The marriage to Judson was long behind her, of course. Having married Margarita Cansino and created Rita Hayworth, Judson had created something beyond his own capacities. He demonstrated that all too well at the time of the breakup, in 1942, when he demanded that his departing wife pay him thirty thousand dollars for his time and services in creating her. She refused, but her testimony in defense of her refusal tended to demonstrate (if, as Hollywood generally believed, everybody was to be judged by his value in the marketplace) that he was right. “I was never permitted to make any decisions,” she said. “He robbed everything of excitement.” She admitted, though, that “running my career was his only concern, and he gave it everything he had, and his efforts paid off.”
Harry Cohn, who suffered from a hopeless infatuation with Miss Hayworth, an infatuation that he expressed by browbeating her, eavesdropping on her, insulting her, and generally harassing her, did not enjoy this kind of publicity about her private life. It was Cohn, the penny-pinching tyrant of Columbia, who paid off Judson’s claim of thirty thousand dollars. Perhaps Cohn hoped for some kind of reward. He got none. Miss Hayworth began going out on the town, and she was quickly picked up by Victor Mature, a sleepy-eyed actor of sorts who had made a reputation for himself by flexing his muscles in various crime dramas. When Mature joined the coast guard and was shipped to a base in Connecticut, Miss Hayworth followed him there; Harry Cohn forbade her to go; she went anyway. She wore a ring that Mature had given her.
Love is eternal as long as it lasts. At a dinner party given by Joseph Cotten, Miss Hayworth met the legendary Orson Welles, by now twenty-eight, who was not only the creator and star of Citizen Kane but also six feet four inches tall and quite attractive, endowed with an interesting face that he himself described as that of “a rather depraved baby.” Jean Cocteau spoke of him more elaborately as “a kind of giant with the look of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog that has broken its chain and lies down in the flower beds. . . .” And that sonorous voice that had recited on the radio every week: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” That voice, said Micheál MacLiammóir, reckoning back to the day when the sixteen-year-old Welles first appeared at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in search of a job, “bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air . . . as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor.”
Welles asked Miss Hayworth out to dinner, and she accepted. And Welles, like every self-conscious intellectual, tried to impress her with what passed for erudition—books, paintings, famous people. She, who had never gone beyond the ninth grade, was appropriately impressed. He gave her books to read, and she struggled with them, trying to play a wholly new role. But there was already aflame in Welles a self-destructive folly that would devour both his marriage and his career.
The trip to the Rio carnival the year before had been orgiastic, a swirl of dancing and drinking and magic tricks from nightclub to nightclub, and even one episode of furniture being flung out of a hotel window. But Welles had discovered, in an old copy of Time, a wonderful way of telling his story: Four penniless fishermen had sailed a log raft nearly two thousand miles from the hump of Brazil to Rio, inspired by God, they said, to tell the government of the people’s suffering. Welles promptly signed up these overnight heroes and made plans to film their leader, a wiry little man known as Jacaré, the alligator, sailing the raft into Rio at the height of the carnival. During the filming of this scene, there was suddenly a convulsion in the waters, and then a shark erupted from the waves, locked in combat with a giant octopus. The filmmakers’ raft tipped over, and while most of the crew made their way to safety, Jacaré, the alligator, disappeared in the foam. A week later, the shark was caught and cut open. Its innards were found to contain Jacaré’s head, along with various pieces of the octopus. Welles suddenly became very unpopular in Brazil, and several members of his film crew were afraid to be seen on the streets of Rio, but Welles insisted that the filming go on. Indeed, he shot a preposterous 400,000 feet of color film on the Brazilian segment of the project. Back at RKO, however, Rockefeller sold all his stock, leaving the studio in the control of the entrepreneur Floyd Odlum, who had no interest whatever in the wild installments of film being sent back from Welles’s crew in Rio de Janeiro. It’s All True was never finished; some of the film was never even developed; some began to deteriorate so much by the late 1950’s, when RKO was taken over by Desilu, and then Desilu by Paramount, that it was dumped unseen into the Pacific Ocean.
But in 1943, Welles’s South American adventures seemed like just another manifestation of his eccentric genius, and perhaps what Rita Hayworth loved best in him was the playfulness in this eccentricity. Ever since his childhood, Welles had delighted in performing magic tricks, and now that there was a war on, he performed a magic show for servicemen in a large tent installed on Cahuenga Boulevard. When he married Rita Hayworth, he entertained the soldiers, night after night, by putting her in a box and sawing her in half. Any magician who would put Rita Hayworth in a box and saw her in half was clearly no ordinary magician.
Of the Hollywood figures who actually put on uniforms, many did go and fight, of course, but a substantial number devoted their war years to doing what they had always done, making movies. Although these films were conceived as propaganda, some of them achieved considerable distinction. Major Frank Capra, head of an outfit called the 834th Photo Signal Detachment, was summoned to the office of the chief of staff, General George Marshall, and told to make a series of documentaries “that will explain to our boys in the Army why we are fighting.” Inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which he regarded as a “lethal . . . psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist,” Capra produced Why We Fight, a highly successful series of seven one-hour documentaries on the origins of the war.
