Warner Bros, page 13
There were other ways of doing things. Olivia de Havilland was only eight years younger than Bette, but she seemed to be from a next generation. She started in pictures as a teenager and was as pretty as anyone had ever been in a placid or obedient mode. That came from a friendly, modest personality that shone out of her face. She was as well educated as Bette and as intelligent, but it was part of her strategy that she chose to get along with people. As time would determine, she was a very good actress, but in her early days with Warners, she accepted the life of a screen consort. Screenwriter Rowland Leigh petitioned Hal Wallis over the forthcoming The Charge of the Light Brigade, with Errol Flynn. Wallis had thought of Anita Louise for the female lead. Wasn’t she irrevocably American, Leigh asked. Whereas Olivia de Havilland, “both in looks and voice could, with careful handling, easily be accepted as a young English woman of the Victorian era.”2 Livvy was a lady at a time when English airs meant a lot in Hollywood.
She became Flynn’s lady, on screen. They would be together in seven Warners pictures: Captain Blood; The Charge of the Light Brigade; The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which her Maid Marian is a jewel of early Technicolor; Dodge City; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, where she is a lady in waiting who loves Essex; Santa Fe Trail; and in They Died with Their Boots On, where she plays Mrs. Custer.
You can’t see those films without guessing at the actors’ real fondness. Flynn claimed a love affair; de Havilland would say it was just love, not consummated. More important, the dangerous reputation that Flynn had in the world, and which he deserved, was soothed to some extent by the apparent loyalty the couple enjoyed on screen, and by the universal feeling that de Havilland was as good and nice as her roles. People sometimes said that Ginger Rogers had brought a touch of sex to Fred Astaire, and de Havilland made a good husband out of Flynn on screen. She was stability in his best pictures, though the actress signed her Warners contract in 1936 for $500 a week while her “husband” was at a much higher salary.
She was patient and considerate, yet artful. It took a good deal of maneuvering, and the friendly offices of Jack Warner’s wife, Ann, to get her the part of Melanie in Gone With the Wind, and she came away from that production so exhausted that she was not ready for her next assignment at Warners, Elizabeth and Essex. There had been a scene on that set where she had begged off at the end of a long day. So she wrote a letter of apology to Jack Warner that contrasts effectively with the way Bette treated her boss:
I know that if you had been present on that set, and had realized my problem, you would have dismissed the company rather than shoot that scene so late in the day. I know, too, that you understand that an actress, no matter how talented she is, is dependent very seriously upon her appearance & her vitality for the quality of her performance. When those two things leave her, whether it is after five years work or at the end of a day, she has nothing to rely on. And when I make suggestions to anyone at the studio, it is for the good of the whole. . . .
You have a tremendous business to conduct, one that you have built to astounding success & complexity, & your time is not to be wasted with trivialities.3
Which actress do you want to have writing your letters? Still, de Havilland felt neglected at her own studio. On loan out to Paramount, she got a Best Actress nomination in Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn, but she was not being offered demanding parts at Warners. So she was refusing scripts and being suspended. It was the Bette Davis story all over again, except that de Havilland took expert legal advice. Martin Gang looked at the statutes and told her that in the state of California it was illegal for any contract to extend beyond seven years, so that the studio practice of adding on suspension time was not legitimate. De Havilland went to court—if Jack Warner could find the time to attend—and she won. It was a decision that changed the contract system for all time, just as the confidence that had once reckoned on seven-year deals was coming to a close. De Havilland was not forgiven or renewed at Warners, and she had a period of two years out of work. Jack had been furious: he had brought this actress “from obscurity to prominence,” and $125,000 a picture!4 Bette Davis admitted that “Hollywood actors will for ever be in Olivia’s debt.” Soon enough, she went over to Paramount and won the Oscar twice in four years for To Each His Own and The Heiress, with another nomination for The Snake Pit.
