City of Nets (71 page)

 

“Kike.” Now that the word is rarely used anymore, it seems peculiarly brutal, but it was hardly less brutal when Mayer used it on Rapf and Schary. Yet if it is difficult to recall how cruel and how pervasive anti-Semitism was in the America of the 1940's, it is no less difficult to realize that it was a relatively recent phenomenon. Only in 1861 did Congress vote that army chaplains must all be ministers of “some Christian faith” (a measure reversed by the lobbying of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites); only in 1864 did Protestant leaders try to have the Constitution amended to declare the United States a Christian nation (and they were defeated again by the American Israelites); only in 1877 did there occur the scandalous scene in which Joseph Seligman, the New York banker, was publicly refused accommodations for himself and his family at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs.

There had always been a certain amount of bias and hostility, of course, for the first Americans all came from Europe and brought Europe's prejudices with them. Nonetheless, the Constitution of 1787 was the first national charter in the world that forbade any distinctions based on religion and thus treated Jews and Christians exactly alike. There were, to be sure, very few Jews. The first census, in 1790, recorded only about two thousand, one tenth of one percent in a population of some two million. Still, it was one of the fundamental principles of the new nation that Jews of whatever national origin were no different from English Quakers or Italian Catholics or French Huguenots or anybody else.

There was probably a certain amount of hypocrisy in this, since the population was overwhelmingly British and overwhelmingly Protestant, and it did nobody any harm to be tolerant toward small minorities. That system and that hypocrisy changed forever during the great migrations that started shortly before the Civil War. Between 1840 and 1870, more than 6.5 million immigrants flooded in, including the first small wave of German Jews like the Seligmans, the Warburgs, Schiffs, Morgenthaus, and Rosenwalds. The United States was so preoccupied with its black slaves and ex-slaves that it only gradually realized how its white population was changing. In the 1870's alone, 2.8 million immigrants arrived; in the 1880's, the total climbed to 5.2 million. The flood reached a record one million a year in 1905, then rose to an all-time high of 1,285,000 in 1907. These were no longer Puritans and settlers but simply the poor, the Poles and Italians and Greeks who were needed to work the mills and mines that American industry was building. Among them came the penniless Jews of Eastern Europe, many driven out by czarist pogroms and steered westward by other European nations' unwillingness to take them in. At the turn of the century, Britain was receiving only 2,500 Jewish immigrants a year while New York was receiving more than 10,000 a month.

And so the official restrictions began. Not only against the Jews, of course, but also in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and in the Jim Crow laws of the 1890's, and finally in the ethnic quota system embodied in the Immigration Act of 1924. Unofficial discrimination was worse. A study of help-wanted ads in Chicago newspapers showed that the phrase “Christians only” or “Gentiles only” appeared in 0.3 percent of the ads in 1911, then rose to 4 percent in 1921, 13.3 percent in 1926, and still held at 9.4 percent in 1937. Henry Ford's
Dearborn Independent,
which had a circulation of 700,000 copies, began in 1920 to campaign against what it called “the Jewish problem” and to republish its campaignings in books with titles like
The International Jew
and
Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States.

This was not simply one of Henry Ford's peculiarities. The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce issued a bulletin advocating specific restrictions against “the Hebrew element.” A Connecticut chamber of commerce publicly asked property owners not to sell to Jews. A Milwaukee golf club requested that eight Jewish charter members resign. The Century Club in New York rejected the application of Dr. Jacques Loeb, a distinguished scientist at the Rockefeller Institute.

Harvard's president A. Lawrence Lowell, in his graduation address for 1922, openly advocated quotas to limit Jewish admissions, a suggestion formally rejected by the Harvard trustees but widely practiced in prestigious universities during the 1920's. By the end of that decade, anti-Semitic discrimination in education, social organizations, jobs, and housing was more widespread and more open in the United States than in Europe, including pre-Hitler Germany. “Today it is no secret that Jews have great difficulty in gaining admission to the institutions of higher learning,” said an article in
Harper's
in 1933, “and that their opportunities for legal and medical training are limited to a minimum. It is equally well-known that the professions of banking, engineering and teaching are closed to all but a few, and the quasi-public service corporations vigorously exclude them. In the mechanical trades, the discrimination is almost as widespread as in the professions, and in clerical work, generally speaking, it is worst of all.”

This was the atmosphere in which the Mayers and Warners and Goldwyns grew up and learned the realities of American life, and came to Hollywood, and fought, and gouged, and prospered. Their basic attitude throughout these conflicts, though, was a yearning for assimilation, a belief in the legend of the “melting pot,” a suppression or even a symbolic denial of all Jewishness, and an invincible faith in the idea that if they could not achieve full assimilation themselves, then they could achieve it for their children. Their insistence on changing names was, in a way, the simplest and most insignificant of evasions—even a Julia Turner was renamed Lana, after all—and yet there was something profoundly degrading in the unwritten rule that no star could have a Jewish name.

Emmanuel Goldenberg, who had come from Romania, left a poignant description of his struggle to deal with the standard view that Goldenberg was “too long, too foreign . . . too Jewish.” He thought about translating it into Goldenhill or Goldenmount, or even Montedore, but the results seemed “too pretentious . . . and God knows they were contrived.” Then he saw a play in which a butler announced, “Madame, a gentleman to see you—a Mr. Robinson.” He liked that, but when he told his friends at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts that he was planning to call himself Emmanuel Robinson, he sensed “something less than enthusiasm.” After considering all the first names that began with his own initial—Edgar? Egbert? Ellery? Ethan?—he decided to name himself after the king of England, Edward VIII. “But I could not desert the Goldenberg entirely,” Edward G. Robinson recalled. “That became the G, my private treaty with my past. . . . Deep down in my deepest heart, I am, and have always been, Emmanuel Goldenberg.”

Julius Garfinkle was a more combative man, and though he changed his name to Jules Garfield for the New York stage, he wanted to keep that name in Hollywood. Jack Warner disapproved. He demanded that the newcomer be called James Fielding. Garfield protested that he had a right to keep his theater name.

“What kind of a name is Garfield anyway?” said Jack Warner. “It doesn't sound American.”

Garfield said it had been the name of an American president. Warner proposed a compromise, keeping the Garfield but changing Jules to James. “But that was the president's name,” said Garfield. “You wouldn't name a goddamn actor Abraham Lincoln, would you?”

“No, kid, we wouldn't,” said one of Warner's executives, “because Abe is a name most people would say is Jewish, and we wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea.”

“But I
am
Jewish,” said the future John Garfield.

“Of course you are,” said the Warners executive. “So are
we
. . . most of us. But a lot of people who buy tickets think they don't like Jews. . . . And Jules is a Jew's name.”

Sam Goldwyn was perhaps the most blunt in this view. When he hired Danny Kaye straight from Broadway to star in
Up in Arms
in 1940, he was dismayed by the first screen tests. “He looks too—too—” Goldwyn complained. “Well, he
is
Jewish,” said Goldwyn's Gentile second wife, Frances. “But let's face it, Jews are funny-looking,” said Goldwyn. After much agonizing, including even the idea of buying back Kaye's contract, Goldwyn finally solved his problem by having Kaye's reddish-brown hair dyed blond, thus, in effect, de-Semitizing him. A few years later, when Goldwyn cast Frank Sinatra in the role that Sam Levene had played in the Broadway production of
Guys and Dolls,
Goldwyn stated his view as a general principle: “You can't have a Jew play a Jew. It wouldn't work on the screen.”

The studio bosses, who spared themselves the humiliations they inflicted on their stars, expiated their own sins in their own ways, by raising money. Thus Goldwyn, who succeeded the pardoned Joe Schenck as president of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947, proceeded, through what his biographer called “tireless efforts,” to raise $8.8 million for Jewish charities. Alvah Bessie, one of the outcast Hollywood Ten, provided a graphic description of how these things were done at Warner Bros. “Every nominally Jewish writer, actor, director and producer was practically ordered to be present . . .” he recalled. “When we were all assembled . . . [Jack Warner] marched in and—to our astonishment—brandished a rubber truncheon, which had probably been a prop for one of the anti-Nazi pictures we were making. He stood behind his table and smashed the length of rubber hose on the wood, and then he smiled and said, ‘I've been looking at the results of the Jewish Appeal drive, and believe you me, it ain't good.' Here he paused for effect and said, ‘Everybody's gonna double his contribution here and now—or else!' The rubber truncheon crashed on the table again as everyone present, including John Garfield, Jerry Wald . . . Albert Maltz, and I reached for our checkbooks.”

