City of Nets Read online

  One of the most remarkable aspects of these buccaneers was how little they understood either their business or their audience. “Less brains are necessary in the motion picture industry than in any other,” Lewis Selznick once testified to a startled congressional committee. He cited an occasion when he had made $105,000 on a $1,000 investment within ten weeks. Selznick eventually went bankrupt, so his testimony is not infallible, but the whole history of Hollywood is a chronicle of misjudgments and miscalculations interspersed among the more celebrated successes. The studio tycoons seemed to have no idea, for example, that the cartel by which they had made themselves rich was vulnerable to a federal antitrust suit, or that the suit originally filed by the Justice Department in 1938 would ultimately devastate their empire. They also had no idea of what technology would mean to them and their fortunes. They had stumbled into the use of sound almost by accident, and they were reluctantly beginning to experiment with color; they completely ignored the fact that television broadcasts were already emanating from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, and that tens of thousands of people were marveling at this novelty at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, New York.

  The lords of Hollywood persuaded themselves that they had some mysterious insight into the American public, and that this insight both explained and justified their riches, their courtiers, their palaces and racehorses. They imagined themselves, with the help of their publicity men, as great showmen, daring gamblers willing to stake fortunes on hunches, and when they were eventually dethroned, as most of them eventually were, they seemed surprised, baffled, hurt. Even in their heyday, however, they were continually being surprised. Louis B. Mayer, for example, saw little future for any actor with the protruding ears of Clark Gable; he opposed one of Gable’s first great triumphs, Mutiny on the Bounty, because he thought the public would never approve of a rebel as a hero. He even rejected a proposal to help finance Mickey Mouse, on the ground that, as he told Walt Disney, “every woman is frightened of a mouse.”

  Mayer did not read scripts or scenarios, much less books, so when some story had to be officially considered, it was acted out for him by a kind of minnesinger named Kate Corbaley, who was paid to tell him stories just as his mother had done years earlier in New Brunswick. One afternoon in May of 1936, Miss Corbaley told Mayer a new story about a tempestuous southern girl named Scarlett O’Hara, and Louis B. Mayer sagely nodded his million-dollar-a-year head and said, “Let’s ask Irving.”

  A summons was issued for Irving Thalberg, the frail and sickly production chief, who was mainly responsible for Mayer’s success at M-G-M. Thalberg had started in New York as a twenty-five-dollar-per-week secretary in the offices of Carl Laemmle. He soon became Laemmle’s chief adjutant at Universal, but when he declined an invitation to marry Laemmle’s eager daughter, Rosabelle, the slighted father made Thalberg’s life so disagreeable that he found himself a new job as vice-president in the fledgling operations of Louis B. Mayer, who offered him six hundred dollars a week and stock options and no marriage proposals. In fact, Mayer warned his twenty-three-year-old protégé that he didn’t want a son-in-law with a weak heart. “If a romance developed between you and either of my girls . . .” he said. “I can’t allow it to happen.”

  While Thalberg lived, he was Hollywood’s supreme wunderkind, the producer who not only kept raking in money but turned out those self-important M-G-M epics like The Barretts of Wimpole Street and The Good Earth, and the Romeo and Juliet that featured Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer. “I, more than any single person in Hollywood, have my finger on the pulse of America,” Thalberg once said. “I know what people will do and what they won’t do.” After his death at thirty-six, he became Hollywood’s lost hero, its martyr. When Scott Fitzgerald returned to work at M-G-M for the last time in 1939, he recreated the vanished Thalberg as Monroe Stahr in his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Recalling a rare encounter in the M-G-M commissary back in 1927, Fitzgerald included almost verbatim in his novel something that Thalberg had told him about the essence of authority: A road has to be built over a mountain, and surveyors arrive with plans for several possible routes. “You say, ‘Well, I think we will put the road there’ . . . and you know in your secret heart that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubts.”

