City of Nets (48 page)

This idea of the friend as murderer seems to have derived from a still earlier fragment that Chandler sketched in his notebooks, in which a man thought his wife had died accidentally and then made friends with her murderer. Perhaps Cissy Chandler contemplated all these fantasies of uxoricide with some misgivings. In any case, Chandler seemed justified in writing to a friend that the original version of
The Blue Dahlia
was “a fairly original idea.” Then, apparently, the U.S. Navy objected to the suggestion that wounded veterans capable of both violence and amnesia were being demobilized and sent forth into the civilian world. Such publicity-minded complaints had carried a certain weight during the war, when the authorities not only provided valuable military services to moviemakers but also felt entitled to request civilian support of the war effort, but why the navy should feel entitled to change the plot of a murder mystery in 1945, and why Paramount should feel obliged to obey, remains unexplained. But so it happened. “What the Navy Department did to the story,” Chandler wrote to a friend, “was a little like making me change the murderer and hence make a routine whodunit.”

Chandler grumblingly accepted whatever the studio authorities did to his work, for he held to the idea that neither the producers nor their films were of any real importance—except, perhaps, as elements in his own books. He found it interesting, for example, that Y. Frank Freeman had built a special dog run at Paramount, where he exercised his prize boxers. In
The Little Sister,
Philip Marlowe went to interrogate someone at a large movie studio and suddenly found himself in a tiled patio where “an elderly and beautifully dressed man was lounging on the marble seat watching three tan-colored boxers root up some tea-rose begonias.” The three boxers urinated in turn on the marble bench, and the old man remarked on the fact that they always did so in the same sequence, according to age. Even in his office, he added, they kept to their rules. Marlowe showed some surprise at that, but the old man went on ruminating about his dogs. “Up against the corner of the desk. Do it all the time. Drives my secretaries crazy. Gets into the carpet, they say. What's the matter with women nowadays? Never bothers me. Rather like it.”

This was Jules Oppenheimer, who owned the studio and much else besides, who thought that the trouble with the movie business was “too much sex. . . . Wade through it. Stand up to our necks in it. Gets to be like flypaper.” But Oppenheimer was not very much interested in what his studio's movies showed. He just ran the business, which mainly consisted, he said, in owning a string of theaters.

“Fifteen hundred theaters is all you need,” said Oppenheimer. “A damn sight easier than raising purebred boxers. The motion-picture business is the only business in the world in which you can make all the mistakes there are and still make money.”

“Must be the only business in the world where you can have three dogs pee up against your office desk,” Marlowe answered.

“You have to have the fifteen hundred theaters,” Oppenheimer said.

This was, of course, what the United States Department of Justice was still trying to prove in court.

 

James M. Cain had wanted to call his first novel “Bar-B-Que.” Alfred Knopf quite rightly thought that was a terrible title. Cain suggested “Black Puma” or “The Devil's Checkbook.” The publisher disliked those, too, and proposed calling it “For Love or Money.” Then Cain thought of a title he really liked: “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Knopf said he still preferred “For Love or Money.” Cain got angry. “There is only one rule I know on a title,” he wrote to Knopf. “It must sound like the author and not like some sure-fire product of the title factory.” He suggested that “For Love or Money” might do very well for a musical comedy or a movie (Universal finally did use that title in 1963, starring Kirk Douglas and Gig Young), or just about anything. He went on to name some more all-purpose titles that sounded typical of the title factory, like “Hold Everything” or “Hell and High Water.” Knopf knew when to retreat.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
received excellent reviews and became one of the best-sellers of 1934, which may have inspired M-G-M to pay $25,000 for the movie rights to a book that couldn't be filmed. By the standards of 1934, it was simply too shocking, not because of any particular sex scenes, which could always be disguised, but because of the essential immorality of the whole story. When the unemployed hitchhiker stopped at Cora's roadside diner, he took a job there mainly out of hunger for Cora, and when the two of them decided to murder Cora's middle-aged husband, generally referred to only as “the Greek,” they killed him simply to get him out of the way. It was Cora's idea.

“They hang you for that,” Frank protested.

“Not if you do it right. . . .”

“He never did anything to me. He's all right.”

