City of Nets Read online

  West worked hard, did as he was told, and seemed not to mind the triviality of his assignments. From the start, he was more interested in exploring the peripheries of Hollywood. He told friends of his encounters with gamblers, lesbians, dwarfs. He began writing a short story about three Eskimos who had been brought to Hollywood to star in an adventure movie and were stranded there after its failure. As the narrator from the studio’s publicity department remarked, “It was about Eskimos, and who cares about Eskimos?”

  Hollywood jobs were as transitory as Hollywood itself. During a long siege of unemployment, made worse by sickness, West lived in a shabby apartment hotel off Hollywood Boulevard called the Pa-Va-Sed, tenanted by a raffish assortment of vaudeville comics, stuntmen, and part-time prostitutes. He began frequenting the city’s Mexican underworld, going to cockfights at Pismo Beach. He began imagining all these figures as the characters in a novel that he planned to call “The Cheated.” He told a friend about a newspaper story, perhaps imaginary, of a yacht named The Wanderer, which had sailed for the South Seas with a strange assortment of passengers: movie cowboys, a huge lesbian, and, once again, a family of Eskimos.

  These were the outcasts who eventually peopled The Day of the Locust. There was no Jean Harlow or Rita Hayworth in West’s Hollywood, only Faye Greener, with her “long, swordlike legs,” whose invitation “wasn’t to pleasure but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love.” In her one movie role, as a dancing girl in a Damascus seraglio, she “had only one line to speak, ‘Oh, Mr. Smith!’ and spoke it badly.” In this Hollywood, there was no Gary Cooper either, only Earl Shoop, the inarticulate cowboy who survived by poaching game in the hills while he vaguely hoped for a job as a movie extra. And instead of the Zanucks and Selznicks, West introduced Honest Abe Kusich, the dwarf bookmaker, complete with black shirt, yellow tie, and Tyrolean hat. And, of course, the Gingos, a family of Eskimos.

  The Hollywood that attracted these outcasts remained always beyond their grasp, rich and tantalizing. West insisted on demonstrating that their city of dreams was really nothing more than “the final dumping ground,” a “Sargasso of the imagination.” Searching for Faye, who had found a bit part in a movie about Waterloo, Tod Hackett got lost in the back lots and wandered through a tangle of briers past the skeleton of a zeppelin, an adobe fort, a Dutch windmill, a Trojan horse, and “a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak.” By following a red glare in the sky, Tod eventually found his way to the new set that was being built for the battle of Waterloo, but just as he reached the slopes of an artificial Mont St. Jean, the whole set collapsed under the charging cuirassiers. “Nails screamed with agony as they pulled out of joists. . . . Lath and scantling snapped as though they were brittle bones. The whole hill folded like an enormous umbrella and covered Napoleon’s army with painted cloth.”

  Theater people have traditionally taken delight in the artifices of their calling, fondly citing Shakespeare’s reflections on the world as a stage and all the men and women merely players, but West saw the artificialities of Hollywood as part of a sinister California pattern that eventually became clear only in our time, when San Clemente and Pacific Palisades emerged on the national political landscape. It was a pattern partly of physical extremes, of burning deserts and alkali flats, but also of the spiritual extremes that West derided as the Church of Christ Physical, where “holiness was attained through the constant use of chest weights and spring grips,” the Tabernacle of the Third Coming, where a woman in man’s clothing preached the “crusade against salt,” and the Temple Moderne, where the initiates taught “brain-breathing, the secret of the Aztecs.”

  The pattern of California extremism became manifest in an atmosphere of rancor and disappointment and ultimately violence. West saw this spirit in the swarms of middle-class migrants who had retired to southern California in the hope of finding some kind of pleasure before they died. They were the people who waited restlessly at a movie premiere at Grauman’s—or Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre, as West called it—and who finally burst into mindless rioting. “Until they reached the line,” West wrote, “they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. . . . All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters . . . saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. . . . Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. . . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

  There was a Gary Cooper in West’s Hollywood after all, but only as an unseen figure rumored to be somewhere nearby. Two women caught in the milling mob tried to figure out how the chaos began. “The first thing I knew,” said one, “there was a rush and I was in the middle.”

