Looks Like We’re Still in Business

SUDDENLY, late in the spring of 1951, the big word around the M-G-M studio was ‘narration’. Having reached the conclusion that his friends and colleagues had loved The Red Badge of Courage because they understood it, and that the public (or at least that very odd sampling of the public that comprises preview-goers) had hated the picture because the public was unable to understand it, Reinhardt, with Huston’s and Schary’s consent, had begun to dub in narration. Only Mayer didn’t think that narration (‘Jabber, jabber, jabber. Who wants to listen?’) or anything else would help. ‘We are using the words of Stephen Crane himself to tell the audience what is happening,’ Reinhardt said to his wife one night, ‘and the picture will start with an introduction that tells the audience that they are going to see a great classic. Dore is writing the introduction himself. L. B. says to me the picture is no good because there is no story. I tell him we are adding narration to the picture, but he says narration won’t help what isn’t there. L. B. is a dangerous man. If you’re his enemy, he destroys you. If you’re his friend, he eats you. John is gone, and now I have to face L. B. alone. I don’t know why it is; every time I go to lunch, I have to run into L. B. Today, on my way to lunch, he came at me like a battleship: “Mr Reinhardt!” Then he told me the same things all over again. “Why don’t you want to make a hit? Why don’t you want to make money for the studio?” Today I said to him, “When John Huston comes to me and says he wants to make a picture, I am honoured. You hired him. I didn’t.” He didn’t hear me. He talks about the picture as though it were refrigerators.’

‘You know, I like Dore,’ Reinhardt went on. ‘Dore still speaks well of the picture. He backed the picture in the beginning and he does not change because of the previews. Dore is a lucky man and a nice man. Dore says to me, “The jury is still out.” ’ Reinhardt laughed. ‘Dore is really lucky. He is on the telephone every day now with Nick Schenck. Dore is a nice man. Nick Schenck thinks the picture might be a bust. But Dore doesn’t want it to happen.’

The next morning, Reinhardt made his daily visit to the studio barber shop, to be shaved. The chief barber, whose name is Mano, lathered Reinhardt’s face and whispered the latest gossip in his ear. At the studio, Mano had the reputation of being an M-G-M authority, having served as L. B. Mayer’s barber for ten years and having seen every M-G-M picture produced in that period. ‘Did you see the list of the ten worst pictures of the year?’ he asked Reinhardt.

‘Dore’s personally produced picture is on it,’ Mano said. ‘The Next Voice You Hear . . . Best. Worst. So many lists. How’s your picture?’

‘L. B. cried at the preview of The Great Caruso,’ Mano whispered, shaving Reinhardt’s chin. ‘Six hundred tears they counted.’

A man sitting in the next chair – Edgar J. Mannix, one of the M-G-M vice-presidents – looked over at Mano and said, ‘You mean six million dollars.’

‘L. B. and Dore,’ Mano whispered soothingly. ‘It’s going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight.’

A week later, another picture personally produced by Dore Schary, Go For Broke!, which was based on the activities of the Japanese-American troops in the European campaigns of the last war, was having what is called an invitational première at the Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood. I attended it with the Reinhardts. On the way to the theatre, Mrs Reinhardt kept up a steady chatter about her French poodle Mocha and Mocha’s resistance to taking pills for his hay fever, but Reinhardt acted as though his mind were on some faraway subject. Mrs Reinhardt asked him several times what was the matter, and each time he replied that nothing was the matter.

Schary’s picture got a big hand. As the Reinhardts and I were driving home, a limousine carrying Schary and his family drew up alongside us. Schary, looking elated, rolled down a window and shouted, ‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Wonderful!’ Reinhardt shouted back, and let the Schary car cut in ahead of him in the heavy traffic.

Ten days after the opening of Go for Broke!, I joined Mayer as he sat in his private dining room at the studio talking about the picture to Arthur Freed, the M-G-M producer of musicals. Mayer had not approved of Go for Broke! ‘I don’t like Japs!’ Mayer said. ‘I remember Pearl Harbour!’ He looked grim. Picking up his private menu, he said he wanted some lamb chops, and Freed said, ‘Likewise.’ Freed remarked that lamb chops were easy to digest. Mayer told Freed about a friend of his who had dropped dead that morning. Heart attack. No warning.

When his chops arrived, Mayer fell to with what seemed to be a hearty appetite. When he had finished, he pushed his plate away. ‘Dore wants to make pictures about Japs,’ he said. ‘All right. I’m through trying to tell him.’ Mayer said that he’d had plenty of disagreements with other M-G-M production heads working under him – especially Irving Thalberg and David Selznick – but they’d always admitted in the end that he was right. ‘Do you know how many times Irving would have seen Quo Vadis?’ he said. ‘He’d have worn out the prints! Or David. That boy could have been one of the outstanding men of our time. Why, he even wrote poetry, and it was beautiful. I told him, “You have an opportunity to be the greatest, and you’re just frittering it away.” He didn’t listen.’

The waitress brought Mayer’s dessert – a bowl of fresh strawberries. ‘I’ll tell you Irving’s words to me,’ he went on, mashing up the strawberries. ‘He was with Laemmle. Making three hundred and fifty dollars a week. Laemmle didn’t like him – a young fella, getting all the attention. I hired him for five hundred dollars a week, and then I asked him, “Why did you leave Laemmle?” He said, “I watched you in New York when you were a distributor of pictures. You were different. I would rather be first violin under your direction than conductor of the orchestra.” Those were Irving’s words to me. After six months, I wanted to make him a partner. Irving knew the business, and what he didn’t know he was willing to learn through work. And he listened to me. Stars. Garbo. I was over in Europe making Ben Hur. They tell me about this girl and the man –’

‘ “Tell him I want him and I want the girl,” I said. Her arms were like that,’ Mayer continued, spreading the fingers of his hands around an imaginary watermelon. ‘She had legs! Fat! But the face! I make a deal. Four hundred a week for her, and a thousand for him to bring her over. I told her American men don’t like fat girls. “Ja, ja, ja, ja.” That’s all she could say. When she got here, she had taken off tremendous weight. “Ja, ja, ja, ja.” ’ Mayer fluttered his lashes like Garbo. ‘No professional I ever handled was as honourable as her. I offered her a hundred and fifty thousand dollars once to hold her in case we made a picture. “Suppose I took the money,” ’ Mayer said, again pretending to be Garbo, ‘ “and then the studio did not do the picture.” Imagine! A few weeks ago, Benny Thau brought her in my office. She wanted to do a story that would never be a hit in this country. In Europe, yes. Here, no. She always said, “I want to play opposite an artist.” Gable? No, she didn’t want Gable. But, you know, I never got mad with her. Turning down a hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Can you question a woman like that?’

‘I’ll never forget the way Irving used to swing his watch when he was thinking,’ Mayer said. ‘He was in my office, telling me a story. I say, “A man as able as you, you’ve got an inferiority complex.” He goes ahead and tells his story, and I don’t like it. I say, “Irving, I don’t like it.” He starts acting out the story. It’s The Red Headed Woman. For Jean Harlow. I say, “Irving, you’re going to jail. Tell the truth. It’s a wonderful thing to tell the truth. Jean Harlow, she’s a platinum blonde – that’s the truth.” Irving says the hair won’t show. That was Irving and I working together. He’d get mad. He’d come back. Then he’d start again. He’d always come back. That I like. Stand up!’ he cried abruptly, looking at me and standing up. ‘I stand up for you. Why? I stand up for a lady.’ He sat down. ‘Nowadays, there’s no manners. He’s making pictures about the Japs. Last week, who went to see the picture? All the Japs! This week, the bottom fell out of his box office.’

Sam Spiegel flew in to Hollywood from London for a few days to take care of some business matters. He telephoned me to say that he had left Huston, sick in bed with the flu, twenty-four hours before in a hotel in London, where Huston had gone on his way to Africa. ‘I have never seen John so depressed. He is so shocked and disappointed because of the bad reaction to The Red Badge of Courage,’ Spiegel said. ‘I have never been so rushed. I just had my smallpox for Africa. In New York, I get the tetanus. The typhus I’ll get when I go back to London. I have a million things to do. I can’t be bothered worrying about M-G-M’s pictures; otherwise I would call Dore and tell him not to touch John’s picture. Too bad. I guess the picture is a bust.’

‘You know, I really like Dore Schary,’ Reinhardt said as we drove from the Reinhardts’ house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard to a theatre in the town of Pacific Palisades for the third preview of The Red Badge of Courage. The picture was being shown for the first time with narration, with a booming voice dubbed in for Tim Durant’s thin, high-pitched one, with the scene of the dead soldier in the woods cut, and with some other slight changes that Reinhardt thought would increase the audience’s understanding of what the picture was about. ‘Dore is one of the few sympathetic executives I know,’ Reinhardt went on. ‘He called me today and he said, “Don’t worry. Don’t be disturbed. I am coming with a baseball bat, and anybody who doesn’t like the picture I will hit over the head.” ’

All the leading M-G-M executives attended this preview, with the exception of L. B. Mayer, whose absence was puzzling to some people. The picture in its new form opened with a shot of the cover of the Stephen Crane novel. James Whitmore, the actor, had been chosen for the role of the narrator, and as the book was opened, Whitmore was heard delivering the introduction written by Dore Schary, in which it was explained that the picture was based on a classic written in 1894, and it was pointed out emphatically that the novel had been ‘accepted’ by critics and public alike as a classic story of war’. ‘Stephen Crane wrote this book when he was a boy of twenty-two. Its publication made him a man,’ Whitmore said. A portrait of Stephen Crane was flashed on the screen. The introduction explained, further, that Stephen Crane’s book had a story. ‘His story is of a boy [the Youth] who, frightened, went into a battle and came out of it a man with courage,’ Whitmore said, in Schary’s words (Huston’s idea of the theme of the movie, which was simply that courage is as unreasoning as cowardice, was not alluded to in the introduction), and then Whitmore said that the remainder of the narration was taken from the classic itself.

The third preview audience was no more and no less respectful than the first two had been. People did not seem impressed by the fact that they were seeing a classic. Many people laughed at the tragic scenes, exactly as people in the other audiences had laughed; just as many others seemed shaken or moved by the same scenes. A shot of a crazed soldier marching in a line of wounded and singing ‘John Brown’s Body’ while keeping time with a tree branch for a baton had been received at the previous showings with some laughter as well as horror. This audience laughed or acted horrified, too. The death scenes of the Tall Soldier, played by John Dierkes, and the Tattered Man, played by Royal Dano, had been hooted and jeered at by the audiences at the earlier previews, and they were similarly received now. Some young patrons had giggled and elderly patrons had walked out on an especially noisy scene showing the Youth, in his flight from battle, coming upon an artillery battery, and some young patrons giggled and elderly patrons walked out on the scene now. On the other hand, some patrons previously had given the movie their quiet attention, and there were patrons now who did the same.