“The hell he's all right. He stinks, I tell you. He's greasy and he stinks.”

So the novel lay untouched in the M-G-M storehouse until Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler managed to turn Cain's equally unsavory
Double Indemnity
into a hit for Paramount, and then M-G-M dug out
Postman
to see if something couldn't be done with it.
*
Carey Wilson, the producer of the Andy Hardy series, was put in charge of making it acceptable. Americans had been through a war by now, and perhaps they weren't as innocent as they liked to think they had been. And perhaps if the script put a lot of emphasis on the two murderers being killed at the end, unsatisfied and unhappy in their sinfulness . . . To win the approval of the censors at what was now called the Johnston Office,
*
Director Tay Garnett said, the studio “raised the tone” of the whole story. “I guess you could say we've lifted it from the gutter up to, well, the sidewalk.” Garnett even called for Cora to be dressed entirely in white, on the theory that, as Garnett put it, “dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.”

The Johnston Office hadn't reckoned on Lana Turner, who was then twenty-five and at the height of her luscious beauty. She had already shown, in films like
Ziegfeld Girl
and
Honky Tonk
and
Somewhere I'll Find You,
that she couldn't act very well, and that she didn't need to act very well. She glowed. At this point, she was also personally on the hunt. She had just been through her second divorce, and she liked going out. “The war had just ended, and . . . the men were home,” she recalled. “They seemed to catch your eye everywhere you went, like the first greening after a thaw. How I'd love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man. Ciro's was a favorite haunt. . . . Ciro's was designed for dramatic entrances and exits because a long flight of stairs led down to the tables and dance floor. . . . I'd usually be dressed in something clingy, black or white, sometimes gold, occasionally red. I'd wear diamonds and a fur of some kind draped over one shoulder. Often white fur, my favorite. Maybe ermine or silver fox.”

The “handsome dark man” in her new film was to be John Garfield, who had achieved a modest success in modest films like
The Sea Wolf
and now stood at the brink of bigger things. As part of his success, Garfield felt himself entitled to proposition virtually every woman he met, and so he greeted his new co-star by saying, “Hey, Lana, how's about a little quickie?” She answered appropriately, “You bastard!” According to studio gossip, things eventually went further than that, but perhaps that was only studio gossip. It was standard in those days to make love scenes appear more authentic by spreading word that the principals continued their romance offscreen. Garfield and Miss Turner needed no such publicity. Their love scenes, in which, by today's standards, nothing happened, were among the most erotic ever filmed. The image of Lana Turner in her white bathing suit on Laguna Beach was one that nobody who saw it ever forgot.

It almost didn't get filmed at all, however, for Garnett wanted to work on location as much as possible, and when he took his whole crew on the fifty-mile trek to Laguna Beach, a fog rolled in. “Each day we'd go down to the beach and sit there in the dense mist, waiting and hoping,” Miss Turner recalled. “After several hours the production people would give up and send us back to our lodgings.” With the studio managers grumbling about delays, Garnett nervously decided to move another fifteen miles down the coast to San Clemente—not yet haunted by the ghost of President Nixon—to try his luck there. More fog. More complaints from the home office. Garnett desperately decided to return to Laguna Beach. Still more fog. Still louder criticisms from the studio. Threats of dismissal. Garnett pleaded for time. Days stretched into weeks.

“That's when Tay fell off the wagon,” Miss Turner said. Garnett was one of those journeyman directors who satisfied themselves in keeping things orderly (he eventually made more than a hundred films, very few of distinction). A heavy drinker, he had given up alcohol three years earlier, but now the fog and the delays and the constant criticism and anxiety were all too much for him. “Nobody could control him,” Miss Turner said. “He was a roaring, mean, furniture-smashing drunk. The girl friend he'd brought along stayed for a while, then gave up. The studio sent nurses, but even they couldn't help.”

Nobody at Laguna Beach knew quite what to do. There were rumors that Garnett would be replaced, that the location shooting would be abandoned, even that the whole film would be canceled. To prevent anything like that, Garfield and Miss Turner went to visit the drunken director to see what could be done. Garfield talked his way past the attendant nurses and went on in alone. He returned shaken.

