Chapter 1
Movies and the Lure of Hollywood
In his essay “Why Hollywood Is a Term of Disparagement,” Evelyn Waugh quite neatly outlines the primary characteristics of cultural life in Hollywood and, by extension, Los Angeles: shallowness, garishness, and banality. Though he acknowledges it may seem a bit presumptuous to make such a judgment after only a six-week visit, he defends his comments because really “a fortnight is ample time in which to appreciate the character of that remote community; there are no secrets under those unflickering floodlights; no undertones to which a stranger must attune his ear. All is loud, obvious, and prosaic.”1 His assessment is not all that surprising—Waugh had a love/hate relationship with film for most of his life and for the most part only a hate/hate relationship with America itself. What is more interesting is his defense of the right to make the judgment in the first place: “[B]ecause Hollywood has made its business the business of half the world. Morally, intellectually, aesthetically, financially, Hollywood’s entries are written huge in the household books of every nation . . . largest of all in those of America, but, because of our common language, second only to them in our own.”2
With characteristic wit and trenchancy, Waugh gets to the heart of the anxiety felt by so many of the British novelists who came to Los Angeles throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. Drawn to Los Angeles for a variety of reasons that included everything from political disaffection, to spiritual longing, to the Mediterranean climate, the British writers who went to Hollywood—no matter how long their stay—did so primarily to work in the movie business. And movies, for good or ill, were clearly becoming the most powerful storytelling medium of the age. Hollywood’s dominance of the film industry meant Hollywood’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual dominance of cultural values around the world. As the sun set on Britain’s empire, a new kind of empire was dawning on the western shores of America, and like the centers of all colonizing powers, Hollywood was both hated and loved—but in either case, its power and allure were undeniable.
Early Hollywood drew talent to it from around the globe, and even a cursory look at the list of intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists who exiled themselves to the warmth of Southern California is astonishing. Among the more famous were Germans and Eastern Europeans, escaping the rising tide of fascism: Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Jascha Hiefitz, Erick Wolfgang Korngold, Bertold Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Horowitz, Billy Wilder, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Max Reinhardt, just to name a few. But by 1930, Los Angeles already had an established British “colony,” as well as a European one. As Carol Merrill-Mirsky notes, when talking of exiles and émigrés in Los Angeles, one must not be too strict in the definition of those terms:
A strict interpretation of “exiles” assumes emigration from Germany or Austria, following direct threat from the Nazis . . . [However,] Los Angeles in the nineteen-thirties and forties was filled with émigrés of all sorts. There were those who fled Germany or Austria only to be in danger again when the Nazis entered France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland. There were artists from Eastern Europe and Russia who were cut off from their careers and homes in Europe even when not in direct pursuit by the Nazis. There were those from “safe” countries like Great Britain whose ideological beliefs made them identify with the European émigrés and with whom they spent considerable time here in Los Angeles.3
Unlike their continental counterparts, who generally gave up prestigious positions and established careers to escape the political oppression of fascism during the thirties and forties, many of the British writers who went to Hollywood did so voluntarily, and most were not all that financially secure back home. Many were at the beginning of their writing careers and were not particularly well known, even in Britain, and not susceptible to what Merrill-Mirsky describes as the “dachshund effect” that plagued so many of continentals forced to emigrate: “Two dachshunds meet out on the palisades in Santa Monica, and one assures the other, ‘Here, it’s true, I’m a dachshund; but in the old country I was a Saint Bernard!’”4
By and large, the British went to Hollywood by choice, seeing it as a relief from the greyness of post–World War I England and the stuffiness of a decadent culture. However, politics did play its part, even for the English, who saw the thirties as perhaps only a hiatus in Europe’s headlong desire to destroy itself. The pacifist beliefs of Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood prompted their departure from England, and Dodie Smith followed her pacifist husband, Alec Beesly, to America. But America was no longer a refuge for pacifists after it entered World War II, and rather than return to England, Heard, Huxley, Isherwood, and eventually Dodie Smith risked their literary reputations by deciding to stay in Hollywood. But even before the eminent threat of war, many British writers at the start of their careers went to Los Angeles because of an interest in the artistic possibilities of film and its connection to the aims and experiments of modernism—not to mention the possibility of making astonishing amounts of money. For many, Hollywood seemed a natural destination to those interested in the making of the new and who had grown weary of the grim life in Britain between and after the world wars. Most went to Hollywood for personal reasons rather than political ones: Malcolm Lowry was desperate and needed to get out of New York, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood were drawn to the lifestyle and to spiritual questing, and Anthony Powell was looking for a change and wanted to make what he thought would be quick and relatively easy money, as were P. G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole. Evelyn Waugh, who never had any respect for the place, wanted to give his wife, Laura, a holiday and have someone else pick up the bill.5
Behind all these motivations was the alluring and potentially lucrative possibility of writing for the studios; however, all these British exiles in Hollywood were first and foremost novelists. Their work in Hollywood remains a footnote in their lives as writers, and none had any ambitions to have a permanent career in the movies. The British experience in Southern California is an extension of the disenchanted wandering that followed immediately after World War I. As soon as they were able to leave England, many writers fanned out across the globe, and “I hate it here” became the leitmotif of British writing between the wars.6 Unlike England, Hollywood was tantalizing and rich, blindly confident and seemingly untouched by the devastation of two world wars that made Europe and England seem tired, resigned, and without possibility. The movies and Hollywood became emblematic of America itself, and these writers’ observations of the “industry,” the landscape, and the way of life are ethnographic as they try to understand the vastness of America, its bumptious self-assuredness, the blithe belief of its inhabitants in the ability to remake themselves and start afresh, and the impact of all this on the rest of the world as these qualities are broadcast through the glamorous medium of the movies.
