The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Television, John,” said Fellows. “The junk they go for on television.”

  Huston asked him vaguely what the talk was in New York about television.

  Television was booming, Fellows said, and all the actors, singers, dancers, directors, producers, and writers who hadn’t been able to get work in Hollywood were going into television in New York. On the other hand, all the actors, singers, dancers, directors, producers, and writers who had gone into television in New York were starving and wanted to go back to Hollywood. “Nobody really knows what’s happening,” said Fellows. “All I know is television can never do what pictures can do.”

  “We’ll just make pictures and release them on television, that’s all. The hell with television,” Huston said. “Do you kids want the lights on?” The room was murky. It made a fine tableau, Huston said. Fellows and I agreed that it was pleasant with the lights off. There was a brief silence. Huston moved like a shadow to a chair opposite mine and lit another brown cigarette, the quick glow from the match lighting up his face. “Been to the races out here, Art?” he asked.

  A few times, Fellows said, but David Selznick had been keeping him so busy he hadn’t had much time for horses.

  “The ponies have me broke all the time,” Huston said. “You know, I can’t write a check for five hundred dollars. I am always broke. I can’t even take an ordinary vacation. But there’s nothing I’d rather spend my money on than a horse, especially when the horse is one of my own. There’s nothing like breeding and raising a horse of your own. I’ve got four horses racing under my colors right now, and in a couple of years I’ll have more, even if I have to go into hock to support them. All I want is one good winner of my own. Everybody I know is conspiring to take my horses away from me. Someday I’ll have one good winner, and then I’ll be able to say, ‘Well, you bastards, this is what it was all about!’ ”

  Financial problems, Huston said, had prevented him from taking the trip around the world. Although his M-G-M salary was four thousand dollars a week while he was making a picture, he had had to get the company to advance him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which he was paying off in installments. He was bound by his contract to make at least one picture a year for the next three years for M-G-M. He was a partner in an independent company, Horizon Pictures, which he had started a couple of years before with a man named Sam Spiegel, whom he had met in the early thirties in London. Huston had directed one picture, We Were Strangers, for Horizon, but it had lost money. He was scheduled to direct another—The African Queen, based on the novel by C. S. Forester—as soon as he had completed The Red Badge of Courage for M-G-M. Huston said he thought The African Queen would make money, and if it did, he could then make some pictures on his own that he wanted to make as much as he did The Red Badge of Courage. The reason L. B. Mayer and the other M-G-M executives did not think that The Red Badge of Courage could be a commercial success, Huston said, was that it had no standard plot, no romance, and no leading female characters, and, if Huston had his way in casting it, would have no stars. It was simply the story of a youth who ran away from his first battle in the Civil War, and then returned to the front and distinguished himself by performing several heroic acts. Huston, like Stephen Crane, wanted to show something of the emotions of men in war, and the ironically thin line between cowardice and heroism. A few months earlier, Huston and an M-G-M producer named Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of the late Max Reinhardt, had suggested to Dore Schary, the studio’s vice-president in charge of production, that they make the picture.

  “Dore loved the idea,” Huston said. “And Dore said he would read the novel.” A couple of weeks later, Schary had asked Huston to write a screen treatment—a rough outline for the detailed script. “I did my treatment in four days,” Huston said. “I was going down to Mexico to get married, so I took my secretary along and dictated part of it on the plane going down, got married, dictated some more after the ceremony, and dictated the rest on the plane trip back.” Schary approved the treatment, and the cost of making the picture was estimated at a million and a half dollars. Huston wrote the screenplay in five weeks, and Schary approved it. “Then the strangest things began to happen,” Huston said. “Dore is called vice-president in charge of production. L.B. is called vice-president in charge of the studio. Nobody knows which is boss.” His voice rose dramatically. “We were told Dore had to O.K. everything. We got his O.K., but nothing moved. And we know that L.B. hates the idea of making this picture.” His voice sank to a confidential whisper. “He just hates it!”

  For the role of the Youth, Huston said, he wanted twenty-six-year-old Audie Murphy, the most-decorated hero of the Second World War, whose film career had been limited to minor roles. Huston said he was having some difficulty persuading both Schary and Reinhardt to let Murphy have the part. “They’d rather have a star,” he said indignantly. “They just don’t see Audie the way I do. This little, gentle-eyed creature. Why, in the war he’d literally go out of his way to find Germans to kill. He’s a gentle little killer.”

