City of Nets Read online

  The Outlaw was complete rubbish, of course, but that hardly bothered anyone. To Hughes, and to Birdwell, its trashiness was simply another challenge. The first step was to produce a photograph that would serve as the one great publicity picture. “What would you charge,” Birdwell asked a Beverly Hills photographer named George Harrell, “to photograph a girl [who] will sit, stand, roll around, dance, smile, sing, laugh, and cry? All you will do is shoot. I am after one, perhaps two, great photographs.” Harrell suggested two hundred dollars. Birdwell was horrified. “Perhaps you didn’t understand me,” he said. “This must be a master photograph.” They finally settled on $2,500. Miss Russell duly arrived at the Harrell studio and spent an afternoon lounging around in a haystack, provided by Birdwell, and sucking thoughtfully on a stalk of hay. The result went to Life magazine, and from Life to U.S. Army camps all over the world. Jane Russell was famous.

  As for the awful movie, The Outlaw, that was another problem to be solved by the appropriate promotion. Hughes hired the Geary Theater in San Francisco for his premiere and then plastered the city with posters of Miss Russell lolling in her haystack. Anticipating some still-imaginary opposition, Hughes’s poster announced: “The Outlaw—the picture that couldn’t be stopped.” Hughes himself piloted a planeload of fifty Hollywood correspondents up to the premiere, but his guests’ reactions ranged from nervous embarrassment to open ridicule. Time called the movie “a strong candidate for the flopperoo of all time.”

  The only solution, obviously, was to play the censorship game. Birdwell called up the San Francisco police department and demanded that The Outlaw be suppressed as an outrage to public morals. The police department showed no interest. Birdwell telephoned clergymen, parent-teacher groups, women’s organizations, urging them to join in a public outcry against his employer. The forces of virtue remained apathetic. Birdwell wrote and planted in a San Francisco newspaper an article entitled “What Time Does Reel Six Go On?” It implied that unspeakable depravities occurred during reel six of The Outlaw and that armies of insiders who knew the secret were storming the theater to witness the orgy, although, as Birdwell later admitted, “there was nothing in reel six that you couldn’t have seen in reel five, four, or seven.”

  Finally, Birdwell had discovered the right method. The rituals of moral protest began, the police bestirred themselves, arrests were made, lawyers were hired, censorship was decried, civil liberties were proclaimed, and attendance records were broken. At that very moment, at the edge of triumph, Howard Hughes withdrew his ludicrous film from circulation. He offered no explanation, simply took it back and locked it up in a special airtight room that he had built for that purpose at his headquarters on Romaine Street.

  The greatest playwright within a thousand miles of Hollywood could not find work in the world’s movie capital. In a small house on Twenty-fifth Street in Santa Monica, Bertolt Brecht set up his typewriter on a small table in the small bedroom, which had pink doors. For this house, he paid $48.50 per month in rent. Having reached America largely on funds solicited by Fritz Lang, he now lived entirely on a $120 monthly dole from the European Film Fund organized by Charlotte Dieterle and Liesl Frank. Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel, bought the necessary furniture and the clothing for the two children from Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. A German refugee doctor sent no bills for treating Brecht’s tubercular daughter, Barbara. As an “enemy alien,” provided with an alien identity card numbered 7624464, Brecht was not allowed outside his home after 8 P.M., and not allowed to travel more than five miles from that home without special permission. “I can’t recall a single breath of fresh air in all these months,” he wrote in his journal. “It’s as if I was sitting a kilometer deep under the ground, unwashed, unshaven, waiting to hear the result of the battle for Smolensk.”

  He referred to Hollywood as “the world center of the narcotics trade,” but he kept trying to write for the movies. He showed William Dieterle a screen treatment entitled “The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.” He drafted a scenario entitled “Rich Man’s Friend,” roughly based on an episode in the life of his fellow exile Peter Lorre. He wrote a story about the founder of the Red Cross, “The Malady of Monsieur Dunant.” Then there was an outline on Walter Reed’s struggle against malaria, “The Fly,” and notes for various projects with titles like “Horoscope,” “The Traitor,” “The Mexican.”

