City of Nets (26 page)

Something about Jane Russell spoke to Howard Hughes. She had no talent, and she wasn't even very good-looking, but Hughes decided that she had commercial possibilities. He sent Howard Hawks out to Arizona to start filming
Billy the Kid.
Theoretically, Hawks was in charge of the production—Hughes had promised him that—but Hughes could never abide by his own rules. After midnight one day in 1940, he telephoned Russell Birdwell, the press agent, and ordered him to come immediately to Hughes's headquarters on Romaine Street. Hughes himself ran through all the rushes on the projector and then demanded to know what Birdwell thought.

“Excellent,” said the uncomprehending Birdwell.

Hughes ran through the rushes all over again.

“I think the rushes are brilliant,” Birdwell tried again. “Of course, they are rough. . . .”

“Didn't you notice anything?” asked Hughes.

“Notice something?” Birdwell echoed.

“No clouds,” said Hughes. “Why go all the way to Arizona to make a picture unless you get some beautiful cloud effects? The whole purpose of going on location is to get scenery you cannot achieve in a Hollywood studio. The damn screen looks naked. Naked.”

Birdwell suggested that there might not be any clouds in Arizona at that particular moment, and that it would be a waste of time to keep the whole company waiting for them to appear. Hughes sent him home, spent the rest of the night rerunning the rushes of
Billy the Kid,
then telephoned Hawks in the morning. “Howard, you're turning out one hell of a movie,” Hughes said, according to Birdwell's account. “In fact, the project is so promising that I want to up the budget from $400,000 and give you $1 million to work with. And, Howard, I would like you to get some clouds in the sky, even if you have to wait a little while.”

Hawks may have been paranoid, or he may just have been sensitive to Hollywood language, or he may just have wanted to escape from Howard Hughes. “Look, Howard,” he said. “I've been offered a new picture with Gary Cooper called
Sergeant York,
and I can't take it until I get
Kid
out of the way. I have an idea. You apparently don't like what I'm doing out here, so why don't you take over on this picture? Then you can do what you want, and I can do what I want.” It was Marshall Neilan and
Hell's Angels
all over again. Howard Hughes was being challenged once again to take the controls. How could he refuse?

Hughes's first act was not to fly to the scene but rather to demand that the entire cast and crew, some 250 people, abandon all work at the site nearly 100 miles beyond Flagstaff, Arizona, and return to Los Angeles for consultations. When filming resumed under Hughes's direction, it resumed at Hughes's own bizarre pace. Often he appeared only late at night and then insisted on filming all night long. Sometimes he demanded thirty retakes of a simple scene, sometimes none at all. While Hughes dawdled, M-G-M stole his title and hastily produced its own
Billy the Kid,
starring Robert Taylor. Hughes called up Louis B. Mayer to protest. Mayer was not stricken by remorse. Hughes had to change to a new title:
The Outlaw.

If Hughes could not coerce Mayer, he could at least torment his own employees, and so, during one of those all-night filming sessions, there occurred the famous scene of the Jane Russell brassiere. The heroine was supposed to be undergoing torture by Indians, supposed to be tied by the wrists between two trees, supposed to be writhing in pain. Hughes, playing director, insisted on having the scene shot over and over. It eventually became clear that he was having trouble in satisfying his own fantasy of what a girl strung up between two trees should look like. “This is really just a very simple engineering problem,” he said as he called for a drawing board, paper, and pencil. The legend is that Hughes regarded the Russell bosom as a challenge to his skill in aeronautical design, that he quickly sketched a plan for a new brassiere, and that a wardrobe mistress immediately stitched together something that would fulfill Hughes's fantasies. The legend defies plausibility, if only because of Hughes's continuing inability to design airplanes that functioned properly. The only plausible element, indeed, was Hughes's morbid insistence that his employees spend their evening hours watching him direct other employees in taking pictures of a girl strung up between two trees. As for what actually happened, Miss Russell herself is the best witness: “When I went into the dressing room and tried it [the new bra] on, I found it uncomfortable and ridiculous. Obviously he wanted today's seamless bra, which didn't exist then. . . . So I put on my own bra, covered the seams with tissue, pulled the straps over to the side, put on my blouse and started out. . . . Everybody behind the camera stared, and Howard finally nodded okay, and filming proceeded.”