  Thalberg was the Hollywood executive who said of Warner Bros.’ first talking film, The Jazz Singer, that “talking pictures are just a passing fad.” And his sense for “the pulse of America” was well expressed when he dismissed an assistant’s protests about a scenario that called for a love scene in Paris to be played against a background of a moonlit ocean. The assistant brought him maps and photographs to demonstrate that Paris is nowhere near any ocean. “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris,” said Thalberg, refusing to make any change in the script. So now, in the last year of his life, when Mayer called him in to hear Kate Corbaley tell once again the story of a southern girl named Scarlett O’Hara, Irving Thalberg quickly became restless.

  “Forget it, Louis,” said the Last Tycoon. “No Civil War picture ever made a nickel.”

  “Well, that’s it,” said Mayer. “Irving knows what’s right.”

  Mayer and Thalberg were not Hollywood’s only experts on the pulse of America. As soon as the agent Annie Laurie Williams learned that M-G-M was rejecting Gone With the Wind, she hurried to Grand Central station and pressed a set of the unpublished galleys on a California-bound producer, Mervyn LeRoy. His wife, Doris, began to read the galleys on the train, and by the time she reached Los Angeles she was determined to persuade her uncle, Jack Warner, that this would be a great part for his main star, Bette Davis. Warner read a synopsis and agreed to make an offer. “I’ve just bought a book which has a marvelous part for you,” he said to Miss Davis, lying. “It’s called Gone With the Wind.”

  “I’ll bet that’s a pip,” said Miss Davis as she departed for England.

  RKO’s Pandro Berman also read the novel and turned it down; so did David O. Selznick; so did a lot of others. Darryl Zanuck offered $35,000, but Miss Williams hoped to get $65,000. One of Selznick’s aides then sent a synopsis to John Hay Whitney, the chairman and chief investor in Selznick’s new production company, and Whitney wanted to buy it. That was how, for $50,000, the story rejected by Louis B. Mayer came to be bought by his son-in-law. (Or so goes the generally accepted version. Zanuck’s account was less respectable. He claimed that he had bid $40,000, had been topped by a $45,000 bid from Adolph Zukor of Paramount, had increased his own bid to $55,000, and that Mayer had then proposed a little conspiracy. “To end the bidding, at the suggestion of L. B. Mayer, we met in Thalberg’s bungalow, the heads of the studios, about five,” Zanuck said. “The lawyer for the producers presided. Someone suggested, let’s put our names on slips of paper and put them in a hat and draw one slip out and whosoever’s name is on the slip will purchase it—whatever the price. The lawyer churned the slips around. . . . The first paper he touched had Selznick’s signature on it. That’s how he got Gone With the Wind. I remember Thalberg smiling like hell because Metro didn’t get it.”)

  The Selznicks were an extraordinary tribe. The father, Lewis, the former jewelry dealer from Kiev, persuaded his three sons that they were heirs to a kingdom. He read aloud to them from David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Tale of Two Cities. When young David Selznick went to Columbia University, he went with an allowance of $750 per week, which, in the 1920’s, was a substantial sum. “Spend it all,” said Lewis Selznick. “Give it away. Throw it away.” In the course of amassing his millions in Hollywood, Lewis managed to make many enemies, and when he couldn’t pay a debt of a mere three thousand dollars, they forced him into bankruptcy. He never found a
nother job during the ten years before his death in 1933. His sons were appalled. The oldest, Myron, a perpetually angry alcoholic, became the first and most ferocious of Hollywood’s big agents. Among the clients for whom he extorted revenge from the studios were Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Boris Karloff, Laurence Olivier, George Raft, Merle Oberon, Carole Lombard, Helen Hayes, Lily Pons, and on and on and on.

  The youngest son, Howard, who sometimes referred to himself as “the third brother,” was a quiet youth, apparently the victim of slight brain damage at birth, and largely ignored by his family. “How is it you always leave after the main course?” his mother once asked him at dinner. “Where do you go?”

  “I go to see my wife,” Howard answered, according to his sister-in-law, Irene Mayer Selznick.

  “What wife? What do you mean?” his mother demanded.

