brecht productions, perhaps even movie sales. By now, however, Brecht was also hearing siren calls from Europe. The Soviet occupation authorities in Berlin were interested in his returning to stage some of his works there. Brecht was characteristically wary, but he began applying for visas to visit Switzerland.

On September 19, just a month after
Galileo
had ended its run in Los Angeles, a seedy and slightly tipsy man appeared at the door of Brecht's house in Santa Monica and handed him a folded pink document that began with the words “By authority of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America . . .” It went on to summon Brecht to “appear before the Un-American Activities Committee . . . in their chamber in the city of Washington . . . and there testify touching matters of inquiry committed to the said Committee. . . . Herein fail not.”

The process server was hardly worthy of such lofty language. He rather resembled a character out of Brecht's plays. Helli Weigel offered him some coffee and he sat there complaining about the hardships of his job, the way people tried to evade him, the way his feet hurt. He seemed to appreciate the Brechts' hospitality. He confided to them that the government paid expenses and per diem compensation for witnesses summoned to Washington, and that if Brecht went by train but claimed reimbursement for auto mileage, he could make a profit on the trip. Brecht was pleased by such revelations. The Good Soldier Schweyk was alive and at work in Hollywood.

 

Brecht was not much worried, apparently, for the House committee was summoning witnesses all over Hollywood.
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
published lists (not entirely accurate) of more than forty people who had received subpoenas: Clifford Odets, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole. . . . A veteran screenwriter whose credits ranged from a Charlie Chan picture to
The House of Seven Gables,
Cole was getting a haircut in the M-G-M barbershop when the phone rang and he found himself talking to Eddie Mannix.

“Lester?” the studio manager said. “In my outside office there's a U.S. marshal with a subpoena for you. You want to duck while I hold him?”

“Duck?” Cole echoed. “Where to? Tell him I'm in the third seat in the barbershop.”

More notable than this clutch of leftist screenwriters were the conservative eminences whom the committee was inviting to testify about the Communist threat: Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner and Walt Disney, Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and Ronald Reagan. It promised to be a great show.

Although the HUAC investigations of the movie business have acquired the status of a national legend, Hollywood was never really more than an entertaining diversion in the committee's zigzagging crusade.
Martin Dies' Story,
the memoirs of the committee's founding chairman, never even mentioned Dies's forays into show business in the late 1930's. His targets were primarily President Roosevelt and the labor unions, secondarily liberals, foreigners, and anyone else who aroused his ire. When Dies retired because of bad health in 1944, his powers devolved onto John Rankin of Mississippi, who hopefully announced that an investigation of Hollywood would reveal “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States” and perhaps even “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government.” Rankin was apparently inspired to these views by the prominence of Jews in Hollywood, but he imagined Jewish threats everywhere. He once denounced Walter Winchell as “a little slime-mongering kike,” and he even baited a congressional colleague, Emanuel Celler, by referring to him as “the Jewish gentleman from New York.” When Celler protested, the courtly Mississippian asked, “Does the member from New York object to being called a Jew or does he object to being called a gentleman?”

Once the 1946 elections had brought the Republicans to power in Congress, the challenge of investigating Hollywood fell to the new HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. It was a little hard, at the start, for Hollywood to take this pudgy, jowly figure very seriously. The son of a Jersey City police commissioner, Thomas had been born John Parnell Feeney, Jr., but after his father's death, he decided to adopt his mother's maiden name. It is probably unfair to accuse anyone who calls himself J. Parnell of trying to hide his Irish origins; on the other hand, the future congressman was quite candid about why the name Thomas seemed preferable to Feeney. “Your petitioner . . .” he told the court, “believes that he can get recognition and business under the name of Thomas that he could not get under the name of Feeney.”

Recognition and business, those were the goals to achieve. Feeney/Thomas went to the Wharton School of Finance for a time, then left to join the army in World War I, rose to be a captain, worked as a bond salesman in New York, and began thinking about a career in politics. Since Catholicism might prove as much a hindrance as the name Feeney, he changed not only his name but his religion. He made a point of attending the Baptist church, but occasionally told interviewers he was an Episcopalian, and a Mason as well. He was elected mayor of Allendale, New Jersey, in 1931, and then a state assemblyman in 1935. In the legislature, he had an experience that he later said had changed his life. The governor of New Jersey had proposed a sales tax to raise money for the relief of the unemployed, and some of these people on relief invaded the Assembly to lobby for the bill. They ate and slept there, played mandolins, and generally dismayed people like J. Parnell Thomas. He began what he called a “quiet” investigation of these troublemakers and discovered that one of them had once been a Communist Party candidate for governor of Ohio. That was enough for Thomas to demand that the authorities expel the demonstrators as dangerous revolutionaries. “Or if they are to be treated as guests of the state,” he added, “let's do the job properly. Feed them caviar. Feed them chocolate eclairs.”

These local controversies were still unresolved when Thomas saw a greater opportunity, in 1936, in the death of the congressman for the Seventh District. Thomas ran for the seat and won. He had a talent for gestures. One of the first bills that he proposed called for the public hanging of kidnappers. He saw possibilities in the creation of a committee on un-American activities. He asked for and won appointment as one of the founding members in 1938. The seniority system inexorably brought him to the chairmanship, and by May of 1947, he was able to announce to the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”