After the showing, the executives and Reinhardt gathered around Schary in the lobby. He seemed to have a new attitude towards the picture. There was no baseball bat in his hand. He looked angry.

‘Gottfried, the way this picture plays now, it’s got no story,’ Schary said.

Reinhardt glanced quickly at Margaret Booth, at Johnny Green, and at Bronislau Kaper, who nodded in agreement as Schary said that he thought the pattern of the battle scenes was wrong. He suggested changing the order of certain scenes and eliminating others.

‘We make these changes, we’ll bring the picture into its proper focus,’ Schary said.

Schary said that he wanted to cut out the death scene of the Tattered Man. Huston and Reinhardt had often said that it was not only the best scene in The Red Badge of Courage but the best scene of its kind ever made, and that it brought out some of the essence of the novel.

‘The construction of the sequence in which the troops are withdrawn is bad,’ Schary went on in an indignant tone. ‘You can’t have ‘em going back and forth, back and forth. You’ve got to get the audience worked up, and then you’ve got to deliver. Like you do with a dame. The way you have it now, Gottfried, you get the dame interested and then the guy leaves her.’

‘Get ‘em ready and charge!’ Schary said, raising a clenched fist. ‘Charge, Gottfried! Build to a climax, and bam!’

‘Maybe what we need is more of the kind of effect we had in Go for Broke!’ Schary said.

‘Correct!’ said Bronislau Kaper, who six months before had called the scene ‘overwhelming’ and had been so proud of the combination of sharp trumpet (for the military effect) and gay harmonica (for the ironic effect) he had worked out for the scene.

‘He’s absolutely right!’ said Margaret Booth, who had sent Huston a memo eight months before saying that the scene was ‘simply wonderful’.

Reinhardt’s face turned red. He stared at Schary in silence and then said slowly, ‘No, Dore. I don’t see it that way.’

‘Get ‘em ready, Gottfried, and it’ll be a good picture,’ Schary said. ‘It’ll play like a doll.’ He did not seem to have noticed Reinhardt’s objection. ‘They’ll cheer.’ He clapped a hand on Reinhardt’s shoulder. ‘I’m leaving. See ya at the factory, kid.’ He walked off.

Albert Band came up to Reinhardt. ‘Best preview cards so far,’ he said. ‘We got several Outstandings.’

‘Now, on top of everything, I have a fight with Dore,’ Reinhardt said, as I walked with him and Mrs Reinhardt to their car. ‘I told John till I was blue in the face we should have only one battle. John is lost in the jungles of Africa and I have to fight with Dore.’

On our way back to the Reinhardts’ house, Reinhardt kept on complaining that now he would have to argue with Schary, particularly about saving the Tattered Man’s death scene.

‘I must tell you, Gottfried,’ said Mrs Reinhardt, ‘you are the only man I know who will make himself a martyr. For what? For a scene that irritates everybody? I tell you, everybody hates that scene.’

‘They loved it until now,’ said Reinhardt. ‘The greatest thing in the picture.’

‘Gottfried! Look!’ Mrs Reinhardt cried suddenly, as Reinhardt slowed the car for a traffic light on Wilshire Boulevard. She pointed out the window. Louis B. Mayer was walking, with great energy, along the street; he was taking his nightly constitutional.

Reinhardt gave a sigh and nodded his head knowingly. ‘He wasn’t there tonight,’ he said. ‘I was so happy to think I no longer had to fight with him. Now I find out I have to fight anyway. I have to fight with Dore.’

‘All right,’ Reinhardt said grimly, as he drove past Mayer. ‘Mayer is leaving the studio. Eddie Mannix told me the day of the Go for Broke! preview. L. B. Mayer is leaving M-G-M.’

The next day Reinhardt found several preview cards on the desk in his office. They ranged from one marked by a ‘Male – Over 45’ that said, ‘It all stinks. Talk, talk, and bum-bum boring,’ to one marked by ‘Female – 31–45’ that said, ‘I will tell everyone I know not to miss it. Pictures of quality, poetically conceived and executed with originality, are rare. This is one of the greatest ever made.’ Reinhardt sent the cards to Schary, along with a memo:

Dear Dore:

These cards came in today and I happened to find them on my desk. I wish you would read them. Not that they make a special point, or one we don’t know ourselves – not that they can teach us much (in fact, one of them attacks something we know has helped the picture enormously, if only because it killed every single bad laugh – the narration) – but I do think they bear out what I was trying to articulate this morning: those who don’t like the picture will never like it. I doubt that with the material at hand we can make them. Those who like it – well, they just like it. They may object to this or that detail, but they will like the quality. And that is the only thing we’ve got to sell, and that is the only reason why you and I wanted to make the picture.

Gottfried

A couple of days later, Schary personally took over the supervision of changing The Red Badge of Courage. I found him sitting at his table in his office, with his sleeves rolled up. ‘While the narration helped, the big trick was setting up an outside voice saying, “Look, this is a classic”,’ he told me. (The big trick had been achieved by his introduction.) ‘It set up the proper frame of reference. It identified the picture, and now the first third of the picture plays like a doll. Now’ – he put his feet up on a stack of M-G-M manuscripts on his desk – ‘the trick is to make the points of the story clear without disturbing the integrity of the picture. I’m reconciled to one thing. There’s a group of people who, no matter what we do, won’t like the picture, so we’ve got to play to those who will. This is what I’m gonna do with the picture: The way Gottfried and John had the picture, the regiment begins to charge and then withdraws and then charges again. The audience anticipates a climax that does not come, because the regiment does not go through with the first charge. I’m gonna take the two charges and make them one. That’ll help the audience. The audience feels the picture is diminishing. “Is the Youth gonna have the courage to charge again?” is too subtle a concept for the audience. They want that mental relief. They want the satisfaction. Then when the charge comes, we’ll stay with it. And the audience goes along! And bam!’ Schary pounded a fist into the palm of his other hand.

‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Red Badge,’ Schary continued. ‘I’m gonna see the picture with the changes tonight. I’m doing an experiment. I’m cutting out the Tattered Man’s death scene. I think it won’t work, but I want to look at it that way. One thing keeps circulating in my head. The audience loses sympathy for the boy when he runs away from this hurt and bleeding man. I wrote to Gottfried about it. He sent me some of the preview cards and I told him you have to approach these things with firm conviction but with an open mind, with passion and yet reasonableness, with experience and yet the desire to be bold and new. I told him there was no easy way to make pictures. They all pull at your guts and at your mind. I told Gottfried to keep his heart brave, and that I wouldn’t hurt his picture ever.’

Schary was silent for a moment, and then went on, ‘The trouble with this job is if you’re a fella who never wavers, they say you’re an obstinate son of a bitch. If you change your mind, then they say, “You can talk him into anything.” I know that there’s a lot of criticism of me – of how I want to like people and how I want them to like me. If I’m honest, I have to say it’s something deeper, but it is also a weakness.’ Schary paused, as though embarrassed at admitting a weakness. ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody, and I don’t like to be hurt myself. You try desperately to work out a relationship with people. Whatever way you do it, it doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other. Zanuck doesn’t care about whether he’s gonna hurt someone. But it doesn’t help him. It wouldn’t make my job any easier if I did it his way.’

As I was leaving Schary’s office, I met Albert Band, who was going in. He said he had an appointment with Schary to talk about an original story he had written. ‘I prefer direct contact with Dore to going through Gottfried,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Reinhardt said to his wife at their house that evening. He was going over to Schary’s to see what had been done to his picture. ‘This morning, I told Dore I understand his problem but he must not get panicky. He’s going ahead without me. I don’t understand. So many of them loved the picture. John isn’t here, and it’s terribly unfair. It puts me in a bad position.’

Reinhardt said he had to be at Schary’s house at a quarter to ten and left. Mrs Reinhardt asked me to stay with her while he was gone, and, as we sat around, with Mocha lying at her feet munching contentedly on pistachio nuts, she talked at some length about problems of life in southern California, including dresses (‘Nobody in this entire city knows how to fit the bosom’); coats (‘You don’t have to go to I. Magnin or to Teitelbaum for a mink coat any more. They are selling them now in the Thrifty Drug-stores’); hairdressers (‘They never give you anything to read. Every time I pick up a movie magazine, all I find is “The Happy Home Life of June Allyson” ’); history of the cinema (‘I wish Gottfried were Baby LeRoy. Baby LeRoy retired at the age of four and a half with four million dollars in the bank’); and literature (‘Gottfried’s latest writer has been out here for ten weeks on a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week, week-to-week basis. Now he tells Gottfried, “I need more time. I’ve got to live with the characters awhile. I don’t hear the drums yet.” He is like a writer I know who is doing a screenplay for Sam Goldwyn and says, “Sam Goldwyn is to pictures what Aristotle was to the drama” ’).

Three hours passed before Reinhardt came back. ‘I need a stiff drink,’ he said. He poured a stiff drink and drank it at one gulp. He poured another and sat down. He shook his head sadly. ‘Love’s labour’s lost,’ he said. ‘Love’s labour’s lost. They took out the cavalry charge, which Margaret Booth calls the roughriders. They took out the wounded man singing “John Brown’s Body”, and another wounded man who complains about generals. They took out the veterans, and Dore turned to me and said, “Do you miss it? I don’t miss it at all.” They took out the Tattered Man’s death scene. Again Dore turned to me and asked did I miss it. It reminds me of my good friend Bernie Hyman, who wanted to put Mozart in The Great Waltz. I said, “You cannot put Mozart in a picture about Strauss.” He said, “Who’s gonna stop me?” Same thing. I don’t know what to say when Dore says, “Do you miss it?” Sure I miss it, but how can you argue about it with Dore?’

They had changed the battle scenes around, he said, to fit Dore’s pattern of battle. ‘Dore doesn’t see the difference,’ Reinhardt said. ‘It’s silly to work on finesse. Nobody appreciates it. Because some people in the audience laughed, they took out the artillery scene John wrote to show what Crane meant when the Youth is running away from the battle and sees the artillerymen still fighting and calls them fools. They took out the key scenes that built the picture up to the feeling Crane had in the novel. I’d like to know what John would have said. It is grotesque. The narration put the audience in the right mood for the picture, and it kept them in the right mood. But suddenly Dore wants to change the picture. It is now like a different picture.’ He spoke in a low monotone, with a good deal of puzzlement. ‘I am stymied,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to combat it. I don’t understand any of them. They loved the picture. And now this is what they are doing to it.’

