City of Nets (50 page)

That wouldn't do at all for Lauren Bacall, or for Hawks's general admiration for adventurous women. When Chandler's Marlowe went into a bookstore, the woman in charge of the place offered him nothing but a few wisecracks. Hawks's Marlowe suggested a drink, and she put a sign on the door saying
CLOSED FOR THE DAY.
When Chandler's Marlowe hired a cab to tail someone, the driver was simply “a fresh-faced kid”; Hawks turned the cabbie into a pretty girl and had her ask Marlowe to call on her again, preferably at night, if he ever wanted another “tail job.” Chandler's novel ended with Marlowe ordering Vivian Sternwood to have her homicidal younger sister locked up in a mental institution, and then departing to deal with some gangsters who were threatening the Sternwood family. Hawks's film ended, of course, with Bogart and Bacall united. “What's wrong with you?” he says. “Nothing that you can't fix,” says she.

Chandler could hardly complain about changes in the plot. His original novel was a tangle of loose ends, and when Hawks's three screenwriters turned in their script, one of them said, “There are a lot of things that don't make sense.” Hawks didn't care. “Good,” he said. “Let's try it and see whether the audience likes that.” So they just started in, and in due time they inevitably came to the question of who murdered Owen Taylor, the Sternwoods' family chauffeur. He was not an important character, and it was not an important murder, but still—there he was, sitting in Vivian Sternwood's black Buick sedan under ten feet of water off a Lido fishing pier. Hawks and the writers pored over Chandler's novel, but Chandler himself, apparently by oversight, had never explained who killed the chauffeur. So Hawks sent him a telegram asking him who had committed the murder. Chandler went back through his book, reflected on the mystery, and then sent a return telegram: “
I DON
'T KNOW.
”

Hawks still didn't care. He said later that this incomprehensible story was “the first time I made a picture and just decided I wasn't going to explain things. I was just going to try and make good scenes.” The interviewer eliciting these reminiscences, Joseph McBride, seemed to think that Hawks had discovered some avant-garde method. “It's a revolutionary thing you did,” said McBride, “because it became the method of modern films that people don't care if the plot makes sense if it's fun.” Hawks was happy to agree. “It's just my way of telling a story,” he said.

The only ones who argued that the narrative of
The Big Sleep
was supposed to make sense were the censors from the Johnston Office, and they disapproved of Chandler's ending in the original script. They disapproved of the fact that nobody in the Sternwood family was punished, that even the gangsters finally went on about their business. Hawks turned on the censors and challenged them to provide an ending themselves. “I said, ‘OK, you write a scene for me,' ” Hawks recalled. “And they did, and it was a lot more violent, it was everything I wanted. I made it and was very happy about it.”

The basic idea of the new ending, whether or not anyone from the Johnston Office actually proposed it, was that Marlowe returned to the scene of the first murder and was trapped there by the gangsters. At this point, Chandler himself was consulted, and he suggested an interesting outcome. In Chandler's version, Carmen Sternwood, the younger sister, was also trapped in the house with Marlowe. The detective knew that whoever first emerged from the house would probably be shot down, and he knew that Carmen was the murderer, and he knew that if she understood the situation, she would have no qualm about killing him. “He didn't feel like playing God or saving his skin by letting Carmen leave,” Chandler later wrote. “Neither did he feel like playing Sir Philip Sidney to save a worthless life. So he put it up to God by tossing a coin. Before he tossed the coin, he prayed out loud, in a sort of way. The gist of his prayer was that he, Marlowe, had done the best he knew how and through no fault of his own was put in a position of making a decision God had no right to force him to make. He wanted that decision made by the authority who allowed all this mess to happen.” The coin came down heads, indicating that Marlowe should let the girl go her own way, even to her death. She started toward the door. He started to stop her. She pulled a gun on him and laughed. Then a burst from one of the gangsters' machine guns, fired more or less at random, drilled through the door and killed her. But Hawks didn't use Chandler's ending. Too complicated, perhaps. In the final version, which had no Carmen Sternwood in it, the burst of machine gun fire accidentally cut down the chief gangster, enabling Bogart to walk out of the trap and into his new wife's embrace.

