City of Nets (13 page)

Reagan claimed that his only ambition for himself was to play the part of George Gipp, the accidental hero. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that he used to put himself to sleep by reliving a perpetual fantasy: “Once upon a time (I tell myself) they needed a quarterback at Princeton, and they had nobody and were in despair. The head coach noticed me kicking and passing on the side of the field, and he cried: ‘Who is
that
man . . . ? Bring him to me.' ” Reagan cherished exactly the same fantasy about the Gipp he wanted to play: “As a freshman walking across the practice field, he had picked up a bouncing football and kicked it back toward the varsity players who were calling for it. He kicked it clear over the fence. . . .”

After all his careless chattering, Reagan was startled to read in
Variety
that Warners had decided to do the story of Rockne. Pat O'Brien, Reagan's own choice for the title role, had already signed up. Reagan implied in his autobiography that his casual talk had inspired someone to steal his idea, and that he didn't even mind. (“The truth is, it had never occurred to me that one got money for story ideas: I just wanted them to make the picture so I could play Gipp.”) Ten men had already been tested for the part of Rockne's great star, as Reagan told the story, but he rushed to the producer's office to claim the role for himself. The producer felt that the slender young actor was too frail for such a heroic part, but Reagan hurried back to his apartment to find some photographs of himself all decked out in the shoulder pads of his own football days at Eureka College. Then came a screen test, and, as Reagan laconically noted, “I got the part.”

It is easy to be cynical about
Knute Rockne.
Even on its original appearance, Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
cited the Gipp scenes as “largely sentimental and on the mock-heroic side.” And now when it flickers onto the late-night television screen, the archaic qualities of Robert Buckner's script seem almost comic. At Warner Bros. in 1940, the message of the day echoed Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty. In one of the very first scenes, Rockne's father was shown telling his friends in Norway that he was going to America because it was the land of equal opportunity, and his son would be just as good as the son of a king. Once in America, the Rocknes were shown demonstrating the traditional virtues of hard work, thrift, and acquiescence. Those were not enough to achieve true Americanism, however. When the young Knute arrived home late for supper, with his nose slightly bloodied on the football field, his immigrant father started to scold him in Norwegian, and the unrepentant boy parried his father by telling him to “talk American.” Hollywood believed in the “melting pot.” The Warner brothers could all remember their father, the cobbler from Poland, and young Ronald Reagan could remember the struggles of old Jack.

The message of
Knute Rockne
was not only that immigrants (and refugees) could make good by working hard but that they and all other Americans could best succeed by being tough. As a student at Notre Dame, the young Rockne became the protégé of a chemistry professor, played by the unmistakably German Albert Basserman, a famous Berlin actor who reached the United States in 1939 without knowing more than a few words of English. Torn between the German voice sternly urging a career as a science teacher and the roar of the crowds cheering the Fighting Irish, Rockne did not hesitate long. And as a coach, he constantly emphasized drill, discipline, self-sacrifice for the good of the team. Summoned before a congressional committee investigating the violence of college football, Rockne counterattacked by warning the fluttering congressmen that the greatest problem facing America was that it was “getting
soft!
” That was Hollywood's pronouncement on the eve of war.

Sentimental, yes, simplistic, yes, old-fashioned and perhaps almost fascistic. But to any boy who first saw it in the darkness of some town auditorium,
Knute Rockne
was an absolutely thrilling movie. When Pat O'Brien told his battered players at halftime how the dying Gipp had said to “tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper,” and when the players then charged back onto the field and slashed a proud West Point team to pieces—nobody, at least nobody in a small-town auditorium in 1940, could watch those scenes without choking. Nobody except Ronald Reagan at the sneak preview in Pasadena. “When I read Gipp's death scene,” he recalled, “I had a lump in my throat so big I couldn't talk. I can get the same lump just thinking the scene, but suddenly there I was on the screen playing the scene, and I was as unmoved as if I had a cold in the nose. It was a terrible letdown and I went home thinking I was a failure. . . .”

Ah, but it is all different now. Reclining in the darkness in the East Wing of the White House, the septuagenarian President can watch his younger self charging into history. He remembers it all, remembers and believes. In the darkness, the President can still feel moved.

