Excerpt from my book, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The letter addressed to Mrs. Donna Owen arrived at
her oceanfront Santa Monica home on October 28, 1945. The return address on the
envelope revealed that it came from her beloved high school chemistry teacher
back in Denison, Iowa, when she lived on a farm and was still known as Donna
Belle Mullenger. She had stayed in touch with handsome young Ed Tompkins for a
few years after graduation, but then he suddenly vanished, without explanation,
and had not responded to any of her letters.
This seemed odd. Tompkins had
deeply influenced her outlook on life a decade earlier when she was an aimless sophomore,
after he gifted her a copy of the popular Dale Carnegie
self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
In short order her grades soared, she secured the lead role in the high school
play (Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16),
and she was voted Campus Queen. Donna Belle wanted to become a teacher but her
parents could not afford a major school, so she moved to the West Coast to
enroll in low-tuition Los Angeles City College. While she appeared in stage
productions, she had no aspirations to become a professional actress. Soon the
honey-haired beauty attracted the attention of talent scouts, leading to
several screen tests. Signed by MGM to a seven-year contract at the age of
twenty, she appeared in her first movie, The
Get-Away, billed as Donna Adams.
Tompkins and former student |
Many supporting roles followed, with her
name changed to one she hated, feeling it had a dull, harsh sound that didn’t
reflect her personality at all: Donna Reed. Still, she secured roles in Shadow of the Thin Man, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, and Apache Trail,
and married her makeup man. She graduated from Mickey Rooney’s love interest in
The Courtship of Andy Hardy to John
Wayne’s object of desire in John Ford’s They
Were Expendable. She could play midwestern wholesome in her sleep, but some
directors felt her range was narrow, and MGM had a flock of other young
actresses to draw on. (Fearing she’d lose out if she took time off, she endured
an abortion.) Along the way she became a popular girl-next-door pinup during World
War II for homesick GIs, and personally answered many of their letters. She got
divorced and in June 1945, still only twenty-four-years-old, married her agent,
Tony Owen.
Then, that autumn, she signed with RKO
for perhaps her biggest role yet, as Mary Bailey, wife of James Stewart in
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life,
after Ginger Rogers turned it down as “too bland.” At the same time she finally
discovered what had happened to Ed Tompkins. A newspaper story revealed that he
had been sworn to silence for several years after joining thousands of others
in helping to create the first atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project site in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee. After reading the article, she sent him another letter, this
time care of Oak Ridge.
Now she had received a reply. Opening the
envelope, she unfolded a typed, single-spaced, two-and-a-half-page letter from
Dr. Tompkins. The tone, given their formerly close relationship, was
surprisingly formal (despite its “Dear Donna” salutation), and urgent. “The
development of atomic explosives necessitates a reevaluation of many of our
previous modes of thought and life,” he began. “This conclusion had been
reached by the research scientists who developed these powerful new explosives
long before August 6, 1945.” That, of course, was the day the first atomic bomb
exploded over the city of Hiroshima in Japan, killing more than 125,000, the
vast majority of them women and children. Three days later, Nagasaki met the
same fate, with a death toll reaching at least 75,000.
The day before Reed received the Tompkins
letter at her modest beach house more than ninety thousand locals had gathered
in the Los Angeles Coliseum to witness a “Tribute to
Victory” program. It
featured a re-creation of the bombing of Hiroshima, narrated by actor Edward G.
Robinson. A B-29 bomber, caught in searchlights, dropped a package that
produced a large noise and a small mushroom cloud. The crowd went wild.
With Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves |
Americans, weeks after the Japanese
surrender, were relieved that the war was over but nervous about atomic energy.
Scientists, political figures, and poets alike were sounding a similar
theme—splitting the atom could bring wonderful advances, if used wisely, or
destroy the world, if developed for military purposes. Atomic dreams, and
nightmares, ran wild. “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors
with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” warned radio commentator Edward R.
