City of Nets (106 page)

Tierney, Gene, 144–45, 154–56, 173–74, 212, 259, 263–65

Tiomkin, Dimitri, 56–57, 328

Todd, Mike, 383, 425

Todd-AO, 627

To Have and Have Not
,
310
, 347–50, 549

Toland, Gregg, 128

Tone, Franchot, 75, 124, 384n

Towne, Robert, 33

Tracy, Spencer, xiv, 19, 65, 259, 300, 506, 616

Trans World Airlines (TWA), 169, 444, 462–63

Treaty of Beverly Hills, 400

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, 527

Trocadero nightclub, 210, 211, 628

Truffaut, François, 620

Truman, Harry, 256, 404, 405, 433, 442, 463, 471–72, 506, 555, 568, 569, 609, 610

Trumbo, Cleo, 610

Trumbo, Dalton, 106,
418
, 429, 437–40, 442, 449–50, 453, 454, 459, 470–71, 484, 538, 548, 550, 610–13, 621, 631

Tshiang, H. T., 158

Turner, Lana, 143, 151, 172, 173, 277, 340–42, 375, 511, 633

Twentieth Century Pictures, 13

20th Century–Fox, 5, 21, 60, 88, 91–93, 108, 208–9, 256, 282–84, 313, 405, 441, 482, 484, 485, 506, 627, 630, 635

 

Ulbricht, Walter, 591–92

Under Capricorn
, 535, 618

Understudies, 118

Unions and talent guilds, 87–97, 100–10, 185, 279, 356–61, 373, 398–408, 430, 434–35, 458, 481, 544.
See also
names of specific organizations

United Artists, 40, 108, 268, 413, 415–16, 505, 522, 538, 568

United Fruit, 485

United Jewish Appeal, 513–14

U.S. Justice Department, 22, 282–84, 503–7

United Studio Technicians Guild, 94

Universal Studios, 21, 23–24, 102, 108, 222, 257, 363–64

University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 44, 45, 393

University of Southern California (USC), 44

Up in Arms
, 512–13

Uris, Leon, 536–38

 

Vajda, Ernest, 103

Valentino, Rudolph, 84–85, 114, 361

Van Druten, John, 28

Van Upp, Virginia, 213–14, 385–86, 389

Vendetta
, 176, 308

Verne, Jules, 383

Vidor, Charles, 385

Vidor, King, 327, 328, 579

Viertel, Berthold, 421

Viertel, Hans, 420

Viertel, Salka, 36–37, 41, 45–48, 60–61, 82, 113, 140–42, 359, 391, 393–94, 425

Vietnam War, 533

Visconti, Luchino, 339n

Vistarama, 627

Vitagraph, 103, 624

Vogel, Joseph, 537–38

Vogler, Gertrude, 211

Von Sternberg, Josef, 82, 362

Von Stroheim, Erich, 22, 229, 603, 605

 

Wagner Act of 1935, 108

Walburn, Raymond, 303

Wald, Jerry, 241, 441, 513, 550

Waldorf Conference (1947), 480–86, 543–54

Walker, Robert, 312–14, 620

Wallace, Henry, 238–39

Waller, Fred, 627

Wallis, Hal, 71, 121, 123–25, 186, 189, 190, 193–95, 197, 344–45, 543

Wallis, Minna, 275

Walsh, Raoul, 212, 242–43

Walsh, Richard, 357–58, 399

Walter, Bruno, 83, 85

Wanger, Walter, 18n, 18–19, 71–72, 76, 298, 441, 464, 481, 483, 498, 534, 585

War bonds, 151–53, 188

War films, xiii, 149–50, 153, 156–59, 184–90, 194, 217–22, 224, 259, 344, 473

War Labor Board, 357–58

Warner, Benjamin, 21

Warner, Harry, 21, 109–10, 185, 188, 450–51, 519, 630

Warner, Jack, xiv, 21, 25, 115, 116, 125, 147, 157, 186, 187n, 190, 193, 197, 212, 218–19, 239–41, 244–45, 271–72, 279, 281–82, 345, 349, 353–56, 371–72,
418
, 430, 433, 448–53, 512–15, 528n, 571, 630

Warner Brothers Studios, 21, 24–25, 58, 60, 70–71, 76–79, 91–92, 108–10, 112–17, 120, 122, 125, 147, 157, 184–85, 188–90, 192, 208, 212–13, 241, 245, 279–84, 344, 345, 353–56, 360, 389–99, 401, 448–49, 481, 485, 494, 577, 617–20, 622, 630.
See also
Warner, Jack

