City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  Flynn, the movie hero who disdained military service, asked Huston if he wanted to make something of it. Huston said he did. Huston had once been a semiprofessional boxer, but Flynn was also an experienced fighter, and twenty-five pounds heavier. Besides, Huston was half drunk. Flynn led the way to a dark corner of Selznick’s garden, and both men took off their coats and started swinging. “I was knocked down almost immediately, landing on the gravel drive on my elbows,” Huston later recalled. “I was up right away, and I was down again.” When Huston fell, he rolled away from Flynn because he expected Flynn to kick at him in an effort to finish him off, but Flynn, to Huston’s surprise, held back. “The fight was conducted strictly according to Queensberry,” said Huston, “for which I take my hat off to Errol Flynn.”

  Unlike the brawls in Hollywood movies, real fights between two strong antagonists do not end in quick knockouts. Flynn’s first assaults had broken Huston’s nose and opened a cut over his eye, but the lieutenant was in good physical condition, and sobering up by now, and determined to keep fighting. As a veteran of the ring, he knew that the main target was not the enemy’s chin but his body, so he kept pounding at Flynn’s ribs. Flynn began to clinch and wrestle, to hang on to the smaller man, and they both swore furiously as they fought. “The language . . . although not heated, was about as vile as it could get . . .” Huston said. “And those were the days when ‘mother-fucker’ was not a term of endearment.”

  For the better part of an hour, they flailed away at each other, out there in David Selznick’s dark garden. When the party finally began to break up, the headlights of the cars emerging from the gravel driveway illuminated the two men still struggling. Selznick, the host, came running out to see what was happening. Half drunk himself, and pugnacious by nature, he assumed that Flynn was the aggressor and tried to join the fight on Huston’s side. Then the usual chorus of bystanders managed to separate and restrain the combatants, as well as the would-be combatants. Both Flynn and Huston had to go to the hospital, Huston for his broken nose, Flynn for two broken ribs. Flynn later telephoned Huston to ask about his condition. “I said that I had thoroughly enjoyed the fight,” Huston said, “and hoped we’d do it again some time.”

  The war was clearly drawing to an end. The Allies landed in Normandy that June, and on the Riviera in August; Paris was liberated; General MacArthur staged his melodramatic return to the Philippines. Soldiers were dying every day, but there was nonetheless a sense that the great struggle was ending, and already some of the lucky ones were coming home.

  Darryl F. Zanuck inevitably saw to it that he was one of the lucky ones. Actually, he was pushed somewhat. A Senate investigating committee headed by Harry Truman of Missouri, which devoted most of its time to checking reports of waste and corruption in military spending, announced that it wanted to look into the army commissions that had been so easily granted to so many Hollywood notables—Colonel Zanuck, Colonel Capra, Colonel Roach, and the rest. Zanuck, for reasons never fully explained, flew to Washington to see General Marshall, and then announced his resignation.

  He returned to 20th Century–Fox and found it somewhat changed. His cofounder, William Goetz, the inept producer whose career was based largely on his marriage to Louis B. Mayer’s older daughter, Edith,* had dared to assert his own authority. He had dared to order Zanuck’s office repainted. It had always been a lurid shade of green known as “Zanuck green,” which the producer applied not only to his office but to his house, his private sauna, his limousines, even his telephone. (Zanuck green turned out, on investigation, to be the shade of green that Zanuck’s mother used to paint her fingernails.) Goetz had repainted Zanuck’s office blue and decorated it with photographs of baseball players. Zanuck called in the studio painters to restore everything to Zanuck green.

  Goetz had also bricked up the back entrance that Zanuck had used for his four o’clock rituals. (“Every day at four o’clock in the afternoon some girl on the lot would visit Zanuck in his office,” said Milton Sperling, a young Fox writer who had made a reputation of sorts by concocting those ice-skating epics for Sonja Henie. “The doors would be locked after she went in, no calls were taken, and for the next half hour nothing happened—headquarters shut down. Around the office work came to a halt for the sex siesta. It was an understood thing. . . .”)

