Lessons in Denying and Taking Authorship Credit

by John Aquino on 05/09/13

Did you ever take credit for something that you really didn't do, or not take credit for something that was yours or mostly your work?

With books, plays, and films, this issue often comes up. Artists can be very competitive. Did Elvis Presley really co-write the lyrics for the 1956 song  "Love Me Tender" with Virginia Matson to the Civil War tune "Aura Lee? Actually, the lyric was written by Ken Darby. When asked why he credited Matson, who was his wife, as co-author, Darby said, "Because she didn't write it either."

Similarly, Al Jolson is credited, along with Buddy DeSylva, with the lyrics for the 1920 song "Avalon" with music by Vincent Rose. Jolson didn't write the lyrics but his name on the song sheet as a co-writer was thought to sell records. Rose may not have written all the music either. Giacomo Puccin's publishers sued, saying that the melody had been taken from Puccini's "E lucevan stelle" from Tosca. The court awarded the publishers $25,000 and all future royalties.

And then there's Orson Welles, who at the height of his fame received co-author and sometimes sole author credit for virtually anything he produced and directed, be it radio program or film. Herman Mankiewicz wrote the original script for Citizen Kane which Welles and others pared down and gave input to as the normal part of collaboration. There is little doubt that Welles' vision for the movie helped reshape it, but, outside of the add-libbing that can be part of theatrical and filmic collaboration, it is unlikely that Welels wrote a word of the script. Welles finally agreed to accept only a co-author credit for the film for which he and Mankiewicz received the Oscar for best screenplay in 1941--Welles' only Oscar.

And then you have stories about selfless people like Darby and very gracious people like Oscar Hammerstein II. When he and Jerome Kern were writing the stage musical Show Boat in 1927, they hit upon the idea of using an unused lyric that P.G. Wodehouse, who had written a number of shows with Kern, penned for a song for the ingénue in Oh, Lady, Lady in 1917. Kern adjusted the music to be more appropriate for a middle age woman and Hammerstein adapted Wodehouse’s lyrics.

Wodehouse's lyric ends this way:
He's just my Bill,
He has no gifts at all,
A motor car
He cannot steer
And it seems clear
Whenever he dances
His partner takes chances.
I can't explain,
It's surely not his brain
That makes me thrill.
I love him
Because he's--I don't know
Because he's just my Bill.

In Show Boat, the song is sung by Julie, whose husband had swallowed her Negro blood from her cut finger so that, with Negro blood in his veins, they could be together in the racist South in the 1880s. But, as the years have passed, we see that she is clearly without him, has been with other men, and has developed a drinking problem. She sings the song in a rehearsal for a show. It’s not about her, but as she sings it becomes clear that it is about the life she wishes she had had. Hammerstein's revised lyric ends like this:
He's just my Bill
An ordinary man.
He hasn't got a thing that I can brag about.
And yet to be
Upon his knee
So comfy and roomy
Seems natural to me.
I can't explain,
It's surely not his brain
That makes me thrill.
I love him
Because he's--I don't know
Because he's just my Bill.

Hammerstein obviously used great portions of Wodehouse's lyrics, and yet he transformed it from a sly and silly song about a silly young man to the quintessential torch song for a woman who had dreamed of falling in love with an Adonis and now finds she loves an ordinary guy. Hammerstein kept the last part of Wodehouse's lyrics intact and yet, with his change to what came before, the singer's "I love him/Because he's--I don't know" is now a grappling to explain—love, a love the singer no longer has. I have not seen the song performed—even the 1951 movie with Ava Gardner as Julie--without my eyes filling up.

Hammerstein received co-credit with Wodehouse but then spent the rest of his life denying it, saying he had done almost nothing to deserve it. Again, this is the Hammerstein about whom his protégé Stephen Sondheim said, comparing Hammerstein to his partner composer Richard Rodgers, “Oscar was a man of limited talent and infinite grace. Rodgers was a man of infinite talent  and limited grace.” I don’t buy the limited talent part of Sondheim’s assessment of Hammerstein, but he seems to have been right about the grace.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have John Wexley. Wexley had written a play called The Last Mile that had made a star of Spencer Tracy and was filmed several times. In the late 1930's and 1940s he had screenwriting credits for some perfectly fine films: The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and especially Angels with Dirty Faces and City for Conquest, the latter with James Cagney as a boxer who is blinded by resin dust placed on his opponents' gloves and who affably and touchingly adjusts to his blindness. 

In 1943, Fritz Lang was assigned to direct a fictionalized film--finally titled Hangmen Also Die--about the assasination Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in the Nazi SS and the reprisals the Nazis took. The Austria-born Lang had always wanted to work with the legendary Bavarian-born playwright Berthold Brecht, who, like Lang, had fled Nazi German and was living in Hollywood. Brecht and Lang worked on the original story. Since Brecht did not speak English, Lang turned to Wexley, who spoke German, to work with Brecht to develop the story into a screenplay.

Brecht and Wexley reportedly fought bitterly during their collaboration--Brecht was not easy to work with--and when the film was in production Wexley went to the Screen Writers Guild and demanded a solo credit, saying he had written everything in the screenplay and Brecht had written nothing. In interviews he gave to Peter Bogdanovich, Lang said that it was clear that Brecht had written the majority of the screenplay and testified to the Guild on this point. But, according to Lang, the Guild felt that some day Brecht would return to Germany and Wexley would need the credit more than he. Wexley did receive sole screenwriters' credit. Lang was only able to get Brecht an "orginal story" credit that he shared with him.

A few years later, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began investigating Hollywood. It called Brecht as a witness, who testified that he was never a member of the communist party. He had to have a translator because he did not speak English, making his testimony difficult for the committee. The committee thanked him, dismissed him, and the day after his testimony Brecht returned to Germany.

Wexley was a member of the American communist party. But, while Brecht had not been a registered communist, he had been schooled in Marxism by some of the founders and prime movers of the communist party in Germany. Wexley's brand of communism was a puppy compared to Brecht's. The HUAC banned Hangmen Also Die as a subversive film, and Wexley was listed as its sole screenwriter. It was cited along with other films he worked on when Wexley was called before the HUAC. Wexley was blacklisted and never worked in Hollywood, or virtually on any other film, again. His only credits after 1947 are two television films made in East Germany.

There is wisdom in being hesitant to take too much credit and in not taking credit for something you did not do.

Oh, and to illustrate how discussing who wrote what can be confusing, and also getting back to Welles, in his preface to the novel based on his screenplay for the 1950 film The Third Man, Graham Greene notes in his preface that although he received sole screenplay credit for the film the most famous line in the movie was add-libbed by Welles. The line is: "Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce, the cuckoo clock." The lines do not appear in Greene's novel, which was really his narrative film treatment for the screenplay. This would appear to put Greene along with Hammerstein as one of the generous ones when it comes to credit

Welles' accepted the credit (and even suggested he wrote all of his own dialogue, which is not true), although he later did suggest that the line came from an old Hungarian play. Later commentators have suggested that Welles' borrowed the lines from an 1888 lecture on art by the painter John Abbott McNeill Whistler or that Greene really wrote them himself after all. One reason for disclaiming or at least qualifying the credit for the lines, as Welles himself admitted, is that cuckoo clocks do not come from Switzerland, they come from the black forest in Germany. 

Copyright 2013 by John T. Aquino