City of Nets (56 page)

Mann seems to have believed that his real answer lay in
Doctor Faustus,
and he was dismayed to see, on its appearance in 1948, that its effect was that of a large stone monument newly unveiled in a public park. The Book-of-the-Month Club once again provided its stamp of approval, but the reviews were solemn rather than enthusiastic. Mann, who had originally declared that this was to be “nothing less than the novel of my era,” now complained to his daughter Erika that “they all place such dreadful stress on the G-e-r-m-a-n allegory.”

The most interesting reaction, though, came from the German exile community in Los Angeles, from the man who saw himself as the model for Mann's “terribly imperiled and sinful artist.” It was Alma Mahler Werfel, naturally, who provoked the controversy. She bustled over to see Mann and “praised the beauty of the novel,” but added some cluckings of surprise that he had made such extensive use of Schoenberg's theory of atonality.

“So you recognized it?” Mann asked, “slightly put out,” according to Mrs. Werfel's account. She answered that “no musician could fail to recognize it.” Mann began to worry. “Do you think Schoenberg will mind?” he asked. Mrs. Werfel only “shrugged, not wanting to set off a general discussion,” but she then hastened to see Schoenberg and to tell him about Mann's activities. “Schoenberg,” she reported, not without satisfaction, “was outraged.”

Schoenberg apparently asked Mrs. Werfel to persuade Mann to have a special notice printed in every copy of
Doctor Faustus,
stating that the twelve-tone theory attributed to Leverkühn was Schoenberg's invention. Mrs. Werfel said she telephoned Mann's home and got his wife, Katia, who “at first resented the idea.” (“She always drank far too many sweet liqueurs and was rather malicious by nature,” Mrs. Mann later wrote of Mrs. Werfel. “She loved to start gossip, and it was she who got Arnold Schoenberg going on the business of the twelve-tone system, telling him that Thomas Mann had stolen his theory.”) Schoenberg really had no proprietary rights to his theory, of course, any more than André Breton did to surrealism, or, for that matter, Einstein to relativity. But Schoenberg was old and neglected, impoverished and embittered, and the idea that his rich and famous fellow refugee had used their dinner table conversations about his unplayed music in a best-selling novel—and without ever mentioning his name . . . was all too much.

Schoenberg didn't even read
Doctor Faustus,
declaring that his eyes were too weak for such an effort, but he began planning a bizarre response. This took the form of an article, written by Schoenberg under the pseudonym of Hugo Triebsamen, allegedly for the
Encyclopedia Americana
of 1988, in which the misguided Triebsamen falsely attributed the invention of twelve-tone music to Thomas Mann. Schoenberg then sent this macabre creation to Mann with a bitter note explaining that it was intended to demonstrate the potential damage that Mann had done him. Mann was baffled, partly because he actually believed, since his ego was almost as large as that of Schoenberg, that he had made Schoenberg's theory his own. “Within the sphere of the book . . .” he argued, “the idea of the twelve-tone technique assumes a coloration and a character which it does not possess in its own right and which—is this not so?—in a sense make it really my property.”

Mann did realize, though, that Schoenberg's “delusions of persecution” derived from “a life suspended between glorification and neglect,” and so he finally agreed, after many more phone calls, to give credit to Schoenberg for his theories in all future editions of
Doctor Faustus.
“It is my sincere hope,” Mann rather grandly declared, “that he may arise above bitterness and suspicion and that he may find peace in the assurance of his greatness and glory.”

 

The ugly strike of 1945, which had theoretically been settled by the victory of Herb Sorrell's Conference of Studio Unions over the larger and stronger forces of IATSE, remained very much unsettled. Two angrily competitive union coalitions still confronted each other, and Hollywood was still ruled by a coterie of producers who feared and hated both unions as much as the unions feared and hated each other. According to the producers, they and their employees were all quite happy until the unions began making trouble. “We have never had a dispute with the labor in Hollywood over wages, hours, or working conditions,” M-G-M's Eddie Mannix testified—falsely testified—lied—to a House subcommittee investigating the Hollywood strikes. Ben Kahan, a Columbia vice-president who identified himself at these same hearings as the unofficial chairman of the studio executives responsible for labor relations, was more specific. He said the labor wars that broke out in 1945 began “not because of any question as to wages, hours, or working conditions, but solely because of jurisdictional disputes.”

