With the arrival of the Talkies, numerous possibilities opened up for the film industry. The 1927 sound sensation caused by Al Jolson’s performance in The Jazz Singer was swiftly followed by the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York (1928), which grossed over a million dollars. Studio heads were keen to cash in. The ‘advent of sound’, as Wodehouse recalls, ‘had made the manufacture of motion pictures an infinitely more complex affair than it had been. It was no longer possible to just put on a toga, have someone press a button, and call the result The Grandeur That was Rome or In the Days of Nero. A whole new organization was required. You had to have a studio Boss to boss the Producer, a Producer to produce the Supervisor, a Supervisor to supervise the Sub-Supervisor. […] And above all, you had to get hold of someone to supply the words’. It was a new gold rush for writers, and the slogan was ‘Come one, come all, and the more the merrier.’ The late thirties were, Wodehouse recalls, ‘an era when only a man of exceptional ability and determination could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other’.1
The Wodehouse finances had taken a number of severe blows in the Wall Street Crash, and income tax liabilities were an ongoing worry, so Wodehouse was keen to increase his income. But he could never have predicted the sort of figures that would be on offer. In 1929, Wodehouse accepted a staggering deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – he was to be paid over $2,000 dollars a week, for six months, with a further option of six months.
As he rolled into Pasadena station, he encountered a new and strange atmosphere. Hollywood seemed, to Wodehouse, something like Alice’s Wonderland, with its ‘[t]all eucalyptus. . . blue-flowered jacarandas, feathery pepper trees dotted with red. . . And what looked like a thousand shiny new cars’.2 Wodehouse settled with Ethel into a rented house belonging to the Hollywood screenwriter and actress Elsie Janis, and set to work as an MGM employee. Leonora, too, joined the payroll for a while, while Ethel visited the local resort spas, and mingled with Hollywood society. Maureen O’Sullivan, the Irish beauty catapulted to fame by MGM, and soon to star in Tarzan the Ape Man, lived nearby [see plate 25]. Other members of their circle included the glamorous actress Norma Shearer, their old friend and former Broadway star Edward G. Robinson, and Boris Karloff, famed for his role as Frankenstein’s monster. Wodehouse later became friends with many of the English expatriates in Hollywood, including C. Aubrey Smith, the elderly actor and former Test cricketer. When Smith founded the Hollywood Cricket Club, Wodehouse acted as Secretary at their inaugural meeting.
Despite these new friends, letters were particularly important to Wodehouse at this time, as he felt the isolation of life in Los Angeles deeply. A sprawling city, ‘some thirty miles long’, in a huge state, within a vast country, Hollywood was quite removed from the rest of the world in both geographical and cultural terms.3
Wodehouse’s job was not a demanding one, but it was utterly different from what he had experienced in his writing life to date. He was ‘set […] on to dialogue’ movies alongside eight or more collaborators, with the result that the script was continually changing, often beyond recognition. Wodehouse was called on to add moments of authentic English charm – the ‘Earls and butlers’, as he put it: ‘the system is’, he explained, ‘that A. gets the original idea, B. comes in to work with him on it, C. makes a scenario, D. does preliminary dialogue, and then they send for me to insert Class and what-not. Then E. and F., scenario writers, alter the plot and off we go again’.4
A few years later, Wodehouse would go on to produce a series of satirical writings about the Hollywood he had known, as well as the novels Laughing Gas and The Old Reliable. In stories such as ‘Monkey Business’ and ‘The Rise of Minna Nordstrom’, Wodehouse skilfully caught what he saw as the ludicrous emptiness of this world of mass-produced ‘culture’ and grasping short-termism. In one story, Wodehouse takes a swipe at the mindless consensus that he saw powering the film industry, encapsulated in the figure of the ‘Nodder’:
