The Whole Truth and Nothing But by James Brough and Hedda Hopper - HTML preview

Nineteen

We used to go riding in the moonlight, raising the dust down roads shadowed by palm trees, walking the horses through citrus groves and fields of barley, up into the trackless red hills, where we’d turn to catch a glimpse of the Pacific gleaming like pewter under the night sky. Now cowboys have to learn how to climb into a saddle before they can gallop away into the sunset for another TV horse opera. There are none of the genuine, Bill Hart variety left.

When I first saw Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn was still Goldfish, and a grain store stood on Sunset Boulevard at the corner of Cahuenga. Cecil B. De Mille, looking for some place to produce The Squaw Man, had rented a livery stable at Selma and Vine, founding the motion-picture capital, the wonderland that clothed dreams in flesh for millions of the world’s inhabitants. Bill Farnum reigned in splendor in a suite at the Hollywood Hotel; I made my movie debut with him, played his leading lady for $100 a week, which was a fortune to me then.

Life was simple, exciting, and, most of all, fun. We worked hard and loved it. People were neighborly, kind, and didn’t know the meaning of class distinction—that came later when the big money rolled in and changed everything. We used to borrow sugar, bake cakes for the folks next door, stop by each other’s houses to gossip about the wonders of this bouncing new baby, the movie business, and the climate, and the everlasting sunshine. Where is it now? Hidden by fog and smog.

Now the dirty-post-card boys have moved in, churning out pictures reeking of violence, prostitution, perversion, and decay. Anybody can produce a movie—it takes no great talent. Everybody can try to make a quick killing in hard times and the devil with the consequences. Of course, we always knew there were such things as sewers, but never before have audiences had their noses pushed over so many gratings.

A different odor used to hang over our town—the smell of fresh money. It poured from the four corners of the earth like the tide coming in. That’s the scent that drew the founders of our industry, a bunch of shrewd dishwashers, nickelodeon proprietors, glove salesmen, dress manufacturers, junk dealers. They knew a good thing when they saw it, and who should worry about tomorrow?

They were freebooters at heart, most of them, set on carving out empires and ruling them like despots. They started by despoiling the land when they lopped down the trees to make room for the shabby warehouses and barns we call studios. My office desk is placed nowadays so that I can turn my back on Hollywood. If I faced the window, the sun would be in my eyes, and I like the sun on my back.

They despoiled the actors and actresses, too, whose names became better known than those of presidents and kings. Money ruined many of the stars, washed over them in a deluge, then left them high and dry when their few working years were over. Lionel Barrymore, for instance, earned a gigantic reputation as director and star, with enough talent left over to make him more than competent in other arts—a water color and two etchings hang in my den, and he was a fine composer, too. But he left very little property behind, and that was seized by federal agents a few hours after his funeral, to be auctioned to pay his income tax.

He lies beside his wife, Irene Fenwick; Jack Barrymore was buried on her other side by Lionel’s order. Years before, Jack had been in love with her, but his big brother broke up the romance and later tried to commit suicide. Then Lionel fell in love with her, and to marry her, he left his wife and two sons, both of whom died in their early teens. Few people knew he had children.

Studio heads dangled the carrots at contract-signing time and cracked the whip once the ink on the paper was dry. Not so long ago David Selznick was reminiscing about those tightly disciplined days with me: “I’ve called Jack Barrymore into my office for not knowing his lines; he was contrite and apologetic. I had to speak to Leslie Howard, who was embarrassing Vivien Leigh by not being prepared for the scene. But you never had to speak a second time. They recognized their fault and corrected it.”

Garbo was never late. She appeared on the set at 9 A.M. sharp, made up and ready to work and no nonsense. But she was patience itself if an older member of the company had trouble remembering lines. She was considered demanding when she wanted to know who would produce, who co-star, who direct. Once she turned down a story Metro wanted her to make, David remembered, “and they cast her opposite Tim McCoy in a Western as punishment. When Lionel Barrymore heard it he said: ‘That’s like cutting Tolstoy’s beard so he wouldn’t write any revolutionary novels.’”

