City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  It was clear that Mayer, like Warner, regarded himself as blameless in all things. If there were Communists at M-G-M—and he was not officially admitting any such thing—there was nothing he could do about it. The committee apparently believed that the M-G-M chief needed further guidance, so it turned to one of his wartime creations, Song of Russia, a maudlin romance of an American conductor touring the Soviet Union and becoming enamored of the country, its people, and one of its girls, all to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky. Robert Taylor, who played the conductor, had roused the committee hounds by testifying in Los Angeles that “White House pressure” by “Roosevelt aides” had forced him to make the movie by delaying his naval commission until he had done so. (“In my own defense,” Taylor subsequently testified in Washington, “lest I look a little silly by saying I was ever forced to do the picture, I was not forced.”) Now Mayer tried to explain how these things worked in wartime Hollywood. “Taylor mentioned his pending commission in the Navy,” Mayer said, “so I telephoned the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and told him of the situation, recalling the good that had been done by Mrs. Miniver and other pictures released during the war period. The secretary called back and said he thought Taylor could be given time to make the film before being called to the service.”

  But about the movie itself—how had it come to be made in the first place? Some writers had outlined a story, Mayer said, and it “seemed a good medium of entertainment and . . . a pat on the back for our then ally, Russia.” Mayer added, as a kind of defense, exactly what the committee wanted to attack: “The Government coordinator . . . agreed with us that it would be a good idea to make the picture.” Asked who the writers actually were, Mayer said that he could not remember. Perhaps he considered it wiser not to remember that the screenplay had been credited to Richard Collins, one of the “unfriendly” nineteen now under subpoena, and Paul Jarrico, who was eventually to plead the Fifth Amendment before this committee. In any case, Mayer himself had read the script and demanded revisions. “They had farm collectivism in it and I threw it out,” he said. “I will not preach any ideology except American.” When the revisions were finished, Mayer said, “the final script of Song of Russia was little more than a pleasant musical romance—the story of a boy and girl that, except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland.”

  Mayer was perhaps too modest. The New York Times had greeted the film on its appearance in early 1944 as “really a honey of a topical musical film, full of rare good humor, rich vitality, and a proper respect for the Russians’ fight in this war.” Nor was that all. Bosley Crowther, the newspaper’s chief film critic, hailed Song of Russia as “very close to being the best film on Russia yet made in the popular Hollywood idiom.” Such a good review just three years before, and now this committee interrogator wanted to know whether Mayer would admit that “scene after scene . . . grossly misrepresented Russia.” Mayer, like Warner, pleaded ignorance. “I never was in Russia,” he said, overlooking the fact that he had been born there. Unlike the craven Warner, though, Mayer tried to counterattack. “You tell me,” he went on, “how you would make a picture laid in Russia that would do any different than what we did there.”

  “Don’t you feel from what you have read . . .” Smith tried again, “that the scenes did not depict Russia in one iota?”

  “We did not attempt to depict Russia,” Mayer retorted. “We attempted to show a Russian girl entreating this American conductor to conduct a concert in her village . . . and as it inevitably happens this girl fell in love with the conductor and he with her. Then we showed the attack of the Germans on the Russians and the war disrupted this union.”

  For a more critical analysis of this prize specimen, the committee summoned the bizarre figure of Ayn Rand, who was then working as a Hollywood screenwriter and hoping that Warners would soon produce her script of her own 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. Miss Rand had been born in 1904 in what she resolutely insisted on calling St. Petersburg, but she had last seen Russia in 1926, so it was a little hard to imagine why the committee considered her an expert on the subject. Still, by comparison with Warner and Mayer, almost anyone might be considered an expert. Miss Rand had not even seen Song of Russia on its first appearance, so the committee staged a special screening for her, and now she was prepared to testify that it was filled with pro-Soviet propaganda.

  She scornfully described how Robert Taylor arrived in M-G-M’s Russia to conduct concerts. “He meets a little Russian girl from a village. . . . He asks her to show him Moscow. She says she has never seen it. He says, ‘I will show it to you.’ They see it together. The picture then goes into a scene of Moscow, supposedly. I don’t know where the studio got its shots, but I have never seen anything like it in Russia. First you see Moscow buildings—big, prosperous-looking, clean buildings, with something like swans or sailboats in the background. Then you see a Moscow restaurant that just never existed there.”

  If M-G-M’s Moscow was exaggerated, M-G-M’s typical Russian village was total fantasy. “You see the happy peasants,” Miss Rand relentlessly continued. “You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. . . .” Robert Taylor not only conducted Tchaikovsky for these happy villagers, but his concert was broadcast throughout the happy country, even to its far frontiers. “There is a border guard . . . listening to the concert,” Miss Rand said. “Then there is a scene inside kind of a guardhouse where the guards are listening to the same concert, the beautiful Tchaikovsky music, and they are playing chess. Suddenly there is a Nazi attack on them.” Miss Rand was sufficiently an ideologue to point out that the border station where the Nazis attacked the chess-playing, music-loving guards must have been located in central Poland, where Stalin had established them at the time of his alliance with Hitler.

