The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

Warners also had a reputation for being cheap and fast. “MGM was the studio that spent,” recalled one Warner Brothers executive at the time. “It was a studio of white telephones. Warners had black telephones”—the basic model, nothing extra. The studio was so notoriously penny-pinching that Harry Warner himself was known to go around turning off the lights in the bathrooms. (And players like Cagney, Bette Davis, and even my father waged regular skirmishes over their low-balled salaries.) Writers, as James Cagney recalled, “were pressed to crank out their stuff by the yard . . . doing the best they could under perpetual rush-rush conditions.” For many years, this reputation seemed to undermine appreciation of the films themselves. Even Jack Warner wondered in a 1934 memo to Zanuck’s successor Hal Wallis whether “we are cutting our pictures too fast and making them too snappy—you can’t tell though, maybe we are right.” But in the last couple of decades, those snappy pictures have been rediscovered and admired—in large part for their brusque energy. As the film critic Andrew Sarris wrote, “Movie for movie, Warners was the most reliable source of entertainment through the thirties and forties, even though it was clearly the most budget-conscious of them all.” To Sarris, “the razor-sharp cutting and frantic pacing look inspired to the point of absurdism. Not for Warners were the longueurs of MGM and the polish of Paramount. A Warners B picture seldom ran more than seventy minutes. MGM and Paramount Production values padded their Bs to the eighty- and ninety-minute mark without adding anything of substance or originality.”

  It was a shooting schedule that certainly shaped my father’s life. Lyle, like all the contract players at Warner Brothers, worked all the time. He made nine movies in 1932, twelve in 1933. He worked six days a week, often twelve hours a day, sometimes acting in two or three pictures at a time. He’d ride his bicycle between soundstages, carrying two or three scripts in the front basket for pictures he was currently acting in, and two or three in the rear basket for pictures he was signed up to make. “Each studio was a kingdom unto itself,” Lyle recalled years later. “Each one had its number of players; we had probably sixty actors under contract at Warner Brothers. We were all called stars. You weren’t a movie actor; you were a movie star. You practically lived at the studio; it was like your home. You had your own dressing room and your own chairs with your name on them. If there were any personal things to take care of—like when you got a traffic ticket, and probably up to murder—the studio would take care of it.” It was cozy in its way, but it could also be oppressive, as my father would find within a few years. At first, though, and with the Depression casting its shadow, the steady work was a tremendous relief.

  Chapter 5

  GANGSTERS, GRIFTERS, AND GOLD DIGGERS

  For many years after my father’s death and long into my adulthood, most of the first movies he made with Warner Brothers were very hard to find. They were pre-Code movies, produced before July 1934, when the motion picture industry was strong-armed into strictly enforcing the moral strictures it had agreed to four years earlier. In the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up, those movies were considered too racy for television. Even when I was in college and graduate school in the 1980s, going to revival houses and film festivals in Berkeley and San Francisco, Cambridge and Boston, it was rare to see a pre-Code film. With the exception of a handful of the great gangster movies like The Public Enemy and Scarface, early Marx Brothers movies, and the occasional Busby Berkeley musical, the films of the early 1930s were terra incognita. Many of them had been out of circulation since after their first run, languishing in studio vaults or carefully preserved in university archives, seen only by the hardest-core movie nerds.

  When I discovered those movies, my father’s and others, from the early 1930s, I wanted to know where they’d been all my life. I was hardly alone in my curiosity. It wasn’t that they were such great examples of cinematic art, though a few were. It was that they were so different from the Hollywood movies that came after them, ragged and breathless and tough, studded with references to subjects like lesbianism and dope addiction that people my age tended to think our forebears scarcely knew let alone talked about. It was like opening a trunk in your grandparents’ attic expecting to find family albums full of sepia-toned portraits and discovering a bunch of raunchy magazines instead.

