Just as Wilder on his own had picked Mae West as a grotesque Norma Desmond, Wilder on his own tried to create one of the most lugubrious opening scenes ever filmed. It was to be set in the Los Angeles morgue, with all the corpses talking about how they got there. Wilder not only wrote this scene but actually shot it. “The corpse lying next to me asks me how I died and I say I drowned,” Holden recalled. “And he asks me how can a young guy like you drown and I say, ‘Well, first I was shot in the back,’ and then he says, yeah, he was shot also. He was a Chicago gangster killed in Los Angeles. Then a little kid on a slab across from me says, ‘I drowned too—swimming with my friend off the Santa Monica pier. I bet him I could hold my breath two minutes.’ Some dame is over by the kid and she says he shouldn’t be unhappy as his parents will come and take him to a nice place. Then from way down there’s this great big Negro corpse and he says, ‘Hey, man, did you get the final score on the Dodger game before you got it?’ And I say, no, I died before the morning papers came out. . . .”
Brackett hated such things, of course. He said the scene was morbid and disgusting, but Wilder had a Vienna/Berlin sensibility, and he savored the macabre, and he saw Hollywood as a macabre place. That was why he hired Von Stroheim to play Gloria Swanson’s chauffeur (and onetime husband), and why he listened to Von Stroheim’s even more macabre suggestions (he wanted to be filmed lovingly washing out Norma Desmond’s underclothes). And that was how Wilder wandered into the famous exchange with his cameraman, John F. Seitz, who asked how Wilder wanted him to film the funeral of Norma Desmond’s pet chimpanzee, thus enabling Wilder to say, “Oh, just your usual monkey funeral shot, Johnny.”
Despite the air of frivolity, though, Wilder was completely serious about what he was doing. When Bill Holden made a Brando-style fuss about needing to know more about the character of Joe Gillis, Wilder countered by asking, “Do you know Bill Holden?”
“Of course,” said Holden, who actually had very little idea of how little he knew Bill Holden, an innocence that was exactly what Wilder wanted when he said, “Then you know Joe Gillis.”
Gloria Swanson was old enough and shrewd enough to see the strategy. “Wilder deliberately left us on our own,” she recalled, “made us dig into ourselves, knowing full well that such a script, about Hollywood’s excesses and neuroses, was bound to give the Hollywood people acting in it healthy doubts, about the material or about themselves. . . . The more you thought about the film, the more it seemed to be a modern extension of Pirandello, or some sort of living exercise in science fiction.”
It was all of that, but it also had a wonderfully Gothic atmosphere, an eeriness, and largely because of Miss Swanson, it had a quality that most Hollywood films lacked: passion. Norma Desmond really had wild feelings about Joe Gillis. When she couldn’t keep him, it was as natural to her as it would have been to Medea or Phaedra to kill him and then go mad. She went mad in a purely Hollywood way, of course, descending that stairway under the bright lights and announcing that she was ready for Mr. DeMille to photograph her, but it was all done with such feeling and such style that it was probably the nearest approach to classic tragedy that Hollywood ever achieved.
But there was still that awful beginning in the Los Angeles morgue. To escape the conventional reactions, Paramount decided to try a preview in Evanston, Illinois, not only because corporate statisticians declared this to be the typical American town but because it was the headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and therefore could be expected to take a favorable view of the makers of The Lost Weekend. That was a mistake. The audience in Evanston laughed and hooted and filled out cards offering a variety of insulting verdicts on Wilder’s masterpiece. Wilder told Paramount that Evanston lacked the sophistication to appreciate Sunset Boulevard. So the studio tried another preview, in a town that its demographers described as the most sophisticated in the country, which was, of all places, Great Neck, Long Island. They hated Sunset Boulevard there too. They not only laughed at it but booed it, hissed it, and razzed it.
