City of Nets (51 page)

The War Labor Board ruled in favor of Sorrell, but the studios tried to avoid a confrontation. They claimed they were helpless, caught in the middle between two rival unions. There was considerable evidence, though, that the studios by now found IATSE a congenial partner. Bioff's successor as IATSE's Hollywood representative was a beefy professional named Roy Brewer, a man who seemed to understand things. Brewer had been head of the AFL's Nebraska Labor Federation, and he was to become one of the major figures in Hollywood's impending labor wars and in the political struggles that grew out of them. He had just resigned from his wartime job with the War Labor Board in Washington when Walsh recruited him to take charge of the IATSE forces in Hollywood. There he found Sorrell on the attack and the studios anxiously maneuvering to delay the inevitable clash.

On March 12, 1945, Sorrell decided that he would wait no longer. His CSU went out on strike and threw up picket lines around the studios. The IATSE chiefs accepted the challenge. They sent bands of workers bulling through the CSU picket lines. William Green, president of the AFL, to which both rival unions belonged, sent Sorrell a telegram that accused him of violating the labor federation's wartime no-strike pledge. “I officially disavow your strike,” Green declared. To California's most fervent right-wingers, Sorrell was simply a Communist, out to make trouble. The state legislature's Jack Tenney, chief propagator of alarms about Reds, declared that Sorrell “has persistently followed the Communist Party line. He subscribed to the Communist Party publication, the
People's World. . . .”
It was true that Sorrell had often supported Communist positions—notably denouncing Roosevelt as a “warmonger” in 1940, the era of the Hitler-Stalin alliance, and then changing to interventionism when the Nazis invaded Russia—but the one issue on which Sorrell and the Communists very markedly differed was the Hollywood strike.
People's World
loyally supported the AFL's no-strike pledge and blamed both Sorrell and the producers for breaking it. Sorrell in turn charged his enemies with conspiracy and corruption. Though IATSE's gangster chiefs were now in jail, Sorrell ridiculed the larger union's claim of having reformed. He later testified before a House committee that IATSE and the studios had conspired against their own workers ever since the 1930's, and “this conspiracy goes on now.”

Hollywood divided. The Screen Writers Guild somewhat reluctantly voted to support the CSU picket lines; the Screen Actors Guild somewhat reluctantly voted to cross them. At the actual studio gates, people made their decisions somewhat capriciously. Salka Viertel recalled separate groups of writers and secretaries meeting in the cafeteria just across from Warner Bros. One writer who claimed that he could work only by dictating to his secretary suggested that they all wait to see what the secretaries decided. “We stepped out onto the sidewalk to watch what the ‘girls' would do,” Mrs. Viertel said. “About thirty of them came out and for a while they stood undecided, watching the slowly moving pickets and the studio police, who were protecting the entrance. Finally an energetic young woman threw back her head, said ‘What the hell!' and ran defiantly across the street and through the passive picket line. The others promptly followed. . . .” Mrs. Viertel asked her own secretary what had happened at her meeting, and she said that most of the secretaries at first sympathized with the strikers, “but one girl, who has worked for Ayn Rand, swayed them by insisting that the strikers were just a bunch of Communists and that a decent person had to be against them.”

Once the battle lines had been established, the studios summarily fired all the striking decorators, and the CSU refused to accept the dismissals. As the deadlock continued, but failed to shut down the studios, some striking unions gave up (the Screen Publicists Guild, for one), some newcomers joined in (the Screen Cartoonists Guild). The Japanese surrender that August formally ended the AFL's no-strike pledge, so various larger unions began choosing sides in the Hollywood struggle. The AFL's big rival, the CIO, formally voted to support the strike. The Teamsters, then a member of the AFL, strongly opposed it. Lawrence P. Lindeloff, the international head of Sorrell's own union of painters, first denounced the strike, then came out in favor of it.

Though strikes cost employers a lot, they cost workers a lot more (in this case, over eight months, an estimated fifteen million dollars). While the CSU workers walked the picket lines all through that spring and summer, they were unable to keep IATSE workers from pushing their way into the heavily guarded studios. Early in October, Sorrell decided he would have to concentrate his forces, and he picked Warners for the battle. The first forty pickets arrived at the studio at 5
A.M.
, and soon there were about 750 marching to and fro. When the first IATSE workers appeared at the gate, the pickets overturned three of their cars. The streets glittered with shards of broken glass. The Burbank police and Warners studio guards beat back the picketers with clubs and sprayed them with fire hoses. Jack Warner and his executives watched the battle from the roof of the studio.