  And so I read everything I could find—luckily quite a bit of scholarship has come out since the early 1990s—about the story of the pre-Code era. The first thing that strikes you when you start to delve into it is the rather startling fact that movies, unlike other American art forms, were subject to legal censorship for much of their history. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit”—and therefore exempt from First Amendment protection. Not until 1952, when the Court reversed itself and ruled that movies were, in fact, “a significant medium for the communication of ideas,” were they granted free speech protections. Movie industry self-censorship remained in effect—though in dwindling force—till the adoption of the alphabet ratings system in 1968.

  By the early 1920s, Americans recognized that movies represented a new and unprecedented phenomenon in entertainment. Unlike many other forms of art or amusement, movies were consumed by people of all ages and social classes, in small towns and big cities alike; their appeal was visceral and often overwhelming; they had the power to shape, and often inflate, people’s expectations of beauty, sexuality, family relationships, self-fulfillment. Many Americans would have agreed that some control had to be exerted over such a force or it would inundate them, washing away some of their most dearly held assumptions and values. The question was: Who would exert that control, and on what authority? In 1934, moviemakers and the forces that wanted to censor them reached a settlement that would prove politically durable and artistically fruitful. But it was a struggle to get there, one that revealed the cultural divide between Hollywood and much of the rest of the country. And that struggle left behind odd and intriguing traces in the form of pre-Code films.

  The Code that the industry adopted in 1930 was both a high-minded, philosophical statement about the power and duty of film to promote moral values and a prim and particular checklist of forbidden words and images. It opened with general principles: “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence, the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” “Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.” “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” The Code’s authors wanted audiences to be led inexorably to the proper conclusions. Hence, “no plot should be so constructed so as to leave the question of right or wrong in doubt or fogged.” Bad guys, in other words, could not get away with it.

  Under “obscenity and profanity,” the Code prohibited a raft of colorful slang, and even sounds: “chippie” and “fairy”; “God, Lord, Jesus, Christ” (“unless used reverently”); “hot” (“as applied to a woman”); “goose” (“in a vulgar sense”); “toilet gags”; Bronx cheers and raspberries. (Words more outré than those—“fuck” or “shit” or their derivatives, for example—were so beyond the pale as to need no addressing.) It completely forbid the presentation of some things: the illegal drug trade; most kidnapping; miscegenation (specifically between blacks and whites); nudity; “excessive” kissing and “lustful embraces”; “sex perversion” or hints of it; allusions to abortion, venereal disease, or birth control; scenes of childbirth; and the presentation of ministers of religion as comical or villainous characters. Brutality and gruesomeness were to be kept to a minimum, and there could be no flaunting of guns by gangsters, no details showing how a crime was committed, and no scenes wherein agents of the law died at the hands of criminals.

  Other dicey matters could be broached, but only with extreme caution. Adultery, if it had to be pres
ented at all, could not be presented as attractive, alluring, or justified, and could not be treated as a laughing matter. Rape could never be more than suggested, and “then only when essential for the plot.” The court system could not be presented as unjust, though an individual court might be. Bedrooms could be shown but not in comedies. (The infamous use of twin beds for husbands and wives in Hollywood pictures of the Golden Age was not actually dictated by the Code; it was a concession to the British market.) The Code acknowledged that “scenes of passion are sometimes necessary to the plot. However they should appear only when necessary and not as an added stimulus to the emotions of the audience.” (How such scenes, played halfway competently by beautiful actors and actresses, would not stimulate some emotion is a bit of a head-scratcher.) “Pure love, the love of a man for a woman permitted by the law of God and man, is the rightful subject of plots. The passion arising from this love is not the subject for plots.” Drinking was to be kept to the absolute minimum necessary for the story. Scenes of undressing—a favorite ploy of late 1920s and early 1930s movies—were to be avoided. Dances of the type known as the Kooch or the Can-Can were a no-no.

  All in all, the Code was a pretty good précis of what conservative, middle-class, mostly white Americans considered nice or nasty in the 1930s, a reliable map of conventional sensitivities and prejudices. It was also a representative document of its times in that its authors could invoke terms like “decent society” and “correct entertainment,” and a general, unspoken agreement about what constitutes vulgarity, without worrying about backlash or misunderstanding. It’s both a record of the comparative ease of building a consensus on what people should and should not see in their popular entertainment—imagine trying to do that today—and a reminder of whom the consensus left out without asking.

