“Not in the least,” I said. “I’m certain he expected at least $50,000 from a man of your wealth and standing.”
“Haven’t you any sentiment?” wailed Louis.
“None. I’m a realist and believe in calling a spade a spade.”
As Ida’s bills piled up and weeks stretched into months of illness, he came up with the noble thought that she ought to go into the Motion Picture Relief Home, where she could live and receive treatment free. He had Howard Strickling telephone to sound me out about the idea. “Let him do that and he’ll be sorry he was ever born,” I said as I slammed down the receiver.
The only alternative open to her seemed to be to sell her grand piano. Two moving men were actually inside her apartment carting off her pride and joy before her heart began to harden and she decided to fight.
* * * * *
We need to flash-back here to Dore Schary, necktie salesman turned press agent, screen writer turned producer, who had gone the rounds of most of the studios—Columbia, Universal, Warners, Fox, Paramount—before he went to Metro. Starting in 1941, he had a phenomenally successful year and a half, making low-budget hits like Journey for Margaret and Lost Angel. Schary considered himself an intellectual and was happy to be known as a liberal. He thought pictures should carry a social message, not exist exclusively on their merits as entertainment. “Movies,” he said, “must reflect what is going on in the world.” Quite a few other people working in Hollywood felt the same way.
For twenty-five years a running fight was waged in our industry over “messages” in movies. Among those who fought to keep them out, you could number John Wayne; Walt Disney; Ward Bond; Clark Gable; John Ford; Pat O’Brien; Sam Wood, who directed For Whom the Bell Tolls; Gary Cooper; James McGuinness, an executive producer at Metro who literally worked himself to death in the cause; and myself. On the other side stood some equally dedicated people who were convinced they were battling fascism in the days when Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese war lords threatened the world. Many of these politically unsophisticated innocents were used mercilessly by another group who set out in the thirties to infiltrate Hollywood—the Communists.
They were all in favor of propaganda messages; tried to squeeze them into every possible picture. A hard core of professional conspirators baited the hook to land the big stars, to use them to glamorize, endorse, and spread the party line. The strategy paid off. So did many stars who fell for it. They were soaked for millions of dollars in contributions to the party itself and its “front” organizations, like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had four thousand dues-paying members at its peak. Leader of the Communist faction was John Howard Lawson, who organized the Screen Writers Guild. He had forty or fifty card-carrying colleagues to help him manipulate the strings that stretched throughout our town and controlled the dupes.
Lawson and his gang flourished in the thirties and during the war years. They got what they wanted by convincing the stooge writers, directors, and stars who fell for what was called the “progressive” line that they were serving humanity by turning out pictures dealing with “real life.” That meant throwing patriotic themes to the winds and focusing instead on bigotry, injustice, miscegenation, hunger, and corruption. What did it matter if audiences still hankered for entertainment and stayed away from most “message” pictures in droves? The Communist answer was: “Better to make a flop with social significance than a hit for the decadent bourgeoisie.”