City of Nets (64 page)

The committee was pretending to investigate the question of whether it should recommend the outlawing of the Communist Party, so it put this question to Jack Warner, who did his best to avoid answering. “I would advocate it providing it did not take away the rights of a free citizen, a good American to make a livelihood,” Warner said, “and also that it would not interfere with the Constitution of the United States as well as the Bill of Rights.” J. Parnell Thomas bristled at the suggestion that his activities could violate the Constitution.

“If we passed a law, that would be proper legal procedure, wouldn't it?” he asked.

“I, as an individual citizen, naturally am in favor of anything that is good for Americans,” Warner said.

“Are you in favor of outlawing the Communist Party?”

“You mean from the ballot?”

“Yes, making it an illegal organization.”

“I am in favor of making it an illegal organization.”

The next major witness, who represented Hollywood even more than Jack Warner did, was Louis B. Mayer. He, too, had a ghostwritten opening statement to read, in which he declared that he had “maintained a relentless vigilance against un-American influences.” And before the committee even had a chance to ask him whether he favored outlawing the Communist Party, Mayer piously called on the committee to recommend “legislation establishing a national policy regulating employment of Communists in private industry.” As for himself, he added, “it is my belief they should be denied the sanctuary of the freedom they seek to destroy.”

Only about a week earlier, according to Lester Cole, Mayer had given a private demonstration of how to deal with Communists. He called Cole to his office and told him that he and Dalton Trumbo were two of M-G-M's best writers. “Your kind don't grow on trees,” he said. “I don't want to lose you.”

“Maybe you won't,” said Cole. “It really looks like we have the law on our side.”

“I don't give a shit about the law,” Mayer said. “It's them goddamn commies that you're tied up with. Break with them. Stick with us. With me. . . . You'll do what you want. Direct your own pictures? Say so. I believe you'd do great. Dough means nothing. We'll tear up the contract, double your salary. You name it, you can have it. Just make the break.”

Cole reported that Mayer's eyes filled with tears, as often happened during his negotiations. Unable to think quite what to answer, Cole only shook his head, whereupon Mayer exploded.

“I know about Communism,” he roared. “I know what happens to men like that. Take that Communist Roosevelt! A hero, a man of the people! And what happens five minutes after they shoveled the dirt on his grave? The people pissed on it! That's what you want, Lester? Be with
us,
be smart. You got kids, think of them.”

“You're a very generous man,” Cole said. “I wish I could go along with you, but I can't.”

“You're nuts!” Mayer shouted, rising to his feet, pointing to the door. “Goddamn crazy Commie! Get out! Goddamn it, get out!”

Now that Mayer was on the witness stand, he had to be more diplomatic. “Are there any Communists, to your knowledge, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer?” asked one of the committee's investigators, H. A. Smith. “There is no proof about it, except they mark them as Communists,” Mayer said, groping, now that he had no statement to read, “and when I look at the pictures they have written for us I can't find once where they have written something like that. . . . I have as much contempt for them as anybody living in this world.” But were there any Communists at M-G-M? Mayer fell back on anonymous informants and said that “they have mentioned two or three writers to me several times.” Smith insisted on details. “Who are these people they have named?” he asked. Mayer cited Trumbo, Cole, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Why didn't Mayer get rid of them, Smith persisted. “I have asked counsel,” Mayer said. “They claim that unless you can prove they are Communists they can hold you for damages.”

It was clear that Mayer, like Warner, regarded himself as blameless in all things. If there were Communists at M-G-M—and he was not officially admitting any such thing—there was nothing he could do about it. The committee apparently believed that the M-G-M chief needed further guidance, so it turned to one of his wartime creations,
Song of Russia,
a maudlin romance of an American conductor touring the Soviet Union and becoming enamored of the country, its people, and one of its girls, all to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky. Robert Taylor, who played the conductor, had roused the committee hounds by testifying in Los Angeles that “White House pressure” by “Roosevelt aides” had forced him to make the movie by delaying his naval commission until he had done so. (“In my own defense,” Taylor subsequently testified in Washington, “lest I look a little silly by saying I was ever forced to do the picture, I was not forced.”) Now Mayer tried to explain how these things worked in wartime Hollywood. “Taylor mentioned his pending commission in the Navy,” Mayer said, “so I telephoned the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and told him of the situation, recalling the good that had been done by
Mrs. Miniver
and other pictures released during the war period. The secretary called back and said he thought Taylor could be given time to make the film before being called to the service.”

But about the movie itself—how had it come to be made in the first place? Some writers had outlined a story, Mayer said, and it “seemed a good medium of entertainment and . . . a pat on the back for our then ally, Russia.” Mayer added, as a kind of defense, exactly what the committee wanted to attack: “The Government coordinator . . . agreed with us that it would be a good idea to make the picture.” Asked who the writers actually were, Mayer said that he could not remember. Perhaps he considered it wiser not to remember that the screenplay had been credited to Richard Collins, one of the “unfriendly” nineteen now under subpoena, and Paul Jarrico, who was eventually to plead the Fifth Amendment before this committee. In any case, Mayer himself had read the script and demanded revisions. “They had farm collectivism in it and I threw it out,” he said. “I will not preach any ideology except American.” When the revisions were finished, Mayer said, “the final script of
Song of Russia
was little more than a pleasant musical romance—the story of a boy and girl that, except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland.”

Mayer was perhaps too modest. The
New York Times
had greeted the film on its appearance in early 1944 as “really a honey of a topical musical film, full of rare good humor, rich vitality, and a proper respect for the Russians' fight in this war.” Nor was that all. Bosley Crowther, the newspaper's chief film critic, hailed
Song of Russia
as “very close to being the best film on Russia yet made in the popular Hollywood idiom.” Such a good review just three years before, and now this committee interrogator wanted to know whether Mayer would admit that “scene after scene . . . grossly misrepresented Russia.” Mayer, like Warner, pleaded ignorance. “I never was in Russia,” he said, overlooking the fact that he had been born there. Unlike the craven Warner, though, Mayer tried to counterattack. “You tell me,” he went on, “how you would make a picture laid in Russia that would do any different than what we did there.”

