Warner Bros Read online

  WARNER BROS

  James Cagney, 1938—part dancer, part boxer; from wisecrack to break your face—the essential Warners actor and the sweetest guy on the lot

  Warner Bros

  The Making of an American Movie Studio

  DAVID THOMSON

  Copyright © 2017 by David Thomson.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Janson Oldstyle type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956162

  ISBN 978-0-300-19760-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  eISBN: 978-0-300-23133-5

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Sam Hamm, who gave Warner Bros a boost in its declining years

  For Michael Barker, who did the same for me

  For Chuck Jones—“What’s up, Doc?”—who treated us all

  CONTENTS

  1. An Introduction: Families and Stories

  2. The Greatest Moment?

  3. What Are Brothers For?

  4. Family Dinner

  5. Mustache

  6. For Liberty?

  7. Rinty

  8. Mama, Darlin’

  9. Now

  10. My Forgotten Man

  11. Be Somebody

  12. Bette v. Everyone

  13. Contracts and Company

  14. Unafraid?

  15. Bogart

  16. After the War, Before the End

  17. Jacob’s Ladder

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Index

  1

  An Introduction: Families and Stories

  FAMILIES ARE ALIKE, whatever they say. They start to talk, to gossip or complain, and soon that turns into stories; we have to do that much, or sit there in silence. The narratives that spring up want to be unique and personal, but they are leaves from one tree. There are only a few stories if we regard them as shapes made out of possibility, rites of fear and desire. This condition lasted mankind from the cave to the cabin, but then story itself took flight. A few families broke into the business of enacting those stories for strangers—audiences who might be far away, but the new technology reached them. The stories existed as coiled celluloid, waiting to be freed by light. This one family, the Warners, helped create that business and left us believing that their stories were our fables and dreams, and not just their money and their made-up name.

  This book is called Warner Bros, but if anyone asks, you’re going to say you’re reading “Warner Brothers.” You don’t quite know how to say “Warner Bros.” That logo seems awkward or compacted in the mouth. This is not a trivial distinction between sound and print, family and business identity. They didn’t call themselves Paramount or Universal or Columbia, names from out of the clouds. No, they said theirs was a family show, just the brothers, one for all and all for one.

  There really were four Warner brothers, and if Albert was a sleeping or sleepy partner, Harry, Sam, and Jack are genuine characters. Sam takes an early hit for the team, and that makes him a beloved hero, but Harry and Jack carry the load of lifelong rivalry, like Karamazov brothers, vectors to build a story arc on. They fall into unthinking opposition. Why do we have siblings? they wonder—So there’s someone close to us who is not us?

  Jack wins this fraternal struggle—you’ll guess that early on, so no suspense is spoiled. But so many of his victories feel like defeats, too, because of his suspect character. He’s known as a rascal now, while Harry seems upright and duty-bound. Harry could read and write in Hebrew, while Jack struggled with English. But it’s too late to take sides: Harry may have been more honest, but he was dull, too; and if Jack was shifty, that was why you shouldn’t take your eyes off him. The two of them seem always at odds, which leaves victorious Jack as maybe the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series. I realize “scumbag” is startling: it doesn’t sound judicious; and it may be disconcerting to have a Jewish Life that isn’t admirable, or couched in integrity. Einstein, Freud, Proust, Primo Levi, Kafka, Emma Goldman . . . Jack Warner? But this subject is more important than respectability.

  I said “scumbag” for a couple of reasons—Jack is something other than a nobleman; but “scumbag” is a familiar term in the movie business, where it carries more affection than if it were being bandied about in insurance or undertaking. Hollywood, you see, is fond of its rascals, rather in the way we relish its villains or tough guys on screen when they are people we would be scared to meet. And that hints at the complicated influence the Warner brothers had, and are still having, on us. Here’s a question to illustrate that: which means the most to the most people, or to you: the Special Theory of Relativity, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, or Jimmy Cagney pushing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face?

  I cannot tell you Jack was a hero, or that many who knew him made that claim on his behalf. But being less than Einstein, Proust, or even Barbra Streisand didn’t stop Jack and Warner Bros from having an impact on our culture and dreams, on us, that is alarming because it’s enormous. Warner Bros was one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there, a mix of patriotism and publicity, and it was open to Poles, Hispanics, the British and Chinese, whomever, as much as to the few Americans who had been here from the start. Even women might get it. That sense of a dream and immigrants—enormous, impersonal, climatic forces—is not easily worked out because we are still so attached to the hope that fine and talented people shape our history. Or very bad people? Don’t rule this out as simple heresy, but America might have been happier without the pursuit of happiness.

  Once upon a time, nearly everyone lived in his or her small, fixed place. You could not get away, so you hardly felt the need—you were contained in the power of heaven and hell, or some such script. Then transport shook us up. It began as railways, steamships, and automobiles, as well as money. It has gone on by way of the telephone and radio to our modern capacity or fantasy for being anywhere. But this transition has been a convulsion; it has driven people crazy and it means we lost godliness, as well as home.

