by Pauline Kael
“Bane had two hits running on Broadway at the same time. Even Nathan liked ’em. Popular ’n satirical. Like Barry, only better. The critics kept waiting for him to write that great American play.”
“What happened to him?”
“Hollywood.”
Hollywood destroyed them, but they did wonders for the movies. In New York, they may have valued their own urbanity too highly; faced with the target Hollywood presented, they became cruder and tougher, less tidy, less stylistically elegant, and more iconoclastic, and in the eyes of Hollywood they were slaphappy cynics, they were “crazies.” They were too talented and too sophisticated to put a high value on what they did, too amused at the spectacle of what they were doing and what they were part of to be respected the way a writer of “integrity,” like Lillian Hellman, was later to be respected—or, still later, Arthur Miller. Though their style was often flippant and their attitude toward form casual to the point of contempt, they brought movies the subversive gift of sanity. They changed movies by raking the old moralistic muck with derision. Those sickly Graustarkian romances with beautiful, pure high-born girls and pathetic lame girls and dashing princes in love with commoners, and all the Dumas and Sabatini and Blasco-Ibáñez, now had to compete with the freedom and wildness of American comedy. Once American films had their voice and the Algonquin group was turned loose on the scripts, the revolting worship of European aristocracy faded so fast that movie stars even stopped brining home Georgian princes. In the silents, the heroes were often simpletons. In the talkies, the heroes were to be the men who weren’t fooled, who were smart and learned their way around. The new heroes of the screen were created in the image of their authors: they were fast-talking newspaper reporters.
That Walter Burns whose entrance in The Front Page Kerr described was based on Walter Howey, who was the city editor of the Chicago Tribune, at $8,000 a year, until Hearst lured him away by an offer of $35,000 a year. Howey is generally considered the “greatest” of all Hearst editors—by those who mean one thing by it, and by those who mean the other. He edited Hearst’s New York Mirror at a time when it claimed to be ten percent news and ninety percent entertainment. The epitome of Hearstian journalism, and a favorite of Hearst’s until the end, he was one of the executors of Hearst’s will. At one time or another, just about all the Hollywood writers had worked for Walter Howey and/or spent their drinking hours with friends who did. He was the legend: the classic model of the amoral, irresponsible, irrepressible newsman who cares about nothing but scoops and circulation. He had lost an eye (supposedly in actual fighting of circulation wars), and Ben Hecht is quoted as saying you could tell which was the glass eye because it was the warmer one. Hecht used him again in Nothing Sacred, as Fredric March’s editor—“a cross between a Ferris wheel and a werewolf”—and he turns up under other names in other plays and movies. In a sense, all those newspaper plays and movies were already about Hearst’s kind of corrupt, manic journalism.
The toughest-minded, the most satirical of the thirties pictures often featured newspaper settings, or, at least, reporters—especially the “screwball” comedies, which had some resemblances to later “black” comedy and current “freaky” comedy but had a very different spirit. A newspaper picture meant a contemporary picture in an American setting, usually a melodrama with crime and political corruption and suspense and comedy and romance. In 1931, a title like Five Star Final or Scandal Sheet signaled the public that the movie would be a tough modern talkie, not a tearjerker with sound. Just to touch a few bases, there was The Front Page itself, in 1931, with Pat O’Brien as the reporter and Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns; Lee Tracy as the gossip columnist in Blessed Event and as the press agent in Bombshell; Clark Gable as the reporter in It Happened One Night; Paul Muni giving advice to the lovelorn in Hi, Nellie; Spencer Tracy as the editor in Libeled Lady; Stuart Erwin as the correspondent in Viva Villa!; Jean Harlow stealing the affections of a newspaperman from girl reporter Loretta Young in Platinum Blonde; Jean Arthur as the girl reporter in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; a dozen pictures, at least, with George Bancroft as a Walter Howey-style bullying editor; all those half-forgotten pictures with reporter “teams”—Fredric March and Virginia Bruce, or Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur, or Loretta Young and Tyrone Power (Love Is News); Cary Grant as the editor and Joan Bennett as the reporter in Wedding Present; and then Cary Grant as Walter Burns in His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell as the reporter; and then Cary Grant and James Stewart (who had been a foreign correspondent in Next Time We Love) both involved with a newsmagazine in The Philadelphia Story, in 1940. Which takes us right up to Citizen Kane, the biggest newspaper picture of them all—the picture that ends with the introduction of the cast and a reprise of the line “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
Nine
AFTER YEARS OF swapping stories about Howey and the other werewolves and the crooked, dirty press, Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself. When he had been in Hollywood a short time, he met Marion Davies and Hearst through his friendship with Charles Lederer, a writer, then in his early twenties, whom Ben Hecht had met and greatly admired in New York when Lederer was still in his teens. Lederer, a child prodigy, who had entered college at thirteen, got to know Mankiewicz, the MacArthurs, Moss Hart, Benchley, and their friends at about the same time or shortly after he met Hecht, and was immediately accepted into a group considerably older than he was. Lederer was Marion Davies’s nephew—the son of her sister Reine, who had been in operetta and musical comedy. In Hollywood, Charles Lederer’s life seems to have revolved around his aunt, whom he adored. (Many others adored her also, though Citizen Kane was to give the world a different—and false—impression.) She was childless, and Lederer was very close to her; he spent a great deal of the time at her various dwelling places, and took his friends to meet both her and Hearst. The world of letters being small and surprising, Charles Lederer was among those who worked on the adaptation of The Front Page to the screen in 1931 and again when it was remade as His Girl Friday in 1940, and, the world being even smaller than that, Lederer married Orson Welles’s ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson Welles, in 1940, at San Simeon. (She married two prodigies in succession; the marriage to Welles had last five years and produced a daughter.)
