Macarthismo em Hollywood

Come In, Lassie!

By Lillian Ross, New Yoker, February 14, 1948

Hollywood is baffled by the question of what the Committee on un-American Activities wants from it. People here are wondering, with some dismay and anxiety, what kind of strange, brooding alienism the Committee is trying to eliminate from their midst and, in fact, whether it was ever here. They are waiting hopefully for Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, or Congress, or God, to tell them. They have been waiting in vain ever since last November, when eight writers, a producer, and a director—often collectively referred to these days as “the ten writers”—were blacklisted by the studios because they had been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to tell the Thomas Committee what political party, if any, they belong to. In the meantime, business, bad as it is, goes on. The place is more nervous than usual, but it is doing the same old simple things in the same old simple ways. The simplicities of life in Hollywood are not, of course, like those anywhere else. This is still a special area where you get remarkable results simply by pushing buttons; where taxi-drivers jump out of their cabs, open their doors, and politely bow you inside; where you can buy, in “the world’s largest drugstore,” a good-looking clock for $735; where all the lakes in the countryside are labelled either “For Sale” or “Not for Sale;” and where guests at parties are chosen from lists based on their weekly income brackets—low ($200–$500), middle ($500–$1,250), and upper ($1,250–$20,000). During the last few months, party guests have tended to be politically self-conscious, whatever their brackets, but this is not especially embarrassing in Hollywood, where it is possible to take an impregnable position on both sides of any controversy. At an upper-bracket party not long ago, a Selznick man introduced to me as Merve told me that he was appalled and outraged by the blacklisting of the ten writers. “It’s a damn shame,” Merve said, beaming at me. “Those human beings got a right to think or believe anything without letting Washington in on their ideas. They can’t put their ideas into Hollywood pictures. Nobody can.”

Just then, we were approached by Sam Wood, the producer, who was feeling grumpy, according to Merve, because his latest picture, “Ivy,” had cost $2,000,000 to make and was expected to gross only $1,500,000. “Glad to see you, Sam,” said Merve. “Listen, Sam, I want you to tell this young lady what you think of the way Congress investigated us here in Hollywood.”

“I say Congress ought to make everybody stand up publicly and be counted!” Mr. Wood shouted. “I say make every damn Communist stand up and be counted. They’re a danger and a discredit to the industry!” Merve continued to beam. “Make every radical, every Communist, every Socialist, and every Anarchist stand up and be counted,” he said expansively. “We ought to get every one of them out of the industry.”

The political self-consciousness at parties is, on the whole, rather cheerful. “I never cut anybody before this,” one actress remarked happily to me. “Now I don’t go anywhere without cutting at least half a dozen former friends.” At some parties, the bracketed guests break up into sub-groups, each eying the others with rather friendly suspicion and discussing who was or was not a guest at the white House when Roosevelt was President— one of the few criteria people in the film industry have set up for judging whether a person is or is not a Communist—and how to avoid becoming a Communist. Some of the stars were investigated several years ago, when the un-American Activities Committee was headed by Martin Dies, and the advice and point of view of these veterans are greatly sought after. One actor who is especially in demand at social gatherings is Fredric March, who suddenly discovered, when called to account by Mr. Dies, that he was a Communist because he had given an ambulance to Loyalist Spain. Dies rebuked him, and it then turned out that Mr. March had also given an ambulance to Finland when she was at war with Russia. “I was just a big ambulance-giver,” Mr. March said to his sub-group at a recent party, loudly enough for other sub-groups to hear. “That’s what I told Dies. ‘I just like to give ambulances,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Well, then, Mr. March, before you give any more ambulances away, you go out and consult your local Chamber of Commerce or the American Legion, and they’ll tell you whether it’s all right.’ ”

 

