The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Kennedy would prove helpful to his Hollywood colleagues in still other ways. Following Repeal, like others in the liquor trade, Kennedy had become a legitimate importer, and an important new source of Kennedy wealth became the importation of a Scotch whiskey called Black Tartan. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Scotch became a very difficult commodity to obtain in the United States. While other American distillers experimented with something called “Scotch-type whiskey,” a very poor imitation, those who had connections with Ambassador Kennedy never had any trouble getting the real thing. It was said that the Beverly Hills Hotel was one of the few places in the country where, throughout the war, good Scotch was always available, and it was always Black Tartan. How it arrived, other than by diplomatic pouch, has never been made clear.

  Hollywood’s Jews reacted to Kennedy’s edict of silence on the subject of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in different ways. Sam Goldwyn, for example, rationalized that reports of concentration camps and mass murders were “probably exaggerated,” and others took this comforting view. But at least one man decided not to be daunted by Kennedy and to be vocal on the subject—the volatile screenwriter Ben Hecht. Born in New York of Russian immigrant parents, Hecht had become something of a Hollywood maverick and gadfly. In various articles for newspapers and in the Reader’s Digest, Hecht had begun to complain about the process of “de-Semitization” he was observing in the popular arts, and “the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, and movies.” It was a process, he claimed, that was designed to stifle any outrage over Hitler’s Jewish policies, and to minimize, as much as possible, the human connotations of the word Jew. In Hollywood, however, Ben Hecht was considered a little crazy, as, indeed, all writers were. (“No writers at story conferences!” had been one of Sam Goldwyn’s famous rules.)

  But Hecht’s protestations had brought him to the attention of a young Jewish activist named Peter Bergson. Bergson, a Palestinian, was a member of the Irgun Tzevai Leumi, the armed, anti-British organization that had been founded by Menachem Begin to aid Israel’s struggle for freedom. Members of the Bergson group had come to the United States to raise money for the Jewish forces in Palestine. Bergson himself had been a disciple of a militant Zionist named Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had been born in Odessa but grew up in Italy, where he had been strongly influenced by the risorgimento. In Palestine, Jabotinsky had organized a Jewish legion, which had done a great deal to bolster Jewish morale, but which had come on the scene too late to do much damage to the Turks or to dislodge the British presence. Jabotinsky was convinced that Jewish armed forces were essential to the creation of a Jewish state, much to the displeasure of more conservative Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann and Louis Brandeis. The trouble was that Zionists were divided as to priorities. Some felt that the creation of the State of Israel should come first, in order to give Europe’s Jews a place to which to emigrate. Others felt that the more pressing task was saving Jewish lives at any cost.

  Early in 1940, Jabotinsky came to the United States, and before a cheering audience of thousands of Jews at Madison Square Garden, urged that the only solution to the plight of Europe’s Jews was the creation of a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies as an independent unit, like the Free French. Such an army, Jabotinsky asserted, would put the lie forever to the claim that Jews made poor soldiers. Though Jabotinsky thrilled his audience in New York, the British Foreign Office was less pleased with his crusade. In London, it was feared—with some justification, as it turned out—that what Jabotinsky really had in mind was a Jewish brigade formed, trained, paid for, and equipped by Britain, which would later be used to seize Palestine from British guardianship. Already, in Palestine, the British had enacted a number of anti-Semitic laws. For one thing, it had been stipulated that only one Jew could volunteer for His Majesty’s army for each Arab who enlisted. Since no Arabs were joining, this meant that no Jews could, either. In London, Jabotinsky had been labeled a “Jewish Fascist.” A few months after his Madison Square Garden appearance, however, Jabotinsky died of a heart attack. The banner for a Jewish army was taken up by Peter Bergson.

  Sparked by Ben Hecht’s articles, Bergson contacted Hecht and met with him in New York, and immediately asked him to be the American leader of the great cause. Funds were needed, not only for the Jewish army but also to mount an extensive campaign of demonstrations and newspaper advertisements to alert the American public to the plight of Europe’s Jews. Some of the richest Jews in America, Bergson pointed out, were in Hollywood, and Hecht, with all his “powerful connections” in the movie capital, could surely and with ease extract “millions” from the Jewish moguls there. Bergson, of course, had a rather unrealistic grasp of Hecht’s standing in the Hollywood community. Hecht was a mere writer, which fact alone placed him close to the bottom of the Hollywood pecking order. Furthermore, in 1940, Hecht was struggling with a reputation for “unreliability,” and was then seriously on the outs with at least two important producers, for allegedly having botched a rewrite job on a film called Lullaby. Also, Bergson was probably overestimating the wealth of the studio heads. Though they paid themselves huge salaries and lived like kings, most, like Sam Goldwyn, were at the same time heavily in debt to New York and California banks.

  Still, flattery has always been an important means of persuasion, and no doubt Hecht was delighted to hear from Bergson that he was a figure of such importance. Without hesitation, Hecht accepted the chairmanship of the Jewish army cause and, early in 1941, headed for the West Coast to press his cause with the producers.

