Warner bros, p.4
Warner Bros, page 4
Still, there would be those later who said Jack “killed” Harry. You don’t have to credit that in an originalist sense of murder, but try forgetting it. Or see how far the Warner Brothers left alive in 1942–43 might look upon the lively melodrama of Casablanca, with its separated families, letters of transit, and noir dreams, as if they might be real. When Steinbeck finished East of Eden, he wrote to a friend with the realization, “Always I had this book waiting to be written.” In rather the same way, though Jack Warner may never have read the novel, or intruded on the filming of East of Eden, it was as much his story as The Jazz Singer, The Public Enemy, White Heat, or so many of the family melodramas made under the Warner Bros colophon. Brothers cannot escape the need for battle.
By 1955, the year of East of Eden, the thing called Warner Brothers was an immense success, and the kind of transformation that helped identify success in America. This was how showmakers out of Russia, without English, a name, or credentials, could become moguls in the land, as well as the arbiters who doled out fame to people named Cagney, Bogart, Davis, and Crawford. So long as you remembered the sardonic Hollywood principle: “It is not enough that I succeed—my best friend must fail.”5
There’s a boast in that candor—it’s like the Clive James poem “The Book of My Best Friend Has Been Remaindered.” But that at least admits an enemy. What emerges from decades of Warners pictures is the obsession with sibling rivalry and pals who become enemies. It’s there in many big pictures discussed in this book, but there are so many more: Four Daughters, where the girls vie for the same guys; The Hard Way, a struggle between sisters; Devotion, with Ida Lupino as Emily Brontë, Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte, and Nancy Coleman as Anne; the deadly brothers in Track of the Cat; buddies fighting over a woman in Other Men’s Women; family vendetta in Pursued; brothers split by a woman in They Drive by Night; co-workers in opposition in Manpower, on which Edward G. Robinson and George Raft came to blows; the brothers at odds in The Master of Ballantrae; and Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins seething together in Old Acquaintance and The Old Maid, a natural extension of the actresses’ real loathing for each other. You have to see how far the storytellers at Warners—the writers, the producers, the directors, and the actors—had this smell of intimate violence in their heads.
Harry and Jack Warner were always at odds, and that intensified as they became the decisive brothers. Harry was a self-conscious older brother, aware of the old country and of the codes the family needed to adhere to if they were to remain themselves during physical and social removal. Harry would like to think of himself as reasonable, good-natured, homely, and happy with that. Leo Rosten would say, “He was not an impressive man to meet. He led a brilliant business but he had no intention of being an outstanding personality. He was kind, honest, devout and devoted to family matters. He always observed the Jewish faith.”6 He was in the spirit of those actors who graced Warner Brothers movies for years—the friend, the sidekick, the amiable listener, the loyalist. You can see that impulse over the years in supporting actors like Alan Hale, Frank McHugh, Pat O’Brien, Jack Carson, Regis Toomey, George Tobias, and Ronald Reagan.
Jack may not have been a simple opposite to Harry, but he found himself in opposing him. He had no intention of being unimpressive. He worked hard to be better looking and to draw attention. People marveled at his bright teeth, and his habit of telephoning while sitting on the john. He adopted a thin mustache and snappy talk: if Warners led the way in bringing sound to the movies, why shouldn’t Jack live up to that? He was a fair singer and a chronic teller of jokes, some of them in poor taste (“Uneasy lies the head that wears a toilet seat!”). Jack Benny said once, “Jack Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good picture.”7 Harry deplored the jokes and said they came from growing up in that racy Youngstown, Ohio, instead of in the shtetl. Of course, in many ways Harry was himself Americanized and a happy resident of fine American houses. But brothers thrive on their differences.