Some groups play it safe at parties by refusing to engage in any conversation at all. They just sit on the floor and listen to anyone who goes by with a late rumor. There are all sorts of rumors in Hollywood right now. One late rumor is that the newest black-market commodity in town is the labor of the ten writers, who are reported to be secretly turning out scripts for all the major studios. Another is that one producer is founding a film company and will have all ten of the blacklisted men on his staff. Rumors that the F.B.I. is going to take over casting operations at the studios are discounted by those who have lived in Hollywood for more than fifteen years. The casting director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a fidgety, cynical, sharply dressed, red-cheeked man named Billy Grady, Sr., who has worked in Hollywood for nearly twenty years, thinks that it would serve J. Edgar Hoover right if the casting of actors were handed over to the F.B.I. “Hoover thinks he’s got worries!” Grady shouted at me in a Hollywood restaurant. “What does a G-man do? A G-man sends guys to Alcatraz! Ha! I’d like to see a G-man find a script about Abraham Lincoln’s doctor in which we could work in a part for Lassie. What do you find inside of Alcatraz? Picture stars? Directors? Cameramen? No! The goddam place is full of doctor, lawyers, and politicians. This is the fourth biggest industry in the country, and only three men in this industry ever went to jail. There are fifty thousand people in this industry, and all they want is the right to take up hobbies. Spencer Tracy takes up painting. Clark Gable takes up Idaho. Dalton Trumbo, who got the sack, takes up deep thinking. Take away their hobbies and they’re unhappy. When they’re unhappy, I’m unhappy. For God’s sake, Tracy doesn’t paint when he’s acting. Gable doesn’t shoot ducks. Trumbo doesn’t think when he’s writing for pictures. I say let them keep their goddam hobbies. They’re all a bunch of capitalists anyway.”

 

The order of creation in Hollywood still works backward, and not only in the matter of filming the end or middle of a picture before the beginning. A man who recently had the job of working up advance interest in a yet-to-be-made picture based on “The Robe” managed to commit the biggest Bible publisher in the country to putting out an edition of the New Testament containing color photographs from the film. “I get this plug in the Bible,” he said to me. “Then I hear we need someone of the calibre of Tyrone Power to play the hero. We get Power, see? Then we put him in the Bible. Then we put him in the picture. Only trouble is we can’t make the picture yet. Ty is too busy.” Evidently, Communism is also responsible for this trouble. Power, returning from a trip abroad lately, announced that he had seen so much suffering in Europe that he had come back determined to spend his time fighting Communism. This, as interpreted by Louella Parsons, meant that he had given up Lana Turner for the cause.

 

Hollywood, for the most part, is waiting earnestly for the Thomas Committee to define Communism, to name at least one film it considers Communistic, and to set down rules about what should and should not be thought about by a good American. Until the Committee offers something helpful, however, Hollywood feels it has no choice but to pay close attention to the counsel of Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Jimmy Fidler, whose guidance to date has consisted of warnings that the public will not be satisfied with the blacklisting of only ten men, that the public wants Congress to complete its investigation of Communism in the industry, and that all writers, actors, producers, directors, and agents who have ever contributed so much as a nickel to the League of Women Shoppers had better announce their political views if they know what’s good for them. Those who fear the thunder on the Right say they are going to leave Hollywood. “I’m a dead duck!” one sad-eyed misanthrope exclaimed to me. “All I can do now is go someplace and raise chickens. Been thinking of doing it for nine years anyway.” Some say they will go back to Broadway or write novels, projects they too have been considering for nine years, more or less. A number of actors and producers, including Charlie Chaplin, are planning to go to England, France, or Italy, where they believe that they will be free to make the kind of pictures they like. Jack L. Warner, busiest of the Brothers, is genially inclined to bolster up the courage of those who are ready to throw in the towel. “Don’t worry!” he roars, slapping the backs of the lesser men around him. “Congress can’t last forever!”

 

Some people in Hollywood like to think of it as still a place for pioneers. “We’re the modern covered-wagon folks,” I was told by Ruth Hussey, the actress, who returned here not long ago from an appearance on Broadway. “We are, we’re the modern covered-wagon folks. Pioneers come out here broke, and within a few years they’re earning fifty thousand a year.” In a way, Miss Hussey is exceptional. Everybody else seems eager to complain about the difficulty of making or keeping money. Studios complain about their telephone bills. Drivers of studio cars complain that they are now being paid by the trip instead of by the week. Santa Anita race-track officials complain that betting has fallen off. Informal statisticians complain that only seventy-five million people a week went to the movies in 1947 and that maybe only sixty million will go in 1948. Producers complain about bankers’ reluctance to lend them money. Bankers complain that the revenue from American films shown overseas in 1947 was only $100,000,000, which is $38,000,000 less than the revenue from American films shown overseas in 1946, and that the revenue in 1948 may be as low as $50,000,000. Both Anglophiles and Anglophobes complain about the British import tax, imposed last August, which would confiscate seventy-five per cent of the English earnings of any American film imported since then. Studio executives complain about production costs and overhead, and studio workers complain about being laid off to cut down on production costs and overhead. The employment of actors and writers is said to be the lowest in twenty years. As of the first of the year, twenty-three feature pictures were in production, as against twice that number in January of last year. “Hollywood is girding its loins,” a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America said to me. “Hollywood is pulling in its belt. Hollywood is pinching its pennies, taking stock of its cupboards, buckling down, putting its shoulder to the wheel and its nose to the grindstone, and looking deep within itself. Hollywood is worrying about the box office.”

