City of Nets Read online

  Chaplin’s political doubts and misgivings about The Great Dictator seem strange today, but they apparently caused him a lot of anxiety during his preparations in the summer of 1939. “United Artists . . . had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship troubles,” Chaplin wrote rather vaguely in his memoirs. “Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.” When Hitler actually invaded Poland that September, Chaplin was even more worried, not about official objections now but about how audiences would react to a slapstick comedy about the aggressor. Having already spent more than $500,000 before any filming began, Chaplin stopped all work for a week of conferences and soul-searching, then, with even more secrecy than usual, decided to go ahead. What he had started as a comedy would end with his impassioned appeal for brotherhood: “The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through!”

  Less rhetorical men confronted the simple question of enlisting. When David Niven finished filming Raffles on September 1, he told one of the film’s writers, Scott Fitzgerald, that he was returning to London to join the armed forces. Fitzgerald declared that he wanted to go too. “I missed out last time,” he said. “I left it too late. I didn’t join up until 1917—I never got to go overseas.” Fitzgerald “became very maudlin,” Niven recalled, “with his mind firmly focused on Agincourt and white chargers.” Shortly thereafter, Fitzgerald was once again fired. “It always happens,” he told Niven as he returned to work on The Last Tycoon. (He was to die of a heart attack the following year.)

  On Sunday morning, September 3, Niven was sleeping aboard a yacht that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had chartered to cruise off Catalina Island; so were Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and a number of other English in colonial exile. They woke to hear on the radio that Britain had delivered an ultimatum, and that Germany had rejected it, and that the two nations were at war. Fairbanks raised a glass to toast victory. Olivier drank that toast and then proceeded to get wildly drunk. “Smashed as a hoot owl,” as Mrs. Fairbanks later put it, he rowed himself to another yacht; climbed aboard, and began bellowing to anyone who would listen, “This is the end! You are finished, all of you! Finished! You are relics! Enjoy your last moments! You’re done for! Doomed!” Then, shivering in his swimming trunks, he staggered back aboard the dinghy, rowed to the next yacht, and repeated his jeremiad.

  Niven went off to war by himself. Fairbanks gave him a farewell party that featured many of the stars of Hollywood’s English colony—Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Basil Rathbone—who were generally inclined to remain in Hollywood. That was not, of course, shameful. Indeed, any Hollywood celebrities who asked the British Embassy what they should do were generally told to stay where they were and go on with their work. That was what Hollywood wanted too. David Selznick summed up the studios’ view splendidly when he asked what would happen if Laurence Olivier and George Sanders abandoned his new production of Rebecca. “We would be in a fine pickle if they walked out in the middle,” he said. “Not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle.”

  So Hollywood remained at peace. When Salka Viertel returned to California, she was struck by the prevailing air of complacent prosperity, by the supermarkets heaped with food, and by “the unconcerned sunbathers on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown . . .” And when the renowned Mrs. Basil Rathbone decided to give a gala dinner in honor of Arthur Rubinstein, Leopold Stokowski, and the heroic people of Poland, she had the walls of her sixty-foot-long dining hall decorated with a three-foot cellophane frieze that displayed the notes of Chopin’s “Polonaise Militaire.” The total effect, according to one contemporary chronicler, was “something pyrotechnic, exotic, ingenious and rare.”

  Rubinstein (left) was performing Brahms when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor.

  Walt Disney’s Fantasia transformed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into a battle of dinosaurs. Stravinsky hated it and hated Stokowski’s conducting of his score (above).

  2

  Ingatherings

  (1940)

  Arnold Schoenberg was one of the first Hollywood immigrants of a new kind, the refugees from political disaster. In the beginning, there had been the ragpickers and song-pushers, the Mayers and Warners and Cohns, who had arrived hungry and proceeded to gorge themselves on whatever they could find. Then came the cosmopolitans, the actors and directors who had already achieved success in Berlin or London—a Greta Garbo or an Ernst Lubitsch—who then signed handsome contracts to come to Hollywood to work for the Mayers and Warners and Cohns. Arnold Schoenberg, the distinguished composer of Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire, the inventor of the twelve-tone “serial” system which he had believed would “guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years,” reached the age of nearly sixty without ever having the slightest intention of going anywhere near Los Angeles.

