American Experiment (393 page)

In this political environment Richard Nixon spent his teens. Doubtless he was far more directly influenced by his family than by the rapidly changing southern California culture. His parents and siblings believed in old-fashioned Horatio Alger industriousness and individualism, not the values of Hollywood’s later plush years—the mother hardworking and moralistic, the father tightfisted, fearful of debt, ever cautious after a lifetime of drifting from job to job. Nixon did some acting, not in Hollywood but at Whittier College. He was interested enough in a business career to take a plunge in a frozen orange juice venture, which ended disastrously. He perfectly summarized, Garry Wills concluded, an older America made up of sacrifice and self-reliance. As a twelve-year-old he had told his mother that he wanted to be “an old-fashioned kind of lawyer—a lawyer who can’t be bought.”

The film industry reached its apogee during the thirties and the war years. Inside huge, walled studio lots, beneath towering sets, tens of thousands of employees worked in the projection rooms, machine shops, dressmaking rooms, scenery-making docks, planing mills, executive offices. Anyone who went to the pictures or read movie magazines knew of the Big Five: M-G-M, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, 20
^th
Century-Fox;
Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were the “little three.” At the top were the producers, the directors, and the stars. Louis B. Mayer for a time was the highest-salaried business executive in the country. In 1941 motion-picture theaters outnumbered banks. Attendance reached an all-time high during the last year of the war.

Stung by rising criticism of their films’ vulgarity and superficiality, especially during the New Deal years, the moguls boasted of the intellectual and artistic talent they had imported—notably authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Bertolt Brecht, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Few writers, however, boasted about working in Hollywood, except perhaps about the money they made. They saw their work reprocessed by directors, producers, other writers, and even the actors. Sometimes they saw no results at all; during a one-year contract, Faulkner worked on nine projects, only two of which were produced. Screenwriting, he complained, allowed for little individual creativity. William Saroyan stayed for a short time and left in disgust. Fitzgerald, nearing the end of his life, appeared to pose some of his own fantasies and self-delusions in his uncompleted novel,
The Last Tycoon.
West exacted a writer’s revenge with his novel
The Day of the Locust,
a kaleidoscopic view of Hollywood that struck his friend Budd Schulberg as a “puke-green phantasmagoria of life in the lower depths of the house of horrors.” Schulberg himself, no migrant but the son of a major producer, wrought his own revenge with
What Makes Sammy Run?
—a savage portrait of a producer clawing his way to the top.

If producers and writers often failed to engage with each other, so did actors and writers. Driving the newly introduced Clark Gable and William Faulkner through Palm Springs on a hunting expedition, Howard Hawks overheard Gable ask Faulkner who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner answered. “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Gable asked. “Yeah,” Faulkner said. “What do
you
do, Mr. Gable?” That was not a put-down, Hawks thought—he doubted that Gable had ever read a book or Faulkner had ever seen a movie.

Like other industries, moviemaking remained vulnerable to new technologies. The advent of sound in the 1920s had brought major changes, especially for the acting corps. The rise of television after World War II seemed for a time to spell the doom of Hollywood. Annual movie-house admissions, at 4.5 billion in the mid-1940s, stabilized at about one billion two decades later. The Hollywood producers fought television by joining it. In 1956 the Screen Actors Guild found that about 35 percent of the
earnings of its members came from television programs and 25 percent from motion pictures. The industry also turned to the production of 16-millimeter home movies, educational programs, color films.

To a Hollywood nearing the height of its influence had come Ronald Reagan in 1937, and it was a declining motion-picture industry that he was to leave two decades later for television and General Electric. He brought with him a finely honed radio voice, a degree from Eureka College, and years of experience as a resourceful sportscaster. He also brought a body of ideas and notions drawn from a childhood in conservative, small-town Illinois, from an Irish-Catholic father whose long career as a salesman had been disintegrating amid alcoholism, from a mother who had musical and theatrical interests along with an abiding devotion to the Disciples of Christ, and from a deep immersion in the life of this middle-class, moralistic, temperance-preaching church. Young Reagan imbibed the dogmas of a small-town rugged individualism, tempered by an admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had inspired optimism during the depression days and helped people like his father. He held no deeply felt political beliefs; he was malleable.