 

Almost the only motion-picture star who is taking conditions in his stride is Lassie, a reddish-haired male collie, who is probably too mixed up emotionally over being called by a girl’s name to worry about the box office. Lassie is working more steadily, not only in films but on the radio, than anyone else in Hollywood. He is a star at M-G-M, the leading studio in Hollywood, which is fondly referred to out here as the Rock of Gibraltar. Visitors there are politely and desperately requested not to discuss politics or any other controversial matters with anyone on the lot. Louis B. Mayer, production chief of M-G-M, recently took personal command of the making of all pictures, of the purchase of all scripts, and of the writing of all scripts and commissary menus. The luncheon menu starts off with the announcement that meat will not be served on Tuesdays. “President Truman has appealed to Americans to conserve food, an appeal all of us will gladly heed, of course,” it says. Patrons are politely and desperately encouraged to eat apple pancakes or broiled sweetbreads for lunch. Lassie eats apple pancakes for lunch. Visitors are politely and desperately introduced to Lassie, who ignores them. “We’d be in a hole if we didn’t have Lassie,” I heard an M-G-M man say. “We like Lassie. We’re sure of Lassie. Lassie can’t go out and embarrass the studio. Katharine Hepburn goes out and makes a speech for Henry Wallace. Bang! We’re in trouble. Lassie doesn’t make speeches. Not Lassie, thank God.” At the moment, Lassie is making a picture with Edmund Gwenn about a country doctor in Scotland. Originally, the script called for a country doctor in Scotland who hated dogs, but a part has been written in for Lassie, the plot has been changed, and the picture is to be called “Master of Lassie.” “It will help at the box office,” Lassie’s director says. Only three other pictures are in production at M-G-M, the biggest of them being a musical comedy called “Easter Parade,” starring Fred Astaire and having to do with Easter on Fifth Avenue at the beginning of the century. One of Lassie’s many champions at M-G-M told me that he had favored writing in a part for Lassie in “Easter Parade” but that he had dropped the idea. “I couldn’t find a good Lassie angle,” he explained.

 

The most noticeable effect on Hollywood of the Thomas Committee investigation is, perhaps, an atmosphere of uncertainty. A man I know named Luther Greene, who belongs to what he calls the C.I.S. (“the cheap international set,” he says. I just get passed around from party to party”), took me one evening to a small gathering at the Beverly Hills home of N. Peter Rathvon, a former New York attorney and investment banker who is now president of R.K.O. Greene and Rathvon, it seemed, thought that I might find an evening in the Rathvon household instructive. Rathvon is a mannerly, mild, yet stubborn little man, with the unwavering enthusiasm of a film-magazine fan for the movies. He has been converted, he says, to Hollywood’s suburban family life. “People enjoy having babies out here,” he says. “They enjoy inviting each other to dinner and sitting in the sunshine. That’s life.” Rathvon has two daughters and a son, rarely dines in a restaurant, and takes a sun bath at least once a week. Two of the ten men who were cited with contempt by Congress—Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk—worked at his studio, and it was he who had to inform them that they had brought disgrace upon R.K.O. and to dismiss them, a task he did not relish. After dinner, there was, as there is every evening the Rathvons are at home, a movie. That evening it was “Good News,” which deals with college life. After the showing, one of Rathvon’s daughters, who goes to the Westlake School for Girls, denounced it as positively silly. Rathvon posted himself behind a small bar and made drinks for everybody. Then he offered to show Greene and me around his house. “Charles Boyer used to live here,” he said. “It’s an odd sensation, very odd, to live in a house Charles Boyer used to live in.” He led us up a narrow spiral staircase, like those in lighthouses, to a bedroom with blond, primavera-panelled walls and another small bar. “This was Charles Boyer’s bedroom,” he said. “It’s my bedroom now.” Greene told Rathvon that I had heard a lot about the movable glass roof over the patio of the house, and asked him to show me how it worked. Our host took us downstairs, pushed a button in the patio, and then seemed to stop breathing. The glass roof overhead slid back, exposing the heavens. He pushed another button and watched anxiously as the roof moved back into place. “I used to be fond of playing with this,” he said. “These days, I never know whether it’s going to come back.”