  The initial response was far from encouraging. In fact, it was loud and angry. Harry Warner, for one, ordered Hecht out of his office and threatened to call the police. The general reaction was: was Ben Hecht out of his mind? Jews fighting as Jews? If Jews wanted to fight, they could fight as Americans or Englishmen. If the British weren’t allowing the Palestinian Jews to fight, should American Jews tell a great nation like Britain how to run a war? If the Hollywood studio heads criticized the British, with whose ordeal everyone in America sympathized, the Jews would be hated even more. Not mentioned was the matter of Joe Kennedy, whose covert operations with London promised a means of drawing more movie receipts out of British escrow, and who had made it perfectly clear that Hollywood’s Jews should maintain as low an anti-Hitler profile as possible. It was practically a matter of United States foreign policy. Yes, Hecht found, Jews were always willing to help other Jews in trouble, but not to help Jews make trouble. He called on twenty different studio heads, including Mayer and Goldwyn, but the response to his campaign was uniformly and resoundingly negative.

  Wearily, Hecht took up the matter with his friends, the director Ernst Lubitsch, the only Hollywood Jew who seemed remotely supportive of Hecht’s position. After Hecht recited his litany of failures with one powerful man after another, Lubitsch expressed surprise that Hecht had not contacted David O. Selznick, who was by then one of the mightiest men in town. Selznick was still riding on the crest of his 1939 hit, Gone with the Wind, which was threatening to become one of the biggest grossers in film history. Himself the son of a pioneer producer, Lewis Selznick, David Selznick had also made the closest thing to a Hollywood dynastic marriage, to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene. Now, in the wake of such successes, David Selznick might be the one man with the courage of his convictions; might be willing to stand up and be counted as a Jew. If, Lubitsch pointed out, someone of David Selznick’s stature could be persuaded to sign a telegram as cosponsor, with Hecht, of a rally for the cause of a Jewish army, then everyone in Hollywood—stars, directors, studio heads, the press—would turn out for it. In Hollywood, an invitation from Selznick was a command. Ben Hecht related what happened in his memoirs:

  I called on David the next day and was happy to find there was no cringing stowaway in my friend. Nevertheless, he was full of arguments. They were not the arguments of a Jew, but of a non-Jew.

  “I don’t want anything to do with your c
ause,” said David, “for the simple reason that it’s a Jewish political cause. And I am not interested in Jewish political problems. I’m an American and not a Jew. I’m interested in this war as an American. It would be silly of me to pretend suddenly that I’m a Jew, with some sort of full-blown Jewish psychology.”

  “If I can prove you are a Jew, David,” I said, “will you sign the telegram as cosponsor with me?”

  “How are you going to prove it?” he asked.

  “I’ll call up any three people you name,” I said, “and ask them the following question—What would you call David O. Selznick, an American or a Jew? If any of the three answers that he’d call you an American, you win. Otherwise, you sign the telegram.”

  David agreed to the test and picked out three names. I called them with David eavesdropping on an extension.

  Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Exhibitors’ Herald, answered my question promptly.

  “I’d say David Selznick was a Jew,” he said.

  Nunnally Johnson hemmed a few moments but finally offered the same reply. Leland Hayward answered, “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with David? He’s a Jew and he knows it.”

  As Lubitsch had predicted, with David Selznick’s name at the bottom of the telegram along with Hecht’s, acceptances to the Jewish army rally poured in from all over town. Sam Goldwyn wired back immediately to “accept with pleasure this worthy cause,” and then spent several hours with his wife, fussing over what she should wear to the event—whether she should “dress rich,” or “dress poor.” The Hecht-Selznick telegram seemed to find even Harry Warner in a more receptive mood, and even though he had ordered Hecht ejected from his office a few weeks earlier when the same subject had been broached, he now replied that he would be absolutely delighted to attend. So did Charlie Chaplin, which was an even greater surprise. Chaplin had always avoided attending anything that smacked of being a “Jewish affair,” lest he give credence to the rumor, which had persisted for years, that he was a crypto-Jew. The magical name of Selznick had done the trick.

  The rally was held in the commissary of Twentieth Century–Fox on a balmy spring night in 1941. The first speaker was Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, who had dined earlier at the Lakeview Country Club while his California hosts for the evening waited outside—in accordance with the restricted club’s policy that no Jews could be admitted to the dining room. Pepper, in silver tones, spoke warmly of the virtues and culture of Jews and their role in history but, to the disappointment of Hecht and Peter Bergson, failed to touch on the subject of a Jewish army. Next on the dais was Colonel John H. Patterson, DSO, of the British army, who, during World War I, had commanded the Jewish Legion when it crossed the Red Sea and entered Palestine. Colonel Patterson, in full uniform and emblazoned with medals and decorations, was an imposing figure, and as he rose to speak, he was given a standing ovation as befitted a true British hero on a night when the well-being of Britain was foremost in every American’s thoughts.