Warnerscope, 627

War Production Board, 157–58, 174

Warren, Earl, 162–63, 373, 438

Wasserman, Lew, 281

Water supply, 10, 31–34, 166–67

Watts, Richard, 119

Watts riots (1965), 11, 30

Waxman, Franz, 58

Wayne, John, 34, 184, 238, 631

Webb, Clifton, 263–65

Webb, Del, 375

Weigel, Helene, 136, 180, 419, 429, 486–87

Weill, Kurt, 421, 519

Welles, Orson, xi, xii, 39, 55, 128–34, 194, 205–6, 215–17, 266–67, 275, 280, 299, 328, 382–89, 425, 552, 555–61, 607

Wells, H. G., 128, 194, 299

Werfel, Alma Mahler, 48, 80–85, 141, 196–97

Werfel, Franz, 80–85, 390

West, Mae, 603, 604

West, Nathanael,
xvi
, 10–16, 19, 20, 108, 113, 201, 322, 434, 541

Western Union
, 66, 230

We Will Never Die
(pageant), 519

Wexley, John, 181–83, 449–50

Whale, James, 287–88

What Makes Sammy Run?
, 98–100, 105–8, 187

Whitney, Iris, 554

Whitney, John Hay, 25

Whitsett, W. P., 34

Why We Fight
series, 194, 218

Wide screens, 627

Wilcox, Daeida, 5–6

Wilcox, Horace Henderson, 5–6

Wilde, Oscar, 556, 561

Wilder, Billy, xii–xiii, 62–63, 180, 227–35, 300, 328–30, 339, 438, 598–607, 616, 628

Wilder, Thornton, 9, 31, 426

Williams, Annie Laurie, 25

Williams, Esther, 458, 495, 616

Willkie, Wendell, 74, 259, 577

Wilson
, 258–59

Wilson, Carey, 339–40

Wilson, Dooley, 194, 350

Wilson, Edmund, 11

Wilson, Woodrow, 161, 258–59

Winchell, Walter, 265, 430, 521, 522, 622

Windom, Barbara Goetz, 514–15

Winters, Shelley, 542–43

The Wizard of Oz
, xi, 500, 625n

Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 606

Wood, Jeane, 239

Wood, Sam, 124, 127, 143–44, 236–40, 459, 578

Woollcott, Alexander, 118

World's Fair (1893, Chicago), 7

World's Fair (1939, New York City), 23

World War II, xi–xii, 35–41, 74, 127–28,
148
, 149–68, 171–72, 174–75, 180–82, 184, 215–27, 256, 281–82, 325, 334, 356, 359, 394–95, 424, 486, 523, 550.
See also
Pearl Harbor; War films

Writers Club, 104

Wuthering Heights
, xi, 31

Wyler, William, 70, 218, 441, 462, 494, 505, 556, 601, 620, 621

Wyman, Jane, 122–23, 123n, 150, 402, 441, 461, 472–73, 633

 

Yankee Doodle Dandy
, 185–88, 189–90, 448

Young, Elizabeth, 65

Young, Howard, 616

 

Zanuck, Darryl F., xii, xiv, 13, 25–26, 66, 105, 106, 124, 133, 149–51, 172, 205, 206, 212, 256–65, 319, 343, 345, 446, 484, 485, 496, 526–28, 556, 560–61, 571, 630

Zanuck, Richard, 630

Zanuck, Virginia, 258, 319

Zavitz, Lee, 29–30

Ziegfeld Follies, 206, 316, 500, 607

Zierold, Norman, 345n

Zionists, 519, 521, 535–38

Zoot suit riots, 199–205

Zorina, Vera, 196, 235–37

Zukor, Adolph, 21, 25

About the Author

OTTO FRIEDRICH
(1929-1995) was a journalist and cultural historian. A contributing editor at
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Time magazine
, he was the author of fourteen books, including
Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s
.

