Book Prize Winner: History : The Lions of Judah in the Jungle of Hollywood

“Giving chicken soup to Cossacks” is how Lillian Hellman acidly characterized the reaction, craven in her view, of the movie industry’s Jewish moguls to the machinations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). One by one these wizened tycoons--whose brutality, calculated risk-taking and sheer shamelessness were already, by the early 1950s, the stuff of legend--capitulated without even token resistance to an anti-Communist campaign with anti-Semitic overtones that, as Neal Gabler shows, eerily substantiated fears that had accompanied them ever since they transformed their empire of back-street nickelodeons into Hollywood.

Hollywood was created by a remarkably homogeneous group of Central and Eastern European Jewish men. Their desire to remake themselves, extinguish their pasts and transcend the hostilities of the old world and the more subtle ones of the new fueled their all-but-insatiable ambitions to rule, to patronize and to assimilate. Hollywood, their magic kingdom, was created, Gabler tells us, to provide an imaginary, and tragically tenuous, haven in what they never ceased to feel was a heartless world.

Readers of Yiddish and Hebrew literature of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries already will be familiar with figures resembling Paramount’s Adolph Zukor or Columbia’s Harry Cohn: men whose reactions to the poverty, marginality, and impenetrable intergroup resentments of Eastern Europe would make them into victims, and then monsters of retribution and resentment. Victims are by no means inevitably saintly, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Mendele Mochor Seforim, knew well, and catastrophe unleashed unsavory, sometimes truly hateful passions. A considerably more sanitized version of the East European Jewish past was eventually, and quite successfully, promulgated in America, and Gabler’s admirable book illuminates, among many other things, an otherwise neglected feature of European Jewry’s desperate, fearful transmutations of the last century.

A nasty, mutually antagonistic coterie of “furriers” is how they were frequently called by their (often justifiably) resentful actors, writers, technicians and bankers who saw their rise from the prototypically Jewish trades to the incomparably glamorous movie industry to be jarring, even inexplicable. Yet at the time when these would-be moguls, some prescient and others just uncannily lucky, first embarked on their careers--typically haphazardly, as one of various ways to make a buck in an unfamiliar, often hostile turn-of-the-century America--the movies they promoted were but brief, low-status entertainments for working men and women.

It was they who transformed the primitive moving pictures, the products of very recent technical advances by Edison and others, into America’s most popular entertainment form by the early 1920s. Nickelodeons were replaced by movie palaces, (sufficiently opulent to satisfy the escapist needs of the working class and to capture the respectable middle class) short flicks expanded into features, their obscure players made into stars, and eventually, by the late 1920s, their visual pleasures enhanced immeasurably by sound.

The men responsible for all this had no special technical expertise, little literacy, typically a spotty command of English, and not much money or prestige. Indeed, had they come from the right side of the tracks they probably never would have found their way into the dives that featured the first penny movies that they so dramatically transformed. What they did have, by virtue of their experience in the clothing trade, was a practiced sense of what constituted popular taste, a willingness, even a hunger, to take chances, keen merchandising skills, and an ability to mediate and shape the preferences of disparate groups. In their first few years in the movie business they lost big sums and moved from good addresses to dismal ones without losing face, friends or confidence. (This would change when they reached the top.) And they entered the industry (a term they coined and preferred) with an insatiable, restless need to win, an abiding sense that a poor man was a broken man and that they could only make their way in a Gentile world by bringing it to their feet. Their heirs, not surprisingly, lacked their combativeness and their talent; these were the products of unhappy pasts so different from those spent in the considerably more benign California climate to which these moguls moved once they began to produce, merchandise and distribute their increasingly lucrative and prestigious films.

They moved to Los Angeles because the weather allowed shooting movies throughout the year. In what is one of the book’s best sections, Gabler describes the content of their daily lives. Never since Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” has this feverish, grittily competitive, strangely cloistered (“Suddenly Stahr could think of no place . . . Where did people meet?”), and irredeemably exhausting routine--one in which even leisure time was spent in endless hours of competition involving gambling, horse racing and womanizing--been told as fully and convincingly. Their family lives were publicly pristine but, in fact, typically vacuous, authoritarian and distant; their friendships were usually based far more on utility than sentiment. Adolph Zukor relaxed, and then only rarely, among Hungarian-born Jews like himself, and he was sure to limit his intimate circle to men without clout or influence who consequently could gain nothing professionally from the relationship.

As one Los Angeles producer recalled: “There used to be a kind of floating Jewish population. We’d go to Palm Springs. We’d go to Coronado. We’d go to Pebble Beach and Arrowhead Springs and Arrowhead Lake . . . They’d go down on Saturday afternoon and come home on Sunday night, and they’d stay overnight and play cards. . . . They never discussed anything. They just played cards.”

In their movies--which they influenced, Gaber suggests, more than their directors did--they projected images of an America that were wholesomely domestic (Louis Mayer’s forte) or stylish, continental, witty--a congenial place where people like themselves would be treated as full, honored members and which did not exist beyond their vaulted studio sound rooms. Ethnicity they eschewed, except for the Warners, who proved an exception to most of these rules. Jews as film characters they believed were unsaleable; as actors they were rendered virtually unrecognizable until HUAC publicized their original names. (Julius Garfinkle was made by Hollywood executives into John Garfield, Emmanuel G. Goldenberg into Edward G. Robinson.)

When Garfield protested his new name, which he pointed out was the name of a President, and countered, “You wouldn’t name a goddam actor Abraham Lincoln, would you?” he was told, “No, kid, we wouldn’t, because Abe is a name that most people would say is Jewish and we wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”)

Accusations that this was a Jewish-dominated industry (by 1936, 53 of the 85 producers in the United States were Jews) were, the moguls hoped, muted by their efforts to ensure that neither their movies nor their lives retained any of the residual influence of their European past, which they attempted to expunge ferociously. They voted Republican when nearly all Jews were Democrats; they loathed Roosevelt when Jews elsewhere worshipped him; their comments about the suffering of Jews (even during the horrors of World War II) testified to a fatal combination of repression and insensitivity, though in this instance again Harry Warner stood out as unusually humane and responsive.

They understood, as Carey McWilliams wrote in the late 1940s, that “Jews have been excluded from participation in the basic industries of the country, the industries that exercise a decisive control over the entire economy. . . . Generally speaking, the businesses in which Jews are concentrated are those in which a large risk-factor is involved; businesses peripheral to the economy . . . businesses which have traditionally carried a certain social stigma, such, for example, as the amusement industry and the liquor industry.” Never did the moguls cease to fear that they would be robbed of what they spent a lifetime building, by virtue of the ramblings of xenophobic ministers, hostile members of congress, the plots of east-coast Gentile bankers, envious west-coast competitors, or the Communist activities of their hapless writers.

A source of solace and inspiration, oddly enough, was their rabbi, Edgar Magnin of Wilshire Boulevard Temple--a man superbly suited for his role as spiritual mentor to an insecure but relentless elite who sought the assurances of a rabbi as long as he substantiated their rather base inclinations. Magnin was charismatic, dogmatic and a source of endlessly facile, often crass, homespun wisdom.

He was as shrewd as any of his powerful Hollywood congregants and the scion of Central European Jews (in fact very rich ones) whose status was immeasurably greater than that of the Eastern ones who had spawned the moguls.

He was no less preoccupied than they with the need to assimilate and, except when it came to the espousal of virulently xenophobic patriotism, he avoided discussion of values, social issues or even personal ethics. Magnin, a good example of how the People of the Book have produced even rabbis who are wholly unbookish, enabled his elite to believe that their deracinated, assimilationist and bullish way of life was precisely what America expected of them.

How these men worked out their existential dilemmas in their movies is at the core of Gabler’s book, and his observations on this score are speculative, probably inevitably so. They were, as he demonstrates, drawn to the movies by chance but they remained, he says, in part because of the way in which this medium helped resolve (or so it seemed) tensions that they never managed to overcome intheir own lives. Speaking of “The Jazz Singer,” that historic milestone which launched movies with sound, Gabler suggests that this movie in particular but film in general provided the moguls with a way to navigate between tortuously conflicting demands: “The movies, after all, are a world of possibility where anything can happen, and of all the themes in ‘The Jazz Singer,’ this might have been the most important and the most telling for theHollywood Jews. The movies can redefine us. The movies can make us new. The movies can make us whole. And this is precisely how the Hollywood Jews would use them.”

Our story ends unhappily. In the end, they were left with precious little: divested of their Jewish wives, their Jewish pasts, having discharged many of their Jewish writers and executives during the hateful McCarthy years, friendless in a milieu (shaped largely by them) where status was made and squandered within the span of minutes, and lost in a raw and empty city devoid of anything resembling the urban cultures they had known in their youth. Once their companies were gobbled up by Coca Cola or Warner Communications, or taken from them in corporate maneuvers, they came to resemble, rather uncannily and despite their wealth, that faded mogul Schwartz in Fitzgerald’s novel whose suicide at the book’s beginning prefigures the tragedy that eventually envelopes its protagonist Monroe Stahr. Once rich, now poor, and consequently desperate, Schwartz was “obviously a man to whom something had happened. Meeting him was like encountering a friend who had been in a fist fight or collision, and got flattened. You stare at your friend and say, ‘What happened to you?’ And he answers something unintelligible through broken teeth and swollen lips. He can’t even tell you about it.”

They created a universe of abiding images. And even if Coca Cola came to control much of what they built, their classic works were colorized in a flourish of rapaciousness of the sort familiar to the movies’ creators, and eventually Hollywood was made into a far more complex place than their feudal-like domain, their legacy nonetheless remains potent. It is jarring to speculate that the images of America that most animated Ronald Reagan, as his biographers have amply demonstrated, were drawn more readily from the assimilationist fantasies of Louis Mayer and others than they were from anything even vaguely resembling American reality. Dorothy, Auntie Em, Andy Hardy were more real to him, and remain more real to many others, than do the main streets and alleys of America’s cities. What can better attest to the potency of these tycoons?

The most potent image that this reader was left with upon closing this excellent book, and one not suggested by Gabler himself, was of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s roaring lion, the ferocious symbol of the biggest of the studios. Can this lion, growling at Mayer’s audiences before each and every screening, have been inspired, however unconsciously, by the lion of Judah, among the best-known symbols of a culture that shunned representative art? Be that as it may, Gabler’s book provides a new and provocative gloss on our most important, certainly our most pervasive, art form, and its study of the wages of 20th-Century American Jewish assimilation is subtle, wise, and humane. This original book is popular history at its best.

History Nominees A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and American in Vietam by Neil Sheehan (Random House) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster) An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler (Crown Books) Highbrow / Lowbrow The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine (Harvard University Press) The Question of Hu by Jonathan Spence (Alfred A. Knopf)