Communism is Twentieth
Century Americanism.
— Earl Browder
Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of changes and decisions. President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal of progressive reforms were up for re-election. The Communist Party sanctioned the Popular Front, a coalition of progressive causes, and modified its own program of immediate revolution in favor of pragmatic reforms. The new agenda was to unite with trade unionists, socialists, and liberals to stop the rise of fascism abroad and at home. In many elections, the Party ran candidates who openly campaigned for the Communist platform of “Jobs, Security, Democracy and Peace.” During this Popular Front era, which lasted till 1939, the CPUSA expanded more rapidly than ever before. That expansion caught Harry in its sweep, but not immediately—he was still having fun. Though he did not attend many Party meetings in 1935 and 1936, he participated in a series of urgent fund-raisers and demonstrations which addressed the Communist concerns of protesting Franco’s Fascist rise in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, forming trade unions, and promoting the civil rights of Negroes. From 1936 to 1938 he volunteered regularly for various progressive organizations, including the E.P.I.C. campaign (End Poverty in California, Upton Sinclair’s near-miss at the governorship), the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the American League Against War and Fascism (primarily reacting to the troubles in Spain), the Mobilization for Democracy, the Workers’ Alliance of America, and Labor’s Non-Partisan League.
A promising business relationship also came to Harry that year. At the end of 1935, Harry’s boyfriend Gabor de Bessenye (the Hungarian count) had introduced him to a Viennese gentleman named Reginald LeBorg. A small, immaculately groomed film director, LeBorg sported continental manners and an accent that were as natty as his ever-present ascots. “Reggie” moved to Hollywood, spelled his name backwards (in Austria it had been Grobel), and by the time Harry met him, he had come under tenuous contract with MGM to direct his specialty, second-unit opera and ballroom scenes. LeBorg spoke shaky English but he wanted to write a futuristic screenplay about a man who saves the world with a death ray. This, he hoped, would be his ticket to steady first-unit directing. As a studio sales strategy, the sci-fi script would first have to be written in novel form, and for this he needed a ghostwriter. During Harry’s affair with George Oppenheimer, he had learned that ghostwriting was a thankless end of the business to start with, but that, if he could prove himself indispensible to someone, he might be “carried along inside the gate” to become a fully credited screenwriter. When LeBorg offered him the chance, Harry took it.
The unwritten but firm rules of ghosting required that Harry attend clandestine story conferences at LeBorg’s Fountain Avenue apartment. “I usually arrived after ten at night and would hide at the end of the hall until the coast was clear. My presence would have been unexplainable to any ‘legitimate’ industry contacts he had.” LeBorg, who died in 1989 after directing forty-three films and nearly one hundred television shows, recalled his partner’s credentials. “Harry impressed me as a well-educated man—knowing literature. And I liked his work.” Talent aside, however, LeBorg felt that Harry’s passionate idealism barred him from a film industry career. “He was too stubborn and had too many opinions. He would never compromise, and you have to compromise in the industry.”
Shortly after New Year’s Day, 1936 they signed an agreement to co-author the novel, to be titled The Death Ray, later changed to Tide Rises. LeBorg was granted controlling interest and first billing, because he said he wanted only “polish” from his co-author. But Harry’s touch marks the entire story, the only novel he ever wrote. In the spaciousness of the speculative genre, his political and social theories took flight, making Tide Rises part science fiction and part political prognostication. It has some remarkable accuracy. The story is set in the distant years of 1975 to 1980, as America falters. Government and industry have become so corrupt that foreign investors make easy prey of the once-great nation. A dome over a ballpark collapses, illustrating the breakdown of the American spirit. Japan, which has come to dominate the world economy, finally launches an invasion of the United States, whose weak leaders fail to repulse the takeover. But a state-by-state folk uprising builds, as Hay phrased it, to “rehearten the urbanites by showing the rising tide of the simple decency of the American people.” LeBorg’s gimmick plays when the hero steps forward at the crucial moment and drives back the Japanese with his death ray.
