City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  Preminger then decided on Dalton Trumbo, also hacking under a pseudonym, who cared relatively little about Israel and still less about the niceties of authorship. “He showed me whatever scene he had just written,” Preminger said, “and while I worked on it he wrote another one, then did the suggested revisions on the first scene. Then I studied the second while he worked on a third, and so on. . . .”

  And so on indeed. So the story of the birth of Israel—or at least the version that M-G-M had commissioned—finally reached the screen in 1960.

  Judgments: Bob Mitchum (top) went to jail for 50 days for smoking marijuana; Ingrid Bergman, the beautiful nun in Bells of St. Mary’s (bottom left), was ostracized for romance with Rossellini while filming Stromboli (middle).

  11

  Expulsions

  (1949)

  The Naked and the Dead had been one of the big novels of 1948, so there were naturally people in Hollywood who thought that Norman Mailer’s saga of the war in the Pacific might be turned into the big movie of 1949. One problem, though, was that the twenty-six-year-old novelist wanted to write the screenplay himself. “We all thought movies were a great art form,” his wife Bea said later. “Now Norman had written the great novel, and he wanted to write the great movie.” Perhaps even more than that, Mailer wanted to assault the legendary citadel of Hollywood, to confront the great beast, the great Moloch, to be tempted by carnality and corruption, and to survive to tell the tale.

  Sam Goldwyn was interested. He wanted Mailer to write an original screenplay for him. Mailer, newly established with his pregnant wife in a two-bedroom house in the hills above Laurel Canyon, called for help. He wrote to Jean Malaquais, a Polish-French novelist who was then teaching at New York University, to come west and collaborate with him. The two of them went to see Goldwyn.

  “The living room was huge, lined with dummy books, and Goldwyn met us in his bathrobe,” Malaquais recalled. “The agent had told him that we—or rather, I—had a story, so it was up to us to do the talking. Goldwyn stood there making comments, all the while pushing his false teeth back in place, all the while speaking with a lisp. Then he told us to write a two-page outline. I refused, knowing all too well how things are done out there, and a few days later we got a contract for $50,000 to write an original screenplay, with Montgomery Clift and Charles Boyer in view. . . .”

  Their “original” idea was a weird adaptation of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Instead of a newspaper lovelorn columnist, their hero would be a dispenser of wise counsel over the radio. And there would be heavy philosophical implications. “Our hero, whose sponsor was a coffin manufacturer, gave ‘heartfelt’ advice to people over the radio, then went out on the sly to actually visit them,” Malaquais recalled. “Eventually he publicly denounced the hoax, upon which the audience came and destroyed the radio station. . . .” After a month or so, the two of them had finished about ninety pages. Goldwyn was not pleased. Once again, he called the writers in for a conference. “He came over to me,” Malaquais recalled, “and started to preach what a movie is supposed to be, lisping all the while: ‘Uth Americanth, ith in our hearth when we make a movie!’ He had grabbed a button on my jacket and was twisting it, standing there lecturing me, until it suddenly came off. ‘But when you Frenthmen make a movie ith dry and intellecthual. Good thentimenth must be rewarded. Bad thentimenth mutht be punithed!’ ”

  The project came to nothing, of course, and Variety dutifully announced that Mailer and Malaquais had broken their contract. The social life continued, however. “As for Norman, who was working on Barbary Shore,” Malaquais said, “he was still invited all over the place: he was Norman Mailer.” And he finally sold The Naked and the Dead, not to Louis B. Mayer, as he probably would have liked, but to Norma Productions, a small, new, independent firm run by Burt Lancaster and an agent named Harold Hecht. “The Naked and the Dead was such a strange, difficult book for film that Burt and I were the only ones in Hollywood interested in doing it,” Hecht said later, “so that’s why Mailer wanted to go with us.”

