City of Nets (68 page)

The problem, said Johnston, was how the movie business as a whole should deal with Communist employees, specifically with the ten witnesses who were now being cited, this very day, for contempt of Congress. His own answer was that they should all be fired. Already there were scattered boycotts and demonstrations in California and Kansas and North Carolina against pictures that involved the ten. The American Legion was threatening a nationwide boycott. The press had originally seemed critical of the House committee, but now it was turning against Hollywood. Two studios, Fox and RKO, had already decided to fire the three witnesses who worked for them (Lardner at Fox, Dmytryk and Scott at RKO), and now it was time for the studios to act together. “I . . . said that, in my opinion, these men would have to make up their minds . . .” Johnston himself later testified. “They would have to fish or cut bait.”

Mayer and a few others offered some rumblings of patriotic support. The only one who spoke up against Johnston's plan was Sam Goldwyn.
*
Dore Schary, the onetime scriptwriter who was now chief of production at RKO, recalled that Goldwyn “was bold enough to suggest that there was an air of panic in the room. Goldwyn, ramrod straight, bald headed, and with a slightly Oriental slant to his eyes, spoke sarcastically and irritated Johnston, who responded with an angry speech . . . asking us whether we were mice or men.” Schary said that he now joined Goldwyn, arguing that nobody had yet been convicted of anything, that there was no law against being a Communist, and that, as he put it, “we would dishonor . . . our industry by an action that would inevitably lead to a blacklist.” Goldwyn spoke up again and angrily declared that he “would not be allied to any such nonsense as that proposed by Johnston.” Walter Wanger also opposed the dismissal of the ten witnesses, and so did M-G-M's Eddie Mannix, who pointed out that there was a California state law against firing anyone because of his political views.

That provoked a remarkable response from the eminent Jimmy Byrnes. He doubted, he said, that any government official “would argue with the decision of the industry to get rid of ‘Reds.' ” Besides, the “morals clause” in the standard Hollywood contract, which permitted any studio to fire just about anyone for just about anything, could certainly be invoked against the ten. Johnston responded to Byrnes's cue by angrily throwing his hotel room key down on the table and threatening to resign unless the producers supported his proposals.

“No vote was ever taken,” Schary recalled. “It was Johnston's threat plus Byrnes's argument that had won the decision to discharge those cited.” Schary, Goldwyn, and Wanger opposed the decision to the end, but they were only three among fifty. The majority chose a committee to concoct the necessary statement to the world, a statement proclaiming that Hollywood believed passionately in free speech and civil liberties but would banish all Communists, that it was indomitably independent but also eager to please. The committee was nicely balanced: Mayer and the pardoned ex-convict Joseph Schenck for the establishment, Wanger and Schary for the powerless opposition, with Mendel Silberberg, a longtime attorney for the producers, as chairman. Schary said later that he had balked at this honor, but that Goldwyn urged him on with a whisper: “Do it—maybe they won't go crazy.”

Craziness was hardly the committee's plan. It started by announcing that the producers “deplored” the behavior of the ten cited witnesses. The producers did not want “to prejudge their legal rights,” they said, but their actions “have been a disservice to their employers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.” Therefore, without any prejudgments of the witnesses' rights, they were all being fired. “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist,” said the document that came to be known as the Waldorf Statement. “On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood . . . we will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States. . . . We are frank to recognize that such a policy involves dangers and risks. There is the danger of hurting innocent people. There is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”

So it was done. M-G-M simply suspended the $1,250 per week contract that Eddie Mannix had so grandly given Lester Cole scarcely a month earlier. The studio not only suspended Dalton Trumbo's $3,000 per week but refused to pay him $60,000 due him for work already completed. (Both Trumbo and Cole sued M-G-M and eventually won a $125,000 settlement.) At 20th Century–Fox, Darryl Zanuck could not bring himself to dismiss Lardner, who was not only very talented but very likable. The producer announced, as Lardner recalled, “that he would still respect my contract until commanded otherwise by his board of directors. His board promptly met in New York and so commanded.” Characteristically, Zanuck avoided telling Lardner himself and sent a lieutenant. “I was reached,” Lardner said, “at a meeting with Otto [Preminger] in his office and requested to leave the premises, which I did.” (Fox, too, eventually had to pay off to settle Lardner's suit.)

