City of Nets (78 page)

The Hollywood realities soon summoned Welles from this Nirvana. Hathaway needed him in London for some additional shooting on
The Black Rose
in the blessed convenience of a studio. Welles sent his Moroccan players—some sixty of them—to a luxury hotel in Venice, to charge their room and board and await further instructions. He had decided, among other things, to hire a new Desdemona, his fourth, Suzanne Cloutier, and to reshoot all the scenes involving her.

And then the money ran out again, totally. Welles was in Rome when he decided to seek salvation in the questionable benevolence of Darryl F. Zanuck, who had after all financed a piece of rubbish like
The Black Rose,
and who was now reported to be investing much of his personal fortune in the high life of the French Riviera. Welles summoned a taxi in Rome and ordered the driver to proceed to France. He arrived at the Hotel du Cap d'Antibes at four in the morning, after a four-hundred-dollar ride, and declared that he would not leave the lobby until Zanuck heard his plea. When Zanuck finally appeared, Welles flung himself on his knees.

“I need $75,000 to finish
Othello,
” Welles cried. “You're the only one in the world who can save me!”

“Get up! Get up!” said the embarrassed Zanuck. Remember that Zanuck was tiny, and Welles enormous. Zanuck was accustomed to enjoying scenes like this in the privacy of his office, but what was he to do with this blubbering petitioner on his knees in a hotel lobby? And how could Welles have engaged in such a degrading spectacle, except, of course, for the fact that he was staging and controlling it?

“I'm destitute!” cried Welles, who had thought nothing of taking a taxi from Rome. Zanuck was just as theatrical as Welles but a little more practical. He retired to make a few telephone calls, then ordered a courier to bring $75,000 in hundred-franc bills. He claimed in exchange, almost as a matter of course, 60 percent of any money that Welles's film might earn.

Instead of finishing
Othello
(another three years would pass before the film would actually be edited and released), Welles now decided that he would like to appear on the Paris stage in an oddity called
Time Runs.
This was a combination of an amateurish play that Welles had written about Hollywood,
The Unthinking Lobster,
plus his own condensation of Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus,
featuring himself as Faustus and a young black dancer, Eartha Kitt, as Helen of Troy. There was also music by Duke Ellington. By the time this bedraggled show closed in Paris and lurched off into a tour of the U.S. and British occupation zones of Germany, Welles had dropped
The Unthinking Lobster
and added a fragmentary version of Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest
and renamed his production
An Evening with Orson Welles.
By now he was truly a fugitive.

 

In his later years, when he had become heavy and paunchy, Robert Mitchum liked to tell stories about his lean youth, back in the Depression-ridden 1930's, before he ever came to Hollywood. He had worked as a stevedore then, and a ditchdigger. He rode the rails, got arrested for vagrancy, and even served time on a Georgia chain gang. “Once I was riding a reefer [refrigerator car] into Idaho Falls, eating frozen pears, and it was so cold I had stuffed newspapers under my pants for warmth,” he once told an eager interviewer. “Some guy had started a little fire in the car, and when I woke up my pants had burned off. So there I was at 2
A.M.
in a cold, strange town, naked. That's always been my challenge. ‘So here you are, asshole, find your way out of this.' ”

It was a thought that might have occurred to Mitchum in February of 1949 when photographers took pictures of him wearing prison denims and swabbing the floor of the Los Angeles County Jail. He had just been sentenced to sixty days in prison, plus two years probation, on a charge of conspiracy to possess marijuana. That was considered scandalous behavior in those days, but David O. Selznick, part owner of Mitchum's contract, ventured to predict that the young actor would “come out of his trouble a finer man.”

Marijuana was such an exotic subject in the 1940's that
Time
magazine felt compelled to include in its story of Mitchum's arrest the previous September a scholarly footnote explaining that “Marijuana, a drug made from Indian hemp, is . . . said to produce a state of exhilaration. . . .” It was not really that exotic, just unpublicized. “Sure, I've been smoking marijuana since I was a kid,” Mitchum said at the time of his arrest. But in Hollywood, the whole subject of drugs recalled some of the most disastrous scandals of the 1920's. Olive Thomas, who had been touted as the “Ideal American Girl” in Lewis Selznick's
The Flapper,
jumped out a hotel window in Paris after failing to get the heroin that she needed for her addiction and that of her husband, Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford's brother, who had been the “Ideal American Boy” in
Seventeen.
Events like that had nearly ruined Hollywood, had led to the Hays Office and the Production Code and the Morals Clause, and the banning of virtually all mention of drugs. There was no such thing.

