The 40s: The Story of a Decade (52 page)

“Nyah,” said Robinson.

“Let’s eat,” said Huston.

After a while, Bogart began to complain about the iron curtain that separates the stars from the public. “There’s only four rips,” he said glumly, “four outlets through the iron curtain—Louella, Hedda, Jimmy, and Sheilah Graham. What can a guy do with only four rips?”

“Nyah,” said Robinson.

Hollywood has various ideas about what the iron curtain is and where it is. Twentieth Century–Fox is making a picture called
The Iron Curtain
—about Communist spies’ stealing atomic-bomb secrets in Canada—around which there is an iron curtain keeping visitors from everyone and everything connected with the picture. A Los Angeles newspaperman tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate it. He was investigated by a man from Twentieth Century–Fox. A lady named Margaret Ettinger, who is generally credited with being “everybody’s press agent” and who handles vaseline, diamonds, and Atwater Kent as well as many movie and radio stars, says there is an iron curtain around Louella Parsons. “Louella is my cousin, but I have a tougher time breaking into her column than into Hedda’s,” she says. Sheilah Graham, whose syndicated column appears locally in the Hollywood
Citizen-News
, in writing a few weeks ago about a certain star’s red sweater and a certain singer’s flashy red car, remarked that the color was still popular in Hollywood. The newspaper received a lot of letters calling Miss Graham a Communist. One of them suggested that an iron curtain be set up around
her.

· · ·

A few weeks ago, many people in Hollywood received through the mails a booklet called “Screen Guide for Americans,” published by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and containing a list of “Do”s and “Don’t”s. “This is the raw iron from which a new curtain around Hollywood will be fashioned,” one man assured me solemnly. “This is the first step—not to fire people, not to get publicity, not to clean Communism out of motion pictures but to rigidly control all the contents of all pictures for Right Wing political purposes.” The Motion Picture Association of America has not yet publicly adopted the “Screen Guide for Americans” in place of its own “A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures,” which advances such tenets as “The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment” and “The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.” Although it is by no means
certain that the industry has got around to following these old rules, either to the letter or in the spirit, there is a suspicion that it may have already begun at least to paraphrase some of the “Screen Guide’s” pronouncements, which appear under such headings as “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System,” “Don’t Deify the ‘Common Man,’ ” “Don’t Glorify the Collective,” “Don’t Glorify Failure,” “Don’t Smear Success,” and “Don’t Smear Industrialists.” “All too often, industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers, or exploiters,” the “Guide” observes. “It is the
moral
(no, not just political but
moral
) duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.” Another admonition reads, “Don’t give to your characters—as a sign of villainy, as a damning characteristic—a desire to make money.” And another, “Don’t permit any disparagement or defamation of personal success. It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.” The booklet warns, “Don’t tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an
American
kind of man, for a change.” The “Guide” instructs people in the industry, “Don’t let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler and Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin, and Edison.” Still another of the “Don’t”s says, “Don’t ever use any lines about ‘the common man’ or ‘the little people.’ It is not the American idea to be either ‘common’ or ‘little.’ ” This despite the fact that Eric Johnston, testifying before the Thomas Committee, said, “Most of us in America are just little people, and loose charges can hurt little people.” And one powerful man here has said to me, “We’re not going to pay any attention to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. We
like
to talk about ‘the little people’ in this business.”

I was given a copy of “Screen Guide for Americans” by Mrs. Lela Rogers, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Mrs. Rogers, the mother of Ginger, is a pretty, blond-haired lady with a vibrant, birdlike manner. “A lot of people who work in pictures wouldn’t know Communism if they saw it,” she said to me. “You think that a Communist is a man with a bushy beard. He’s not. He’s an American, and he’s pretty, too.” The Congressional investigation of Hollywood, Mrs. Rogers thinks, will result in better
pictures and the victory of the Republican Party in the next election. “Last month, I spoke about Communism at a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner given by the Republican Party,” she said. “My goodness, I amassed a lot of money for the campaign. Now I have more speaking engagements than I can possibly fulfill.” Mrs. Rogers is also writing screen plays. I wanted to know if she was following the “Do”s and “Don’t”s of the “Screen Guide for Americans.” “You just bet I am,” she said. “My friend Ayn Rand wrote it, and sticking to it is easy as pie. I’ve just finished a shooting script about a man who learns how to live after he is dead.”

Other people in the industry admit that they are following the “Guide” in scripts about the living. One man who is doing that assured me that he nevertheless doesn’t need it, that it offers him nothing he didn’t already know. “This is new only to the youngsters out here,” he said. “They haven’t had their profound intentions knocked out of them yet, or else they’re still earning under five hundred a week. As soon as you become adjusted in this business, you don’t need the ‘Screen Guide’ to tell you what to do.” A studio executive in charge of reading scripts believes that Hollywood has a new kind of self-censorship. “It’s automatic, like shifting gears,” he explained. “I now read scripts through the eyes of the D.A.R., whereas formerly I read them through the eyes of my boss. Why, I suddenly find myself beating my breast and proclaiming my patriotism and exclaiming that I love my wife and kids, of which I have four, with a fifth on the way. I’m all loused up. I’m scared to death, and nobody can tell me it isn’t because I’m afraid of being investigated.”

