The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  I was given a copy of “Screen Guide for Americans” by Mrs. Lela Rogers, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Mrs. Rogers, the mother of Ginger, is a pretty, blond-haired lady with a vibrant, birdlike manner. “A lot of people who work in pictures wouldn’t know Communism if they saw it,” she said to me. “You think that a Communist is a man with a bushy beard. He’s not. He’s an American, and he’s pretty, too.” The Congressional investigation of Hollywood, Mrs. Rogers thinks, will result in better pictures and the victory of the Republican Party in the next election. “Last month, I spoke about Communism at a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner given by the Republican Party,” she said. “My goodness, I amassed a lot of money for the campaign. Now I have more speaking engagements than I can possibly fulfill.” Mrs. Rogers is also writing screen plays. I wanted to know if she was following the “Do”s and “Don’t”s of the “Screen Guide for Americans.” “You just bet I am,” she said. “My friend Ayn Rand wrote it, and sticking to it is easy as pie. I’ve just finished a shooting script about a man who learns how to live after he is dead.”

  Other people in the industry admit that they are following the “Guide” in scripts about the living. One man who is doing that assured me that he nevertheless doesn’t need it, that it offers him nothing he didn’t already know. “This is new only to the youngsters out here,” he said. “They haven’t had their profound intentions knocked out of them yet, or else they’re still earning under five hundred a week. As soon as you become adjusted in this business, you don’t need the ‘Screen Guide’ to tell you what to do.” A studio executive in charge of reading scripts believes that Hollywood has a new kind of self-censorship. “It’s automatic, like shifting gears,” he explained. “I now read scripts through the eyes of the D.A.R., whereas formerly I read them through the eyes of my boss. Why, I suddenly find myself beating my breast and proclaiming my patriotism and exclaiming that I love my wife and kids, of which I have four, with a fifth on the way. I’m all loused up. I’m scared to death, and nobody can tell me it isn’t because I’m afraid of being investigated.”

  William Wyler, who directed the Academy Award picture The Best Years of Our Lives, told me he is convinced that he could not make that picture today and that Hollywood will produce no more films like The Grapes of Wrath and Crossfire. “In a few months, we won’t be able to have a heavy who is an American,” he said. The scarcity of roles for villains has become a serious problem, particularly at studios specializing in Western pictures, where writers are being harried for not thinking up any new ones. “Can I help it if we’re running out of villains?” a writer at one of these studios asked me. “For years I’ve been writing scripts about a Boy Scout–type cowboy in love with a girl. Their fortune and happiness are threatened by a banker holding a mortgage over their heads, or by a big landowner, or by a crooked sheriff. Now they tell me that bankers are out. Anyone holding a mortgage is out. Crooked public officials are out. All I’ve got left is a cattle rustler. What the hell am I going to do with a cattle rustler?”

  Hollywood’s current hypersensitivity has created problems more subtle than the shortage of heavies. Treasure of Sierra Madre, a film about prospecting for gold, was to have begun and ended with the subtitle “Gold, Mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” The line is spoken by Walter Huston in the course of the picture. John Huston, who directed it, says that he couldn’t persuade the studio to let the line appear on the screen. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor,’ ” he told me. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “You can sneak it onto the sound track now and then, though.” At a preview, in Hartford, Connecticut, of Arch of Triumph, attended by its director, Lewis Milestone, and by Charles Einfield, president of Enterprise Productions, which brought it out, the manager of the theatre asked Einfield whether it was necessary to use the word “refugees” so often in the picture. “All the way back to New York,” says Milestone, “Charlie kept muttering, ‘Maybe we mention the word “refugees” too many times?’ ‘But the picture is about refugees,’ I told him. ‘What can we do now? Make a new picture?’ ”

  A Msgr. Devlin, the Western representative of the Legion of Decency, has been on the set of Joan of Arc, which is being produced by Walter Wanger and stars Ingrid Bergman, since production started, and the services of a Father Doncoeur, of France, were enlisted shortly afterward. The director, Victor Fleming, who directed Gone with the Wind, said to me, “We’ve worked very closely with the Catholic Church, doing it the way they want it done. We want to be sure all these artists don’t get a bum steer.” I watched the shooting of a scene in which Miss Bergman, supposedly dying, lay on a prison bed of straw. The Bishop and the Earl of Warwick, her captors, leaned over her, and the Earl said, “She must not be allowed to die. Our King has paid too much for this sorceress to allow her to slip through our fingers.” “Cut!” Fleming shouted. “Say that as if you mean it,” he went on frantically. “She’s valuable property! She must not be allowed to die! We have to finish the picture with her! This picture is costing three million dollars! Put more feeling into it! She must not be allowed to die, goddammit!” Just before the cameras were started up again, Fleming remarked, “Gone with the Wind was more fun than this. It cost about a million and a half more than Joan.” Everything, apparently, used to be more fun.