Paramount officials reacted by delaying any further showings for six months. Then, by some process of internal revision, Wilder was persuaded, or persuaded himself, to try a new beginning. His new version was quite bizarre too, with the body of Joe Gillis floating in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool and then starting to tell the story of how he got there. At least, he was the only talking corpse in the scene, and audiences no longer got the impression that they were about to witness some perverse comedy. Released in the summer of 1950, Sunset Boulevard received the excellent reviews that it deserved, and it did well at the box office. The only audience that really disliked it was the collection of movie notables who assembled for its Hollywood premiere. Louis B. Mayer, still the head of M-G-M and thus still the king of Hollywood, not only denounced Sunset Boulevard to his entourage of retainers but shouted his hostility at Wilder.
“You bastard,” cried Mayer, shaking his fist, “you have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you. You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood.”
Billy Wilder paused for a moment, trying to think what to say, the perfect riposte. Then his instincts provided the answer.
“Fuck you,” Billy Wilder said.
William Randolph Hearst, who had once seemed so powerful in Orson Welles’s portrait of Citizen Kane, now lay dying. He was already well into his eighties when he began suffering from auricular fibrillation, a dangerous heart condition, and his doctors told him he must abandon his mountaintop palace at San Simeon. He wept as he was driven down the hill for the last time, past the zoo with its zebras and camels and its black panther. Hearst and Marion Davies settled into a relatively modest Spanish stucco house in Beverly Hills, with only eight acres of palms and gardens and only two dozen servants to take care of things. They also brought along twelve paintings of Miss Davies in various film roles. Hearst still loved to look at her in private screenings of The Red Mill and Peg o’ My Heart and When Knighthood Was in Flower.
Once, when Hearst not only financed all her films but ordered his newspapers to chorus her praises, Miss Davies was generally regarded as his puppet. After all, she was just a stammering seventeen-year-old chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies when she met this millionaire publisher nearly forty years her senior. There is a countertheory, though, that Hearst suppressed and destroyed her natural talent for comedy by insisting that she star only in sentimental romances. Still, theirs was a sentimental romance too, and if it was ridiculous for Hearst to fall in love with such a girl, to abandon his wife and children for her, it was hardly less ridiculous for her to love him just as loyally for the next thirty years. She didn’t mind absurdities. Making fun of Hearst’s magisterial figure, she referred to him as “Droopy drawers.” It was true that he gave her jewels and cars and even real estate, anything that he might think she might want, but it was also true that when he was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in 1937, she hocked everything on which she could raise money and presented him with a totally unexpected check for one million dollars. “I thought: Why have him tortured, for a miserable million dollars . . .” Miss Davies said later. “That was one thing I liked about W.R.—he had no idea of money at all.”
Despite Hearst’s pretensions, he was the most inept of tycoons. He made millions from mining stocks that he inherited from his father, but he lost millions in his publishing enterprises, his garish combination of sensationalism and jingoism. And though he sounded his trumpets on various crusades like antivivisectionism, his real power was so feeble that he was never able to win any political office, not even as mayor of New York. Droopy drawers indeed. Now, though his hands often shook uncontrollably and his weight had sunk to 125 pounds, he still sat in his wheelchair and dictated memoranda to his embarrassed editors, or told Miss Davies to telephone them in the middle of the night with trivial instructions.
On New Year’s Eve of 1950, Anita Loos joined a little delegation to troop over to what she called the “cheerless” Hearst p
lace in Beverly Hills to wish the eighty-seven-year-old chief a happy new year. Along with her came Hearst’s Hollywood gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, herself nearly seventy and failing, and Charlie Lederer, who was part of the entourage not because he was a witty scriptwriter but because he was Miss Davies’s scapegrace nephew. Before ushering them into “The Presence,” Miss Loos said, Miss Davies stammered a warning: “He can’t t-t-talk so don’t ask h-h-how he is. Just m-m-make conversation as usual—you know, b-b-be idiotic.”
“Trying our best to seem nonchalant,” Miss Loos recalled, “we filed into a large, sparsely furnished bedroom where W.R. lay inert. But as we spoke those large, liquid eyes shifted to each one of us. Their expression registered mild interest in such items as, ‘You’re going to love Louella’s new porch furniture, Mr. Hearst.’ After a few pearls of thought we filed out, vastly shaken. . . .”
