City of Nets Read online

  Miss Lombard sold two million dollars’ worth of bonds, then couldn’t wait for the train on which she already had a ticket and a reservation. On the night of January 16, she boarded a TWA DC-3 bound for home. A few minutes after takeoff from Las Vegas, the plane somehow strayed off course. Beacons that might have warned the pilot had been blacked out because of the continuing anxiety about Japanese bombers. The plane smashed into a cliff near the top of Potosi Mountain. The first reports to reach Hollywood said only that the plane was missing, but somehow everyone knew what had happened. M-G-M publicity agents mobilized, chartered planes, organized searches. A dazed Gable asked to join the search parties but was persuaded to wait in Las Vegas. It was Eddie Mannix, the studio’s general manager, who accompanied the stretcher-bearing mules up into the snow-covered mountains and retrieved the charred and decapitated corpse of Carole Lombard.

  Gable was distraught for months. “Why Ma?” he kept asking. (He and his wife had called each other Ma and Pa.) He bought a motorcycle and drove wildly through the canyons north of Hollywood. He refused to speak to anyone, or else talked compulsively about his dead wife. Of the many diamond pieces he had given her, only one mangled fragment was found at the site of the crash, and he wore that around his neck. But there was now a war on, and the army was keenly aware of the promotional value of Clark Gable. On January 23, 1942, at a time when the Japanese were conquering the Philippines and advancing through much of Southeast Asia, a telegram from Lieutenant General H. H. Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Forces, informed Gable that “we have a specific and highly important assignment for you,” and announced that an aide would soon arrive in California to “discuss my plans with you.” The only thing more remarkable than General Arnold’s devoting any effort at such a time to recruit a movie star was that M-G-M intercepted his message and repressed it. “Wire to Gable received but not giving it to him as do not think it advisable to discuss with him at present time,” Howard Strickling of the M-G-M publicity department cabled back to Washington.

  The movie studio’s goal, apparently, was to keep Gable at work before the cameras as long as possible (Somewhere I’ll Find You did get made), but Gable could hardly work at all. He brooded. He drank. Joan Crawford invited him to dinner and listened to him talk about his dead wife until three in the morning. “One night,” she recalled, “I said, ‘Clark, you have got to stop this drinking, you’ve got to.’ He started to cry, and said, ‘I know I must.’ ” So Gable went to the air force recruiting office that August and enlisted as a private. But an M-G-M cameraman named Andrew McIntyre enlisted at the same time and never left the star’s side, and when the two of them were shipped to Miami Beach for training, an Army officer remarked, “Gable is the only private in the history of the Army who had his own orderly.” On his first day in camp, in Miami Beach, Gable was asked if he would mind if photographers took pictures of him shaving off his famous mustache. “I’ll probably be cooler anyway,” he was quoted as saying. Within two months, he was commissioned a lieutenant and sent with McIntyre to Colorado to make a training film about “the day-to-day activities of a typical heavy bombardment group.”

  Los Angeles was a major point of departure for young servicemen bound for combat in the Pacific, and they all wanted to see the sights before they left. The main sight was Hollywood, and Hollywood naturally wanted to oblige. It wanted to be patriotic; it also wanted its patriotism richly publicized. John Garfield was apparently the man who conceived the brilliant idea of organizing the Hollywood Canteen, where the boys could meet all the glittering stars, and the stars could play at being the girl next door. Garfield also had the no less brilliant idea of recruiting the tireless Bette Davis as president. She found and leased a former livery stable at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard, just off Sunset, and then dragooned studio workmen into volunteering to paint the walls, install the lights, and turn this refurbished barn into the social center of Hollywood.

  Miss Davis also went to her agents at MCA and persuaded the firm’s reclusive president, Jules Stein, to push a few buttons. As a start, he proposed a gala opening night in October, with seats at $100 in the surrounding bleachers. “The canteen made $10,000 that night from the bleacher seats,” Miss Davis recalled. “It seemed thousands of men entered the canteen. . . . I had to crawl through a window to get inside.” But that was only the beginning of Jules Stein’s button-pushing. Lo, Harry Cohn of Columbia suddenly felt inspired to donate to the canteen the $6,500 in proceeds from the premiere of Talk of the Town (Ronald Colman, Jean Arthur, Cary Grant). Stein even persuaded Warners, which happened to be Miss Davis’s studio, to make a movie entitled Hollywood Canteen and to donate a share of the proceeds to the operation of the canteen.

