The most extraordinary encounter of all took place in Danbury, where Lardner and Cole were sternly warned, on their arrival, against any attempts at violence. Cole told the parole officer that he had been “convicted for contempt, not violence,” but the parole officer remained suspicious.
“There are rumors already here in advance of your arrival,” said the parole officer, “that both you and Lardner are prepared for violent revenge if you can get away with it.”
“Who the hell could have said that?” Cole wondered.
“Will you swear,” the parole officer persisted, “that you are not planning some sort of revenge against J. Parnell Thomas, who is in this institution?”
It was no secret that the crusading congressman had been indicted in 1948 for padding his congressional payroll and taking kickbacks from his employees, that he had delayed the proceedings for nearly a year with claims of bad health, that he had finally pleaded nolo contendere and thrown himself on the mercy of the court, which mercifully sentenced him to no more than eighteen months in jail, plus a fine of ten thousand dollars. But Cole and Lardner had not realized that they and their grand inquisitor would be locked up in the same federal prison.
“He must have started the rumor himself,” Cole said. “Kill him? My greatest pleasure will be seeing him here with his own kind, petty thieves.”
“It’s true,” the parole officer said. “It was Thomas who suggested it when he learned you were coming here.”
Lardner was being given the same warning by another parole officer, and when the two writers next met, they both burst into laughter. “What luck!” said Lardner. “There’s got to be a way, a dozen ways, to make the bastard miserable.”
When Lardner finally saw the frightened congressman in the prison yard, however, he could not bring himself to speak to him. “He had lost a good deal of weight,” Lardner recalled later, “and his face, round and scarlet at our last encounter, was deeply lined and sallow. . . . Neither of us made any social overtures to the other.” Cole was more combative. He said that Thomas “scurried at least fifty feet away when he saw us coming,” but they finally met at work. Cole had been assigned to cut grass with a sickle, and that brought him near the chicken coops, where Thomas was engaged in scraping up dung with a hoe.
“Hey, Bolshie, I see you still got your sickle,” Thomas jeered from behind the chicken fence. “Where’s your hammer?”
“And I see just like in Congress, you’re still picking up chickenshit,” Cole shouted back.
So time passed, month after month, and in the last week of Cole’s imprisonment, he encountered a new irony. “That week was torture . . .” he recalled, “because the House Un-American Activities Committee . . . had started new hearings in Hollywood.” Every afternoon, at the end of work, the convicts would gather around the radio and listen to the news. Among the first witnesses was Richard Collins, one of the original unfriendly nineteen, who had collaborated with his friend Paul Jarrico in writing the ill-starred Song of Russia. Now Collins became, as Cole put it, “the first snitch, stoolie, squealer.” He named twenty-six people he had known as Communists, including Jarrico, and Carl Foreman, and Budd Schulberg, which prompted Schulberg to cable the committee that he was ready to “cooperate with you in any way I can.” Dmytryk, too, now wanted to testify, after serving his prison term in full, “that the battle for freedom of thought, in which I believed completely, had been twisted into a conspiracy of silence. . . .” The convicts sitting around the radio in the Danbury prison “looked at me and shook their heads,” Cole recalled, “some with pity, most with contempt.” One of them finally said, “What kind of a horse’s ass are you to get into that lousy mob of stool pigeons?”
Of all the beautiful girls who flowered in Hollywood during the later 1940’s, the most supremely beautiful was Elizabeth Taylor, so her wedding at the age of eighteen was naturally the social event of 1950. She was apparently still a virgin. On her sixteenth birthday, when she had yearned for a date, M-G-M arranged for her to be taken out by Glenn Davis, the All-American football star from West Point. They soon became “engaged to be engaged,” as she put it, just before he went off to Korea. When he came back, he gave her a necklace of sixty-nine graduated pearls for her seventeenth birthday. By then, she had become interested in a much richer young man named Bill Pawley. When she and Pawley became engaged, he gave her her first diamond, a 3.5-carat emerald-cut solitaire with two half-carat diamonds on each side. But he wanted her to give up her career, and George Stevens had just hired her to star with Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, Stevens’s version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. So there were scenes, and the engagement was broken, and Elizabeth Taylor looked very beautiful as the mindless heiress in A Place in the Sun.
Conrad Nicholas Hilton, Jr., aged twenty-two, was the son of the chairman of the Hilton Hotel Corporation, an assertive Texan said to be worth about $125 million. The engagement ring that Nicky Hilton gave Miss Taylor bore a five-carat diamond. A few people tried to tell her that Hilton drank too much and had a violent temper, but Miss Taylor’s parents approved of him, and so did M-G-M, which scheduled the release of her latest picture, Father of the Bride, to appear shortly after her wedding on May 6. The studio also announced that it was providing her with a $3,500 wedding dress, twenty-five yards of shell-white satin sprinkled with seed pearls and bugle beads, plus a train of fifteen yards of satin chiffon, not to mention a veil of silk illusion net, a creation that eventually occupied fifteen M-G-M seamstresses for two months. (What would that cost today, if M-G-M actually had fifteen seamstresses capable of such labors and a star worthy of them?) The studio even provided Miss Taylor with her wedding-night costume, a white satin negligee trimmed with rose-point lace. And almost as a matter of course, it donated the bronze chiffon dress for Miss Taylor’s mother and the daffodil-yellow dresses for her seven bridesmaids and her seven attendants.
All kinds of people sent all kinds of presents. A rich uncle named Howard Young provided a $65,000 pearl ring. Conrad Hilton offered a token 100 shares of Hilton hotel stock, then worth only $1,350 but increasing over the next thirty years to more than $150,000. The Gorham Silver Company promised a forty-five-piece silver service, on condition that it could photograph Miss Taylor pouring tea from the Gorham pot; it could. Somebody or other sent a mink coat, and another one for Miss Taylor’s mother. “I just love everything about getting married,” Miss Taylor said.
It happened at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, with about six hundred guests crammed into the church and about three thousand admirers pressed against the police barricades outside. Who was actually there? Well, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, of course, and Sheilah Graham too, and Spencer Tracy, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Esther Williams, June Allyson, Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Rosalind Russell, Greer Garson, George Murphy, Joan Bennett, and so on. And so on. “Just your usual monkey funeral shot, Johnny,” as Billy Wilder had said.
Miss Taylor had seventeen steamer trunks already packed for her honeymoon voyage to the Riviera aboard the Queen Mary. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were also aboard and invited the newlyweds to dinner. Nicky Hilton worried about whether he was supposed to wear evening clothes. (No, he was not.) There were worse contretemps ahead. Screaming crowds gathered everywhere Miss Taylor appeared in Europe, and Miss Taylor, reared and trained in the folkways of the M-G-M lot, spent hours signing autographs. Her husband seethed. Since he was even more spoiled and childish than she, he soon began taking revenge by drinking and gambling and insulting his bride. “I’m so goddamned sick and tired of looking at your face,” he shouted on one occasion. On another, he called her “a fucking bore.”
The honeymooners returned to Hollywood so that Miss Taylor could resume her career by starring in a movie called Love Is Better Than Ever, and after one shrieking argument too many, when Hilton told her to “get the hell out,” she did. The celebrated marriage lasted seven months. “My troubles all started,” Miss Taylor said in an
often-quoted confession to the press, “because I have a woman’s body and a child’s emotions.” No such easy exculpation could be offered by Nicky Hilton, the first of her six husbands. Or by M-G-M, which demanded the return of not only Miss Taylor’s wedding dress but those of her bridesmaids. “They didn’t even send someone to pick them up,” said one of the victims. “We all had to take them back to the studio ourselves.”
“Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car,” Raymond Chandler remarked to his secretary as they stood waiting in the doorway of Chandler’s house in La Jolla. The secretary tried to quiet him by warning him that the fat bastard struggling to emerge from his limousine might be able to hear what he said. “What do I care?” said Chandler.