She was not quite his new wife yet. They had agreed to marry as soon as Bogart could get a divorce from the quarrelsome Mayo Methot, but the third Mrs. Bogart did not go quietly. All through the filming of
The Big Sleep,
there were fights and scenes. Bogart decided to leave home. Then friends told him that his wife would kill herself if he left. She promised to stop drinking if he would stay. She had to go to a hospital. He decided she deserved a last chance. Miss Bacall wept. And so on. At one point, when Bogart and Miss Bacall were enjoying themselves aboard his yacht, Mrs. Bogart came back early from a shopping trip. Miss Bacall had to hide in the ship's head until Mrs. Bogart departed again. On another occasion, Miss Bacall picked up a telephone and heard an angry voice shouting, “Listen, you Jewish bitch—who's going to wash his socks? Are
you
?” Early in May, Mrs. Bogart finally gave up and got her divorce. Less than two weeks later, Bogart took a weekend break from some reshooting on
The Big Sleep
and married Miss Bacall on the Ohio farm of the novelist Louis Bromfield.

So everything ended happily, except for William Faulkner, who decided that he could not bear working for Warner Bros. any longer. “I think I have had about all of Hollywood I can stand,” he wrote to his agent, Harold Ober. “I feel bad, depressed, dreadful sense of wasting time, I imagine most of the symptoms of some kind of blow-up or collapse. Feeling as I do, I am actually afraid to stay here much longer.”

Part of Faulkner's difficulty was a matter of health. He complained of being “not well, physically, have lost weight, etc.,” though that was nothing unusual for an alcoholic nearing the age of fifty. Part was desperation about his continuing failure as a novelist. “My books have never sold, are out of print,” wrote the author of
The Sound and the Fury
and
Light in August.
“The labor (the creation of my apocryphal country) of my life, even if I have a few things yet to add to it, will never make a living for me.” And part was simply a dislike of Los Angeles and everything in it. “Nobody here does anything,” he complained to a fellow writer named Paul Wellman as they waited on a street corner for the bus to Burbank. “There's nobody here with any roots. Even the houses are built out of mud and chicken wire. Nothing ever happens and after a while a couple of leaves fall off a tree and then it'll be another year.”

Faulkner told Warners in September of 1945 that he wanted to go back to Mississippi and finish a novel. It was to be about a mutiny in France toward the end of World War I, about a Christlike figure who ended as the Unknown Soldier. Faulkner had been fascinated by the idea ever since he first heard it in 1942 from the director Henry Hathaway and a free-lance producer named William Bacher, who had given him a thousand-dollar advance to write it as a novel that they could then buy for filming. Faulkner also told Warners that he owned a mare that was going to foal, and he wanted it to foal in Mississippi, and so he was going to take it there and stay there. The studio offered to grant him a six-months leave without pay to finish his novel, on the understanding that Warners would have first chance at the movie rights. Faulkner naturally had to decline, since he had already sold the movie option to the two men who had told him the idea. Warners said he couldn't take any leave unless he signed the agreement. Faulkner cleared out his desk and left.

Back in Mississippi, the novelist wrote a very deferential personal appeal to Jack Warner, whom he even addressed as Colonel Warner, asking to be released from his contract. This was a contract, it should be remembered, under which Warner Bros. was giving Faulkner nothing—no money, no office, no benefits of any kind. Yet Warners treated him, as it treated its actors, like somebody who had to be confined to the studio for the contractual period of seven years. And while rebellious stars like Olivia de Havilland sued for the right to work for competing studios, Faulkner was asking only the right to stay in Mississippi and write his novel. “I feel that I have made a bust at moving picture writing and therefore have mis-spent and will continue to mis-spend time which at my age I cannot afford,” he wrote to Warner. He then recited the thin list of movie work accomplished for Warners. He had done “the best work I knew how” on a half-dozen scripts, but only two were produced, and he had been credited for his work on those “partly through the friendship of Director Howard Hawks.” And finally, perhaps a little too calculatingly, he appealed to Warner's rather insubstantial sense of honor, to “that same fairness which you have shown before in such situations.”

