City of Nets (23 page)

The Cassinis struggled on for a time, then agreed on a divorce and consigned their hopelessly retarded daughter to a school in Pennsylvania. Then, at a tennis party on a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Miss Tierney was approached by a young woman who smiled and said they had met at the Hollywood Canteen.

“Did you happen to catch the German measles after that night?” she inquired. Miss Tierney was too startled to answer. “I probably shouldn't tell you this,” the woman went on. She had been in the women's branch of the Marine Corps, she said, and her whole camp had been swept by an epidemic of rubella. “I broke quarantine to come to the canteen to meet the stars,” she said, smiling cheerily. “Everyone told me I shouldn't, but I just had to go. And you were my favorite.”

Miss Tierney stood silent for a moment, then turned and walked away. “After that,” she recalled, “I didn't care if I was ever again anyone's favorite actress.” She was already beginning to crumble, and the crumbling would lead her to a mental institution, to attempted suicide, to a sense of nothingness and despair. Her lost child, Daria, she wrote in her memoirs, was a war baby, born in 1943. “Daria was my war effort.”

 

These were individual episodes, but there remained always a collective Hollywood, an array of low-lying buildings and streets and people on the northern edge of Los Angeles, a community that was partly an industry, partly a technology, partly a style and a quality of mind, partly a negation of all those things, partly just a hunger for money and success. The war was good for Hollywood. It brought in big grosses, big profits. Hollywood expected as much. One of its first reactions to Pearl Harbor had been a race to register movie titles that might attract audiences to the box office:
Yellow Peril, Spy Smashers, Wings over the Pacific, V for Victory. . . .
(The songwriters were more imaginative, for it took very little time to churn out such novelties as “Goodbye, Momma, I'm Off to Yokohama” or “Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” or “To Be Specific, It's Our Pacific” or “When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys.”)

There were problems, though, with film scripts suddenly outdated. What could M-G-M do with an Eleanor Powell musical entitled
I'll Take Manila
when the city was actually being threatened by the Japanese army? At Warners, the
Maltese Falcon
gang—Huston, Bogart, and the rest—was in the midst of filming
Across the Pacific,
which was supposed to be about a struggle to thwart an unthinkable Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor. That was hastily changed to an unthinkable plot to bomb the Panama Canal. More complicated was the fact that Huston was suddenly called to duty as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. As a going-away prank, he decided to leave Warners a movie that was not only unfinished but virtually unfinishable. He filmed Bogart tied to a chair in a house filled with Japanese guards. “I . . . installed about three times as many Japanese soldiers as were needed to keep him prisoner,” Huston recalled with satisfaction. “There were guards at every window brandishing machine guns. I made it so that there was no way in God's green world that Bogart could logically escape. I shot the scene, then called Jack Warner, and said, ‘Jack, I'm on my way. I'm in the army. Bogie will know how to get out.' ” Bogie didn't know, and neither did anyone else. Warners assigned the mess to one of its more reliable professionals, Vincent Sherman, and he or some nameless underling had to concoct an escape. “His impossible solution,” Huston gloated, “was to have one of the Japanese soldiers in the room go berserk. Bogie escaped in the confusion, with the comment, ‘I'm not easily trapped, you know!' ”

The material demands of the burgeoning war effort caused far greater problems. The windows that heroes used to leap through had been made of sugar, which was now rationed. The chairs that they smashed over each other's heads had been made of balsa wood from the Philippines, now under attack by the Japanese. Harmlessly breakable whiskey bottles suitable for barroom brawls had been made of resin, and that, too, was now needed for military production. Film itself was made of cellulose, which was required for explosives (and for the metastasizing production of official military training and propaganda movies). The amount of film available to Hollywood was cut by about 25 percent. Even the flow of money—Hollywood's lifeblood—was restricted. The War Production Board issued a decree on May 6 limiting the use of new materials for stage sets to $5,000 per picture. James F. Byrnes, the Director of Economic Stabilization, even ordered that all salaries be held to $25,000 as of January 1, 1943 (Louis B. Mayer's salary for the previous year was reported to be $949,766), but Congress soon canceled that unseemly gesture of austerity.

The restrictions had some unexpectedly beneficial results. The assembly-line production of trashy B pictures, required for the double features that had become standard during the Depression, had to be curtailed, and a Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of the supposedly insatiable viewers approved of the curtailment. Overall, Hollywood's output decreased from 533 pictures in 1942 to 377 in 1945. Because of the shortage of film, directors could no longer shoot dozens of takes of each scene, so they devoted more time and effort to rehearsals before filming. And because of the tackiness of sets that relied on painted canvas to substitute for scarce metals and lumber, they began exploring the possibilities of moving out of the sound stages into the real world. Alfred Hitchcock even took the daring step of filming
Shadow of a Doubt
entirely on location.

One shortage was unique: the lack of Japanese villains who could sneer at a captive Bogart or gibber and gesticulate on the bridge of an imperial battleship as the forces of retribution started dropping bombs. All starring parts were played by Caucasians, of course (wasn't Peter Lorre perfectly credible as John Marquand's Mr. Moto, after all, and hadn't Paul Muni and Luise Rainer been admirable as Chinese peasants in
The Good Earth?
), so the only problem was to round up some non-Japanese Orientals to play the secondary Japanese villains. Thus a former beer salesman named Richard Loo
*
and a poet named H. T. Tshiang suddenly found themselves making around a thousand dollars per week in
The Purple Heart.
“The leading Oriental villains (if we exclude J. Carroll Naish) were Sen Yung, Chester Gan and Philip Ahn,” as Richard Lingeman wrote in his witty history of this period,
Don't You Know There's a War On?
“Gan specialized in portraying stolid brutal Japs. Sen Yung was the treacherous, English-speaking Japanese, whose mastery of American slang he turned back on Americans in such films as
Across the Pacific
and
God Is My Co-Pilot
(‘OK, you Yankee Doodle Dandy, come and get us . . .'). Philip Ahn, a Korean, was perhaps the most sought-after villain of all, with his nasal flat voice and his mask-like face that looked as if it had been carved out of India rubber. Ahn eventually tired of his type-casting and refused any more Japanese roles, saying he wanted to play romantic Chinese leads. . . . There were no romantic Chinese leads.”