  “I’ve been married for two years,” said Howard. With his brothers’ help, Howard was eventually established in a Hollywood flower shop called Forget Me Not. The shop almost inevitably failed.

  Then there was David, fat, bumptious, impossible David. Paramount’s chief of production, Benjamin P. Schulberg, described him as “the most arrogant young man I’ve ever known,” and then hired him as an assistant. Selznick was twenty-six when he applied for work at M-G-M. The application went promptly to Louis B. Mayer, who decreed that no son of Lewis Selznick would ever work at M-G-M. Selznick immediately applied to Mayer’s own boss, Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s, Inc. Schenck, perhaps maliciously, hired him. Selznick immediately began sending out memoranda in all directions. Yet every night, when the young executive returned home, his father would put him to bed. “Regardless of the hour . . .” Irene Selznick recalled, “Pop would read with his ear cocked for David’s return, whereupon he would descend to cover David up, stretched out on the couch in his study, instantly asleep. After an hour or two Pop would lead his comatose boy gently to his bed and undress him.”

  Louis B. Mayer warned his younger daughter against Selznick. “Keep away from that schnook,” he said. “He’ll be a bum just like his old man.” But Irene Mayer was fascinated by Selznick’s energy and enthusiasm. After all the usual sparring, the children of the rival producers decided to get married. (Some skeptics naturally jeered. “Someone had to marry Irene Mayer,” according to a cruel ditty by the screenwriters Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer, “someone had to have the guts to lay her . . .”) Louis B. Mayer professed to be pleased by the marriage, but he kept insisting on delay. “You cannot do this to me, Mr. Mayer,” Selznick finally said. “I cannot wait any longer. You’re a man. What kind of hell do you think I go through?”

  Mayer was shocked, scandalized, outraged at such a suggestion of sex. When the wedding finally took place, there was almost a public quarrel between Mayer and his daughter. “I marched down the aisle on his arm,” she later said, “still pleading with him, as he shushed me, all in full view of the guests. By the time I got to the altar, I had dried my tears, but I looked wan and grave.”

  Having fought with all his rivals at M-G-M, and at Paramount, and at RKO, David Selznick established his own independent production company. His first film was a story that his father had once read to him, Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  But throughout the late 1930s, his grand obsession was the filming of Gone With the Wind, a project for which he had neither the cast nor the capital. He knew from the start that he wanted Clark Gable to play Rhett Butler, though he considered such possibilities as Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Ronald Colman, and even Basil Rathbone. But Gable was owned by M-G-M, which never loaned him out to other studios. Louis B. Mayer was willing to break a rule for his fractious son-in-law, but the terms were murderous. Not only would Selznick have to pay Gable’s regular salary of $7,000 per week, but Mayer would put up $1,250,000 as half the financing of the film and would then take world distribution rights plus half the total profits. And Gable wasn’t free to start work for two years. That gave Selznick two years to keep revising the script (the original version, by Sidney Howard, was just an agenda for rewrite teams that included Scott Fitzgerald, John Van Druten, and Ben Hecht, the last of these at fifteen thousand dollars for one week’s work). It also gave him two years to milk publicity from his own inability to find the perfect Scarlett O’Hara.

  The interminable “search,” orchestrated by a former Hearst police reporter named Russell Birdwell, featured all the major stars of the day. Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis campaigned fiercely for the part, and the gossip columns chronicled each rise and fall in their prospects. Paulette Goddard nearly won, but various ladies’ clubs noisily protested that she was not really married to her supposed husband, Charlie Chaplin. Though she claimed they had been married in Singapore harbor by the captain of an Oriental cruise ship, the lack of any wedding certificate drove Selznick back into his customary state of indecision. Meanwhile, his adjutants wandered across the countryside, interviewing various high school prom queens and other local talents. One girl in crinolines, quite possibly acting on instructions from Birdwell, had herself shipped to Selznick’s home in a large packing crate. All in all, fourteen hundred “discoveries” were formally interviewed, and ninety of them were actually tested before a movie camera. The tests totaled 162,000 feet of film, amounting to more than twenty-four hours’ running time, all of it worthless. The cost of the famous search was estimated at $100,000, and its value as publicity was priceless.

