The 40s: The Story of a Decade (51 page)

Later, after a prolonged discussion of Charles Boyer’s acting, Charles Boyer’s reading habits, and Charles Boyer’s intelligence, someone said that Charles Boyer, together with several hundred other stars, had signed a statement protesting that the Thomas Committee investigation was unfair and prejudiced.

“What about that, Peter?” Greene asked. “A lot of people in your business feel that a man’s politics has nothing to do with his work in pictures. Why, Scott and Dmytryk made
Crossfire
for you on a shoestring—five hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. Took them twenty-two days. You’ll gross three million on that picture. For heaven’s sakes, why
fire
the men?”

“I sure hated to lose those boys,” Rathvon said miserably. “Brilliant craftsmen, both of them. It’s just that their usefulness to the studio is at an end. Would you like to go out on the terrace and look down on the lights of Hollywood?” Everyone said yes, and we all went out on the terrace to look down on the lights of Hollywood.

On our way home, Greene said that his social evenings were becoming more and more of a strain. “Everyone spends the night looking at those goddam lights,” he said unhappily. “I think I’ll go to Lady Mendl’s tomorrow.”

· · ·

The Screen Writers Guild a while back voted to intervene as
amicus curiae
in the civil suits that five of the ten blacklisted men have brought against their studios for breaking their contracts. It also decided to
decline an invitation of the Association of Motion Picture Producers to cooperate in eliminating subversives from the studios. The Guild agreed, in addition, to oppose the blacklisting of writers because of their political views, as long as those views do not violate the law. On the other hand, the Guild turned down a proposal by some of its members to give financial and public-relations support to the ten men in their trials for contempt. The Motion Picture Association of America, which voted with the Producers’ Association to blacklist the ten men and not to employ or re-employ any one of them until he is acquitted of contempt of Congress or swears that he is not a Communist, not long ago addressed a communication to Adrian Scott, one of the ten. From it, Scott, who had then been out of work about two weeks, learned that the 1947 Humanitarian Award of the Golden Slipper Square Club, a philanthropic organization in Philadelphia, had been given to Dore Schary, R.K.O.’s executive vice-president in charge of production, for having made, among other pictures,
Crossfire
, which Scott produced and Dmytryk directed. According to an inscription on the award, it was made for Schary’s “contribution to good citizenship and understanding among men of all religions, races, creeds, and national origins.” The award was accepted for Schary by Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, who told the Philadelphians, “In Hollywood, it’s ability that counts.… Hollywood has held open the door of opportunity to every man and woman who could meet its technical and artistic standards, regardless of racial background or religious belief.” “We’re not supposed to be useful any more because they say the public has lost confidence in us,” one of the ten blacklisted men said to me. “But they’re not withdrawing any of the pictures we worked on. Ring Lardner’s name is thrown on the screen in front of the public seeing
Forever Amber.
Lester Cole’s name is up there on
High Wall.
If the public has confidence in these pictures, the public still has confidence in us.”

An exceedingly active Hollywood agent, a woman, claims that since the start of the Congressional investigation the studios have been calling for light domestic comedies and have been turning down scripts with serious themes. “You might say the popular phrase out here now is ‘Nothing on the downbeat,’ ” she said. “Up until a few months ago, it was ‘Nothing sordid.’ ” The difference between “Nothing sordid” and “Nothing on the downbeat,” she explained, is like the difference between light domestic comedy and
lighter
domestic comedy. After the investigation got under way, the industry called in Dr. George Gallup to take a public
poll for the studios. Dr. Gallup has now submitted figures showing that 71 percent of the nation’s moviegoers have heard of the Congressional investigation, and that of this number 51 percent think it was a good idea, 27 percent think not, and 22 percent have no opinion. Three percent of the 51 percent approving of the investigation feel that Hollywood is overrun with Communism. The studio executives are now preparing a campaign to convince this splinter 3 percent, and the almost as bothersome 97 percent of the 51 percent, that there is no Communism in the industry. There is some disagreement about whether the industry should tackle the unopinionated 22 percent or leave it alone.