In Hollywood, Reagan entered a world of illusion. At its zenith of prosperity and of power over social attitudes Hollywood was coming under increasing attack for its superficial plots, bland “message,” insipid preachments of God, country, and home. Hortense Powdermaker called it the “dream factory,” others the world of make-believe, the city of deceptions. Hollywood was escapism, Powdermaker wrote, escapism not into the broadening of experience and the world of the imagination, but into “saccharine sentimentality” and the stylized exaggeration of existing stereotypes, shibboleths, and fears. On the one hand, the Production Code Administration systematically cleared scripts of words like
lousy, punk, nuts, jerk,
and
damn
—except for Gable in
Gone With the Wind
—threw out all suggestions of sexual intimacy outside of marriage, lovemaking in bed, “open-mouthed or lustful kissing,” prostitution, scenes of a wet baby, even doll-wetting, or of the sex organs of animals, of toilets, of the sign
LADIES.
Yet Hollywood continued to put out pictures with the most torrid love scenes and amoral behavior—as long as sinners were punished or redeemed by the end of the last reel. Hollywood films frowned on adultery and divorce, even while the movie magazines dealt in salacious detail with the marital goings-on of the stars, not always inaccurately.

Reagan was a performer in the dream factory. The very image of the chaste male, he had become the protégé of the Hearst columnist Louella Parsons, long feared as the maker and breaker of stars and their marriages. In her column Parsons gushed that Jane Wyman, brown eyes sparkling and
voice bubbling with happiness, had told her, “Have I got a scoop for you! Ronnie and I are engaged!” The two were married at Forest Lawn, in the Wee Kirk o’ th’ Heather. It was the second marriage for Wyman. When Reagan and Wyman were divorced, Parsons seemed personally affronted. The couple had always stood for “so much that is right in Hollywood.” She was “fighting hard” to bring them to their senses.

Make-believe of far greater import characterized Reagan’s involvement in a number of organizations—the Screen Actors Guild, Americans for Democratic Action, the Music Corporation of America—despite his distrust of organized social action as against individual initiative. He voluntarily offered the FBI—the
government
—the names of SAG members suspected of following the Communist party line. Some SAG members were convinced that in granting a blanket waiver in 1952 to one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, MCA, that would allow it to produce television shows while continuing to represent actors—thus giving MCA an unprecedented advantage over its competitors—SAG president and MCA client Reagan had sold them out to MCA.

But if Reagan had made a deal with MCA, the agency had much the better part of it. While MCA by 1961 was producing 40 percent of all prime-time television, Reagan’s own film career faltered badly. After a brief stint in a Las Vegas nightclub, he joined General Electric in 1954 as a promoter of the company and of conservatism, an easy step for a man in transition between marriages and careers. At first a liberal dubious about liberalism, later a Democrat who urged Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, still later a Democrat who supported Republican Ike, Reagan shifted steadily rightward across the political spectrum. Not only was he confirmed in his new conservatism by the GE world in which he now moved, but, in Lou Cannon’s judgment, with his growing wealth he resented more and more the bite of a steeply graduated income tax. His second wife, Nancy Davis, and her conservative stepfather helped nudge him toward the right. When General Electric later let him go, evidently in part because he was
too
conservative and controversial as a spokesman for a corporation with huge government contracts, Reagan was ideologically primed to move into the political right wing—and he was available.

Hollywood continued to cope with technology. During the 1960s the major studios began to rent to television networks films made within the preceding five years and to create their own TV-film fare—not only the made-for-TV movie but the miniseries and novel-for-television. Pay television came along when Time Inc.’s Home Box Office offered cable TV viewers movies without commercials. A few years later Sony moved in with the Betamax home videocassette recorder, followed by the VHS. Despite
the complaints of Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association, that the VCR was a parasitical instrument, Hollywood recouped by grossing over $1.5 billion in 1985 from selling videocassettes mainly as rental copies—which was more than it grossed from the box office. The industry also stepped up its production of blockbuster films that won huge audiences.

