When Hollywood Had a King Read online

  Over the course of the years, as Reagan made his remarkable climb, Dunne had ample opportunity to observe him in new roles; but his view of Reagan remained unchanged. “I have never had much use for him ever since my dealings with him in the Hollywood strike,” Dunne commented, “because he played a key role in cooperation with what, in my judgment, were the thoroughly immoral Hollywood producers in league with the thoroughly immoral Chicago gangster Outfit. . . . At least,” he amended slightly, “the union had been controlled by those gangsters and, in my judgment, it was still. And it was operating in conspiratorial cooperation with the Hollywood producers to destroy what was the only honest and democratic trade union movement in Hollywood. Reagan played a key role in that destruction.

  “It’s been difficult for me to believe that he wasn’t aware of what he was doing and with whom he was cooperating,” Dunne went on. “And I also have been convinced that he was rewarded for it. I don’t pretend to charge that he had a prior arrangement with the producers, that the producers agreed, ‘We will do this for you if you do this for us.’ No, I don’t charge that . . . [but] he was at the end or near the end of his acting career, such as it was, and it’s from this period on, after having done this very effective job in the interests of the producers, that his whole success stems. . . . The producers don’t forget their friends, any more than the crime syndicate people forget their enemies.” Dunne alluded to the example of Willie Bioff, who—after having testified for the government in the Hollywood racketeering trial—lived in Phoenix under an assumed name for years, until the morning of November 4, 1955, when he turned on the ignition of his pickup truck and it exploded. “They didn’t forget Willie Bioff,” Dunne concluded, “and the producers didn’t forget Ronald Reagan.”

  The IA’s Roy Brewer and Richard Walsh, and the Teamsters’ Joe Tuohy and Ralph Clare thrived, too. They all sang from the same hymnbook—in the tradition established by Willie Bioff in his heyday—blaming the Communists when any criticism was leveled at them or their allies. Tuohy was no longer even nominally a union man, having been employed by the producers; his place at the head of Teamsters Local 399 had been taken by his assistant, Ralph Clare, who had accompanied him to the secret meetings with the producers in the days just before the lockout. Clare had served on the board of the Hollywood Canteen with Jules Stein, and was a good friend of Wasserman’s. In 1947, Clare became the chairman of an ultraconservative group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (Roy Brewer and Joe Tuohy were members of its executive board). The alliance had been created, according to its statement of purpose, because, “in our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, communists, radicals, and crackpots.” Clare’s affiliation with the organization allowed him, a Teamster, to wear two hats. For example, he wrote a letter to The Tidings, which was published, objecting to the March 1947 report to the archbishop that had blamed the producers for the strike’s continuing. Clare argued that the authors of the report had reached erroneous conclusions because they had not gathered sufficient evidence from all sides. “There are many unions which have close contact with the motion picture studios, although they are not primarily engaged in motion picture work, and whose leaders have intimate knowledge of the personalities involved, of their political adherence, and of the issues. Such a union is the Teamsters,” Clare wrote, unabashedly. “Yet, this informed and unaffected source of information has not been tapped for your report.” He signed his letter, “Ralph Clare, Chairman of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.”

  Victorious allies in the struggle against the CSU—Roy Brewer (left), Ronald Reagan, and Richard Walsh (right)—with Kenneth Thomson, co-founder of the Screen Actors Guild (to Reagan’s right), at the Truman White House in 1949. Screen Actors Guild Archives

  Clare was a good soldier, but Brewer evidently saw himself as a general. And he was one during the dark years of blacklisting that now began to unfold in Hollywood—when MCA, like other agencies, did nothing to fight the blacklist. Robert Gilbert, the labor lawyer, knew Brewer well. “The IA needed somebody squeaky-clean to come out to the Hollywood office, because the CSU was attacking the IA as corrupt—so they brought out Roy Brewer, who had never been in Hollywood in his life,” Gilbert recalled. “They threw him into this very complicated strike situation—which some said was a dress rehearsal for revolution. That led to a close friendship between Brewer and Clare, Brewer and Reagan. When Reagan got that acid threat, he turned to Brewer for protection and support. Reagan thought Brewer was the be-all and know-all in labor. (Indeed, Brewer later claimed credit for Reagan’s moving right, declaring, “I was the man who persuaded Reagan he was on the wrong side.”)

