City of Nets (87 page)

Now, in this new time of trial, DeMille once again led the penitential procession back to the half-forgotten gold mine. He wanted to film what he characteristically called “one of the greatest love stories in history or literature, which is also a poignant drama of faith, the story of Samson and Delilah.” Some other executives apparently expressed skepticism about whether a biblical epic was what the supposedly more sophisticated postwar generation wanted to see, so DeMille had one of his artisans sketch a poster of “a big brawny athlete and, looking at him with an at once seductive and coolly measuring eye, a slim and ravishingly attractive young girl.” At a meeting of the skeptics, DeMille recalled, he displayed this picture and said, “That, gentlemen, is
Samson and Delilah.
” Everyone was impressed. DeMille hired as his protagonists the beefy Victor Mature and the aging Hedy Lamarr and produced a thoroughly ludicrous picture, only partially redeemed by the climactic scene in which the blinded Mature pushed against two pillars and brought down a whole temple. Whatever its faults, though,
Samson and Delilah
made a lot of money, and that inspired Hollywood's seekers of inspiration.

Quo Vadis
was not exactly part of the Bible, but it was sort of biblical. M-G-M had been trying for years to get a usable script out of Henry Sienkiewicz's turgid novel about the early Christians. With Dore Schary's encouragement, John Huston had devised what he regarded as “a modern treatment,” in which Nero was portrayed as a prototype for his “fellow madman, Adolf Hitler.” Louis B. Mayer was profoundly suspicious. He summoned Huston to his house for a breakfast conference, and since he almost invariably drew all his arguments from the good old days, he began telling Huston how he had taught Jeanette MacDonald to sing “Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life” by singing “Eli, Eli” to her. In Hebrew. She had wept. So Mayer now sang the same dirge to Huston. “Then he said that if I could make
Quo Vadis
into that kind of picture,” Huston recalled, “he would crawl to me on his knees and kiss my hands . . . which he then proceeded to do. I sat there and thought, ‘This is not happening to me. I've nothing to do with any of this.' ”

Huston began casting on a grand scale, Gregory Peck as the hero and Elizabeth Taylor as the heroine, and then he went to Europe and started spending money. About two million dollars had disappeared by the time the differences between Mayer and Huston brought the production to a halt, and Mayer turned everything over to a man he trusted, Mervyn LeRoy.
*
Gregory Peck had dropped out with an eye infection, and Elizabeth Taylor had other commitments, but what did it matter? LeRoy hired sixty thousand extras and directed them by firing a series of pistol shots from a boom high over Rome's Cinecittà studio. And he acquired more than fifty lions, all that M-G-M scouts could hire in all the circuses of Europe. Since he could never get these lions to simulate the desired carnage, he fell back on the oldest Hollywood traditions of fakery. “I wound up having the prop men stuff empty clothing with meat, so it looked like a Christian lying on the ground, and we brought the lions out forcibly and they ate those ‘bodies,' ” LeRoy recalled. “I augmented that with close-ups of fake lions, which the technicians built, jumping on real people. It worked, although I never did get the scene exactly as I wanted.”

But how could he fail? He went to see Pope Pius XII and actually asked the Pope to bless the script of
Quo Vadis,
which he just happened to have brought with him, and the Pope “put his lovely hands on the script, murmured some Latin words, and then said, in English, ‘May your film be a successful one.' ” It is possible that Pope Pius would have blessed anything at all that was presented to him under the proper auspices, but it soon turned out that he had a special interest in LeRoy's project. “I like the cinema,” the Pope said. And there was more. “By the way,” the Pope said, “do you remember a movie called
Going My Way?”
How could LeRoy forget the Oscar-winner as the best picture of 1944? And another Oscar for Father Bing Crosby playing a little boogie-woogie and singing “Swinging on a Star”? “I have a print of it,” said Pope Pius XII. “Don't you love that scene where the priest takes a little drink?” So
Quo Vadis
eventually cost twelve million dollars but turned into what Huston called “another dreadful spectacle, catering to the audience L.B. thought was there. L.B. was right; the audience
was
there.”