  “Another Martini?” Fellows asked.

  “I hate stars,” Huston said, exchanging his empty glass for a full one. “They’re not actors. I’ve been around actors all my life, and I like them, and yet I never had an actor as a friend. Except Dad. And Dad never thought of himself as an actor. But the best actor I ever worked with was Dad. All I had to tell Dad about his part of the old man in Treasure was to talk fast. Just talk fast.” Huston talked rapidly, in a startling and accurate imitation of his father. “A man who talks fast never listens to himself. Dad talked like this. Man talking fast is an honest man. Dad was a man who never tried to sell anybody anything.”

  It was now quite dark in the room. We sat in the darkness for a while without talking, and then Huston got up and went over to the light switch. He asked if we were ready for light, and then snapped the switch. He was revealed in the sudden yellow brightness, standing motionless, a look of bewilderment on his face. “I hate this scene,” he said. “Let’s go out and get something to eat.”

  · · ·

  Five weeks later, Huston was back at the Waldorf, in the same suite. When he telephoned me this time, he sounded cheerful. During his absence, The Asphalt Jungle had opened in New York and had been reviewed enthusiastically, but he didn’t mention that; what he felt good about was that he had just bought a new filly from Calumet Farms. When I went over to see him that evening, he was alone in his suite. Two days before, he had found a superb location for The Red Badge of Courage outside Nashville.

  When Huston had returned to the studio after his Eastern trip, he told me, he had found that no preparations at all were under way for The Red Badge of Courage. “Those uniforms just weren’t being made!” he said with amazement. “I went to see L.B. and L.B. told me he had no faith in the picture. He didn’t believe it would make money. Gottfried and I went to see Dore. We found Dore at home, sick in bed. The moment we entered, he said, ‘Boys, we’ll make this picture!’ Maybe it was Nick Schenck who gave Dore the go-ahead sign. Anyway, that night Dore wrote a letter to L.B. and said in the letter he thought M-G-M ought to make the picture. And the next morning L.B. called us in and talked for six hours about why this picture would not make any money. You know, I like L.B. He said that Dore was a wonderful boy, that he loved Dore like his own son. And he said that he could not deny a boy who wrote that kind of letter to him. And when we came out of L.B.’s office, the studio was bubbling, and the uniforms were being made!” Huston chortled. He and Reinhardt had found a marvellous actor named Royal Dano to play the part of the Tattered Man, he said, and Dano had that singular quality that makes for greatness on the screen. Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo have that quality, he said. “The screen exaggerates and magnifies whatever it is that a great actor has,” he said. “It’s almost as though greatness is a matter of quality rather than ability. Dad had it. He had that something people felt in him. You sense it every time you’re near it. You see it in Audie Murphy’s e
yes. It’s like a great horse. You go past his stall and you can feel the vibration in there. You can feel it. So I’m going to make the picture, kid. I’m going to direct it on horseback. I’ve always wanted to direct a picture on horseback.”

  The expenses at the Nashville site, he said, would be less than at the one he had originally hoped to get, in Leesburg, Virginia, and its terrain lent itself perfectly to the kind of photography he wanted—a sharply contrasting black-and-white approximating the texture and atmosphere of the Brady photographs of the Civil War.

  “Tell you what,” Huston said, in his amazed tone. “I’m going to show you how we make a picture! And then you come out to Hollywood and you can see everything that happens to the picture out there! And you can meet Gottfried! And Dore! And L.B.! And everybody! And you can meet my horses! Will you do it?”

  I said I would.

  · · ·

  Several weeks later, Huston telephoned again, this time from California. He was going to start making The Red Badge of Courage in a month, and the location was not going to be in Tennessee, after all, but on his own ranch, in the San Fernando Valley. He didn’t sound too happy about it. “You’d better get out here for the fireworks,” he said. “We’re going to have the Civil War right here on the Coast.”

