City of Nets (39 page)

Early in 1943, Miss Barry found that she was pregnant and accused Chaplin of being the father. “Isn't it a fact,” Jerry Giesler later asked her in court, “that on June first, 1943, in the yard of Mr. Chaplin's home, when you were alone with him, you accused him of being the father of your unborn child, and didn't you tell him that unless he gave your mother $65,000 and placed $75,000 in trust for the baby, you'd make trouble for him—that the press was on your side, and when they got through with him they would blast him out of the country?” Miss Barry denied making any such threat, but she did file a paternity suit against Chaplin. He denied everything.

Chaplin by now was once again involved with an adolescent girl, and a beauty, Oona O'Neill, the daughter of Eugene O'Neill. She was just seventeen, a debutante with vague theatrical ambitions, out in Hollywood to inspect the scene. Orson Welles, the eternal magician, took her to a nightclub on their first date and read her palm and said, “Within a very short time you will meet and marry Charles Chaplin.” Hal Wallis's sister Minna, a Hollywood agent who thought that Miss O'Neill might get the part of Bridget in Chaplin's version of
Shadow and Substance,
invited them both to dinner at her house. Chaplin found Miss O'Neill “of a luminous beauty, with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing.” They were married that June.

In October, Miss Barry gave birth to a girl she named Carol Ann. Chaplin's lawyer had worked out a deal to pay her $25,000 if she and the baby would submit to blood tests to see whether Chaplin was the father. If they all had the same blood type, that would not prove that he was the father, of course, but a difference would prove that he wasn't. In the midst of these negotiations, Chaplin got a call from Justice Frank Murphy of the Supreme Court, who warned him that some politicians he had met at a dinner party in Washington had spoken of planning “to get Chaplin.” More paranoia? In January of 1944, a federal grand jury indicted Chaplin for violating the Mann Act, an antiprostitution law of 1910, which made it a federal crime to transport a woman across a state line for immoral purposes. Every once in a while, not often, the federal authorities invoked this antique statute to harass someone they didn't like. The first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who married three different white women, was convicted under the Mann Act in 1913, fled the country to avoid imprisonment, but finally served a year in jail for his sins. And now, on February 10, 1944, the federal authorities claimed that Chaplin had violated the Mann Act by paying Joan Barry's railroad fare to New York and then meeting her there.

Five days after Chaplin's indictment, the blood tests on Miss Barry's baby showed that Chaplin couldn't possibly be the father. Miss Barry was type A, her baby was type B, and Chaplin was type O. Chaplin felt exonerated, but the federal indictment did not say that he had fathered Miss Barry's baby; it said that he had transported her across a state line for immoral purposes. Chaplin's friends persuaded him to call in the famous Jerry Giesler, and Giesler fought the case on what he considered the perfectly sensible ground that a man “who could have enjoyed Miss Barry's favors in Los Angeles for as little as twenty-five cents carfare, would [not] pay her fare to New York . . . for immoral purposes.”

Chaplin suffered a lot of criticism in the press, which regarded him as vain and arrogant, but he knew how to play his new role. “Chaplin was the best witness I've ever seen in a law court,” Giesler said later. “He was effective even when he wasn't being examined . . . but was merely sitting there, lonely and forlorn, at a far end of the counsel table. He is so small that only the tops of his shoes touched the floor. He looked helpless, friendly and wistful, as he sat there with the whole weight of the United States Government against him.” The federal indictment was ridiculous, and Giesler won a fairly quick acquittal. “I believe in the American people,” Chaplin said, just like Errol Flynn, just like every acquitted criminal. “I have abiding faith in them. In their sense of fair play and justice.”

He was to learn better. Chaplin thought that Miss Barry's paternity suit against him had been nullified by the blood tests, certified by three doctors, declaring that he could not be the father of the baby. But the judge ruled that the “ends of justice” would best be served by a “full and fair trial of the issue.” Chaplin, perhaps overconfident that a medical decree of his innocence must lead to an acquittal, had abandoned the artful Giesler and entrusted his case to a more ordinary lawyer. Miss Barry entrusted hers to an old-fashioned orator named Joseph Scott. Ignoring the scientific evidence of Chaplin's innocence, Scott proceeded to attack the star as a “master mechanic in the art of seduction,” and a “cheap Cockney cad,” and a “little runt of a Svengali,” and a “gray-headed old buzzard,” and a “reptile [who] just looked upon her as so much carrion.”

