City of Nets (75 page)

Out in southern California, Dore Schary took these events in his own way, which was, in a sense, the way of post-pioneer Hollywood, corporate Hollywood. Comparing the social-minded Schary style at M-G-M to Louis B. Mayer's social-climbing dedication to racehorses, Groucho Marx once made a cruel joke: “In the old days, to see the head of M-G-M, you had to be dressed like a jockey. Today you have to be carrying a plaque for civic service.” Schary's sense of civic service was always very civil. Though he sponsored RKO's production of
Crossfire,
his main contribution to anti-anti-Semitism at M-G-M was to be
Ivanhoe
(1953), which deplored medieval discrimination against a beautiful Jewish girl named Rebecca, who was played by Elizabeth Taylor. Of course. Schary also tried for a time to produce a John Huston metamorphosis of
Quo Vadis
(1951), in which Nero became a quasi-Hitler figure staging a quasi-Holocaust in the Colosseum. Still, Schary was stirred by the birth of Israel, and he commissioned the most commercially grandiloquent novelist he could think of, Leon Uris, to write the great saga for M-G-M.

“You must write a dramatic novel about the birth of Israel,” Schary told Uris. M-G-M would pay all the expenses for Uris to go to Israel, talk to lots of people, record the whole great story. Uris went to Israel, talked to lots of people, and then, after two years of work, wrote the best-selling novel
Exodus.
Schary bought the movie rights for $75,000, which was then considered a fairly substantial amount of money. But then, somehow, nothing happened. Apparently, the high command at Loew's worried that a movie extolling the triumph of Zionism would offend the British, and these were difficult times in the movie business, and British markets were important. . . .

Ten years after the founding of Israel—we have now drifted into the late 1950's—Otto Preminger happened to be poking around in the office of his brother Ingo, who was Uris's agent, when he unearthed what he later described as “an untidy pile of cardboard boxes filled with manuscript pages.” This was
Exodus,
which Schary had commissioned and bought but never produced. Preminger, who had made a whole career out of spotting opportunities, spotted an opportunity. He telephoned the man who was then president of M-G-M, Joseph Vogel, who had fired Dore Schary two years earlier
*
, and told him that he, Preminger, was prepared to save M-G-M a lot of money.

“What do you mean?” said Vogel.

“You own a book by Leon Uris about the exodus of the Jews to Israel but you'll never produce it,” Preminger said, according to his own account. “I'm here to take it off your hands.”

“That's crazy,” said Vogel. “Of course we'll produce it. Everyone tells me it's a great book.” Thus admitting that he had never read it.

“It is,” Preminger said, “but if you make it the Arab countries will close all M-G-M theaters and ban all M-G-M films. You can't afford an Arab boycott but I can. Since I am an independent producer, they can't hurt me too much.”

Vogel said M-G-M had no intention of giving up
Exodus.
But he apparently did mention the matter to his board of directors at the next meeting. A week later, he telephoned Preminger. “If you still want to buy it, we're ready to make a deal,” he said. “How much are you offering?”

“It cost you $75,000, so I'll pay you $75,000,” Preminger said.

“We commissioned the book,” Vogel protested. “It was our idea from the start.”

“But you can't produce it,” Preminger said.

So M-G-M sold
Exodus
to Preminger for $75,000, and he promptly went to Arthur Krim of United Artists and raised $3.5 million to produce it, and the Israelis were eager to help in any way they could. Preminger began with his usual procedure, trying to “work with” Uris several hours a day to produce a script. Preminger regarded this as a rather unequal collaboration—“Just as I direct the actors . . .” he later wrote, “I consider it my job to direct the writer”—so he and Uris almost inevitably quarreled. Ever frugal, Preminger went to Mexico to attempt a similar collaboration with Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, who now survived by writing under a pseudonym at reduced rates. “Maltz was impressive to watch,” Preminger said. “Whenever I visited him I found him surrounded by tables piled high with research material he was collecting. But he never got around to writing a line.”

Preminger then decided on Dalton Trumbo, also hacking under a pseudonym, who cared relatively little about Israel and still less about the niceties of authorship. “He showed me whatever scene he had just written,” Preminger said, “and while I worked on it he wrote another one, then did the suggested revisions on the first scene. Then I studied the second while he worked on a third, and so on. . . .”

