The Oscar Syndrome

In the old days it was fun. The annual revels of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were private affairs, generally held in the Ambassador ballroom, and there was no television to inhibit gaiety. Each studio picked up the tab for all its nominees, the food was good, the liquor abundant, and the people fun – and they even joked among themselves without the aid of a teleprompter.

I have reason to remember one occasion, on which Donald Ogden Stewart was nominated for his screenplay of The Philadelphia Story, and I for mine of Kitty Foyle. Mr. Stewart, who is a wise and kindly man, approached me before the announcements and suggested the following charade: if I won the Oscar, Stewart would rise from his seat at the MGM table, cross to mine in RKO territory, and tell me frankly he thought he'd been robbed. Then, went the plot, I would answer him in scalding words, and the argument would continue on a rising note till management intervened. If Stewart won, I agreed to reciprocate.

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He won. I rose and approached his table. In those days Leo the Lion really roared, and his keepers were Schenck, Mayer, Mannix and Thau. Together with a full covey of Metro stars, they were huddled over Mr. Stewart, fondling him and his Oscar and calculating profits. A chill silence fell over the company as I addressed my complaint to the victor. Apparently Mr. Stewart didn't understand. He begged my pardon, obliging me to repeat in even stronger terms my opinion the best man hadn't won. A look of almost insane sympathy settled over his face. He rose, in the midst of terrible stillness, draped a consoling arm over my shoulder – and gently agreed. He was so moved by my disappointment he almost cried, and I put on a good performance of actually doing it.

Nothing like that could happen now. There's no more liquor, no tables, no Donald Ogden Stewart (he lives in London), and no such gall. But there's a good reason for it. The instant Academy presentations became public events comparable in audience rating with a Presidential inauguration, they became pompous. Not that a film academy hasn't the same right to pomposity as the Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) or the Academy of Arts and Letters (New York) – and perhaps a better right than the Academy of Allergy (Milwaukee). It isn't a matter of rights, it's a question of innocence and spontaneity; and they, so immensely more important than public dignity, are forever lost.

For it was innocence and spontaneity, blended with cheerful extroversion and open competition, that made the film community centered in Hollywood not only one of the most amusing and cultivated (the word is quite intentional) in the world, but also one of the most influential. For twenty-five years the American cinema sought out, and formed a loosely cohesive community of, the most attractive personalities and talents that Europe could offer. It was a cosmopolitan society that worked hard, played hard, and raised the American film to first competitive position practically everywhere in the world.

But now senescence has set in. Many of the most talented actors, writers and directors have fled abroad to avoid either taxes, the blacklist, or the frightful gerontic problem of the community, and sometimes all three. Five of the seven major studios have fallen by default into the hands of aging accountants. Their rambling public remarks, always, unluckily, quoted in the press, are so incoherent as to completely panic the stockholders of any other business. Leading men of fifty-five and even sixty fornicate – at least on the screen – with lasses of scarcely twenty-two. Grandmothers stride across Vistavision in fierce pursuit of happiness, usually sexual. The belles dames of the press corps are almost Biblical in their longevity. Dignity, as a result, is everywhere. It's almost all the town has left.

The Academy was founded in 1927 by, among others, Richard Barthelmess, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Milton Sills, Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, a pair of Warner brothers, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who served as its first president. Among its stated purposes was that of "encouraging the arts and sciences of the profession by . . . awards of merit for distinctive achievement."

The militant statuette, later christened Oscar, was designed by a founding member, the late Cedric Gibbons. "To the public," declares a recent Academy brochure, "an Oscar is a badge of distinction. To its recipient, the film maker, an Oscar means even more. It is his most valued possession because it represents what every creative mind prizes highest: the respect and admiration of his peers."

However inflated the winner's evaluation may be, the Academy, in section fourteen of Rules for the Use of Academy Award Symbols, takes a more realistic view of Oscar's worth when it contracts that the winner "shall not sell or otherwise dispose of it nor permit it to be sold or disposed of by operation of law without first offering to sell it to the Academy for the sum of $10; and this provision shall apply to the heirs and assigns of Academy Award winners who may acquire a statuette by gift or bequest."