  To celebrate the deal, Mailer decided to give a party, to invite all of Hollywood to his hillside cottage to admire him. It was one of the earliest manifestations of his genius for publicity, more specifically of his genius for turning social difficulties into publicity triumphs. All of Hollywood accepted the celebrated novelist’s invitation, and all of Hollywood was surprised to find itself confronting itself. “It was a fiasco of a party,” said Shelley Winters, who arrived with Marlon Brando in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, “because Norman had invited everybody in Hollywood both left and right, and you didn’t do that in 1949. Adolphe Menjou was there snubbing Charlie Chaplin. Bogart was giving Ginger Rogers the fish eye. Monty and Elizabeth and Marlon were very uncomfortable.”

  It was worse than that. John Ford was there too, and Cecil B. DeMille, eyeing the enemy. Then all the enemies began arguing, and trying to prove themselves. “Marlon was wearing a borrowed tuxedo because he didn’t own a suit, and it was much too small for him,” Miss Winters recalled. “There was a black bartender there, and Marlon just stood behind the bar and talked to the bartender in his little suit. I was trying to talk to people, trying to be sexy and everything, but my dress was soaked. Monty was having a fight with somebody. . . .”

  In the midst of all this, Bea Mailer decided to be the determined hostess. She started erecting little tables and setting out a typically New York delicatessen buffet. “Big hams and turkeys,” Miss Winters recalled, “—stuff like Norman still serves at his parties—baked beans, potato chips. It was good but like a picnic, not elegant food like squab and quiche that was usually served in Hollywood.”

  Marlon Brando suddenly wanted to go home. There was too much political argument. “This party’s making me nervous,” he said. Miss Winters agreed to leave, but in leaving she took Elizabeth Taylor’s coat (“We both had the same blond beaver coats we’d bought wholesale when they were just coming back in style”). Mailer was dismayed to see Brando departing. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “You didn’t meet anybody.” Brando responded in kind. “What the fuck are you doing here, Mailer?” he asked. “You’re not a screenwriter. Why aren’t you in Vermont writing your next book?” Mailer’s answer evaporated in the general confusion. Not only did Miss Winters wander off in Elizabeth Taylor’s beaver coat but Brando took the coat of a young actor named Mickey Knox, whose car was subsequently found to be blocking the driveway. “Nobody could get out,” Miss Winters recalled. “Hal Wallis, Mickey’s and Burt’s boss at Paramount, called me at three A.M. and sent a police car over to retrieve Mickey’s keys. I suppose Norman himself had mixed feelings about being in Hollywood. . . .”

  Mixed feelings is probably an understatement of the emotional turmoil that eventually produced The Deer Park, with all its yearning for Hollywood’s riches and celebrity, and all its disgust with that yearning. Mailer saw his own sins as well as he saw the sins of his surroundings. “Out there in Hollywood,” he wrote, “I learned what pigs do when they want to appropriate a mystery. They approach in great fear and try to exercise great control. Fear + Control = Corporate Power.”

  The blacklist grew very slowly, almost imperceptibly. At the beginning, in fact, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that there should not be a blacklist. “We are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source,” the swayed and intimidated producers had declared after the so-called Waldorf Conference of 1947. “There is the danger of hurting innocent people. There is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. . . . We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”

  In announcing the dismissal of the Hollywood Ten, however, and in promising that “we will not knowingly employ a Communist,” the producers left wide open the question of who might be a Communist. And who could provide an authoritative answer to that question, and what to do in cases of doubt. And since Communists did not ordinarily proclaim their party membership, what could there be except
cases of doubt?

  FBI men kept coming around to ask questions. They couldn’t force people to answer, of course, but a refusal to answer became part of the secret record. Investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee also came around to ask questions, though nobody seemed to know when the committee might call new hearings (not until 1951, as it turned out). Various self-appointed experts offered opinions. American Legion posts offered opinions. So did the Catholic Legion of Decency and newspaper columnists like George Sokolsky and Hedda Hopper.* After a number of opinions had been proclaimed, the object of those opinions came to be known as “controversial.” Producers who worried about their financial responsibilities naturally tried to avoid trouble, and getting involved with controversial people could cause trouble.