In the midst of the current preoccupation with public opinion, many stars are afraid that the public may have got a very wrong impression about them because of having seen them portray, say, a legendary hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor, or an honest, crusading district attorney, or a lonely, poetic, antisocial gangster. “We’ve got to resolve any conflicts between what we are and what the public has been led to believe we are,” one actor told me. “We can’t afford to have people think we’re a bunch of strong men or crusaders.” At the Warner Brothers studio, some time ago, I accepted a publicity representative’s invitation to watch the shooting of a scene in
Don Juan
, a Technicolor reworking of the
Don Juan
made in 1926 with John Barrymore. Filming of the production has since been called off, owing to the illness of the star, Errol Flynn, but he was still in good health the day I was there. “I want you to meet Errol,” said the publicity representative. “Just don’t discuss anything serious with him—politics, I mean.” Being a publicity man out here seems to have taken on some of the aspects of a lawyer’s and an intelligence agent’s duties and responsibilities. Studio visitors who are suspected of having ways of communicating with the public are always accompanied by a publicity man, or even two publicity men. The present-day importance of the publicity man is indicated by the fact that a member of the trade at M-G-M now occupies the office of the late Irving Thalberg, Thalberg still being to Hollywood what Peter the Great still is to Russia. I asked Flynn, who stood glittering in royal-blue tights and jerkin, golden boots, and a golden sword, how his version of
Don Juan
compared with Barrymore’s. “That’s like comparing two grades of cheese,” he said moodily. “The older is probably the better. But I’m trying to make my Don Juan as human as possible. Jack’s was a tough Don Juan. Mine is human. The script calls for one of the Spanish nobles to tell me that Spain is going to war. ‘You’re not afraid?’ he asks me. ‘Yes, I
am afraid!’ I reply. I added that line to the script myself. I don’t want to be heroic. This picture is definitely non-subversive.”

A Paramount man informed me that he had the perfect solution for both the split-personality problem and the Thomas Committee problem. “Make your pictures more of a mish-mosh than ever!” he said, glowing all over with health, well-being, and the resolution of a man who has at last found inner calmness. “
Confuse
the enemy—that’s my technique. Confuse them all!” He has apparently confided his formula to Ray Milland, a Paramount actor whom I came across while he was working on
Sealed Verdict.
“My picture is politically significant,” Mr. Milland said to me. (Paramount publicity men, like the Warner men, warn visitors not to discuss politics with stars, but Mr. Milland brought up the subject himself.) “This is a picture about political justice,” Milland went on. “I play Major Robert Lawson, a brilliant young American prosecutor in the American-occupied zone of Germany, where I am closing my case against six Nazi war criminals, including General Otto Steigmann, whose war crimes against humanity were most revolting. I get Steigmann condemned to death by hanging, and then I am visited by a beautiful French model named Themis Delisle, and I fall in love with her. No, first Themis Delisle tells me that Steigmann is innocent,
then
I fall in love with her. My young aide, Private Clay Hockland, has been having an affair with a seventeen-year-old German girl, who is pregnant and shoots Private Hockland and then becomes seriously ill, although Private Hockland is also seriously ill after the
Fräulein
shoots him.” Milland was interrupted by a man who wanted to comb his hair. “Later,” Milland said to him, and firmly continued telling me about Private Hockland’s death, the assorted difficulties of the ladies in the cast, and the problem of getting penicillin in the black market for the
Fräulein.
He was interrupted periodically by the man who wanted to comb his hair, but he proceeded unswervingly to a castle, for the hanging of General Steigmann. “I tell the General his mother has snitched on him,” Milland said, “but he boasts that Hitlerite Germany will rise again. I knock him to the floor and take a vial of poison from a scar on his cheek, for Themis Delisle has revealed his last and most dramatic secret. Steigmann confesses his guilt, and Themis returns to France to defend herself, but she leaves with the promise that a certain brilliant young American lawyer—me—will be fighting on her team.” Milland beckoned to the man with the comb. “Now,” he concluded belligerently, “I’d like to see the Thomas Committee find anything in
that.
”