When the RKO board voted for the dismissal of Scott and Dmytryk, who had recently produced and directed the successful
Crossfire,
Dore Schary did his best to avoid responsibility. First he argued against the dismissal, then he asked that his nay vote be recorded in the minutes, then he said that he “would not execute the order to fire Scott and Dmytryk.” Board Chairman Floyd Odlum “was patient,” Schary said. He turned to President Peter Rathvon and “told Rathvon to do the firing.” Rathvon obliged. “Rathvon called Scott and me into his office and asked us once more to recant and to purge ourselves,” Dmytryk recalled. “With hardly any sense of martyrdom at all, we refused. In that case, he informed us, we were no longer employees of RKO. So much for ironclad contracts. We went back to clean out our respective offices. The next day was Thanksgiving. Even a B writer wouldn't have dared that bit of bathos. . . .”

It is still unclear why the Hollywood executives, who had so recently seemed so impervious to the molestations of the Un-American Activities Committee, should have surrendered so soon and so abjectly. The easy answer, often proposed without much evidence, is that the decision was made by the money men in New York, both the executives at the film corporations' headquarters and the banks and other financial interests that supported them. Studio bosses like Mayer or Zanuck were bosses only in Hollywood. Their own bosses in New York attached less importance to the filmmakers' cherished independence when they weighed it against declining box office receipts and the threats of political boycotts.

Not only were the New York executives a bit remote from the actual filmmaking process but they also had to maintain their standing among still more remote financial allies. Warner Bros. had close connections with J. P. Morgan; 20th Century–Fox with New York Trust, General Foods, and Pan Am; RKO with United Fruit and National Can. Zanuck told Philip Dunne that he had “fought” against firing Lardner, but that “the actual decision had been made on Wall Street, by the money men who bankrolled the movie companies.”

This may well be true, but it is also true that anonymous Wall Street forces provide a convenient scapegoat both for liberal commentators and for the timorous Hollywood executives themselves. What would have happened if just one of the studio bosses had refused to accept the punishment of the ten witnesses—or the scores of colleagues who later followed them onto the blacklist—remains unknowable. It is quite possible, though, that the Waldorf Statement was produced simply because Eric Johnston was the only man in that roomful of anxious producers who had a definite plan of what should be done and was ready to resign to get his way. It is also quite possible, of course, that Johnston was acting not out of any personal conviction (“I will never be a party to anything as un-American as a blacklist,” he had said) but simply as the well-paid representative of those same distant Wall Street interests.

Scarcely a week after the purge of the ten, a Philadelphia organization called the Golden Slipper Square Dance Club staged a dinner to present its annual humanitarian award to the makers of
Crossfire.
Scott and Dmytryk could hardly accept the award since they had just been fired. Schary was invited to receive it, but he couldn't bring himself to go. So it was Eric Johnston who went to be saluted for humanitarianism. On accepting the award, he boldly declared that Hollywood was free from all forms of discrimination. “Hollywood,” said the father of the blacklist, “has held the door of opportunity open to every man and woman who could meet its technical and artistic standards. . . . What [our industry] is interested in is his skill or talent, ability to produce pictures for the joy and progress of mankind.”

 

Once Bert Brecht was back in Europe, he could say anything, and anything he said became Brechtian. Gone and forgotten (except, probably, by Brecht) were all the humiliations of life in Santa Monica, the unanswered telephone calls to M-G-M, the struggles to pay the rent, the rejected scripts, the obligation to obey the curfew on enemy aliens—the obscurity, the terrible obscurity in the capital of celebrity. But now, having capitulated and fled, he could pose as a political martyr. “When they accused me of wanting to steal the Empire State Building,” he rather grandly said to Donald Ogden Stewart, himself a political refugee, “I thought it was high time to leave.”

Everything called him back to Berlin, but Berlin was now a divided and occupied city, and if Brecht could remember the humiliations of Santa Monica, he could also remember the humiliations of being a refugee in Moscow. He went and established himself in Zurich, a good place to make plans, a good place from which to negotiate. He negotiated a contract to adapt and direct
Antigone,
with his talented wife, Helene Weigel, who had been little more than a cook and housekeeper in Hollywood, as the star. He negotiated himself a lucrative publishing contract with the West German firm of Suhrkamp, and a Swiss bank account in which to store the incoming royalties. He even negotiated himself an Austrian passport, by promising (and then reneging on his promise) to produce a Marxist
Everyman
for the Salzburg Festival. “He was wearing his convict's face again,” the Swiss writer Max Frisch observed of those days, “little beady bird's eyes sticking out from a flat face above a too-bare neck. A frightening face. . . . One felt like giving him a muffler for his neck.”

