City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  So everything ended happily, except for William Faulkner, who decided that he could not bear working for Warner Bros. any longer. “I think I have had about all of Hollywood I can stand,” he wrote to his agent, Harold Ober. “I feel bad, depressed, dreadful sense of wasting time, I imagine most of the symptoms of some kind of blow-up or collapse. Feeling as I do, I am actually afraid to stay here much longer.”

  Part of Faulkner’s difficulty was a matter of health. He complained of being “not well, physically, have lost weight, etc.,” though that was nothing unusual for an alcoholic nearing the age of fifty. Part was desperation about his continuing failure as a novelist. “My books have never sold, are out of print,” wrote the author of The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. “The labor (the creation of my apocryphal country) of my life, even if I have a few things yet to add to it, will never make a living for me.” And part was simply a dislike of Los Angeles and everything in it. “Nobody here does anything,” he complained to a fellow writer named Paul Wellman as they waited on a street corner for the bus to Burbank. “There’s nobody here with any roots. Even the houses are built out of mud and chicken wire. Nothing ever happens and after a while a couple of leaves fall off a tree and then it’ll be another year.”

  Faulkner told Warners in September of 1945 that he wanted to go back to Mississippi and finish a novel. It was to be about a mutiny in France toward the end of World War I, about a Christlike figure who ended as the Unknown Soldier. Faulkner had been fascinated by the idea ever since he first heard it in 1942 from the director Henry Hathaway and a free-lance producer named William Bacher, who had given him a thousand-dollar advance to write it as a novel that they could then buy for filming. Faulkner also told Warners that he owned a mare that was going to foal, and he wanted it to foal in Mississippi, and so he was going to take it there and stay there. The studio offered to grant him a six-months leave without pay to finish his novel, on the understanding that Warners would have first chance at the movie rights. Faulkner naturally had to decline, since he had already sold the movie option to the two men who had told him the idea. Warners said he couldn’t take any leave unless he signed the agreement. Faulkner cleared out his desk and left.

  Back in Mississippi, the novelist wrote a very deferential personal appeal to Jack Warner, whom he even addressed as Colonel Warner, asking to be released from his contract. This was a contract, it should be remembered, under which Warner Bros. was giving Faulkner nothing—no money, no office, no benefits of any kind. Yet Warners treated him, as it treated its actors, like somebody who had to be confined to the studio for the contractual period of seven years. And while rebellious stars like Olivia de Havilland sued for the right to work for competing studios, Faulkner was asking only the right to stay in Mississippi and write his novel. “I feel that I have made a bust at moving picture writing and therefore have mis-spent and will continue to mis-spend time which at my age I cannot afford,” he wrote to Warner. He then recited the thin list of movie work accomplished for Warners. He had done “the best work I knew how” on a half-dozen scripts, but only two were produced, and he had been credited for his work on those “partly through the friendship of Director Howard Hawks.” And finally, perhaps a little too calculatingly, he appealed to Warner’s rather insubstantial sense of honor, to “that same fairness which you have shown before in such situations.”

  Warner didn’t bother to answer. The reply came from R. J. Obringer, of the studio’s legal department, demanding that Faulkner sign the leave agreement. And just as Warner had blacklisted Miss de Havilland, he now seemed to think that he could exercise similar power over the entire publishing business. “He has already made vague though dire threats about warning any editor to buy my stuff at his peril, if I don’t come back,” Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, who had just put together the Viking Portable Faulkner, which was to become an important element in bringing the novelist’s best work back into print.

  On into 1946, Warners continued its pursuit of the errant Faulkner. Obringer wrote him a stern letter warning him that he had violated his contract. Only when Ober sent Warners the first sixty-four pages of Faulkner’s new novel (which was then called “Who?”) as clear evidence that it was not anything the studio would want to film, and only when Bennett Cerf of Random House made his own personal appeal to Warner to leave Faulkner in peace, only then did Warner agree at least to stop harassing Faulkner until the novel was finished. Before that day came, the Nobel Prize for 1949 would finally reduce the Warners contract to a dead letter. So Faulkner went on writing A Fable, mercifully unaware that the unfinished novel he regarded as his magnum opus would actually turn out to be one of his worst books, that all his best work was already behind him.

