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  Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund

  of the University of California Press Foundation.

  RKO Radio Pictures

  A Titan Is Born

  RICHARD B. JEWELL

  University of California Press

  BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2012 by Richard B. Jewell

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jewell, Richard B.

  RKO Radio Pictures : a titan is born / Richard B. Jewell.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-27178-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-520-27179-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. RKO Radio Pictures—History. I. Title.

  PN1999.R3J46 2012

  384'.80979494—dc23 2011047718

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  10 9 8 7 8 7 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30 percent postconsumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (z 39.48) requirements.

  For

  Lynne and Annie

  and

  John and Vernon

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  1. “MASTER SHOWMEN OF THE WORLD”: PREHISTORY AND THE FORMATION OF THE COMPANY

  2. “IT'S RKO—LET'S GO”: THE BROWN-SCHNITZER-LEBARON REGIME (1929-1931)

  3. “FAILURE ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, A TICKET AT A TIME”: THE AYLESWORTH-KAHANE-SELZNICK REGIME (1932-1933)

  4. “ALL THIS IS VERY DISTRESSING TO ME”: THE AYLESWORTH-KAHANE-COOPER REGIME (1933-1934)

  5. “HE FEELS THE COMPANY IS UNSETTLED”: THE AYLESWORTH-MCDONOUGH-KAHANE REGIME (1934-1935)

  6. “AN AWFULLY LONG CORNER”: THE SPITZ-BRISKIN REGIME (1936-1937)

  7. “PLAYTHING OF INDUSTRY”: THE SPITZ-BERMAN REGIME (1938)

  8. “THE COMPANY'S BEST INTEREST”: THE SCHAEFER-BERMAN REGIME (1939)

  9. “QUALITY PICTURES ARE THE LIFEBLOOD OF THIS BUSINESS”: THE SCHAEFER-EDINGTON REGIME (1940-1941)

  10. “CROSSING WIRES”: THE SCHAEFER-BREEN REGIME (1941-1942)

  Appendix: “The Whole Equation of Pictures”

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. Joseph P. Kennedy, the famous Bostonian

  2. David Sarnoff, president of the RCA Corporation and the true father of RKO

  3. William LeBaron, the first production chief of RKO

  4. David O. Selznick, the wunderkind head of RKO production

  5. Rockabye (1932)

  6. The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

  7. Little Women (1933)

  8. Of Human Bondage (1934)

  9. Down to Their Last Yacht (1934)

  10. Roberta (1935)

  11. Becky Sharp (1935)

  12. Top Hat (1935)

  13. Sylvia Scarlett (1936)

  14. Shall We Dance (1937)

  15. Samuel Briskin, head of production at RKO

  16. Mary of Scotland (1936)

  17. A Damsel in Distress (1937)

  18. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

  19. Room Service (1938)

  20. George Schaefer, RKO corporate president

  21. Bachelor Mother (1939)

  22. They Knew What They Wanted (1940)

  23. Suspicion (1941)

  24. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

  Introduction

  “RKO—isn't he a wrestler?” asked one of my students when I told him I would be teaching a class on RKO during the following semester.

  “No,” I said. “It's an old movie studio that had a particularly interesting history.”

  “Oh,” he responded, and quickly walked away.

  As the years fall away since the general public recognized only one kind of screen entertainment, the name RKO Radio Pictures has less and less resonance. Most of the company's competitors during the “golden age” of American cinema—Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia—remain familiar, their ubiquitous corporate logos gracing all manner of moving-image entertainment. But the RKO organization stopped producing motion pictures in 1957 and is now remembered principally by a small coterie of nostalgia buffs, film historians, and cinema students required to learn a bit about the industrial aspects of old Hollywood. This is a pity because RKO's abbreviated lifespan has a great deal to teach us about the movie business, corporate management, and the very special era when the company was making its product.

  RKO was, in fact, one of the major corporations that dominated film commerce from the late 1920s until the mid-1950s. Along with four elite competitors, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Fox, it was vertically integrated—the company operated a studio to produce its product, a worldwide distribution arm to market it, and a chain of theaters where its films nearly always played. During its lifetime, it released more than one thousand feature motion pictures, including some of the most famous titles in cinema history. And yet today, most of what we know about RKO comes indirectly from general texts on American film; biographies of David Selznick, Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Orson Welles, Howard Hughes, and other well-known individuals who worked there; studies of musicals, comedies, horror films, film noir, and other genres that were RKO specialties; and analyses of famous individual pictures such as King Kong and Citizen Kane. I am in a unique position to argue that this company deserves additional attention, having already written a book on the company that was published almost thirty years ago.1

  I am proud of The RKO Story, but its authorship was a frustrating experience. The book contains an overview of the company's development, plus short descriptive reviews of all the films the studio produced or released. It is a handsome volume with lots of photo illustrations and was designed to sit majestically atop coffee tables all over the world, though I attempted to make it the most carefully researched and accurate book of its kind. But I had much more to say about the company—information that was impossible to include because of the format and space limitations. Thus, I always knew that someday I would return to the subject and write a different sort of corporate history, one that would focus on the constantly changing leadership of RKO.

