We urged them to publicly declare their opposition to Communism and to volunteer to appear before the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee—two things no Communist could agree to. We would arrange their meetings and we would vouch for their innocence.
If on the other hand, someone said, “I won’t do that,” we simply said: “We can’t help you.”
The system allowed people to clear themselves and it worked, it really worked. The industry and the public accepted our recommendations of innocence.
These were eye-opening years for me. When I’d come back to Warner Brothers after the war, I’d shared the orthodox liberal view that Communists—if there really were any—were liberals who were temporarily off track, and whatever they were, they didn’t pose much of a threat to me or anyone. I heard whispers that Moscow wanted to infiltrate the world’s most powerful medium of entertainment, but I’d passed them off as irrational and emotional red baiting.
Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism.
16
OF THE FIFTY-THREE PICTURES I APPEARED IN, thirty-one were made before the war and twenty-two after the war. In addition to Kings Row and Knute Rockne—All American, I’m especially proud of several of the postwar pictures, particularly The Voice of the Turtle, John Loves Mary, The Hasty Heart, and The Winning Team, in which I played the great baseball player, Grover Cleveland Alexander.
But enormous change was coming to Hollywood after the war, and a lot of it wasn’t for the good.
When I arrived there in my Nash convertible in 1937, there were seven major studios in Hollywood. Each had a huge production lot dominated by barn-like soundstages where the interior scenes of movies were shot, a make-believe New York City neighborhood, and a western town with false-fronted saloons and a dusty main street for exterior shots. The studios also owned large ranches in the San Fernando Valley where western and outdoor movies were filmed.
In those days Hollywood was run a lot like an old-fashioned candy store: You cooked it in the back and sold it in the front. Each studio had a big stable of contract actors, writers, directors, musicians, and producers who turned out the pictures, and a nationwide chain of theaters where the pictures were exhibited. The studio was like an assembly line that was entrusted to keep a steady stream of pictures flowing to the theaters.
This system turned out many of the best pictures ever made. Each studio was like a big family. You belonged to Warner Brothers or MGM or Paramount and your associates and friends were mostly other performers and writers and directors from your studio. Sometimes we had family fights, but the system gave a solid stability to the picture business. You belonged someplace.
But that all changed after the war. An antitrust suit was brought by a private chain of theaters and as a result the Justice Department issued a series of decrees declaring that the studios could either make pictures or operate theaters—they couldn’t do both.
This turned Hollywood inside out overnight. The studios chose to continue producing movies. But no longer could they afford stables of actors and other workers under contract because from now on, they had to make movies purely on the speculation theaters would want to show them.
Because of tax problems, many stars were willing to give up the security of a studio contract and a weekly salary. I was one of them. I was in the ninety-four percent tax bracket, which meant the government took most of what I earned. I’d always thought there was something inherently unfair toward actors in the tax system. I’d seen careers take off like a comet, shine briefly, then burn out almost overnight, but during their brief period of stardom, taxes would have eaten up most of their income and they’d have little left afterward.
Nevertheless, I believe the government’s decision to break up the studio system was wrong. It destroyed the stability of the industry under the justification that the studios monopolized the picture business. But they didn’t have a monopoly; there was intense competition that worked well for everybody. You had seven companies who were always competing with each other to turn out a better movie than the guy down the street, and if people didn’t like a picture, they’d show it by voting with their feet.
Owning the theaters provided a guarantee to the studios that if they guessed wrong on a movie and made it, at least they’d get some of their money back by playing it at their own theaters. This allowed them to take risks on people and stories.
It allowed the public to create real stars—legendary stars with staying power like Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, and a lot more.
A star like Judy Garland or Mickey Rooney wasn’t born a great star. When a studio spotted people they thought had talent and promise—for instance, a pretty girl in a college play—they’d sign them up for a small salary and send them to classes where they were taught to act and sing and dance. Then they tried to nurture them, bring them up.
The studios knew they didn’t make stars, the public did. But they could tailor movies to showcase an actor’s particular talents, allow their talent to develop, and give them the backing of wonderful character actors and actresses who would never become stars. In those days, the great stars were built up over time and their names and faces became as familiar to people as their next of kin. The studio publicity machine saw to that. Every performer had a publicity agent whose responsibility it was to see that you were in the trade papers, the gossip columns, and the movie magazines: It built an image of you. That’s what sold the tickets.