The reason that the fat bastard had driven all the way to La Jolla to see Chandler was that the novelist’s new $2,500-per-week contract with Warner Bros. specified that he could work at home, so anyone who wanted to have a story conference would have to come to La Jolla to do so. Chandler hated such conferences anyway. He described them as “these god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business.”
The fat bastard didn’t greatly enjoy the jabber sessions with Chandler either. “Our collaboration was not very happy,” said Alfred Hitchcock, who always insisted on a good deal of collaboration with anyone hired to write one of his pictures. “Sometimes when we were trying to get the idea for a scene, I would offer him a suggestion. Instead of giving it some thought, he would remark to me, very discontentedly, ‘If you can go it alone, why the hell do you need me?’ ”
These were not the best of times for Hitchcock. The last film he had made before breaking away from Selznick, The Paradine Case (1948), had not been a success, either artistically or commercially. The two films he had then made on his own, Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949), had not done well either, and his longtime dream of independent production had ended in failure. Nor had he recovered in his first picture for Warner Bros., Stage Fright (1950). Critics now spoke slightingly of his coldness, his affectations and artificiality. But early in 1950, Hitchcock discovered a novel with a captivating idea: Two strangers meet, and one of them proposes an exchange of murders, an exchange of guilt, almost, in a way, an exchange of murderous identities. Each of them would kill someone whom the other wanted dead, and since neither had any motive or any connection to the victim, neither would ever be caught. Hitchcock bought the film rights to Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith for a trivial $7,500, then collaborated with a writer named Whitfield Cook on a sixty-five-page “treatment.” In trying to develop a full screenplay, though, Hitchcock ran into difficulty. “I couldn’t find anyone to work on it with me,” he lamented. “They all felt my first draft was so flat and factual that they couldn’t see one iota of quality in it.”
One of the writers Hitchcock tried to hire was the ruined Dashiell Hammett, but something went wrong in the negotiations, and Hammett faded away. Then, after several more rejections, came the almost equally ruined Chandler, who was to produce for Hitchcock the last movie script he ever wrote. “Why am I doing it?” Chandler wondered aloud. “Partly because I thought I might like Hitch, which I do, and partly because one gets tired of saying no. . . .” The liking did not last long. Chandler wrote a first draft while Hitchcock went scouting locations in the East. When the director returned, he read Chandler’s script with some dismay, dictated a lot of changes that he wanted, and then went east again to shoot the tennis matches at Forest Hills (the hero, who had originally been an architect, was now a tennis star, a more photogenic occupation). “Hitchcock . . . directs a film in his head before he knows what the story is,” Chandler complained. “You find yourself trying to rationalize the shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every time you get set he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.” And again: “He is full of little suggestions and ideas, which have a cramping effect on a writer’s initiative. . . . Hitchcock . . . is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or a mood effect. He is aware of this and accepts the handicap. He knows that in almost all his pictures there is some point where the story ceases to make any sense whatever and becomes a chase, but he doesn’t mind. This is very hard on a writer, especially on a writer who has any ideas of his own.”
When Hitchcock read Chandler’s second draft, he decided that Chandler had to be fired. He hoped now to hire Ben Hecht, but all he could get was one of Hecht’s assistants, Czenzi Ormonde (though Hecht may have helped too). She wrote a new script with another collaborator, Barbara Keon, and with Hitchcock’s wife, Alma, and of course Hitchcock himself. What did such jumbled authorship matter? Chandler had been right—Hitchcock did include the Jefferson Memorial in one scene, and the Washington Monument in another. And he did care primarily for camera effects. For example, the murder of the wife of Guy, the tennis player, whom the psychopathic Bruno strangled even though Guy had never agreed to Bruno’s bizarre proposition. Hitchcock built an enormous lens so that he could film the entire murder as a reflection in the eyeglasses dropped by the victim. Or that spectacular ending when the carousel spun wildly out of control. Hitchcock started by filming a toy carousel going faster and faster until it finally exploded. Then he enlarged the film and projected it onto a huge screen and then placed his actors in front of the screen. “This was a most complicated sequence,” Hitchcock later explained. “For rear projection shooting there was a screen and behind it an enormous projector lens and the lens of the camera had to be right on that white line. The camera was not photographing the screen and what was on it, it was photographing the light in certain colors; therefore the camera lens had to be level and in line with the projector lens. . . .” And so on.
