13 Some Eminent Visitors
I
Albert Einstein came to America in 1931 to become a professor in the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He had been world-famous for a dozen years or so, had been awarded the Nobel Prize, and was a doctor honoris causa in fourteen of the world’s great universities. His coming was a prestige matter to Cal Tech and had been announced weeks in advance; reporters swarmed around him, the newspapers made front-page stories of his arrival, the institute gave a banquet in his honor, and one of the town’s many millionairesses contributed ten thousand dollars for the privilege of tasting that food.
I had been corresponding with Einstein for some years. He had read some of my books and had written me: “To the most beautiful joys of my life belongs your wicked tongue.” He had promised to come to see me; and soon after his arrival in Pasadena, Craig’s sister Dolly came in and reported, “There’s an old man walking up and down on the street, and he keeps looking at the house.”
Craig said, “Go out and ask what he wants.” Dolly went and came back to report, “He says he’s Dr. Einstein.” Craig said, “Go bring him in,” and called to me.
Such was the beginning of as lovely a friendship as anyone could have in this world. I report him as the kindest, gentlest, sweetest of men. He had a keen wit, a delightful sense of humor, and his tongue could be sharp—but only for the evils of this world. I don’t like the word “radical”; but it is the word that the world chose to employ about me, and Albert Einstein was as radical as I was. From first to last, during his two winters in Pasadena, he never disagreed with an idea of mine or declined a request I made of him.
Of course, it was shocking to the authorities at Cal Tech that Einstein chose to identify himself with the city’s sharpest social critic. I could forgive Dr. Robert Millikan, president of the great institution, because I knew he had to raise funds among the city’s millionaires and so had to watch his step; but Einstein was less tolerant. He knew snobbery when he saw it, and he expressed his opinions freely. He also recognized anti-Semitism and knew when his loyal and devoted wife was slighted. Said one young instructor at Cal Tech to Craig, “The Jews have got Harvard, they are getting Princeton, and they are on the way to getting Cal Tech.”
Of course, when our friends knew that we knew Einstein, they all begged to meet him; and when I told Einstein about it, he said, of course he and his wife would come to a dinner and meet our friends. We engaged a private dining room in the “swanky” Town House of Los Angeles. Craig and I went a little early to make sure that everything was in order, and we were in the dining room when Einstein and his wife arrived. He always wore a black overcoat—I think a bit rusty—and a little soft black hat. He came into the large room where a table was set for twelve and looked around as if at a loss. Then he took off his overcoat, folded it carefully, and laid it on the floor in an unoccupied corner. He then took off the black hat and laid that on top of the coat. He was ready for dinner. I was too tactful to mention that there is a hat-check room in fashionable hotels.
Another episode: Some labor leader was arrested in a strike. I felt it my duty to make a protest, but I doubted if the press services would pay heed to me. I thought they would pay heed to Einstein, and I asked him if he would care to make a protest. He told me to write out the message and he would sign it. He did so, and I turned it over to the United Press. It was not sent out. Whereupon I telegraphed a protest to Carl Bickel, head of the agency in New York. Bickel sent me a copy of the rebuke he had telegraphed to the head of the Los Angeles office, informing him that he had made the United Press ridiculous and that hereafter anything that Einstein had to say on any subject was news.
Once I mentioned to Einstein that someone had called my social protest “undignified.” The next time he came to our home he brought a large and very fine photograph of himself, eighteen by twenty-four inches, and on it he had inscribed six lines of verse, in colloquial German that calls for a Berliner. Needless to say, that trophy was framed and hung on the wall, and German visitors always call for a flashlight and a footstool to stand on.
People ask for the text of the verses, so I give it here, first in German, then in translation:
Wen ficht der schmutzigste Topf nicht an?
Wer klopft die Welt auf den hohlen Zahn?
Wer verachtet das Jetzt und schwört auf das Morgen?
Wem macht kein “undignified” je Sorgen?
Der Sinclair ist der tapfre Mann
Wenn einer, dann ich es bezeugen kann.
In herzlichkeit
Albert Einstein
Whom does the dirtiest pot not attack?
Who hits the world on the hollow tooth?
Who spurns the now and swears by the morrow?
Who takes no care about being “undignified”?
The Sinclair is the valiant man
If anyone, then I can attest it.
