Mrs. Mayer suffered a relapse. She kept weeping. Mayer brought in psychiatrists from London, who didn’t provide much help. Mayer vowed he would be faithful once again. He also sent back orders to Hollywood that Charlie Feldman was never again to be allowed on the M-G-M lot.* So they tried to patch things together, Louis and Maggie, but some things can’t be patched. There were occasional returns to Riggs, and although Mrs. Mayer spent perhaps two thirds of the next ten years at home, according to her daughter Irene, “she could never quite pick up the threads of her life.”
Then began Mayer’s decade of hypocrisy. There were timorous nights out, like the occasion on which the manager of a well-known Hollywood establishment asked all her customers to leave because “Mr. Mayer has just called and wishes to come here incognito. He doesn’t like to be here with strangers.” The man who didn’t like to have strangers see him at a brothel remained always the man who insisted that there mustn’t be too much kissing in his Andy Hardy pictures, and that Mickey Rooney should get down on his knees to pray for the health of his mother. After the decade of hypocrisy, then, Mayer simply announced to his wife, in the summer of 1944, on the eve of their fortieth wedding anniversary, “I’m leaving.” And moved out, first to the San Fernando Valley ranch of his patient publicity man, Strickling, and then into the Beverly Hills house that had once been Marion Davies’s bungalow dressing room at M-G-M (it was later hauled across town to make Miss Davies feel at home at Warner Bros., and then finally moved to Benedict Canyon Drive). In his lordly years of power, Mayer had spent a fortune on buying and raising racehorses, and in the autumn of the year of his divorce, he invited several friends to watch him gallop around on his training track. The horse reared up and flung him to the ground. He broke his pelvis, and then, in the hospital, he developed pneumonia. It was a hard year.
When Louis B. Mayer abandoned the long effort to pretend that he was contentedly married to the girl of his youth, that made it vaguely all right for all the other restless tycoons to abandon similar pretenses. Harry Cohn, who always moved quickly, had divorced his Rose a couple of years before Mayer finally walked out on Maggie, and Darryl Zanuck remained with his Virginia a couple of years longer, but the principle was the same: The Andy Hardy series was coming to an end. The person who naturally heard that message most clearly was Mayer’s own daughter, Irene. Less than a year after her father had said, “I’m leaving,” she said, in the darkness, “The jig’s up.”
Before she decided that the jig was up, though, Irene Selznick insisted that her husband see a psychoanalyst. Selznick’s behavior was always erratic, but it seemed to keep getting more bizarre. He drank heavily, dosed himself with Benzedrine, gambled wildly, and quarreled with everyone he knew. The divorce and death of his alcoholic brother, Myron, in March of 1944, struck him a heavy blow. Holed up in the Waldorf in New York, unwilling or unable to see anyone, Selznick told his wife that he was “really scared . . . afraid that he was actually going insane.” Mrs. Selznick asked Dorothy Paley, wife of the head of CBS, to recommend a psychoanalyst. Mrs. Paley arranged a meeting with Sandor Rado, one of the pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement in Berlin, who had come to America in 1931 to take charge of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Selznick’s behavior was characteristic. He couldn’t bring himself to go to Dr. Rado’s office; he wanted Rado to come to him. Mrs. Selznick finally escorted her husband to the psychoanalyst’s office, and the doctor soon told her his verdict. He said Selznick “was having a breakdown.” He said Mrs. Selznick should take her husband back to Los Angeles and get him into treatment there. There were few analysts in Los Angeles then, and the only one Rado could vouch for was Dr. May Romm. Mrs. Selznick followed instructions.
It is a little hard now to realize how esoteric and how controversial psychoanalysis still was in the early 1940’s. Sigmund Freud had long been established as a pop oracle, an explicator of sex, but not as the creator of a psychiatric system that would solve, as its more ardent supporters believed, many of the fundamental problems of mankind. In America, in particular, psychoanalysis was widely regarded as something foreign, alien, and therefore not quite serious, not quite respectable. American psychiatrists tended to be mechanistic, devoted to the study of rats in mazes. If they had a contemporary hero in the era between the wars, it was probably J. B. Watson, the founder of the movement that he named in his book Behaviorism, in which he dismissed “the elaborate nonsense the Freudians have written.” Hitler changed all this by uprooting the Freudians from their Central European nests and dispersing them into their golden exile. Freud himself was barely rescued from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, and then only after he signed a statement declaring that he had been well treated (to which he added a sentence that one of his admirers defended as “ironic”: “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone”).
