City of Nets Read online

  Dedication

  To Liesel and Molly

  Epigraph

  People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. . . .

  —ADAM SMITH

  Every morning, to earn my bread,

  I go to the market where lies are bought.

  Hopefully

  I take up my place among the sellers.

  —BERTOLT BRECHT

  It is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths.

  —FORD MADOX FORD

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 - Welcome (1939)

  2 - Ingatherings (1940)

  3 - Treachery (1941)

  4 - Americanism (1942)

  5 - Prejudice (1943)

  6 - Reunions (1944)

  7 - Breakdowns (1945)

  8 - Treachery (1946)

  9 - Un-Americanism (1947)

  10 - Prejudice (1948)

  11 - Expulsions (1949)

  12 - Farewells (1950)

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Otto Friedrich

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  * A page of photographs introduces each chapter

  FOREWORD

  Glen David Gold

  I was born in Hollywood in 1964 at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Although intended for civilians, Cedars was funded by industry titans Will Rogers, Joseph Schenck, and Jack Warner back in the 1920’s. Apparently my birth was made a little easier by a fund-raising campaign started by Al Jolson, who was specifically interested in expanding the maternity ward. The man had a lifelong thing for the word mammy, it turns out.

  Marilyn Monroe had her appendix out there, and soon after, the slightly spoiled patient Elizabeth Taylor ate meals sent to her from Chasen’s while being serenaded by violinists hired by Richard Burton.

  Later, courtesy of a check from Max Factor, Cedars moved west, where it expanded to include the Burns and Allen Research Institute. My old birthplace became the Church of Scientology, the emergency entrance located on a cross street now called L. Ron Hubbard Way. See, in Hollywood, even where you’re born is part of the cult of celebrity. The town’s urban history is indistinguishable from the visions generated by the power of movies. I was born into City of Nets.

  Little else has been written about cinema that’s like Friedrich’s classic book. Assured, scholarly, gossipy, omniscient, intimate, Dickens filtered through Kevin Starr, Friedrich knew exactly when to take the trivial seriously and vice versa. The narrative isn’t easily described except as that Trojan horse “it’s about Hollywood in the 1940’s.” It’s so much more than that—it’s a genuine epic in the sense of its being a creation myth, with sex and violence and humor and, above all else, resonance. You can’t read this book without seeing the hidden rooms of the 1940’s that gave us the culture we have today, Cedars of Lebanon included.

  I cannot wait for you to read about Brecht writing musicals for M-G-M. Or the tragedy of Gene Tierney and the Hollywood Canteen. Or Jack Warner collecting for the United Jewish Appeal with a rubber truncheon. Those are little moments in a much larger opera about the strange relationships among reality and art and desire and fear. In these pages I learned that America became America because Hollywood led it to its future, taking its hand in the dark, the smell of popcorn in the air, palm trees fifty feet tall on the screen, the promise of a pretty girl’s kiss yet to come, all seduction and all as real as light penetrating celluloid.

  But that’s big-screen stuff. Now, as movies are once again under siege, this time not from television but from what we’re now calling digital media, we can turn to Friedrich to help us figure out what’s next—no doubt something transformative and greedy and hilarious and strange. We know the past isn’t dead. But thanks to City of Nets, Ronald Reagan is eternally bedridden and delirious before a grim Knute Rockne, Sunset Boulevard is always a grimy thrill, and the fire just about to consume the city, the match that’s been waiting to ignite since Nathanael West struck the tinder in 1939, is still waiting for the perfect light.

  Glen David Gold is the author of the novels Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil.

  Introduction

  In 1939, the year of Gone With the Wind, of Ninotchka, of Wuthering Heights and The Wizard of Oz, the leading moviemakers of Hollywood could with some justification regard themselves as conquering heroes. The assorted film studios, which really produced nothing but a series of flickering images, had by now become the nation’s eleventh-largest industry. They created some four hundred new movies every year, attracted more than fifty million Americans to the theater every week, and grossed nearly $700 million annually. Just a decade later, Hollywood was in a shambles, its biggest studios losing money, its celebrities embroiled in charges of Communist influence, its audiences turning to television. And a community that had once taken in newcomers as diverse as William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, and Thomas Mann now drove away anyone who disturbed its conventions or aroused its fears—away with Charlie Chaplin, Ingrid Bergman, Orson Welles.

  This is the story, then, of a great empire built out of dreams of glamour, dreams of beauty, wealth, and success, and of that empire’s sudden decline and fall. It is a social and cultural history of Hollywood during the decade of upheaval from the start of World War II to the start of the Korean War. Some marvelous movies were created during these years: Citizen Kane, for example, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, All About Eve. And not only movies; Mann’s Doctor Faustus was written here, and so was Brecht’s Galileo, Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress. And then, scarcely ten years after David Selznick had triumphantly opened Gone With the Wind, he was walking along a deserted street at dawn and saying to a companion, “Hollywood’s like Egypt. Full of crumbling pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.”