And so on indeed. So the story of the birth of Israel—or at least the version that M-G-M had commissioned—finally reached the screen in 1960.

Judgments: Bob Mitchum (
top
) went to jail for 50 days for smoking marijuana; Ingrid Bergman, the beautiful nun in
Bells of St. Mary's
(
bottom left
), was ostracized for romance with Rossellini while filming
Stromboli
(
middle
).

11
Expulsions

(1949)

T
he Naked and the Dead
had been one of the big novels of 1948, so there were naturally people in Hollywood who thought that Norman Mailer's saga of the war in the Pacific might be turned into the big movie of 1949. One problem, though, was that the twenty-six-year-old novelist wanted to write the screenplay himself. “We all thought movies were a great art form,” his wife Bea said later. “Now Norman had written the great novel, and he wanted to write the great movie.” Perhaps even more than that, Mailer wanted to assault the legendary citadel of Hollywood, to confront the great beast, the great Moloch, to be tempted by carnality and corruption, and to survive to tell the tale.

Sam Goldwyn was interested. He wanted Mailer to write an original screenplay for him. Mailer, newly established with his pregnant wife in a two-bedroom house in the hills above Laurel Canyon, called for help. He wrote to Jean Malaquais, a Polish-French novelist who was then teaching at New York University, to come west and collaborate with him. The two of them went to see Goldwyn.

“The living room was huge, lined with dummy books, and Goldwyn met us in his bathrobe,” Malaquais recalled. “The agent had told him that we—or rather, I—had a story, so it was up to us to do the talking. Goldwyn stood there making comments, all the while pushing his false teeth back in place, all the while speaking with a lisp. Then he told us to write a two-page outline. I refused, knowing all too well how things are done out there, and a few days later we got a contract for $50,000 to write an original screenplay, with Montgomery Clift and Charles Boyer in view. . . .”

Their “original” idea was a weird adaptation of Nathanael West's
Miss Lonelyhearts.
Instead of a newspaper lovelorn columnist, their hero would be a dispenser of wise counsel over the radio. And there would be heavy philosophical implications. “Our hero, whose sponsor was a coffin manufacturer, gave ‘heartfelt' advice to people over the radio, then went out on the sly to actually visit them,” Malaquais recalled. “Eventually he publicly denounced the hoax, upon which the audience came and destroyed the radio station. . . .” After a month or so, the two of them had finished about ninety pages. Goldwyn was not pleased. Once again, he called the writers in for a conference. “He came over to me,” Malaquais recalled, “and started to preach what a movie is supposed to be, lisping all the while: ‘Uth Americanth, ith in our hearth when we make a movie!' He had grabbed a button on my jacket and was twisting it, standing there lecturing me, until it suddenly came off. ‘But when you Frenthmen make a movie ith dry and intellecthual. Good thentimenth must be rewarded. Bad thentimenth
mutht
be punithed!' ”

The project came to nothing, of course, and
Variety
dutifully announced that Mailer and Malaquais had broken their contract. The social life continued, however. “As for Norman, who was working on
Barbary Shore,
” Malaquais said, “he was still invited all over the place: he was Norman Mailer.” And he finally sold
The Naked and the Dead,
not to Louis B. Mayer, as he probably would have liked, but to Norma Productions, a small, new, independent firm run by Burt Lancaster and an agent named Harold Hecht. “
The Naked and the Dead
was such a strange, difficult book for film that Burt and I were the only ones in Hollywood interested in doing it,” Hecht said later, “so that's why Mailer wanted to go with us.”

To celebrate the deal, Mailer decided to give a party, to invite all of Hollywood to his hillside cottage to admire him. It was one of the earliest manifestations of his genius for publicity, more specifically of his genius for turning social difficulties into publicity triumphs. All of Hollywood accepted the celebrated novelist's invitation, and all of Hollywood was surprised to find itself confronting itself. “It was a fiasco of a party,” said Shelley Winters, who arrived with Marlon Brando in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, “because Norman had invited
everybody
in Hollywood both left and right, and you didn't do that in 1949. Adolphe Menjou was there snubbing Charlie Chaplin. Bogart was giving Ginger Rogers the fish eye. Monty and Elizabeth and Marlon were very uncomfortable.”