  Proud of his lifetime appointment as professor at the Berlin Academy of Music, Schoenberg realized during the very first year of the Nazi regime that his lifetime appointment was worthless. On vacation in France that summer of 1933, he received word that it would be dangerous for him to return to Berlin at all. Schoenberg was shocked, outraged. Though he had been raised a Catholic, and then converted to Lutheranism in his youth, he went to the main synagogue in Paris and asked to be converted again, this time to Judaism. Then, with his wife and daughter, he set sail into exile. Only one obscure reporter met his ship in New York; he recalled many years later that “he was a lion—a lion—there is no other way to describe it.” The League of Composers arranged a Schoenberg concert in Town Hall, and the audience dutifully applauded even the dissonances that arose from the pianist’s accompanying the singer in the wrong clef. When it came to finding a job, however, there was nothing available except at the Malkin Conservatory, a small institution in Boston, where not a single student registered for the composition course that Schoenberg offered. New England’s winter weather also proved dangerous for his chronic asthma. He had to find a haven in some warmer place. His publisher, Carl Engel of G. Schirmer, wrote letters to various universities to propose a series of lectures. Of the forty-seven colleges approached, only twenty-two answered, and none made a definite offer. Engel was reduced to soliciting charitable contributions for the exile, even a place to stay.

  Schoenberg was saved by the continuous competition between UCLA and USC. When USC invited him to lecture in September of 1935, UCLA countered by offering him a professorship. And so, at sixty, small, frail, bald, and gruff-tempered—“his eyes were protuberant and explosive, and the whole force of the man was in them,” Stravinsky once wrote—Schoenberg finally established himself in the unlikely sanctuary of Los Angeles, which was in the process of becoming, without ever realizing it, the music capital of the world. Schoenberg had long been bitter about the general failure to acclaim his thorny creations, and now he was more bitter than ever. His UCLA students, he wrote to Hermann Scherchen, had “such an inadequate grounding that my work is as much a waste of time as if Einstein were having to teach mathematics at a secondary school.” In perhaps twenty years, he wrote to another colleague, “there will certainly be . . . a chapter in the musical history of Los Angeles: ‘What Schoenberg has achieved in Los Angeles . . .’ Frankly, I am very disappointed not to find the interest of the society in my doing, not to find appreciated what I am doing in favor of the future state of musical culture in this city. . . .”

  What Schoenberg was doing, amid constant interruptions, was to keep on creating music, notably the second suite for strings, the fourth quartet, the violin concerto, a setting of “Kol Nidre,” the second chamber symphony. On the death of George Gershwin, with whom Schoenberg liked to play tennis, the exile acclaimed his younger and more successful friend as a comrade. “An artist to me is like an apple tree,” Schoenberg said of both Gershwin and himself. “When his time comes, whether he wants it or not, he bursts into bloom and starts to produce apples. And as an apple tree neither know
s nor asks about the value experts of the market will attribute to its product, so a real composer does not ask whether his product will please the experts. . . .”

  Irving Thalberg, the young chief of production at M-G-M, considered himself both an expert of the market and a man of refined taste, and he listened, as many people did in those days, to the weekly radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. In one of its occasional departures from Beethoven and Brahms, the orchestra performed Verklärte Nacht, the almost morbidly luscious nocturne that Schoenberg had written nearly a half century earlier. Thalberg was impressed. This was the kind of music he wanted for his newest production, Pearl Buck’s best-selling drama of China, The Good Earth.

  When Thalberg’s inquiries informed him that the composer was living right in Los Angeles, a humble professor at UCLA, he wanted him summoned. Important executives always need intermediaries on such occasions, and since Schoenberg had no agent or business manager, Thalberg invoked a mutual acquaintance, Salka Viertel. Thalberg knew Mrs. Viertel as the writer of several Garbo films, among them Queen Christina and Conquest, but she was also the sister of Eduard Steuermann, an eminent pianist and advocate of Schoenberg’s music.

