Going Hollywood

You went from being a reporter to going to Hollywood. Tell me about that.

I went to work in January 1935 for the New York Daily Mirror, and I worked there until November. During the summer, I visited Sands Point, Long Island, several times, at the home of Herbert Bayard Swope, who had lived next door to us in Great Neck in the twenties and had been the editor of the New York World, wrote campaign speeches for Franklin Roosevelt, and was a man known for the parties he gave and the number of celebrities who hung around his place. His son, Herbert Swope Jr., and I had known each other as children and roomed together our second year at Princeton.

One weekend David Selznick was a guest, and I got to talking to him. He asked me if I was interested in working in Hollywood, and I said that I might be. I didn't know. He was starting a new company; he had just left MGM. And then I got a letter from him suggesting that I send him some stuff that I had written, and I sent him some of the material that had appeared in the humor magazine at Princeton, the Princeton Tiger, and some other things I don't remember, quite a bunch.

Anyway, in the fall came this offer to sign a seven-year contract, which was then standard in Hollywood. The only thing that wasn't standard about it was that it started at forty dollars a week, with options every six months.

I was making twenty-five dollars a week on the Mirror, so that was a distinct raise. It didn't say specifically what I was supposed to do; they could use me almost any way. But he had mentioned the publicity department or something like that, which was tied in. So I decided to sign the contract and flew out to Hollywood.

I went to work in the publicity department for his first publicity director in this new company, Selznick International, who was replaced pretty soon. Selznick had told him that he didn't want any publicity about himself personally; he just wanted publicity about the company. And this fellow, Joe Shea, took him literally. So Selznick fired him and hired a man named Russell Birdwell, to whom he told the same thing. But Birdwell didn't pay any attention and just put out as many stories as he could talking about this young genius, David Selznick.

What were your specific duties?

First I was on the set of the picture they were making, Little Lord Fauntleroy [1936], starring Freddie Bartholomew and Dolores Costello Barrymore. And I would just do interviews with actors and people around and whatever Birdwell assigned me to  . . . 

Then, after I had been there about a year, Selznick was preparing A Star is Born and had asked Budd Schulberg, who was a reader in the story department, and me to do some work on the script.^[*] Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell were rewriting the script by William Wellman and Robert Carson; and Selznick felt we might get some ideas for a few scenes, and he had us tag along as writers  . . . 

Right around about that time, Selznick also gave me a screen test, which he had the right to do under my contract.

What was the story behind that? He thought you had possibilities?

Yes. George Cukor was assigned to do the screen test, but George passed it off to an assistant of his named Mortimer Offner, who took just a silent test, actually, and it was not very good. The only time Selznick ever commented on it, he said, "I think you are going to be a writer." And it was never seen again except that Budd Schulberg swiped it out of the vaults of Selznick; and one night at a party at his friend Maurice Rapf's house, where they had a projection room—Maurice's father was an MGM producer—they were showing some movies, and they put on this screen test of mine as a short subject. That was the only time it was ever seen.

Anyway, Budd and I started to work on A Star Is Born, and as a matter of fact, we came up with the ending used in the picture. It was the scene that took place at Grauman's Chinese Theater. Janet Gaynor was having her footprints placed in cement, and although she was a star under the name of Vicki Lester, she said, "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," in memory of her husband, played by Fredric March. The same ending was later used in the Judy Garland-James Mason version.

We did, as I say, some other scenes. Dorothy Parker said she thought we ought to receive credit on it. According to the Screen Writers Guild rules,^[**] we weren't entitled to it, and Selznick wouldn't hear of it anyway. But at least we were, so to speak, graduated into being writers, and he gave us a project to work on with [the producer] Merian Cooper.

Cooper did King Kong [1933].

* Budd Schulberg, a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter, wrote the story and script of On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd. His most famous novel is What Makes Sammy Run? a Hollywood roman a clef. Maurice Rapf's screen credits include The Bad Man of Brimstone, They Gave Him a Gun, Jennie, Call of the Canyon, Song of the South, and So Dear to My Heart. Rapf was blacklisted in the 1950s; Schulberg cooperated with the HUAC investigation. In 1939, Schulberg and Rapf had collaborated on Winter Carnival, about their Dartmouth alma mater, with another alumnus, Walter Wanger, acting as producer. Among the uncredited writers on the project was the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.

** The Screen Writers Guild, founded in 1933, was the forerunner of today's Writers Guild. In 1954, when the guild merged with the Radio and Television Writers Guild, the new organization was called Writers Guild of America.

Yes. Then they did a picture called Nothing Sacred [1937], with Carole Lombard and Fredric March. Budd was sick at the time, but I was one of the writers assigned by Selznick to think of an ending. I seemed to be becoming an ending specialist. Selznick had had a quarrel with Ben Hecht, who had written the script, and Hecht left with an ending that Selznick didn't like. So, in typical Selznick fashion, he airmailed copies of the script to George S. Kaufman and Sidney Howard and Moss Hart and people all over the country, as well as to some who were in Hollywood, and he also assigned an MGM writer named George Oppenheimer and me. We wrote the ending that was used.

