City of Nets (17 page)

What remains most interesting is not the squirming of either the Hollywood establishment or the Hollywood Communists but the ending of the story itself. For the Guild did not die after it announced its own death in the summer of 1936. Meetings continued to be held in the homes of the most active members, among them Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Samson Raphaelson, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, John Howard Lawson, and Nathanael West. Early in 1937, the producers signed a tentative agreement with their protégés, the Screen Playwrights, to take effect in case the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act of 1935, which guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions. A week after the Court did uphold the Wagner Act, in the spring of 1937, the Guild reemerged from underground and petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for the right to represent all screenwriters. The revived Guild claimed four hundred members, but the producers claimed they now had a binding contract with the Screen Playwrights. The NLRB held extensive hearings and then ruled in June of 1938 that Hollywood was indeed an industry, that its writers were indeed employees, and that they had a right to vote on a union to represent them. In the voting held later that June, the reborn Guild defeated the crumbling Screen Playwrights by a majority of more than four to one. The next month, the federal government applied still stronger pressure on the studios by filing an antitrust suit against Loew's, Warners, Paramount, Fox, Columbia, Universal, United Artists, and RKO.

Now the studios had no choice but to negotiate with the hated Guild, but still they stalled. They said they wouldn't negotiate with any Communists. All Communists on the Guild side withdrew. In 1940, the producers finally agreed to a six-month contract, which included a minimum wage of fifty dollars per week, but when that expired, they balked at any renewal. Delegates from both sides met for dinner at the Brown Derby in May of 1941 and then settled down for a bargaining session. Mendel Silberberg, an attorney for the producers, warned that international events might overtake them all. “This country might go to war, the studios might be closed,” Silberberg said.

Sheridan Gibney, who was now the Guild president, acknowledged the political uncertainties and asked that the producers accept a provisional agreement: recognition of the Guild as representative of the writers, an 85 percent Guild shop, and a minimum wage of $120 per week. After eight years of bargaining, of threats and lawsuits and claims of Communist subversion, eight years of defeats by the courts and the Administration and the votes of the employees, this basic proposal for a minimum wage of $120 per week struck Harry Warner, the president of Warner Bros., as an absolute outrage. He rose to his feet and turned to his colleagues and rhetorically asked, “Is that all they want?”

“We think, under the circumstances, it's fair,” Gibney replied.

“That's all they want! They want blood!” Warner bellowed. “They want to take my goddamn studio. My brothers built this studio. I came here from Europe. My father—” Then he turned and started shouting at the Guild delegation. “That's all you want, you goddamn Communist bastards! You dirty sons of bitches! All you'll get from me is shit!”

“And he let out a stream of obscenities I wouldn't dare repeat,” according to Dore Schary, who was present as one of the Guild representatives, “calling us all sorts of wild names and screaming. Well, we were stunned. We didn't even get angry, because we were watching a man who was obviously getting blown out of his head.” The other producers were also somewhat taken aback by Warner's frenzy. Two of them, Y. Frank Freeman of Paramount and Eddie Mannix of M-G-M, got to their feet and each took one of Warner's arms, and then they all lurched toward the doorway. “They kind of carried him out,” Schary recalled, “and he was still screaming, ‘And furthermore, you dirty commies,' and they took him out to the parking lot, and there was an absolutely dead silence.”

The Guild delegates sat in wonderment for a while, and then the producers returned, without Harry Warner. “Gentlemen, we regret that Mr. Warner cannot rejoin us,” Silberberg said. “He wasn't feeling well. But we've discussed your proposal, and we find it acceptable. You have your contract.”

 

Dashiel Hammett knew the corruption of the labor wars in his bones. He had been a Pinkerton detective in the days when corporate managements hired Pinkerton agents to break strikes and break unions. “I was just doing a job, and if our clients were rotten it didn't concern me,” he said later. “They hired us to break up a union strike, so we went out there to do that.”

Hammett had become a Pinkerton agent almost by accident. The son of an unsuccessful Maryland farmer, he dropped out of school at fourteen and worked as a stevedore, a stockbrokerage clerk, a cannery laborer, a railroad freight agent. “Usually, I was fired,” he said of these brief jobs. In 1915, he answered what he later described as “an enigmatic want-ad,” which called for varied experience and a willingness to travel but didn't specify what the work involved. So Hammett applied and was hired, at the age of twenty-one, at a starting salary of twenty-one dollars per month, in the Baltimore office of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. Its symbol was an all-seeing eye; its slogan, “We never sleep.”

