City of Nets (86 page)

 

“Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car,” Raymond Chandler remarked to his secretary as they stood waiting in the doorway of Chandler's house in La Jolla. The secretary tried to quiet him by warning him that the fat bastard struggling to emerge from his limousine might be able to hear what he said. “What do I care?” said Chandler.

The reason that the fat bastard had driven all the way to La Jolla to see Chandler was that the novelist's new $2,500-per-week contract with Warner Bros. specified that he could work at home, so anyone who wanted to have a story conference would have to come to La Jolla to do so. Chandler hated such conferences anyway. He described them as “these god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business.”

The fat bastard didn't greatly enjoy the jabber sessions with Chandler either. “Our collaboration was not very happy,” said Alfred Hitchcock, who always insisted on a good deal of collaboration with anyone hired to write one of his pictures. “Sometimes when we were trying to get the idea for a scene, I would offer him a suggestion. Instead of giving it some thought, he would remark to me, very discontentedly, ‘If you can go it alone, why the hell do you need me?' ”

These were not the best of times for Hitchcock. The last film he had made before breaking away from Selznick,
The Paradine Case
(1948), had not been a success, either artistically or commercially. The two films he had then made on his own,
Rope
(1948) and
Under Capricorn
(1949), had not done well either, and his longtime dream of independent production had ended in failure. Nor had he recovered in his first picture for Warner Bros.,
Stage Fright
(1950). Critics now spoke slightingly of his coldness, his affectations and artificiality. But early in 1950, Hitchcock discovered a novel with a captivating idea: Two strangers meet, and one of them proposes an exchange of murders, an exchange of guilt, almost, in a way, an exchange of murderous identities. Each of them would kill someone whom the other wanted dead, and since neither had any motive or any connection to the victim, neither would ever be caught. Hitchcock bought the film rights to
Strangers on a Train
by Patricia Highsmith for a trivial $7,500, then collaborated with a writer named Whitfield Cook on a sixty-five-page “treatment.” In trying to develop a full screenplay, though, Hitchcock ran into difficulty. “I couldn't find anyone to work on it with me,” he lamented. “They all felt my first draft was so flat and factual that they couldn't see one iota of quality in it.”

One of the writers Hitchcock tried to hire was the ruined Dashiell Hammett, but something went wrong in the negotiations, and Hammett faded away. Then, after several more rejections, came the almost equally ruined Chandler, who was to produce for Hitchcock the last movie script he ever wrote. “Why am I doing it?” Chandler wondered aloud. “Partly because I thought I might like Hitch, which I do, and partly because one gets tired of saying no. . . .” The liking did not last long. Chandler wrote a first draft while Hitchcock went scouting locations in the East. When the director returned, he read Chandler's script with some dismay, dictated a lot of changes that he wanted, and then went east again to shoot the tennis matches at Forest Hills (the hero, who had originally been an architect, was now a tennis star, a more photogenic occupation). “Hitchcock . . . directs a film in his head before he knows what the story is,” Chandler complained. “You find yourself trying to rationalize the shots he wants to make rather than the story. Every time you get set he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.” And again: “He is full of little suggestions and ideas, which have a cramping effect on a writer's initiative. . . . Hitchcock . . . is always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or a mood effect. He is aware of this and accepts the handicap. He knows that in almost all his pictures there is some point where the story ceases to make any sense whatever and becomes a chase, but he doesn't mind. This is very hard on a writer, especially on a writer who has any ideas of his own.”

