City of Nets (70 page)

To Peterson's dismay—he naturally assumed that some important M-G-M executive must have told her the news about her firing, and that he was just bringing the legal confirmation—Miss Garland cried out in amazement and rage, then flung herself onto the floor of her dressing room and rolled around, screaming, “No, no, no!”

Peterson made his escape, and soon Miss Garland was having a drink—“I'm going to have that fucking drink”—with the director, Chuck Walters. “I don't believe it,” she kept saying, crying and laughing at the same time. “After the money I made for these sons of bitches! These bastards! These lousy bastards! Goddamn them!”

What protected Dore Schary during all the conflicts of his early days at M-G-M was that he seemed to have a Midas touch. He was just as sentimental as Mayer but more skillful, and younger. Not only did Betty Hutton make a splendid success out of Judy Garland's role in
Annie
but the thirty-eight films that emerged from M-G-M during Schary's first year included
On The Town, The Asphalt Jungle, Father of the Bride,
all good middle-class hits. After a deficit of $6.5 million during the fiscal year before Schary's arrival, the studio halted its decline and made a profit of $300,000; the next year, the profits rose to $3.8 million. Schenck was pleased. He gave Schary a large stock option, without even telling Mayer. Mayer was furious at both Schenck and Schary, whom he rather justifiably imagined to be in league against him. He rallied his underlings to resist the new regime. In mid-1951, rumors of executive disagreements reached the newspapers. Unknown to Schary, Mayer wrote a letter to Schenck declaring that either he or Schary must have full control of M-G-M, and the other must go. Schenck wrote back that if that was the choice, he chose Schary. According to Schary's account, he was in Mayer's office to discuss some production plans when the telephone rang and he heard Mayer talking angrily with Schenck's lawyer in New York.

“You can tell Mr. Nicholas Schenck that he and Dore Schary can take the studio and choke on it,” Mayer shouted as he hung up. (Mayer's exact language was probably more pungent than Schary could bring himself to report.)

“What was that all about, L.B.?” Schary inquired.

“Sit down and I'll tell you everything,” Mayer snarled, “you little kike. . . .”

 

The most important event in Hollywood in 1948 attracted remarkably little attention. Nor did it take place in Hollywood. Nor was it actually an event but rather a months-long series of events. The essential fact was that the Justice Department persuaded the Supreme Court that the whole Hollywood system, all those rich and powerful studios and all those highly paid executives who talked of their talents for showmanship—all this was actually a criminal conspiracy.

The controversy dated back almost to the beginning of the movie business. As early as 1921, the Federal Trade Commission was investigating such Hollywood practices as block-booking and blind-selling. The producers, many of whom had started out as light-fingered opponents of the patent holders whom they called the “Trust,” now insisted on their own right to protect their interests.

In 1940, the antagonists had agreed to a three-year consent decree, in which the government let the studios keep their theaters, and the studios agreed to buy no more theaters, and to limit block-booking to blocks of five films. At the end of three years, both sides were discontented. The government still wanted to separate the studios from their theaters, and the studios still wanted to be free from government restraints. In 1947, the federal district court in New York ruled that the problem was not who owned the movie theaters but how movies were sold to them. It called for sales by auction—free competition, and all that. The only thing that both the producers and the theater owners agreed on was that auctions wouldn't work. Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court.

In February of 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark appeared before the Supreme Court to argue once again that the studios must give up their theaters. There was no other way, he said, “to effectively pry open to competition the channels of trade in the industry.” The Justice Department had already submitted to the Court a petition arguing that its plea was not just a matter of free trade in the movie business but of free trade in ideas. “The content of films, regardless of who produces them or exhibits them, must necessarily be conditioned to some extent by the prejudices and moral attitudes of those who control the channels of distribution,” the Justice Department brief said. “Only by assurance that the distribution field is open to all may the fullest diversity of film content be had.”

