City of Nets (79 page)

The FBI secretly played a part in the absurd prosecution of Chaplin on Mann Act charges. J. Edgar Hoover himself assigned his forces to collect evidence against Chaplin. They interviewed scores of witnesses (such as, for example, Hedda Hopper), bugged hotel rooms and telephones, and amassed more than four hundred pages of testimony, all proving nothing whatever except the strange proclivities of the FBI. In 1947, Hoover asked to see a copy of a
Pravda
article in praise of Chaplin, an article that, as it happened, had appeared on the occasion of Chaplin's first film being shown in the Soviet Union in 1923. The FBI subsequently sent this tidbit to Mrs. Hopper, thus using her as an outlet as well as a source of information.

Hoover to Hopper, Hopper to Hoover, this was all gossip, but in November of 1949, the FBI got more serious. Assistant Attorney General Alexander Campbell asked the FBI for the complete Chaplin file for the purposes of a “Security-R investigation.” A search through the voluminous collection of papers indicated that gossip was about all there was. “It has been determined,” according to an official analysis, “that there are no witnesses available who could offer testimony that Chaplin has been a member of the Communist Party in the past, is now a member, or has contributed funds to the Communist Party.”

So Chaplin went on making
Limelight,
true to all the Hollywood traditions of artifice and illusion. To represent the theatrical boardinghouse in the London of his youth, he discovered and used what had originally been built as a row of New York brownstones on the back lot at Paramount. And to show the once-paralyzed Claire Bloom turning into a ballerina, he simply hired Melissa Hayden and then filmed her beautiful dancing from such a distance that nobody could tell the difference. Miss Bloom, who greatly admired Chaplin, almost loved him, found his whole production oddly antiquarian. “I was surprised at how old-fashioned much of what he prescribed seemed,” she observed, “—rather theatrical effects that I didn't associate with the modern cinema.”
Limelight
is undeniably old-fashioned. It is also incurably sentimental, but Chaplin wanted it just that way. The stylized plot is that of some Tchaikovsky ballet, its philosophizing is that of a Puccini opera. Like them, it is beautiful—pretentious but nonetheless beautiful.

When Chaplin had finished editing
Limelight
early in 1952, he wanted to take a long vacation, to take Oona to England, and to preside over the film's London premiere. The only problem, which should have been a routine matter, was that he needed a reentry permit. The FBI wanted some questions answered. An agent came to Chaplin's door with a stenographer. He wanted to know whether Chaplin was his real name. Chaplin said it was. The agent said, according to Chaplin, “ ‘Some people say your name is—' (here he mentioned a very foreign name) ‘and that you are from Galicia.' ” Chaplin denied it. The agent pressed on. “You say you've never been a Communist?” Chaplin denied that too, denied ever belonging to any political organization. And had he ever committed adultery? “What is a healthy man who has lived in this country for thirty-five years supposed to answer?” Chaplin countered. And why had he never become a citizen? “There's no law against that,” said Chaplin. “However, I pay my taxes here.”

The Internal Revenue Service disputed that, or at least it differed on the amounts due, as it had for many years. In their last battle, shortly after the making of
The Great Dictator,
the IRS had demanded a large supplementary payment, but a court ruled in favor of Chaplin's counterclaim that he had actually overpaid by $24,938. Now, on hearing that Chaplin planned to leave the country, the IRS put in a claim for $200,000 and demanded that he post bond of two million dollars. Chaplin demanded a prompt trial, and the IRS responded with what Chaplin called “a quick settlement for a very nominal sum.” So he finally got his reentry permit. But no sooner had Chaplin and Oona reached New York than his lawyer warned him that a former employee of United Artists was suing the studio and might try to subpoena Chaplin, who by now owned half the company. He had to spend most of his last days in New York confined to his room at the Sherry Netherland, then crept aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
at five in the morning and hid in his cabin until the ship sailed.