When Hitchcock read Chandler's second draft, he decided that Chandler had to be fired. He hoped now to hire Ben Hecht, but all he could get was one of Hecht's assistants, Czenzi Ormonde (though Hecht may have helped too). She wrote a new script with another collaborator, Barbara Keon, and with Hitchcock's wife, Alma, and of course Hitchcock himself. What did such jumbled authorship matter? Chandler had been right—Hitchcock did include the Jefferson Memorial in one scene, and the Washington Monument in another. And he did care primarily for camera effects. For example, the murder of the wife of Guy, the tennis player, whom the psychopathic Bruno strangled even though Guy had never agreed to Bruno's bizarre proposition. Hitchcock built an enormous lens so that he could film the entire murder as a reflection in the eyeglasses dropped by the victim. Or that spectacular ending when the carousel spun wildly out of control. Hitchcock started by filming a toy carousel going faster and faster until it finally exploded. Then he enlarged the film and projected it onto a huge screen and then placed his actors in front of the screen. “This was a most complicated sequence,” Hitchcock later explained. “For rear projection shooting there was a screen and behind it an enormous projector lens and the lens of the camera had to be right on that white line. The camera was not photographing the screen and what was on it, it was photographing the light in certain colors; therefore the camera lens had to be level and in line with the projector lens. . . .” And so on.

The only “flaws” in
Strangers on a Train,
as Hitchcock later confided to François Truffaut, were those things that a less cinematic director might have considered essential: “The ineffectiveness of the two main actors and the weakness of the final script.” Hitchcock was too critical. Farley Granger was perfectly adequate as Guy, and Robert Walker was quite remarkable as Bruno. Perhaps precisely because he had so often played the role of the nice young man, shyly hungering for affection, the Walker who had emerged from the Menninger Clinic now became almost demonic as the mirror image of his past self, sly, cunning, implicitly homosexual, domineering, and ruthless. And insane. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it—all this roiled in Robert Walker in the last complete movie he made before he was done to death.

Chandler, of course, could see none of the morbid brilliance in
Strangers on a Train.
“The picture has no guts, no plausibility, no characters and no dialogue,” he said. “But of course it's Hitchcock, and a Hitchcock picture always does have something.” And to another friend: “I don't know why it's a success, perhaps because Hitchcock succeeded in removing almost every trace of my writing from it.”

 

Walker's former wife, Jennifer Jones, who had finally married David Selznick in 1949, now had a chance to star with Laurence Olivier in William Wyler's version of
Sister Carrie,
so she didn't tell Wyler that she was pregnant. When her condition became obvious, she admitted to Wyler that she had tried to keep it secret in order not to lose the part. Still, the part was especially difficult now because the fashions of Dreiser's times required tight corsets. Wyler tried, uncharacteristically, to be obliging. “I told her, ‘When it's a closeup you don't have to do it, I'll tell you when we see the full figure,' ” he recalled. “But she always had herself strapped in. Just watching her made me uncomfortable. She lost the baby after the picture. How much the strapping of her waist had to do with it I don't know.”

 

Just a few months after the prison gates in Kentucky opened for the release of Trumbo, Lawson, and Scott, they opened again to take in Dashiell Hammett. At the age of fifty-nine, he was a wreck, gaunt, toothless, coughing fitfully. In the food line on his first day in prison, he fainted.

Hammett had not finished a novel for nearly twenty years, though he still made a living from the royalties on his past work. He had recently been trying to write something that he called
December First,
but he never finished that either. His old friend William Wyler invited him out to Hollywood to work on the film adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's play
Detective Story.
He enjoyed going out to dinner with the handsome young Patricia Neal, but he soon realized that he couldn't write the script for Wyler, and he returned the ten-thousand-dollar advance he had received.

Despite all these signs of decrepitude, Hammett's continuing political activities made him an attractive target for the FBI. The agency assigned a man to watch him. This follower reported that Hammett had attended a Communist dinner to denounce the racist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, and that he had donated a thousand dollars to the cause. He donated another thousand dollars at a rally in Madison Square Garden to stop the Korean War.

What really aroused the authorities, though, was that when the Supreme Court finally upheld the convictions of the eleven Communist Party leaders in the summer of 1951, four of them jumped bail. This bail of twenty thousand dollars each had been provided by a leftist organization called the Civil Rights Congress, and Hammett was one of four trustees of its bail fund. Federal Judge Sylvester Ryan, in whose court the fugitives had failed to appear for sentencing, not only declared the bail money forfeited but demanded that the four trustees appear before him to tell who had donated the bail money. Hammett, who had no idea who the many donors were, responded to this harassment by pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, because, as he told Lillian Hellman, “I don't let cops or judges tell me what I think democracy is.” But although the Fifth Amendment is supposed to protect citizens in situations like this, the courts (even the Supreme Court, eventually) held that Hammett was not being asked to incriminate himself since he was being asked only to serve as a witness, and a witness had no right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Hence, a sentence of six months in Ashland, Kentucky.