Major William Wyler directed for Capra’s series a documentary on The Negro Soldier, then went to England and began flying bombing runs over Germany to supervise the shooting of his remarkable film about one Flying Fortress, Memphis Belle. Lieutenant John Huston’s orders were somewhat less exalted. He was told to go and shoot a documentary on the defense of Alaska. His Report from the Aleutians was to be followed, in 1943, by his celebrated documentary on the Italian campaign, The Battle of San Pietro, and then by his even more celebrated study of the army’s psychiatric casualties, Let There Be Light, which the army, in its wisdom, decided to suppress.
Jack Warner, by contrast, responded to the call to service by saying that he wanted to start out as a general. He added that he would be happy to telephone the White House to get President Roosevelt’s approval. Persuaded to settle for the rank of lieutenant colonel, and assigned to a public relations post in Los Angeles, Warner proceeded to the studio tailoring shop to get himself outfitted for his new role. Though his military duties never called him far from his office in Burbank, he let it be known that he liked to be addressed as “Colonel” while he produced films like Winning Your Wings and Rear Gunner. On the day that a full colonel came to the studio to discuss future film projects, though, when Jack Warner graciously welcomed his visitor by shaking his hand, and the visiting colonel said, “You should have saluted me”—that was the day Jack Warner resigned his commission.
Before that unfortunate encounter with military protocol, Warner had already organized his two major contributions to the war effort. One was to become a major embarrassment, the other a source of pride. The embarrassment originated, according to Warner’s own account, with an invitation from President Roosevelt to lunch at the White House. (Warner insisted, in another version, on bringing along his own silverware, to the dismay of Mrs. Roosevelt.) The President apparently told Warner that he wanted him to make a movie of Mission to Moscow, Ambassador Joseph Davies’s glowing account of his recent diplomatic service in Russia. “Jack, this picture must be made, and I am asking you to make it,” Warner quoted the President as saying. “I’ll do it,” Warner answered. “You have m
y word.” “We simply can’t lose Russia at this stage . . .” Roosevelt supposedly went on. “We have to keep Stalin fighting—and your picture can make a case for him with the American people.”
White House officials later denied that any such meeting ever occurred, and so did Ambassador Davies, but Warner presumably had some kind of high-level Washington encouragement to undertake the project. He assigned it to Howard Koch, the chief writer of Casablanca, and to Mike Curtiz, who had directed that and almost everything else, and Davies himself oversaw the political perspectives. (“There is no man in the world I would trust more fully than Joe Stalin . . .” Davies said at a Warners lunch shortly before the movie was released.) The result of all this patriotic endeavor was a disaster. William Randolph Hearst personally denounced Warner for showing only “the Communist side,” and so did such anti-Stalinist liberals as John Dewey and Robert La Follette, who called it a “whitewash.”* Warner felt aggrieved. “There are some controversial subjects that are so explosive . . . that it doesn’t pay for anyone to be a hero or a martyr,” he complained. “You’re a dead pigeon either way. Unless, of course, you do it under orders from the President of the United States. Even then, you’re just as dead.”
Warner’s other big project contained no such booby traps. This Is the Army was a star-spangled affair derived from a show that the young immigrant Irving Berlin had written about the desolate Long Island camp where he had been stationed in World War I, Yip Yip Yaphank. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Berlin began writing an updated version, reserving a place for himself to don his old doughboy uniform and sing, “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning.” Warner paid nearly two million dollars to army charities for the film rights, and the army provided 350 servicemen, all on army salaries, as the cast. One of them was Lieutenant Ronald Reagan.
Reagan had managed to remain in the cavalry reserve ever since his college days, even though his eyesight was so poor that when he was called to duty one doctor said, “If we sent you overseas, you’d shoot a general.” A second doctor said, “Yes, and you’d miss him.” The army could find some use for almost anyone in those days, however, so Reagan was assigned to the staff at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, as a liaison officer responsible for the loading of convoys. And as a cavalryman, he still wore spurs. “I’m sure many people . . . have forgotten that spurs are a regulation part of the uniform for mounted troops,” Reagan happily recalled. The cavalry had other uses for the young lieutenant besides the wearing of spurs. It sent him back to Hollywood to appear at a fund-raising rally for the USO. His commanding officer, who was an admirer of Jeanette MacDonald, even got Lieutenant Reagan to make some telephone calls so that Miss MacDonald would come to Fort Mason to sing the national anthem as part of the fort’s observation of I Am an American Day. And finally Reagan was sent back to Hollywood to help make training films, an assignment that his commander proudly described as “putting a square peg in a square hole.”
The Army Air Corps had taken over the nine-acre Hal Roach studio on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, and the First Motion Picture Unit now operated in what was unofficially known as Fort Roach. Since air corps regulations said that only a flying officer could command a post, the thirteen hundred assorted moviemakers at Fort Roach were put under the command of Paul Mantz, Hollywood’s preeminent stunt pilot. Fort Roach made training films and documentaries; it trained combat camera units; it produced combat film segments for commercial newsreels; it even made films simulating flight over a city to be bombed, so that a pilot assigned to raid Hamburg or Yokohama could acquire some idea of what his target would look like from his cockpit. The one thing that Fort Roach didn’t do, or didn’t do very well, was to preserve the rituals of army ceremony.