  Zanuck did not reopen the bricked-up back door—perhaps his army life had taught him to be slightly more discreet—but concentrated his fire on the “crap” that Goetz had approved. Some of the films in production, Zanuck said in a formal memo, “make me vomit—and will make the public vomit too if we make the mistake of showing them.” Goetz tried briefly to defend himself. At one meeting, he accused the five-foot-five-inch Zanuck of bullying him and declared that he refused to be a doormat, but then he fled from the room, near tears. He went to seek counsel from his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, who advised him to abandon Fox and offered one million dollars to finance the move. And so it was announced that Goetz was moving to Universal as the head of an autonomous operation named International Films. Zanuck resumed full control at Fox.

  Zanuck saw something that Mayer and the Warners never saw—that the war was changing American attitudes and perceptions, and that the sprightly little movies of the 1930’s, the B pictures, the cheap Westerns and detective stories, would never again support the Hollywood studios. “The war is not yet over, but it soon will be,” Zanuck declared to a meeting of his chief producers and directors on his first day back in command. “And when the boys come home from the battlefields overseas, you will find they have changed. They have learned things in Europe and the Far East. How other people live, for instance. How politics can change lives. . . . Oh, yes, I recognize that there’ll always be a market for Betty Grable and Lana Turner and all that tit stuff. But they’re coming back with new thoughts, new ideas, new hungers. . . . We’ve got to start making movies that entertain but at the same time match the new climate of the times. Vital, thinking men’s blockbusters. Big-theme films.”

  Brave words, and basically true, but Zanuck didn’t really have the judgment to carry out the mission he was proclaiming. The most important event in this last full year of war, apart from the battlefields on the road to victory, was the first revelation of the incredible things that had been happening in Poland. There had been reports of massacres of Jews ever since 1940, but it was only in the spring of 1944 that the holocaust reached its unimaginable climax in the shipment of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and only in the summer of 1944 that the Soviet army liberated the first of the Polish death camps, Maidanek, and discovered the great heaps of bone and ash that had once been a whole people. Hollywood can hardly be blamed too harshly for failing to grasp what was happening, since President Roosevelt and a lot of other people failed in much the same way. But when one of Zanuck’s lieutenants suggested that he should consider making a movie about the Nazi concentration camps, Zanuck briskly scorned the idea. “Any story about Germany or labor slaves appalls me,” he declared in a memo to Kenneth MacGowan, the director. “Every picture yet made dealing with occupied countries including [John Steinbeck’s] The Moon Is Down has laid a magnificent egg with the public. I can imagine no subject less inviting to an audience than the subject of slave labor at this time. . . . Show me how I can make a good story out of the life of Ernest R. Ball, and the great Irish songs he wrote.”

  Zanuck did produce a film on Ball, Irish Eyes Are Smiling, but the project that really captured his imagination, that struck him as a “thinking man’s blockbuster,” was a biography of one of America’s coldest and most unloved presidents, Woodrow Wilson. Zanuck labored long over the script, struggling to convert the complexities of America’s relationship to the world into the kind of scenes that his audiences would applaud. As President Wilson bade farewell to a group of departing doughboys, for example, one of them recited the traditional litany that appeared in so many World War II pictures: “Mike yonder’s a Bohunk, this guy’s Irish, Tex here clai
ms he’s just from plain Texas, and my name’s Vespucci, Mr. President, but I’m just an American too.” The only additional element needed to guarantee the failure of Wilson was to assign the title role to an obscure actor who actually resembled the frigid president, Alexander Knox. When Zanuck showed the final print of his patriotic pageant to his dutiful wife, Virginia, she dutifully said, “I’m proud of you.” Zanuck was impressed. “I’m kind of proud of myself,” he said. “I think it will win the Oscar.”

  Zanuck characteristically decided to stage the premiere not in Washington, not in Wilson’s home town, but in his own, Wahoo, Nebraska. He took there a trainload of his highly paid captives—Betty Grable, Tyrone Power, Joan Fontaine, Gene Tierney—plus the usual contingent of the kept press. To the guests at a civic luncheon, he announced, “If my movies have reflected the spirit of America, the inspiration came from my boyhood days in Nebraska.” The Wahoo movie theater was crowded at the premiere that October day in 1944, but the next day it was embarrassingly empty. One of the local citizens had to explain the spirit of America to Zanuck. “The people of Wahoo wouldn’t have come to see Woodrow Wilson if he’d rode down Main Street in person,” he said, “so why in hell should they pay to see him in a movie?”