 

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Otto Friedrich

The Poor in Spirit

 

The Loner

 

Decline and Fall

 

The Rose Garden

 

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's

 

Going Crazy

 

Clover: A Love Story

 

The End of the World: A History

 

Glenn Gould: A Life & Variations

 

The Grave of Alice B. Toklas: And Other Reports from the Past

 

Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet

 

Kingdom of Auschwitz

 

Blood and Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler

Copyright

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

 

Photographic Credits

Facing page 1, Nathanael West, Bettmann Archive. Atlanta ablaze, New York Public Library Picture Collection./page 42, Rubinstein performing, Culver Pictures Inc. Walt Disney's
Fantasia
, Culver Pictures Inc. Stokowski conducting, Gjon Mili,
Life
Magazine © 1948 Time Inc./page 86, Willie Bioff, UPI/Bettman Newsphotos./page 148, Bob Hope, Wide World. Hedy Lamarr, Culver Pictures Inc./page 198, Errol Flynn and Betty Hansen, Wide World. Rita Hayworth, New York Public Library Picture Collection. Margarita Cansino, Culver Pictures Inc. Anti-Mexican rioting, Julian Robinson,
Los Angeles Times
, Courtesy of Life Picture Service./page 254, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, Wide World. Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill, Bettmann Archive. Chaplin on trial, Wide World./page 310, Herbert K. Sorrell, UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos. Leftist strike, Culver Pictures Inc. Bogart and Bacall, Wide World./page 368, Bugsy Siegel, Wide World. Bugsy Siegel and George Raft, Brown Bros./page 418, Dalton Trumbo, UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos. Bertolt Brecht, UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos. Jack Warner and J. Parnell Thomas, Martha Holmes,
Life
Magazine, © 1947 Time Inc./page 488, Louis B. Mayer and Lorena Danker, UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos./page 540, Bob Mitchum, Wide World. Ingrid Bergman in
Bells of St. Mary's
, Culver Pictures Inc. Ingrid Bergman in
Stromboli
, Culver Pictures Inc./page 596, Gloria Swanson, Culver Pictures Inc.

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

Excerpts from
Ingrid Bergman: My Story
by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess. Copyright © 1980 by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess. Reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press and International Creative Management, Inc.

Quotes from
Front and Center
by John Houseman. Copyright © 1979 by John Houseman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Quotes from Bertolt Brecht's poems from
Bertolt Brecht Poems
1913–1956
. Copyright © 1976 by Eyre Methuen Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Methuen, Inc. by arrangement with Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt. All rights reserved.

 

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1986 by HarperCollins Publishers.

 

CITY OF NETS.
Copyright © 1986 by Otto Friedrich. Foreword copyright © 2014 by Glen David Gold. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

 

First Harper Perennial edition published 1987. Reissued in 2014.

 

The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:

  Friedrich, Otto.

      City of nets : a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's / Otto Friedrich.

      p. cm.

      Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, c1986.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-20949-7

      1. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Social life and customs. 2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social life and customs. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)—History. I. Title.

  F869.H74F75 1997

  979.4'93—dc20    96-34574

  CIP

 

ISBN 978-0-06-232604-1 (reissue)

EPUB Edition © FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062333803

14   15   16   17   18  
RRD
   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

 

 

*
The sources for all facts and quotations in this book may be found at the end, in the Notes section.

 

 

*
Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman,
was signed and copyrighted by Hedy Lamarr in 1966, but she later filed suit, trying unsuccessfully to prevent its publication. Although the book was apparently based on taped interviews, her suit contended that the work produced by Leo Guild and Sy Rice was “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene.”

 

 

*
The
Algiers
script was officially credited to John Howard Lawson, the Communist playwright who eventually became the leader of the famous Hollywood Ten, but his script was never used. Producer Walter Wanger decided instead simply to translate the script for Julien Duvivier's original French version,
Pépé le Moko,
which had starred Jean Gabin.

 

 

*
A Napoleonic lack of height was common among Hollywood tycoons. With only small exaggeration, Philip French wrote in
The Movie Moguls:
“One could have swung a scythe five and a half feet off the ground at a gathering of movie moguls without endangering any lives; several would scarcely have heard the swish.”

 

 

*
By comparison, Warners' 1937
Life of Emile Zola
never mentioned the fact that Captain Dreyfus, the victim of French anti-Semitism, whom Zola helped to liberate from prison, was a Jew.

 

 

*
Though Dies was the first chairman, true fatherhood of the committee might better be attributed to Samuel Dickstein, congressman for Manhattan's Lower East Side, who began in 1934 to campaign for congressional investigation of pro-Nazi propaganda and subversion. While Dies was more interested in strikes in Detroit, Dickstein demanded “a standing committee of this House known as the Committee on Un-American Activities, which should watch every subversive group in this country.” The two joined forces, but when Congress approved the plan in 1938, Dies became chairman. Dickstein, perhaps because he was too abrasive, perhaps because he was a Jew, failed even to win a seat on his committee. Thus was its future course charted.

 

 

*
Samuel Goldwyn, after reading the galleys, telephoned Schulberg and reputedly offered him $200,000 not to publish the book, “because you are double-crossing the Jews.”