In heartiness
Albert Einstein
There is an amusing story connected with those verses. Life published six pages of photographs of American rocking chairs; and I wrote them a playful note, rebuking them for having left out the most characteristic of all American chairs, the cradle rocker. I enclosed a photo of myself in our cradle rocker and pointed out the photograph of Einstein just behind the chair—which the great man had often sat in. I mentioned the poem, and there came a phone call from Life’s Hollywood office. The editor, an agreeable lady, asked for the text of the poem. I said it was in German, and she didn’t know German. Would I translate it for her? I said I would, but I also said it would be useless, as Life wouldn’t publish it. She asked why, and I answered, “Because it praises me.”
The lady laughed merrily; she thought that was a witticism, asked again for the translation, and wrote it out line by line. Life published the letter and the photograph, April 28, 1961. It did not mention the poem. So I knew Life better than one of its own editors! I had a bit of fun telling her so when next I had her on the phone.
Einstein was surprised to learn that I had never been invited to speak at Cal Tech and had never had the honor of meeting Dr. Millikan. I told him that Bertrand Russell, when he had come to speak at Cal Tech, had made an engagement to have lunch with us at the home of Mrs. Gartz. The lecture took place in the morning, and we had arranged to meet him afterward, but Dr. Millikan carried him off to lunch at the Valley Hunt Club and made no apology to us.
On one of Einstein’s last days in Pasadena, I went to his home to say good-by to him. You entered his house into a hallway, and on one side was a door opening into the dining room and on the other a door leading into the living room. I was saying my farewell to Einstein in the living room; just as I was ready to leave, Mrs. Einstein came in and said in a half whisper, “Dr. Millikan is here. I took him into the dining room.”
I, of course, started to get out of the way; but Einstein took me firmly by one elbow and led me out of the living room and across the hall and opened the dining-room door. “Dr. Millikan,” he said, “I want you to meet my friend Upton Sinclair.” So, of course, we shook hands. I said a few polite words and took myself off.
I never saw Dr. Millikan again, but I will include one more story having to do with him. At the time of our entrance into World War II, Phil La Follette was opposing our entrance and came on a lecture tour to Pasadena. Dr. Millikan’s son was casting about to find someone to oppose Phil in debate, and he came to me. I was in favor of our entrance, as I had been in the case of World War I; in both cases most of my socialist friends opposed me, some of them very bitterly.
When young Millikan asked if I would be willing to enter the lists, I consented. My wife attended the debate and found herself seated just in front of a group of young socialists who were jeering at my speech; when she turned around and looked at them, they recognized her, and got up and moved to another part of the hall. When some of the ardent patriots jeered at La Follette, I got up from my seat on the platform and asked them please to hear him. Some photographer took a snapshot of that moment, and it made an amusing picture.
My friendship with Einstein continued by mail for almost twenty years. And in the course of time I received another jingle from him—he had a propensity for writing them. A pacifist lady, Rosika Schwimmer, worked up a little fuss with me over a story I had told in my book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, to the effect that she had gone to Fox with a proposal to finance a “peace ship” to Europe, and he had declined. Rosika claimed that the story was false and employed a lawyer to demand that I state in the next edition of the book that it was false. I was perfectly willing to say that she denied it, but how could I say it was false when it was a square issue of veracity between two persons, and I had no other evidence?
Rosika sued me for libel—the only time that has ever happened to me. Obviously it was no libel, for she had made the same appeal to Henry Ford, and with success as all the world knew. She carried the case to the Supreme Court of New York State and lost all the way. She also carried it to Albert Einstein, and he, friend to all pacifists, wrote me some verses, mildly suggesting I take on more weighty foes. I replied with another set of verses, pointing out that I had taken on the Francos and the Hitlers.
Postscript: When I published an article about Einstein for the Saturday Review of April 14, 1962, Dr. Lee DuBridge, present head of Cal Tech, wrote me a long letter protesting my statements about that institution. In reply I wrote him some of my evidence that I had been too polite to include in my article; for instance, that Mrs. Einstein had complained to my wife that she had never been able to get the use of the bus that was maintained for the convenience of faculty wives. Dr. DuBridge had sent his letter to me to the Saturday Review, requesting publication; but the Saturday Review presently informed me that he had withdrawn his request. I was left to guess that he had read my letter.
II
You may be interested to hear of another man who sat in our cradle rocker more recently. Craig’s brother Allan, a Mississippi planter who has succeeded in his life purpose of buying back most of his father’s lands, wrote Craig that his close friend, Judge Tom Brady, was lecturing in southern California and would like to meet us. Allan had been Craig’s darling from babyhood and could have anything he asked from her. An appointment was made, and Hunter brought the Judge to our home one evening.
He was a grave and courteous Southern gentleman who was spokesman for the citizens’ councils and had helped to spread them all over the Deep South. We welcomed him, and he sat motionless in the chair and in a quiet, persuasive voice repeated what was obviously the speech he had been delivering to southern California audiences. It took an hour or more, and we listened without interruption.