  But what had anybody actually done? Who could tell? The producers, trying to avoid trouble, hoped that the so-called talent guilds, the unions of actors, writers, and directors, could help by finding some way to screen and purge their own members. Or simply some way to determine who was to be branded and who was not. The guilds themselves were divided. The Hollywood Ten asked the Screen Writers Guild to help finance their ruinously expensive legal appeals, and the Guild refused, but that did not mean that the Guild was ready to punish other writers who might or might not be Communists, or even to find out who actually were Communists.

  The age of the loyalty oath was dawning. The Los Angeles authorities imposed such an oath on all city and county employees in 1948, and the University of California imposed one in 1949, requiring the dismissal of anyone who balked. At the urging of the Hollywood studios, some people tried to clear themselves of suspicion not by taking any formal oath but by simply proclaiming their own purity and patriotism. “I am not now and never have been associated with any Communist organization or supporters of communism,” said Gregory Peck. “I am not a Communist, never was a Communist, and have no sympathy with Communist activities,” said Gene Kelly. “The only line I know how to follow is the American line.”

  On this matter of loyalty oaths, too, the Hollywood guilds were divided. At the request of Cecil B. DeMille, the board of the Screen Directors Guild passed a bylaw in the fall of 1950 requiring that all members take a loyalty oath. The Guild president, Joseph Mankiewicz, was out of town when DeMille persuaded the board to act. On Mankiewicz’s return, he called a full membership meeting to overrule the board. DeMille did his best to block the meeting, but the members finally assembled and overturned the board. Then, having won his point, Mankiewicz urged all directors to take a “voluntary” loyalty oath.

  Protestations of loyalty were often considered insufficient, however, since Communists, like witches, were known to lie about their beliefs. The only real proof of orthodoxy was the ritual of naming other past and present sinners. To avoid that test, some of the guilty and some of the innocent simply departed. Laszlo Löwenstein, who, as Peter Lorre, had graced such films as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, was only a mild Socialist, but he didn’t like FBI agents coming to his house to ask him for the names of subversives, so he returned in 1949 to the Germany that he had fled in 1933. Gordon Kahn, a screenwriter who had been one of the original “unfriendly” nineteen summoned by HUAC, responded to rumors of new hearings by fleeing to Mexico. “Life became a nightmare of suspicion and anxiety,” said his wife, Barbara. “Letters to Gordon had to be enclosed in envelopes addressed to a Mexican family in order to avoid FBI interference. I had to negotiate the sale of our home and most of our possessions while being hounded by FBI agents.”

  “Forty-nine, it was forty-nine,” said Donald Ogden Stewart, who was probably a Communist but who was also a funny and goodhearted man, the model for Bill in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and who now was asked to come and “answer some questions” at the M-G-M offices in New York. “It was suggested that I clear myself . . . and give names and so forth. And that was the end of that beautiful contract.”

  The blacklist didn’t really get well organized until after the 1951 HUAC hearings, when the committee included in its annual report for 1952 an alphabetical list of 324 people who had been named as Communists by cooperative witnesses. Private lists also began circulating. The American Legion drew up a collection of three hundred names, which it admitted had been drawn from “scattered public sources,” and which it sent to eight major studios with a request for “such reports to us as you deem proper.” Smaller private organizations joined in: Red Channels, Counterattack, Alert.

  The compilers of these lists could not punish anyone, for they had no such authority. They left it up to the Hollywood studios to expel or “clear” their own employees. Since the process of “clearing” thus defined the blacklist, the Hollywood authorities naturally wanted to control the process even before the blacklists were formally drawn up and publicized. Among the most assertive of these authorities was Roy Brewer, the triumphant leader of the IATSE unions, who organized in March of 1949 a group called the Motion Picture Industry Council to deal with the “Communist problem.” “Communists want to use the movies to soften the minds of the world,” Brewer told a reporter. “They shouldn’t work in Hollywood because we shouldn’t make it possible for them to subvert the free world.”

  Brewer asked other guilds and unions to send representatives so that his council could identify the subversives and clear the innocent. Among the council’s first presidents were Dore Schary and Ronald Reagan. In the fall of 1949, the MPIC joined with the producers and exhibitors to form the Council of Motion Picture Organizations as “a national policy-making authority.” The purpose of all this was to convince outsiders that Hollywood needed no policing because it was actively policing itself.