Thus hedged about with more conditions and restrictions than the Nobel, Pulitzer and Goncourt prizes lumped together, the man who owns an Oscar is bound to feel that the responsibility of the thing outweighs its pleasure. He's stuck with a public trust that cost the Academy approximately $100 on the day of presentation, which can only go down in value, and which he can't turn loose of until it hits bottom, and he along with it. In the old days before dignity hit town, the minute you laid hands on an Oscar it was yours. You could hock it, shoot craps for it, or boil it down to pot metal. The town's best procuress, who was a flesh peddler in the community long before MCA came onto the scene; once had three of them in forfeit on her boudoir mantel.

The first Academy Awards were handed out in 1928. In exactly four minutes, thirty-two seconds. They were given, however, for performances viewed in the Los Angeles area during the preceding year, which was, of course, 1927. The Best Film of that year, as voted by Academy members, was Wings, although it did not contain the best acting (Emil Jannings for The Way of all Flesh and Janet Gaynor for Seventh Heaven), nor the best direction (Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights and Frank Bor-zage for Seventh Heaven), nor even the best writing (Ben Hecht for Underworld and Benjamin Glazer for Seventh Heaven).

To the Academy mind, it is possible – to a mind-boggling degree – for the whole of a film to be so much greater than the sum of its parts that, in 1936, although Victor McLaglen copped an acting Award for The Informer, John Ford received a directing Award for The Informer, and Dudley Nichols walked off with the writing Award for The Informer, the Award for Best Film went not to The Informer but to Mutiny on the Bounty. The following year, 1937, Paul Muni was named Best Actor for his contribution to The Story of Louis Pasteur and the writing team of Sheridan Gibney and Pierre Collings were Oscared for their fine work in creating the script of the same film; Best Film of the Year, however, was a musical "spectacular" called The Great Ziegfeld. There is the charitable notion that the Award donors had some idea of spreading the wealth, or the uncharitable explanation that Hollywood is the last place on earth from which to expect consistency. However, if consistency is a virtue – and the evidence is far from in on that score – it shone most brightly in 1947. The Best Years of Our Lives won Awards for writing (Robert E. Sherwood), direction (William Wyler), the Best Actor (Fredric March), the Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), the Best Editing (Daniel Mandell), the Best Dramatic Music Score (Hugo Friedhofer), and was, oddly enough, adjudged the Best Film. As this is written, the 1960 score is not in, but this in no way invalidates or alters the conclusions to be drawn from the form sheets thus far.

It has always been an open question whether the Awards, in the Actors' division, for example, represent actual merit, or whether other factors come into play. The argument for merit is substantially supported on the roster of Award-winners by the names of such gifted artists as Walter Huston, Charles Laughton, Katherine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Alec Guinness, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Fredric March and Ingrid Bergman.

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But what is one to say when the names of Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Warner Baxter, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby or Jennifer Jones appear in the same category? One answer, perhaps, may be found in subject matter. Clearly it would be impious not to vote for Miss Jones in The Song of Bernadette, or for Mr. Crosby in Going My Way, just as it would be un-American to ignore Mr. Cooper as the hero of Sergeant York and the lawman of High Noon. The rarity of comedy and the superb director-writer team of Frank Capra and the late Robert Riskin probably account for the inclusion of Clark Gable (It Happened One Night). Nothing short of pure miracle, or a graceful compliment to popularity, can account for the others.

Sometimes it appears that particular Awards are cumulative. Bette Davis' first Award, for Dangerous (her second was for Jezebel), seemed obvious apology for having ignored her stunning performance in Of Human Bondage, just as Ingrid Bergman's second Award, for Anastasia (her first having been for Gaslight), can only be interpreted as a shamefaced token from a community that had piously immolated her for publicly living as she damned well pleased, a life most of its denizens had tried to live in clammy secret.

If the town was capable of giving Luise Rainer two Awards in succession (The Great Ziegfeld in 1937 and The Good Earth in 1938) and then forgetting her altogether, it is nevertheless surprisingly responsive to warm-hearted new talent, or to talent from other media appearing on the screen for the first time. When it is remembered that the actors themselves nominate actor-candidates, and that an Oscar is generally considered to be the cordon bleu of a certified career, the Awards to Shirley Booth (Come Back, Little Sheba), Audrey Hepburn (Roman Holiday), Anna Magnani (The Rose Tattoo), Ernest Borgnine (Marty) and Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces of Eve), as well as a dozen similar Awards voted to supporting actors and actresses, reveal an unsuspected streak of generosity in a profession whose individual members are not lacking in egocentricity.

