Between racism, the blacklist, the casting couch, and the closet, survival in the 1950s
film industry studio system required more than just thick skin and determination.
While Billy Wilder was writing the screenplay for Sunset Boulevard,
he feared censorship and studio interference so much that he told the studio he was adapting a
short story that didn't exist, and only submitted a few pages at a time. When they began filming,
the script wasn't finished, so no one knew how it ended.
The working title was A Can of Beans in an effort to hide the anti-Hollywood
nature of the project from the studio brass. Wilder came to America to escape the Nazis,
having lost family at Auschwitz. He knew all too well about oppression and censorship and
saw something to be afraid of in the enforced morality of the Hays code.
"But we do know It's literally true that a man had to keep his feet on the floor
while making love to a woman on a divan or a lounge chair."
The production code was a set of guidelines that decreed which topics were off-limits and which
were to be handled with care. Its influence was felt in Hollywood from 1930 until 1968,
when the Motion Picture Association adopted the ratings system that is still in use,
with a few minor changes, today.
Movie stars were expected to maintain a certain image, both physically and socially,
and the studios were ruthless in enforcing it. Homosexuality was taboo,
so much so that Rock Hudson, who had been romantically linked to several male stars,
was forced into a marriage in 1950.
Shortly before his 30th birthday, Hudson married his agent's secretary,
Phyllis Gates. They divorced three years later. In 1985, Hudson would publicly reveal his
AIDS diagnosis and turn the conversation about AIDS and HIV into a national one.
"Mr. Rock Hudson has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome."
Persistent rumors of homosexuality or bisexuality attached themselves
to several other notable stars of the period. Tallulah Bankhead,
Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo were frequently mentioned in such a context.
"I shall die a bachelor!"
But to be labeled gay or bi would have been career death if confirmed,
so while stars did as they wished behind closed doors,
no hint of homosexuality was allowed to creep into the public eye.
In 1950, the achievements of the Civil Rights movement were years away. America
was still very much a segregated society, and actors and actresses of color were treated and
paid poorly, denied equal rights, and forced into stereotypical roles with stereotypical dialogue.
"Who dat?"
"Who dat say who dat?"
"Who dat say who dat, when I say who dat?"
Hollywood whitewashed scripts, meaning that non-white roles were often played
by white actors. Orson Welles played Othello in blackface in 1955, and in 1950's Winchester '73,
Rock Hudson played a Native American. Then there was Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon:
"Lovely ladies. Kind gentlemen. Pleased to introduce myself.
Sakini by name. Interpreter by profession."
Blackface had been a feature of Hollywood productions for decades prior, going back
to Al Jolson in 1927's The Jazz Singer, but increased racial tensions in the 1950s made the
whitewashing of roles much more troublesome and contentious. In 1951, Ava Gardner, a white woman,
played a mixed-race character passing as white in Show Boat. She was cast over Lena Horne, who
was actually of mixed descent, because the studio was worried about how audiences would receive her
love scenes with a white man. Interracial marriage was still very much taboo and actually illegal in
many states, so there was some question of whether they could even show Horne in romantic situations.
Black actors had little recourse, leverage, or social agency, so roles that were originally
written for characters of color were regularly renamed or recast to feature white actors instead.
"Yes, I know. You never expected to see me.".
When they were cast, Black actors and actresses were often given smaller roles,
or demeaning ones, and little recognition. The Black vaudeville circuit, where many
Black performers got their start, was hard work for little pay, largely catering to old
minstrel stereotypes and a point of argument within the Black community. Hattie McDaniel,
who had a career in vaudeville and later worked at Sam Pick's nightclub as a singer
before coming to Hollywood, won an Oscar for her role in Gone With The Wind but didn't get
many opportunities to play anything besides a maid or a servant for much of her career.
In fact, at the Oscars that evening, McDaniel was seated apart from the rest
of the audience. In Jill Watts' biography titled Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition,
White Hollywood, she quotes McDaniel saying,
"I can be a maid for $7 a week. Or I can play a maid for $700 a week."
McDaniel wasn't allowed to attend the premier of Gone With the Wind in 1939,
and by the 1950s the situation hadn't improved to any noticeable degree. Black actors and actresses
were still relegated to largely supporting roles, with a few exceptions. Dorothy Dandridge,
for example, was nominated for Best Actress in 1954 but had little success in Hollywood after.
When movie star Kim Novak was discovered to be in a relationship with Sammy Davis Jr.,
studio head Harry Cohn forced Davis into breaking it off.
Interracial marriage wasn't legal in the U.S. until 1967, so when the two were romantically
linked by a gossip columnist in 1957, it meant big trouble. Davis had been linked romantically
to several Hollywood leading ladies, but Cohn, who had taken great pains to develop Novak into
a big-studio bombshell, saw the actress as his own personal project. He was so infuriated that
he suffered a mild heart attack at the news. Since Novak's relationship with Davis would jeopardize
her status as a sex symbol and potentially cost the studios a great deal in lost profits, Cohn,
already notorious for his temper, called on his shady mob connections, who threatened to end
Davis' life. According to Davis' friend Arthur Silber, in an article in Smithsonian magazine,
"They said they would break both of his legs, put out his other eye,
and bury him in a hole if he didn't marry a black woman right away."
Davis and Novak broke it off, and he married somebody else a year later.