 

Later, after a prolonged discussion of Charles Boyer’s acting, Charles Boyer’s reading habits, and Charles Boyer’s intelligence, someone said that Charles Boyer, together with several hundred other stars, had signed a statement protesting that the Thomas Committee investigation was unfair and prejudiced. “What about that, Peter?” Greene asked. “A lot of people in your business feel that a man’s politics has nothing to do with his work in pictures. Why, Scott and Dmytryk made ‘Crossfire’ for you on a shoestring—five hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. Took them twenty-two days. You’ll gross three million on that picture. For heaven’s sakes, why fire the men?”

 

“I sure hated to lose those boys,” Rathvon said miserably. “Brilliant craftsmen, both of them. It’s just that their usefulness to the studio is at an end. Would you like to go out on the terrace and look down on the lights of Hollywood?” Everyone said yes, and we all went out on the terrace to look down on the lights of Hollywood. On our way home, Greene said that his social evenings were becoming more and more of a strain. “Everyone spends the night looking at those goddam lights,” he said unhappily. “I think I’ll go to Lady Mendl’s tomorrow.”

The Screen Writers Guild a while back voted to intervene as amicus curiae in the civil suits that five of the ten blacklisted men have brought against their studios for breaking their contracts. It also decided to decline an invitation of the Association of Motion Picture Producers to coöperate in eliminating subversives from the studios. The Guild agreed, in addition, to oppose the blacklisting of writers because of their political views, as long as those views do not violate the law. On the other hand, the Guild turned down a proposal by some of its members to give financial and public-relations support to the ten men in their trials for contempt. The Motion Picture Association of America, which voted with the Producers’ Association to blacklist the ten men and not to employ or re-employ any one of them until he is acquitted of contempt of Congress or swears that he is not a Communist, not long ago addressed a communication to Adrian Scott, one of the ten. From it, Scott, who had then been out of work about two weeks, learned that the 1947 Humanitarian Award of the Golden Slipper Square Club, a philanthropic organization in Philadelphia, had been given to Dore Schary, R.K.O.’s executive vice-president in charge of production, for having made, among other pictures, “Crossfire,” which Scott produced and Dmytryk directed. According to an inscription on the award, it was made for Schary’s “contribution to good citizenship and understanding among men of all religions, races, creeds, and national origins.” The award was accepted for Schary by Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, who told the Philadelphians, “In Hollywood, it’s ability that counts. . . . Hollywood has held open the door of opportunity to every man and woman who could meet its technical and artistic standards, regardless of racial background or religious belief.” “We’re not supposed to be useful any more because they say the public has lost confidence in us,” one of the ten blacklisted men said to me. “But they’re not withdrawing any of the pictures we worked on. Ring Lardner’s name is thrown on the screen in front of the public seeing ‘Forever Amber.’ Lester Cole’s name is up there on ‘High Wall.’ If the public has confidence in these pictures, the public still has confidence in us.”

 

An exceedingly active Hollywood agent, a woman, claims that since the start of the Congressional investigation the studios have been calling for light domestic comedies and have been turning down scripts with serious themes. “You might say the popular phrase out here now is ‘Nothing on the downbeat,’ ” she said. “Up until a few months ago, it was ‘Nothing sordid.’ ” The difference between “Nothing sordid” and “Nothing on the downbeat,” she explained, is like the difference between light domestic comedy and lighter domestic comedy. After the investigation got under way, the industry called in Dr. George Gallup to take a public poll for the studios. Dr. Gallup has now submitted figures showing that seventy-one per cent of the nation’s moviegoers have heard of the Congressional investigation, and that of this number fifty-one per cent think it was a good idea, twenty-seven per cent think not, and twenty-two per cent have no opinion. Three per cent of the fifty-one per cent approving of the investigation feel that Hollywood is overrun with Communism. The studio executives are now preparing a campaign to convince this splinter three per cent, and the almost as bothersome ninety-seven per cent of the fifty-one per cent, that there is no Communism in the industry. There is some disagreement about whether the industry should tackle the unopinionated twenty-two per cent or leave it alone.