Lieutenant Reagan apparently had to be taught that. On his first day overseeing basic training, according to one account, he disapproved of the haphazard way the men marched, so he began drilling them.
“We aren’t going to do this, Ronnie,” one of the men rebuked him.
“What do you mean?” asked the nonplussed Lieutenant Reagan.
“You’re an actor, and a lot of us are producers and directors. Right?”
“Right.”
“And after the war you’re going to be an actor again and we’re going to be producers and directors. Right?”
“Right.”
“So knock off with the marching around.”
Reagan was always a quick study. In his own account of those days, he portrayed himself not as a parade ground martinet but as an outspoken critic of such a martinet. “I was standing at the corner of a studio street,” Reagan said, “when they came swinging by, four abreast, our ex-cadet shouting orders like a true drillmaster. I shouldn’t have done it, but on the other hand we should have been making pictures, not playing soldiers. When the column was just about halfway past me, so that my voice was audible to most of the men but not to their commander, I said, ‘Splendid body of men—with half this many I could conquer M-G-M.’ The ranks dissolved . . .”
There was equally little reverence for military protocol at the old Paramount studio in Long Island City, which was Fort Roach East. Its Company B was a company in which, when the red-faced sergeant shouted names at roll call, the Cheever who said “Here!” was John Cheever, the Laurents was Arthur, the Saroyan was William, and the Shaw was Irwin. It was also a company in which PFC Carl Laemmle, Jr., heir to the founder of Universal Pictures, would start his weekend leave by taking a limousine to a Manhattan bank that was being kept open solely in order to provide him with whatever money he might need that weekend.
Gottfried Reinhardt, who had been a fledgling producer at M-G-M, was a sergeant in Company B, so he had to go to the major’s office to get the telephone call from his father. Max Reinhardt was seventy years old now, and fat, and almost accustomed to living at the brink of disaster, but he was still determined to produce La Belle Hélène if he could just find somebody willing to provide the last twenty thousand dollars needed for a Broadway production of an Offenbach operetta in the year of Stalingrad. Max Reinhardt had gone to Fire Island to brood. It was late September of 1943, and after most of the summer cottages had been locked up, Reinhardt liked to walk along the windswept beach with his Scottish terrier, Mickey.
Wandering there, perhaps daydreaming, Reinhardt suddenly became aware of a wild barking and lunging at the end of the leash. He and his little terrier had encountered a solitary boxer, and the Scottie refused to concede an inch to the bigger dog. He yapped and growled and scurried in and out of the old man’s legs. The boxer grimly advanced, preparing for the kill.
Alone on the stormy beach, Reinhardt looked around for help and saw nothing, except for a telephone booth standing alone in the wind. He lurched toward it, dragging the frantic terrier after him on its leash. He hauled the terrier into the telephone booth and slammed the folding door shut against the boxer, which sniffed and pawed and barked. Reinhardt may have thought that he had saved his pet, but the terrier was wild with rage. It turned on its aged master inside the closed telephone booth, and began biting whatever it could reach. It bit his shoes, through and through. It bit his legs, his arms, even his sides and chest. As the old man tried to defend himself from the terrier inside the telephone booth, he apparently suffered a stroke. He bit his own tongue, badly. Somehow, after the boxer had loped off down the beach, Reinhardt managed to struggle home, dragging the terrier behind him. “He came home with his face all out of shape,” a caretaker later told Gottfried Reinhardt. “And his talk—you couldn’t understand a word. In the morning it looked like he was better again. Till I made his bed. He wet it in the night. Me, I’m not staying with this old man any more. I’m quitting.”
“When are you coming?” Max Reinhardt asked his son, on the phone in the major’s office.
“Tomorrow, just as we said,” said Gottfried, who still knew nothing about the crisis.
“When are you coming?” Reinhardt repeated, haltingly, in the slurred voice of a man who must concent
rate on the essentials and cannot make those essentials clear. Perhaps he knew that he was never going to recover, that he had just another two months to live.
“Anything wrong?” Gottfried asked.
The answer sounded “muddled,” Gottfried wrote later. “Only a single word is clear: ‘Come!’ It keeps recurring and then the line is dead.”
Reinhardt apologized to the major, whom he had known slightly in Hollywood as an irregularly employed screenwriter. “Skip it, sergeant,” said the major. “I’m crazy for Kraut dialogue.”
Hollywood people who weren’t in the army entertained the army. Touring military camps was one of the major productions in this midwar year of 1943. Perhaps it was pure patriotism; perhaps it was partly publicity for all those wartime movies that kept rolling off the assembly lines; perhaps there was even a touch of guilt that all the war movies (and nonwar movies) were making so much money. The armed forces had by now become Hollywood’s biggest customer. Never before had there been such a captive audience as the twelve million servicemen, most of them idle and bored. And so, through this new evolution of its traditional monopoly, Hollywood became richer than ever. The least it could do in return was to send some of its celebrities on tours of military bases.
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