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  Bioff described his encounters in more amiable terms. “He don’t eat no lunch, he eats an apple,” he said of Nick Schenck. “I had an apple with him.” Bioff told his bizarre tale about borrowing money from Joe Schenck to buy an alfalfa farm, and then he was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. His nominal boss, the pitiful George Browne, who did not testify at all, was sentenced to eight. Once Bioff had been consigned to Alcatraz, he decided in 1943 that he wanted to testify more fully about his activities. He told for the first time of the fortune he had been forced to pay to Frank Nitti and Nitti’s associates in Chicago. Delighted federal prosecutors duly indicted Nitti and five of his peculiarly named lieutenants: Paul “The Waiter” de Lucia, Phil “The Squire” D’Andrea, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, and Frank “The Immune” Maritone. On the day the indictments were handed down, a drunken man clutching a bottle was seen reeling alongside some railroad tracks at Riverside, near Chicago. Several people called out to him, jeering. The drunken man pulled out a pistol and fired wildly at them. Then he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. That was the end of Frank Nitti, “The Enforcer.”

  Bioff was a star witness against Nitti’s friends. He admitted under cross-examination that he had “lied and lied and lied” in his previous court appearances, but he declared that the outbreak of war had greatly affected him. It was solely to join the fight against the Axis, he said, that he had petitioned for his release from prison. The assorted gangsters whom he accused were duly convicted and sentenced to ten years each. Bioff and Browne were paroled after three years of their sentences. Joe Schenck served four months and five days, then received a presidential pardon.

  On emerging from prison, Willie Bioff disappeared from sight, or at least from public view. He called himself Bill Nelson and moved to Phoenix. He bought a small house just outside city limits and planted a flowering hedge of lantana and plumbago. He told neighbors that he was a retired businessman, but it was said later that he dabbled in diamonds, or in cattle brokerage, or that he occasionally did some work for old friends in the Las Vegas casinos, or that he acted as an FBI informant. One day in November of 1955, he waved goodbye to his wife, walked out to his Ford pickup truck, and started the engine. The explosion flung his body about twenty-five feet from the wreckage of the truck. “He was so good and kind . . .” his wife said later. “He didn’t have an enemy in the world.” The murder has never been solved.

  Joe Schenck spent his last years in a state sometimes called “confused,” at his penthouse suite atop a Beverly Hills hotel, and there he died of a heart attack in 1961. Many friends and associates praised him as one of Hollywood’s founding fathers, and Anita Loos eulogized him by saying, “One of the best Christians I’ve ever known was a Jew.” He left an estate of $3.5 million.

  At a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers Association, one day in 1941, Louis B. Mayer worked himself into a rage about a novel that had just been published by the son of another one of the producers.

  “God damn it, B.P., why didn’t you stop him?” demanded Mayer, whose patriarchal authority was such that he refused to allow his own daughters to go to college because their morals might be corrupted there. “How could you allow this? It’s your fault.”

  “Louis, how can I stop him?” retorted Ben Schulberg, the longtime chief of production at Paramount. “It’s a free country.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” Mayer grumbled. “You should have stopped him, and I think it’s an outrage, and he ought to be deported.”

  “Deported? Where?” Schulberg laughed. “He was one of the few kids who came out of this place. Where are we going to deport him to? Catalina? Lake Helena? Louis, where do you send him?”

  “I don’t care where you send him,” said Louis B. Mayer of Minsk, “but deport him.”

  What Makes Sammy Run?, the novel that had just been published by the twenty-seven-year-old Budd (originally Seymour) Schulberg, was not a very distinguished work. Its hero, Sammy Glick, was a crude caricature of the Jew as betrayer.* From his boyhood in the East Side ghetto to his apogee as a producer in Hollywood, Sammy Glick lied and cheated, stole ideas, plagiarized stories, double-crossed everyone he knew—not just because it was in his interest, as one former Washington official said of a recent secretary of state, but because it was in his nature. Schulberg kept explaining that nature in terms of social Darwinism. Sammy had been rocked in “his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor.” So he grew into a creature trained only for combat. “I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag,” said Schulberg’s narrator, Al Mannheim. Perhaps anticipating the inevitable charge of anti-Semitism, Schulberg made his preachy narrator a Jew as well, so that in one of his sermons about Sammy’s swindling of yet another Jew, Mannheim could urge, “as a last resort, the need of Jews to help each other in self-defense.”