  Bette Davis worked the phone. She called, for example, Hedy Lamarr.

  “Sure . . . but what can I do?” asked Hedy Lamarr, according to her own account.

  “We need help in the kitchen,” said Bette Davis, perhaps not without malice. But then she became more expansive. “You can sign autographs and dance with the boys. And there are a hundred other things. You’ll see when you get there.”

  Hedy Lamarr remembered herself as being docile. “I couldn’t cook. I was a mess in the kitchen. I would wash dishes gladly. . . . This was my adopted land and it had been good to me.” She recalled later that she went to work two nights every week in the kitchen of the canteen, which “was always hot, noisy, and swinging.” Her chief memory of the place was that the canteen was “where I met my third husband.”

  He was John Loder, who was wearing a tweed suit with a pipe in the breast pocket as he dried stacks of dishes. The canteen was like that—a social center for even those celebrated stars who often had nowhere to go in the evening, but also a social obligation for those same stars, who knew that their celebrity depended on imagery. Betty Grable, too, met her future husband, Harry James, while he was conducting the orchestra there.

  Gene Tierney considered it perfectly natural that someone should call her “to remind me that I had not appeared at the Hollywood Canteen lately to entertain the GIs.” She “felt guilty about that,” even though she was pregnant and suffering “spells of being tired,” so she promised to appear the following night. Miss Tierney was a somewhat unusual figure in Hollywood, a girl of considerable beauty but without either great talent or that animal ambition that vivified a Joan Crawford or a Barbara Stanwyck. Her beauty itself was slightly waxen, like that of a debutante, which was natural enough since her father was a prosperous New York insurance broker, and she had gone to Miss Porter’s and made her debut at the Fairfield Country Club. Her father actually filched much of her Hollywood income (he was her trustee until she was twenty-one), but the whole family nonetheless disapproved profoundly of her marrying Oleg Cassini, a rather sleek-looking costume designer at Paramount, who posed as an aristocrat because his mother had once been a Russian countess. After Pearl Harbor, Cassini joined the coast guard, then somehow transferred to the cavalry. That took him to Fort Riley, Kansas, and thus took Gene Tierney there too.

  Just before she left Hollywood, though, and just after her appearance at the Hollywood Canteen, she came down with German measles. She postponed her trip a few days until the red spots were gone, then joined the migration of women to army camps. “My first room was in the post guest house, where the walls were made of beaverboard and you could hear everything that went on in the rooms on either side . . .” she said later. “After a week you had to look for housing. . . . I rented a dumpy little place that I soon discovered was inhabited by mice. . . .”

  Her daughter was born prematurely, weighed two and a half pounds, and had to have eleven blood transfusions. She was named Daria. When she was about a year old, it became clear that her sight and hearing were impaired, and that there were even worse prospects. It was only beginning to be known in those days that German measles in early pregnancy could seriously damage an unborn child. “I would not, could not, accept the idea that Daria was retarded or had brain damage,” Miss T
ierney recalled.

  The Cassinis struggled on for a time, then agreed on a divorce and consigned their hopelessly retarded daughter to a school in Pennsylvania. Then, at a tennis party on a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Miss Tierney was approached by a young woman who smiled and said they had met at the Hollywood Canteen.

  “Did you happen to catch the German measles after that night?” she inquired. Miss Tierney was too startled to answer. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” the woman went on. She had been in the women’s branch of the Marine Corps, she said, and her whole camp had been swept by an epidemic of rubella. “I broke quarantine to come to the canteen to meet the stars,” she said, smiling cheerily. “Everyone told me I shouldn’t, but I just had to go. And you were my favorite.”

  Miss Tierney stood silent for a moment, then turned and walked away. “After that,” she recalled, “I didn’t care if I was ever again anyone’s favorite actress.” She was already beginning to crumble, and the crumbling would lead her to a mental institution, to attempted suicide, to a sense of nothingness and despair. Her lost child, Daria, she wrote in her memoirs, was a war baby, born in 1943. “Daria was my war effort.”