  “Brewer was the keeper of the blacklist,” Gilbert added. “Here’s this little guy from Nebraska. Studio heads would call him up and say, ‘I want to hire this guy—is he okay?’

  “He was powerful!” Gilbert declared. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

  And on the labor front, harmony ruled. An article in Fortune in November 1949 stated that “relations between Hollywood labor and major producers are bathed now in a calm so colossal that the eventful signing in August of a five-year basic agreement between the major film producers and the unions that control most of the technical labor in film production created only a slight ripple of new interest.” For decades to come, neither the IA nor the Teamsters (which would negotiate together, essentially as a unit, with the producers) would call a major strike against the studios. The Screen Actors Guild would, but rarely. And the men who had been shoulder to shoulder in the IA-CSU war—Reagan, Brewer, Clare, Walsh—would eventually find in representing their unions that there was one man among the producers so dominant that he could speak for all the rest; and, powerful as he was, he made them feel that he was not their adversary but their friend. As Brewer said, “Lew was always ready to meet with me, and listen. He worked with me. And he understood me better than most people.”

  It was at this moment, with Hollywood’s labor situation pacified, that Wasserman was preparing to steer MCA into its next great business. Once again—just as when Stein had started the Music Corporation of America—it was a dispirited time in entertainment. Although the labor peace was certainly a boon to the studio bosses, they had been badly shaken by what was known as the Paramount Decree: in May 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the major studios had to sell their cinema chains, because they had conspired to fix admission prices and had used block booking to force small exhibitors, especially, to take their bad movies along with the good. The roots of this decision extended back to a case brought in 1938 by Thurman Arnold, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Arnold, whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt had chosen to launch his attack against the cartels, had sought to dismantle the vertical integration of production, distri-bution, and exhibition that had enabled the studios to wield power over the international movie industry since the early twenties. The studio bosses had fought this case, and its successor, for the better part of the decade; but in the end, most of what Arnold had envisioned was done (though the studios were, importantly, allowed to keep control over distribution), and the structure was broken apart. It was a radical break. As David Puttnam pointed out in Movies and Money, in 1948 investment in cinemas accounted for 93 percent of all investment in the American movie industry, and production only 5 percent; therefore, “the studios were more akin to real estate companies than to creators of entertainment; and the cinemas served as collateral, which underwrote their activities in production and distribution.” Now, with the forced sale of their cinemas, the studio system gradually began to come apart; studios could no longer afford the vast payrolls required to maintain their long-established stables of talent employed in multiyear contracts, and many of the stars and directors—with the encouragement of MCA—left the studios to form independent production companies. For men like Louis B. Mayer a
nd Adolph Zukor and Jack Warner, their long-accustomed hegemony was fading into memory.

  The Paramount Decree had another effect, too, on the beleaguered studios. In the mid-forties, when television was still embryonic, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, and Paramount had each attempted to start building TV networks of their own; but the Federal Communications Commission had blocked their efforts, awaiting the outcome of the antitrust action. Now, with that decree, the studios’ desire to create networks of their own—a version of cinemas, through which they could control the exhibition of this new medium—was stymied. They could have made filmed product for TV, but that was considered heresy; if they could not control it, then TV was the enemy—and why feed your enemy? Movie attendance fell off dramatically (in 1951, movie admissions were as low as twenty years earlier) and TV was commonly viewed as the culprit. Because the studio bosses were already weakened, reeling from the Paramount Decree and the unraveling of their empires, they may have ascribed to television an even greater destructive force than it actually possessed. But whatever the cause, the industry was filled with doomsayers. David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone With the Wind, made a pronouncement many thought oracular at the time: “Hollywood’s like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.”