  From March 1930 to July 1934, though this grand moral plan was formally in place, its enforcement was much weaker than it would be afterward. When the Motion Picture Production Code office made recommendations for cuts, producers frequently ignored them or negotiated compromises that favored raciness. The movies that came out of that period, now known by the slight misnomer “pre-Code,” have a distinctive feel to them. They are more cynical than anything before film noir in the 1940s, more irreverent than many movies before the 1960s. They’re pumped full of what my grandparents used to call “fresh talk”—smart-alecky slang and vinegary put-downs. They are more matter-of-fact about sex, and particularly about its use as a tradable commodity for women, than most movies that came after them, at least until the end of the Code era; and despite the warnings of the Code and the fact that Prohibition was in effect till 1933, they are awash in alcohol. They accommodate broad ethnic stereotypes but also an easy sense of immigrant cultures bumping up against one another in prickly familiarity; in pre-Code movies, especially those by Warner Brothers, you could hear Yiddish words like goniff and shiksa coming from characters who were Jewish and those who were not. Pre-Code movies are steeped in the struggles of the Depression, peopled with characters who skitter along the edge of flat-out penury and who scam without shame and with few sentimental plays for our sympathy, characters who work all the angles with a verve that just barely varnishes their desperation.

  Yet as dark as some of them are, pre-Code movies can also be brightly, brassily vulgar. “Am I gonna stink pretty!” shouts an ebullient James Cagney, as he soaks in a scented bath in Picture Snatcher. In The Purchase Price, a gaggle of ribald mail-order brides whoop it up as they look at photographs of their future husbands. “You know what they say about men with bushy eyebrows and a long nose?” says one, pointedly brandishing the banana she’s eating. “Oh, Queenie,” hoots her companion. “I can tell you’ve been married before!” “What’s wrong with you?” a woman asks her unhappy gal pal in Bed of Roses. “You look like you had a bad pickle.” The pre-Code era produced only a few really great talking pictures—The Public Enemy, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Duck Soup. But many more have a rough energy that draws you in and rattles your teeth like a fast ride over potholed city streets.

  The story of Hollywood, the Code and the pre-Code, goes back to the 1910s, when across the country, states and cities began setting up their own censorship boards to review movies and make cuts before the pictures could be shown in their jurisdictions. The boards varied in what they most cared about. New York and Chicago went hard on depictions of official corruption. By contrast, as the screenwriter Courtney Terrett noted, censorship in Maryland, Virginia, Kansas, and Ohio had “been concerned principally with the moral flavor of pictures. Kansas censors could view with equanimity a scene showing a New York copper getting his lumps from some hoodlums, but grow frothy around the lips at the most delicate suggestion that human beings ever climb into bed for any purpose other than sleeping.” Pennsylvania was notoriously strict across the board on politics and on morals, and on any allusions to pregnancy or childbearing.

  Local censorship was a costly nuisance for the studios. They had to pay a fee when the boards made cuts, the movies came back to them as damaged goods with bits hacked out, and some movies couldn’t be shown at all in some parts of the country. The edicts were inconsistent and, for the producers, maddening. But they were also legal; the Supreme Court had authorized them with its 1915 ruling.

  Over time, though, tensions developed along the seams of this patchwork system. The censorship boards, and the church and women’s groups that supported them, increasingly saw themselves as locked in battle with a business willing to put just about anything on screen in order to lure audiences. They saw themselves as upholding American values—though it would be more accurate to describe them as small-town Protestant values—that an industry run largely by Jewish immigrants from big cities was all too willing to flout. Anti-Semitism would prove to be a remarkably persistent thread in the Hollywood censorship story. A Mrs. Rufus Gibbs, of the Citizens League of Maryland for Better Motion Pictures, put it this way: “Motion Pictures are already controlled by a little group of men who are without moral standards; for the most part composed of agnostic Jews, who as a class are becoming a great moral menace to this country, and who have no sense of obligation to the youth of the Nation.” The early 1920s was a moment of anti-immigrant panic—the resurgent KKK was particularly focused on immigration, for instance—and the anti-film crusade battened off such sentiments and fed them in turn.

