City of Nets (57 page)

The membership of the Screen Actors Guild voted overwhelmingly on October 2, 1946, to back Reagan's leadership, denounce the CSU strike as a jurisdictional dispute, and cross the picket lines. The SAG also took the lead in organizing a declaration by twenty-four other Hollywood unions to that effect. The year before, Sorrell had been saved by Washington, by the National Labor Relations Board's ruling in his favor. Now there was no sign of any such rescue. On the contrary, the national elections of 1946, which took place less than two months after Sorrell's unions went out on strike, were ruinous. A nation weary of wartime restrictions voted overwhelmingly for whatever alternatives a renascent Republican party could offer. In their strongest showing since the stock market crash of 1929, the Republicans won most of the governorships, a narrow majority in the Senate, and a large majority in the House.

Important positions changed hands. One of them was the chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been bumbling along, since the retirement of Martin Dies, under the aegis of Democratic Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey. It now acquired the spirited Republican leadership of another New Jerseyan, J. Parnell Thomas, who seemed to believe that the entire New Deal was a nightmare to be exposed, illuminated, and destroyed. One of the newly elected congressmen assigned to help him in his efforts was a young Los Angeles lawyer named Richard Nixon, victor over the hapless liberal Jerry Voorhis. Another newcomer who would soon achieve a considerable celebrity was the freshman senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. But the national sickness subsequently known as McCarthyism was already being nurtured by President Truman. Just three weeks after the Republican triumph in the election, Truman assigned an interagency committee to start checking the “loyalty” of more than two million government employees.

In the narrow little world of Hollywood, the immediate effect of this conservative shift was that there was no longer any New Deal to help Herb Sorrell and his strikers. They were on their own, without either the numbers or the weapons to defeat the forces that they had committed themselves to challenge. Under a court injunction to limit the number of pickets to no more than eight at any studio gate, Sorrell sent 1,500 to lay siege at Columbia. Police arrested 610 men, including Sorrell, and 69 women. By the end of that November week, the arrests totaled 802, on various charges of assault with deadly weapons, conspiracy to commit extortion, unlawful assembly, and interference with the orderly administration of justice. Bail was set at five thousand dollars each.

Sorrell later charged that these prosecutions were all part of a “conspiracy to destroy the CSU,” that Warners put policemen from Burbank and Glendale on the studio payroll, that M-G-M paid thirty-two dollars per day for every policeman used at the Culver City studio, and that M-G-M manager Eddie Mannix “told the policemen when and when not to cause trouble with the pickets.” The studios seem to have engaged in still more clandestine maneuvers. The efforts of IATSE workers to break through Sorrell's picket lines naturally depended heavily on which side the teamsters union would take. The teamsters local voted to honor the CSU picket lines, but the chief of the local, Joe Touhy, threatened to bring in out-of-state teamsters to support the IATSE strikebreakers “and see that they are carried through.”

Touhy naturally would not have attempted such coercion without the approval of the corrupt union's leaders, Dan Tobin and Dave Beck, but what was particularly interesting was Touhy's negotiations with Joe Schenck, who had been pardoned by President Truman for his intrigues with Willie Bioff, released from prison, and reinstalled in the executive offices at 20th Century–Fox. Several months before the strike began, Schenck promised to hire Touhy as “industrial relations director” for National Theaters, a chain of movie houses of which Schenck was an executive officer. Touhy, who had been getting $175 per week from the teamsters, went on Schenck's payroll on January 1, 1947, roughly three months after he helped break the strike, at $400 a week, plus $100 in expenses, on a seven-year contract that escalated to $500 a week for the last three years.

