City of Nets Page 8

  For the true professionals—and Hollywood had the standard proportion of experts, mediocrities, and incompetents—writing for film was an extremely exacting craft. Each piece of music had to accompany not just a specific scene but a specific piece of film. Hence the click track. The standard film moved through a projector at a rate of 24 frames per second, or 1,440 frames per minute. A click track consisted of holes punched into the sound track that ran along the edge of the film. A composer could either write for a click track or somebody else would have to do it for him. So in Max Steiner’s score for Since You Went Away, for example, at the point marked “The Kiss,” where the violins played a series of sweet high quarter-note chords while an arpeggio swept up from below, the score was marked not only “measure 44” but “5/53” on the click track. The conductor listening through earphones knew exactly what was expected of him.

  When these musicians went home at the end of a day’s work, they wanted very much to play a different kind of music. Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, grew up in Hollywood and recalled that his father, Felix Slatkin, a violinist who worked at 20th Century–Fox, and his mother, Eleanor Aller, a cellist who worked at Warner Bros., met at the Hollywood Bowl and eventually founded the Hollywood Quartet. “They would come home at 5 o’clock and play music all night,” said Slatkin. “They knew everybody, and you never could tell who might drop in, anybody from Schoenberg to Sinatra.”

  These Hollywood musical encounters could reach a rather exalted level. Stravinsky had already gone to bed one night in July of 1942 when he heard a noise on the steps leading to his front door. He went to investigate and found himself confronting a tall and austere-looking man who apologized in Russian for the lateness of his visit but said he wanted to bring Stravinsky a jar of honey and to invite him to dinner. He promised that music would not be mentioned. Stravinsky naturally recognized his nocturnal visitor as the unmistakable Sergei Rachmaninoff, and accepted. If no music was discussed—it seems hard to believe—that was hardly the case when Vladimir Horowitz came to visit Rachmaninoff’s home shortly before the composer’s death in 1943. The two master pianists spent the evening—imagine the scene!—playing four-hand duets.

  The superb RCA Victor recordings of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio and the Schubert B-flat came about largely because Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, and Emanuel Feuermann were all neighbors. “After those recordings . . .” Rubinstein recalled later, “the three of us, joined by other musicians, spent glorious days and nights playing chamber music.” Some of these occasions, though, were less distinguished. Oscar Levant, who had been studying desultorily with Schoenberg, wrote a piano concerto that Schoenberg thought might interest Otto Klemperer, another Berlin refugee, who had become the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. When they all met at one of Salka Viertel’s parties, Schoenberg urged Levant to perform his new work. “This was the opportunity that would have meant so much to me,” Levant confessed, “but my unpredictability and my quixotic impulse to undo myself resolved into a bad joke. I sat at the piano and played and sang ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling,’ and to this day I am perplexed by my own behavior. . . . To top it off, I asked Klemperer if he liked Beethoven.”

  Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht’s hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of the Ben Hecht Symphonietta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

  On the night of the first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht’s house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

  “Quiet, please!” he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him.

  The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarrassment. “Groucho’s jealous,” Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

  “Quiet, you lousy amateurs!” he shouted.

  When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhäuser.

  “Thunderstruck,” Antheil recalled, “we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphonietta. We took him in.”

  The rise of Hitler brought America some of its best filmmakers, just as it brought some of its best composers, teachers, nuclear physicists, and everything else. America welcomed them, for the most part, with variations of apathy and dismay. Samuel Wilder, born in a Galician town not far from Krakow and nicknamed Billy because of his mother’s enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, got to Hollywood early in 1934 through a series of misunderstandings. In Paris, he had written a jazzy story entitled “Pam-Pam,” about a runaway girl who took refuge in an abandoned Broadway theater. He sent it to a friend from Berlin named Joe May, who had become a producer at Columbia. The studio offered Wilder a one-way ticket to Hollywood and a six-month contract at $150 per week, and only then discovered that its latest acquisition could hardly speak English.

  “Pam-Pam” never got filmed, nor did the other scenarios that Wilder kept frantically churning out. By Christmas of 1935, he was living in a basement anteroom outside the women’s toilets in the Chateau Marmont. “This Christmas of 1935,” Wilder said later, “when I could not sleep, when women were coming in and peeing and looking at me funny, when I . . . knew that war was on the way for Europe, suddenly I wasn’t sure if I fitted in around here in Hollywood. I had the feeling I was not in the right country and I didn’t know if there was a right country for me. Right here was the low point of my life.”

  Wilder was still only twenty-nine, an ebullient youth with curly red hair and the courage of desperation. Erich Pommer, the former UFA producer in Berlin now under contract at RKO, bet Wilder fifty dollars at a party that he wouldn’t dare jump into the swimming pool with all his clothes on. Wilder promptly earned himself fifty dollars. Eventually, he found a job at Paramount, at $250 a week, as a foot soldier in the studio’s army of 100-odd contract writers. They were required by their contracts to turn in at least eleven pages of copy every Thursday. It was more or less assumed that nobody could write a movie script by himself. Paramount assigned the unruly young Wilder to the most implausible of partners, a wealthy New Yorker and Harvard Law School graduate named Charles Brackett, fourteen years his senior. Together, they were supposed to rewrite for Ernst Lubitsch a creaky Alfred Savoir play entitled La Huitième Femme du Barbe-Bleu.