The psychoanalysts driven into exile were by no means an army. One authoritative account estimated the total who came to America at not more than about two hundred. Most remained in New York, but one of their favorite oases in the West was Los Angeles, perhaps simply because of the climate that so enchanted Thomas Mann, perhaps because people like Mann lived there. Ernst Simmel, a dedicated Socialist who had been one of the founders of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, received word early in 1933 that the Nazis were coming to get him. He left through a back window and didn’t stop running until he reached Los Angeles, where he inevitably founded the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Study Group. To this he welcomed such Berlin comrades as Otto Fenichel. (Before he left his last way station in Prague, Fenichel reported, someone asked him what was the most pressing question confronting psychoanalytic research, and Fenichel answered: “The question of whether the Nazis come to power in Vienna.”) Simmel also welcomed that whole group of sociologists known as the Frankfurt Institute, headed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. These Frankfurt exiles cherished the idea of synthesizing Marx and Freud in their critique of modern society, and although they never accomplished anything very substantial, they did their best to serve as an irritant even in southern California. Blessed with foundation grants from the East, they staged little seminars, attended by fellow exiles like Brecht and Feuchtwanger, on various cultural topics, the significance of jazz or the movies.
What attracted the refugee psychoanalysts at least as much as the climate or the émigré atmosphere was, of course, money. Hollywood was full of neurotic people who wanted the meaning of their lives explained to them and who had lots of money to pay for the explanations. At one point in the turbulent life of Judy Garland, for example, when she was in the midst of a floundering affair with Joseph Mankiewicz, he sent her to be treated by Simmel. Just as Simmel was getting started, Miss Garland’s mother reported this development to Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer called in Mankiewicz for a scolding, and Mankiewicz quit M-G-M forever. And Miss Garland broke off her therapy.
Artie Shaw, who spent the war years leading a navy band on hectic tours of overseas military bases, was another one of those who felt that he was cracking up; the navy agreed, granting him a medical discharge. “This was in 1944,” Shaw recalled, “and at that point I wanted nothing more than to lie down somewhere in a deep hole and have someone shovel enough dirt over me to cover me.” Being an avid reader, Shaw duly found his way to psychoanalysis and to Dr. May Romm, who began leading him back through his days as young Arthur Arshawsky of the Bronx. No sooner had he recovered sufficiently to start courting Ava Gardner than he wanted her to join him in consulting Dr. Romm. Miss Gardner dutifully began to prepare herself for analysis, but then Shaw began to worry that his own analysis might cure him of wanting to marry Miss Gardner, so he gallantly abandoned Dr. Romm.
Beyond such contretemps, there was a more serious controversy that tormented the psychoanalysts when they established themselves in Hollywood in the early 1940’s. Was Freud’s system basically a philosophy, an attempt to explain the world’s problems, or was it a medical therapy, a cure for what people now called “mental illness”? The former alt
ernative seemed important in 1945, when the world was trying to comprehend the successive shocks of the Nazi death camps, of the atomic bomb, and then of the epochal war coming to an end. But although Freud’s writings provided insights into contemporary disasters, American psychoanalysts showed a certain practicality in arguing that their system was basically nothing more than a medical therapy, that analysts were not theoreticians but simply doctors, certified by MD degrees, who devoted their time to curing the sick.
