Eve of a Hundred Midnights (15 page)

Though both Mel and Annalee worked at the
Daily,
they rarely interacted. When he joined the paper, Annalee worked as a night editor. When she was elevated to her position as co-managing editor, Mel was off to China for his year at Lingnan University. He was still gone when Annalee graduated.

Despite her successes, Annalee found few career opportunities in journalism after graduating. Though she was determined to find work that capitalized on her intellect, her memory of the Depression and the Whitmores' economic struggles lingered. Annalee was afraid to be too picky in her job search, which led to a memorable encounter shortly after she left Stanford.

After graduating, Annalee went to work at the U.S. Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). This was a New Deal program that addressed deflated food prices during the Great Depression. Farmers participating in the program were paid not to plant certain crops in order to help align supply and demand and drive up the price of farm products. Annalee took a $75-per-month secretarial position in the AAA's San Francisco office, which managed the program's public relations. The work itself wasn't terribly challenging or glamorous, but Annalee accepted it because she was concerned about being able to make ends meet if she hesitated too much before taking a job out of school. More importantly, it gave Annalee a chance to help bring to light the squalid conditions and hunger experienced by migratory laborers in California . . . or so she thought.

“In spite of her quick and very well-oiled brain, Annalee frequently leads with her heart, not in the conventional love
story–sense, but in the quantity of tense emotion she spends on causes her quick mind has found to be honest,” Shelley Mydans later observed while discussing Annalee's job at the AAA.

Annalee had written about the AAA during her junior year at Stanford, in the
Daily
's “Viewing the News” column, which analyzed current events. This piece contextualized the agricultural practices and climactic conditions that caused the Dust Bowl, which eviscerated Midwest farms in the middle of the 1930s.

“Travelers in the Middle West pass through mile after mile of land entirely covered by drifting dry soil,” Annalee opened the April 1935 article. “Each dust-laden wind brings destruction to crops already hurt by drought, and each headline announces a new area hit by the storms.”

Building off an interview with a Stanford economics professor, Annalee soberly argued that in order to reverse a long history of natural resource exploitation that had contributed to the destruction suffered across the country, Americans would need to rethink their history of individualism to pursue a policy of preservation. The brief piece underscored Annalee's early interest in social conditions and news that went beyond the trivialities of campus life.

Though Annalee was hired to conduct the government's work at the AAA, R. Louis Burgess, her supervisor, tried to pressure her to work on his own personal projects. Burgess wanted Annalee to write his memoir and ordered her to take his dictation and type up his in-progress book.

Frustrated that the menial work Burgess asked her to do had nothing to do with her job requirements, Annalee refused the assignment. At the same time, Burgess pressured Annalee not to focus on displaced people's accounts of Depression-era conditions in her reports on the AAA's work in California. He wanted to present a glowing picture of the government lifting
up the state's farmworkers. Since Annalee's own father had been forced by the Depression's upheavals to move his family across the country, the request particularly galled Annalee. Her reluctance to gloss over discomfiting stories—evidence, perhaps, of a journalist's instinct toward the truth—and her refusal to transcribe his memoir enraged Burgess. So Annalee quit.

No doubt Burgess, who would for years repeatedly accuse Annalee of having been “high strung,” was a reactionary and a sexist, but the self-assurance and independence he rejected as moodiness on Annalee's part were among the traits that others most admired in her. If she didn't outright entrance the people she encountered, Annalee impressed them.
Life
photographer Carl Mydans later wrote that she “was electric; she was brilliant, bright, quick.”

Though Annalee may have been pushed out of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, it turned out to be a good move. Annalee was later quoted by the
Stanford Daily
as saying that she left the job because she was “bored with it.” In any case, the PR spin that the job necessitated was anathema to a woman with her mind-set. She was, after all, someone who thought—and acted—like a “journalist through and through,” as her daughter would one day say.

But as it turned out, something quite different beckoned: Hollywood.

The film
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
opens with a close-up on the cover of
Snapshots
magazine. The fictional fifteen-cent glossy features brunette “Deb of the year” Daphne Fowler (played by Diana Lewis). As the camera zooms out, we discover that the rag rests on a pillow next to a slumbering, pubescent Mickey Rooney. Rooney grins, dreaming, the sequence suggests, of the starlets in his magazine. The next few scenes
introduce a teenage boy so obsessed with his crush that he cuts pictures of her out of household magazines to paste in the pages of a scrapbook fantasy collection disguised as a botany project.

So begins this “deathless classic” starring Rooney and Judy Garland, still riding the height of her
Wizard of Oz
fame. So also began the film-writing career of two Stanford graduates: Annalee Whitmore and Thomas Seller. Released in 1940, the film was a hit for MGM—and for Annalee's career.

As Mel Jacoby completed his thesis at Stanford over the 1938–1939 school year, Annalee was reassessing her career. After her abrupt departure from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, she left San Francisco. Her parents had moved to Los Angeles, where Leland Whitmore had a new job with the Federal Housing Administration.

Annalee moved back in with her family, then turned her attention to Hollywood. It was a meandering path from government to studio work. At first, Annalee sought a job at Culver City–based MGM reading scripts, but competition for the position was so tight that she couldn't get an interview.

However, it turned out that while MGM had too many applicants for scriptwriting positions, the studio still needed secretaries. The idea of another secretarial position was initially anathema to Annalee, but she overcame her reluctance. A job anywhere at MGM was a foot in the studio's door, she realized. She applied for the position with an eye toward using it as a springboard back into her true passion: writing.

MGM tested the competence of its secretarial pool applicants by playing a recorded speech and having potential secretaries quickly and accurately transcribe it using shorthand. Annalee knew that the teenage summers she spent typing her fingers raw would help her handle the speed the job required, and she also knew that her years as a student reporter had honed her note-taking skills. And she had one more secret weapon:
a photographic memory. Back at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, she relied on her tremendous powers of recollection to take dictation. But she didn't know shorthand.

“Annalee didn't know shorthand, but she didn't tell anyone,” Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky later reported. “She had her own brand of shorthand.”

This shorthand was so cryptic that later in her life it vexed even Annalee's closest colleagues. Her notes, Shelley Mydans wrote, “were a strange scrawling hieroglyphic, a secret code between Annalee and her quick pencil.”

Secret code or not, Annalee took down the words she could in her own way. As Skolsky reported, she made up words in between the notes she transcribed, reconstructing the speech as closely as she could.

“She did it good enough to get a job,” Skolsky wrote.

Yes, it was just a secretary's position, but she was in the door. After
Debutante
's release, she told an unnamed
Stanford Daily
reporter that she felt lucky to get her original job at MGM, because the odds were “steep” against young writers.

“When I talk about odds, I mean the odds of getting inside a picture studio in the first place,” Annalee said. “After you get in, the people are grand.”

At the beginning, the job was as menial as the one she'd held with the government. Annalee even helped organize an office workers' union at the studio, and according to Shelley Mydans, MGM almost fired her for it. Her new job put her in close contact with massive names from literature and film. During her year as a writing department secretary, Annalee transcribed dictated scripts by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald—then in the last year of his life—and Oscar-winning screenwriter William Ludwig. Annalee also ran errands as an assistant to the writers. At one point, Fitzgerald enlisted her to buy a makeup compact for him to give to his daughter on her birthday.

Still, her superiors knew Annalee wanted to write, and as she herself said, she “never let anyone forget that.” In fact, while Annalee was taking dictation and running errands for MGM scribes, she was also studying how they wrote. Annalee rarely passed on a chance to learn something new.

“I couldn't help but learn the technique of putting down words in movie script style,” she told a columnist in July 1940. “I mean, I learned the mechanics of picture writing.”

Late in 1939, MGM needed a project for Rooney and Garland after one they were supposed to do was postponed. Annalee overheard someone talking about the studio's dilemma while she was taking dictation. Sensing an opportunity, she started on her own script for the project when she went home that day. The following Monday morning, Annalee walked into the study with a complete draft of a new installment in the
Andy Hardy
series.

Based on a character adapted from a play by Aurania Rouverol (another Stanford graduate),
Andy Hardy
's titular character was played by Rooney, while Garland also had a recurring role in the series. Annalee's treatment had parts for each. Ludwig had written three previous
Andy Hardy
installments; when Annalee showed him her script, he was floored by her initiative and its results. He urged her to turn the treatment into a full-fledged screenplay.

Seller, who graduated from Stanford two years before Annalee, started working at MGM a few months before she did. At Stanford, Seller had acted in several plays and written the winning entry in a one-act playwriting contest; later he wrote a play produced by a Palo Alto community theater. Like Annalee, Seller had been a member of the Ram's Head dramatic society at Stanford. Knowing Seller from that club, Annalee teamed up with him on the
Andy Hardy
script.

MGM green-lighted the story. Afterward, Ludwig urged
Annalee and Seller to enroll in MGM's school for junior screenwriters. They both breezed through the school.

“Their names are on the screen as the authors, their salaries already in substratosphere brackets, they both have long-term contracts, they're working now on ‘
Ziegfeld Girl
'—and if anybody claims there are no opportunities for youngsters in Hollywood, he's crazy,” argued a
Stanford Daily
article about the school's two screenwriting alums.

The movie wasn't an intellectual masterpiece. “Daphne, the ‘deb,' he decides, was ‘just another milestone in my career,'”
New York Times
critic Bosley Crowther wrote of the film. “And so is ‘
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
' just another milestone in this popular family series—a milestone to be welcomed, that is. But we can't help speculating upon how much they all look alike.”

But this milestone was lucrative for MGM. The film cost MGM less than $500,000 to make, but it earned more than $2.6 million at the box office. To reward Annalee, the studio gave her a seven-year-long, full-time screenwriting contract, an assistant of her own, and an office. From that point on, she and Seller worked closely together as a writing team. They scribed other productions, such as
Honky Tonk
and
Ziegfeld Girl
. Their careers, it seemed, were made.

“Annalee Whitmore is a Hollywood product,” wrote Skolsky, who regularly lunched with Annalee during her tenure at MGM. “Her career at Metro was a Cinderella story.”

But this Cinderella was never satisfied for long. Annalee soon tired of writing formulaic vehicles for Hollywood's young stars. She had loved working at the
Daily,
and having watched global affairs deteriorate since her graduation in 1937, Annalee itched to return to journalism.

“She was at heart a newspaper woman and the world was full of big news,” the
Stanford Daily
's Mike Churchill would later write.

By the end of 1940, having learned how more than three years of war had ravaged much of China's civilian population, Annalee wanted to focus her writing on topics that might make a difference. As author Nancy Caldwell Sorel described Annalee's mind-set, “she found the prospect of seven years of Hollywood fluff when the real world was falling apart unendurable.”

Annalee tried to go to Chungking as a correspondent. China seemed like a fertile land for writing inspiration, and so Annalee pitched an idea for a freelance story to
Reader's Digest,
hoping that if she had an assignment she could get permission to go there. The magazine accepted. Though Annalee was only a few months into her seven-year contract at MGM, she successfully made a case to the studio that a trip to China would also expose her to compelling subjects for future films.

So Annalee had MGM's support, but the prospect of a good story wasn't all a woman needed to get to China in 1941. The U.S. government, which also needed to be convinced to grant permission for citizens, especially women, to travel to an active war zone, wouldn't let her go. Because Chungking was an embattled city that endured air raids whenever the weather was clear, and because relations between the United States and Japan were rapidly deteriorating by early 1941, the State Department refused to issue Annalee—or any U.S. woman without guaranteed employment in China—the proper permits allowing her to travel there.