 

The refugees kept coming. The fall of France in the summer of 1940 put to flight a whole covey of Parisian filmmakers—René Clair, Max Ophuls, Julien Duvivier, and Jean Renoir, who even brought along Antoine de Saint-Exupéry so he could finish his new novel,
Vol de Nuit,
in Hollywood. It also drove into a new exile those anti-Nazi Germans who had previously taken refuge west of the Rhine.

Thomas Mann's white-bearded and quixotic older brother Heinrich, for example, had established himself in Nice to work on a historical novel about France's King Henry IV. A vociferous anti-Nazi, he prided himself on being president of a nebulous leftist organization called the German Popular Front Abroad. His personal life was equally unworldly. When war broke out in 1939, one of his first acts had been to go to the city hall and marry his mistress, Nelly Kroeger, a half-crazy Berlin barmaid who had already made one drunken attempt at suicide. “By marrying her, I can help her get well,” Heinrich wrote to his dismayed younger brother in America. Now that the Germans had swept into Paris, both Heinrich and Nelly Mann had to flee further, and flight became more difficult every day. The eminent novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, for instance, was interned by the French as an enemy alien in 1939, then released under British pressure, then interned again in May of 1940. A newspaper photograph of the sickly Feuchtwanger staring out from behind barbed wire prompted his American publisher to protest to President Roosevelt, who indulgently asked the State Department to provide whatever help seemed appropriate.

Franz Werfel, an exile who happened to be Czech by birth, was living near Toulon when the French government fled Paris, and he, too, began one of those typical refugee flights from anywhere to anywhere. He and his wife, Alma, the celebrated Alma Mahler, who was eleven years his senior, drove first to Marseilles, vainly sought exit visas, then wandered circuitously to Bordeaux, where the French government itself had taken refuge from the invading Germans. “Get away from here, Bordeaux is hell!” an old friend warned them, so they set off again for Biarritz, trying to reach the Spanish border, which they had no permission to cross. Alma, who had made a sort of career out of marrying first Gustav Mahler and then Walter Gropius and now Werfel, mourned the inevitable loss of her various suitcases, stuffed with Mahler scores and other mementos. She consoled herself with Benedictine. The Werfels finally reached Lourdes, in the unoccupied zone, where they were trapped in one sleazy hotel room for week after week while they tried anew to get exit papers. Werfel promised the spirit of the local saint, Bernadette Soubirous, that if he ever escaped from this nightmare, he would write a book in her honor.

Roosevelt's request for assistance to Feuchtwanger inspired the U.S. vice-consul in Marseilles to organize a virtual kidnapping of the imprisoned novelist. The consulate then turned the whole problem over to a gallant young Quaker named Varian Fry, who represented the fledgling Emergency Rescue Committee. Fry had undertaken the mission of getting a whole flock of eminent German refugees across the Spanish border (he was ultimately to rescue nearly two thousand of them). It was not a heavily guarded border, but still, the troupe that Fry herded onto a night train to the frontier town of Cerbère that September was not young. It consisted of the fugitive Feuchtwanger; his wife, Marta, who had been freed from the internment camp at Gurs; Heinrich Mann, nearly seventy, and his alcoholic wife, Nelly; their nephew Golo Mann, Thomas's son; and the Werfels, Franz beginning to brood about the message of Bernadette, and Alma fretting about the music scores that had magically reappeared from Bordeaux.

Now they had to climb the Pyrenees. “It was sheer slippery terrain that we crawled up, bounded by precipices,” Alma Werfel said later. “Mountain goats could hardly have kept their footing on the glassy shimmering slate. If you skidded, there was nothing but thistles to hold on to.” When they finally reached the mountaintop border, they were stopped by “a dull-faced Catalan soldier” and turned over to a French police officer. “I was wearing old sandals and lugging a bag that contained the rest of our money, my jewels and the score of Bruckner's Third . . .” Mrs. Werfel said. “After the march in the broiling sun we felt utterly wretched.”

Money and cigarettes began to change hands, and the tottering exiles were allowed to clamber over the iron chains that marked the frontier of Spain. Once over that frontier, they flew to Lisbon. There, a Greek steamer, the
Nea Hellas,
one of the last ships still making regular voyages to New York, was ready to set sail.

