“Apology accepted. I’m going to make more coffee.” Paulette started out of the room. “Would you gentlemen care to join me in the kitchen?”
As both men were rising none too lithely from their chairs, Prentice said, “Your report to Mr. Mayer, McCubbin — it doesn’t have to be entirely dismal. You can, for example, tell him that the orchestra on Joe E. Brown’s show tonight performed a fine version of that song, ‘Something, Something, the Witch is Dead,’ from your new picture The Wizard of Oz.”
“And wasn’t Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on Arthur Godfrey’s show this morning?” added Paulette, her voice trailing off into the kitchen.
“And don’t forget that we all heard that adenoidal girl singing it on Major Bowes only a few hours ago,” said Prentice. “The whole country is going nutty for The Wizard of Oz and you have the proof right here in the suburbs of our nation’s capital, McCubbin. Mr. Louis B. Mayer should be very pleased.”
As the two men were pulling out chairs to sit down at the kitchen table, McCubbin replied, “It isn’t that simple. Now I’ll admit it, Mrs. Fedderson: you aren’t the only reason I was dispatched to the East Coast. I’ve got three days of meetings scheduled with Nick Schenck and the other MGM lever-pullers in Manhattan. Everybody’s nervous about Gone with the Wind—the cost overruns, the whole Cukor mess, and may I say, between you and me and the lamppost, what a terrible decision it was to cast Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes? The man is forty-six years old and isn’t even attempting a Southern accent. And now that Britain’s at war, we may have to contend with even more of these English milksops coming over here and limeying up our red-blooded American movies.”
“Spoken like a true Fenian,” groaned Prentice with a roll of his eyes. McCubbin and his host and hostess for this long day — now coming mercifully to its end — had reached a level of uninhibited appraisal of each other. The sort of appraisal that usually comes after a long period of intensive imposed intimacy. Positions had been staked out early in the day, and through all of the ensuing hours, neither party had budged.
It had, in fact, been a most remarkable day. That morning, McCubbin had come to the door of Prentice and Paulette Fedderson’s small wood-frame house in their Falls Church, Virginia, neighborhood, just west of Arlington, to discuss Paulette’s wildly popular novel of Old San Francisco, The Milk of Human Kindness and its forthcoming film adaptation View from Potrero Hill. MGM’s 1936 blockbuster San Francisco had led the studio heads to believe that they could repeat their success with Paulette’s book. The story was also set in 1906 ’Frisco, and would be fortified by a scintillating screenplay by the gifted Miss Anita Loos (who had also contributed to San Francisco and, coincidentally, to The Women). The film, which was slated to go before the cameras in the spring, was to be given a budget that would nearly rival that of Gone with the Wind, with the entire picture being shot in glorious and decadently expensive Technicolor.
Everything was set. There was only one small hitch — a hitch that was visited and revisited repeatedly throughout the day, each visitation fraught with numerous interruptions. These interruptions in various forms related to Paulette’s monthly reunion with her parents, originally from San Francisco and now living on the family’s ancestral farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia, and to the audio wallpaper of WJSV radio’s broadcast signal. WJSV, a CBS affiliate, infiltrated every moment of the day in a sometimes welcome, sometimes intrusive manner, through the speaker of Paulette and Prentice’s tabletop cathedral-styled radio, disrupting, along the way, nearly all thought and conversation through, for example, importunate offerings of Arthur Godfrey and Pretty Kitty Kelly and Life Can Be Beautiful and The Romance of Helen Trent, and the Goldbergs, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president, as it so happened, had chosen September 21 of all days to make a joint address to the Congress to urge, in light of the recent invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, the repeal of the arms embargo provision of the Neutrality Act of 1937.
Paulette’s father, Dilby Gammond, had demanded absolute silence during the speech, and Michael McCubbin had sat obediently, though restlessly, mum. It was an important day in history (the Romanian prime minister Armand Călinescu had just a few hours earlier been assassinated by members of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, this fact representing just one more inconvenience to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s chargé d’affaires). He had come to Falls Church for one purpose only: to ask that the author’s contract by which The Milk of Human Kindness would be turned into View from Potrero Hill—a contract which had been especially structured to give Paulette nearly unprecedented script approval — be altered to reflect the following: that when it came to the matter of whether a female character, for the first time in the history of the much-strengthened Hays Code of Hollywood self-censorship, could or could not be seen suckling a child at her breast, MGM would have the definitive last word. And that word, obviously, would be “no.” No baby in any American movie was to be fed by anything but a bottle, given that the cinematic guardians of American morality felt that the presentation of the female mammary gland in any form or fashion (including that function for which it was expressly designed) was patently lewd and vulgar.
“I think,” said Prentice, picking up the topic that had been picked up and then dropped repeatedly throughout this day of false starts and frustrating distractions and an outright presidential coup de théâtre, “that you will have to do a much better job of explaining to my wife and me why she must sign off on an ending that would most assuredly subvert the primary intent of her story, when the whole matter of a woman feeding a child in the way that God intended isn’t even addressed in the Hays Code. I’m looking at it right now.”
He was, in fact. A typewritten copy of the code, formally titled, “The United States Motion Picture Production Code of 1930,” all one page of it, was laid upon the table so that Prentice could stab it with his forefinger to make his point. “See? Nothing here about a mother nursing her child—”
Paulette interrupted from the coffee pot: “Not her child, dear — her friend’s child. That’s the point of the climactic scene: a wall has collapsed upon the crib holding her own baby, killing it. Her friend has sustained an injury to the breast that prevents her from nursing her own child, so our heroine volunteers her own milk to feed the other woman’s little girl in the name of sister love and Christian compassion.”
“It’s a moving story,” said McCubbin. “I wept when I read it. But you can’t show a tit on the screen — or even anything suggestive thereof — however high-minded your purpose. Mr. Mayer would shit a brick. If this entire matter got before the press, can you just imagine the firestorm? All the advance publicity for Gone with the Wind would be drowned with the bath water as this whole country got to arguing the pros and cons of wet-nursing on the silver screen. And I can tell you from experience, Mrs. Fedderson: that Puritanical subset of the film-going American public won’t sit still for it. Besides which, it isn’t even relevant these days. It’s a rarity, is it not, to find the mother of an infant who feeds her own baby in such an outmoded way?”