And so, in the years of fear and blacklisting, began the age of pious epics:
David and Bathsheba
(1951),
The Robe
(1953),
The Egyptian
(1954),
Land of the Pharaohs
(1955),
Alexander the Great
(1956),
The Ten Commandments
(1956) (by DeMille, again). It was also, of course, the age of sci-fi horrors:
The Thing from Another World
(1950);
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951);
Them, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The War of the Worlds, It Came from Outer Space, The Lost Planet, Zombies of the Stratosphere
(all of these in 1953). But never mind—prehistoric monsters and biblical heroes were all pretty much the same, as were prehistoric monsters and Martian invaders of the twenty-first century.

Such films were inspired partly by Hollywood's exploration of large-screen technology as a weapon against the lilliputian television screen. An inventor named Fred Waller devised a system for using three projectors to cast images on a curved screen, and in 1952 he and two partners (Lowell Thomas and Merian C. Cooper) astonished New York with
This Is Cinerama.
In a sense, this, too, was a return to the origins of the cinema. William Friese-Greene had patented a three-dimensional movie process at the turn of the century, and the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière attracted huge crowds in Paris to their projections of moving film on a fifty-three-by-seventy-foot screen.

Still, reinventing the wheel is the essence of show business.
This Is Cinerama
delighted audiences with a series of spectacles ranging from the triumphal march in
Aïda
at La Scala to a terrifying ride on a roller coaster at Coney Island. The show ran more than two years in New York and grossed nearly five million dollars. The trouble was that it was expensive to convert ordinary theaters to Cinerama. Once the possibilities of technical novelties became clear, other versions of the wide screen appeared: Paramount's VistaVision, Warnerscope, Todd-AO, Vistarama, Naturama. The search for novelty extended even to 3-D, in which viewers had to don special spectacles to see lions jumping at them in
Bwana Devil.
And even to Smell-O-Vision, in which tubes behind each theater seat provided clues to the solution of a film called
Scent of Mystery.
The most successful of all these experiments was 20th Century–Fox's Cinemascope, which used an anamorphic lens to spread out the projected image to nearly twice the previously standard width, and the first film made by this process was the immensely successful religious epic
The Robe.

Beyond all such technical questions, though, beyond all commercial questions of the struggle against television (weekly moviegoing continued dropping from about sixty million to forty million during the 1950's), the biblical epics represented a kind of self-portrait of the Hollywood studios in their decline and fall. “The epics were the ideology of the ideology,” as Michael Wood has written. “They were Hollywood's own version of
The Last Tycoon:
flights, as Fitzgerald said of his novel, into ‘a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our time.' . . . Hollywood was Egypt, and Rome, and Jerusalem. The ancient world of the epics was a huge, many-faceted metaphor for Hollywood itself, because . . . these movies are always
about
the creation of such a world in a movie.” And having created one of the great cities of the past, the mission of the epic was finally to destroy it. The great idol grandly toppled in
Samson and Delilah;
Rome itself burned in
Quo Vadis.
Though these films professed to acclaim the triumph of Christianity, Wood observed, “doom and apocalypse lurk around these optimistic movies, tokens of catastrophe surround these celebrations of success.”

 

“Hollywood's like Egypt,” David Selznick once remarked morosely to Ben Hecht as they walked through the deserted streets at dawn. “Full of crumbling pyramids. . . . It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” First, though, everything must be torn down and rebuilt into something else. The mansion that Billy Wilder found for
Sunset Boulevard
was demolished in 1957 to provide a site for the new Getty headquarters office building. The Spanish hacienda built on Sunset Boulevard by Alla Nazimova in the early 1920's, with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, gave way in 1927 to the Garden of Allah Hotel, with bungalows occupied by Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, John O'Hara, and other serious drinkers, and that gave way in 1959 to a bank. The former livery stable that Bette Davis turned into the Hollywood Canteen is now a four-story parking garage. The Mocambo nightclub on Sunset is a parking lot, and all that remains of the nearby Trocadero are the three steps that used to lead to the front door.