What Kahan airily dismissed as a series of jurisdictional disputes, however, was an important struggle for power (as well as the wages, hours, and working conditions that Kahan claimed were not at issue). To both IATSE and the producers, Sorrell and his CSU were a dangerous threat, probably Communist dominated. That, in any case, was the charge with which they planned to resist Sorrell's challenge. When a new CSU strike appeared imminent early in 1946, IATSE's chief official in Hollywood, Roy Brewer, denounced it as “a last desperate effort to keep Communist control of certain AFL unions in Hollywood.” Sorrell, on the other hand, insisted that Brewer and IATSE president Richard Walsh were simply the heirs to the corrupt empire of Willie Bioff and George Browne. Walsh had been one of IATSE's vice-presidents under Browne, after all, and most of the union's other executives remained in the same seats of power. Sorrell described IATSE as “a company-dominated union run by a group of racketeers.” He said the IATSE leaders had engaged in a “criminal conspiracy . . . to deprive a lot of workers of their rights.”

While both Brewer and Sorrell undoubtedly exaggerated each other's malefactions, Stewart Meacham, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, was probably accurate in saying that “the producers and the IATSE . . . did not want peace. They were determined to destroy the Conference of Studio Unions.” Brewer was even more accurate in telling an inquiring priest named George H. Dunne that “the IATSE and the Conference cannot exist together in Hollywood. It is war to the finish.”

The first step was the prosecution of Sorrell for the whole array of misdemeanors committed during the violent climax of the 1945 strike. On January 9, 1946, the CSU leader was convicted on nine counts of contempt of court for having sent masses of pickets to blockade the gates at Warner Bros. He was sentenced to sixteen days in prison and a fine of seventeen thousand dollars. He paid the fine under protest, and after a month's freedom on a writ of habeas corpus, he served his term in prison. In April, he was taken back to court, along with eight others, on a charge of rioting during the melee outside Warners. A jury acquitted him of that but convicted him on a minor charge of “failure to disperse.”

Throughout all this, Sorrell was trying to negotiate a new wage contract for his unions. The studios offered a ridiculous 10 percent wage increase; Sorrell demanded an equally ridiculous 50 percent. Both sides finally agreed to 25 percent, but then the “jurisdictional disputes” once again providentially intervened. This time, the conflict centered on the machinists who had gone out on strike with Sorrell's CSU in 1945 and the rival machinists who had been hired to replace them. These strikebreakers, with IATSE support, insisted on their right to keep their jobs. Sorrell called all his unions out on strike again on July 1. The studios quickly decided to avoid combat. Everyone gathered at a conference and worked out a truce known as the Treaty of Beverly Hills; everyone returned to work while negotiations continued. Sorrell gloated at the prospects after what seemed another victory. “From now on, we dictate,” he said.

The most difficult problem involved not the machinists but the carpenters, who traditionally had enjoyed the right to build and install all movie sets. IATSE challenged that right, partly because it represented the “grips” who moved props and furniture around, partly because the carpenters belonged to Sorrell's CSU. When both sides appealed to AFL president William Green, since all these quarreling unions were members of the disorganized coalition that called itself a federation of labor, Green characteristically appointed a three-man committee to consider the problem. These three implausible judges were William C. Doherty, head of the postal workers union, Felix H. Knight of the barbers, and William C. Birthright of the trainmen. Given thirty days to resolve a dispute that had baffled more experienced experts for many years, the three journeyed to Los Angeles, spent several hours touring one studio, Paramount, interviewed a few of the rival combatants, and then retreated to write their report.

That report turned out to be a marvel of ambiguity. “All trim and millwork on the sets and stages” should be done by the carpenters, said the three Solomons, while IATSE men should undertake “the erection of sets on stages.” Both sides immediately began arguing about the meaning of the word “erection,” whether it meant building sets or simply putting together things already built. IATSE claimed the former, and thus claimed some three hundred jobs held by Sorrell's carpenters. Although IATSE had no unions specifically chartered for such work, it immediately organized a new local designated as “set erectors.” The producers, predictably, sided with IATSE and gave its members the work; the carpenters, just as predictably, appealed to AFL headquarters for a “clarification.”

