Returning to the attack nonetheless, Hecht wrote another powerful ad, entitled “My Uncle Abraham Reports.” It was inspired by a conference in Moscow late in 1943, at which the Allies promised punishment for Nazi crimes against various groups—the Czechs, the French, the Serbs—a list that somehow omitted the Jews. “I have an uncle who is a ghost . . .” Hecht’s ad began. “He was elected last April by the Two Million Jews who have been murdered by the Germans to be their World Delegate. Wherever there are conferences on how to make the World a Better Place, maybe, my Uncle Abraham appears and sits on the window sill and takes notes. . . . Last night my Uncle Abraham was back in a Certain Place where the Two Million murdered Jews met. . . . ‘Dishonored dead,’ said my Uncle Abraham. . . .” He made his report, then, on the Moscow conference at which all persecuted victims except the Jews had been promised retribution. Some of the dead protested, but Uncle Abraham was stoical.
“ ‘Little Children,’ my Uncle Abraham spoke: ‘Be patient. We will be dead a long time. Yesterday when we were killed we were changed from Nobodies to Nobodies. Today, on our Jewish tomb, there is not the Star of David, there is an asterisk. But, who knows, maybe Tomorrow—!”
“This ended the meeting of the Jewish Underground. My Uncle Abraham has gone to the White House in Washington. He is sitting on the window sill two feet away from Mr. Roosevelt. But he has left his notebook behind. . . .”
Roosevelt was reported to be upset by Hecht’s attack, but as usual, nothing was done. All the Jews who could be killed were killed, and when some of the dazed survivors managed to reach Palestine after the war, they were met by British barbed wire. Keep out. The Zionist establishment kept negotiating for the promised homeland in Palestine—successfully, as it turned out—while the Irgun did its part in violence, irresponsibility, warfare. It bombed civilians in the King David Hotel. It executed British soldiers in retaliation for British executions. And who knows what mysterious combination of negotiation and gunfire, high principle and guilt, finally persuaded the British to depart?
“Kike.” Representative John Rankin had used the word on the floor of Congress to describe Walter Winchell, “the little kike I was telling you about.” Time magazine published a story on the incident in its issue of February 14, 1944. “This was a new low in demagoguery, even for John Rankin,” said Time, “but in the entire House, no one rose to protest.” On the contrary, when Rankin came to the end of his speech, according to Time, “the House rose and gave him prolonged applause.”
The story made a strong impression on Laura Z. Hobson, who tore the page out of the magazine and saved it. Mrs. Hobson was a woman of considerable dash. As an advertising copywriter, she met Henry Luce at a cocktail party, talked her way into a job as a Time promotion writer, and soon became director of promotion. She also became the mistress of Ralph Ingersoll, the general manager of Time Inc., and then of Eric Hodgins, the managing editor of Fortune. Her first novel, The Trespassers, achieved a considerable success in 1943. A script editor at United Artists invited her to try writing a screenplay for William Bendix, on spec, then told her that the result was wonderful but “wouldn’t play.” Characteristically, Mrs. Hobson decided to go to Hollywood on her own to find out “what would play.” She borrowed two thousand dollars. She got a job at M-G-M, then lost it. Her debts mounted to eleven thousand dollars before she finally sold an original screenplay called Threesome to Columbia for exactly eleven thousand dollars. Columbia also hired her at $750 a week.
By this time, the Time story about Rankin calling Winchell a “kike” had become the idea for a novel about anti-Semitism. The only plot Mrs. Hobson could think of, though, involved a Gentile journalist being assigned to write a series of articles about anti-Semitism and finding—what? It all seemed rather familiar, preachy, dull. Then she met Michael Arlen at Romanoff’s, and remembered The Green Hat as one of the excitements of her adolescence, and that reminded her, for some reason, of an old anecdote in which some London matron supposedly said to him, “You sound so British, Mr. Arlen. Is it true that you really are Armenian?” To which Arlen, born Dikran Kuyumjian, had answered, “Would anybody say he was Armenian if he wasn’t Armenian?” To which Mrs. Hobson, born Laura Zametkin, daughter of the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, answered, in her autobiography, in italics, “Would anybody say he was Jewish if he wasn’t Jewish?” And then, like another Newton recalling the apple, she added: “Even now, as I sit here on a snow-quieted winter afternoon nearly forty years later, a thin ghost of that moment’s sudden charge runs along my nerves, and prickles my skin. It was the thread I needed, the story line to run through the entire book.”
