City of Nets

Otto Friedrich

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062333803
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A dazzling social and cultural history of Hollywood's golden age in the decade from World War II to the Korean War

In 1939, fifty million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering. The 1940s became the decade of Hollywood's decline: anticommunist hysteria excommunicated some of its best talent, while a 1948 antitrust consent decree ended many of the business practices that had made the studio system so profitable.

In this masterful work of cultural history, the legendary Otto Friedrich tells the story of Hollywood's heyday and decline in a vivid narrative featuring an all-star cast of the actors, writers, musicians, composers, producers, directors, racketeers, labor leaders, journalists, and politicians who played major parts in the movie capital during the turbulent decade from World War II to the Korean War.

Friedrich draws on sources from celebrity biographies to trade-union history, mingling lively gossip with analysis of Hollywood's seedier business dealings and telling the stories of legendary movies such as Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and All About Eve.

A classic portrait of a special place in a special time, City of Nets gives us a singular behind-the-scenes glimpse into a bygone era that still captivates our imaginations.

1
Welcome

(1939)

TO THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS, says the sign. The arrow points off toward the right, where a corridor of darkness leads to the glowing irons of the Inquisition, but what the arrow actually announces is a nearby tableau entitled “The Great Presidents.”* George Washington stands proudly aloof in his Continental blue uniform, Lincoln sits reflective, and the others display various attitudes of official interest. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Hoover, Coolidge—the creators of the Hollywood Waxworks Museum have odd ideas about which Presidents are great. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not here, but a special spotlight on the right bathes Richard Nixon in a sepulchral glow. He looks embalmed.

In the foreground, at the center of this presidential assembly, propped up at a speaker’s rostrum ornamented with the White House seal, stands the exemplar of Hollywood and of all southern California, the winsome cowboy with the rueful grin. Ronald Reagan’s waxen face (waxworks nowadays are actually made of noninflammable vinyl plastisol) wears an expression of amiable bewilderment. He has been outfitted in a dark blue suit, a white shirt with a collar that looks somewhat too large for him, and a rather muddy striped tie. Life may seem difficult, but the plastic Ronald Reagan stands monumental behind the presidential seal, staring bravely out into the darkness.

“Welcome to Madame Tussaud’s Hollywood Wax Museum,” says the recorded voice across the aisle, emerging from a murky tableau of Queen Victoria and Madame Tussaud herself. Since this is Hollywood, though, the nearby corridor is lined with niches devoted to the movie industry’s official gods and goddesses. Here is Tyrone Power, as the young matador in Blood and Sand, about to stab an onrushing bull. Here is Clark Gable in evening dress, looking knowingly at Carole Lombard, and Charlie Chaplin in the ruins of a tuxedo, looking imploringly at Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino in the robes of The Sheik, looking soulfully into thin air. The image of the desert seems to inspire in southern California a sense partly of recognition and partly of yearning. Here is a luscious mannequin of Hedy Lamarr as Tondelayo in White Cargo, lolling in a tent on an implausible white fur rug. She wears a pink orchid over one ear and several strings of brown wooden beads around her neck, and then nothing else down to her flowery pink skirt.

No city west of Boston has a more intensely commercial sense of its own past, and yet that sense keeps becoming blurred and distorted in Hollywood. Not only do the decades vaguely intermingle, so that Harold Lloyd dissolves into the young Woody Allen, but the various forms of entertainment also merge. Any pilgrim arriving in the movie capital is shown the newest shrines of television and rock music, as though they were all the same. The Hollywood Waxworks Museum understands. Just beyond the rather feral figure of the young Shirley Temple, in white lace, the visitor confronts “An Evening with Elvis Presley.” In the half-darkness, the strains of “Hello, Dolly” fade into those of “Love Me Tender,” and the king of country singers can be observed entertaining Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor. Behind this incongruous gathering stands a mysterious row of six costumed footmen, all in eighteenth-century wigs, all holding up candelabra to illuminate Presley’s soirée.