  The honking of distant auto horns one August afternoon brought to most Americans their first news that the war had finally come to its inevitable end. First a few horns, then soon more and more of them, then shouts from window to window, and then everybody began parading through the streets under showers of confetti. It was a happy day, but it didn’t have that stunning surprise of the war’s beginning, that sense that all of life had suddenly become different. The outcome had long been certain, and the main difference that it promised—promised falsely—was that peace would bring a restoration of life as it had once been.

  This did not mean a return to the Depression, of course. The era of the breadline and the dole was over, and everybody now expected to prosper. There had been enough talk of sacrifice; it was time to concentrate on making more money, making more and spending more. The American Federation of Labor had pledged to Roosevelt that there would be no strikes for the duration of the war, but well before V-day, the rival Hollywood unions were already getting ready to fight. As early as January of 1945, the first strike vote was taken. It involved a supposedly jurisdictional dispute, one of those internecine quarrels that few outsiders can either understand or judge, yet on each side of the dispute there began to form the ragged coalitions of right and left that would soon tear Hollywood apart.

  At the center of the conflict were seventy-seven interior decorators, who had formed their own little union and negotiated a five-year contract with the studios back in 1937. That was the period when Willie Bioff of IATSE was trying to seize control of everything within reach. In 1939, IATSE organized and demanded studio recognition for a new Local 44 that included what it called “set dressers.” The studios answered that they already had a contract with the independent decorators. By the time that contract expired in 1942, Bioff and IATSE president George Browne were in prison for racketeering, and IATSE had been inherited by Richard Walsh, a pudgy Brooklyn Irishman who had been one of Browne’s vice-presidents. Walsh withdrew IATSE’s request to represent the decorators on condition that no other outside group could represent the decorators either. The studios agreed.

  Late in 1943, however, the decorators voted to strengthen their little union by affiliating with Local 1421 of the painters’ union, a somewhat shaggy organization that also included designers, illustrators, and model builders. Most important, the chief of the painters was Herbert Sorrell, a sturdy ex-boxer who had actually served his apprenticeship with a brush and bucket. He liked to describe himself as “just a dumb painter.” After serving as a picket captain in a painters’ strike in 1937, Sorrell won election as head of the Hollywood local and helped organize the bitter but successful cartoonists’ strike against the Walt Disney studio in 1941.

  Sorrell was unusual in another way: He had resisted both the threats and the inducements of Willie Bioff, who once suggested that they could make some money by working together. Sorrell not only rejected Bioff’s offer but began organizing an anti-IATSE coalition called the Conference of Studio Unions. The CSU was everything that IATSE was not: militant, leftist, and honest. By 1945, Sorrell’s CSU had grown to a total of nine unions, including the painters, carpenters, and machinists, nearly ten thousand workers in all, a serious challenge to IATSE’s control of its sixteen thousand membe
rs. So when Sorrell requested a new contract for the seventy-seven decorators, IATSE once again demanded recognition for its own group of “set dressers.” IATSE president Walsh warned that all his men would walk out if the studios gave in to Sorrell.

  The War Labor Board ruled in favor of Sorrell, but the studios tried to avoid a confrontation. They claimed they were helpless, caught in the middle between two rival unions. There was considerable evidence, though, that the studios by now found IATSE a congenial partner. Bioff’s successor as IATSE’s Hollywood representative was a beefy professional named Roy Brewer, a man who seemed to understand things. Brewer had been head of the AFL’s Nebraska Labor Federation, and he was to become one of the major figures in Hollywood’s impending labor wars and in the political struggles that grew out of them. He had just resigned from his wartime job with the War Labor Board in Washington when Walsh recruited him to take charge of the IATSE forces in Hollywood. There he found Sorrell on the attack and the studios anxiously maneuvering to delay the inevitable clash.