Having stumbled onto the MacGuffin that would become Gentlemen’s Agreement—what would happen to an ordinary middle-class Gentile if he began masquerading as a Jew?—Mrs. Hobson suddenly began experiencing self-important sensations of guilt and anxiety. “Could I,” as she put it, “in good conscience, while we were at war, accuse America of harboring anti-Semitism and largely ignoring it?” She decided to ask some influential friends. She wrote a nine-page outline, “a sort of thematic statement of what my book might be.” It included the dreadful first sentence that she was to insist on to the end: “Abrupt as anger, depression plunged through him.” And then several key scenes, like the one in which his hero told his girl of his scheme of telling people that he was a Jew, and she immediately said, “But you’re not, are you?” She immediately added that “it wouldn’t make any difference, of course,” but the hero felt that “something had come across her eyes . . . the instant, the unnameable thing.”
Mrs. Hobson sent this offering to her publisher, Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster. She sent it to Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, to Dorothy Thompson, the columnist, to Harry Scherman of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Not for nothing had Mrs. Hobson been a success as an advertising and promotion writer. Cousins was the first to answer, with a telegram that said “SINCERELY THRILLED WONDERFUL IDEA. . . .” The others had doubts. Simon predicted that readers would not believe that a Gentile would pose as a Jew, and Dorothy Thompson fretted that “anti-antisemitism campaigns are very dubious means to overcome intolerance.” Mrs. Hobson knew better. “Abrupt as anger, depression plunged through him,” she wrote, again. “It was one hell of an assignment . . .” She planned to call her novel “Make the Tree Corrupt.”
There were interruptions. She worked on a number of unsuccessful film projects. She joined the American Women’s Volunteer Services and spent one day a week driving trucks for the navy. Not until the war was nearly over did she excitedly write in her journal: “Pages 16, 17, 18, 19 The Break-Through? at last ?? Chap I ended. Started Chapter II!!!!!” As in all such books, Mrs. Hobson devoted many pages to her hero’s discovery of the obvious. Assigned to write about anti-Semitism for Smith’s Weekly, Phil Green wondered about how to “find some angle.” He didn’t even notice when his own sister used the term “trying to Jew us down,” and then when he remembered it, he regarded it as a sort of revelation. He read Time’s account of Rankin’s speech and felt the appropriate indignation: “Shame for the Congress twisted in him . . . ‘Jesus, what’s happening to this country?’ ” He even read an unnamed novel that sounded rather like What Makes Sammy Run? and wondered why the unnamed Schulberg had felt “some savage necessity to pick a Jew who was . . . a swine in the movie business.” Not until the fourth chapter did the earnest Phil finally discover his great idea: “ ‘Oh, God, I’ve got it. It’s the way. It’s the only way. I’ll be Jewish. I’ll just say—nobody knows me—I can just say it. I can live it myself . . . Christ, I’ve got it.’ An elation roared through him. He had it, the idea, the lead, the angle. . . . ‘I Was Jewish for Six Months.’ That was the title. It leaped at him. There was no doubt.”