Up until nearly the end, the Hollywood Ten seemed to be confident that the Supreme Court would overturn their convictions for contempt of Congress. The Court’s previous rulings appeared to guarantee that the Ten were entitled to rely on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. What ruined these expectations, several of them later said, was the death in 1949 of two liberal New Dealers on the Court, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, and their replacement by two relatively conservative Truman appointees, Sherman Minton and Attorney General Tom Clark.
In attaching so much importance to the personnel of the Court, the convicted men seemed to be ignoring the whole climate of opinion in the United States. This was a nervous, frightened country, frightened by the Soviets’ testing of their first atomic bomb the previous summer, frightened by the Communists’ conquest of China that fall. In October of 1949, the eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted of advocating the overthrow of the government, an advocacy obviously permitted by the First Amendment but now declared illegal by the Smith Act.
In January of 1950, the most spectacular in a series of spy trials ended with the conviction of Alger Hiss, the former State Department official, on a charge of perjury. The chief beneficiary of the Hiss case was the young California congressman Richard Nixon, who had played a prominent part in Hiss’s interrogation before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and who now decided to run for the Senate. His Democratic opponent, the former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, was an outspokenly liberal congresswoman who had voted to cut off all funds for HUAC. Nixon based his victorious campaign on the implication that Mrs. Douglas was a dangerous leftist. “If she had her way,” Nixon said, “the Communist conspiracy would never have been exposed.” And again: “Why has she followed the Communist line so many times?”
The Supreme Court decided in April, by a majority of six to two, that there was no reason to review the conviction of the Hollywood Ten. And so, although new appeals were immediately filed, the defendants had to start preparing for the inevitability of actually going to prison: humdrum details like how the mortgage payments would be made, and what should be told to the children.
Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, whose appeals served as precedents for the other eight, were the first to go to Washington for sentencing. The small crowd at the Los Angeles airport included Trumbo’s beautiful wife, Cleo, and their three children, who waved a homemade banner that said: DALTON TRUMBO IS GOING TO JAIL. FREE THE HOLLYWOOD TEN. On June 9, Trumbo and Lawson were both sentenced to one year in prison and fined a thousand dollars. On June 29, the other defendants received the same sentences.* Whatever sympathy they might have expected on this harsh judgment faded when the Korean War broke out that same week and President Truman promptly ordered U.S. troops to resist the Communist invasion across the thirty-eighth parallel.
To Alvah Bessie, a veteran of the Spanish civil war, the experience of being sentenced to prison in the capital of his own country was a little hard to believe. The Washington court itself, he said, “was impressive, as all American Federal courtrooms are impressive.” It was made of oak and marble, and an American flag stood behind the judge, and the court officers were all “soft-spoken, courteous and correct.” The white-haired judge, David Pine, “could have been type-cast by Hollywood.” The judge listened judiciously to the defense lawyers’ arguments for lenience and then judiciously rejected them as irrelevant. He asked Bessie if he had anything to say, and when Bessie said he did, the judge listened judiciously to that too. “Judge Pine smiled several times during the three minutes I spoke and nodded in agreement once or twice,” Bessie recalled, “and then he pronounced sentence.”