Having curtsied to generosity, and bowed low to deserved Awards voted to talented artists, one is compelled to take another look, this time at the greatest actress the American cinema has ever known, and an actor who is also the only genius it has produced: Greta Garbo and Charles Chaplin. It has been the judgment of their peers, over a period of thirty-two years, that neither of them has achieved sufficient mastery of the medium to merit its highest accolade.

During the years that Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and Jean Harlow reigned over the American screen, Greta Garbo appeared in Flesh and the Devil, Susan Lennox, Grand Hotel, As You Desire Me, Queen Christina, The Painted Veil, Anna Karenina, Camille and Ninotchka. And in the first season of the Awards, when Wings and The Way of All Flesh and Seventh Heaven and Underworld were being decked with laurel, the Best Film of the Year, and perhaps of several decades, was made by Charles Chaplin. He called it The Circus.

The original Board of Governors of the Academy, perhaps anticipating many awkward omissions, created the category of "Special Award," which was changed in 1950 to "Honorary Award." A Special, or Honorary Award, unlike the Oscars, may be conferred by the Board of Governors itself without recourse to Academy membership vote. The first Special Award coincided with the first Academy presentations ceremony. It went to Charles Chaplin "For versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing, and producing The Circus." While the Academy's roster of Best Films turns obsolescent, Chaplin's un-Oscared Little Tramp, in all his various guises, still plays to full houses and a third generation of enchanted moviegoers.

Since 1928, something over eighty Special, or Honorary Awards, have been conferred. Chaplin got the first, and Greta Garbo, in 1955, the sixty-seventh. Among holders of the Special Award are, curiously enough, the March of Time, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, the Motion Picture Relief Fund, the British Ministry of Information, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the Technicolor Company, RCA Manufacturing Company, Bell & Howell, Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., not to mention Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Margaret O'Brien, Claud Jarman, Jr., Peggy Ann Garner and Bobby Driscoll. Other recipients, and hence co-equals with Garbo and Chaplin, range from Bob Hope (three times) through Noel Coward and George K. Spoor to Gilbert (Bronco Bill) Anderson and Benjamin Bertram Kahane, among whose current titles may be found those of Vice President of Columbia Pictures, Inc., Vice President of the Motion Picture Producers Association of America, and – of all things – President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Although the air these days is filled with lamentations for what is called a national moral crisis, one thing can be said of the Academy that may not be applied to the major film studios (vide distribution, overhead), or to TV (vide quiz shows), or to radio (vide payola), or to the theatre (vide scalpers), or to nightclubs (vide the boys), or to Madison Avenue (vide fake ads), or to any other organization in the entertainment world: it keeps an honest set of books, conducts an honest vote, and honestly doesn't know who's won an Award until it's announced on the air.

The idea is so refreshing it requires explanation. The Academy, at present, embraces thirteen branches of the various arts and crafts represented in the creation and production of motion pictures. A candidate for membership must be sponsored by at least two members of the branch he wishes to join. If the branch and its Executive Committee find him a man of quality, his name is submitted to the Board of Governors, who have the power of life and death over all, since membership, as they carefully point out, "is limited to those who have achieved distinction in the arts and sciences of the motion picture industry." Some 2300 persons have achieved it, and presently comprise the Academy's roster of electors.

As Award season approaches, a check list of the previous year's work is sent out to the Academy membership. Balloting for nomination – five in each category – is restricted in each category to members of the Academy branch concerned. Thus actors nominate actors, and so on down the line, or up it, as directors and sometimes even writers occasionally assert. The entire Academy membership then votes, again by secret ballot, to determine the final winners.

Balloting is conducted by mail, with the same precautions for secrecy that characterize – or should, at least – balloting for public office. The ballots are mailed by the voter directly to the Los Angeles accounting offices of Price, Waterhouse & Company. There Mr. William Miller, CPA and a partner in the firm, goes to work with a staff of three CPAs. They are isolated in a special office of the firm behind locked doors, and the counting begins. At the end of each day's work the ballots and all papers relating to them are sealed and placed in the firm's vault. Contents of the wastebaskets are burned.

