City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  This was the atmosphere in which the Mayers and Warners and Goldwyns grew up and learned the realities of American life, and came to Hollywood, and fought, and gouged, and prospered. Their basic attitude throughout these conflicts, though, was a yearning for assimilation, a belief in the legend of the “melting pot,” a suppression or even a symbolic denial of all Jewishness, and an invincible faith in the idea that if they could not achieve full assimilation themselves, then they could achieve it for their children. Their insistence on changing names was, in a way, the simplest and most insignificant of evasions—even a Julia Turner was renamed Lana, after all—and yet there was something profoundly degrading in the unwritten rule that no star could have a Jewish name.

  Emmanuel Goldenberg, who had come from Romania, left a poignant description of his struggle to deal with the standard view that Goldenberg was “too long, too foreign . . . too Jewish.” He thought about translating it into Goldenhill or Goldenmount, or even Montedore, but the results seemed “too pretentious . . . and God knows they were contrived.” Then he saw a play in which a butler announced, “Madame, a gentleman to see you—a Mr. Robinson.” He liked that, but when he told his friends at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts that he was planning to call himself Emmanuel Robinson, he sensed “something less than enthusiasm.” After considering all the first names that began with his own initial—Edgar? Egbert? Ellery? Ethan?—he decided to name himself after the king of England, Edward VIII. “But I could not desert the Goldenberg entirely,” Edward G. Robinson recalled. “That became the G, my private treaty with my past. . . . Deep down in my deepest heart, I am, and have always been, Emmanuel Goldenberg.”

  Julius Garfinkle was a more combative man, and though he changed his name to Jules Garfield for the New York stage, he wanted to keep that name in Hollywood. Jack Warner disapproved. He demanded that the newcomer be called James Fielding. Garfield protested that he had a right to keep his theater name.

  “What kind of a name is Garfield anyway?” said Jack Warner. “It doesn’t sound American.”

  Garfield said it had been the name of an American president. Warner proposed a compromise, keeping the Garfield but changing Jules to James. “But that was the president’s name,” said Garfield. “You wouldn’t name a goddamn actor Abraham Lincoln, would you?”

  “No, kid, we wouldn’t,” said one of Warner’s executives, “because Abe is a name most people would say is Jewish, and we wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

  “But I am Jewish,” said the future John Garfield.

  “Of course you are,” said the Warners executive. “So are we . . . most of us. But a lot of people who buy tickets think they don’t like Jews. . . . And Jules is a Jew’s name.”

  Sam Goldwyn was perhaps the most blunt in this view. When he hired Danny Kaye straight from Broadway to star in Up in Arms in 1940, he was dismayed by the first screen tests. “He looks too—too—” Goldwyn complained. “Well, he is Jewish,” said Goldwyn’s Gentile second wife, Frances. “But let’s face it, Jews are funny-looking,” said Goldwyn. After much agonizing, including even the idea of buying back Kaye’s contract, Goldwyn finally solved his problem by having Kaye’s reddish-brown hair dyed blond, thus, in effect, de-Semitizing him. A few years later, when Goldwyn cast Frank Sinatra in the role that Sam Levene had played in the Broadway production of Guys and Dolls, Goldwyn stated his view as a general principle: “You can’t have a Jew play a Jew. It wouldn’t work on the screen.”

  The studio bosses, who spared themselves the humiliations they inflicted on their stars, expiated their own sins in their own ways, by raising money. Thus Goldwyn, who succeeded the pardoned Joe Schenck as president of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947, proceeded, through what his biographer called “tireless efforts,” to raise $8.8 million for Jewish charities. Alvah Bessie, one of the outcast Hollywood Ten, provided a graphic description of how these things were done at Warner Bros. “Every nominally Jewish writer, actor, director and producer was practically ordered to be present . . .” he recalled. “When we were all assembled . . . [Jack Warner] marched in and—to our astonishment—brandished a rubber truncheon, which had probably been a prop for one of the anti-Nazi pictures we were making. He stood behind his table and smashed the length of rubber hose on the wood, and then he smiled and said, ‘I’ve been looking at the results of the Jewish Appeal drive, and believe you me, it ain’t good.’ Here he paused for effect and said, ‘Everybody’s gonna double his contribution here and now—or else!’ The rubber truncheon crashed on the table again as everyone present, including John Garfield, Jerry Wald . . . Albert Maltz, and I reached for our checkbooks.”