The only “flaws” in Strangers on a Train, as Hitchcock later confided to François Truffaut, were those things that a less cinematic director might have considered essential: “The ineffectiveness of the two main actors and the weakness of the final script.” Hitchcock was too critical. Farley Granger was perfectly adequate as Guy, and Robert Walker was quite remarkable as Bruno. Perhaps precisely because he had so often played the role of the nice young man, shyly hungering for affection, the Walker who had emerged from the Menninger Clinic now became almost demonic as the mirror image of his past self, sly, cunning, implicitly homosexual, domineering, and ruthless. And insane. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it—all this roiled in Robert Walker in the last complete movie he made before he was done to death.
Chandler, of course, could see none of the morbid brilliance in Strangers on a Train. “The picture has no guts, no plausibility, no characters and no dialogue,” he said. “But of course it’s Hitchcock, and a Hitchcock picture always does have something.” And to another friend: “I don’t know why it’s a success, perhaps because Hitchcock succeeded in removing almost every trace of my writing from it.”
Walker’s former wife, Jennifer Jones, who had finally married David Selznick in 1949, now had a chance to star with Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s version of Sister Carrie, so she didn’t tell Wyler that she was pregnant. When her condition became obvious, she admitted to Wyler that she had tried to keep it secret in order not to lose the part. Still, the part was especially difficult now because the fashions of Dreiser’s times required tight corsets. Wyler tried, uncharacteristically, to be obliging. “I told her, ‘When it’s a closeup you don’t have to do it, I’ll tell you when we see the full figure,’ ” he recalled. “But she always had herself strapped in. Just watching her made me uncomfortable. She lost the baby after the picture. How much the strapping of her waist had to do with it I don’t know.”
Just a few months after the prison gates in Kentucky opened for the release of Trumbo, Lawson, and Scott, they opened again to take in Dashiell Hammett. At the age of fifty-nine, he was a wreck, gaunt, toothless, c
oughing fitfully. In the food line on his first day in prison, he fainted.
Hammett had not finished a novel for nearly twenty years, though he still made a living from the royalties on his past work. He had recently been trying to write something that he called December First, but he never finished that either. His old friend William Wyler invited him out to Hollywood to work on the film adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s play Detective Story. He enjoyed going out to dinner with the handsome young Patricia Neal, but he soon realized that he couldn’t write the script for Wyler, and he returned the ten-thousand-dollar advance he had received.
Despite all these signs of decrepitude, Hammett’s continuing political activities made him an attractive target for the FBI. The agency assigned a man to watch him. This follower reported that Hammett had attended a Communist dinner to denounce the racist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, and that he had donated a thousand dollars to the cause. He donated another thousand dollars at a rally in Madison Square Garden to stop the Korean War.
What really aroused the authorities, though, was that when the Supreme Court finally upheld the convictions of the eleven Communist Party leaders in the summer of 1951, four of them jumped bail. This bail of twenty thousand dollars each had been provided by a leftist organization called the Civil Rights Congress, and Hammett was one of four trustees of its bail fund. Federal Judge Sylvester Ryan, in whose court the fugitives had failed to appear for sentencing, not only declared the bail money forfeited but demanded that the four trustees appear before him to tell who had donated the bail money. Hammett, who had no idea who the many donors were, responded to this harassment by pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, because, as he told Lillian Hellman, “I don’t let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is.” But although the Fifth Amendment is supposed to protect citizens in situations like this, the courts (even the Supreme Court, eventually) held that Hammett was not being asked to incriminate himself since he was being asked only to serve as a witness, and a witness had no right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Hence, a sentence of six months in Ashland, Kentucky.
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