  Brecht worked with Elisabeth Bergner’s husband, Paul Czinner, on an idea that Miss Bergner had given him, about a girl who became a political radical while under the influence of hypnosis. Brecht later claimed that Billy Wilder had heard about his scenario and sold the idea to some producer for $35,000. (Wilder not long ago dismissed the charge: “I met him two or three times at parties during the war. That’s all I can tell you.”) Brecht engaged in the traditional writer’s revenge of crying “J’accuse.” “When I was robbed in Los Angeles, the city/ Of merchandisable dreams,” he wrote, “I noticed/ How I kept the theft, performed,/ By a refugee like me, a reader/ Of all my poems,/ Secret, as though I feared/ My shame might become known,/ Let’s say, in the animal world.”

  It was Fritz Lang, once again, who came to Brecht’s rescue, by opening up the possibility of a film about a spectacular killing in Europe. On May 27, 1942, two Czech guerrillas whom the British had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia ambushed the green Mercedes carrying Reinhard Heydrich, deputy chief of the Gestapo and organizer of the still-secret “final solution.” Their grenade shattered his spine. The next day, while Heydrich lay dying, and the Nazi police began rounding up hostages, Brecht and Lang went walking along the beach at Santa Monica, like the walrus and the carpenter, wondering if the manhunt for the assassin of Heydrich the Hangman would make a good movie.

  It obviously would. Working together, in German, Lang and Brecht soon produced a one-hundred-page treatment, which Lang then sold to an independent producer, another refugee, named Arnold Pressburger. The penniless Brecht got a beggarly advance of $250, which filled him with hope for the future. Would $3,000 be too much to ask for the finished script? Brecht asked. Not at all, said Lang, who grandly promised him $5,000 for the script plus $3,000 more for any necessary revisions. Brecht felt prosperous enough to move into a slightly larger house in Santa Monica, one block away, which cost $12.50 per month more in rent.

  Lang was not a real movie writer, and neither, as he well knew, was Brecht, so Lang hired as a collaborator a professional named John Wexley. He paid a stiff price, $1,500 per week, for Wexley had written some very successful screenplays, notably Angels with Dirty Faces and Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Lang may also have promised Wexley full script credit (subsequent accounts contradict each other), but Brecht accepted him simply as a colleague. He described him as “very leftist and decent.” And so they began their doomed collaboration. Pressburger had rented some space in the Charlie Chaplin studio, and when the work stretched on after the alien curfew of 8 P.M., they would meet at Brecht’s house. The collaboration was doomed not only because Brecht and Wexley had very different ideas about the film—Brecht’s title, “Trust the People,” implied the kind of Lehrstück that he wanted to write, complete with choruses and montages of headlines—but also because Brecht regarded all collaboration as an ideologically inspired mating of his genius and his colleagues’ suggestions for the fulfillment of that genius. He was nettled that Wexley addressed him as “Bert,” when even his own wife called him “Brecht,” but he wrote of Wexley’s efforts in his journals, “I correct his work.”

  Wexley naturally viewed the situation quite differently. He saw himself as the skilled professional summoned west from his Bucks County farm to create a viable screenplay out of the jotted notes of two gifted refugees who could hardly speak English. And as he dictated his own work to a secretary, he made sure that each page bore his name. When the two writers argued, as they inevitably did, they often ended by including in the script both Brecht’s Berlinisms and Wexley’s Hollywoodisms. Their joint creation eventually reached abo
ut three hundred pages, roughly twice the standard size. Then Lang’s own anxieties intervened. He took Wexley aside and told him that what he wanted to make was “a Hollywood picture.” That injunction, that concept, was presumably something that the two of them could understand, not Brecht. One of the most interesting elements, though, was Lang’s objection to scenes in which Brecht showed Nazis mistreating Jews, even scenes in which Jews were seen wearing the Star of David. The question that Lang kept raising, according to Brecht, was whether or not “the public will accept this.” What he meant by “the public,” of course, was the authorities in both Hollywood and Washington, who decided what it was that the public would accept. In both places, it was more or less official policy that the Jews were incidental to the larger struggle between freedom and dictatorship. So here was Lang, a Jew, warning Brecht, a Gentile, that their movie about Nazism must not show Jews being persecuted as Jews. And this in 1942, when the four gigantic gas chambers at Auschwitz were in the process of being built.