  These were individual episodes, but there remained always a collective Hollywood, an array of low-lying buildings and streets and people on the northern edge of Los Angeles, a community that was partly an industry, partly a technology, partly a style and a quality of mind, partly a negation of all those things, partly just a hunger for money and success. The war was good for Hollywood. It brought in big grosses, big profits. Hollywood expected as much. One of its first reactions to Pearl Harbor had been a race to register movie titles that might attract audiences to the box office: Yellow Peril, Spy Smashers, Wings over the Pacific, V for Victory. . . . (The songwriters were more imaginative, for it took very little time to churn out such novelties as “Goodbye, Momma, I’m Off to Yokohama” or “Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” or “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific” or “When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys.”)

  There were problems, though, with film scripts suddenly outdated. What could M-G-M do with an Eleanor Powell musical entitled I’ll Take Manila when the city was actually being threatened by the Japanese army? At Warners, the Maltese Falcon gang—Huston, Bogart, and the rest—was in the midst of filming Across the Pacific, which was supposed to be about a struggle to thwart an unthinkable Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor. That was hastily changed to an unthinkable plot to bomb the Panama Canal. More complicated was the fact that Huston was suddenly called to duty as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. As a going-away prank, he decided to leave Warners a movie that was not only unfinished but virtually unfinishable. He filmed Bogart tied to a chair in a house filled with Japanese guards. “I . . . installed about three times as many Japanese soldiers as were needed to keep him prisoner,” Huston recalled with satisfaction. “There were guards at every window brandishing machine guns. I made it so that there was no way in God’s green world that Bogart could logically escape. I shot the scene, then called Jack Warner, and said, ‘Jack, I’m on my way. I’m in the army. Bogie will know how to get out.’ ” Bogie didn’t know, and neither did anyone else. Warners assigned the mess to one of its more reliable professionals, Vincent Sherman, and he or some nameless underling had to concoct an escape. “His impossible solution,” Huston gloated, “was to have one of the Japanese soldiers in the room go berserk. Bogie escaped in the confusion, with the comment, ‘I’m not easily trapped, you know!’ ”

  The material demands of the burgeoning war effort caused far greater problems. The windows that heroes used to leap through had been made of sugar, which was now rationed. The chairs that they smashed over each other’s heads had been made of balsa wood from the Philippines, now under attack by the Japanese. Harmlessly breakable whiskey bottles suitable for barroom brawls had been made of resin, and that, too, was now needed for military production. Film itself was made of cellulose, which was required for explosives (and for the metastasizing production of official military training and propaganda movies). The amount of film available to Hollywood was cut by about 25 percent. Even the flow of money—Hollywood’s lifeblood—was restricted. The War Production Board issued a decree on May 6 limiting the use of new materials for stage sets to $5,000 per picture. James F. Byrnes, the Director of Economic Stabilization, even ordered that all salaries be held to $25,000 as of January 1, 1943 (Louis B. Mayer’s salary for the previous year was reported to be $949,766), but Congress soon canceled that unseemly gesture of austerity.

  The restrictions had some unexpectedly beneficial results. The assembly-line production of trashy B pictures, required for the double features that had become standard during the Depression, had to be curtailed, and a Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of the supposedly insatiable viewers approved of the curtailment. Overall, Hollywood’s output decreased from 533 pictures in 1942 to 377 in 1945. Because of the shortage of film, directors could no longer shoot dozens of takes of each scene, so they devoted more time and effort to rehearsals before filming. And because of the tackiness of sets that relied on painted canvas to substitute for scarce metals and lumber, they began exploring the possibilities of moving out of the sound stages into the real world. Alfred Hitchcock even took the daring step of filming Shadow of a Doubt entirely on location.