It took a year of negotiations before Brecht was ready to go to Berlin, and by then the Russian blockade was under way. He went over to the side of the blockaders to negotiate a production of
Mother Courage
in the Soviet sector, again with Miss Weigel as the star. The following summer, in June of 1949, Brecht returned permanently to Berlin to direct his own theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, in his own theater, the Schiffbauerdamm, where his
Threepenny Opera
had opened back in 1928. There he remained, a willing captive among unwilling captives, and when the workers of East Berlin rose in rebellion, and fought Soviet tanks with rocks, Brecht issued a statement in support of the Stalinist regime. He had his Swiss bank account now, his Austrian passport, and his own theater company. But in a poem dated 1953, the year of the revolt, he wondered about his belated success:

 

I sit by the roadside

The driver changes the wheel.

I do not like the place I have come from.

I do not like the place I am going to.

Why with impatience do I

Watch him changing the wheel?

 

Louis B. Mayer, nearing the end at M-G-M, married Lorena Danker.

10
Prejudice

(1948)

T
he first time Dore Schary met Louis B. Mayer, shortly before the war, the head of M-G-M impressed the cherubic young writer as a man who “radiated power—physical and psychological.” And then there was all that Melvillean whiteness. Mayer's office, as Lillian Ross later described it, had walls of white leather, an enormous white desk with four white telephones, a white bar, a white grand piano, and a white fireplace with white andirons. Behind the great man's desk stood an American flag and a number of photographs of his eminent friends, the most prominent being Herbert Hoover, Cardinal Spellman and J. Edgar Hoover. “He held out a hand, short fingered and well manicured,” Schary recalled, “then settled into his chair sideways. . . .”

Schary had been working at M-G-M for seven years, had written several successful films, notably
Boys Town
(1938) and
Young Tom Edison
(1940), and now he wanted to try directing. Mayer raised various objections. Somehow, the talk veered onto the subject of low-budget B pictures, a subject of relatively little concern in Mayer's empire. Schary professed great interest. “I believe that low-cost pictures should dare—should challenge—” he proclaimed, according to his own account. Mayer was so impressed by Schary's heavy-breathing enthusiasm that he summoned him back the next day and took him, without explanation, to the Hollywood Park racetrack, where they watched one of Mayer's horses lose. Then Mayer offered Schary the job of overseeing all of the studio's B pictures, eighteen per year. Schary gasped, went home to consult his wife, and then agreed.

There was just one problem: Harry Rapf. “I'll put Harry Rapf with you to bother about budgets,” Mayer said. “He'll have nothing to do with the pictures. He's doing nothing—he'll be grateful.” That was a promise of trouble. Rapf was one of M-G-M's embarrassments. A graying man with a long, mournful nose, Rapf had once owned a share of the studio, but he had been squeezed out during the reorganizational power plays of the 1920's. He had then been the studio manager, supervising all the routine pictures that paid for Thalberg's more pretentious extravagances. Demoted once again, to working as one producer among many, Rapf tyrannized over everyone assigned to his projects. He had fired an obscure young writer named Dore Schary not once but twice. Now the reborn Schary went to see him, to tell him that Mayer wanted them to work together, and he found that Mayer had already called. “He got up and said, ‘L.B. just told me,' ” Schary recalled. “Then he started to cry, the tears tumbling out of his pale blue eyes. He told me how grateful he was to me for accepting this new arrangement, and as he went on my embarrassment permitted only short responses—‘It's okay,' ‘Don't worry,' ‘It's going to be all right,' ‘Let's have no tears.' ”

Schary soon proved a success on his B pictures, enriching M-G-M from such modest outlays as the $400,000 invested in
Lassie Come Home
(1943). But the grateful Harry Rapf could not resist interfering, first asking about scripts, then offering opinions. During one showing of daily rushes of new film by two of Schary's young discoveries, Jules Dassin and Fred Zinnemann, Rapf buzzed the projectionist to stop the film and then announced, “These rushes are lousy. I wouldn't let these two guys direct traffic.”

Schary shooed everyone else out of the projection room, including the criticized directors. “Then I turned to their critic,” Schary said, “and asked what the hell and why the hell.” Rapf retorted that he “wasn't an office boy” and “used to own part of this studio.” Schary snapped back that he, Schary, had been given complete control of all B pictures. “We'll see about that,” Rapf said as he walked out.

