City of Nets Read online

  What Mrs. Parsons now asked Welles, on behalf of her thirty million readers, was whether his new movie dealt with William Randolph Hearst. Why, of course not, said Welles. It was entirely a work of fiction. Perhaps because Welles was feeding her a five-course lunch in his dressing room, which had belonged to Gloria Swanson and was still lined with red satin, or perhaps because he was young and handsome, Mrs. Parsons believed him. And so it was not until the official press screening in New York in early January of 1940 that Hedda Hopper first saw Citizen Kane and said to Welles, “You can’t get away with this.” Said Welles: “I will.” When Hearst read Mrs. Hopper’s column, he hastily asked Mrs. Parsons what was going on, and she rushed to a special screening with two lawyers. Then she began telephoning. She telephoned Schaefer, and Rockefeller, and every member of the RKO board of directors, and Will Hays, and Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl Zanuck—anybody she could think of. She said, among other things, “Mr. Hearst says if you boys want private lives, I’ll give you private lives.”

  Citizen Kane was scheduled to open on February 14, 1941, at Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center (the Rockefellers owned a large share of RKO). Then the theater abruptly canceled the opening. Schaefer called Nelson Rockefeller to find out the reason and learned some details of Mrs. Parsons’s threats of retribution. “Rockefeller told me,” Schaefer recalled later, “that Louella Parsons . . . had asked him, ‘How would you like to have [Hearst’s] American Weekly run a double-page spread on John D. Rockefeller?’ ” And then, suddenly, Schaefer had trouble booking Citizen Kane anywhere at all. And there was more. Hearst photographers began following Welles through the streets, hoping to catch some moment of indiscretion. Inquiries to his draft board persistently raised the question of why he was not in the army. Hedda Hopper predicted darkly that “the refugee situation would be looked into,” which seemed to threaten a general investigation by the Hearst newspapers and the American Legion and other patriotic organizations into the question of why so many Hollywood studios employed so many foreigners, particularly those of leftist sympathies. “Nor are private lives to be overlooked,” Mrs. Hopper warned.*

  Then came the most extraordinary proposal of all. Nicholas Schenck, the head of Loew’s, invited Schaefer to New York and made him an offer. He was making this offer, he said, on behalf of Louis B. Mayer, who considered himself not only a friend of Hearst’s but also the patriarch of the movie business. Mayer proposed to pay RKO $842,000 in cash if Schaefer would destroy the negative and all the prints of Citizen Kane. Since the film had cost $686,000, Mayer’s offer represented a fairly handsome profit on a movie that Schaefer was having trouble in booking anywhere. Schaefer, to his credit, refused. Schaefer, to his credit, didn’t even mention this irresistible offer to his own board of directors, for he feared that the directors might order him to accept it. Schaefer, to his credit, responded to the M-G-M bribe by threatening a conspiracy suit against all the major theater chains: Fox, Paramount, Loew’s. This was the crisis that roused Time and other journals to protest. And since the theater chains were just as terrified of conspiracy suits as they were of Hearst boycotts, they relented enough to provide a few showings for Citizen Kane, which, in the final accounting, just barely broke even.

  And then, in one of those executive whirlwinds, a major RKO stockholder named Floyd Odlum, a Texas entrepreneur of nebulous ambitions, bought enough additional shares from David Sarnoff to give him control of the whole studio, and that was the end of Schaefer. And two weeks after Schaefer was evicted, Orson Welles was also evicted, given a few hours’ notice to move out (the Mercury Theatre’s space was needed for a Tarzan film crew). One of the contributing reasons for this upheaval was a widespread rumor, apparently sponsored by Louis B. Mayer, that Schaefer couldn’t get good bookings for RKO films because he was anti-Semitic.

  It is difficult to maintain a sense of perspective. The year 1941—the year in which Hollywood granted its Academy Award not to Citizen Kane, nor to The Maltese Falcon, nor even to Kings Row, but to How Green Was My Valley—was the year in which Adolf Hitler betrayed his ally Stalin and sent more than 150 Wehrmacht divisions plunging eastward on a front that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Yet the epic overview often fails to see what is really happening. In Mother Courage, written in exile in Denmark in 1938, Bertolt Brecht had demonstrated brilliantly that all the grand strategies of the Thirty Years’ War could be reduced to one woman wheeling her wagonload of supplies in the wake of whichever army needed food. “Christians, awake! The winter’s gone!” she sang. “The snows depart, the dead sleep on . . .”