More IATSE workers arrived to join the fight. Some of them tried to overturn a CSU sound truck, and the driver slugged one who attacked with a wrench. A striking painter named A. Kieser was stabbed in the nose and forehead by a strikebreaker with a penknife. A picketing secretary named Helen McCall was hit in the eye by a gas bomb. The police arrested Sorrell on suspicion of inciting a riot and held him on fifteen hundred dollars bond.

Sorrell was back on the streets the next day, and this time the picketing seemed to succeed in shutting down Warners. Except for a few chorus girls rehearsing a dance sequence, all work stopped on the three films in production. Warners lawyers were in court, though, to get an injunction against further mass picketing, and the IATSE men went to enforce the injunction the next morning. Several hundred IATSE men formed a column six abreast across the street from the pickets patrolling the Olive Avenue entrance to the Warners studio. At 6
A.M.
, they marched forward, and the two armies met in a storm of fists, clubs, even flares. This time, nearly eighty people were injured before police from four nearby towns could restore a semblance of order. Eight combatants were arrested, including one twenty-nine-year-old secretary to a Universal producer, who was charged with possession of a blackjack.

The combined power of the police, studio guards, and IATSE was too much for the strikers, who were beaten back from the studio gates and permitted only to stage sitdowns. It was Washington that saved them. At the end of October, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the decorators were entitled to join the painters. Grudgingly, the studios and IATSE gave way. For Sorrell and his allies, it was a victory, but perhaps a Pyrrhic victory. The cry of Communist influence in Hollywood had sounded once again, and the forces behind it were getting stronger. Their cry would soon reverberate far beyond the impulsive urgings of Ayn Rand's secretary.

 

At three o'clock in the morning on September 16, 1945, Theodore Dreiser lurched up out of bed at his Spanish stucco house on North Kings Road and began turning on all the lights. He called out for his wife, whom he had married just the previous year after a quarter century of turbulent concubinage.

“Helen!”

Helen Dreiser emerged from her own bedroom to find the seventy-four-year-old novelist roaming through the house and still calling her name. She pattered after him, repeatedly telling him that she was there, all to no avail.

“I said, ‘I am Helen,' ” she later wrote in some notes on the incident. “First he said, ‘Everyone thinks she's Helen.' Then I told him quietly that I could prove it. T.D. then said, ‘I'll believe you if you say so.' ” Mrs. Dreiser thought she had won that exchange, but a few days later, Dreiser confided to a visitor, “It's odd, a strange woman has been here.”

It was because of Helen Patges Richardson that Dreiser had first come to Hollywood, back in 1919. She was young and pretty then, aged twenty-five, a secretary in a New York office, and she wanted to be an actress. She admired the author of
Sister Carrie,
who happened to be her second cousin, aged forty-eight, so she went to pay him a visit, and they became lovers, and headed for Los Angeles. Helen started out as an extra, at $7.50 a day, and then found a few minor parts at twenty dollars. She played in Rudolph Valentino's first film,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(1921). Dreiser was not very happy about her fledgling career, even though it helped pay the rent. He himself had received a four-thousand-dollar advance to write a novel,
The Bulwark,
about a Quaker whose yearning to do good led to nothing but trouble. He decided to go back to New York to write it. Helen went with him.

Dreiser's major encounter with Hollywood occurred only after the success of
An American Tragedy
(1925). Paramount bought it but didn't know what to do with it. When Sergei Eisenstein visited Hollywood in 1930, someone at the studio conceived the remarkable idea of assigning him to film Dreiser's novel. Eisenstein feared that the Hays Office would forbid it, but he was assured that the Hays Office approved, and that the studio had budgeted one million dollars for the project. Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu wrote a script that Dreiser wholeheartedly endorsed, but Paramount's executives began getting nervous. “Your scenario,” said Ben Schulberg, “is a monstrous challenge to American society.”

