City of Nets (107 page)

 

 

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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.”

 

 

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One surprising critic was Charlie Chaplin. In a discussion with the blacklisted Alvah Bessie, who was trying in vain to sell him 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.”

 

 

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Others felt a need for relief from Harry Cohn. When the Columbia boss billed Rosalind Russell for some studio gowns that she wanted to use on a tour of military bases during the war, she retaliated by charging him for the use of her fur coat in a Columbia film. As she went out the door, ostentatiously fanning herself with Cohn's check for $2,700, Cohn shouted after her: “Jew!”

 

 

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It is also worth remembering that in the supposedly independent Hollywood of today, nobody made a movie critical of the Vietnam war until after it was all over.

 

 

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Remember that Jack Warner, in testifying before the committee, had singled out Kazan, who was then in the midst of directing
Gentleman's Agreement,
as a subversive, “one of the mob.”

 

 

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This was Miss Bergman's own account. A recent biographer, Laurence Leamer, charges, without offering much evidence, that she had actually been having a series of rather casual affairs since her first years in Hollywood. Her supposed lovers included Gary Cooper; Victor Fleming, the director; Larry Adler, the harmonica virtuoso; and various unidentified others.

 

 

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Unlike other dismissed movie producers, Schary went off and wrote a successful play,
Sunrise at Campobello,
about the young Roosevelt.

 

 

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Mrs. Hopper had a fondness for innuendo. After Dore Schary went to M-G-M in 1948, she observed that “the studio will be known as Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow.” Schary immediately threatened to sue both her and the
Los Angeles Times
for $5 million, which prompted the
Times
to kill the item in its later editions, and to apologize.

 

 

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Except for Dmytryk and Biberman, who happened to be brought before a more lenient judge, and who therefore received, for no particular reason, terms of only six months.

 

 

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LeRoy had overseen such workmanlike successes as
Little Caesar
(1931) and
The Wizard of Oz
(1939), but he deserves a special kind of fame as a subject of a classic pun. At an executive meeting at M-G-M, Nicholas Schenck was fretting about LeRoy's failure to stay within his budget on
The Wizard of Oz,
and Mayer presented the young Joseph Mankiewicz as an experienced writer and director who could explain such things. When all the executives turned to Mankiewicz for his explanation, Mankiewicz felt some irresistible impulse to evoke Victor Hugo and blurted out. “I suppose LeRoy
s'amuse.
” Schenck said, “What?” Mankiewicz repeated his inspired line. Somebody said, “That's French.” Schenck said, “Why are you talking French?” “All I could think of,” Mankiewicz said later, “was, ‘Why am I here?' ”

 

 

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I list paperback reprints only when those are the editions that I used.