  Executive turnover was in fact the distinguishing feature of its twenty-nine-year existence. Unlike the executive setup at most of the other major companies during the studio system era, RKO's management was never stable. New corporate presidents or production heads, or both, arrived every few years, making RKO the most unsettled and erratic of motion picture enterprises. Each new leader focused his attention on the goal of making RKO a vital and profitable corporation, and each one reacted to a variety of internal and external pressures that affected his job performance. This book centers on them—their personalities, philosophies, management styles, and efforts to succeed.

 
Movie folk—even the executives—tend to be dreamers. They dream of running a company that produces “quality” products that will be applauded by the most erudite and sophisticated members of the audience, yet will simultaneously generate millions of dollars in box-office revenues. Most do not believe these two types of product are mutually exclusive. RKO came late to the business, so its executives were always struggling to catch up with the established companies in order to realize their dreams. Still, they had confidence they could challenge the other studios if only RKO could corral a unique stable of performing talent, or pull together the best producers, directors, and writers in the business, or discover the next technological breakthrough that would propel the corporation past MGM, Warner Bros., and the others. None ever saw his dreams become reality, but their lives were certainly not failures. New stars, innovative productions, surprise hits emerged from the seven hundred-plus films that the company produced, as well as flops and fizzles and other disappointments. This is a history that contains many peaks and valleys, and a story of the men who steered the vehicle called RKO through them.

  My research on RKO began in the 1970s and was aided immensely by two very generous men: John Hall and Vernon Harbin. In 1977 John was placed in charge of RKO's West Coast archive, which was then housed in a building on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. The archive had been offlimits for many years, but John opened it up and welcomed scholars from around the world to access its contents. That little building on Vermont contained a treasure trove of film history. One of the fortuitous aspects of the studio system for film scholars was its bicoastal structure. Because the corporate president and the heads of distribution and exhibition were headquartered in New York while all the production work took place in Hollywood, a continual flow of letters, telegrams, and memoranda between the two coasts resulted. These archival documents, along with internal studio correspondence, provide the crucial skeleton of this book, as well as that of my forthcoming second volume of the company's history.

  John Hall was pleased with my work and even allowed me photocopying privileges, so I began to amass my own miniversion of the archive. It was, indeed, fortunate that I copied so many documents, because after John's untimely death, the archive was broken apart. Some of the material was donated to UCLA, some ended up at Warner Bros., but most was transported to Atlanta, where, I'm told, the documents reside in a warehouse closed to all except a few select employees of the Turner/Warner Bros. organization.

  Vernon Harbin “built” the archive that John Hall so openly shared with others during that wonderful period in the late-1970s and 1980s. Vernon became an RKO employee in the early 1930s. His first task was to forge Richard Dix's signature on publicity photographs, but he soon worked his way up to an executive position. He continued to labor for the studio, with time off for military service during World War II, until its demise, spending most of his years in the Commitments Department. Even after the studio stopped making movies, Vernon was retained by RKO General, which owned the theatrical rights to the old RKO films. Vernon oversaw the studio's paper holdings, answering questions, renewing copyrights, and fielding queries about the possibility of remaking specific productions. To do his job thoroughly and accurately, he spent part of his time reorganizing the files from the studio's many departments, and despite his lack of archival training, he did an exceptional job of arranging the materials in a comprehensive and comprehensible fashion.

  Vernon became a close friend and collaborated with me as consulting editor on The RKO Story. He pointed out many important documents in the archive, but his greatest asset was his extraordinary memory. Whenever I got a fact wrong or misinterpreted an event in the studio's history, Vernon would gently straighten me out. He died not long after John Hall, and I miss them both.