The waxworks commentary on Hollywood seems at times to go beyond the frontiers of incongruity into the realms of chaos. It is possible to smile at the juxtaposition of Charlton Heston bearing the sacred tablets down from Sinai and a panoramic re-creation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, but why is Anthony Quinn standing next to Charles de Gaulle? And why, in this central group, which is dominated by the Beatles but also includes Sophia Loren, Amelia Earhart, and Thomas Alva Edison—why should the figure between Paul McCartney and Jeanette MacDonald be that of Joseph Stalin? One reason may be that there used to be a tableau of the Allied leaders at Yalta, created perhaps for some other waxworks museum somewhere else, and then, according to the portly Mexican who takes tickets at the door, there was a fire here a few years ago, and things have been moved around a bit. Things are always being moved around a bit in Hollywood. “False fronts!” Nicholas Schenck once cried during a guided tour of the outdoor sets at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which Schenck, as president of Loew’s, Inc., theoretically ruled, owned, commanded. “False fronts! Nothing behind them. They are like Hollywood people.”

Outside the waxworks museum, which sprouts between Jack’s Pipe Shop and the Snow White Coffee Shop, the California sun beats down on the peculiar black sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. Relentless sun, the image of fire and destruction. The sidewalks are not entirely black, for the local authorities have embedded in every other panel a gold-edged metal star filled with crushed pink stone. Within each star, they have inscribed one golden name. There are no explanations or definitions of these multitudinous names (more than 1,775 in all). Since they are all here, they must all be famous. As one strolls westward along Hollywood Boulevard, one treads on a remarkably diverse cast of characters: Charles Chaplin, Ken Maynard, Ilka Chase, Richard Barthelmess, Joseph Schenck, Lee Strasberg, Ingrid Bergman, Red Skelton, Robert Merrill, Eddie Cantor, Marie Wilson, Bing Crosby, Milton Berle, Vivien Leigh, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Kirsten Flagstad, Bessie Love, Jascha Heifetz, Judy Canova. . . .

The black sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard lead eventually to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a large pagoda with a scarlet roof supported by prancing dragons. Next to the entrance stand two fierce beasts, about seven feet high, which Grauman’s alleges to be “heaven dogs” of the Ming dynasty. “Half lion and half dog these sacred sentinels stood guard for many centuries at a Ming tomb in China,” the sign says. “These massive monsters surnamed the dogs of Foo or Buddha combined leonine ferocity with dog-like devotion and served to terrify the transgressors and inspire the righteous.” Officially, this strange palace is now Mann’s Chinese Theaters, for an entrepreneur named Teddy Mann bought the establishment in the late 1970’s and opened two adjoining theaters in the wings that flank the central courtyard; but to the flocks of tourists who come to marvel, Grauman’s remains Grauman’s. The tourists gather here to gape at the famous footprints and handprints embedded in the concrete panels of Grauman’s courtyard.

To Sid Grauman Thanks Rita Hayworth

To Sid A great guy Henry Fonda July 2 ’42

To Sid My greatest thrill Jeanne Crain October 7 1949

To Sid His fan Charles Boyer July 24 ’42

To Sid Sincere thanks Gene Tierney June 24 ’46

Thank you Sid Jimmy Stewart Fri. 13 Feb. 1948

For Mr. Grauman All happiness Judy Garland 10-10-39

A showman is what the yellowing newspaper clippings call people like Sid Grauman. Born in Indianapolis, he got his start by selling San Francisco newspapers for one dollar each in remote Alaskan mining camps during the Klondike gold rush of 1896, and yet he attributed his theatrical successes to “the big boss upstairs.” “God does my shows,” he said.

Grauman brought luxury to the showing of movies. He spent a million dollars to build the Metropolitan Theater in Los Angeles, but that was modest compared to his Egyptian Theater, which opened in 1922 with live tableaux dramatizing the coming attractions. It was here that Grauman invented the “Hollywood premiere,” with spotlights sweeping the skies, and eager crowds assembled behind tasseled ropes to watch the stars arriving in their limousines.

