City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  The HUAC Hearings (from top down): Dalton Trumbo was a noisily hostile witness, Bertolt Brecht dodged and equivocated, Jack Warner did his best to please Chairman J. Parnell Thomas.

  9

  Un-Americanism

  (1947)

  Charles Laughton was so nervous during the last preview performances that he kept putting his hands in his pockets and rubbing his genitals. People in the audience could hardly help noticing. Some snickered. Nobody backstage dared tell Laughton the reason for the laughter. Everyone relied on Helene Weigel, Bertolt Brecht’s wife, to do something. “Helli got his pants away on the pretext of pressing them,” said a young member of the cast, Frances Heflin, the sister of Van Heflin. “She wanted his hands out of his pockets, so she sewed them up.” Laughton was frantic when he found the pockets sewn up, and when he learned why, but though he insisted that the stitches be removed, he behaved himself better on opening night.

  And it was quite an opening night. Charlie Chaplin was there, and Ingrid Bergman, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Boyer, Billy Wilder, Olivia de Havilland, John Garfield, Igor Stravinsky—all of these were among the people who crowded into the 260-seat Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard for what proved to be, in retrospect, one of the major theatrical events of its time, presenting Laughton in his first stage appearance in nearly fifteen years, the premiere of Brecht’s greatest play, Galileo. In addition to being a splendid piece of theater, Galileo dug into two of the most troubling issues of the day, the responsibility of the scientists who had built the atomic bomb and the responsibility of intellectuals who were summoned for interrogation about their political beliefs. The audience viewed Brecht’s probings with misgivings; it remained restless. The newspaper reviews also sounded somewhat dubious. The New York Times was reasonably representative in declaring that the play was “barren of climaxes and even sparse in stirring moments.” Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner called it “a fussy, juvenile harangue.”

  That ambiguous night at the Coronet Theater had been an extraordinarily long time in coming. Brecht had originally written Galileo in Denmark, in one three-week burst of creativity during the autumn of 1938, and there had even been a staging in the wartime isolation of Zurich in 1943. By then, Brecht was enmeshed in the controversies over Hangmen Also Die. Despite the bitter end to those quarrels, he stubbornly went on hatching new ideas for movies. With Salka Viertel’s son Hans, he discussed the possibilities of a film about Shakespeare’s difficulties in getting financial support for the Globe Theater. He professed to see in this many similarities to contemporary Hollywood: “Collective writing, fast writing-on-order, the same motifs used over again. . . .” He wrote an outline entitled “Uncle Sam’s Property,” which told the story of a bayonet being passed from one owner to another. He wrote a full narrative treatment, “The Crouching Venus,” about a museum curator in occupied Marseilles who saved a famous statue from a German official who wanted to acquire it. He wrote an outline for a film version of one of his most moving poems, “Children’s Crusade 1939.” He discussed a modern version of Lysistrata. He worked on more than fifty film projects in all.

  His only sale came by accident. During 1942 and ’43, he collaborated with Lion Feuchtwanger on an unsuccessful play about a modern Joan of Arc in the French resistance, The Visions of Simone Machard. When the two collaborators inevitably quarreled and split, Brecht took all theatrical rights to the project and Feuchtwanger all rights to a prospective novel he planned to write. Sam Goldwyn rejected Brecht’s play but bought Feuchtwanger’s novel for fifty thousand dollars, hoping to star Teresa Wright as the saintly heroine. Feuchtwanger needlessly but graciously gave Brecht twenty thousand dollars. Goldwyn never produced the film.

  Brecht knew perfectly well that all these movie projects were secondary to his vocation in the theater, and after the dispute over Simone Machard, he settled down to work on his major new play of these Hollywood years, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. But the writing of a play was only the first step in the long series of maneuvers that might or might not lead to a stage production. Brecht already had a whole portfolio of earlier work in various stages of negotiation. He had updated his 1928 version of Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik into Schweyk in the Second World War, for example, in the hope that Peter Lorre would star in it. He explored the possibility of his old collaborator Kurt Weill setting the play to music. He got Berthold Viertel, Salka’s husband, to direct four scenes from The Private Life of the Master Race in New York in German in 1942 (a complete English version only very belatedly reached the stage in June of 1945).