By the time of The Heiress, Hollywood was in convulsions: the Supreme Court had at last determined that production-distribution companies (Warners included) had to sell off their theatres; television was in prospect; the seven-year contract and the whole atmosphere of company cohesion was falling away. But great stars were beginning to originate and own their pictures.
That change would be vast. In 1984, at the time he made Tightrope, I interviewed Clint Eastwood on the Warners lot in Burbank. His production company, Malpaso, had a bungalow suite of offices there. Warners had appointed an amiable executive, Joe Hyams, who was known as “vice president for Clint.” This relationship had started in 1971, when Eastwood made Dirty Harry for Warners after Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen, and many others had turned down that role. When Eastwood accepted the part, the picture became a Malpaso production—that was the name of the actor’s own company.5
After the great hit of Dirty Harry (it earned $36 million domestically on a $4 million budget), Malpaso generated the pictures on which Clint variously acted, directed, and produced. Some time after Jack Warner’s death, Malpaso would earn two Best Picture Oscars for Warners—Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. These pictures were distributed by Warners and represented an important element in the studio’s revenue. So Eastwood was a profit (or loss) participant in what he made. He was an iconic actor, a proficient director, and a great producer. Jack Warner would have applauded him and started telling him awful jokes. For Jack had known and marketed the prototype taciturn hero, John Wayne. Clint had become his own business, and that model has dominated Hollywood now for decades. It is a role that neither Bette Davis nor Jimmy Cagney explored. So for years and contracts they griped about the lousy deal and imperfect attention they were getting from Jack Warner.
Eastwood has been a self-made industry, a model of movie success in his time, who had graduated from the Universal training school by way of a TV series and Italian westerns to reach unrivaled authority. And he carried himself like a man who had expected no less. If he made mistakes, he took the blame—and sometimes fired people. When he did well, he smiled that Clint smile on the way to a net worth not far short of $400 million now. He admired Warners and he knew the studio history. He had seen some of it happen: Clint is actually a year older than James Dean would have been; he knew the kid and saw him come and go.
So Bette Davis was driven to fury over all the bad scripts sent to her as assignments, and she would never forget how Jack and Hal Wallis didn’t really like her. But there are other ways of regarding the studio system: you would have to allow that George Raft refused to do The Maltese Falcon with John Huston because he thought it was not an “important” picture.6 Paul Muni declined High Sierra because he felt it had no message. Edward G. Robinson was a notorious fusspot who wanted to change most scripts sent to him—“As I see it, Eddie,” Darryl Zanuck had written to him in 1932, “the whole fault lies in the fact that you want to be a writer. By this I mean that you want to put your views into whatever subject we purchase rather than to accept the views of the men I engage here who are specialists at a high salary in this specific work.”7 So Eddie declined Lawyer Man, and William Powell had a hit with it. Bette Davis hadn’t wanted to do Dangerous. And maybe there was a morning when Casablanca might have been Hedy Lamarr and Ronald Reagan. And maybe it would have worked (and changed his life and our history).
Meanwhile, Bogart and Bergman worked out pretty well. The studio was against having Dooley Wilson as Sam: “He isn’t ideal for the part,” said Hal Wallis, “but if we get stuck and can’t do any better I suppose he could do it.”8 Today, Dooley Wilson is immortal, even if few recall what became of him. Warners was a school or a prison, beset by gossip, rumor, lies, and false reports. Everyone wanted to know everyone else’s business and talk behind your back. And so, yes, Casablanca was made in a state of chaos and disagreement, but within weeks of its opening it was regarded as enchanted. Today, it is axiomatic, a given, something that came down from heaven as a classic benediction on factory moviemaking.
