Beyond the fringe of Hollywood in gilded enclaves, architectural mimesis ran riot. Houses were not houses but Art Deco Palazzo, Mexican haciendas, Gothic castles, Tudor manors.... Greta Garbo lived in an Algerian monastery, Charlie Chaplin a colonial mansion... everything was sham and fancy.
From the vast studio hangars came a cascade of scenery as substantial as a Dadaist delirium. Here in painted canvas and plywood, mocked up lath and plaster was a cyclorama featuring the entire history and mythology of mankind. No one conjured up the chaos of conflicting images more vividly than Nathanael West. Stumbling past flapping marble porticoes and cellophane waterfalls, his hero (in The Day of the Locust) encounters the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of Four-teenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimack, a corner of a Mayan temple.36 Like these evanescent tableaux, the costume drama overflowed from the studio lots. Sunset Boulevard and its surroundings witnessed a perpetual masquerade, a strutting procession of mimic men and women dressed for their parts. Females wore mink coats over purple lounging pyjamas. Males sported green trousers, orange sneakers, pastel handkerchiefs. Stars con-cealed themselves behind dark glasses with large white rims, "a triumph of conspicuous anonymity."37 Extras competed in exhibitionism. Hollywood attracted a huge company of supporting players—small-town beauty queens and vaudeville midgets, cabaret dancers and circus strong men, burlesque comedians and opera soubrettes. Following like prospectors in a gold rush came barkers, mountebanks, swamis, "healers," beauticians, morticians. Of all the make-belief merchants none were more extraordi-nary than the so-called "cinemoguls" or "cellulords." Almost without exception these men—they were all men, many of them Jewish—had risen from humble beginnings. Sam Goldwyn had been a glove salesman, Louis B. Mayer a rag-picker, Harry Cohn a furrier, Eddie Mannix a bouncer in an amusement park. The Warner brothers were butcher's sons. The Schenks had owned a drugstore. Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor had run penny arcades. Most had come to Hollywood via the slums of show business: flea circuses, theatrical agencies, nick-elodeons, vaudeville. Once established as the rulers of movie-land they became, as often as not, a prey to fantasy, vanity and megalomania. They confused cinema with verite: Walt Disney reckoned that the centaur sequence in his cartoon film Fantasia would be the making of Beethoven. Monarchs of the "marzipan kingdom" moved in "an aura of greatness," said Ben Hecht, "and reports of their genius would have embarrassed Michelangelo."38 Like royalty, Sam Goldwyn never carried money. The film producers became pocket dictators. Louis B. Mayer of MGM declared that directors should learn to crawl before they could walk. Harry Cohn of Columbia bugged and purged his employees, exploited his star-
THE DARK VALLEY
America in Isolation
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lets sexually and modelled his office on that of Mussolini. "I don't ulcers," he said, "I give them. "39 Cohn also vouchsafed an explanation of what the film industry was about: "It's cunt and horses."4° This was not so much a definition as a characteristically crude declaration of philistinism. And it would have amply confirmed the low esteem in which the movie tycoons were held. Writers, who ranked in the studio hierarchy above hairdressers but below heads of publicity, particularly despised them. They were always (in an expression attributed to Sam Goldwyn) "biting the hand that lays the golden egg." Thus Dorothy Parker complained that she was working for cretins. S. J. Perelman described them as hoodlums of great wealth. Ben Hecht called them trash-pedlars who had lamed the American mind. Josef Von Sternberg, who wielded pen as well as lens, said that his bosses knew what they wanted but didn't know how to spell it. Another writer, who wished to get out of his contract with Columbia, offered to act as Harry Cohn's interpreter on a trip to England. But it was Sam Goldwyn who attracted the most joyous ribaldry. Bald, jug-eared and hook-nosed, he was the prototype of the language-garbling, cigar-chewing Hollywood Napoleon. His verbal solecisms—"Include me out," "In two words, im possible"—were notorious and (mostly) apocryphal. His greed was leg-endary. Goldwyn "beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine," said Hecht, "shaking it for a jackpot."42 His taste was execrable. Like Walt Disney, he tended to equate art with obscenity. Yet writers, who invariably have the last word in the struggle between culture and commerce, gave a false impression of film producers. They inflated the already bizarre follies and foibles of the caliphs of California, caricaturing them as ignorant clowns, lunatic charlatans, sacred monsters. Part of the writers' animus stemmed from the fear that their literary talents were atrophying in Hollywood, which they variously compared to Devil's Island and the Sargasso Sea. More galling still, they were shackled to Goldwyn and his ilk with golden chains. As one memorably expostulated, "They ruin your stories. They massacre your ideas. They prostitute your art. They trample on your pride. And what do you get for it? A fortune." Fortunes were made because the film tsars were skilful salesmen. They had a shrewd grasp of public taste, which they did not intend to go bust by overestimating. There was a method in their seeming madness: they made money even more prodigiously than they wasted it. P. G. Wodehouse, who admitted that he had been paid huge sums for doing practically noth-ing in Hollywood, nevertheless recorded: "Studio life is all perfectly nor-mal, not a bit crazy." He claimed, regretfully but erroneously, that it would not afford him a single comic story. "Sam Goldwyn," said another author, "goes up the hill and teaches the foxes to be smart."Goldwyn and his kind were particularly smart when it came to defending their fiefdom against the only man of letters who ever seriously threatened it. This was Upton Sinclair, who sought election as Governor of California in 1934 on the Democratic ticket and a utopian socialist platform. "What does Sinclair know about anything?" growled Louis B. Mayer. "He's just a writer. "46 Sinclair knew a good deal and he was not impressed by the New Deal. An old-time muckraker, he had become famous by denouncing many American evils, from the meat-packing industry to the child labour laws. Now he began the EPIC crusade to "End Poverty in California." Nor-mally Sinclair could be dismissed as a crank. He preached more "isms" than Horace Greeley: feminism, spiritualism, food faddism, prohibition-ism, Fourierism. He attempted to uplift humanity, as H. L. Mencken gleefully noted, through sex hygiene, Esperanto, telepathy, twilight sleep, chiropractic, war gardens, vers libre and paper-bag cookery. Though not a Communist, Sinclair was an ascetic defender of Soviet Russia. Neverthe-less, at a time when one in seven inhabitants of California was on relief, Sinclair's radical nostrums seemed so attractive that people paid to attend his political meetings. What he proposed, in brief, was to tax according to means and to set up cooperatives producing for use rather than profit. He even had ideas about generating jobs in the film industry: "Why should not the State of California rent one of the idle studios and let the unemployed actors make a few pictures of their own?" Louis B. Mayer was appalled and he led his fellow magnates in a bitter assault on the muck-raker. It demonstrated that Hollywood was not simply in the business of conjuring up a candyfloss world. When provoked, it could create vicious as well as vapid distortions of reality. Sinclair asked for trouble, not least by likening movie bosses to Jewish traders of yore who had sold Christian girls into concubinage. But he was taken aback by the dirty tricks that followed. A slight, professorial figure with pince-nez, pursed lips and an expression of quizzical geniality, Sin-clair expected others to share his fundamental benevolence. Instead he found himself pilloried as "Utopian Sincliar," a "red devil," the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse riding his hobby in an attempt to catch up with Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. MGM freely issued California cinemas with bogus newsreels in which respectable Americans pledged their support to the Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, while shabby aliens said they would vote for Sinclair because, "His system worked veil in Rus-sia, vy can't it work here?"
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