  The most important of these maneuverings began in Salka Viertel’s salon on a Sunday afternoon in March of 1944, when Brecht first encountered the elephantine figure of Charles Laughton. He had seen and admired Laughton’s best prewar films—Rembrandt and The Private Life of Henry VIII—so he was ready to treat the actor seriously, and, of course, to make use of him. Laughton was still earning a star-worthy $100,000 per picture, though several of his recent films had been undistinguished failures (The Tuttles of Tahiti, Stand By for Action, The Man from Down Under), and he felt a hunger to be taken seriously, even to be used. Brecht showed Laughton the manuscript of Schweyk; Laughton was suitably impressed. They became friends. Brecht even wrote a poem entitled “Laughton’s Belly”:

  Here it was: not unexpected, but not usual either

  And built of foods which he

  At his leisure had selected, for his entertainment.

  And to a good plan, excellently carried out.

  Laughton’s acerbic wife, Elsa Lanchester, was less impressed with Brecht. “He smoked awful cigars . . .” she observed. “Or perhaps the passing through Brecht made the smoke come out with the sourest, bitterest smell. . . . He hadn’t many teeth and his mouth opened in a complete circle, so you’d see one or two little tombstones sticking out of this black hole. A very unpleasant sight.” But Laughton was charmed by his new discovery. “Often L would come and meet me in the garden,” Brecht wrote long afterward, “running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass, and would show me some changes in his flowerbeds, for his garden always occupied him.”

  Laughton was proud of his garden, overlooking the ocean from the heights of Pacific Palisades. Brecht wrote a poem praising its giant eucalyptus trees, its lemon hedge, its ferns and fuchsias and bright anemones and “the lordly lawn.” Laughton was deeply upset that autumn when eight or ten feet at the edge of his garden suddenly broke away and slid down the hillside. Brecht ended his poem on that note of dismay: “Alas, the lovely garden . . . /Is built of crumbling rock . . . /There is not much time left in which to complete it.”

  Laughton and Brecht were the most implausible partners, aliens from two countries at war: one fat, one thin; one rich and famous, the other penniless and obscure; one a guilt-ridden homosexual, the other a shameless philanderer; one a connoisseur, indifferent to politics, the other a radical in all things. What bound them together was Galileo, which Brecht was now determined to rewrite with and for Laughton. Brecht had wanted from the start to portray Galileo as the father of modern physics, the apostle of a “new age.” Even then, in Denmark, Brecht had known a physicist who worked for Nils Bohr, so he was fully aware of Bohr’s efforts to explain to the world Otto Hahn’s success, late in 1938, in splitting the atom. But the central fact about Galileo, apart from his great discoveries, was that he had recanted them under the threat of torture by the Inquisition. Brecht’s original idea was apparently the conventional one, to portray Galileo as the supreme rationalist, who cunningly feigned acquiescence to authority so that he could go on with his life and his work. It was thus that Galileo survived to write his celebrated Discorsi. As his disciple Andrea later said: “We cried: ‘Your hands are stained!’ You say: ‘Better stained than empty.’ . . . And: ‘If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line.’ ”

  There is a theory, most strongly argued by Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, that Brecht’s accou
nt of the struggle between Galileo and the church was at least partly inspired by the Soviet purge trials of 1936–38, that Brecht, never the most orthodox of radicals, had “some sympathy with Trotskyism,” and that “the Galileo of his drama is Zinoviev, or Bukharin or Rakovsky dressed up in historical costume.” There may be some truth in this, for Galileo is a complicated play, with subtext buried beneath subtext, but the idea of saying or doing anything for the sake of survival ran deep in Brecht’s work. It was the guiding principle of both Mac the Knife and Jenny, of Mother Courage and Schweyk. In a time of extreme crisis, this hunger for survival can lead to ugly collaborations, but it can also lead to the very reasonable alternative chosen by the refugee, to the folk wisdom implicit in the saying that he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.

