City of Nets Read online

  After the soup, when the roast beef was supposed to arrive, one of the servants pointed out to Mrs. Viertel that Thomas Mann had risen to his feet and put on his spectacles and taken a thick manuscript out of an inner pocket of his tuxedo. The roast beef had to wait. “It was a magnificent tribute to the older brother,” Mrs. Viertel said, “an acknowledgment of Heinrich’s prophetic political wisdom, his far-sighted warnings to their unhappy country, and a superb evaluation of his literary stature.” Everyone was deeply impressed. Glasses were raised to toast Heinrich Mann’s good health. But then Heinrich, too, arose. And put on his spectacles. And took out of his pocket a thick manuscript. And began to read. “First he thanked me for the evening,” Mrs. Viertel said, “then, turning to his brother, paid him high praise for his continuous fight against fascism. To that he added a meticulous literary analysis of Thomas Mann’s oeuvre in its relevance to the Third Reich.”

  The roast beef was ruined by now, but the eminent refugees all ate, and Salka Viertel was impressed and moved, as she watched her famous guests devour her chocolate cake. Even when Nelly Mann screamed with drunken laughter as her red dress split open, Mrs. Viertel focused her thoughts on higher things. She told Bruno Frank how touched she had been by the Mann brothers’ tributes to each other.

  “Yes,” said Frank. “They write and read such ceremonial evaluations of each other every ten years.”

  One of the pleasant traditions of the 1940’s was the Sunday afternoon broadcasts by the New York Philharmonic. The concerts began at 3 P.M., which, of course, was noon in Hollywood, so everyone of refined sensibility made it a practice, after a leisurely breakfast, to turn on the radio. Many of them remembered for years afterward that on December 7, 1941, Arthur Rubinstein played the Brahms Concerto in B-flat.

  At Bob Hope’s home on Navajo Street in North Hollywood, the sensibilities were divided. Dolores Hope, who had recently met Rubinstein, retreated to her sitting room to listen to the concert. Hope lolled in bed in the adjoining room and listened to the pro football game from the Polo Grounds in New York, and fretted about an article in that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reported all too publicly that his gross income for that year would be nearly $600,000. The game was suddenly interrupted.

  “Dolores!” Hope shouted. She came to the door.

  “What happened?”

  “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Rubinstein himself recalled hearing the news just after the intermission. “I was about to take the steps leading to the platform when I heard an outcry of horror from several stagehands and from [Artur] Rodzinski himself, who arrived gesticulating dramatically. ‘Japan has attacked the United States in Honolulu. . . .’ We were all thunderstruck, but the concert had to go on. Rodzinski was charged with announcing the dreadful news to the public. On my way to the piano he said to me, ‘You must first play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” ’ We found the audience in a great state of agitation but ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ restored order; everyone stood at stiff attention but then settled down quietly to listen to the Brahms concerto, which we played with special fervor. With the last note, the audience ran to the door, and the orchestra, Artur, and I went to listen to the radio.”

  Not everyone was so genteel. Lana Turner, for example, was immensely proud of having just bought her first house, a large cottage on a hilltop in Westwood, which she regarded as “a lush, green community with attractive white Moderne-style houses . . . nestled in the curves and dips of hills amid the eucalyptus and cypress trees.” In keeping with all that, she had bought a white piano and started giving parties. On this particular Sunday, the party started in the early afternoon. The guests included Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, and “two of my favorite girl friends, Linda Darnell and Susan Hayward.” When Miss Turner’s mother arrived late in the evening, she was surprised at all the hilarity. “You mean you haven’t heard?” she cried. “Turn on the radio, for heaven’s sake!”

  The news on the radio caught many people in strangely incongruous places. Sam Wood, the director, was high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, trying to finish filming a scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascist planes bomb a guerrilla camp; the radio broadcasts that flickered through the static told him that all aircraft were grounded. Alan Ladd, stricken with pneumonia in the midst of filming his first great hit, This Gun for Hire, was still confined to a hospital bed when he heard the news. It was alleged by an imaginative gossip reporter that he leaped up from his bed and shouted, “I’ve got to get out of here, they’ll be needing guys like me!”