  Harry Cohn, as always, had his own views of these matters. “Relief for the Jews?” he said when asked to contribute. “What we need is relief from the Jews. All the trouble in the world has been caused by Jews and Irishmen.”* Cohn, who was quite accustomed to addressing a writer as “Jew-boy,” liked to boast that the only Jewish actors he had under contract at Columbia played Indians. In fact, most of the studio bosses regarded most minorities with no more respect than they accorded to the Jews. Jack Warner, for example, once ordered a scene of two blacks kissing to be not only removed from a movie but destroyed. “It’s like watching two animals,” he said. “Terrible!” Any black kissing a white was forbidden, of course, by the studios’ production code. Louis B. Mayer disliked his own studio’s highly praised version of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. The black hero was “too uppity,” he told Schary. “He ought to take off his hat when he talks to a white man.” Mayer also disapproved of Schary’s producing Go for Broke, about the heroism of the Nisei 442nd Infantry Battalion. “He’s making pictures about the Japs,” Mayer grumbled. “Last week, who went to see the picture? All the Japs! This week, the bottom fell out of his box office.”

  In all this crudity, the Hollywood executives were expressing not simply their own crude prejudices but their own crude sense of what America thought of itself, a completely homogenized white Gentile society. Yet they kept being reminded that it wasn’t true. Hedda Hopper recalled Louis B. Mayer asking her—“begged” was the word she used—“to get his daughters into our most private private school, whose principal was a friend of mine.” Mrs. Hopper demurred.

  “Mr. Mayer, they don’t accept them,” she said.

  “But they’ll take my daughters,” Mayer said. “Can’t you tell the head mistress how important I am?”

  “It won’t do any good . . .” Mrs. Hopper said. “They will not take Jews.”

  Mayer was certainly the least dedicated of Jews, and he may even have considered the idea of converting to Christianity. He not only kept the portrait of Cardinal Spellman prominently displayed by his desk but donated large sums to the cardinal’s favorite charities. And even if one did not actually convert, one could always dissemble, play the game. Mayer’s granddaughter, Edie’s daughter, Barbara Goetz Windom, told an interviewer not long ago about her family’s elaborate Christmas parties and Easter egg hunts and said that she was surprised to hear her mother object to a Christian marriage ceremony. “It was the first time I’d heard of any reference to my being Jewish,” said the granddaughter of the onetime junk dealer from Minsk.

  The suave Rabbi Edgar Magnin presided over Temple B’nai B’rith in downtown Los Angeles—indeed, he built a glittering new temple on Wilshire Boulevard and remained in charge well into the 1980’s—but this was a Reform temple so reformed that it included Sunday school classes for the wealthy children of wealthy Hollywood. Their grandparents, whom Budd Schulberg described as “aged anachronisms in their dark suits and long beards, with Yiddish as their daily speech and Hebrew for their daily prayers,” were appalled. Their sons had proudly brought them west from New York and established them in villas with orange trees, but they didn’t like all this extravagance. “The old men got together and held a council of religious war,” Schulberg recalled. “They wanted a real shul like the ones they had left behind.” The studio executives wer
e anxious to placate their fathers and their forefathers. The old men rented a bungalow for ninety dollars a month, and then the executives sent studio carpenters and painters to recreate, just as in some set for a dramatization of Sholom Aleichem (which these same producers would never have produced), the spiritual center of the half-remembered shtetl.

  “The results were astonishing,” Schulberg recalled. “From the outside, Grandpa’s shul looked like any other little white bungalow on the street, complete with small green lawn and the obligatory miniature orange or lemon tree. But once you stepped inside you found yourself walking into an old world steeped in Jewish tradition, where Grandpa Max, and Old Man Mayer and Old Man Warner (those seemed to be their official names) and the rest of the immigrant Talmudists finally felt at home. They sent to New York for a real rabbi, a little Moses who would see to it that the Laws of the Torah were upheld. . . . When the rabbi arrived, a young man whose features were appropriately hidden by a bushy black beard, Grandpa and his Orthodox pals were driven down to the Santa Fe station in studio limousines as the reception committee. . . .”

