Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War Read online

  ALSO BY MARK HARRIS

  Pictures at a Revolution:

  Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

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  First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Mark Harris

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  Photograph credits appear here.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Harris, Mark, 1963–

  Five came back : a story of Hollywood and the Second World War / Mark Harris.

  pages cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15157-4

  1. Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History. 2. Motion pictures—United States—History. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Motion pictures and the war. I. Title.

  PN1993.5.U65H373 2008

  791.4302'33092279494—dc23 2013039983

  Version_1

  For my brother

  Contents

  Also by Mark Harris

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Pearl Harbor

  PART ONE

  1. “The Only Way I Could Survive”

  HOLLYWOOD, MARCH 1938–APRIL 1939

  2. “The Dictates of My Heart and Blood”

  HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, APRIL 1939–MAY 1940

  3. “You Must Not Realize that There Is a War Going On”

  HOLLYWOOD, JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1940

  4. “What’s the Good of a Message?”

  HOLLYWOOD, EARLY 1941

  5. “The Most Dangerous Fifth Column in Our Country”

  HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY–DECEMBER 1941

  PART TWO

  6. “Do I Have to Wait for Orders?”

  HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND HAWAII, DECEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  7. “I’ve Only Got One German”

  HOLLYWOOD, DECEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  8. “It’s Going to Be a Problem and a Battle”

  WASHINGTON, MARCH–JUNE 1942

  9. “All I Know Is That I’m Not Courageous”

  MIDWAY AND WASHINGTON, JUNE–AUGUST 1942

  10. “Can You Use Me?”

  WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1942

  11. “A Good Partner to Have in Times of Trouble”

  ENGLAND, NORTH AFRICA, AND HOLLYWOOD, SEPTEMBER 1942–JANUARY 1943

  12. “You Might as Well Run into It as Away from It”

  THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND NORTH AFRICA, SEPTEMBER 1942–MAY 1943

  13. “Just Enough to Make It Seem Less Than Real”

  ENGLAND, HOLLYWOOD, AND WASHINGTON, JANUARY–MAY 1943

  14. “Coming Along with Us Just for Pictures?”

  WASHINGTON, ENGLAND, AND NEW YORK, MARCH–JULY 1943

  PART THREE

  15. “How to Live in the Army”

  NORTH AFRICA, HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, AND WASHINGTON, SUMMER 1943

  16. “I’m the Wrong Man for That Stuff”

  WASHINGTON, HOLLYWOOD, AND ENGLAND, JUNE–DECEMBER 1943

  17. “I Have to Do a Good Job”

  ENGLAND AND ITALY, OCTOBER 1943–JANUARY 1944

  18. “We Really Don’t Know What Goes On Beneath the Surface”

  WASHINGTON, THE CHINA-BURMA-INDIA THEATER, ITALY, AND NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1943–MARCH 1944

  19. “If You Believe This, We Thank You”

  HOLLYWOOD AND ENGLAND, MARCH–MAY 1944

  20. “A Sporadic Raid of Sorts on the Continent”

  HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND NEW YORK, MARCH–MAY 1944

  21. “If You See It, Shoot It”

  FRANCE, JUNE–JULY 1944

  22. “If Hitler Can Hold Out, So Can I”

  HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY–DECEMBER 1944

  23. “Time and Us Marches On”

  FRANCE, BELGIUM, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, AND ENGLAND, JULY 1944–JANUARY 1945

  24. “Who You Working For—Yourself?”

  HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, ITALY, AND NEW YORK, FEBRUARY–MAY 1945

  25. “Where I Learned About Life”

  GERMANY, MARCH–AUGUST 1945

  26. “What’s This Picture For?”

  WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, SUMMER 1945

  27. “An Angry Past Commingled with the Future in a Storm”

  HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND GERMANY, 1945

  28. “A Straight Face and a Painfully Maturing Mind”

  HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 1945–MARCH 1946

  29. “Closer to What Is Going On in the World”

  HOLLYWOOD, MAY 1946–FEBRUARY 1947

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Index

  Prologue:

  Pearl Harbor

  John Ford was the first of the five to go. By the time the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, he was already three thousand miles from Hollywood and had been in uniform for three months. When news of the bombing came, Ford, now a lieutenant commander in the navy, and his wife, Mary, were guests at a Sunday luncheon at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew Pickens in Alexandria, Virginia. A maid nervously entered the room holding a telephone. “It’s the War Department, animal,” she said, stumbling over her employer’s rank. The visitors braced themselves as the admiral left his table to take the call. He returned to the party and announced, “Gentlemen, Pearl Harbor has just been attacked by the Japanese. We are now at war.” As the guests dispersed, the admiral’s wife tried to save the afternoon. “It’s no use getting excited. This is the seventh war that’s been announced in this dining room,” she said. She showed the Fords a bullet hole in the wall left by a musket ball during the American Revolution. “I never let them plaster over that,” she told them.

