by Tom Shroder
Consider how astounding it is, then, that after making the contemporary equivalent of about a million dollars over two years, in the first month of 1939 he wrote this to his sister:
“Since I sold my first poem in 1923 for two bucks, I have made one hundred and thirty-two thousand, nine hundred and one dollars. . . . To my intense delight, I find myself not at all baffled or broken-hearted because I haven’t any of it left.”
For someone who’d grown up in poverty and only briefly glimpsed the luxury purchased by the tainted wealth of his father, Mack had a real talent for spending. I saw one letter from this period where he discussed the impossibility of getting by without servants—cooks, maids, and a full-time nanny—despite the fact that Irene did not work. He rented houses in Manhattan, and in upstate New York, and even in Webster City, where he funded a summer archaeological expedition to excavate Indian mounds he’d always been curious about when he was growing up. He paid off ancient family debts, repurchased his childhood home as a summer place (he never used it), and put Virginia’s daughter, born with cerebral palsy, through five years of an expensive private school for kids with disabilities. There were cruises to South America and multiple tours of Europe, complete with first-class cabins in the ships that brought them there and luxury hotel rooms in the places they traveled. And he built the (too expensive) beach house on Siesta Key.
He tried to put a positive spin on it all in that January 1939 letter: “Irene and I have kept ourselves through a combined quarter century of life, and we have had fun. We have learned, seen, looked, laughed, cried, growled, cheered, whined or enjoyed. We have driven cars, we have sailed and flown and fished and danced and drunk and eaten. We own nearly twenty thousand dollars worth of palm trees and sand and beds and tables and curtains and hibiscus bushes, even if we can’t do much with it right now.”
A year later, finances had only gotten worse.
In January of 1941 he wrote Dick Whiteman: “1940 was a hell of a year and so was the last part of 1939. Couldn’t write and was oppressed with bills and financial necessities . . . had a nervous breakdown.”
A nervous breakdown?
I had never heard nor imagined such a thing about my grandfather. As I had always understood it, through sheer cussedness and almost superhuman perseverance, Mack had banged his head against the wall of literary success until he broke through with Long Remember, and then never looked back. I’d even found a newspaper interview where he’d made exactly that assessment of his own career.
Now it appeared that wasn’t the whole story. Nor was writer’s block the entire cause. The breakdown came right about the time Peggy Pulitzer told him to grow up. The timing is unlikely to be a coincidence.
He continued: “Went to Central America twice to recuperate. . . .” I had to assume he considered the hookup with the hot señora on the first of those voyages part of his therapy. He found a different kind of heat on his next trip: “I caught a recurrent fever which started hitting me in a regular menstrual cycle. . . . Well it’s one long tale of woe up to December of 1940. Last year I earned less than half of what I earned in 1937. I simply couldn’t work and there was an end to it. . . . We got a lucky break by not selling our house down here when we had actually tried to and I hoped to, so now we are comfortably installed and I am really doing some work and enjoying it.”
Looked at another way: Now that Peggy had dumped him, the apartment in New York no longer seemed so necessary. Suddenly, Florida was the perfect place to work.
In 1941, he indeed began to turn things back around. He made $17,000—same as $275,000 today—but it still wasn’t enough to pay his debts and support his lifestyle. He’d gone through the earnings, including the advance on a novel he’d whipped out in two months, and was still behind on his phone bill.
The novel, Gentle Annie, was a shoot-’em-up Western with a twist. The bandits were sympathetic, and the sheriff not. Again, Mack was ahead of his time with this moral ambiguity, anticipating Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by twenty-eight years. He hoped to attract serial publication in a major magazine and the interest of Hollywood. But the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. War was upon America and nobody knew what the coming years would bring. Certainly nobody knew what Americans would want to read, or what movies they’d want to see, in wartime.
Mack’s agent had bleak news: Magazine editors had been infected with caution. His plot was too immoral for their readers, they’d decided. From Hollywood, there was only silence.
My uncle’s memoir tells what happened next: Just after New Year’s 1942, Mack decided to use his dwindling funds to travel to New York himself and see if he could do any better selling his stuff than his agents had. After a few days of hotel bills and bar tabs, he had to admit failure.
Feeling down and defeated, he boarded a return train to Florida at Penn Station. He’d taken his seat, no doubt thinking grimly of starting all over again with new ideas for new stories that might well not sell, either, when a boy holding a slip of paper in his hand came walking toward his seat calling, “Mr. Canton? Mr. Canton?”
Close enough. Mack took the paper from the boy and unfolded it: a message telling him to call Tim Coward. What could be so important that he’d be called off a train? He felt a brush of alarm. Irene? The kids?
“Oh,” the messenger added, belatedly remembering his instructions. “Mr. Coward said to tell you it was good news.”
Very good news. From the stationmaster’s office he called Coward, who told him Donald Friede, Mack’s new Hollywood agent, had telephoned to say that he’d been offered $20,000 for the film rights to Gentle Annie—and turned it down. Friede felt certain they could get even more. Mack should find somewhere he could talk comfortably and call Friede back.
