The Big Screen (42 page)

In Las Vegas (and all the subsequent sites for gaming) the deal was a lot blunter, but equally reckless. The fantasy was interactive: you could win, and lose, on the spot. You put down as much as you wanted, as much as you had, or as much as you could borrow, for the chance at a mythic happiness—the big win, the golden moment, breaking the bank. There were many ways of describing this reward, but none of them made it more likely. In an allegedly conservative, hardworking, practical, and realistic nation, founded in God, honesty, and a fair deal, some of us persuaded ourselves that we could get the big Happiness of the right numbers coming up in a row. Everyone knew what a long shot they were following. But they took the chance, which was an early sign that soon the American habits of saving your money and being prudent with the economy were doomed. The adrenaline of fantasy was surging through our veins. Increasingly, the stock market was perceived as a casino, and in the great financial crash of 2007 and onward the practices of fraud, criminality, and deceit were institutionalized. The masses were as huddled as ever, and the light of entertainment was a blinding and imprisoning force.

Not the least result of this was both an astonishing adulation of the lucky winner as an American ideal, and the actual increase in the statistics for suicide in Clark County (the highest in the nation, with people 54 to 62 percent more likely to kill themselves than average citizens in the United States).

But even that new and deranged economic model is not the end of the transaction. Gaming, or picking directions at random and by whim, had altered the bases of narrative. When the movies began, the moral codes in narrative were strenuously underlined, especially in popular fiction, but in the great novels and dramas, too. Novelists from George Eliot to Henry James weighed the moral being of their characters, and even if the authors might have lost their own guiding religious faith, their humanism and their interest in social well-being were hinged upon the moral impact of how things turned out. In
The Portrait of a Lady
, Isabel Archer is left up in the air at the end of the novel—and we are there with her—but the outlines are clear on the choices she has made, the traps she has found, and the large things she still needs to do.

That pressure is very strong in silent film; indeed, it may now be a moralizing impediment to our pleasure with such movies. There was also an emerging contradiction between the helpless observation of appearance and the assertion of inner values. More and more in films, we watch people and refrain from judgment. The clearer and closer the scrutiny, the less easy it is to reach a moral conclusion.

Then add to that natural predicament the sheer overload of story, a slide that becomes an avalanche with television. Our stories, the narrative shapes we invent to explain the world to ourselves, resemble one another. And as you watch movies, where the formulaic begins to congeal, that pattern becomes inescapable. Hollywood repeated stories that worked. With its great stars, it searched for “vehicles” for Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or whomever, so their films became copying devices, reiterations of familiar typologies and principles—they became Joan Crawford pictures and not particular, fresh stories. That potential was drastically increased by television, where Lucy and Desi replayed the same “situation” week after week: Lucy has a crazy scheme or need—can she get it past Desi? It will all end in a great sigh and a forgiving embrace.

It wasn't just that the audience was getting a shot of
I Love Lucy
every week. In the same week, they were getting
Amos 'n' Andy
,
Strike It Rich
,
The Jackie Gleason Show
, the various Arthur Godfrey shows,
The Red Buttons Show
,
Our Miss Brooks
,
The Jack Benny Program
,
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
,
I've Got a Secret
,
Two for the Money
,
The Millionaire
,
Topper
,
The $64,000 Question
,
The Ed Sullivan Show
—and these are just the CBS offerings. There was another large network, NBC, that had its own shows, and ABC was struggling to rival them. Some of the shows I've named were not strictly fiction; they were game shows, talk shows, or reality TV, but they were many of them thoroughly written and often rigged. So little could be trusted.

Comedy shows and game shows were looser, and we felt we were watching real people. (Remember Susan Sontag's words.) But coming along was a host of real fiction shows. They had the same characters episode after episode, but they posed as crucial dramas; they solved problems so relentlessly you wondered how problems kept arising; they were earnest and ponderously repetitive:
Gunsmoke
(the most popular show in America from 1957 to 1961, the moment of John Kennedy!),
Wagon Train
,
Have Gun—Will Travel
,
The Rifleman
,
Perry Mason
,
Rawhide
,
Bonanza
,
Dr. Kildare
,
The Defenders
,
The Fugitive
—hour upon hour of it, day upon day. I daresay some of you loved those shows for an hour and a season. We “all” watched them. And as we lived with them, how could we avoid seeing that story was like a game, with the same cards seeking a different arrangement every week, and the moral conclusion seeming increasingly unbelievable?

Few things are more decisive in the history of the mass media than this undermining of story as a thing of educational value. But the proposal in gambling is to subvert ordinary value or worth and to impose the arbitrariness of chance on all other codes.

Once you've noticed the gambling instinct, you see it everywhere; soon you can't cross the street or get married without weighing the risk or the win. So, would you rather make
Harvey
or
Winchester '73
(both from 1950)? To make that decision, you must pretend you're Jimmy Stewart—hasn't everyone tried that impersonation? Didn't Jimmy and nearly every other actor ask that we try? (There's only one actor you've never heard an impression of, Spencer Tracy, and that thought comes from James Curtis, who gave years of his life doing a biography of the actor, so calm on-screen, so turbulent in life.)

James Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1908, the son of a hardware merchant. He got a degree in architecture at Princeton and joined the University Players in Massachusetts, a group that included Joshua Logan, Henry Fonda, and the actress Margaret Sullavan. He went onstage as an appealing but very thin romantic lead. There was a sweetness to him, a boyishness that attracted women and the liberal aspirations of directors such as Frank Capra, even if Stewart's own politics were to the right. As part of that charm, he leaned on his natural urge to hesitation and country drawl. Soon that act was a part of him.

He was put under contract by M-G-M, and he became a popular favorite. He formed an intriguing on-screen bond with Margaret Sullavan—he loomed over her, but she was the commanding figure, and their two voices (his shy, hers throaty) worked together. He felt like her lover and her child. So they did
Next Time We Love
(1936),
The Shopworn Angel
(1938), and
The Mortal Storm
(1940), and found their masterpiece as Alfred and Klara in Lubitsch's
The Shop Around the Corner
(1940), set in a studio-made Budapest, in a novelty gift store at Christmas, with two people cool to each other in person, unaware they are pen pals falling in love.

Beyond that, Stewart had several big hits: he was in Capra's
You Can't Take It with You
(1938), and then the soulful rural senator in Capra's
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), filibustering for justice; he was the laconic cowpoke who tames and enchants Marlene Dietrich in
Destry Rides Again
(1939); and he won the Oscar playing the reporter in George Cukor's movie version of
The Philadelphia Story
(1940). That award seems a touch perverse: Cary Grant does have the lead role, but in his heyday no one really got Grant any better than the Academy understood that
The Shop Around the Corner
was destined to be a treasure.

At which point, Stewart went off to war (he was underweight and had to cheat his way in). He flew bomber missions over Germany and rose to the rank of colonel, with decorations. But at the end of the war, he had a crisis, if not a breakdown, because of the stress. He came back a little heavier, with gray in his hair and more sadness in his eyes.

He was not sure what to do. “Frank [Capra] really saved my career,” he would say. “I don't know whether I would have made it after the war if it hadn't been for Frank. It wasn't just a case of picking up where you'd left off, because it's not that kind of a business. It was over four and a half years that I'd been completely away from anything that had to do with the movies. Then one day [he] called me and said he had an idea for a movie.”

That idea was George Bailey in
It's a Wonderful Life
, a man presented with an ultimate gamble: to live or die, to keep Bedford Falls intact or let it turn into Pottersville. At the time, the public wasn't bowled over, but history knows better. George Bailey is at the heart of the Jimmy Stewart legend, as a savings-and-loan manager dedicated to his hometown and identified with Christmas. It is an enchanting myth, even if Pottersvilles have won the bet in so many ruined places in America.

In truth, Stewart was more of a businessman. But when he came back from the U.S. Army Air Forces he found himself without an agent. His old handler, Leland Hayward (who had been married to Margaret Sullavan—it was a small world; she had married Henry Fonda, too), was going into theatrical production. Hayward's future was
Mister Roberts
(1955) and
South Pacific
(1958), on Broadway. So Stewart moved over to another stable.

Louis, or Lew, Wasserman was born in Cleveland in 1913, the son of a bookbinder from Russia. At the age of twelve he got a job selling candy in movie theaters and he was on the edge of the city's Mayfield Road gang as a wistful onlooker. As he grew up he became an agent in the local music business, joining Jules Stein, who had founded the Music Corporation of America (MCA). It was in 1940, seeking to grow, that Stein sent Wasserman to Hollywood, where he had no clients as yet. Things developed, and Wasserman is the most important show business arranger this book has yet touched. The MCA client list grew, because Wasserman had seen that the role of agents was changing.

Agents were fringe figures once, kept around to agree with their clients and to process paperwork. Those tasks abide, but Myron Selznick had altered the nature of the job. He was an older brother to David Selznick, and a son to Lewis J. Selznick, a big shot in the early picture business until he went broke. Myron longed to make good on his dad's name and he was a tough businessman. As sound arrived, Myron saw a way to take some of the talents (actors, writers, and directors) and demand higher salaries as their contracts came up for renewal. He loved to insult and exploit the studios. But a contract generally lasted seven years, with set increases, so the agent didn't have a lot to do. Myron was a savage alcoholic and he died in 1944 at the age of forty-five. Leland Hayward inherited some of his clients and a lot of his methodology, including the realization that if actors became corporations and reported profits instead of income, their tax bill could be greatly reduced.

Wasserman was the heir to this scheme. He also saw that in postwar Hollywood, with studios looking to cut back on contracts, a few top stars had exceptional bargaining power. So he talked Stewart into not renewing at M-G-M, and he encouraged the actor to go independent. Stewart was smart enough to understand that prospect, though not every performer could have overcome the insecurity of being out on his own. The actor said he was doing it all for Frank Capra (and
It's a Wonderful Life
had a problematic budget, ending up over $2.3 million), but he did it for $200,000, more than Capra's salary.