  Brecht himself, who remembered this as “the dark time [when] we went changing countries more often than our shoes,” had fled from Berlin to Prague to Austria to France to Denmark and found refuge at last in a whitewashed and thatch-roofed farmhouse on the island of Langeland. He liked to imagine it as an outpost of anti-Nazi resistance. “Fled under a thatched Danish roof,/My friends, I follow your struggles,” he wrote. “Here I send you—from time to time—/Verses raked up through bloody visions.” Yet here in exile, between 1937 and 1940, he wrote three of his greatest plays, Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and Galileo. (Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo: “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”)

  Brecht never wanted to leave the periphery of Germany, never felt at ease in any land that did not speak German, but some combination of shrewdness, instinct, and luck kept him in flight. In March of 1939, just a few months before the war began, he applied for an American visa, and since the American authorities were in no hurry to process such applications, Brecht moved in April from Denmark to the slightly safer sanctuary of Stockholm. A year later, on April 9, 1940, the Nazis marched into Denmark and attacked Norway; on April 17, Brecht sailed for Finland and once again “took up the exile’s trade: hoping.” Brecht considered himself a Marxist, but he had no intention of establishing himself in the Soviet Union. Too many of his friends had disappeared in the recent purges. But other friends, in both Hollywood and New York, were actively working to bring him to America. Fritz Lang solicited funds to keep Brecht going, and Erwin Piscator persuaded Alvin S. Johnson of the New School for Social Research to appoint the exile as a lecturer in literature. That enabled Brecht to reapply for an American visa. “Curiously, I examine the map of the continent,” he wrote. “High up in Lapland,/Toward the Arctic Ocean,/I still see a small door.”

  Brecht was trying to arrange not only his own flight, not only the flight of his wife and two small children, but also that of two women who served, as women did all through his life, as his secretaries, collaborators, assistants, mistresses. One was a Danish actress named Ruth Berlau, who had left her husband to follow Brecht; the other was a Berliner named Margarete Steffin, who had already lost one lung and was deathly ill with tuberculosis. In December of 1940, the Brechts got visas to Mexico, but Miss Steffin was barred on medical grounds. Brecht stayed on in Helsinki—one of his rare acts of altruism—to keep his tribe together. Not until the following May did the U.S. authorities grant visas to the whole ménage, and even then, Miss Steffin was granted only a visitor’s visa, as a secretary to Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel. The next day, they all boarded a train for Moscow, where Miss Steffin soon collapsed and had to be hospitalized. Altruism could go only so far. After making arrangements for Miss Steffin to follow him as soon as she recovered, Brecht led the rest of his flock aboard the trans-Siberian railroad to catch a small Swedish freighter, the S. S. Annie Johnson, which was to sail from Vladivostok on June 14. Before he even got there, he received a telegram announcing that Miss Steffin had died. And while the Annie Johnson was wallowing across the Pacific, he learned of Hitler’s attack on Russia.

  Marta Feuchtwanger, the wife of the novelist, who had escaped over the Pyrenees just the year before, went to meet the Brechts at San Pedro harbor and drove them to an apartment that the director William Dieterle had rented for them at 1954 Argyle Avenue in Hollywood. Argyle Avenue.
Hollywood. There was a time when such exotic American names had rollicked in Brecht’s imagination. “Oh, moon of Alabama,/We now must say goodbye . . .” the chorus of whores had crooned in Mahagonny, and the whole opera was full of such geographical evocations. When a hurricane threatened Mahagonny, Brecht relished the announcements from the radio: “Zerstört ist Pensacola! Zerstört ist Pensacola!”