Then I said, very gently, that I happened to have personal knowledge of some of the events to which my guest had referred, and that several of the institutions he had named as communist were nothing of the sort. For example, the League for Industrial Democracy. I had founded it more than half a century before. I had run it from my farmhouse attic in the hills above Princeton, New Jersey, for the first year or two, and I had known about its affairs ever since. It was just what it called itself: an organization for democracy, and never anywhere in its publications was there any suggestion for the achieving of socialist aims except by the democratic process.
Then some of the persons whom the judge had called “communist-influenced” were my friends. For example, Oswald Garrison Villard, for many years publisher and editor of the Nation. I had known Villard well and had read his magazine from my youth. He was a libertarian of conviction so determined that it might be called religious. It would have been impossible to name an American less apt to fall under communist influence. And so on for other names that I have now forgotten.
Our guest listened without interruption; when I finished, he said that he was surprised by what I had told him and would give careful study to the matter and not repeat the mistakes. So we parted as Southern gentlemen, and on the way back to the motel he told Hunter that he was humiliated by what had happened. When he got home he sent me his book and later one or two pamphlets; but I have not heard that the policies of the citizens’ councils have been modified in this respect.
III
Early in 1933 William Fox, most mighty of the movie moguls—excuse the movie language—came into my life. He wrote that he wished to visit my home. My wife, who knew the smell of money when it came near, got a good fire burning in our fireplace and saw that a pitcher of lemonade was prepared, with no alcohol in it. The country boy from Oregon who was our servant at that time was literally trembling with excitement at the prospect of seeing the great William Fox. When the boy came in to report the arrival, Craig said, “What did you tell him?” The answer was, “I told him to rest his hat and set.”
William Fox had brought his lawyer with him and was “set” for action. He had been robbed of a good part of his fortune during the recent panic; he wanted that story told—and I was the man to do it. I explained somewhat sadly that I was in the midst of another writing job and never liked to break off my work once started. Usually Craig let me make my own decisions, but not that one. She told Mr. Fox that I would accept his offer of twenty-five thousand dollars—and what could I do about that?
Every day Fox came with his suitcase full of documents and his little round pudgy lawyer to elucidate them. Every day he rested his hat and set, and every day he had his pitcher of prohibition lemonade. I hired two secretaries to listen on alternate days, and so in a very short time I had a book. The great mogul himself suggested the title, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox; and when the mighty labor was done and the bulky manuscript complete, Fox put the check into my wife’s hands—not mine! He went off to New York in the midst of loud cheers from the Sinclair establishment.
And what happened then? Well, to be precise—nothing. I waited patiently for two or three days, and then I waited impatiently for two or three weeks, and I heard not a word. Then I received a letter from my friend Floyd Dell, who happened to be in New York. How Floyd got the information I have forgotten, but the substance of it was that Fox was using the threat of publishing my manuscript in an effort to get back some of the properties of which he had been deprived. I asked a lawyer friend in New York to verify this information for me, and when it was verified I knew exactly what to do. I sent my carbon copy to my dependable printers in Hammond, Indiana, and instructed them to put the book into type, send me the proofs, and order paper for twenty-five thousand copies. Before long it occurred to me that it might be a wise precaution to tell them to order paper for another twenty-five thousand copies.
When those beautiful yellow-covered books hit Hollywood, it was with a bang that might have been heard at the moon if there was anybody there to listen. It wasn’t but a few hours before I received a frantic telegram from William Fox, threatening me with all kinds of punishments; but the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check had been cashed, and the books had gone to reviewers all over the United States—and I guess William Fox decided that he might just as well be the hero I had made him. Anyhow, I heard no more protests, and I sold some fifty thousand copies of the book at three dollars a copy. (It would cost twice that today.) I was told that immediately after the book appeared, there was posted on the bulletin board of all entrances to the immense Fox lot a warning that anyone found on the lot with a copy of the book would be immediately discharged. So, of course, all the hundreds of Fox employees had to do their reading at home.
It is interesting to note that now, as I read the proofs of this book, the great Fox establishment is shut down and the company is issuing statements that it is not going into bankruptcy.
IV
It was also in 1933 that we got involved with Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film director. He had come to Hollywood two years before to make a picture. Because he would not do what our screen masters wanted, his plans had miscarried, and now he was about to return to Russia. Then, only a few hours before he was supposed to leave, he sent a friend to us with a wonderful idea: if only someone would raise the money, he would go to Mexico and make an independent picture of the primitive Indians about whom Diego Rivera had told him.