The following year, I or his secretary, Silvia Schulman, revealed to Selznick that she and I were going to get married, and he thought this was a very poor idea. He had just gone through a big struggle with Budd Schulberg about his marriage. His objection in both cases was that these were mixed marriages, that Budd was marrying a Gentile girl, and I was marrying a Jewish girl. He told Budd that he ought to remember that he had producer's blood in him. (Laughs. )

About the same time, Selznick wanted to sign Budd and me to new contracts. We would each get a raise from $75 to $100 a week. We went through several sessions with his business manager, Daniel O'Shea, who was arguing about why we should be content with $100 rather than $125, which I think we were asking for. During the course of one of these discussions, the interoffice phone sounded, and it was Selznick's voice saying, "What about Sidney Howard on Gone with the Wind? " and O'Shea said, "He won't work for $2,000 a week; he wants $2,500."

And Selznick said, "For Christ's sake, give it to him."

And O'Shea said, "Okay, David." Then he turned to us and said, "Now, boys, you've got to realize—"

Anyway, Silvia advised us to hold out. And we did, and we got the 125 bucks.

A couple of months after we were married, a contract option came up and Selznick let it lapse and I was still there on salary. But whatever projects we were working on seemed pretty ephemeral, and a writer named Jerry Wald, who was working at Warner Brothers, suggested that I go to work there. And I was offered a job in the B department under Bryan Foy, who made thirty pictures a year with budgets under $250,000.

Was that a step down—going from Selznick?

Well, it was a step down in a way, except that at least I thought I could get something made. With Selznick, it wasn't practical for writers at our level: he was only making one or two pictures a year. In any event, I left Selznick in the early part of 1937 and went to Warner Brothers, where I remained for about a year, I guess, without anything really coming out the way I wanted it to.

I worked at Warner Brothers for about a year, and then during the following two years, I worked on a number of projects. I think it was in 1938 that Ian

McLellan Hunter and I worked together for the first time on a series of movies that were made with Jean Hersholt playing a character called Dr. Christian, which he had played on the radio.^[*] We did this with a director named Bernard Vorhaus, who had directed in England and Switzerland, though he was an American by birth. He had come to Hollywood to work for Republic Pictures. I think we worked for him first on a Republic Pictures venture based on a book by Irving Stone called False Witness [New York: Book League of America, 1940], on which I think we received some kind of screen credit [on the film, which was titled Arkansas Judge ].

Then an independent company called Stevens-Lang undertook to produce these Dr. Christian pictures, and we worked on a script they had called Meet Dr. Christian; we wrote the next picture entirely, The Courageous Dr. Christian. Around this time, I also collaborated with an Austrian writer on an original screen story, which we sold to MGM for a very small sum of money. But we were both interested in getting jobs, so we agreed to sell our story for $5,000, or something like that, provided that we could each work on the picture for $250 a week for a minimum of six weeks or so.

After we made the sale, they paid us off with six weeks' salary—maybe it was only four weeks' salary, I don't know—and gave the story to somebody else to do. I was told by someone at the studio that William Fadiman, who was the story editor at the studio, had said that I would not be allowed to work at MGM; that they never had any intention of letting me work there. This was because by that time I had gotten involved in the reorganization of the Screen Writers Guild, which was fighting the company union called the Screen Playwrights. Also, at Warner Brothers, I had, in collaboration with John Huston, raised money for medical aid to Spain. We would corner people like James Cagney and Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart at lunch, and get them to contribute to sending ambulances to Spain. John, I must say, was much more persuasive and influential in this endeavor than I was. My job was mainly to goad him to do the spiel.

Fadiman, who was Clifton Fadiman's brother, had apparently gotten wind of these activities and took a position against me. As a matter of fact, that was one of the reasons why, when Michael Kanin and I did the script for Woman of the Year, we contrived with Kate Hepburn for her to take it to Metro with no names on the script, so Louis B. Mayer would agree to her terms before anybody at MGM realized who had written it.

* Ian McLellan Hunter had a distinguished career. He collaborated with his friend Ring Lardner Jr. In addition to working together on the Dr. Christian series for film and The Adventures of Robin Hood for television, they also teamed up for the 1964 Broadway musical Foxy, a Yukonset adaptation of Ben Johnson's Volpone. Hunter won an Oscar for Best Story for Roman Holiday (1953), and shared a nomination for Best Screenplay with John Dighton. His other screenplay credits include Second Chorus, Mr. District Attorney, A Woman of Distinction, and, after years of blacklisting and television work under pseudonyms, A Dream of Kings (1969).

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in George Stevens's film  Woman of the Year.

Woman of the Year

How did Woman of the Year start?

Well, it started with Garson Kanin, really. A friend of mine, Paul Jarrico, had written Tom, Dick and Harry [1941], which Garson was shooting. And I visited him on the set one day. Garson said he had this idea for Hepburn, who was still very much in the shadow of the exhibitor's denunciation.^[*] But the play The Philadelphia Story was a big hit and brought her back to Metro.