 

In the midst of the current preoccupation with public opinion, many stars are afraid that the public may have got a very wrong impression about them because of having seen them portray, say, a legendary hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor, or an honest, crusading district attorney, or a lonely, poetic, antisocial gangster. “We’ve got to resolve any conflicts between what we are and what the public has been led to believe we are,” one actor told me. “We can’t afford to have people think we’re a bunch of strong men or crusaders.” At the Warner Brothers studio, some time ago, I accepted a publicity representative’s invitation to watch the shooting of a scene in “Don Juan,” a Technicolor reworking of the “Don Juan” made in 1926 with John Barrymore. Filming of the production has since been called off, owing to the illness of the star, Errol Flynn, but he was still in good health the day I was there. “I want you to meet Errol,” said the publicity representative. “Just don’t discuss anything serious with him—politics, I mean.” Being a publicity man out here seems to have taken on some of the aspects of a lawyer’s and an intelligence agent’s duties and responsibilities. Studio visitors who are suspected of having ways of communicating with the public are always accompanied by a publicity man, or even two publicity men. The present-day importance of the publicity man is indicated by the fact that a member of the trade at M-G-M now occupies the office of the late Irving Thalberg, Thalberg still being to Hollywood what Peter the Great still is to Russia. I asked Flynn, who stood glittering in royal-blue tights and jerkin, golden boots, and a golden sword, how his version of “Don Juan” compared with Barrymore’s. “That’s like comparing two grades of cheese,” he said moodily. “The older is probably the better. But I’m trying to make my Don Juan as human as possible. Jack’s was a tough Don Juan. Mine is human. The script calls for one of the Spanish nobles to tell me that Spain is going to war. ‘You’re not afraid?’ he asks me. ‘Yes, I am afraid!’ I reply. I added that line to the script myself. I don’t want to be heroic. This picture is definitely non-subversive.”

 

A Paramount man informed me that he had the perfect solution for both the split-personality problem and the Thomas Committee problem. “Make your pictures more of a mish-mosh than ever!” he said, glowing all over with health, well-being, and the resolution of a man who has at last found inner calmness. “Confuse the enemy—that’s my technique. Confuse them all!” He has apparently confided his formula to Ray Milland, a Paramount actor whom I came across while he was working on “Sealed Verdict.” “My picture is politically significant,” Mr. Milland said to me. (Paramount publicity men, like the Warner men, warn visitors not to discuss politics with stars, but Mr. Milland brought up the subject himself.) “This is a picture about political justice,” Milland went on. “I play Major Robert Lawson, a brilliant young American prosecutor in the American-occupied zone of Germany, where I am closing my case against six Nazi war criminals, including General Otto Steigmann, whose war crimes against humanity were most revolting. I get Steigmann condemned to death by hanging, and then I am visited by a beautiful French model named Themis Delisle, and I fall in love with her. No, first Themis Delisle tells me that Steigmann is innocent, then I fall in love with her. My young aide, Private Clay Hockland, has been having an affair with a seventeen-year-old German girl, who is pregnant and shoots Private Hockland and then becomes seriously ill, although Private Hockland is also seriously ill after the Fräulein shoots him.” Milland was interrupted by a man who wanted to comb his hair. “Later,” Milland said to him, and firmly continued telling me about Private Hockland’s death, the assorted difficulties of the ladies in the cast, and the problem of getting penicillin in the black market for the Fräulein. He was interrupted periodically by the man who wanted to comb his hair, but he proceeded unswervingly to a castle, for the hanging of General Steigmann. “I tell the General his mother has snitched on him,” Milland said, “but he boasts that Hitlerite Germany will rise again. I knock him to the floor and take a vial of poison from a scar on his cheek, for Themis Delisle has revealed his last and most dramatic secret. Steigmann confesses his guilt, and Themis returns to France to defend herself, but she leaves with the promise that a certain brilliant young American lawyer—me—will be fighting on her team.” Milland beckoned to the man with the comb. “Now,” he concluded belligerently, “I’d like to see the Thomas Committee find anything in that.”

 

Walter Wanger, head of Walter Wanger Pictures, Inc., maintains that the public has an unjustifiably poor opinion of Hollywood, and one day, trailing the inevitable publicity man, he took me to his studio commissary to tell me about the progress the industry has made since he got into it, twenty-five years ago. “In those days, we couldn’t even have an unhappy ending,” he said. “Today, pictures are different. Pictures have made great and wonderful contributions to the country and to the world.” Wanger ordered coffee. Then he said that pictures had helped raise our standard of living, had encouraged understanding among men, and had, because of their merit and integrity, contributed to social progress. Wanger drank his coffee. I mentioned the last two Wanger pictures I had seen—“Arabian Nights” (love in a Baghdad harem) and “Canyon Passage” (Technicolor on the prairie). “I made those pictures because I wanted to be a success,” Wanger replied. “If you want to stay in this business, if you want to make pictures that contribute to the country’s welfare, you’ve got to make pictures that make money.”