It was worse than that. John Ford was there too, and Cecil B. DeMille, eyeing the enemy. Then all the enemies began arguing, and trying to prove themselves. “Marlon was wearing a borrowed tuxedo because he didn't own a suit, and it was much too small for him,” Miss Winters recalled. “There was a black bartender there, and Marlon just stood behind the bar and talked to the bartender in his little suit. I was trying to talk to people, trying to be sexy and everything, but my dress was soaked. Monty was having a fight with somebody. . . .”

In the midst of all this, Bea Mailer decided to be the determined hostess. She started erecting little tables and setting out a typically New York delicatessen buffet. “Big hams and turkeys,” Miss Winters recalled, “—stuff like Norman still serves at his parties—baked beans, potato chips. It was good but like a picnic, not elegant food like squab and quiche that was usually served in Hollywood.”

Marlon Brando suddenly wanted to go home. There was too much political argument. “This party's making me nervous,” he said. Miss Winters agreed to leave, but in leaving she took Elizabeth Taylor's coat (“We both had the same blond beaver coats we'd bought wholesale when they were just coming back in style”). Mailer was dismayed to see Brando departing. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “You didn't meet anybody.” Brando responded in kind. “What the fuck are you doing here, Mailer?” he asked. “You're not a screenwriter. Why aren't you in Vermont writing your next book?” Mailer's answer evaporated in the general confusion. Not only did Miss Winters wander off in Elizabeth Taylor's beaver coat but Brando took the coat of a young actor named Mickey Knox, whose car was subsequently found to be blocking the driveway. “Nobody could get out,” Miss Winters recalled. “Hal Wallis, Mickey's and Burt's boss at Paramount, called me at three
A.M.
and sent a police car over to retrieve Mickey's keys. I suppose Norman himself had mixed feelings about being in Hollywood. . . .”

Mixed feelings is probably an understatement of the emotional turmoil that eventually produced
The Deer Park,
with all its yearning for Hollywood's riches and celebrity, and all its disgust with that yearning. Mailer saw his own sins as well as he saw the sins of his surroundings. “Out there in Hollywood,” he wrote, “I learned what pigs do when they want to appropriate a mystery. They approach in great fear and try to exercise great control. Fear + Control = Corporate Power.”

 

The blacklist grew very slowly, almost imperceptibly. At the beginning, in fact, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that there should not be a blacklist. “We are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source,” the swayed and intimidated producers had declared after the so-called Waldorf Conference of 1947. “There is the danger of hurting innocent people. There is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. . . . We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”

In announcing the dismissal of the Hollywood Ten, however, and in promising that “we will not knowingly employ a Communist,” the producers left wide open the question of who might be a Communist. And who could provide an authoritative answer to that question, and what to do in cases of doubt. And since Communists did not ordinarily proclaim their party membership, what could there be except cases of doubt?

FBI men kept coming around to ask questions. They couldn't force people to answer, of course, but a refusal to answer became part of the secret record. Investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee also came around to ask questions, though nobody seemed to know when the committee might call new hearings (not until 1951, as it turned out). Various self-appointed experts offered opinions. American Legion posts offered opinions. So did the Catholic Legion of Decency and newspaper columnists like George Sokolsky and Hedda Hopper.
*
After a number of opinions had been proclaimed, the object of those opinions came to be known as “controversial.” Producers who worried about their financial responsibilities naturally tried to avoid trouble, and getting involved with controversial people could cause trouble.

But what had anybody actually done? Who could tell? The producers, trying to avoid trouble, hoped that the so-called talent guilds, the unions of actors, writers, and directors, could help by finding some way to screen and purge their own members. Or simply some way to determine who was to be branded and who was not. The guilds themselves were divided. The Hollywood Ten asked the Screen Writers Guild to help finance their ruinously expensive legal appeals, and the Guild refused, but that did not mean that the Guild was ready to punish other writers who might or might not be Communists, or even to find out who actually were Communists.