Then there were the more direct methods. Early in March of 1947, Sorrell and his wife were going to a union meeting at a church in Glendale. Shortly after he had dropped off his wife, he was stopped by three men in another car. One of the three was in police uniform and had a police badge and a police gun. “I didn't resist,” Sorrell said later, “because I thought I was going to a police station. He put handcuffs on me. When I went to get into the car somebody hit me on the side of the head. . . . They tied me, and every time I moved or tried to get up, they hit me over the head with a gun.” Sorrell said he heard the men discussing a reward for killing him, but then they drove away. He was found at the side of the road by a passing motorist, who took him to a nearby hospital. In this case, in contrast to the strikers' picketing outside the movie studios, nobody was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The strike went on. It is virtually impossible, of course, for workers to win a strike unless they can shut down the employer's plants, or else persuade the government to intervene on their side. Since Sorrell and his CSU could do neither of these things, they were doomed to stand on the sidewalks outside the studios and shout insults at the IATSE men going to work every day. Their last remaining hope was that by their persistence they might somehow win over that nebulous force known as public opinion. This was highly unlikely, since the press showed little interest and less sympathy. And Sorrell's opponents kept bringing in the issue of communism.

This question dragged on even longer than the strike. Lawrence P. Lindeloff, the head of the painters union, testified before a House subcommittee in 1948 that he had talked to Sorrell several times about the matter and concluded that “he may be a radical, but I couldn't accuse him of being a Communist.” More impartial corroboration came from Pat Casey, who had served as chairman of the Motion Picture Producers Association Labor Council for twenty years, and who testified: “I've dealt with Herb Sorrell since 1937 or 1938. In my opinion, he's not a Communist.”

By this time, though, the authorities had unearthed a Communist Party membership card made out to Herbert Stewart, Stewart being Sorrell's mother's maiden name. A Los Angeles handwriting expert, Clark Sellers, said that the signature on the card was by Sorrell, but Sorrell denied it, denied that he “ever saw a Communist Party card.” Republican Congressman Thomas L. Owens of Illinois, a member of the House subcommittee investigating the strike, handed Sorrell the card and asked him if he didn't think the handwriting looked like his.

“I'd say it looks very much like my handwriting, but it is not my handwriting,” Sorrell said. He acknowledged that his mother's name had been Stewart and added, “I suppose that's why they put it on there.”

Owens pointed out to him that the second letter in the name on the card looked like both a
t
and an
o.
“It looks like you started to write Sorrell and then wrote Stewart, doesn't it?” Owens asked. “That's the way it looks,” Sorrell said.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover resolved these contradictions by telling the subcommittee that the Communist Party card had definitely been signed by Sorrell. At that time, such a judgment by Hoover was considered definitive. Now that more is known about his corrupt and capricious rule of the FBI, his testimony seems considerably less authoritative, though it may quite well have been true.

This was all secondary, however, to the painters and carpenters and other pickets parading to and fro outside the gates of Warners or Metro. They had been trapped, as they increasingly realized, in a battle they could not win. They marched, they shouted slogans, but nothing happened. Winters are not hard in Los Angeles, and this was not like a strike in Chicago or Boston, but still, the strikers had to go without pay while they watched the IATSE workers ride through the gates to their jobs in the flourishing studios. There seemed to be no end in sight, and scarcely the possibility of an end.

The end came, as it usually does, obliquely, blurred by a smoke screen of lies and equivocations. The painters, Sorrell's own union, voted in October of 1947 that the members of their union were entitled to cross the CSU picket lines if they were suffering personal hardships. And who among them, after a year of striking, was not suffering personal hardships? Sorrell officially supported the move. How could he do otherwise? He could not win.
So they all trickled back to work, on whatever terms they could get. The progressive labor movement in Hollywood had been broken, and the studios left it to the machinery of the AFL to settle with Herb Sorrell. The defeated CSU simply disintegrated and faded away, but there were punishments to be inflicted, scores to be settled. The international headquarters of the painters union demanded in 1951 that Sorrell be expelled from the leadership of Hollywood's Local 644 on the ground that he had “willfully and knowingly” associated with “organizations and groups which subscribe to the doctrines of the Communist parties.” Sorrell said he would resign if the members of Local 644 asked him to do so. Local 644, numbering perhaps three hundred painters, refused. It voted to support its battered leader. The international headquarters thereupon revoked the local's charter early in 1952, thus depriving it of all authority. Sorrell's paychecks of $255 per week stopped. When he sued the international headquarters on the ground that he had a three-year contract, the suit didn't come to trial until the summer of 1955. By this time, Sorrell claimed that the union owed him $20,670. Sorrell lost.

