City of Nets: A Portrait of
Hollywood in the 1940`s
By Otto Friedrich
Harper & Row, 495 pages, $25
A couple of years ago, an anthology titled ”The Good Parts” was published which collected between hard covers the juiciest bits from a score or more of Hollywood autobiographies and memoirs. It provided an important service to readers, making it possible to savor the sexy and scandalous kernels from these books without being forced to chew the tasteless pulp that surrounds them.
Otto Friedrich has done something similar in ”City of Nets.” It is subtitled ”A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940`s” and, while it is not an anthology, it does present a distillation of a vast number of Hollywood books written over the past 30 years or so.
Friedrich declares in his foreword, ”Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been interrogated over and over again.” So he has sought out no new witnesses, unearthed no secret memos, checked out no persistent rumors. ”What is needed, I think, is not more tape-recorded interrogations but rather a new effort to synthesize what has already been said, to combine, to interpret, to analyze, to understand.” Is it a synthesis then? Indeed yes, though he summarizes whole lives and synopsizes biographies and histories here with such deft dispatch that it often seems a bit more like ”Hollywood`s greatest hits from the `40s.” The book presents an endless march of nostalgic anecdotes and stories from the good old days–a group ”portrait” rather than a history.
For all their tumult and disaster, the 1940s were indeed Hollywood`s good old days. Beginning with 1939, Friedrich sketches an era in which movies were firmly established as America`s favorite recreation. In that year, he says, there were more movie theaters than banks in America. That made movies the 14th biggest business in America in cash volume and the 11th largest in terms of assets. The major movie studios produced a combined total of about 400 new films a year, and these attracted 50 million Americans a week to box offices across the country. Television? It was just a rumor of big things to come, a gimmick that was demonstrated that year to oohs and aahs at the New York World`s Fair.
And so the movie industry entered the `40s in very healthy shape. But before the decade was out, the studios would lose their greatest assets–the chains of theaters which provided them with direct markets for their products. The theaters were forcibly removed in 1948 by an anti-trust suit.
By the end of the decade, as well, television was more than just a rumor. All three commercial networks were programming on a regular basis seven days a week. People were buying television sets by the millions and staying home to watch them. As a consequence, movie attendance took a nosedive. To lure people back into the theaters all sorts of technical gimmicks were tried during the next decade–Cinerama, 3-D, Cinemascope, Todd A-O,–even Smell-O-Vision.
At the beginning of the decade, the moguls who had made the movies such a strong industry were still firmly in control at the major studios.
By 1950, their hold had loosened considerably and before the next decade was out, all the rest would be gone.
And so in both matters of economics and in leadership, the `40s was a crucial decade for the movie business, the one in which things began to change, as Friedrich documents through stories and anecdotes.
The workings of the unions, whether mob-dominated or Communist-influenced, are a very big part of this Hollywood story. When the Hollywood Ten were denounced by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and cited for contempt of Congress, the blacklist and witch-hunt for reds began, and Friedrich follows the situation as it changes from year to year. Repeatedly he comes back to Ronald Reagan, not because of his importance to Hollywood in the `40s but rather because of his position in Washington in the `80s.
Friedrich seems to see Reagan`s favorite role as the Gipper in ”Knute Rockney–All American” as the key to all that followed: ”Reclining in the darkness in the East Wing of the White House, the septuagenarian president can watch his younger self charging into history. He remembers it all, remembers and believes.”
He is also fascinated by the glamour girls–Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, and others. And some of his best pages recount their misadventures in movieland. What he quotes Elizabeth Taylor as saying might well have been said by all: ”My troubles all started because I have a woman`s body and a child`s emotions.”
He recounts a key incident in the transformation of `30s starlet Margarita Cansino into `40s goddess Rita Hayworth, telling how she bought a $500 silver dress and wore it to the Trocadero nightclub. There she was spotted by Columbia boss Harry Cohn and director Howard Hawks, who cast her in ”Only Angels Have Wings.”
Not all the stories from the era were so glamorous or ended so happily. For example, Friedrich tells two versions of how John Barrymore`s body was stolen from a funeral parlor and propped up in Errol Flynn`s living room (by Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, in one account). But whatever they did, these people, all of them, had style, a style that is simply lacking in Hollywood today. Friedrich conveys this in the gusto with which he tells the many, many stories in this book.
But what do all these individual stories add up to? He indicates he has read through some 500 books to put together this one. I believe it. He has plundered them expertly, showing himself to be a fine storyteller, one who can leap by kaleidoscopic association from one subject to the next, from one individual to another.
This approach, pioneered in non-fiction by Frederic Lewis Allen in ”Only Yesterday,” and used by countless documentary filmmakers, is worked to perfection here. Nevertheless, Friedrich might have done more than simply present this material. He could have given it a bit of direction, a bit more of the analysis he promised in his foreword. There is not much of it here;
there is no order except a loose chronology.
It`s a history of Hollywood in the 1940s I`m pleading for, rather than the ”portrait” that is promised and delivered here. Someday that history may be written; meanwhile ”City of Nets” may serve as a first draft for it.