The age of the loyalty oath was dawning. The Los Angeles authorities imposed such an oath on all city and county employees in 1948, and the University of California imposed one in 1949, requiring the dismissal of anyone who balked. At the urging of the Hollywood studios, some people tried to clear themselves of suspicion not by taking any formal oath but by simply proclaiming their own purity and patriotism. “I am not now and never have been associated with any Communist organization or supporters of communism,” said Gregory Peck. “I am not a Communist, never was a Communist, and have no sympathy with Communist activities,” said Gene Kelly. “The only line I know how to follow is the American line.”

On this matter of loyalty oaths, too, the Hollywood guilds were divided. At the request of Cecil B. DeMille, the board of the Screen Directors Guild passed a bylaw in the fall of 1950 requiring that all members take a loyalty oath. The Guild president, Joseph Mankiewicz, was out of town when DeMille persuaded the board to act. On Mankiewicz's return, he called a full membership meeting to overrule the board. DeMille did his best to block the meeting, but the members finally assembled and overturned the board. Then, having won his point, Mankiewicz urged all directors to take a “voluntary” loyalty oath.

Protestations of loyalty were often considered insufficient, however, since Communists, like witches, were known to lie about their beliefs. The only real proof of orthodoxy was the ritual of naming other past and present sinners. To avoid that test, some of the guilty and some of the innocent simply departed. Laszlo Löwenstein, who, as Peter Lorre, had graced such films as
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca,
was only a mild Socialist, but he didn't like FBI agents coming to his house to ask him for the names of subversives, so he returned in 1949 to the Germany that he had fled in 1933. Gordon Kahn, a screenwriter who had been one of the original “unfriendly” nineteen summoned by HUAC, responded to rumors of new hearings by fleeing to Mexico. “Life became a nightmare of suspicion and anxiety,” said his wife, Barbara. “Letters to Gordon had to be enclosed in envelopes addressed to a Mexican family in order to avoid FBI interference. I had to negotiate the sale of our home and most of our possessions while being hounded by FBI agents.”

“Forty-nine, it was forty-nine,” said Donald Ogden Stewart, who was probably a Communist but who was also a funny and goodhearted man, the model for Bill in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises,
and who now was asked to come and “answer some questions” at the M-G-M offices in New York. “It was suggested that I clear myself . . . and give names and so forth. And that was the end of that beautiful contract.”

The blacklist didn't really get well organized until after the 1951 HUAC hearings, when the committee included in its annual report for 1952 an alphabetical list of 324 people who had been named as Communists by cooperative witnesses. Private lists also began circulating. The American Legion drew up a collection of three hundred names, which it admitted had been drawn from “scattered public sources,” and which it sent to eight major studios with a request for “such reports to us as you deem proper.” Smaller private organizations joined in: Red Channels, Counterattack, Alert.

The compilers of these lists could not punish anyone, for they had no such authority. They left it up to the Hollywood studios to expel or “clear” their own employees. Since the process of “clearing” thus defined the blacklist, the Hollywood authorities naturally wanted to control the process even before the blacklists were formally drawn up and publicized. Among the most assertive of these authorities was Roy Brewer, the triumphant leader of the IATSE unions, who organized in March of 1949 a group called the Motion Picture Industry Council to deal with the “Communist problem.” “Communists want to use the movies to soften the minds of the world,” Brewer told a reporter. “They shouldn't work in Hollywood because we shouldn't make it possible for them to subvert the free world.”

Brewer asked other guilds and unions to send representatives so that his council could identify the subversives and clear the innocent. Among the council's first presidents were Dore Schary and Ronald Reagan. In the fall of 1949, the MPIC joined with the producers and exhibitors to form the Council of Motion Picture Organizations as “a national policy-making authority.” The purpose of all this was to convince outsiders that Hollywood needed no policing because it was actively policing itself.

Under Reagan's leadership, the board of the Screen Actors Guild drafted a loyalty oath in 1950, and the following year it openly condoned the blacklist. It claimed that it would “fight against any secret blacklist,” but on the other hand, “if any actor . . . has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employer to hire him.”