Murrow, with “survival not assured.”
In
the rather dense letter to his former pupil, Tompkins explained that the scientists’
initial “excitement” and pride in what they had accomplished were now subsumed
by much soul-searching. Until the Hiroshima blast, many of his colleagues were
unaware they had been working on a munitions project. Others had signed
physicist Leo Szilard’s futile petition asking President Harry S. Truman to
hold off using the new weapon against Japan. In any case, a large number were
now opposed to the building of new and even bigger earth-shattering bombs.
Tompkins revealed that thousands of Manhattan
Project scientists had now formed associations in Oak Ridge, Chicago, Los
Alamos, and New York to deliver their warnings and “to foster thought and
discussion which can lead to adoption of international control of atomic
energy.” Contrary to claims by military leaders and politicians, there was “NO
possibility” that the United States could keep a monopoly on production of
these weapons. The so-called secret of the atomic bomb was known
internationally. The Soviets, for example, would surely build their own bombs
within a few years. Finally, there could never be an effective defense against
these weapons, and “a hundred long-range rockets carrying atomic explosives
could wipe out our civilization in a matter of minutes.”
In light of all this, it was imperative
that effective international controls be established as soon as feasible. But
what did Donna’s old chem teacher (and positive thinking advocate) want her to do about it? Tompkins revealed
that the new associations were showering elected officials in Washington with
leaflets, lobbying influential reporters and commentators, and preparing a
major book. This was “a good start but much remains to be done,” he noted. It
seemed to him “there would be a large segment of the population that could be
reached most effectively through the movies.” His final paragraph featured an
explicit pitch:
Never inserting even a hint of personal
familiarity from their days in Iowa, or asking about her life or career,
Tompkins concluded with the plea, “Will you give the whole matter your
consideration and perhaps discuss it with others at the studio? I’d appreciate
hearing your reaction to the suggestion as soon as possible.”
Just days later, after speaking to other
members of the activist group at Oak Ridge, Tompkins fired off a second letter
to “Mr. and Mrs. Tony Owen.” He had polled his peers and found they were
willing and eager to wander down the Hollywood path, but not quite blindly. Tompkins
boldly proposed that the couple fly east to Oak Ridge at their own expense the
following week to discuss the project, with no time to waste. Together they
could hash out a scenario for “a very good picture with a lot of public appeal”
that would hit the theaters before any other entry—and then catch a short
flight to Washington to gain the required approval of the Manhattan Project
director, General Leslie R. Groves. “I wish to thank you for the great interest
you have taken in this matter,” Tompkins concluded.
Well, that was a lot for Donna Reed, or
anyone, to digest. Just seven years earlier the same man had been delivering
quite a different lesson in a classroom. Fortunately she had someone to share
it with and, as she told Tompkins in a brief phone call, carry the ball in
responding to his feverish pleading. This was her new husband, Tony Owen, a
slick, fast-talking dynamo who was thirteen years her senior. Owen, a native of
New Orleans and Chicago (real name: Irving Ohnstein), had served as vice
president of the Detroit Lions pro football team after brief careers as an
actor and as a newspaper reporter. Following a stint in the military, he
settled in Los Angeles and secured his first clients as a talent agent.
When he finished reading the Tompkins
missives, Owen started calling producers to gauge their interest, if any. Having
not heard from Donna again, Tompkins called her at home. She said she had
started three letters to him but each became outdated by events. Her husband
had learned from studio insiders that it might be a simple matter to get such a
movie produced if the military signaled its approval—and exclusive dramatic
rights for key figures in the story could be obtained. Reed warned Tompkins,
however, that Hollywood studios were reluctant to make any pictures with “political
repercussions.” When he told her that scientists were already sketching
scenarios for a script, she advised that surely any of them would be “completely
rewritten” by the studio.