John Huston’s wife was living at Malibu Beach with their year-old-son, awaiting the birth of their second child. When I went over to see her, she told me she had not heard too much from Huston since he had gone abroad to make The African Queen, but in that week she had received two letters. She sat on the beach, in the balmy sunshine, reading about her husband’s adventures in the Belgian Congo:

Last year there were some man-eating lions about, and they seized the natives out of their huts and dined on them. Every morning and evening we go after elephant. I’d like to get one with really big tusks. In fact, we’ve got him all picked out. But so far something has always happened so that I couldn’t get a shot. Stalking elephant is most exciting. They don’t see at all well and if one stays down wind of them one can get very close. Yesterday morning we were after them in some forest and we weren’t more than six or eight yards away from them finally. Just a little wall of vines between us and them. I tell you it gave me a very funny feeling.

To begin with, I didn’t get my elephant. Never saw the big tusker again. . . . The company, including Katie and Bogie, will arrive tonight. They’ve been in Stanleyville for several days. Naturally, I haven’t seen any of them yet. Sam is with them. I’m anxious to get him here, what with mosquitoes and leopards and snakes and all.

On 23 June 1951, the local newspapers carried front-page stories announcing that L. B. Mayer was quitting M-G-M, the studio he had helped establish twenty-six years before. One story said, ‘The sixty-five-year-old production chief, one of the giants of the film industry, started more rumours brewing by adding that he is not retiring. “I am going to remain in motion-picture production, God willing,” he said. “I am going to be more active than at any time during the last fifteen years. It will be at a studio and under conditions where I shall have the right to make the right kind of pictures – decent, wholesome pictures for Americans and for people throughout the world who want and need this type of entertainment.” ’ Another story pointed out that Mayer had been dissatisfied with M-G-M policies since the appointment of Dore Schary as chief of production three years before; that he had been in disagreement for a long time with Nicholas M. Schenck, president of Loew’s; and that for seven consecutive years he had received the highest salary in the United States.

Now that the news was official, people in the industry seemed rather shocked by it. Many who had formerly spoken harshly of Mayer now spoke sympathetically.

‘After all those years on the throne!’ an M-G-M vice-president said to Reinhardt. ‘What’s going to happen to him now in this lousy, fake town?’

Reinhardt gave a short, cynical laugh. ‘I am rather proud that I have never, during my eighteen-year relationship with M-G-M, kowtowed to L. B.,’ he said. ‘I marvelled at him. I was amused by him. I was afraid of him, and sometimes I hated him. I never flattered him. I never flattered myself that he liked me. And I never believed that Mayer would really leave the studio.’

The two men reminisced about Mayer’s hey-day. The vice-president knew a man in New York who had once mentioned the size of Mayer’s salary to Schenck. Schenck, who, though president of the company, took a smaller salary himself, had waved a disparaging hand and said, ‘Oh, Louie likes that sort of thing.’

Two days after the news about Mayer was out, The Red Badge of Courage was previewed again, at the Encino Theatre, in Encino. Nobody looked for Mayer this time. When I arrived, I found Dore Schary beaming at a placard that announced the next attraction, Go for Broke! ‘It’s gonna play here all next week,’ he said.

The Tattered Man’s death scene had definitely been cut out, and most of the other changes that Reinhardt had seen at Schary’s house had now been made permanent. The battle sequences added up to an entirely different war from the one that had been fought and photographed at Huston’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. The elimination of scenes accounted for part of the difference. The old man with the lined face who was digging was gone, the ragged veterans gibing at the recruits both before and after a battle were gone. Many small touches – brief glimpses of the men at war – had been trimmed, including a close-up of a wounded man berating an officer for ‘small wounds and big talk’. The last shot in the picture – of the Youth’s regiment marching away from the battlefield – which Huston had wanted to run long, had been cut to run short. (Reinhardt had succeeded in getting Schary to restore the wounded man singing ‘John Brown’s Body’ and part of the scene of the Youth shouting at the artillerymen.) The revision had some odd results. Audie Murphy, who played the Youth, started to lead a charge with his head wrapped in a bandanna, rushed forward without the bandanna, and then knelt to fire with the bandanna again around his head.

The audience reaction seemed to be friendlier, although there still were walk-outs and laughter at tragic scenes. Schary emerged from the theatre and, as Reinhardt came over to him, Schary grinned and said confidently that the picture was now a doll. ‘Everything is better now, sweetie,’ he said to Reinhardt. ‘The audience understands this boy now.’

The picture was better without it, said Lawrence Weingarten, an M.G.M. executive. ‘Now Dierkes stands out as a single vignette,’ he said.

‘You’re wrong, Gottfried,’ said Schary. He turned to Weingarten. ‘Did you miss the scene?’ he asked.

Reinhardt drew a deep breath. ‘Missing it or not missing it is not the point,’ he said.

Schary left, and Reinhardt began to read some preview cards Albert Band had put in his hands.

‘ “A war picture about the Civil War is ridiculous at this time,” ’ Reinhardt read aloud. He shrugged and gave the cards back to Band. ‘The funny thing is that tonight John would have sided with Dore.’

‘John doesn’t care,’ Kaper said. ‘Call me Metro-Goldwyn-Kaper, but I tell you the purpose of a motion picture is to be successful.’

‘This picture will not make money,’ said Reinhardt. ‘I knew it the day I saw the first rushes.’

‘She hated it,’ said Reinhardt. ‘She wouldn’t talk to me when I told her I was going to make it.’ He looked blankly at his wife, at Kaper, at Band, and at me. ‘So now I do not have a great picture and it will be a flop.’

Two days later, Reinhardt told me that he had made a study of the latest preview cards. The percentage of members of the audience who said they would recommend the picture to their friends was much higher. ‘That is the important thing,’ he said. ‘I had a very serious talk with Dore. He will accept the responsibility for the picture as it is now, and he will write this to John. He is going to release the picture as it now is. He said he would be a bad executive if he let the picture out any other way.’ Reinhardt did not sound happy, but he sounded happier than he had two nights before.

We’re in a place called Biondo that’s on the Ruiki River about thirty miles from Pontiaville and the Lualaba. But what a long thirty miles it is. Once a week provisions are brought in and the exposed film is taken out. There hasn’t been very much rain (for the Congo) and the river has fallen several feet so that now it’s just barely navigable. . . .

At about the time Huston was writing this, Reinhardt, who had not heard anything at all from him since the first preview of their picture, sat down alone at home one evening after dinner and typed out a letter to him by the one-finger method:

Mr John Huston

Darkest Africa

Dear John:

This is not an official letter. This is not the producer writing the director, but rather the Tall Soldier addressing the Youth. For despite the physical incongruities implied in this statement, that is exactly how I feel: like the Tall Soldier, having ‘in his ignorance’ held the line, now giving up his soul, telling the Youth who ran away what happened. ‘Laws, what a circus!’

Lacking all signs of life from you, I find it difficult to carry the analogy much further. I am too unfamiliar with your present circumstances, although I presume that on a Spiegel location you will have had a brush with a Tattered Man, a very short one, to be sure, for the Tattered Man turned out to be one of the first casualties, in more ways than one, and is one of the main reasons for this accusatory confession.

However, whatever these transitory episodes, one development is inevitable, one happening is sure to be in store for you: you will one day return to your regiment, and that will be painful. True, your desertion will not have been noticed. People will say you have been fighting somewhere ‘on the right’. And you will say we have seen nothing of the real fighting. But it will be painful just the same. For, no matter what anybody says, you will find your regiment decimated. Irretrievable casualties will stare in your face, and the survivors are bruised and battered and bitter.

The Tall Soldier will be gone, or at least his soul. The real adversary of all of us, Louis, the Captain – he will be gone. The minor executives, the Lieutenants, will be, as usual, asleep. But in Dore you will find again your Friend. For that he is.

He did have his moments of wavering, and serious moments, too. When, in the heat of battle, he parted with his watch, when he cut out the death of the Tattered Man, when he wanted to cut out ‘John Brown’s Body’ (or shall I say: ‘John’s Body’?), a surgical operation which I was able to prevent him from performing, when he shortened the last shot of the picture, when he eliminated the first veterans as well, maybe, deep in his heart, sometimes he, too, felt tempted to run away. And the only reason he stuck it out in the end was that he was more afraid of the Captain than of the public. Be that as it may, he did stick it out. And he is a Friend. And, whatever his mistakes (and who knows, maybe they aren’t even mistakes; maybe he is right?), if this war of ours should by a miracle, in spite of all the confusion, the intramural disagreements, the unpopularity of the cause, the abundance in casualties, be crowned by victory, he will in his way be as responsible for it as the Tall Soldier or even the Youth.

But even if you should disagree with him completely, your position will be a weak one. Just as the Youth’s triumph, when he returns the watch to the Friend, is a hollow one, no arguments of yours can retroactively make up for your absence. Right or wrong, the decisions in battle must be made by those who take part in the fighting. As you know, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the strategy may be. The test of battle is what counts. So, all that remains for you upon your return is to ‘get mad’ and, even if somewhat belatedly, to become a hero, and to fight bigger and better battles, make better, if not necessarily bigger, pictures, and stay with them.

This, in short, is what happened: after you left us, there was a long lull in the fighting. The picture was taken off the release schedule and all decisions were postponed until, as we discussed doing the day before your departure, we had another preview with narration. Only four weeks ago did we have this preview. The reason for this delay was that we couldn’t get into the dubbing rooms. A lot of other products had to be rushed through first. Unfortunately, it leaked out what kind of an audience reaction we had had at the first two previews and there were some damaging items in the press to that effect. Especially, a New York Times story did word of mouth a good deal of harm. Professional circles in New York and locally were whispering that M-G-M had a dud on its hands and didn’t know what to do with it. Some went so far as to assert that The Red Badge was so bad it couldn’t be released. There were those who conceded that the picture may very well be an artistic achievement but would surely be a commercial disaster. There was very little I could do to stem this tide of unfavourable and often vicious comment, especially as some of it unquestionably emanated from the studio itself. The New York Times man, for instance, told me that his information came directly from one of our executives. Naturally, the whole Mayer situation, which, thank God, has since come to its dénouement, did not help matters any.

Reinhardt told Huston about the picture’s new opening, which involved the shots of the book and the portrait of Crane, about Schary’s introduction and about the narration, which ‘seemed to succeed in keeping the audience concentrated on the Youth’s inner development’. ‘Fewer people walked out,’ he said, ‘and while I did not kid myself and still felt that a large part of the audience did not care for the picture at all, I was quite satisfied with our effort. I felt we had a very distinguished, immensely beautiful, and, to those who appreciated it, very moving and even great picture.’ He then said that Schary, seeing the picture for the first time with an audience, had become worried:

Dore had secretly higher hopes for the picture box-officewise than I. I was long resigned to the limited appeal I believed we could count on. And all I tried to do was to put the picture in its best possible shape to further this appeal, recognizing fully its limitations. Dore was not quite in the same mood. He wanted to conquer the resistance of the audience, which he clearly – and we both – felt. I, frankly, believed that was futile. And dangerous to boot. Because I seriously questioned our ability to win the hearts of those who objected to the picture basically; those who hated it. On the other hand, we might easily, in trying to win them, lose those who were already our friends, those who loved the very things the others hated. Actually, there wasn’t much of a fight. I was in a very bad position to fight. Dore had behaved wonderfully all along in the face of violent opposition, bordering on sabotage. I had to be – and am – very grateful to him for that. In acting so courageously, he assumed a definite and heavy responsibility for the picture. How could I deny him the privilege to salvage a million-and-three-quarter-dollar investment?