The established studios had proved themselves unwilling or unable to permit such a diversity, the Justice Department said. On the contrary, their past efforts had consisted of “creating and maintaining a control of the film market expressly designed to prevent” any views other than their own. “Such a past,” the Justice Department said, “gives little hope that they will in the future encourage production of the wide variety of films needed to satisfy the wide variety of tastes possessed by the potential American film audience, rather than a standardized mass product adapted to profitable exhibition in a controlled market.”

There had been independent producers from the start, of course. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, had arrived in Hollywood long before Paramount even existed, and though he used Paramount's studio and its distribution system, he remained very much his own boss. United Artists was created in 1919 as a partnership among the highly independent Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. The two producers who were absolutely unable to work for anyone else, David Selznick and Sam Goldwyn, had been independent so long that they had acquired the aura of studios. And after the war, a whole flock of directors and actors began going independent, partly as a way to assert their independence, partly as a way to escape the 85 percent taxes on their high salaries.

One of the first of these was Colonel Frank Capra, who, even before the war ended, launched Liberty Films in the spring of 1945, with two fellow colonels and fellow directors, William Wyler and George Stevens, as partners. Capra felt strongly that Hollywood's wartime prosperity had turned the big studios into assembly lines of mediocrity, and he ridiculed many so-called independent producers as “war profiteers seeking status, socialites seeking glamour, swishy ‘uncles' promoting handsome ‘nephews,' big daddies buying star parts for blonde chicks, et cetera ad nauseam.” Capra, Wyler, and Stevens were all skilled professionals; they would each put up fifty thousand dollars to make use of RKO's facilities, then pay themselves three thousand a week to make one picture a year.

That was not a very promising budget, but it sounded like fun, and Capra started right in by making his most Capra-ish film. It was an engaging story about a good man (Jimmy Stewart, of course) who became such a failure that he wished he had never been born, whereupon a rather Pickwickian guardian angel appeared and showed him what his town would be like if all his unsung good deeds had not been done.
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946) impressed Capra as not only “the greatest film I had ever made” but “the greatest film
anybody
had ever made,” but though it still reappears on television, usually at Christmastime, it was not a great commercial success, not enough to keep Liberty Films afloat.

So Capra tried again, with
State of the Union,
a Pulitzer Prize comedy of politics by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. He got Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as stars, and even President Truman liked the picture, but by the time it appeared in 1948, Capra had discovered that Liberty Films represented “the fastest and most gentlemanly way of going broke ever invented.” And by the time Capra sold out to Paramount, many of his fellow independents were negotiating their own disappearance. Times were getting hard in postwar Hollywood. “At least 76 indie units have dropped from the ‘active' production lists . . .”
The Hollywood Reporter
said in the summer of 1949. “The Cary Grant–Alfred Hitchcock unit, Leo McCarey's Rainbow Productions, Bill Dozier–Joan Fontaine, Frank Borzage, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Montgomery. . . .”

In the midst of this rather confused situation, the Supreme Court spent three months reflecting on the Justice Department's demand for “the fullest diversity of film content.” Then it declared in May of 1948 that the Hollywood system was indeed a conspiracy, and that it would finally order the breakup that Thurman Arnold had requested back before the war. “It is clear, so far as the five majors are concerned, that the aim of the conspiracy was exclusionary, i.e. that it was designed to strengthen their hold on the exhibition field,” said the seven-to-one opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas. “In other words, the conspiracy had monopoly in exhibition for one of its goals.” Instead of breaking up the monopoly then and there, however, the Court sent the case back to the district court for the Southern District of New York for further consideration.

In October, the Justice Department announced once again that it wanted the five major studios to give up their interests in some fourteen hundred movie theaters. It served notice on Paramount, Loew's, RKO, Warners, and Fox that this would be its position when the New York District Court took up the case. Among all the alleged conspirators, the one who cracked was, of all people, Howard Hughes. RKO told the federal authorities at the end of October that it would give up the battle and sell off its interest in 241 theaters within a year. Ten days later, Loew's also surrendered, and then the others gave up. A consent decree was approved by the Justice Department, the studios, and the court. Though it would take another year for the theaters to be sold, and still longer for the studios to realize the devastating implications of what had happened to them, the golden age that Hollywood had founded on a conspiracy was now coming to an end.

