The Pittsburgh Press (October 20, 1940)
FILM LAND SPLIT BY POLITICS
…
Opposing Groups Wage Active Campaigns
…
By Paul Harrison
Hollywood, Oct. 19 –
The movie colony has waded into politics up to nits ears. Maybe even a little above its ears, because it doesn’t seem to hear the cautioning voices of a few stars and executives who figure a campaign stump makes a very poor stage for an entertainer.
Time was when picture players shunned politics as they would controversies on religion, prohibition, birth control, vivisection or the simple tax. True, many of them didn’t know or care much about politics. Others were deeply concerned and would make campaign contributions, but only under a pledge of secrecy.
Studios even ordered stars not to express any political opinions, or to wear campaign buttons which might show in still photos snapped around town. “Thou shalt not commit thyself,” was an unwritten commandment in 1936.
All Wear Buttons
This year, the lid is off. You can even hear glamour girls discussing the presidential election in the night clubs. Robert Montgomery heads the Willkie committee in Hollywood, and Pat O’Brien is chairman of the Roosevelt group. O’Brien leads the more impressive list of stars, such as Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Alice Faye.
And you ought to see the buttons! Almost everybody wears a Roosevelt or a Willkie button. A favorite story of the press agents is how this or that player went into a scene wearing a button, and how nobody noticed it until it showed up in the rushes. Margaret Sullavan actually did wear a Roosevelt button in a scene in Flotsam, the period of which is 1938, the locale Austria. But the shot wasn’t a close-up.
With anti-trust suits and the anti-block booking bill pending against it, and with Martin Dies branding Hollywood with charges of Communism, the picture industry doesn’t feel that it has been getting many favors from the administration. A majority of the top movie executives are Willkie supporters, yet none of the bigwigs on either side is nearly as militant as the actors.
Should Stay Out
Out at Claudette Colbert’s house the other day, when she was giving me an earful of opinions on private lives versus the press, she also commented that actors ought to stay out of politics.
The star said:
There’s a lot of campaigning going on around town, and it’s bad. We’re supposed to be seen as characters in screen plays not as politicians in newsreels. Our business is entertainment, and I believe we’re going to disappoint a lot of people if we try to be anything except entertainers.
Resent ‘Dope’ Label
Miss Colbert also explained, to my satisfaction, why Hollywood is going in for so much political activity. She said it’s because the movie colony has come to resent the popular notion that actors are a flock of dopes, smug in their isolation and not caring what goes on in the rest of the nation and the world. They’re out to disprove this idea, even if they alienate a lot of fans while doing it.
Somewhat the same motive, Miss Colbert suggested, prompted Hollywood’s flirtations with communism. Important people in important affairs weren’t paying much attention to the movie folk; so a few of the latter, piqued by being regarded as naive kiddies, began to play with the hammer and sickle.