Jack was eager to be a show business person: this makes him awful in some ways, despised by many of his own employees. But he is irresistible, too, the showman in the family, the one who’s likely to tell the world, “You ain’t heard nothing yet!” He liked exclamation marks, while Harry found them vulgar. In 1907, Harry had married Rea Levinson, a longtime girlfriend. They had three children. The family lived according to the Jewish faith and tradition, and no one ever saw a sign that Harry needed to go outside his marriage for diversion. They were a steadfast and devoted couple, a model for the contented families that run through Hollywood movies.
But Jack Warner had seen another way. He was just twenty as the Warner Brothers moved into the picture business, and he quickly assessed the armies of pretty women dedicated to getting on screen by catching his eye. By 1915, Jack was in charge of the family movie exchange in San Francisco. That’s where he met Irma Solomons, from a wealthy Jewish family. He wooed her and married her, and was educated and embarrassed by Irma’s disdain for his own parents. As Neal Gabler puts it in An Empire of Their Own, Jack had “married up.”8 He and Irma had a single child, born in 1916, and Jack named the son Jack Jr., contrary to the Ashkenazi practice of not naming a child to honor a living relative. Harry deplored that decision, and he was shocked when Jack’s marriage became a mask for affairs with actresses and women eager to be attached to the movies.
Harry had become a self-appointed guardian of family morals—it is the one sign of anything other than kindness in his life. His younger brother Sam had married the actress Lina Basquette in 1925. This was a shaming concession to the new world as Harry saw it. Lina was a Catholic, twenty years younger than Sam, with a reputation for fast living. Sam and Lina had a daughter, born in 1926, named Lita. But in 1927, when Sam died suddenly, Harry took steps to ensure that Lina would not have control of Lita, especially in the matter of religious upbringing. He went to law over it, and Lina yielded after Harry volunteered $300,000 as a trust fund for Lita. Thereafter, he and Rea were the child’s legal guardians, despite repeated, failed attempts by Lina to regain custody.
Lina Basquette had a turbulent life. She returned to acting and worked in small parts until around 1940; she would be married eight times; she eventually retired to raise dogs in Pennsylvania. Great Danes. She never saw her daughter properly until the 1970s, and she was barred from any Warners inheritance. She died in 1994, hoping that her life story might be made into a movie.9
There was more. A young man named José Paige, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was trying to make a career as a Latin lover actor named Don Alvarado. He actually made a few films for Warners, perhaps because of his young wife, Ann Boyar. She was sixteen when they married, a lustrous beauty, of Russian Jewish descent, and she caught Jack Warner’s eye. He persuaded her to divorce Alvarado in Mexico, probably in 1933. Then Jack left his wife, Irma, and started living with Ann. They had a daughter, Barbara, in 1934, and in 1936 they were married.
Harry did not attend that ceremony. He wrote Jack saying that the only good thing about it was that their parents had not lived to see it.10 They had died in 1934 and 1935. Harry regarded the divorce between Irma and Jack and the illegitimate child as a scandal and a disaster. It hardened a gulf between the brothers, just as it was a metaphor for the disquiet that the movies had made a cult of glamour and attractiveness, promiscuity and divorce.
Don Alvarado acted for a few years, but the field for Latin lovers was too crowded. He gave that up and became an assistant—at Warner Brothers (he knew people). As Don Page, he would be an assistant director on East of Eden.
Jack and Ann Warner, though frequently estranged, became a famous social couple in Hollywood, just as Harry shrank from any such attention. But the brothers were business partners nonetheless, and their business—with ups and downs—was an astonishing success. By the 1940s, Jack Warner had become Warner Brothers in the public eye, and he was more significant in running the studio than Harry. But Harry was president, still, strict, disapproving, and a mote and a beam in Jack’s eye. “What a boring guy Harry was,” said Darryl Zanuck once. “Jack was unreliable, but never boring.”11 In that passing remark lies a lesson of the picture business. Sooner or later, Harry had to go.