Heinrich Mann contemplated his future in America with little enthusiasm. “He stayed in his cabin as he was sick,” Mrs. Werfel wrote in her diary. “He was also feeling angry with the world. When his nephew went to see him he was in bed. He was drawing women with large breasts; sometimes just the latter.” Thomas Mann was waiting at the dock to greet his older brother on his arrival in mid-October of 1940. He also helped arrange a job of sorts in Hollywood. The medium for these arrangements was the European Film Fund, which had been created in 1939 by Ernst Lubitsch, Salka Viertel, and the agent Paul Kohner, to find some kind of work for the fugitives from Hitler. After some arm twisting by Kohner—that was his job, after all—Warner Bros. and M-G-M both agreed to pay at least a hundred dollars a week to such shocked, helpless, and basically useless exiles as Alfred Döblin, the author of the novel
Berlin Alexanderplatz,
and Walter Mehring, a founder of Dada poetry in Berlin.

And so it was that while Thomas Mann's novels about Joseph the Provider were selling tens of thousands of copies, enabling him to build himself a new house on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, his older brother went to work for $125 a week as a scriptwriter at Warner Bros. Heinrich Mann was given very little to do since, among other things, he spoke very little English, but like all the rest of Warners' scriptwriters, he was expected to appear at the office every morning at nine. Perhaps a few of the writers in adjoining cubicles recognized the white-bearded old German as the author of the novel on which Josef von Sternberg had once based that harrowing chronicle of a man's degradation
The Blue Angel.
To Thomas Mann, Pacific Palisades seemed a paradise. “I have what I wanted,” he wrote, “—the light; the dry, always refreshing warmth; the spaciousness . . . the holm oak, eucalyptus, cedar, and palm vegetation; the walks by the ocean. . . .” Heinrich Mann saw little of that. He wrote of “loneliness and ingratitude.”

Werfel was more fortunate. His most recent novel,
Embezzled Heaven,
had been a Book-of-the-Month Club choice and a best-seller, so he and Alma moved right into a handsome house on Los Tilos Road, off Highland Avenue, and began entertaining their musical friends: Schoenberg and Stravinsky, always separately, and Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and Erich Korngold (“We rejoiced whenever he sat down at the piano,” Alma said). And since Werfel had made a vow to Saint Bernadette, he now began carrying out that pledge. “He wrote the new novel in a state of rapture, without tiring once,” according to Mrs. Werfel. “He brought me each finished chapter and often said, ‘I'm sure this can't interest anybody.' Just the same, he kept writing with joy. At the end he said it had been like taking dictation. We celebrated the completion of the first draft like a great holiday.”

The Song of Bernadette
was a smashing success, as befitted a novel written “with joy.” The Book-of-the-Month Club chose it early in 1942, the regular edition sold 350,000 copies, 20th Century–Fox bought it for $100,000, and it became one of the most successful movies of 1943. Jennifer Jones played the soulful peasant girl with all the soulfulness she could command, which was quite a lot, and won herself an Academy Award as the best actress of the year. (Stravinsky hovered at the outer edge of this triumph too, for Werfel asked him to write the background score, but the negotiations, as usual, came to nothing. The piece that Stravinsky actually did write for Bernadette's vision of the Virgin eventually became, with the usual Stravinskian practicality, the Andante of his Symphony in Three Movements.)

Perhaps, though, the transformation of a mystic vision into a commercial triumph can be dangerous. At a Hollywood dinner party during the success of
Bernadette,
Werfel regaled the other guests with stories of his flight across France, the same flight that had brought him to the grotto of Bernadette at Lourdes. He told of a little Jew named Jacobowsky and of an anti-Semitic Polish colonel, who had fallen in together during their flight from the Nazis, and of how they had gradually acquired a mutual respect and even a grudging affection. The host, Max Reinhardt, insisted that Werfel must write this story as a play. When Werfel expressed misgivings about his unfamiliarity with Broadway, another one of the guests, S. N. Behrman, was urged into service as a collaborator. As often happens, Werfel and Behrman started with great enthusiasm, then began arguing, and finally reached the point of no longer speaking to each other. Werfel sequestered himself in a hotel in Santa Barbara to do rewrite after rewrite.