City of Nets (12 page)

“We're not at war with anybody,” Mayer explained. “This picture just shows these [English] people having a hard time, and it's very sympathetic to them, but it's not directed against the Germans.”

“Mr. Mayer, you know what's going on, don't you?” Wyler protested.

“This is a big corporation,” Mayer said. “I'm responsible to my stockholders. We have theaters all over the world, including a couple in Berlin. We don't make hate pictures. We don't hate anybody. We're not at war.”

It was only after Pearl Harbor, when Hitler actually did declare war on the United States, that Mayer again summoned Wyler and grandly permitted him to portray the downed German pilot as he saw fit. “You just go ahead,” Mayer said. “You do it the way you wanted.”

Warners had a much better record. “Warner Brothers had guts,” Mankiewicz recalled. “They hated the Nazis more than they cared for the German grosses.” Warners also had a special reason for being anti-Nazi: the studio's Berlin representative, Joe Kauffman, was beaten up in a random attack by Nazi toughs and died of his injuries. Warners closed down its Berlin office.

It also began working, apparently at the urging of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, on a movie called
Confessions of a Nazi Spy,
in which Edward G. Robinson played an FBI agent named Leon Turrou, who had infiltrated the Germans' underworld of propaganda and espionage in America. In retrospect, it seems a rather modest sort of exposé, but the German Embassy made its customary protests and threats. And Hollywood was impressed by all threats. “Look, Jack, a lot of us are still booking pictures in Germany, and taking money out of there,” Jack Warner later quoted “one studio owner” as telling him. “We're not at war with Germany, and you're going to hurt some of our own people.” Warner quoted himself responding with high-minded indignation: “Hurt what? Their pocketbooks? Listen, these murdering bastards killed our own man in Germany because he wouldn't heil Hitler. The Silver Shirts and the Bundists and all the rest of these hoods are marching in Los Angeles right now. There are high school kids with swastikas on their sleeves a few blocks from our studio. Is that what you want in exchange for some crummy film royalties out of Germany?”

Self-dramatization apparently came naturally to Warner, and though
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
was hardly a landmark in cinema history, it did create a stir when it was released in 1939, the first openly anti-Nazi film that Hollywood had produced.
*
Not only did the German government lodge complaints with the State Department but the German-American Bund filed a suit for $500,000 in damages. Anonymous letters threatened the lives of Jack Warner, production chief Hal Wallis, producer Robert Lord, and Edward G. Robinson. This was the kind of agitation that made other producers nervous. Even Charlie Chaplin kept worrying about hostile reactions to
The Great Dictator.
When his film finally appeared in 1940, however, Americans were becoming quite accustomed to jeers about Hitler and his absurd mustache, his supposed name of Shicklgruber, his supposed career as a paperhanger. The New York premiere of
The Great Dictator
was a huge success.

The Hollywood Production Code still insisted, however, that the movie industry must not urge American involvement in the war. So when Walter Wanger (né Feuchtwanger) and Alfred Hitchcock decided to film Vincent Sheean's
Personal History,
they managed to concoct a rattling good tale of Nazi espionage without ever saying that the spies were Germans. Actually, Hitchcock was less interested in politics than in the wonderful sets that Wanger let him build: a $200,000 model of a public square in Amsterdam, a huge pipeline from the Colorado River so that the square could be filmed in drenching rain, a 600-by-125-foot copy of London's Waterloo Station (filled with five hundred extras in handsome summer costumes). But Wanger kept demanding that the script, now called
Foreign Correspondent
and far removed from Sheean's memoirs, be revised to include the latest war news—the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries, the fall of France. And though the story was supposed to take place in the fall of 1939, the reports of an impending battle of Britain inspired Hitchcock to call in Ben Hecht to write a stirring ending. “Hello, America,” the foreign correspondent, Joel McCrea, began his wildly implausible broadcast from London. No sooner had he started than bombs exploded outside, the electricity failed, and McCrea had to improvise. “It feels as if the lights are all out everywhere—except in America,” he declared, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” began sounding in the background. “Keep those lights burning! Cover them with steel, ring them with guns! Build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them! Hello, America! Hang on to your lights! They're the only lights in the world. . . .”