The still incredulous prisoners, none of whom had ever been inside a prison before, none of whom had done anything that could seriously be considered a prisonworthy crime, were then handcuffed and led through marble corridors to an elevator and then down to a municipal jail, quite different from the dignified courtroom. “The bullpen was filthy and crowded with men,” Bessie recalled. “The paint was peeling off the walls; the open latrine in the corner stank; the men—mostly Negroes—sat on battered wooden benches around the walls, for the most part apathetic, depressed, and disinclined even to ask each other, ‘What’re you in for?’ . . . Some Negro prisoners who were being booked shouted through the screening at us, ‘Hiya, Hollywood kids!’ ”
After two weeks in the Washington jail, the Hollywood kids were shipped out to various federal prisons. There were eight minimum-security institutions, and although the prisoners could request a specific one, the government followed its own arcane rules in reaching a final decision. Trumbo, Lawson, and Scott were sent to Ashland, Kentucky; Lardner and Cole to Danbury, Connecticut; Biberman and Bessie to Texarkana, Texas; Maltz and Dmytryk to Millpoint, West Virginia (there they met Clifford Odets, about to leave after completing a three-month term for contempt). Ornitz, already afflicted with cancer, went to the prison hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The prisoners’ physical circumstances were not at all bad. “Life here is something like life in a sanitarium,” Trumbo wrote to his wife. “The place is airy, immaculate and most attractive, with wide expanse of lawns, and views of green country-side in every direction. The food is good, the attitude is friendly, and the restrictions are not onerous. The regularity of food, sleep [and] work is most relaxing. . . . The sudden shucking off of all responsibility gives one a sense of almost exhilarating relief.” The prisoners were given undemanding work. Lardner became a clerk-typist in the parole office; Cole worked in the food warehouse; Dmytryk was a clerk in the prison garage; he also learned how to run a bulldozer, how to build a whiskey still, and how to make a knife. Several of the prisoners took up calisthenics and lost weight. Lardner started to write a novel (which eventually became The Ecstasy of Owen Muir). So did Trumbo, though he never finished his. And for every imprisoned writer, this was an opportunity, finally, to read War and Peace. Both Trumbo and Cole did so.
The most unusual aspect of the prison lives of the Hollywood Ten, though, was their confrontation with hundreds of men quite unlike anyone they had ever known in Hollywood. “Moving about in the population of the prison,” Bessie wrote of Texarkana, “you met inmates who were named Cupcake (short and fat), Bebop (Negro), Turkey (long, red neck), Snake (had one tattooed on his arm . . .), Mother (an old Southern explanation that need not be translated here), Heavy, Slugger, Eleven, Porky, Dimples, Garbage Can (who weighed three hundred pounds and got himself committed regularly so that he could eat free), Muscles, One-Eye, Short-Timer. . . . Kansas City, Double-O (eyeglasses), Tokio, and Buckskin. . . .”
These other prisoners regarded the Hollywood radicals not with the hostility that they might have expected but rather with a kind of disbelief that anyone would go to prison for political reasons. They knew and cared nothing about politics, but they disliked all American authorities. When newsreels were occasionally shown, the prisoners indiscriminately cheered both Stalin and Hitler. Many of these convicts were black—about two thirds in the southern prisons and one third in the North—and both sleeping and eating arrangements were strict
ly though unofficially segregated. The Hollywood writers, rather guileless in such things, did their best to make friends with the blacks. Occasionally, they succeeded. Cole and Lardner even managed to desegregate the cafeteria in their Connecticut prison.
Dalton Trumbo, once extravagantly well paid for his writing, became an unofficial scrivener for the illiterate and helped a number of imprisoned moonshiners to correspond with their families. He particularly remembered one convict named Cecil, whose letters from his wife, written for her by her daughter, told an endless tale of trying to harvest crops and collecting firewood and tending sick children. “His wife’s teeth were very bad,” Trumbo reminisced later, “and she’d been to the county two or three times about her teeth. And finally, there came a letter from her that said that although she . . . begged them not to, the county took out all her teeth. She said, ‘I haven’t got any teeth. . . . All I’ve got is gums now, and my mouth is all scrunched up. And when you see me you’re not going to love me any more because I am so ugly.’ In other words, this woman was just heartbroken. . . .
“So I wrote a letter in which Cecil said she wasn’t to worry about her teeth, that she would be pretty without her teeth, that as a matter of fact when he first saw her and married her, he never even thought about her teeth and didn’t remember whether she had any teeth or not—he didn’t give a Goddamn about her teeth. She would always be as beautiful as she was because it wasn’t her teeth he loved anyhow. A letter came back written by the daughter for the mother. It was a love letter. I can’t describe it. Just a complete, total love letter. It was very moving just to read it. . . .”
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