Whether or not the film industry was stabilizing, southern Californians appeared to have emerged from their long bewitchment by Hollywood and to have entered a period of mature growth with the creation of a larger and broader industrial base as well as a steady increase in population. Planning exuberantly for their entrance into the third millennium, southern Californians could boast of having the largest concentration of high technology in the world, the largest port in the United States, one of the leading international financial centers, and superb access to the burgeoning Pacific rim economies. The Los Angeles
Times,
once the very exemplar of stodgy, conservative journalism, had become one of the best and most aggressive newspapers in the country, and the region’s universities were achieving ever greater prestige. Illusions and make-believe were declining as the region faced the economic and human costs of development.

As self-delusion slowly died, however, the region’s most salient characteristic once more came to the fore—its social and political and intellectual fragmentation. Los Angeles and many of the other cities were still racially splintered. The megalopolis sprawled ever outward, engorging mountain and desert. Angelenos still insisted on their separate houses on tiny plots. Public transportation remained primitive. Few great writers comparable to Fitzgerald and West were either coming to the area or springing up from its asphalt and desert.

Above all, southern Californians continued their love affair with their cars and the freeways that slashed through city and country, linking some citizens and diking off others. By the late 1980s the road system had reached the saturation point. Congestion had spread out from central Los Angeles freeways to virtually the whole region. With five million more population expected within the next quarter century in the southern California basin, from Ventura down the coast to San Juan Capistrano and inland as far as Riverside, it was projected that even after planned freeway expansion half of all driving time would be spent stuck in traffic jams, while average rush-hour speeds for all streets and freeways would fall from 37 miles per hour to 19. Meanwhile motorists would be wasting millions of hours a year sitting on freeways.

Wasting? Drivers were not daunted. Highway police reported that motorists passed their time eating, isometric exercising, brushing and flossing teeth, singing, shaving, smooching, changing clothes, screaming to relieve
tension. Said one driver to a reporter, “I think basically the car is like a movable home. You’re in a private world and you can do and say and think anything you want when you’re alone in that car.” Not long after these benign reports there was an outburst of random shooting on the freeways. Making love inside the automobile, shooting up the other highwaymen outside, as in an old Hollywood film—perhaps the South Sea natives had understood something when they reduced things to “kiss-kiss” and “bang-bang.”

Even the most jaded habitués of Las Vegas looked up from their gaming tables on hearing this news. The long-anticipated title match between “Marvelous Marvin” Hagler and “Sugar Ray” Leonard would be held on April 6, 1987, in their own remote Nevada town. And it evidently would be the battle of the century, for more than 1,100 reporters from all over the world would be trekking to Vegas. Soon torrents of media publicity turned the boxing match into “Superfight.” Hagler, the self-made brawler—coarse, mean, and hungry—would be pitted against Leonard, an Olympic gold medal winner, a media darling, a strategist surrounded by trainers, publicists, and groupies. And it must be Superfight because of the money involved—an anticipated purse of $25 million, the largest yet.

Only a spoilsport or two mentioned that both men were past their prime, that even at their best they were second-raters compared to such greats of the past as Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis. For boxing aficionados who remembered the epic contests in the smoky haze of Madison Square Garden, with its tens of thousands of frenzied onlookers, there was something quite depressing about this Vegas bout. Superfight would have a live audience of only a few thousand persons, those who could afford the plane fare to Vegas as well as fight tickets, many of which were reserved for celebrities or scalped far above their face value. A sports event hyped for days and weeks on national and local television was unavailable to the stations that had been ecstatically playing it up. Nor could it be seen on cable television or pay TV. The fight could be viewed only in select establishments, on closed-circuit television for sums ranging from $25 to $100. In the end the fight itself was far less of a spectacle than the media coverage of it.