  John Houseman and Pare Lorentz were returning aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief from New York, where they had been interviewing actors for their prospective film, “Name, Age, and Occupation,” about auto workers on the Detroit assembly lines, a film that was never made. They heard the news from Honolulu in the lurching club car, where, in Houseman’s words, they clustered around “the train’s only working radio, drinking bourbon as we listened through the night to the mounting list of disasters.”

  Maxine Andrews was in Cincinnati to sing with her sisters Patti and LaVerne, the Andrews Sisters (“Don’t sit under the apple tree/With anyone else but me . . .”), and she liked walking to the theater to see people standing in line to get tickets. “This Sunday, I walked over and there were no lines,” she recalled. “I thought, Now, this is funny. I walked onto the stage, which was very dark. The doorman and the stagehands were sitting around the radio. They had just one light on. They were talking about Pearl Harbor being bombed. I asked the doorman, ‘Where is Pearl Harbor?’ ”

  Mary Astor was in love with a publicity man who also gave flying lessons, so she had signed on to learn flying, and the two of them were returning that Sunday from the resort of La Quinta. “As we came in for a landing at Grand Central Airport,” she recalled, “an odd sight greeted us: not a single plane was on the field; none was even in sight. A colored boy came with a step to help us down from the plane; he was babbling something about the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, and telling us to get our plane off the field and into a hangar.”

  Gene Tierney and Henry Fonda were filming a comedy called Rings on Her Fingers on the beaches of Catalina Island. The cameras had just been set up when an assistant director came running down the beach, shouting the news of the attack and adding that everyone would have to return to the mainland immediately. “We wrapped up at once and were soon sailing toward San Pedro,” Miss Tierney said. “The radio reports of the Japanese attack . . . led to wild speculation aboard our boat. Some of the cast thought that they might hit the California coast next. For all anyone knew, the waters we were now churning through might have been mined.”

  This mixture of fear, rumor, and a sudden sense of vulnerability was the dominant emotion in Los Angeles that Sunday. If the Japanese had dared to launch a surprise attack against the strong defenses of Pearl Harbor, how could they fail to strike next against feebly defended Los Angeles? Two thirds of the nation’s aircraft production came from southern California, and just north of Los Angeles, the Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Vultee plants offered obvious targets. It so happened that four thousand antiaircraft troops had arrived from Camp Haan that weekend for maneuvers in the Los Angeles area, so they were immediately assigned to guard the aircraft plants. Antiaircraft artillery and high-angle machine guns soon surrounded the factories.

  None too soon. That Monday, the Fourth Interceptor Command in San Francisco announced that two formations of “many planes,” believed to have come from Japanese aircraft carriers, had flown over San Francisco and then headed south. All military installations along the coast were ordered blacked out. Guileless reporters asked why the Japanese planes had not attacked anything, and why no American planes had taken off to attack the attackers. The military authorities responded with bluster. “Why bombs were not dropped, I do not know,” said Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command. “It might have been better if some bombs had dropped to awaken
this city. Death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.”

  The following night, the phantom Japanese planes were reported over Los Angeles, and all radio stations were ordered off the air, all planes grounded. The Eleventh Naval District decreed a blackout from Los Angeles harbor across an area fifteen miles inland. All street lights, advertising signs, and oil refinery lights were turned off. Police stopped cars and forced them to cut their headlights and rely on dimmers. Nobody apparently had any authority to order lights off in stores and private homes, though, so the blackout was at best partial. The authorities broadcast appeals, however, to everyone to keep lights to a minimum. Outdoor Christmas trees nonetheless glittered brightly in both Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles dreaded not only phantom Japanese bombers but phantom Japanese saboteurs. Its “Little Tokyo,” just north of the main business district, was the center of the nation’s largest Japanese-American community, about fifty thousand people, of whom roughly one third were native Japanese, the rest Japanese-American nisei. Within two hours of the news from Honolulu—hardly time for Rubinstein to finish his Brahms concerto—the first arrests began. Police greeted the municipal ferry as it docked at San Pedro, rounded up everyone who looked Japanese, and herded them into a wire enclosure at the Sixth Street pier. The Paramount studio’s baseball team was in the third inning of a game against the L.A. Nippons when the news from Pearl Harbor began. “FBI men allowed the game to finish,” The Hollywood Reporter said, gloating over Paramount’s 6–3 victory, “then rounded up the Jap contingent.”