Tony Owen, meanwhile, called his friend Samuel
Marx, a top producer at MGM, where Reed was still under contract. Marx agreed
to meet him the next day for breakfast at the swanky Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There
he would find Owen in a highly animated state. Owen showed him the letter to
his wife from Tompkins, which the producer found fascinating. (Marx got the
impression that Tompkins may have once had something of a secret “crush” on his
pupil.) The producer offered to take Owen to meet with Louis B. Mayer, one of
the most powerful men in town and the studio chief since the 1920s, straight
away. So they raced their automobiles to the studio lot at Culver City. Mayer
knew Owen well, had even attended his recent wedding.
As it happens, MGM had expressed some
interest in an atomic bomb film nearly two months earlier, with the Japanese
victims of the attacks still smoldering in the ruins. On August 9, just hours
after the assault on Nagasaki, MGM’s Washington representative, Carter Barron,
phoned the chief of the Pentagon’s Feature Film Division to discuss the
possibility of the studio rushing ahead with an exclusive movie about the bomb
project. Five days later, Barron wrote him to reveal that MGM was “now working”
on a movie tentatively titled Atomic Bomb
and would appreciate any useful “information or material.” The heroine would be
a physicist associated with the genesis of nuclear fission, Lise Meitner, who
had fled Germany for Sweden in 1938. But nothing came of Barron’s interest and
the idea seemingly expired at the studio.
Now, MGM was being handed, via Donna Reed
and Ed Tompkins, a unique and exclusive entry point to a far more ambitious cinematic
bomb project. To date the studio’s main reference to the new weapon was
crowning its newly signed starlet Linda Christian “The Anatomic Bomb” (leading
to a full-page photo of her in a swimsuit in Life magazine).
___
In his massive office at the studio,
sitting behind his pure-white oval desk in the sprawling Thalberg Building,
L.B. Mayer greeted the fervent Marx and Owen. The actress Helen Hayes once
called Mayer “the most evil man I have ever dealt with in my life,” yet called
MGM “the great film studio of the world—not just of America, or of
Hollywood, but of the world.” Sam Marx considered him ruthless, an unprincipled
pirate, but like others recognized that Mayer’s deceptions and bullying—not to
mention his eye for talent and understanding of movie audiences—proved pivotal
for the studio. Mayer, no intellectual, tolerated “social issue” pictures but
loved escapist entertainment. Among MGM’s greatest films were an inordinate
number of musicals, from The Wizard of Oz
to An American in Paris.
Listening to the atomic bomb pitch, Mayer
grew excited. Now in his early sixties, overweight, and white-haired, King
Louis remained vigorous, vulgar, tyrannical, and, as always, quick to judge. With
little prompting, he promised that if the necessary approvals and rights were
gathered he would make an epic film on this subject his top priority for 1946! He
would budget at least $2 million for it, a lofty sum for that time. It might
one day be “the most important movie” he would ever film (and this was the man
who had made Gone with the Wind),
perhaps in the vein of his 1943 film, Madame
Curie, but more topical. This was a man, born in Minsk and raised in
Canada, so patriotic he falsely claimed he had been born on the Fourth of July
(the actual date was July 12) and for years staged an elaborate studio picnic
that day to mark the occasion.
Eager to rush forward, Mayer urged Owen
and Marx to seek clearances that very minute, straight from the top—“from the
horse’s mouth,” as Mayer put it. “Let’s call President Truman himself,” he
suggested. Mayer was a rock-ribbed Republican, but the studio titan believed
Truman would surely accept his call. It took some persuading, but Owen finally
talked him down from that idea. Instead, Mayer ordered Marx to call the studio’s
representative in DC, Carter Barron, to find out if White House and military
approvals were likely to come.
The following day Barron assured him on
this score, but added that to make sure of that—and, also, gather background
information and gauge the mood of scientists and generals—Marx and Owen should
visit both Oak Ridge and Washington as soon as possible. Louis B. Mayer ordered
Marx to “take the Starwind” (MGM’s
private plane) and “come back and tell me what you find.”
Excerpted from The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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