As a free lance, I agreed to make one picture a year for three years at Warner Brothers and was also able to make pictures at Paramount, MGM, RKO, and Universal. I finally got to do some westerns. Among them two of my favorites were The Last Outpost and Cattle Queen of Montana, with Barbara Stanwyck. In The Last Outpost, I teamed up with my favorite horse, Baby, the mare I rode and bought during Stallion Road.
During the late 1940s, one side effect of the attempted Communist infiltration of our industry was a kind of national backlash against Hollywood. The movie business became a popular target for politicians who attacked it as a hotbed of reds and immoral conduct, and organizations began forming around the country with the declared purpose of censoring the movies.
Like any big group of people, we had our bad apples, but they were in the minority and most of the anti-Hollywood propaganda wasn’t true. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, I began speaking out to defend the industry.
At first, I just spoke to others in Hollywood and motion picture theater owners, encouraging them to get together to improve our industry’s image and its public relations by speaking out against the critics and columnists who unfairly maligned us. I described how we’d responded to the Communist threat in the industry, pointed out that the life-style of the majority of people in Hollywood was tame, and tried to emphasize how important the movies were to American culture. Pretty soon, I was giving a couple of speeches a week, and as time went on, I was speaking less frequently to others in the industry and more often to groups like the Rotary Club and local Chambers of Commerce.
By now, I guess I was beginning to undergo a political transformation. As I’ve said, Pd emerged from the war a liberal: Like my father, I mistrusted business and believed government could solve all our country’s problems, as it had during the Depression. Only later did I realize it was probably World War II that ended the Depression. I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent f
our months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.
Probably because of my dad’s influence and my experiences during the Depression, I had loved the Democratic Party. I agreed with Thomas Jefferson, its founder, who said: “Democrats consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them, therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent. . . the equal rights of every man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.”
But the party had begun to change drastically in the thirties. Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that “governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.” Abe Lincoln once said, “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and the axioms of a free society.” But during the Depression, the Democrats began to repudiate many of these principles while creating a government that grew ever larger and increasingly demanded the right to regulate and plan the social and economic life of the country and move into arenas best left to private enterprise.
I guess I was beginning to form one of my own principles about government: There probably isn’t any undertaking on earth short of assuring the national security that can’t be handled more efficiently by the forces of private enterprise than by the federal government.
Our federal bureaucracy expanded relentlessly during the postwar years and, almost always with the best of intentions, it began leading America along the path to a silent form of socialism. Our government wasn’t nationalizing the railroads or the banks, but it was confiscating a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth through excessive taxes, and indirectly seizing control of the day-to-day management of our businesses with rules and regulations that often gave Washington bureaucrats the power of life and death over them.
Well, pretty soon my speeches in defense of Hollywood were beginning to take on a new tone. And I received a telephone call that was to change my life and enrich it forever after.
17
THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS from director Mervyn LeRoy, who told me an actress working on one of his pictures needed my help. The young woman, Nancy Davis, was extremely upset because the name of another actress identified as Nancy Davis had appeared on the membership rosters of several Communist front groups and she was receiving notices of their meetings in her mail.
Mervyn said he was sure the young woman had absolutely no interest in left-wing causes, and knowing of the work we had done to clear movie people unfairly accused as Communists, he asked me if I would look into it.
As president of the Screen Actors Guild, I did a little research and found out that there was more than one Nancy Davis connected with show business—in fact there were several—and it took me only a few minutes to establish that Mervyn’s Nancy Davis was not the one who belonged to several Communist front groups. I told him to tell her we had cleared her, that she had nothing to worry about.
Pretty soon, Mervyn called back and said his assurances hadn’t been enough to satisfy the young lady.
“She’s a worrier,” he said. “She’s still worried that people are going to think she’s a Communist. Why don’t you give her a call? I think she will take it better from you than from me. Just take her out to dinner and tell her the whole story yourself.”
I agreed, and, besides, taking out a young actress under contract to MGM, even sight unseen, didn’t seem like a bad idea to me—and I could call it part of my duties as president of the Guild.
To be on the safe side, however, when I called her, I said: “I have an early call in the morning, so I’m afraid we’ll have to make it an early evening.”
“Fine,” Nancy said, “I’ve got an early call, too. I can’t stay out too late either.”
She had her pride, too.
We were both lying.
When I picked her up that evening at her apartment, I was standing on two canes a la Pete MacArthur: Several months earlier I’d shattered my right thighbone during a charity softball game and was still hobbling around because of it.
I took her to a restaurant on the Sunset Strip and soon realized that Mervyn hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said she was really steamed up over having been confused with someone else.