 

Some producers express the interesting point of view that there are no Communistic pictures, that there are only good pictures and bad pictures, and that most bad pictures are bad because writers write bad stories. “Writers don’t apply themselves,” I was informed by Jerry Wald, a thirty-six-year-old Warner Brothers producer, customarily described as a dynamo, who boasts that he makes twelve times as many pictures as the average producer in Hollywood. “Anatole France never sat down and said, ‘Now, what did a guy write last year that I can copy this year?’ ” Wald assured me. “The trouble with pictures is they’re cold. Pictures got to have emotion. You get emotion by doing stories on the temper of the times.” The Congressional investigation, he said, would have no effect on his plans for this year’s pictures on the temper of the times. These will include one on good government (with Ronald Reagan), another about underpaid schoolteachers (with Joan Crawford), and an adaptation and modernization of Maxwell Anderson’s “Key Largo” (with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore). “Bogart plays an ejected liberal,” Wald said, “a disillusioned soldier who says nothing is worth fighting for, until he learns there’s a point where every guy must fight against evil.” Bogart, who two or three months before had announced that his trip to Washington to protest against the methods of the Thomas Committee hearings had been a mistake, was very eager, Wald said, to play the part of an ejected liberal.

 

At Wald’s suggestion, I had lunch one day with several members of the “Key Largo” cast, its director, John Huston, and a publicity representative at the Lakeside Golf Club, a favorite buffet-style eating place of stars on the nearby Warner lot. The actors were in a gay mood. They had just finished rehearsing a scene (one of the new economies at Warner is to have a week of rehearsals before starting to film a picture) in which Bogart is taunted by Robinson, a gangster representing evil, for his cowardice, but is comforted by the gangster’s moll, who tells Bogart, “Never mind. It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.” Bogart had not yet reached the point where a guy learns he must fight against evil. Huston was feeling particularly good, because he had just won a battle with the studio to keep in the film some lines from Franklin Roosevelt’s message to the Seventy-seventh Congress on January 6, 1942: “But we of the United Nations are not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last world war.”

 

“The big shots wanted Bogie to say this in his own words,” Huston explained, “but I insisted that Roosevelt’s words were better.” Bogart nodded. “Roosevelt was a good politician,” he said. “He could handle those babies in Washington, but they’re too smart for guys like me. Hell, I’m no politician. That’s what I meant when I said our Washington trip was a mistake.”

 “Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician,” said Huston, who went to Washington with him. “Bogie owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide for her upkeep.”

“The Great Chief died and everybody’s guts died with him,” Robinson said, looking stern.

“How would you like to see your picture on the front page of the Communist paper of Italy?” asked Bogart.

“Nyah,” Robinson said, sneering.

“The Daily Worker runs Bogie’s picture and right away he’s a dangerous Communist,” said Miss Bacall, who is, as everybody must know, Bogart’s wife. “What will happen if the American Legion and the Legion of Decency boycott all his pictures?”

“It’s just that my picture in the Daily Worker offends me, Baby,” said Bogart.

“Nyah,” said Robinson.

“Let’s eat,” said Huston.

After a while, Bogart began to complain about the iron curtain that separates the stars from the public. “There’s only four rips,” he said glumly, “four outlets through the iron curtain—Louella, Hedda, Jimmy, and Sheilah Graham. What can a guy do with only four rips?”

“Nyah,” said Robinson.

 

Hollywood has various ideas about what the iron curtain is and where it is. Twentieth Century-Fox is making a picture called “The Iron Curtain”—about Communist spies’ stealing atomic-bomb secrets in Canada—around which there is an iron curtain keeping visitors from everyone and everything connected with the picture. A Los Angeles newspaperman tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate it. He was investigated by a man from Twentieth Century-Fox. A lady named Margaret Ettinger, who is generally credited with being “everybody’s press agent” and who handles vaseline, diamonds, and Atwater Kent as well as many movie and radio stars, says there is an iron curtain around Louella Parsons. “Louella is my cousin, but I have a tougher time breaking into her column than into Hedda’s,” she says. Sheilah Graham, whose syndicated column appears locally in the Hollywood Citizen-News, in writing a few weeks ago about a certain star’s red sweater and a certain singer’s flashy red car, remarked that the color was still popular in Hollywood. The newspaper received a lot of letters calling Miss Graham a Communist. One of them suggested that an iron curtain be set up around her.