  Wasserman did not share this view. Indeed, what was anathema to the moguls was enthralling to him. He would later say he had believed in television’s potential from the start; he liked to mention that he had owned a set in 1940, when he believed there was only one other in all of California. It was an unprepossessing contraption—a big set with a tiny screen that was a mirror when the lid of the machine was raised, and it had images like sticks. “I would take people up to my office to see this box, and all that was on it was a cartoon, Aesop’s Fables. I’d say, don’t you understand it’s going to be in your home? And they’d say, let’s go to the projection room.” While that may have been the reaction of the entertainment cognoscenti, the public’s response was different; in the early forties, Wasserman observed crowds of people standing in front of store windows to watch the TV cartoons, and seeing them so mesmerized, he became even more convinced that TV, like radio before it, was the future.

  It was really not surprising that Wasserman would respond so differently to this new medium than Jack Warner and his compatriots. They were the old guard, defending their fortress, and it was Wasserman, more than any other individual, who had begun to scale the walls. It was he who had advised Olivia de Havilland, repeatedly suspended by Warners for refusing roles, that the Hollywood custom of adding suspension time to stars’ contracts was probably illegal; de Havilland had sued to get out of her contract, and she’d won in a 1944 California Supreme Court decision that undercut the power of the studio system. And it was Wasserman who dealt the studio system an even more decisive blow when he constructed a revolutionary deal for his client Jimmy Stewart in 1950. Wasserman recalled that he made a two-picture deal for Stewart to star in Harvey and Winchester 73; Universal was either to pay Stewart a salary of $200,000 per movie, or half of the movies’ profits. (“Universal didn’t have the $400,000, that’s why they paid the percentage,” Wasserman said.) At a time when the postwar tax rates were as high as 90 percent, the deal was especially advantageous to Stewart, because his income would be spread over the life of the films. Wasserman said that Harvey saw no profits for many years, but Winchester 73 brought him about $800,000 to $900,000. It was a bonanza for Stewart, making him Hollywood’s best-compensated star. By this time, Wasserman had driven stars’ salaries so high that, little by little, studios began to grudgingly accept this new sliding scale. Thus, for the first time, the fact that stars were largely responsible for the success of a movie was reflected in the bottom line. As more and more stars demanded such treatment, their power grew, and the studios’ diminished. And the agent who had shaped this new system (and controlled so much of it through the talent) was, of course, the most powerful of all.

  This altered reality must have been difficult for the autocratic Warner to assimilate—sometimes he seemed to react reflexively, as though he still ruled. In April 1950, he barred Wasserman and all his MCA agents—whom he referred to, contemptuously, as “the MCA blackbirds” for their sartorial style—from the Warner lot. According to Wasserman, the trouble had started when Warner had been slow to respond to a deal Wasserman had proposed for Charlton Heston—and Wasserman made the deal with producer Hal Wallis instead. That added insult to injury. (The history between Warner and his former employee, Wallis, was acrimonious; the two had worked together on Casablanca, and “at the Academy Awards, they both started down the aisle but Wallis picked up the award! So Warner fired him,” Wasserman recalled.) The day after Warner barred MCA, Wasserman arranged a lunch across the street from the studio lot, with about thirty MCA clients who were working there that day. “Bette Davis showed up, and she said, ‘F— Jack Warner! Let’s have a drink!’ No one left until four that afternoon. And when I got back to the office,” concluded Wasserman, “there was a call from Warner . . . he was so upset I couldn’t tell what he said, I had to call his secretary back and ask her.” The ban was lifted. “It was an emotional thing,” Wasserman continued. “I think he got worried, I might have luncheons once a week—and what would happen to his shooting schedule?” He paused, and added, “Studio heads were funny in those days—so isolated and eccentric.”