Now we have Elizabeth Taylor picking up more than $2,000,000 for Cleopatra, jeopardizing the whole future of Twentieth Century-Fox by her behavior, and getting herself proposed for a seat on the board of directors by a disgruntled stockholder. We have Mr. Brando collecting more than a million from Mutiny on the Bounty, plus overtime for every day’s delay his antics caused. Selznick calls such ventures “movies of desperation.”

“The men who make movies have been digging their own graves,” he says. “They’ll put up with anything for a transient advantage. They have no long-term concern because they’re busy getting dollars for the next statement, watching the effect that statement will have on the company’s stock.” I second that.

What went wrong with Hollywood? Well, something like this....

The founding fathers didn’t know what competition was. They had it all their own, undisputed way so long. They hit on something, motion pictures, that the world took to like babies take to candy. The handful of families that ran the big studios made a cozy little clique by intermarriage, bringing in their relatives, sticking together like mustard plasters.

The same men owned the studios, the distributing companies, and many of the biggest movie theaters. Right down the line, they controlled what audiences saw and how much they paid to see it. An independent theater owner in any town at home or abroad either was deprived of the pictures he wanted or else had to accept block booking. To lay hold of, say, a sure-fire Humphrey Bogart picture from Warners, he had to take three others that he’d have to take a chance on.

But a picture had to be a real turkey not to pay its way, at least. If people wanted an evening out, in most cases, they had no place to go except the movies. There’s never been a monopoly that brought such sweet rewards to the men who ran it. Radio proved to be no kind of competition. If I paid them enough—and some big stars demanded $5000 to stand up and read a script—I could get virtually anybody I wanted, including Dore Schary, on my weekly show when I crashed into broadcasting. A loud-speaker was no substitute for the screen, where a kind of earthy paradise was on view. Illusion had to be put into pictures, not just into words.

The film factories were organized like an automobile assembly line. They had to be. The demand for movies was insatiable. Our town turned out four, five hundred pictures a year, with close to a thousand actors and actresses under contract. Every year the bosses prepared lavish promotion programs to light a gleam in the exhibitors’ eyes, listing the four colossal musicals, the half dozen scintillating comedies, the seven searing dramas, and so forth which the particular studio would deliver in the months ahead. Many times these promises were pure blue sky. They’d invent a title, pencil in the stars, then a team of contract writers would knock out a story. Today no production head can promise what next year will bring because the system’s out of his control and he just doesn’t know about tomorrow.

On top of the heap sat the Mayers, Schencks, Warners, Goldwyn, most of them ruling like pharaohs, unapproachable by underlings except by invitation. At the next level down, among the producers and directors, came the real pros who kept the wheels aturning. A man like Byrnie Foy, the “Keeper of the B’s” at Warners, could look at a script for a Western, rip out a page after a single glance, and order: “Don’t have them cross a bridge, or you’ll have to build it. Have them cross a gulch and save $20,000.”

That’s a far cry from Something’s Got to Give, where Fox watched $2,000,000 disappear down the gutter and all they got for it was some footage of Marilyn Monroe slipping into a swimming pool naked. Most of the old-time professional producers are dead. Our town needs the likes of them the way a burning house needs firemen.

We had directors whom actors and actresses gave their eyeteeth to work for; it was the cracker-jack directors who made the stars. Beginners in grease paint slogged their way up through bit parts in “B” pictures until they’d picked up enough experience for bigger things and better contracts. Sometimes the lightning would strike an actor like Bob Mitchum, glimpsed by Bill Wellman as he strode down Hollywood Boulevard. Bill had G.I. Joe to make, didn’t fancy Gary Cooper for it because he needed a man with a look of sweat on his skin and the devil inside him. Bill tapped Bob Mitchum for stardom on the spot. Bob, after more than his share of headlines, ranks now as one of our more solid citizens.

Like a ride on a roller coaster, Hollywood reached peak prosperity just before the final dive began. World War II brought in profits that overflowed the tills and burst the bank vaults. It also brought on the first of the catastrophic decisions that wrecked the industry.

A soldier with a precious pass or an off-duty hour to spare, a war worker on the swing shift—the whole world flocked to the movies to escape reality for a few moments. You couldn’t produce a picture, any picture, without it turning a handsome profit. So we promptly made the worst claptrap and flung it on the screens.