 

 

*
Thau was sometimes described as an M-G-M executive without portfolio. When someone asked Herman Mankiewicz exactly what Thau did, Mankiewicz replied that it was his function to watch from the window of the third floor of the Thalberg Building and to report any appearance of the north wind.

 

 

*
In an interview with Reagan's wife, Jane Wyman, Rex Reed quoted her as telling him, “For ten years, I was the wisecracking lady reporter who stormed the city desk snapping, ‘Stop the presses, I've got a story that will break this town wide open.' ”

 

 

*
As though to test this same capacity in his lieutenants, Cohn installed in Columbia's executive dining room a chair that looked like all the others but gave a shock when an unsuspecting victim sat in it. Frank Capra once came in after a hard day's work and unthinkingly sat in the chair, which promptly gave him a shock. “Oh, shit,” Capra said wearily, without moving. “That stupid son of a bitch Cohn and his goddamn chair.” Then Capra got up and tore the chair to pieces. Cohn subsequently had the electric chair repaired and restored to use. He gave it up only after one of his victims suffered a mild heart attack.

 

 

*
She achieved happiness of a sort with her third husband, Dr. Harry “Docky” Martin, a urologist, for whom she found work as a “technical adviser” on various films and then as a $30,000-per-year part-time staff physician at 20th Century–Fox. Martin was such a heavy drinker that he often passed out at parties. When somebody once tried to lift him off the floor, according to one much-told tale, Mrs. Parsons said, “Oh, let him rest. He has to operate in the morning.”

 

 

*
In the midst of all this, on the day of the San Francisco opening, Welles met Hearst for the first time, an accidental encounter in the elevator of the Fairmont Hotel. Welles said later that he was unable to resist introducing himself as the son of Hearst's old friend Richard Welles. Then he invited Hearst to the premiere. Hearst said not a word and stalked off the elevator when it reached his floor. Welles impudently called after him: “Charles Foster Kane would have
accepted.
”

 

 

*
Loo, who was born in Hawaii, had actually been making films as early as Frank Capra's
Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1933), and he lived on to become a
Kung Fu
television star, but when he died in 1983 at the age of eighty, the obituaries all featured his World War II villainy. “He was known as the man who died to make a living,” said his daughter, Beverly Jane Loo, a New York publishing executive. “He was always either stabbing himself or committing hara kiri.”

 

 

*
As often happened throughout Hughes's career, the mysterious accidents during
Hell's Angels
inspired a lot of rumors. Lester Cole, a prominent screenwriter who later went to prison as one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote in his memoirs,
Hollywood Red,
that the mechanic had not been given a parachute because the plane was supposed to pull out of its dive. The pilot took along a spare parachute and gave it to the mechanic at the last minute, Cole said, but the mechanic was too terrified to use it. “The pilot tried to put it on him when the plane was in a spin, a second plane photographing it all,” Cole wrote. “Desperate at three thousand feet, the pilot leaped to safety, unable to help the frozen-with-fright mechanic, who crashed with the plane in flames. (What a scene
that
would have made!)”

 

 

*
Miss Leslie was actually sixteen at the start of the filming and celebrated her seventeenth birthday on the set. Jack Warner, who professed a paternal interest in her career, had a new car wheeled across the set to be presented to her. “Enjoy it,” he said as he handed her the keys. After the photographers had recorded this tender scene, Warner departed, the keys were taken back, and the car was wheeled away. Miss Leslie never saw it again.

 

 

*
The standard Warners contract required the authors to transfer to the studio all rights “of every kind and character whatsoever, whether or not now known or contemplated, for all purposes whatsoever.” Despite this, Burnett, now in his seventies, began suing Warners in 1983 in an effort to regain control of his characters, but his pleas have repeatedly been rejected.

 

 

*
Raft eventually became so dissatisfied with the parts being offered him at Warners that he asked for an end to his contract. Jack Warner, who was sick of Raft's grumbling, agreed to pay him off. “What do you say we settle for ten thousand dollars?” Warned offered. Raft, according to Hollywood legend, promptly took out his checkbook and wrote Warner a check for $10,000. “I was never very good with money,” Raft later explained.

 

 

*
Actually, Selznick had wired Miss Brown earlier that Miss Bergman's name would have to be changed because it had a “somewhat unattractive and even Semitic sound.”

 

 

*
In her witty book
Running Time,
Nora Sayre captured the essential quality of
Mission to Moscow
by observing that “in no other film have I seen so many spinning globes. . . . Again and again, world leaders pensively twirl the spheres while asserting that peace (or war) is possible.”

