City of Nets (11 page)

On the set one morning, Wilder was dismayed to hear that the scene had been cut. Charles Boyer, the star, a onetime classical actor who now lived mainly by his toupee, his corset, and his heroic image of himself, didn't like it. Wilder went to Lucey's restaurant, found Boyer having breakfast, and started to protest. “I could not speak such lines,” said Boyer. “One does not talk to cockroaches. You wish to make me look
stupide?
” Wilder tried to explain the scene, but Boyer was not interested. “I don't wish to have these discussions while I am at the table,” he said. “Go away, Mr. Wilder, you disturb me.” Angry and helpless, Billy Wilder returned to his office, pounded on his desk, and shouted, “I'll kill him! I'll kill him!” He vowed that he would become a director, the man who gave the orders.

Fritz Lang, by contrast, was already a famous director before he ever left Germany. Almost too much so. Joseph Goebbels, newly installed as Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had summoned Lang to his office to tell him that Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of his film
Metropolis.
He wanted Lang to take charge of all film production under the Third Reich. Lang reminded Goebbels that he was partly Jewish. Goebbels said that could be overlooked. Lang asked for twenty-four hours to consider the offer, then fled under an assumed name on the night train to Paris.

David Selznick, who was then still at M-G-M, brought Lang to Hollywood under a personal contract, but could find nothing for the creator of
M
and
Dr. Mabuse
to do. Lang studied English, refusing to speak or write a word of German. He read comic strips. He learned that his wife, Thea von Harbou, who had written several of his most successful films, wanted to stay in Germany, join the Nazi Party, and get a divorce. He spent two months in Arizona, studying the Navajo Indians and photographing their sand paintings.

When David Selznick finally quit his father-in-law's empire to form an independent production company, he left the unemployed Fritz Lang behind. M-G-M duly informed the celebrated immigrant that his contract would not be renewed. “You can't do this to me, I am the first director of Europe,” Lang protested to Eddie Mannix, M-G-M's general manager. Mannix apparently took pity on Lang. According to one account, he asked Lang what he would like to do, and Lang said he had found in the story department an interesting outline for a film about a lynching (eventually called
Fury
). According to another version, Mannix simply handed him Norman Krasna's outline of a lynching story and told him to film it. In yet another version, Krasna told his idea to Joseph Mankiewicz—this idea, based on a recent lynching of two kidnappers in California, was that an accidental photograph of the lynch mob could bring the ringleaders to justice—and Mankiewicz sold the idea to M-G-M, with himself as producer. Once the idea was sold, Krasna said he had no recollection of what his story had been. Mankiewicz had to pay Krasna $25,000 for the screen rights to the idea, which subsequently won Krasna an Academy Award, and then write the scenario himself. And then he, Mankiewicz, supposedly asked that Lang be assigned to direct it.

“Joe was much impressed by the Great German Director and his monocle, long cigarette holder, etc.,” said Mankiewicz's ex-wife, Elizabeth Young. Others were less impressed. Joseph Ruttenberg, the cameraman who actually shot the film, described Lang as a “mean, ornery German, arrogant and domineering.” Perhaps Lang really was all that, or perhaps, badly frightened, he was trying to play the role he thought was expected of him, or perhaps he was simply engrossed in his work. He seemed to be unaware that Hollywood film crews generally took a break for lunch. After several days of Lang's ignoring such details—“German production methods,” Mankiewicz remarked, “meant that you never called ‘lunch' and that you had your secretary bring you a pill and a glass of brandy on the set”—Spencer Tracy spoke up for the crew.

“What about some lunch?” he asked Lang.

“It is I who will decide when lunch is called, Mr. Tracy,” Lang said.

“Oh,” said Tracy. He smeared a hand through the makeup on his face, walked off the set, and called out, “Lunch!”

Everything kept getting worse. The lynch scenes had to be shot at night. Rain poured down. Lang insisted on reshooting and reshooting again. At one point, during a scene in which the lynch mob set fire to the jail, Lang insisted on throwing a smoke pot himself and managed to hit one of his actors in the head. According to Mankiewicz, the film crew planned to stage an accident in which a heavy spotlight would fall on Lang and kill him. He claimed that he dissuaded them.