  This was happening all over the world, but in the United States the throb of fiction or future becoming was a frenzy as, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, millions of strangers came to the country and complicated its old New England ideals. That immigrant anxiety, over feeling freed yet lost, has never gone away, but in America a mass medium was set up, for fun but as a version of moral guidance and comfort: the stories told people how to live, or what to believe in—stay a family, they sometimes urged. But the technology was dynamic and disruptive, too: it catered to loneliness, instability, and escape and said such things were as natural as home and allegiance. The messages strove to be wholesome, and conservative, but families like the Warners had escaped, so they loved the dangerous energy that needed. The contradictions were riotous—for example, crime does not pay, they said, but get ready to enjoy these hoodlums of ours! And in that process these men represented all immigrants. They were storytellers who dramatized the vitality of instability and transformation. They were th
e actors who played the role of strangers in the land. And, don’t forget, some “true” Americans still look upon immigrants with suspicion and fear.

  Another point of the title, Warner Bros, is to say that this genius is collective as well as individual, and that is a challenging theory in both film history and the progress of artistic appreciation. You can take a film like Casablanca and ask, who made it? If Casablanca ends up being taught at Cornell or a junior college for credit and tenure, then it helps to pin it on an author. But maybe so many people made the picture that no one deserves the credit—perhaps we did it.

  Criticism and tenure are alike in needing heroes. There are important (and self-important) individuals in this book—not just Jack Warner but Darryl Zanuck, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Howard Hawks . . . Bugs Bunny—and there will be times when their talent and their choices stand out from the body of the institution. But this is also a book in which general weather systems—like sound, a factory system for storytelling, business, rivalry, the sounds of song and gunfire, and the shuffling off of responsibility—take priority.

  The thing called “audience” may be the most profound and mysterious of those forces. “Audience” is a lovely and beguiling idea, and sometimes it is enough to scatter those darker versions of the same principle—the public, the crowd, the mass, the others. One of the essential areas of intrigue in going to the movies, of sitting in the dark with strangers, was feeling the show was just for you—yet guessing you didn’t matter. Because the bright life on the screen didn’t know or care if you existed. So long as you paid your nickel, or your $16.

  In coming to this task, it feels proper to raise a question, or an eyebrow, at the mention of Harry, Abe, Sam—and Jack? Even the shvontz—the prick? Are we sure of where we’re going with these Warner boys?

  What do we expect of a Jewish Life? Surely the publishing test isn’t based on the mere existence of anyone who happened to be Jewish? I doubt the editors of this series would proceed to print a full account of what might be plain or empty lives—say, Isaac of Prague (1171–1262), or Hirsch Wonsal (1781–1858), the one a tailor, the other a shoemaker, lacking not just English, but American, too, dots in that unstable eastern part of Europe, buffeted or chased by fierce ethnic disputes in which they had no say and so little record that a “Life” is beyond telling.

  Those two names—Isaac and Hirsch are both invented—could be signifiers for lives that left hardly a trace of evidence and which we may assume to have been commonplace (dull?), subject to passing happiness and terror, but resigned to history having no reason to remember or identify their small “hill of beans.” These were not prophets, scholars, creative artists, or leaders—if they had genius, it went unnoticed (and that can happen—must everything hang on the test of success or fame?). It is the pattern of history and the tradition of our evolutionary culture that many lives are not much attended to—except by the Lord, or Yahweh. Unless those overseers are just figures in storytelling.

  But Warner Bros movies were for all of us. Yiddish theatre might be for the Jews, but the movies were for everyone. You didn’t have to be Orthodox or saved to buy your ticket. And these brothers longed to transcend Jewishness, and the traditions that they thought made them vulnerable in America.

  There was a movie made in 1947, Gentleman’s Agreement.1 It was not from Warners, and it is not well remembered now. Nevertheless, it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1947, and was once reckoned to be on a cutting edge because it exposed antisemitism. It is a story in which a sincere journalist (played by Gregory Peck) pretends to be Jewish to report on that cultural hostility. The film has dated (a smaller film, same year, similar theme, Crossfire, is superior). But in 1947 someone organized a gathering of Hollywood elders to impress upon Darryl Zanuck (the film’s producer) that it was ill-advised and unduly provocative to stir up this issue. The instigator of that meeting was Jack Warner, who preferred to make Jewishness go away as a brand image.

  Zanuck was not Jewish, and he is essential to the Warners story. He was of Swiss, Protestant descent (he said), born in Wahoo, Nebraska. His father was a hotel clerk who claimed the principles of Episcopalianism, while being a drunk and a gambler who neglected his son. A stepfather came along later, an accountant and another drunk who carried a Bible for quoting from. But Darryl discarded these parents to spend his working life with people who were Jewish, and it was often said that he topped them all in behaving as if Jewish, or the way a movie mogul was expected to behave.