A list of winners is made in duplicate. One set remains on Mr. Miller's person until announced over the air. The other is sealed and placed in the vault, in case (continued on page 86)Oscar(continued from page 78) of a mishap to the first.

Not once in thirty-two years has there been even a hint of irregularity or foreknowledge, and it can be assumed the record will continue unbroken for the next thirty-two. It's probably the most honest election anywhere in the world.

The generalization complete, an exception must be noted – one that has nothing to do with the ballot's secrecy, but rather with its effectiveness. It occurred on a melancholy night in February 1957, when the Academy Board of Governors, wearing robes and chanting exorcismal litanies, descended from Olympus and entered politics.

It will be remembered by some that in recent years we have had in this country – and not for the first time in our history – a problem of witches. It is a law almost as sound as Gresham's that wherever witches abide there will rise up people to hunt them down. It's an instinct as deep as the sexual drive, almost as much fun, and often safer. In Hollywood, where everything is carried to extremes, the sport flourished to the point of obsession.

Spurred on by a Congressman whose cupidity finally landed him in the penitentiary, the pursuit of witches in Hollywood became something of a national pastime, while investigators investigated, informers informed, patriots roared through studio commissaries, legions of the loyal marched and counter-marched, and the most dedicated bayed like wild things all night long whenever the Hollywood moon turned red through the smog, which was, and still is, practically always.

The victims themselves, caught in a situation where there were far more witches than broomsticks, were doomed from the outset. A few canny oldsters managed successful take-offs, but the majority were left flopping about on the ground like emperor penguins, blinking in the public glare, and making soft, reproachful little calls. The horror tapered off, not because the pursuers lost heart for their sport, but simply because they over-hunted the preserve. When the smoke finally settled, over 230 specimens were recovered. Three were veterans of World War I. Forty-one had served in World War II. Nine were found clutching the Oscars whose fatal weight had cost them altitude. The sounds of pursuit fled eastward, and the quiet of an institutionalized blacklist settled over the community like a shroud.

Meanwhile, a series of embarrassments had occurred to the Academy. In 1952 Michael Wilson was awarded an Oscar for A Place in the Sun, but he'd already been shot down as a witch. In 1954 Ian McLellan Hunter won the Award for Roman Holiday, and again a defunct witch had to be Oscared. In 1957, Michael Wilson turned up again with Friendly Persuasion as a possible nominee. Wilson had written the film before he was blacklisted, and now, several years later, his presence hung over the project like a ghost. Faced with another witch on the podium, the Academy decided it must abandon the idea that the results of a secret vote can qualify a man to receive "the respect and admiration of his peers." They passed a new bylaw that in future no witch could be nominated for the Award, and that if he was nominated, his name would not be placed on the ballot for final voting. Then they resolved to keep the bylaw secret until and unless Michael Wilson was nominated for Friendly Persuasion.

Sure enough, he was. The Academy promptly publicized its secret bill of attainder, and voided the nomination. With Wilson out of the contention, the Award for Best Screen Adaptation went to the authors of Around the World in Eighty Days, after a loud credit squabble. The category of Best Original Story was won by Robert Rich for The Brave One. Then it turned out there was no Robert Rich. Or rather, there were a dozen Robert Riches, all claiming an abandoned Oscar that rumor now attributed to some dishonorable witch who had shifted names in mid-flight.

Meanwhile, King Brothers Productions, who had produced The Brave One, found themselves embarked upon a flood of litigation. The absence of Robert Rich, combined with the suspicion he'd never dare to publicly admit his authorship, caused a number of fists to reach for the unguarded jampot. One plagiarism suit was filed, and quietly settled out of court. Instantly three more got under way. The King Brothers, unwilling to pay more than four times for a script they'd already bought twice, finally produced the ectoplasmic Robert Rich. He turned out to be–a witch. Me. The plagiarism suits faded one by one, and the Academy solved its dilemma by listing King Brothers Productions as author of The Brave One and winner of its Oscar–the first yarn in history to be written by a corporation.

