City of Nets (88 page)

Jennifer Jones suffered from depressions. Two years after Selznick's death, with her own career in decline, she took a number of pills, telephoned her doctor that she wanted to die, and drove to a four-hundred-foot cliff near Malibu. Searchers found her lying unconscious near shallow surf; they revived her and took her to a hospital. Miss Jones married the millionaire Norton Simon in 1971, and now she is occasionally seen with him at a charity dinner or the opening of an art exhibit.

Many succumbed to cancer, particularly the tough guys. Humphrey Bogart, in 1957, got weaker and weaker until his hands shook as he sipped grape juice through a flexible straw. “Goodbye, Kid,” he said to Miss Bacall as she left to run an errand shortly before he slipped into a coma. “Hurry back.” And John Wayne, too, and Gary Cooper, and Edward G. Robinson. Also Dalton Trumbo, who had won the 1956 Academy Award under the pseudonym Robert Rich, who had received his first post-imprisonment screenwriting credit from Otto Preminger for
Exodus
—thus beginning the end of the blacklist—though it was not until 1975, just a year before his death at seventy-one, that the Academy actually gave him the Oscar statue that he had won two decades earlier. It was Trumbo who pronounced the epitaph on that ugly era when he said that there had been “no villains or heroes or saints or devils. . . . There were only victims.”

And Ingrid Bergman, who survived both the insults of Hollywood and the desertion of Rossellini, who went on stage to play Shaw and Ibsen and O'Neill and won two more Academy Awards, for
Anastasia
in 1956 and
Murder on the Orient Express
in 1974, the same year in which she learned she had cancer. In her last year, 1981, after she finished her last role, in a TV biography of Golda Meir, her right arm began to swell to monstrous size. It weighed almost sixty pounds and had to be covered with a shawl, and she had to hold it up with her left arm. “I am fighting my dragon, my arm,” she wrote to a friend. “I cannot get free of it, that is, I cannot have it amputated, thus I fight him. Yet with fun. I call him my dog, I joke with him: ‘You are not a dragon, you are a dog, a nasty sick dog. Come on, let's go walking.' Then, carrying him as a sick dog, we go walking together, to see the sun and the trees and the people. While walking, I think: ‘Ingrid, it could go worse. You could have gone blind and be incapable of seeing the sun. . . .' ” She died in London on her sixty-seventh birthday.

But there are all kinds of survivors too. Who could have imagined that Claudette Colbert, who was already a successful Broadway actress when she appeared in 1927 in a First National silent film,
For the Love of Mike,
would reappear on the New York stage at the age of eighty-one in a 1985 revival of Frederick Lonsdale's half-century-old comedy,
Aren't We All?
Who could have imagined, for that matter, that Lillian Gish, the heroine of
The Birth of a Nation,
would still be rattling around on the lecture circuit in the mid-1980's and showing off the Blackglama mink coat that she received for posing under the slogan “What becomes a legend most?”

The theater has been rather kind to these figures from the past. Mickey Rooney, the onetime Andy Hardy, was thought to be in the last stages of decline when he bounced back to life in
Sugar Babies
(with Ann Miller) and played to sold-out houses for months. Lauren Bacall did much the same in
Cactus Flower,
and even Van Johnson reemerged from obscurity in 1984 to star in
La Cage aux Folles.
Irene Selznick established herself as a producer of such successes as
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Bell, Book and Candle,
then settled down in the Plaza Hotel to write her memoirs. And Bob Hope, in a kind of vaudeville theater all his own, goes on and on. He is past eighty now, and yet he still spends every Christmas entertaining U.S. troops overseas. If there is no war on, he finds the nearest thing to it—Beirut, Korea, wherever—and turns up with a new collection of pretty girls and those terrible old jokes that have served him so well.