  What neither the old men in their shul nor their sons in their executive offices seemed to realize, most of them, was that whatever relatives they had left behind were all destined for annihilation. In this, they were not alone, of course. President Roosevelt did not realize it, and did not want to be told about it. The State Department and the War Department did not want to be told either, and when they were told, they did their best to ignore the information, and even to suppress it.*

  One of those who heard and told was a rather unpleasantly cocksure writer, Ben Hecht. A onetime Chicago newspaperman who fancied himself a novelist—has anyone ever read Erik Dorn (1921) or Gargoyles (1922) or Fantazius Mallare (1923) or Count Bruga (1926)?—Hecht achieved his biggest success by collaborating with Charles MacArthur on the hit play The Front Page (1928). Even before the first talking pictures, when Hollywood’s need for writers would become desperate, Herman Mankiewicz persuaded Paramount to offer Hecht a contract, and then he sent his famous telegram proclaiming that “millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.”

  It was true. Hecht soon became the fastest hack in Hollywood, and he was paid accordingly. He spent only a week writing his first script, Underworld, and Paramount paid him ten thousand dollars for it. Of the sixty movies he eventually wrote, he once estimated, more than half took less than two weeks. His pay went as high as ten thousand per week. From Howard Hughes, he demanded and got one thousand dollars per day, payable at 6 P.M. of each day he worked. David Selznick, who desperately needed him to rewrite Gone With the Wind after filming had already started, paid him three thousand per day to salvage the project.

  While Hecht was churning out scripts—he once wrote, with different collaborators, four at the same time—he also wrote a daily column, titled Thousand and One Afternoons, for the liberal New York newspaper PM. For seventy-five dollars per week. This enabled him, among other things, to trumpet his own sense of Jewishness. He had, as he put it, “turned into a Jew in 1939. I had before then been only related to Jews. In that year I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes.” This was not a popular viewpoint. “The Americanized Jews who ran newspapers and movie studios,” Hecht later recalled, “who wrote plays and novels, who were high in government and powerful in the financial, industrial and even social life of the nation were silent.” In one of his 1941 columns, “My Tribe Is Called Israel,” Hecht struck back. “My angry critics all write that they are proud of being Americans and of wearing carnations, and that they are sick to death of such efforts as mine to Judaize them and increase generally the Jew-consciousness of the world. Good Jews with carnations, it is not I who am bringing this Jew-consciousness back into the world. It is back on all the radios of the world. I don’t advise you to take off your carnation. I only suggest that you don’t hide behind them too much. They conceal very little.”

  This last column brought him a letter from a man named Peter Bergson (he was actually Hillel Kook, nephew of the former chief rabbi of Palestine, but he had changed his name to spare his family embarrassment over his political activities). Bergson wanted Hecht to become the American leader of the organization for which he himself worked, a radical Palestinian underground group that called itself the Irgun Zvai Leumi. “They could have selected no more unqualified and uninformed and un-Palestine-minded man in the entire land . . .” Hecht wrote. “I disliked causes. I disliked public speaking. . . . I never attended meetings of any sort. I had no interest in Palestine.” Bergson was not to be denied. Hecht joined the cause.

  The Irgun was small and impoverished and strongly opposed by Rabbi Stephen Wise and all the other leaders of Jewish respectability. What Bergson had found in Hecht, however, was what the Irgun most needed in America, a brilliant propagandist. Bergson imagined that Hecht could mobilize Hollywood to raise millions of dollars for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis, but Hecht soon found the most prosperous producers solidly opposed. Mayer refused him; Goldwyn refused him; Harry Warner ordered him out of his office. (None of these magnates happened to mention that they had recently attended a private meeting with Joseph P. Kennedy, onetime cofounder of RKO and most recently U.S. ambassador to London, who had warned this gathering of about fifty leading producers that any Jewish protests against Nazism would only lead to increased anti-Semitism in America.) Hecht next went to see Selznick and asked him to serve as cosponsor of a fund-raising dinner.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with your cause,” Selznick said, “for the simple reason that it’s a Jewish political cause. And I am not interested in Jewish political problems. I’m an American and not a Jew. . . . It would be silly of me to pretend suddenly that I’m a Jew, with some sort of full-blown Jewish psychology.”

