City of Nets Page 5
“I took one look,” David later declared in a ghostwritten account that sealed the legend, “and knew that she was right.”
God never meant man to live here, as Thornton Wilder said, but man had tortured the desert into giving him sustenance. Wilder was only slightly exaggerating the ugly history of Los Angeles’ long struggle to provide itself with water. The region was not totally a desert, of course, for the original pueblo was built alongside the Los Angeles River, which meanders southward out of the San Gabriel Mountains to debouch in what is now Long Beach. This river was dammed and used for irrigation in the early nineteenth century, but it was never considered capable of supporting a city of more than 250,000 people. By the turn of the century, the population had already passed 150,000 and was growing rapidly. “The time has come,” Water Commissioner William Mulholland declared in 1904, after a survey of the river, “when we shall have to supplement its flow from some other source.”
Mulholland was a tall, rawboned Dubliner, a former seaman and lumberjack, who had wandered into Los Angeles in 1877 and found himself a job as a laborer on a pipe-building project alongside the Los Angeles River, which he later recalled as “a beautiful, limpid stream with willows on its banks.” Mulholland was a man of large and irresistible vision. The “other source” that he discovered for Los Angeles water was the Owens River Valley, some 250 miles to the northeast, fed from the snows of the High Sierras. President Theodore Roosevelt had already brought the federal government into the field of large-scale reclamation, using the sale of western lands to finance irrigation, and the officials who arrived to buy up water rights in the Owens Valley told the ranchers that they were planning an irrigation project for the valley. By the time the ranchers realized their mistake, their betrayal, Mulholland had floated a $1.5 million bond issue and embarked on his great aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. It was an engineering marvel that extended 233 miles across the Mojave Desert; it had 142 separate tunnels and twelve miles of inverted steel siphons and three large reservoirs, the largest of which could store more than nineteen million gallons of water. “There it is!” said Mulholland when he opened the spillway to the San Fernando Reservoir in 1913. “Take it!”
The new aqueduct could supply a city of two million people, Mulholland figured, and Los Angeles would not reach that size for many years, so the water commissioner used the surplus water to begin irrigating the arid San Fernando Valley just north of the city. Annexed by Los Angeles, it grew green at the expense of the Owens Valley ranchers, whose fertile lands were now doomed to revert to desert. The ranchers fought back with lawsuits and even gunfire. They temporarily seized part of the aqueduct, and even blew it up in 1927. Their protests were futile. Their last outcry was a Los Angeles newspaper advertisement that said: “We, the farming communities of the Owens Valley, being about to die, salute you. . . .” The newspaper ad seemed appropriate enough, for General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was one of the oligarchs who had anticipated Mulholland’s benificence in the San Fernando Valley by buying up large tracts of land there. His syndicate paid $3 million for 62,000 acres, which duly became worth about $120 million. Among the other foresighted land-buyers were the railroad magnates E. H. Harriman and Henry Huntington. They also did very well for themselves.
Robert Towne apparently drew inspiration from these half-buried scandals when he wrote the screenplay for Chinatown, for the millionaire land speculator played by John Huston boasted happily that there were only two choices: “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water.”
“Why are you doing it?” asked the detective played by Jack Nicholson. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”
“The future, Mr. Gittes, the future!” cried Huston.
The future of Los Angeles had seemed assured by Mulholland’s foresight, but the two million people to be served by his aqueduct were already in sight by the early 1920’s, and the population was growing by 100,000 a year. Mulholland began planning for yet another aqueduct, this time to reach still farther east and drain water from the Colorado River. Mulholland was not to see the completion of his last great scheme. One of his lesser projects, the St. Francis Dam in the Santa Clara Valley, suddenly gave way on March 12, 1928, and sent a wall of water cascading down on the homes of Mexican citrus workers. Some 385 people drowned, and 1,240 homes were destroyed. Mulholland, by now seventy-two, acknowledged full responsibility for the disaster and resigned, saying unhappily that he “envied the dead.” Seven years later, he suffered a severe stroke and died in his sleep.