As we know, Casablanca was directed by Michael Curtiz, who also directed several films acclaimed in this book: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Mandalay, Jimmy the Gent, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Curtiz was not what I would think of calling a “great” director; Andrew Sarris placed him in this “Lightly Likable” category.9 Everyone told stories about comical things Curtiz would say on set. But no one can look at his pictures without feeling his camera fluency and his grasp of movie moments. The executives at Warners wearied of his doing elaborate, unscripted shots for their own sake, because they seemed eloquent. But they kept him on because his films worked. Lightly Likable is OK, if it persists over thirty years on all manner of films where maybe Curtiz hardly read the scripts. Perhaps he never bothered to read because he knew there’d be a rewrite.
Curtiz was under contract at Warners, just as much as Bogart and other actors, along with the writers and the craftspeople—Owen Marks edited Casablanca, and did the same job on The Petrified Forest, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and East of Eden; Arthur Edeson photographed it—as well as Each Dawn I Die, They Drive by Night, and The Maltese Falcon; Carl Jules Weyl was the art director—as he had been on Kid Galahad, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Letter. Max Steiner wrote the music that was a sauce poured over so many Warners pictures and which came to be the theme music of the entire studio.
We don’t have to sentimentalize this company of collaborators and claim they were all friends or even a team. Anyone who has worked in an office for years has met its festering antagonisms. But these people knew each other, the actors and the executives, and they had by heart what you have to call a house style. They worked long days under great pressure. They could be ousted or replaced by sharper talents, or by downright betrayal. But they were paid very well, even at the lower levels, and they were engaged on a project that stirred the public at large. To be making movies during the Depression and the Second World War was to be on the front lines for raising morale. It was to feel you were somebody.
The pictures from Warners, from sound to 1950, were not very flexible. Vehicles made on a production line are resolutely alike. So they repeat the same problems as well as the virtues: most Warners pictures were moody, fast, tough yet romantic, gritty but in a stylish way. So many feelings were cast in a dark or sardonic light—long before film noir was recognized. They also had narrow theories on men and women, happy endings, honor, courage, and race—and those principles have proved too fixed or conservative for a developing America. You shouldn’t judge Warners in those years by, say, M, La Règle du Jeu, L’Atalante, or Bicycle Thieves. It’s not even legitimate to test Warners’ product against The Shop Around the Corner, Citizen Kane, or His Girl Friday—American vehicles that drove in new, contrarian ways. You can’t usefully measure a Warners picture against what was being done by Edward Hopper, Duke Ellington, or William Faulkner (though Faulkner often worked at Warners). You should admit that the studio was usually short on comedies—yet full of wisecracking. But you risk misunderstanding America in those same years if you don’t take into account I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Letter, and Casablanca. Plus—if you’ll wait a bit—you may decide that the movie of The Big Sleep was even in a class with Faulkner or Hopper (as well as one of the funniest pictures ever made).
We have long since exhausted the aura of old Hollywood, and there’s no reason to romanticize it. The SIGN sits up in the hills above Los Angeles, humorless and archaic, as if pilots didn’t know where to land. The romantic attitudes of movies hindered rational thought and social progress—perhaps they curtailed it, for unleashed dreaming stifles evidence. The stereotypes have been a source of damage that we are still trying to repair. Ours is not a tough guy’s world—but that dream persists. Still, it’s unfair to omit the spirit in which people worked in the factory, when work was denied to so many Americans. No one recalled that spirit better than Joan Blondell—and no one had delivered it better on screen:
Oh, those musicals were tough. Much tougher than a straight movie. And the hours were awful because we didn’t have unions then. We worked any time they wanted to work. You could come in to work at 6:00 a.m. and work till midnight and then be back at 6:00 next morning. And you might have breakfast at 6:30 and then not break for lunch till 3:00 in the afternoon. You’d be ready to fall over. Then you’d work all day Saturday, and they made it a point to work all night Saturday night. It was awfully tough. And I don’t think it was like that at all the studios. I think they specialized in it at Warners. They had something hot going for them: the musicals and the gangster things. And they had a bunch of us who were hot, and they were going to wring it dry. . . . But at Warners we were all in it together. Happy, sad, well, ill, we all talked to each other. The crew too. The crew was an important part of our life and they were great. We made them happy, they made us happy. It was like, “Okay, guys, we’re all tired and exhausted, but we’ve got a job to do, we’ve done it before, let’s put up the old fight and do it the best we can.” We were never afraid to have guts.10
14
Unafraid?