Hearst was so fond of Lederer that on the evening of the nuptials he broke his rule of one cocktail to guests before dinner and no hard liquor thereafter. A guest who gulped the cocktail down was sometimes able to swindle another, but this is the only occasion that I can find recorded on which Hearst dropped the rule—a rule that Marion Davies customarily eased by slipping drinks to desperate guests before Hearst joined them but that nevertheless m ad it possible for Hearst to receive, and see at their best, some of the most talented alcoholics this country has ever produced. Not all writers are attracted to the rich and powerful, but it’s a defining characteristic of journalists to be drawn to those who live at the center of power. Even compulsive drinkers like Mankiewicz and Dorothy Parker were so fascinated by the great ménage of Hearst and his consort—and the guest lists of the world-famous—that they managed to stay relatively sober for the evenings at Marion Davies’s beach house (Colleen Moore described it as “the largest house on the beach—and I mean the beach from San Diego to the Canadian border”) and the weekends at San Simeon.
If Kane has the same love-hate as The Front Page, the same joyous infatuation with the antics of the unprincipled press, it’s because Mankiewicz, like Hecht and MacArthur, reveled in the complexities of corruption. And Hearst’s life was a spectacle. For short periods, this was intoxication enough. A man like Hearst seems to embody more history than other people do; in his company a writer may feel that he has been living in the past and on the outskirts and now he’s living in the dangerous present, right where the decisions are really made.
Hearst represented a new type of power. He got his first newspaper in 1887, when he was twenty-four, by asking his fathe
r for it, and, in the next three decades, when, for the first time, great masses of people became literate, he added more and more papers, until, with his empire of thirty newspapers and fifteen magazines, he was the most powerful journalist and publisher in the world. He had brought the first comic strips to America in1892, and his battling with Pulitzer a few years later over a cartoon character named the Yellow Kid revived the term “yellow journalism.” Because there was no tradition of responsibility in this new kind of popular journalism, which was almost a branch of show business, Hearst knew no restraints; perhaps fortunately, he was unguided. Ultimately, he was as purposeless about his power as the craziest of the Roman emperors. His looting of the treasures of the world for his castle at San Simeon symbolized his imperial status. Being at his table was being at court, and the activities of the notables who were invited there were slavishly chronicled in the Hearst papers.
The new social eminence of the Mankiewiczes, who sometimes visited San Simeon for as long as ten days at a time, can be charted from Louella Parsons’s columns. By the end of 1928, Louella was announcing Mankiewicz’s writing assignments with a big bold headline at the top of the column, and was printing such items as:
One of the few scenario writers in Hollywood who didn’t have to unlearn much that he had learned is Herman Mankiewicz. Herman came to Paramount directly from the stage, and naturally he knows the technique just as well as if he hadn’t written movies in the interval.
It was worth another item in the same column that Herman Mankiewicz had been observed “taking his son down Hollywood Boulevard to see the lighted Christmas trees.” In 1931, the Mankiewiczes were so prominent that they were among those who gave Marion Davies a homecoming party at the Hotel Ambassador; the other hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Irving Thalberg, Mr. and Mrs. King Vidor, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, John Gilbert, Lewis Milestone, Hedda Hopper, and so on. Hedda Hopper, who worked as a movie columnist for a rival newspaper chain but was a close friend of Marion Davies (to whom, it is said, she owed her job), was also an enthusiastic reporter of Mankiewicz’s activities during the years when he and his ravishing Sara were part of the Hearst-Davies social set.
When writers begin to see the powerful men operating in terms of available alternatives, while they have been judging them in terms of ideals, they often develop “personal” admiration for the great bastards whom they have always condemned and still condemn. Hearst was to Mankiewicz, I suspect, what Welles was to be to him a little later—a dangerous new toy. And he needed new toys constantly to keep off the booze. Mankiewicz could control himself at San Simeon in the late twenties and the very early thirties, as, in those days, he could control himself when he was in charge of a movie. Producing the Marx Brothers comedies kept him busy and entertained for a while. With the title of “supervisor” (a term for the actual working producer, as distinguished from the studio executive whose name might appear above or below the name of the movie), he worked on their pictures from the inception of the ideas through the months of writing and then the shooting. But he got bored easily, and when he started cutting up in the middle of preparing Duck Soup, in 1933, he was taken off the picture. When the Marx Brothers left Paramount and went to M-G-M, he joined them again, in the preparation of A Night at the Opera, in 1935, and the same thing happened; he was replaced as supervisor by his old boss George S. Kaufman.