A New York literary agent with the promising name of Henrietta Buckmaster represented the novel, certain that its social criticisms would find a place in the liberal press. For several years Harry hoped something would come of it but, perhaps because it was too radical, no one would publish it. Such issues gave rise to frequent arguments within the partnership. “We had fights over commerciality and politics,” LeBorg confirmed. “Our protagonist was a money man, and Harry painted him as very greedy, the bad man, the bad boy. He said my ideas were too fascistic, too Right-wing.” Whatever their arguments, at the close of each conference the continental Reggie offered liqueur, cake, and a handshake.
They worked on several other projects, including Largo, a feature-length script based on the life of eighteenth-century composer George Frederick Handel, with a fictional love interest built around one of his compositions. Harry happily dove into the research, combing the vast collections of the Central Library in Los Angeles and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, producing rich historical detail with which to embroider the script. Largo might have made a perfect period costume epic in the style of Irving Thalberg, who was exactly the person LeBorg had in mind for the project. LeBorg had social connections with British actor Basil Rathbone, and had tailored a role for him so as to help sell the package. When an interview with Thalberg was granted, LeBorg was confident. But, “the day I was to see him, his secretary called me and canceled the appointment. Mr. Thalberg had fallen ill. Three days later, he died.”
Largo never sold, but their next (and last) project did, with rather extraordinary results. It was another classical composer story, about Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Scarlatti (this time convening in the hereafter), and naturally called Heavenly Music. Harry remembered pitching nine concepts, and that only that one caught MGM’s attention. “They thought it was a cute idea, and told LeBorg they would buy it. But as the studios always were, they had a couple of people they were interested in pushing who changed two lines and got the job based on that. It was basically my script. In the end, LeBorg got original story credit and I remained anonymous. Imagine my surprise a few years later when the damn thing won the Oscar!” LeBorg, for the record, denied Harry had any part in the writing of Heavenly Music, the winner of the 1943 Academy Award for best short subject. Harry had suspected as much; it was part of the ghostwriting game. And as Reginald LeBorg’s career slowed to directing such films as The Zombie’s Ghost and The Black Sleep, it was his highest honor ever.
The Left’s anti-fascism was not based only on the eruption of the Nazi and Fascist Parties of Germany, Italy and Spain. Harry believed that fascism could take hold anywhere, and that many established interests, particularly large businesses, would support it. As if to bear this out, some American companies did business as usual with the Third Reich until war was officially declared in 1941. When the U.S. sent athletes to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, Communists were among the few who protested in Los Angeles. The clandestine Friends of the New Germany, which had beaten up Will Geer, and its public counterpart, the German-American Bund, advocated the “benefits” of Nazism for the U.S. Harry often helped round up crowds to loudly protest outside its Washington Boulevard office.
The strongest organized local response to Hitler was the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, organized that spring of 1936 by Dorothy Parker, Oscar Hammerstein, and writer Donald Ogden Stewart. Harry described the League as geared toward the film industry, particularly actors of conscience. (Paul Muni and Boris Karloff were among those on his list of League supporters.) For three years the group aided refugees, found funds for their transport, arranged American sponsors for them and organized a boycott of German goods.
In the League’s office on Yucca Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, Harry spent regular shifts folding, stuffing, and stamping mailings about the emergency in Europe and its Nazi supporters in Los Angeles. The Anti-Nazi League was a typical mass organization, which, while independent, relied heavily on leadership from the CPUSA and served to introduce sympathetic people to Marxist principles and to the Party. The structure of the Mattachine Society, fourteen years later, was strongly influenced by this model. The League lost most of its support in 1939, however, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact.
What was then “the Jewish question” abroad and at home concerned Harry deeply. In Los Angeles, he was appalled by the reluctance of the strongest Jewish leaders to become active. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, he said, was not welcome to make presentations at local Jewish temples and synagogues concerning the persecution of Jews becoming apparent in Germany.1 Many Party members were Jewish, often immigrants who had been involved in European Marxist movements, and the Jewish community in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles was the heart of what Harry called the “Cultural Left,” so his concern over anti-Semitism deepened as Naziism played out its horrors. Additionally, several of his romantic involvements were with Jewish men, and he probably identified with Jews as a people separated from the mainstream by a profound difference, and subject to severe prejudice and ostracism because of it.