  As the beginning of 1939 drew near, however, some actual work had to be started. The designers had already drawn their plans for the construction of Tara, and Twelve Oaks, and the Atlanta Bazaar, but before the building could begin, some space had to be cleared on the cluttered back lot of Selznick’s studio. This studio, set among slatternly bars and apartment houses on Washington Boulevard, had been operated at various times by Sam Goldwyn, Pathé, and Joseph Kennedy’s RKO. Its forty acres had served as both English countryside and African jungle. Sets of all kinds were built and then abandoned: a village from The Last of the Mohicans, a street from Little Lord Fauntleroy, even the giant gateway that once guarded the entry to the domain of King Kong. Eventually, these dilapidated ruins would have to be dismantled, but William Cameron Menzies, who had been hired to design the sets for Gone With the Wind, conceived an inspired idea. Why not put a few false fronts on the relics, enough to make them look like an approximation of Atlanta, and then set the whole tumbledown mess on fire?

  Cautious M-G-M executives argued that it would be cheaper and simpler to work with models, and local fire officials worried that the conflagration might easily break out of control, but Selznick was adamant. Let it all burn, like the original Atlanta, like London, like Rome. He assigned the technical problems to Lee Zavitz, a special-effects man known as an explosives expert, and Zavitz rigged up an elaborate network of pipes throughout the assembled buildings. Zavitz built his conduits at three levels—on the ground, at the second story, and along the roofs. Throughout this network, he installed two different kinds of pipes that ran alongside each other, with sprinklers at fixed intervals. One set of pipes contained a highly flammable mixture of 80 percent oil distillate and 20 percent rock gas; the other contained water and a fire-extinguishing solution. All of these pipes, designed to make the fires burn more fiercely or to wet them down, led to a kind of keyboard console, where a row of push buttons could regulate the flames in various parts of the holocaust. It was an arsonist’s dream. Selznick insisted on operating the console himself.

  Though the night of December 10, 1938, was cold, Selznick was determined to make a party of the great fire. He had built an observation platform for his guests. His widowed mother, Florence, was there, wrapped in a shawl, but Myron Selznick was delayed at a dinner party. Selznick waited for more than an hour, and so did twenty-five officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, and fifty firemen, and two hundred studio employees pressed into service as volunteers to man the five-thousand-gallon water tanks. So did three white-suited doubles for Clark Gable,
ready to rescue three different Scarletts on three different buckboard wagons. So did seven different camera crews trained to use the new and unpredictable Technicolor process; there would, after all, be no way of correcting mistakes.

  When nervous aides finally persuaded the nervous Selznick that he could wait no longer, he started pushing buttons. Suddenly the night was on fire. Selznick pushed a button, and one of the sets from The Garden of Allah exploded into flames; he pushed a button and the great gateway from King Kong collapsed in ruins. Only now did Selznick’s publicity man, Russell Birdwell, telephone the Los Angeles newspapers with anonymous tips that the whole lot was on fire, and when skeptical editors looked out their windows, they could see the sky reddening miles away.

  “Burn, baby, burn,” was a cry heard only thirty years later, in Watts, and one can only imagine what reverberated inside the head of David O. Selznick as he pushed the buttons that spread the flames through the sham buildings of Atlanta. Burn, Atlanta! Burn, Hollywood, and all of southern California! Burn, Louis B. Mayer, and all the bankers and lawyers and dealmakers! Burn!

  The flames were beginning to die down, according to legend, when Myron Selznick finally arrived, half drunk as usual, with some of his dinner guests, among them a relatively obscure young English actress named Vivien Leigh. She had just come to Hollywood because she was following her lover, Laurence Olivier, who had signed to play Heathcliff in Sam Goldwyn’s production of Wuthering Heights. When drunk, Myron Selznick often addressed his younger brother as “Genius.” Sometimes, they got into fistfights. “Hello, Genius,” Myron Selznick said now. “I want you to meet your Scarlett O’Hara.”