As they begin to experience Hollywood—and by extension America—these writers begin to see England differently, and this has implications for both the British novel during the middle and second half of the twentieth century and for constructions of English identity. If England after World War I seemed a “stuffy and comatose . . . dying civilization,”7 its solidity became a virtue measured against the ephemera of Hollywood, and America began to represent a cultural “other” against which Englishness could be defined. The Hollywood film pointed to what Graham Greene described as “the eternal adolescence of the American mind, to which literature means the poetry of Longfellow and morality means keeping Mother’s Day and looking after kid sister’s purity.”8 Though England was still seen as far from perfect, its struggles and deprivations now made it seem wiser and more interesting.
Though most arrived with a sense of superiority, not unlike that found in travel accounts to the farthest reaches of the empire, the feelings of cultural preeminence soon vanished, and instead of establishing themselves with a mission of colonial superiority like the generations before them, British writers soon found that their cultural power clashed with the commercially powerful mass production of American popular culture. Looking at novels, letters, and memoirs, a story begins to unfold about Englishness, as well as about America. When confronted with the youthful, confident, entitled consumerism of the United States, British decline seemed both more evident but also more morally chastened and culturally sound, and the British experience in Southern California challenged their traditional ideas of personal and national identity.
Jed Esty as has argued that the breakup of the British Empire caused the later work of English modernist writers to take an “anthropological turn” inward, away from the “cosmopolitan perception” of high modernism and toward the cultural origins at the center. With the end of empire, Englishness was less and less easily defined against its imperial other, and he claims there is an attempt by English writers to “recover an alternative set of cultural origins not contaminated by the colonizing experience.”9 His work counters the more conventional ideas of scholars and writers who equate national decline with artistic decline—as he says, “to metaphorize literary change as national decline”—or who would see the attenuation of high modernism as the death of the novel or the end of the road for British literature in the twentieth century.10 Rather than describe the collapse of British power and the diminishment of English literature in terms of direct causality, the literature of late modernist writers represented and mediated imperial contraction and national culture in complex ways. Even writers whose work is characterized by self-conscious experimentation and modernist cosmopolitan themes turn, in their later careers, toward a more Anglocentric engagement with time and space: Woolf writes Between the Acts, with a country pageant as the primary metaphor for England’s history and future; Eliot’s fractured, cosmopolitan aesthetic of The Waste Land yields to the meaningful national sites of “Little Gidding”; and Forster travels from the sensuous warmth of Italy and India in his major fiction to the comfort of parochial midcentury rituals and country rambles. Esty compellingly argues that “the works of the late-modernists begin to de-emphasize the redemptive agency of ‘art,’ which . . . operates unmoored from any given national sphere, and to promote instead the redemptive agency of ‘culture,’ which is restricted by national or ethnolinguistic borders.”11 The work of intermodernist writers is characterized by this concern with culture, and therefore writers of the thirties and forties began to examine the passing of British hegemony not solely in terms of cultural or artistic diminishment but also in terms of recovered cultural particularity that is, at least potentially, the basis for both social and artistic renewal.