And now here was Bob Mitchum, who had become a star in
The Story of G.I. Joe
(1945), and not only a new star but a new type, cynical, laconic, sexy—here was Mitchum, who earned $3,250 a week, caught trying to snuff out a marijuana cigarette. The circumstances of the arrest were a little peculiar. Two detectives who had been listening outside a three-room cottage in Laurel Canyon tried to open the door and then were let in by a dancer, Vickie Evans. They followed her into the living room, where they found the hostess, a blond movie starlet named Lila Leeds, a real estate man named Robin Ford, and Mitchum. “Well, this is the bitter end of everything—my career, my home, my marriage,” Mitchum said.

Time
's account a week later was even more apocalyptic: “The most self-conscious city of a self-conscious nation was in for a first-rate scandal, and it hated and feared every whisper of it. . . . Hollywood's laboriously contrived self-portrait was once again in danger of looking like a comic strip—and an ugly one. For years, the world's best press agents have been plugging the theme that Hollywood is a typical American town, a wholesome little community. . . . The fact [is] that under the klieg-lit, high-pressure, high-paid strains peculiar to Hollywood, some of its supertense citizens sometimes volatilize and take to drink, adultery or dope. . . . Speaking for the whole industry, M-G-M's Dore Schary pleaded with the public not to ‘indict the entire working personnel of 32,000 well-disciplined and clean-living American citizens.' ”

Once again, as in the troubles of Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin, a cry for help went to Jerry Giesler. The celebrated attorney soon came to the conclusion that Mitchum had been trapped. “His tribulation,” Giesler rather mysteriously declared, “was the result of a deliberate design on the part of someone who wished him ill. He had even received warnings, ‘Watch your step or something will happen to you.' ” At a time when Mitchum's wife was on a visit in the East, according to Giesler's account, the actor had been invited to a party in Laurel Canyon. Soon after he arrived, somebody handed him a reefer. “A split second later the door crashed open,” Giesler said. “Mitchum and some of the others at the party were caught with lighted marijuana cigarettes they had just put down. That wasn't all. The place had been bugged; a microphone had been planted on the wall. But the most peculiar thing about the whole affair was that the press had the story before the cops crashed in.”

That sounds plausible enough, but neither Giesler nor anyone else ever indicated who might have wanted to trap Mitchum, or why. Ordinarily, somebody would probably have found a way for Mitchum to pay his way out of his troubles, but the publicity surrounding the arrest made that difficult. Giesler decided instead on a go-limp defense of the kind that used to be urged on civil rights demonstrators threatened by deputy sheriffs. Confronted by a grand jury investigation, he counseled Mitchum not to appear. When the grand jury indicted Mitchum, Giesler waived a trial, offered no plea of guilty or not guilty, and asked the trial judge to decide the case entirely on the basis of the evidence that the district attorney had provided to the grand jury.

That was how Giesler managed to snuff out all possibility of a spectacular trial, but at the price of Mitchum's serving sixty days in jail (minus ten days off for good behavior). Nobody has ever disclosed who wanted Mitchum arrested, and the arrest publicized, or who wanted the publicity canceled by a modest jail sentence. Whatever the deal was, in those frightened days of 1949, it was based on the assumption that the American public would be shocked and outraged at the idea that a movie star smoked marijuana. What nobody in Hollywood seemed to realize was that the American public was changing. Letters in defense of Mitchum poured in. RKO, which had been quaking at the possibility of losing its investment in completed Mitchum films, nervously released one of them,
Rachel and the Stranger,
and soon saw to its amazement that the film had become number one at the box office all across the country.

Mitchum, who was supposed to go to prison and suffer, emerged as a kind of folk hero, still cynical, laconic, sexy, and quite unreformed by his incarceration. “I had privacy there,” he said. “Nobody envied me, nobody wanted anything from me. Nobody wanted my bars or the bowl of pudding they shoved at me through the slot.”