Two days out at sea, Chaplin had just finished having lunch with Arthur Rubinstein when he heard the news: The Truman administration was announcing that Chaplin's reentry permit had been canceled. If Chaplin tried to return to Hollywood, said Attorney General James McGranery, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would hold him for hearings to “determine whether he is admissible under the laws of the United States.” A Justice Department spokesman explained that this involved the U.S. Code of Laws on Aliens and Citizenship, Section 137, Paragraph C, which, with a wonderful blending of condemnations, barred foreigners who might be objectionable on grounds of “morals, health or insanity, or for advocating Communism or associating with Communists or pro-Communist organizations.”

Asked for comment by United Press, Chaplin hesitated. “I would like to have told them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better,” he later wrote, “that I was fed up with America's insults and moral pomposity, and that the whole subject was damned boring. But everything I possessed was in the States and I was terrified they might find a way of confiscating it. . . . So instead I came out with a pompous statement to the effect that I would return and answer their charges, and that my re-entry permit was . . . a document given to me in good faith by the United States Government—blah, blah, blah.” When the
Queen Elizabeth
docked at Southampton, reporters swarmed around Chaplin to hear more. He sounded more pompous than ever. “These are days of turmoil and strife and bitterness,” he said. “This is not the day of great artists. This is the day of politics. . . . All I want to do is create a few more films. . . . I've never been political. . . .”

Not everyone supported the Truman administration in the banishing of Chaplin. “No political situation, no international menace, can destroy the fact that he is a great artist who has given infinite pleasure to many millions . . .” said the
New York Times.
“Unless there is far more evidence against him than is at the moment visible, the Department of State will not dignify itself or increase the national security if it sends him into exile.” Attorney General McGranery really had no evidence, but he huffed and puffed. There had been accusations that Chaplin was a Communist, he said, as well as “grave moral charges.” And furthermore, said the attorney general, Chaplin “has been charged with making leering, sneering statements about the country whose gracious hospitality has enriched him.” And yet furthermore, said the attorney general, “if what has been said about him is true, he is, in my opinion, an unsavory character.”

These somewhat conditional accusations from Washington may seem grossly unfair—indeed, they are grossly unfair—but there were some people who considered the attorney general too gentle. Hedda Hopper, the friend of the FBI, wrote that Chaplin's undeniable talents did not “give him the right to go against our customs, to abhor everything we stand for, to throw our hospitality back in our faces. . . . I abhor what he stands for. . . . Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Even such criticisms were not enough for some. “I agree with you that the way the Chaplin case has been handled has been a disgrace for years,” wrote one of Mrs. Hopper's readers. “Unfortunately, we aren't able to do much about it when the top decisions are made by the likes of Acheson and McGranery. You can be sure, however, that I will keep my eye on the case and possibly after January we will be able to work with an Administration which will apply the same rules to Chaplin as they do to ordinary citizens.” The letter was signed “Dick Nixon.”

Chaplin may have been justified in his fear that all his wealth would be confiscated. The American Legion had already begun picketing theaters that were showing
Limelight,
and such major chains as Fox, Loew's, and RKO refused to show the film. But Chaplin's solution to the threat was so simple that perhaps nobody in Washington ever thought of it. He sent his twenty-six-year-old wife back to California to liquidate his entire corporate empire. She found, to her dismay, that the FBI had been interrogating everyone who might reveal any past or present scandals—all the household servants, Chaplin's previous wives, employees, relatives, everyone. But nobody had done anything to prevent Oona from simply going to the bank and emptying Chaplin's safety-deposit box and departing, so that was what she did, all within ten days. Then the Chaplins bought a fifteen-room villa on thirty-seven acres of land overlooking the Swiss town of Vevey and the beauties of Lake Geneva, and there they lived more or less happily forever after. Chaplin created two more movies,
A King in New York
(1957) and
A Countess from Hong Kong
(1967), and four more children, Eugene (1953), Jane (1957), Annette (1959), and Christopher (1962). That made eight by Oona, ten in all. When Chaplin died in his sleep in 1977, many people all over the world honored him for his achievements, and very few wondered what ever became of James McGranery, the onetime attorney general of the United States.

 

At the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Nixon asked Jack Warner whether he was making any anti-Communist movies comparable to the anti-Nazi films of the early war years. Warner could think of only one, a project entitled
Up Until Now.
That was obviously not enough to satisfy Nixon. Hollywood has “a positive duty” to make anti-Communist pictures, he said. J. Parnell Thomas put a similar question to Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer complimented himself for having made fun of communism in
Ninotchka
and
Comrade X,
though both pictures dated back to before the war. The committee's questions made it clear that Washington expected more from Hollywood.