The Outlaw
was complete rubbish, of course, but that hardly bothered anyone. To Hughes, and to Birdwell, its trashiness was simply another challenge. The first step was to produce a photograph that would serve as the one great publicity picture. “What would you charge,” Birdwell asked a Beverly Hills photographer named George Harrell, “to photograph a girl [who] will sit, stand, roll around, dance, smile, sing, laugh, and cry? All you will do is shoot. I am after one, perhaps two, great photographs.” Harrell suggested two hundred dollars. Birdwell was horrified. “Perhaps you didn't understand me,” he said. “This must be a master photograph.” They finally settled on $2,500. Miss Russell duly arrived at the Harrell studio and spent an afternoon lounging around in a haystack, provided by Birdwell, and sucking thoughtfully on a stalk of hay. The result went to
Life
magazine, and from
Life
to U.S. Army camps all over the world. Jane Russell was famous.

As for the awful movie,
The Outlaw,
that was another problem to be solved by the appropriate promotion. Hughes hired the Geary Theater in San Francisco for his premiere and then plastered the city with posters of Miss Russell lolling in her haystack. Anticipating some still-imaginary opposition, Hughes's poster announced: “
The Outlaw
—the picture that couldn't be stopped.” Hughes himself piloted a planeload of fifty Hollywood correspondents up to the premiere, but his guests' reactions ranged from nervous embarrassment to open ridicule.
Time
called the movie “a strong candidate for the flopperoo of all time.”

The only solution, obviously, was to play the censorship game. Birdwell called up the San Francisco police department and demanded that
The Outlaw
be suppressed as an outrage to public morals. The police department showed no interest. Birdwell telephoned clergymen, parent-teacher groups, women's organizations, urging them to join in a public outcry against his employer. The forces of virtue remained apathetic. Birdwell wrote and planted in a San Francisco newspaper an article entitled “What Time Does Reel Six Go On?” It implied that unspeakable depravities occurred during reel six of
The Outlaw
and that armies of insiders who knew the secret were storming the theater to witness the orgy, although, as Birdwell later admitted, “there was nothing in reel six that you couldn't have seen in reel five, four, or seven.”

Finally, Birdwell had discovered the right method. The rituals of moral protest began, the police bestirred themselves, arrests were made, lawyers were hired, censorship was decried, civil liberties were proclaimed, and attendance records were broken. At that very moment, at the edge of triumph, Howard Hughes withdrew his ludicrous film from circulation. He offered no explanation, simply took it back and locked it up in a special airtight room that he had built for that purpose at his headquarters on Romaine Street.

 

The greatest playwright within a thousand miles of Hollywood could not find work in the world's movie capital. In a small house on Twenty-fifth Street in Santa Monica, Bertolt Brecht set up his typewriter on a small table in the small bedroom, which had pink doors. For this house, he paid $48.50 per month in rent. Having reached America largely on funds solicited by Fritz Lang, he now lived entirely on a $120 monthly dole from the European Film Fund organized by Charlotte Dieterle and Liesl Frank. Brecht's wife, Helene Weigel, bought the necessary furniture and the clothing for the two children from Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. A German refugee doctor sent no bills for treating Brecht's tubercular daughter, Barbara. As an “enemy alien,” provided with an alien identity card numbered 7624464, Brecht was not allowed outside his home after 8
P.M.
, and not allowed to travel more than five miles from that home without special permission. “I can't recall a single breath of fresh air in all these months,” he wrote in his journal. “It's as if I was sitting a kilometer deep under the ground, unwashed, unshaven, waiting to hear the result of the battle for Smolensk.”

He referred to Hollywood as “the world center of the narcotics trade,” but he kept trying to write for the movies. He showed William Dieterle a screen treatment entitled “The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.” He drafted a scenario entitled “Rich Man's Friend,” roughly based on an episode in the life of his fellow exile Peter Lorre. He wrote a story about the founder of the Red Cross, “The Malady of Monsieur Dunant.” Then there was an outline on Walter Reed's struggle against malaria, “The Fly,” and notes for various projects with titles like “Horoscope,” “The Traitor,” “The Mexican.”