TV has been rather kind, too, at least with its money. The star ratings and the star salaries go to an ever-changing procession of youths, but the networks' insatiable need for material feeds the old as well. It is hard to remember, when watching
Falcon Crest,
that Jane Wyman was once young and beautiful, but she still makes a very good living ($100,000 per episode) as a tyrannical hag. And not too long ago, there was a much-publicized guest appearance on the same show by the reluctantly aging but still resolutely blond Lana Turner. Guest appearances become a way of life, and a guessing game for audiences that have not seen these former stars since they were stars. Was that really Ava Gardner on
Knots Landing?
Yes, and Joan Fontaine on
Dark Mansions,
Ginger Rogers on
Glitter,
Jane Russell on
Yellow Rose,
Olivia de Havilland and June Allyson on
Love Boat.

John Huston, white-bearded in his late seventies, is probably the most active moviemaker among the veterans of the 1940's. His splendid adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano
was a major contender for an Academy Award as the best picture of 1984, and
Prizzi's Honor
won him 1985 nominations for both best picture and best director (though the only Huston who actually won an Oscar was his daughter Anjelica as best supporting actress). But both Hollywood and New York are full of semiretired celebrities who could probably be coaxed out of semiretirement by the right offer. Katharine Hepburn starred in her forty-fifth film,
Grace Quigley,
in 1985. As of mid-1986, Cary Grant still seems a marvel of fitness at eighty-one, and so does Jimmy Stewart at seventy-seven. Marlene Dietrich lives well in Paris at the age of God knows what. These people still appear in evening clothes at testimonial dinners celebrating Hollywood's past, and graduate students come visiting them with tape recorders. The only one who never talks but is occasionally spotted shopping for groceries or simply taking a walk on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is the once-ageless Greta Garbo, now a wrinkled relic of eighty.

 

As for Ronald Reagan, his prospects at midcentury looked rather bleak. When he returned from filming
The Hasty Heart
in wintry Britain toward the end of 1949, he was infuriated to discover that a Western novel that he had asked Warners to buy for him had been bought and assigned to Errol Flynn, partly because several of Reagan's most recent pictures had not done well. “I'm going to pick my own pictures . . .” Reagan said snappishly in an interview early in 1950. “I could do as good a job of picking as the studio has done. . . . At least I could do no worse.” Warners, which was trying like all other studios to cut back on the number of contract actors as it entered the television age, answered Reagan's criticism by negotiating a reduction from two pictures a year to one. Reagan's agent made up the difference by arranging a five-year, five-picture deal with Universal, but no sooner had the contracts been signed than Reagan made a bad slide while playing baseball, broke his right thigh, and had to spend six months in traction.

His divorce had become final the previous summer, and though that restored to him the social possibilities of bachelor life, Reagan at thirty-nine apparently regarded those possibilities with mixed feelings. “I had a comfortable apartment from which, on a clear day, I could see the Mocambo . . .” he rather guardedly said. “My phone was unlisted, but a collection of numbers weren't. Obviously this pattern of living was acceptable if you didn't look more than forty-eight hours ahead.”

It was the Hollywood blacklist, strangely enough, that rescued Reagan from some of these uncertainties. He got a telephone call from Mervyn LeRoy, the director, who said that a young actress in his current picture was fretting because her name kept turning up on the membership lists of various Communist front organizations. Could it be that there were two Nancy Davises? Could Reagan, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, find out? And perform a sort of clearing? Reagan checked and said she was clear. She asked if he would like to have dinner. They were married in 1952.

Reagan's career as a movie actor was by now so weather-beaten—“a truly sick industry . . . had virtually ground to a halt,” as he put it—that his agents proposed he try a nightclub act in Las Vegas. “You must be kidding,” said Reagan. Since he could neither sing nor dance, he could only serve as a sort of master of ceremonies, making a few wry jokes about his inabilities and then introducing other performers. The first offer was to play on Christmas. Reagan declined. The second was to introduce a stripper. Reagan declined. He finally teamed up, early in 1954, with a male singing quartet called The Continentals, who, according to Reagan, “did some sharp comedy material.” After “a wonderfully successful two weeks,” Reagan was glad enough to get an offer from General Electric to serve as host on a weekly TV series, and to spend ten weeks a year touring GE plants around the country, giving talks, meeting people.