By way of gratitude toward the men who fought the war, our town let them wander by the thousands around the streets when they drifted in on leave, craning their necks to see a famous face or ready to settle for a pretty one. Aside from limited efforts like the much-publicized Hollywood Canteen, our hospitality was mostly private. Many towns put cots down for GI’s to sleep on in town halls and firehouses if they were caught without accommodations for the night. Not us. I campaigned for vacant sound stages to be converted into temporary quarters for our visitors in uniform. For all I achieved, I was talking to myself.

The catastrophe that the studios invited was the death of glamour, which had filled the air we breathed. The stars were asked to stop wearing the golden glow of gods and goddesses and look like plain folks, as homey as apple pie and lawn mowers. You couldn’t pick up a magazine without coming across publicity shots of Betty Grable out marketing, Bette Davis washing dishes, or Alice Faye changing diapers. Nobody had ever seen a picture of Dietrich hanging out wet wash or Jack Barrymore in a life-with-father layout. We were busy bringing stars down out of the sky, lousing up the act, cutting our own throats.

Realism strangled the dream stuff, and it’s slowly slaughtering Hollywood. I see very little hope unless glamour is given its rightful place again. I believe that audiences wanted it then and want it now. More and more people share that point of view. Jerry Lewis is one of them.

“It wasn’t good to take the soft lights off the tinsel,” said Jerry. “The days of the stars must return. There’s been too much haphazard mingling with the public by the stars. It killed a beautiful illusion, the illusion that helped make Hollywood and picture stars important to the public.”

When the GI’s came back from the war, the lean years set in for our industry. They’d seen strange sights and found new dreams. They were a restless generation, looking for fresh excitements. They turned to bowling alleys, night baseball, the race tracks. Suddenly there were a whole lot of other things to do besides going to the movies. The money that went for new pastimes used to go into movie-house tills.

They reacted by bumping up admission prices. It didn’t help. Instead of a couple being able to see a double feature, cartoons, and a newsreel at thirty-five cents a head, for a first-run picture the tab leaped up to $1.50 and more apiece. Coincidentally, another great American invention had come along in the postwar years, the baby sitter.

Only a handful of households could afford living-in servants after the maids and cooks and butlers had enjoyed a taste of wartime wages on factory assembly lines. It was no longer the thing to do to ask a neighbor to mind the baby while Dad took Mother to the movies. They had to hire a baby sitter at accelerating hourly rates. If Dad stood Mother dinner out somewhere first, a couple of hours watching Luise Rainer knocked the family budget for ten or fifteen dollars. It just wasn’t worth that much. The tide on the sea of gold was ebbing fast.

Then the government started huffing and puffing, and the big empires were gone with the wind. What happened was that the independent theater owners, who’d been pushed around for years, finally nudged the Justice Department into declaring that it was illegal under the anti-trust laws for the same organization to make movies, distribute them, and screen them in its own picture palaces.

This was like the Ford Motor Company waking up one morning to find it had lost all its showrooms. Or Fanny Farmer discovering she could cook up her candy but not run the stores she sold it in. The movie makers, who had never smelled real competition up to date, suddenly realized they were in a tougher grind than the cloak-and-suit business ever was.

There was a moment when they could have had another gilt-edged guarantee of money by the billions if they’d had the sense to see it. The early runners of the television industry came on their knees to Hollywood and begged the movie men to help them. “You’ve got the factories to make the product, we’ll get the outlets to show it,” they said. “Let’s co-operate, and we’ll all grow rich.”

Oh, but the studio heads were too smart for that! They could have held television in the palms of their hands. Instead they jeered: “Who’s going to stay home and watch a little box?” They sneered: “What have you got—women wrestlers and bike races? It’s a fad like Yo-yo. It can’t last. Movies are better than ever.”

Only Paramount sensed the potential in the little boxes when there were no more than half a million of them, with post-card-sized screens, in the country. That studio joined hands with Dr. Allen Du Mont, the pioneer TV scientist, hoping to build a network of Channel Fives. But he was an inventor, not an executive who could put together the necessary hours of daily programming. The idea failed, the network amounted to nothing, and all that Y. Frank Freeman, head of Paramount, could do was watch NBC and CBS forge ahead, while he speculated on what might have been.

