The Hollywood Raj: How Brits Reigned in the Golden Age of the Movies, page 1
Sheridan Morley
The Hollywood Raj
HOW BRITS REIGNED IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MOVIES
‘Hollywood is a chain gang and we lose the will to escape; the links of our chain are forged not of cruelties but of luxuries: we are pelted with orchids and roses; we are overpaid and underworked.’
First there was Charles Chaplin. Then came Stan Laurel, and subsequently a host of well-loved British actors and charactors whose lives, loves, lavish parties and bitter rivalries constitute the sceptred isle’s last empire builders. This unique and comprehensive history of the dream factory starts at the very beginning of cinema history with Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of moving pictures, and the founder of RADA Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who starred in a version of Macbeth filmed in a studio before the area was even called Hollywood. The book looks at the golden age of the 1930s, when expat life under the Californian sun revolved around cricket clubs and food parcels sent by family members left behind, before absorbing the impact of McCarthyism. Morley discusses the paradox of establishing oneself as a Beverly Hills player without losing one’s roots, the numerous successes, disasters, murders, suicides, Oscars and scandals that epitomise the British experience in the place where dreams are made.
‘Darling,’ Robert Coote once called across to Gladys Cooper in tones of some disapproval during a weekly gathering: ‘there seems to be an American on your lawn.’
For Peter Bull, with love
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The British are Coming
Chapter 2: Wilde Times
Chapter 3: California Cockneys
Chapter 4: Tree in the Backwood
Chapter 5: English Spoken Here
Chapter 6: To Sin with Elinor Glyn
Chapter 7: Indecent Exposure
Chapter 8: Hays Fever
Chapter 9: Officers and Gentlemen
Chapter 10: Wallace in Wonderland
Chapter 11: Disraeli Wins an Oscar
Chapter 12: Journey’s End in Tinseltown
Chapter 13: Hollywood Cavalcade
Chapter 14: Campbell in the Soup
Chapter 15: We Play for an Empire
Chapter 16: Hons and Rebels
Chapter 17: Closing Ranks in Ruritania
Chapter 18: Up Stars, Down Stars
Chapter 19: Scarlett Heights
Chapter 20: Gone with the Wind up
Chapter 21: Home Thoughts from Abroad
Chapter 22: Writing on the Cinema Wall
Chapter 23: The Memsahibs Arrive
Chapter 24: Playing with Fire
Chapter 25: Staying On
Chapter 26: The British Empire Strikes Back
About the Author
Titles by Sheridan Morley
Copyright
‘Hollywood is a chain gang and we lose the will to escape; the links of our chain are forged not of cruelties but of luxuries: we are pelted with orchids and roses; we are overpaid and underworked.’
Clive Brook, 1933
‘God felt sorry for actors, so he gave them a place in the sun and a swimming-pool; all they had to sacrifice was their talent.’
Cedric Hardwicke, 1935
‘They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.’
Sir Francis Hinsley in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, 1948
‘It’s no good explaining to people why one lives here – either they understand it’s the only place, or they don’t.’
Christopher Isherwood, 1966
‘The British are coming.’
Colin Welland, at the 1982 Oscar-winning ceremony for Chariots of Fire, made just a century after the British first arrived in California
Acknowledgements
For the last five years, between other assignments, I have been assembling this book in jigsaw fashion; it is intentionally written much in the style of a radio or television documentary script, for the ground it covers seems by its very nature to require that kind of approach: seven decades of Hollywood on- and off-screen history seen through the eyes of the expatriate British who helped to make and shape it.
Many of the actors, actresses, writers and directors involved have been dead for several years, and in writing about them I have drawn not only on their own published or private memoirs but also on the often more accurate memories of their friends and families. Many others are still happily very much alive and have been invaluable in their spoken and written help. Credits will be found in the body of the text: a list of books consulted here would read like a complete catalogue of the British Film Institute’s superlative library (both its chained and public sections) and a list of people consulted over the years would simply be an alphabetical index of those dozens of British actors who have worked in Hollywood and been kind enough to talk to me about some aspect of it. They will be found in the main index and it will be clear from any reading of the book precisely who they are.
I would additionally like to thank Tony Richardson, Douglas Fairbanks, Vincent Price and Anna Lee for giving up a great deal of their time to answer my questions while I was completing the book, and the staffs of the BFI Information Library in London and of the Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood for their constant and patient help. I am also extremely grateful to the owner of the Cinema Bookshop in London for letting me use it as a third reference library. Finally I am grateful to three men (quite apart from my ever encouraging publishers at Weidenfeld and Viking) without whom this book would have happened even more slowly than it did: one is Colin Webb, who finally over a lunch gave shape to an idea that had been living at the back of both our minds for several years; the second is Steve Bottomore, whose initial research got me started; and the third is my editor at Punch, Alan Coren, who once again was kind enough to give me the time to finish a book which would otherwise have remained forever incomplete.