“It's terrible, Lana,” he said. “He didn't know who I was. When I tried to talk to him, he'd say, ‘Sure, Johnny boy, whatever you think.' But a moment later he'd start shouting, ‘Who the hell are you? Get out of my room.' Then he came at me with the cane he always carries.”

“Maybe if I went to see him,” Miss Turner offered.

Garfield was skeptical. So were the nurses. They said they first had to quiet Garnett down. They managed to get his cane away from him. Then they let her in.

“What I found was a besotted man who regretted what he'd done . . .” Miss Turner said. “He sniffled and begged my forgiveness. Now he was rational enough to be sent back to Los Angeles for treatment. By the time he returned a week later, the fog had obligingly lifted, and we were able to complete the film.”

 

If there was any writer who disliked Hollywood more than Raymond Chandler, it was William Faulkner. “They worship death here,” he once remarked at dinner with a friend. “They don't worship money, they worship death.” A small, trim man, his mustache by now gray, Faulkner was in Hollywood because almost nobody bought his books, not even
The Sound and the Fury
(1929), not even
Light in August
(1932). His first four novels had sold an average of two thousand copies, and when he tried to dash off a best-seller,
Sanctuary
(1931), his publisher soon collapsed in bankruptcy. So he came to Hollywood in 1932 and signed a contract with M-G-M at what he considered a princely five hundred dollars per week.

M-G-M's story editor, Sam Marx, asked him to start work on a wrestling story for Wallace Beery. “I want to write for Mickey Mouse,” said Faulkner, quasi innocent. When informed that Mickey Mouse belonged to the Disney studio, Faulkner said, “Then what about newsreels? I like cartoons and newsreels.” Marx sent Faulkner to a projection room to watch Wallace Beery in
The Champ
and asked an office boy to go along with him to answer any questions. Ten minutes later, the boy returned and told Marx that Faulkner had disappeared after asking only one question: “How do I get out of here?” According to other accounts, Faulkner emerged from the projection room repeatedly saying to himself, “Jesus Christ, it ain't possible!”

M-G-M put the novelist to work at patching and revising various projects, almost none of which were ever filmed, then cut his pay to $250 and finally fired him the following year. He stoically went back to Mississippi and began writing his most majestic novel,
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936). That didn't sell either, so he returned to Hollywood to go to work for Darryl Zanuck at Fox at one thousand dollars a week.

Zanuck assigned Faulkner to a film being produced by Nunnally Johnson, who was both a fellow writer and a fellow southerner and who welcomed Faulkner to his palatial office with a great show of courtliness. Faulkner responded by reaching into his pocket and taking out a pint of whiskey. He started to pick at the heavy tinfoil that covered the cork but had difficulty in unsealing the bottle. Dropping his hat to the floor so that he could attack the bottle with both hands, he cut his finger on the tinfoil. He tried to stop the bleeding by licking the finger with his tongue. When that failed, he looked around for some receptacle but could see nothing except his own hat. According to Roark Bradford, the teller of this tale, Faulkner held his dripping finger over his hat while he “continued to work, methodically and silently, until the bottle was finally uncorked. He then tilted it, drank half its contents, and passed it to Johnson.

“ ‘Have a drink of whiskey?' he offered.

“ ‘I don't mind if I do,' said Johnson, finishing off the pint. This, according to the legend, was the beginning of a drunk which ended three weeks later, when studio sleuths found both Faulkner and Johnson in an Okie camp, sobered them up, and got them to work.”

In 1937, Faulkner was fired again and returned to Mississippi to write
The Wild Palms
(1939) and
The Hamlet
(1940). By 1942, his royalty statement from Random House credited him with three hundred dollars as his total earnings for that year from whatever novels were still in print (and by the following year, they were all out of print, except for a Modern Library edition of
Sanctuary
). So Faulkner had to return once again to Hollywood, to Warner Bros., which granted him in the summer of 1942 one of its seven-year contracts. It paid him a starting wage of three hundred dollars a week, substantially less than either of his previous jobs. At the end of this seven-year Warners contract, Faulkner would win the Nobel Prize, but now he was working at the pay scale of a “junior writer.” He was forty-five.