William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  The film opened on December 7 at Radio City Music Hall. The critics loved it, and it turned into a commercial success as well. Rice, who did not like Hollywood, was delighted with the film. In a telegram to Wyler he wrote, “The picture is excellent in all its details and you have every reason to be proud of the fine job you have done. I am sure that your work will receive general recognition.”35

  Wyler, however, was not entirely happy with the “recognition.” Although the Los Angeles press praised his direction, the New York press generally avoided naming the director in its reviews. This rankled, given that Wyler's name was included in many of the film's advertisements. Wyler knew he was coming into his own as a director of importance, and he wanted industry members to be aware of his work as well.

  3

  First-Class Pictures

  These Three (1936)

  Wyler's last film for Universal, the studio that had nurtured him for fifteen years, was The Good Fairy, released in 1935. That same year, after returning from his honeymoon with Margaret Sullavan, he made his first freelance film for producer Jesse Lasky at Twentieth Century–Fox. That film, The Gay Deception, starring Francis Lederer and Frances Dee, was the first Wyler film to earn an Oscar nomination (for Best Original Story). More significant than the nomination, however, was that the film brought Wyler to the attention of Samuel Goldwyn.

  In 1935, Goldwyn's fortunes were waning. Of his recent films, only a few Eddie Cantor pictures had done well critically or commercially, and he was looking for a new actress to change the fortunes of his studio. He wanted someone like Bette Davis, who had won that year's Best Actress Oscar, or Katharine Hepburn, who had won the previous year. Joel McCrea, one of Goldwyn's contract actors, had been trying to promote his wife, Frances Dee, as this potential star for months. Frustrated by Goldwyn's lack of interest, McCrea brought a print of The Gay Deception to the studio and ran it for Goldwyn. His boss was delighted and charmed by the film, but he had no interest in Frances Dee. Instead, he turned to McCrea and asked, “Who directed this?” “A funny little guy named Wyler” was the reply.1

  Leland Hayward, who was Wyler's agent (and who would soon marry Margaret Sullavan after her divorce from Wyler), reported that Goldwyn needed a director for a property he had recently purchased and wanted to meet Wyler. “He couldn't have been more charming,” Wyler remembered of that meeting, “but I thought he had lost his mind. He told me he wanted to make ‘The Children's Hour.’”2 Lillian Hellman's first play had caused a sensation when it opened in November 1934, in part because of its lesbian theme. Wyler could not believe that the Production Code Administration (PCA) would allow a film version to be made. In fact, in a letter to Goldwyn following a discussion of the project, PCA head Joseph Breen confirmed that Goldwyn could not “use the title ‘The Children's Hour’” and could “make no reference directly or indirectly in either advertising or exploitation of the picture…to the stage play ‘The Children's Hour.’” In addition, Goldwyn was instructed “to remove from your finished production all possible suggestions of Lesbianism.”3

  Years later, Hellman recalled that she had been able to sell Goldwyn the screen rights by persuading his story editor, Merritt Hulburd, that the play's deeper implications transcended lesbianism. “it's not about lesbians. It's about the power of a lie. I happened to pick what I thought was a very strong lie.”4 Goldwyn would become the only bidder for the screen rights, offering $40,000 and eventually paying $50,000. And once Goldwyn had explained Hellman's reasoning to him, Wyler jumped at the opportunity to direct it, noting that “Sam Goldwyn's name stood for something, for quality. I had been making second-class pictures, and Goldwyn was making first-class pictures, so it was a good step for me.”5

  Within months of each other, Wyler and Hellman both signed three-year contracts with Goldwyn. Wyler's contract gave him a first-year salary of $88,000, paid out over forty months. Goldwyn paid him $2,500 a week for the first fourteen weeks to direct These Three, and $2,083 a week for the next fourteen weeks. Hellman's three-year contract guaranteed her ten weeks’ salary a year, at $2,500 a week. Both contracts allowed the principals to be loaned out to other studios if their schedules did not conflict with Goldwyn's production plans. There was also a provision for “suspension and extension,” meaning that if either one turned down a project that was not to his or her liking, the time that would have been devoted to that assignment would be added on to the contract. Wyler was often suspended. As he explained, “i always chose the best material he had. I refused to do things I didn't like…. When I refused I was suspended and extended.”6 So his three-year contract ended up running for five years.