  Hollywood has survived, of course, but everything has changed since the decay of the great studios. Filmmaking is taught in universities now, and the white-haired survivors of the golden age are cajoled into telling their stories to young interviewers with tape recorders. Is this book then just another exercise in nostalgia? No, I would like to try something quite different, starting with an unorthodox new rule: No more interviews. Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been interrogated over and over again. And in no other field of history, not in Hitler’s Berlin or in Roosevelt’s Washington, have so many interviews grown into so many ghost-written autobiographies. These works include not only major figures like Chaplin or DeMille but even such ephemeral talents as Jackie Cooper and Veronica Lake. In other cases—Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles, for example, or Mel Gussow’s life of Darryl F. Zanuck—a favored biographer has been granted such extensive interviews that the result is just as authoritative, for better or for worse, as an autobiography. All in all, just about everybody has spoken.

  What is needed now, I think, is not more tape-recorded interrogations but rather a new effort to synthesize what has already been said, to combine, to interpret, to analyze, to understand. I have read about five hundred books on Hollywood, ranging from scholarly studies of the Holocaust in films to exhaustive analyses of Raymond Chandler’s screenplays to the lubricio
us memoirs of Hedy Lamarr, which she has formally denied writing, dictating, or confessing. The most remarkable aspect of all these books is how isolated from one another they all are.

  Survivors of the 1940’s freely recall that Paramount writers generally talked only to other Paramount writers, and that a $500-per-week writer would not be welcome at a party given by a $1,500-per-week writer. As this self-segregation of the 1940’s becomes ossified in the memoirs of the 1970’s and 1980’s, it seems astonishing that Billy Wilder, say, and Igor Stravinsky—and, yes, the future President Ronald Reagan—were hardly aware of each other’s existence. “The only way to avoid Hollywood,” Stravinsky once remarked, “is to live there.”

  Hollywood really is an imaginary city that exists in the mind of anyone who has, in his mind, lived there. My Hollywood is different from your Hollywood, just as it is different from Rex Reed’s Hollywood or Aljean Harmetz’s Hollywood, not because they know more about Hollywood than you or I do but because they are different from us, just as we are different from each other.

  We are different in time, for one thing. I lived in the Hollywood of the 1940’s when I was a student outside Boston and went to the movies two or three times a week. I loved Ingrid Bergman above all others, but I also loved such half-forgotten people as Betty Hutton and Ida Lupino, even Diana Lynn. I know and care much less about the 1950’s and 1960’s because I spent those years raising five children, too poor to go to movies.

  No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one’s own mental furniture along. In the 1940’s, I cared passionately about sports. That’s why tears came to my eyes at the death of Ronald Reagan as George Gipp. The war was very important too, and so was Hollywood’s version of it—Robert Taylor defending Bataan, Humphrey Bogart steaming across the North Atlantic, Errol Flynn conquering Burma, all that. Like Reagan himself, I still feel a tightening of the throat at seeing the death of the Gipper, but I really don’t care very much about football anymore, and I dislike military heroics.

  So the Hollywood that I have been inhabiting once again for the last few years is not only different from anyone else’s Hollywood but different even from the Hollywood that I myself inhabited when I was young. Bertolt Brecht, whom I had never heard of when I admired George Gipp, now seems a far more interesting character than many big stars like, say, Cary Grant or Betty Grable. So Brecht plays a fairly large part in my re-creation of Hollywood in the 1940’s, while Grant and Miss Grable play almost none. It is astonishing to me, in fact, how a book of this large size could leave out so much about so many celebrities. There is very little here about Jimmy Stewart, for example, or Tyrone Power, or Spencer Tracy. These are all commendable people, but I find that actors seem to me less interesting than writers, gangsters, musicians, tycoons, and sex goddesses. And since Hollywood produced about five thousand movies during the 1940’s, one can pick and choose what to write about. Indeed, one must.

  There remains a basic question about the mountain of Hollywood’s reminiscences: Are they true? Well, perhaps partly true. Remember that Hollywood people lived and still live in a world of fantasy, and they are accustomed to making things up, to fibbing and exaggerating, and to believing all their own fibs and exaggerations. Remember, too, that they all had press agents who made things up, and that fan-magazine writers made things up, and that ghostwriters still make things up, and that the celebrities who sign these concoctions no longer remember very well what really happened long ago. In a few cases, I have offered several contradictory versions of some much-told tale. If the late Jack Warner and the late Darryl Zanuck both claimed to be the one who found William Faulkner working at home in Mississippi rather than at home in Beverly Hills, for example, who am I to decide which one was right? And if all this is true of the printed word, must it not be equally true of the improvised interview?

  But if all the details in this book have already been published somewhere or other, then what is new in this portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s? Why, the portrait itself. If you already know a lot about Rita Hayworth, you may not know a great deal about Arnold Schoenberg, or vice versa, and if you know a lot about both of them, you may not know a great deal about Bugsy Siegel, or the aircraft industry, or Herbert K. Sorrell. And even if you know a lot about President Reagan, you may not know a great deal about how he got to be what he is today. Or how, in many ways, we ourselves got to be what we are. This is a portrait of a special place in a special time—an imaginary city, as I have suggested—and yet it was the dream factory of the 1940’s that created much of what Americans today regard as reality.