Mack had been staying in a cheap hotel downtown, but to hell with that now. He told Coward he’d be at the bar in the Algonquin, and that’s where Friede reached him.
The offer was now $25,000 for movie rights.
“But the deciding point,” Friede explained in a letter he wrote to Mack that same day, “was the offer of a twenty-seven week writing contract. . . . You will have an opportunity which I feel you need very badly, namely the opportunity of learning motion picture technique. . . . With what you will learn out here—being paid for learning it at the rate of $1,000 per week—you will be able to quadruple your income in the future.”
Since he’d sold the rights to Long Remember in 1934, Mack’s experience with the movies had been mixed. Long Remember got kicked around from studio to studio, but never filmed. The Voice of Bugle Ann had become a fairly successful movie. But mostly his relations with “the Coast” had been so much sound and fury.
“I’ve had three series of negotiations with those people which came to anything, and about fifteen which came to nothing,” he wrote in a 1936 letter.
In 1938, he said he had been approached to come to Hollywood to rewrite the screenplay of Gone with the Wind, but “we scared them out by asking for too much money.”
Well, now the money was on the table, the equivalent of nearly $15,000 a week in 2015 currency for twenty-seven weeks over a two-year period.
Let the spending begin.
Once in Hollywood, he rented a big house on Beverly Glen Boulevard in West LA, overlooking a pool, a patio bar, changing rooms, and landscaped hills beyond. He labored there, between parties where he palled around with stars including Gregory Peck and James Cagney, mostly in futility. Gentle Annie got made, with Donna Reed as the romantic lead, and earned modestly positive box office and reviews, but someone else wrote the screenplay.
That would be the case for most of his books that made it to film. Eventually, in 1950, he would get a significant screenwriting credit. The movie, Gun Crazy, was based on a short story he’d written and is now considered a noir classic, the inspiration for Arthur Penn’s famous film version of Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
Even today, noir buffs know and love Gun Crazy. The aggregate critical rating on the Rotten Tomatoes movie website is an almost unheard of 97 percent. One typical review from a critic reads, “One of the most distinguished works of art to emerge from the B movie swamp.”
I bought the DVD and watched it one night, not knowing what to expect. I was riveted. The plot centered—as the original story had—on a sympathetic bad guy, a reform-school kid who had a passion for guns. When he ages out of state custody, he really is reformed, a decent sort who can’t even bring himself to shoot a rabbit, until he hooks up with a femme fatale in the form of a carnival sharpshooter à la Annie Oakley, a temptress with all the moral fiber of Lucrezia Borgia. She leads him into a life of bank robbing, then murder, and finally doom—the inevitable unwinnable dead-end shootout, surrounded by heavily armed police. The characterizations are grabbing, the dialogue amusingly hard-boiled, and the direction way ahead of its time, including a famous scene of one of the bank robberies filmed entirely from the lover/robbers’ point of view, using a single camera in one unbroken take.
I thought it exceedingly odd that my grandfather had written a cult-classic movie that I’d never known about. As I dug deeper, I discovered why Mack had never mentioned it. In Who the Devil Made It, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1997 book of movie lore, Gun Crazy director Joseph H. Lewis told him: “The King brothers came to me. They had a script written by MacKinlay Kantor—quite a fabulous writer, as you well know . . . about 375 pages [roughly five hours of screen time], and the task was given to me to cut it down to about 140 pages. . . . Now, in so doing, maybe I took out some of the things he liked. . . . He has never forgiven me. . . . He’s the only one I ever spoke to who said he thought the picture was horrible.”
The final script was attributed to my grandfather and Millard Kaufman, who wrote an Oscar-nominated script for Bad Day at Black Rock and, later in his career, co-created the character Mr. Magoo. As I dug deeper, I discovered that actually Kaufman had nothing to do with the script, except agreeing to serve as a front for the writer Dalton Trumbo, who had refused to “name names” in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s communist witch hunt and was declared in contempt. He served eleven months in prison and was blacklisted from Hollywood movies when he got out.
I wanted to credit my grandfather with the noble deed of offering to front for the unjustly treated Trumbo, as some sources indicated. But Kaufman shared Trumbo’s agent, and said that he was the one approached with the request. I ultimately concluded Mack’s only contribution to helping Trumbo out was in writing a script so massive it needed a rewrite in the first place.
I don’t know if Mack always wrote so overlong in his Hollywood efforts, but I do know this: Though he spent good portions of a number of years laboring in Hollywood and eventually a dozen of his books would be produced as movies or television shows, other than one forgotten B Western and Gun Crazy, his screenwriting credits are nowhere to be found. Even Long Remember, his big best-selling hit, kept failing to make it into theaters. Mack’s hopes kept being raised, then dashed, the classic Hollywood two-step. In 1939, he wrote to a friend that Merian Cooper, who’d directed King Kong, had expressed strong interest in Long Remember, then backed off.
“If Gone with the Wind is successful,” Mack wrote, “he may take another crack at the Civil War.”
Gone with the Wind came out the following year and became the highest-grossing film of all time. I guess you could call that successful. But Long Remember was never produced.