Such flights of rhetoric helped to spread reports that Hitchcock remained in America at the behest of the British authorities. One might suppose that these authorities, threatened with a major military catastrophe, had better uses for their energies, but the British tradition of obliquely effective propaganda and sabotage prepared one to believe anything. If the Korda family legends can be believed, Sir Alex (somewhat mysteriously knighted in 1942) produced
That Hamilton Woman
at the direct suggestion of Winston Churchill—who, according to the romantic account of Korda's nephew Michael, may even have written Nelson's long speech warning that Napoleon would have to be fought to the death. More important, Korda supposedly carried out a request from Churchill to use his corporate offices in New York and Los Angeles for the benefit of British intelligence. “These offices would exist for their own sake as a moneymaking enterprise of Alex Korda's,” Michael Korda wrote, “but they would also serve as ‘cover' for British agents working in what was then neutral America. American isolationists had made it difficult for British intelligence operatives to work freely in the United States, but a movie company offered unparalleled opportunities. . . .”

American isolationists were not guileless innocents either, of course. They represented, to some extent, all those unpleasant American characteristics of xenophobia, anglophobia, anti-Semitism, and a general hostility toward anything eastern and cosmopolitan. To some extent, too, they were the creatures of Nazi Germany's official propaganda and unofficial manipulation. But they also represented simply the traditional American desire to avoid getting involved in European quarrels. They kept reminding anyone who would listen that George Washington—or was it Thomas Jefferson?—had warned all Americans against foreign entanglements.

Senator Burton Wheeler, a Democrat from Montana and a prominent member of the America First Committee, accused the movie industry of conspiring with the Roosevelt administration to conduct “a violent propaganda campaign intending to incite the American people to the point where they will become involved in this war.” Another isolationist senator, Gerald Nye of North Dakota, shared Wheeler's suspicion that Hollywood wanted “to rouse war fever in America and plunge the nation to her destruction.” Nye also offered an explanation. “In each of these companies,” he said in a speech, “there are a number of production directors, many of whom have come from Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan countries. . . . They are interested in foreign causes.” Out in the countryside, Charles Lindbergh was more explicit in describing the Jews as the “principal war agitators.” “Their greatest danger to this country,” he said before a crowd of eight thousand in Des Moines in September of 1941, “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

Nye introduced a resolution calling for an official investigation of “pro-war” propaganda. The Senate voted its approval, and so a Senate Subcommittee on War Propaganda duly began investigating forty-eight allegedly pro-war movies. These ranged from Warners'
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
and
Sergeant York
(which was to win Gary Cooper an Academy Award) to ten
March of Time
newsreels. Hollywood's producers reacted with indignant denials and even hired Wendell Willkie to represent their interests, but by the time the subcommittee hearings under Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho finally opened, in September of 1941, American policy toward the Axis was generally acknowledged to be an issue larger than anything that might be suggested in Hollywood.

More ambiguous and more ominous than the fretting of the isolationists was the announcement by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, founding father
*
of the House Un-American Activities Committee, that Hollywood should be investigated as a “hotbed of Communism.” Dies had made his first raid on Hollywood in 1938, but his indictment was so sweeping that he was widely ridiculed for accusing even Shirley Temple, then ten years old, of aiding the forces of subversion. Dies shifted to an attack on the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, and Congress backed him up by voting in June of 1939 to cut off all the project's funds. That triumph revived Dies's interest in investigating Hollywood. He announced early in 1940 that “forty-two or forty-three prominent members of the Hollywood film colony either were full-fledged members of the Communist Party or active sympathizers and fellow travelers.” Though he cited no names, he suggested that “Communist influence was responsible for the subtle but very effective propaganda which appeared in such films as
Juarez, Blockade,
and
Fury.
” He also offered an explanation for Communist influence in Hollywood: “Most of the producers are Jews.”