I also have to thank the original editors, writers and publishers of the following newspapers and magazines, some of them alas long since defunct, from which I have drawn both direct and indirect quotations: Cinema, Film Spectator, Photoplay, Picturegoer, Picture Show, Vanity Fair, Sight and Sound, Films and Filming, The New Yorker, Punch, Kine Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Motion Picture, Moving Picture Classic, Film Weekly, Moving Picture World, Variety, The Stage, the Los Angeles, New York and London Times, Literary Digest, Movie and The Movie.
Sheridan Morley
1: The British Are Coming
Though there have been countless histories of Hollywood and its professional inhabitants, not one has ever considered in isolation the extraordinary feat of colonization achieved there by the British from the coming of sound through fifty years to the final destruction of the old studio structures by television.
It was India all over again and a century later: the British arrived as an invading army of expert settlers (they, after all, could speak the English language at a time when many silent film stars were still having trouble mastering basic American) who formed themselves rapidly into polo clubs and cricket teams and gave tea parties for each other on Sunday afternoons. ‘Darling,’ I once heard Robert Coote call across to my grandmother Gladys Cooper in tones of some disapproval during one of these weekly gatherings, ‘there seems to be an American on your lawn.’
The fact that the lawn was in Pacific Palisades, not a mile away from where Ronald Reagan was then setting up home in the course of his 1940s career as a B-movie star, and the fact that the American was a director no less distinguished than George Cukor, did not seem to strike anyone as odd.
Although it has been twelve years now since Gladys died, twenty since she tore up her deep Hollywood roots and came home to Oxfordshire, I find that I still think of California in terms of her own unshakably English attitude towards it. A child of the Victorians, born in 1888, she belonged to that C. Aubrey Smith generation who colonized Beverly Hills as surely as their parents had once colonized Africa and Australia. The Americans, though for two decades her MGM-contract employers, were also her natives; they were there to be taught the English language, to be encouraged towards a more European way of life, to be civilized if possible and dealt with if not. They were to be spoken to loudly and tersely and clearly; they were to be urged into the war, off the drink and out into the fresh air.
They were not to be mocked, or patronized, or cheated; but neither were they to be treated as equals, exactly, even if their wealth and their lives and their weather were vastly superior to anything Gladys had known back home in England. It was not precisely the Americans’ fault that they could not be born and die (as did Gladys) by the banks of the Thames, but they should not be allowed to forget it either. Then there was Nanny Marshall, whose name wasn’t really Marshall at all; it just so happened that she’d been taken out to California by Edna Best and Herbert Marshall early in the 1930s to look after their baby, and following the London tradition of the time she’d acquired the family surname along with the job. Nanny Marshall had stayed on in Hollywood, taking care not only of o
Nanny Marshall, therefore, found herself at the head of a powerful nanny mafia; in return for ‘filling in’ on her compatriots’ various days off, she acquired an enviable store of Hollywood backstairs gossip. If you wanted to know about the Chaplin marriage or the Sinatra divorce, you asked Nanny Marshall. Nanny Marshall knew it all and had a memory that must have been the envy of both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Once, just after the war when I was living with Gladys in California, word came that Greta Garbo was expected for tea. Gladys rather liked her, especially as she always volunteered to wash up afterwards, but I asked Gladys if the great Swede was truly expected: ‘Certainly,’ came the reply, ‘but so too is Nanny Marshall and she is far more important, so kindly be on your best behaviour.’ Garbo may have been the world’s greatest movie star but Nanny Marshall was English, and that, even in the California of 1949, was still what really counted.
The British who had begun to arrive in California twenty years earlier were often refugees from the Broadway or London stage, actors who realized that on home territory their careers might prove unexciting, but who had discovered (often on some prolonged American stage tour) this magical place in the sun where just to be English and an actor was already enough.
The early arrivals, like those in India, had to be prepared to put up with the heat, separation from nearest and sometimes dearest, and a long five-day rail trek out from New York, which itself was at least another five days by boat from London. Some, like Elizabeth Taylor, arrived at such an early age that they went native without discernible difficulty; others, like Cedric Hardwicke and C. Aubrey Smith, realized that their success would lie in their ability to become more and more English the longer they stayed in California, so that they ended up on screen as caricatures of the colonels they might in other circumstances so easily have become.
Later arrivals, like Harrison and Niven, tended to colonize by stealth, but here too there was a remarkable air of colonial settlers: many brought furniture and nannies and children out by boat and train from the old country. For those of us lucky enough to have been children there after the war, California was a magical land where you could swim and buy bananas and not have to go to school too often. For the nannies, it was still a posting abroad. Deborah Kerr met hers at Los Angeles station off the train that in five marvellous days and nights crossed the vast hinterlands of the mid-West and the Grand Canyon.
‘Well, Nanny,’ she asked on the platform, ‘what did you think?’
‘Of what, Madam? If you mean America, I did not care for it. All those open spaces.’
