City of Nets (63 page)

With the hearings adjourned, Hughes could concentrate on his Spruce Goose. In two days and two nights, at a cost of $55,000, he had the plane's parts carted from Culver City to Long Beach and reassembled there. Then he invited Brewster and his committee to join him in taking the behemoth on its first outing. The senators said they were busy. Hughes then invited the press to come and watch, at his expense. Several dozen reporters showed up, and Hughes took them out into the windswept bay, forcing his gigantic plane through the choppy waters at a speed of about forty miles per hour. Then, after depositing the reporters back on the dock, Hughes said he wanted to make one more run. He opened the throttles until the eight engines reached a speed of ninety miles an hour, and then, shuddering, the plane slowly soared up out of the water. Hughes got it up to about seventy feet and cruised along for a mile or so, then happily brought it back. “It just felt so buoyant and good, I just pulled it up,” he said.

The Spruce Goose never flew again. But Hughes could not give it up. He spent about one million dollars a year to keep it in storage for nearly three decades. After his death in 1976, it passed on to others, who opened it up as a tourist attraction, and that it remains to this day.

 

When the nineteen Hollywood witnesses flew to Washington and established themselves at the Shoreham Hotel, they suddenly felt themselves in enemy territory. Zanuck and Goldwyn were mere names here, and Eddie Mannix's writ did not apply. Howard Koch, for one, was appalled at the general atmosphere of suspicion. “We were in our own capital, yet no foreign city could have been more alien and hostile,” he recalled. “All our hotel rooms were bugged. When we . . . wanted to talk with each other or with our attorneys, we had either to keep twirling a metal key to jam the circuit or to go out of doors.” Another of the nineteen, Gordon Kahn, said that none of the “unfriendly” witnesses had a single telephone conversation without “strange clickings” on the line. “Waiters hovered too long at tables where these men dined,” he reported. Whenever one of the witnesses wanted to meet someone in the lobby, “sauntering figures took nearby chairs and leaned back to listen better.”

But the producers were still behind them, or so they thought. On the night of October 19, Kenny, Crum, and the other lawyers went to another suite at the Shoreham Hotel to see Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, and two of the producers' attorneys, Paul V. McNutt and Maurice Benjamin. Kenny showed Johnston the papers he had filed to challenge the committee's hearings on constitutional grounds. “We are maintaining that the Thomas Committee aims at censorship of the screen by intimidation,” Kenny said.

“We share your feelings, gentlemen,” Johnston said. “And we support your position.”

But Kenny and his associates were worried about some of the things that Chairman Thomas was saying to the press. “He was quoted,” Kenny complained, “as saying that the producers had agreed to establish a blacklist throughout the motion picture industry.”

“That report is nonsense!” Johnston answered with a great show of indignation. “As long as I live I will never be a party to anything as un-American as a blacklist, and any statement purporting to quote me as agreeing to a blacklist is a libel upon me as a good American.”

“Eric, I knew you were being misquoted,” Crum said, shaking Johnston by the hand. “I'd never believe that you'd go along with anything as vicious as a blacklist.”

“The witnesses we represent will be more than delighted to have that assurance from you,” said Charles Katz.

“Tell the boys not to worry,” said Johnston. “There'll never be a blacklist. We're not going to go totalitarian to please this committee.”

The committee had its own plans. Two days before the hearings began, Chairman Thomas had even staged a kind of rehearsal for the benefit of nine newsreel cameras arrayed in the brightly lit Caucus Room of the House's Old Office Building. He marched in, took his seat behind the rostrum, and nearly disappeared from sight. A Washington telephone directory had to be found for him to sit on, with a red silk pillow on top of that. Now, on Monday, October 20, respectably late at twenty minutes past 10
A.M.
Thomas once again marched into the crowded Caucus Room and established himself on his pillow. The newsreel cameras whirred; there was even one television camera. Thomas welcomed his audience with a short opening statement on the importance of his crusade. “Over 85 million people attend the movies each week . . .” he said. “It is not unnatural—in fact it is very logical—that subversive and undemocratic forces should attempt to use this medium for un-American purposes. . . .”

No sooner had Thomas signaled for the first witness to be called than Kenny rose to argue a motion that the whole proceeding be stopped on constitutional grounds.

