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City Without a Heart, by Anonymous (1933)

Cover of City Without a Heart

Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”

Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.

But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”

In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:

Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.

If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”

It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:

Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.

His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”

Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:

Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.

Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.

Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”

She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.

Almost.

There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.

I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.


City Without a Heart, by Anonymous
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

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