Hammett apparently enjoyed disguise and deception and the pursuit of suspected thieves, forgers, murderers. He carried a gun and sometimes used it. “It is held by the agency that the ends being for the accomplishment of justice, they justify the means used,” Allan Pinkerton had written in the handbook he provided for his agents. The quarry, of course, took a similar view of the pursuers. Hammett carried to the end of his life a long knife scar on his leg and a deep indentation on his skull. “He was shadowing someone,” his wife, Josephine, later recalled, “but what he didn't know was that he was not shadowing one, he was shadowing two, and the second one came up behind him and dropped a brick on his head.”

As part of “the accomplishment of justice,” the Pinkerton agency sent young Hammett to combat the efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to organize the Anaconda copper miners in Montana. Hammett posed as an enthusiastic supporter of the IWW and got himself confined in a hospital so that he could cajole information out of a suspected radical lying sick in a neighboring bed. Though such treachery apparently did not trouble his conscience at the time, it came to haunt him later. Not long after he met Lillian Hellman, who was then a discontented twenty-four-year-old scriptreader at M-G-M, and the discontented wife of the screenwriter Arthur Kober, Hammett told her that an officer of Anaconda “had offered him $5,000 to kill Frank Little, the labor union organizer.” Hammett apparently told the company that murder was not part of his job, so other arrangements were made. A lynch mob seized Little and three other union men and did them to death. Hammett “was to repeat that bribe offer so many times,” Miss Hellman later wrote in
Scoundrel Time,
“that I came to believe . . . that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would murder.” That idea seems to have shocked Hammett, but a man who would masquerade as a hospital patient in order to extract information from a patient in a neighboring bed was presumably the kind of man to whom a corporate official might feel he could entrust any kind of mission.

Miss Hellman's admiring memoirs of Hammett, with whom she carried on an intermittent but hectic liaison for more than thirty years, have helped to create the legend that this former gunman was a proud stoic living by some intensely chivalric code of honor. Hammett himself presumably knew better. An inveterate philanderer, afflicted more than once by gonorrhea, he was sued for $35,000 on one occasion by a minor Hollywood actress named Elise de Vianne, who claimed that he had “forced his sexual attentions” upon her. That may have been little more than a nuisance suit, but it sounds rather like rape. A Los Angeles judge awarded Miss de Vianne $2,500 in damages. An inveterate gambler and a profligate too, Hammett not only squandered Hollywood earnings of $100,000 a year but ran up absurdly large bills for hotel suites and rented limousines, then evaded payment and left his unfortunate creditors to pursue him in the courts. There was an inherent dishonesty in all this, but Miss Hellman eulogized Hammett at his funeral by saying, “He never lied. He never faked.” She herself coolly billed his estate for forty thousand dollars that she said she had loaned him, and she used his debts as part of her successful suit to gain control of his copyrights.

The screenwriter Nunnally Johnson offered an explanation for Hammett's behavior by recalling that he had been deathly ill from tuberculosis since his army service in World War I. The illness had forced him to retire after three years with the Pinkertons, and that in turn led him to start writing. “Here was a man who had no expectation of being alive much beyond Thursday,” Johnson said, “—which is why he spent himself and his money with such recklessness.” Perhaps. But after writing all of his five novels in six years, Hammett wasted much of his last thirty years, the Hellman years, on drunken quarrels. He blamed his drinking on illness too, but once claimed that it derived from his painful sense of the differences between what people said and what they meant. A detective would appreciate those differences.

When Hammett's third and best novel,
The Maltese Falcon,
appeared in 1930, Warner Bros. paid his publisher, Knopf, $8,500 for all movie rights. That certified, to the rest of Hollywood, Hammett's commercial value. “We have an opportunity to secure Dashiell Hammett . . .” young David O. Selznick wrote in a memo to his boss at Paramount, B. P. Schulberg. “Hammett is unspoiled as to money . . . I have tentatively discussed the following: Four weeks at $300 weekly.” So Hammett went to Hollywood, that summer of 1930, and Paramount assigned him to try to concoct a gangster movie for one of its new stars, Gary Cooper. Hammett did produce a story, which was eventually filmed as
City Streets,
pairing Cooper with Schulberg's mistress, Sylvia Sydney.

