Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  Reeves shot himself. Or did he? Although the death was declared a suicide, evidence suggested that the gun that killed him had been at some distance, rather than pressed to his head.

  Reeves’s mother, Helen Bessolo, was convinced that her son had been murdered and brought in Hollywood lawyer Jerry Giesler to investigate further. Giesler, who’d represented mobster Bugsy Siegel, backed out of the case, telling Bessolo that there were too many dangerous people involved. Toni Mannix also didn’t think it was suicide. She made a phone call a couple of hours after Reeves’s death, telling a friend he’d been murdered. After that, Mannix kept her sedated for weeks and she was never interviewed by police.

  CITIZEN KANE

  AS ACTOR AND director, Orson Welles was the ‘boy genius’ of 1930s New York radio and theatre. When he was not yet 25, Hollywood beckoned. Joining forces with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, Welles directed Citizen Kane, a film that, although it was presented as fiction, clearly mirrored, and at times lampooned, the life of America’s richest living newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz had been a journalist for Hearst newspapers and had known him socially before being barred for drunkenness. But could the cynical wit Mankiewicz and the cocky Welles get away with mocking a man as powerful as Hearst?

  RKO Pictures backed Citizen Kane, but shortly before the film’s proposed release on Valentine’s Day 1941, Hearst banned advertisements or articles related to any RKO films in his newspapers. So, what did Hearst object to in the film? It’s been suggested that while he was thick-skinned enough to take the flak about his business life, he was sensitive about the portrayal of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane as senile (Hearst was 78 when the film was made).

  More importantly, the film mocked Kane’s love for a much younger lounge singer, whom he fails to turn into an opera star. Hearst’s girlfriend, actress Marion Davies, was 40 years younger than he was, and never became a star, despite the contracts set up for her at MGM and Warners after Hearst bought stock in the companies. And Davies, like Kane’s lover, had a drink problem.

  On seeing a preview of the film, Louella Parsons, the gossip columnist on Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, threatened Welles (pictured, right, as Kane) and the RKO board of directors that she’d write fictitious scandals about them if Citizen Kane was released. The movie was booked to première at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but when the manager was threatened that no Hearst newspaper would ever again review or accept advertising for a film that played there, he turned his back on it. Bowing to pressure, the RKO board agreed to delay the film’s release, while major news agencies dropped Citizen Kane stories. They couldn’t afford to have Hearst newspapers stop buying their material.

  Hearst also began calling in favours. He reminded Louis B. Mayer of all the times his newspapers hadn’t run scandals they’d uncovered about MGM’s stars, or had given weak films good coverage. It’s not clear if it was Hearst money or Hollywood money, but Mayer subsequently offered to buy Citizen Kane off RKO so that it could be destroyed. RKO turned him down.

  When the movie was finally released in May 1941, some cinema circuits wouldn’t accept it, fearing lawsuits or losing advertising space in Hearst newspapers. RKO later sent it out as part of their block-booking package of films, but many cinemas simply chose not to screen it and took a loss. And, despite good reviews, the public didn’t flock to the available screenings.

  Citizen Kane went on to be nominated for nine Oscars, winning for Mankiewicz’s and Welles’s screenplay, and, in time, it would often be voted the greatest film ever made. Hearst hadn’t stopped the picture, but he’d hurt it at the box office. Hollywood studios were powerful, but Hearst was bigger. Citizen Kane paid the price for making fun of William Randolph Hearst.

  If it wasn’t suicide, had Leonore Lemmon shot Reeves in a drunken struggle? Or was it done on behalf of broken-hearted Toni? Or on behalf of Mannix for the pain it was causing Toni and the embarrassment it was causing him? Was it a case of murder dressed as suicide, as people suspect Paul Bern’s death might have been 25 years earlier? After all, when Bern’s butler had discovered his body, it was Strickling and Mannix he rang first.

  The première of Citizen Kane in May 1941. A number of Hearst sympathizers had even begun reporting Welles’s activities to the FBI as being potentially dangerous to the national interest. An investigation into the star was launched, though nothing came of it.

  The Stars Fight Back

  When it came to money, even the biggest stars sometimes had to resort to some extreme measures to better their deal. James Cagney managed to lever Warner Bros. up from $1000 to $1750 a week in 1932 by walking out on the studio. But when he tried this again in the late 1930s, Warners took him to court, simultaneously using their clout to limit the distribution of two films Cagney had made independently. The studio’s influence may have reached further than Cagney had anticipated. Chastened, he returned to his old studio.

  When Bette Davis turned down two scripts in a row in 1937, Warners put her on a three-month suspension without pay. She headed to Britain, planning to make films in Europe, but Warners responded by serving her with an injunction, prohibiting her from working anywhere. From London, Davis sued the studio, but became aware that she was, in fact, taking on the whole system. ‘Not one other film company in Hollywood would touch me with a ten-foot pole,’ she later wrote, ‘for, were I to win the case, every major star would rush for the nearest exit and follow me to freedom.’ She failed in her lawsuit, but Jack Warner subsequently paid her legal fees and began giving her better roles. Unlike that of Cagney, her fight had paid off.