Dies kept announcing throughout the summer of 1940 that he would soon hold hearings in Hollywood, but the man who saw real opportunity in this prospect was Buron Fitts, who had been the Los Angeles district attorney since 1928 and now faced a difficult election campaign. Fitts persuaded a former Communist named John L. Leech, who had been executive secretary of the party's Los Angeles branch before he was expelled in 1937, to tell a grand jury all about communism in Hollywood. Leech's testimony was then artfully leaked to the press, which duly reported that Leech's naming of names had involved Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fredric March, Melvyn Douglas, Franchot Tone, and a dozen others.

Congressman Dies, annoyed at seeing a local prosecutor take over his investigation, hurried to Los Angeles and announced that he wanted to interrogate everyone involved. Hollywood reacted in a way that probably seemed forthright at the time but looks worse in retrospect. Paramount's Y. Frank Freeman, who was then also president of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, led a Hollywood delegation to Dies's hotel room and declared that the moviemakers would not “yield to anyone in their true Americanism.” The studios, he said, would “welcome a complete and impartial investigation,” and if such an investigation unearthed anyone who “brought discredit upon this industry,” then, by God, “there will be no attempt to protect those individuals.”

Hollywood's progressives made more of a fuss. There were protest meetings. “The people want democracy—real democracy, Mr. Dies,” cried Dorothy Parker at a meeting in Philharmonic Hall, “and they look to Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies—that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations—because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.” But all Dies really wanted, he kept saying, was to ask a few questions. The stars whom he wanted to question, including Cagney, Bogart, and March, proved quite willing to talk. They “were very frank and submitted their books and records for our inspection,” Dies said afterward. As a result of his investigation, he could add that they “are not or never have been Communist sympathizers.”

Hollywood was content. It had been cleared, exonerated. And since publicity was always the main purpose of these maneuvers, Dies was content too. He went darting off to investigate the TVA and the WPA. If Communist influence in Hollywood could not be made to seem a national peril in 1940, that was because the time was not yet right.

 

None of these political problems really played a very large part in the Hollywood of 1940. There was another war in Europe, but Europe was far away. There were criticisms in Washington, but Washington was also far away. Hollywood still shared the belief of Calvin Coolidge that the chief business of America was business, and the business of the big movie studios was to churn out whatever the box offices in Dallas or Indianapolis seemed to want. “Hollywood made 350 pictures last year,” said Walter Wanger, a producer who was thought to be intellectual because he had once gone to Dartmouth. “Fewer than ten of these pictures departed from the usual Westerns, romances, and boy-meets-girl story.” When it came time for that year's Academy Awards, by which Hollywood somehow managed to define itself, Selznick's
Rebecca
(Hitchcock's
Rebecca,
Olivier's
Rebecca,
Daphne Du Maurier's
Rebecca
) won the honors as the best movie. Jimmy Stewart was cited as the best actor for his role in
The Philadelphia Story
and Ginger Rogers as the best actress for
Kitty Foyle.

 

When President Ronald Reagan played
his
favorite movie of 1940 in the aqua-and-white family theater in the East Wing of the White House not too long ago, he chose neither
Rebecca
nor
The Philadelphia Story
but
Knute Rockne—All American.

Reagan had arrived in Hollywood at the age of twenty-six, an ambitious sports broadcaster from Iowa, and soon found that Warners' promise of a contract meant nothing but a series of thoroughly second-rate movies:
Love Is on the Air, Submarine D-1, Cowboy from Brooklyn, Hollywood Hotel.
Reagan later declared that everyone came to Hollywood with “the desire to see a certain story become a picture,” and that the story he yearned to see on the screen was the life of Knute Rockne. Perhaps it was the influence of his alcoholic father, Jack Reagan, who had never been to Notre Dame but who worshiped the football coach from afar. (When the film was finally finished, Reagan had to arrange for his father to attend the triumphant premiere in South Bend, and to worry over the father's night-long carousing.) “Being brand-new in Hollywood,” Reagan said later, “I explored my idea openly, questioning all who would hold still about whom to see, whether simply to do a treatment, or try to write a script. . . .”