  But to the Brecht of the 1920’s, the America of the Jazz Age had been a wildly hedonistic fantasy, a land of boxing, gangsters, and perpetual movement. When he had actually visited New York briefly in 1935, to direct his adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother, he had quarreled with everyone involved, and now that he had been forced to flee to Hollywood, he regarded everything around him with loathing. “I get the impression of having been removed from my age,” he wrote in his diary. “This is Tahiti in metropolitan form. . . . I have the feeling of being like Francis of Assisi in an aquarium, Lenin at the Prater (or the Oktoberfest), or a chrysanthemum in a coal mine.” Nothing could please him. The opulent fruits of California impressed him as having “neither smell nor taste.” The pretty little houses on which Californians prided themselves were still worse—“additions built onto the garages.” In fact, prettiness itself was an affront. “Cheap prettiness,” said the exile, “depraves everything.”

  “On thinking about Hell,” Brecht wrote, “I gather/My brother Shelley found it was a place/Much like the city of London. I/Who live in Los Angeles and not in London/Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be/Still more like Los Angeles./In Hell too/There are, I’ve no doubt, these luxuriant gardens/With flowers as big as trees, which of course wither/Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water . . . /And endless processions of cars/Lighter than their own shadows, faster than/Mad thoughts, gleaming vehicles in which/Jolly-looking people come from nowhere and are nowhere bound./And houses, built for happy people, therefore standing empty/Even when lived in. . . .”

  Despite all these laments, Brecht was as determined to conquer Hollywood as he had once been determined to conquer Berlin. It was just a matter of concocting a few ideas, and movie ideas had been part of Brecht’s life for years. As early as 1921, he had written scenarios for various silent films, and when The Threepenny Opera became a great theatrical hit in 1928, he demanded an opportunity to take part in G. W. Pabst’s film version. The Threepenny Opera was a masterpiece of treachery and betrayal, in which the police and the underworld not only cooperated but virtually merged, yet no drama of deception could have outdone Brecht’s own maneuvering. Having become a doctrinaire Marxist since the original creation of the play, he now demanded the right to rewrite his own work, and when Pabst rejected his attempts to convert a cynical melodrama into a didactic attack on capitalism, Brecht sued, claiming an artist’s right to control his own creation—and quite ignoring the fact that John Gay had created the whole play some years earlier. When the courts proved unsympathetic to Brecht’s claims, he wrote a chronicle entitled The Threepenny Trial, excoriating them as well.

  Controversy was, of course, Brecht’s lifeblood. When he finally wrote a movie that was actually produced—not before the producers went bankrupt, and the successors declared that shooting could continue only if everyone worked without salary—the Weimar Republic’s official censors banned it early in 1932 out of fear that it would cause riotous demonstrations by Nazi storm troopers. Kuhle Wampe, named after a district of Berlin, was about the suicide of an unemployed youth, and the censor complained that “your film has the tendency to present the suicide as typical, as something not just appropriate to this or that (morbidly inclined) individual but rather as the fate of an entire class!” Brecht was delighted. “The sharp-witted censor . . .” he remarked, “went much deeper in understanding our artistic intentions than our friendliest critics did.”

  In Hollywood, now, there were no censors, no storm troopers, no interest in controversy or politics of any sort. This was the place dominated by Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer liked Andy Hardy movies. Brecht remained Brecht. He read in a copy of Life that an Ohio farmer named Frank Engels had been selected, together with his wife and three children, as the state’s “most typical farm family,” and that the Engelses had been hired to spend a week living their typical family lives in a model home at the Ohio State Fair. Brecht thought it would be interesting to imagine what would happen if Ohio’s typical family should start quarreling bitterly on the night before the state fair opened, and then smashed up the model home that had been prepared for them.

  And then there was bread, Brot. The tastelessness of what emerged from the American assembly lines seemed to the exile from Berlin to symbolize everything that was lacking in American society. Back in the 1920’s, Brecht had started an adaptation of The Pit, Frank Norris’s epic novel about the extravagances of the Chicago wheat exchange, but what interested Brecht was not the wheat exchange as such but the corrupting process that separated the growing wheat from the final loaf. As in his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, he wanted to pit the soulless entrepreneur, Joe Fleischhacker, against the humble creator, the baker, and to dramatize the creator’s triumph over the merchants. After a long talk with a German-American writer named Ferdinand Reyher, Brecht wrote in his Arbeitsjournal: “I tell Reyher the plan for Joe Fleischhacker in Chicago, and in a couple of hours we develop a film story, The Bread King Learns Bread Baking. There is no real bread in the States, and I really like to eat bread; my main meal is at night, and it is bread with butter. R thinks the Americans have always been nomads, and nomads understand nothing about eating.” The idea of these two nomad writers was that Joe Fleischhacker, the villainous millionaire, should find happiness in munching bread baked by a poor farmer’s wife. When he tried to buy her recipe, waving his checkbook as a weapon, he was told that good bread required not only good flour but “one day of good work; one world of good neighbors; a heart of good will; and a good appetite.”

