Frontier Hotel, Las Vegas, at $50,000 a week. In preparation he forced
himself once more on to a heroic diet, worked out religiously with bar
bells and exercise machines, submitted to hours of pounding on the
massage table, then took off for Vegas with Betty, their children, and
his trainer, Terry Robinson, in a total entourage of twelve. The staff
at the New Frontier had strict instructions not to let Mario start
drinking, come what may. The town’s gamblers anticipated trouble; the
wise money was eight to five against.
On the afternoon of the opening Louella Parsons went looking for him.
Ben Hecht, who was writing a new picture for him, also sought him out.
He found Mario in his suite, pale with nerves but dry as a bone. Ben
felt like a drink, and a waiter arrived with champagne.
I tried to reach Mario that afternoon but couldn’t get near him. I
went to his suite and knocked and knocked. I could hear voices inside,
but nobody let me in. “I did all the drinking,” Ben said later. “When
he left me at six o’clock he was O.K. to walk out on any stage and do
handsprings. Whether he had desert dust or goofy dust in his throat, I
don’t know.”
He added: “I’ve never seen a guy suffer so because of what he was
doing, whatever that was. Does he always have those soul agonies, or
doesn’t he give a damn?” And then: “I’ve listened to his story--some of
it funny, most sad. I’ve heard this same story in this town for thirty
years. The minute a guy gets big, people start sitting on his head. I
still have complete confidence in the guy.”
After he left Ben Hecht in the hotel, Mario disappeared. Half an hour
before the show, he staggered back to the New Frontier. There were
panicky efforts to revive him. But he passed out cold. A star-flecked
audience, including Sonja Henie, Ann Miller, Jack Benny, George Burns,
Robert Young, and 150 newsmen, waited for him in vain. The management
canceled his contract and sued him for $125,000.
The rest was all exclusively downhill. Beatrice, the Lanzas’ colored
housekeeper, paid some of the bills out of her salary to hold things
together. He desperately tried for work at other studios, but nobody
would take a chance on him. So he took up a deal to make a picture in
Rome, to give concerts there and elsewhere in Europe, taking his family
along. In Rome he rented the fabulous Villa Badaglio, where crystal
chandeliers gleamed on statuary and marble floors and old masters
decorated the walls.
In London he failed to appear at the Albert Hall concert that had been
arranged for him; same thing in Hamburg, where crowds jeered his name.
He died in Rome, aged thirty-eight, suffering from phlebitis and a
blood clot in a coronary artery. His enormous bulk created some macabre
problems for the undertakers. Not long after, when Betty Lanza had
brought her children back to Beverly Hills, her mother tried to get
her committed for psychiatric care. Betty would listen to no one, any
more than she’d listened when Mario’s sanity was at stake. There were
five more months left before drugs took Betty’s life. Love for the man
she’d lost? Desperation? The verdict simply said: cause unknown.
All of us, within ourselves, carry the seed of our own destruction.
But in some there is an inner core beyond our powers to destroy. Jack
Barrymore was one of these. I watched him try to pull himself down. He
was a man embittered, disillusioned, broken in health and finances,
burlesquing his own genius with a devil’s grin. He saw the same public
that idolized him in _The Jest_, _Richard III_, _Hamlet_ shriek with
sadistic laughter over his antics on and off the camera.
During a lull on the set one afternoon, some jokester said to him:
“Come on, Jack, give us one of your old tear jerkers.” He agreed, with
a shrug; started hamming Mark Antony’s lines from _Julius Caesar_.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen.... My heart is in the coffin there with
Caesar, and I must pause till it comes back to me.”
After the first few lines something had happened. As the voice steadied
and deepened the set grew quiet. Grips, carpenters, electricians,
extras approached, soft-footed. When Mark Antony finished, Hamlet took
his place. The years fell away and there, on the cluttered sound stage,
stood the young Hamlet, the greatest any theater ever knew.
In complete silence Barrymore walked to his dressing room. Then such
a storm of applause broke out that the whole stage shook with it.
More faces than one were streaked with tears. We knew we had seen an
indestructible human spirit fighting its way clear of the dross of a
reckless and ill-spent life.
_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.