Paramount junked the whole project and started over again, with the poet Samuel Hoffenstein as scriptwriter and Josef von Sternberg as director. Dreiser's contract included a clause saying that “the Purchaser agrees that it will use its best endeavors to accept such advice, suggestions and criticisms that the Seller may make in so far as it may, in the judgment of the Purchaser, consistently do so.” It was an ambiguous clause, which Dreiser thought gave him some control over the filming of his novel, but which in fact gave Paramount the right, after listening to whatever Dreiser might want to say, to do as it pleased.

Once the contracts were signed, Hoffenstein set to work writing a script, and Dreiser, who had discovered a new girl, set off with her for Cuba, leaving no forwarding address. When Hoffenstein finished his script and wanted to get Dreiser's approval, Dreiser could not be found. Paramount sent out official notices that filming would soon begin. Dreiser reappeared in New Orleans, and denounced all previous correspondence as “the usual Hollywood swill and bunk.” He demanded the right to discuss Hoffenstein's script. With some trepidation, Hoffenstein sent his screenplay to New Orleans and asked if he could meet Dreiser there. “
IF YOU CAN DISCUSS THIS AMICABLY OTHERWISE NOT
,” Dreiser wired back. Amicable as could be, Hoffenstein flew to New Orleans, to find at his hotel a note from Dreiser saying that the script was “nothing less than an insult,” and that “to avoid saying how deeply I feel this, I am leaving New Orleans now without seeing you. You will understand, I am sure.”

Hoffenstein understood. Paramount understood. The studio went ahead and started making the movie. Dreiser publicly denounced it, before filming even started, as “a cheap, tawdry, tabloid confession story.” He threatened legal action if Paramount went ahead. Paramount delayed long enough to invite him to state his views and objections, then resumed work on the film. Dreiser denounced all of Hollywood as “Hooeyland” and declared that
An American Tragedy
had been “traduced” into “a Mexican comedy.” And he did sue, demanding that Paramount show cause why it should not be restrained from distributing the film. Since such a suit by an artist defending his work against Hollywood adaptation was extremely rare, almost unprecedented, cultural historians tend to see Dreiser as the hero of the trial in White Plains, New York, in 1931, but in fact the Paramount attorneys blackened Dreiser's reputation and the judge rejected his petition.

Nearly ten years later, ten years poorer and wearier, Dreiser moved back to Hollywood, partly to negotiate a movie sale of
Sister Carrie.
He hated the place. “This region is stuffed with hard boiled savage climbers,” he wrote to his old friend H. L. Mencken, “the lowest grade of political grafters, quacks not calculable as to number or variety, all grades of God-shouters . . . and loafers, prostitutes, murderers and perverts.” To another friend, he offered another objection: “The movies are solidly Jewish. They've dug in, employ only Jews with American names. . . . The dollar sign is the guide—mentally & physically. That America should be led—the mass—by their direction is beyond all believing. In addition they are arrogant, insolent and contemptuous.”

But he thought he could sell
Sister Carrie
to Universal, and he wrote the decaying John Barrymore to urge him to “live to present Hurstwood for me.” For the sake of “the dollar sign,” the once-uncompromising Dreiser was even willing to make compromises with the Johnston Office. To the objection that Carrie's “sins” were never punished, he proposed that this “can be adjusted.” He even suggested, about his first and best novel, that “a different ending could be used—a somewhat more optimistic ending—several of which I have in mind.” So now that Dreiser was willing to be reasonable, as the phrase goes, a deal could be made. It was not Universal, though, but RKO that rescued Dreiser from deepening poverty in the fall of 1940 by buying
Sister Carrie
for forty thousand dollars.

In his politics, however, Dreiser was anything but reasonable. The only constants, tenuously linked by his sympathy for the downtrodden, were an unreasoning devotion to Stalin's Russia and an equally unreasoning hatred of the British Empire. This led Dreiser into some weird positions. He rather admired not only Stalin but Hitler, and so, almost alone among American radicals, he felt no shame over the Hitler-Stalin pact. “Hasn't anyone ever bothered to tell you the facts of life?” he demanded of one skeptical interviewer. “Don't you realize that France and England were all set to attack Russia?” And of President Roosevelt, who failed to share his fantasies, Dreiser wrote to Mencken: “I begin to suspect that Hitler is correct. The president may be part Jewish.”