It is not easy to explain […] the extremely intricate ramifications of the personnel of a Hollywood motion-picture organization. Putting it as briefly as possible, a Nodder is something like a Yes-Man, only lower in the social scale. […] The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes. He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man – or Vice-Yesser, as he is sometimes called – and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed, do the Nodders begin to function. They nod.5
While never a ‘nodder’, Wodehouse’s criticisms of studio life are initially tempered by a sense of loyalty to the studio. Gradually, his dislike for Hollywood (‘this place is […] loathsome’, he reports), and his longing for home emerge.6
As an Englishman in Beverly Hills, Wodehouse was not really an outsider. Hollywood, after all, was a place inhabited by displaced individuals. As Norman Murphy points out, ‘all the studio heads, except one, were Jewish immigrants from Europe’ for whom English was a second language.7 Nobody in Hollywood was really at home. Where Wodehouse stood out was in his wry indifference to the whirl of activity. For most of Hollywood’s inhabitants, such as ex-glove salesman Sam Goldwyn and ex-pool hustler Harry Cohn, this was a place of ultimate opportunity. Hollywood was ‘a place of despots’, all of them vying for attention.8 Neither needing nor wanting this sort of fame or approval, Wodehouse looked on at this ‘dream world’ – a ‘combination of Santa Claus and Good-Time Charlie’ – with a raised eyebrow.9
Indeed, in this era of cultural pronouncements, one can see a touch of the cultural critic about Wodehouse. Throughout these letters, one can see his repeated concern with a sense of slipping values. Some of his scorn was directed towards what he saw as the emptiness of modern culture. Elsewhere, his focus is on the lowering of standards. While his later letters show a certain prurient interest in the seamier side of Hollywood, in the late twenties and early thirties this sort of moral atmosphere was anathema. His daily swims, frequently mentioned in his letters, seem like so many subconscious efforts to ward off the American sloth. He clings to his boarding school regime of regular exercise, and prides himself on looking ‘like something out of Sapper’, the archetypal British bulldog.10
Wodehouse disliked much of the work that he was asked to do. ‘It needs’, he told Townend, ‘a definitely unoriginal mind’, but there was one notable bugbear in this period at the studio.11 Rosalie, a musical comedy set in an imaginary kingdom, had been bought by MGM for Hearst’s mistress, the movie star Marion Davies, and numerous writers had been charged with the task of rewriting it. Wodehouse had originally had a part in the creation of Rosalie as a musical comedy at the Amsterdam Theatre in 1928. He was now given what he saw as a particularly tiresome job: recasting the newly plotted film scenario of Rosalie as a novelette, which would then be sold as a spin-off product. Much of Wodehouse’s other work hit the cutting-room floor, as ideas changed and writers rotated – and the novelette, once completed, was also deemed to be surplus to requirements.
Reflecting in an interview on his time spent working on Rosalie, Wodehouse recalls that ‘it wasn’t my story. But it was a pleasant light little thing, and no one wanted me to hurry. When it was finished they thanked me politely and remarked that as musicals didn’t seem to be going so well, they guessed they would not use it.’12
Soon, he began to see his role as almost entirely redundant, and focused his energy on his novels and short stories. As he wrote to Denis Mackail, work for Goldwyn ‘cut[s] into my short-story-writing. It’s odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one’s salary.’13 Throughout the letters, one sees a sense that the role of the writer, in Hollywood, had diminished to that of an insignificant bit-part. Showered with money, Hollywood scriptwriters were almost entirely expendable, forced to write in ‘little hutches’ like so many battery-farmed animals, while their product was regarded with some contempt.14 Jack Warner of Warner Bros and Columbia’s Harry Cohn were ‘famous for their refusal to read a book or a play’.15 Wodehouse was not alone in his critique. While Evelyn Waugh condemned the ‘Californian Savages’, Raymond Chandler soon tired of this ‘showman’s paradise’:
To me the interesting point about Hollywood’s writers of talent is not how few or how many they are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve.
