City of Nets (85 page)

The still incredulous prisoners, none of whom had ever been inside a prison before, none of whom had done anything that could seriously be considered a prisonworthy crime, were then handcuffed and led through marble corridors to an elevator and then down to a municipal jail, quite different from the dignified courtroom. “The bullpen was filthy and crowded with men,” Bessie recalled. “The paint was peeling off the walls; the open latrine in the corner stank; the men—mostly Negroes—sat on battered wooden benches around the walls, for the most part apathetic, depressed, and disinclined even to ask each other, ‘What're
you
in for?' . . . Some Negro prisoners who were being booked shouted through the screening at us, ‘Hiya, Hollywood kids!' ”

After two weeks in the Washington jail, the Hollywood kids were shipped out to various federal prisons. There were eight minimum-security institutions, and although the prisoners could request a specific one, the government followed its own arcane rules in reaching a final decision. Trumbo, Lawson, and Scott were sent to Ashland, Kentucky; Lardner and Cole to Danbury, Connecticut; Biberman and Bessie to Texarkana, Texas; Maltz and Dmytryk to Millpoint, West Virginia (there they met Clifford Odets, about to leave after completing a three-month term for contempt). Ornitz, already afflicted with cancer, went to the prison hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The prisoners' physical circumstances were not at all bad. “Life here is something like life in a sanitarium,” Trumbo wrote to his wife. “The place is airy, immaculate and most attractive, with wide expanse of lawns, and views of green country-side in every direction. The food is good, the attitude is friendly, and the restrictions are not onerous. The regularity of food, sleep [and] work is most relaxing. . . . The sudden shucking off of all responsibility gives one a sense of almost exhilarating relief.” The prisoners were given undemanding work. Lardner became a clerk-typist in the parole office; Cole worked in the food warehouse; Dmytryk was a clerk in the prison garage; he also learned how to run a bulldozer, how to build a whiskey still, and how to make a knife. Several of the prisoners took up calisthenics and lost weight. Lardner started to write a novel (which eventually became
The Ecstasy of Owen Muir
). So did Trumbo, though he never finished his. And for every imprisoned writer, this was an opportunity, finally, to read
War and Peace.
Both Trumbo and Cole did so.

The most unusual aspect of the prison lives of the Hollywood Ten, though, was their confrontation with hundreds of men quite unlike anyone they had ever known in Hollywood. “Moving about in the population of the prison,” Bessie wrote of Texarkana, “you met inmates who were named Cupcake (short and fat), Bebop (Negro), Turkey (long, red neck), Snake (had one tattooed on his arm . . .), Mother (an old Southern explanation that need not be translated here), Heavy, Slugger, Eleven, Porky, Dimples, Garbage Can (who weighed three hundred pounds and got himself committed regularly so that he could eat free), Muscles, One-Eye, Short-Timer. . . . Kansas City, Double-O (eyeglasses), Tokio, and Buckskin. . . .”

These other prisoners regarded the Hollywood radicals not with the hostility that they might have expected but rather with a kind of disbelief that anyone would go to prison for political reasons. They knew and cared nothing about politics, but they disliked all American authorities. When newsreels were occasionally shown, the prisoners indiscriminately cheered both Stalin and Hitler. Many of these convicts were black—about two thirds in the southern prisons and one third in the North—and both sleeping and eating arrangements were strictly though unofficially segregated. The Hollywood writers, rather guileless in such things, did their best to make friends with the blacks. Occasionally, they succeeded. Cole and Lardner even managed to desegregate the cafeteria in their Connecticut prison.

Dalton Trumbo, once extravagantly well paid for his writing, became an unofficial scrivener for the illiterate and helped a number of imprisoned moonshiners to correspond with their families. He particularly remembered one convict named Cecil, whose letters from his wife, written for her by her daughter, told an endless tale of trying to harvest crops and collecting firewood and tending sick children. “His wife's teeth were very bad,” Trumbo reminisced later, “and she'd been to the county two or three times about her teeth. And finally, there came a letter from her that said that although she . . . begged them not to, the county took out all her teeth. She said, ‘I haven't got any teeth. . . . All I've got is gums now, and my mouth is all scrunched up. And when you see me you're not going to love me any more because I am so ugly.' In other words, this woman was just heartbroken. . . .