That paid Reagan a starting wage of $125,000 a year, but what finally made him rich was the great land deal. Twentieth Century–Fox paid him $1,931,000 in 1966 for 236 acres of ranchland in the Santa Monica mountains, which he had bought for $85,000 back in 1951. By now, Reagan was running for governor of California, and some people said that he had a promising political future.

Notes

1 Welcome (1939)

 

1    
To the chamber:
All the obviously firsthand descriptions in this chapter are based on a visit to Hollywood in the summer of 1982.

3    
The waxworks commentary:
Samuel Marx,
Mayer and Thalberg,
p. 199.

3    
Outside the waxworks:
Newsweek,
Feb. 6, 1984.

4    
A showman:
New York Times,
March 6, 1950.
Variety,
March 8, 1950.
Time,
March 1, 1943.

5    
Long before Grauman:
Charles Lockwood,
Dream Palaces,
pp. 20–32. See also Kevin Starr,
Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era,
pp. 283–5.

6    
Back east, winter:
Works Progress Administration,
Los Angeles: A Guide,
pp. 74–5. Starr,
Inventing the Dream,
p. 288.

7    
Many of these pioneers:
Starr,
Inventing the Dream,
pp. 285–7. Michael Conant,
Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry,
pp. 16–24. Hortense Powdermaker,
Hollywood: The Dream Factory,
p. 89.

8    
Years before Bertolt:
Bertolt Brecht,
Mahagonny,
libretto for CBS recording, pp. 1, 15.

9    
If Brecht's vision:
Lockwood,
Dream Palaces,
p. 36.

9    
Thornton Wilder:
Fred Lawrence Guiles,
Hanging on in Paradise,
p. 38.

9    
The prospect of cataclysm:
Information provided by George C. Page Museum, Los Angeles.

9    
The first Spanish explorers:
John D. Weaver,
Los Angeles: The Enormous Village,
p. 15.

10    
The city that now numbers:
New York Times,
June 9, 1978; November 17, 1980.

10    
The droning voices:
Joan Didion,
Play It as It Lays,
pp. 103–4.

11    
Miss Didion ascribed:
Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
p. 220.

11    
Nathanael West had seen:
Nathanael West,
The Day of the Locust,
p. 78.

11    
West was thirty-five:
Jay Martin,
Nathanael West,
pp. 341, 359.

12    
Like most writers:
In addition to Martin, see Stanley Edgar Hyman,
Nathanael West,
p. 6. Also S. J. Perelman,
The Last Laugh,
p. 163.

12    
Perelman, who first:
Martin,
Nathanael West,
pp. 205, 213. Also S. J. Perelman,
The Most of S. J. Perelman,
p. 47.

13    
West came to Hollywood:
Tom Dardis,
Some Time in the Sun,
p. 140.

13    
West worked hard:
Martin,
Nathanael West,
pp. 213, 262–72.

13    
These were the outcasts:
West,
The Day of the Locust,
p. 12.

14    
The Hollywood that attracted:
Ibid., pp. 96, 100, 104, 156ff.

16    
This city of the inferno:
Martin,
Nathanael West,
pp. 338–40. “Introduction” to
The Day of the Locust,
by Richard Gehman, pp. xii, xi.

16    
Hedy Lamarr. Hedwig:
New York Times,
Aug. 23, 1970.

16    
Probably it was:
Time,
Jan. 14, 1935. Hedy Lamarr,
Ecstasy and Me,
p. 29. For the controversy over this book, see
New York Times,
Sept. 27, 1966.