 

Despite the ordeal of
Monsieur Verdoux,
Charlie Chaplin could not believe that he would ever be ostracized for his political opinions. He could not believe, as he put it, that the American people were “so politically conscious or so humorless as to boycott anyone that could amuse them.” He decided, though, that his next movie would be completely nonpolitical, his first such film since
City Lights
back in 1931. This would be a love story, which he described as “something completely opposite to the cynical pessimism of
Monsieur Verdoux.
” The idea soon took possession of him. “Under its compulsion I did not give a damn what the outcome would be,” he said. “The film had to be made.”

Chaplin began writing early in 1948 the story that he originally called “Footlights.” He wrote and wrote and wrote. His story took the form of a novel, more than 100,000 words long, most of which he intended only as the background of his two characters. It was a variation on the familiar story of
A Star Is Born,
the theatrical legend of an older man helping a younger woman and then sinking as she rises to stardom. Chaplin's version of the tale was richly autobiographical, combining his memories of his younger self with memories of his alcoholic father and then adding a new sense of what it meant for a professional comedian to lose the heart for comedy.
The Great Dictator
had been slapstick, and even
Monsieur Verdoux
had been subtitled “a comedy of murder,” and in both of those films Chaplin had played an essentially clownish character. In
Limelight,
as it came to be called, he played himself for the first time, a white-haired has-been named Calvero who could dress up in funny costumes and do comic turns on the stage but who remained an essentially serious persona, often sentimental, occasionally pretentious.

But what wonders Chaplin could perform in those Edwardian-era comic turns! Like the one in which he cracked a lion tamer's whip as he came marching on stage and then demonstrated in pantomime the high-flying talents of two trained fleas that existed only in the movements of Chaplin's eyes. Or the brilliant finale in which Chaplin tried to play his violin while Buster Keaton sat solemnly at the piano and struggled with the sheet music that kept cascading down into his lap. Chaplin never filmed a funnier scene.

The aging Calvero could only have been played by Chaplin, of course, but his young protégé, Terry, could have been almost anyone. Like most of Chaplin's heroines (and most of his wives), she was supposed to be young and adoring and compliant. And like many of them, like the blind girl in
City Lights
or the crippled wife in
Monsieur Verdoux,
she suffered from a debilitating physical handicap, which enabled Chaplin to work a cure. “I can walk! I can walk! I can walk!” Hollywood was full of pretty girls who could declaim lines like that, but Chaplin was looking for some special quality that he couldn't quite define but thought he could recognize. The playwright Arthur Laurents urged him to consider a beautiful girl he had seen on the London stage in
Ring Around the Moon,
Christopher Fry's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's
L'Invitation au Château.
Her name was Claire Bloom, she was nineteen, and Chaplin asked her to send some photographs. Then he invited her and her mother to New York for a screen test. He recognized her. Only after she had been hired and brought to California and introduced to Chaplin's young wife, Oona, did she see what Chaplin had recognized in her.

Having worked three years on the script, Chaplin now talked obsessively about his graying memories of the London that Miss Bloom had just left. “He reminisced,” she recalled, “about the Empire Theatre, the smart music hall of its day, frequented by the smartest courtesans; he talked of his early triumph as a boy actor in a stage adaptation of
Sherlock Holmes. . . .
When we went to his rooms for lunch, he continued with his memories of London and seemed desperate to hear that nothing he had known had changed. In the last few years he had been deeply homesick, he said, but he didn't dare to leave America for fear that the U.S. wouldn't allow him to reenter the country. His family, home, studio, money—everything was in America.”

That sounds like paranoia, but the FBI had in fact been maintaining files on Chaplin ever since 1922, when one of the G-men reported that Chaplin had given a reception for a visiting Communist union leader, William Z. Foster, which was attended by many “Parlor Bolsheviki.” To this file, which grew to nearly two thousand pages and was finally opened up by one of Chaplin's biographers, David Robinson, the G-men kept adding what Robinson described as “hearsay, rumors, poison-pen letters and cranky unsolicited correspondence, along with the public revelations of Hedda Hopper, Ed Sullivan and other syndicated gossip columnists.” At some point, the FBI's operatives discovered a book called
Who's Who in American Jewry,
which claimed that Chaplin's family name was really Thonstein, and so a number of the subsequent reports referred to him as “alias Charlie Chaplin; alias Israel Thonstein.”