The authorities in Ashland took pity on the old man, after their fashion. They assigned him to easy indoor work, like mopping floors and cleaning toilets. He also served on a committee to make sure that all new prisoners knew how to use toilets. One of his fellow committeemen, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt, and also a fellow trustee of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund, was shocked to discover that there were Americans who didn't know how to use toilets. It dismayed even Hammett, the creator of the tough detective, but prisons usually do provide surprises.

Some newspaper columnists thought it their function to add their insults to Hammett's prison sentence. “Call him Samovar Spade,” said Walter Winchell in one of his characteristic efforts at wit. Inside the prison, though, the convicts gathered around the radio every Friday night to hear the broadcast adventures of Sam Spade. Hammett was still involved in litigation with Warner Bros., which claimed that its purchase of
The Maltese Falcon
back in the 1930's gave the studio all rights to the name and persona of Sam Spade forever. For the time being, though, the disembodied radio voice of the tough young Sam Spade was still working in the service of Spade's aged and imprisoned creator.

 

In the last year of Arnold Schoenberg's life, a former pupil named Dika Newlin went to visit him in Brentwood and found to her amazement that the austere old man “had now discovered
TELEVISION
!” Schoenberg claimed that he had bought a set just for the children—his younger son was still only nine—but Miss Newlin was not convinced. “No one was more enthralled than he,” she observed, “as we sat in front of Hopalong Cassidy with our TV trays in our laps.”

 

Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia, hated his brother Jack, who was the president of the company, and Jack reciprocated his feelings as only a brother could. Jack even tried once to get rid of Harry by going secretly to see A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, who financed the Cohns and much else besides, to tell him that Harry was wasteful and irresponsible. Giannini smiled understandingly and then called Harry and said, “I think you should know who just visited me.” So Harry was not very receptive when Jack suggested to him that Columbia try making a Bible picture.

“Keep your nose out of my end of the business,” Harry said.

“I just thought we should make a Bible picture, that's all,” said Jack. “There are a lot of good stories in the Bible.”

“What the hell do you know about the Bible?” Harry demanded. “I'll bet you don't even know the Lord's Prayer.”

“I sure do,” said Jack.

“The hell you do!” said Harry. “I'll bet you fifty bucks you can't recite the Lord's Prayer. Come on—put up or shut up.”

The brothers both put up fifty dollars.

“Okay, say it,” said Harry.

“Now I lay me down to sleep—” Jack began, a little hesitantly.

“That's enough,” said Harry, grudgingly surrendering his fifty dollars. “I didn't think you knew it.”

Jack was right, though, not about the Lord's Prayer but about the commercial possibilities of the Bible. As the millions who used to go to the movies to watch Blondie or Gene Autry now stayed home and watched much the same sort of thing on the new television set, the Poverty Row studios like Republic and Monogram started going out of business. The soothsayers in the larger studios began to imagine that they could see salvation for themselves in vastness, gigantism. Blockbusters! A cast of thousands! The greatest story ever told!

This was, in a sense, a return to the beginnings, for a French version of the Oberammergau Passion Play was one of the first films that young Louis B. Mayer had shown in his first theater back in 1907. One of the big successes of the following year was Vitagraph's five-reel
Life of Moses.
Hollywood returned once again to religious epics in the early 1920's, after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921 threatened the fledgling film capital's entire future. Cecil B. DeMille led the process of atonement with his spectacular production of
The Ten Commandments
(1923), which grossed $14 million on an investment of $1.5 million. He followed that with
The King of Kings
(1927) and
The Sign of the Cross
(1932), and lest anyone suspect that he had any commercial motives, he started each day's shooting with a religious service on the set. Indeed, after the filming of the crucifixion in
The King of Kings,
the entire cast had to stand with heads bowed during five minutes of organ music.