  “Yeah,” said the other. “Somebody hollered, ‘Here comes Gary Cooper,’ and then wham!”

  “That ain’t it,” said a man in a cloth cap and sweater. “This is a riot you’re in.”

  “Yeah,” said another woman. “A pervert attacked a child.”

  “I come from St. Louis,” said the first woman, “and we had one of them pervert fellows in our neighborhood once. He ripped up a girl with a pair of scissors.”

  “He must have been crazy,” said the man in the cap. “What kind of fun is that?”

  Everybody laughed. They were enjoying themselves. Rioting was something to pass the time, and as Tod Hackett was swept along by the crowds, he imagined them all as the arsonists of his painting, imagined working on the painting itself, “modelling the tongues of fire so that they licked even more avidly at a corinthian column that held up the palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.”

  This city of the inferno, both cruel and grotesque, was somewhat different from the Hollywood that had bewitched the American imagination, and the reviews of West’s book were respectful but unenthusiastic. Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker that it had “all the fascination of a nice bit of phosphorescent decay.” To Scott Fitzgerald, West wrote: “So far the box score stands: Good reviews—fifteen percent, bad reviews—twenty-five percent, brutal personal attacks—sixty percent.” In June, just a month after publication, Bennett Cerf informed West that the sales for the latest two weeks numbered exactly twenty-two copies. He added that the “outlook is pretty hopeless.” Cerf was sadly disappointed. “By God,” he declared, “if I ever publish another Hollywood book, it will have to be ‘My 39 ways of making love,’ by Hedy Lamarr.”

  Hedy Lamarr. Hedwig Kiesler was her real name, Hedwig Kiesler Mandl by marriage, aged twenty-five or thereabouts, a recent immigrant from Vienna. What was there about Hedy Lamarr that should make a sedentary New York publisher like Bennett Cerf, thinking about Hollywood in 1939, start to glow when he thought of her and her thirty-nine ways of making love?

  Probably it was the rumors surrounding Ecstasy, in which she had been photographed, from a discreet distance, darting through some trees and going for a swim in the nude. When Ecstasy was first imported into the United States in the fall of 1934, it was immediately seized by the customs authorities. An official committee, including Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, wife of the Secretary of the Treasury, viewed the film and professed itself shocked not by the nude swimming but by a subsequent scene in which the camera focused on Hedy Lamarr’s face while a man supposedly made love to her. “I was not sure what my reactions would be, so . . . I just closed my eyes,” Miss Lamarr later recalled.* “ ‘Nein, nein,’ the director yelled. ‘A passionate expression on the face.’ He threw his hands up and slapped them against his sides. He mumbled about the stupidity of youth. He looked around and found a safety pin on a table. He picked it up, bent it almost straight, and approached. ‘You will lie here,’ he said. ‘I will be
underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react!’ I shrugged. . . .”

  The customs authorities demanded that this scene be expunged; the distributors refused, so Ecstasy was not only banned but literally burned. The distributors imported another copy, and managed to get it past customs, but then a federal jury in New York declared that it was “indecent . . . and would tend to corrupt morals.” Various legal appeals permitted showings in Boston, Washington, and Los Angeles. The litigation and publicity rumbled along in New York until a censored version was officially approved in 1940.

  By then, of course, Hedy Lamarr was famous, both as a beauty and as a fugitive. Her husband, Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a secret financial backer of the Austrian Nazis, was reputed to have spent more than $300,000 buying up and destroying copies of Ecstasy. He also kept its heroine under close supervision in his palace in Vienna. According to her disputed memoirs, she disguised herself as her own maid and fled to Paris. The subsequent gossip in Hollywood, according to Errol Flynn, was that the beautiful prisoner had persuaded Mandl to let her wear all the family jewels at a dinner for the Nazi Prince Ernst von Stahremberg, then pleaded a headache and disappeared. When Flynn asked her at a party to tell the details of her departure from her husband, she answered only, “That son of a bitch!”