One unfortunate victim of this practicality was Otto Fenichel, who had come to Los Angeles in 1938 with impressive credentials as one of the leaders of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Fenichel believed passionately that Marx and Freud both offered answers to the disaster engulfing Europe, but there was very little that one lonely refugee could do. When Fenichel conducted a seminar on literature at Simmel’s Psychoanalytic Study Group, one admirer commended the effort with the somewhat ambiguous judgment that it was “one of the last refuges of the avant-garde period of the psychoanalytic movement before it became a commercialized specialty.” To keep in touch with his scattered allies, those who believed in the Marxist aspects of psychoanalysis, Fenichel sent out a series of more than one hundred circular letters, or Rundbriefe, reporting on who was doing what, and what he thought of their activities. It was a hopeless task. In his last Rundbriefe, in July of 1945, Fenichel wrote mournfully that he had recently spoken with several sympathetic colleagues and wondered whether any of them would suggest organizing a conference of politically minded analysts. “Silently I thought that such a wish would be a sign that the Rundbriefe still have some meaning . . .” Fenichel observed. “No one suggested a meeting.”
The psychoanalysts of Los Angeles didn’t want to get involved in politics. They wanted to get established and make money. And in that city of cults, where, as Nathanael West had written, people preached the crusade against salt and the Aztec secret of brain-breathing, the psychoanalysts wanted respectability, medical certification. Freud had argued fervently for the development of “lay analysts” who could spread the faith without years of medical training, but the American psychoanalytic establishment insisted on exactly that training, that respectability. Fenichel had earned his medical degree long ago at the University of Vienna, which didn’t count for much in Los Angeles now. So in the summer of 1945, after sending out his last Rundbriefe, he decided to start earning new credentials by becoming an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. He was forty-seven, and fat, and a friend who visited him on night duty noted that he looked out of shape in a tight and ill-fitting white uniform. He complained of exhaustion. He worried about his ability to keep up with new developments in medicine. He talked vaguely of finding another hospital that didn’t require night shifts. Within six months, he collapsed and died of a ruptured cerebral aneurism.
But Hollywood found that psychoanalysis was fun. David Selznick enjoyed pouring out his thoughts to Dr. Romm, and that outpouring apparently helped him to get back to work. Then, of course, he began treating Dr. Romm as one of his employees. “He became too busy for Romm,” Mrs. Selznick recalled. “He was forty minutes late, if he showed up at all. When he arrived on time, he was often unwakable through the entire session. He recounted these antics as though they were amusing. . . . He misinterpreted her patience as enchantment with him; in fact, he was afraid she was falling in love with him. He rang her doorbell at midnight and, standing outside, demanded to be heard. He found it unreasonable of her to refuse.” After nearly a year of this, Dr. Romm decided to cancel Selznick as a patient. Selznick didn’t seem to mind. He told his wife that he now “knew more than she did; he could analyze her.”
One predictable outcome of Selznick’s involvement with psychoanalysis was that he decided to make a movie about the subject, a movie that would simultaneously dramatize it, explain it, and proselytize for it. Selznick’s desire made him vulnerable to the serpentine intrigues of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the few people in Hollywood who could out-Selznick Selznick. Hitchcock persuaded the producer that he had found exactly what was wanted. This was a peculiar novel called The House of Dr. Edwardes, originally published in 1927 by a pseudonymous Francis Beeding, a murder mystery that involved witchcraft and satanic cults in a Swiss mental clinic. Hitchcock told Selznick that this story would portray psychoanalysis both as a cure for mental torment and as a means of solving a murder. He also told him, in due time, that he, Hitchcock, had acquired all rights to the novel, available for resale. He even extracted from Selznick a substantial advance for a nonexistent screenplay. Selznick kept snapping at the bait. “I’d like to stress,” he said in one of his myriad memos “that I’m almost desperately anxious to do this . . . psychiatric story with Hitch.”
Hitchcock’s customary method of devising a movie script was to consult for hours on end with his chosen writer, then send the writer to his typewriter for a day or two, then consult some more. This suited the needs of Ben Hecht, who was also in the throes of psychoanalysis and who liked to talk out a story while he wrote it. Hitchcock, he later observed, “gave off plot turns like a Roman candle.” At the end of a month, the two of them had concocted an implausible but dramatic script, to which one of Selznick’s secretaries later gave the title Spellbound.