  “How much would they pay?” Schoenberg asked Mrs. Viertel when she told him of Thalberg’s desire to hire him for The Good Earth.

  “About twenty-five thousand dollars, I suppose,” she answered.

  Schoenberg, who was earning less than one fifth of that sum for a year’s teaching, agreed to be interviewed. Mrs. Viertel had to arrange the protocol. An M-G-M car was assigned to bring Schoenberg to the M-G-M studio. An appointment was made for 3 P.M., and Thalberg promised not to keep the composer waiting. (Schoenberg once became furious at Jascha Heifetz for sending a note that said, “You are expected at two o’clock.” “Russian peasant!” cried Schoenberg. “In Vienna, an invitation from Franz Josef would read, ‘We request the honor of your presence.’ ”) By 3:30 P.M., when Schoenberg had not appeared, Thalberg began to get irritated. Secretaries started telephoning. They soon discovered that the composer had wandered by mistake into a guided tour of the studio. He seemed to regard the tour as a perfectly appropriate gesture by Thalberg, an invitation to see whether M-G-M was a studio for which he would like to compose music.

  Brought finally to Thalberg’s imperial office, Schoenberg took a seat in front of the producer’s desk. He kept both hands clasped on the handle of an umbrella, which he refused to give up. Thalberg began explaining his idea.

  “Last Sunday, when I heard the lovely music you have written—”

  “I don’t write ‘lovely’ music,” Schoenberg interrupted.

  Thalberg looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled politely and started again. The Good Earth was the story of China, he said, so he wanted music that sounded distantly Oriental. Chinese themes. Since Paul Muni and the other characters were supposed to be peasants, there was not much dialogue but lots of action. There was a scene, for example, in which swarms of locusts invaded the fields and ate all the grain. That would require music of a special kind . . .

  Mrs. Viertel tried translating all this into German, but Schoenberg stopped her. He said he understood perfectly. And now he would have to explain the problem of music in films. It was generally terrible, he told Thalberg; dull, meaningless. Furthermore, the producers didn’t seem to understand that the dialogue also suffered from a certain monotony. He would work on The Good Earth, he said, only if he was given complete control of all sound, the dialogue as well as the music.

  “What do you mean by complete control?” Thalberg asked in wonderment.

  “I mean that I would have to work with the actors,” Schoenberg said. “They would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in. It would be similar to Pierrot Lunaire, but of course less difficult.”

  Schoenberg turned to Mrs. Viertel and asked her if she could remember and recite any of the Sprechstimme from Pierrot Lunaire. She could and did, valiantly starting to wail and quaver, “Der Mond, den Mann mit augen trinkt . . .”

  “Well, Mr. Schoenberg,” Thalberg managed to say, “the director and I have different ideas, and they may contradict yours. You see, the director wants to handle the actors himself.”

  “He could do that,” Schoenberg said grandly, “after they had studied their lines with me.”

  Thalberg, who was not accustomed to being patronized, particularly by threadbare professors, could not help being impressed by Schoenberg’s self-assurance. He gave the composer a copy of the Good Earth screenplay and asked him to read it and think about it. After he had ushered Schoenberg to the door, he could only say to Mrs. Viertel, “This is a remarkable man.”

  Thalberg assumed, of course, that nobody could decline an M-G-M assignment. “He’ll write the music on my terms, you’ll see,” he said. On the contrary, Schoenberg changed the terms. He had his wife call up Mrs. Viertel the next day to say that not only did he insist on complete control of dialogue as well as music, but the price would have to be doubled, to $50,000. “When I related this to Thalberg,” Mrs. Viertel recalled, “he shrugged and said that meanwhile the Chinese technical adviser had brought some folk songs which had inspired the head of the sound department to write some very lovely music.”

  Schoenberg seemed to think that he had narrowly escaped from Thalberg. “I almost agreed to write music for a film,” he wrote to Alma Mahler Werfel, “but fortunately asked $50,000, which, likewise fortunately, was much too much, for it would have been the end of me. . . .”