  The authorities kept announcing that it was not a general roundup, that the FBI had been carefully investigating each case, seeking only potential saboteurs. “Less than 1,000 Japanese nationals will be affected,” U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle told a press conference that Monday, December 8. “Procedures are being established to provide a fair hearing for all.” Actually, the number of Japanese arrested came to 1,370 within four days and 2,192 by mid-February. A delegation from the Japanese-American Citizens League went to call on Mayor Fletcher Bowron at City Hall to assure him of their patriotism. “Treat us like Americans,” said the league’s spokesman, Fred Tayama. “Give us a chance to prove our loyalty.” Bowron smiled politely, but by then most of the main stores in Little Tokyo had closed, and they stayed closed. In Hollywood, people complained that the gardeners had all disappeared.

  So Hollywood began going to war. The army moved into Walt Disney’s new studio in Burbank with hardly more than a by-your-leave, and established a searchlight battery to guard the adjoining Lockheed plant. And at Warner Bros., also in Burbank, some people began fretting that the Japanese bombers that would inevitably fly overhead in search of the Lockheed plant might bomb the movie studio by mistake. The Warners authorities decided to build a bomb shelter to protect the executive talent. “I vaguely remember,” said Jack Warner, “sitting in this rough underground haven playing checkers with Jesse Lasky, Mervyn LeRoy, and others, and expecting to have the game broken up any moment by Japanese bombs.”

  Stoic acceptance was not sufficient, though, for a man who had once tried out vaudeville routines with Sid Grauman. “I thought the situation called for a sense of humor, even if I had to stretch it a bit,” said Warner. “I went to our painting shop and had an enormous sign made for the roof of one of our sound stages. It had a twenty-foot arrow painted toward Burbank and the lettering read: LOCKHEED THAT-A-WAY.”

  In the natural course of events, Donald Douglas, president of Douglas, asked Warners technicians to camouflage his aircraft plant in Santa Monica, and they did the job so well that Robert Gross, president of Lockheed, asked Warner for the same protective coloring for his plant. He added dryly that it might include an arrow and a sign saying: WARNER BROS.—THAT-A-WAY. After finishing the camouflage job for Lockheed, Warner ordered his preposterous sign removed and sheepishly admitted that “this gag does not seem so funny in retrospect.”

  Hollywood at war: Bob Hope took his gags wherever the GI’s were stationed; Hedy Lamarr welcomed them at the Hollywood Canteen.

  4

  Americanism

  (1942)

  Jimmy Stewart quietly began putting on weight so that he could meet the army’s physical requirements, and then he enlisted as a private (he soon became a bomber pilot and eventually a lieutenant colonel). Robert Montgomery joined the navy and ultimately commanded a destroyer at the invasion of Normandy. Tyrone Power abandoned both his wife and his male lover to join the marines; he became a transport pilot in the South Pacific. William Holden joined the army as Private William F. Beedle, Jr. Henry Fonda, who was thirty-seven years old and had three children, waited only until the final shooting on The Ox-Bow Incident and then enlisted as a sailor. He got as far as boot camp in San Diego, where the shore patrol picked him up and sent him back to Los Angeles. “Why?” Fonda still bristled at the memory forty years later. “Because Darryl F. Fuck-it-all Zanuck had pull in Washington and demanded, ‘I want Henry Fonda for a picture I’m planning. It’s for the war effort and I need him.’ And he had enough weight to swing it.”