Grauman loved practical jokes, and many of them seemed to involve wax dummies. He once filled his dimly lighted room at the Ambassador Hotel with seventy-five mannequins, then persuaded Marcus Loew, the original Loew of Loew’s, Inc., that these were fellow theater-owners whom he had assembled to hear an authoritative account of M-G-M’s forthcoming features. Loew apparently improvised an impassioned spiel for the seventy-five attentive dummies. On another occasion, Grauman telephoned Charlie Chaplin and said he had found a murdered woman in his hotel room. He begged Chaplin to help him. Chaplin hurried to the Ambassador and found Grauman crouched over a bloodstained figure in his bed. Grauman pleaded for help in avoiding a scandal. Chaplin nervously insisted that the police must be called. Grauman finally brought Chaplin closer, to see the ketchup smeared on the dummy in the bed. Grauman’s obituary in Variety a generation later did not record Chaplin’s reaction, but it did say that “among his intimate friends, he was known as a great gagger.” Grauman died of heart failure in the spring of 1950, died a bachelor, aged seventy-one, and the only people at his deathbed were his doctor, his secretary for the past twenty-one years, and the publicity chief of 20th Century—Fox.

Long before Grauman or Mary Pickford or the Gish sisters came to live here, there were mostly barley fields and orange groves. An Ohioan named Horace Henderson Wilcox, who had been lamed by typhoid fever in childhood but made a fortune in Kansas real estate, began hopefully mapping out avenues and boulevards through these barley fields in 1887. His homesick wife, Daeida, named the prospective settlement after the country place of some friends back in the east: Hollywood. The Wilcoxes were pious. They forbade any saloons in Hollywood; they offered free land to any church built in their barley fields.

Oil was discovered in 1892 near Glendale Boulevard, just a few miles to the south, but Hollywood remained an obscure rural tract until it was bought in 1903 by a syndicate headed by General Moses Hazeltine Sherman, who had made millions in railroads, and Harry Chandler, the future publisher of the Los Angeles Times. This syndicate managed to get the vacant fields incorporated as an independent municipality. It built a rickety trolley line to the south and called it the Los Angeles—Pacific Railroad, erected the thirty-three-room, Spanish-style Hollywood Hotel on unpaved Hollywood Boulevard, and started a campaign to sell building lots by posting hundreds of signs that said SOLD. Was this the first Hollywood lie? The original deception? The Hollywood town authorities tried to maintain the Wilcoxes’ moral tone. Various edicts by the board of trustees in the early 1900’s forbade all sales of liquor, all bowling or billiards on Sundays, and the driving of herds of more than two thousand sheep, goats, or hogs through the streets.

Back east, winter storms over the Great Lakes inspired the Selig Studio of Chicago to abandon its filming of The Count of Monte Cristo, and to send the star, Francis Boggs, off to California in search of a sunnier location. Boggs found it at Laguna Beach, well to the south of Los Angeles, and finished the filming there in 1907. Indeed, he found the climate so pleasant that he returned to Los Angeles the following winter and converted a Chinese laundry at Eighth and Olive streets into California’s first movie studio. The first complete film shot there was called In the Sultan’s Power.

Other fledgling filmmakers soon followed, not to stodgy Hollywood but to Edendale, a few miles to the east, or to the beach at Santa Monica. It was all rather pristine and primeval. Cops and robbers chased each other through the streets, and directors improvised their stories as they went along (one of them, Charles K. French, shot 185 films for the Bison Company in a little more than eight months). The official histories explain this first flowering as a happy combination of sunshine, open spaces, and diverse settings: the Sahara, the Alps, and the South Seas could all be simulated within Los Angeles’ city limits. And the sun kept shining, all year round.