[…]
It makes very little difference how a writer feels towards his producer as a man; the fact that the producer can change and destroy and disregard his work can only operate to diminish that work in its conception and to make it mechanical and indifferent in execution.16
As Wodehouse’s Hollywood years unfold, one sees, increasingly, his sense of the place as one of mirages and illusions. With its child stars and gorilla impersonators, Hollywood was nearer to a zoo or a circus than a recognisable world – ‘so unreal’, as Wodehouse put it, as to make one feel ‘removed from ordinary life’.17 Nothing in Hollywood ‘is what it affects to be’: ‘What looks like a tree is really a slab of wood backed with barrels. What appears on the screen as the towering palace of Haroun al-Rashid is actually a cardboard model occupying four feet by three of space. The languorous lagoon is simply a smelly tank with a stagehand named Ed wading around it in bathing trunks.’18 Nathanael West captured the same sense of illusion:
The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneakers with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court.19
In the end, it was Wodehouse’s inability to keep the conventional mask up that led to the end of this period of his Hollywood career. Interviewed about his work, Wodehouse spoke to the journalist Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times, and was candid about the way in which writers were treated and paid. ‘I have’, he claimed, been paid ‘$104,000 for loafing’. ‘I feel as if I have cheated’ the studios, he added cheerfully.20 Wodehouse’s interview made the front page of the Sunday edition of the paper, and outraged both studio and readers. His services, he soon found out, were no longer required – and Hollywood studios began to make massive cutbacks. As the financial situation in America became increasingly unstable, his comments seemed particularly insensitive. ‘I am a sort of Ogre to the studio now’, he confessed.21
Wodehouse, in fact, never worked as little as he claimed in Hollywood. His snipe at the studio was, in part, revenge for the never-used Rosalie novelette, but there was, as McCrum notes, a certain delicious bravado in claiming that his time on the MGM payroll had been spent writing ‘a novel and nine short stories […] brushing up my golf, getting an attractive suntan and perfecting my Australian crawl’.22 As they prepared to leave Hollywood in November 1931, Ethel made elaborate plans for a world cruise, in which she imagined ‘Plum riding camels and elephants and taking pot shots at anything he may see’.23 The plan, in the end, was rejected, and the Wodehouses made their way to France.
1 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘The Girl in the Pink Bathing Suit’, Hollywood Omnibus (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 9 (first published as ‘Slaves of Hollywood’, SEP, 1929).
2 Bring on the Girls, p. 234.
3 PGW to William Townend, 16 January 1931 (Dulwich).
4 PGW to Denis Mackail, 26 June 1930 (Wodehouse Archive).
5 ‘The Nodder’, first published in January 1933 in The Strand, and in the same month in The American as ‘Love Birds’. Repr. in Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935).
6 PGW to Denis Mackail, 28 December 1930 (Wodehouse Archive).
7 Murphy, p. 312.
8 Salman Rushdie, ‘Debrett Goes to Hollywood’, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991), p. 326.
9 ‘The Girl in the Pink Bathing Suit’, p. 9.
10 PGW to Denis Mackail, 26 June 1930 (Wodehouse Archive).
11 PGW to William Townend, 26 August 1931 (Dulwich).
12 Interview, Los Angeles Times, quoted in Robert McCrum, ‘A Lotus Eater in Hollywood’, Observer, 29 August 2004.
13 PGW to Denis Mackail, 26 June 1930 (Wodehouse Archive).
14 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘The Hollywood Scandal’ (1932), Louder and Funnier (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 16.
15 Murphy, p. 313.
16 Evelyn Waugh to A. D. Peters, 21 November 1946 (Austin, Texas); Raymond Chandler, ‘Writers in Hollywood’, Atlantic Monthly 176 (Nov. 1945), p. 52.
17 PGW to Denis Mackail, 26 June 1930 (Wodehouse Archive).
18 ‘The Hollywood Scandal’, p. 15.
19 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (London: Grey Walls Press, 1951), pp. 6–7.
20 Interview, Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1931.
21 PGW to William Townend, 26 August 1931 (Dulwich).
22 McCrum, ‘A Lotus Eater’.
23 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis Mackail, 8 October 1931 (Wodehouse Archive).