  Years later, this would be one of the stories Wasserman would tell and retell with discernible relish. However, while it did serve to demonstrate the power he had been able to lord over Warner, it was not as unprecedented as it might have sounded. In an oral history given to Columbia University by Dore Schary, the producer, screenwriter, and director, Schary recounted a strikingly similar confrontation that had occurred in the thirties between the famous agent Myron Selznick and L. B. Mayer. “Mayer felt that he didn’t have to bother with agents—and he wouldn’t allow Myron Selznick on the lot to talk to some of his stars. Myron had Jean Harlow, and William Powell, and Wallace Beery, and a whole big rack of them. Selznick said that he was now barring MGM. . . . His stars would go off the lot for lunches, and when they were asked where they were going, they’d say, ‘I have to go see my agent. He won’t come on the lot. You don’t want him on and he won’t come on the lot.’ Finally, Mayer had to make an appeal to Myron Selznick. Selznick finally agreed that he would no longer bar MGM.”

  Schary, a Wasserman client, had been a writer at MGM in the thirties and early forties and returned as chief of production from 1948 to 1956. It was a very difficult time; MGM, for so long the richest studio, was suffering badly from the dramatic drop in movie attendance—and the studio system on which it had prospered was in extremis, its troubles exacerbated by Wasserman’s efforts. Regarding the issue of stars’ participation, Schary commented, “This was a trend MGM was very loath to accept. . . . There had always been a feeling that Metro was above and beyond what appeared to be casual trends, that they could keep the company going by stars under contract, and that they did not have to submit to this. . . . It became very apparent that we were beginning to lose people and that we could no longer attract certain people to the studio because we would not give them participation.” While the producers were stubbornly resisting this change, the agents embraced it. “If the producers had been wise enough—and I think in their younger days they would have been wise enough—they would have taken the initiative. You must remember, when all these things happened, L. B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn, the Paramount group, were all older men. . . . They wanted to be left alone, ‘leave things as they are.’ Twenty years before, those same men would have been sharp enough to anticipate all this, and to move quickly. They would have made arrangements with stars, given them a piece of the picture, done this and that, and prevented the agents from taking over the entire operation. . . . So you had Lew Wasserman, who is . . . the smartest individual m
an I have ever met in pictures. He’s sharp, he’s wise, he has great imagination, and he exudes confidence and enthusiasm. Mr. Schenck once said to me that he would never see Lew Wasserman after 12:00 noon, because he said after 12:00 he could no longer cope with his very bright mind.”

  Warner, too, evidently admired Wasserman, even if he infuriated him. And an exchange of telegrams in April 1951, a year after Warner attempted to bar Wasserman from the lot, shows Warner still trying to exert the kind of control over stars that he had been accustomed to—as well as, half seriously, offering to hire Wasserman.

  “Dear Lew: Didn’t know that Jules was back in business again. You told me he was retired. Why all of a sudden is he in charge of Russell Nype. We have a script he wants to do and we want to make a deal that is satisfactory to all concerned. Needless to contact Jules in Nassau or Palm Beach because we can’t do business in these two ports. We are extremely interested in an exclusive long term motion picture contract with Nype. Would permit him to do state shows and personal appearances at stipulated periods. Television and radio subject our consent. Let me hear from you by return wire how soon we can make this deal and when are you returning. Warm personal regards. Jack Warner.”

  In his return telegram, Wasserman was his succinct self. First, he said, Jules was not in Nassau or West Palm Beach, but Cuba. Second, Jules handled Russell Nype himself. Third, he would be returning from Cuba on Saturday, at which time he, Wasserman, would immediately raise this issue with him. And fourth, if Jules were to fire Wasserman after reading Warner’s telegram—because he so objected to the suggestion that he was even partly retired—”I will look to you for a job.”

  “Dear Lew: Thanks for your wire. Will certainly appreciate your getting into the Nype situation with Jules as soon as he returns. If the fourth condition of your wire ever happens you can certainly hook up with us. Expect to hear from you on your return. Best Wishes. Jack.”