  Bluebeard—Gary Cooper in pursuit of Claudette Colbert—was a solid success. Then came Midnight and the triumphant Ninotchka. And Hold Back the Dawn, in which Billy Wilder, having finally become an American citizen in 1939, wrote a sad little comedy about the refugees who were trapped in Tijuana, waiting for U.S. visas that never came. Wilder’s hero, who had arrived jaunty and confident, was finally reduced to lolling on his dirty hotel bed and addressing a bitter monologue to a cockroach. “Where you going?” he snarled at the cockroach, in the manner of an immigration official. “Let’s see your papers.”

/>   On the set one morning, Wilder was dismayed to hear that the scene had been cut. Charles Boyer, the star, a onetime classical actor who now lived mainly by his toupee, his corset, and his heroic image of himself, didn’t like it. Wilder went to Lucey’s restaurant, found Boyer having breakfast, and started to protest. “I could not speak such lines,” said Boyer. “One does not talk to cockroaches. You wish to make me look stupide?” Wilder tried to explain the scene, but Boyer was not interested. “I don’t wish to have these discussions while I am at the table,” he said. “Go away, Mr. Wilder, you disturb me.” Angry and helpless, Billy Wilder returned to his office, pounded on his desk, and shouted, “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!” He vowed that he would become a director, the man who gave the orders.

  Fritz Lang, by contrast, was already a famous director before he ever left Germany. Almost too much so. Joseph Goebbels, newly installed as Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had summoned Lang to his office to tell him that Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of his film Metropolis. He wanted Lang to take charge of all film production under the Third Reich. Lang reminded Goebbels that he was partly Jewish. Goebbels said that could be overlooked. Lang asked for twenty-four hours to consider the offer, then fled under an assumed name on the night train to Paris.

  David Selznick, who was then still at M-G-M, brought Lang to Hollywood under a personal contract, but could find nothing for the creator of M and Dr. Mabuse to do. Lang studied English, refusing to speak or write a word of German. He read comic strips. He learned that his wife, Thea von Harbou, who had written several of his most successful films, wanted to stay in Germany, join the Nazi Party, and get a divorce. He spent two months in Arizona, studying the Navajo Indians and photographing their sand paintings.

  When David Selznick finally quit his father-in-law’s empire to form an independent production company, he left the unemployed Fritz Lang behind. M-G-M duly informed the celebrated immigrant that his contract would not be renewed. “You can’t do this to me, I am the first director of Europe,” Lang protested to Eddie Mannix, M-G-M’s general manager. Mannix apparently took pity on Lang. According to one account, he asked Lang what he would like to do, and Lang said he had found in the story department an interesting outline for a film about a lynching (eventually called Fury). According to another version, Mannix simply handed him Norman Krasna’s outline of a lynching story and told him to film it. In yet another version, Krasna told his idea to Joseph Mankiewicz—this idea, based on a recent lynching of two kidnappers in California, was that an accidental photograph of the lynch mob could bring the ringleaders to justice—and Mankiewicz sold the idea to M-G-M, with himself as producer. Once the idea was sold, Krasna said he had no recollection of what his story had been. Mankiewicz had to pay Krasna $25,000 for the screen rights to the idea, which subsequently won Krasna an Academy Award, and then write the scenario himself. And then he, Mankiewicz, supposedly asked that Lang be assigned to direct it.

  “Joe was much impressed by the Great German Director and his monocle, long cigarette holder, etc.,” said Mankiewicz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Young. Others were less impressed. Joseph Ruttenberg, the cameraman who actually shot the film, described Lang as a “mean, ornery German, arrogant and domineering.” Perhaps Lang really was all that, or perhaps, badly frightened, he was trying to play the role he thought was expected of him, or perhaps he was simply engrossed in his work. He seemed to be unaware that Hollywood film crews generally took a break for lunch. After several days of Lang’s ignoring such details—“German production methods,” Mankiewicz remarked, “meant that you never called ‘lunch’ and that you had your secretary bring you a pill and a glass of brandy on the set”—Spencer Tracy spoke up for the crew.

  “What about some lunch?” he asked Lang.

  “It is I who will decide when lunch is called, Mr. Tracy,” Lang said.

  “Oh,” said Tracy. He smeared a hand through the makeup on his face, walked off the set, and called out, “Lunch!”

  Everything kept getting worse. The lynch scenes had to be shot at night. Rain poured down. Lang insisted on reshooting and reshooting again. At one point, during a scene in which the lynch mob set fire to the jail, Lang insisted on throwing a smoke pot himself and managed to hit one of his actors in the head. According to Mankiewicz, the film crew planned to stage an accident in which a heavy spotlight would fall on Lang and kill him. He claimed that he dissuaded them.