  The first thing to do with Galileo, though, was to produce a working draft in English. Brecht, who still knew little English, offered Laughton, who knew no German, a literal and rather Germanic translation that he said had been done by “a secretary.” Apparently dismayed by that, Laughton hired two young writers he knew at M-G-M, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker, to produce something readable. These two also knew relatively little German, so the version that they produced in November of 1944 was quite free. Laughton and Brecht both professed to like it, but that was only the beginning. Laughton yearned to write, and Brecht liked to keep rewriting, so they met regularly in Laughton’s study to rework the whole play. Laughton had to break off in February of 1945 to film Captain Kidd, and again in August to make Because of Him, but the work continued. Brecht wrote a poem about that too: “Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we/Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking/Up words in dictionaries, and time after time/Crossed out our texts . . . /Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating/A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you/Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you/Stepped outside his profession.”

  Brecht’s journal of this period showed no entry concerning either August 6 or August 9, the dates of the American atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Brecht later claimed that everyone had been appalled. “The day the bomb was dropped will not easily be forgotten by anyone who spent it in the United States . . .” he wrote some years afterward in his preface to the German edition of Galileo. “The great city arose that morning to an astonishing display of mourning. I heard bus drivers and women in markets express nothing but horror. It was a victory but it was received with the shame of defeat.” Though this was a recollection strongly discolored by both politics and hindsight, Brecht clearly believed that the public view of Galileo would never be the same. “Overnight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently,” he wrote. “The infernal effect of the great bomb placed the conflict between Galileo and the authorities of his day in a new and sharper light. . . . Galileo’s crime (his abjuration) can be regarded as the ‘original sin’ of modern natural sciences.”

  Galileo’s crime? Just a few years earlier, Brecht had portrayed it as a shrewd evasion, justified for several good reasons. Now he, Brecht, recanted all that.

  “ANDREA: You gained time to write a book that only you could write. Had you burned at the stake in a blaze of glory they would have won.

  “GALILEO: They have won. And there is no such thing as a scientific work that only one man can write.

  “ANDREA: Then why did you recant, tell me that!

  “GALILEO: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.

  “ANDREA: No!

  “GALILEO: They showed me the instruments.”

  When Andrea still tried to argue that the higher good of science had been served, Brecht forced Galileo to repudiate that too. The only purpose of science is “to ease human existence,” according to Galileo, and science for its own sake would lead only to “a progress away from the bulk of humanity” until “some new achievement would be echoed by a universal howl of horror.” In his recantation, Galileo insisted: “I have betrayed my profession. Any man who does what I have done must not be tolerated in the ranks of science.”

  Part of this was Brecht’s self-laceration over his own flight from Europe, his sense, as he had written in that poem to Salka Viertel, of self-hatred over his own survival; part of the self-laceration was also slightly self-indulgent, as in the twisted proverb, Qui s’accuse, s’excuse. In addition to all these complexities, Brecht, as a matter of principle, never wanted his heroes to be heroic. He declared repeatedly (and in vain) that Mac the Knife was not to be portrayed as romantically attractive, and Mother Courage was not courageous.

  But Brecht was not the only creator of Galileo. Laughton, who would have to go out on stage and be the scientific renegade, had no intention of making himself despicable. So Laughton resisted all Brecht’s efforts to condemn Galileo, and if Galileo had to condemn himself, then Laughton would make him heroic in doing so. “Laughton . . . has a kind of devil in his head,” Brecht complained in his journal, “that has transformed scorn for himself into empty pride—pride in the greatness of his crime, etc.”

  At the end of a year’s work, the two of them finally agreed on their script. Laughton read it aloud to Orson Welles, who happily agreed to direct it. Contracts were signed early in 1946, Mike Todd was brought in as producer, and rehearsals were scheduled for August. There must be some predictable limit, though, to the length of time four grandiose egos can work together on a project. Welles was the first to go. “Brecht was very, very tiresome today,” he wrote to Laughton, “until (I’m sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. Then he behaved. I hate working like that.” As for Todd, when he told Brecht that he planned to acquire some leftover Renaissance furniture and other props from a Hollywood studio, Brecht promptly brought the curtain down on him.