  Under Reagan’s leadership, the board of the Screen Actors Guild drafted a loyalty oath in 1950, and the following year it openly condoned the blacklist. It claimed that it would “fight against any secret blacklist,” but on the other hand, “if any actor . . . has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employer to hire him.”

  One of the oddities of the still unacknowledged but increasingly official blacklist was that virtually no top stars were permanently barred. Harassed and intimidated but not banished. People like Howard Da Silva and Gale Sondergaard were blacklisted, along with a number of successful writers and directors, but none of the most glamorous celebrities. One reason was that the studios had to protect their investments in these stars; another was that the stars who found themselves in jeopardy would do almost anything to save their careers.

  One of the most notable of these victims was Edward G. Robinson, whom the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities denounced in 1949 as “frequently involved in Communist fronts and causes.” This committee provided a fairly typical list of what had once seemed worthy ventures: “Affiliated with American Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born, a Communist front. Sponsor, American Committee for Yugoslav Relief, a C.P. front. . . . Cited as a supporter, who praised American Youth for Democracy, a Communist youth front. . . . Initiating sponsor, National Congress on Civil Rights. . . . Attended meeting of Communist front, Committee for First Amendment.” And so on.

  Robinson freely admitted all these activities, but denied ever knowing that the criticized groups were Communist fronts, or denied that they were fronts at all. He then began to experience a certain chill that he vividly described in a series of statements that he attributed to his agent: “Phase 1: ‘Hell, Eddie, I’ve read a lot of scripts submitted for you, and there isn’t one that’s right for you. Nothing but the best for you, Eddie, baby. You know that.’ Phase 2: ‘Business in lots of trouble, Eddie, baby. Postwar adjustment and all that crap. I’ve got something really hot cooking. Believe me, baby.’ Phase 3: ‘Eddie, it’s not so easy at your age. Character parts, you know. After all, you’re not exactly a baby, are you, Eddie?’ Phase 4: ‘There seems to be some opposition to you, Eddie. I’m looking into it. Whatever it is, we’
ll fight it with every penny we’ve got. You know that.’ Phase 5 (coming from the agent’s secretary): ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Robinson, but Mr. B. is out of town. I’ll give him your message. He’ll certainly call you at his earliest convenience.’ ”

  Robinson was not exactly blacklisted. He starred in All My Sons for Universal, Key Largo for Warners, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes for Paramount (1948); House of Strangers for Fox and It’s a Great Feeling for Warners (1949). But the parts offered him were fewer and smaller, and there were other aggravations. Hearst’s Chicago Herald-American invited him to speak at a ceremony granting citizenship to five hundred new Americans, and then the invitation was withdrawn on the ground that Robinson was “not acceptable.” Robinson protested to Hearst himself and got a telegram from an underling, apologizing and reinviting him. Dalton Trumbo asked for a loan for his family, so Robinson sent a check for $2,500, and that somehow became public knowledge and brought scoldings from right-wing Hearst columnists like George Sokolsky and Victor Riesel. Robinson and his accountants drew up an elaborate list of all the contributions he had made to liberal organizations, and he sent the whole bundle to J. Edgar Hoover, who had once sent Robinson praises for his portrayals of FBI agents. Hoover’s office sent a form letter of acknowledgment.

  “Hear me! Somebody!” Robinson cried out in his recollection of these years. “God in heaven, to whom do I turn? Call me as a witness. Probe me. Ask me questions. Swear me in. I will testify under oath. The House Committee on Un-American Activities refused to call me. There were no accusations against me.”

  Robinson persisted in his efforts to swear loyalty. With the support of Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, he got a chance to appear before HUAC late in 1947, and there he spewed forth his views. “I may not have been as good a husband or father or friend as I should have been,” he said, “but I know my Americanism is unblemished and fine and wonderful, and I am proud of it.” The committee listened politely and nodded and did nothing. Since the committee had not accused Robinson of anything, what was there for it to do? But the criticisms kept appearing in the press, and the job offers kept declining, and Robinson appealed again to HUAC as what he called “the only tribunal we have in the United States where an American citizen can come and ask for this kind of relief.”