City of Nets (7 page)

“The day after the pact,” said Bonnie Clair Smith, who worked at the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, “you never saw anything like what hit the League's office. The phones didn't stop, the telegrams of withdrawal poured in.” Charles Glenn, who wrote a Hollywood column for the
People's Daily World,
recalled that Browder suddenly couldn't be found. “The known Reds were in hiding,” he said, “afraid to stick their heads out of doors because the Old Country Jews, the ones who had fled Hitler, would have torn them apart.” They soon reappeared, of course, but with a difference. “Before the pact,” recalled the writer Philip Dunne, “every other word out of Biberman's mouth spoke of collective security. All of a sudden he added the modifying phrase, ‘collective security for peace, not war.' ”

Not everyone thought in purely ideological terms. The day after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Louella Parsons wrote in her column for August 25: “With war imminent, Hollywood yesterday realized how many of its important stars are still in Europe. Tyrone Power and Annabella . . . Charles Boyer . . . Robert Montgomery . . . Maureen O'Sullivan . . . Bob Hope.” Hope and his wife, Dolores, had just arrived in Paris and were scheduled to return to New York on the
Queen Mary
in mid-September, but when they heard rumors that the ship's August 30 sailing might be its last voyage as a civilian vessel, they scrambled back across the English Channel to get aboard.

In France itself, Arthur Rubinstein was spending the season at Deauville with his young children when he noticed that all his neighbors suddenly began leaving, and the streets of the resort were deserted. In the south, though, the rich gathered as usual to watch the fireworks explode in the sky at the annual charity ball for the Petits Lits Blancs at the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes. It was the last day of August, the last day of peace before Hitler invaded Poland. Pola Negri, the star of Ernst Lubitsch's
Madame Du Barry,
who had spent all too much of the 1930's making films in Berlin, recalled later that she was drinking champagne and watching the fireworks at the Cannes casino when a sudden gust of wind sent a dance program flying across the lawn, and the nearby trees began to shudder and sway. “We scurried for shelter,” she said, “catching muddied silver heels in spattered silken hems, trampling bruised and battered flowers. Trellised walls crumbled around us, and what had been a rich spectacle was quickly transformed into a pathetic ruin.”

“The blackouts made Paris fantastically beautiful . . .” said Salka Viertel, the Polish actress who wrote several of Greta Garbo's notable films of the 1930's. “With Alfred and Lisl Polgar I walked through the Palais Royal flooded with moonlight. We were overcome by a great nostalgia. . . .” M-G-M had sent Mrs. Viertel to France that summer to plan the script of
Madame Curie,
a project for which Scott Fitzgerald had produced one of his last scripts and then been fired again. She had hoped also to visit her mother in Poland, but now M-G-M insisted that she return to Hollywood and even applied some pressure to find her a small cabin on the
Île de France,
sailing from Le Havre on September 1. From the port, Mrs. Viertel tried to send her mother an explanatory cable. “
Pologne?
” the cable clerk asked. “
Les Allemands sont en Pologne, Madame. C'est la guerre.
” She clambered aboard the
Île de France,
and the lifeboat drills now acquired an ominous significance. “I put on my life jacket and went to my assigned place,” she recalled, “where . . . I was welcomed by Gregor Piatigorsky, the cello virtuoso, who, with his wife and small child, was returning to California. In the same lifeboat would be Nathan Milstein, the famous violinist, and his American wife. . . .”

Aboard the
Queen Mary,
by now at sea, the news bulletins caused a certain amount of panic. Dolores Hope awakened her husband to tell him that France and Britain had declared war. “You ought to see what's going on up in the salon,” she said. “People are sobbing. One woman stopped me and said that there are German submarines waiting for orders to sink this boat. They've issued blackout instructions and people are crying—and scared.” Hope responded in his characteristic way. He went to see the captain and arranged to give a special show for the passengers, then started writing himself some new material.