  Other angels could always be found. John Houseman had founded an organization called Pelican Productions, and one of his friends had happily discovered what Houseman called “certain underworld elements that . . . were trying to divert some of their Las Vegas profits into Hollywood show business.” The producer rented the little Coronet Theater and set out to bring Culture to Los Angeles. He worried about opening with Galileo, however, and decided to precede it with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. And finally, it was Laughton who put up $25,000 of his own money, half the production costs, to underwrite a four-week run of Galileo. He had a deep emotional commitment to Brecht’s play, which was by now partly his play. He had again been forced to interrupt his collaboration with Brecht to make a film, The Paradine Case, for Alfred Hitchcock and David Selznick, and then again for that marvelous Kenneth Fearing nightmare about Time Inc., The Big Clock. In June of 1947, with Joseph Losey hired as a director who would defer to all of Brecht’s wishes, and T. Edward Hambleton recruited as a backer who would pay Brecht’s bills, Galileo finally went into rehearsals.

  Brecht, as usual, was impossible. He insisted on controlling everything and quarreled ferociously with anyone who disagreed. He wanted the costumes just so and the sets just so, and he kept rewriting the script, adding new characters, and then ordering the costumes changed again. Part of all this was perfectionism, part was pure temperament, but the most important reason for all the controversy was that Brecht totally opposed—hated—all the prevailing fashions in the American theater. He hated the idea that the stage represented “reality”; he wanted the theater to remain always a scene of spectacles. He hated the idea that actors should try to “be” the characters they were playing; he wanted them to be themselves, players, performers. In trying to impose his ideas of how he wanted his work produced, he had to deal with people who often couldn’t understand what he was talking about. His views contradicted everything they had been taught, everything they by now took for granted. The problem was epitomized in an exchange with Abe Burrows, whom Laughton had recruited to rewrite a song that Brecht had assigned to a wandering street singer. “I kept trying to find out what was to be the tone of the song I was going to write,” Burrow
s recalled. “Our conversation went something like this:

  ME: Is this fellow praising Galileo?

  BRECHT: No.

  ME: Is he knocking him?

  BRECHT: No.

  ME: Well, Mr. Brecht, how does this fellow feel about Galileo?

  BRECHT: He feels nothing.

  ME: Well, why does this fellow stand up there and sing a song?

  BRECHT: Because I want him to.”

  That kind of dialogue, repeated over and over again, might have driven anyone to the point of fury, but Brecht, even at the best of times, was rude and domineering. John Houseman had heard “horror stories” about Brecht’s behavior, and now he found them all true. “His attitude was consistently objectionable and outrageous,” Houseman recalled. “In his determination to impose the precise style and interpretation he wanted . . . he was harsh, intolerant, and, often, brutal and abusive.” One of the main victims of this abuse was the choreographer Anna Sokolow, who had ideas of her own about how to stage the street scenes. Brecht told her, in front of the assembled cast, that he would not allow “a lot of Broadway commercial shit.” When she didn’t quit, he got her fired. The only participant he accepted without arguments was Hanns Eisler, a fellow refugee and fellow leftist, who had written the music for Hangmen Also Die and who had now composed for Galileo a fascinating accompaniment for harpsichord, small orchestra, and a cappella choir (Stravinsky came to several rehearsals to hear it). But Losey, the director, survived only by doing exactly what Brecht told him. Only once, in fact, was Losey so goaded and provoked that he threw the script at Brecht and went home. He was working in his garden when Laughton telephoned with the inevitable plea that he return to the theater. “ ‘I will,’ I said, ‘if Brecht apologizes to me,’ ” Losey recalled. “Laughton hung up, and after a while he called back saying, ‘Brecht says please come back, and he also says you should know Brecht never apologizes.’ I went back.”