 

A few weeks ago, many people in Hollywood received through the mails a booklet called “Screen Guide for Americans,” published by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and containing a list of “Do”s and “Don’t”s. “This is the raw iron from which a new curtain around Hollywood will be fashioned,” one man assured me solemnly. “This is the first step—not to fire people, not to get publicity, not to clean Communism out of motion pictures but to rigidly control all the contents of all pictures for Right Wing political purposes.” The Motion Picture Association of America has not yet publicy adopted the “Screen Guide for Americans” in place of its own “A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures,” which advances such tenets as “The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment” and “The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.” Although it is by no means certain that the industry has got around to following these old rules, either to the letter or in the spirit, there is a suspicion that it may have already begun at least to paraphrase some of the “Screen Guide’s” pronouncements, which appear under such headings as “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System,” “Don’t Deify the Common Man,” “Don’t Glorify the Collective,” “Don’t Glorify Failure,” “Don’t Smear Success,” and “Don’t Smear Industrialists.” “All too often, industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers, or exploiters,” the “Guide” observes. “It is the moral (no, not just political but moral) duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.” Another admonition reads, “Don’t give to your characters—as a sign of villainy, as a damning characteristic—a desire to make money.” And another, “Don’t permit any disparagement or defamation of personal success. It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.” The booklet warns, “Don’t tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an American kind of man, for a change.” The “Guide” instructs people in the industry, “Don’t let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler and Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin, and Edison.” Still another of the “Don’t”s says, “Don’t ever use any lines about ‘the common man’ or ‘the little people.’ It is not the American idea to be either ‘common’ or ‘little.’ ” This despite the fact that Eric Johnston, testifying before the Thomas Committee, said, “Most of us in America are just little people, and loose charges can hurt little people.” And one powerful man here has said to me, “We’re not going to pay any attention to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. We like to talk about ‘the little people’ in this business.”

 

I was given a copy of “Screen Guide for Americans” by Mrs. Lela Rogers, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Mrs. Rogers, the mother of Ginger, is a pretty, blond-haired lady with a vibrant, birdlike manner. “A lot of people who work in pictures wouldn’t know Communism if they saw it,” she said to me. “You think that a Communist is a man with a bushy beard. He’s not. He’s an American, and he’s pretty, too.” The Congressional investigation of Hollywood, Mrs. Rogers thinks, will result in better pictures and the victory of the Republican Party in the next election. “Last month, I spoke about Communism at a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner given by the Republican Party,” she said. “My goodness, I amassed a lot of money for the campaign. Now I have more speaking engagements than I can possibly fulfill.” Mrs. Rogers is also writing screen plays. I wanted to know if she was following the “Do”s and “Don’t”s of the “Screen Guide for Americans.” “You just bet I am,” she said. “My friend Ayn Rand wrote it, and sticking to it is easy as pie. I’ve just finished a shooting script about a man who learns how to live after he is dead.”

 

Other people in the industry admit that they are following the “Guide” in scripts about the living. One man who is doing that assured me that he nevertheless doesn’t need it, that it offers him nothing he didn’t already know. “This is new only to the youngsters out here,” he said. “They haven’t had their profound intentions knocked out of them yet, or else they’re still earning under five hundred a week. As soon as you become adjusted in this business, you don’t need the ‘Screen Guide’ to tell you what to do.” A studio executive in charge of reading scripts believes that Hollywood has a new kind of self-censorship. “It’s automatic, like shifting gears,” he explained. “I now read scripts through the eyes of the D.A.R., whereas formerly I read them through the eyes of my boss. Why, I suddenly find myself beating my breast and proclaiming my patriotism and exclaiming that I love my wife and kids, of which I have four, with a fifth on the way. I’m all loused up. I’m scared to death, and nobody can tell me it isn’t because I’m afraid of being investigated.”

 

William Wyler, who directed the Academy Award picture “The Best Years of Our Lives,” told me he is convinced that he could not make that picture today and that Hollywood will produce no more films like “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Crossfire.” “In a few months, we won’t be able to have a heavy who is an American,” he said. The scarcity of roles for villains has become a serious problem, particularly at studios specializing in Western pictures, where writers are being harried for not thinking up any new ones. “Can I help it if we’re running out of villains?” a writer at one of these studios asked me. “For years I’ve been writing scripts about a Boy Scout-type cowboy in love with a girl. Their fortune and happiness are threatened by a banker holding a mortgage over their heads, or by a big landowner, or by a crooked sheriff. Now they tell me that bankers are out. Anyone holding a mortgage is out. Crooked public officials are out. All I’ve got left is a cattle rustler. What the hell am I going to do with a cattle rustler?”