  Frau Mandl’s flight in the summer of 1937 led her to London, and there to the hotel of Louis B. Mayer, the chief of M-G-M, and thence to the S.S. Normandie, bound for New York. Mayer just happened to be traveling on the same boat; the actress presented herself as a governess to a violin prodigy named Grisha Goluboff; by the time the boat docked in New York, she had acquired M-G-M contracts for both the violinist and herself (at five hundred dollars a week), and a new name as well. When a Daily News reporter went to the pier to interview “The Ecstasy Lady, brunette Hedy Kiesler,” she said, “My name is Hedy Lamarr. Please call me that.” Mayer had apparently named her after Barbara La Marr, a great beauty he had admired in the 1920’s, who had succumbed to drugs and alcohol. After Mayer shipped his newest acquisition to Hollywood and signed her up for English lessons, however, he didn’t know what to do with her. It was apparently Charles Boyer who encountered her at a party and then persuaded the producer Walter Wanger to borrow her, for a fee of fifteen hundred dollars a week to Mayer, as his leading lady in Algiers.

  “Come with me to the Casbah.” The most famous line in Algiers is—like Humphrey Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam,” in Casablanca—not actually in the movie at all.* Boyer, as the fugitive jewel thief Pépé le Moko, could hardly invite the roving Hedy Lamarr to the Casbah, since he himself was already trapped within its walls. The police wanted Hedy to lure him out, and so he was duly enticed, caught, killed. Despite the glib absurdity of the story, the reviewers were very much impressed. “Best of all,” said Time, “is the smoldering, velvet-voiced, hazel-eyed, Viennese Actress Hedy Kiesler (Hollywood name: Hedy Lamarr).”

  This, then, was probably what made Bennett Cerf’s wrinkled jowls tingle when he wrote to Nathanael West. These were some of the essential elements of the imagined Hollywood of 1939: imagined romance, imagined sex, vaguely foreign and thus vaguely unreal, and thus permissible. There were, of course, other kinds of unreality also being manufactured and merchandised in Hollywood. The previous year’s Academy Awards had been presented to Spencer Tracy as the heroic priest in Boys Town and Bette Davis as the Dixie prima donna in Jezebel, but Louis B. Mayer’s great favorites were the pseudo-family comedies featuring Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy, fourteen of which were churned out between 1937 and 1943. Once, to demonstrate how Andy should pray for his sick mother, Mayer fell heavily to his knees, clasped his hands together, and looked up toward heaven. “Dear God,” he begged, almost in tears, “please don’t let my mom die, because she’s the best mom in the world. Thank you, God.” When Mayer compared such scenes with other movies of the time, his judgments were forthright. “Any good Hardy picture,” he said, “made $500,000 more than Ninotchka made.”

  That was the most remarkable thing about Hollywood in 1939: how successful it was. While the rest of the country wallowed along through the remnants of the Depression, Hollywood kept making more and more money. Several major studios went bankrupt and had to be “reorganized,” but the movie industry as a whole flourished. Perhaps it was because movies were still a novelty, and still cheap (and some, of course, were good), or perhaps because they offered people an escape from their troubles. “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time, during this Depression,” President Roosevelt said of Shirley Temple, “it is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby. . . .” Perhaps, on the other hand, Hollywood’s success was based on the cruder fact that it required no expensive ingredients like coal or steel, that its largely nonunionized employees could be not only dismissed on a producer’s whim but made to take pay cuts for the good of the studio. Or perhaps it was simply because the studios had gradually established what amounted to an illegal cartel, controlling both their actors and writers at one end of the process and their distributors and exhibitors at the other end. They couldn’t lose.