It took Reinhardt several more hours to outline the changes that had been made in the picture. And then he wrote:

Well, John, I felt very bad. Except for the time when I finally gave in to you on Audie, I hadn’t been that miserable. You see, I had been able to fight all studio opposition, because I always had the deep conviction that I was helping make a work of art. Not these two times. The fact that I could have never won my fight without Dore’s blessing made this last situation only more difficult and painful. I never harboured much hope for a commercial success. I know you did. I reminded Dore of his letter to Mayer where he explained that this kind of picture should be made by a studio like M-G-M regardless of commercial considerations. It was to be a ‘classic’. Mayer and all the other executives loathed the idea. To go ahead with the project under the circumstances was a fateful decision for a producer. More than for a director. A producer is not supposed to divorce his judgement, from commercial considerations. Even the head of a studio can sometimes with impunity think in purely artistic terms. He makes forty pictures a year. The producer makes one or two. If those are flops – that’s his product. He is a flop. He may be an ‘artist’ but a flop. I knew and weighed all that. I didn’t care. I was delighted to make this picture with you. Up to these two moments, when I suddenly saw before me the spectre of the unartistic flop.

I sincerely hope that all this is terribly exaggerated. In any event, my dwelling on it seems highly superfluous. The fourth and last preview with these changes (all except the cavalry charge, which I made Dore put back before) went unquestionably much better. The cards too for the first time showed an astonishing improvement. Only thirty per cent would not recommend the picture this time. The picture had lost some of its complexities and colours. It was now a straighter, simpler picture. The consensus was, ‘You can follow it now. You can understand it now.’ Whether that is desirable I shall leave to posterity’s judgement. Anyway, Dore was happy. He felt – and, in a way, was – vindicated. He was sure. Everybody agreed with him. Weingarten, Kaper, the cutters, the assembled studio personnel, even Silvia. It is probably a very fine picture. Everybody tells me it is.

But I would have to lie if I said it was the picture that I had hoped for (even in my ‘limited’ way) or that I wanted to make. I cannot speak for you, of course. For you are not here. But I tried to. In fact, I did. I did try especially to persuade Dore to put back the Tattered Man scene. He was adamant. And, I admit, there is a lot of sense in what he says. And I believe that the audience, or a large part of it, agrees with him. Certainly very few will miss the death of the Tattered Man, since they haven’t seen it. But I have seen it.

I would never have made this picture without you, John. I wanted it to be a John Huston picture. For it to be anything else now seems to me senseless. I told Dore that. Dore thinks it still is. Maybe he is right. Everybody tells me so. Maybe I have a special idea of a John Huston picture. Maybe even more special than John Huston has.

Dore told me that he would write you, that he accepts the whole responsibility for the present cuts, that he knows he is right, that this is one of those times when an executive has to step in and make the final decision – if he wants to be an executive.

I sincerely hope that he is right. I pray that he is right. I know that I have done everything I could to make this what it should be. I pray that the discrepancy between what it should be and what it is is not too great. I wish nobody ill. I believe in sincerity and friendship and talent. Yet I realize that these three priceless qualities can be easily defeated by geography and power. I bow smilingly and, as I said before, without ill will. And with humility. Because I can be terribly wrong.

Good luck, John.

Yours always,

Gottfried Reinhardt

Huston’s reply, a cable from darkest Africa, was briefer. He said, ‘DEAR GOTTFRIED. JUST GOT YOUR LETTER. KNOW YOU FOUGHT GOOD FIGHT. HOPE YOU NOT TOO BLOODY MY ACCOUNT. LET’S MAKE NEXT ONE REINHARDT NOT A HUSTON PICTURE. JOHN.’ Reinhardt read the cable, then went upstairs to Schary’s office to ask the man who now had the authority of vice-president in charge of production and of the studio to give him an assignment, in addition to the two he had as a producer, as a director of a motion picture.

Schary was talking to me one afternoon a week later about the future of motion pictures. His photograph had appeared in the Los Angeles papers that morning, along with the news that he had been chosen judge for the Downtown Business Men’s Association talent show, open to boys and girls between the ages of five and eighteen. In the photograph, he had a slight, bemused smile, and his eyes were good-natured. He looked exactly the same now. People in the motion-picture industry, he told me, had to be constantly prepared for change. ‘People who make predictions about change are those who are afraid of it or don’t know about it,’ he said. ‘You say, “Let’s try this” or “Let’s try that”. You watch and see what happens. The pontifical statements about change in our industry amuse me. A certain progression of changes was inevitable in this business even before the advent of TV. Of course, with TV there’s a certain kind of picture we won’t be making. We’ll say, “Let TV make it.” We’ll make fewer pictures and bigger ones – bigger in the sense that we will aim higher.’ He cited Quo Vadis as an example of the kind of picture that TV would never be able to make, an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar picture dealing with the history of Christianity. ‘They sat here with Quo Vadis for years,’ he added, ‘but I activated it. They’d still be stalling around with it if I hadn’t been here.’

Schary was inclined to be gracious about his predecessor, L. B. Mayer. He had heard that Mayer had not liked Go for Broke!, but he thought that Mayer had a right to his opinion. ‘Mayer was surrounded by enormous prestige and enormous power,’ he said. ‘He undoubtedly left his studio with bitterness. Why? What do people tell me? Good things, about myself, not bad things. What did they use to tell him? Good things, not bad things. He had no way of knowing. I have to be careful now not to be put in the same position Mayer was in. I understand Mayer. He’s an old man. He’s rich. He’s healthy. Let him enjoy himself now. I don’t know what the hell he got mad about. He could have been so happy here. Mayer once said to me, “Wouldn’t it be better if you had men with years of experience to sit down with you and help you make decisions? Wouldn’t you like it better?” I said no. This job has to be a one-man operation. There has to be one boss. He listened to everybody and he came up with a piece of junk. Before I arrived at the studio, he made the basic decisions. The committee would tell him stories. They had a story board and two storytellers to help him pick the stories. That was the first thing I felt was all wrong. I wanted the authority to pick the stories. I said I would discuss controversial stories with him and we would come to a decision. I got the authority. And the only difference of opinion I ever had with him was on The Red Badge of Courage. And that was settled amicably. After we decided to make the picture, he said, “We’re in this now and we’re in it together.” Maybe the reason he got mad was because he had a disagreement with Nick Schenck six months ago. Mayer was annoyed with Schenck because Schenck did not tell him the details of the deal in which I was given the option to buy a hundred thousand shares of Loew’s stock. The deal was a New York decision. Maybe Schenck didn’t want to tell anybody.’

It was Mayer who, in 1948, had invited Schary to come over to M-G-M. Schary was head of production at R.K.O., which Howard Hughes had bought a few months earlier. Hughes had told Schary he did not want to make Battleground, a picture Schary had been preparing to produce himself. ‘That’s why I left,’ Schary said. ‘Hughes didn’t think the picture was a commercial picture. I came over here and bought the story from R.K.O. for a hundred thousand dollars. And we made it. The rest is history. It cost a million six, took forty-five days to shoot, and will probably clear a profit of three million.’ When Schary left R.K.O., Mayer immediately sent word to him that he’d like to see him. ‘I went to see him at his house, and he told me he’d like me to come and run production at M-G-M. I said I wanted him to know that if he thought of me as the executive who would get out the scripts, I wasn’t interested. I said if I took the job, I wanted to be head of production. He said then that he planned to leave the studio and retire in one year, two years, or, at the most, three years. We signed a three-year deal. And we agreed on what I said I meant by “head of production”. I would pick the stories, I said, and be responsible for the cast, for who directs, and for who produces. I said, “If that’s what you mean, fine.” I said, “I’d be challenged by the idea, if you want me to do the job.” And that’s the way we signed it.’

Schary grinned and leaned forward. ‘Let me tell you about Nick Schenck,’ he said. ‘Schenck is a man near seventy. He’s a wonderful fella. He’s shrewd. Smart. Hard. You always know exactly how you stand with him. Because he tells you. You know exactly what he’s thinking. Because he tells you. He says, “You fellas make the pictures!” He only wants to be consulted on high policy. From there on in, you know exactly where you stand. He’s a great businessman.’

Schary was to take the train to New York the next day for a conference with Schenck.

Things were going to be different from now on, Reinhardt told me on 3 September 1951, the day he started his first job as a director. His picture, Invitation, was about a wealthy girl (Dorothy McGuire) who has only a year to live and whose wealthy father (Louis Calhern) hires a handsome, penniless young man (Van Johnson) to marry her. ‘I have stars and I have a story in this picture,’ Reinhardt said. ‘I will try to make this picture a little gem.’

In addition to stars and a story, Reinhardt had expressions of good wishes from his wife (a solid-gold watchchain charm engraved Forti Nihil Difficile) and from his brother, Wolfgang (a forty-franc gold coin their father, Max Reinhardt, had carried as a good-luck piece), a memo from Margaret Booth (‘I know you are going to have a wonderful picture and needless to say you will be a fine director, so all my best wishes and thoughts are with you. With love’), and a letter from Schary (‘My every good wish today on the start of INVITATION. You’re a versatile fellow, and I’m sure we’ll have a good picture with this one. Good luck and my best wishes’).

Reinhardt felt so pleased about the picture he was going to direct that he began to feel more pleased about the picture he had recently produced. The Red Badge of Courage was now ready to be released. Schary told Reinhardt that he would order ‘the boys in New York’ to give the movie the special promotion a classic film derived from a literary classic deserved. ‘It is up to New York from here on,’ Reinhardt said to me. For the past year, he said, he had been trying to make a picture that was both an artistic and commercial success; now he was going to simplify matters. ‘I will give them just what the doctor ordered,’ he said. He had a new job, a new outlook, and a new contract with M-G-M. To celebrate, he bought a new Cadillac convertible. ‘Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life,’ he said. Reinhardt rapidly gained the reputation of being pleasant to work with, patient, quiet, modest, and a good director, and several people on the set eventually paid him one of the highest compliments the industry knows. ‘Gottfried is a real person,’ they said.

Band tagged after Reinhardt around the lot, and the slightly rebellious manner he had developed right after the disastrous first preview of The Red Badge of Courage faded completely away. Now, when he was asked to look after Mocha, he was extremely solicitous of Mocha’s ailments, and he listened with a respectful manner whenever Reinhardt was talking.