  Once the three-hundred-page script was finished, Lang adopted the predictable expedient of paying off Brecht, thanking him for his services, promising him that all would be well, and then telling Wexley to cut the script in half. The next time Brecht saw Wexley, he described him as looking like a “living bad conscience.” And when he was invited to watch the actual filming, the first scene he saw was one in which the heroine argued with her aunt about the décolletage of her wedding dress, a scene that he thought had been cut out. In general, he thought he had been “able to remove the main stupidities from the story. Now they’re all back in.” And of course his title, “Trust the People,” never had a chance. Neither did some other possibilities he had considered: “Never Surrender,” “Unconquered,” “Silent City.” Instead, Lang and Pressburger solicited suggestions from their office staff—an idea that Brecht should have approved as an example of collective creativity—and some nameless secretary won the hundred-dollar prize by proposing the title that the film eventually acquired: Hangmen Also Die.

  For Brecht, who still felt that Lang’s successful film contained some mutilated fragments of his ideas, there remained one last degradation: Wexley received the sole credit as the author of the screenplay. Brecht formally appealed to the Screen Writers Guild, since, as he put it, “credit for the film would possibly put me in a position to get a film job if the water gets up to my neck.” The Guild, which had struggled for years for the right to adjudicate such disputes (as many as a hundred per year), followed a basic rule, that a writer who had contributed one quarter of the final script deserved a share of the credit. But when the union’s three examiners investigated this case, Wexley produced pages and pages of the final script that he had dictated, with his own name at the top of each page, whereas Brecht could provide only a memorandum on all the meetings that had produced the script. Lang testified on Brecht’s behalf, citing many passages that “only Brecht could have written.” And Brecht could hardly have asked for a court more in accordance with his own ideology, a court organized by the union of his fellow writers, but that court ruled exactly as the author of Mahagonny might have anticipated. It voted to give the full screen credit to Wexley, and not because he had written the whole script but because Brecht was a German, who would someday go back to Germany, whereas Wexley would remain in America, and therefore the screen credit, the lifeblood of the Hollywood writer, was more important to Wexley, the American, than to the refugee from the Nazism that was the basic subject of the movie.

  Like Detroit, Hollywood was by now producing war movies on an assembly line. It requisitioned Ronald Reagan back from the Army training-film center known as Fort Roach to star in Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army. It saluted American pilots in Air Force and Destination Tokyo, and Marines in Guadalcanal Diary, and merchant seamen in Action in the North Atlantic, and army nurses in So Proudly We Hail. Some of these films made a dogged pretense at realism, like Wake Island, in which William Bendix and Robert Preston fought gallantly against overwhelming hordes of Japanese. Some were shamelessly sentimental, like Mrs. Miniver, in which the beautiful Greer Garson seemed to save the entire British army from Dunkirk. Some were primarily thrillers, like Hitchcock’s Saboteur, with that unforgettable finale of the villain dangling by his sleeve from the hand of the Statue of Liberty—and then the sleeve starting to tear. Even the movies that were purely escapist, like You Were Never Lovelier, in which Fred Astaire found his new dancing partner in Rita Hayworth, or Reap the Wild Wind, in which John Wayne, Paulette Goddard, and Hedda Hopper were all upstaged by a giant squid—even these were escapes from the war, and the war remained in the anxieties of everyone who watched them.

  Hollywood’s shrewder producers knew that the most successful war films would play on those emotions without addressing them too literally. Let war, like so many other difficult realities, be symbolic, an outpouring of patriotism without too much actual gore. It was Warner Bros. that perhaps best understood the possibilities, understood, for example, the new value in the story of an aged vaudevillian who had once sung the cock’s crow of combat in an earlier time, not against Hitler but simply “Over There.”

  George M. Cohan, who knew all too well that he was dying of bladder cancer, had been trying for several years to interest some studio in his life story. Samuel Goldwyn was willing to explore the idea and offered it to Fred Astaire, but Astaire declined. Cohan tried negotiating at Paramount, without success. His aura as the composer of “Over There” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” was also the aura of an anachronism, and that quality of outdated rhetoric extended into politics. Cohan had strongly supported the theatrical producers during the Actors Equity strike of 1919, and his Irish-American jingoism was not entirely free of anti-Semitism.