  · · ·

  Most producers stick firmly to the line that there is no Communism whatever in the industry and that there are no Communistic pictures. “We’re going to make any kind of pictures we like, and nobody is going to tell us what to do,” I was informed by Dore Schary, the R.K.O. vice-president and winner of the Golden Slipper Square Club’s Humanitarian Award. He is a soft-spoken, unpretentious, troubled-looking man in his early forties, who might be regarded as one of Miss Hussey’s “modern covered-wagon folks.” In sixteen years, Schary pioneered from a $100-a-week job as a junior writer to his present position, which brings him around $500,000 a year. When he testified before the Thomas Committee, he said that R.K.O. would hire anyone it chose, solely on the basis of his talent, who had not been proved to be subversive. The R.K.O. Board of Directors met soon afterward and voted not to hire any known Communists. Schary then voted, like the other producers, to blacklist the ten men because they had been cited for contempt. He is talked about a good deal in Hollywood. Many of his colleagues are frequently critical of the course he has taken, and yet they understand why he has done what he’s done. “I was faced with the alternative of supporting the stand taken by my company or of quitting my job,” Schary told me. “I don’t believe you should quit under fire. Anyway, I like making pictures. I want to stay in the industry. I like it.” Schary is one of the few Hollywood executives who will talk to visitors without having a publicity man sit in on the conversation. “The great issue would have been joined if the ten men had only stood up and said whether or not they were Communists,” he continued. “That’s all they had to do. As it is, ten men have been hurt and nobody can be happy. We haven’t done any work in weeks. Now is the time for all of us to go back to the business of making pictures, good pictures, in favor of anything we please.” I asked Schary what he was planning to make this year. “I will assemble a list,” he said. He assembled the following out of his memory, and I wrote them down: Honored Glory (in favor of honoring nine unknown soldiers), Weep No More (in favor of law and order), Evening in Modesto (also in favor of law and order), The Boy with Green Hair (in favor of peace), Education of a Heart (in favor of professional football), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (in favor of Cary Grant), The Captain Was a Lady (in favor of Yankee clipper ships), Baltimore Escapade (in favor of a Protestant minister and his family having fun).

  “Committee or no Committee,” Schary said, “we’re going to make all these pictures exactly the way we made pictures before.”

  Richard Rovere

  MAY 7, 1949
(ON THE NORTH ATLANTIC PACT)

  The North Atlantic Pact was signed almost a month ago, but it isn’t in effect yet, and there is a chance that it never will be. That chance was somewhat reduced, however, late last week, when Dean Acheson announced a clearance-sale price on the lend-lease program for Western Europe. He said he thought that in the year coming up, the job could be done for $1,130,000,000, and that a good part of that sum would not be an immediate cash outlay, since we have a lot of spare parts in our military establishment that could be shipped abroad and be replaced here at our leisure. Up to the time of this statement, which was made in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, unofficial and semi-official quotations on the cost of the program had become more and more fanciful—fanciful, that is, if we assume that Mr. Acheson’s figure stands for the true cost. The earliest figures cited, when the speculation started a few months ago, were fairly close to the one named by Mr. Acheson, but in the meantime they had jumped a couple of hundred million every few days, and every time they jumped, another senator came down with a bad case of the shakes and declared that he was thinking of voting against the whole program, treaty and all, because we haven’t the money. One of the first to be affected by the bullish talk was Senator Walter F. George, of Georgia, a man whose devotion to the administration’s foreign policy has been equalled only by his devotion to hard money and double-entry bookkeeping. After hearing Mr. Acheson, the Senator authorized reporters to say that he was beginning to see things in a different light. Still, a number of people in Washington are wondering why we got all those high estimates in the first place. Were they really miscalculations? Or could it be that the highest ones, which were double Mr. Acheson’s estimate, represented the whole loaf, and that the administration, mindful of a certain proverb, is settling for half a loaf, in order to push the treaty through? If this is the case, the consequences, naturally, could be tragic, for a lot of grief has come to the world because of too great a reliance on this proverb. There is a third way of accounting for the disparity; the fact that the State Department waited until the figures kicking around the Capitol were running above two billion dollars before it put out its “All Prices Slashed 50 Percent” sign could lead one to suspect that it was playing the old trick of marking the goods way up in order to make the reduced price look like an irresistible bargain.