  As the colonel began developing his remarks, however, there were looks of confusion and distress among his audience. He began by extolling the bravery of the Jewish Legion and of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He then turned to a detailed account of how Jabotinsky had been mistreated by the British. The British, the good colonel went on to say, were basically anti-Semites, and after the Jewish Legion had bravely entered Palestine, Britain had tried to degrade the legion to a mere labor battalion. He went on to cite instance after instance of British foul play and anti-Semitism, and from there he moved to the subject of the British pledge to the Jews to make Palestine their homeland. The British were actually intending to do nothing of the kind, the colonel asserted. Instead, under the guise of policing and protecting the land, they were preparing to take over Palestine and drive the Jews out. On and on went Colonel Patterson, denouncing the treacherous, duplicitous, perfidious British—his own countrymen and country!—and the British hatred of the Jews.

  Of course there was more than a little truth in what the colonel was saying, and he may have supposed that his obvious philo-Semitism would win him a sympathetic audience. But his timing could not have been worse. Though America had not yet entered the war, mere was no question of which side Americans would fight for, if and when it did. Earlier in the year, President Roosevelt had proposed the Lend-Lease program to aid Britain and its allies in the struggle against the Axis powers. Colonel Patterson’s audience could not believe its ears. No one had been remotely prepared for anything like this. It was all right for the colonel to love and admire the Jews—but at the expense of America’s best friend? It was unthinkable, particularly tonight, while the British were undergoing what Churchill would call their finest hour. Now was the time to forgive Britain for its sins of commission and omission in the past. Suddenly there were boos and catcalls from the audience. Sam Goldwyn rose to his feet and commanded the speaker to “sit down! Sit down!” A number of people headed for the door—at least one to place a telephone call to the FBI to report the outrageous goings-on at the Fox commissary—but still the speaker continued, laying bare more and more examples of the blackness of the British soul. When he finally concluded, there was a stunned silence among what remained of the audience, and no applause. Hecht and Bergson fidgeted in their seats, and David Selznick threw his cohost a murderous look. He had been right. It was a time when Jews wished to be Americans first, Jews second.

  There were more speakers on the program, including Burgess Meredith, Peter Bergson, and Hecht, each of whom did his best to salvage what was left of the evening. When the speeches were over, there was general confusion in the commissary until one clear voice rose above the audience. It belonged to, of all people, Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist, who said crisply, “We’re here to contribute to a cause. I’ll start the contributions with a check for three hundred dollars.” And Miss Hopper was not even Jewish. Immediately the remaining movie moguls, not to be outdone by a woman and a goy at that, began pledging contributions. These ranged from a hundred dollars up to five thousand dollars—though Hecht was somewhat sorry to notice that among the five-thousand-dollar pledgers were men like Gregory Ratoff, Sam Spiegel, and one or two others who were known at the time to be in a state of questionable solvency. Nonetheless, in the space of an hour, $130,000 had been pledged.

  It was not the “millions” Bergson had hoped for, of course, nor was it sufficient to finance an army. But it did seem sufficient to make the evening a moderate success. In the weeks that followed, however, when Hecht and his committee attempted to get the movie men to make good on their pledges, the true state of affairs was revealed. Many reneged. In the end, only nine thousand dollars was collected in cash, not enough for a full-page ad in the New York Times.

  In Yiddish, the expression is sha-sha, which can be loosely translated as hush-hush, don’t say it. In the early months of 1941 America was whipping itself into a near-hysterical frenzy of patriotism, and any sentiments that were not profoundly and resoundingly pro-American came across as disloyal or even treasonous. Just a few months earlier, the America First Committee had formally announced its existence—a curious mixture of people who traditionally feared “foreign entanglements,” along with political radicals and pacifists, and some who were probably secretly, if not openly, pro-German. The most celebrated America Firster was the all-American-boy hero from America’s heartland, Charles A. Lindbergh, who on September 14 of that year would make a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, that certainly sounded like anti-Semitism. So this was not the time to stir up Jewish political causes. It was sha-sha time, not for Jews themselves, but for Jewishness.

  In Hollywood, there was particular reason for fear. Whether as a direct result of the meeting at the Fox commissary or not, a few months later, in August, and three thousand miles away, in Washington, the United States Senate was pushing through Senate Resolution Number 152, authorizing “an investigation of propaganda disseminated by the motion picture industry tending to influence participation of the Unit
ed States in the present European war.” The resolution was spearheaded by Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, an America Firster, who said, “What I am protesting about is the control of a great agency of propaganda in the hands of a small monopolistic group undertaking to plunge this country into war.” Though Senator Clark seemed not to have understood Hollywood’s attitude toward the war very well, and though he made no specific mention of Jews, his comments also had anti-Semitic overtones, as he spoke darkly of “propaganda that reaches weekly the eyes and ears of one hundred million people … in the hands of groups interested in involving the United States in war,” and of “Powers … real or potential, partial or whole, economic, political, or social, and trade practices, organizations of motion picture producers,” and so on, which made the movie men sound like part of an evil conspiracy, or at the very least a cabal.

  Within four months, of course, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was in the war without the moviemakers’ help. The America First Committee, stranded without a cause, disbanded, and the Senate investigation, much to Senator Clark’s disappointment, was called off. In Hollywood, the movie people turned their talents to making a long stream of patriotic wartime films.