  In the spring of 1933, as he was finishing The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett had come across a collection of British court cases compiled by William Roughead under the title Bad Companions (1931). Hammett was particularly taken by the chapter “Closed Doors, or The Great Drumshuegh Case,” which took place in 1810 and involved Jane Cumming, a student at a Scottish girls’ school called Drumshuegh Gardens. Jane had informed her grandmother, Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, that two of her teachers (who had also founded the school) had displayed “inordinate affection” in front of their students. Dame Helen used her influence to have all the students removed from the school within forty-eight hours. The teachers sued for libel, but despite what was clearly false testimony, the jury found in favor of Dame Helen. Although the teachers later appealed and won, the case was never fairly resolved, and after eleven years, they settled for around £1,400 each; the school never reopened. Hammett thought the story might make a good play and considered writing it himself, but he eventually concluded it would be more suitable for Hellman and offered it to her.

  Hellman was fascinated by the concepts of malice and evil, which figure prominently in a number of her works, including The Little Foxes (which Wyler would film five years later). Clearly concerned with the destructive effects of lies and the implications of unprovoked malice, “The Great Drumshuegh Case” proved irresistible to her. Doris Falk writes that in her manuscript notes for the play, Hellman compared Mary Tilford (her version of Jane Cumming) to Shakespeare's iago as the exemplar of “motiveless malignancy.” According to Hellman, the only difference between Mary and Othello's villain is Mary's fear of the possible consequences of her actions.7

  Hellman retains many plot points from the legal case in her play. Mary Tilford, a student at a New England girls’ school, falsely accuses her teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, of lesbianism. Mary, like her real-life counterpart, has an influential grandmother, Mrs. Tilford, who uses her influence to have all the children removed from the school. Martha, like her model, has an aunt, Lily Mortar, an actress who lives at the school and teaches there. As in the British trial, a fabricated keyhole is introduced as evidence, and true to the original, the teachers sue for libel and lose. Hellman, however, makes some crucial changes. In The Children's Hour, Mrs. Tilford eventually discovers the truth and tries to make amends, but she arrives just moments too late to prevent either Karen's loss of her fiancé or Martha's suicide.

  The playwright also adds a surprise revelation at the end: before shooting herself, Martha admits that there is some truth to Mary's accusation—she does harbor erotic feelings for Karen, and the incident has forced her to confront aspects of her nature she had previously suppressed. In his biography of Hellman, Carl Rollyson points out that in the first draft of the play, Hellman labeled Martha an “unconscious lesbian.”8 Martha's startling confession may be an attempt on Hellman's part to push the play toward tragedy, but as a belated ironic recognition, it doesn't quite work. The main action of the play turns on Mary's role as an agent of evil, and Hellman concentrates on the injustice of her accusation rather than the reasons behind it.

  Indeed, the major criticisms of Hellman's dramatic adaptation involved Martha's last-minute declaration. Both Brooks Atkinson and Eric Bentley thought the play should have ended with the pistol shot signaling Martha's suicide, with no messy confession to d
ilute its impact. In his review of the original production, Atkinson wrote in the New York Times, “When two people are defeated by the malignance of an aroused public opinion, leave them the dignity of their hatred and despair.”9

  To ensure a focus on Mary's evil, Hellman made another important departure from her source material. In Roughead's book, Jane Cumming is described as the bastard child of an aristocrat's liaison with a black woman, and Roughead ascribes Jane's motives to her illegitimacy—she is determined to wreak revenge on those who have punished her for breaking the rules. Hellman eliminates this complication, in large part to make Mary, in William Wright's words, “a symbol of pristine evil.”10

