Waiting for Orders (13 page)

I
T
was twenty-five years before I wrote another short story. Five years of the interval were spent in the army. I had an eventful war, and for a time after it took to film-making as a writer-producer. As a producer I was a flop but as a writer I had a series of successes. A screenplay I had written for an Ealing film was nominated for an Oscar. For the American Academy to nominate a British writer for his work on a British film was at that time unusual. I was flattered and should have been encouraged as well, but by the mid-fifties I was beginning to have doubts about film-making as even a part-time occupation for a writer who enjoyed his work most when he was writing to be read. I had begun writing novels again and, although I now had friends in the film industry with whom I enjoyed working, I had no sense of commitment to the over-indulged accountant and his lay-preaching master who tried to lead it.

The children had grown up and gone back to America. Louise was working again, and well, as a fashion illustrator. I could pay off the back income tax by selling the house in Pelham Crescent and we could start again; but we didn’t. The Suez Canal was about to be re-opened. We went to Marseille and boarded a Messageries Maritimes boat bound for South-East Asia. We returned on a Rotterdamsche-Lloyd liner crammed with Dutch colonial refugees from Java. In the Red Sea the ship lost a propeller blade and we had to jolt home at reduced speed.

It was not a happy return. A few months later Louise divorced me. The divorce was ‘amicable’; that is to say we both remained mindful of good times past as well as of changed minds. We had been married eighteen years.

With the Pelham Crescent house sold and the proceeds from a sale of movie rights in a novel, there was enough both to pay
off the back income tax and to set Louise up in a New York studio apartment. She took the bits of furniture she liked; I put my books and writing table into storage and rented a furnished flat. There, I wrote the script of a film that turned out to be the first of a new wave of disaster movies; I also wrote the first chapter of a novel to be called
Passage of Arms.
At that point I was asked if I would like to go and work in Hollywood.

It was not the first time I had been asked. Just after the war, and before the McCarthy witch hunts began, I had been assured over expensive hotel lunches that a fortune awaited me in California. The persuaders, from Leland Hayward to Irving (Swifty) Lazar, had been charming and sometimes even entertaining, but I had always resisted the call. I knew that my reputation as a storyteller and a screenwriter was worth more in America than it was in England but I liked my country then and believed in its future. I had helped to elect the Attlee government, I could call Michael Foot a friend and was indebted to him for letting me meet Nye Bevan. True, Bevan had spent half an hour or more trying to persuade me to write a film based on the mystery of the Junius letters, but it had been a boozy evening and after all, Dumas had made entertaining fiction out of old French political scandals.

The French, too, I would remind myself had made superb films for French-speaking audiences without bankrupting themselves or corrupting the French theatre from which the native cinema drew its acting and directing strengths. Its writers for the screen had often been poets first. In England we had been told that we had to make films that would penetrate the American market and earn dollars. It should be easy we were told; we and our cousins had a common language; we had been gallant allies and fought the good fight for the soul of Europe. Ask them in Madison, Ohio, the heart of America! But all we penetrated in the end were the ‘art house’ circuits of the big cities; but probably no more deeply than Italian films with English subtitles.

The McCarthy inquisitions and the black lists they spawned had their compensations. Exiled writers and directors made Europe the centre of excellence for international film production. Hollywood was where the best all-American movies were still made. The days of the Hollywood major studios and the
vertically integrated monopolies of which they were a part were now numbered. The advent of network television and American anti-trust laws together brought them down. The first of the studios to rise again was Universal and it rose with the help of the talent agency MCA who bought it and made a television programme factory out of it, the first of its kind.