After a week of shooting, Reinhardt had a visitor on the set – his friend Joe Cohn, M-G-M vice-president and head of the Production Office. Cohn is a cheerful, white-haired man with white rings around the pupils of his eyes, which gives him a bird-like look. He had told Mayer that the studio shouldn’t make The Red Badge of Courage. ‘How you doing, Gottfried?’ he asked. ‘How’s the picture? On schedule?’

Cohn said he had heard that The Red Badge of Courage would open in New York in a few weeks.

‘I have news for you,’ Cohn said cheerily. ‘The Trans-Lux, a little place on Lexington Avenue in the Fifties. Don’t worry, Gottfried. It’ll get brilliant reviews, and it won’t make a nickel.’

Four days before The Red Badge of Courage opened in New York, for its first regular run – at the Fifty-second Street Trans-Lux, a house with a seating capacity of five hundred and seventy-eight, only half that of the Astor – the first advertisement appeared in the New York newspapers: ‘M-G-M, the company that released Gone with the Wind, presents a new drama of the War Between the States – Stephen Crane’s immortal classic, The Red Badge of Courage.’ The ad announced ‘A John Huston Production’, ‘Screenplay by John Huston’, ‘Adaptation by Albert Band’, ‘Directed by John Huston’ (letters three times as large as those in the other credits), and ‘Produced by Gottfried Reinhardt’ (letters the same size as Albert Band’s).

The day after the opening, I saw Reinhardt at the studio, and he said he had not had time to read the reviews. Two days after the opening he ran into Eddie Mannix at lunch. Mannix told him that the first day’s business had been weak.

A week later, Reinhardt showed me the reviews that had been relayed to him from the New York office. The Tribune said:

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage has been transformed by John Huston into a striking screen close-up of a young man’s introduction to battle. With war hero Audie Murphy as a raw recruit in Union blue, this seventy-minute vignette is a study of one man’s emotional adjustment to an environment chokingly filled with powder smoke and animal terror. The dialogue is sparing but acute, and the camera work is a procession of visual effects detailing most vividly the progress of a Civil War battle. Except for a redundant narration that clutters up the sound track from time to time explaining facts already clear in the images, there are no concessions made to movie conventions in this film.

The Times critic wrote, ‘Now, thanks to Metro and John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage has been transferred to the screen with almost literal fidelity.’ He felt, however, that the picture could not convey the reactions of Crane’s hero to war, for Crane had conveyed them ‘in almost stream-of-consciousness descriptions, which is a technique that works best with words’. He continued:

This is a technical problem Mr Huston has not been able to lick, even with his sensitive direction, in view of his sticking to the book. Audie Murphy, who plays the Young Soldier, does as well as anyone could expect as a virtual photographer’s model upon whom the camera is mostly turned.

The Mirror’s reviewer called the picture ‘a brilliant emotional drama, a memorable war saga’, added that ‘the carnage between the states forms a grim backdrop for the personal story of a young raw recruit’, and wound up by saying that the picture ‘comes aptly as the industry celebrates its silver jubilee. It’s a wonderful example of modern film art.’ The Daily News critic gave the picture a three-star rating. The Morning Telegraph called it ‘fine’ and ‘thought-provoking’, and said it ‘has been brought to the screen by the brilliant John Huston as an offbeat motion picture, not to be compared or contrasted with anything else you’ve seen lately, a strange and strangely exciting work that stands unique in the recent history of the movies’. The reviewer went on to say that the picture ‘may not fit very neatly into the idea that motion pictures represent entertainment for the whole family, but it comes very close to a true work of art for all that’.

The World-Telegram & Sun reviewer said, ‘John Huston has written and directed a stirring film in an understanding and close reproduction of the novel’.

‘If someone other than John Huston had made Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, there would have been little cause for disappointment,’ the Post critic began, and then praised Huston, saying that he ‘studies his men in intimate close-ups, he lays out his battles in long vistas with climaxes mounting as attackers climb the screen like the Teutonic knights coming across the ice of Lake Peipus in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky’. He continued:

The picture does not become a fully realized experience, nor is it deeply moving. It is as if, somewhere between shooting and final version, the light of inspiration had died. Huston got tired of it, or became discouraged, or decided that it wasn’t going to come off. Perhaps the story itself stood revealed, too late, as a thin and old one, and there wasn’t enough time to go back and do it over. So they cut losses and cut footage, thereby reducing a large failure to the proportions of a modest, almost ordinary picture. . . . Mr Huston’s product is that of a splendid director who had lost interest, who was no longer striving for that final touch of perfection, who had missed the cumulative passion and commentary on human beings that mark his best pictures.

Time said that Huston had avoided ‘the customary Hollywood clichés of battle’ and that ‘both the camera and the spoken commentary (taken word for word from Crane’s novel) are filled with human understanding as they follow Murphy’s wanderings through the rear areas’. Newsweek said that ‘The Red Badge of Courage bids fair to become one of the classic American motion pictures’, and the Saturday Review of Literature remarked that ‘If Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is considered a classic of American nineteenth-century literature, John Huston’s adaptation of it for the screen may well become a classic of American twentieth-century filmmaking. Adhering to Crane’s characters, his structure, and his theme, Huston has discovered for all time how to make a printed page come alive on the screen.’

Not one of the reviews made any mention at all of Gottfried Reinhardt, Dore Schary, Louis B. Mayer, or Nicholas M. Schenck.

A couple of days later Reinhardt received a cable from Huston: ‘REVIEWS RECEIVED. THINK EXCELLENT ON WHOLE ONLY THEY DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH OF WHAT IS GOOD IN FILM YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR. BUT I DO. JOHN.’

By the time The Red Badge of Courage was in its second week at the Trans-Lux, I was back in New York. I dropped in at the theatre late one afternoon and found the manager standing in front of the box office gossiping with the cashier. The marquee said, ‘JOHN HUSTON’S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. A MAJOR ACHIEVEMENT – N.Y. TIMES. MASTERFUL – CUE.’ I asked the manager how business was. ‘Not socko,’ he said.

Schary came to New York the next week, and I went over to the Sherry-Netherland to see him. Walter Reilly, Schary’s executive assistant, invited me in to the sitting room of Schary’s suite. ‘The boss’ll be right with you,’ he said. ‘We just got back from Washington. He saw the President.’

Schary, when he appeared, looked full of health and energy. ‘Just got back from Washington,’ he said, giving me a cordial handshake. ‘Saw the President. Had a fifteen-minute appointment. He stretched it to twenty-five. Nice guy, the President. Boy, I’ll be glad to get on a train and get the hell out of New York. I never liked living in the East anyway. The pressures! I’m running around all the time. How’s my schedule, kiddy?’ he asked Reilly.

Elizabeth Taylor would be up to see him in twenty minutes, Reilly said, and the next day there would be Winthrop Rockefeller, who wanted to talk about making a short subject.

‘Hah! Some people lead such a sheltered life,’ said Schary. ‘My, but I keep busy! Reviewing the studio policies with the New York boys can exhaust a fella. Today I had an all-day session with Nick Schenck. At the end of an all-day session, he looks as though he just got out of a shower, and you’re punchy. The way his mind works! He asks for a complete picture of a situation and asks what you think, and you tell him, and then he makes his decision, and that’s it.’ Schary said he had also been working with Howard Dietz on the advertising campaign for Quo Vadis. It was going to open simultaneously at the Astor and the Capitol in a week. ‘If you make a picture with enough vitality, you do very well with it,’ he said.

The Red Badge of Courage had vitality now, he said, but it was too early to tell how it would do. ‘Great notices,’ he said. ‘That picture is a credit to the studio. By the way, Reinhardt is gonna be a hell of a director. I saw his picture Invitation. It’s a good little picture. Reinhardt is a great raconteur. Like John, he knows how to tell a story. He is gonna be a very stylish director, a very terrific director.’

Schary said he had been having a hell of a lot of fun working with Schenck. ‘I’m very crazy about that man,’ he said. ‘You know exactly where you stand with him. A very reasonable man. He thinks fast. He’s agile. He doesn’t waste a lot of time going around through Dixie. He’s the most respected man in the whole picture business. He’s smart and he’s shrewd. He has tact and he has wisdom. He’s got wonderful balance. There’s not a thing going on at the studio he doesn’t know about. He knows how to manage the business.’

There was a buzz. Reilly admitted Elizabeth Taylor and her agent, Jules Goldstone.

Dear Gottfried:

A fine thing! What gets me is the sneaky, underhand way you went about it. I can see now that you had it all planned out way back there: ‘When Huston’s deep in the African forest, stricken with malaria, his consciousness dimmed by bites of the tsetse and his limbs swollen with elephantiasis – then I shall become a director.’ No doubt your hands tremble as you are holding this letter. I, Huston, have returned. I am among the living, and I know well how to deal with your treachery. I shall strike without warning. Silvia may find you sprawled on your wide veranda, transfixed by one of those same arrows from a pygmy’s blow-gun. Or it may happen in your office, late of an evening, when you and Albert are working over your next script. The cleaning women will discover the two of you at your desk, inclined a little forward, grinning at each other as though in delight at having finished a perfectly splendid scene. I take it for granted that Albert will be sitting in the big chair behind the desk; he is the producer now, of course. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, you might tell me some of the details. As a matter of fact, I heard about it only day before yesterday. I don’t know the name of the picture or who’s in it or anything, except that your leading lady thinks you’re the best director she ever had. I expect I’ll be in New York in a week or two. Your letter, if one is forthcoming, may not reach me before I leave. I’ll call you in any case.

The Monster

Huston arrived in New York from London just as Reinhardt arrived to work on a screenplay with a writer here. Neither Huston nor Reinhardt went to the Trans-Lux, where The Red Badge of Courage was in its sixth, and last, week. Huston didn’t want to see the picture in its final form. He looked tired – even more tired than he had looked nine months before, at the preview of The Red Badge of Courage in Pasadena, where I had last seen him. The creases between his eyes and at the sides of his mouth looked deeper. His tweed cap seemed too small for him, and so did his suit. Its peg top trousers were the latest thing in England, he told me. ‘Dore wrote me a letter,’ he said, and took the letter from a pocket and handed it to me.

Dear John:

I don’t know if you have seen the finished print of RED BADGE OF COURAGE but we did have to make some cuts and we did have to bring clarification by the use of narration that helped us enormously and brought the audience reaction from a majority negative response to a big majority positive response. I don’t think we sacrificed any of the integrity that you poured into the movie and I hope you like it. The final important thing is that the picture has been accepted by critics as the classic that we thought it would be, and maybe over the long pull we’ll get most of the money back.

If I had to do it all over again I would still let you make it. I hope things are well with you.

My fondest always,
Dore

‘I lied to Dore,’ he told me, in a mildly conspiratorial tone. ‘I called Dore up and said I had seen the picture. I told him I approved of everything he had done.’