We hated to see a great artist humiliated by the forces that had assailed Eisenstein in California; so we very foolishly undertook to raise the money. Mrs. Gartz put up the first five thousand dollars—on condition that Craig’s brother Hunter Kimbrough should be the manager of the expedition.
Now, the way in which “independent” pictures are made is as follows: the director gets a certain sum of money and shoots a certain number of miles of film; then he telegraphs back to the investors that the picture is, unfortunately, not completed and that he must have more money, and more miles of film, or else, unfortunately, the investors will have no picture. Thereupon, the investors put up more money, and the director shoots more miles of film, and then telegraphs that the picture is, unfortunately, not completed and that he must have more money, and more miles of film, or else, unfortunately, the investors will have no picture. There may have been some case in the history of movie expeditions where this did not happen, but I have not been able to come upon any recollection of it in Hollywood.
Eisenstein and his staff went to the tropical land of Tehuantepec, and made pictures of Tehuana maidens with great starched ruffles over their heads, and bare feet that gripped the rough hillsides like hands, and baskets made of gourds painted with roses. He went to Oaxaca and made pictures of masonry tumbling into ruins during an earthquake. He went to Chichén Itzá and made pictures of Mayan temples with plumed serpents and stone-faced men and their living descendants, unchanged in three thousand years. He climbed Popocatepetl and made pictures of Indian villages lost in forgotten valleys. Miles and miles of film were exposed, and packing cases full of negatives in tin cans came back to Hollywood.
Meanwhile, my wife and I found ourselves turned into company promoters, addressing persuasive letters, many pages long, to friends of Soviet Russia, devotees of Mexican art, and playboys of the film colony—anyone who might be tempted by a masterpiece of camerawork and montage. We interviewed lawyers and bankers, and signed trust agreements and certificates of participating interest. We visited Mexican consuls and United States customs inspectors, and arranged for censorship exhibitions. We mailed bank drafts, took out insurance policies, telephoned brokers, and performed a host of other duties far out of our line.
And Eisenstein went to the Hacienda Tetlapayac and made endless miles of film of a maguey plantation, with peons wearing gorgeous striped serapes, singing work hymns at dawn by old monastery walls, driven to revolt by cruel taskmasters, and hunted to their death by wild-riding vaqueros. He went to Mérida and “shot” señoritas with high-piled headdresses and embroidered mantillas. He made the life story of a bullfighter—his training and technique, his footwork and capework, his intrigue with ladies of fashion, and his escape from vengeful husbands, fiercer than any bull from Piedras Negras. The most marvelous material: pictures of golden sunlight and black shadows; dream scenes of primitive splendor; gorgeous pageants, like old tapestries come to life; compositions in which the very clouds in the sky were trained to perform.
But, oh, the tens of miles of film and the tens of thousands of dollars! The months and months—until at last Craig began to cry out in protest and to demand an end. Mexico is a land of difficulties and dangers, and Hunter Kimbrough was managing the expedition; her affection for him multiplied the troubles in her mind. “Bring them home!” became her cry, day and night.
And, meanwhile, Eisenstein was in Chapala, shooting white pelicans, gray pumas, and Nayaritan damsels paddling dugouts in mangrove swamps. He was in Cholula, shooting Catholic churches with carven skulls, and images of Jesus with real hair and teeth. He was in Guadalupe, photographing miraculous healings, and penitents carrying crosses made of spiny cactus, crawling by hundreds up rocky hillsides on bare knees.
“Bring them home!” demanded Craig; and she and her husband came to a deadlock over the issue. The husband was infatuated, she declared; he was as complete a madman as a Soviet director. They argued for days and nights; meanwhile, Eisenstein tore off the roof of a Tehuantepec mansion to photograph a dance inside, gave a bullfight to keep an actor from going to Spain, and made arrangements to hire the whole Mexican Army. Again Craig clamored, “Bring them home!” And again husband and wife took up the issue; this time the husband was seized by a deadly chill and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and he lay on his back for two weeks.
The raising of money went on, and freight trains groaned under the loads of raw film going into Mexico, and exposed film coming out. Eisenstein shot the standing mummies of Michoacàn, the flower festivals of Xochimilco, and the “dead peoples’ day” celebrations of Amecameca, and ordered the Mexican Army to march out into the desert to fight a battle with a background of organ cactuses thirty feet high. It was the beginning of the fifteenth month of this Sisyphean labor when Craig assembled the cohorts of her relatives and lawyers, and closed in for the final grapple with her infatuated spouse. “Bring them home!” she commanded; and for eight days and nights the debate continued. To avoid going to the hospital, the husband went to the beach for three days; then he came back, and there were more days and nights of conferences with the assembled cohorts. At times such as this, husbands and wives discover whether they really love each other!