  It was wonderfully characteristic of Selznick, the former analysand, to start talking about “full-blown Jewish psychology,” but Hecht countered with an equally characteristic challenge. If Selznick thought he was an American rather than a Jew, would he be willing to make a bet on what other people thought of him? Hecht proposed that Selznick name any three people in Hollywood, and then he, Hecht, would call them up and ask them whether they regarded Selznick “as an American or a Jew.” If one single one of them thought that Selznick was what he thought he was, “an American,” then Hecht would retire in defeat.

  Selznick, an inveterate gambler, couldn’t resist. The first name that he chose was Martin Quigley, publisher of Motion Picture Exhibitors’ Herald. Hecht called him up and asked him the poisoned question. “I’d say David Selznick was a Jew,” Quigley said.

  The second name was Nunnally Johnson, the eminent screenwriter of such pictures as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and The Moon Is Down. He “hemmed a few moments,” Hecht recalled, “but finally offered the same reply.”

  The third name was Leland Hayward, the agent.

  “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with David?” says Hayward. “He’s a Jew and he knows it.”

  Be it said to Selznick’s credit that just as he paid off his thousands of dollars in gambling debts, he now put his name on Hecht’s fund-raising invitation. Suddenly Harry Warner changed his mind and accepted; so did Goldwyn. But when the dignitaries all gathered in the 20th Century–Fox commissary, they were appalled to hear one of the speakers, a British colonel who had commanded the Jewish Legion during World War I, criticize the now-beleaguered British for their policies in Palestine. “Sit down! Sit down!” Goldwyn shouted at him. Selznick squirmed. When the speeches ended, the Jews sat silent; the first donation was a modest offer of $300 from Hedda Hopper. Then came some more pledges, a total of $130,000, but only $9,000 of that pledged money was actually paid.

  Hecht would not be silenced. He wrote a historical pageant about the Jews, entitled We Will Never Die, to be performed in Madison Square Garden as a memorial to the growing number of victims of what was not yet called the Holocaust. The pageant began with a rabbi
in canonicals reading a prayer: “Almighty God, Father of the poor and the weak, Hope of all who dream of goodness and justice . . . we are here to say our prayers because of the two million who have been killed in Europe, because they bear the name of your first children—the Jews.” Kurt Weill wrote the music, Billy Rose produced, Moss Hart directed, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson served as narrators. A record forty thousand people crowded into Madison Square Garden to see two consecutive performances on a cold night early in 1943, and thousands more waited outside in the hope that it would be repeated a second time. Rose then took the production on a highly successful tour of Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood, but the pageant’s appeal for a Jewish army aroused strong opposition from more conservative Jewish organizations. Warning phone calls were made, pledges of financial support faded, and the pageant came to an end.

  There were more immediate problems. The Romanian government let it be known that it would allow seventy thousand Jews to emigrate if someone would provide a home for them and pay their transportation expenses. The State Department reacted as usual, pretending that the proposal was not serious, and that nothing could be done. Hecht wrote and signed a full-page ad in the New York Times that began with a jolting headline:

  FOR SALE TO HUMANITY

  70,000 JEWS

  GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS AT $50 APIECE

  “Roumania is tired of killing Jews,” Hecht’s ad went on. “It has killed 100,000 of them in two years. Roumania will now give Jews away practically for nothing.” The Jewish establishment angrily denounced the ad as irresponsible, sensational, bordering on fraud, and, of course, nothing was done. The Romanian Jews went to their death. “I saw,” Hecht wrote later, “that propaganda was incapable of altering anything around it. It might incubate in time . . . but it could only confuse the present or irritate it, or be lost entirely in all the other word noises of its own day.”