4
Family Dinner
IF IT WAS LATE 1903, or early 1904, Harry Warner was twenty-two; Abe was nineteen; Sam was sixteen; and Jack was eleven. It was dinner time at the Warner home in Youngstown, Ohio. You do not have to credit what follows in every detail, except that it is a story that was told by one of the family, years later, when that little girl had had the chance to hear versions of the evening told to her by many of the people who had been there.1
The family had tried Baltimore, Canada, Pittsburgh, and now Youngstown. Benjamin had kept working at shoe repairing, because in American cities looking for work and life the citizenry were soon wearing out their shoes. Harry had become an expert young cobbler. The family had had a flurry of activity with bicycles as the developing society sought technologies that might spare shoe leather. Their thoughts of business were all transport and friction. They had tried running a bowling alley, and they had spent time in the meat business, but shoes were the standby because only the hopelessly poor went without them. The Warners were managing better than many families, but they were as yet unknown to anyone except themselves. Dinner was served and cleared away, and it was then that Pearl brought out her best latkes, with apple sauce and sour cream.
There were sisters in the group—Rose, Sadie, and Anna—and they were eager voices in the family, yet not much more important than two sisters who had died already in infancy. The light of the family and its hope were the brothers, and they had been taught by their parents and their own company to behave like a group. “One for all, and all for one,” their father told them, though the Warners had few of the advantages of Dumas’s musketeers.
But this was a special night—or so it would be memorialized—and Sam was the agent of the occasion. Sam then was the extrovert and the doer; he was the brother Jack looked up to. Somehow or other, for hard-earned money (perhaps as much as $1,000!), he had purchased one of the new kinetoscopes, a primitive movie projector, made by Thomas Edison, the marvels people were talking about, and Sam was proposing a movie show for the family on a white sheet he had pinned up on the wall.
It was Sam who had acquired the machine and heard about how it operated, because by consent he was the one in the family who had the best sense of how gadgets worked. So he had set up the projector and he had threaded it with the motion picture that came with it—for demonstration purposes—The Great Train Robbery, it was called.
At first, with whirring and clanking noises, a picture played on the sheet that seemed like life. But then the machine lost its sharp focus, and then it stopped. The miracle in those days had many mechanical impediments. So Sam was embarrassed, and he did what he could, with knives and forks from the dinner table, to get the machine to work. He knew that his father would be asking why it had cost so much if it wasn’t working properly. Then the kid, Jack, leaped into the void, and proposed that, pretending to be the great and famous singer Leon Zuardo, he would now sing “Sweet Adeline.” He gave out with that song and all the energy of a natural show-off reluctant to be subdued by the order and anxiety of his family. Brother Abe wondered aloud whether Sam had been conned by the neighbor who sold him the projector. Harry recalled that the neighbor had admitted it hardly ever worked without a problem.
But Sam, the machine, the miracle, and destiny would not be denied—all over the world, people were struggling to get these machines to work so that transport could be achieved without friction. Then, for eleven minutes or so, the assembled Warners watched The Great Train Robbery. Of course, it could have been any strip of film. But that’s no reason not to note what a strange piece of work The Great Train Robbery was.
This was a Jewish family, from out of the shadow of Russia, lately installed in the United States. Most of them had not spoken English for their early years. They had had to learn and labor to find a place for themselves. They understood from the outset that many Americans feared or hated them because they were Jewish and foreign. They had recognized that in determining on a business, and a living for themselves, they would have to combat that. In settling for shoes, they realized that they would oppose the stereotype by which many Jews made basic items of clothing for people. They were resolved, if not desperate or anxious, to be respectable, law-abiding, and part of the new country.
Families of greater fortune or advantage tell themselves stories in which honesty, honor, hard work, and persistence are the most available of human assets. These are stories of virtue defended and rewarded by history. Not too far away, in Pittsburgh and then New York, a Lithuanian American, Lewis Selznick (Laiser Zeleznick, once), had read Dickens’s David Copperfield to his son David, with that opening in which David wonders whether he will be the hero of his own story. Thirty years later, that David Selznick had produced a film from David Copperfield, and it is still one of the most beloved movie versions of Dickens’s work, with W. C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, striving to make ends meet.
