Left-leaning Hollywood: A myth dies

If Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign does nothing else, it ought to excise the mythology of liberal Hollywood from our popular consciousness once and for all.

The notion that Hollywood marches in ideological lock step -- left foot always forward -- has long been useful to publicity-seeking congressmen, right-wing culture warriors and moralists-on-the-make from the Legion of Decency to the Traditional Values Coalition. In fact, there was a time, not so very long ago, when the mere mention of Jane Fonda’s name was so remunerative to conservative fund-raisers’ direct mail campaigns that they should have put her on retainer.

Like so much in politics, it all works very nicely -- until you consider the record:

Schwarzenegger is traversing a well-marked path from entertainment celebrity to elective office, and all who have preceded him have been Republicans, foremost among them Ronald Reagan. Age and Constitution permitting, he probably could have been elected to a third presidential term. There’s former U.S. Sen. George Murphy and the late Rep. Sonny Bono, who came to politics through song and dance. Clint Eastwood was probably America’s most famous small-town mayor.

The last time a certified Hollywood liberal had a real shot at elective office it was 1950, when one-time actress Helen Gahagan Douglas -- whose husband was actor Melvyn Douglas -- ran as the Democratic candidate for one of California’s U.S. Senate seats. She, of course, was defeated in a bruising campaign by a young Orange County congressman named Richard M. Nixon.

The 1960s generally are regarded as the time when liberalism spread Kudzu-like throughout the film and television industries, choking out every other mode of thought and expression and producing a spate of culturally subversive and anti-Vietnam War films. Like a majority of Americans, most people who worked in Hollywood in those years came to oppose the war, and it’s safe to say that a fair number inhaled along the way. Yet it was also an era in which so-called mainstream stars like John Wayne and Bob Hope maintained considerable influence.

And, when all was said and done, the guys with the real power -- the ones in suits who run the studios -- recruited as their industry’s new international spokesman President Lyndon B. Johnson’s former chief of staff, Jack Valenti. And so he remains today, Hollywood’s sonorous paladin of unshakable centrism.

David Freeman, novelist and screenwriter, is also a shrewd chronicler of his company town.

He points out that the real Hollywood -- as opposed to the imagined one -- always has encompassed both ends of the ideological spectrum. “Jimmy Stewart, a deeply conservative and sincere Republican, and Gregory Peck, a very liberal and committed Democrat, were the opposing poles of their era,” he said. “Louis B. Mayer thought of himself as a Republican plutocrat. Big money usually is conservative; this is not news. Over the last generation, it’s certainly true that liberals have been noisier, but there always have been plenty of conservatives, though an ingrained sense of good manners made them quieter about it.

“There are vocal people on the left -- Barbra Streisand, for example -- but on the other side there are people like Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Arnold, who have made their positions known. In fact, now that conservatism is fashionable, Republicans everywhere, including Hollywood, have become louder. There’s been a change in the country, and Hollywood always reflects changes in the country. It doesn’t lead change; it reflects it.”

Thus, said Freeman, since Sept. 11, most Hollywood Democrats -- like most Americans -- have adopted a more traditionally conservative approach to issues of physical security.

Take, for example, his friend and former Yale Drama School classmate Roger L. Simon, a mystery novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and filmmaker whose best-selling Moses Wine mysteries involve a protagonist who came to private detection as a pot-smoking Berkeley radical. Nowadays, Simon -- whose latest novel is “Director’s Cut” -- also maintains a popular blog that generally supports Schwarzenegger, whom he describes as “a straight down the line, middle-of-the-road Republican.”

“When I came here 30 years ago,” Simon said, “I was known as a radical. I was considered too left wing for creating a hero out of Moses Wine.

“Now, I consider myself nothing. Since 9/11, my politics are completely based on individual issues. I was definitely in favor of war on Iraq.”

Even when he began writing films, Simon recalled, Hollywood’s “liberalism was never universal. When I wanted to pitch stories with leftish themes, I never went to the so-called baby moguls, who made such a big deal out of being former SDSers. They were afraid of those stories, but other -- ostensibly more conservative -- people in the industry wanted to appear open. Hollywood is a business. You can have any opinion you want, if your movies are making money.”

There is no better evidence of that -- and no stronger refutation of the liberal Hollywood myth -- than the movie industry’s most decisive intervention ever into California politics.

In 1934, the muckraking novelist, socialist tract writer and dietary crank Upton Sinclair stunned the state by winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. His platform called for adopting a modest universal old-age pension and seizing idle factories and farmlands so that they could be handed over to cooperatives of the unemployed. Sinclair was favored to win the general election, and that prospect rattled the California establishment to its marrow.

Among those most alarmed were the mostly Republican, mostly Jewish founding fathers of the film industry. They had a particular reason to loathe Sinclair, who, as a relatively well-paid but unsuccessful screenwriter and producer, had turned on the industry. The year before he won the nomination, Sinclair had published a book, “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox,” based on a series of interviews he had conducted with the recently deposed Fox Studios founder. The book, as historian Kevin Starr points out, was “an anti-Semitic document in which Jewish villains were everywhere. Ostensibly an expose of Hollywood and Wall Street, the Fox memoir had a strong secondary theme as well: Hollywood as the Cosa Nostra of American Jewry.”

Hollywood responded as it never had before -- or since. Louis B. Mayer collected a day’s pay from every one of his employees making more than $100 a week for Sinclair’s Republican opponent. Irving Thalberg, Metro’s production chief, produced dozens of phony newsreels, subsequently distributed free to theaters up and down the state, in which seedy, suspicious looking immigrants with vaguely Russian accents endorsed the Sinclair program: “Vell, his system worked vell in Russia. Vy can’t it vork here?”

Sinclair lost and returned to his tracts and novels, though he never worked in Hollywood again. Paradoxically, he later would win the Pulitzer Prize for “Dragon’s Teeth,” one of 10 novels he wrote about the adventures of an anti-Nazi secret agent, Lanny Budd.

Somehow, like the Schwarzenegger campaign, it all suggests that Hollywood lives not by ideas left or right but by Joseph P. Kennedy’s famous dictum: “Sooner or later, everybody does business with everybody.”