City of Nets (72 page)

 

What neither the old men in their
shul
nor their sons in their executive offices seemed to realize, most of them, was that whatever relatives they had left behind were all destined for annihilation. In this, they were not alone, of course. President Roosevelt did not realize it, and did not want to be told about it. The State Department and the War Department did not want to be told either, and when they were told, they did their best to ignore the information, and even to suppress it.
*

One of those who heard and told was a rather unpleasantly cocksure writer, Ben Hecht. A onetime Chicago newspaperman who fancied himself a novelist—has anyone ever read
Erik Dorn
(1921) or
Gargoyles
(1922) or
Fantazius Mallare
(1923) or
Count Bruga
(1926)?—Hecht achieved his biggest success by collaborating with Charles MacArthur on the hit play
The Front Page
(1928). Even before the first talking pictures, when Hollywood's need for writers would become desperate, Herman Mankiewicz persuaded Paramount to offer Hecht a contract, and then he sent his famous telegram proclaiming that “millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.”

It was true. Hecht soon became the fastest hack in Hollywood, and he was paid accordingly. He spent only a week writing his first script,
Underworld,
and Paramount paid him ten thousand dollars for it. Of the sixty movies he eventually wrote, he once estimated, more than half took less than two weeks. His pay went as high as ten thousand per week. From Howard Hughes, he demanded and got one thousand dollars per day, payable at 6
P.M.
of each day he worked. David Selznick, who desperately needed him to rewrite
Gone With the Wind
after filming had already started, paid him three thousand per day to salvage the project.

While Hecht was churning out scripts—he once wrote, with different collaborators, four at the same time—he also wrote a daily column, titled
Thousand and One Afternoons,
for the liberal New York newspaper
PM.
For seventy-five dollars per week. This enabled him, among other things, to trumpet his own sense of Jewishness. He had, as he put it, “turned into a Jew in 1939. I had before then been only related to Jews. In that year I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes.” This was not a popular viewpoint. “The Americanized Jews who ran newspapers and movie studios,” Hecht later recalled, “who wrote plays and novels, who were high in government and powerful in the financial, industrial and even social life of the nation were silent.” In one of his 1941 columns, “My Tribe Is Called Israel,” Hecht struck back. “My angry critics all write that they are proud of being Americans and of wearing carnations, and that they are sick to death of such efforts as mine to Judaize them and increase generally the Jew-consciousness of the world. Good Jews with carnations, it is not I who am bringing this Jew-consciousness back into the world. It is back on all the radios of the world. I don't advise you to take off your carnation. I only suggest that you don't hide behind them too much. They conceal very little.”

This last column brought him a letter from a man named Peter Bergson (he was actually Hillel Kook, nephew of the former chief rabbi of Palestine, but he had changed his name to spare his family embarrassment over his political activities). Bergson wanted Hecht to become the American leader of the organization for which he himself worked, a radical Palestinian underground group that called itself the Irgun Zvai Leumi. “They could have selected no more unqualified and uninformed and un-Palestine-minded man in the entire land . . .” Hecht wrote. “I disliked causes. I disliked public speaking. . . . I never attended meetings of any sort. I had no interest in Palestine.” Bergson was not to be denied. Hecht joined the cause.

The Irgun was small and impoverished and strongly opposed by Rabbi Stephen Wise and all the other leaders of Jewish respectability. What Bergson had found in Hecht, however, was what the Irgun most needed in America, a brilliant propagandist. Bergson imagined that Hecht could mobilize Hollywood to raise millions of dollars for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis, but Hecht soon found the most prosperous producers solidly opposed. Mayer refused him; Goldwyn refused him; Harry Warner ordered him out of his office. (None of these magnates happened to mention that they had recently attended a private meeting with Joseph P. Kennedy, onetime cofounder of RKO and most recently U.S. ambassador to London, who had warned this gathering of about fifty leading producers that any Jewish protests against Nazism would only lead to increased anti-Semitism in America.) Hecht next went to see Selznick and asked him to serve as cosponsor of a fund-raising dinner.