Craig was with me in the dream of a picture—until she decided that Eisenstein meant to grind her husband up in a pulp machine and spin him out into celluloid film. She thought that thirty-five miles of film was enough for any picture. And then she stood and looked at her husband, and her hands trembled and her lips quivered; she had licked him in that last desperate duel, and she wondered if in his heart he could ever forgive her. He did.
V
The real reason for Eisenstein’s delaying tactics was that he did not want to go back to his beloved Soviet Union. He had been trying to get a contract to make a picture in India, one in Japan, one in the Argentine. His relations with Craig’s brother had reached a point where he cursed Hunter; and Hunter, a Mississippian, got a gun and told him the next time he cursed he would be shot. So, I sent a cablegram to Stalin, asking him to order Eisenstein to return home; in reply I received a cablegram signed by Stalin informing me that they no longer had any use for Eisenstein and considered him a renegade.
The history of that cablegram is amusing. Craig regarded it as she would a rattlesnake in her home. Anyone who saw it, including the F.B.I., would assume that I was a cryptocommunist. The evil document must be locked up in a secret treasure box that contained such things as the letters from Jefferson Davis and his daughter, Winnie. I was not even allowed to know where that box was hidden.
But I had told one or two friends about the cablegram. Way back in the early Greenwich Village days I had known Robert Minor, art editor of The Masses. I had played tennis with him at Croton; and much later, in the days when I was writing the Lanny Budd books, he provided me with a story of what it was like to be arrested by the French police—a story that makes a delightful ending for the first Lanny Budd book, World’s End. Now, a friend in New York mentioned the cablegram to Bob, and reported Bob’s comment, “Tell Upton if he has a cablegram from Stalin he is the only man in America who can say it.”
In the end, we made a contract with Amtorg, the Russian trade agency in New York, which handled the whole Eisenstein matter. We agreed to ship the film to them with precise specifications that the boxes should not be opened in New York but should be forwarded immediately to Moscow where Eisenstein would cut the film, and the cut film would be shipped to us. So Eisenstein received orders that he could not fail to obey, and Hunter did not have to shoot him.
The director and his two associates left Mexico City in our Buick car and drove to New York; but instead of going at once to Moscow, as the agreement specified, Eisenstein stayed in New York, and about a week later we received letters from persons in New York to whom he had been showing the film.
That settled the matter for us. We put it into the hands of our lawyer, with instructions to repossess the film, repack it, and ship it to Hollywood—which was done. We made an agreement with Sol Lesser to cut it, and that was done. And in the spring of 1934 Thunder Over Mexico was scheduled to open at the Rialto Theater in New York.
In the eyes of the communists, of course, we had committed a major crime. We had deprived the great Russian master of his greatest art work, and we had done it out of blind greed. All over the world the communist propagandists took up that theme, and we could not answer without damaging the property of our investors.
The situation was still more odd because my friends, the socialists, were also involved. I was just on the point of announcing my EPIC campaign for the governorship of California. I had sent a copy of my program to Norman Thomas, and he lit into it in the New York Call, denouncing EPIC as a “tin-can economy,” and me as “a renegade to the socialist movement.” The Socialist Party, which had placed a large order for seats for the opening night of Eisenstein’s film, canceled the order. So, we were getting it from all sides. On opening night there was a minor riot; communists yelled protests, and some of them shook their fists in my face in the lobby of the theater.
I had one comfort, however. Among the investors in the picture was Otto H. Kahn, New York banker and art patron; he had put in ten thousand dollars at my request, without ever having met me. I invited him to dinner with my wife and me at the Algonquin Hotel on the evening of the opening. He came up to me in the lobby and took both my hands in his and said, “I am telling all my friends that if they want to invest money and want to be sure of having it carefully handled and promptly accounted for, they should entrust it to the socialist, Mr. Upton Sinclair.”
Of course, Thunder Over Mexico wasn’t a very good picture. It couldn’t be because it was only a travelogue and had no form. Sol Lesser, an experienced producer, did his best and dealt with us fairly. The investors got about half their money back, and Sol’s friendship was the best thing that we got out of the whole experience.
When the film had run its course, we turned it over to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and occasionally I see mention of its being shown here and there. As for Eisenstein, he went back to Russia; I have no report on his meeting with Stalin. But all the world knows that for many years he was put to teaching his art instead of practicing it, and that when he made another picture it was a glorification of the most cruel of all the tsars.