  The crisis ended like many Hollywood crises. Lang did his shooting, refused to let anything be changed, and was fired. Mankiewicz edited what Lang had created, and almost everyone at the studio was amazed when Fury proved to be a great success. After the premiere, Mankiewicz encountered Lang and Marlene Dietrich at the Brown Derby restaurant and held out his hand. Lang refused to shake it. “You have ruined my picture,” he said.

  Lang did not return to M-G-M for more than twenty years (Louis B. Mayer hated the whole idea of a film about a lynching from the beginning), but the success of Fury demonstrated that a German director could shoot Hollywood action, and so it led to other things. By 1940, Darryl Zanuck had Lang working on The Return of Frank James, a sequel to the previous year’s big hit about Jesse James, and from that he proceeded immediately to Western Union. “The Western,” said Lang, who had filmed the epic version of Die Nibelungen back in 1924, “is not only the history of this country, it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European.”

  It is remarkable that none of these gifted refugees from Hitler made much of an effort to create films opposing Nazism. One reason was simply fear. Every refugee carried fear in his suitcase—far more than he ever remembered in later years—fear of unemployment and ostracism, of hunger, of disgrace, fear even of retribution from the evil regime he had fled. “Be very careful,” Schoenberg wrote to his son-in-law, Felix Greissle, on his arrival in New York. “Here they go in for much more politeness than we do. Above all, one never makes a scene; one never contradicts. . . . Everything must be said amiably, smiling, always with a smile. . . . Something very important: Don’t say anything you don’t have to say about your experiences of the last few weeks. Especially not to newspapermen or to people who might pass it on to them. You know the Nazis take revenge on relatives and friends still in their power. So be very reserved and don’t get mixed up in politics.”

  More important, though, was that Hollywood itself had no desire to oppose Nazism. A variety of liberal and leftist worthies had joined in 1936 to found the Anti-Nazi League (Dorothy Parker and Oscar Hammerstein were the chief organizers, and Donald Ogden Stewart the chairman), which engaged in speechmaking and fund-raising and attempted a boycott of German goods. Unfortunately, this lasted only until the Hitler-Stalin pact, when the group suddenly changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and supported a policy of neutrality. On the other hand, Harry Cohn, the Duce of Columbia Pictures, had made a 1933 documentary entitled Mussolini Speaks, had gone to Rome to receive a medal for his efforts, and had been so impressed by Mussolini that he not only kept an autographed photograph of the dictator on his office wall but had the office itself rebuilt in the Mussolini style—his own desk raised on a platform so that he could survey visitors as they approached, with the lights in their eyes.

  These were all personal idiosyncrasies. Hollywood as a whole made movies only for profit, and it earned about one third of its income from abroad. The studios didn’t want to offend anyone, neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists. And the studios’ monopolistic domination of all production and distribution meant that there were virtually no independent filmmakers able to produce anything that might offend anyone, neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists nor anyone else. (Besides, who was really anti-Fascist anyway? The English and French who acquiesced so tamely in Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss and stood by while the Nazis helped Franco conquer Spain?)

  Hollywood’s political timidity toward Nazism was also a consequence, however, of its feelings about Jewishness and anti-Semitism. Schoenberg was not the
only one who would advise a relative to “be very reserved and don’t get mixed up in politics.” Anti-Semitism in America in 1940 was widespread and strong, far more so than is now remembered or acknowledged. Jews were totally excluded from many executive jobs and from many of the best places to live. There were quotas limiting Jews in many universities, clubs, corporations. Ordinary Americans did not often act violently against Jews—certainly less so than against blacks, Mexicans, Chinese—but they generally regarded them as an alien people, avaricious, scheming, and dishonest. “What they [the Jews] seem to resent,” Raymond Chandler wrote to his English publisher in a fairly typical expression of the common view, “is the feeling that the Jew is a distinct racial type, that you can pick him out by his face, by the tone-quality of his voice, and far too often by his manners. In short, the Jews are to some extent still foreigners. . . . I’ve lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and I’ve watched one become Jewish, and it was pretty awful.” Such statements may seem surprising today, but the most surprising thing is that Chandler was writing in this vein as late as 1950, five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and that he was writing to deny any suggestion that he might be considered anti-Semitic. “After all I dealt with dozens and dozens of Jews in Hollywood,” he declared, “and was never accused by any of them of any such feeling.”

  Most Jews of that time had been taught to shrug and accept. Sigmund Freud had been twelve when his father told him how an arrogant gentile had knocked his new fur cap into the muddy gutter and shouted: “Jew! Get off the pavement!” “And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund. “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap,” said Jakob Freud. In America, though—as in many areas of Germany—Jews clung to the belief in assimilation, the belief that if one behaved just like everyone else, then one would be considered to be just like everyone else, a good American. In Hollywood, stars assumed neutral names like Fairbanks or Howard or Shaw; actresses underwent plastic surgery; some made a point of going to Christian churches or donating money to Christian charities. This was not so much a denial of Jewishness—though it was also that—as an effort to make Jewishness appear insignificant, too unimportant to be criticized, or even noticed.