The bankers moved deeper and deeper into the faltering movie industry. They had to. They were the people with money to keep it going. They didn’t know a thing about it, but they knew a star when they saw one. To a banker, a star looked like the safest bet in a business beset with more hazards than a steeplechase. The studios found out you could always raise the financing if you showed Mr. Moneybags a big enough star and a script the star liked. Independent producers learned the same lesson and flocked around, waving contracts. Directors, cameramen, every other key employee necessary to make good movies—the banks didn’t want to hear about them.

The ever-loving agents grabbed hold hard. If the industry lived or died on names like Gable, Brando, Hepburn, and Taylor, then, by crikey, their clients were going to grab the steering wheel from the professional producers and studio heads. The only way the stars could be guaranteed enough money to tempt them to work was to give them a slice of the picture’s potential profits on top of salary. The slice grew bigger and bigger and bigger.

In the old days we used to wait impatiently for the studio gates to open at 9 A.M. I couldn’t get there soon enough. Nowhere else did you have such fun. You had companions of your own kind to work with, many of them the finest talents in the worlds of the theater, concert platform, fashion salon. On Saturdays and Sundays we’d hurry back to the studios to hear the orchestras record sound tracks with stars of the musicals, or maybe listen to four hundred Negroes sing spirituals for a Lawrence Tibbett picture.

When George Cukor was preparing The Women, I was so eager to play in it that I called him on the quiet after Dema Harshbarger had set a price on my head of $1000 minimum, whether for a day’s work or a week’s. “Confidentially, I’d work for nothing,” I told him. A contract was drawn at a cut-down figure and sent to Dema.

She asked me into her office, next to mine. “I’d like to give you a farewell luncheon at some smart place,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming bright. “We won’t have any unpleasantness, and we’ll stay friends, but I don’t want any business dealings with you unless you let me set a value on you.” I got the point—and a revised contract.

At least two once-powerful studios, Fox and MGM, were driven into a corner from which they may never emerge, thanks to the present, overpriced star system. Rome and Madrid today are the temporary movie capitals of the world. Tokyo, London, Paris—all compete for the title. Soaring costs at home push more and more production overseas. The peccadilloes of foot-loose stars and producers who hanker for far-off places favor foreign production. Some countries freeze profits from the screening of American movies, so the money must be used to stake new pictures inside those countries’ frontiers. Then, too, the big screen demands the real locations; you can no longer paint a mountain on a piece of glass and make it look like the Rockies.

So pictures like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur are made anywhere except in Hollywood. William Holden won’t come home from Switzerland for reasons of taxes—and his pictures get picketed by our town’s movie unions. Even Tom and Jerry are refugees now. They were made at Culver City before the animation studios were shut five years ago. Now Tom and Jerry are drawn in Italy, Popeye is a Yugoslav sometimes, and Bullwinkle comes to life on drawing boards in Mexico. Walt Disney remains one of the all-Americans.

MGM prayed it would be helped out of its Mutiny hole by the oil well that started to flow on the back lot at Culver City at about the time that Brando was stumbling through the final scenes of the picture in Hollywood.

Twentieth Century-Fox went in for sterner stuff, very late in the day. They tried to hurry Cleopatra production to a conclusion by cutting off the salary in Rome of Walter Wanger. They fired Marilyn Monroe and sued her for $500,000 for absenteeism from the set of Something’s Got to Give after she had given five days of performance in seven weeks of shooting.

The Fox counterrevolution against stars found her colleague, Dean Martin, in the line of fire next. He’d promptly announced after Marilyn was dismissed that so far as he was concerned it was Monroe or nobody. He walked out; the picture was shut down. Equally promptly the studio threw a record-breaking suit for $5,678,000 at his head, claiming breach of contract, and Dean’s attorneys filed countercharges.

He was no hero to the unions, though they sat back and did nothing. An official said to me: “He’s putting people out of work at a time when we’re all faced with unemployment due to runaway production. He’s certainly demonstrating his unconcern for his co-workers.”