Now the carpenters were not just a few handymen who hammered nails in the back lots of Warner Bros. Their commander in chief, Bill Hutcheson, was a crusty old swashbuckler who had risen to the exalted role of an AFL vice-president, a man who, when he asked for a clarification, wanted things clarified very much his own way. The three wise men responded, that August, much as Hutcheson wished. They had never meant, they clarified, to deprive a single Hollywood carpenter of a single job. All carpentry of all sorts, they said, should be done by the carpenters. The IATSE chiefs were furious. Their lawyers argued that the AFL committee had long since completed its work and had no right now to “clarify” its own decision at the expense of the IATSE workers. The studios, as usual, sided with IATSE. They did more. In a series of secret meetings with IATSE's Roy Brewer, the studio negotiators agreed to confront another strike by Sorrell. Brewer, in turn, promised that his IATSE workers would crash through Sorrell's picket lines and keep the studios open. According to the minutes of a producer's meeting, subsequently read to a congressional hearing, the plan was ruthlessly simple: “By 9
A.M.
, Monday, clear out all carpenters first, then clear out all painters, following which proceed to take on IA men to do the work.”

Whether this represented an unprovoked strike by aggressive leftists in the CSU or a deliberately calculated provocation and lockout by the producers remains arguable to this day. In any case, Sorrell called his ten thousand workers out on strike, and Brewer sent his sixteen thousand workers in to do their jobs. The first major clashes occurred outside Warners, where strikers threw bricks and rocks at IATSE workers trying to get through the gates. Burbank police fired shots into the air. Some two hundred people engaged in another fracas outside the M-G-M studio in Culver City. Stones, shouts, shovings—each side accused the other of using “goon squads.” Eight studios in all were involved, eight studios at work on the filming of fifty pictures. Amid all the uproar, IATSE's Roy Brewer soon demonstrated that he could provide the workers to keep the studios open and operating. The studio chiefs were grateful. Work went on.

Then began an elaborate series of efforts at mediation. One of the first and most important of these efforts was led by Ronald Reagan, who had just succeeded Robert Montgomery as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and who reacted to the prevailing spirit of violence by carrying a .32 Smith & Wesson in a shoulder holster. Reagan later condemned Sorrell as a Communist, but at this point he still regarded himself as “a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal,” and he decided, not unreasonably, that the major force behind the strike was Bill Hutcheson of the carpenters union. So he led a delegation of movie actors to the AFL convention in Chicago and asked for a meeting with Hutcheson. Hutcheson gruffly refused. Reagan's group then “wangled,” as he put it, a meeting with the three arbitrators who had first ruled for IATSE and then “clarified” their ruling in favor of the carpenters. Under questioning, Reagan said, the three had admitted that their clarification “was a mistake,” but they added that “a third clarification would be another mistake.” They had acted, they told Reagan, “as a result of . . . months of ceaseless pressure on the part of Hutcheson.”

Reagan's committee included some rather celebrated names: Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Alexis Smith, and Reagan's own wife, Jane Wyman. They all went to AFL president Green, according to Reagan, and blamed the strike on Hutcheson. They threatened to fly movie stars to every major city in the country to denounce Hutcheson. “To our consternation,” Reagan recalled, “Green burst into tears. With his cheeks still wet, he said brokenly, ‘What can I do? We are a federation of independent unions. I have no power to do anything.' ”

Reagan finally arranged a meeting with Hutcheson and found him mired in twenty-year-old conflicts, thirty-year-old conflicts, between his carpenters and other unions. They wrangled over how many carpenters' jobs were jeopardized by the strike, how many carpenters were involved, even how many carpenters there were in Hutcheson's union. But finally Hutcheson told Reagan, according to Reagan, that if the actors could get IATSE to back down on the three hundred disputed jobs, “I'll run Sorrell out of Hollywood and break up the CSU in five minutes.”
*
The actors reflected on this remarkable proposition as they rode down in the elevator from Hutcheson's hotel room, and then in the deserted lobby they met Herb Sorrell. They told him, perhaps naively, perhaps maliciously, what Hutcheson had said. “It doesn't matter a damn what Hutcheson says,” Sorrell retorted, according to Reagan. “This thing is going on, no matter what he does! When it ends up, there'll be only one man running labor in Hollywood and that man will be me!”