  The M-G-M love story followed its inevitable course, boy first losing girl to her “anti-parachute work,” and then getting girl so that they can both spread the good word in America. In describing all this, Miss Rand was particularly indignant about Taylor’s manager, played by Robert Benchley, who said to the heroine, “You are a fool, but a lot of fools like you died on the village green at Lexington.” Quite apart from the question of whether such a remark would make any sense to a Russian villager, Miss Rand called it “blasphemy,” because the men of Lexington were “fighting for political freedom and individual freedom,” and “to compare them to somebody, anybody, fighting for a slave state, I think is dreadful.”

  Congressman John Wood, a Georgia Democrat, tried to get Miss Rand to admit that the United States had a strategic interest in keeping the Soviets at war against Germany, but she disputed even that. “I think we could have used the lend-lease supplies that we sent there to much better advantage ourselves,” she said. She therefore rejected completely the idea that a glib film like Song of Russia could serve some worthy political purpose. “If the excuse that has been given here is that we had to produce the picture in wartime, just how can it help the war effort?” she asked. “If it is to deceive the American people . . . then that sort of attitude is nothing but the theory of the Nazi elite, that a choice group of intellectual or other leaders will tell people lies for their own good.”

  “You paint a very dismal picture of Russia,” said John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican. “You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?”

  “Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no,” said the unbudging Miss Rand.

  “They don’t smile?” McDowell repeated.

  “Not quite that way, no,” said Miss Rand.

  What Miss Rand could not seem to understand, what the House committee could not seem to understand, was that Song of Russia was rub
bish not because of any political purpose, subversive or otherwise, but because M-G-M was in the business of producing rubbish. That was its function, its nature, its mission. It hardly knew that political purposes existed. M-G-M was the home of Andy Hardy, of Judy Garland and Esther Williams, and no Communist ideology could ever penetrate or take root in such a playland. When Louis B. Mayer of Minsk decided to make a movie about Russia, he would inevitably make it the Russia of Andy Hardy, accompanied by Tchaikovsky.

  The rest of the committee’s friendly witnesses provided a lumpy anthology of conservative opinion. Walt Disney complained bitterly about Herb Sorrell’s leadership of a strike at his studio in 1941. As a result, he said, “all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures.” Roy Brewer testified that his IATSE forces had saved Hollywood from communism during the strikes of 1945 and 1946. “There has been a real Communist plot to capture our unions in Hollywood, as part of the Communist plan to control the motion-picture industry . . .” Brewer said. “Sorrell has religiously followed the Communist line. . . . There was some of the most unbelievable amounts of violence that have ever appeared on the scene in the history of the American labor movement.”

  Sam Wood, the principal founder of the Motion Picture Association for the Preservation of American Ideals, and thus the principal instigator of these committee hearings, testified that the chief sources of Communist influence were the writers. Asked to identify some of the most subversive, he offered the by now familiar names, Lawson, Trumbo, and Stewart. “Is there any question in your mind as to whether Lawson is a Communist?” Stripling asked. “If there is, then I haven’t any mind,” said Wood.

  And so on. Morrie Ryskind, who had helped write some of the great Marx Brothers comedies, like Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera, said of another writer that “if he isn’t a Communist, I don’t think Mahatma Gandhi is an Indian.” Still another writer, Fred Niblo, Jr., offered similar testimony: “I can’t prove that he is a Communist any more than Custer could prove that the people who were massacring him were Indians.” Leo McCarey, who had become rich by producing and directing Going My Way (1944), in which Bing Crosby demonstrated that a Catholic priest could play boogie-woogie (and still richer by demonstrating in The Bells of St. Mary’s that not even a nun’s starched wimple could detract from the beauty of Ingrid Bergman), testified that his films had not earned any money in the Soviet Union.

  “What is the trouble?” asked Stripling.

  “Well, I think I have a character in there they do not like,” said McCarey.

  “Bing Crosby?” Stripling suggested.

  “No, God,” said McCarey.

  Then there were the actors. Adolphe Menjou, a minor player in various costume dramas, testified that he had read many books about communism and regarded it as “an Oriental tyranny, a Kremlin-dominated conspiracy.” Robert Taylor (née Spangler Arlington Brugh) swore to his patriotic reluctance to make Song of Russia and then went on to declare that he would never take part in any movie with a Communist. “I would not even have to know that he was a Communist,” Taylor said. “This may sound biased. However, if I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I am afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists do.”

  Gary Cooper was equally opposed to any involvement with Communists, but he couldn’t quite remember when any such involvement had actually threatened him.