  Although she was being paid $1350 a week in 1937, Bette Davis called working for Jack Warner ‘slavery’ and sued the studio. But when she was then blacklisted by all the other studios, she was forced to back down.

  Olivia de Havilland, who had co-starred in Gone with the Wind, successfully sued Warner Bros. when it added six months of suspension time to her seven-year contract. She changed Hollywood, too – seven years became the absolute maximum by law.

  And Davis wasn’t the only one. Following an Oscar-nominated role in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, Olivia de Havilland was disappointed to be only offered middling scripts by Warner Bros. Having begun to turn down roles, she was placed on suspension. Rather than caving in, she took her case to the Superior Court of California, citing the law that limited employment contracts to seven years. The court hearings lasted for months and, unable to work, she didn’t appear on screen for two years. However, in March 1944, the court ruled that actors were released from serving out time added to their contracts through suspensions. De Havilland had won. The hold of the studio system had begun to weaken.

  In 1946, cinema attendances had reached an all-time high of 98 million, but by 1950 this had plunged to 50 million.

  End of an Era

  Four years later the studios would be dealt another blow. During the golden age, the studios had come to not only produce and distribute their movies, but also to own 80 per cent of ‘first run’ cinemas, taking in 45 per cent of the US box office. They’d achieved some of this by using the threat of physical violence to muscle out the weaker competition, and when they didn’t own the cinemas, they’d insist on blind-bidding and block-booking. Thus, independent cinemas weren’t given a chance to view films before ordering them, and if a cinema wanted a prized film, it had to take a dozen poorer movies in the same package. In all, the studios maintained an anti-competitive hold over the cinema chains.

  Although lawsuits to break this had begun in 1933, the studios managed to keep their system going legally through the courts and illegally through pay-offs. But in 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that they had to sell off their cinemas. They’d lost the direct access to the box office and the immense collateral wealth of all their cinemas. The movie moguls who’d been the cinema-owning upstarts and had challenged Edison’s cartel were now being separated from their cinemas for running their own cartel.

  Show Me the Money<
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  Having broken the hold over long contracts, stars now pushed for greater freedom. On returning to Hollywood after serving as a bomber pilot during World War II, James Stewart followed his agent Lew Wasserman’s advice and worked independently, rather than committing to another long studio contract. And when Stewart made Winchester ’73 in 1950, Wasserman negotiated for him a first in Hollywood: Stewart would give up his fee for the film in return for a percentage of the film’s profits. When the film went on to be a hit and Stewart made $600,000, all the stars wanted profit participation. After a generation of what some actors had described as ‘slavery’ under the studio system, stars were once again in a position to bargain.

  The entire Hollywood landscape was changing. The moguls were wily showmen who went on gut instinct, but they weren’t actually very good at numbers and certainly weren’t men of corporate finance. Now the likes of Lew Wasserman were bringing a more corporate nous to Hollywood itself, and it was undermining the studio system.

  Changing Times

  Stewart would give up his fee for the film in return for a percentage of the film’s profits. When the film went on to be a hit and Stewart made $600,000, all the stars wanted profit participation.

  Beyond the concerns of Hollywood politics, America itself was transforming. In 1946, cinema attendances had reached an all-time high of 98 million, but by 1950 this had plunged to 50 million. With a post-war population boom, young adults were spending their money moving to the suburbs, where there weren’t cinemas, and investing in their new houses and families rather than going out. And, from the late 1940s, into those suburban homes came television.

  In Winchester ’73 James Stewart broke the Hollywood mould in not being paid an upfront fee. Instead, he had a percentage of the film’s profits, which also enabled him to avoid 90 per cent tax rates.

  Initially, the moguls regarded television as an immense threat, even prohibiting TV sets being seen in their films. They were also surprisingly shortsighted: when the live broadcast rights to the Academy Awards ceremony were sold to television in 1953, the studios still held the event on a Saturday evening – the biggest movie-going night of the week. After that, Daily Variety suggested that, ‘Hollywood return the art of hara-kiri to the Japanese’. These days the Oscars are held on Sundays.

  By the mid-1950s, MGM, which 20 years earlier had promised ‘more stars than there are in heaven’, was the last studio to cease keeping actors on contracts. Audiences could no longer recognize a studio by its actors and the moguls were moving on or growing old. Agents were becoming more powerful, although even they probably couldn’t yet imagine that in another ten years Lew Wasserman’s agency MCA would buy Universal Pictures.

  ‘Hollywood’s like Egypt,’ said studio head David O. Selznick in the early 1950s, ‘full of crumbling pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.’ He was right about the studio system, but wrong about Hollywood.

  Bob Hope was the master of ceremonies at the first televised Academy Awards in 1953. At different stages, the studios had both ignored, resented and feared television, but, in time, they came to embrace it as another way of making money from movies.