  Unquestionably the most important item I copied from the Vermont Avenue archive was a ledger entitled “Statistics of Feature Releases—June 1952,” which belonged to C. J. Tevlin, a studio executive who worked for Howard Hughes when he was running RKO. This ledger contained the production costs, domestic and foreign film rentals, and profits or losses of all RKO feature films up through the end of 1951. Accurate information of this kind is difficult, in many cases impossible, to find for most of Hollywood's classical-era movie companies. Whenever I report financial data related to individual pictures in this study, they are derived from the Tevlin Ledger.2

  The reader may wonder why it has taken me so long to return to my work on the studio. After I completed The RKO Story, I decided to put the organization aside for a time and pursue other projects. Little did I know that those projects would be superseded by academic administration, wherein I would labor for most of the next twenty years. During that period, I occasionally revisited my cache of documents and published articles related to the studio's history, but I was an indifferent scholar at best while I was department chair of Critical Studies and subsequently associate dean of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Now, finally, I have come back to RKO Radio Pictures with renewed enthusiasm and a determination to make this two-volume study the capstone of my career.

  As any student of historiography understands, there are many different kinds of histories. The one that you are about to read is a business history. It focuses on the men who attempted to make RKO a financial powerhouse and judges them largely on their success or failure to accomplish that job.

  Of course, theatrical motion pictures have always been more than just a business. They are also an art form, a technological phenomenon, a medium of communications, and an influential conveyor of popular culture, and RKO certainly made important contributions in each of these areas Unfortunately, the scholarship related to Hollywood and its films is often unbalanced, emphasizing artists and artistic achievements while ignoring or even attacking the industrial basis of all production. What many scholars tend to downplay is one simple fact: the films they admire or believe are worth discussing would never have been produced if executives had not believed they would make money for their companies.

  Choosing to approach the history of RKO from a business perspective sometimes places me in the awkward position of presenting negative assessments of films and individuals I admire. But just because a movie is aesthetically brilliant and stands the test of time does not mean it was a boon to the company that made it. Many of the greatest cinematic works failed at the box office when first released. From a business perspective, such artists as Howard Hawks and Orson Welles and such films as Bringing Up Baby and Citizen Kane were bad news for RKO, and the problems they spawned will be detailed in this study. There are plenty of other scholarly works that analyze the excellence of such films; this book considers them from a different point of view—as commercial products expected to generate substantial revenue.

  Now that I have clarified the kind of history I am presenting, I need to offer the following disclaimers. This book focuses on RKO and its principal product: feature-length motion pictures. After years of research, I am convinced that Hollywood companies like RKO rose and fell, thrived, survived, or expired based on the financial performance of their features. Therefore, certain particularly influential feature motion pictures and the individuals responsible for them are emphasized. But there were other important components of the organization's business model, especially its worldwide distribution network and its chain of affiliated theaters. The functioning of RKO distribution and exhibition and the people who worked in these areas play roles in the narrative, but they will not receive as much attention as the feature production end of the corporation.

  The company's short films are barely noted. Over the years, RKO produced hundreds of shorts, mostly comedies starring Leon Errol, Edgar Kennedy, and others. They were licensed to theaters for a nominal price. Directors Mark Sandrich and George Stevens, among others, honed their craft in the shorts unit before graduating to feature film making, but the shorts were always a very small component of RKO's business equation. So was its newsreel, the RKO P
athe News, which the company acquired in the 1931 merger with Pathe. Beginning in 1935, RKO also started distributing the March of Time, short informational documentaries made by Time, Inc., and, until Walt Disney partnered with RKO, it offered theater owners cartoons produced by the Van Beuren Corporation. None of these shorts is unimportant, but there is only room for passing mention of them in this history.

  For those unfamiliar with the structure and operations of a classical-era movie studio like RKO, I suggest they begin by reading the book's appendix. In it, I have summarized how the organization functioned, broken down by production, distribution, and exhibition and by its most important departments. Included are the names and job titles of a number of the company's crucial employees. Although RKO must have seemed like one giant revolving door to most of its executives, it was home to a legion of stalwart staff members who spent the lion's share of their careers working for the company. They deserve more credit than I am able to provide them for their never-ceasing efforts to propel RKO to the top. A reader knowledgeable about the studio system approach to film business should skip the appendix and proceed directly to chapter 1, though I hope you will eventually take a look at it for additional information about the company and its workforce.

  I have received significant support for this project. I am particularly grateful to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for naming me an Academy Scholar and providing a generous grant that helped broaden my research, enabling me to visit additional archives containing valuable documents. My own academic home, the Critical Studies Department of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, chaired by Tara McPherson and later Akira Lippit, allocated funding for some of these excursions as well. I also spent a good deal of time catching up on many books and articles, published since I conducted my initial RKO research, that touch on the company's history. In this regard, I want to thank Erin Hoge and Jennifer Rosales, two USC graduate students who located and pulled together important material for me. Kristen Fuhs and Eric Hoyt did this and more; their superior research skills enriched the project in more ways than I could ever describe.