Schary was dismayed to learn shortly afterward that Rapf had left to spend the weekend with Mayer. What would the embittered old man tell the great overlord? Schary worried. To counteract whatever Rapf might say to Mayer, Schary told his own side of the story to Eddie Mannix. On Monday, when Schary came to work expecting a confrontation, he was amazed to hear from Mayer that Rapf had never mentioned any quarrels during their pleasant weekend. Mannix had already informed Mayer about the row, however, and now Mayer summoned Rapf on the intercom. “Get up here right away, now!” he snarled.

Schary anticipated unpleasantness, but he was unprepared for Mayer's wild explosion. No sooner had Rapf entered the white-on-white office than Mayer began shouting at him.

“Goddammit, Harry, you spent a weekend with me and never breathed a word. Mannix told me all about it. You stupid kike bastard—you ought to kiss this man's shoes—get on your knees.”

Schary was horrified. He lurched to his feet, hoping to make peace. (“Through the years I had heard many of the top-drawer Jewish studio executives lose their tempers at meetings or in card games and I was always dismayed when one of the first pejorative terms they used was ‘kike'—usually ‘dirty kike.' ”) Mayer waved him back into his chair. Rapf didn't say a word. He just stood there and took it. Schary began feeling sick. “Mayer kept pummelling Rapf with curses,” Schary said, “and then L.B. suddenly pointed a finger at Rapf and declared, ‘Get out of here, you're fired, get out of your office. You had your last chance, you son of a bitch.' Rapf turned and hurried out.”

Schary also hurried out. He stumbled into the nearest executive washroom and threw up. Then he began feeling remorse, not about his degradation but about his victory. He told Mayer that he wanted Rapf reinstated, that he himself would resign if Rapf were so harshly expelled. Mayer told him not to be foolish, told him that he had to learn to be tough. “If you have to cut, cut fast, finish it quick,” Mayer said. Schary still insisted on Rapf's reinstatement, so Mayer shrugged and acquiesced.

He had bigger problems. War seemed imminent. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked. When Mayer gathered his shoals of executives for a pre-Christmas lunch, he told them that they would all have to rededicate themselves to the national struggle. “Many of our young men will be going to war and some will die,” Mayer said. “But we who stay at home must help all we can. Please join now in a toast, to our president—Nicholas Schenck.”

In contrast to Mayer's concentration on the M-G-M corporate powers, Schary kept having significant thoughts, geopolitical thoughts. He wanted to make a movie that only he could describe: “I was going to tell the story of Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, and the United States as an American Western epic. The locale was to be a large Western territory; the shape of the area looked a bit like Europe. The time was a few years after the Civil War. Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering were to be three escaped convicts. . . .” To “work with me” on this prospective disaster, Schary wanted a writer of appropriate celebrity, and he managed to snare Sinclair Lewis. After months of collaboration, the two of them produced a script entitled “Storm in the West.” Mayer hated it. Not because it was pretentious and absurd but because, as Schary put it, “there were too many other war movies.” So the idea was bucked to New York, to Nicholas Schenck, and Schenck was not interested either.

So Schary walked out. That was characteristic of the man, of his youthful abilities and his youthful confidence in those abilities. Mayer was incredulous. Had anyone in Hollywood ever resigned from a major executive position, from a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a week, at the age of thirty-eight, just because one of his scripts had been rejected? “You've got another job,” Mayer said, accusingly. Schary denied it. He just wanted to leave.

David Selznick promptly hired Schary as an autonomous producer, at his hard-won rate of fifteen hundred dollars per week, plus 15 percent of the profits of any pictures he made. Schary's first project was a romance about a shell-shocked soldier home on leave. Selznick sent Schary one of his long memos, denouncing the script, forbidding his autonomous producer to produce it. Schary once again resigned. Selznick consulted his wife, Irene, who said, “Schary is right. You made a bargain—you ought to keep it.”

Under the title
I'll Be Seeing You
(1945), Schary's first “independent” project grossed seven million dollars. He followed that with a string of successes:
The Spiral Staircase, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, The Farmer's Daughter,
the last of which won an Oscar for Loretta Young as the best actress of 1947. Then RKO's production chief, Charles Koerner, suddenly sickened and died of leukemia, and RKO president Peter Rathvon took Schary out to lunch and offered him the job. Schary declined, citing his contract with Selznick, but Selznick ridiculed his scruples. “Don't worry about me,” he said. “They'll pay a good price for you—I'll make my deal with them.”