17    
The customs authorities:
New York Times,
Oct. 27, 1937; Nov. 17, 1940.

17    
By then, of course:
Time,
July 25, 1938. Also Errol Flynn,
My Wicked,
Wicked Ways,
p. 221 (1974).

18    
Frau Mandl's flight:
Lamarr,
Ecstasy and Me,
pp. 41–3. Also Bosley Crowther,
Hollywood Rajah,
p. 220. This is the basic work on Mayer.

18n    
The
Algiers
script:
Larry Swindell,
Charles Boyer,
p. 118.

19    
This, then, was:
Crowther,
Hollywood Rajah,
pp. 236–41.

19    
That was the most remarkable:
Norman Zierold,
The Moguls,
p. 264.

20    
In 1939, there:
Leo C. Rosten,
Hollywood,
pp. 3–4, 378–9. A pioneering and expertly done sociological study of Hollywood as an industry. See also Conant,
Antitrust,
pp. 25–26. Also Roland Flamini,
Scarlett, Rhett and a Cast of Thousands,
p. 32 (1978).

20    
The creation of fantasy:
Dardis,
Some Time in the Sun,
p. 62. Rosten,
Hollywood,
p. 80. Zierold,
The Moguls,
p. 33.

20    
But the lords:
Crowther,
Hollywood Rajah,
pp. 11–12. Gavin Lambert,
GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind,
pp. 4–5. Jack Warner,
My First Hundred Years in Hollywood,
p. 21. Stephen Birmingham,
“The Rest of Us,”
p. 32.

21    
The legend of:
Rosten,
Hollywood,
p. 17.

21    
He spent his boyhood:
Crowther,
Hollywood Rajah,
pp. 28, 221–4, 323. Zierold,
The Moguls,
p. 276. Marx,
Mayer and Thalberg,
pp. 24, 78.

22    
One of the most remarkable:
Zierold,
The Moguls,
p. 21. On Hollywood's misjudgments, see also Powdermaker,
Hollywood: The Dream Factory.

22n    
A Napoleonic lack:
Quoted in Flamini,
Scarlett,
p. 22.

23    
The lords of Hollywood:
Stephen Farber and Marc Green,
Hollywood Dynasties,
p. 19.

23    
Mayer did not read:
Flamini,
Scarlett,
pp. 3–4. Marx,
Mayer and Thalberg,
pp. 17ff.

24    
While Thalberg lived:
Dardis,
Some Time in the Sun,
p. 44. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Last Tycoon,
pp. 20, 134.

24    
Thalberg was the:
Marx,
Mayer and Thalberg,
pp. 100, 198.

25    
Mayer and Thalberg:
Flamini,
Scarlett,
pp. 4–5. Lambert,
GWTW,
p. 17.

25    
RKO's Pandro Berman:
Mel Gussow,
Darryl F. Zanuck,
p. 70 (1980).

26    
The Selznicks were:
Zierold,
The Moguls,
pp. 26ff. Irene Mayer Selznick,
A Private View,
p. 107.

27    
Then there was David:
Zierold,
The Moguls,
pp. 43–4. Selznick,
A Private View,
pp. 107–8, 133–7. Hedda Hopper,
The Whole Truth and Nothing But,
p. 114.

27    
Louis B. Mayer warned:
Selznick,
A Private View,
pp. 133–7. Jhan Robbins,
Front Page Marriage: Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur,
p. 121.

28    
But throughout the:
Lambert,
GWTW,
pp. 32–3, 47–56.

29    
As the beginning:
Flamini,
Scarlett,
p. 148. Lambert,
GWTW
, p. 51. Ronald Haver,
David O. Selznick's Hollywood,
p. 256.

31    
The flames were:
Flamini,
Scarlett,
p. 154. Also Anne Edwards,
Vivien Leigh,
pp. 88–97.

31    
God never meant:
Work Projects Administration,
Los Angeles,
pp. 52–3. Also William L. Kahrl,
Water and Power,
pp. 20ff.