 

The reason for the absence of Japanese villains in Hollywood was that the federal government suspected everyone of Japanese ancestry of being a potential saboteur, and banished all the victims of its suspicion to a newly created network of ten concentration camps in what the army called the Zone of the Interior. This move did not come, surprisingly enough, in the first outburst of hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor. On the contrary, the prevailing attitude in the earliest days of the war seemed to be one of restraint and common sense. There was considerable anger against Tokyo, but the powerful and conservative
Los Angeles Times
reminded its readers in an editorial published on December 8, 1941, that most of the 110,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast were “good Americans.” Two days later, the
Times
published an editorial against war hysteria under the headline: “Let's Not Get Rattled.”

This admirable advice was destined to be overwhelmed. The press itself began baying. A former sportswriter named Henry McLemore wrote in his syndicated column for the Hearst newspapers that all Japanese should be rousted out of California and shipped to the interior. “I don't mean a nice part of the interior, either,” he said. “Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give them the inside room in the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

This may seem merely an eructation typical of the Hearst press, but it was soon repeated in the Mandarin preachings of Walter Lippmann. After acknowledging that there had not been a single case of Japanese sabotage on the West Coast—indeed, there never was a single such case throughout the war—Lippmann wrote on February 20, that this meant nothing. “From what we know about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared,” he declared. “It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” Japanese invaders might soon turn the whole Pacific coast into a battlefield, said Lippmann, and “nobody's constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.” The novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain, who had been a colleague of Lippmann's on the old
New York World,
and who now served with Cecil B. DeMille as a helmeted air raid warden in the Hollywood Hills Air Raid Defense Unit, felt a similar sense of alarm. “I'm not given to easy suspicion about people,” he said in a postwar interview, “but . . . there was a general feeling that the Japanese were doing a lot of spying, that getting them all bunched together in one place and keeping them there for the duration was not such a terribly bad idea.”

This was largely racism. Though there were laws restricting “enemy aliens,” so that potential subversives like Bertolt Brecht had to obey a curfew and stay home after 8
P.M.
, all special curbs on California's 58,000 Italian and 23,000 German aliens were dropped by the end of 1942. San Francisco's Italian-American mayor, Angelo J. Rossi, testified before a congressional committee that “the activities of Japanese saboteurs” convinced him that “every Japanese alien should be removed from this community,” whereas “evacuation of Axis aliens, other than Japanese, should be avoided.” Nobody even suggested any moves against native-born citizens of German or Italian ancestry, like Mayor Rossi, and yet Rossi declared that even “Japanese who are American citizens should be subjected to . . . all-encompassing investigation.” A minor Hollywood actor named Leo Carillo, who claimed that his Mexican origins made him aware of discrimination against minorities, now cabled Santa Monica Congressman Leland M. Ford to call for action: “Why wait until [the Japanese] pull something before we act . . . ? Let's get them off the coast into the interior.” Congressman Ford read this into the
Congressional Record,
then made a similar demand on the floor of the House and in a letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: “All Japanese, whether citizens or not, [should] be placed in inland concentration camps.” California's Senator Hiram Johnson, acting on behalf of all legislators from the West Coast, sent President Roosevelt a letter demanding “immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage.”

The Japanese who were now to be imprisoned had originally been welcomed to California as an alternative preferable to the despised Chinese. In 1869, when the Chinese laborers who built the railroads and tilled the fields represented about 10 percent of the state's population, the first Japanese to arrive from their long-secluded empire were described in the
San Francisco Chronicle
as “gentlemen of refinement and culture,” who had brought along wives, children, and new business. As late as 1890, there were only two thousand Japanese in the continental United States. About thirty thousand of them had been brought to Hawaii as contract laborers on the sugar plantations, however, and after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Japanese began moving from Hawaii to California. Dennis Kearney, the Irish immigrant who had led the demagogic opposition against the Chinese, now launched a new campaign against the Japanese, “another breed of Asiatic slaves . . . men who know no morals but vice.”

Federal law at that time limited U.S. citizenship to “free white persons” or “persons of African descent,” and when Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress in 1905 to permit Japanese immigrants to become citizens, the legislators refused. Liberals shared in this opposition. “We cannot make a homogeneous population out of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race,” Woodrow Wilson said during his 1912 presidential campaign. The following year, anti-Japanese lobbyists succeeded in getting the California legislature to forbid Japanese immigrants to buy any more land. (Though the diligent Japanese occupied only 1 percent of California's arable land, they produced 10 percent of its crops.) Finally came the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which imposed ethnic quotas to favor the British and other Northern Europeans at the expense of Russian Jews, Italians, Greeks. Only one people received an immigration quota of zero: the Japanese.

The FBI and military intelligence agents had begun investigating the entire Japanese-American community as early as 1932, and by the time of Pearl Harbor they had accumulated voluminous files on both aliens and native-born citizens whom they considered potentially subversive. These included not only civic leaders but also “opinion-molders” like schoolteachers and journalists, as well as any fisherman with a ship-to-shore radio. “Two FBI men in fedora hats and trench coats—like out of a thirties movie—knocked on [the] door, and when they left, Papa was between them . . .” said Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was seven at the time, one of ten children of a fisherman in Santa Monica. “He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy. But he still had dignity, and he would not let those deputies push him out the door. He led them.”