By then, the New Deal was in full flower, and the harnessing of the Colorado River was one of its major projects. Just two months after Mulholland’s death, President Roosevelt voyaged out into the desert southeast of the former Mormon outpost of Las Vegas and dedicated what he called “a twentieth century marvel,” then known as Boulder Dam, originally and now again Hoover Dam. It was indeed a marvel, 726 feet high, built out of 6.5 million tons of concrete, but it was built at a cost. Temperatures in the desert climbed as high as 140 degrees, and when some of the laborers attempted a strike against the brutal working conditions and the four-dollar daily wage, the strike was broken by force. Only after the dam was built did the government fine the builders $100,000 for 70,000 violations of the eight-hour-day law. All in all, some 110 workmen died from various accidents during the two years of construction. “They died to make the desert bloom,” reads a plaque in their honor. The builders—a Western consortium that included Bechtel, Kaiser, and Morrison-Knudsen, who called themselves the Six Companies, after the group that ruled San Francisco’s Chinatown—made a profit of more than ten million dollars.
The aqueduct from the Colorado to Los Angeles was hardly less a marvel. Construction had begun in 1932, and some thirty thousand workmen labored on it throughout the Depression. When the $220 million project was finished in the fall of 1939, a network of canals, tunnels, pumping plants, and reservoirs could carry nearly one billion gallons of water a day nearly three hundred miles across the desert from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. “It is a dream of empire coming true before our eyes,” said W. P. Whitsett, chairman of the Metropolitan Water District.
Hollywood was not particularly interested in water in the fall of 1939, or in the Los Angeles megalopolis that the new water would make possible. Hollywood was largely preoccupied, as always, with itself, with making movies and making money. As a whole, the industry invested $170 million to make 530 feature pictures that year, among them some of the most popular movies ever made. This was the year in which Greta Garbo did not win an Academy Award for starring in Ninotchka, and Judy Garland did not win one for The Wizard of Oz. Neither did Laurence Olivier for Wuthering Heights, nor John Wayne for Stagecoach, nor Jimmy Stewart for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, not to mention Destry Rides Again. This was the year in which a million people crowded into Atlanta—still alive despite the ashes to which David Selznick had reduced it—for the ceremonial opening of Gone With the Wind. Confederate flags flew everywhere, and hawkers peddled Rhett caramels and Melanie molasses and Tara pecans, and when Vivien Leigh heard a military school band bleating “Dixie,” she said, “Oh, they’re playing the song from our picture.”
There was a grand unreality about all the festivity, this celebration of defeat in a war long finished, as though nobody could understand that a much larger struggle had already begun. That September, a group of Selznick’s technicians had been carrying out one of their last tasks, filming the title itself—Gone With the Wind—pulling the camera along on a dolly so that each word could be framed separately, when Fred Williams, the head grip, turned on his radio and heard that Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany.
War had been inevitable ever since German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow the previous week to sign the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression treaty. Hollywood’s small but noisy troop of Communists, like Communists everywhere, insisted u
p to the last minute that what was happening could not be happening. On the night before the Hitler-Stalin treaty was proclaimed, someone asked Herbert Biberman, a writer-director who was acting as chairman of yet another anti-Fascist meeting, about the rumors that such a treaty was impending. Biberman, later to become one of the Hollywood Ten, pounded on the table and denounced the rumors as “Fascist propaganda.” That was perfectly appropriate, for Earl Browder, secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, had recently told a gathering in Virginia that “there is as much chance of agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the Chamber of Commerce.”