  MGM’s head of production Irving Thalberg, like many Americans of the 1930s, feared Communism more than Fascism. ‘When a dictator dies,’ he said, ‘his system dies, too. But if Communism is allowed to spread, it will be harder to root out.’

  IV

  HOLLYWOOD

  THE BLACKLIST

  The anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s ruined careers, tore friendships apart, forced some film-makers to leave America for good, and perhaps even caused some early deaths. But how could that have happened? What led America into blacklisting more than 300 people working in Hollywood? Were film-makers really inserting Communist propaganda into movies? And was there really a planned Communist takeover of Hollywood?

  ‘Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’

  Although the post-war anti-Communist witch-hunts were products of the Cold War, their genesis in Hollywood can be found as early as the invention of talking pictures. From 1928, Hollywood demanded actors who could not only act well but speak as well, and that required writers who could come up with convincing dialogue for them. This brought to Hollywood an invasion of actors and playwrights from Broadway, where, not part of the studio system, they’d had their own unions, such as Actors Equity. Fearing unionization in their industry, the studios had established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, but in April 1933 the Screen Writers Guild (SWG) was set up in Los Angeles and hundreds joined.

  MGM’s head of production Irving Thalberg immediately tried to resist the power of the SWG. ‘Those writers are living like kings,’ he said. ‘Why on earth would they want to join a union like coal miners or plumbers?’ In fact, in that very year, 1933, in the middle of the Depression, the studios had declared they couldn’t meet payroll and had cut the pay by half of any employees earning more than $50 a week – which included screenwriters. At first the studios said it would be only for two months, but they reneged on their promise and the lower rates remained.

  Budd Schulberg was born into a privileged Hollywood upbringing, became a screenwriter who joined the Communist Party for a time in the 1930s and later named names. This allowed him to continue working, but ruined some of his friendships.

  Nor was the screenwriters’ union only about arguing for better pay. It also wanted to ensure that writers were credited on the films they wrote, rather than sometimes seeing a studio favourite’s name on the screen when he or she hadn’t even been involved in the production. But, whether fighting for money or credit for their work, the battle between the SWG and the studios continued throughout the 1930s, as Roosevelt’s New Deal promoted unionization across the country.

  The screenwriters’ union wanted to ensure that writers were credited on the films they wrote, rather than sometimes seeing a studio favourite’s name on the screen when he or she hadn’t even been involved in the production.

  The irony of the studios’ battles with the SWG was that it probably made the screenwriters more politically aware than many had ever been. Budd Schulberg, for instance, who’d grown up in Hollywood, joined the Communist Party. ‘Fascism was coming, the old world was dying, a new world would be born,’ he would explain, while admitting to, ‘some sense of guilt about being in Hollywood, living that prosperous life, knowing that millions of people were suffering in America, that unemployment was horrendous, and the whole world was sort of hurting.’ Screenwriter Albert Hackett quipped: ‘Louis B. Mayer created more Communists than Karl Marx.’

  But how serious was membership of the Communist Party in 1930s southern California? ‘In those years just before the war, the activity of the Communists in the Hollywood section was very little different from the left-wing liberals generally,’ said screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr, referring to a group known as the Popular Front who were active in the Anti-Nazi League and the Motion Picture Democratic Committee. As writer Philip Dunne remembered: ‘I think the Communists had a great deal to do with forming the organizations, but they did it purely on an anti-Nazi basis.’

  The studios’ battles with the SWG probably made screenwriters more politically aware. Said writer Albert Hackett: ‘Louis B. Mayer created more Communists than Karl Marx.’

  ‘NOTHING IS UNFAIR IN POLITICS’

  WHEN, IN 1934, novelist Upton Sinclair (pictured below) stood for election as Democrat governor of California and proposed higher taxes on the studios and on the rich, the studios quickly united behind acting Republican governor Frank E. Merriam. Newsreels were distributed that were very selectively edited so that of those interviewed, only the obviously well-to-do came out in favour of Merriam and the poor and dirty were used only if they were voting for Sinclair.

  Further sullying of the Sinclair campaign came in the Los Angeles Examiner, which hired actors from Central Cas
ting, dressed them as down and outs, and photographed them supposedly arriving in California on freight trains to cash in on Sinclair’s ‘End Poverty’ campaign. In defence of these tactics, MGM’s Irving Thalberg, who was allegedly behind the newsreels, said: ‘Nothing is unfair in politics.’ Merriam went on to win an overwhelming victory.

  Red Scare

  By 1936, the conservative trade newspaper the Hollywood Reporter had begun to link the SWG directly with Communism, while in the Los Angeles Examiner, press baron William Randolph Hearst described a proposal to amalgamate the SWG and other writers’ guilds (encompassing authors, playwrights and radio dramatists) as ‘a device of Communist radicals’. And when some screenwriters began raising money for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), MGM’s front office was so alarmed that Eddie Mannix placed a number of MGM’s employees under surveillance.