“So I wrote a letter in which Cecil said she wasn't to worry about her teeth, that she would be pretty without her teeth, that as a matter of fact when he first saw her and married her, he never even thought about her teeth and didn't remember whether she had any teeth or not—he didn't give a Goddamn about her teeth. She would always be as beautiful as she was because it wasn't her teeth he loved anyhow. A letter came back written by the daughter for the mother. It was a love letter. I can't describe it. Just a complete, total love letter. It was very moving just to read it. . . .”

The most extraordinary encounter of all took place in Danbury, where Lardner and Cole were sternly warned, on their arrival, against any attempts at violence. Cole told the parole officer that he had been “convicted for contempt, not violence,” but the parole officer remained suspicious.

“There are rumors already here in advance of your arrival,” said the parole officer, “that both you and Lardner are prepared for violent revenge if you can get away with it.”

“Who the hell could have said that?” Cole wondered.

“Will you swear,” the parole officer persisted, “that you are not planning some sort of revenge against J. Parnell Thomas, who is in this institution?”

It was no secret that the crusading congressman had been indicted in 1948 for padding his congressional payroll and taking kickbacks from his employees, that he had delayed the proceedings for nearly a year with claims of bad health, that he had finally pleaded
nolo contendere
and thrown himself on the mercy of the court, which mercifully sentenced him to no more than eighteen months in jail, plus a fine of ten thousand dollars. But Cole and Lardner had not realized that they and their grand inquisitor would be locked up in the same federal prison.

“He must have started the rumor himself,” Cole said. “Kill him? My greatest pleasure will be seeing him here with his own kind, petty thieves.”

“It's true,” the parole officer said. “It was Thomas who suggested it when he learned you were coming here.”

Lardner was being given the same warning by another parole officer, and when the two writers next met, they both burst into laughter. “What luck!” said Lardner. “There's got to be a way, a dozen ways, to make the bastard miserable.”

When Lardner finally saw the frightened congressman in the prison yard, however, he could not bring himself to speak to him. “He had lost a good deal of weight,” Lardner recalled later, “and his face, round and scarlet at our last encounter, was deeply lined and sallow. . . . Neither of us made any social overtures to the other.” Cole was more combative. He said that Thomas “scurried at least fifty feet away when he saw us coming,” but they finally met at work. Cole had been assigned to cut grass with a sickle, and that brought him near the chicken coops, where Thomas was engaged in scraping up dung with a hoe.

“Hey, Bolshie, I see you still got your sickle,” Thomas jeered from behind the chicken fence. “Where's your hammer?”

“And I see just like in Congress, you're still picking up chickenshit,” Cole shouted back.

So time passed, month after month, and in the last week of Cole's imprisonment, he encountered a new irony. “That week was torture . . .” he recalled, “because the House Un-American Activities Committee . . . had started new hearings in Hollywood.” Every afternoon, at the end of work, the convicts would gather around the radio and listen to the news. Among the first witnesses was Richard Collins, one of the original unfriendly nineteen, who had collaborated with his friend Paul Jarrico in writing the ill-starred
Song of Russia.
Now Collins became, as Cole put it, “the first snitch, stoolie, squealer.” He named twenty-six people he had known as Communists, including Jarrico, and Carl Foreman, and Budd Schulberg, which prompted Schulberg to cable the committee that he was ready to “cooperate with you in any way I can.” Dmytryk, too, now wanted to testify, after serving his prison term in full, “that the battle for freedom of thought, in which I believed completely, had been twisted into a conspiracy of silence. . . .” The convicts sitting around the radio in the Danbury prison “looked at me and shook their heads,” Cole recalled, “some with pity, most with contempt.” One of them finally said, “What kind of a horse's ass are you to get into that lousy mob of stool pigeons?”