Huston planned to spend ten days in New York promoting The African Queen and making various arrangements for his next picture, Moulin Rouge, based on a recent novel, of the same name, about Toulouse-Lautrec. This would be another independent picture. Schary had agreed to release him from his contractual obligation to make another picture for M-G-M right away, so he was able to go ahead with plans for Moulin Rouge. Huston had a lot to say about The African Queen, and its possibilities of success. He thought it would be a big commercial hit. ‘I may yet become the Last Tycoon,’ he said. He looked as if he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t.

I went with Huston and his wife, who had in the meantime had her second child, to see Reinhardt and his wife, who were staying at the Plaza.

As we got out of the elevator at the Reinhardts’ floor, Huston glanced at a small man wearing a derby who was talking to a crumpled old lady in a wheelchair. The small man was talking in a low, hoarse monotone, and at Huston’s glance, the man looked over at us sideways, full of mysterious promise. Huston glanced at him again and seemed to lose interest. The small man wearing the derby suddenly lost his promise. There was no Huston scene. Huston led us quickly to the Reinhardts’ suite and knocked on the door. Reinhardt opened it.

The two men shook hands, then looked uncomfortably at each other. Reinhardt took a white silk handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow with it.

‘Well!’ said Huston to Mrs Reinhardt. ‘Well!’ The word sounded as small as it was.

Reinhardt said that everything was all right. ‘Did you see the picture?’ he asked.

‘I fought, but there was nothing I could do,’ said Reinhardt. ‘You were not here.’

‘What are you doing now, Gottfried?’ Huston asked. ‘You’re a director!’ He laughed as though it took a great effort to laugh.

Reinhardt said that he had just finished directing a picture and was making plans to start on another.

Huston said that he was doing some promotion work on The African Queen and thought the picture would be a hit. ‘I hope it makes a pot of dough,’ he said, and added a faint ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’

‘You think The African Queen will be a commercial success?’ Reinhardt asked.

‘I hope so, Gottfried,’ said Huston. ‘You know, there’s a strange irony in what happened to Red Badge. Even though a lot of people in the business think otherwise, my other pictures did all right at the box office. The Maltese Falcon was a very great success. I believed it grossed over four million bucks. Another one was In This Our Life. Across the Pacific was also very successful, and Key Largo was a very great success. Treasure of Sierra Madre was a very expensive picture – two million eight, I think it cost – and even though it didn’t make an immediate and resounding bang at the box office, it did very well, and by this time it should be showing a profit. The Asphalt Jungle made money, and We Were Strangers, although it wasn’t successful, didn’t actually lose money. The only picture I ever made that seems as though it’s going to be marked down simply as a box-office failure is The Red Badge of Courage. And I thought that was the best picture I ever made.’

‘Like old times,’ Reinhardt said. ‘I went to “21” my first evening in America. I adored it. I had dinner at Dinty Moore’s. Then I was taken to see Of Thee I sing. Then I went to “21”. I adored it. And I adored America.’

‘You adored it!’ Huston said dimly. ‘You adored it, huh, Gottfried?’ His tone had a hint of amazement in it.

There was a flicker in Reinhardt’s eyes. He took the cigar out of his mouth and shook gently as he laughed.

About a month later, after Huston had returned to Europe and Reinhardt to California, Sam Spiegel brought a print of The African Queen from London to New York. United Artists was going to release it. He looked affluent, well-groomed, and at peace. ‘I fly to the Coast tonight,’ he said. ‘Then I fly back to New York. I will be here forty-eight hours, and then I must fly back to London. I must be in a dozen places at once. We are going to have a big hit on our hands. The picture will make a lot of money.’

That week Huston wrote me from the cháteau in Chantilly that he and his family were occupying to say that he was planning to bring a horse over from Ireland and train him on the steeplechase course in Chantilly, and if all went well, he planned to ride the horse himself at some of the race meetings the next year. ‘Have you heard that The African Queen is the greatest success England has had in years and years?’ Huston wrote. ‘Indications are that it will also be very big in America. In England, however, its future is assured. With my percentage, I stand to make a lot of money. . . . I’m going to have it all in twenty-dollar bills with a rubber band around it.’

When The African Queen opened in New York a few weeks later, it was received enthusiastically by both the critics and the public. Among the critics, there were only two dissenters – the reviewer for the Post, who said that the picture had some aspects of a Tarzan movie and that ‘Huston has put out two considerably less than perfect pictures in a row’, and the reviewer for the Times, who said that the picture had been made to insure popularity, and that ‘with this extravagant excursion into realms of adventure and romance of a sort that, to our recollection, Mr Huston has heretofore eschewed, the brilliant director has put himself in a position where he can be charged with compromise’.

A couple of months after that, United Artists announced that The African Queen was the biggest hit it had had in five years.

In certain circles, The Red Badge of Courage continued to receive tributes of one kind and another. Reinhardt had not succeeded in getting M-G-M to bring out a record album of the score, but the studio did send the original manuscript of the music to Syracuse University, which Stephen Crane attended briefly in 1891. In the Stephen Crane Collection of the University, the score, together with photographs of the cast in costume, is now on file. Lester G. Wells, curator of the university’s special collections, saw the movie seven times when it played in Syracuse; then he asked for the original of the score, and M-G-M agreed to lend it to the collection.

The picture was not nominated for any of the Motion Picture Academy awards, but the Film Daily included it in its list of the five best-directed pictures of the year. It was named second-best picture of the year by the National Board of Review. (A Place in the Sun was first). The Motion Picture Academy nominated Huston for an Oscar for his direction of The African Queen, and Bogart was nominated for one for his acting in the picture. Bogart won his Oscar, but the prize for direction went to George Stevens, for A Place in the Sun. (‘A Place in the Sun is only a reasonably good picture,’ Stevens said to another director. ‘The industry doesn’t want good pictures. It wants the norm.’) The picture the Academy named the best of the year was Arthur Freed’s musical An American in Paris. The Irving Thalberg Award, the honour bestowed by the Academy upon the person who is considered to have done most for the movie industry in the past year, was won by Arthur Freed. Darryl Zanuck, who reminded the industry members gathered for the occasion that he had won the Thalberg Award three times, presented it to Freed, describing him as ‘a creative producer’ and declaring, ‘His pictures have been perfect examples of creative art.’

In Paris, Huston was worrying about the business end of producing Moulin Rouge, as well as writing and directing it. ‘I am trying to learn all the things Sam Spiegel was born knowing,’ he wrote me. ‘I find it pretty hard going. As a bona-fide producer, I don’t dare admit to being ignorant of what “off the top” means. But I damn well am. I was a couple of days trying to figure out what three and a half per cent of seventy per cent amounted to before giving it up. Now I just try to look wise. I’m afraid it won’t be very long before I give that up, too.’

At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it was announced that the studio would be known thenceforward simply as M-G-M, since Goldwyn and Mayer were no longer there. Louis B. Mayer announced that he would produce pictures independently and set about buying film properties; he started off by outbidding Metro for the film rights to the musical Paint Your Wagon, for which he paid $225,000. Around that time, Loew’s, Inc., paid Mayer $2,750,000 in return for a release from the company’s agreement to pay him ten per cent of the net receipts of every picture made between 7 April 1924, and the day he left the company.

Mayer’s cream-coloured office at the studio was taken over by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had left Twentieth Century-Fox and Darryl Zanuck, because, he said, he was determined to make a drastic change in the conventional pattern most movie makers conformed to. Mankiewicz moved from Fox and Zanuck to M-G-M and Dore Schary, to work on a film as a director and writer.

M-G-M announced that the studio would make forty pictures in the coming year and that eighteen of them would be musicals. Arthur Freed announced that he would produce half a dozen of the musicals himself, including one to be made in France and another in Scotland. Audie Murphy became greatly in demand as a leading man for Western melodramas. John Dierkes was cast as a Western bad man in the movie Shane, produced and directed by George Stevens. Royal Dano, whose characterization of the Tattered Man had drawn high praise from everybody who had helped to make The Red Badge of Courage, as well as from many others who had seen the early version – in which his death scene was included – did not immediately find any other acting jobs in Hollywood. He returned to his home in New York to do some television work, then appeared in a picture called Flame of Araby, then obtained a small part as a Georgia cracker in a Broadway musical called Three Wishes for Jamie. When Reinhardt temporarily dropped his activities as a producer and became a full-time director, Albert Band was reassigned from his job as Reinhardt’s assistant to a job as assistant to a producer named Armand Deutsch, with whom he set to work on a movie called The Girl Who Had Everything. Deutsch was so impressed by Band’s abilities that he petitioned Dore Schary for a raise for him, and it was granted.

Reinhardt devoted himself to directing a movie trilogy entitled The Story of Three Loves, on which Lee Katz, unit production manager for The Red Badge of Courage, was again unit production manager. Reinhardt had finished one part of the trilogy, starring James Mason and Moira Shearer, and he wrote me that Schary and all the other executives at the studio loved it. ‘I have to admit it myself; it’s really pretty good,’ he said. A stray kitten turned up at the Reinhardts’ house and was adopted as a playmate for Mocha. It was christened Lee Katz. Mrs Reinhardt was working very hard, too. She was preparing to move. Reinhardt had decided that he might be in Hollywood to stay after all, and this time, instead of renting a house, as he had always done before, he had bought one. The new house had a large garden and a swimming pool, and although he felt a bit more tied down, he told me, it was really terrific, and that was why he had finally, after eighteen years with M-G-M, bought a house.

The total cost of making The Red Badge of Courage – Production No. 1512, the fifteen-hundred-and-twelfth picture produced by M-G-M – turned out to be $1,642,117.33. The picture received only slight attention in Nicholas M. Schenck’s annual report to the stockholders of Loew’s, Inc., for the fiscal year ending 31 August 1951. In this document, the cost of producing and releasing the movie was merely included in the $26,243,848.61 item ‘Film Productions Completed – Not Released’. (The report also showed that the net income of Loew’s, Inc., for the year was $7,806,571.83, that dividends of $1.50 a share were paid on the 5,142,579 shares of stock outstanding, and that Loew’s directors and officers were paid $2,789,079, of which $277,764 was paid to Schenck and $300,000 to Mayer.) At the annual stockholders’ meeting, however, the movie was mentioned by several of the stockholders, as well as by the chairman of the meeting, J. Robert Rubin, a tall, gaunt man with pince-nez and a quiet, gracious manner, who is a vice-president of Loew’s and counsel for the firm. (Mr Rubin’s compensation for 1951, according to the report, was $224, 439.) The meeting began at ten o’clock on the morning of 29 April 1952, in a projection room on the eighteenth floor of the Loew’s State Theatre Building, at 1540 Broadway, at Forty-fifth Street. It was attended by a hundred and fifty stockholders (out of a total of 37,991), who represented three hundred thousand shares of stock. (Four million shares of stock were represented by the management, as holders of proxies for that number.) The first mention of The Red Badge of Courage was made by the chairman, during one of his attempts to entertain the stockholders while ballots for the election of a board of directors were being passed out. He took a slip of paper out of his pocket, and, reading from it, informed the stockholders that Esther Williams, who is under contract to M-G-M, had recently been voted one of the year’s most popular stars by the magazine Modern Screen. Then he took out another slip of paper and read, in a drone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call your attention to the fact that M-G-M pictures have received great honours. Each month, Coronet magazine chooses three favourite pictures, to recommend, and during the past twelve months we have had ten of our pictures chosen for recommendation by Coronet magazine. I’m sure you’ll agree that that is a pretty fine record.’ Rubin raised his eyes and, removing his pince-nez, gazed at the stockholders. Their attention seemed to be fixed on their ballots. He cleared his throat, put his pince-nez back on, and read off the names of the ten pictures. The Red Badge of Courage was one of them.