 

In the midst of the humdrum routine of the movie capital—the story conferences, the executive lunches, the Saturday night poker games—there occasionally occurred odd and exotic encounters. The first visit, for example, by W. H. Auden to Igor Stravinsky.

Having recently finished his somber Mass, Stravinsky wanted to write an opera, something light and deliberately old-fashioned, out of its time, both pre-modern and pre-Romantic, something almost Mozartean. In the spring of 1947, he had seen a Hogarth exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, and that seemed to offer great possibilities. Back in Hollywood, he asked Aldous Huxley to recommend a poet to write a libretto on
The Rake's Progress,
and Huxley warmly recommended Auden. Stravinsky was a very frugal man, but he not only invited the customarily penniless Auden to come and spend a week at his house in Hollywood that November, he even paid the poet's air fare from New York. He also asked his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, to send him the orchestral scores of the four main Mozart operas, which he called the “source of inspiration for my future opera.”

Auden worried about the proprieties. Should he pack a dinner jacket? Stravinsky worried about the accommodations. Was the couch in his den long enough for Auden? How tall was Auden anyway? Stravinsky, a small man, searched in vain through Auden's poetry for some clue. As soon as the visitor arrived, it was clear that he would not fit into his allotted space. But no matter. After a bountiful dinner with lots of wine, Stravinsky arranged a chair and some pillows as an extension to the couch, and Auden bedded down there amid Stravinsky's softly rustling collection of forty parrots and lovebirds.

The two unlikely collaborators got along surprisingly well. Auden admitted later that he had been “scared stiff” (Stravinsky was, among other things, twenty-five years Auden's senior). “Rumor had it that Stravinsky was a difficult person with whom to work. Rumor had lied. [Stravinsky] was a professional artist concerned not for his personal glory, but solely for the thing-to-be-made.” On the other side, Stravinsky equally admired Auden's professionalism, as well as his combination of technical virtuosity and thoughtful lyricism. “He
was
inspired,” Stravinsky wrote, “and he inspired me.”

They worked hard. Within a week, they had agreed on their central characters, on their plot and their general structure. Auden chain-smoked and drank and refused to go anywhere near the ocean. Almost the only time he ventured out of Stravinsky's house, in fact, was when they went to the parish hall of a Hollywood church to see an obscure production of Mozart's
Così Fan Tutte.

Back in New York, Auden set to work on a full libretto, and he soon sent the first act out to Hollywood. It was a remarkable venture into pastiche: “Now is the season when the Cyprian Queen/With genial charm translates our mortal scene. . . .” Stravinsky was delighted; this was just the kind of witty anachronism that he himself planned to write. “Having chosen a period-piece subject,” Stravinsky said later, “I decided to assume the conventions of the period as well, though respectable (progressive) music had pronounced them long since dead.”

Stravinsky worked methodically. He started by writing scansion marks over every word in Auden's libretto. Then he memorized every line, pacing up and down as he did so. After reciting each section, he adopted the odd practice of writing down the exact length of time that the music should last before he actually wrote any of the music itself.

Stravinsky was not happy that Auden had recruited his twenty-seven-year-old lover, Chester Kallman, as a collaborator, and that the manuscript for the first act arrived with both men's names on it. But when Auden finally brought him the third act early in 1948—bringing it personally to Washington, where Stravinsky was conducting—the poet assured him that Kallman “is a better librettist than I am,” and that the scenes Kallman had written were “at least as good as mine.” So Stravinsky acquiesced. And kept working. “Many pages have already been achieved, but I am not quite through the first scene,” he wrote to Boosey & Hawkes that summer. “This work affords me great joy and freshness, and nobody need worry about my losing a moment. The music will be very easy to listen to, but making this easiness is very expensive with my time.”