  Zanuck, who was thirty-nine himself, also had enough weight to get a commission as a colonel in the Army Signal Corps so that he could, as Otto Preminger sardonically put it, “photograph the war.” Zanuck spent his last weeks at Fox firing off a whole broadside of patriotic films—To the Shores of Tripoli, Secret Agent of Japan, Immortal Sergeant, Crash Dive, Tonight We Raid Calais—and when he went off to war, he donated his entire string of twenty Argentine polo ponies to West Point. Colonel Zanuck’s mogul style remained unique. Sent to London to coordinate training films, he took up residence at Claridge’s and duly accompanied a team of British commandos on a real night raid on Calais (actually, it was Saint-Valery). Sent to North Africa to produce a documentary, he took to carrying not only a .45 automatic but a tommy gun, and when he saw a German plane flying overhead, he began firing wildly. “I probably did no damage,” he acknowledged, “yet there was always the chance that a lucky shot might strike a vital spot.”

  Each celebrity’s call to colors was a major event in his studio’s publicity department, and in the fan magazines that fed at the studio publicity trough. Ronald Reagan, despite his poor eyesight, had long been a lieutenant in the cavalry reserve, so he was summoned early in 1942 to report to Fort March in San Francisco. “It’s Jane’s war now,” began an account by Cynthia Miller in Modern Screen. This story was entitled “So Long, Button-Nose,” which was apparently Reagan’s nickname for his wife, Jane Wyman. The story reported that she had “seen Ronnie’s sick face bent over a picture of the small swollen bodies of children starved to death in Poland. ‘This,’ said the war-hating Reagan, ‘would make it a pleasure to kill.’ That night he’d stood a little longer beside the crib of Button-Nose the Second, who’d inherited both the nose and the name from her mother. She’d known Ronnie would go, that he’d probably have enlisted after Pearl Harbor if he hadn’t been a member of the Cavalry Reserve.” And so on.

  By October of 1942, some 2,700 Hollywood people—12 percent of the total number employed in the movie business—had joined the armed forces. But it was impractical and unrealistic for the celebrities to pretend that they were just ordinary citizens eager to do their patriotic duty. As a grizzled navy petty officer said to Fonda when he volunteered for service as a gunner’s mate, “You know what the fuckin’ gunners’ mates do in this man’s fuckin’ Navy? They get killed! . . . You’re too smart to be some fuckin’ gunner’s mate.” The stars’ value to the war effort obviously lay not in becoming cannon fodder but in exploiting their stardom, in making propaganda films, entertaining the troops, selling war bonds.

  Women were especially good at that, selling war bonds. Hedy Lamarr offered to kiss any man who would buy $25,000 worth of bonds. She once sold more than $17 million worth of government paper in a single day. Lana Turner’s price for the promise of a kiss was $50,000, and she recalled that she “kept that promise hundreds of times,�
� adding that she “appeared in so many cities that they’re all blurred together in my mind.” Dorothy Lamour was perhaps the most successful of all. The people who kept track of such things estimated that she once sold $30 million worth of bonds in four days, and ended with a total of $350 million, with and without kisses.

  It was all very organized. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau chose M-G-M’s publicity director, Howard Dietz, to promote the sale of bonds, state by state. Dietz sent his plans to Clark Gable, who had been asked to head the actors’ division of the Hollywood Victory Committee. Among those plans was a proposal that the bond drive in Indiana be launched that January by one of the state’s most popular citizens, Carole Lombard, who was also Mrs. Gable. Dietz warned her and all his other recruits to avoid airplanes, which he considered unreliable and dangerous, so Miss Lombard set off by train, selling bonds at various stops en route to Indianapolis. Gable had to stay behind to start work with Lana Turner on Somewhere I’ll Find You. Miss Lombard left in Gable’s bed a pneumatic blond dummy, as a substitute for Miss Turner, with a note that said, “So you won’t be lonely.” Gable chortled at her ribaldry. (“I’m really nuts about him,” Miss Lombard had once said to Garson Kanin. “And it isn’t all that great-lover crap because if you want to know the truth, I’ve had better.”) He spent three days building a male dummy, expectantly erect, to welcome her home.