“I don't want to have anything to do with your cause,” Selznick said, “for the simple reason that it's a Jewish political cause. And I am not interested in Jewish political problems. I'm an American and not a Jew. . . . It would be silly of me to pretend suddenly that I'm a Jew, with some sort of full-blown Jewish psychology.”

It was wonderfully characteristic of Selznick, the former analysand, to start talking about “full-blown Jewish psychology,” but Hecht countered with an equally characteristic challenge. If Selznick thought he was an American rather than a Jew, would he be willing to make a bet on what other people thought of him? Hecht proposed that Selznick name any three people in Hollywood, and then he, Hecht, would call them up and ask them whether they regarded Selznick “as an American or a Jew.” If one single one of them thought that Selznick was what he thought he was, “an American,” then Hecht would retire in defeat.

Selznick, an inveterate gambler, couldn't resist. The first name that he chose was Martin Quigley, publisher of
Motion Picture Exhibitors' Herald.
Hecht called him up and asked him the poisoned question. “I'd say David Selznick was a Jew,” Quigley said.

The second name was Nunnally Johnson, the eminent screenwriter of such pictures as John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Moon Is Down.
He “hemmed a few moments,” Hecht recalled, “but finally offered the same reply.”

The third name was Leland Hayward, the agent.

“For God's sake, what's the matter with David?” says Hayward. “He's a Jew and he knows it.”

Be it said to Selznick's credit that just as he paid off his thousands of dollars in gambling debts, he now put his name on Hecht's fund-raising invitation. Suddenly Harry Warner changed his mind and accepted; so did Goldwyn. But when the dignitaries all gathered in the 20th Century–Fox commissary, they were appalled to hear one of the speakers, a British colonel who had commanded the Jewish Legion during World War I, criticize the now-beleaguered British for their policies in Palestine. “Sit down! Sit down!” Goldwyn shouted at him. Selznick squirmed. When the speeches ended, the Jews sat silent; the first donation was a modest offer of $300 from Hedda Hopper. Then came some more pledges, a total of $130,000, but only $9,000 of that pledged money was actually paid.

Hecht would not be silenced. He wrote a historical pageant about the Jews, entitled
We Will Never Die,
to be performed in Madison Square Garden as a memorial to the growing number of victims of what was not yet called the Holocaust. The pageant began with a rabbi in canonicals reading a prayer: “Almighty God, Father of the poor and the weak, Hope of all who dream of goodness and justice . . . we are here to say our prayers because of the two million who have been killed in Europe, because they bear the name of your first children—the Jews.” Kurt Weill wrote the music, Billy Rose produced, Moss Hart directed, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson served as narrators. A record forty thousand people crowded into Madison Square Garden to see two consecutive performances on a cold night early in 1943, and thousands more waited outside in the hope that it would be repeated a second time. Rose then took the production on a highly successful tour of Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood, but the pageant's appeal for a Jewish army aroused strong opposition from more conservative Jewish organizations. Warning phone calls were made, pledges of financial support faded, and the pageant came to an end.

There were more immediate problems. The Romanian government let it be known that it would allow seventy thousand Jews to emigrate if someone would provide a home for them and pay their transportation expenses. The State Department reacted as usual, pretending that the proposal was not serious, and that nothing could be done. Hecht wrote and signed a full-page ad in the
New York Times
that began with a jolting headline:

 

FOR SALE TO HUMANITY

70,000 JEWS

GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS AT $50 APIECE

 

“Roumania is tired of killing Jews,” Hecht's ad went on. “It has killed 100,000 of them in two years. Roumania will now give Jews away practically for nothing.” The Jewish establishment angrily denounced the ad as irresponsible, sensational, bordering on fraud, and, of course, nothing was done. The Romanian Jews went to their death. “I saw,” Hecht wrote later, “that propaganda was incapable of altering anything around it. It might incubate in time . . . but it could only confuse the present or irritate it, or be lost entirely in all the other word noises of its own day.”