I was only dimly aware of this development. My experience of television was limited to the serialization of a novel of mine by one of the commercial production companies. I attended some of the rehearsals – it was to be transmitted ‘live’ – and the whole thing was quite unnerving. I was told that filming the rehearsals and afterwards cutting the bits together would be impossibly expensive. I was surprised when Alfred Hitchcock, who was then making at Universal a one-hour anthology series called ‘Suspicion’, asked me to write an original screenplay for the show. Of course, with an ‘anthology’ series there were no series characters – the format was that of a short three-act play – and, of course, the great man did not ask me himself. Joan Harrison, the ‘Suspicion’ producer, did all the commissioning and I was one among those commissioned. I called my piece
The Eye of Truth
and when produced it starred Joseph Cotten and the young George Peppard. It went down well in America and probably served to remind MGM of my existence.

My producer at their Culver City studios was Julian Blaustein, one of the new corps of semi-independent producers created to fight the MGM battle to retain the audiences drifting away from their movie theatres and drive-ins to the increasingly accessible pleasures of colour TV. The dreadful Louis B. Mayer had long gone and the head of the studio was now Sol Siegel, but writers were still allocated offices on the writers’ floor of the Irving Thalberg building and still had to seek special permission to do their work at home. The day when William Faulkner, working at home, had been summoned by Thalberg to an urgent script conference and found to be at home, two thousand miles away in Oxford, Mississippi had not been forgotten. Nothing had been forgotten. It was still the custom when an expensive British writer was hired and reported for work for him to be paraded for inspection by the top brass of the front office in the producers’ dining-room on the fourth floor. It was the only time he would be invited to eat there and he was
expected to speak only when spoken to. The food was dull, no wine was served (producers had bar cupboards in their offices) and the only person of interest to me there, aside from Blaustein my escort, was Arthur Freed who had produced all the great MGM musicals. He, however, was there just to eat and all I got from him was a nod between mouthfuls. It was left to Eddie Mannix, who had been a trouble-shooter for Thalberg and was the senior old timer there, to ask the test questions.

‘Where are you going to be staying?’

‘I’m renting a house on Camden Drive.’

‘That the one on the corner of the seven hundred block, the one Vincent Minelli had?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Ever hear the story about William Faulkner working at home when he was on our payroll?’

It was one of the oldest Hollywood stories but I must have said that I had heard it too patiently. He gave me a sharp look.

‘Writers come and go,’ he said; ‘anyone ever tell you that when those bigheads over at Western Electric brought in sound they ruined a great industry?’

‘I’ve heard it said.’

‘I’ll bet you have. And there are still quite a lot of us who think it’s true.’

‘If you want to know all about the silent days,’ said my producer, ‘Eddie knows where all the bodies are buried. But right now we ought to be getting back to work.’ When we were outside he said: ‘You won’t have to go through that again.’

Julian Blaustein was a Harvard man and his best-known film at that time was
Broken Arrow
which had starred James Stewart. The film he had hired me to write was based on a Hammond Innes novel called
The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
It starred Gary Cooper as a rogue sea captain used as a fall guy by marine insurance swindlers. The story is about his fight to regain his reputation as an employable ship’s captain. It was a well-mounted film in the MGM tradition with a fine supporting cast directed by Michael Anderson; and it was a flop; not commercially perhaps, but I could only see its failings. I think we had the wrong star. The part called for an angrier, hungrier healthier actor than Gary Cooper. Poor old Coop had prostate trouble. Where in the film there should have been fire and fight
there was only a weary desperation. You did not blame the woman for her final rejection of him. This was not the Coop of
High Noon
or
Mr Deeds Goes to Town.
He made only one more picture before he died.

At Culver City MGM had taken one more step on the way down. Sol Siegel’s new policy was to remake old hits. Even I knew that this was wrong. The received wisdom about remakes was that it was the good properties you made again, not the successful ones. Spectacles like
Ben Hur
and
The Ten Commandments
could be remade because they could always be improved technically. Artistic development was a different matter.
The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett was twice made into below average Warner Bros. B-movies before the 1941 version directed by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor turned out to be a classic of the genre. That sort of success can never be calculated. What Julian Blaustein had now been assigned to produce was a remake of an old silent hit
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Julian wanted me to write a new script setting the story in World War Two instead of World War One. He ran the old film for me in the Thalberg building projection room.