  Mary Ford later remembered that for “everybody at that table, their lives changed that minute.” But Ford had already changed his life, drastically and unexpectedly. By late 1941, most people in the movie industry, like most people in the country, believed that it was only a matter of time before the United States entered World War II. But what many of his colleagues viewed as a vague shadow spreading across the distant horizon, Ford accepted as a certainty that would require, and reward, advance preparation. For months before he left Hollywood for Washington, D.C., that September, he had been spending his nights and weekends overseeing the creation of a group he called the Naval Volunteer Photographic Unit, training camera operators, sound technicians, and editors to do their jobs under wartime conditions in close quarters; he even used gimbaled platforms in order to simulate attempts to develop film on ships while they pitched and listed. If war was inevitable, he believed the effort to record that war would be essential, and its planning co
uld not be left to amateurs or to the bungling of War Department bureaucrats.

  Still, Ford was an unlikely candidate to lead Hollywood’s march toward battle. He was old enough to be the father of a typical draftee; at forty-six, he was just a couple of years from welcoming his first grandchild. And although he had done his part in Hollywood over the years on several of the industry’s various committees—toiling among the interventionists, the fervent anti-Nazi campaigners, the leaders of ad hoc groups trying to provide aid in the Spanish Civil War—he hadn’t been on the front lines of those battles recently. Since 1939, he had spent most of his time and energy directing a string of movies—among them Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Grapes of Wrath—that had turned him into Hollywood’s most respected filmmaker.

  What moved Ford, just three weeks after completing production on How Green Was My Valley, the picture that would win him his third Best Director Academy Award in seven years, to step away from his thriving career and request a transfer from the Naval Reserve to active duty? Was it lingering shame at having failed the entrance exam for the Naval Academy at Annapolis as a high school student a quarter of a century earlier? Was it embarrassment about having missed America’s entry into the First World War in 1917, when he was busy trying to break into the movie business as a stuntman, actor, and fledgling director? Ford’s motivation was an enigma even to those closest to him—his wife, the colleagues with whom he made movies, and the drinking buddies at his favorite haunt, the Hollywood Athletic Club. “Is the ace director . . . tired of the tinsel of Hollywood?” one news story queried. Ford seemed to delight in withholding any explanation at all, burnishing his public image as a taciturn and cryptic man by accepting an invitation to be interviewed about his decision and then declining to offer anything more expansive than, “I think it’s the thing to do at this time.”

  It may have been that simple—a sense of duty, combined with a fear of how he might feel if he shirked it. That September, he had boarded a train for Washington, D.C., predicting misery and remorse for the able-bodied men in Hollywood who were still waiting, wondering what the war would mean and hoping the draft might leave them untouched. “They don’t count,” he wrote. “The blow will hit them hard next year.” He checked into the Carlton Hotel, hung his uniform in the closet, and installed himself in his modest room with its single window of old, runny glass, stacking a couple of books on the bureau along with his pipes and cigars and living out of an open wardrobe trunk. He had the air, wrote a reporter who visited him, “of a man who might set out to sea with an hour’s notice.” In fact, that was just what he was thinking and even hoping; as Ford awaited orders from his mentor, intelligence chief “Wild” Bill Donovan, his mind was only on what was to come. “Things are moving apace here,” he wrote to Mary, admonishing her to avoid the needless expense of late-night long-distance calls to him whenever she felt lonely or sad or angry, and telling her of the “hum of preparation and excitement” that the city was experiencing. “It would take volumes to say what I think of your unselfish courageous attitude in this present emergency,” he added as he awaited her arrival in the capital. “Words literally fail me. I am very proud of you.”

  When Mary finally joined her husband in Washington, Ford gave his wife of twenty-one years something she had always wanted, a proper Catholic wedding ceremony. It was a preparatory gesture, a gift before what they both knew might be a long separation. And when the moment finally came, Ford and the men he trained, who had been streaming into Washington in the last few weeks, could barely contain their enthusiasm. Just hours after the news of Pearl Harbor broke, his Photo Unit recruits began showing up at the Carlton, knocking on the Fords’ door, wanting to know what was going to happen next. The drinks started to flow, and as dusk fell on December 7, Ford and his men welcomed America into the war with cocktails.

  • • •

  The sense of urgency that had led Ford to upend his life was not shared by most of his colleagues in Hollywood until that December Sunday. William Wyler was at home in Bel Air the morning of Pearl Harbor, playing tennis with his friend John Huston. Wyler was a few weeks into shooting Mrs. Miniver, a drama about the gallantry of one middle-class British family and the inspiring home-front unity of their traditional village in the face of what, until that day, Americans still felt comfortable referring to as “the war in Europe.” Huston, who was Wyler’s junior and in many ways his protégé, was riding a wave of acclaim as his breakthrough directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, was opening around the country. During their match, the two friends talked about an idea they had cooked up for a celebratory men-only trip they hoped to take later that winter, once Wyler completed Mrs. Miniver. That afternoon, they planned to join another friend, director Anatole Litvak, and meet with a travel agent about a visit to the Far East. “Willy and I wanted to get out of Hollywood for a while. I suggested it would be great to go on a proper trip to China,” said Huston. “We wanted to see a bit of the outer world.”