Engagement with America—and particularly Hollywood—prompted English writers to examine English identity in the face of imperial decline in a very specific way. Hollywood did not problematize national identity in the way that the empire or modernism did—which had been read as diluting the English and essentially rural identity with the cosmopolitanism of the metropole. Hollywood’s threat came from the homogenizing commodification of identity through global capitalism and popular culture, and after working in the Hollywood machine, many writers looked back to England for cultural origins that might resist these modern forces. Their look back often resulted in fiction, travel narratives, and memoirs that grapple with defining Englishness against Hollywood visions of Englishness and with challenging the commodity values of the Hollywood film machine without giving in to the reactionary temptation of clinging to an outmoded past. But most, as writers of satires and social comedies, deal with both Hollywood and Englishness somewhat ambivalently, and their comedies often reveal a deep-seated anxiety about both American culture and attempts to reclaim a traditional English one. This is particularly evident in Waugh, whose essays and memoirs are full of anxiety about the increasing hegemony of American values and aesthetics on English culture, both literary and popular. His Hollywood novel, The Loved One, centers on death, and the connection between Hollywood and the death of Western culture is one of its main themes. More surprising, though, is the fact that even a genial satirist like P. G. Wodehouse reveals in his writing a connection between Hollywood values and the utter emptying out of tradition and culture, peopling his novels with scions of aristocratic families working as “nodders” (“yes-men” paid to agree with everything an ignorant studio mogul says), elocution teachers, and Hollywood extras in gorilla suits.
However, Hollywood welcomed these witty British writers. In the decades between the wars, Hollywood still manifested a bit of a cultural inferiority complex leftover from its early rough-and-tumble origins, and those with a British accent—both writers and actors—lent the place some cultural capital. Americans had an appetite for British culture, and Hollywood capitalized on cultural insecurity and class consciousness and the reassurances of country-house nostalgia; perhaps these even appealed to the British writers themselves, as they saw England’s old certainties passing away but still somewhat extant in films. By the thirties, “the studios were exporting British drama to Britain itself, which gave rise to Britain’s quota system and the ‘quota quickie,’” many of which were made my American studios run by British subjects. Producers were interested in writers who could lend credibility to their films, paying handsomely for names like Aldous Huxley, Hugh Walpole, Dodie Smith, and P. G. Wodehouse.12 The British made good money in Hollywood, and more than a few felt a little self-conscious about it, especially given that most of their work never made it onto film. Richard Fine notes that most novelists in Hollywood prospered in financial terms, but nearly every one of them was “disquieted or unnerved by the experience,” because “the profession of authorship was under attack in Hollywood.”13 J. B. Priestley, though he never worked under contract himself, remarks, “We all know the comic stories about Hollywood and its authors, who are invited out there, given gigantic sums of money, and then left to droop and wonder in silence for months.”14 Hugh Walpole was paid £200 a week when he was first hired by MGM in 1934, and upon his return to England after little less than a year in Hollywood, he figured that he had earned well over £10,000.15 Isherwood’s contract at MGM in 1939 was for $500 a week, not a lot for a studio contract at the time, but considering that he was down to his last $15 before getting the job, the salary must have seemed princely.16 In 1939, Dodie Smith was assured that she could get $2,500–$3,000 a week and had MGM, Universal, and Warner Bros vying for her.17 Smith writes in her memoir, Look Back with Gratitude, that—though she was homesick for England and her cottage in Essex, with its “yew tree swaying at her bedroom window, a faint mist over the fields”—she “might as well be homesick in Beverly Hills as anywhere else and Metro were willing to pay me $2500 a week.”18 The enormous salaries are a running joke in Wodehouse’s fiction. In “The Juice of an Orange,” Wilmot Mulliner, who through absurdly Wodehousian turns of plot is promoted from the lowly position of a nodder to that of a studio executive, makes $1,500 a week. In “Monkey Business,” the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Motion Picture Corporation pays its star gorilla $750 a week, with billing guaranteed in letters not smaller than those of Edmund Wigham and Luella Benstead, the stars.
The British were generally shocked not only by the sums of money on offer but also at the excessive lifestyles and the rude abundance of nearly everything in Southern California; however, the fruit, the cars, the houses, and the salaries were never enough to keep them in Hollywood, either physically or occupationally. Part of the reason for their dissatisfaction was the feeling that they were being bought off, seduced by money and glamour while their work as writers suffered, but there is also the fear that the written word was becoming increasingly irrelevant given the power of the moving image and the inexorable allure of movies stars. Even the staid J. B. Priestley admits being lulled by the lifestyle and easy money, and during his visit in 1938, he muses to himself, “For the first time, I wondered if it would not be fun to work and live there for a fairly long spell. For once, I was really tempted. The sunshine, the spangled nights, the easy money, the publicity-fed glamour of these names and faces, the amusing cynical talk—it would all be fun . . . no wonder that So-and-so and Such-and-such—good dramatists and actors who had had their success in London—preferred it to our distant fog and gloom and formality.”19
Not only did the lifestyle seem easy and fun, but the British were vouchsafed an automatic sophistication, which on the surface at least had a lot of cultural currency that bought them entrée to all the best parties and meetings at most of the major studios. As David King Dunaway notes, “Wealthy Californians ...