Between bouts of activism, Harry still sought the comfort of gay bars. He emphasized that gays were only tolerated, never truly welcome in such spots, which were invariably “sullen basements with a pall of smoke, a bare bulb on a string, and smelly floors.” People of the same gender could find each other there and, as he noted in a story he wrote in 1936, coyly shout, “Well isn’t this gay!” while nursing a beer, the longest, cheapest drink available. His favorite spot during the mid-Thirties was on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard, just off Highland, and its brightly painted entrance earned the name the Red Door. “The whole place was hardly big enough for two dozen people to squeeze into,” Harry recalled fondly, “but some of us managed to convince the proprietor to stay open late and serve beer and sandwiches after the theater let out. Most of that group happened to be queer, so the Red Door became a temperamental clubhouse.” The proprietor, an older heterosexual man, was delighted with the steady business and asked no questions. He later opened a larger bar nearby, the Cherokee House, on the street of the same name. With its gold-flecked mirror over the bar, Harry recalled this as the first “elegant” bar for gays in Los Angeles—at least the first one he saw.
Often, after the show was over and after whatever passed for the bar was closed, Harry cruised Hollywood Boulevard until the last bus came. If he was distracted or determined enough to wave it on, he would spend the wee hours in Delongpre Park, then walk home, watching the sun rise over the east end of Hollywood Boulevard. Other times he would take late strolls in vacant lots, such as the top of Kirkwood Canyon, Lookout Mountain, the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz, and the Cerro Gordo water tower in Echo Park, places where he often found other single men—also out for late strolls.
And with certain of his randier pals, Harry often went south to Wilmington on what was known colloquially as the Milk Run. “That was notorious. The word would spread like wildfire that the Navy was in, and hundreds of families, friends, and ‘well-wishers’—like us—welcomed them. The lineup around the pier was four to five deep and the more expensive your car the better chance you had of offering someone a ride.” That Halloween, Harry and his lover took a weekend oceanfront cottage in Venice, to offer a place to sleep to passing sailors. He recalled, “I had been working in the orchard for my dad that fall, but had made him promise to give me the weekend off. At the last minute, that Saturday morning, he reneged and demanded I work. There was a confrontation and I informed him then that not only was I not going to work for him that day, but I would never work for him again. And I never did—until he was in the hospital and his crop was freezing.”
Harry liked to analyze the gay social scenes then. “Gay life was not so much a life as an aggregate of cliques,” he observed, cliques which he found insular and isolated. Several times, when he introduced friends to a favorite bar, they met co-workers there whose homosexuality they had never suspected, despite long work days together. “The little pockets existed,” he explained, “and either you were lucky enough to fall into them or you could go your whole life and not know about them. The closedown, the terror, was so complete that people could remain ignorant, un-socialized and undeveloped. ‘Communities’ were the little groups that formed by accident. And with lots of restrictions. Tiresome bitchiness and boasting predominated. To find someone whose sensibility was more wide-ranging was relatively rare.”
There were other restrictions. At the Red Door, he made friends with a good-looking young man named Wynn, who was being kept by the president of a major record company. Wynn and Harry had a frustratingly discreet affair. “He so wanted for the two of us to go away together so he could be himself—a bright young man in love, and not the handsome, kept plaything whose patron required that he dress well, sit still, and look pretty. It was during this time that I let myself be ‘kept in the same social clique.”
This mostly symbolic episode started when Wynn introduced Harry to Hal, an older, heavier man whose family owned several large national corporations. Hal wrote for radio, and he and Harry found each other pleasant and witty in conversation; soon Harry was always welcome for dinner or to help at script sessions. An affair developed, and when Hal invited Harry for an all-expenses-paid vacation south of the border, Harry accepted, thought better of it, and left early, never again to flirt with such bourgeois compromise. It would be easier to go straight, and there are several mentions of a “best girl” in Harry’s paper from that spring.
