It was at this point that a little voice in my head went, Uh-oh. I was steeped in my own book about Hollywood history, “Oscar Wars,” in which men such as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and the brothers Warner figure prominently, both as architects of a great American industry and as often ruthless bosses who treated their studios like fiefdoms. Mayer, born Lazar, in the Russian Empire, may have been the head of M-G-M and the prime mover of the Academy, but to the actor Ralph Bellamy he was “a Jewish Hitler, a fascist. He had no feeling for any minority, including his own. No feeling for people, period.” The well-known story of his punishing treatment of the teen-age Judy Garland during the filming of “The Wizard of Oz” had already appeared in the museum. In 1929, Mayer summoned the actress Anita Page for “special favors” and sidelined her after she rejected his advances. Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, was even more notorious for his casting couch—known as “King Cohn,” he was the Harvey Weinstein of the Golden Age. After Rita Hayworth refused his sexual demands, he stalked her and bugged her dressing room.
These stories received new scrutiny after #MeToo, but they were far from the only way that the moguls misused their power. The Jewish studio heads were immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and faced pervasive antisemitism in America, where they longed to assimilate. (Mayer adopted the Fourth of July as his birthday.) Unable to rise through Wasp-dominated industries in the East, they created their own path to success out West. But that success made them conspicuous—the automaker Henry Ford warned of “the almost complete submergence of moviedom into the hands of Jews”—and some of their worst tendencies arose from a sense of vulnerability. Even as they lifted movies into the mainstream of American culture, they whitewashed the screen of minorities, including their own, in order to uphold a sanitized vision of the country. Apart from Warner Bros., they kept concerns about Hitler’s rise off movie screens in the thirties, worried that they’d be accused of pushing Jewish propaganda. In the late forties, as the House Un-American Activities Committee launched a (largely antisemitic) hunt for Communist infiltrators in Hollywood, the moguls insulated themselves by helping to create the blacklist, which targeted many leftist Jews in their own employ.
In other words, the studio moguls weren’t just enterprising, talented men with private flaws. They created and enforced a system of power which had real victims, which entrenched marginalization in American popular culture, and which contemporary Hollywood was still grappling with as the museum opened its doors. Like America’s Founding Fathers, they’re complicated historical figures, not ready-made Jewish heroes—which is why I saw the Academy walking into a minefield.