But The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter and made for the Edison Company, was a story in which sensation crowded out honor and respectability. Indeed, it is notable that in the story of that dinner-table miracle, Ben or Pearl or Harry did not remark on what a disgrace and a peril the film was. But in the play of light and emulsion, motion and emotion, something was slipping past all the safeguards of respectability.
It is the story of a band of robbers who hold up a train. It is something we can now identify as a Western, shot in a mixture of staged awkwardness and movie excitement. We see a gang of robbers planning to waylay a locomotive. We see the local control office of the train, where a telegraph operation keeps track of the action. We find ourselves on the train, with window rectangles of back projection giving the crude feeling of terrain passing by. We see that operator beaten and tied up.
This is mundane and stilted, but then we are on the moving locomotive itself as the masked robbers seize control of the train. They order it stopped. They separate the engine from the body of the train. They call the passengers to assemble on the track. When one of that group seeks to run away, a robber shoots him down, and the splendid death fall leaves no doubt about what has happened.
The plan to rob the train works—it becomes a “great” robbery, and then there is a screen event so lovely it may have made people swoon in 1903. As the robbers escape and get away, so the camera pans with their movement, celebrating it—motion equals emotion (even Einstein could have guessed that, and in 1903 he was hot on the trail of relativity).
To this point, The Great Train Robbery could be a primer in how to take advantage of an innocent locomotive. A moment’s reflection tells us that a motion picture business—which was only slowly emerging in 1903—could not leave the story at that. You could not make something that was so plainly “How to Rob a Train.” The onus of business in America, or in any culture desiring respectability, was that the energy of the robbers had to be corrected and punished.
So it turns out. An inexplicable child revives and frees the operator. A telegraph message is sent. Very soon (this is only eleven minutes) a posse comes upon the robbers in the woods, dividing up their loot, and shoots them down. Fair’s fair, you can say: you may have had the thrill of outlawry, but correction is guaranteed. Ben, Pearl, and Harry Warner could take some comfort in the show, even if that rascal Jack was jumping up and down with glee, riding a horse on the arm of the sofa, and firing off his fingers as six-guns.
Then something happens that is a prediction of the movies, Warner Brothers, and America. The story is done, but the movie continues with a head-on close-up of a Western character—a tough face with a cowboy hat and a drooping mustache, enough to make us think of photographs of the Wyatt Earp family (the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone was in 1881). This man then takes out his six-gun and fires six times into the camera, with smoke and flash at every shot, as if to say, “Take that, law and order!” (He actually keeps firing after the gun is empty.) We are still living with this uncanny, unexplored release of energy, will, and passion.
The traditional version of this Youngstown story comes from Cass Warner Sperling, a granddaughter of Harry Warner. And she wraps up the story in a way that indicates the influence of her grandfather and his sober sense of business. We are in no position now to decide whether the 1903 dinner scene happened exactly like this. But once the story was passed on, the facts ceased to matter too much:
In the flickering light, Harry turned his face from the screen and watched the excited family audience as they viewed the magic shadows dancing on the sheet. If this is what it does to my own brothers and sisters, and my parents, then think what it can do to others. He imagined himself selling tickets to long lines of people waiting to see this new wonder on the wall come to life.2
The impact of The Great Train Robbery lingers still. It helps illuminate the ambiguity of two remarkable pictures, both of which were made for Warner Brothers.
The Letter was made in 1941, directed by William Wyler, from the Somerset Maugham play. The film starts at night, beneath a tropic moon, on a Malay rubber plantation. The camera tracks across the nocturnal scene until a shot rings out, and we come to the verandah of a wealthy house. The body of a man falls, and then we see the figure of a woman who has shot him. We know nothing beyond the fact of execution and the way this woman has carried it out, firing all six shots into the body of the man.3