“What is your name, please?” said Thomas, who knew perfectly well who Kenny was. Only after Kenny had formally identified himself did Thomas tell him that his clients would not be questioned until the following week, and that he should submit his petition then. Kenny asked if he could cross-examine the “friendly” witnesses. “You may not ask one more thing at this time,” Thomas said. “Please be seated.”

The first major witness was Jack Warner. Chroniclers of these hearings have tended to emphasize Thomas's gavel-pounding clashes with the leftist writers who eventually went to prison as the Hollywood Ten, but there was more to be learned from the outpourings of the “friendly” witnesses, particularly this first one. Jack Warner was in many ways Hollywood incarnate. He was vain, ignorant, pretentious, deceitful, greedy, ruthless, and passionately fond of telling bad jokes. (When Field Marshal Montgomery paid a state visit to Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn introduced him at a studio lunch as “my good friend Marshall Field Montgomery,” and Warner could not resist correcting his fellow producer: “What Sam meant to say was Marshall Field Montgomery Ward.”) While the Warner Bros. studio became notorious for cheap sets and cut-rate productions, and its lawsuits against rebellious stars like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, Jack Warner built up a personal fortune estimated at forty million dollars. Yet by some mysterious alchemy, Warner Bros. produced a fair share of the best movies made during this whole period.
The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, Casablanca, Kings Row, Yankee Doodle Dandy
—these were all Warners pictures.

There was also a yellow streak in Jack Warner. He was terrified every time he faced a fight with some blusterer like Errol Flynn. And no sooner had J. Parnell Thomas summoned him to the preliminary committee hearings in Los Angeles that spring than Warner began babbling. He claimed both that Washington had exerted political pressure on him and that Communists had tried to influence the making of Warner Bros. films, but he insisted that he had always done his best in the cause of Americanism. John Huston later recalled asking Warner what kind of questions the committee had put to him. “They wanted to know the names of people I thought might be Communists out here . . .” Warner said nervously. “I told them the names of a few.” When Huston expressed disapproval, Warner got still more nervous. “I guess I shouldn't have, should I?” he pleaded. “I guess I'm a squealer, huh?”

In Washington, despite his declarations about defending “a free press and a free screen,” Warner offered an opening statement worthy of J. Parnell Thomas himself. “Ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries,” Warner said. “I say let us dig them out and get rid of them.” And again: “Subversive germs breed in dark corners. Let's get light into those corners.” Warner even claimed that his studio would be happy to organize a “pest-removal fund” that would “ship to Russia the people who don't like our American system of government.”

Splendid, splendid, but the committee wanted Warner to do his part by naming some of these termites and subversive germs that he had found burrowing in his studio. Warner tried at first to be evasive. “I have never seen a Communist,” he said, “and I wouldn't know one if I saw one.” Stripling, the chief investigator, reminded Warner that he had done better in his private testimony in Los Angeles. Stripling now read a good deal of that testimony aloud. Warner had been asked whether there had been a time when he noticed an increased Communist influence in Hollywood, and he had said that in 1936 and 1937 he became aware of “that type of writing coming into our scenarios.” Now, perhaps under the influence of studio lawyers, he was reluctant to call anyone a Communist, but he did acknowledge that “there are people with un-American leanings who have been writing . . . types of—what I personally term un-American principles, for want of a better name.”

And who were these people with un-American leanings? Warner equivocated. “When I say these people are Communists . . . it is from hearsay,” he said. But he did keep declaring that he had dismissed them. When Stripling had pressed for names during the Los Angeles hearings, Warner finally began spewing them forth: Bessie and Kahn, Koch, Lardner, Lawson, Maltz, Rossen, Trumbo, Wexley, Guy Endore, Emmet Lavery, Irwin Shaw, Clifford Odets, Sheridan Gibney, Julius and Phil Epstein. Not only were these not all Communists, but not all of them had been fired by Warner either, and now he wanted to make a few amends. “I was naturally carried away at the time . . .” he testified. “I was rather emotional, being in a very emotional business. . . .” Specifically, he wanted to say that Endore, Gibney and the Epsteins had never “written any subversive elements.” But it was hard, Warner said, to keep track of what all these writers were doing. “Some of these lines have innuendos and double meanings and things like that,” he said, “and you have to take eight or ten Harvard law courses to find out what they mean.”

