The authorities in Ashland took pity on the old man, after their fashion. They assigned him to easy indoor work, like mopping floors and cleaning toilets. He also served on a committee to make sure that all new prisoners knew how to use toilets. One of his fellow committeemen, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt, and also a fellow trustee of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund, was shocked to discover that there were Americans who didn’t know how to use toilets. It dismayed even Hammett, the creator of the tough detective, but prisons usually do provide surprises.
Some newspaper columnists thought it their function to add their insults to Hammett’s prison sentence. “Call him Samovar Spade,” said Walter Winchell in one of his characteristic efforts at wit. Inside the prison, though, the convicts gathered around the radio every Friday night to hear the broadcast adventures of Sam Spade. Hammett was still involved in litigation with Warner Bros., which claimed that its purchase of The Maltese Falcon back in the 1930’s gave the studio all rights to the name and persona of Sam Spade forever. For the time being, though, the disembodied radio voice of the tough young Sam Spade was still working in the service of Spade’s aged and imprisoned creator.
In the last year of Arnold Schoenberg’s life, a former pupil named Dika Newlin went to visit him in Brentwood and found to her amazement that the austere old man “had now discovered TELEVISION!” Schoenberg claimed that he had bought a set just for the children—his younger son was still only nine—but Miss Newlin was not convinced. “No one was more enthralled than he,” she observed, “as we sat in front of Hopalong Cassidy with our TV trays in our laps.”
Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia, hated his brother Jack, who was the president of the company, and Jack reciprocated his feelings as only a brother could. Jack even tried once to get rid of Harry by going secretly to see A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, who financed the Cohns and much else besides, to tell him that Harry was wasteful and irresponsible. Giannini smiled understandingly and then called Harry and said, “I think you should know who just visited me.” So Harry was not very receptive when Jack suggested to him that Columbia try making a Bible picture.
“Keep your nose out of my end of the business,” Harry said.
“I just thought we should make a Bible picture, that’s all,” said Jack. “There are a lot of good stories in the Bible.”
“What the hell do you know about the Bible?” Harry demanded. “I’ll bet you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.”
“I sure do,” said Jack.
“The hell you do!” said Harry. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer. Come on—put up or shut up.”
The brothers both put up fifty dollars.
“Okay, say it,” said Harry.
“Now I lay me down to sleep—” Jack began, a little hesitantly.
“That’s enough,” said Harry, grudgingly surrendering his fifty dollars. “I didn’t think you knew it.”
Jack was right, though, not about the Lord’s Prayer but about the commercial possibilities of the Bible. As the millions who used to go to the movies to watch Blondie or Gene Autry now stayed home and watched much the same sort of thing on the new television set, the Poverty Row studios like Republic and Monogram started going out of business. The soothsayers in the larger studios began to imagine that they could see salvation for themselves in vastness, gigantism. Blockbusters! A cast of thousands! The greatest story ever told!
This was, in a sense, a return to the beginnings, for a French version of the Oberammergau Passion Play was one of the first films that young Louis B. Mayer had shown in his first theater back in 1907. One of the big successes of the following year was Vitagraph’s five-reel Life of Moses. Hollywood returned once again to religious epics in the early 1920’s, after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921 threatened the fledgling film capital’s entire future. Cecil B. DeMille led the process of atonement with his spectacular production of The Ten Commandments (1923), which grossed $14 million on an investment of $1.5 million. He followed that with The King of Kings (1927) and The Sign of the Cross (1932), and lest anyone suspect that he had any commercial motives, he started each day’s shooting with a religious service on the set. Indeed, after the filming of the crucifixion in The King of Kings, the entire cast had to stand with heads bowed during five minutes of organ music.