  One shortage was unique: the lack of Japanese villains who could sneer at a captive Bogart or gibber and gesticulate on the bridge of an imperial battleship as the forces of retribution started dropping bombs. All starring parts were played by Caucasians, of course (wasn’t Peter Lorre perfectly credible as John Marquand’s Mr. Moto, after all, and hadn’t Paul Muni and Luise Rainer been admirable as Chinese peasants in The Good Earth?), so the only problem was to round up some non-Japanese Orientals to play the secondary Japanese villains. Thus a former beer salesman named Richard Loo* and a poet named H. T. Tshiang suddenly found themselves making around a thousand dollars per week in The Purple Heart. “The leading Oriental villains (if we exclude J. Carroll Naish) were Sen Yung, Chester Gan and Philip Ahn,” as Richard Lingeman wrote in his witty history of this period, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? “Gan specialized in portraying stolid brutal Japs. Sen Yung was the treacherous, English-speaking Japanese, whose mastery of American slang he turned back on Americans in such films as Across the Pacific and God Is My Co-Pilot (‘OK, you Yankee Doodle Dandy, come and get us . . .’). Philip Ahn, a Korean, was perhaps the most sought-after villain of all, with his nasal flat voice and his mask-like face that looked as if it had been carved out of India rubber. Ahn eventually tired of his type-casting and refused any more Japanese roles, saying he wanted to play romantic Chinese leads. . . . There were no romantic Chinese leads.”

  The reason for the absence of Japanese villains in Hollywood was that the federal government suspected everyone of Japanese ancestry of being a potential saboteur, and banished all the victims of its suspicion to a newly created network of ten concentration camps in what the army called the Zone of the Interior. This move did not come, surprisingly enough, in the first outburst of hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor. On the contrary, the prevailing attitude in the earliest days of the war seemed to be one of restraint and common sense. There was considerable anger against Tokyo, but the powerful and conservative Los Angeles Times reminded its readers in an editorial published on December 8, 1941, that most of the 110,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast were “good Americans.” Two days later, the Times published an editorial against war hysteria under the headline: “Let’s Not Get Rattled.”

  This admirable advice was destined to be overwhelmed. The press itself began baying. A former sportswriter named Henry McLemore wrote in his syndicated column for the Hearst newspapers that all Japanese should be rousted out of California and shipped to the interior. “I don’t mean a nice part of the interior, either,” he said. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give them the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt
, hungry and dead up against it. . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

  This may seem merely an eructation typical of the Hearst press, but it was soon repeated in the Mandarin preachings of Walter Lippmann. After acknowledging that there had not been a single case of Japanese sabotage on the West Coast—indeed, there never was a single such case throughout the war—Lippmann wrote on February 20, that this meant nothing. “From what we know about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared,” he declared. “It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” Japanese invaders might soon turn the whole Pacific coast into a battlefield, said Lippmann, and “nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.” The novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain, who had been a colleague of Lippmann’s on the old New York World, and who now served with Cecil B. DeMille as a helmeted air raid warden in the Hollywood Hills Air Raid Defense Unit, felt a similar sense of alarm. “I’m not given to easy suspicion about people,” he said in a postwar interview, “but . . . there was a general feeling that the Japanese were doing a lot of spying, that getting them all bunched together in one place and keeping them there for the duration was not such a terribly bad idea.”

  This was largely racism. Though there were laws restricting “enemy aliens,” so that potential subversives like Bertolt Brecht had to obey a curfew and stay home after 8 P.M., all special curbs on California’s 58,000 Italian and 23,000 German aliens were dropped by the end of 1942. San Francisco’s Italian-American mayor, Angelo J. Rossi, testified before a congressional committee that “the activities of Japanese saboteurs” convinced him that “every Japanese alien should be removed from this community,” whereas “evacuation of Axis aliens, other than Japanese, should be avoided.” Nobody even suggested any moves against native-born citizens of German or Italian ancestry, like Mayor Rossi, and yet Rossi declared that even “Japanese who are American citizens should be subjected to . . . all-encompassing investigation.” A minor Hollywood actor named Leo Carillo, who claimed that his Mexican origins made him aware of discrimination against minorities, now cabled Santa Monica Congressman Leland M. Ford to call for action: “Why wait until [the Japanese] pull something before we act . . . ? Let’s get them off the coast into the interior.” Congressman Ford read this into the Congressional Record, then made a similar demand on the floor of the House and in a letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: “All Japanese, whether citizens or not, [should] be placed in inland concentration camps.” California’s Senator Hiram Johnson, acting on behalf of all legislators from the West Coast, sent President Roosevelt a letter demanding “immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage.”