A stockholder named Greenstock stood up and asked whether The Red Badge of Courage had made money.

‘Well, it was a beautiful picture, but that wasn’t enough,’ Rubin said. ‘It didn’t come to a climax, the way a picture is supposed to do. The picture didn’t appeal to the public. Mr Schary was very keen about the picture. It played here in a special house and everything, and the Times put it is as one of the best pictures of the year. But the public didn’t go for it.’ Rubin removed his pince-nez.

‘I want to say something,’ a stockholder named Mrs Wentig remarked. ‘In reference to The Red Badge of Courage. I want to say of course, we’re interested in dividends, in profits, but it’s a tribute to the company that they had the courage to put out a picture that did not make money.’

‘It set good standards for the movie industry,’ Mrs Wentig said, raising her voice. ‘I say do more of it, and I’m glad you made the picture even if it didn’t make money. Make more movies like that!’

At the conclusion of the meeting, the stockholders were shown Singin’ in the Rain, a new Arthur Freed musical, and then they descended to the restaurant, in the basement, for the company’s annual free lunch. Rubin moved among the stockholders, giving each one a kindly nod. He escorted an elderly, grey-haired lady to a chair and brought her a tongue sandwich. ‘It’s very good,’ he said. ‘I could eat one myself. Did you like the meeting?’

‘Where is Mr Schenck?’ the lady asked. ‘Why doesn’t he come to the meeting?’

‘He leaves this sort of thing to us,’ Rubin said. ‘You don’t want him to neglect important and pressing business matters, do you?’

At a nearby table, Charles C. Moskowitz, vice-president and treasurer of Loew’s, Inc. (his compensation was $188,176 for the year), was talking with Eugene W. Leake, chairman of the Retirement Plan Committee of Loew’s. Moskowitz is a bald, chunky man with a grey moustache, who wears glasses with heavy tortoise-shell rims, and usually has a white carnation in his lapel. He handed Leake a cigar. ‘Smoke a good one, Judge,’ he said.

Leake, a white-haired man with a small head and a pink face, put down a half-smoked cigar and lit the good one.

‘The meeting went all right, Judge,’ said Moskowitz. ‘The only thing they’re worried about is The Red Badge of Courage. They’ve got worries.’

‘Moskowitz!’ a stockholder called ‘When are we going to hear about the profits from our foreign interests?’

‘My gosh, I just realized!’ Moskowitz said to Leake. ‘I haven’t seen a picture since yesterday. Can you imagine that, Judge?’

‘I try to see every picture that’s made. If not at the office, then at home,’ Moskowitz said. ‘I know every picture that’s being made at the studio in Culver City at this very minute. Isn’t that right, Judge?’

‘I can tell you who is directing every one of our pictures at this very minute, who is producing, and the names of the leading characters,’ Moskowitz said. ‘Mr Schenck can do the same, only more so. I had Eddie Mannix on the phone last night for an hour. Today, I’ll talk to Dore Schary. I know the business inside out. I’ve worked for Loew’s forty years. I started as a bookkeeper. I thought the work was going to be steady, Judge.’ He beamed at Leake.

‘I worked for Nick Schenck when he was spending days and nights going from theatre to theatre doing everything himself, even being the cashier in the box office – in the days when our theatres had vaudeville,’ Moskowitz went on. ‘There’s not a man in the business who’s more respected for his capabilities than Mr Schenck. Put him in a room where anything is being talked about and he’ll learn it. There’s no branch of this business he doesn’t know.’

‘He keeps tabs on every little thing,’ Leake said. ‘The minute a picture is released, there he is on the telephone, the reviews in his hand.’

‘Brilliant!’ said Moskowitz. ‘The minute he sees a picture, he knows whether it will go. Brilliant!’

Almost two years before, I had become interested in The Red Badge of Courage, and I had been following its progress step by step ever since, to learn what I could about the American motion-picture industry. Now, three thousand miles from Hollywood, in an office building at Forty-fifth and Broadway, I began to feel that I was getting closer than I ever had before to the heart of the matter. Reinhardt’s and Huston’s struggle to make a great picture, Mayer’s opposition, Schary’s support, the sideline operations of a dozen vice-presidents, the labour and craftsmanship of the cast and technical crew, the efforts of Huston’s aides to help him get his concept of the Stephen Crane novel on film, the long series of artistic problems and compromises, the reactions of the preview audiences – all these seemed to compose themselves into some sort of design, but a few pieces were still missing. I felt that somewhere in the office upstairs I might find them.

The accounting and executive officers of Loew’s are on the seventh floor. Moskowitz had two ways he used for getting to his private office – a carpeted corridor leading directly to it, and a roundabout route through a vast, pillared room. After lunch, Moskowitz took Leake and me through the big room. It contained a hundred and twenty-five desks, many of them occupied by clerks or accountants operating machines to tabulate admissions at Loew’s theatres and returns on Loew’s pictures. To make himself heard, Moskowitz had to raise his voice.

Moskowitz waved his cigar in greeting to the backs of the clerks and accountants, and walked on.

The walls of Moskowitz’s outer office covered with photographs of M-G-M stars, all of them autographed. (‘To Charles Moskowitz, from a very devoted member of the M-G-M family. My best wishes – Robert Taylor.’ ‘To Charles Moskowitz – I sincerely hope I shall be able to repay in the future the faith you have in me today. Gratefully, Mario Lanza.’) There were photographs of Lionel Barrymore, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Gene Kelly, Esther Williams and Lassie (this one autographed with a paw print). There was also a photograph of Dore Schary (‘For Charlie, with my fond good wishes, Dore’).

Moskowitz looked at the pictures proudly and told Leake that he’d be seeing all the stars in a few weeks, at the studio. ‘Mr Schenck is going out to see things at first hand,’ he said. ‘And where Mr Schenck goes, Moskowitz goes close behind.’

Four floors below, I found Howard Dietz, advertising and exploitation head of Loew’s, who told me there was no point in throwing good money after bad to promote a picture that was clearly a bust. ‘Schenck thinks the picture is doomed to be a box-office failure,’ he said. ‘As a commercial property, it’s no good. The country isn’t interested in the picture. It turned it down. I didn’t like the picture. Schenck wasn’t enthusiastic. But that isn’t the point. Anything that makes money we’re for.’ He smiled wearily, looking as bored as he had looked when he sat in the bar of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a year and a half before, listening to Reinhardt’s plea for a good promotion campaign for The Red Badge of Courage. ‘The phony talk I’ve had to listen to about this picture!’ he said. ‘ “It’s a classic.” “Art.” Nonsense. A novel is a novel. A poem is a poem. And a movie is a movie. Take the Wordsworth poem “I wandered, lonely as a cloud” and make a movie about it. What can you show visually? “I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils.” We might have a cloud, some vales and hills, and then a batch of daffodils.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t do it. What stops you is the equity that goes with the classic. It’s borrowed imagination. You know, I’m not of the school that believes that popular entertainment need be art. And neither is Schenck. He’s a showman. That’s our business.’

A few doors down, I found Si Seadler, Loew’s Eastern advertising manager, in his office working on plans to escort a hundred motion-picture theatre exhibitors from all over the country on a three-day visit to the studio to see all the M-G-M movies awaiting release. (A few days later, the trade papers carried a reprint of a message from Dore Schary to the exhibitors. ‘We believe that the sunshine of showmanship can dispel grey clouds of pessimism,’ he wrote, in the course of offering a hearty hello on behalf of Mr Nicholas Schenck, the executive staff, and the five thousand employees of M-G-M.) Seadler’s telephone kept ringing, and his look of worried amiability increased as he alternated between the phone and giving instructions to a young man whose face reflected Seadler’s worry but not his amiability.

‘I’ve got a mob of people all asking whether Seeing Is Believing is the official name of the junket and how much it’s all gonna cost,’ the young man said.

‘Seeing Is Believing is official, but check with Howard Dietz – it’s Howard’s idea,’ Seadler said. ‘The cost is a hundred thousand dollars. Be sure to tell everybody we think it’s worth it. It’s Howard’s idea.’

The telephone rang. ‘The minute you called me, I took care, of it,’ he said. ‘You’re as big as Charlie. Bigger. Don’t worry.’ He hung up. ‘From the Coast,’ he told me, with distaste. ‘Everybody fighting with everybody. Human beings in conflict. That’s the way it is with creative people. Thank God this is a business office. Any problem or conflict comes up here, Mr Schenck says, “My boy –” and gives us the word.’ Seadler waved his hand. ‘No more conflict.’

‘Will Mr Schenck get out to the studio in time to play host to the exhibitors?’ the young man asked.

Seadler shook his head. ‘Dore Schary will do it,’ he said. ‘Mr Schenck is the president. Dore works for him.’

Seadler told me he had given Schenck his opinion of The Red Badge of Courage before it was released, as he had promised Reinhardt he would a year and a half before, when he saw some scenes from the then unfinished film. ‘Mr Schenck saw the picture, and he knew right away it wouldn’t go over with the public, and I agreed with him,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t pay to be so faithful to a book, the way John Huston did it. As a great novel, The Red Badge of Courage is a great novel. As a movie, it’s too fragmentary. There’s no story. The country wasn’t interested in the picture, as Howard says. A novel is a novel as Howard says, and a movie is a movie. The picture was beautiful, but it’s just a vignette. As soon as Mr Schenck saw the picture, we knew it was a flop. Let’s just say it was a flop d’estime. I guess that’s the way Mr Schenck would put it.’