Warner didn't bother to answer. The reply came from R. J. Obringer, of the studio's legal department, demanding that Faulkner sign the leave agreement. And just as Warner had blacklisted Miss de Havilland, he now seemed to think that he could exercise similar power over the entire publishing business. “He has already made vague though dire threats about warning any editor to buy my stuff at his peril, if I don't come back,” Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, who had just put together the Viking
Portable Faulkner,
which was to become an important element in bringing the novelist's best work back into print.

On into 1946, Warners continued its pursuit of the errant Faulkner. Obringer wrote him a stern letter warning him that he had violated his contract. Only when Ober sent Warners the first sixty-four pages of Faulkner's new novel (which was then called “Who?”) as clear evidence that it was not anything the studio would want to film, and only when Bennett Cerf of Random House made his own personal appeal to Warner to leave Faulkner in peace, only then did Warner agree at least to stop harassing Faulkner until the novel was finished. Before that day came, the Nobel Prize for 1949 would finally reduce the Warners contract to a dead letter. So Faulkner went on writing
A Fable,
mercifully unaware that the unfinished novel he regarded as his
magnum opus
would actually turn out to be one of his worst books, that all his best work was already behind him.

 

The honking of distant auto horns one August afternoon brought to most Americans their first news that the war had finally come to its inevitable end. First a few horns, then soon more and more of them, then shouts from window to window, and then everybody began parading through the streets under showers of confetti. It was a happy day, but it didn't have that stunning surprise of the war's beginning, that sense that all of life had suddenly become different. The outcome had long been certain, and the main difference that it promised—promised falsely—was that peace would bring a restoration of life as it had once been.

This did not mean a return to the Depression, of course. The era of the breadline and the dole was over, and everybody now expected to prosper. There had been enough talk of sacrifice; it was time to concentrate on making more money, making more and spending more. The American Federation of Labor had pledged to Roosevelt that there would be no strikes for the duration of the war, but well before V-day, the rival Hollywood unions were already getting ready to fight. As early as January of 1945, the first strike vote was taken. It involved a supposedly jurisdictional dispute, one of those internecine quarrels that few outsiders can either understand or judge, yet on each side of the dispute there began to form the ragged coalitions of right and left that would soon tear Hollywood apart.

At the center of the conflict were seventy-seven interior decorators, who had formed their own little union and negotiated a five-year contract with the studios back in 1937. That was the period when Willie Bioff of IATSE was trying to seize control of everything within reach. In 1939, IATSE organized and demanded studio recognition for a new Local 44 that included what it called “set dressers.” The studios answered that they already had a contract with the independent decorators. By the time that contract expired in 1942, Bioff and IATSE president George Browne were in prison for racketeering, and IATSE had been inherited by Richard Walsh, a pudgy Brooklyn Irishman who had been one of Browne's vice-presidents. Walsh withdrew IATSE's request to represent the decorators on condition that no other outside group could represent the decorators either. The studios agreed.

Late in 1943, however, the decorators voted to strengthen their little union by affiliating with Local 1421 of the painters' union, a somewhat shaggy organization that also included designers, illustrators, and model builders. Most important, the chief of the painters was Herbert Sorrell, a sturdy ex-boxer who had actually served his apprenticeship with a brush and bucket. He liked to describe himself as “just a dumb painter.” After serving as a picket captain in a painters' strike in 1937, Sorrell won election as head of the Hollywood local and helped organize the bitter but successful cartoonists' strike against the Walt Disney studio in 1941.

Sorrell was unusual in another way: He had resisted both the threats and the inducements of Willie Bioff, who once suggested that they could make some money by working together. Sorrell not only rejected Bioff's offer but began organizing an anti-IATSE coalition called the Conference of Studio Unions. The CSU was everything that IATSE was not: militant, leftist, and honest. By 1945, Sorrell's CSU had grown to a total of nine unions, including the painters, carpenters, and machinists, nearly ten thousand workers in all, a serious challenge to IATSE's control of its sixteen thousand members. So when Sorrell requested a new contract for the seventy-seven decorators, IATSE once again demanded recognition for its own group of “set dressers.” IATSE president Walsh warned that all his men would walk out if the studios gave in to Sorrell.