The Maltese Falcon,
meanwhile, was destined for strange metamorphoses. This had been Hammett's first effort to break away from the routine pursuits of the anonymous Continental (Pinkerton) operative. His new hero, Sam Spade, was in business for himself; he was perfectly willing to take criminals as his clients; he was having an affair with his partner's wife; he liked to believe that he belonged to nobody. Hammett later claimed that his hero “had no original. . . . He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the detectives I worked with would like to have been . . . a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody.” If Sam Spade was a dream man, though, his identity was hardly accidental; everyone who knew Hammett in his detective days knew him not by his middle name, Dashiell, but by his first name, Sam.

The Maltese Falcon
was also Hammett's first attempt to break away from the mindless violence of the “action” stories he had published in
Black Mask
magazine, to create a drama of primarily psychological tension. The climactic scene occurred when Spade and the beautiful Brigid O'Shaughnessy and the bloated Casper Gutman and the twittering Joel Cairo all sat confined in one room and tried to outwit each other to get possession of the jeweled statue of the Maltese falcon. It was another variation on Hammett's favorite situation, the detective attempting to provoke the criminals into fighting and betraying each other, though the actual violence all occurred offstage. Hammett suggested richer possibilities when he portrayed Spade trying to persuade Gutman to pin a murder charge on his own bodyguard, Wilmer. “But that's ridiculous,” Gutman protested. “I feel towards Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son. I really do. But if I even for a moment thought of doing what you propose . . .”

In a Hollywood that paid people a weekly wage to rewrite
A Farewell to Arms
and
Miss Lonelyhearts,
that hired Salka Viertel to “adapt”
Anna Karenina,
nothing, obviously, could be left alone. Warners assigned
The Maltese Falcon
not to Hammett but to three of its regular employees, Maude Fulton, Lucien Hubbard, and Brown Holmes. And since it was unthinkable for the hero to denounce the heroine as a murderess and then turn her over to the police (“I'll be sorry as hell—I'll have some rotten nights—but that'll pass,” Spade had said to Brigid), the trio of rewriters ended by suggesting that Spade would win a fine new job in the district attorney's office, that Brigid would get out of prison soon, and that she and Spade would finally be reunited. Warners assigned the role of Spade to Ricardo Cortez (né Jacob Krantz), who was trying to become the successor to Rudolph Valentino and played several of his scenes with Brigid in a silk lounging robe. Brigid was Bebe Daniels, who was known mainly as a comedienne. The whole thing was renamed “Woman of the World,” then “Dangerous Female,” and it inevitably failed.

In 1936, Warners tried again. One of the three rewriters, Brown Holmes, was assigned once again to claw at the bones of Hammett's novel. This time, Spade turned into a lawyer named Ted Shayne. He ended by marrying his secretary. Casper Gutman became a woman. The black figure of the falcon turned into a jeweled French horn. This version, too, received several new titles: “Men on Her Mind,” then “Hard Luck Dame,” then, finally, and most ludicrous of all, “Satan Met a Lady.” Spade/Shayne was played by Warren Williams, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy (renamed Valerie Purvis) by Bette Davis, who called this farrago “one of the worst turkeys I ever made.”

And in 1941, Warners tried yet again. This time, though, as so often happened with Hollywood's great successes, there occurred a series of happy accidents. The driving force behind them was John Huston. Having been a semiprofessional boxer, a Mexican cavalryman, a painter of sorts, and finally a screenwriter of considerable promise (
Juarez, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, High Sierra
), Huston had reached the age of thirty-five and wanted to strike toward the center of Hollywood power. His agent, Paul Kohner, had artfully inserted a clause into his screenwriting contract that committed Warners to letting him choose one picture to direct himself. “I selected Dashiell Hammett's
The Maltese Falcon,
” Huston rather laconically recalled in his memoirs. “It had been filmed twice before but never successfully. Blanke and Wallis [his producers] were surprised at my wanting to remake a two-time failure, but the fact was that
Falcon
had never really been put on screen.” Allen Rivkin's recollection is more vivid: “Johnny . . . asked me to work with him as screenwriter on a new version of
Falcon,
telling me, ‘Christ, Al, the book has never been done right.' ”