But Garson knew she needed something after the film version of The Philadelphia Story [1940]. So he came up with a sort of Dorothy Thompson character. Dorothy Thompson was the only woman columnist at the time. I said I thought it might work, and Garson suggested that I get together with his brother Mike and see if we could work out a story. He had never written anything and was preparing to go into the army because he had been drafted  . . . 

* According to Me, by Katharine Hepburn (New York: Random, 1991): "During this period [post-Sylvia Scarlett ], my career had taken a real nosedive. It was then that the 'box-office poison' label began to appear. The independent theatre owners were trying to get rid of Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and me. It seems that they were forced to take our pictures if they got certain ones which they really wanted. I felt sorry for them. I had made a string of very dull movies."

How did you work with Kanin or any collaborator?

Generally, by talking out a whole scene or sequence in considerable detail, so that we were substantially agreed on it, and very often two scenes, so that one of us could sit down and write a first version of each. And then we would switch them, and the other one would rewrite the scene. Each would rewrite the other's work, and then we would go at it again together. The process of setting it down for the first time has always required one person being at the typewriter by himself. The collaboration takes place in the plotting and then in the rewriting.

So we started to work out the story, and finally, I wrote it in the form of a kind of novella in the first person and in the past tense. It was told by this newspaperman, a sportswriter, the part [Spencer] Tracy played. I think it was called "The Thing about Women." It was that version that we sent to Kate. Garson probably sent it to her; he was the one who knew her personally. And she responded very well to it. And then we got up this plan of her taking it herself to Louis B. Mayer and talking to him about it.

Was Hepburn involved in developing the story?

Not in the story itself, because we wrote it as a piece of fiction. We wrote it that way, incidentally, after having talked it out as a screenplay, thinking it would work better and be more readable. I had found out that the great obstacle in getting attention paid to a piece of writing in the movies is that people have to read it—and most screenplays don't read very well, and treatments don't either.

Kate had nothing to do with that part of it. But after she read it, she figured out the terms: $211,000: $100,000 for her, $100,000 for us, $10,000 for her agent, and $1,000 for her expenses to come from Hartford. And that $100,000 for us included a screenplay and all the revisions that would have to be done on it, although no scene had been written yet.

Once MGM went for the deal and we started to work on the script, we had a number of consultations with Kate, including a few sessions that took place in Michael Kanin's house, where she stayed around for hours, late at night, while we were talking and sometimes actually writing some of the stuff, and she took quite an active part in the sessions.

Then what?

Well, after we finished the first draft of the screenplay, we got more actively involved with the people who were going to do it—with [the producer] Joe Mankiewicz and George Stevens, the director—and we had many consultations with them, resulting in revisions. Once the picture started shooting, there was relatively little to be done. We were free to be on the set whenever we wanted to. We both had signed contracts with MGM and were working on another script, so it was convenient to drop in on the set almost every day, and sometimes that would result in a conference with George Stevens about something.

Did you get along well with him?

Yes, through the shooting of the picture. But then, when we thought it was all through—it had been cut and was getting ready for a preview when Mike and I and our wives went to New York on vacation, [and] when we got back—we found out that the studio executives had decided they didn't like the ending and decided to shoot a new ending and had assigned a writer, John Lee Mahin, who had been president of this company union of screenplay writers that we had fought against—but who was a pretty good writer^[*]—to write this revision, and they had a version of it by the time we came back.

Well, we objected strenuously. We didn't like the ending. The whole theory behind it seemed to be that there had to be some comeuppance for the female character.

Why did they think she needed a comeuppance?

The executives at MGM, including Joe Mankiewicz, supported by George Stevens, felt that the woman character, having been so strong throughout, should be somehow subjugated and tamed, in effect. They felt it was too feminist, and they devised this ending that involved Hepburn trying to fix breakfast in an apartment that Tracy had taken by himself. It was based on some comedy routines that George Stevens had done back in his silent picture days when he used to do Harry Langdon comedies. Even on paper, it was conceived of quite broadly.

And so we objected to it in theory and then objected specifically to a number of lines, etcetera. And George and Joe did agree that some of our points were well taken, and we were allowed to revise Mahin's work within the context of the scene as planned, not to try to go back to our old ending, which they didn't like, or to devise something different.

So we did modify it somewhat before it was shot. But then Stevens went the other way in the shooting, and the action was quite broad, and we were disappointed in the result.

What kind of business did the film do when it was released?

It did very good business. I believe it was the first picture to run three weeks at the Radio City Music Hall.

And it won the Academy Award in what areas? Do you remember?

I think the only Academy Award was for us: for the Best Original Screenplay.

How old were you?

Twenty-six.

Were you at the ceremony?

* John Lee Mahin, a favorite writer of both Clark Gable and Victor Fleming at MGM, where he spent most of his career, is profiled in the first Backstory.

No, by that time I'd gone to work for the Army as a civilian employee writing training films. So I just heard about it. I was working at the cooks and bakers school at Camp Lee, Virginia, writing a picture called Rations in the Combat Zone.

What did the success of Woman of the Year mean to you—to your career?

Oh, it meant a great deal. It meant, in the first place, that MGM, after we had finished the script, offered us—and we signed—a contract at a lot more money than either of us had been making. Really, from then until 1947, 1 never had any trouble getting work.