Now, in this new time of trial, DeMille once again led the penitential procession back to the half-forgotten gold mine. He wanted to film what he characteristically called “one of the greatest love stories in history or literature, which is also a poignant drama of faith, the story of Samson and Delilah.” Some other executives apparently expressed skepticism about whether a biblical epic was what the supposedly more sophisticated postwar generation wanted to see, so DeMille had one of his artisans sketch a poster of “a big brawny athlete and, looking at him with an at once seductive and coolly measuring eye, a slim and ravishingly attractive young girl.” At a meeting of the skeptics, DeMille recalled, he displayed this picture and said, “That, gentlemen, is Samson and Delilah.” Everyone was impressed. DeMille hired as his protagonists the beefy Victor Mature and the aging Hedy Lamarr and produced a thoroughly ludicrous picture, only partially redeemed by the climactic scene in which the blinded Mature pushed against two pillars and brought down a whole temple. Whatever its faults, though, Samson and Delilah made a lot of money, and that inspired Hollywood’s seekers of inspiration.
Quo Vadis was not exactly part of the Bible, but it was sort of biblical. M-G-M had been trying for years to get a usable script out of Henry Sienkiewicz’s turgid novel about the early Christians. With Dore Schary’s encouragement, John Huston had devised what he regarded as “a modern treatment,” in which Nero was portrayed as a prototype for his “fellow madman, Adolf Hitler.” Louis B. Mayer was profoundly suspicious. He summoned Huston to his house for a breakfast conference, and since he almost invariably drew all his arguments from the good old days, he began telling Huston how he had taught Jeanette MacDonald to sing “Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life” by singing “Eli, Eli” to her. In Hebrew. She had wept. So Mayer now sang the same dirge to Huston. “Then he said that if I could make Quo Vadis into that kind of picture,” Huston recalled, “he would crawl to me on his knees and kiss my hands . . . which he then proceeded to do. I sat there and thought, ‘This is not happening to me. I’ve nothing to do with any of this.’ ”
Huston began casting on a grand scale, Gregory Peck as the hero and Elizabeth Taylor as the heroine, and then he went to Europe and started spending money. About two million dollars had disappeared by the time the differences between Mayer and Huston brought the production to a halt, and Mayer turned everything over to a man he trusted, Mervyn LeRoy.* Gregory Peck had dropped out with an eye infection, and Elizabeth Taylor had other commitments, but what did it matter? LeRoy hired sixty thousand extras and directed them by firing a series of pistol shots from a boom high over Rome’s Cinecittà studio. And he acquired more than fifty lions, all that M-G-M scouts could hire in all the circuses of Europe. Since he could never get these lions to simulate the desired carnage, he fell back on the oldest Hollywood traditions of fakery. “I wound up having the prop men stuff empty clothing with meat, so it looked like a Christian lying on the ground, and we brought the lions out forcibly and they ate those ‘bodies,’ ” LeRoy recalled. “I augmented that with close-ups of fake lions, which the technicians built, jumping on real people. It worked, although I never did get the scene exactly as I wanted.”
But how could he fail? He went to see Pope Pius XII and actually asked the Pope to bless the script of Quo Vadis, which he just happened to have brought with him, and the Pope “put his lovely hands on the script, murmured some Latin words, and then said, in English, ‘May your film be a successful one.’ ” It is possible that Pope Pius would have blessed anything at all that was presented to him under the proper auspices, but it soon turned out that he had a special interest in LeRoy’s project. “I like
the cinema,” the Pope said. And there was more. “By the way,” the Pope said, “do you remember a movie called Going My Way?” How could LeRoy forget the Oscar-winner as the best picture of 1944? And another Oscar for Father Bing Crosby playing a little boogie-woogie and singing “Swinging on a Star”? “I have a print of it,” said Pope Pius XII. “Don’t you love that scene where the priest takes a little drink?” So Quo Vadis eventually cost twelve million dollars but turned into what Huston called “another dreadful spectacle, catering to the audience L.B. thought was there. L.B. was right; the audience was there.”
