City of Nets (27 page)

Once the three-hundred-page script was finished, Lang adopted the predictable expedient of paying off Brecht, thanking him for his services, promising him that all would be well, and then telling Wexley to cut the script in half. The next time Brecht saw Wexley, he described him as looking like a “living bad conscience.” And when he was invited to watch the actual filming, the first scene he saw was one in which the heroine argued with her aunt about the décolletage of her wedding dress, a scene that he thought had been cut out. In general, he thought he had been “able to remove the main stupidities from the story. Now they're all back in.” And of course his title, “Trust the People,” never had a chance. Neither did some other possibilities he had considered: “Never Surrender,” “Unconquered,” “Silent City.” Instead, Lang and Pressburger solicited suggestions from their office staff—an idea that Brecht should have approved as an example of collective creativity—and some nameless secretary won the hundred-dollar prize by proposing the title that the film eventually acquired:
Hangmen Also Die.

For Brecht, who still felt that Lang's successful film contained some mutilated fragments of his ideas, there remained one last degradation: Wexley received the sole credit as the author of the screenplay. Brecht formally appealed to the Screen Writers Guild, since, as he put it, “credit for the film would possibly put me in a position to get a film job if the water gets up to my neck.” The Guild, which had struggled for years for the right to adjudicate such disputes (as many as a hundred per year), followed a basic rule, that a writer who had contributed one quarter of the final script deserved a share of the credit. But when the union's three examiners investigated this case, Wexley produced pages and pages of the final script that he had dictated, with his own name at the top of each page, whereas Brecht could provide only a memorandum on all the meetings that had produced the script. Lang testified on Brecht's behalf, citing many passages that “only Brecht could have written.” And Brecht could hardly have asked for a court more in accordance with his own ideology, a court organized by the union of his fellow writers, but that court ruled exactly as the author of
Mahagonny
might have anticipated. It voted to give the full screen credit to Wexley, and not because he had written the whole script but because Brecht was a German, who would someday go back to Germany, whereas Wexley would remain in America, and therefore the screen credit, the lifeblood of the Hollywood writer, was more important to Wexley, the American, than to the refugee from the Nazism that was the basic subject of the movie.

 

Like Detroit, Hollywood was by now producing war movies on an assembly line. It requisitioned Ronald Reagan back from the Army training-film center known as Fort Roach to star in Irving Berlin's
This Is the Army.
It saluted American pilots in
Air Force
and
Destination Tokyo,
and Marines in
Guadalcanal Diary,
and merchant seamen in
Action in the North Atlantic,
and army nurses in
So Proudly We Hail.
Some of these films made a dogged pretense at realism, like
Wake Island,
in which William Bendix and Robert Preston fought gallantly against overwhelming hordes of Japanese. Some were shamelessly sentimental, like
Mrs. Miniver,
in which the beautiful Greer Garson seemed to save the entire British army from Dunkirk. Some were primarily thrillers, like Hitchcock's
Saboteur,
with that unforgettable finale of the villain dangling by his sleeve from the hand of the Statue of Liberty—and then the sleeve starting to tear. Even the movies that were purely escapist, like
You Were Never Lovelier,
in which Fred Astaire found his new dancing partner in Rita Hayworth, or
Reap the Wild Wind,
in which John Wayne, Paulette Goddard, and Hedda Hopper were all upstaged by a giant squid—even these were escapes from the war, and the war remained in the anxieties of everyone who watched them.

Hollywood's shrewder producers knew that the most successful war films would play on those emotions without addressing them too literally. Let war, like so many other difficult realities, be symbolic, an outpouring of patriotism without too much actual gore. It was Warner Bros. that perhaps best understood the possibilities, understood, for example, the new value in the story of an aged vaudevillian who had once sung the cock's crow of combat in an earlier time, not against Hitler but simply “Over There.”