Well, I suggested, one solution would be to change her name—actresses did it all the time, I said.
When I said that, Nancy looked at me with her hazel eyes and a sense of logic that made me feel a little ridiculous: “But Nancy Davis is my name,” she said.
Pretty soon, we weren’t talking any more about her problem, but about her mother, who had been a Broadway actress, and her father, a prominent surgeon, and our lives in general. Although we’d agreed to call it an early night, I didn’t want the evening to end, so I said: “Have you ever seen Sophie Tucker? She’s singing at Ciro’s just down the street. Why don’t we go see the first show?”
Well, she’d never heard Sophie Tucker before so we went to Ciro’s to catch the first show. Then we stayed for the second show and we got home about three o’clock in the morning. No mention was made of early calls. I invited her to dinner the following night and we went to the Malibu Inn.
After that, we dated occasionally, sometimes with our good friends, Bill and Ardis Holden, but both of us continued to date other people, and now and then our paths would cross while we were out with someone else.
This had been going on for several months when I found myself booked for a speech to the Junior League Convention at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego. I had always looked forward to that trip down the Coast Highway: In those days before freeways, it was my favorite drive, with the blue Pacific on my right and the rolling green hills of California on my left.
I wanted to share the ride with someone and wondered who I should ask to join me. Then it suddenly occurred to me there was really only one person I wanted to share it with—Nancy Davis. I called her and she accepted and said she was a member of the Junior League in Chicago.
Pretty soon, Nancy was the only one I was calling for dates. And one night over dinner as we sat at a table for two, I said, “Let’s get married.”
She deserved a more romantic proposal than that, but—bless her—she put her hand on mine, looked into my eyes, and said, “Let’s.” Right after that, I had pictures coming up, so we had to wait two or three months before we could marry.
If the Hollywood press had gotten wind of our plans, they would have stormed the church, so, apologizing to Nancy, I suggested we have a quiet, secret wedding. She agreed and we were married in a touching ceremony in the Little Brown Church in the Valley on March 4, 1952. There were just five of us in an empty church: Nancy and me; Bill Holden, my best man; Ardis, Nancy’s matron of honor; and the minister.
After we said “I do,” Bill and Ardis took us to their house for dinner where they had a photographer who took our wedding photos. After dinner, we drove to Riverside about seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles, where we stayed overnight before driving on to Phoenix, where Nancy’s parents were vacationing.
If ever God gave me evidence that He had a plan for me, it was the night He brought Nancy into my life.
I have spent many hours of my life giving speeches and expressing my opinions. But it is almost impossible for me to express fully how deeply I love Nancy and how much she has filled my life.
Sometimes, I think my life really began when I met Nancy.
From the start, our marriage was like an adolescent’s dream of what a marriage should be. It was rich and full from the beginning, and it has gotten more so with each passing day.
Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness that I’d been trying to ignore for a long time. Coming home to her is like coming out of the cold into a warm, firelit room. I miss her if she just steps out of the room.
Af
ter we were married, Nancy asked to be released from her seven-year contract at MGM: Maybe some women can handle a career and a marriage, she said, but she wasn’t going to try. She was going to be my wife.
I can sum up our marriage in a line I spoke when I played the great pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, a line spoken by him in life to his wife, Aimee: “God must think a lot of me to have given me you.”
I thank Him every day for giving me Nancy.
In college I had a philosophy class in which our professor told us that the world was divided into two kinds of people: those who are skeptical of others until the other persons prove themselves, and those who assume that other people are good and decent unless proven otherwise.
I suppose that pretty well describes one of the differences between Jack and Nelle. And maybe it describes a difference between Nancy and me. I can’t say which of us has been right more often than the other. I believe, in general, people are inherently good and expect the best of them. Nancy sees the goodness in people but also has an extra instinct that allows her to see flaws if any are there.
She’s a nest builder and defender of her own. If you’ve seen a picture of a bear rearing up on its hind legs when its mate or one of its cubs is in danger, you have a pretty good idea of how Nancy responds to someone whom she thinks is trying to hurt or betray one of hers.
Although I was pleased with several of the pictures that I made as a free lance, there were two or three that I wish I hadn’t said yes to—and after a while I began worrying a little about the direction my career and Hollywood in general were taking.
The turmoil set off by the Justice Department’s consent decrees was still reverberating through the industry and nobody knew where it was headed. And sometimes it seemed the studios were trying to respond to the crisis by making poorer, not better, pictures.
An American Life Page 12