  Everything that made the Cohan story a problem in Hollywood, however, made it a solution to the problems of James Cagney, who was best known for his gangster roles but had once been a song-and-dance man. Cagney was also an ambitious stalwart of the Screen Actors Guild (he became its president in the autumn of 1942), and when various official bodies began “investigating” Hollywood, a former Communist Party official named John L. Leech falsely identified Cagney and various others as fellow conspirators. Harry Warner was appropriately indignant, not at the slandering of his star but at the star himself. “He told me in no uncertain terms,” said Cagney’s brother William, who by then was managing most of the actor’s affairs, “that if my brother didn’t clean his skirts of this charge, he was going to destroy him.”

  William Cagney apparently thought the solution would be to win the approval of Martin Dies, so he went to see the visiting congressman at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Dies listened with interest but wanted to know why Jimmy Cagney himself had not come. William Cagney said his brother was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. Dies was not satisfied. “Well, where I come from,” he said, “somebody calls you a sonofabitch and you do nothing about it, you’re a sonofabitch.” Dies demanded that the actor return to California immediately for “a clean bill of health.” William Cagney telephoned Martha’s Vineyard to urge his brother to comply. Jimmy Cagney agreed in principle, but the famous tough guy was terrified of flying and had never boarded a plane in his whole life. “To his credit,” William Cagney said later, “Jimmy got on the plane, which is probably the hardest thing he ever did.” Cagney not only flew to California but testified about his political beliefs for about fifteen minutes behind the closed doors of the Dies committee, then emerged with Dies’s approval.

  William Cagney was still worried. “We’re going to have to make the goddamndest picture that’s ever been made,” he said to his brother after the encounter with Dies. “I think it’s the Cohan story.” There followed then the usual Hollywood controversies and confusions. Jack Warner and his production chief, Hal Wallis, both claimed later that it had been their idea to film the Cohan story, and that Cagney was their choice as the star. “Cagney refused to make the picture,” said Wa
llis, who had never gotten on well with the actor. Wallis hoped to change Cagney’s mind by assigning the project to Robert Buckner, an amiable ex-journalist who had done well for the studio with such scripts as Jezebel and Knute Rockne. Buckner had never seen Cohan on stage, but he went to visit the dying man at his Fifth Avenue apartment, and the two began going out for long walks together. Cohan approved of him, Buckner said, partly because of “the fact that I am a gentile.” Cohan sang some of his old songs, even attempted a dance step from time to time, and Buckner soon concocted a saga of heroic dimensions. Wallis was pleased with Buckner’s effort and sent it to Cagney to impress him. “I got the impression I had made a dent in Jimmy’s armor,” he said.

  Cagney’s impression was the exact opposite. He said he read the script “with incredulity. There wasn’t a single laugh in it.” Cagney acknowledged, however, that his brother “wanted to do the Cohan story as a 100 percent American experience principally to remove the taint that apparently still attached itself to my reputation—a reputation now scarred by my so-called radical activities in the thirties when I was a strong Roosevelt liberal.” Cagney’s solution, he said, was to announce that he would play Cohan only if the script was turned over to the Epstein brothers, whom he regarded as “two very bright lads.” These two, Julius and Phil Epstein, were identical twins, both quite bald even in their youth, who modestly toiled away for anyone who would pay them. It was said, in fact, that Budd Schulberg used the two of them as the model for Julian Blumberg, the talented but timorous writer whose scripts were all plagiarized by Sammy Glick. The Epsteins so disliked Buckner’s flag-waving script that they declined the job, but William Cagney pursued them until they agreed to rewrite it. Buckner complained bitterly, of course, and so did Cohan, but it was the Epsteins who wrote that saccharine deathbed scene for Cohan’s father (Walter Huston). And it was they who solved the problem of Cohan’s first wife, a fellow vaudevillian named Ethel Levey, who was preparing to sue everyone involved (and eventually did, without success), by combining her and the second Mrs. Cohan into an idealized creature named Mary (“And it was Mary, Mary, long before the fashions changed . . .”), enchantingly played by the seventeen-year-old Joan Leslie.*