He had never discussed his true intimacies with his parents, who must have experienced tension as their eldest remained unattached. There was no shortage of women interested in him, and he dated several. One close brush with heterosexuality started when his friend Hazel Ito was trying to put together a two-couple professional waltz team for a possible film extravaganza that summer. “She was having trouble keeping men who were willing to train rigorously, and someone suggested me. I was happily partnered with a handsome woman with a broad forehead, cool, blue-grey eyes, and silver blonde hair that she always wore straight back in a knot, pulled tight so one could see the design of the comb. She always looked equally at home in the saddle, on a tennis court, or on the dance floor.” Her name was Edie Huntsman, and she and Harry made dates to go swimming or riding together. When they began bumping into each other at political events, she introduced Harry to smart-set progressives.
One of those people was society girl Janet Riesenfeld, the daughter of prominent conductor Hugo Riesenfeld. She was a Spanish dancer who felt passionately about the anti-fascist cause in Spain and raised money for it through her performances. She and Harry made a sport of rounding up one hundred people between them to cheer at demonstrations for Free Spain, and a few dozen to attend the monthly Rhumba Cotillion held by Los Angeles’ Cuban families to rhumba up funds for the Spanish Loyalists. A gaggle of music-loving progressives frequently gathered to listen to Janet’s father’s tremendous collection of 78 rpm records.
Harry remembered “a man named Bill Miller, who later went to Spain, was in that group, and so was Janet’s friend Selma, who decided that she and I were cut out for each other.” Though Harry had other ideas, Selma was the first woman to lay him. “Selma did everything she could to get me into bed and finally did. That was my first sexual experience with a woman. When it was over I blurted out, ‘I certainly hope I never go through that again!’ She was a very nice girl, and I immediately felt sorry, but I just couldn’t help it.” Even so, Harry pursued the woman he really liked, Edie Huntsman. When he told her that he wanted to see more of her, she shocked him with the reply that she was dying. Cancer claimed her within a year.
The happily torrid consummation he finally had was with another member of the waltzing team he had joined in the springtime—the other man. “Beautiful Antti Halonen,” a Finn, had come to dance in Hollywood movies, and his thick blond hair, blue eyes, and dancer’s physique gave him an edge. He was frequendy picked out off the beach for background in other people’s photo layouts, but his Hollywood break was slow in coming, so he lived at the cheapest room available, upstairs at the Melrose Baths. Harry and Antti had a pleasant summer affair, but the relationship ended on a sour note. Halonen wrote Harry a blistering letter expressing resentment over his “sophistication and critical mind” and “big words”—words that he accused Harry of using as an emotional shield. Still, Antti suggested they continue to see each other.
Harry turned him down and took up another steamy and ultimately strained romance with Walter Keller, a young man he met that autumn. Keller was of Russian-Jewish heritage, seventeen years old, and resembled a young faun. They met at one of Don Sample’s parties in “Homo Hollow,” a house Harry’s old friend rented on Lower Laurel Canyon Road. It had been painted by a Hollywood set designer to look like a crumbling ruin and was a well-known party spot. “Don had cultivated a salon of all sorts of people—from the adventurous to the pretentious,” recalled Helen Johnson. “Parties there would start Friday night and end sometime Monday or Tuesday, whenever people had to crawl off to work. That house had great suspended ceiling beams, and I remember Don walking barefoot across them every time he got drunk enough.”
On this particular night at Homo Hollow, Keller was with Kenneth Hopkins (gay but married to a lesbian), a successful hat designer whose clients included Hedda Hopper. “Kenneth warned me that Harry was experienced, and could sweep pretty young boys off their feet.” Walter, however, was ready to be swept. “Harry was being fascinating,” he recalled of their first meeting. “He was tall, thin-faced, balding. He had piercing eyes and this cynical mouth that twitched a little bit.” The pretty young naif was smitten by the college dropout who poured on the sophistication. “He made you feel he was very smart and had very important connections. And if it worked out between you, you’d have a perfectly fascinating life.”
Keller looked up Harry’s phone number and dropped everything in pursuit of a relationship with him. (“I gave up Homo Hollow for Harry,” he said.) The Kellers lived in Sierra Madre, near Pasadena, and were remarkably accepting of their son’s homosexuality. He was consequently well adjusted and secure for his age. They began to see each other, and late at night, Keller would park his Model-A Ford near the Hays’ house, walk the last block, and throw pebbles at Harry’s ground-floor window. If they had argued, Hay might lock Walter out. “I would cry outside his window,” Keller recalled. “I could never resist that,” Harry said. In the mornings Keller always left by five, before anyone in the house awoke. Once, as he tiptoed out, he was startled by Margaret, who was “tall, pale, and disapproving.” Harry made an excuse to her later, and she did not pursue the subject.