  Brecht finished this peculiar scenario on a Saturday night in October of 1941, and he was so pleased with himself that he hurried over to M-G-M the following Tuesday to present his creation to Max Reinhardt’s son, Gottfried, who was then working as an assistant to one of the studio’s leading producers, Bernie Hyman. “For an hour and a half,” Reinhardt recalled, “Brecht fascinated me in his unalloyed Augsburg dialect with a film story about the production, distribution, and enjoyment of bread. . . . He had the right man but the wrong place, and he had no illusions when I said as he left that I would try my best to sell the story.” Reinhardt apparently did make some effort to interest M-G-M in Brecht’s idea, but the results were predictable. Brecht’s scenario, Reinhardt later observed, “had as much chance of being sold to M-G-M as ‘Gone with the Wind’ had of being played at the Berliner Ensemble.”

  But Brecht did have illusions. He registered his idea about bread at the Screen Writers Guild to protect his claims on it. And his journal records at the end of 1941 a frantic assortment of movie projects: a biography of the labor leader Samuel Gompers, which William Dieterle hoped to direct; an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s comedy Reigen, which was supposed to interest Charles Boyer; a lost work known as Days of Fire. The journal even contains lists of Brechtian titles: Refugees Both, The Senator’s Conscience, The Traitor, and, most self-defeating of all, Boy Meets Girl, So What? None of these was ever finished, much less sold or produced.

  “Again and again . . .” Brecht wrote bitterly, “seeking a living, I am told:/Show us what you’re made of/Lay it on the table/Deliver the goods!/Say something to inspire us! Tell us of your own greatness!/Divine our secret desires!/Show us the way out/Make yourself useful!/Deliver the goods!” Then one night, he sat up late with Salka Viertel, talking about the pain of flight and exile. Mrs. Viertel told him her own sense of guilt at having failed to get her family out of Poland. The next morning, she found a poem that Brecht had stuck under her door.

  I know of course: it’s simply luck

  That I’ve survived so many friends. But last night in a dream
/>   I heard those friends say of me: “Survival of the fittest”

  And I hated myself.

  By arriving on one of the last ships to cross the Pacific before Pearl Harbor, Brecht managed to miss the social event of the year for Hollywood’s refugees, the celebration of Heinrich Mann’s seventieth birthday. Actually, the Mann brothers missed it too, for on Heinrich’s birthday in March, Thomas was scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and after that he had to go on a lecture tour. Since nothing could disturb Thomas Mann’s schedule of awards and speeches, and since Heinrich’s birthday could not be celebrated without the presence of his famous younger brother, who was also supporting him, Heinrich had to wait until the end of April.

  Salka Viertel, who was acting as the hostess, in her house on Mabery Road in Santa Monica, needed all that time to handle the diplomatic negotiations among the factious refugees. Heinrich Mann’s alcoholic wife, Nelly, was feuding with Alma Werfel and opposed invitations to anyone who was particularly friendly with the Werfels. There had been times of political conflict, in fact, when the Mann brothers themselves didn’t speak to one another. The Feuchtwangers finally succeeded in arranging a general truce, and Mrs. Viertel provided a table for forty-five, with candles and flowers and a good German menu that started with good German soup. There were three German servants on hand to do all the work, but many refugees who weren’t worthy of an invitation volunteered for the kitchen so that they could catch a glimpse of the distinguished exiles who represented what Mrs. Viertel proudly called “the true Fatherland”: the Manns, the Feuchtwangers, the Werfels, Alfred Döblin, Walter Mehring, Alfred Neumann, Bruno Frank, Ludwig Marcuse. “At the open door to the pantry,” Mrs. Viertel noted when the speechmaking began, “the ‘back entrance’ guests were listening, crowding each other, and wiping their tears.”