  “I have turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with Communistic ideas,” Cooper said.

  “Can you name any of those scripts?” asked Smith, the committee investigator.

  “No, I can’t recall any of those scripts to mind,” Cooper said.

  “Just a minute,” Chairman Thomas intervened. “Mr. Cooper, you haven’t got that bad a memory.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” said Cooper.

  “You must be able to remember some of those scripts you turned down because you thought they were Communist scripts,” Thomas said.

  “Well, I can’t actually give you a title to any of them . . .” Cooper said. “Most of the scripts I read at night, and if they don’t look good to me, I don’t finish them, or if I do finish them I send them back as soon as possible to their author. . . . I could never take any of this pinko mouthing very seriously, because I didn’t feel it was on the level.”

  Ronald Reagan was, by comparison, quite eloquent, almost presidential. Speaking as head of the Screen Actors Guild, he said the union had been afflicted by a “small clique” that he described as “suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party.” He said he had “no investigative force” to ascertain whether these people actually were Communists, and the committee did not press him to name them.

  Reagan’s testimony could hardly have surprised the committee, for he apparently told all he knew to the FBI the previous April. According to FBI documents made public in a freedom-of-information request by the San Jose Mercury-News in 1985, Reagan was an informant listed by the agency as “T-10.” The FBI documents reported that both Reagan and Jane Wyman identified various members of the Screen Actors Guild as pro-Communist, though the FBI deleted all mention of the suspects’ names. When Reagan’s activity as an FBI informant about his own union membership was made public in 1985, a White House spokesman named Rusty Brashear said that Reagan’s role was really “very minor.” “I’m not sure that this reference to confidential informant is quite what it sounds like,” Brashear said.

  Reagan ended his testimony—as befitted his role, or his sense of his role—on a note of windy statesmanship. “Sir, I detest, I abhor their philosophy,” he said, “but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.”

  This first week of hearings, in which the committee had presumably put forward its strongest evidence on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, ended with the case far from proven. The press was notably unconvinced. “We do not think the Committee is conducting a fair investigation,” said a reasonably typical editorial in the New York Times. “We think the course on which it is embarked threatens to lead to greater dangers than those with which it is presently concerned.” And Hollywood’s liberals still boasted considerable firepower. That Sunday night, October 26, the Committee for the First Amendment broadcast a nationwide radio program entitled “Hollywood Fights Back,” in which various celebrities cried defiance at the congressional inquisitors. One of the most important was Thomas Mann, who professed to see analogies between the congressional hearings and the first oppressive measures undertaken by Hitler. Unlike many Hollywood liberals, who coupled their criticisms of the committee with denunciations of communism, Mann insisted on a solemn defense of Marx and Marxism too. “The ignorant and superstitious persecution of the believers in a political and economic doctrine which is, after all, the creation of great minds and great thinkers—I testify that this persecution is not only degrading for the persecutors themselves but also very harmful to the cultural reputation of this country,” Mann declared. “As an American of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’ . . . that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism, and what followed fascism was war.”

  Over the bugged telephone lines from Washington, the nineteen witnesses and their lawyers pleaded with friends in Hollywood for an even more public demonstration of support. In what was after all a publicity battle, a confrontation between conflicting sets of images and reputations, the witnesses
in Washington asked for a planeload of Hollywood supporters to come and provide a celebrity audience for the next week’s hearings. “I became very emotional about it,” Lauren Bacall recalled of a meeting of First Amendment stalwarts at the home of William Wyler. “I was up in arms—fervent. I said to Bogie, ‘We must go.’ He felt strongly about it too. . . . So it was decided that a group of us would fly to Washington—John Huston, Phil Dunne, Ira Gershwin, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Paul Henreid, John Garfield, June Havoc, Evelyn Keyes. . . .”*

  Huston was dining at the Brown Derby when he got a telephone call from Howard Hughes, who, despite his perpetual inaccessibility, always seemed to know what was going on. “John, I understand you are planning a trip to Washington, and I just want you to know that you can use one of my airplanes,” the head of TWA told Huston. “Not for nothing, because, by law, I have to charge you something, but you can have it for the minimum rate allowable . . . and it will be all to yourselves.”

  “So that’s what we did . . .” Huston reported. “Our plane stopped a couple of times en route to Washington, and we were met each time by sympathetic reporters. We got the feeling that the country was with us, that the national temper resembled ours—indignant and disapproving of what was going on.” Lauren Bacall made some of those airport speeches, as did Bogart, Huston, Kaye, and Kelly. “We were a serious group—reasonably well informed, bright, and we all cared . . .” Miss Bacall remembered. “The airport crowds were large and vociferous—cheers went up—God, it was exciting. I couldn’t wait to get to Washington. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we really could effect a change—if we could make that Committee stop?”