Free City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

Niven was sleeping aboard a yacht that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had chartered to cruise off Catalina Island; so were Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and a number of other English in colonial exile. They woke to hear on the radio that Britain had delivered an ultimatum, and that Germany had rejected it, and that the two nations were at war. Fairbanks raised a glass to toast victory. Olivier drank that toast and then proceeded to get wildly drunk. “Smashed as a hoot owl,” as Mrs. Fairbanks later put it, he rowed himself to another yacht; climbed aboard, and began bellowing to anyone who would listen, “This is the end! You are finished, all of you! Finished! You are relics! Enjoy your last moments! You’re done for! Doomed!” Then, shivering in his swimming trunks, he staggered back aboard the dinghy, rowed to the next yacht, and repeated his jeremiad.
    Niven went off to war by himself. Fairbanks gave him a farewell party that featured many of the stars of Hollywood’s English colony—Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Basil Rathbone—who were generally inclined to remain in Hollywood. That was not, of course, shameful. Indeed, any Hollywood celebrities who asked the British Embassy what they should do were generally told to stay where they were and go on with their work. That was what Hollywood wanted too. David Selznick summed up the studios’ view splendidly when he asked what would happen if Laurence Olivier and George Sanders abandoned his new production of Rebecca. “We would be in a fine pickle if they walked out in the middle,” he said. “Not so much of a pickle as Poland, I grant you, but still a pickle.”
    So Hollywood remained at peace. When Salka Viertel returned to California, she was struck by the prevailing air of complacent prosperity, by the supermarkets heaped with food, and by “the unconcerned sunbathers on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown . . .” And when the renowned Mrs. Basil Rathbone decided to give a gala dinner in honor of Arthur Rubinstein, Leopold Stokowski, and the heroic people of Poland, she had the walls of her sixty-foot-long dining hall decorated with a three-foot cellophane frieze that displayed the notes of Chopin’s “Polonaise Militaire.” The total effect, according to one contemporary chronicler, was “something pyrotechnic, exotic, ingenious and rare.”

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    Rubinstein ( left ) was performing Brahms when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor.
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    Walt Disney’s Fantasia transformed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into a battle of dinosaurs. Stravinsky hated it and hated Stokowski’s conducting of his score ( above ).

2
Ingatherings
    (1940)
    A rnold Schoenberg was one of the first Hollywood immigrants of a new kind, the refugees from political disaster. In the beginning, there had been the ragpickers and song-pushers, the Mayers and Warners and Cohns, who had arrived hungry and proceeded to gorge themselves on whatever they could find. Then came the cosmopolitans, the actors and directors who had already achieved success in Berlin or London—a Greta Garbo or an Ernst Lubitsch—who then signed handsome contracts to come to Hollywood to work for the Mayers and Warners and Cohns. Arnold Schoenberg, the distinguished composer of Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire, the inventor of the twelve-tone “serial” system which he had believed would “guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years,” reached the age of nearly sixty without ever having the slightest intention of going anywhere near Los Angeles.
    Proud of his lifetime appointment as professor at the Berlin Academy of Music, Schoenberg realized during the very first year of the Nazi regime that his lifetime appointment was worthless. On vacation in France that summer of 1933, he received word that it would be dangerous for him to return to Berlin at all. Schoenberg was shocked,