32    
The new aqueduct:
David Halberstam,
The Powers That Be,
p. 116.

33    
The future of Los Angeles:
Carey McWilliams,
Southern California Country,
p. 195.
New York Times,
July 23, 1935.

33    
By then, the New Deal:
Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb,
Empires in the Sun,
pp. 15–19. Joan Didion,
The White Album,
pp. 198–9.

34    
The aqueduct from:
New York Times,
June 22, 1941. Weaver,
Los Angeles,
p. 127.

34    
Hollywood was not:
Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook,
1940, p. 460. Flamini,
Scarlett,
p. 327. Edwards,
Vivien Leigh,
pp. 111–13.

35    
War had been inevitable:
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund,
The Inquisition in Hollywood,
p. 142. This is the most comprehensive (if occasionally murky) book on this complex subject.

35    
“The day after”:
Nancy Lynn Schwartz,
The Hollywood Writers' Wars,
p. 146ff. Another basic text, though marred by an irritating leftist bias.

36    
Not everyone thought:
William Robert Faith,
Bob Hope,
pp. 136–7.

36    
In France itself:
Arthur Rubinstein,
My Many Years,
p. 460. Pola Negri,
Memoirs of a Star,
p. 390.

36    
“The blackouts made”:
Salka Viertel,
The Kindness of Strangers,
p. 236. A warmhearted and valuable guide.

37    
Aboard the
Queen Mary:
Faith,
Bob Hope,
p. 136.

37    
“Thanks for the memory”:
Bob Hope,
Have Tux, Will Travel,
p. 168.

37    
Ingrid Bergman, after:
Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess,
My Story,
p. 106 (1981).

38    
Whether Sweden was safe:
Martin Esslin,
Brecht,
p. 67 (1961). Nigel Hamilton,
The Brothers Mann,
p. 310.

38    
And there in London:
Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 3, p. 245.

38    
Igor Stravinsky, too:
Igor Stravinsky,
Themes and Conclusions,
p. 48. Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft,
Stravinsky: In Pictures and Documents,
p. 350.

39    
In Hollywood, these events:
Sybille Bedford,
Aldous Huxley,
pp. 381–2.

39    
The origins of:
Charles Chaplin,
My Autobiography,
p. 391. Also David Robinson,
Chaplin,
pp. 493–508.
New York Times,
May 1, 1947.
Time,
May 12, 1947.

40    
Chaplin's political doubts:
Chaplin,
My Autobiography,
pp. 392, 400.

40    
Less rhetorical men:
David Niven,
Bring on the Empty Horses,
p. 101 (1976). Marvelous anecdotes.

40    
On Sunday morning:
Laurence Olivier,
Confessions of an Actor,
p. 110 (1984). A slightly different version appears in Edwards,
Vivien Leigh,
p. 109.

41    
Niven went off:
David Niven,
The Moon's a Balloon,
p. 227 (1973). John Russell Taylor,
Strangers in Paradise,
p. 131.

41    
So Hollywood remained:
Viertel,
Kindness of Strangers,
p. 239. Rosten,
Hollywood,
p. 185.

 

2 Ingatherings (1940).

43    
Proud of his:
H. H. Stuckenschmidt,
Arnold Schoenberg,
pp. 114–15. John Russell Taylor,
Strangers in Paradise,
pp. 49, 384. Hans W. Heinsheimer,
Best Regards to Aida,
pp. 214–16.

44    
Schoenberg was saved:
Arnold Schoenberg,
Letters,
pp. 196–8.

45    
What Schoenberg was doing:
Stuckenschmidt,
Arnold Schoenberg,
p. 117.

45    
Irving Thalberg, the young:
Salka Viertel,
The Kindness of Strangers,
pp. 206–8.

46    
Schoenberg, who was earning:
This is mostly from Viertel, but see also Oscar Levant,
The Memoirs of an Amnesiac,
p. 132.

48    
Schoenberg seemed to think:
Schoenberg,
Letters,
p. 197.