The trouble was that “message pictures” generally lost money. You want to send a message, call Western Union, according to the traditional Hollywood wisdom. This traditional wisdom had been challenged in recent years by a number of moviemakers who had been influenced by what they had seen and felt in the armed forces. William Wyler, for example, had won an Academy Award for
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946), and Darryl Zanuck achieved repeated successes with
Gentleman's Agreement
(1947),
The Snake Pit
(1948), and
Pinky
(1949). But the message in all these pictures was little more than a high-minded injunction to love thy neighbor, because he is really much like thee. Not only was Gregory Peck not a Jew, as Ring Lardner, Jr., had remarked, but Olivia de Havilland was not really crazy in
The Snake Pit,
and Jeanne Crain was not really black in
Pinky.

Still, the HUAC hearings, combined with threats of picketing and boycotts by right-wing groups like the American Legion, frightened Hollywood into changing course. According to a detailed study by Dorothy B. Jones in John Cogley's
Report on Blacklisting,
the number of films with what could be described as “social and psychological themes” declined from 28 percent of Hollywood's output in 1947 to 20 percent in 1948 and 18 percent in 1949. At the same time, along with a new emphasis on light entertainment, the production of purposefully anti-Communist pictures rose considerably, from three in 1948 to thirteen in 1952. Some of the now-forgotten titles tell their own story:
The Iron Curtain
(1948);
The Red Menace, The Red Danube,
and
Guilty of Treason
(1949);
I Married a Communist
(1950);
I Was a Communist for the FBI
(1951);
Red Planet Mars
(1952).

Miss Jones, who had served as chief of the film reviewing and analysis section of the Office of War Information, was relentless in her analysis of these films. They were, she said, of three types. “The vast majority were anti-Communist spy thrillers. . . . Except for a change in the identity of the foreign power involved, they were indistinguishable from the Nazi and Japanese spy stories of World War II or from the endless stories about unspecified foreign powers whose spies and secret agents have peopled the Hollywood films of earlier years.” The second category of anti-Communist films tried to show how and why the Communist Party had grown in the United States. “American Communist leaders,” she wrote, “were characterized in the gangster tradition as tough men who rule with an iron hand and use violence as their primary weapon.” The third category “dramatized events of the Cold War which had taken place abroad.”

In general, then, Hollywood responded to what Nixon called its “positive duty” by evoking its oldest traditions of melodrama and stereotype. The anti-Communist movies that flowed forth at the end of the 1940's were, in effect, B pictures, the successors to Bulldog Drummond and Boston Blackie. They were cast, designed, and directed accordingly. And though conservatives in both Hollywood and Washington believed that a vast public hungered to see anti-Communist movies, none of them made any money. Perhaps this was because they were so cheaply produced, or perhaps they were cheaply produced because the producers anticipated failure, or perhaps the conventional wisdom was right, that nobody wanted message pictures anyway.

Movies have different ways of conveying messages, however. It is now commonplace, for example, to regard the space-war pictures of the 1950's as an unconscious expression of political paranoia, but a little gem like Don Siegel's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) can be interpreted as paranoia either about Communist brainwashing or about conservative conformity. Similarly, Carl Foreman thought when he was writing
High Noon
(1952) that his screenplay about the lone sheriff confronting the outlaw band was a political allegory. Being a leftist (he was subpoenaed by HUAC while the film was in production), Foreman naturally thought of Sheriff Gary Cooper as a courageous liberal standing alone against the gunslingers of the FBI and the American Legion. But
High Noon
turned out to be one of President Eisenhower's favorite films, and he enjoyed showing it to visitors at the White House.
Pravda,
by contrast, criticized it as “a glorification of the individual.” Foreman, in a TV interview not long before his death, boasted of Eisenhower's approval. He seemed to take pride in the fact that his supposedly liberal message had appealed to an eminent conservative, and to ignore the inescapable inference that his message had been totally misunderstood.