“The day after the pact,” said Bonnie Clair Smith, who worked at the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, “you never saw anything like what hit the League’s office. The phones didn’t stop, the telegrams of withdrawal poured in.” Charles Glenn, who wrote a Hollywood column for the People’s Daily World, recalled that Browder suddenly couldn’t be found. “The known Reds were in hiding,” he said, “afraid to stick their heads out of doors because the Old Country Jews, the ones who had fled Hitler, would have torn them apart.” They soon reappeared, of course, but with a difference. “Before the pact,” recalled the writer Philip Dunne, “every other word out of Biberman’s mouth spoke of collective security. All of a sudden he added the modifying phrase, ‘collective security for peace, not war.’ ”
Not everyone thought in purely ideological terms. The day after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Louella Parsons wrote in her column for August 25: “With war imminent, Hollywood yesterday realized how many of its important stars are still in Europe. Tyrone Power and Annabella . . . Charles Boyer . . . Robert Montgomery . . . Maureen O’Sullivan . . . Bob Hope.” Hope and his wife, Dolores, had just arrived in Paris and were scheduled to return to New York on the Queen Mary in mid-September, but when they heard rumors that the ship’s August 30 sailing might be its last voyage as a civilian vessel, they scrambled back across the English Channel to get aboard.
In France itself, Arthur Rubinstein was spending the season at Deauville with his young children when he noticed that all his neighbors suddenly began leaving, and the streets of the resort were deserted. In the south, though, the rich gathered as usual to watch the fireworks explode in the sky at the annual charity ball for the Petits Lits Blancs at the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes. It was the last day of August, the last day of peace before Hitler invaded Poland. Pola Negri, the star of Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Du Barry, who had spent all too much of the 1930’s making films in Berlin, recalled later that she was drinking champagne and watching the fireworks at the Cannes casino when a sudden gust of wind sent a dance program flying across the lawn, and the nearby trees began to shudder and sway. “We scurried for shelter,” she said, “catching muddied silver heels in spattered silken hems, trampling bruised and battered flowers. Trellised walls crumbled around us, and what had been a rich spectacle was quickly transformed into a pathetic ruin.”
“The blackouts made Paris fantastically beautiful . . .” said Salka Viertel, the Polish actress who wrote several of Greta Garbo’s notable films of the 1930’s. “With Alfred and Lisl Polgar I walked through the Palais Royal flooded with moonlight. We were overcome by a great nostalgia. . . .” M-G-M had sent Mrs. Viertel to France that summer to plan the script of Madame Curie, a project for which Scott Fitzgerald had produced one of his last scripts and then been fired again. She had hoped also to visit her mother in Poland, but now M-G-M insisted that she return to Hollywood and even applied some pressure to find her a small cabin on the Île de France, sailing from Le Havre on September 1. From the port, Mrs. Viertel tried to send her mother an explanatory cable. “Pologne?” the cable clerk asked. “Les Allemands sont en Pologne, Madame. C’est la guerre.” She clambered aboard the Île de France, and the lifeboat drills now acquired an ominous significance. “I put on my life jacket and went to my assigned place,” she recalled, “where . . . I was welcomed by Gregor Piatigorsky, the cello virtuoso, who, with his wife and small child, was returning to California. In the same lifeboat would be Nathan Milstein, the famous violinist, and his American wife. . . .”
Aboard the Queen Mary, by now at sea, the news bulletins caused a certain amount of panic. Dolores Hope awakened her husband to tell him that France and Britain had declared war. “You ought to see what’s going on up in the salon,” she said. “People are sobbing. One woman stopped me and said that there are German submarines waiting for orders to sink this boat. They’ve issued blackout instructions and people are crying—and scared.” Hope responded in his characteristic way. He went to see the captain and arranged to give a special show for the passengers, then started writing himself some new material.
“Thanks for the memory,” he sang that night,
“Some folks slept on the floor,
Some in the corridor;
But I was more exclusive,
My room had ‘Gentlemen’ above the door,
Ah! Thank you so much.”
Ingrid Bergman, after the triumph of Intermezzo, her first American film for Selznick, had just returned to her family in Stockholm that August. She started a new film in Swedish and celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday, happy that she could once again enjoy “eating everything I want.” The idea of war could hardly be more remote. She was “just sewing up the hems of the new curtains for the living room when I heard over the radio that Germany had invaded Poland.” Her husband insisted that she take their year-old daughter, Pia, and return to America, and since she was half German on her mother’s side, she went from Sweden to Nazi Berlin, then sailed from Genoa.