  “ ‘Don’t pull that Jewish crapola on me,’ Sammy said. ‘What the hell did the Jews ever do for me?—except maybe get my head cracked open for me when I was a kid. . . .’

  “ ‘Jews,’ he said bitterly and absently.

  “ ‘Jews,’ he said, like a storm trooper.”

  Jewish anti-Semitism, Jewish self-hatred, is the standard accusation applied to such an outburst, and it comes easily to accusers who did not experience the gentile anti-Semitism of the 1930’s, or the desperation of the victims’ efforts to escape it. But if Sammy Glick was a caricature, he nonetheless achieved the durability of such older paradigms as Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt or Ring Lardner’s Jack Keefe. This was partly because of an element of truth at the heart of the caricature and partly because of the richly ornamented detail surrounding the portrait. When Mannheim went to visit Sammy in his new house in upper Beverly Hills, Sammy insisted on turning on the floodlights that illuminated the garden. “I’ve got my own barbecue pit and my own badminton court,” he proudly announced. “And have I got flowers! Do you realize you’re looking at twelve hundred dollars’ worth of hibiscus plants?” A bit later, when Sammy’s boasting made Mannheim feel “as if I were watching The Phantom of the Opera or any other horror picture,” he could not resist setting a trap. “ ‘Sammy,’ I said quietly, ‘how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?’ He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer. ‘It makes me feel kinda . . .’ And then it came blurting out of nowhere—‘patriotic.’ ”

  Hollywood was accustomed to such barbs from visiting English novelists, but what made Sammy so wounding was that Schulberg had grown up in Hollywood and had known it from the inside all his life. He and his best friend, Maurice Rapf, the son of M-G-M producer Harry Rapf, spent their boyhood playing hide-and-go-seek on the stage sets of “their” studios, watching the creation of The Merry Widow and Ben Hur. The young Schulberg had been petted and kissed by Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. His mother, Adeline, built the first house on Malibu Beach and spent her time trying to elevate the cultural tastes of Sylvia Thalberg, Rosabelle Laemmle, and the Mayer girls. So Schulberg was intensely pleased when Dorothy Parker praised him by saying, “I never thought anyone could put Hollywood—the true shittiness of it—between covers.” For that was indeed what he had done.

  The element that Dorothy Parker thought so characteristic of Hollywood appeared most noxiously in its labor union struggles, which Schulberg, almost alone among the novelists of the subject, explored in considerable detail. But that Hollywood struggle can only be understood within the framework of Los Angeles as a whole, which had been for more than half a century the capital of the open shop, and thus of the open labor market, and thus of low wages. Indeed, Los Angeles’ officially organized resistance to unions was one of the major reasons why it overtook San Francisco as the great metropolis of California. San Francisco in the late nineteenth century boasted not only a great natural harbor and a rich agricultural hinterland but an established base of commerce and industry and even a c
ultural heritage of sorts; Los Angeles had relatively nothing.

  The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1883 started a great real estate boom in Los Angeles. The fare from Kansas City dropped to as low as one dollar, and land sales to the immigrants from the Middle West soared to thirteen million dollars a month. When the boom collapsed at the end of the decade, the city’s entrepreneurs faced disaster. General Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times decided that he had no alternative but to cut all his employees’ wages by 20 percent. The unionized printers objected; Otis refused to negotiate; the printers went out on strike in August of 1890; Otis began importing strikebreakers from Kansas. Otis continued publishing, and as the depression of 1893 began ruining both farmers and bankers, Otis became the vociferous champion of economic growth based on low labor costs. “Los Angeles wants no dudes, loafers, and paupers,” the Times declared, “people who have no means and trust to luck, cheap politicians, failures, bummers, scrubs, impecunious clerks. . . . We need workers! Hustlers!”

