Hollywood (22 page)

“But you can’t do it, Harry. This is one time you’re not going to have it your way. You’ve got to get rid of him. He’s a Communist.”

Cohn, who had been staring glumly out of the window, whirled suddenly and roared down from the top of his voice, “So what? I’ve got the greatest songwriter in the world on the lot working for me—what’s his name?—and he’s a
fairy
!”

On this note of frenzied logic, the meeting came to a close. Harry Cohn again prevailed. He defied the Committee and its attempts at extralegal enforcement.
Counterattack
was made and succeeded, and although it took years and left scars, the bad time passed.

Like a great many toughs, Harry Cohn had a powerful sense of morality, especially where the behavior of others was concerned.

George Cukor once gave a dinner dance in honor of the René Clairs, who were visiting Hollywood for the first time since their wartime residence. Since Cukor was working at Columbia, he engaged a small orchestra through the music department.

The party was a great success. Harry Cohn clearly enjoyed himself and got to sing “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” twice. At two in the morning, only a handful of die-hards remained. The orchestra was playing soft, dreamy, slow music. The event was fading to a charming diminuendo.

As Cohn and I were leaving, we stopped and looked back at the beautiful house. Through a large bay window, we could see into the sitting-room-cum-ballroom. There, in the dim light, the little orchestra was playing “As Time Goes By.” A couple was dancing. The girl was a beautiful young English actress who, because her husband was on location in Mexico, had come to the party escorted by the man she was now dancing with, a beautiful young English director. It was a romantic sight indeed, and became more so as the couple kissed and continued to dance beautifully.

We watched for a moment. Suddenly, Cohn grasped my arm.

“Wait a second,” he said. “Isn’t that What’s’ername? I mean the one who’s married to What’s’isname?”

“That’s right.

“Well, wait a second,” he said with growing concern, “that guy she’s dancing with— dancing, some dancing—that ain’t him, is it? Her husband?”

“No. Just a friend.”

“Some friend!” said Cohn righteously. “Son of a bitch.”

“Harry,” I said, “you want some good advice? Mind your own business.”

Harry turned to me with the air of a man who has no interest in taking advice.

“Listen, you dope,” he said. “In this business, everybody’s business is everybody else’s business. Things like that,” he pointed with his chin, “they give the whole business a bad name.”

“Okay,” I said, “but let’s go. There’s nothing
you
can do about it.”

“There ain’t, huh?” He pulled the cigar from his mouth, threw it into the beautifully tended hydrangea bed, and strode back to the house. I followed, since I could sense action in the air.

He clomped through the hall into the little ballroom, past the dancers, and up to the orchestra. “Okay, you guys. Knock it off! That’s it.”

The musicians looked at him blankly.

“That’s it,” said Cohn, waving with his arms in a criss-cross fashion. “Stop playing. Play ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ for Chrissake.” When the band failed to respond, Cohn moved a step closer to them and shouted, “I’m Harry Cohn! Cut!”

The music stopped in mid-note. “As Time Goes By” went by no longer. Cohn marched out of the room in triumph.

The dancers, finally aware of the absence of music, stopped, and floated out of the room, hand in hand. The musicians began to pack up. For Harry Cohn, the splendid evening had come to a most satisfactory close. He had exercised, in a fashion, his
droit
de seigneur
. He had inhibited immorality. He felt a renewed sense of power as he settled back into his limousine and lit another cigar.

Although he was inclined to be close-fisted in his business dealings, I found Harry Cohn to be, as a rule, warmly generous in private life. I once mentioned this curious discrepancy to him.

“What’s hard to understand, you dummy? When I’m making a deal, it ain’t only
my
money. It’s the
company’s
money and the company’s money means other people’s money, but if I want to send some broad some flowers or give you some kind of a cigarette case, that’s out of my own pocket.”

At one time the fashionable gift of the year was the deep freeze. It became a symbol of petty graft and corruption, and a number of government careers were wrecked as a result of giving or taking a deep freeze. It was the newest of American common luxuries, a status symbol, a much wanted creature comfort.

My wife and I had bought a house in New York City. When Cohn heard about it, he phoned us.