As the feverish style indicates, many exciting things soon happened to Phil Green. In fact, just about every slight that had ever been inflicted on Mrs. Hobson, every slight she had even heard about, she inflicted on her her
o. Casual conversations included obnoxious phrases like “little Jew boy.” A drunken soldier said, “I don’t like offishers. An’ shpecially if they’re yids.” A more genteel doctor praised a Jewish colleague who was “not given to overcharging . . . the way some do.” Green began to encounter the barriers. His reservation at a ski resort got canceled after he asked whether the place was “restricted.” His own research assistant confessed that she had changed her name from Walovsky to Wales in order to get her job at this liberal-minded magazine, but she protested against letting in “the kikey ones.” Green sternly answered that “words like kike and kikey and coon and nigger just make me kind of sick, no matter who says them.” Miss Wales became icy. So did Green’s fiancée, Kathy, who didn’t want him to mention his Jewishness at her sister’s party in Connecticut. They quarreled. Green’s son got beaten up in school. “They called me ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘stinky kike. . . .’ ”
It is a little hard to judge, after nearly half a century, whether Gentleman’s Agreement provided an accurate portrayal of anti-Semitism in the America of 1946. Despite an unavoidable distortion caused by the compression of many episodes into a relatively brief period of time, it probably did. One might think that the war against Nazi Germany would necessarily have changed Americans’ views of the Nazis’ most cruelly mistreated victims, but that did not happen, at least not until some years later. On the contrary, it was commonplace during and just after the war to hear that the Jews had been the cause of it all, that they had provoked it, profiteered from it, and avoided fighting in it. “During World War II . . . a change in the quality of anti-Semitism began to appear,” wrote Ernst Simmel, the psychoanalyst, in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (1946). “It has taken on the color of German anti-Semitism. It embraces an ever-widening circle of the American population, and the more it expands, the more irrational becomes the defamation of the Jews.” Late in 1947, Elmo Roper took a survey for Fortune and asked whether various groups were “getting more economic power than is good for the country.” Nearly 40 percent answered that this was true of the Jews. To a similar question on political power, about 20 percent said the Jews had too much of it, as compared to only 4 percent citing the Protestants, who actually did have most of the power.
And the anti-Semitic discrimination went right on. Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, the president of Dartmouth, not only admitted in 1945 that he maintained a quota system but defended it by saying that Dartmouth was “a Christian college founded for the Christianization of its students.” Though most universities were more discreet, one postwar study showed that Princeton, for example, limited its Jewish enrollment to 4 percent, that Colgate admitted only four or five out of more than two hundred Jewish applicants. The same system applied in business. Banking, insurance, steel, coal, oil, chemicals, aviation, shipping—all of these, according to the 1947 Fortune survey, remained solidly Gentile. This discrimination was not entirely peaceful either. In one brief period of 1946, nearly twenty cases of anti-Semitic vandalism were reported in Los Angeles, including the desecration of Temple Israel and the destruction of an ancient Torah that a refugee rabbi had brought from Berlin. None of these crimes was punished.
It still seems remarkable, though, that Gentleman’s Agreement attacked anti-Semitism purely in terms of derogatory phrases and restricted ski resorts, without the slightest mention of the fact that millions of Jews had just been massacred in Europe. It is equally remarkable that such a trivializing and conventional book should have been considered “controversial.” Looking back, Mrs. Hobson herself seemed a little puzzled by the general misjudgment of relative evils. “It seems inconceivable now,” she wrote in her memoirs in 1983, “that as late as 1944, the world at large still had only a limited conception of how far Hitler’s ‘final solution’ had gone or would go.” This was probably true of “the world at large,” and it was probably true of the Hollywood fund-raising that Jack Warner conducted with a truncheon, but it was not really true of everyone. It was not true, for example, in the White House or the State Department, nor was it true for the people who saw Ben Hecht’s full-page ads in the New York Times proclaiming “guaranteed human beings at $50 apiece.”
Perhaps precisely because Mrs. Hobson did unwittingly trivialize the disaster, reducing the unbearable reality of Auschwitz to the easily criticized vulgarities of social discrimination in Connecticut, Gentleman’s Agreement achieved a success that anyone but her own publisher could have foreseen. Richard Simon ordered a first printing of 17,500 copies, and before the book was even officially published, in February of 1947, he had to order an additional 40,000. Hollywood was one of the main reasons. Several studios bid on the galley proofs, and Darryl Zanuck bought the book for $75,000. “Gentleman’s Agreement . . . is bound to be one of the most discussed novels of the year,” said the New York Times. “In fact, it is already one of the most discussed novels of the year.” And the Herald-Tribune: “Mrs. Hobson is subtle but not gentle. . . . Her book . . . achieved a terrific emotional tension. . . . This story gets under your skin. It makes you think furiously about your own code, your own silence. It hurts.”