 

Hollywood’s current hypersensitivity has created problems more subtle than the shortage of heavies. “Treasure of Sierra Madre,” a film about prospecting for gold, was to have begun and ended with the subtitle “Gold, Mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” The line is spoken by Walter Huston in the course of the picture. John Huston, who directed it, says that he couldn’t persuade the studio to let the line appear on the screen. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor,’ ” he told me. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “You can sneak it onto the sound track now and then, though.” At a preview, in Hartford, Connecticut, of “Arch of Triumph,” attended by its director, Lewis Milestone, and by Charles Einfield, president of Enterprise Productions, which brought it out, the manager of the theatre asked Einfield whether it was necessary to use the word “refugees” so often in the picture. “All the way back to New York,” says Milestone, “Charlie kept muttering, ‘Maybe we mention the word “refugees” too many times?’ ‘But the picture is about refugees,’ I told him. ‘What can we do now? Make a new picture?’ ”

 

A Msgr. Devlin, the Western representative of the Legion of Decency, has been on the set of “Joan of Arc,” which is being produced by Walter Wanger and stars Ingrid Bergman, since production started, and the services of a Father Doncoeur, of France, were enlisted shortly afterward. The director, Victor Fleming, who directed “Gone with the Wind,” said to me, “We’ve worked very closely with the Catholic Church, doing it the way they want it done. We want to be sure all these artists don’t get a bum steer.” I watched the shooting of a scene in which Miss Bergman, supposedly dying, lay on a prison bed of straw. The Bishop and the Earl of Warwick, her captors, leaned over her, and the Earl said, “She must not be allowed to die. Our King has paid too much for this sorceress to allow her to slip through our fingers.” “Cut!” Fleming shouted. “Say that as if you mean it,” he went on frantically. “She’s valuable property! She must not be allowed to die! We have to finish the picture with her! This picture is costing three million dollars! Put more feeling into it! She must not be allowed to die, goddammit!” Just before the cameras were started up again, Fleming remarked, “ ‘Gone with the Wind’ was more fun than this. It cost about a million and a half more than ‘Joan.’ ” Everything, apparently, used to be more fun.

 

Most producers stick firmly to the line that there is no Communism whatever in the industry and that there are no Communistic pictures. “We’re going to make any kind of pictures we like, and nobody is going to tell us what to do,” I was informed by Dore Schary, the R.K.O. vice-president and winner of the Golden Slipper Square Club’s Humanitarian Award. He is a soft-spoken, unpretentious, troubled-looking man in his early forties, who might be regarded as one of Miss Hussey’s “modern covered-wagon folks.” In sixteen years, Schary pioneered from a $100-a-week job as a junior writer to his present position, which brings him around $500,000 a year. When he testified before the Thomas Committee, he said that R.K. O. would hire anyone it chose, solely on the basis of his talent, who had not been proved to be subversive. The R.K.O. Board of Directors met soon afterward and voted not to hire any known Communists. Schary then voted, like the other producers, to blacklist the ten men because they had been cited for contempt. He is talked about a good deal in Hollywood. Many of his colleagues are frequently critical of the course he has taken, and yet they understand why he has done what he’s done. “I was faced with the alternative of supporting the stand taken by my company or of quitting my job,” Schary told me. “I don’t believe you should quit under fire. Anyway, I like making pictures. I want to stay in the industry. I like it.” Schary is one of the few Hollywood executives who will talk to visitors without having a publicity man sit in on the conversation. “The great issue would have been joined if the ten men had only stood up and said whether or not they were Communists,” he continued. “That’s all they had to do. As it is, ten men have been hurt and nobody can be happy. We haven’t done any work in weeks. Now is the time for all of us to go back to the business of making pictures, good pictures, in favor of anything we please.” I asked Schary what he was planning to make this year. “I will assemble a list,” he said. He assembled the following out of his memory, and I wrote them down: “Honored Glory” (in favor of honoring nine unknown soldiers), “Weep No More” (in favor of law and order), “Evening in Modesto” (also in favor of law and order), “The Boy with Green Hair” (in favor of peace), “Education of a Heart” (in favor of professional football), “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (in favor of Cary Grant), “The Captain Was a Lady” (in favor of Yankee clipper ships), “Baltimore Escapade” (in favor of a Protestant minister and his family having fun). “Committee or no Committee,” Schary said, “we’re going to make all these pictures exactly the way we made pictures before.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 21, 1948, issue, with the headline “Come In, Lassie!.”

Lillian Ross (1918-2017) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and worked with Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor.