City of Nets (10 page)

“Fine, fine,” said Selznick. “Now the orgasm theme.”

Tiomkin whistled. Selznick shook his head somberly.

“That isn't it,” Selznick said. “That's just not an orgasm.”

Tiomkin went away and worked some more. He combined the sighing of cellos and a brassy stirring of trombones, all in the rhythm of what he later described as a handsaw cutting through wood. Once again, he was summoned to Selznick's studio, once again the orchestra assembled, and this time Selznick ordered Tiomkin's music played during a screening of a stormy love scene between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones (whom Selznick was to marry three years later). Everything seemed to go splendidly until the orgasm theme, which Selznick wanted to have repeated, and then repeated again.

“You're going to hate me for this, but it won't do,” he finally said to Tiomkin. “It's too beautiful.”

“Mr. Selznick, what is troubling you?” Tiomkin protested. “What don't you like about it?”

“I like it, but it isn't orgasm music,” Selznick said. “It's not
shtump.
It's not the way I fuck.”

“Mr. Selznick, you fuck your way, I fuck my way,” cried Tiomkin. “To me,
that
is fucking music.”

On this one occasion, Selznick relented, and Tiomkin had it his way. More often, the producers simply decreed that the traditions of the factory were the law, that whatever they decreed must be obeyed. Hanns Eisler, a Berlin radical who had written the music for a number of Bertolt Brecht's plays, was astonished, on his first visit to Hollywood in 1935, to see the system at work. “Every factory has five or six music specialists who . . . have to keep punctually to their office hours,” he later wrote. “Number one is a specialist in military music, number two in sentimental love songs, number three is a better trained composer for symphonic music . . . number four is a specialist in Viennese operetta, number five is for jazz. So if music is required for a film, then every composer has to work on a certain section, according to his specialty. The composers have no idea of what is happening in the rest of the film.”

André Previn, who was working for $250 a week at M-G-M in those days, was a bit less indignant about the system, but his recollections were no less tart. He recalled that one of M-G-M's top officials had complained about some musical passage in a biblical epic, and he had not been mollified when the composer explained that it was “nothing but a minor chord.” From the producer's office came an announcement that remained for years on the bulletin board of the M-G-M music department: “From this date forward, no M-G-M score will contain a minor chord.”

Music, major and minor, had been an essential element in movies from the beginning, for even the earliest silent films were shipped out with suggested programs for the hired pianist to thump at in the darkness of the neighborhood theater. When sound came, and Hollywood began buying all the writers it felt it needed, it bought all the composers too. George Gershwin was hired to write the score for
The Goldwyn Follies,
and Aaron Copland for
Of Mice and Men,
Darius Milhaud for
The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami,
Virgil Thomson for
Louisiana Story.
In Europe, too, the new art of film exerted a magnetic attraction on all kinds of composers: Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Honegger and Vaughan Williams and Poulenc.

The Hollywood authorities bought anyone they wanted, but, like David Selznick, they all had definite ideas of what they wanted done. Their idea of a truly distinguished musician was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had been earnestly composing since the age of six. While still an adolescent, he saw his operas performed at the Vienna State Opera and praised by Mahler, Strauss, and Puccini. In Hollywood, where he arrived in 1934, his first assignment from Warner Bros. was to doctor Mendelssohn's music for Max Reinhardt's version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
From there, it was only a short move to
Captain Blood
and
The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Korngold's scores were lush and melodious imitations of Brahms, not to say Rachmaninoff. So were those of his most successful colleagues, like Max Steiner, another Viennese, whose works extended from
King Kong
to
Gone With the Wind
to
Casablanca,
or Franz Waxman, a Pole, who orchestrated Friedrich Holländer's songs for
The Blue Angel,
achieved his first Hollywood success with
The Bride of Frankenstein,
and eventually composed the theme performed on each of the five hundred-odd television installments of
Peyton Place.

These were the stars, who succeeded from time to time in having their background music performed and recorded as symphonic suites, but when the M-G-M factory reached its height in the mid-1940's, it had about fifteen films in production on any given day. Its music department, Hollywood's largest, boasted twenty full-time composers on the payroll, as well as twenty-five arranger-orchestrators and forty copyists. “The music department,” said André Previn, “was no more nor less important than the Department of Fake Lawns.” Previn's first success for M-G-M had been to write some jazzy variations on “Three Blind Mice” for José Iturbi to “improvise” in a film called
Holiday in Mexico,
to demonstrate, as was generally required in such films, that classical musicians were not snobs. M-G-M's hired composers couldn't afford to be snobs either. “We shaped up at the Music Department each day like truckers waiting to see who had tomatoes to be driven to Chicago or furniture for Delaware,” Previn recalled. “We never knew who might need what. If some composer was in trouble with a prize-fight film that had to be finished immediately, we might all be rushed over to that set to pitch in for a few days.”

For the true professionals—and Hollywood had the standard proportion of experts, mediocrities, and incompetents—writing for film was an extremely exacting craft. Each piece of music had to accompany not just a specific scene but a specific piece of film. Hence the click track. The standard film moved through a projector at a rate of 24 frames per second, or 1,440 frames per minute. A click track consisted of holes punched into the sound track that ran along the edge of the film. A composer could either write for a click track or somebody else would have to do it for him. So in Max Steiner's score for
Since You Went Away,
for example, at the point marked “The Kiss,” where the violins played a series of sweet high quarter-note chords while an arpeggio swept up from below, the score was marked not only “measure 44” but “5/53” on the click track. The conductor listening through earphones knew exactly what was expected of him.