  On March 12, 1945, Sorrell decided that he would wait no longer. His CSU went out on strike and threw up picket lines around the studios. The IATSE chiefs accepted the challenge. They sent bands of workers bulling through the CSU picket lines. William Green, president of the AFL, to which both rival unions belonged, sent Sorrell a telegram that accused him of violating the labor federation’s wartime no-strike pledge. “I officially disavow your strike,” Green declared. To California’s most fervent right-wingers, Sorrell was simply a Communist, out to make trouble. The state legislature’s Jack Tenney, chief propagator of alarms about Reds, declared that Sorrell “has persistently followed the Communist Party line. He subscribed to the Communist Party publication, the People’s World. . . .” It was true that Sorrell had often supported Communist positions—notably denouncing Roosevelt as a “warmonger” in 1940, the era of the Hitler-Stalin alliance, and then changing to interventionism when the Nazis invaded Russia—but the one issue on which Sorrell and the Communists very markedly differed was the Hollywood strike. People’s World loyally supported the AFL’s no-strike pledge and blamed both Sorrell and the producers for breaking it. Sorrell in turn charged his enemies with conspiracy and corruption. Though IATSE’s gangster chiefs were now in jail, Sorrell ridiculed the larger union’s claim of having reformed. He later testified before a House committee that IATSE and the studios had conspired against their own workers ever since the 1930’s, and “this conspiracy goes on now.”

  Hollywood divided. The Screen Writers Guild somewhat reluctantly voted to support the CSU picket lines; the Screen Actors Guild somewhat reluctantly voted to cross them. At the actual studio gates, people made their decisions somewhat capriciously. Salka Viertel recalled separate groups of writers and secretaries meeting in the cafeteria just across from Warner Bros. One writer who claimed that he could work only by dictating to his secretary suggested that they all wait to see what the secretaries decided. “We stepped out onto the sidewalk to watch what the ‘girls’ would do,” Mrs. Viertel said. “About thirty of them came out and for a while they stood undecided, watching the slowly moving pickets and the studio police, who were protecting the entrance. Finally an energetic young woman threw back her head, said ‘What the hell!’ and ran defiantly across the street and through the passive picket line. The others promptly followed. . . .” Mrs. Viertel asked her own secretary what had happened at her meeting, and she said that most of the secretaries at first sympathized with the strikers, “but one girl, who has worked for Ayn Rand, swayed them by insisting that the strikers were just a bunch of Communists and that a decent person had to be against them.”

  Once the battle lines had been established, the studios summarily fired all the striking decorators, and the CSU refused to accept the dismissals. As the deadlock continued, but failed to shut down the studios, some striking unions gave up (the Screen Publicists Guild, for one), some newcomers joined in (the Screen Cartoonists Guild). The Japanese surrender that August formally ended the AFL’s no-strike pledge, so various larger unions began choosing sides in the Hollywood struggle. The AFL’s big rival, the CIO, formally voted to support the strike. The Teamsters, then a member of the AFL, strongly opposed it. Lawrence P. Lindeloff, the international head of Sorrell’s own union of painters, first denounced the strike, then came out in favor of it.

  Though strikes cost employers a lot, they cost workers a lot more (in this case, over eight months, an estimated fifteen million dollars). While the CSU workers walked the picket lines all through that spring and summer, they were unable to keep IATSE workers from pushing their way into the heavily guarded studios. Early in October, Sorrell decided he would have to concentrate his forces, and he picked Warners for the battle. The first forty pickets arrived at the studio at 5 A.M., and soon there were about 750 marching to and fro. When the first IATSE workers appeared at the gate, the pickets overturned three of their cars. The streets glittered with shards of broken glass. The Burbank police and Warners studio guards beat back the picketers with clubs and sprayed them with fire hoses. Jack Warner and his executives watched the battle from the roof of the studio.

  More IATSE workers arrived to join the fight. Some of them tried to overturn a CSU sound truck, and the driver slugged one who attacked with a wrench. A striking painter named A. Kieser was stabbed in the nose and forehead by a strikebreaker with a penknife. A picketing secretary named Helen McCall was hit in the eye by a gas bomb. The police arrested Sorrell on suspicion of inciting a riot and held him on fifteen hundred dollars bond.