 

“How could this man so methodically take these women out and cut them up and burn them in his incinerator, and then tend his flowers, with the black smoke coming out of the chimney?” It was almost a rhetorical question that Charlie Chaplin blurted out to his oldest son, in the spring of 1946, as he neared the end of his script for
Monsieur Verdoux.
Charles Chaplin, Jr., by now twenty-one and newly discharged from the army, could offer no answer, but that was hardly expected. “In the next instant,” the son recalled, “he would snap out of his brown study and start pantomiming the gruesome episode, turning it into such comedy that I couldn't help laughing.” That summer, the same pantomime became one of the opening scenes of
Monsieur Verdoux:
Chaplin pruning his roses, the incinerator gushing smoke in the background, Chaplin nearly stepping on a caterpillar, shuddering at the possibility of such cruelty, tenderly rescuing the caterpillar from harm's way.

Chaplin had found what he thought was a perceptive answer to his question, and that was to portray Verdoux as a simple businessman, who courted rich old women and then killed them for their property. A businessman would do anything for profit, in Chaplin's formulation, and so business logically led to war and the death of millions. “Wars, conflict—it's all business,” Verdoux said to a press conference shortly before his execution. “One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify!” This quasi-leftist equation of business and war was actually less Marxian than Brechtian, but when Chaplin hopefully showed his script to Bertolt Brecht, he received a bewildering response. “Oh,” the playwright commented after thumbing through Chaplin's work, “you write a script Chinese fashion.”

Serious critics, of the kind who complain that Brecht's
Mahagonny
is not an accurate representation of contemporary life, naturally objected to both the philosophizing in
Monsieur Verdoux
and the philosophy itself. Perhaps the sharpest of these was Dwight Macdonald, who declared that Chaplin's comparison of murderers to political leaders represented “an irony that was probably first observed by some ur-Montaigne of the time of Belshazzar.” More generally, Macdonald went on, “it was a sad day for Chaplin when the intellectuals convinced him that he was the Tragic Clown, the Little Man. . . . The nature of reality, which he understood intuitively as a mime, became opaque to him when he tried to think about it.”

This was one of the sad consequences of the coming of sound to films; it required words, which implied thought. Chaplin resisted sound as long as he could.
City Lights
(1931) and
Modern Times
(1936) perpetuated the silent film for nearly a decade after
The Jazz Singer
had doomed it. But to proclaim that the philosophical arguments of
Monsieur Verdoux
are familiar or oversimplified or wrong, or all three, is like objecting to the political reasoning of Picasso's
Guernica.
No matter how much Chaplin may be criticized for pretentiousness, naïveté, sentimentality, and various other intellectual sins, he nonetheless managed, more than any other filmmaker in Hollywood, to grasp the central problems of his time, to make his films as commentaries on them, and to make the right commentaries. To have dramatized the lust for money in 1925 (
The Gold Rush
), the mechanization of life in 1936 (
Modern Times
), the threat of Nazism in 1940 (
The Great Dictator
), and the ambiguities of mass murder in 1946 implies an artistic prescience well beyond the arguing of Chaplin's critics. Perhaps it is precisely because
Monsieur Verdoux
was not about the Holocaust that the image of the incinerator behind the rose garden speaks so tellingly.

None of Chaplin's achievements would have been possible, of course, if he had been required to submit his ideas to Louis B. Mayer or Darryl F. Zanuck or any of their nervous deputies. Chaplin committed to his faith in
Monsieur Verdoux
the astonishing (for 1946) sum of two million dollars. But though he didn't have to subject his idea to the views of any executive producers, he did have to win the approval of the censors at the Johnston Office, and the censors disapproved of almost everything. In a letter to Chaplin, they began by declaring that they were not disputing the political views expressed in
Monsieur Verdoux
but hinted that they might yet return to raise objections on this front. “We pass over those elements which seem to be anti-social in their concept and significance,” the letter said. “There are the sections of the story in which Verdoux indicts the ‘System' and impugns the present-day social structure.” Having brought up this issue only to declare that they were “passing over” it, the censors then turned from mass murder to a more serious concern, “a distasteful flavor of illicit sex, which in our judgment is not good.”