  Other than Clifford Odets, whom she preceded on Broadway by three months, Hellman was arguably the most acclaimed new playwright of the 1930s. The Children's Hour ran for 691 performances—a total that Odets never even approached, and one that would be bettered by only six other plays in the entire decade. The Children's Hour exhibits many of the strengths and weaknesses common to Hellman's plays, which are reliably well constructed, tight, vivid, and lively. However, because of her habit of prioritizing the establishment of clear moral points over the development of characters and relationships, she regularly encounters problems in creating truly memorable characters. In her introduction to Six Plays, Hellman rationalizes this flaw, declaring, “i am a moral writer, often too moral a writer, and I cannot avoid it seems, that last summing up.”11

  The play's success was largely due to Hellman's ability to weave liberal social attitudes into a suspenseful plot. There was also the taboo but titillating subject of lesbianism, although it is difficult to say how much this shock factor contributed to the play's success. In 1927, Edouard Bourdet's The Captive, which deals with lesbianism more directly, had been shut down by the courts after a police raid. The same year, Mae West's The Drag, about male homosexuality, was closed by its producers out of town rather than face the inevitable police action. Presumably, The Children's Hour was allowed to run because lesbianism was not its central issue.

  The play in large part belongs to Mary, whose malignancy blights the lives of all those around her. Her lies lead to the closing of the school, the death of Martha, the dissolution of Karen and Joe's engagement, and the humiliation and spiritual dissipation of her grandmother, who shares in Mary's guilt. Mrs. Tilford is portrayed as a self-righteous yet gullible woman (she instantly believes her granddaughter's lies) and a gossip. In addition to the lives of three innocent people, her willing participation in character assassination ultimately destroys an entire society, just as a similar malignancy would do almost two decades later in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Hellman displays her distrust of liberalism when Joe and Karen come to learn that reason is useless when confronted by a force like Mary. Rollyson explains: “Because he cannot take the radical view—that a lie is just that, a false insupportable assertion—[Joe] is doomed to half-believing in the lie he would try to persuade Mary to reject. Hellman's plays imply that the liberal mentality goes only half-way toward opposing evil.”12

  The Children's Hour opens with a student reading from the “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice. In fact, mercy is what is missing in the world of the play—apparently, Hellman felt that society should be reminded of this lack in the midst of the Depression, when suffering by the weak and exploitation by the powerful seemed likely to be alleviated only by significant political reform. At the end of the play, Karen is left alone: her best friend is dead, her fiancé is gone, her school is an empty shell. But when Mrs. Tilford attempts to make amends, Karen is able to accept the older woman's apology and her offer of friendship. Such mercy is “not strained”—it comes as a blessing. Her gesture ends the play on a note of muted triumph, as Mary and her evil have been pushed to the background and Karen takes steps toward building a new life. By breaking free of the oppressive, if misguided, power represented by Mrs. Tilford, Hellman implies, the young can overcome entrenched, conservative forces that threaten their prospects for the future. This somewhat upbeat mood was reflected in the politics of the period. President Roosevelt's New Deal came out squarely for the young in its establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration, which created jobs for unemployed young people.

  Hellman worked on one screenplay for Goldwyn before starting on her adaptation of The Children's Hour. That film was The Dark Angel (1935) for director Sidney Franklin, whom Hellman came to despise when she learned that he consulted his card-playing buddies on how to revise her script. She was teamed with British playwright Mordaunt Sharp—who, in an interesting coincidence, had shocked Broadway in 1933 with his play The Green Bay Tree, featuring a homosexual theme. The Dark Angel was also adapted from a play; it had been filmed by Goldwyn as a silent in 1925, with a script by Frances Marion. Hellman claimed that she never read the original play by Guy Bolton but worked directly from Marion's script.

  Hellman's work on The Dark Angel is interesting, in that it sheds light on how she restructured The Children's Hour into the film These Three. After writing the play, she was still preoccupied by its triangular structure, involving two protagonists who were college friends and a male lead who is the fiancé of one of them. Hellman's film version of The Dark Angel focuses on similar themes of love and friendship. The characters Gerald Shannon (Herbert Marshall), Alan Trent (Fredric March), and Kitty Vane (Merle Oberon) are childhood friends; the Vanes and the Shannons are neighbors, and Trent and Shannon are cousins. In a prologue, Hellman introduces them as children enjoying a picnic in the decade before World War I. A gust of wind—prefiguring the winds of war that will force them apart—scatters their food. The subsequent plot of the film is less important than its anticipation of the writer's adaptation of her own play, including an attempt, later abandoned, to include a prologue introducing Karen and Martha as children.