Congressman Richard B. Vail suggested that the Hollywood producers should join forces to expel all Communists from their studios. Warner demurred, perhaps once again recalling advice from his lawyers. “I can't, for the life of me, figure where men could get together and try in any form, shape, or manner to deprive a man of a livelihood because of his political beliefs,” he said. “It would be a conspiracy. . . .” He would soon learn otherwise.

Checked, rebuffed by an apparent ally, the committee retaliated by turning to Warner's production of
Mission to Moscow.
In his ghostwritten 1965 memoirs, Warner claimed that he had made this film at the explicit request of President Roosevelt himself—a claim that the committee would have enjoyed exploring—but in his congressional appearance, Warner sounded considerably less certain.

“Were you asked to make
Mission to Moscow?
” Stripling had asked him during the Los Angeles hearings.

“I would say we were, to a degree,” Warner answered, adding a few more evasions. “You can put it that way, in one form or another.”

“Who asked you to make
Mission to Moscow?
” Stripling persisted.

“I would say former Ambassador Davies,” Warner said, thus offering nothing more subversive than an author's desire to have his own book filmed.

But now, in Washington, Warner wasn't even sure of that. He said he couldn't remember whether Davies had approached Harry Warner, president of the corporation, or whether Harry had approached Davies, to buy the screen rights to what was, after all, a best-seller. Stripling was getting a bit tired of Warner's uncertainties. He began reading aloud from a book by Quentin Reynolds,
The Curtain Rises
(1944), in which Reynolds described the amazement of the American correspondents in Moscow at seeing this filmed paean to the accomplishments of Joseph Stalin. Warner sounded flustered as he declared that he had never heard of Reynolds's book.

“Is it your opinion . . . that
Mission to Moscow
was a factually correct picture, and you made it as such?” Stripling asked.

“I can't remember,” Warner said.

“Would you consider it a propaganda picture?” Stripling persisted.

“A propaganda picture—” Warner echoed.

“Yes.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that it portrayed Russia and Communism in an entirely different light from what it actually was?”

“I have never been in Russia,” Warner protested. “I don't know what Russia is like . . . so how can I tell you if it was right or wrong?”

Well, couldn't Warner have hired some expert to tell him whether his planned film would be accurate? “There are inaccuracies in everything,” Warner said. “I have seen a million books—using a big term—and there have been inaccuracies in the text. There can be inaccuracies in everything, especially in a creative art. . . .”

In a creative art—Warner was beginning to get carried away, to lose his sense of the seriousness of the committee's purpose. Expansively, he acknowledged that leftist writers kept trying to slip bits of radical propaganda into their scripts, but since they knew that he, Jack Warner, would cut out all such propaganda, they persisted in their efforts in what Warner called “a humorous vein.”

“Not only humorous,” said J. Parnell Thomas, sounding a bit shocked.

“Well, strike the word humorous,” said Warner. “I stand corrected.”

“You might say in an insidious vein,” said Thomas.

“Yes, insidious,” Warner agreed.

The producer seemed to sense that he might be in danger. Asked once again about the possibility of blacklisting all Communists, he held up two personnel forms that he said his studio had been imposing on all employees ever since 1936. The main one asked: “Are you affiliated with any organization or group antagonistic to the principles of our American form of government?” Warner claimed that some would-be employees had balked at answering and signing this form, and had thus been discovered—like witches commanded to cross running water—discovered and barred from access to Warner Bros. But though his studio was doing everything it could, Warner insisted, un-Americanism was everywhere. In the theater, for example. (Wouldn't the committee like to turn its investigations toward Broadway?) He had recently seen
All My Sons
by a new playwright named Arthur Miller, which dealt with a manufacturer who produced defective airplanes during the war. “That play disgusted me,” Warner said. “I almost got into a fist fight in the lobby. I said, ‘How dare they?' ” Young Arthur Miller did not seem important enough to pillory, but Warner told the committee that the play's director, Elia Kazan, now engaged in directing a film called
Gentleman's Agreement,
was “one of the mob. I pass him by but won't talk to him.”