When a star got out of line, the crew used to have a peculiar way of handling the situation. Jack Barrymore would be performing his heart out when out of the blue a crystal chandelier came crashing down, missing his head by inches. If his behavior didn’t improve, the next one fell even closer.

If the handful of stars still left to us disappears, who will replace them? Who’s in sight to give Hollywood the color and excitement that it needs to live? Where are the newcomers to be discovered and how can they be trained? The answers, so far as the eye can see, are Nobody and Nowhere. Opera has been stirred by new names in the past decade—Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Maria Callas. The concert stage has its Van Cliburns. Politics has its Kennedys and Nixons. The movies have virtually nothing at the top except the same names that were shining in lights ten years ago—Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and the rest politely called “middle-aged.”

Television’s no better off. The surge of talent there was mostly in writers and directors—Rod Serling, Delbert Mann, and others—who subsequently migrated to Hollywood. But the surge is about over. The TV networks pretend to foster young talents. But do they?

They got going on their own account when Hollywood turned them down as partners, then was compelled to sell its old movies to them to raise cash to keep the studios open. The young, untried talents who came out of the war swarmed like flies into TV. They couldn’t find a place in the movie industry or in the Broadway theater. Early television was like early movie making all over again, a great adventure filled with fun but not much money; a wonderful place for experiment and experience, because everybody could afford to make mistakes.

The networks needed that mysterious thing called programming, meaning a dependable timetable of big hits and steady features, spectaculars blended with Lassie. Without programming, they couldn’t get TV sets sold, and a network like NBC, owned by RCA, was primarily in business not to entertain its audiences but to sell sets.

NBC programming was in the hands of Pat Weaver, a farsighted pioneer at his business with a special, rare ability to spend other people’s money without being frightened by the cost. Before he departed network headquarters in Rockefeller Center, he had brought in “Wide, Wide World,” Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar.

CBS had an executive, too, in Hubbell Robinson, who also ran a good store. ABC had its problems as the little brother fighting to break into a situation where its rivals divided most of the country between themselves. But along came men like Bob Kintner, Oliver Treyze, Tom Moore, and Dan Melnick. They took a backward look at what Warner Brothers had done when they had to crack open a similar situation in the movies and the big studios closed ranks against them.

Jack and Harry Warner, with stars like Bogart and Cagney on the payroll, broke in with action pictures, with gang bullets flying and fists swinging in every reel. ABC copied a leaf from that book. Never had such a volley of blank bullets resounded over the land before. Critics threw up their hands in horror, but ABC arrived with a bang and stayed there.

It’s a tragedy of the entertainment industry that the networks were as blind to the future needs of their business as the movie makers had been to theirs. Like Pharaoh, the television tycoons let the people go; the big talents left when the money wasn’t put up to keep them together. The tycoons thought they made television, not the writers, directors, and producers. They wouldn’t dream of setting up a studio system, a great pool of brains that could have made NBC or CBS or ABC the biggest creator there ever was of entertainment and the lively arts. They put no funds aside for research, as General Motors, Westinghouse, Du Pont and the others do.

Now TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside. If the finished film doesn’t make sense, no matter. If the kid with the six-shooter can’t act to save his mother’s life, who cares?

The idea is that if enough people are watching, some of the advertisers’ message will rub off on them to make the series worth while. But if enough people stop watching the stuff that’s put on their screens, then commercial television faces a similar fate to the movies, in spite of color sets or tomorrow’s gimmicks such as giant screens to hang on your living-room wall.

I believe the only possible solution for television and movies alike is a recognition of the eternal values of real talent, excitement, and glamour. Audiences are starved for all three. Entertainment must be a satisfying emotional experience, a stirring of the heart. We need all kinds of young men and women. Those people with an artist’s eye and an executive’s brain that we term directors. Those wrestlers with their souls and typewriters known as authors. The beggars on horseback called actors and actresses.

* * * * *

Hollywood is my home, and most of my friends live there. I like to travel sometimes, but I find scenery as a diet doesn’t nourish me. So I intend to stick around and watch what happens, remembering a few more words from the plaque that stands on my desk:

I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.