“I hear you bought a house,” he said. “That’s great. Everybody should have a house. I’m gonna buy you a deep freeze to put in it.”

“Fine,” said my wife and, knowing Cohn, added, “not too big though, Harry.”

Time passed. We made room for the deep freeze in our kitchen but it did not arrive. There were a number of conferences with Cohn but the subject of the deep freeze was not mentioned.

A year or so later, we were in Hollywood and went over to Columbia to sell Cohn a story. On that particular occasion, we failed. Still, the meeting ended amiably enough. Cohn saw us to the door of his office and as we were leaving, he decided to cap the hour gaily by telling a joke.

“Say, listen,” he said. “Did you hear this one? Jessel told it to me. You’ll get a belly out of it. Listen. These two little Jews get into a rowboat, see—”

That was as far as he got. My wife turned away abruptly and disappeared.

“What’s the matter with
her
?” asked Cohn.

“Nothing,” I said. “She just doesn’t like that kind of comedy.”

“What kind of comedy? Jew comedy?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t get it,” said Cohn. “She’s not even Jewish.”

“That’s right.”

“So why should she care?”

“I don’t know, Harry. That’s how it is.”

“Well, Jesus,” he said, “you think she’s sore?”

“Probably.”

He turned back into his office and ran over to one of the windows. Looking out, he saw my wife crossing Gower Street to the parking lot. He flung open the window and shouted down.

“Ruthie! Hey,
Ruthie
!” She continued toward the parking lot. “Hey, Ruthie, listen!” She turned back for an instant. Harry cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “How big a deep freeze you want?”

Although she did not reply then or ever, a few weeks later, the best and biggest deep freeze on the market was delivered and installed in our New York house, gift of Harry Cohn.

Harry Cohn enjoyed nothing more than he did a feud, a battle or a fight. He thrived on friction, generated energy in combat. Since he was not given to compromise, he achieved his share of hostilities. There was the celebrated breakup involving his best director, Frank Capra; his long-continued swordspoint relationship with Rita Hayworth; his bitter lawsuit with Charles Vidor, and many others. Perhaps the most intense and lengthy of his wrangles was the one that involved Jean Arthur.

Jean Arthur was unique and irreplaceable. She hardly needed a part written for her since she always brought along her own enchanting personality. She was one of Columbia Pictures’ greatest assets and starred for Cohn in a brilliant series of films, including
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
,
You Can’t Take It with You
, and
Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington
.

But she and Cohn did not often see eye to eye on material. Therefore, she was frequently on suspension and relations between them deteriorated as the years passed. Early in 1941, after Jean had turned down four of the pictures Cohn had offered her, he placed her on suspension and it appeared they were permanently deadlocked.

I was in the Army at that time, having recently been drafted, and stationed in the East at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Jean and her husband, Frank Ross, were in New York for an extended stay. They were close friends, and I saw them every time I got a leave and came to New York.

From time to time, in order to strengthen his case, Harry Cohn would send Jean a script or a story or a book. She asked me to read some of this material for her. It seemed clear from the quality of the submissions that Cohn was simply going through the motions, that he would be horrified if by any chance Jean were to accept one of those scripts. Were this to occur, I believed he would find a way of pulling out.

I suggested to Jean and Frank that one way out of the dilemma would be for them to find a piece of suitable material and offer it to Cohn.

“He’d turn it down,” said Jean.

“Not if it was good,” I argued.

“But he’d never find out,” said Frank. “Because he probably wouldn’t read it.”

“But what
if
?” I insisted. “What if you offered him a shooting script for nothing? Now that’s something he couldn’t resist. He’d have to look a gift script in the mouth, just out of curiosity.”

“Maybe,” Frank agreed.

“Sure,” said Jean, “but where do we get one of those?”

“That’s the next step,” I said. “Let me think.”

We had another drink.

At Fort Monmouth, I had made a friend—a gangly charmer from California, named Robert Wallace Russell. He occupied the bunk next to mine in the Company D barracks, but for the first week or so of our proximity, we exchanged no more than a morose grunt now and again. Morale was low.

At 3:15 one morning, I awoke from a nightmare in which I had become a paratrooper who knew that when his turn came, he would not be able to jump. I did jump, however—
or was pushed—and floated down in soft terror until I landed on my cot in the Company D barracks. As I opened my eyes, I saw my bunkmate sitting on the edge of his cot, fully dressed, pressed, and carefully groomed. He simply sat, apparently thinking. It was a rare sight.

I raised myself on the elbow, squinted at him, and asked, “What’s the matter, buddy? Can’t you sleep?”

He looked back at me through his always-droopy eyes and replied, seriously, “It’s my dreams. They
bore
me.”

I knew at once we were going to be friends.

Bob had been trained in architecture; had gone to work for Walt Disney; had written fiction, plays, and screenplays; was an accomplished documentarian; and had written an impressive monograph on the subject of the dynamic screen, offering imaginative ideas for changing the size and shape of the conventional screen.

Some time later, when we were both placed on detached service to the New York headquarters of the film division of the Office for Emergency Management, we rented a small but ridiculously expensive house in New York from Miriam Hopkins—a reaction against our ghastly months in the barracks.

It occurred to me that Bob might assist in the Jean Arthur situation. I asked Frank Ross if he and Jean would be prepared to pay, say, $25,000 for that screenplay we were looking for. I was delighted when Frank agreed, since a solution of Jean’s problems might also be a solution to ours. Ours was that we were flat broke, drawing Army pay—“Twenty-one dollars a day, once a month”—and borrowing heavily.

At dinner that night, I said to Bob, “Listen, how would you like to make twenty-five thousand dollars?”

Bob chewed his lamb chop slowly and did not reply. Woolgathering, I diagnosed, and achieved his attention with a snap of my fingers in front of his nose.

“Bob!” I repeated with increased projection.

“Yuh?”

“How would you like to make twenty-five thousand dollars?”

There was another long pause during which he regarded me fretfully. Then he asked, “Would it be hard work?”

We began to root around for possible ideas. Most of his were wild and splendid, but I could not see Harry Cohn responding.

We spent many hours on this project and eventually developed something out of an idea for a play Bob had once had: a girl in an overcrowded city rents half of her apartment, for economic reasons, to an elderly gentleman. The elderly gentleman, in turn, rents half of his to an attractive young man. Now all three are sharing a single apartment. Take it from there.

A weekend trip to Washington, D.C. proved to be the catalyst for the completion of the story. Wartime Washington was the ideal city for the situation. We returned to New York and wrote, with youthful speed and laughing all the way, a screenplay that Bob titled
Two’s a Crowd
. This was delivered in due course to Jean Arthur and Frank Ross, who responded as we had hoped they would.

We could not imagine Harry Cohn turning it down, especially since he was going to get it free of charge. On the other hand, we could not imagine him, hostile as he was
toward Jean, sitting down to read a script she had submitted. He would probably toss it routinely to a reader for a swift report, and who knew where that might lead?

When I learned accidentally from a film editor at Columbia that Harry Cohn was coming to New York, an idea struck me. After discussing it with Frank and Jean and Bob, it was carried out.

Although we had never met, I phoned Harry Cohn. He took my call and could not have been more cordial—until I mentioned Jean Arthur.

“Jean Arthur!” he shouted. “Don’t talk to me about any goddamn Jean Arthurs. If they were all like her, there wouldn’t be any
pictures
. She don’t want to work, she only wants to aggravate
me
. You know how many scripts she’s turned down? In a row?”

“Seven,” I said.

“How the hell do you know that?” he asked.

“She told me.”

“She did, huh?
Nine
! She’s a liar on top of everything else. Not seven. Nine.”

“All right,” I said. “Nine. I’ll tell her.”

“Don’t tell her. Stay out of this. Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Well, look, Mr. Cohn. I’m just trying to—”

“Harry,” he said firmly. “Not Mr. Cohn. Harry. Call me Harry. You’re not that young and I’m not that old.”

“All right, Harry. Listen. A friend of mine—terrific writer—and I have written a screenplay, and we’ve sold it to Jean.”

“Are you nuts?” he shouted. “Sold it to
Jean
! Who’s Jean? What
is
she? A studio? A producer? What’s she going to do with it? Sit on it? She can’t work for nobody, any place—except for me. What the hell is
she
going to do with a screenplay?”