  · · ·

  When I arrived on the West Coast, Huston set about arranging for me to meet everybody who had anything to do with The Red Badge of Courage. The day I met Gottfried Reinhardt, the thirty-nine-year-old producer of The Red Badge of Courage, he was sitting in his office at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, in Culver City, studying the estimated budget for the picture. It would be the fifteen-hundred-and-twelfth picture to be put into production since Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was founded, on May 24, 1924. The mimeographed booklet containing the estimate was stamped “Production No. 1512.” (The estimate, I learned later on, informed Reinhardt that the picture would be allotted nine rehearsal days and thirty-four production days; the footage of the finished film was expected to come to 7,865 feet; the total cost was expected to be $1,434,789.)

  Reinhardt is a paunchy man with a thick mane of wavy brown hair; in his cocoa-brown silk shantung suit, he looked like a Teddy bear. There was a cigar in his mouth and an expression of profound cynicism on his face. A heavy gold key chain hung in a deep loop from under his coat to a trouser pocket. He speaks with a German accent but without harshness, and his words come out pleasantly, in an even, regretful-sounding way. “We promised Dore we would make our picture for one million five or under, and that we would make it in about thirty days,” he said, sitting down at his desk again. He put a hand on the estimate and sighed heavily. “The producer’s job is to save time and money.” He bobbed his head as he talked. A strand of hair fell over his face. He replaced it and puffed at his cigar in a kind of restrained frenzy. Then he removed the cigar and, bobbing his head again, said, “When you tell people you have made a picture, they do not ask, ‘Is it a good picture?’ They ask, ‘How many days?’ ” He tapped the ash from his cigar tenderly into a tray and gave another heavy sigh.

  Reinhardt, who was born in Berlin, arrived in the United States in 1932, at the age of nineteen, for a visit. He had been over here a few months when Hitler came to power in Germany, and he decided to stay. Ernst Lubitsch, who had worked with the elder Reinhardt in Europe, offered Gottfried a job, without pay, at Paramount, as his assistant on a film version of Noël Coward’s Design for Living, starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, and Gary Cooper. In the fall of 1933, Reinhardt moved to Metro, as a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week assistant to Walter Wanger, then a producer at that studio. Not long afterward, Wanger left and Reinhardt was made assistant to Bernard Hyman, who was considered a right-hand man of Irving Thalberg. Reinhardt became first a film writer (The Great Waltz) and then, in 1940, a producer (Comrade X, with Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr; Rage in Heaven, with Ingrid Bergman and Robert Montgomery; Two-Faced Woman, with Greta Garbo, the last picture she appeared in). In 1942, he went into the Army. He worked on Signal Corps films for four years, and then returned to Metro and produced pictures featuring some of the studio’s most popular stars, including Clark Gable and Lana Turner.

  At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Gottfried Reinhardt had witnessed a succession of struggles for power among the executives at the studio. He had learned many lessons simply by watching these battles, he told me. “M-G-M is like a medieval monarchy,” he said. “Palace revolutions all the time.” He leaned back in his swivel chair. “L.B. is the King. Dore is the Prime Minister. Benny Thau, an old Mayer man, is the Foreign Minister, and makes all the important deals for the studio, like the loan-outs of big stars. L. K. Sidney, one vice-president, is the Minister of the Interior, and Edgar J. Mannix, another vice-president, is Lord Privy Seal, or, sometimes, Minister without Portfolio. And John and I are loyal subjects.” He bobbed his head and gave a cynical laugh. “Our King is not without power. I found, with The Red Badge of Courage, that you need the King’s blessing if you want to make a picture. I have the King’s blessing, but it has been given with large reservations.” He looked at me over his cigar. “Our picture must be a commercial success,” he said flatly. “And it must be a great picture.”

  · · ·

  The maze of paths followed by all the individuals at M-G-M who work together to make a motion picture led inexorably to the office of Louis B. Mayer, and I found him there one day, behind a series of doors, talking to Arthur Freed, a producer of musicals for the studio. Mayer’s office was about half as large as the lounge of the Music Hall, and he sat behind a huge cream-colored desk overlooking a vast expanse of peach-colored carpet. The walls of the office were panelled in cream-colored leather, and there was a cream-colored bar, a cream-colored fireplace with cream-colored fire irons, cream-colored leather chairs and couches, and a cream-colored grand piano. Behind Mayer’s desk stood an American flag and a marble statue of the M-G-M lion. The desk was covered with four cream-colored telephones, a prayer book, several photographs of lions, a tintype of Mayer’s mother, and a statuette of the Republican Party’s elephant. The big desk hid most of Mayer, but I could see his powerful shoulders, decked in navy blue, and a gay, polka-dot bow tie that almost touched his chin. His large head seems set upon the shoulders, without an intervening neck. His hair is thick and snow-white, his face is ruddy, and his eyes, behind glasses with amber-colored frames, stared with a sort of fierce blankness at Freed, who was showing him a report on the box-office receipts of his latest musical, then playing at the Radio City Music Hall.