  Zanuck already had another vital, thinking man’s blockbuster on his schedule. Like many self-made executives of his time, he had been mesmerized by the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie, and Willkie’s loss of the election did not disillusion him. When Willkie wandered around through all the regions of conflict and then produced a hopeful book titled One World, Zanuck glowed. He paid $100,000 for the movie rights, assigned the project to one of his favorite writers, Lamar Trotti, and spent nearly a year of his own time working with Trotti on the screenplay. When that was done, he tried to hire Spencer Tracy to play Willkie; Tracy was not interested. He tried to hire John Ford to direct the film; Ford was not interested. “If they aren’t successful,” he said of his blockbusters, Wilson and One World, “I’ll never make another film without Betty Grable.” Wilson lost a stunning two million dollars; One World was never filmed at all; Betty Grable went on supporting Zanuck’s studio.

  Another one of the unpleasant surprises that Zanuck discovered on his return from the wars was that Bill Goetz had somehow been persuaded to rehire Otto Preminger, a man Zanuck thought he had banished from the studio forever. Preminger was an ambiguous figure, very bright, very ambitious, very assertive, but somehow limited, conventional even in his most belligerent attempts to be unconventional. His father had been attorney general of Austria, a remarkable achievement for a Jew in a profoundly anti-Semitic society, but Preminger abandoned his own legal studies to become an actor on the Viennese stage, to become a director, to become an aide to the great Max Reinhardt and then his successor. He was only twenty-nine when Joe Schenck heard about him and signed him up during one of his talent-hunting tours of Europe. On his arrival, a chauffeured limousine took Preminger to a suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where flowers and champagne awaited him. Schenck welcomed him with a grand party. “Otto, this house will always be open to you,” Schenck said. “Any time you want to come to dinner, don’t even bother to phone. Just arrive. There will always be a plate for you on my table. As though you were my own son.”

  Zanuck, who was more directly in charge of things at Fox, told Preminger to spend his first weeks at the studio watching other directors and seeing how films were made. “When you think you’re ready, just let me know,” Zanuck said. When Preminger duly announced that he felt ready, he was handed a disaster, a stalled film entitled Under Your Spell, starring Lawrence Tibbett, a Metropolitan Opera baritone whom Zanuck had decided he should never have hired. Preminger somehow turned this disaster into a modest success. Zanuck was surprised and pleased. Preminger got better assignments, a new contract, a raise, invitations to dinner at Zanuck’s palace. (It was perhaps during this phase of his success that Preminger encountered a group of his fellow expatriates, all talking Hungarian. “Come on,” he protested, “we’re all in America now, so talk German.”)

  Then Zanuck handed him one of the studio’s biggest projects, one of Zanuck’s personal productions, Kidnapped. Preminger had never heard of the Stevenson novel, had never been to Scotland, didn’t want to make the movie. One of Zanuck’s aides persuaded him that Zanuck could not be refused, but the first rushes did not look good. Zanuck summoned Preminger to scold him about a scene in which the boy said farewell to his dog. Once Zanuck had approved a script, no director was supposed to make any changes.

  “I don’t like the cuts you’ve made in that scene,” Zanuck said, according to Preminger. “That’s a very touching moment in the script. I am the producer. You have no right to make cuts.”

  “I didn’t make any cuts in that scene,” Preminger said.

  “Do you mean to tell me I don’t know my own script?” Zanuck shouted, turning to a revolving bookcase that contained all the scripts in production.

  “Look at it!” Preminger shouted back. “You’ll see that I have not cut a word.”

  “He began to suspect he was mistaken, which made him even wilder,” Preminger recalled. “He ordered me out of his office.” Zanuck’s aide warned Preminger that he could save himself only by an immediate letter of apology to the producer. Preminger refused. Then he began learning for the first time how the Hollywood studios really worked. There were no further summonses to Zanuck’s office, nor any invitations to the executive dining room. Kidnapped was assigned to someone else, and failed.

  Since Preminger had a contract, he simply sat in his office and waited. One day he arrived to find that his name had been removed from the door, and the lock changed. He stayed at home, still being paid, but he wanted to work. He called Joe Schenck, who had told him to consider himself as Schenck’s own son. Schenck’s secretary said he was busy. Preminger called every day for several weeks, but Schenck was always busy. Preminger hired an agent to get him a job at any other studio, doing anything. Nobody wanted to risk offending Darryl Zanuck.