 

Of all the beautiful girls who flowered in Hollywood during the later 1940's, the most supremely beautiful was Elizabeth Taylor, so her wedding at the age of eighteen was naturally the social event of 1950. She was apparently still a virgin. On her sixteenth birthday, when she had yearned for a date, M-G-M arranged for her to be taken out by Glenn Davis, the All-American football star from West Point. They soon became “engaged to be engaged,” as she put it, just before he went off to Korea. When he came back, he gave her a necklace of sixty-nine graduated pearls for her seventeenth birthday. By then, she had become interested in a much richer young man named Bill Pawley. When she and Pawley became engaged, he gave her her first diamond, a 3.5-carat emerald-cut solitaire with two half-carat diamonds on each side. But he wanted her to give up her career, and George Stevens had just hired her to star with Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun,
Stevens's version of Dreiser's
An American Tragedy.
So there were scenes, and the engagement was broken, and Elizabeth Taylor looked very beautiful as the mindless heiress in
A Place in the Sun.

Conrad Nicholas Hilton, Jr., aged twenty-two, was the son of the chairman of the Hilton Hotel Corporation, an assertive Texan said to be worth about $125 million. The engagement ring that Nicky Hilton gave Miss Taylor bore a five-carat diamond. A few people tried to tell her that Hilton drank too much and had a violent temper, but Miss Taylor's parents approved of him, and so did M-G-M, which scheduled the release of her latest picture,
Father of the Bride,
to appear shortly after her wedding on May 6. The studio also announced that it was providing her with a $3,500 wedding dress, twenty-five yards of shell-white satin sprinkled with seed pearls and bugle beads, plus a train of fifteen yards of satin chiffon, not to mention a veil of silk illusion net, a creation that eventually occupied fifteen M-G-M seamstresses for two months. (What would that cost today, if M-G-M actually had fifteen seamstresses capable of such labors and a star worthy of them?) The studio even provided Miss Taylor with her wedding-night costume, a white satin negligee trimmed with rose-point lace. And almost as a matter of course, it donated the bronze chiffon dress for Miss Taylor's mother and the daffodil-yellow dresses for her seven bridesmaids and her seven attendants.

All kinds of people sent all kinds of presents. A rich uncle named Howard Young provided a $65,000 pearl ring. Conrad Hilton offered a token 100 shares of Hilton hotel stock, then worth only $1,350 but increasing over the next thirty years to more than $150,000. The Gorham Silver Company promised a forty-five-piece silver service, on condition that it could photograph Miss Taylor pouring tea from the Gorham pot; it could. Somebody or other sent a mink coat, and another one for Miss Taylor's mother. “I just love everything about getting married,” Miss Taylor said.

It happened at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, with about six hundred guests crammed into the church and about three thousand admirers pressed against the police barricades outside. Who was actually there? Well, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, of course, and Sheilah Graham too, and Spencer Tracy, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Esther Williams, June Allyson, Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Rosalind Russell, Greer Garson, George Murphy, Joan Bennett, and so on. And so on. “Just your usual monkey funeral shot, Johnny,” as Billy Wilder had said.

Miss Taylor had seventeen steamer trunks already packed for her honeymoon voyage to the Riviera aboard the
Queen Mary.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were also aboard and invited the newlyweds to dinner. Nicky Hilton worried about whether he was supposed to wear evening clothes. (No, he was not.) There were worse contretemps ahead. Screaming crowds gathered everywhere Miss Taylor appeared in Europe, and Miss Taylor, reared and trained in the folkways of the M-G-M lot, spent hours signing autographs. Her husband seethed. Since he was even more spoiled and childish than she, he soon began taking revenge by drinking and gambling and insulting his bride. “I'm so goddamned sick and tired of looking at your face,” he shouted on one occasion. On another, he called her “a fucking bore.”

The honeymooners returned to Hollywood so that Miss Taylor could resume her career by starring in a movie called
Love Is Better Than Ever,
and after one shrieking argument too many, when Hilton told her to “get the hell out,” she did. The celebrated marriage lasted seven months. “My troubles all started,” Miss Taylor said in an often-quoted confession to the press, “because I have a woman's body and a child's emotions.” No such easy exculpation could be offered by Nicky Hilton, the first of her six husbands. Or by M-G-M, which demanded the return of not only Miss Taylor's wedding dress but those of her bridesmaids. “They didn't even send someone to pick them up,” said one of the victims. “We all had to take them back to the studio ourselves.”