  “Great! I saw it!” Mayer said, sweeping Freed back with his arm. “I said to you the picture would be a wonderful hit. In here!” he cried, poking his index finger at his chest. “It wins the audience in here!” He lifted his snowy head and looked at the cream-colored wall before him as though he were watching the Music Hall screen. “Entertainment!” he cried, transfixed by what he seemed to see on that screen, and he made the face of a man who was emotionally stirred by what he was watching. “It’s good enough for you and I and the box office,” he said, turning back to Freed. “Not for the smart alecks. It’s not good enough any more,” he went on, whining coyly, in imitation of someone saying that winning the heart of the audience was not good enough. He pounded a commanding fist on his desk and looked at me. “Let me tell you something!” he said. “Prizes! Awards! Ribbons! We had two pictures here. An Andy Hardy picture, with little Mickey Rooney, and Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo. Ninotchka got the prizes. Blue ribbons! Purple ribbons! Nine bells and seven stars! Which picture made the money? Andy Hardy made the money. Why? Because it won praise from the heart. No ribbons!”

  “Hah!” Mr. Freed said.

  “Twenty-six years with the studio!” Mayer went on. “They used to listen to me. Never would Irving Thalberg make a picture I was opposed to. I had a worship for that boy. He worked. Now they want cocktail parties and their names in the papers. Irving listened to me. Never satisfied with his own work. That was Irving. Years later, after Irving passe
d away, they still listened. They make an Andy Hardy picture.” He turned his powerful shoulders toward me. “Andy’s mother is dying, and they make the picture showing Andy standing outside the door. Standing. I told them, ‘Don’t you know that an American boy like that will get down on his hands and knees and pray?’ They listened. They brought Mickey Rooney down on his hands and knees.” Mayer leaped from his chair and crouched on the peach-colored carpet and showed how Andy Hardy had prayed. “The biggest thing in the picture!” He got up and returned to his chair. “Not good enough,” he said, whining coyly again. “Don’t show the good, wholesome, American mother in the home. Kind. Sweet. Sacrifices. Love.” Mayer paused and by his expression demonstrated, in turn, maternal kindness, sweetness, sacrifice, and love, and then glared at Freed and me. “No!” he cried. “Knock the mother on the jaw!” He gave himself an uppercut to the chin. “Throw the little old lady down the stairs!” He threw himself in the direction of the American flag. “Throw the mother’s good, homemade chicken soup in the mother’s face!” He threw an imaginary plate of soup in Freed’s face. “Step on the mother! Kick her! That is art, they say. Art!” He raised and lowered his white eyebrows, wiggled his shoulders like a hula dancer, and moved his hands in a mysterious pattern in the air. “Art!” he repeated, and gave an angry growl.

  “You said it,” said Freed.

  “Andy Hardy! I saw the picture and the tears were in my eyes,” Mayer said. “I’m not ashamed. I’ll see it again. Every time, I’ll cry.”

  “In musicals, we don’t have any of those phony artistic pretensions,” Freed said.

  Mayer gave no sign that he had heard Freed. “Between you and I and the lamppost,” he said, straightening his bow tie, “the smart alecks around here don’t know the difference between the heart and the gutter. They don’t want to listen to you. Marie Dressler! Who thought you could take a fat old lady and make her a star? I did it. And Wally Beery. And Lionel Barrymore.” He leaned back in his chair, one hand tucked into his shirt, his eyes squinting, his voice turning into the querulous rasp of Dr. Gillespie informing Dr. Kildare of his diagnosis of the disease. Then, resuming his natural manner, he said, “The audience knows. Look at the receipts. Give the audience what they want? No. Not good enough.” He paused.