  The midwesterners who had been lured to California by promises of cheap houses and sunshine were now trapped there in their little houses. Otis helped organize the Los Angeles Merchants and Manufacturers Association, generally known as M & M, which not only opposed unions but threatened and even cut off bank credit to any business that hired union labor. The unions, in turn, organized strikes; the merchants broke them, often with violence. During the whole period of 1890–1910, Los Angeles wages averaged 20 to 30 percent lower than those in San Francisco. And business flowed in. One October night in 1910, a bomb exploded in the main plant of the Times, and twenty employees were killed. “O you anarchic scum,” Otis declared in his newspaper, “you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims. . . .” Otis hired the William J. Burns detective agency to catch the bombers, and when the detectives produced two Irish toughs, who confessed, on the eve of a hotly contested mayoralty election, Otis stood triumphant. And more business kept flowing in. Among the newcomers were those buccaneers who founded the movie industry.

  In the prosperous 1920’s, when it seemed easy for anyone to make money, there was little thought of labor unions in Hollywood, but even then, Louis B. Mayer had an interesting idea. As host at a dinner party in his house, Mayer was entertaining himself by playing solitaire, but he also eavesdropped on two of his guests talking about the need for an organization that would include all elements of the industry and would act for the common good. “Why don’t you get together, then, and try it out?” said Mayer. They did, but it was Mayer’s invitation that summoned thirty-six notables to a private dinner at the Biltmore Hotel, where Mayer explained the idea of a Hollywood organization that would make it unnecessary for anyone to organize any unions. And so was born, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It included producers, directors, writers, actors, technicians, anyone who “contributed in a distinguished way to the Arts and Sciences of Motion Picture Production.” The distinguished contributors promptly began giving each other prizes, Academy Awards—to Emil Jannings for The Way of All Flesh and Janet Gaynor for Seventh Heaven, and to Paramount for Wings, best picture of the year.

  This convivial system seemed to work admirably until 1931, when a spokesman for the producers blighted an Academy Awards dinner by announcing that because of hard times, all wages would have to be cut by 10 to 25 percent. Paramount and Universal had already imposed 25 percent reductions on people earning more than $150 per week. The Academy’s directors made a fuss about the general cut, though, and the producers postponed their maneuver. Until March 8, 1933. Then, in the midst of the financial collapse that President Roosevelt ended by the temporary shutdown called a “bank holiday,” the movie producers couldn’t meet their payrolls. Three days later, appropriately enough, Hollywood trembled and shook from the thrusts of a major earthquake.

  The studios were all determined now to cut their payrolls by 50 percent, regardless of any previous contracts or agreements, and Mayer took the lead by summoning his employees to a pay-cut meeting in the Thalberg Projection Room. He kept his victims waiting for twenty minutes before making his entrance. “His face [was] stubbled and his eyes red, as if his nights had been as sleepless as his days were unshaven,” M-G-M story editor Sam Marx recalled. “He began with a soft utterance: ‘My friends . . .’ Then he broke down. Stricken, he held out his hands, supplicating, bereft of words.”

  Lionel Barrymore knew a cue when he saw one. “Don’t worry, L.B.,” he said huskily. “We’re with you.”

  A Hungarian scriptwriter named Ernest Vajda ventured to disagree. “I read the company statements, Mr. Mayer,” he said. “I know our films are doing well. Maybe these other companies must do this, but this company should not. Let us wait. There’s no reason to cut our pay at this time.”

  Barrymore recognized another cue.

  “Mr. Vajda,” he said, “is like a man on his way to the guillotine, waiting to stop for a manicure.”

  Dutiful laughter and applause rippled through the Thalberg Projection Room. But would all the M-G-M employees who had contracts allow Mayer to renege on those contracts?

  May Robson, who had been a star for Vitagraph back in 1916, rose to her feet and said, “As the oldest person in the room, I will take the cut.” A now-forgotten child actor echoed her: “As the youngest person in the room, I will take the cut.” Mayer beamed paternally at his employees and asked if they would all vote to accept lower pay until “this terrible emergency is over,” and they all shouted their approval. As Mayer left the meeting, Marx heard him gloat to one of his lieutenants, Benny Thau,* “How did I do?”