One of the first projects confronting Schary at RKO was the script of a novel entitled
The Brick Foxhole,
by Peter Brooks. Edward Dmytryk, the writer-director, later described it as “a loose, rambling story of the frustrations of stateside soldiers at the end of the war,” in which one of several subplots “concerned the murder of a homosexual by a sadistic bigot.” The whole subject of homosexuality was outlawed by the Johnston Office censors, of course, but Adrian Scott, the producer who had optioned the novel, had what Dmytryk called “an inspiration.” What if the homosexual victim was made a heterosexual Jew? This was not an equation of vilified minorities that was likely to occur to any Jew, but Scott and Dmytryk were both Gentiles, and they thought that an attack on anti-Semitism would be a commendable project. “Adrian discussed it with our friend Dore Schary,” Dmytryk wrote of the first explorations, when Schary was still working for Selznick, “and Schary advised him against it.”

Schary naturally remembered things differently. He said that Rathvon, Koerner, and other RKO executives had all rejected the project, now retitled
Crossfire,
but that he vowed to make it one of his first productions. RKO business executives took polls, which showed that less than 10 percent of a typical audience wanted to see such a film. The influential American Jewish Committee, publishers of
Commentary,
urged the studio to halt the production, or change the Jew to a black. Warner Bros. even announced that the picture would not be shown in any Warners theater. Schary did persist, though. He also helped assemble a good cast, notably Robert Ryan as the psychotic killer. So
Crossfire,
which asserted somewhat heavily that it was wrong to murder an American soldier just because he was a Jew, achieved a small-scale but apparently surprising commercial success.
*

Schary had a remarkable knack for making the obvious seem fresh. Quite apart from
Crossfire,
the RKO of 1947 blossomed with films of inspiration and good cheer:
I Remember Mama, Sister Kenny,
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
Schary also committed himself to yet another story of wartime heroism,
Battleground.
“By then,” Schary later wrote of this period, “I had also traded Theodore Dreiser's melancholy
Sister Carrie
to William Wyler and Paramount for their priority right to
Ivanhoe.
”

Melancholy was obviously not Schary's style, but despite his cheery successes, RKO kept losing money. The melancholy statistics on 1947 amounted to a loss of nearly $2 million. The chief stockholder, Floyd Odlum, was not a movie man but a rancher and flier, someone who liked to maneuver money. After a series of secret nighttime rendezvous in parked cars and obscure way stations, he agreed to sell the whole of RKO, including the production studio with its 2,000 employees, plus 124 movie theaters, for the sum of exactly $8,825,690 to that dark nemesis Howard Hughes.

Dore Schary was appalled. He complained to Rathvon about the secret dealings, and Rathvon arranged a meeting in the garden behind his own house. “I hear you want to quit,” Hughes said as a greeting. “If I were rich and bought a studio, I'd want to run it,” Schary said, according to his own account. “But you don't need me at my price simply to deliver your orders.”

“You can run the studio,” Hughes said, according to another version. “I haven't got any time.”

So Schary, who had quit Mayer and quit Selznick to assert his independence, and then found reasons of high principle not to quit when the RKO board fired Scott and Dmytryk as un-American, now found reasons not to quit when Howard Hughes acquired control. Then he began learning that nothing Hughes said could ever be trusted. “Studio personnel told me that Hughes was coming to the studio late at night to see the daily rushes,” Schary recalled. “Scripts were being sent to him; he was examining payrolls. After all, he now owned the entire spread and wanted to know what was doing on the range.”

Once Hughes knew what was doing on the range, of course, he wanted to make changes. He started telephoning Schary late at night to give orders. He wanted to halt work on one of Schary's favorite projects,
Battleground.
People were tired of war movies, Hughes said. He also wanted a young actress named Barbara Bel Geddes fired. The storm of phone calls showed Schary his future. So he once again resigned. So did Rathvon. Hughes took over.

Schary almost immediately received a call from Louis B. Mayer. The nation's most highly paid executive was in deep trouble—deeper than he realized—and so was M-G-M, so was the whole movie business. Some experts thought that the audiences had changed since the war. People had become more serious, it was said, more sophisticated, less willing to accept the superficial and essentially mindless pictures that kept rolling off the M-G-M assembly line. (Esther Williams, a handsome swimmer with no talent on dry land, was now the studio's biggest box office attraction.) Other experts thought that people were tired of the movies themselves. They were now free to spend their time and money on travel, clothes, sports, whatever they regarded as the good life.