His credits began to taper off after 1933, and in 1936 Mankiewicz didn’t get a single credit. That year, he published an article called “On Approaching Forty,” a brief satirical account of what had happened to him as a writer. It began:
Right before me, as I write, is a folder in which my wife keeps the blotters from Mr. Eschner, the insurance man, Don’s first report card, the letter from the income tax people about the gambling loss at Tia Juana, the press photograph of me greeting Helen Kane (in behalf of the studio) at the Pasadena Station and my literary output. There are four separate pieces of this output and they are all excellent. I hope some friend will gather them into a little book after my death. There is plenty of ninety point Marathon in the world, and wide margins can’t be hard to find.
He includes those tiny pieces in their entirety, and after one of them—the first three sentences of a short story—he comments:
I moved to Hollywood soon after I had made this notation and was kept so busy with on thing and another—getting the pool filled, playing the Cadillac and Buick salesmen against each other, only to compromise on a Cadillac and a Buick, after all, and locating the finance company’s downtown office—that the first thing I knew, a story, a good deal like the one I had in mind, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and in Collier’s, too.
This is the end of his article:
The fourth note looks rather naked now, all by itself on the desk. It says, simply:
“Write piece for New Yorker on reaching thirty-fifth birthday. No central idea. Just flit from paragraph to paragraph.”
People who complain that my work is slipshod would be a little surprised to find that I just am not always satisfied with the first thing I put down. I’m changing that thirty-fifth to fortieth right now.
“On Approaching Forty” didn’t come out in The New Yorker; it appeared in the Hollywood Reporter.
Ambivalence was the most common “literary” emotion of the screenwriters of the thirties, as alienation was to become the most common “literary” emotion of the screenwriters of the sixties. The thirties writers were ambivalently nostalgic about their youth as reporters, journalists, critics, or playwrights, and they glorified the hard-drinking, cynical newspaperman. They were ambivalent about Hollywood, which they savaged and satirized whenever possible. Hollywood paid them so much more money than they had ever earned before, and the movies reached so many more people than they had ever reached before, that they were contemptuous of those who hadn’t made it on the scale at the same time that they hated themselves for selling out. They had gone to Hollywood as a paid vacation from their playwriting or journalism, and screenwriting became their only writing. The vacation became an extended drunken party, and while they were there in the debris of the long morning after, American letters passed them by. They were never to catch up; nor were American movies ever again to have in their midst a whole school of the richest talents of a generation.
We in the audience didn’t have to wake up afterward to how good those films of the thirties were; in common with millions of people, I enjoyed them while they were coming out. They were immensely popular. But I did take them for granted. There was such a steady flow of bright comedy that it appeared to be a Hollywood staple, and it didn’t occur to me that those films wouldn’t go on being made. It didn’t occur to me that it required a special gathering of people in a special atmosphere to produce that flow, and that when those people stopped enjoying themselves those pictures couldn’t be made. And I guess it didn’t occur to older, more experienced people, either, because for decades everybody went on asking why Hollywood wasn’t turning out those good, entertaining comedies anymore.
By the end of the thirties, the jokes had soured. The comedies of the forties were heavy and pushy, straining for humor, and the comic impulse was misplaced or lost; they came out of a different atmosphere, a different feeling. The comic spirit of the thirties had been happily self-critical about America, the happiness born of the knowledge that in no other country were movies so free to be self-critical. It was the comedy of a country that that didn’t yet hate itself. Though it wasn’t until the sixties that the self-hatred became overt in American life and American movies, it started to show, I think, in the phony, excessive, duplicit use of patriotism by the rich, guilty liberals of Hollywood in the war years.
Ten
IN THE FORTIES, a socially conscious film historian said to me, “You know, Paramount never made a good movie,” and I brought up the names of some Paramount movies—Easy Living and Trouble in Paradise and lovely trifles like Midnight—and, of course, I couldn’t make my point,
because those movies weren’t what was thought of in the forties as a good movie. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere at all if I tried to cite Million Dollar Legs or Mississippi, or pictures with the Marx Brothers or Mae West; I would be told they weren’t even movies. Though Paramount made some elegant comedies in the “Continental” style, many of the best Paramount pictures were like revues—which was pretty much the style of the Broadway theatre they’d come out of, and was what I liked about them. They entertained you without trying to change your life, yet didn’t congratulate you for being a slobbering bag of mush, either. But by the forties these were considered “escapist entertainment,” and that was supposed to be bad. Many of the thirties comedies, especially the Paramount ones, weren’t even “artistic” or “visual” movies—which is why they look so good on television now. They also sound good, because what that historian thought of as their irresponsibility is so much more modern than the sentimentalities of the war years. What was believed in was implicit in the styles of the heroes and heroines and in the comedy targets; the writers had an almost aristocratic disdain for putting beliefs into words. In the forties, the writers convinced themselves that they believed in everything, and they kept putting it all into so many bad words. It’s no wonder the movies had no further use for a Groucho or a Mae West; once can imagine what either of them might have done to those words.