On the other hand, the nostalgia business has become very profitable in Hollywood. Musso and Frank's still flourishes on Hollywood Boulevard, and so does Chasen's on Beverly (try the chili, the guidebook says). Nothing typifies the efforts to institutionalize the past better than the migrations of the DeMille barn. A two-story yellow structure, it was originally built in 1895 on the southeast corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street, and Cecil B. DeMille rented it for Jesse Lasky in 1913 for two hundred dollars a week to make his first spectacle,
The Squaw Man.
Actually, he didn't rent all of it, because the owner, Harry Revier, retained the right to keep his horse and carriage in one corner. When Paramount, the successor to the Lasky company, moved to a twenty-six-acre studio on Melrose Avenue in 1927, the sentimental executives took along the barn, which they used as a company library, then, in a characteristic progression, as a gymnasium, then as a set for the
Bonanza
television series.

In 1979, whether for reasons of nostalgia, publicity, or tax deduction, Paramount bequeathed the increasingly decrepit DeMille barn to the Hollywood Historic Trust, a branch of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and it was moved to a parking lot on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. There, the relic stood unused for three years while various interests argued over its fate. Universal offered to add it to the various props on view to tourists in its back lots, but preservationists opposed that as a desecration. In 1982, the Hollywood Historic Trust finally moved the barn to a “permanent” site across from the Hollywood Bowl and began a $400,000 project to turn it into a movie museum.

 

And what finally happened to all those people, all the characters in the drama of Hollywood in the 1940's? A great many, including all the biggest bosses, went to their downfall and died, as any screenwriter could have predicted, rich and unhappy.

Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia in 1957, shortly after the stockholders of M-G-M voted down the last of his schemes to regain control of the studio. His last words to an associate were: “Nothing matters. Nothing matters.” In bed that night, though, he kept asking, “Is she here yet? Is she outside?” Each of his quarreling daughters insisted forever after that she was the one the old man meant.

Darryl F. Zanuck abandoned both his wife and his command of 20th Century–Fox in 1956 so that he could go to Europe with a young Polish adventuress named Bella Darvi. His successors at the studio made such a mess that Zanuck got the stockholders to vote him back into power, with his brash young son, Richard, as chief of production. The two Zanucks then quarreled, and father fired son, but the son and the discarded wife joined dissident stockholders in voting Zanuck into retirement. “I feel tired,” said Zanuck, who finally returned to his bed-ridden wife in Palm Springs, then endured five years of lingering illness before his death at the age of seventy-seven.

Jack Warner and Harry Warner didn't speak to each other throughout the whole year before Harry's death in 1958. The reason for the quarrel was that both had agreed to sell their shares of Warner Bros., but Jack reneged, kept control of the studio, and watched the shares rise to three times the price that Harry had received. The last surviving brother, Jack was seventy-five when he finally sold his holdings for $32 million in 1967, but he didn't enjoy his decade of retirement in Palm Springs. “You're nothing if you don't have a studio,” he said. “Now I'm just another millionaire.”

Harry Cohn was still in charge of everything at Columbia when he died of a heart attack in 1958, at the age of sixty-six. It was raw and rainy on the day of his funeral, but a large crowd gathered to see the last of him, which prompted Red Skelton to remark, “It goes to show that the public will always come if you give them what they want.”

Sam Goldwyn suffered a severe stroke in 1969 and spent the next five years bedridden in his home, hugely obese, partly paralyzed, incontinent, staring into space, only intermittently able to speak a few words. At the age of ninety-one, he died in his sleep.

David Selznick kept hoping to make films that would glorify Jennifer Jones. More than ten million dollars in debt, he talked of filming
War and Peace,
then of filming the whole Bible. Then he finally cast Miss Jones in a boring, expensive, and commercially unsuccessful version of Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
(1957). Eight years later, haggard and worn at the age of sixty-three, he was talking business in his lawyer's office when he suffered a fatal heart attack.