  Fire: Nathanael West (top) imagined a painted “Burning of Los Angeles.” David Selznick set Atlanta ablaze in Gone With the Wind.

  1

  Welcome

  (1939)

  TO THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS, says the sign. The arrow points off toward the right, where a corridor of darkness leads to the glowing irons of the Inquisition, but what the arrow actually announces is a nearby tableau entitled “The Great Presidents.”* George Washington stands proudly aloof in his Continental blue uniform, Lincoln sits reflective, and the others display various attitudes of official interest. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Hoover, Coolidge—the creators of the Hollywood Waxworks Museum have odd ideas about which Presidents are great. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not here, but a special spotlight on the right bathes Richard Nixon in a sepulchral glow. He looks embalmed.

  In the foreground, at the center of this presidential assembly, propped up at a speaker’s rostrum ornamented with the White House seal, stands the exemplar of Hollywood and of all southern California, the winsome cowboy with the rueful grin. Ronald Reagan’s waxen face (waxworks nowadays are actually made of noninflammable vinyl plastisol) wears an expression of amiable bewilderment. He has been outfitted in a dark blue suit, a white shirt with a collar that looks somewhat too large for him, and a rather muddy striped tie. Life may seem difficult, but the plastic Ronald Reagan stands monumental behind the presidential seal, staring bravely out into the darkness.

  “Welcome to Madame Tussaud’s Hollywood Wax Museum,” says the recorded voice across the aisle, emerging from a murky tableau of Queen Victoria and Madame Tussaud herself. Since this is Hollywood, though, the nearby corridor is lined with niches devoted to the movie industry’s official gods and goddesses. Here is Tyrone Power, as the young matador in Blood and Sand, about to stab an onrushing bull. Here is Clark Gable in evening dress, looking knowingly at Carole Lombard, and Charlie Chaplin in the ruins of a tuxedo, looking imploringly at Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino in the robes of The Sheik, looking soulfully into thin air. The image of the desert seems to inspire in southern California a sense partly of recognition and partly of yearning. Here is a luscious mannequin of Hedy Lamarr as Tondelayo in White Cargo, lolling in a tent on an implausible white fur rug. She wears a pink orchid over one ear and several strings of brown wooden beads around her neck, and then nothing else down to her flowery pink skirt.

  No city west of Boston has a more intensely commercial sense of its own past, and yet that sense keeps becoming blurred and distorted in Hollywood. Not only do the decades vaguely intermingle, so that Harold Lloyd dissolves into the young Woody Allen, but the various forms of entertainment also merge. Any pilgrim arriving in the movie capital is shown the newest shrines of television and rock music, as though they were all the same. The Hollywood Waxworks Museum understands. Just beyond the rather feral figure of the young Shirley Temple, in white lace, the visitor confronts “An Evening with Elvis Presley.” In the half-darkness, the strains of “Hello, Dolly” fade into those of “Love Me Tender,” and the king of country singers can be observed entertaining Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor. Behind this incongruous gathering stands a mysterious row of six costumed footmen, all in eighteenth-century wigs, all holding up candelabra to illuminate Presley’s soirée.

  The waxworks commentary on Hollywood seems at ti
mes to go beyond the frontiers of incongruity into the realms of chaos. It is possible to smile at the juxtaposition of Charlton Heston bearing the sacred tablets down from Sinai and a panoramic re-creation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, but why is Anthony Quinn standing next to Charles de Gaulle? And why, in this central group, which is dominated by the Beatles but also includes Sophia Loren, Amelia Earhart, and Thomas Alva Edison—why should the figure between Paul McCartney and Jeanette MacDonald be that of Joseph Stalin? One reason may be that there used to be a tableau of the Allied leaders at Yalta, created perhaps for some other waxworks museum somewhere else, and then, according to the portly Mexican who takes tickets at the door, there was a fire here a few years ago, and things have been moved around a bit. Things are always being moved around a bit in Hollywood. “False fronts!” Nicholas Schenck once cried during a guided tour of the outdoor sets at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which Schenck, as president of Loew’s, Inc., theoretically ruled, owned, commanded. “False fronts! Nothing behind them. They are like Hollywood people.”

  Outside the waxworks museum, which sprouts between Jack’s Pipe Shop and the Snow White Coffee Shop, the California sun beats down on the peculiar black sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. Relentless sun, the image of fire and destruction. The sidewalks are not entirely black, for the local authorities have embedded in every other panel a gold-edged metal star filled with crushed pink stone. Within each star, they have inscribed one golden name. There are no explanations or definitions of these multitudinous names (more than 1,775 in all). Since they are all here, they must all be famous. As one strolls westward along Hollywood Boulevard, one treads on a remarkably diverse cast of characters: Charles Chaplin, Ken Maynard, Ilka Chase, Richard Barthelmess, Joseph Schenck, Lee Strasberg, Ingrid Bergman, Red Skelton, Robert Merrill, Eddie Cantor, Marie Wilson, Bing Crosby, Milton Berle, Vivien Leigh, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Kirsten Flagstad, Bessie Love, Jascha Heifetz, Judy Canova. . . .