Hollywood’s Jews
An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.
by Neal Gabler.
Crown. 560 pp. $24.95.
The overall thesis of this long, meandering book is that the immigrant Jews who started the American film industry had an outsider’s yearning to become part of American society; that their films reflected an idealized version of America; and that these films, in turn, became so influential as to have defined American values. For Neal Gabler, then, the Jews of Hollywood, “by creating their idealized America on the screen, . . . reinvented the country in the image of their fiction”; they “colonized the American imagination.” This paradox is hardly news to anyone who has thought about the rise of Hollywood, but it is buttressed here by hundreds of pages of biography of selected film moguls (Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Jesse L. Lasky, Harry Cohn, the Warner brothers) and their studios.
Many of the early studio heads were self-made men who had ambivalent feelings, at best, about the Judaism in which they had been raised; it was associated with the hardships of their youth, a subject they preferred not to think about. Several, while attached to their mothers, resented their fathers as shiftless luftmenshen whose failure to make their way in the world was galling to their ambitious offspring. (Admittedly, though, few moguls were as bitter about their past as William Fox, who spat on the coffin at his father’s funeral.) Then, too, as successful businessmen presiding over an industry of worldwide proportions, the studio heads saw no need to stress their Jewish identity. Far from it: just as they had recreated their own America in their films, they recreated (or, in Gabler’s unfortunate term, “aestheticized”) their lives; for many, the process involved divorcing their Jewish spouses to marry younger, Gentile women.
Still, to their credit, as Gabler notes, the moguls were not just money-grubbing philistines. Not only did they sincerely believe in the films they made, but they themselves were the creative powers behind those films. Louis B. Mayer, semi-literate though he may have been, ultimately guided MGM in the type of movie it made for decades. Harry Cohn, often portrayed as a monster of egotism and predatory sexual behavior, was also a brilliant executive who, on a fraction of MGM’s budget, moved Columbia Pictures up from poverty row into the front rank.
Although the Hollywood history Gabler presents is more or less familiar, an interesting exception is his chapter, “Rabbi to the Stars,” which focuses on three prominent figures in the Hollywood Jewish community: Rabbis Edgar Magnin and Max Nussbaum, and the lawyer Mendel Silberberg.
The two rabbis offer a curious contrast in style. Magnin, California-born, represented assimilation and smooth worldliness; both were fittingly served by his huge Wilshire Boulevard Temple, modeled on the Pantheon and seating 1,500 people. An intimate of Louis B. Mayer and a consummate performer in the pulpit, Magnin had no time for counseling individual members of his congregation, whom he reportedly dismissed with, “I’m your rabbi, not Dear Abby. Don’t bother me,” or words to that effect.
Magnin’s reign was eventually challenged by the more intense and charismatic Max Nussbaum, a Berlin rabbi who fled the Nazis to preside over Temple Israel and its glamorous congregation, including such converts as Elizabeth Taylor Fisher and Mr. and Mrs. Sammy Davis, Jr. More conservative in religious outlook and more of an activist in social issues, Nussbaum became enough of a celebrity in his own right to be the subject of a 1958 This Is Your Life television program.
As for Mendel Silberberg, he was a studio lawyer par excellence, a power in Los Angeles political circles, and, as chairman of the Community Relations Council, a kind of ambassador-at-large of the Hollywood Jewish community. Silberberg had been raised as a Christian Scientist, and perhaps it was this, opines Gabler, that made him so attractive as a Jewish emissary: “A rather tenuous Jew himself, he was extremely sensitive to the image of the Jew among Gentiles. . . . He was also articulate, cultured, magnetic, intelligent, rich, and powerful, which was exactly how the Hollywood Jews wanted to be represented to the Gentiles.” Assimilation, after all, was the name of the game: Jesse Lasky and his wife dabbled in spiritualism, Christian Science, and automatic writing to replace the Judaism that the family had abandoned; Harry Cohn was known for going to work at the studio on Yom Kippur—although he made the one concession of not taking telephone calls; Louis B. Mayer chose a Catholic woman as his second wife, cultivated the friendship of Cardinal Spell man, and was, in his daughter’s words, “very Catholic prone.”
Yet however much the studio heads strove to distance themselves from their origins, events in the 1930’s and 40’s forcibly reminded them of their identity. The moguls responded with large-scale fund-raising for Jewish causes. Some, like Universal Pictures’ Carl Laemmle, went further: with the same extended sense of kinship which had made his studio notorious for nepotism, “Uncle Carl” arranged in the late 1930’s for the emigration from his native town in Germany of not only his sister and brother-in-law but of virtually every Jew who wished to leave—about 250 people in all.
Hollywood’s Jews were more or less spectators to the tragedy of the war years, but the heating up of the cold war brought more direct threats to the moguls’ hard-won power and status. Members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) included anti-Semites who made no bones about the connection in their minds between Jews and Communists. As Gabler notes, the industry was in an embarrassing dilemma, for although the moguls themselves were strongly conservative—and most of them Republican party stalwarts—in general Hollywood Jews were greatly “overrepresented” in the Communist party and on the Left as a whole. Of the original nineteen Hollywood witnesses called up to testify before the Committee, thirteen were Jewish; and of the “Hollywood Ten” cited for contempt of Congress, six were Jews.
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Unfortunately, Gabler’s account of the HUAC investigations and the Hollywood blacklist demonstrates the chief weakness of his book as a whole. In situations demanding summary, interpretation, and analysis, too often we get only a welter of confusing detail, and opinions trivialized by the gushy prose in which they are expressed. Thus we learn that the moguls initiated the blacklist to “save themselves from the wrath of the anti-Semites” by throwing their employees to the wolves; but as to the world events causing the national mood of panic that allowed HUAC to flourish, Gabler offers no insight or explanation. In the absence of any larger perspective, his account of Hollywood during the McCarthy period seems partial and incomplete.
Gabler is similarly unclear as to why the moguls capitulated: was there any truth to the claim that the studios’ New York offices had demanded the blacklist because without it their films would be boycotted by right-wing groups? Gabler quotes, with apparent agreement, one witness’s assertion that such a threat was empty and that the producers’ fears were utterly baseless, but then reverses himself to remark that “everyone knew that the American Legion had been applying enormous pressure on the New York executives.” Finally, in yet another shift of opinion, he states that “the idea of a New York bogeyman was too pat an explanation.”
Conclusion? None. All we are left with is the general notion that the blacklist years marked the end of the American dream for Hollywood’s Jews: those “who tried appeasing Hollywood’s tormentors only demonstrated their tormentors’ strength and the Jews’ weakness. Paradise was lost. It would never be regained.”
By its narrative chronology, An Empire of Their Own implies a strong causal connection between the rise of HUAC and the decline of the studio system. Yet if paradise was indeed lost in the late 1940’s, it was probably because of far more prosaic economic factors: the advent of television, the rise of the independent producers, and, most importantly, a Supreme Court antitrust case that ultimately led the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains and exhibition rights. None of this merits more than a single sentence in the text and a footnote in Gabler’s book.
An Empire of Their Own is thus a disappointing work, containing but failing to integrate the raw material for several different essays not necessarily related to one another. For long stretches the “Jewish” theme is subordinated to straight studio history and biography, subjects that have been more lucidly treated elsewhere. Even the anecdotes Gabler recounts are more entertainingly presented in such recent books as Irene Mayer Selznick’s A Private View and Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s. Finally, one misses a full discussion of the films themselves in terms of their Jewish content (or lack of it). It is a pity that so much research has yielded so little insight into what we already know of Hollywood’s past.
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