Brecht worked with Elisabeth Bergner's husband, Paul Czinner, on an idea that Miss Bergner had given him, about a girl who became a political radical while under the influence of hypnosis. Brecht later claimed that Billy Wilder had heard about his scenario and sold the idea to some producer for $35,000. (Wilder not long ago dismissed the charge: “I met him two or three times at parties during the war. That's all I can tell you.”) Brecht engaged in the traditional writer's revenge of crying “J'accuse.” “When I was robbed in Los Angeles, the city/ Of merchandisable dreams,” he wrote, “I noticed/ How I kept the theft, performed,/ By a refugee like me, a reader/ Of all my poems,/ Secret, as though I feared/ My shame might become known,/ Let's say, in the animal world.”

It was Fritz Lang, once again, who came to Brecht's rescue, by opening up the possibility of a film about a spectacular killing in Europe. On May 27, 1942, two Czech guerrillas whom the British had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia ambushed the green Mercedes carrying Reinhard Heydrich, deputy chief of the Gestapo and organizer of the still-secret “final solution.” Their grenade shattered his spine. The next day, while Heydrich lay dying, and the Nazi police began rounding up hostages, Brecht and Lang went walking along the beach at Santa Monica, like the walrus and the carpenter, wondering if the manhunt for the assassin of Heydrich the Hangman would make a good movie.

It obviously would. Working together, in German, Lang and Brecht soon produced a one-hundred-page treatment, which Lang then sold to an independent producer, another refugee, named Arnold Pressburger. The penniless Brecht got a beggarly advance of $250, which filled him with hope for the future. Would $3,000 be too much to ask for the finished script? Brecht asked. Not at all, said Lang, who grandly promised him $5,000 for the script plus $3,000 more for any necessary revisions. Brecht felt prosperous enough to move into a slightly larger house in Santa Monica, one block away, which cost $12.50 per month more in rent.

Lang was not a real movie writer, and neither, as he well knew, was Brecht, so Lang hired as a collaborator a professional named John Wexley. He paid a stiff price, $1,500 per week, for Wexley had written some very successful screenplays, notably
Angels with Dirty Faces
and
Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
Lang may also have promised Wexley full script credit (subsequent accounts contradict each other), but Brecht accepted him simply as a colleague. He described him as “very leftist and decent.” And so they began their doomed collaboration. Pressburger had rented some space in the Charlie Chaplin studio, and when the work stretched on after the alien curfew of 8
P.M.
, they would meet at Brecht's house. The collaboration was doomed not only because Brecht and Wexley had very different ideas about the film—Brecht's title, “Trust the People,” implied the kind of
Lehrstück
that he wanted to write, complete with choruses and montages of headlines—but also because Brecht regarded all collaboration as an ideologically inspired mating of his genius and his colleagues' suggestions for the fulfillment of that genius. He was nettled that Wexley addressed him as “Bert,” when even his own wife called him “Brecht,” but he wrote of Wexley's efforts in his journals, “I correct his work.”

Wexley naturally viewed the situation quite differently. He saw himself as the skilled professional summoned west from his Bucks County farm to create a viable screenplay out of the jotted notes of two gifted refugees who could hardly speak English. And as he dictated his own work to a secretary, he made sure that each page bore his name. When the two writers argued, as they inevitably did, they often ended by including in the script both Brecht's Berlinisms and Wexley's Hollywoodisms. Their joint creation eventually reached about three hundred pages, roughly twice the standard size. Then Lang's own anxieties intervened. He took Wexley aside and told him that what he wanted to make was “a Hollywood picture.” That injunction, that concept, was presumably something that the two of them could understand, not Brecht. One of the most interesting elements, though, was Lang's objection to scenes in which Brecht showed Nazis mistreating Jews, even scenes in which Jews were seen wearing the Star of David. The question that Lang kept raising, according to Brecht, was whether or not “the public will accept this.” What he meant by “the public,” of course, was the authorities in both Hollywood and Washington, who decided what it was that the public would accept. In both places, it was more or less official policy that the Jews were incidental to the larger struggle between freedom and dictatorship. So here was Lang, a Jew, warning Brecht, a Gentile, that their movie about Nazism must not show Jews being persecuted as Jews. And this in 1942, when the four gigantic gas chambers at Auschwitz were in the process of being built.