The trial ended with a hung jury, seven to five for acquittal; the second trial, in April of 1944, ended with an eleven-to-one verdict for Miss Barry. Chaplin, who could not have been the father, was ordered to pay $75 per week to support Carol Ann until the age of twenty-one, a tidy sum amounting to $82,000, and he did pay it. He then took Oona, pregnant, to live in Nyack, up the Hudson from New York, while he wrote the screenplay of
Monsieur Verdoux,
about a man who murdered love-hungry women. Miss Barry was eventually committed to a state mental hospital.

 

One of the cornerstones of the Hollywood studios' monopoly was the standard contract by which they controlled actors, directors, and any other people they considered valuable. The standard contract lasted for seven years, renewable every six months at the wish of the studio, usually with an increase in pay if the studio decided to renew. The studios justified these contracts on the ground that they invested time and money in developing an actor's career, and during the Depression, both the actor and the studio benefited from the security of a long-term contract. It was theoretically possible to free-lance (Charles Boyer, Cary Grant, and a few others insisted on signing for just one picture at a time), but the studios naturally favored their contract players, and few people dared to take the risks of the jungle.

They were frightened people, many of these famous stars, emerging from origins of poverty and conflict, driven onward not by talent or vocation so much as by the simple hunger for what Hollywood could give them: riches, success, fame. (Lana Turner was surprised to realize, on making a count, that she had acquired 698 pairs of shoes.) And among the few who triumphed, and thus acquired a surrounding phalanx of managers, agents, publicists, paid companions, there remained always an element of panic. “They didn't know what they had,” as the screenwriter Daniel Fuchs put it in his novel
West of the Rockies,
“what it was in them that accounted for their good fortune. They didn't know how to present it, manipulate it, embellish it, portion it out—since they didn't know what it was or whether in fact they had anything at all.”

The standard contract gave the studio not only the right to decide on each renewal but also the right to make all the professional decisions in the actor's life. The studio told him which film he would make next, and who else would be in it, and who would produce and direct it. If the studio had no immediate work for the actor, it could “loan” him out to another studio for any film that the other studio wanted to make, and the loan-out fee went entirely to the studio, which paid the actor his regular salary out of its profits on the loan. If the actor heard of an interesting movie at some other studio and wanted to be loaned out to take a part in it, that, of course, was a decision to be made by the studio that owned him. It might agree, or it might think him too valuable to loan, or it might, for various reasons, want to punish him by refusing. The studio that owned him could also command him to take part in publicity tours, or just about anything else that it wanted him to do. In fact, some studio contracts forbade an actor to leave Los Angeles for any reason without the studio's permission.

In addition to all this, the standard contract contained what was known as the “morals clause.” When M-G-M signed up the nineteen-year-old Ava Gardner in 1941, for example, its contract made her promise that she agreed “to conduct herself with due regard to public conventions and morals,” and that she would not “do or commit any act or thing that will degrade her in society, or bring her into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, that will tend to shock, insult, or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer or the motion picture industry in general.” Miss Gardner signed, perhaps with fingers crossed, and so did everybody else.

If an actor objected to the next film assignment, or anything else, his only recourse was to refuse the studio's orders, whereupon the studio was entitled to suspend the actor without pay, indefinitely, or until he agreed to do as he was told. Furthermore, the period of suspension was added to the end of the contract, so that the actor owed the studio not just seven years of his life but seven submissive and obedient years. To any reasonable outsider, this standard contract seemed extremely unfair, and the only thing more remarkable than the contract itself was the labor unions' docile acceptance of it. “As a union contract which gives the employer the right to fire a worker every six months . . . it is unique in trade union history,” wrote a sociologist named Hortense Powdermaker in
Hollywood, The Dream Factory
(1950). “Hollywood presents the picture of a 100 percent union community, paying the highest salaries in the country . . . but with the atmosphere of a company town.” The standard contract, she added, “smacks more of mediaeval power relationships between lord and serf than of employer and employee in the modern world of industry.”