On the tenth floor, Arthur M. Loew, president of Loew’s International Corporation, which is a subsidiary of Loew’s, Inc., chatted with me about what he called the pattern of economics of the industry. His office had recently been redecorated, along with all the other offices on the floor, in a style that included streamlined potted plants, African sculpture, desks that were jagged boards attached to walls, and an air-conditioning system that distributed a chemical to prevent people from catching cold. Loew, the son of Marcus Loew, one of the founders of the company, is a wiry, restless man in his early fifties; in addition to supervising the international distribution of pictures owned by Loew’s, Inc., he has supervised the production of one movie, The Search, and personally produced another, Teresa, both of which made out very well with movie critics and movie audiences. He started in foreign distribution in 1920, and he is in charge of a hundred and thirty sales offices, in thirty-eight countries. Every day, he checks on the receipts of forty theatres owned and operated by Loew’s outside the United States and Canada. (A Supreme Court decision twenty-three months earlier had upheld a lower court’s order for the divorcement of motion-picture production from motion-picture exhibition, and Loew’s, like other picture corporations, was now working out the separation.) As Loew talked, he played with a button that controlled a sliding cork wall at one end of his office.

‘We have a pretty definite knowledge in this office of what the public wants, and we know one thing – pictures that are liked in this country are liked abroad,’ Loew said. ‘We operate in a pattern of economics brought on by public taste.’ He pushed the button, and the cork wall slowly receded. ‘The mechanism operating that wall costs only three hundred and seventy-five dollars,’ Loew said as the adjoining room came into view. It had a modernistic conference table rimmed by modernistic chairs. ‘That’s where we confer about foreign sales,’ he said.

Internationally, he added, The Red Badge of Courage had not done well at the box office, and, here and there, Loew’s was trying to book it as the lower half of a double bill that featured a musical starring Esther Williams, M-G-M’s biggest money-making star. At the moment, The Red Badge of Courage was playing as the lower half of such a bill in nine theatres in Australia. ‘It’s a problem picture,’ Loew said. ‘It gets poor public response. Nothing glamorous always hurts a picture. In England, we put the picture in a theatre in London where it played only on Sunday afternoons. The critics saw it and liked it, so we’ve put it in a small house for the regular run. But it’s not making any money. No point in wasting promotion on a picture that won’t go.’ Loew pushed the button, and the cork wall slid back into place.

‘Nick Schenck was afraid of The Red Badge of Courage,’ Loew went on. ‘In the beginning, when Dore joined the company – I was glad to see him get the job – Schenck gave him free rein. He even let Dore make a few pictures Schenck really didn’t want to make. But now Schenck is pulling back on the reins.’

On the sixth floor of the Loew Building, J. Robert Rubin, sitting at his desk, was looking over the papers neatly stacked on it. It was a long, dark desk in a long, businesslike room that had on the walls autographed photographs of half a dozen prominent Republicans, dead and alive. ‘I didn’t imagine there would be any controversy about a movie at the meeting,’ he said to me softly. ‘All they usually want to know about is dividends. Well, this is the one day of the year when we like to make the stockholders feel the company is theirs. It’s better to have them friendly than unfriendly. My, hasn’t The Red Badge of Courage created a fuss, though! Mr Mayer was against making it to begin with, but Mr Schary was very keen about it. Funny thing is Mr Schary still likes the picture, even if it didn’t make any money.’ He gave a thin laugh. ‘Can’t have much of that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘We’re not in business for our health. We’re a business. Just think of our board of directors! There’s not only Mr Schenck, Mr Moskowitz, Mr Leake, and myself but Mr George A. Brownell, Mr F. Joseph Holleran, Mr William A. Parker, Mr William F. Rodgers, Mr Joseph R. Vogel, and Mr Henry Rogers Winthrop. We have to make money or we go out of business.’

Rubin, who is a native of Syracuse, and a graduate of the Syracuse University law school, had been in the motion-picture business since 1915. He helped a friend organize a picture company called New York Alco, and when the company failed, after a year, a new company, called Metro Pictures Corporation, was founded in its place, with Louis B. Mayer as one of the owners. Loew’s bought out Metro in 1920. In 1918, Rubin and Mayer had founded the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation and made movies for Metro. Irving Thalberg joined them about two years later. Rubin handled many of the legal entanglements involved in the transactions, including the purchase by Metro, in 1924, of the Goldwyn studio, in Culver City, and, that same year, the purchase of the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation by Metro-Goldwyn.

‘Mr Mayer, Mr Thalberg, and I made quite a trio,’ Rubin said. ‘Thalberg was a genius. He had a conception of pictures no one has been able to duplicate. Mr Mayer built up the studio to what we have today. He knew how to build an organization, and how to run it. It was always exciting to work with him. He was dynamic. He would dramatize everything. I used to say, “Louie, you’re the best actor on the lot,” He’d say, “I only show what I feel.” Mr Mayer always liked good pictures. Clean pictures. I don’t care too much what kind of pictures we make. When a picture is liked in this office it is liked everywhere. What Mr Schenck is in favour of, we are for. All of us here like the kind of pictures that do well at the box office.’

‘Come into my office. I want to show you some reviews,’ the voice from the drawer said.

‘Right away,’ said Rubin. ‘I’m with Mr Schenck,’ he said to his secretary.

As I arrived in Nicholas M. Schenck’s office, a little later, he was talking with Howard Dietz about the reviews of the new M-G-M Technicolor movie Scaramouche, which had just opened at the Music Hall. ‘I would have bet a hundred to one that Scaramouche would get the finest notices,’ Schenck said. ‘I can’t understand it. It opens at the Music Hall, and Mr Tribune knocks it. Three stars in the News. I would have given odds it would get four stars.’

‘I still think that Scaramouche is a very good picture, my boy,’ Schenck said seriously, and he raised his right index finger at Dietz in a gesture of kindly warning. ‘And I think the audiences will think so, too.’

Schenck spoke decisively, confidently, and with a strong air of knowledgeability about his business. He is a compactly built, energetic man in his late sixties, with greying hair brushed back and parted on the left. He has a quietly direct manner and benevolent air. The day I saw him, he was deeply tanned, and he was wearing a double-breasted grey suit, a white shirt with blue stripes, a small-figured dark-blue necktie, and tortoise-shell glasses. He sat behind a large, highly polished mahogany desk, on which stood framed photographs of his three daughters as children, all with long curls; a carafe and two glasses; an ashtray; a brown leather folder; and four yellow pencils with sharp points. At his feet was a brass spittoon. His office was small and modest. It had a green carpet; a fireplace, on the mantel of which stood a black iron statuette of the M-G-M lion; a couch covered with brown fabric; four worn chairs; and Italian walnut panelling. The panels had been bought from the mansion of Senator William A. Clark, on Fifth Avenue. Schenck had gone to work for Loew’s in 1907 and had been in the same office for thirty years. When he shifted from executive vice-president to president of Loew’s, after the death of Marcus Loew, in 1927, he refused to leave the office.

Schenck lit a cigarette and cocked his head slightly at Dietz, who took a cigarette, too. ‘I like Scaramouche,’ Schenck said. ‘I like entertainment. Clean, wholesome entertainment. Romance and love. I love dramatic, romantic stories. But I can’t go only by my own taste. I don’t like slapstick. Audiences like slapstick. What are you going to do? The audience is the final judge.’

‘I wish I knew who first said that popular entertainment had to be art,’ Dietz said blandly.

Schenck shrugged. He had been working hard, he said, studying the budgets of various pictures, considering their casting problems, and seeing, on an average, four films during the week and three over the weekend at his home in Sands Point. ‘You have to see other people’s pictures as well as your own,’ he said. ‘Any picture that becomes good or important, I see it. You have to know about everybody’s taste. Everybody must work and we all have a job to do.’

Schenck smiled broadly and, unbuttoning his coat, patted his ribs. ‘I weigh a hundred and forty-one in the morning, a hundred and forty-three at night,’ he said.

‘I don’t know whether it’s your work or your golf that does it,’ Dietz said.

Schenck’s smile broadened, and he buttoned his coat. ‘You’re right, my boy, there are no rules,’ he said, raising his right hand again. ‘It all comes from the brain. You can’t get into the other fellow’s brain. You decide what picture will be made. You decide who will be in the cast. You decide what it will cost. The budget means a lot to me. Unfortunately, stories don’t grow on trees, so you have to compromise on what you are going to make. You can’t take too many chances where you are paying terrific overhead and terrific weekly salaries.’

‘There are no rules for choosing what you’re going to make,’ Dietz said. ‘You know what to choose only by growing up in the fabric of the business.’

Schenck said that he did not read the scripts of all the movies M-G-M was planning to make, but he did read an outline of each script or idea for a script. When he read the outline for The Red Badge of Courage, he said, he felt that the studio was taking a big chance. At the time, Schary was in New York, and was not feeling well. ‘I went right over to Dore’s hotel to talk to him,’ he said. ‘Dore had been having differences with Louie about the picture. They had not been getting on too well before that, even. I found Dore sick, and sicker over the trouble with Louie. Right from the hotel, I called Louie, and had him talk to Dore. I arranged for Dore and Louie to talk it over when Dore got back home. But Louie remained opposed to making the picture, and on other things he wasn’t seeing eye to eye with me. Eventually, I had to support Dore.’

Schenck lit another cigarette. ‘Dore is young,’ he said. ‘He has not had his job very long. I felt I must encourage him, or else he would feel stifled. It would have been so easy for me to say no to him. Instead, I said yes. I figured I would write it off to experience. You can buy almost anything, but you can’t buy experience.’ He smiled in a wise, fatherly manner.

‘The Red Badge of Courage was not a whole motion picture,’ Dietz said. ‘It was a fragment. It wasn’t a good picture.’

‘Before I saw it, I had heard it was very bad,’ Schenck said. ‘But it was better than I had been led to expect. I would call it a fairly good picture. Only, it was above the heads of our audiences. For me, it was good entertainment. But not for our audiences. I felt immediately we would have to take a loss on it, and we have. When I saw the picture was not doing any business, we stopped spending money on promoting it.’

‘Yes, I decided that,’ Dietz said to Schenck. ‘You know, I don’t always have to go to you about what money I’m going to spend. We tried a concentrated campaign on the picture in a couple of spots and it didn’t go.’

‘The public didn’t take to the picture,’ Schenck said. ‘The next picture John Huston made – and this time he was making it for his own company – he made a commercial picture, a tremendous hit.’

‘Red Badge had no stars and no story,’ said Dietz. ‘It wasn’t any good.’

‘They did the best they could with it,’ said Schenck. ‘Unfortunately, that sort of thing costs money. If you don’t spend money, you never learn.’ He laughed knowingly. ‘After the picture was made Louie didn’t want to release it,’ he said. ‘Louie said that as long as he was head of the studio, the picture would never be released. He refused to release it, but I changed that.’

Schenck puffed quickly on his cigarette. ‘How else was I going to teach Dore?’ he said. ‘I supported Dore. I let him make the picture. I knew that the best way to help him was to let him make a mistake. Now he will know better. A young man has to learn by making mistakes. I don’t think he’ll want to make a picture like that again.’ Schenck picked up one of his yellow pencils and jotted something down on a memo pad. Then he buzzed for his secretary and asked her to get Mr Schary on the telephone at Culver City. After a couple of minutes, he picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello, my boy. How are you doing?’