“I think I can call myself about the most unproduced writer in Hollywood,” Mack said in a newspaper interview. “They buy a lot of my stuff, and get me out there on special writing jobs, but most of the time they seem to lay my work in files and forget about it.”
It probably isn’t all that unusual, then or now. Hollywood is famous for many things, including its profligate waste of both talent and money. One of my closest friends and his writing partner were assigned by a famous director to write a screenplay and were paid a lot of money for it. When they finished, all the director’s minions oohed and ahhed about how great it was—Number One for Takeoff! Totally green-lit. Some A-list star just couldn’t wait to make it!
And then, years passed in silence, during which, unbeknownst to my friend, the director gave the script to two other writers. Both did complete rewrites. Both cashed big checks.
Five years later, the famous director called again to say he’d recently reread all three scripts and decided that my friend’s version was his favorite. With a few caveats.
So once again my friend and his partner were handed a big wad of cash to do yet another rewrite. Once again the minions cooed wildly over the completed script—totally green-lit! A big star cannot wait to make it! And then . . . nothing.
I’ve had my own Hollywood hijinks. My book Old Souls, about a psychiatrist who spent thirty years investigating cases of small children who appeared to remember previous lives, was optioned to the movies a half-dozen times, each time with energetic assurances that it would become a feature film or a documentary or a TV series. Once, someone worked on a script for a couple of years and then said that the story had been altered so much in the process, he no longer felt he needed the rights. Another time a producer used capital letters in an e-mail, saying how much she LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the screenplay that I’d finally written myself and how she was DEFINITELY buying it, after which she never returned another message. Finally, a big production company—also rabidly positive about the book—optioned it yet again. When I called to discuss how they were going to handle the adaptation, I discovered that they were turning a story about a researcher risking his career to explore the fringes of science into a story about a cult of serial killers who believed that reincarnated children might bring about the apocalypse.
It is oddly comforting to learn that my grandfather would have understood, and been sympathetic.
“No one knows better than myself that the picture business is cockeyed,” he wrote in a 1936 letter.
In any case, by 1940, Mack no longer wanted to be a screenwriter. What he really wanted to do, what he’d wanted to do ever since he was a child playing make-believe in Webster City, and as a teenager telling lies in Des Moines, was go to war.
—
As the Nazi war machine trampled Europe, Mack was entering middle age and was physically unfit for service. Yet he’d been looking for a way to join the fight ever since, as he told his sister, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had condemned Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. Mack had already persuaded The Saturday Evening Post to sponsor his application for certification as a war correspondent by the relevant French and British bureaucracies.
“I was going in the middle of September, but realized that I had to get the family in proper financial shape before I left . . . also the leg was giving me trouble,” he told Virginia.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1943—after the sale of Gentle Annie to the movies filled his accounts once more and a surgeon at Johns Hopkins finally managed to permanently heal the seeping wound in his thigh, which had plagued him on and off, mostly on, for two decades—that he actually went.
To do so meant he would be leaving not only Irene, but his fifteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. I found a disturbing mention of this aspect in my uncle’s memoir. When my mother, understandably upset, asked why he had to go to war, Mack said he felt duty-bound, and then added, “You know, Layne-o, I kind of hope I don’t come back.”
Shocked and terrified, she asked why he would say such a thing.
“Well, hell, I’d make a lousy old man.”
That last sentence leapt off the page and exploded in my brain. Forty-one years after Mack went off to war I was sitting with my father in his Siesta Key living room when he got the news that, at age fifty-seven, he had less than a year to live before lung cancer would kill him.
“What the hell,” h
e said. “I would have made a lousy old man.”
—
Mack sold his plan to write about the war to Ben Hibbs, the legendary editor of The Saturday Evening Post.
“I couldn’t be sure how Mack would perform as a war correspondent,” Hibbs wrote in a recollection, “but I suspected that the fire within him, his towering love of country, was something the American people could use in those anxious days.”
Mack had a less altruistic intent. “I simply didn’t want to miss out on this emotional experience as I did the last one,” he wrote.
It made me think of all the old movies in which men exulted in cheers and hat-waving when they learned they would be going to war. Apparently it was what people did Back Then. Was it real? Or a mask to hide their fear?
I pictured my own dread, so vivid still after nearly half a century, lying on a bunk in a dormitory room, listening to a voice on the radio reading out birth dates and draft numbers, knowing that but for a quirk of luck I might soon be swept to the other side of the world, forced to kill, or be killed by, people against whom I had no grudge and who otherwise presented no threat I found credible. As I lay awake in the small defenseless hours after midnight, my mind endlessly looped around a puzzle with no solution. Would I go or would I run? Was I driven by conscience or cowardice? How different would I feel if I thought war could accomplish something, if not entirely good, at least absolutely necessary?
From the earliest time I can remember, war meant one thing to me, an unstoppable holocaust of nuclear destruction; cities flattened, walls blown away, bodies incinerated or cooked by deadly radiation; all the beauty in the world poisoned. I spent long nights of my childhood fearing I’d never have a chance to grow up, or that I’d sicken and starve in a postapocalyptic wasteland.