Zanuck announced that Gentleman’s Agreement would be his only “personal production” during the year 1947, an indication of the commercial weight he planned to put behind the film. His first and best biographer, Mel Gussow, even described it as “probably . . . the definitive Zanuck movie of the period in terms of subject matter (anti-Semitism), source (a best-selling novel), approach (a social situation studied through a human relationship), timeliness, controversy, and quality packaging. Seen today, it seems outmoded, but. . . .” But maybe it was outmoded in its own time as well. Zanuck, however, was perhaps the most eminent of Gentile producers, and what apparently struck many Jewish filmmakers as a subject to be avoided, dreaded, ignored, struck him as “timely” and “controversial.” As James Agee wrote about Hollywood’s early efforts to deal with racism, “Few things pay off better in prestige and hard cash . . . than safe fearlessness.”
Zanuck naturally wanted to win all possible credit for being so bold as to make Hollywood’s first movie condemning anti-Semitism, and it galled him that RKO had already gone into production with a low-cost thriller on the same subject, Crossfire. According to Schary, Zanuck wrote to protest. “We exchanged a few notes—” Schary recalled, “then a phone call during which I was compelled to tell him he had not discovered anti-Semitism, and that it would take far more than two pictures to eradicate it. The conversation ended with both of us not having budged one inch.”
Having failed to persuade Schary to get out of his way, Zanuck ordered full steam ahead on his project. He hired Moss Hart to write the screenplay. He hired Elia Kazan, who had just finished filming A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, as the director. He hired Gregory Peck, who had already demonstrated in Spellbound his remarkable gift for bewildered sincerity, as the sincerely bewildered hero. Kazan, too, subscribed to the idea that Mrs. Hobson’s novel was something daring. “Lots of rich Jews in Hollywood didn’t want Gentleman’s Agreement,” he said. “Don’t stir it up!” Kazan neglected to provide any details on which rich Jews in Hollywood said that “it” should not be stirred up, or what form their opposition took, and it is just possible that his own ambition to make controversial films inspired him to imagine more controversy than actually existed. When Kazan subsequently appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named everyone he had ever seen at a Communist meeting, and even took out full-page advertisements to explain and justify his past and present behavior, he cited Gentleman’s Agreement as “in a healthy American tradition, for it shows Americans exploring a problem and tackling a solution. . . . It is opposite to the picture which Communists present of Americans.”*
But what was the actual effect of Gentleman’s Agreement on the “healthy American tradition”? A survey by Irwin Rosen, published in the Journal of Psychology in 1948, reported that 73 percent of the people who had seen the movie acquired a more favorable attitude toward Jews (or said th
ey did), while a significant 26 percent became increasingly anti-Semitic. These somewhat ambiguous figures were further muddied by a control group in which 47 percent reported themselves favorably affected and 52 percent unfavorably. Despite its celebrity in its own time, Gentleman’s Agreement probably deserved Nora Sayre’s harsh judgment of its message, “that if only people wouldn’t behave badly, or use rude words, then ‘prejudice’ could be eliminated—if everyone would learn good manners, there would be no problem.” Or, as she paraphrased the reaction of Ring Lardner, Jr., after the original screening, “the movie’s moral is that you should never be mean to a Jew, because he might turn out to be a gentile.”
Gentleman’s Agreement does not appear very often nowadays on television or in the revival theaters, and yet one retains a faint but persistent memory of the very decent Gregory Peck repeatedly saying, at every confrontation with Connecticut country club society, that all good men must unite to defeat this “conspiracy of silence.” That was Hollywood’s silent commentary on the Holocaust. Uncle Abraham would have been a better witness.
So would Arnold Schoenberg. Sitting there in his little house in Brentwood, he understood very well the message that had come from the Warsaw ghetto, the message that Hollywood ignored, the message that Jews must fight for their lives, and that nobody else would help them in that fight. But Schoenberg was very old by now. Nearly sixty when the Nazis had expelled him from Berlin, when he had defiantly decided to reconvert from Christianity to Judaism, he was past seventy when the war ended and the full extent of the horrors at Auschwitz and Treblinka became clear. Still, even in his seventies in Brentwood, he had something that he wanted to say.
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