The crisis ended like many Hollywood crises. Lang did his shooting, refused to let anything be changed, and was fired. Mankiewicz edited what Lang had created, and almost everyone at the studio was amazed when
Fury
proved to be a great success. After the premiere, Mankiewicz encountered Lang and Marlene Dietrich at the Brown Derby restaurant and held out his hand. Lang refused to shake it. “You have ruined my picture,” he said.

Lang did not return to M-G-M for more than twenty years (Louis B. Mayer hated the whole idea of a film about a lynching from the beginning), but the success of
Fury
demonstrated that a German director could shoot Hollywood action, and so it led to other things. By 1940, Darryl Zanuck had Lang working on
The Return of Frank James,
a sequel to the previous year's big hit about Jesse James, and from that he proceeded immediately to
Western Union.
“The Western,” said Lang, who had filmed the epic version of
Die Nibelungen
back in 1924, “is not only the history of this country, it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European.”

 

It is remarkable that none of these gifted refugees from Hitler made much of an effort to create films opposing Nazism. One reason was simply fear. Every refugee carried fear in his suitcase—far more than he ever remembered in later years—fear of unemployment and ostracism, of hunger, of disgrace, fear even of retribution from the evil regime he had fled. “Be very careful,” Schoenberg wrote to his son-in-law, Felix Greissle, on his arrival in New York. “Here they go in for much more politeness than we do. Above all, one never makes a scene; one never contradicts. . . . Everything must be said amiably, smiling, always with a smile. . . . Something very important: Don't say anything you don't have to say about your experiences of the last few weeks. Especially not to newspapermen or to people who might pass it on to them. You know the Nazis take revenge on relatives and friends still in their power. So be very reserved and don't get mixed up in politics.”

More important, though, was that Hollywood itself had no desire to oppose Nazism. A variety of liberal and leftist worthies had joined in 1936 to found the Anti-Nazi League (Dorothy Parker and Oscar Hammerstein were the chief organizers, and Donald Ogden Stewart the chairman), which engaged in speechmaking and fund-raising and attempted a boycott of German goods. Unfortunately, this lasted only until the Hitler-Stalin pact, when the group suddenly changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and supported a policy of neutrality. On the other hand, Harry Cohn, the
Duce
of Columbia Pictures, had made a 1933 documentary entitled
Mussolini Speaks,
had gone to Rome to receive a medal for his efforts, and had been so impressed by Mussolini that he not only kept an autographed photograph of the dictator on his office wall but had the office itself rebuilt in the Mussolini style—his own desk raised on a platform so that he could survey visitors as they approached, with the lights in their eyes.

These were all personal idiosyncrasies. Hollywood as a whole made movies only for profit, and it earned about one third of its income from abroad. The studios didn't want to offend anyone, neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists. And the studios' monopolistic domination of all production and distribution meant that there were virtually no independent filmmakers able to produce anything that might offend anyone, neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists nor anyone else. (Besides, who was really anti-Fascist anyway? The English and French who acquiesced so tamely in Hitler's Austrian Anschluss and stood by while the Nazis helped Franco conquer Spain?)

Hollywood's political timidity toward Nazism was also a consequence, however, of its feelings about Jewishness and anti-Semitism. Schoenberg was not the only one who would advise a relative to “be very reserved and don't get mixed up in politics.” Anti-Semitism in America in 1940 was widespread and strong, far more so than is now remembered or acknowledged. Jews were totally excluded from many executive jobs and from many of the best places to live. There were quotas limiting Jews in many universities, clubs, corporations. Ordinary Americans did not often act violently against Jews—certainly less so than against blacks, Mexicans, Chinese—but they generally regarded them as an alien people, avaricious, scheming, and dishonest. “What they [the Jews] seem to resent,” Raymond Chandler wrote to his English publisher in a fairly typical expression of the common view, “is the feeling that the Jew is a distinct racial type, that you can pick him out by his face, by the tone-quality of his voice, and far too often by his manners. In short, the Jews are to some extent still foreigners. . . . I've lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and I've watched one become Jewish, and it was pretty awful.” Such statements may seem surprising today, but the most surprising thing is that Chandler was writing in this vein as late as 1950, five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and that he was writing to deny any suggestion that he might be considered anti-Semitic. “After all I dealt with dozens and dozens of Jews in Hollywood,” he declared, “and was never accused by any of them of any such feeling.”

