City of Nets (19 page)

Up to the very end, the authorities at Warners couldn't seem to understand that
The Maltese Falcon
was a marvelous title. Having changed it to “Dangerous Female” and “Men on Her Mind” and “Satan Met a Lady,” and having failed every time, they now wanted, even at the last preview, to change it to “The Gent from Frisco.” It was apparently Hal Wallis, the production chief, who persuaded all the nervous improvers to desist. So
The Maltese Falcon,
finally, was a smashing success.

And what financial rewards did Dashiell Hammett, the creator, derive from this success? Nothing whatever, for when Warner Bros. had bought the movie rights to his novel eleven years earlier, for $8,500, the studio had bought all movie rights forevermore. A few years later, in fact, when Hammett sold ABC Radio the right to produce a series called
The Adventures of Sam Spade,
Warners filed suit claiming, in the spring of 1948, that the studio owned the name of Sam Spade as well as all related “scenes, language, story, dialogue, plot, characters, and other materials” of
The Maltese Falcon.
It took three years of judgments and appeals before Hammett won the right to his own hero, and by that time the whole show had been forced off the airwaves on the ground that Hammett was a “subversive.”

 

Despite Hollywood's three versions of its favorite legend about itself, its stars were not born but rather cultivated, like Candide's garden. The studios put their employees in role after role and watched to see what happened. While a complex character like Bogart's transformed itself into something rich and strange. Ronald Reagan seemed to remain perpetually the same, cheerful and friendly. Though Reagan had won considerable attention and praise in
Knute Rockne,
that was only the fourth of his six pictures in 1940. Warners promptly loaned him out to M-G-M for
Tugboat Annie Sails Again,
then put him to work with Errol Flynn in
Santa Fe Trail.
As 1941 started, he went back to M-G-M for
The Bad Man,
then returned to Warners for
Million Dollar Baby.
By now a successful journeyman and a member of the board of the Screen Actors Guild, he was earning one thousand dollars a week, a princely salary during the last years of the Depression for a modestly talented actor just turning thirty, but not very much by Hollywood standards. Claudette Colbert, Bing Crosby, and Irene Dunne each made more than eight times that much. Reagan was generally considered pleasant and hard-working, useful, not much more.

The year 1941 was important to Reagan. It began, almost exactly a year after his marriage to Jane Wyman, with the birth of their first child, Maureen, on January 4. Three months later, Reagan's alcoholic father, who had been such a troublesome hero, died of heart failure. The routine films rolled on:
Nine Lives Are Not Enough
(Reagan recalled his role as a brash reporter: “You could always count on me to rush into a room, grab a phone and yell, ‘Give me the city desk—I've got a story that will crack this town wide open' ”);
*
International Squadron
(Reagan as an American stunt pilot in Warners' version of the RAF: “Our ‘Spitfire' was a doctored-up Ryan monoplane that didn't even have retractable gear”). But then came
Kings Row,
which Reagan recalled as a “slightly sordid but moving yarn,” which “made me a motion picture star.”

Warners had spent fifty thousand dollars to buy this ponderous bestseller, without quite knowing what it was doing. The author, Henry Bellamann, a Vassar professor of music who had turned to writing novels in his fifties, was one of the many disciples of Balzac:
Kings Row
fell about halfway between
Winesburg, Ohio
and
Peyton Place.
Here, there, and everywhere, the disciples of Balzac were determined to demonstrate that the tranquil surface of small-town life covered a roiling inferno of fraud, corruption, treachery, hypocrisy, class warfare, and ill-suppressed sex of all varieties: adultery, sadism, homosexuality, incest. And philistinism, of the kind that could not appreciate Bellamann's florid opening sentence: “Spring came late in the year 1890, so it came more violently, and the fullness of its burgeoning heightened the seasonal disturbance that made unquiet in the blood.”

Of such burgeoning and unquiet are best-sellers made, but when Warners bought the novel and turned it over to one of the studio's favorite writers, Casey Robinson, he judged the whole project hopeless. The Hays Office would never allow it. He cabled this verdict from Hong Kong, where he had docked briefly on a vacation cruise through the Far East. Hal Wallis, the prospective producer, cabled back to ask Robinson to read the novel again. Robinson was not easily persuaded. “While sailing between Manila and Bali,” Wallis recalled, “he finally tossed the book into the sea, thinking that I was crazy to have bought so downbeat a property.” Nothing, perhaps, could so quickly change a writer's mind about a difficult challenge as the sight of that challenge disappearing into the ocean. “As he saw the book floating on the waves,” Wallis said, “he suddenly realized how he could lick the subject: make it the story of an idealistic young doctor challenged by the realities of a cruel and horrifying world.”