· · ·

Walter Wanger, head of Walter Wanger Pictures, Inc., maintains that the public has an unjustifiably poor opinion of Hollywood, and one day, trailing the inevitable publicity man, he took me to his studio commissary to tell me about the progress the industry has made since he got into it, twenty-five years ago. “In those days, we couldn’t even have an unhappy ending,” he said. “Today, pictures are different. Pictures have made great and wonderful contributions to the country and to the world.” Wanger ordered coffee. Then he said that pictures had helped raise our standard of living, had encouraged understanding among men, and had, because of their merit and integrity, contributed to social progress. Wanger drank his coffee. I mentioned the last two Wanger pictures I had seen—
Arabian Nights
(love in a Bagdad harem) and
Canyon Passage
(Technicolor on the prairie). “I made those pictures because I wanted to be a success,” Wanger replied. “If you want to stay in this business, if you want to make pictures that contribute to the country’s welfare, you’ve got to make pictures that make money.”

Some producers express the interesting point of view that there are no Communistic pictures, that there are only good pictures and bad pictures, and that most bad pictures are bad because writers write bad stories. “Writers don’t apply themselves,” I was informed by Jerry Wald, a thirty-six-year-old Warner Brothers producer, customarily described as a dynamo, who boasts that he makes twelve times as many pictures as the average producer in Hollywood. “Anatole France never sat down and said, ‘Now, what did a guy write last year that I can copy this year?’ ” Wald assured me. “The trouble with pictures is they’re cold. Pictures got to have emotion. You get emotion by doing stories on the temper of the times.” The Congressional investigation, he said, would have no effect on his plans for this year’s pictures on the temper of the times. These will include one on good government (with Ronald Reagan), another about underpaid schoolteachers (with Joan Crawford), and an adaptation and modernization of Maxwell Anderson’s
Key Largo
(with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore). “Bogart plays an ejected liberal,” Wald said, “a disillusioned soldier who says nothing is worth fighting for, until he learns there’s a point where every guy must fight against evil.” Bogart, who two or three months before had announced that his trip to Washington to protest against the methods of the Thomas Committee hearings had
been a mistake, was very eager, Wald said, to play the part of an ejected liberal.

At Wald’s suggestion, I had lunch one day with several members of the
Key Largo
cast, its director, John Huston, and a publicity representative at the Lakeside Golf Club, a favorite buffet-style eating place of stars on the nearby Warner lot. The actors were in a gay mood. They had just finished rehearsing a scene (one of the new economies at Warner is to have a week of rehearsals before starting to film a picture) in which Bogart is taunted by Robinson, a gangster representing evil, for his cowardice, but is comforted by the gangster’s moll, who tells Bogart, “Never mind. It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.” Bogart had not yet reached the point where a guy learns he must fight against evil. Huston was feeling particularly good, because he had just won a battle with the studio to keep in the film some lines from Franklin Roosevelt’s message to the Seventy-seventh Congress on January 6, 1942: “But we of the United Nations are not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last world war.”

“The big shots wanted Bogie to say this in his own words,” Huston explained, “but I insisted that Roosevelt’s words were better.”

Bogart nodded. “Roosevelt was a good politician,” he said. “He could handle those babies in Washington, but they’re too smart for guys like me. Hell, I’m no politician. That’s what I meant when I said our Washington trip was a mistake.”

“Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician,” said Huston, who went to Washington with him. “Bogie owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide for her upkeep.”

“The Great Chief died and everybody’s guts died with him,” Robinson said, looking stern.

“How would you like to see
your
picture on the front page of the Communist paper of Italy?” asked Bogart.

“Nyah,” Robinson said, sneering.

“The
Daily Worker
runs Bogie’s picture and right away he’s a dangerous Communist,” said Miss Bacall, who is, as everybody must know, Bogart’s wife. “What will happen if the American Legion and the Legion of Decency boycott all his pictures?”

“It’s just that my picture in the
Daily Worker
offends me, Baby,” said Bogart.