  Hollywood’s big musical event of 1940—drowning out all the routine M-G-M musical comedies and even the first pairing of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, in the engaging Road to Singapore—was Walt Disney’s grandiose venture into culture, Fantasia. Disney was then at the height of his success. Not only had his Mickey Mouse become a figure of worldwide renown, followed by such epigoni as Donald Duck and Goofy, but Disney had gambled heavily and triumphantly on the idea of a full-length animated film. The result, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, appeared in 1937 and eventually grossed eight million dollars, a titanic sum for a film made during the Depression. Once Dopey, Sneezy, and the other dwarfs had become in their turn international celebrities, Disney began building himself a three-million-dollar studio in Burbank. Like the Disney worlds of the future, it was to be a self-contained empire, with its own streets and electric system and telephone exchange, its own sun decks and gymnasium and volleyball courts. Disney’s film projects of that period were equally ambitious, full-length versions of Pinocchio and Bambi.

  Disney felt a little unhappy, though, about the overshadowing of his original hero, Mickey Mouse. Somewhere, he got the idea of reviving Mickey’s fortunes by starring him in a two-reel version of an old fairy tale, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which had been set to music by the late Paul Dukas. Disney saw all kinds of possibilities in this comedy of an overworked apprentice misappropriating his master’s magical powers in an effort to get the cleaning chores done, then being overwhelmed by an ungovernable army of household implements, all relentlessly determined to work. Disney casually mentioned his idea to Leopold Stokowski at a dinner party, according to one version, and the tempestuous conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra eagerly offered to conduct the Dukas score. According to Stokowski’s own version, Disney approached him in a restaurant and asked him to help on the project.

  Stokowski came to the Disney studio and was enchanted. He toyed with the sound-mixing equipment and pronounced the possibilities “the ultimate in conducting.” He recorded the Dukas score—at considerable expense, rather more than the frugal Disney wanted to invest in music for a short—then began suggesting how the movie might be expanded with other pieces that he might perform and Disney might illustrate. His own overblown orchestration of Bach’s organ toccata in D minor, for example. Now it was Disney who was enchanted. He and Stokowski puzzled over how to convert Bach’s improvisations into moving images. One passage inspired Disney to say that he saw orange. “Oh, no, I see it as
purple,” said Stokowski.

  As the two of them labored on toward what the studio called only “The Concert Feature,” Stokowski kept suggesting yet more pieces. What about Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”? Perhaps Rachmaninoff could be persuaded to play his second piano concerto, though Stokowski warned that he might refuse because “he’s very peculiar, a very nice man, but a very strange one.” If Rachmaninoff balked, said Stokowski, they could ask Vladimir Horowitz, whom the conductor described as “marvelous.” One of Disney’s lieutenants objected that Horowitz was not well enough known. “I don’t know anything about music,” said Disney, “but I have heard of Rachmaninoff for a long time.”

  Stokowski suggested a Debussy prelude, “Les Sons et les Parfums Tournent dans l’Air du Soir,” and he had a special reason. “I have always wanted to put perfume in theaters, have wanted to do it for years,” he said. Disney seemed enthusiastic. “Get a good flower smell,” he said. “There you’ve got something. . . . You could get them to name a special perfume for this—create a perfume—you could get writeups in the papers. . . . It’s a hot idea.”

  Out of such conferences, “The Concert Feature” evolved. One of the first selections was Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” for Disney believed that he could “build a beautiful thing based on the devil’s orchestra [with] a lot of these little devils playing instruments with one big devil conducting.” That eventually led to Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” presented as a torchlight procession in the wake of the Mussorgsky, which prompted the critic Richard Schickel to observe that in Disney’s fancies “nothing is sacred, not even the sacred.” Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” became a ballet for prancing elephants, alligators, and ostriches, and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony turned into a frolic for fauns, nymphs, centaurs, “centaurettes,” and other inhabitants of Disney’s Mount Olympus. When Disney saw the final version of what his animators had done to the “Pastoral” Symphony, he was impressed. “Gee, this’ll make Beethoven,” he said.