Wallis was naturally delighted at the prospect of small-town sex turning into the saga of an idealistic doctor. He began hiring. He hired Sam Wood, recently acclaimed for
Kitty Foyle,
as his director; and William Cameron Menzies, the real creator of much of
Gone With the Wind,
as art director; and Erich Korngold as the composer of moody music; and the celebrated James Wong Howe as cameraman. Then came the usual casting problems. Wallis wanted Henry Fonda or Tyrone Power as the idealistic doctor, Parris Mitchell, but Darryl Zanuck at Fox owned them both, and owned their idealistic images as well, and declined to rent them to Warners. The nymphomaniac Cassie Tower presented interesting possibilities. Wallis offered the part to Ida Lupino, but she was busy making
Ladies in Retirement
for Columbia. Bette Davis hungered to play Cassie, but Wallis was afraid that she would dominate the picture. Drake McHugh, the hero's amiably pleasure-loving friend, was a secondary role destined for one of Warners' contract players—Dennis Morgan, or Jack Carson, or perhaps Eddie Albert. Robert Preston and Franchot Tone were also considered. Or maybe Ronnie Reagan. Why not Reagan?

Joseph I. Breen, a professional Catholic who headed the Hays Office, and who had not yet seen a page of the script that Casey Robinson was writing, interrupted all this planning by forbidding the entire project. In a lengthy memo to Wallis, he began by complaining of “illicit relations” between various characters, and “much loose sex everywhere.” And there was a “sadistic characterization” of a doctor, that villain who was to amputate Drake McHugh's legs. “Any suggestion of sex, madness, syphilis, illegal operations, incest, sadism, all must go,” Breen declared. “If this picture is made . . . decent people everywhere will condemn you and Hollywood.”

Jack Warner, Wallis, and Robinson all had to go to Breen's office and argue with a hypocrisy worthy of characters in
Kings Row,
or even in some novel by Balzac himself. They were not just trying to make money, much less to earn the condemnation of decent people everywhere, but rather, in Wallis's words, to “illustrate how a doctor could relieve the internal destruction of a stricken community.” Breen, said Wallis, “was impressed.” If Warners agreed to take out all references to nymphomania and incest—and no mercy killings, and no nude swimming either—then maybe approval could be granted. Robinson wrote a new version; Breen rejected it; Robinson wrote a third version; Breen rejected it; Robinson wrote a fourth version; Breen reluctantly approved. “In the long run I felt it was all to the good,” Wallis declared with the stoicism of the continually censored. “Too much grimness might have wrecked its chances at the box office.”

There was one scene that managed to survive all this moral improvement. That was the scene in which Drake McHugh, having been swindled out of his inheritance by the local bankers, having been rejected as unworthy to marry the daughter of the town's preeminent doctor, had to get a job at the railway station, suffered an accident that crushed his legs, and woke to find that the doctor who had rejected him as a suitor for his daughter had now amputated both his legs. Randy Monaghan, Drake's current girl, was trying to nurse him. “It was then that the dreadful sound came from the upper room,” Bellamann wrote. “Randy knew even in that terrifying instant that she would never forget the sound of Drake's voice. It was a hoarse scream—almost a yell in which there was horror, and pain, and something worse—sheer animal terror. She tore up the narrow staircase and flung the door open. . . . Drake's eyes were rolling and his face worked violently as if the very bone structure had been shattered. Randy saw with a sick horror that his hands were groping frantically under the blankets. She almost leapt across the room and seized his hands. . . .

“ ‘Randy!'

“ ‘Yes, I'm here, Drake. I'm here with you . . .'

“
Randy
—where—where's the rest of me?' ”

Ronald Reagan, having finally been chosen to play the part, saw something important in that scene of symbolic castration, in all the implications of the question itself. “No single line in my career has been so effective in explaining to me what an actor's life must be,” he said in the ghostwritten autobiography that he produced twenty-five years later. He made Drake's question the title of the book. At the time, however, Reagan saw that scene primarily as a chance to make his mark. Wallis had by now hired a rather remarkable cast. Though Robert Cummings was barely adequate as the young doctor, he was surrounded by experts. His mother was Maria Ouspenskaya, and his mentor was Claude Rains, and the mentor's lustful daughter was Betty Field. There was even Judith Anderson as the wife to the wicked doctor, Charles Coburn, and Ann Sheridan was captivating as Randy Monaghan. Against this array of talent, Reagan had only the one great scene, the one great opportunity.