I had first seen it at the age of twelve while on holiday in Broadstairs. It was Rudolf Valentino’s introduction to a world audience and I remembered some of his scenes, but what I remembered best were the war sequences. The character of the tango-dancing playboy played by Valentino seemed to me to have no possible counterpart in the second war context; and if the heroes and France were so different, so were the enemy villains. A reformed playboy in the Resistance? Sure, why not? But I did not want to write it. I was tired of World War Two heroics, even the genuine kind. Julian was disappointed with me and did not ask me to work for him again.

I went back to writing
Passage of Arms
and passed the test for a regular Californian driving licence. I made friends. Later that year Joan Harrison and I were married.

Joan was an Oxford graduate (St Hugh’s, Modern Greats) and had come to Hollywood with the Hitchcock family (Hitch, Alma and their daughter Pat) in 1938 to work for Selznick on
Rebecca.
She had been the writer on other Hitchcock pictures, notably
Foreign Correspondent
, but left for RKO to be a producer on
her own account. She made several successful pictures there, starring Robert Montgomery, before Howard Hughes bought the studio and delivered an ultimatum. It was addressed to all contract producers but it was meant for Joan Harrison. In future, he said, all RKO pictures would be about one of only two things, fighting and fornication. He did not like women in positions of authority. She had taken the hint and moved to New York as a ‘live’ television producer. When MCA moved into Universal Hitch invited her back to take charge of his television productions. She had the authority of an executive producer which in Hollywood is considerable; for many years she ran Hitchcock television. She hired writers, directors and actors to do work that displayed their talents to advantage. Some valuable professional careers had their beginnings in the Hitchcock shows. In Hollywood Joan was an important person.

This importance had its drawbacks and I soon discovered some of them. In the small cities and suburbs of West Los Angeles those who dealt with the public in an official capacity, the counter clerks behind the grilles in local and state government offices, were always very polite and helpful and were obviously trained to be so; elected officials like to protect their majorities. However their friendliness was not wholly innocent. When the clerk looked at the name on the form and asked “Are you the writer?” no literary interest could be assumed; what the clerk was probably wondering was whether or not your presence before him or her was worth a call to Hedda Hopper’s office or, maybe, Louella Parsons’. Applications for wedding licences could be newsworthy, of course, but the preliminaries to the licence could be important leads. In the state of California at that time both applicants for a licence had to have Wasserman tests to prove that they did not have syphilis, and the tests had to be done by state-licensed pathologists. Obviously, the two of you did not go to the same clinic. The business of getting the actual licence with both your names on it was much simpler because the applicants did not have to appear in person – they could be legally represented – and because the licence was issued not by the City of Los Angeles but by the County, all four hundred square miles of it. A Universal Studios attorney who liked Joan and approved of my books sent two of his legal staff out to a desert town near
Bakersfield where there was a County official whose discretion, for some mysterious reason, could be absolutely relied upon. The legal assistants, armed with sworn copies of my English divorce papers and our Wasserman test results, had no difficulty at all. The wedding itself would take place in San Francisco. Hitch, who would give the bride away, made the arrangements. His attorney there had clout enough to persuade a Superior Court judge to forgo his Saturday golf game and open up his chambers in the City Hall. It had to be a Saturday because a short weekend was the only time that could be spared away from the studios. The attorney reserved a suite in my name at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The security was very tight.

It was I who blew it. The ‘maid’ – that is, the woman who came in daily at Camden Drive to tidy and make the bed – also did the routine marketing that kept the refrigerator stocked. She was a quiet ladylike woman of fifty or so and she drove an old Buick that looked better in the driveway than my rented Chevrolet. I knew that she was registered with Central Casting and that she did walk-ons and extra work, but many of the Beverly Hills maids did that. What I had not realized was that, whatever their part-time activities, they all acted as informers for the syndicated gossip columnists; they were paid by results, but they were well paid; they were pros.