Whether Sweden was safe—whether any place was safe—depended on one’s point of view. Bertolt Brecht, who had fled from Germany in 1933, wandered along the whole circuit of sanctuaries from Prague to Paris before ending in Denmark, where, as a lifelong survivor, he decided in the summer of 1939 to flee to Stockholm. Thomas Mann, by contrast, arrived in Stockholm that August as a Nobel Prize laureate scheduled to address a PEN conference on September 1. On hearing of Hitler’s invasion, Mann promptly canceled his speech and flew to London to catch the next sailing of the United States Lines’ Washington.
And there in London, dying of the cancer that was eating a hole through the side of his face, lay Sigmund Freud, who had foreseen everything and nothing. The incurable wound in his face had begun to give off an appalling stench. When his pet chow was brought to visit him, she cowered in a far corner of the room. The day the war began, Freud lay on a couch in his garden and listened stoically as the radio announced an air raid, then announced that it had been a false alarm. The last book he was able to read was Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, which he described as “just the book for me—it deals with starvation.” A hearty voice on the radio proclaimed that this was to be the last of wars. Freud’s doctor, Max Schur, asked the dying man whether he could believe that. “Anyhow, it is my last war,” said Freud.
Igor Stravinsky, too, was surrounded by death. He spent most of that summer of 1939 confined to a tuberculosis sanitarium at Sancellemoz, France. His daughter Mika had died there in the fall of 1938 and his wife, Catherine, the following spring. That June, his mother died. “For the third time in half a year, I heard the Requiem service chanted for one of my own family,” he said, “and for the third time walked through the fields to the cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois, in Montlhéry, which is on the road to Orléans, and dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave. And once again I was able to go on only by composing. . . .” He was composing, miraculously, the gay and charming Symphony in C. He was also organizing the reflections that he had agreed to deliver as the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard in September. To him, the invasion of Poland was yet another assault. “Igor is in a terrible state of nerves,” his friend Vera Sudeikina wrote in her diary. She had rescued him from the sanitarium, brought him to Paris, and installed him at Nadia Boulanger’s country home until the sailing of the S.S. Manhattan. “He takes a dozen suitcases—for only two weeks!” Miss Sudeikina
marveled. “. . . We have had an alarm every night, and already the stores are advertising ‘pajama styles for the basement,’ which is very French.”
In Hollywood, these events all seemed far away, as indeed they were. Aldous Huxley had just been assigned to write an M-G-M screenplay for Pride and Prejudice, and his wife, Maria, stayed up late by herself to hear Neville Chamberlain go before Parliament to call for war. “I heard Chamberlain here in the middle of the night as he addressed you in London . . .” she wrote to Edward Sackville-West. “It still seems unbelievable. Certainly unimaginable.” Just a month earlier, she had given her husband a birthday party, and Orson Welles had come, and Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes, and Paulette Goddard had brought an eight-pound birthday cake inscribed Mon Coeur, and Charlie Chaplin “gave an exquisite performance, among other things a dance he is going to do with a balloon.”
The origins of The Great Dictator, like many of Chaplin’s creations, are somewhat obscure. Chaplin himself credited Alexander Korda with having suggested in 1937 that he “should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity,” but he added that he “did not think too much of the idea then.” (Some years later, a pudgy and walrus-mustached writer named Konrad Bercovicci sued Chaplin for more than six million dollars, claiming that he had suggested not only the basic idea of Chaplin as Hitler but even such details as “a ballet dance with a globe.” When the suit finally came to trial in New York, Bercovicci testified that he and Chaplin had discussed his five-page outline for several hours but that Chaplin was worried “because the State Department says we cannot ridicule the heads of two states with which we are at peace.” Chaplin in turn testified that he had never seen Bercovicci’s outline, and the two then settled out of court for a payment of $95,000 to Bercovicci.)