When these musicians went home at the end of a day's work, they wanted very much to play a different kind of music. Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, grew up in Hollywood and recalled that his father, Felix Slatkin, a violinist who worked at 20th Century–Fox, and his mother, Eleanor Aller, a cellist who worked at Warner Bros., met at the Hollywood Bowl and eventually founded the Hollywood Quartet. “They would come home at 5 o'clock and play music all night,” said Slatkin. “They knew everybody, and you never could tell who might drop in, anybody from Schoenberg to Sinatra.”

These Hollywood musical encounters could reach a rather exalted level. Stravinsky had already gone to bed one night in July of 1942 when he heard a noise on the steps leading to his front door. He went to investigate and found himself confronting a tall and austere-looking man who apologized in Russian for the lateness of his visit but said he wanted to bring Stravinsky a jar of honey and to invite him to dinner. He promised that music would not be mentioned. Stravinsky naturally recognized his nocturnal visitor as the unmistakable Sergei Rachmaninoff, and accepted. If no music was discussed—it seems hard to believe—that was hardly the case when Vladimir Horowitz came to visit Rachmaninoff's home shortly before the composer's death in 1943. The two master pianists spent the evening—imagine the scene!—playing four-hand duets.

The superb RCA Victor recordings of Beethoven's “Archduke” Trio and the Schubert B-flat came about largely because Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, and Emanuel Feuermann were all neighbors. “After those recordings . . .” Rubinstein recalled later, “the three of us, joined by other musicians, spent glorious days and nights playing chamber music.” Some of these occasions, though, were less distinguished. Oscar Levant, who had been studying desultorily with Schoenberg, wrote a piano concerto that Schoenberg thought might interest Otto Klemperer, another Berlin refugee, who had become the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. When they all met at one of Salka Viertel's parties, Schoenberg urged Levant to perform his new work. “This was the opportunity that would have meant so much to me,” Levant confessed, “but my unpredictability and my quixotic impulse to undo myself resolved into a bad joke. I sat at the piano and played and sang ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling,' and to this day I am perplexed by my own behavior. . . . To top it off, I asked Klemperer if he liked Beethoven.”

Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of the Ben Hecht Symphonietta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of the first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

“Quiet, please!” he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him.

The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarrassment. “Groucho's jealous,” Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

“Quiet, you lousy amateurs!” he shouted.

When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to
Tannhäuser.

“Thunderstruck,” Antheil recalled, “we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphonietta. We took him in.”

 

The rise of Hitler brought America some of its best filmmakers, just as it brought some of its best composers, teachers, nuclear physicists, and everything else. America welcomed them, for the most part, with variations of apathy and dismay. Samuel Wilder, born in a Galician town not far from Krakow and nicknamed Billy because of his mother's enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, got to Hollywood early in 1934 through a series of misunderstandings. In Paris, he had written a jazzy story entitled “Pam-Pam,” about a runaway girl who took refuge in an abandoned Broadway theater. He sent it to a friend from Berlin named Joe May, who had become a producer at Columbia. The studio offered Wilder a one-way ticket to Hollywood and a six-month contract at $150 per week, and only then discovered that its latest acquisition could hardly speak English.

“Pam-Pam” never got filmed, nor did the other scenarios that Wilder kept frantically churning out. By Christmas of 1935, he was living in a basement anteroom outside the women's toilets in the Chateau Marmont. “This Christmas of 1935,” Wilder said later, “when I could not sleep, when women were coming in and peeing and looking at me funny, when I . . . knew that war was on the way for Europe, suddenly I wasn't sure if I fitted in around here in Hollywood. I had the feeling I was not in the right country and I didn't know if there was a right country for me. Right here was the low point of my life.”

Wilder was still only twenty-nine, an ebullient youth with curly red hair and the courage of desperation. Erich Pommer, the former UFA producer in Berlin now under contract at RKO, bet Wilder fifty dollars at a party that he wouldn't dare jump into the swimming pool with all his clothes on. Wilder promptly earned himself fifty dollars. Eventually, he found a job at Paramount, at $250 a week, as a foot soldier in the studio's army of 100-odd contract writers. They were required by their contracts to turn in at least eleven pages of copy every Thursday. It was more or less assumed that nobody could write a movie script by himself. Paramount assigned the unruly young Wilder to the most implausible of partners, a wealthy New Yorker and Harvard Law School graduate named Charles Brackett, fourteen years his senior. Together, they were supposed to rewrite for Ernst Lubitsch a creaky Alfred Savoir play entitled
La Huitième Femme du Barbe-Bleu.

Bluebeard
—Gary Cooper in pursuit of Claudette Colbert—was a solid success. Then came
Midnight
and the triumphant
Ninotchka.
And
Hold Back the Dawn,
in which Billy Wilder, having finally become an American citizen in 1939, wrote a sad little comedy about the refugees who were trapped in Tijuana, waiting for U.S. visas that never came. Wilder's hero, who had arrived jaunty and confident, was finally reduced to lolling on his dirty hotel bed and addressing a bitter monologue to a cockroach. “Where you going?” he snarled at the cockroach, in the manner of an immigration official. “Let's see your papers.”