Many of these pioneers had another good reason for moving west—to escape the law. The moving-picture process had not invented itself, after all. It originated, more or less, in a whimsical wager by Leland Stanford, the railroad tycoon, who in 1872 bet $25,000 that a galloping horse lifted all four feet off the ground at once. Stanford then hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to prove him right. Muybridge did so by installing a series of twelve cameras next to a racetrack and filming a classic sequence of a horse in full gallop. In the course of winning Stanford’s bet, Muybridge almost invented the movies.

That, however, was left to the restless mind of Thomas Alva Edison, who devised a method of filming movement not with Muybridge’s row of cameras but with one camera that could take a series of pictures on fifty feet of continuously running film. Edison, for reasons of his own, photographed a laboratory assistant named Fred Ott in the process of sneezing, and then showed this sequence of moving pictures inside a cabinet called a Kinetoscope. It was one of the big hits of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Other inventors were working along similar lines. In France, the Lumière brothers demonstrated in 1895 that a series of pictures of a railroad train puffing its way out of a station could be projected onto a large screen at a rate of sixteen frames per second. Interesting, if enough people wanted to see a train puffing its way out of a station. Or, for that matter, Fred Ott sneezing.

In 1903, an Edison Company cameraman named Edwin S. Porter created a completely different kind of motion picture. Instead of simply filming an event, he created events to be filmed. The Life of an American Fireman recorded the rescue of a woman and her child from a burning building. The Great Train Robbery recorded exactly what its title promised. These dramas could be shown on sheets hung up in empty stores, and thousands of people were willing to pay a nickel to see them. They were especially popular among immigrants who knew little English. Edison tried to preserve his control over this lucrative process by creating the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1909, and then licensing others to exploit his discoveries.

Little did he know the ingenuity of the founders of Hollywood. The “Trust,” as Edison’s company came to be known, kept filing lawsuits in New York against all would-be pirates, but who could track down and enjoin all the violators of New York court orders in obscure suburbs of Los Angeles? Movies could be shot in a few days, and production companies could be dissolved and recreated almost as quickly. “The whole industry . . . is built on phony accounting,” David O. Selznick once remarked. And if every other evasion failed, the Mexican border was only about a hundred miles away.

Years before Bertolt Brecht ever came to Hollywood, he had something like this in mind when he wrote the opening of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Somewhere in an America of Brecht’s own imagining, a battered truck carrying three fugitives from justice broke down and sputtered to a halt “in a desolate region.” “We can’t go on,” said Fatty, the bookkeeper. “But we’ve got to keep going,” said Trinity Moses. “But ahead of us is only the desert,” said Fatty. “You know, gold is being discovered up the coast,” said Moses. “But that coastline is a long one,” said Fatty. “Very well, if we can’t go farther up, we’ll stay down here . . .” said the Widow Begbick. “Let us found a city here and call it ‘Mahagonny,’ which means ‘city of nets.’ ”

It should be like a net,

Stretched out for edible birds.

Everywhere there is toil and trouble

But here we’ll have fun. . . .

Gin and whiskey,

Girls and boys. . . .

And the big typhoons don’t come as far as here.

If Brecht’s vision of an unknown future was prophetic, so was that of the Hollywood Board of Trustees. In 1910, it officially banned all movie theaters, of which it then had none. That same year, however, the town of Hollywood was jurisdictionally swallowed up by Los Angeles, which saw no particular virtue in restricting the newcomers’ enterprises.

Thornton Wilder, ordinarily a friendly soul with a rather jaunty manner, was going out to dinner with some old friends in Hollywood one evening when he suddenly began to describe a vision of utter devastation. “You know, one day someone is going to approach this area and it will be entirely desert,” the playwright told his friends, Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur. “There will be nothing left standing, stone upon stone. . . . God never meant man to live here. Man has come and invaded a desert, and he has tortured this desert into giving up sustenance and growth to him, and he has defeated and perverted the purpose of God. And this is going to be destroyed.”

The prospect of cataclysm is one of Los Angeles’ oldest traditions. The threat lies in the earth itself, in the sweet-smelling tar that still oozes up out of the La Brea p...