  Hellman was aware that she would have to revise her play for the movies—Breen's memo had been very specific, and she was prepared to abide by it. Breen's stipulation that Goldwyn's film must not reference the stage play in any way was accomplished by changing its title to These Three. Though believing that the film deserved a life of its own, Hellman worked to ensure that the thematic integrity of her play—the power of a lie—was retained. Later, she rejected the notion that Hollywood was a “dead end for serious writers,” declaring, “i wouldn't have written movies if I thought that.”13

  Hellman's drafts went through a variety of permutations. The earliest prose treatment in the Goldwyn files is undated but was probably done in early August 1935. In it, Hellman creates an entirely new backstory for Karen and Martha to open the film, apparently having decided that, unlike the play (which opens with Mrs. Mortar teaching in the school), the film should focus immediately on the two friends. This early version of the story begins in England, where Karen's family, the Wrights, are landed gentry and Martha Dobie is a distant cousin. When Martha's father dies unexpectedly, leaving her only £100, she is taken in by the Wrights, who raise the two girls like sisters. World War I intervenes, and Karen's father dies, “a wreck from the war”; her mother dies shortly thereafter from grief. Mrs. Mortar—the black sheep of the family because she is an actress—becomes their chaperone. Karen and Martha conclude that they are best equipped to start a school and decide to do so in America, where they feel their English ancestry will convey a certain prestige. Once in America, Karen meets Dr. Joseph Cardin at a garden party; they fall in love and decide to marry. The school, however, is not doing very well, so Joe recommends that they visit Mrs. Tilford, who decides to send her granddaughter Mary to the school and then persuades others to send their children as well. One evening, Joe is called to the school to attend to a student suffering from pneumonia; he spends the night with the dying girl, who is being treated in Martha's room. While Karen lingers in the room with the dead girl, Mary sees Joe put his arm around Martha's shoulder as they emerge from the room. Mary fakes a heart attack and returns to her grandmother's h
ouse, where she accuses Karen and Martha of killing students and charges that Joe is having an affair with Martha. From there, the treatment follows the plot of Hellman's play until the end, at which point Martha patches things up with Karen and Joe and returns to England.

  Why Hellman wanted to embellish the story in this way is not clear. None of the other treatments or drafts utilizes these details, including the two women's English beginnings. Perhaps, in an attempt to placate Breen, Hellman was trying to truly distance the film from the play. However, she obviously decided that this treatment pushed the story too far into the past, because the next treatment, dated August 21, 1935, opens in Karen and Martha's college dormitory room, where graduation gowns are being delivered amidst great excitement about the day ahead. It is established that Karen has inherited an old farmhouse, and the two young women decide to start a school there. When Karen and Martha arrive at the house, they meet Joe Cardin, who is tearing shingles off the roof to get rid of the bees that have nested there. This homely introduction of Joe was retained for the film, but other details were dropped in a treatment dated five days later, including that Joe and Karen had been childhood friends, that Joe is related to Mrs. Tilford, and Joe's proposal to Karen in the garden of Mrs. Tilford's estate (in the finished film, it occurs at a town fair). The treatment ends with Mrs. Tilford telling Martha and Karen that she has made a public apology for defaming their character and handing them a check as a gesture of restitution. The script ends with Martha on a ship alone and Joe and Karen getting back together.

  In the August 26 treatment, as in the earlier draft, Mary's lie is unmasked when Rosalie's mother finds the bracelet her daughter had stolen from a classmate—Mary had been using this theft to force Rosalie to corroborate her lie about Martha and Karen. Martha decides that she must bring Karen and Joe back together, but she knows she cannot stay with them. Joe and Karen decide to pick up the pieces together, but somewhere else—”any place in the world.”14