“Don't you feel from what you have read . . .” Smith tried again, “that the scenes did not depict Russia in one iota?”

“We did not attempt to depict Russia,” Mayer retorted. “We attempted to show a Russian girl entreating this American conductor to conduct a concert in her village . . . and as it inevitably happens this girl fell in love with the conductor and he with her. Then we showed the attack of the Germans on the Russians and the war disrupted this union.”

For a more critical analysis of this prize specimen, the committee summoned the bizarre figure of Ayn Rand, who was then working as a Hollywood screenwriter and hoping that Warners would soon produce her script of her own 1943 novel,
The Fountainhead.
Miss Rand had been born in 1904 in what she resolutely insisted on calling St. Petersburg, but she had last seen Russia in 1926, so it was a little hard to imagine why the committee considered her an expert on the subject. Still, by comparison with Warner and Mayer, almost anyone might be considered an expert. Miss Rand had not even seen
Song of Russia
on its first appearance, so the committee staged a special screening for her, and now she was prepared to testify that it was filled with pro-Soviet propaganda.

She scornfully described how Robert Taylor arrived in M-G-M's Russia to conduct concerts. “He meets a little Russian girl from a village. . . . He asks her to show him Moscow. She says she has never seen it. He says, ‘I will show it to you.' They see it together. The picture then goes into a scene of Moscow, supposedly. I don't know where the studio got its shots, but I have never seen anything like it in Russia. First you see Moscow buildings—big, prosperous-looking, clean buildings, with something like swans or sailboats in the background. Then you see a Moscow restaurant that just never existed there.”

If M-G-M's Moscow was exaggerated, M-G-M's typical Russian village was total fantasy. “You see the happy peasants,” Miss Rand relentlessly continued. “You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. . . .” Robert Taylor not only conducted Tchaikovsky for these happy villagers, but his concert was broadcast throughout the happy country, even to its far frontiers. “There is a border guard . . . listening to the concert,” Miss Rand said. “Then there is a scene inside kind of a guardhouse where the guards are listening to the same concert, the beautiful Tchaikovsky music, and they are playing chess. Suddenly there is a Nazi attack on them.” Miss Rand was sufficiently an ideologue to point out that the border station where the Nazis attacked the chess-playing, music-loving guards must have been located in central Poland, where Stalin had established them at the time of his alliance with Hitler.

The M-G-M love story followed its inevitable course, boy first losing girl to her “anti-parachute work,” and then getting girl so that they can both spread the good word in America. In describing all this, Miss Rand was particularly indignant about Taylor's manager, played by Robert Benchley, who said to the heroine, “You are a fool, but a lot of fools like you died on the village green at Lexington.” Quite apart from the question of whether such a remark would make any sense to a Russian villager, Miss Rand called it “blasphemy,” because the men of Lexington were “fighting for political freedom and individual freedom,” and “to compare them to somebody, anybody, fighting for a slave state, I think is dreadful.”

Congressman John Wood, a Georgia Democrat, tried to get Miss Rand to admit that the United States had a strategic interest in keeping the Soviets at war against Germany, but she disputed even that. “I think we could have used the lend-lease supplies that we sent there to much better advantage ourselves,” she said. She therefore rejected completely the idea that a glib film like
Song of Russia
could serve some worthy political purpose. “If the excuse that has been given here is that we had to produce the picture in wartime, just how can it help the war effort?” she asked. “If it is to deceive the American people . . . then that sort of attitude is nothing but the theory of the Nazi elite, that a choice group of intellectual or other leaders will tell people lies for their own good.”

“You paint a very dismal picture of Russia,” said John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican. “You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn't anybody smile in Russia anymore?”

“Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no,” said the unbudging Miss Rand.

“They don't smile?” McDowell repeated.

“Not quite that way, no,” said Miss Rand.

What Miss Rand could not seem to understand, what the House committee could not seem to understand, was that
Song of Russia
was rubbish not because of any political purpose, subversive or otherwise, but because M-G-M was in the business of producing rubbish. That was its function, its nature, its mission. It hardly knew that political purposes existed. M-G-M was the home of Andy Hardy, of Judy Garland and Esther Williams, and no Communist ideology could ever penetrate or take root in such a playland. When Louis B. Mayer of Minsk decided to make a movie about Russia, he would inevitably make it the Russia of Andy Hardy, accompanied by Tchaikovsky.

The rest of the committee's friendly witnesses provided a lumpy anthology of conservative opinion. Walt Disney complained bitterly about Herb Sorrell's leadership of a strike at his studio in 1941. As a result, he said, “all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures.” Roy Brewer testified that his IATSE forces had saved Hollywood from communism during the strikes of 1945 and 1946. “There has been a real Communist plot to capture our unions in Hollywood, as part of the Communist plan to control the motion-picture industry . . .” Brewer said. “Sorrell has religiously followed the Communist line. . . . There was some of the most unbelievable amounts of violence that have ever appeared on the scene in the history of the American labor movement.”

Sam Wood, the principal founder of the Motion Picture Association for the Preservation of American Ideals, and thus the principal instigator of these committee hearings, testified that the chief sources of Communist influence were the writers. Asked to identify some of the most subversive, he offered the by now familiar names, Lawson, Trumbo, and Stewart. “Is there any question in your mind as to whether Lawson is a Communist?” Stripling asked. “If there is, then I haven't any mind,” said Wood.