A Testimonial Dinner for Joseph I. Breen

On the evening of November 3, 1954, at Chasen's, the storied Beverly Hills eatery ("where the stars dine"), a group of friends and colleagues gathered to say farewell to Joseph I. Breen on his retirement as head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the in-house censorship arm of the Hollywood studio system. Soaked in cigarette smoke, bluff camaraderie, and misty-eyed nostalgia, the soiree enacted a masculine rite of passage from a bygone era—not a modern roast, where the insults and vulgarities fly, and certainly not a raucous "gentleman's club" outing to ogle pole dancers, but a more restrained and sentimental confab befitting the early Eisenhower era, with the boys—they were all boys—waxing nostalgic and expressing a mushy affection not suitable for the button-down workplace. Well lubricated with sentiment but not, surprisingly, libations, it was the final gathering of the men who patrolled the moral terrain of Hollywood cinema—a posse once tall in the saddle, now feeling the reins slipping from their hands.

Having written a cultural biography of Breen and his tenure at the PCA, I knew about the testimonial dinner, but only lately did I learn that an audio recording of the evening existed, preserved on 78 rpm records and presented as a memento to Breen. ¹ Hollywood insiders all, the celebrants enjoyed pro bono access to the sound equipment and technical expertise of the major studios. The gift was a suitable state-of-the-art media souvenir for a man who had himself shaped the art of Hollywood cinema.

Shortly after my book was published, I got an e-mail from Timothy Fitzgerald, a California-based buyer and seller of rare books and other collectibles. Fitzgerald said that he was in possession of a recording of the evening, discovered after a friend had invited him to rummage through a box of old 78 rpm records stashed in a garage. Among the detritus, he came across a four-sided gem: two red vinyl ten-inch records in the original package sent by William Gordon, Universal Pictures Co. Inc., to Mr. Joseph I. Breen Jr., 7201 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 46, California (via transportation). All four labels read "Banquet Tendered Joseph I. Breen at Chasen's Nov. 3 1954." Fitzgerald graciously duped me a copy on CD. He has since sold the original records to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, where they may be accessed by scholars.

Breen is a figure of some controversy in film studies, mainly for a series of anti-Semitic screeds he vented in private correspondence during the early 1930s. "These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence," he fumed in 1932 in a letter to the Reverend Wilfrid Parsons, SJ, editor of the Jesuit weekly America. "Ninety-five per cent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth." ² That same year, to his friend and patron Martin J. Quigley, editor of the influential trade weekly Motion Picture Herald and coauthor of the Production Code, Breen also expressed his loathing for Hollywood Jewry. "The fact is these damn Jews are a dirty, filthy lot. Their only standard is the standard of the box-office. To attempt to talk ethical value to them is time worse than wasted." ³ No wonder that today, film historians routinely label Hollywood's censor an "extreme anti-Semite," a "rabid anti-Semite," and "notoriously anti-Semitic." ⁴

My own take was more nuanced. Breen wrote what he wrote, but he was also an early supporter of the Hollywood anti-Nazi League for the Defense of Democracy, the animating center for the town's anti-Nazi activism in the 1930s; a warm friend to Hollywood Jews such as the producers Sam Spiegel and Joseph Pasternak; and a vigilant expunger of any whiff of anti-Semitism on the Hollywood screen, particularly after World War II. At his funeral in 1965, several of his Jewish friends served as honorary pallbearers.

Whatever the verdict on Breen's...