By 1959 another witch loomed as a possible competitor in the person of Nathan Douglas, co-author of The Defiant Ones, which looked like a certain nominee and a very possible winner. But Douglas had collaborated with a non-witch named Hal Smith. Under the new bylaw, the script was clearly ineligible because half of it had been written by a witch. But what to do about the non-witch who had written the other half? Douglas and Smith were like Siamese twins; if you shot one down you got them both. What served Douglas right would be terrible for Smith – and besides, there had always been a closed season on non-witches. The Academy threw up its hands, and rescinded the bylaw as "impractical." Witch and non-witch walked away with the Oscar, and people tried to forget the whole thing.

It was the Academy's one slip in three decades, and compared with the record of the film studios and TV networks, it was almost an honorable slip. Bedeviled though it was by witches and eager as it was to eliminate them, the Academy did not once consider the practical solution of tampering with the ballot; it merely abrogated the vote. By leaving the fundamentals intact, it was thus enabled to repair the original structure without having to rebuild from the ground up. There's a lesson in it somewhere.

From now on it appears the problem of witches is approaching a solution throughout the area. Some say it's because there aren't any more witches left out here. Others say they think there are a few still lurking in the higher altitudes, say timberline and above. But they're the shyest, cleverest, fastest witches in the world. They take off like guided missiles at the drop of a rumor, and they orbit four times before landing upwind of their stalker. A man could spend years trying to bag such quarry. Still, one can never tell. It's an ancient sport, and it is fun.

Hollywood, the amorphous area in which germinates the American Cinema, has never had a good press, and it never will have. Its work is too exciting. Its rewards are too rich, and its pleasures are too stimulating to arouse anything but envy. There is no columnist, however debased, who cannot dismiss screen-authorship as hackwork. There is no spear-carrier from an off-Broadway flop who cannot tilt his nose at the brightest star in Hollywood. And there is no intellectual, regardless of how many academic sterns he's osculated in getting tenure, who cannot successfully berate Hollywood for doing violence to the world's integrity. Contempt for Hollywood is as necessary to the intellectual and his Broadway counterfeit as the "nigrah" is to his cracker neighbors. We're all going down, boys, but look at him – –

One would not, of course, claim the heights of Parnassus either for the community or the medium: our elderly accountants can't stand such altitudes. But a good many lively years in Hollywood have convinced me that more first-rate motion pictures are created in America than first-rate novels or plays, year by given year. As for philosophy and the revisionist historians – a prayer, gentlemen, and three minutes of silence.

The pleasantest thing about the medium is that people like it. It is a new art form which counts its audience by the hundreds of millions. The artist who chooses to work in the cinema has the satisfaction of knowing that the ideas he conveys will swiftly travel to every country on earth, regardless of the language barrier. It's like speaking in a universal tongue, and carries with it a corresponding moral responsibility. If Hollywood doesn't often measure up to the responsibility, it is no more culpable than the Broadway Theatre, or the great publishing institutions that consume forests each year for the printing of trash. Moreover, there have been occasions when Hollywood rose very high indeed: they are not many, to be sure, but their number compares favorably with the existing competition.

Meanwhile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences enjoys a Trendex rating for its Award ceremonies of slightly over 75.5, which means, roughly, that every other person in the country views the event. No President has done so well in a decade. The Academy declares that its purposes in bestowing the Oscars are "To raise the standards of motion picture production educationally, culturally, and technically, and to dignify the film medium."

The Academy may, in some degree, "dignify the medium" (which is to say, publicize it), but when it is asserted that the Awards are "an incentive for producers, writers, directors, actors, cinematographers and other technicians to strive for an increasingly better product," we are in the presence of sheer institutional nonsense. Or, to put it differently, the Academy stimulates Hollywood to "strive for an increasingly better product" precisely as the Nobel Peace Prize stimulates world governments to strive for peace.

The truth is, no prize stimulates the creative person to anything. Not the Nobel, not the Pulitzer, not the American Booksellers Award, not the Oscar. Creative people do not and cannot compete with each other. Their struggle lies in that private area where the individual competes against his own faulted talents for a more nearly perfect expression of what he feels and thinks the truth to be.

The rest is tinsel, and the organizers of competitions and the donors of prizes get far more fun out of them than the recipients. There's something mighty fine about patting your better on the head and murmuring "Well done, good and faithful servant." But it only flatters the head-patter; the pattee of integrity always knows it's spinach.