  In 1967, when Zanuck was once more in charge of Twentieth Century–Fox, John Gregory Dunne went to interview him in his New York office. He found what he wanted—a tough character, a onetime scenarist, talking splashy dialogue:

  “I’m so goddamn sick of being written about. What the hell am I going to say about myself that I haven’t said before?” groaned Zanuck.2 It’s a tyrant’s lament that would fit most of our demon moguls, from Louis B. Mayer to . . . Donald Trump.

  As studio president in New York, Zanuck was in daily contact with his son Richard, the man he had appointed head of production in Los Angeles, and the kid Darryl had always beaten at checkers, croquet, or any other game anyone could think of: “I was put under terrific criticism when I sent Dick out to head up the studio. What could I do? He was the only one I could trust. . . . Well, when I took over, I cleaned house. I knew things were bad, but not that bad. I paid off millions of dollars in contracts and threw out every goddamn script we had in preparation. They were all lousy. And then I sent Dick out there. I let him alone.”3

  Trust the rhythm of the paranoia and its assertion more than what is claimed; listen to the act. For all his house-cleaning, Darryl Zanuck had kept the studio attached to Doctor Dolittle, Star!, and Tora! Tora! Tora!, and when those films flopped, three in a row, he had to fire someone—so he fired Dick. Beware of family.

  For a man of five feet six, Zanuck had always cast a big shadow. He revered his wife and his kids, but got into the early habit of sex with young actresses. He believed in himself, his instincts, his will, and his luck. His mouth clenched a cigar while firing off indefatigable show business lines full of panache. These were wisecrack howlers like the infamous remarks of Sam Goldwyn. Zanuck was at a preview once, at Warners, in the early thirties, with the film’s director, Michael Curtiz. Zanuck was in charge of production at Warners then. He felt there was something wrong with this picture they were watching. He tried to spell out what it was, and the anxious Curtiz leaped in with “Wonderful! Darryl! Yes! Yes!” Whereupon Zanuck glared at his unquenchable yes man, and said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t say yes until I finish talking!”4

  Was that Jewish—or simply the kind of sizzling line that a boss might utter in a Hollywood picture (especially one directed by Michael Curtiz)? It’s a laugh line; it’s an assertion of authority, and it’s memorable—it illustrates a way of talking in life that owes a lot to sound pictures. The line rides along with “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” from The Jazz Singer (for which Zanuck won an honorary Oscar as its controlling mastermind).

  Everyone agreed with Darryl Zanuck that he was not Jewish—and people didn’t expect to win arguments with him. But how many people did you ever hear of who were called “Zanuck,” and might have come from Switzerland? Is Zanuck a Swiss name, or is it just the most punchy, catchy handle in the picture business? Darryl was blue-eyed and fair-haired; he was from out of Nebraska. According to Orson Welles, he was also “by all odds the best and brightest of the big studio bosses.”5

  In passing, recollect that Orson Welles sometimes wondered whether both his parents were the advertised article—as in straight Americans; as an orphan, he was significantly raised by a Jewish guardian; he did wonder whether his mother had known a dashing Jewish actor; and he was inclined to rave about the glories of Yiddish literature and theatre—“It was the only international theatre in history. Movies are the second.”6

  This alchemy is crucial in the transactions by which strangers become Americans
when the rest of the world regards the United States as a reckless, slightly disturbed, but beckoning mélange of so many races and nationalities that have not really had time or boredom to be American yet. The cultural importance of the movies was in presenting a persuasive model for style and authenticity, and no group had more to do with that than the Jews who established the picture business. Maybe living creatures as diverse as Cary Grant and Rin Tin Tin found themselves as American role models. Grant, who had grown up as Archie Leach in Bristol, England, with a father named Elias, believed he might be “partly” Jewish. The great Rinty (America’s favorite canine) was actually a French German shepherd puppy, found by an American soldier in the village of Flirey in Lorraine in September 1918. That dog soon became a hero in Warner Brothers films, some of them written by Darryl Zanuck. For much of his life, Charlie Chaplin flirted with the thought that he could have been Jewish.7 The American movie is a lever in the reinvention of the self—and its eternal discontent with fixed reality.

  This spreading confusion of identities is a measure of collapsing times. We’ll see, because the process continues. But in the Warner Brothers we face an attempt—organic but crazy, yearning yet hardly planned—by early-twentieth-century Jews to be American. That’s how Zanuck—ten years his junior—had such an influence on Jack Warner. And whereas Harry, Albert, and Sam were escaped from eastern Europe, their kid brother, Jack, was show business or North American.

  That’s not to attack Jack, or to excuse him, but it’s surely relevant that these Warner brothers lived at a moment when the world was suddenly aroused by the question of what it meant to be Jewish. In so many respects, the substance of spiritual belief was disappearing in the West. But at the same time a new urge to tell stories arose—stories that were parables on community and individualism, success and responsibility. The thing Orson Welles noted—the way in which Yiddish storytelling produced and was then supplanted by the movies—meant that in a culture abandoning religion, myths were made fresh and accessible to the ragbag of Americans. Those stories taught immigrants English—and a thought of being American.