“I felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it,” Reagan recalled. “I simply had to find out how it really felt. . . . I rehearsed the scene before mirrors, in corners of the studio, while driving home, in the men's rooms of restaurants, before selected friends. At night I would wake up staring at the ceiling and automatically mutter the line before I went back to sleep. I consulted physicians and psychiatrists; I even talked to people who were so disabled, trying to brew in myself the caldron of emotions a man must feel who wakes up one sunny morning to find half of himself gone.”

After all this self-rehearsal, there inevitably came a day when the scene had to be played out. The night before, Reagan lay in bed and worried. He couldn't sleep. He came to the studio looking pale and haggard—which was, of course, exactly the way he was supposed to look—and approached the set where the scene would have to take place.

“I found the prop men had arranged a neat deception,” he recalled. “Under the patchwork quilt, they had cut a hole in the mattress and put a supporting box beneath. I stared at it for a minute. Then, obeying an overpowering impulse, I climbed into the rig.” Reagan seems to have undergone some strange emotional crisis there in that bed. He simply lay, “contemplating my torso and the smooth undisturbed flat of the covers where my legs should have been.” Ten minutes passed. Twenty. “Gradually,” Reagan said, “the affair began to terrify me. In some weird way, I felt something terrible had happened to my body.” By now, the camera crew had gathered around. They didn't seem to know what to do. Somebody lit the lights. Reagan lay there in a kind of trance. The director, Sam Wood, finally approached the prostrate actor and bent over him.

“Want to shoot it?” he murmured.

“No rehearsal?” Reagan asked, just as though he hadn't been rehearsing brilliantly for the past hour.

“God rest his soul—fine director that he was, he just turned to the crew and said, ‘Let's make it.' There were cries of ‘Lights!' and ‘Quiet, please!' I lay back and closed my eyes, as tense as a fiddle-string. I heard Sam's low voice call, ‘Action!' There was the sharp
clack
which signaled the beginning of the scene. I opened my eyes dazedly, looked around, slowly let my gaze travel downward. I can't describe even now my feeling as I tried to reach for where my legs should be. ‘Randy!' I screamed. Ann Sheridan (bless her), playing Randy, burst through the door. She wasn't in the shot and normally wouldn't have been on hand until we turned the camera around to get her entrance, but she knew it was one of those scenes where a fellow actor needed all the help he could get and at that moment, in my mind, she was Randy answering my call. I asked the question—the words that had been haunting me for so many weeks—‘Where's the rest of me?' ”

One take was enough. “It was a good scene,” Reagan said with some satisfaction. It was good enough, in fact, to lift him out of the ranks of pleasant young men and make him a star. Warners realized that and promptly renegotiated his contract to triple his pay to three thousand dollars per week. By the time
Kings Row
was released in February of 1942, however, the war had just begun and Reagan was subject to call-up by the army. The stardom that he seemed to have won had to be postponed, and he was never able to capture it again.

 

“As in some grotesque fable,” one of
Time
's nameless writers wrote in March of 1941 about a new movie called
Citizen Kane,
“it appeared last week that Hollywood was about to turn upon and destroy its greatest creation.” That judgment has withstood quite well the passage of nearly half a century. If it is possible to single out any movie as Hollywood's “greatest creation,” then the best choice is probably
Citizen Kane.
Even now, squeezed into television and repeatedly interrupted by commercials, it still shows immense confidence, high spirits, vitality. It was hardly a Hollywood creation, though, but rather the creation of Orson Welles, who didn't want to come to Hollywood at all when he was invited there late in 1938, after the wild success of his radio version of H. G. Wells's
War of the Worlds.
George J. Schaefer, whom Nelson Rockefeller had just helped to install as the new president of the foundering RKO studio, made Welles an irresistible offer: $100,000 to produce, direct, write, and star in one movie per year, with total autonomy for himself and the whole theater company that he had organized in New York, the Mercury Theatre. Welles was then twenty-three.