  Sorrell was back on the streets the next day, and this time the picketing seemed to succeed in shutting down Warners. Except for a few chorus girls rehearsing a dance sequence, all work stopped on the three films in production. Warners lawyers were in court, though, to get an injunction against further mass picketing, and the IATSE men went to enforce the injunction the next morning. Several hundred IATSE men formed a column six abreast across the street from the pickets patrolling the Olive Avenue entrance to the Warners studio. At 6 A.M., they marched forward, and the two armies met in a storm of fists, clubs, even flares. This time, nearly eighty people were injured before police from four nearby towns could restore a semblance of order. Eight combatants were arrested, including one twenty-nine-year-old secretary to a Universal producer, who was charged with possession of a blackjack.

  The combined power of the police, studio guards, and IATSE was too much for the strikers, who were beaten back from the studio gates and permitted only to stage sitdowns. It was Washington that saved them. At the end of October, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the decorators were entitled to join the painters. Grudgingly, the studios and IATSE gave way. For Sorrell and his allies, it was a victory, but perhaps a Pyrrhic victory. The cry of Communist influence in Hollywood had sounded once again, and the forces behind it were getting stronger. Their cry would soon reverberate far beyond the impulsive urgings of Ayn Rand’s secretary.

  At three o’clock in the morning on September 16, 1945, Theodore Dreiser lurched up out of bed at his Spanish stucco house on North Kings Road and began turning on all the lights. He called out for his wife, whom he had married just the previous year after a quarter century of turbulent concubinage.

  “Helen!”

  Helen Dreiser emerged from her own bedroom to find the seventy-four-year-old novelist roaming through the house and still calling her name. She pattered after him, repeatedly telling him that she was there, all to no avail.

  “I said, ‘I am Helen,’ ” she later wrote in some notes on the incident. “First he said, ‘Everyone thinks she’s Helen.’ Then I told him quietly that I could prove it. T.D. then said, ‘I’ll believe you if you say so.’ ” Mrs. Dreiser thought she had won that exchange, but a few days later, Dreiser confided to a visitor, “It’s odd, a strange woman has been here.”

  It was because of Helen Patges Richardson that Dreiser had first come to Hollywood, back in 1919. She was young and pretty then, a
ged twenty-five, a secretary in a New York office, and she wanted to be an actress. She admired the author of Sister Carrie, who happened to be her second cousin, aged forty-eight, so she went to pay him a visit, and they became lovers, and headed for Los Angeles. Helen started out as an extra, at $7.50 a day, and then found a few minor parts at twenty dollars. She played in Rudolph Valentino’s first film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Dreiser was not very happy about her fledgling career, even though it helped pay the rent. He himself had received a four-thousand-dollar advance to write a novel, The Bulwark, about a Quaker whose yearning to do good led to nothing but trouble. He decided to go back to New York to write it. Helen went with him.

  Dreiser’s major encounter with Hollywood occurred only after the success of An American Tragedy (1925). Paramount bought it but didn’t know what to do with it. When Sergei Eisenstein visited Hollywood in 1930, someone at the studio conceived the remarkable idea of assigning him to film Dreiser’s novel. Eisenstein feared that the Hays Office would forbid it, but he was assured that the Hays Office approved, and that the studio had budgeted one million dollars for the project. Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu wrote a script that Dreiser wholeheartedly endorsed, but Paramount’s executives began getting nervous. “Your scenario,” said Ben Schulberg, “is a monstrous challenge to American society.”

  Paramount junked the whole project and started over again, with the poet Samuel Hoffenstein as scriptwriter and Josef von Sternberg as director. Dreiser’s contract included a clause saying that “the Purchaser agrees that it will use its best endeavors to accept such advice, suggestions and criticisms that the Seller may make in so far as it may, in the judgment of the Purchaser, consistently do so.” It was an ambiguous clause, which Dreiser thought gave him some control over the filming of his novel, but which in fact gave Paramount the right, after listening to whatever Dreiser might want to say, to do as it pleased.