“Thanks for the memory,” he sang that night,

“Some folks slept on the floor,

Some in the corridor;

But I was more exclusive,

My room had ‘Gentlemen' above the door,

Ah! Thank you so much.”

Ingrid Bergman, after the triumph of
Intermezzo,
her first American film for Selznick, had just returned to her family in Stockholm that August. She started a new film in Swedish and celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday, happy that she could once again enjoy “eating everything I want.” The idea of war could hardly be more remote. She was “just sewing up the hems of the new curtains for the living room when I heard over the radio that Germany had invaded Poland.” Her husband insisted that she take their year-old daughter, Pia, and return to America, and since she was half German on her mother's side, she went from Sweden to Nazi Berlin, then sailed from Genoa.

Whether Sweden was safe—whether any place was safe—depended on one's point of view. Bertolt Brecht, who had fled from Germany in 1933, wandered along the whole circuit of sanctuaries from Prague to Paris before ending in Denmark, where, as a lifelong survivor, he decided in the summer of 1939 to flee to Stockholm. Thomas Mann, by contrast, arrived in Stockholm that August as a Nobel Prize laureate scheduled to address a PEN conference on September 1. On hearing of Hitler's invasion, Mann promptly canceled his speech and flew to London to catch the next sailing of the United States Lines'
Washington.

And there in London, dying of the cancer that was eating a hole through the side of his face, lay Sigmund Freud, who had foreseen everything and nothing. The incurable wound in his face had begun to give off an appalling stench. When his pet chow was brought to visit him, she cowered in a far corner of the room. The day the war began, Freud lay on a couch in his garden and listened stoically as the radio announced an air raid, then announced that it had been a false alarm. The last book he was able to read was Balzac's
La Peau de Chagrin,
which he described as “just the book for me—it deals with starvation.” A hearty voice on the radio proclaimed that this was to be the last of wars. Freud's doctor, Max Schur, asked the dying man whether he could believe that. “Anyhow, it is my last war,” said Freud.

Igor Stravinsky, too, was surrounded by death. He spent most of that summer of 1939 confined to a tuberculosis sanitarium at Sancellemoz, France. His daughter Mika had died there in the fall of 1938 and his wife, Catherine, the following spring. That June, his mother died. “For the third time in half a year, I heard the Requiem service chanted for one of my own family,” he said, “and for the third time walked through the fields to the cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois, in Montlhéry, which is on the road to Orléans, and dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave. And once again I was able to go on only by composing. . . .” He was composing, miraculously, the gay and charming Symphony in C. He was also organizing the reflections that he had agreed to deliver as the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard in September. To him, the invasion of Poland was yet another assault. “Igor is in a terrible state of nerves,” his friend Vera Sudeikina wrote in her diary. She had rescued him from the sanitarium, brought him to Paris, and installed him at Nadia Boulanger's country home until the sailing of the S.S.
Manhattan.
“He takes a dozen suitcases—for only two weeks!” Miss Sudeikina marveled. “. . . We have had an alarm every night, and already the stores are advertising ‘pajama styles for the basement,' which is very French.”

In Hollywood, these events all seemed far away, as indeed they were. Aldous Huxley had just been assigned to write an M-G-M screenplay for
Pride and Prejudice,
and his wife, Maria, stayed up late by herself to hear Neville Chamberlain go before Parliament to call for war. “I heard Chamberlain here in the middle of the night as he addressed you in London . . .” she wrote to Edward Sackville-West. “It still seems unbelievable. Certainly unimaginable.” Just a month earlier, she had given her husband a birthday party, and Orson Welles had come, and Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes, and Paulette Goddard had brought an eight-pound birthday cake inscribed
Mon Coeur,
and Charlie Chaplin “gave an exquisite performance, among other things a dance he is going to do with a balloon.”