The classic On the Waterfront had strong parallels to director Elia Kazan's own
experience testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
HUAC was tasked with investigating allegations of communism, and much
of the investigation focused on Hollywood.
Kazan was brought before the committee in 1952. Unlike most of the people questioned,
he named names, a fact that Hollywood never forgot and only partially forgave.
"A great deal of animosity still lingered between those who had given up names to HUAC and those
who had suffered under the blacklist, or who had friends who had suffered."
Interviewed by NPR in 1988, Kazan said of his testimony,
"I thought very hard about it. And I did — I made a difficult choice. Both sides,
both ways would have been difficult for me."
Kazan downplayed the impact his testimony might have had, but the complicated Kazan
was quoted in slightly different context in a French interview in 1962, saying,
"You don't want to have dinner with a monster. But in art, it's necessary to be a monster,
in part, to have very strong feelings and to have them on the outside, so that we can use them."
While the script for On The Waterfront deals with longshoremen in Hoboken, it also deals
with mob interference and political betrayal, so it's not much of a stretch to conclude that the
betrayals in the film had a more personal resonance for Kazan, given his testimony.
During the 1950s, hundreds of filmmakers and other industry
professionals found themselves on a blacklist compiled by the studios in
order to avoid backlash from employing talent with alleged communist ties.
The film High Noon was written in response to the HUAC by Jewish screenwriter Carl Foreman,
who was blacklisted by Hollywood after pleading the Fifth in front
of the Committee. The following day, Columbia Pictures began the process of firing him and
taking away his producer credit on High Noon, which meant that, according to Glenn Frankel,
author of High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,
"He really lost his control over the film, and,
for all intents and purposes, that was the end of his Hollywood career."
Foreman left America for England, where the professional and emotional impact of
being blacklisted lingered for the rest of his working life.
Women were expected to maintain a studio-approved persona in both their public and private lives,
a standard men were not held to as closely. Bergman became interested in Italian director
Roberto Rossellini after seeing two of his films, Open City and Paisan, she offered to act for him.
"Could I also come into that type of picture? Could I become as real as that?"
In 1950, she went to Italy to work with him on the film Stromboli. At the time she was
married to Peter Lindström, and the two had a daughter, but she fell in love with Rossellini
and moved in with him. She was pregnant with his child before her divorce from
Lindström was finalized, and this scandal prompted outcry and outrage in America.
Bergman was ridiculed in the press, and there were calls for a boycott
of her work. While she didn't intend to return to Hollywood,
the damage to her career was significant. Her daughter, Isabella, said in a Newsweek interview,
"Mother spoke five languages and had a full career in English,
a full career in Swedish, a full career in French and German, which is very unusual."
Bergman's career path would probably have been quite different without the
moral outrage of America that led her to turn her back on Hollywood.
Studios had clauses banning pregnancy written into stars' contracts. After all,
according to the wisdom of the studio heads, a woman couldn't be a sex symbol
and a mother at the same time. As a result, many actresses were forced to choose between
having a child or having a career. The fact that abortion was illegal and dangerous was
a lesser concern than any potential damage to their looks, reputation or earning power.
Abortions were commonplace even before the 1950s, and stars like Judy Garland,
Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford were only a few women said to have had
them. Fixers like MGM's Eddie Mannix were reported to have arranged more than a few.
Speaking of the Hollywood double standard,
women were often involved with men many years their senior.
"You know how to whistle, don't' cha, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."
For example, while filming the James Dean classic Rebel Without A Cause, Natalie Wood reportedly had
an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray. Natalie Wood was 16 at the time, while Ray was 43. While
this would raise eyebrows today, there were no consequences back then, despite the statutory rape
laws on the books in California stating that their age difference should have resulted in charges.
Wood had a less-than-perfect home life before being drawn into Hollywood. In her book,
Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography, biographer Suzanne Finstad suggests Wood may have been forced
into a relationship with Frank Sinatra at 15 and reportedly began a relationship with Ray
in order to secure her role in Rebel Without a Cause. The California Penal Code defines a
minor as someone under the age of 18 and specifies that sex with a minor three or
more years younger than the perpetrator may face a misdemeanor or a felony. Clearly the difference
in their ages was significant enough to qualify. The relationship fell apart,
and Wood moved on to become involved with Robert Wagner, whom she married in 1958.
Despite making money for the studios, actors and actresses made little money themselves — and in
a few cases didn't get paid at all. When the 1957 classic film 12 Angry Men was released,
star and co-producer Henry Fonda didn't see a paycheck.
Produced on a small budget by Hollywood standards of $340,000,
12 Angry Men got good reviews but wasn't immediately profitable.
"You couldn't get a cast like that today. These guys were wonderful."
Fonda and writer-producer Reginald Rose had deferred their salaries and ultimately,
inexplicably, didn't recoup even half of their expected pay. Fonda remained critical
of the role the studios played in the film's disappointing box office. In his autobiography,
he blamed United Artists for failing to properly support the film in the marketplace.
For example, they didn't rerelease the film after it was nominated for three Academy Awards, which
is the custom in the industry. While 12 Angry Men went on to earn far more money and garner
international acclaim over the years. Twelve Angry Men is on the American Film Institute's
list of 100 Years - 100 Movies, a list of the hundred best American movies of the 20th century.