Tales Of

By John Skow

They don't make tinsel the way they used to, which may be progress but also may not. Hollywood in the 1940s, the last imperial decade of the movie industry, was a dream factory, a sausage machine, a gloriously successful trade conspiracy (till the feds made the studios sell their captive theater chains). It was, for wowsers who cared to moralize, a creepy metaphor of the American soul. Ignorance ruled. Bad taste feasted; genius writhed. Or so genius said. Oddly, though not many superior films were produced, quite a few good flicks got made.

Anyone who reads has toured parts of this fun house before. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West spurned it in novels. Elderly actresses and directors have told gaudy lies to their tape recorders. What Author Otto Friedrich contributes in City of Nets (Harper & Row; 512 pages; $25) is a lucid, darkly funny recounting that threads the loopy stories and the titanic egos into a coherent narrative. Friedrich, a TIME senior writer, clearly cherishes the surreal nuttiness of Hollywood's great days.

During the '30s Hollywood became a roost for an astonishing assortment of wanderers and political refugees. Playwright Bertolt Brecht despised Hollywood but scuttled about trying to get work (his evil city Mahagonny, a net for pleasure lovers, gives Friedrich his title). Igor Stravinsky, Friedrich relates, tried to write movie music but never succeeded. When Producer Irving Thalberg offered $25,000 for a score for The Good Earth, the distinguished and threadbare atonalist Arnold Schoenberg demanded $50,000 and the right to direct the actors, who, he felt, should chant their lines.

Wrongheadedness and bizarre tales abounded. Warner Bros. had filmed The Maltese Falcon twice before Director John Huston got hold of it, first under the clanking title Dangerous Female, then as Satan Met a Lady. Studio biggies were narrowly headed off from calling Huston's version The Gent from Frisco. Before Humphrey Bogart got the starring role, it had been turned down by George Raft, Paul Muni, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. Edward C. Judson, a middle-aged businessman who married the 18-year-old Rita Cansino and guided her career as Rita Hayworth, kept an electric train for her to play with. Producer Mervyn LeRoy took the script of Quo Vadis? to the Vatican and had no trouble getting Pope Pius XII to bless it.

Friedrich starts off his portrait of the '40s expansively with 1939, the year of Gone With the Wind. The movie town's enormous energy and arrogance stayed intact through the war years, but then its charmed life began to bleed away. One cause was Red baiting by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. TV cut into attendance. It became commonplace to shoot movies abroad, beyond the easy control of studios. Hollywood's civility, soured by the blacklist that the studios said did not exist, was further strained by the expulsion of Actress Ingrid Bergman in 1949 for her adulterous love affair with Director Roberto Rossellini. Ancient history now; the author must explain that adultery once was shocking, and in other chapters, that Hollywood's casual, persistent racism and anti-Semitism in the '40s accurately reflected the larger society. His tone avoids the traps of moralism and amused superiority.

The old Hollywood did not really need an epitaph, but Mogul David O. Selznick produced one anyway, appropriately overblown, in a moody conversation with Ben Hecht: "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids . . . It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands."