City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

  Excerpts from Ingrid Bergman: My Story by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess. Copyright © 1980 by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess. Reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press and International Creative Management, Inc.

  Quotes from Front and Center by John Houseman. Copyright © 1979 by John Houseman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Quotes from Bertolt Brecht’s poems from Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913–1956. Copyright © 1976 by Eyre Methuen Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Methuen, Inc. by arrangement with Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt. All rights reserved.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1986 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  CITY OF NETS. Copyright © 1986 by Otto Friedrich. Foreword copyright © 2014 by Glen David Gold. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First Harper Perennial edition published 1987. Reissued in 2014.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:

  Friedrich, Otto.

  City of nets : a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s / Otto Friedrich.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, c1986.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-20949-7

  1. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Social life and customs. 2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social life and customs. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)—History. I. Title.

  F869.H74F75 1997

  979.4'93—dc20 96-34574

  CIP

  ISBN 978-0-06-232604-1 (reissue)

  EPUB Edition © FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062333803

  14 15 16 17 18 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  * The sources for all facts and quotations in this book may be found at the end, in the Notes section.

  * Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, was signed and copyrighted by Hedy Lamarr in 1966, but she later filed suit, trying unsuccessfully to prevent its publication. Although the book was apparently based on taped interviews, her suit contended that the work produced by Leo Guild and Sy Rice was “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene.”

  * The Algiers script was officially credited to John Howard Lawson, the Communist playwright who eventually became the leader of the famous Hollywood Ten, but his script was never used. Producer Walter Wanger decided instead simply to translate the script for Julien Duvivier’s original French version, Pépé le Moko, which had starred Jean Gabin.

  * A Napoleonic lack of height was common among Hollywood tycoons. With only small exaggeration, Philip French wrote in The Movie Moguls: “One could have swung a scythe five and a half feet off the ground at a gathering of movie moguls without endangering any lives; several would scarcely have heard the swish.”

  * By comparison, Warners’ 1937 Life of Emile Zola never mentioned the fact that Captain Dreyfus, the victim of French anti-Semitism, whom Zola helped to liberate from prison, was a Jew.

  * Though Dies was the first chairman, true fatherhood of the committee might better be attributed to Samuel Dickstein, congressman for Manhattan’s Lower East Side, who began in 1934 to campaign for congressional investigation of pro-Nazi propaganda and subversion. While Dies was more interested in strikes in Detroit, Dickstein demanded “a standing committee of this House known as the Committee on Un-American Activities, which should watch every subversive group in this country.” The two joined forces, but when Congress approved the plan in 1938, Dies became chairman. Dickstein, perhaps because he was too abrasive, perhaps because he was a Jew, failed even to win a seat on his committee. Thus was its future course charted.

  * Samuel Goldwyn, after reading the galleys, telephoned Schulberg and reputedly offered him $200,000 not to publish the book, “because you are double-crossing the Jews.”

  * Thau was sometimes described as an M-G-M executive without portfolio. When someone asked Herman Mankiewicz exactly what Thau did, Mankiewicz replied that it was his function to watch from the window of the third floor of the Thalberg Building and to report any appearance of the north wind.

  * In an interview with Reagan’s wife, Jane Wyman, Rex Reed quoted her as telling him, “For ten years, I was the wisecracking lady reporter who stormed the city desk snapping, ‘Stop the presses, I’ve got a story that will break this town wide open.’ ”

  * As though to test this same capacity in his lieutenants, Cohn installed in Columbia’s executive dining room a chair that looked like all the others but gave a shock when an unsuspecting victim sat in it. Frank Capra once came in after a hard day’s work and unthinkingly sat in the chair, which promptly gave him a shock. “Oh, shit,” Capra said wearily, without moving. “That stupid son of a bitch Cohn and his goddamn chair.” Then Capra got up and tore the chair to pieces. Cohn subsequently had the electric chair repaired and restored to use. He gave it up only after one of his victims suffered a mild heart attack.

  * She achieved happiness of a sort with her third husband, Dr. Harry “Docky” Martin, a urologist, for whom she found work as a “technical adviser” on various films and then as a $30,000-per-year part-time staff physician at 20th Century–Fox. Martin was such a heavy drinker that he often passed out at parties. When somebody once tried to lift him off the floor, according to one much-told tale, Mrs. Parsons said, “Oh, let him rest. He has to operate in the morning.”