Returning to the attack nonetheless, Hecht wrote another powerful ad, entitled “My Uncle Abraham Reports.” It was inspired by a conference in Moscow late in 1943, at which the Allies promised punishment for Nazi crimes against various groups—the Czechs, the French, the Serbs—a list that somehow omitted the Jews. “I have an uncle who is a ghost . . .” Hecht's ad began. “He was elected last April by the Two Million Jews who have been murdered by the Germans to be their World Delegate. Wherever there are conferences on how to make the World a Better Place, maybe, my Uncle Abraham appears and sits on the window sill and takes notes. . . . Last night my Uncle Abraham was back in a Certain Place where the Two Million murdered Jews met. . . . ‘Dishonored dead,' said my Uncle Abraham. . . .” He made his report, then, on the Moscow conference at which all persecuted victims except the Jews had been promised retribution. Some of the dead protested, but Uncle Abraham was stoical.

“ ‘Little Children,' my Uncle Abraham spoke: ‘Be patient. We will be dead a long time. Yesterday when we were killed we were changed from Nobodies to Nobodies. Today, on our Jewish tomb, there is not the Star of David, there is an asterisk. But, who knows, maybe Tomorrow—!”

“This ended the meeting of the Jewish Underground. My Uncle Abraham has gone to the White House in Washington. He is sitting on the window sill two feet away from Mr. Roosevelt. But he has left his notebook behind. . . .”

Roosevelt was reported to be upset by Hecht's attack, but as usual, nothing was done. All the Jews who could be killed were killed, and when some of the dazed survivors managed to reach Palestine after the war, they were met by British barbed wire. Keep out. The Zionist establishment kept negotiating for the promised homeland in Palestine—successfully, as it turned out—while the Irgun did its part in violence, irresponsibility, warfare. It bombed civilians in the King David Hotel. It executed British soldiers in retaliation for British executions. And who knows what mysterious combination of negotiation and gunfire, high principle and guilt, finally persuaded the British to depart?

 

“Kike.” Representative John Rankin had used the word on the floor of Congress to describe Walter Winchell, “the little kike I was telling you about.”
Time
magazine published a story on the incident in its issue of February 14, 1944. “This was a new low in demagoguery, even for John Rankin,” said
Time,
“but in the entire House, no one rose to protest.” On the contrary, when Rankin came to the end of his speech, according to
Time,
“the House rose and gave him prolonged applause.”

The story made a strong impression on Laura Z. Hobson, who tore the page out of the magazine and saved it. Mrs. Hobson was a woman of considerable dash. As an advertising copywriter, she met Henry Luce at a cocktail party, talked her way into a job as a
Time
promotion writer, and soon became director of promotion. She also became the mistress of Ralph Ingersoll, the general manager of Time Inc., and then of Eric Hodgins, the managing editor of
Fortune.
Her first novel,
The Trespassers,
achieved a considerable success in 1943. A script editor at United Artists invited her to try writing a screenplay for William Bendix, on spec, then told her that the result was wonderful but “wouldn't play.” Characteristically, Mrs. Hobson decided to go to Hollywood on her own to find out “what
would
play.” She borrowed two thousand dollars. She got a job at M-G-M, then lost it. Her debts mounted to eleven thousand dollars before she finally sold an original screenplay called
Threesome
to Columbia for exactly eleven thousand dollars. Columbia also hired her at $750 a week.

By this time, the
Time
story about Rankin calling Winchell a “kike” had become the idea for a novel about anti-Semitism. The only plot Mrs. Hobson could think of, though, involved a Gentile journalist being assigned to write a series of articles about anti-Semitism and finding—what? It all seemed rather familiar, preachy, dull. Then she met Michael Arlen at Romanoff's, and remembered
The Green
Hat
as one of the excitements of her adolescence, and that reminded her, for some reason, of an old anecdote in which some London matron supposedly said to him, “You sound so British, Mr. Arlen. Is it true that you really are Armenian?” To which Arlen, born Dikran Kuyumjian, had answered, “Would anybody
say
he was Armenian if he wasn't Armenian?” To which Mrs. Hobson, born Laura Zametkin, daughter of the editor of the
Jewish Daily Forward,
answered, in her autobiography, in italics,
“Would anybody say he was Jewish if he wasn't Jewish?”
And then, like another Newton recalling the apple, she added: “Even now, as I sit here on a snow-quieted winter afternoon nearly forty years later, a thin ghost of that moment's sudden charge runs along my nerves, and prickles my skin. It was the thread I needed, the story line to run through the entire book.”