And so, in the years of fear and blacklisting, began the age of pious epics: David and Bathsheba (1951), The Robe (1953), The Egyptian (1954), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Alexander the Great (1956), The Ten Commandments (1956) (by DeMille, again). It was also, of course, the age of sci-fi horrors: The Thing from Another World (1950); The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); Them, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The War of the Worlds, It Came from Outer Space, The Lost Planet, Zombies of the Stratosphere (all of these in 1953). But never mind—prehistoric monsters and biblical heroes were all pretty much the same, as were prehistoric monsters and Martian invaders of the twenty-first century.
Such films were inspired partly by Hollywood’s exploration of large-screen technology as a weapon against the lilliputian television screen. An inventor named Fred Waller devised a system for using three projectors to cast images on a curved screen, and in 1952 he and two partners (Lowell Thomas and Merian C. Cooper) astonished New York with This Is Cinerama. In a sense, this, too, was a return to the origins of the cinema. William Friese-Greene had patented a three-dimensional movie process at the turn of the century, and the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière attracted huge crowds in Paris to their projections of moving film on a fifty-three-by-seventy-foot screen.
Still, reinventing the wheel is the essence of show business. This Is Cinerama delighted audiences with a series of spectacles ranging from the triumphal march in Aïda at La Scala to a terrifying ride on a roller coaster at Coney Island. The show ran more than two years in New York and grossed nearly five million dollars. The trouble was that it was expensive to convert ordinary theaters to Cinerama. Once the possibilities of technical novelties became clear, other versions of the wide screen appeared: Paramount’s VistaVision, Warnerscope, Todd-AO, Vistarama, Naturama. The search for novelty extended even to 3-D, in which viewers had to don special spectacles to see lions jumping at them in Bwana Devil. And even to Smell-O-Vision, in which tubes behind each theater seat provided clues to the solution of a film called Scent of Mystery. The most successful of all these experiments was 20th Century–Fox’s Cinemascope, which used an anamorphic lens to spread out the projected image to nearly twice the previously standard width, and the first film made by this process was the immensely successful religious epic The Robe.
Beyond all such technical questions, though, beyond all commercial questions of the struggle against television (weekly moviegoing continued dropping from about sixty million to forty million during the 1950’s), the biblical epics represented a kind of self-portrait of the Hollywood studios in their decline and fall. “The epics were the ideology of the ideology,” as Michael Wood has written. “They were Hollywood’s own version of The Last Tycoon: flights, as Fitzgerald said of his novel, into ‘a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our time.’ . . . Hollywood was Egypt, and Rome, and Jerusalem. The ancient world of the epics was a huge, many-faceted metaphor for Hollywood itself, because . . . these movies are always about the creation of such a world in a movie.” And having created one of the great cities of the past, the mission of the epic was finally to destroy it. The great idol grandly toppled in Samson and Delilah; Rome itself burned in Quo Vadis. Though these films professed to acclaim the triumph of Christianity, Wood observed, “doom and apocalypse lurk around these optimistic movies, tokens of catastrophe surround these celebrations of success.”
“Hollywood’s like Egypt,” David Selznick once remarked morosely to Ben Hecht as they walked through the deserted streets at dawn. “Full of crumbling pyramids. . . . It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” First, though, everything must be torn down and rebuilt into something else. The mansion that Billy Wilder found for Sunset Boulevard was demolished in 1957 to provide a site for the new Getty headquarters office building. The Spanish hacienda built on Sunset Boulevard by Alla Nazimova in the early 1920’s, with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, gave way in 1927 to the Garden of Allah Hotel, with bungalows occupied by Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, John O’Hara, and other serious drinkers, and that gave way in 1959 to a bank. The former livery stable that Bette Davis turned into the Hollywood Canteen is now a four-story parking garage. The Mocambo nightclub on Sunset is a parking lot, and all that remains of the nearby Trocadero are the three steps that used to lead to the front door.
On the other hand, the nostalgia business has become very profitable in Hollywood. Musso and Frank’s still flourishes on Hollywood Boulevard, and so does Chasen’s on Beverly (try the chili, the guidebook says). Nothing typifies the efforts to institutionalize the past better than the migrations of the DeMille barn. A two-story yellow structure, it was originally built in 1895 on the southeast corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street, and Cecil B. DeMille rented it for Jesse Lasky in 1913 for two hundred dollars a week to make his first spectacle, The Squaw Man. Actually, he didn’t rent all of it, because the owner, Harry Revier, retained the right to keep his horse and carriage in one corner. When Paramount, the successor to the Lasky company, moved to a twenty-six-acre studio on Melrose Avenue in 1927, the sentimental executives took along the barn, which they used as a company library, then, in a characteristic progression, as a gymnasium, then as a set for the Bonanza television series.
In 1979, whether for reasons of nostalgia, publicity, or tax deduction, Paramount bequeathed the increasingly decrepit DeMille barn to the Hollywood Historic Trust, a branch of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and it was moved to a parking lot on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. There, the relic stood unused for three years while various interests argued over its fate. Universal offered to add it to the various props on view to tourists in its back lots, but preservationists opposed that as a desecration. In 1982, the Hollywood Historic Trust finally moved the barn to a “permanent” site across from the Hollywood Bowl and began a $400,000 project to turn it into a movie museum.
And what finally happened to all those people, all the characters in the drama of Hollywood in the 1940’s? A great many, including all the biggest bosses, went to their downfall and died, as any screenwriter could have predicted, rich and unhappy.
Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia in 1957, shortly after the stockholders of M-G-M voted down the last of his schemes to regain control of the studio. His last words to an associate were: “Nothing matters. Nothing matters.” In bed that night, though, he kept asking, “Is she here yet? Is she outside?” Each of his quarreling daughters insisted forever after that she was the one the old man meant.
Darryl F. Zanuck abandoned both his wife and his command of 20th Century–Fox in 1956 so that he could go to Europe with a young Polish adventuress named Bella Darvi. His successors at the studio made such a mess that Zanuck got the stockholders to vote him back into power, with his brash young son, Richard, as chief of production. The two Zanucks then quarreled, and father fired son, but the son and the discarded wife joined dissident stockholders in voting Zanuck into retirement. “I feel tired,” said Zanuck, who finally returned to his bed-ridden wife in Palm Springs, then endured five years of lingering illness before his death at the age of seventy-seven.
Jack Warner and Harry Warner didn’t speak to each other throughout the whole year before Harry’s death in 1958. The reason for the quarrel was that both had agreed to sell their shares of Warner Bros., but Jack reneged, kept control of the studio, and watched the shares rise t
o three times the price that Harry had received. The last surviving brother, Jack was seventy-five when he finally sold his holdings for $32 million in 1967, but he didn’t enjoy his decade of retirement in Palm Springs. “You’re nothing if you don’t have a studio,” he said. “Now I’m just another millionaire.”
Harry Cohn was still in charge of everything at Columbia when he died of a heart attack in 1958, at the age of sixty-six. It was raw and rainy on the day of his funeral, but a large crowd gathered to see the last of him, which prompted Red Skelton to remark, “It goes to show that the public will always come if you give them what they want.”
Sam Goldwyn suffered a severe stroke in 1969 and spent the next five years bedridden in his home, hugely obese, partly paralyzed, incontinent, staring into space, only intermittently able to speak a few words. At the age of ninety-one, he died in his sleep.
David Selznick kept hoping to make films that would glorify Jennifer Jones. More than ten million dollars in debt, he talked of filming War and Peace, then of filming the whole Bible. Then he finally cast Miss Jones in a boring, expensive, and commercially unsuccessful version of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1957). Eight years later, haggard and worn at the age of sixty-three, he was talking business in his lawyer’s office when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
Jennifer Jones suffered from depressions. Two years after Selznick’s death, with her own career in decline, she took a number of pills, telephoned her doctor that she wanted to die, and drove to a four-hundred-foot cliff near Malibu. Searchers found her lying unconscious near shallow surf; they revived her and took her to a hospital. Miss Jones married the millionaire Norton Simon in 1971, and now she is occasionally seen with him at a charity dinner or the opening of an art exhibit.
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