  When Preminger’s contract expired, he went to New York and found himself several plays to direct. One of them was Clare Boothe Luce’s Margin for Error, and as she watched Preminger directing, she said to herself, according to Preminger’s friend Willi Frischauer, “There’s a Nazi for you.” So when the German playing the villainous Nazi consul decided in the midst of rehearsals to return to Germany, Mrs. Luce proposed that Preminger replace him. There was something lugubrious about a Jew playing a Nazi in 1939, but Preminger delighted in his monocle, his saber scar and shaven head. He was such a success that when Fox decided to film the play—now that Zanuck was off at war—the studio asked Preminger to play the same role. Preminger boldly asked Bill Goetz to let him direct the movie, as he had directed the play. Goetz nervously refused. Preminger even more boldly offered to direct the film without pay. He added that if his first week’s rushes were not satisfactory, he would accept dismissal and serve only as an actor. Goetz nervously agreed. And that was how, when Zanuck returned from the army, he found Preminger, whom he had exiled from Hollywood, back under contract at Zanuck’s own studio.

  One of the remarkable qualities about Zanuck, who was a very remarkable man, was that he had great confidence in his own ability to judge things on their merits, and to . . . not admit a mistake but correct a mistake, in his own seigneurial way. He summoned Preminger, whom he had not seen or spoken to for more than five years, to his mansion. A butler led the way to the garden. “Zanuck was sitting in swimming trunks beside his pool,” Preminger recalled. “His back was to me. He glanced around briefly and then gave me the back of his head again. He picked up a piece of paper and said: ‘I see you are working on a few things. I don’t think much of them except for one, Laura. I’ve read it and it isn’t bad. You can produce it but as long as I am at Fox you will never direct. Goodbye.’ ‘Goodbye,’ I said to his back and left.”

  Everything in Preminger’s life was a struggle, Preminger against the rest of the wo
rld. He worked on Laura with three different screenwriters, including the poet Samuel Hoffenstein, and the final script offended Vera Caspary, who had written the original novel. The supervising producer, Bryan Foy, didn’t like it either. Foy didn’t actually read scripts; he had an assistant named David who did that. “David read the Laura script and says it’s lousy,” Foy said. Preminger gave a Hollywood answer: “David is making seventy-five dollars a week and I’m making fifteen hundred. He doesn’t like it but I do. Maybe you’d better read it yourself.” Foy did read it, or pretended to, and announced the next day: “David’s right. The script stinks.” Preminger asked him to send it to Zanuck for a verdict. “Zanuck hates you,” Foy said. “All you need is for him to read this lousy script. He’ll fire you.”

  Laura was all a series of gimmicks, true enough. The beautiful heroine was reported to have been murdered, and the young detective assigned to the case became infatuated with the portrait of the dead girl on the wall of her apartment (and there was that song by David Raskin and Johnny Mercer: “Laura is the face in the misty light . . . the laugh that floats on a summer night . . .”). And then there she was, not dead at all, and now a suspect in the murder of the friend who had been found dead in her apartment. And the demon in this dance of death was the waspish newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, who loved Laura not wisely and not well. Preminger always bore a grudge against such people, critics and columnists, so it must have seemed a great idea to have the homicidal villain be one of them, and one with odd sexual proclivities. Laura was to become one of the most celebrated examples of that odd and semi-European genre of the mid-1940’s subsequently known as film noir.

  Zanuck read the script, called both Preminger and Foy into his office, heard out Foy’s criticisms, and then removed not Preminger but Foy from the project. But several directors declined the script, either because they didn’t like it or because they didn’t want to get caught in the continuing crossfire between Preminger and Zanuck. Yet the two enemies were already engaged in casting. Zanuck wanted John Hodiak as the young detective; Preminger persuaded him to gamble on a relatively untried newcomer, Dana Andrews. The title role, which was actually of secondary importance, was apparently turned down by Jennifer Jones, and then Zanuck talked a rather reluctant Gene Tierney into taking it. (“I have never felt my own performance was much more than adequate,” she said later, with becoming modesty.)