  In 1939, there were more movie theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and the number of theaters per capita was about twice as high as it is today. More than fifty million Americans went to the movies every single week of the year. There were about four hundred new movies per year to watch. The box office receipts that poured into Hollywood (into New York, actually, for it was always New York that quietly ruled and controlled Hollywood) totaled $673,045,000. The movies were the nation’s fourteenth-biggest business in terms of volume ($406,855,095), the eleventh-biggest in terms of assets ($529,950,444), bigger than office machines, bigger than the supermarket chains.

  The creation of fantasy made the creators rich. Though Hollywood was not among the ten biggest American industries, it ranked second in the percentage of sales and profits that it awarded to its own executives. It even paid its grumbling writers remarkably well. If Nathanael West’s $350 per week seemed small, it nonetheless compared very favorably to the average newspaper reporter’s wages of about $50. Scott Fitzgerald was making $1,000 during his last years of ruin, while Ben Hecht once got a contract guaranteeing him $15,000 a week. The highest-paid stars, like Bing Crosby and Claudette Colbert, earned more than $400,000 per year. Shorter contracts were even more lucrative. Douglas Fairbanks once received a stunning $37,000 per week, Walter Huston an even more stunning $40,000.

  But the lords of creation were those studio executives who could still remember their boyhoods as penniless immigrants from Eastern Europe, and who, having defeated Thomas Edison’s “Trust,” formed a trust of their own, and, as lords, paid themselves accordingly. Samuel Goldwyn, born Shmuel Gelbfisz, a former glove salesman from Lodz; Joseph Schenck, of Rybinsk, Russia, the founder and chairman of 20th Century–Fox, and his younger brother, Nick, president of Loew’s, Inc.; Lewis Selznick, born Zeleznik, a jewelry dealer from Kiev; “Uncle Carl” Laemmle, the founder of Universal, a clothing store manager from Laupheim, Germany; Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, a furrier from Ricse, Hungary—these were the legendary rulers of Hollywood. And those who were not themselves penniless immigrants were generally the sons of penniless immigrants: the ruthless Cohn brothers, sons of a German tailor, founders of Columbia; the Warner brothers, all four of them, sons of a Polish cobbler. Benjamin Warner taught his sons, among other things, to save shoe nails and to store them between their lips while they worked. Many years later, Jack Warner recalled a time when Ann Sheridan was showing a young actor around the Warner Bros. lot and encountered an elderly man walking slowly with his head bowed. Occasionally, he bent down, picked up an object, and popped it into his mouth. “Who’s that man and what’s he doing?” the actor asked Miss Sheridan. “Doing what comes naturally,” she said. “He’s picking up nails. His name is Harry Warner, and
he happens to be president of the company.”

  The legend of the ignorant immigrants becoming plutocrats is partly fiction. Leo Rosten demonstrated in his detailed study of Hollywood, The Movie Colony (1941) that just as 80 percent of Hollywood actors earned less than $15,000 per year, nearly 60 percent of the 120 leading Hollywood executives had graduated from college and less than 5 percent came from Russia and Poland. Still, the confirmation of all legends, the richest and most powerful of all the semiliterate monarchs, was Louis B. Mayer, who was born in Minsk, probably in 1885, and was probably named Lazar. He himself did not know for sure.

  He spent his boyhood as a ragpicker in New Brunswick, Canada. He was twenty-two when he bought a former burlesque theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts, for a down payment of six hundred dollars and began exhibiting a French film of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Though he stood only five feet seven* , he had powerful shoulders and a fierce temper. He attacked and knocked down Charlie Chaplin for speaking disrespectfully of his own ex-wife; he knocked down Erich von Stroheim for saying that all women were whores. In 1937, as president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he received a salary and bonuses totaling $1,300,000, which made him the highest-paid man in the United States. He was to retain that ambiguous honor for the next nine years, and when he was finally overthrown in 1951, M-G-M declared that over the course of his twenty-seven years in power, he had “received over $20,000,000 in compensation.” It was part of the folklore at M-G-M that the studio commissary had to serve at lunch every day, in honor of Mayer’s long-dead mother, chicken soup with real pieces of chicken in it, at thirty-five cents a bowl.