William Wyler, who directed the Academy Award picture
The Best Years of Our Lives
, told me he is convinced that he could not make that picture today and that Hollywood will produce no more films like
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Crossfire.
“In a few months, we won’t be able to have a heavy who is an American,” he said. The scarcity of roles for villains has become a serious problem, particularly at studios specializing in Western pictures, where writers are being harried for not thinking up any new ones. “Can I help it if we’re running out of villains?” a writer at one of these studios asked me. “For years I’ve been writing scripts about a Boy Scout–type cowboy in love with a girl. Their fortune and happiness are threatened by a banker holding a mortgage over their heads, or by a big landowner, or by a crooked sheriff. Now they tell me that bankers are out. Anyone holding a mortgage is out. Crooked public officials are out. All I’ve got left is a cattle rustler. What the hell am I going to do with a cattle rustler?”

Hollywood’s current hypersensitivity has created problems more subtle than the shortage of heavies.
Treasure of Sierra Madre
, a film about prospecting for gold, was to have begun and ended with the subtitle “Gold, Mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” The line is spoken by Walter Huston in the course of the picture. John Huston, who directed it, says that he couldn’t persuade the studio to let the line appear on the screen. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor,’ ” he told me. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “You can sneak it onto the sound track now and then, though.” At a preview, in Hartford, Connecticut, of
Arch of Triumph
, attended by its director, Lewis Milestone, and by Charles Einfield, president of Enterprise Productions, which brought it out, the manager of the theatre asked Einfield whether it was necessary to use the word “refugees” so often in the picture. “All the way back to New York,” says Milestone, “Charlie kept muttering, ‘Maybe we mention the word “refugees” too many times?’ ‘But the picture is
about
refugees,’ I told him. ‘What can we do now? Make a new picture?’ ”

A Msgr. Devlin, the Western representative of the Legion of Decency, has been on the set of
Joan of Arc
, which is being produced by Walter Wanger and stars Ingrid Bergman, since production started, and the services of a Father Doncoeur, of France, were enlisted shortly afterward. The director, Victor Fleming, who directed
Gone with the Wind
, said to me, “We’ve worked very closely with the Catholic Church, doing it the way they want it done. We want to be sure all these artists don’t get a bum steer.” I watched the shooting of a scene in which Miss Bergman, supposedly dying, lay on a prison bed of straw. The Bishop and the Earl of Warwick, her captors, leaned over her, and the Earl said, “She must not be allowed to die. Our King has paid too much for this sorceress to allow her to slip through our fingers.” “Cut!” Fleming shouted. “Say that as if you
mean
it,” he went on frantically. “She’s
valuable property
! She must not be allowed to
die
! We have to finish the picture with her! This picture is costing three million dollars! Put more
feeling
into it! She must not be allowed to
die
, goddammit!” Just before the cameras were started up again, Fleming remarked, “
Gone with the Wind
was more fun than this. It cost about a million and a half more than
Joan.
” Everything, apparently, used to be more fun.

· · ·

Most producers stick firmly to the line that there is no Communism whatever in the industry and that there are no Communistic pictures. “We’re going to make any kind of pictures we like, and nobody is going to tell us what to do,” I was informed by Dore Schary, the R.K.O. vice-president and winner of the Golden Slipper Square Club’s Humanitarian Award. He is a soft-spoken, unpretentious, troubled-looking man in his early forties, who might be regarded as one of Miss Hussey’s “modern covered-wagon folks.” In sixteen years, Schary pioneered from a $100-a-week job as a junior writer to his present position, which brings him around $500,000 a year. When he testified before the Thomas Committee, he said that R.K.O. would hire anyone it chose, solely on the basis of his talent, who had not been proved to be subversive. The R.K.O. Board of Directors met soon afterward and voted not to hire any known Communists. Schary then voted, like the other producers, to blacklist the ten men because they had been cited for contempt. He is talked about a good deal in Hollywood. Many of his colleagues are frequently critical of the course he has taken, and yet they understand why he has done what he’s done. “I was faced with the alternative of supporting the stand taken by my company or of quitting my job,” Schary told me. “I don’t believe you should quit under fire. Anyway, I like making pictures. I want to stay in the industry. I like it.” Schary is one of the few Hollywood executives who will talk to visitors without having a publicity man sit in on the conversation. “The great issue would have been joined if the ten men had only stood up and said whether or not they were Communists,” he continued. “That’s all they had to do. As it is, ten men have been hurt and nobody can be happy. We haven’t done any work in weeks. Now is the time for all of us to go back to the business of making pictures, good pictures, in favor of anything we please.” I asked Schary what he was planning to make this year. “I will assemble a list,” he said. He assembled the following out of his memory, and I wrote them down:
Honored Glory
(in favor of honoring nine unknown soldiers),
Weep No More
(in favor of law and order),
Evening in Modesto
(also in favor of law and order),
The Boy with Green Hair
(in favor of peace),
Education of a Heart
(in favor of professional football),
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
(in favor of Cary Grant),
The Captain Was a Lady
(in favor of Yankee clipper ships),
Baltimore Escapade
(in favor of a Protestant minister and his family having fun).

“Committee or no Committee,” Schary said, “we’re going to make all these pictures exactly the way we made pictures before.”