  The technicians were the only workers who had a union contract, so they didn’t have to take the cut. Their union, IATSE, was not strong in its pregangster days, however. When the inevitable conflict broke out, between M-G-M and a crew of sound men, the studio called in strikebreakers, and when IATSE pulled out all of the six thousand members it then represented, the other studios hired still more strikebreakers. “We expect to keep on the job every man and woman who wants to be,” said Mayer.

  The most unorganized of all the studio employees were the writers. They liked to think of themselves as creative and independent. They were also the most vulnerable to competition from every young newspaperman or novelist who yearned to become a success in Hollywood. The producers hired these neophytes as “junior writers,” the literary equivalent of starlets, at thirty-five dollars per week, or less, or assigned them to write scripts on speculation. One studio, Republic, achieved a certain notoriety for firing all its writers the day before Thanksgiving so that they could be rehired on Friday without being paid for the holiday. Other than Louis B. Mayer’s Academy, the writers had no organization except the Writers Club, which occupied a pleasant house with a fireplace and a billiard room on Sunset Boulevard. Though it had been officially connected with the Authors League of America since 1920, it was a social club and nothing more.

  Early in 1933, even before the general wage cut, ten writers met at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel to talk about reorganizing their lives. They were easterners, for the most part, liberal to leftist in politics, and with some record of accomplishment on the New York stage. John Howard Lawson had achieved a considerable reputation in 1925 with his play Processional. Samson Raphaelson had written in that same year The Jazz Singer, on which the first sound movie had been based. Among the others were Edwin Justus Mayer, Lester Cole, and John Bright. They decided not only that a new writers’ organization should be founded but that it should be allied with the Dramatists Guild in New York, so that if the predictable conflicts reached the point of a strike, the writers’ organization would cover the whole field of dramatic writing.

  The studios’ wage cuts provided a powerful inducement to the writers to start a union, and in April of 1933, they founded the Screen Writers Guild. A total of 173 charter members paid one hundred dollars each. John H
oward Lawson was elected president. He was not then a Communist, but he publicly announced a year later that he had joined the party. Such things were not secret in those days. “As for myself,” Lawson wrote in New Theatre magazine, “I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position and to do so in the most specific manner.”

  Lawson’s politics were not of critical importance, since the producers made it perfectly clear that they would not recognize the SWG as a union or negotiate with it under any circumstances. The movie industry was not an industry, the studios argued, and its writers were not employees. Since the new National Recovery Act forbade this line of argument, however, there now began the long and ugly process of forcing the producers to come to terms. The whole thrust of the New Deal supported the writers, and so did the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, but the producers fought back with every weapon they could find. They threatened, they delayed, they cajoled, they delayed some more, they sued, they appealed, they even sent Nicholas Schenck to Hyde Park with a large donation for President Roosevelt, and then they delayed some more.

  In 1936, the period central to What Makes Sammy Run?, the two sides clashed over the issue of the Screen Writers Guild joining forces with the Dramatists Guild in New York. The producers, who still didn’t recognize the SWG, raised shrill cries of warning that the writers were trying to subject Hollywood to the domination of New York Communists. And since the Guild was asking all its members not to sign any contracts extending beyond May of 1938, so that they would then be legally free to go on strike, every writer was subject to all the pressure that the producers could apply, which was considerable. “If those guys set up a picket line and try to shut down my studio,” cried Darryl Zanuck, “I’ll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow them down.”

  The Guild called a meeting on May 2, 1936, for a vote on the alliance with New York. Shortly before that meeting, a half-dozen well-established screenwriters, to whom the studios had offered new contracts as writer-producers, announced that they were forming an opposition movement to fight the Guild leadership and the alliance with New York. In Schulberg’s version, one of these half dozen was naturally Sammy Glick. “I’m catching the express now, baby,” he told Mannheim. “I’m getting off at my station in one stop.”