  * In the midst of all this, on the day of the San Francisco opening, Welles met Hearst for the first time, an accidental encounter in the elevator of the Fairmont Hotel. Welles said later that he was unable to resist introducing himself as the son of Hearst’s old friend Richard Welles. Then he invited Hearst to the premiere. Hearst said not a word and stalked off the elevator when it reached his floor. Welles impudently called after him: “Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.”

  * Loo, who was born in Hawaii, had actually been making films as early as Frank Capra’s Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), and he lived on to become a Kung Fu television star, but when he died in 1983 at the age of eighty, the obituaries all featured his World War II villainy. “He was known as the man who died to make a living,” said his daughter, Beverly Jane Loo, a New York publishing executive. “He was always either stabbing himself or committing hara kiri.”

  * As often happened throughout Hughes’s career, the mysterious accidents during Hell’s Angels inspired a lot of rumors. Lester Cole, a prominent screenwriter who later went to prison as one of the
Hollywood Ten, wrote in his memoirs, Hollywood Red, that the mechanic had not been given a parachute because the plane was supposed to pull out of its dive. The pilot took along a spare parachute and gave it to the mechanic at the last minute, Cole said, but the mechanic was too terrified to use it. “The pilot tried to put it on him when the plane was in a spin, a second plane photographing it all,” Cole wrote. “Desperate at three thousand feet, the pilot leaped to safety, unable to help the frozen-with-fright mechanic, who crashed with the plane in flames. (What a scene that would have made!)”

  * Miss Leslie was actually sixteen at the start of the filming and celebrated her seventeenth birthday on the set. Jack Warner, who professed a paternal interest in her career, had a new car wheeled across the set to be presented to her. “Enjoy it,” he said as he handed her the keys. After the photographers had recorded this tender scene, Warner departed, the keys were taken back, and the car was wheeled away. Miss Leslie never saw it again.

  * The standard Warners contract required the authors to transfer to the studio all rights “of every kind and character whatsoever, whether or not now known or contemplated, for all purposes whatsoever.” Despite this, Burnett, now in his seventies, began suing Warners in 1983 in an effort to regain control of his characters, but his pleas have repeatedly been rejected.

  * Raft eventually became so dissatisfied with the parts being offered him at Warners that he asked for an end to his contract. Jack Warner, who was sick of Raft’s grumbling, agreed to pay him off. “What do you say we settle for ten thousand dollars?” Warned offered. Raft, according to Hollywood legend, promptly took out his checkbook and wrote Warner a check for $10,000. “I was never very good with money,” Raft later explained.

  * Actually, Selznick had wired Miss Brown earlier that Miss Bergman’s name would have to be changed because it had a “somewhat unattractive and even Semitic sound.”

  * In her witty book Running Time, Nora Sayre captured the essential quality of Mission to Moscow by observing that “in no other film have I seen so many spinning globes. . . . Again and again, world leaders pensively twirl the spheres while asserting that peace (or war) is possible.”

  * When Zanuck walked out of Warners in 1933 and began organizing Twentieth Century Pictures, Nicholas Schenck invested $375,000 so that his brother Joe could be a partner, and Louis B. Mayer invested $375,000 so that Goetz could be one too.

  * A doomed decree. Feldman’s operations eventually became the powerful Famous Artists Agency.

  * “MacGuffin” was Hitchcock’s term for the seemingly irrelevant point on which a whole plot would eventually be found to turn. The writer Angus MacPhail ascribed the term to an encounter between two men traveling on a train to Scotland. One of them asked the other what his oddly wrapped package on the luggage rack might be. “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin,” said the other. “What’s a MacGuffin?” asked the first. “It’s a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands,” said the second. “But there aren’t any lions in the Scottish Highlands,” said the first. “Well, then,” said the second, “I guess that’s no MacGuffin.”

  * A classically trained Hungarian, Rozsa won an Academy Award for his Spellbound music, which he also turned into a briefly popular Spellbound Concerto.

  * In the midst of the war, the young Italian director Luchino Visconti solved all these problems by simply stealing Cain’s novel, resetting it in a trattoria by the marshes along the Po, and retitling it Ossessione (1942). M-G-M subsequently barred his film from the U.S.

  * Eric Johnston, who replaced Will Hays as head of the Motion Picture Association in 1945, was a cheery enthusiast who had talked his way up from door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman to president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Johnston was an avid delegator of responsibility, so he delegated responsibility for Hollywood’s self-censorship to Joseph I. Breen, an ardent Catholic who had played the same role under Hays. Johnston assigned to himself the role of Hollywood’s official oracle. He made many speeches in favor of free enterprise. He later organized the Hollywood blacklist.

  * For that matter, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., a screenwriter during these years, declared that the victim of Faulkner’s homesickness was Louis B. Mayer. Norman Zierold wrote in The Moguls that it was Harry Cohn.

  * Unfortunately for this tale, If I Die Before I Wake was published in 1938, and there was no paperback edition until 1962, so it would not have been easy for Welles to spot a copy in 1946. Actually, Columbia already owned the rights to this thriller, which it had bought as a vehicle for Franchot Tone.

  * No less characteristically, Mann included some coy pedantry that he considered a compliment to his teacher. He tried to transform the beautiful theme of the Adagio into a series of what he called “poetic little illustrative phrases,” which his translator rendered as “Heav-en’s blue, lov-ers’ pain . . . meadow-land.” In German, “meadow-land” is Wiesengrund, Adorno’s original name, which Mann said he slipped into his novel “by way of showing my gratitude.”

  * Or so Reagan said in his memoirs. In his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October of 1947, Reagan testified that Hutcheson had actually said that he “would run this Sorrell and the other Commies out.”

  * By Rankin’s standards, that was fairly mild. On an earlier occasion, he had denounced Chaplin as “perverted” and said he had “become notorious for his forcible seduction of white girls.”

  * The official estimates of Communist fund-raising in Hollywood were probably similarly exaggerated. HUAC claimed in 1950 that $926,568.36 had been contributed to eight groups that it said were Communist fronts. Murray Kempton, a reasonably fair-minded observer, has estimated that the Communist Party probably “would have been fortunate to net as much as half a million dollars out of its Hollywood fronts in fifteen years.”

  * Or so Dmytryk said in his 1978 memoir, It’s a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living. On the other hand, when he reappeared before the House committee in 1951, after serving a prison term for contempt and then deciding to cooperate with the authorities, he was asked about this same point: “Was there an agreement by all to resort to that general procedure of refusing to testify?” Dmytryk answered: “We were very careful not to discuss this in the group. We felt there was some danger that this might constitute conspiracy.”

  * Congressman Rankin soon provided his own evaluation of the visiting celebrities. “I want to read you some of these names,” he declared on the House floor, waving a copy of the list. “One of the names is June Havoc. We found out from the Motion Picture Almanac that her real name is June Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Another one here is . . . Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Eddie Iskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldberg [actually, it was Goldenberg]. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the committee for doing its duty to protect this country and save the American people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.”

  * Mocking the famous line “Come with me to the Casbah,” Murray Kempton observed that this, “next to Odets’ ‘We could make beautiful music together’ (The General Died at Dawn), may be considered the most permanent cultural contribution by a left-wing scriptwriter during the entire period.”

  * Goldwyn and Mayer had disliked each other for years. According to Gary Carey’s history of M-G-M, All the Stars in Heaven, “their simmering hostility, dating back to the days when Goldwyn was peddling Lasky–Famous Artists films and Mayer was an exhibitor-distributor, erupted one afternoon in the thirties when they chased each other around in the locker room of the Hillcrest Country Club, swapping insults and swatting towels at each other’s bottoms.”

  * One surprising critic was Charlie Chaplin. In a discussion with the blacklisted Alvah Bessie, who was trying in vain to sell h
im on the idea of filming a modern Don Quixote in Franco Spain, Chaplin referred to Crossfire as an anti-Semitic picture. “I asked him why he felt that way,” Bessie reported, and he said, ‘You remember Sam Levene, the way he played the part’; his face changed; he assumed the stance; and he gestured, ‘washing’ his hands. Inventing words to illustrate what he felt Levene’s interpretation of the role of the Jewish victim implied, he said obsequiously, ‘Why’re you picking on me? I’m a nice feller; really, I’m a nice feller . . .’ It was a shattering performance.”