George M. Cohan, who knew all too well that he was dying of bladder cancer, had been trying for several years to interest some studio in his life story. Samuel Goldwyn was willing to explore the idea and offered it to Fred Astaire, but Astaire declined. Cohan tried negotiating at Paramount, without success. His aura as the composer of “Over There” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” was also the aura of an anachronism, and that quality of outdated rhetoric extended into politics. Cohan had strongly supported the theatrical producers during the Actors Equity strike of 1919, and his Irish-American jingoism was not entirely free of anti-Semitism.

Everything that made the Cohan story a problem in Hollywood, however, made it a solution to the problems of James Cagney, who was best known for his gangster roles but had once been a song-and-dance man. Cagney was also an ambitious stalwart of the Screen Actors Guild (he became its president in the autumn of 1942), and when various official bodies began “investigating” Hollywood, a former Communist Party official named John L. Leech falsely identified Cagney and various others as fellow conspirators. Harry Warner was appropriately indignant, not at the slandering of his star but at the star himself. “He told me in no uncertain terms,” said Cagney's brother William, who by then was managing most of the actor's affairs, “that if my brother didn't clean his skirts of this charge, he was going to destroy him.”

William Cagney apparently thought the solution would be to win the approval of Martin Dies, so he went to see the visiting congressman at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Dies listened with interest but wanted to know why Jimmy Cagney himself had not come. William Cagney said his brother was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. Dies was not satisfied. “Well, where I come from,” he said, “somebody calls you a sonofabitch and you do nothing about it, you're a sonofabitch.” Dies demanded that the actor return to California immediately for “a clean bill of health.” William Cagney telephoned Martha's Vineyard to urge his brother to comply. Jimmy Cagney agreed in principle, but the famous tough guy was terrified of flying and had never boarded a plane in his whole life. “To his credit,” William Cagney said later, “Jimmy got on the plane, which is probably the hardest thing he ever did.” Cagney not only flew to California but testified about his political beliefs for about fifteen minutes behind the closed doors of the Dies committee, then emerged with Dies's approval.

William Cagney was still worried. “We're going to have to make the goddamndest picture that's ever been made,” he said to his brother after the encounter with Dies. “I think it's the Cohan story.” There followed then the usual Hollywood controversies and confusions. Jack Warner and his production chief, Hal Wallis, both claimed later that it had been their idea to film the Cohan story, and that Cagney was their choice as the star. “Cagney refused to make the picture,” said Wallis, who had never gotten on well with the actor. Wallis hoped to change Cagney's mind by assigning the project to Robert Buckner, an amiable ex-journalist who had done well for the studio with such scripts as
Jezebel
and
Knute Rockne.
Buckner had never seen Cohan on stage, but he went to visit the dying man at his Fifth Avenue apartment, and the two began going out for long walks together. Cohan approved of him, Buckner said, partly because of “the fact that I am a gentile.” Cohan sang some of his old songs, even attempted a dance step from time to time, and Buckner soon concocted a saga of heroic dimensions. Wallis was pleased with Buckner's effort and sent it to Cagney to impress him. “I got the impression I had made a dent in Jimmy's armor,” he said.

Cagney's impression was the exact opposite. He said he read the script “with incredulity. There wasn't a single laugh in it.” Cagney acknowledged, however, that his brother “wanted to do the Cohan story as a 100 percent American experience principally to remove the taint that apparently still attached itself to my reputation—a reputation now scarred by my so-called radical activities in the thirties when I was a strong Roosevelt liberal.” Cagney's solution, he said, was to announce that he would play Cohan only if the script was turned over to the Epstein brothers, whom he regarded as “two very bright lads.” These two, Julius and Phil Epstein, were identical twins, both quite bald even in their youth, who modestly toiled away for anyone who would pay them. It was said, in fact, that Budd Schulberg used the two of them as the model for Julian Blumberg, the talented but timorous writer whose scripts were all plagiarized by Sammy Glick. The Epsteins so disliked Buckner's flag-waving script that they declined the job, but William Cagney pursued them until they agreed to rewrite it. Buckner complained bitterly, of course, and so did Cohan, but it was the Epsteins who wrote that saccharine deathbed scene for Cohan's father (Walter Huston). And it was they who solved the problem of Cohan's first wife, a fellow vaudevillian named Ethel Levey, who was preparing to sue everyone involved (and eventually did, without success), by combining her and the second Mrs. Cohan into an idealized creature named Mary (“And it was Mary, Mary, long before the fashions changed . . .”), enchantingly played by the seventeen-year-old Joan Leslie.
*