  Still, the censorship system might have stayed more or less in equilibrium if not for the Hollywood scandals of 1921–1922, which gave a major boost to the forces that wanted to see national censorship of the movies. What they were now learning about Hollywood convinced its critics that it was indeed a roiling cesspool of iniquity, and that its denizens could hardly be trusted to clean up their act without the solvents and scrub brushes provided by more virtuous citizens. The most notorious case was that of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a bulky and beloved silent-era comedian. On Labor Day weekend, 1921, Arbuckle hosted a wild party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A few days later, one guest, a twenty-six-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe, died of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder. Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter, and though he was never found guilty of anything—even after three trials—rumors persisted that he had caused Rappe’s death. The reigning, rather dubious theory was that, as large as he was, and as sexually perverse as he was imagined to be, he had somehow fatally injured Rappe while having sex with her.

  Subsequent investigations of the case have revealed just how flimsy it was: the allegations against Arbuckle had been made by a woman who was a professional blackmailer and procurer of girls for parties; the unfortunate Rappe had a history of medical problems, and may have been suffering from complications of the several abortions she had undergone; and the San Francisco D.A. who prosecuted Arbuckle was a grandstanding type who “had tried the case,” as one film historian put it, “on practically no evidence, as an anti-Southern California vice crusade.” The third jury to hear
Arbuckle’s case even apologized to the moonfaced comedian, saying, “We feel a great injustice has been done to him. . . . Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free of blame.” Still, the scandal, eagerly stoked by the Hearst newspapers, transfixed the anti-Hollywood constituency and ruined Arbuckle, who could not find acting work again and whose films were pulled from circulation. (His friends in Hollywood helped him to get some directing jobs, which he took under the pseudonym Will B. Goode.)

  In the wake of the Arbuckle case, a new wave of anti-Hollywood rhetoric drew on the notion that actors didn’t know how to behave themselves because most of them had come from the lower classes. They were like overindulged, ill-bred children, stuffing themselves with gooey sweets and stomping all over propriety. “At Hollywood, Calif., is a colony of these people, where debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation, free love, seem to be conspicuous,” declared Senator Henry Lee Myers of Montana on the floor of Congress. “Many of these ‘stars,’ it is reported, were formerly bartenders, butcher boys, sopers, swampers, variety actors and actresses, who may have earned $10 or $20 a week, and some of whom are now paid, it is said, salaries of something like $5,000 a month or more.”

  In January 1922, the studios turned to Will Hays, Warren Harding’s postmaster general, to help them save their reputation and reassure their Wall Street investors. Hays’s official title was president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), a newly formed trade association. He was popularly known, though, as the movie czar (or by some wags as the Czar of all the Rushes), and his office as the Hays Office. Hays was a skinny, jug-eared native of Sullivan, Indiana—a conservative Republican, a teetotaler, and an elder in the Presbyterian church. But he was also good-humored (he asked photographers to take his picture with “an ear-reduction lens”) and pragmatic, and he got a few things done quickly that were very helpful from a public relations point of view. He saw to it that studios included morals clauses in their contracts with performers, ensuring they could fire any who got caught up in scandals. He persuaded studio publicity departments to muffle the tales of sybaritic luxury that Hollywood stars enjoyed; and for a time, the studios dutifully pumped out home movies of stars like Marion Davies (the mistress of the media titan William Randolph Hearst) dusting her living room, or Alma Rubens (a beautiful dope addict) chatting sedately with her aged mother. He tried to do something about the problem of would-be actresses stranded in Hollywood, prey to hunger and vice—a problem much fretted about in the 1920s—by establishing Central Casting to help register extras and monitor their treatment.