  When Wyler’s wife, Talli, who was pregnant with their second child, received a call telling her that Hawaii had been attacked, she ran out of the house and onto the tennis court, telling her husband and Huston to stop playing. The outer world was now at their doorstep. Later that day, the two men drove to Litvak’s Malibu beach house, their prospective jaunt abroad already forgotten, and started making plans: How soon could they wrap up their professional commitments? How quickly could they walk away from the Hollywood work that now seemed to them like a silly game?

  Wyler, who was thirty-nine, was exempt from military service because of his age. At thirty-five, Huston was a year under the cutoff and therefore eligible for the draft according to the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, but the aftereffects of a childhood defined by frail health would probably have gotten him an easy 4-F exemption. However, there was no hesitation or second-guessing for either man. Wyler was a Jewish immigrant whose first sight of Americans had been the troops who liberated his hometown in Alsace at the end of World War I. He had relatives trapped in Europe. Eleven days after Pearl Harbor, he was awaiting his first assignment from the Signal Corps, the army’s communications unit. Huston’s attitude was more devil-may-care; he had been making up for lost time since his bedbound youth—he had ridden with the Mexican cavalry as an adolescent—and he was sure the war would offer more opportunity to reinvent himself as a man of action. Less than a month after Wyler, he accepted his own Signal Corps commission—“a distinct loss to the Warner studios,” noted the New York Times, “where he is the directorial find of the year.” When he had saddled up in Mexico, Huston said, “I was only a kid . . . I was more interested in going horseback riding than learning how to fight. This time it’s different.”

  The men were seeking adventure, but more than that, they were reaching for relevance in a world that had become rougher and more frightening than anything their studio bosses would allow them to depict on film. Hollywood’s best moviemakers shared a growing concern that they were fiddling while Europe burned, using their talents to beguile the American public with diversions—means of escape from the churn and horror of the headlines—rather than striving to bring the world into focus. Hollywood had never been interested in anticipating the news or leading public opinion, but recently its ability to react to changing circumstances had felt agonizingly slow. Wyler had intended Mrs. Miniver, a paean to the British national spirit, to galvanize American support for its closest ally; now that the United States itself was at war, he fretted that what he had once intended as a bold statement would seem embarrassingly behind the times. And Huston had spent much of that autumn working with his friend Howard Koch on the script for a Broadway play called In Time to Come, about Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the League of Nations after World War I. When their drama opened three weeks after Pearl Harbor and, despite good reviews, closed a month later, Huston wasn’t surprised. It “seemed dated,” he wrote.

  Suddenly, Hollywood’s most skilled filmmakers faced the possibilit
y that their movies would be of significantly less interest to audiences than the newsreels that preceded them. At MGM, George Stevens was busy making Woman of the Year, the comedy that initiated what would become one of the screen’s most beloved sparring partnerships by teaming Katharine Hepburn with Spencer Tracy. Over the last several years, Stevens had demonstrated an extraordinary knack for creating light-spirited movies that nonetheless seemed to take place in the here and now; he knew how to use the economic grind of the Depression and the buzz of modern urban life as context for deft romances that delighted moviegoers. His new film would be no exception—his heroine, Tess Harding, was a journalist, a staunch anti-Hitler interventionist whose must-read opinion pieces had themes like “Democracies Must Stand Together or Collapse.” (One ad for her columns shouted, “Hitler Will Lose, Says Tess Harding.”) The tone of Woman of the Year was perfect for a country engaged by world events but not yet ensnared in them. As the script had it, Tess’s professional passion was merely a distraction on the way to her real destiny; her meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt would ultimately be exposed as busywork for a woman who was uneasily attempting to avoid a more meaningful future as a wife and mother.

  But the picture wasn’t working. The weekend of Pearl Harbor, Stevens was coming off a disappointing test screening of Woman of the Year. His producer at MGM, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, had told him that audiences had rejected the movie’s last scene, in which Hepburn and Tracy reconciled while covering a prizefight. They wanted to see Hepburn brought low, humiliated for her careerism. Reluctantly, he was preparing to shoot a new ending, in which Tess was to be shamed by her inability to find her way around a kitchen and cook a simple breakfast. Stevens had shot some of Laurel and Hardy’s funniest short comedies when he was coming up in the 1920s, and he knew how to execute the pratfalls the scene required, but not how to refute Hepburn’s bluntly stated conviction that the new ending was “the worst bunch of shit I’ve ever read.” He and Hepburn both went through with the reshoot, but by the time Woman of the Year was in theaters two months later, Stevens was already thinking about turning his cameras on the war. That winter, he had sat alone in a Los Angeles screening room and watched, with horror and enthrallment, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary tribute to Aryan invincibility, Triumph of the Will. After that, he knew he could not make another movie that could possibly be used to divert anyone’s attention from the war. Stevens often said that he decided to enlist that night, but what he saw stirred more than just his patriotic desire to beat the Germans. Watching the movie, he said years later, he realized that “all film,” including his own, “is propaganda.”