SIDE BY SIDE with Joan Blondell, who wouldn’t be there at 6:00 a.m.? So the working conditions were tough, and the exploitation was automatic, but even the world-weary tough guys and the dames could respond to the rhetoric of the Warner Bros product. They were doing it for the team, and maybe the team could save the world. Nearly everyone in movies in those days had the dream—from Charlie Chaplin to Jack Warner—that in troubled times the movies were a medium in which we were all together. Adolf Hitler thought exactly the same thing. He loved pictures. I put it that way because it’s hard to be a cockeyed optimist unless you have a pack of sour wisecracks to go with the deal.
But the spirit was real and it was braver at Warners than anywhere else. Consider Robert Lord, one of the invaluable middlemen at the studio. He had been a producer on Gold Diggers of 1933. He had watched the team do “Remember My Forgotten Man.” Maybe he was the one who said, give Blondell that close-up. At exactly the same time, in the spring of 1933, when the money pinch was at its most severe and when Warners agreed to fifty percent pay cuts—that’s when Darryl Zanuck decided he’d had enough of self-sacrifice and would be moving on—Lord began to write a script he called “Forgotten Man.” He had a collaborator on the job, Wilson Mizner. Mizner was twenty-four years older than Lord, and a character. With his brother Addison he had been a font of creative ideas, a wit, a writer, and co-owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles. (The Mizners are the subject of a Stephen Sondheim musical, variously known as Wise Guys or Gold.) Jack Warner was especially fond of Mizner and his jokes. One day, when they were dining at the Brown Derby, the table legs were uneven. “How can you expect anything in Hollywood to be on the level?” quipped Mizner.1
Lord and Mizner wrote a script for “Forgotten Man,” and then Mizner died on April 3, 1933. But the script went ahead as Heroes for Sale, to be directed by William Wellman two years after The Public Enemy.2 Heroes was seventy-six minutes, and here is a compressed version of how much Lord and Mizner got into that time. Tom (Richard Barthelmess) is a soldier in the Great War. He is wounded after heroic action and captured by Germans. They give him morphine for his pain, and Tom becomes an addict. When he gets home he discovers that his best pal has taken credit for Tom’s heroism. He soldiers on, with time in an asylum, and then unemployment. He gets a job in a laundry, he meets a woman (Loretta Young); he promotes a radical new way of doing laundry—this is a down-to-earth movie. But there is a labor dispute. His woman is killed. And Tom ends up in prison.
This pilgrim’s progress is merciless, but when he is set free Tom tries again, and now we are at the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s election. Up there on the screen, Tom quotes FDR’s inaugural and tells the other characters—and us—that all they have to do is try again and believe. Heroes for Sale is still not as well known as it should be, so see it and recognize the bold marriage of pessimism and hope, and see how easily a Warners picture stood up for propaganda—as Tom says, “It takes more than one sock on the jaw to lick a hundred and twenty million people.”
Play that picture with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and the double bill reminds us of Warner Bros’ reputation as the most socially conscious or leftist studio outside the Soviet Union. How secure is that reputation, and where did it come from? Darryl Zanuck, as he left Warners, on his way to leadership of the new Twentieth Century–Fox studio, where he would reign for thirty years and make a fortune, claimed he had had a hand in the script for Heroes for Sale. And I’m sure he had approved it, and encouraged Lord and Mizner. Zanuck was a boss subject to fits of conscience: at Fox he would be a stalwart defender of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, as well as Alice Faye musicals. Why not? He had learned at Warners that you had to balance the hard and the soft.