  If that was the game, it was a very foxy one, and up to now the administration has been just the opposite of foxy in the way it has gone about selling the Pact to the Senate. First off, it forgot Congress’s touchiness about its Constitutional responsibility for the declaration of war, and let the word get around that under the treaty we would be honor-bound to start shooting the moment Luxembourg, Iceland, Portugal, or anyone else ran up distress signals. Next, the State Department’s protocol people invited only a handful of senators to witness the signing of the Pact—an inexcusable oversight, for which only partial amends were made when, at the last minute, some of the more understanding guests were asked to shove over and provide room for the men who have the power to make the North Atlantic entente about as effective as the Alliance of the Three Emperors. Shortly after that, President Truman, apparently without realizing what he was doing, approved the proposal of Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, of the Council of Economic Advisers, that the money to rehabilitate the European armies be got in part by whittling down our own military budget—an idea that wasn’t at all what the President, to say nothing of the generals and admirals, had in mind. Dr. Nourse’s speech raised the hope in the Senate that the lend-lease deal could be worked not just cheaply but without cost, and it was up to the administration to dash this hope. Destroying pleasant illusions is a good way to lose friends, and the administration lost plenty. There were other blunders, too, and they came in such profusion that the belief was expressed in some quarters that the Pact would not be ratified, because it couldn’t get to the Senate floor in less than ten weeks, and within that time the administration would make enough blunders to insure its defeat.

  The outlook has improved during the past week, but not many people here would be rash enough to go on record with the statement that the Pact is now certain to be ratified. The general feeling, I think, is that if a rollcall were taken this week or next, there would be not more than ten or twelve votes against ratification. In the present atmosphere, the lend-lease proposals, which, of course, involve the House as well as the Senate, would probably carry, too, though the fight would be tougher and the margin of victory slimmer. But there won’t be a rollcall this week or next, and since nowadays epochal events can occur in the time it takes to finish an average Senate committee hearing, it would be unwise to predict that the current Congressional attitude will last into the approaching summer. Two or three new people’s democracies could spring into being by then; Stalin could apprehensively come to terms with the West, or even take Winston Churchill’s advice and die. (However, Ex-Ambassador Smith has returned from Moscow with the news that nonagenarians are common in the Dzhugashvili family and with the opinion, based on observation, that the Generalissimo is feeling tiptop and has many years of rich, full living ahead of him.) Developments of this sort could drastically affect sentiment in Congress, and so could a number of less dramatic ones at home—an increase of troubles in the domestic economy, for example, or a realignment in Congress because of an issue with no bearing on the Pact. If a lot could happen while the Pact is in committee, a lot more could happen before it comes to a vote. The Pact will probably get to the Senate floor fairly soon after it has been approved in committee, which means about a month from now, but it’s going to stay there a long time. The party leaders plan to allow every member of the Senate to speak on the Pact; this will be what is known as a Historic Debate, so no one is likely to forgo his chance to be heard, and heard at length. The supporters of the Pact are doubtless at work now dusting off ancient pieties to put into the record, and the opponents are doubtless improving the delaying tactics with which they held up the authorization of more Marshall Plan funds for several days beyond the deadline. There isn’t any deadline on this one, and the betting here is that we’ll still be at it on the Fourth of July or even, some wise money says, Labor Day. Historic Debates are interesting, but one disadvantage is that they give some people the idea of running out and making a little history while the debating is going on.

  · · ·

  It isn’t news to anyone that J. Edgar Hoover, who will this year celebrate his completion of a quarter century as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is a superb showman and a master politician. He has served under four Presidents—two Republicans and two Democrats—and has had seven Attorneys General shot out from over him in the course of achieving an endurance record unequalled by anyone else in high appointive office today. Somehow surmounting nature, which endowed him with a rather moist and commonplace personality, he has become for millions of Americans one of the most vivid and exciting figures in our public life. His career has been so replete with accomplishments that many of them have not received half the attention they merit. This was borne in upon me a few days ago when, in the agreeable company of some out-of-town high-school boys and girls, I went on a conducted tour of the F.B.I. headquarters, in the Department of Justice Building. This student group was one of the many that have come to Washington, from all over the East and the Middle West, this spring—as others have come in other springs—to spend a few days watching democracy at work and having themselves a good time. They make extensive tours in rubberneck buses, shake hands with their congressman and listen patiently as he tries to justify his ways to the teen-age mind, sit for a while in the House and Senate galleries, peer at historic documents in the National Archives, get some lessons in applied physics at the Bureau of Standards, watch paper money being made at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and, invariably, tour the F.B.I. headquarters. I had been told that by far the most popular feature of these junkets is the F.B.I. tour, so I decided to go along with a group and see what the s
how was like.