Harry Cohn, as always, had his own views of these matters. “Relief for the Jews?” he said when asked to contribute. “What we need is relief
from
the Jews. All the trouble in the world has been caused by Jews and Irishmen.”
*
Cohn, who was quite accustomed to addressing a writer as “Jew-boy,” liked to boast that the only Jewish actors he had under contract at Columbia played Indians. In fact, most of the studio bosses regarded most minorities with no more respect than they accorded to the Jews. Jack Warner, for example, once ordered a scene of two blacks kissing to be not only removed from a movie but destroyed. “It's like watching two animals,” he said. “Terrible!” Any black kissing a white was forbidden, of course, by the studios' production code. Louis B. Mayer disliked his own studio's highly praised version of Faulkner's
Intruder in the Dust.
The black hero was “too uppity,” he told Schary. “He ought to take off his hat when he talks to a white man.” Mayer also disapproved of Schary's producing
Go for Broke,
about the heroism of the Nisei 442nd Infantry Battalion. “He's making pictures about the Japs,” Mayer grumbled. “Last week, who went to see the picture? All the Japs! This week, the bottom fell out of his box office.”

In all this crudity, the Hollywood executives were expressing not simply their own crude prejudices but their own crude sense of what America thought of itself, a completely homogenized white Gentile society. Yet they kept being reminded that it wasn't true. Hedda Hopper recalled Louis B. Mayer asking her—“begged” was the word she used—“to get his daughters into our most private private school, whose principal was a friend of mine.” Mrs. Hopper demurred.

“Mr. Mayer, they don't accept them,” she said.

“But they'll take my daughters,” Mayer said. “Can't you tell the head mistress how important I am?”

“It won't do any good . . .” Mrs. Hopper said. “They will not take Jews.”

Mayer was certainly the least dedicated of Jews, and he may even have considered the idea of converting to Christianity. He not only kept the portrait of Cardinal Spellman prominently displayed by his desk but donated large sums to the cardinal's favorite charities. And even if one did not actually convert, one could always dissemble, play the game. Mayer's granddaughter, Edie's daughter, Barbara Goetz Windom, told an interviewer not long ago about her family's elaborate Christmas parties and Easter egg hunts and said that she was surprised to hear her mother object to a Christian marriage ceremony. “It was the first time I'd heard of any reference to my being Jewish,” said the granddaughter of the onetime junk dealer from Minsk.

The suave Rabbi Edgar Magnin presided over Temple B'nai B'rith in downtown Los Angeles—indeed, he built a glittering new temple on Wilshire Boulevard and remained in charge well into the 1980's—but this was a Reform temple so reformed that it included Sunday school classes for the wealthy children of wealthy Hollywood. Their grandparents, whom Budd Schulberg described as “aged anachronisms in their dark suits and long beards, with Yiddish as their daily speech and Hebrew for their daily prayers,” were appalled. Their sons had proudly brought them west from New York and established them in villas with orange trees, but they didn't like all this extravagance. “The old men got together and held a council of religious war,” Schulberg recalled. “They wanted a real
shul
like the ones they had left behind.” The studio executives were anxious to placate their fathers and their forefathers. The old men rented a bungalow for ninety dollars a month, and then the executives sent studio carpenters and painters to recreate, just as in some set for a dramatization of Sholom Aleichem (which these same producers would never have produced), the spiritual center of the half-remembered
shtetl.

“The results were astonishing,” Schulberg recalled. “From the outside, Grandpa's
shul
looked like any other little white bungalow on the street, complete with small green lawn and the obligatory miniature orange or lemon tree. But once you stepped inside you found yourself walking into an old world steeped in Jewish tradition, where Grandpa Max, and Old Man Mayer and Old Man Warner (those seemed to be their official names) and the rest of the immigrant Talmudists finally felt at home. They sent to New York for a
real
rabbi, a little Moses who would see to it that the Laws of the Torah were upheld. . . . When the rabbi arrived, a young man whose features were appropriately hidden by a bushy black beard, Grandpa and his Orthodox pals were driven down to the Santa Fe station in studio limousines as the reception committee. . . .”