It was Buckner, though, who conceived the flashback structure that began with an almost godlike President Roosevelt, nameless and filmed only from behind, presenting the aging Cohan with a medal and thus enabling him to tell his inspiring story, and thus making that story an allegory of innocent America catapulted once more into the sordid conflicts of Europe. But it was Cagney, of course, who carried the whole movie. Twice, he sprained an ankle as he struggled to master that oddly stiff-legged way in which Cohan danced, but his strutting performance of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” is still marvelous. “A proud and feverish characterization,” as one critic put it. And even the scene in which Cagney sits at the piano and dabbles at the theme that will eventually become “Over There”—even that is strangely moving, strange because it is so obvious and so mawkish, but perhaps we were all mawkish in 1942. Cagney naturally won an Academy Award, and when he accepted the statue, he had the wit to say, “Don't forget to say that it was a good part, too.”

There had been many liberties taken, however, and Warners worried about Cohan's approval. The studio shipped a projector and a screen in that April of 1942 to the firehouse in Monroe, New York, and there both Cohan and his second wife, Agnes, sat in their wheelchairs and watched. The cancer-ridden Cohan had to be escorted from the room several times to relieve himself, but when it was all over, Agnes Cohan was so captivated by Cagney's impersonation that she said to Cohan, “Oh, George, you were fine. And I always
knew
I was ‘Mary' to you.”

Warners had planned to stage the gala premiere on July 4 (Cohan really was, as Cagney sang, “a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the fourth of July”), but Cohan was so sick that the studio advanced the premiere to May 29, and the opening-night audience bought six million dollars in war bonds. “As our soldiers and sailors depart to fight on the seven seas and five continents . . .” Howard Barnes wrote in the
New York Herald Tribune,
“what could be more timely than to have recalled for us the career of America's lustiest flag-waver?”

 

It was typical of Warners to assign
Yankee Doodle Dandy
to a tall and rather handsome Hungarian director who had never mastered more than the rudiments of English. Michael Curtiz had been born Mihaly Kertész, and his background was very Hungarian. The son of either a wealthy architect or a poor carpenter, depending on which press release could be believed, he either was or was not a strongman (or perhaps an acrobat) with a touring circus, then served in the Austrian artillery (or cavalry) in World War I, then organized Hungary's first film studio. Harry Warner heard praises of a Curtiz film made in Germany,
Moon of Israel,
so he signed him up and brought him to America in 1927. One of the legends is that Curtiz was gratified to see flags and fireworks welcoming him to New York. “All this for me?” he asked. “Sorry, Mike,” said Warner, “it's the fourth of July.”

If Curtiz knew little about America, he was a phenomenally hard worker, and he had a certain talent for whipping up scenes of action, crowds, battles. He helped make a star out of Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
(1935), and then went on to make
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1936),
Robin Hood
(1938), and six other Flynn epics. It was in
The Charge of the Light Brigade
that Curtiz delivered his famous command for a herd of riderless horses by shouting, “Bring on the empty horses!” David Niven, who made that the title of his Hollywood memoirs, wrote that he and Flynn both doubled up guffawing at Curtiz's order. Their laughter did not please the director. “You lousy bums,” Curtiz shouted, “you and your stinking language . . . You think I know fuck nothing . . . well, let me tell you—I know
fuck all!
”

And there was more. Hal Wallis insisted that Curtiz once described Bette Davis as “the flea in the ointment and a no good sexless son of a bitch.” Less belligerent was his request to an actress to “sit a little bit more feminine.” Or “Watch me, I'll give you the cue a feet before.” And to a pair of lovers: “Come a little closer together apart.” And to an assistant returning from an unsuccessful errand: “Next time I send some fool for something I go myself.”