 

 

*
When Zanuck walked out of Warners in 1933 and began organizing Twentieth Century Pictures, Nicholas Schenck invested $375,000 so that his brother Joe could be a partner, and Louis B. Mayer invested $375,000 so that Goetz could be one too.

 

 

*
A doomed decree. Feldman's operations eventually became the powerful Famous Artists Agency.

 

 

*
“MacGuffin” was Hitchcock's term for the seemingly irrelevant point on which a whole plot would eventually be found to turn. The writer Angus MacPhail ascribed the term to an encounter between two men traveling on a train to Scotland. One of them asked the other what his oddly wrapped package on the luggage rack might be. “Oh, that's a MacGuffin,” said the other. “What's a MacGuffin?” asked the first. “It's a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands,” said the second. “But there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands,” said the first. “Well, then,” said the second, “I guess that's no MacGuffin.”

 

 

*
A classically trained Hungarian, Rozsa won an Academy Award for his
Spellbound
music, which he also turned into a briefly popular
Spellbound Concerto.

 

 

*
In the midst of the war, the young Italian director Luchino Visconti solved all these problems by simply stealing Cain's novel, resetting it in a
trattoria
by the marshes along the Po, and retitling it
Ossessione
(1942). M-G-M subsequently barred his film from the U.S.

 

 

*
Eric Johnston, who replaced Will Hays as head of the Motion Picture Association in 1945, was a cheery enthusiast who had talked his way up from door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman to president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Johnston was an avid delegator of responsibility, so he delegated responsibility for Hollywood's self-censorship to Joseph I. Breen, an ardent Catholic who had played the same role under Hays. Johnston assigned to himself the role of Hollywood's official oracle. He made many speeches in favor of free enterprise. He later organized the Hollywood blacklist.

 

 

*
For that matter, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., a screenwriter during these years, declared that the victim of Faulkner's homesickness was Louis B. Mayer. Norman Zierold wrote in
The Moguls
that it was Harry Cohn.

 

 

*
Unfortunately for this tale,
If I Die Before I Wake
was published in 1938, and there was no paperback edition until 1962, so it would not have been easy for Welles to spot a copy in 1946. Actually, Columbia already owned the rights to this thriller, which it had bought as a vehicle for Franchot Tone.

 

 

*
No less characteristically, Mann included some coy pedantry that he considered a compliment to his teacher. He tried to transform the beautiful theme of the Adagio into a series of what he called “poetic little illustrative phrases,” which his translator rendered as “Heav-en's blue, lov-ers' pain . . . meadow-land.” In German, “meadow-land” is
Wiesengrund,
Adorno's original name, which Mann said he slipped into his novel “by way of showing my gratitude.”

 

 

*
Or so Reagan said in his memoirs. In his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October of 1947, Reagan testified that Hutcheson had actually said that he “would run this Sorrell and the other Commies out.”

 

 

*
By Rankin's standards, that was fairly mild. On an earlier occasion, he had denounced Chaplin as “perverted” and said he had “become notorious for his forcible seduction of white girls.”

 

 

*
The official estimates of Communist fund-raising in Hollywood were probably similarly exaggerated. HUAC claimed in 1950 that $926,568.36 had been contributed to eight groups that it said were Communist fronts. Murray Kempton, a reasonably fair-minded observer, has estimated that the Communist Party probably “would have been fortunate to net as much as half a million dollars out of its Hollywood fronts in fifteen years.”

 

 

*
Or so Dmytryk said in his 1978 memoir,
It's a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living.
On the other hand, when he reappeared before the House committee in 1951, after serving a prison term for contempt and then deciding to cooperate with the authorities, he was asked about this same point: “Was there an agreement by all to resort to that general procedure of refusing to testify?” Dmytryk answered: “We were very careful not to discuss this in the group. We felt there was some danger that this might constitute conspiracy.”

 

 

*
Congressman Rankin soon provided his own evaluation of the visiting celebrities. “I want to read you some of these names,” he declared on the House floor, waving a copy of the list. “One of the names is June Havoc. We found out from the Motion Picture Almanac that her real name is June Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Another one here is . . . Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Eddie Iskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldberg [actually, it was Goldenberg]. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the committee for doing its duty to protect this country and save the American people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.”

 

 

*
Mocking the famous line “Come with me to the Casbah,” Murray Kempton observed that this, “next to Odets' ‘We could make beautiful music together' (
The General Died at Dawn
), may be considered the most permanent cultural contribution by a left-wing scriptwriter during the entire period.”