The first rebel to challenge this system in court was Bette Davis. Having won the 1935 Academy Award for
Dangerous,
she didn't like the scripts that Warner Bros. kept sending her. She also wanted her sixteen-hundred-dollar weekly salary doubled. Jack Warner balked, and when the news of the argument leaked out, a producer in London offered Miss Davis a contract to make two movies for him. She accepted and promptly departed for England. Jack Warner pursued her with a charge of breach of contract, and in the fall of 1936, the controversy came before the bewigged legal authorities of London. It was not a very distinguished trial. Jack Warner testified that his company had built Miss Davis “up almost from oblivion to what the company thinks is a very great height.” His lawyer, Sir Patrick Hastings, accused Miss Davis of being “a very naughty young lady.” But the main legal point was that a contract was a contract, and the London court could only conclude that Miss Davis had freely committed herself to Warner Bros. The decision left her with nothing but a thirty-thousand-dollar legal bill. Jack Warner, to his credit, paid most of it.

Still, holdouts and suspensions were more of a problem at Warners than anywhere else. They were relatively rare at M-G-M and almost unknown at Paramount. Perhaps Warners' problem lay in Jack Warner's fondness for typecasting, or perhaps simply in the feistiness of his repeatedly suspended stars—Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield. (Warner had similar difficulties with one of his three-hundred-dollar-per-week hirelings, William Faulkner.)

The one star who fought him the hardest was Olivia de Havilland, whom Warner had first seen and admired as Hermia in Max Reinhardt's Hollywood Bowl version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
She was eighteen, and according to Warner, she was “a girl with big, soft brown eyes . . . and a fresh young beauty that would soon stir a lot of tired old muscles around the film town.” Despite all this, Warner had very little idea what to do with her. Almost by chance, he cast her opposite the unknown Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
(1935), and when that proved a great success, he cast them both in a variety of sequels.

It was after the friendly intervention of Warner's wife, Ann (Miss de Havilland was nothing if not resourceful), that the actress got permission to play Melanie in
Gone With the Wind.
After that, Warner went right on putting her in second-rate films like
Devotion,
an ill-conceived biography of the Brontë sisters, and
Princess O'Rourke,
the title of which is description enough. There were various explanations for this Hollywood tradition of miscasting. One was that the studios had to produce a good deal of fodder to satisfy their theater chains; another was that they believed a star could carry an inferior film; another was that they sometimes assigned a star to a bad script as a form of discipline; and yet another was that they didn't know the difference between good and bad, and didn't much care.

Whatever the reasons, Warner's assignments exasperated Miss de Havilland, and her exasperation was compounded by the fact that David Selznick was finding much better roles for her beautiful but somewhat less talented younger sister, Joan Fontaine.
Rebecca
had made Miss Fontaine a star, and Hitchcock's
Suspicion
had won her an Academy Award in 1941. While Miss de Havilland was struggling to impersonate Charlotte Brontë in
Devotion,
her sister was starring opposite Orson Welles in the title role of
Jane Eyre.
Miss de Havilland began suffering from a series of headaches, temper tantrums, mysterious swellings in the legs. She refused Warner's latest offering,
The Animal Kingdom,
and so she was suspended.

It was her sixth suspension, and since the periods of suspension kept being added to her contract, she went to her lawyer, Martin Gang, and asked whether there was any way to break the Warner Bros. standard contract. Gang said he had been doing some research on this very question, and he believed that the studio contract violated an old California law against peonage. He urged her to sue for relief, and so she did. Ronald Reagan, oddly enough, later credited this idea not to Gang but to an agent, Lew Wasserman. He said that he and Miss de Havilland and Wasserman were all having lunch together when Wasserman remarked that “Hollywood contracts are always seven years [because] there is a California law that anything beyond seven becomes slavery. . . . It was his opinion that the Hollywood custom of suspending actors . . . and then adding the suspension time to their contracts was illegal. Fiery Olivia rose to this like a trout (a pretty trout) to a fly. She had taken so many suspensions she could grow old and still be on her original seven-year deal. What happened is history. . . .”