It involved a psychoanalyst who had come to take charge of a mental hospital but soon showed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. He couldn’t bear the sight of parallel lines; he couldn’t stand whiteness. The marks of a fork drawn across a white tablecloth drove him frantic, and when in a frenzy, he was apt to faint dead away. In such phobias Hitchcock found what he liked to call the MacGuffin.* Then it turned out that the phobia-ridden doctor was only impersonating the doctor who was supposed to take charge of the clinic, and that the real doctor was dead, and that the impersonator might have murdered him. But there was another psychiatrist at the clinic, a woman, who would fall in love with the mysterious stranger and solve all his problems. “Just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” Hitchcock said with a shrug.
Selznick had grandiose ideas of luring Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the heroine, and when he turned to Ingrid Bergman, whom he already had under contract, she at first refused him. “I won’t do this movie,” she said. “The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can’t fall in love so deeply.” Talked out of that odd misjudgment, she made a splendid effort to portray an intellectual woman falling in love with the rather wooden Gregory Peck. It was a struggle, though. Hitchcock wrote for his two stars a series of psychiatric explanations that now sound platitudinous but also sound like Hitchcock’s effort to confess and explain his own obscure sense of guilt. “I’m haunted, but I can’t see by what,” Peck said at one point. “People often feel guilt over something they never did,” Miss Bergman reassured him. “It usually goes back to their childhood.” And so on. “I had the feeling that something ailed him,” Peck later said of Hitchcock, “and I could never understand what it might be.”
The most striking novelty in Spellbound was Hitchcock’s attempt to dramatize Peck’s guilt-ridden dreams by hiring Salvador Dali to design them. “I felt that if I was going to have dream sequences, they should be vivid,” Hitchcock said. “I didn’t think we should resort to the old-fashioned blurry effect they got by putting vaseline around the lens. . . . I used Dali for his draftsmanship. I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. . . . Chirico has the same quality, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective.”
Dali arrived in Hollywood with his customary fanfare, produced more than a hundred sketches and five paintings to be filmed (at a thousand dollars apiece). Eyewitness accounts of the result vary. “It opened with four hundred human eyes glaring down at [Peck] from black velvet drapes,” according to Miss Bergman. “Then a pair of pliers fifteen times taller than Peck chased him up the side of a pyramid.” The most spectacular effect was a vision of Miss Bergman as
a Greek statue, which slowly cracked apart, enabling a stream of ants to pour forth from her face. Selznick hated the whole thing. “The more I look at the dream sequence in Spellbound, the worse I feel it to be,” he declared in one of his memos. Hitchcock, too, was less than enthusiastic, and so a twenty-minute sequence of Dali nightmares shrank to a few brief visions. The only regrets came from Miss Bergman, who thought the original Dali sequence had “many wonderful things” and “could have been really sensational.”
But that was all irrelevant to the basic message of Spellbound, which was the basic message that everyone consciously or unconsciously wanted to hear in 1945: It’s not your fault; you didn’t do it. Skiing over hill and dale—all those parallel lines! all that whiteness!—Peck seemed to be going madder and madder, helped along by the feverish music of Miklos Rozsa,* until he finally fell, and thus relived the forgotten moment in which his younger brother had slid down a snow-covered stairway and impaled himself on a fence. It was all an accident, Miss Bergman assured him, not a killing, not your fault.
But what had happened to the original Dr. Edwardes? In another message for the atomic-bomb year 1945, but as old as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, not to mention Frankenstein, it soon turned out that it was kindly old Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), another psychiatrist, who had hoped to become head of the clinic, and then had murdered the destroyer of his ambitions. So even though psychoanalysis can almost magically cure us of our ills and our guilt, not all psychoanalysts (or other scientists) can be trusted. Some of these magicians are insane, homicidal. To dispatch the menacing Dr. Murchison, Hitchcock invoked an idea that he had wanted to use for years. Dr. Murchison, who had been threatening Miss Bergman, finally turned the gun on himself, and on the camera, and thus on the audience, and, with one red burst of flame, fired.
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