The origins of
The Great Dictator,
like many of Chaplin's creations, are somewhat obscure. Chaplin himself credited Alexander Korda with having suggested in 1937 that he “should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity,” but he added that he “did not think too much of the idea then.” (Some years later, a pudgy and walrus-mustached writer named Konrad Bercovicci sued Chaplin for more than six million dollars, claiming that he had suggested not only the basic idea of Chaplin as Hitler but even such details as “a ballet dance with a globe.” When the suit finally came to trial in New York, Bercovicci testified that he and Chaplin had discussed his five-page outline for several hours but that Chaplin was worried “because the State Department says we cannot ridicule the heads of two states with which we are at peace.” Chaplin in turn testified that he had never seen Bercovicci's outline, and the two then settled out of court for a payment of $95,000 to Bercovicci.)

Chaplin's political doubts and misgivings about
The Great Dictator
seem strange today, but they apparently caused him a lot of anxiety during his preparations in the summer of 1939. “United Artists . . . had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship troubles,” Chaplin wrote rather vaguely in his memoirs. “Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.” When Hitler actually invaded Poland that September, Chaplin was even more worried, not about official objections now but about how audiences would react to a slapstick comedy about the aggressor. Having already spent more than $500,000 before any filming began, Chaplin stopped all work for a week of conferences and soul-searching, then, with even more secrecy than usual, decided to go ahead. What he had started as a comedy would end with his impassioned appeal for brotherhood: “The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through!”

Less rhetorical men confronted the simple question of enlisting. When David Niven finished filming
Raffles
on September 1, he told one of the film's writers, Scott Fitzgerald, that he was returning to London to join the armed forces. Fitzgerald declared that he wanted to go too. “I missed out last time,” he said. “I left it too late. I didn't join up until 1917—I never got to go overseas.” Fitzgerald “became very maudlin,” Niven recalled, “with his mind firmly focused on Agincourt and white chargers.” Shortly thereafter, Fitzgerald was once again fired. “It always happens,” he told Niven as he returned to work on
The Last Tycoon.
(He was to die of a heart attack the following year.)

On Sunday morning, September 3, Niven was sleeping aboard a yacht that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had chartered to cruise off Catalina Island; so were Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and a number of other English in colonial exile. They woke to hear on the radio that Britain had delivered an ultimatum, and that Germany had rejected it, and that the two nations were at war. Fairbanks raised a glass to toast victory. Olivier drank that toast and then proceeded to get wildly drunk. “Smashed as a hoot owl,” as Mrs. Fairbanks later put it, he rowed himself to another yacht; climbed aboard, and began bellowing to anyone who would listen, “This is the end! You are finished, all of you! Finished! You are relics! Enjoy your last moments! You're done for! Doomed!” Then, shivering in his swimming trunks, he staggered back aboard the dinghy, rowed to the next yacht, and repeated his jeremiad.

Niven went off to war by himself. Fairbanks gave him a farewell party that featured many of the stars of Hollywood's English colony—Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Basil Rathbone—who were generally inclined to remain in Hollywood. That was not, of course, shameful. Indeed, any Hollywood celebrities who asked the British Embassy what they should do were generally told to stay where they were and go on with their work. That was what Hollywood wanted too. David Selznick summed up the studios' view splendidly when he asked what would happen if Laurence Olivier and George Sanders abandoned his new production of
Rebecca.
“We would be in a fine pickle if they walked out in the middle,” he said. “Not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle.”

So Hollywood remained at peace. When Salka Viertel returned to California, she was struck by the prevailing air of complacent prosperity, by the supermarkets heaped with food, and by “the unconcerned sunbathers on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown . . .” And when the renowned Mrs. Basil Rathbone decided to give a gala dinner in honor of Arthur Rubinstein, Leopold Stokowski, and the heroic people of Poland, she had the walls of her sixty-foot-long dining hall decorated with a three-foot cellophane frieze that displayed the notes of Chopin's “Polonaise Militaire.” The total effect, according to one contemporary chronicler, was “something pyrotechnic, exotic, ingenious and rare.”