Most Jews of that time had been taught to shrug and accept. Sigmund Freud had been twelve when his father told him how an arrogant gentile had knocked his new fur cap into the muddy gutter and shouted: “Jew! Get off the pavement!” “And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund. “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap,” said Jakob Freud. In America, though—as in many areas of Germany—Jews clung to the belief in assimilation, the belief that if one behaved just like everyone else, then one would be considered to
be
just like everyone else, a good American. In Hollywood, stars assumed neutral names like Fairbanks or Howard or Shaw; actresses underwent plastic surgery; some made a point of going to Christian churches or donating money to Christian charities. This was not so much a denial of Jewishness—though it was also that—as an effort to make Jewishness appear insignificant, too unimportant to be criticized, or even noticed.

That defense provided protection part of the time, but every failure, when it inevitably occurred, illustrated the failure of the whole illusion, and therefore had to be denied, an aberration. The Bel Air Country Club did not accept Jews as members; they could play golf as guests, but they could not join the club. So a number of Jews started a country club of their own, Hillcrest, inspiring Groucho Marx's famous remark that any club that would let him in was not a club he wanted to join. These were small conflicts and small defeats, but always defeats. The wife of a famous screenwriter remembered that the Santa Monica beach club had a chart on its wall naming such members as Louis B. Mayer, but when a friend put her up for membership, she was puzzled by the application form. “This old man handed me a paper for me to fill out, and it said, ‘Religious affiliation,' and I said, ‘What does that mean?' I really didn't know what it meant. So he said, ‘It means, are you Jewish or not?' I said, ‘I'm Jewish.' He reached for the paper to take it back. I said, ‘Oh, no, I want the pleasure of tearing this up myself.' As I was tearing it up, I said to the old man, ‘How come you have a lot of Jewish people there on your chart as members?' He said, ‘Well, they got in before we made this rule.' ”

Scott Fitzgerald apparently thought that his employers at M-G-M would be impressed by his friendship with the famous Ernest Hemingway, and that Hemingway would be impressed at meeting the rulers of Hollywood's biggest studio, so he brought his friend for a visit to the offices of Louis B. Mayer. First, though, he introduced Hemingway to one of Mayer's chief producers, a small and cherubic figure named Bernie Hyman. “You're doing pretty well for a Heeb,” Hemingway said by way of a jocular greeting. There is no record of what the celebrated novelist said on being ushered into the vast white-on-white office of Louis B. Mayer, but the studio president soon called for his private police. “If this man isn't out of my office in five minutes, it's your job,” said Mayer. Hemingway retired to a bar across the street, the Retake Room, and proceeded to tell everyone how he had stood up to the president of M-G-M.

This was the same Mayer, however, who worried about what the Hitler government would think of one of his new movies,
Three Comrades,
which was based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel set in Weimar Germany. The script, written by Fitzgerald (and rewritten, to Fitzgerald's great dismay, by the producer, Joseph Mankiewicz), blurred the identity of the various factions fighting in the streets, but it was clear enough that the Nazis were Nazis. Mayer invited an official from the German consulate in Los Angeles to a private screening. The German official came, saw, and disapproved.

Mayer apparently was quite willing to make changes. Mankiewicz, however, refused. Joseph I. Breen, the head of Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code Administration (the Hays Office), offered what he considered a solution: Let the rioters be clearly identified as Communists. Mayer ordered that the changes be made. Mankiewicz threatened to resign, and to explain his reasons to the
New York Times.
Mayer shrugged and decided to leave the movie alone. “M-G-M kept on releasing its films in Nazi Germany until Hitler finally threw them out,” Mankiewicz recalled. “In fact, one producer was in charge of taking anyone's name off a picture's credits if it sounded Jewish.” As late as 1941, Mayer called in the director William Wyler to complain that the early rushes of
Mrs. Miniver
showed an anti-German bias. One scene, in particular, portrayed a downed German pilot as a Nazi fanatic.