By the time I got there, during the last heyday of that particular Californian Raj, a lot of the flags were already coming down and the younger actors, those who had not already gone home for the war, were beginning to become uneasily aware that for the 1950s in Hollywood it was no longer going to be quite enough just to be English. But others could never go back; they were too old, too rich, too comfortable or sometimes just still too nervous: the wartime British press campaign known as ‘Gone With The Wind Up’ and directed at those who had declined to come home in 1939 had left scars which had not fully healed a decade later.
A few, like my grandmother, stayed on into the early 1960s, picking up useful work as dowagers in television series and waiting for the occasional Anglophile blockbuster like Separate Tables or My Fair Lady; but even she, with her passionate love of the California sun, began spending more and more of her time at home in England, where the work and the family now tended to be, and if you go back to California today, traces of a British settlement are limited to the occasional mock-Tudor pub in Santa Monica or a friendly accent in a used-car showroom specializing in the Rolls-Royce status symbols which seem to change hands rapidly in a still volatile local economy.
Now the British actor in California tends to be out there on a short-term contract, for a single movie or television series, and the coming of the ten-hour flight across the Pole from London has made Los Angeles just one more location stop where before it was a way of life. Even the once valuable English accent is now a problem for world audiences who have become used to an all-purpose mid-Atlantic neutrality of speech.
Yet there is one building that still flies the Union Jack in the heart of Hollywood today. Just above the Sunset Boulevard that has always been the main thoroughfare of the celluloid dream, and now resembles nothing so much as the decaying central street of a town from which the parade has definitely passed on, runs North Doheny Drive, and about halfway up it, in a house decorated with more flags than you will see outside Windsor Castle during the average royal wedding, lives the last doyenne of the Hollywood British.
She is Anna Lee, and at the age of sixty-nine she’s one of the few survivors of the generation of British actors who settled in Hollywood during the 1930s. Born Joanna Winnifrith, she had started out in the London theatre, gone under contract to Gaumont-British and then followed her husband, the director Robert Stevenson (who later made the Orson Welles Jane Eyre and seventeen of the most successful Disney features), out west:
I only ever really meant to come for a holiday, but in those days Hollywood was quite a lovely place; the air was clean and you could see the snow-capped mountains and there were no freeways and I thought perhaps I’d stay for a while. Then the war came and I was trapped; Bob wasn’t about to go home and they wouldn’t give me a visa on my own because I had a young child, so Bob joined the American army and I went up to Canada and got into the Red Cross and somehow I never managed to live in England again.
Instead she brought a hunk of England to California: married now for the third time, to the veteran American author and poet Robert Nathan, she lives in a house that appears to have been designed by Harrods and provisioned by Fortnum’s, surrounded by paintings of the Duke of Wellington and signed photographs of the Queen Mother, these last being the trophies gained from a series of charity banquets arranged in Hollywood by Miss Lee to benefit the National Trust. Were we still in need of food parcels, she would doubtless be first in line at the Sunset Boulevard post office; as it is, she declares her almost fanatical devotion to England on all possible occasions and often at considerable personal risk. During a recent spate of Ulster bombings she raised a banner from her roof on St Patrick’s Day reading GOD SAVE THE QUEEN AND DEATH TO THE IRA, only to awake the next morning to find her front door smeared with blood.
Though still best known for the John Ford classic How Green Was My Valley (and a fleeting appearance as a nun in The Sound of Music), Anna Lee now makes a comfortable living as one of the stars of a daytime American television soap opera called General Hospital. More than half her life and three-quarters of her career have been totally American, yet she remains deeply and defiantly homesick: ‘The thing I most dread now is dying in America; I really can’t bear the idea of Forest Lawn. I want an English country churchyard and a tombstone with moss growing on it.’
Meantime, dressed in Ingrid Bergman’s breastplate from St Joan and Charlton Heston’s helmet from Ben-Hur, she rides as Britannia in Los Angeles parades and remembers a somewhat different Hollywood:
When I first arrived here there were very few women stars from England, and most of the men were already thinking about going home to fight or at the very least they were going off to join the Eagle Squadron in Canada. The first film I ever starred in here was My Life With Caroline, in which I played opposite Ronald Colman, and he insisted the writers should add a bulldog called Winston to the script. But the really disgusting thing at that time, before Pearl Harbor, was that Hollywood was full of Germans, and I remember one at a cocktail party proposing a toast to the fall of France, so I threw a lot of glasses at him and they told me to behave because America was still supposedly neutral. One or two people did behave really appallingly; I remember Chaplin claiming that the war in Europe wasn’t ‘our war’ and that we shouldn’t join it, so I told him never to forget he had been born English, and that seemed to surprise him. Aubrey Smith and Nigel Bruce used to go around presenting one-way tickets home to England to young British actors they found hanging around the studios. They were a bit old themselves for the fighting, but most of the younger ones like Niven and Olivier behaved very well and went home as soon as they could, though there was always a good deal of doubt surrounding Hitchcock.