Harry saw Walter for almost a year, but the relationship, though passionate, did not last. There was a harsh legal reality: “If Harry had acknowledged me,” Keller said, “he could have gone to jail. I was underage.” Even had they been able to move in together, they would have had a hard time surviving the hostile Depression economy. Worse, for Harry, was their political incompatibility. Keller was not susceptible to even the suggestion of going to Party classes—he did not trust the C.P. and was politically moderate. Harry feared that a relationship with a non-movement person would force compromises and stifle his growing radical zeal. Ideological problems intruded frequently. “I got him to go to a play once,” Keller recalled, “the WPA production of Johnny Johnson at the Mayan Theater downtown. I was going on about the power of theater when Harry said, ‘That’s just a snobbery of yours. The movies are a much more important art form.’” That was a Communist Party line, to which Harry already adhered.
The gap between Harry’s politics and his gay friends widened, although he sometimes attempted to bridge it. In the fall of 1936, a clique of “rather shallow, listless, and pissy queens who lived in southeast L.A.” threw a costume party for Halloween. Harry, thinking politics, decked himself out as the spirit of fascism. “I wore lots of black tulle and horrendous scarlet, a black Charlemagne-type cardboard crown topped with a huge swastika, a belt and wristlets of chain. Did I clank!”
Though Keller remembered the costume as “Spain in Flames,” referring to the Spanish Civil War, Harry was certain he was spoofing Germany and projecting the demise of Naziism. “Everyone in that group was being very nonpolitical,” he said, “and I was doing my best to rouse people into action about what was going on in Germany.” Finding little sympathy at the party, he “trooped the Boulevard.” There, dressed as Fascism, he scored.
The best-preserved image of Harry Hay from that time survives in New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an experimental film he made with LeRoy Robbins and Roger Barlow, friends from the Hollywood Film and Foto League. Hay oversaw the script; Robbins and Barlow, both WPA-trained photographers, handled the filming; and all three acted. Their black-and-white, sixteen-millimeter movie is called Even—As You and I.
Though they were financially strapped—between them they barely scraped up the budget of twenty dollars—they were lavish with their imagination. The story was a self-reflective imitation of life, in which a trio of poor scenarists enter a “shorts” film competition. Conventional story lines bore them, but a magazine article on surrealism inspires them. They make a film called The Afternoon of a Rubber Band, where trick photography spoofs surrealist cliches and classic avant-garde films, the best being when Harry’s eye fills the screen, a la Bunuel’s Chien Andalou, and a straight razor hovers menacingly, then slices a boiled egg, a cow’s eye from the butcher, and finally passes Harry’s eye and neatly shaves his cheek. Bohemian wags that they were, the filmmakers constructed the climax to parody the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence from Eisenstein’s Potemkin: Crosscutting between a steam roller and a snail results in a scream and dough smashed under a rolling pin. Harry, as director, looks like a mad queen with his black beret and excited gesticulations.
The three filmmakers entered this group project in the Liberty-Pete Smith short film contest. Though Even—As You and I did not win—Harry heard that the film was judged too professional and was thus disqualified with a backhanded compliment—the film was recognized as an unusually early and skillful experimental film (it has been called the first surrealist film made in the United States) and was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of die Bicentennial program of 1976-1977. It was also shown at U.C.L.A. in 1987 in the presence of several of Hay’s political comrades from the Mattachine era. When it was announced that the film was silent, his friend Don Slater cracked, “Silent’ Then how will we be able to recognize Harry?”
Early in 1936, Big Harry had a stroke that paralyzed the entire left side of his body. As with his accident in the Andes, he hurled his will into recovering, but this batde was far tougher. He was incapacitated for months, and Harry often entered the sickroom to find his gruff father weeping in frustration. Bit by bit, he regained some muscle function. To compound the family’s troubles, Bob, the youngest of Big Harry’s brothers, became ill with pneumonia and was brought to Los Angeles for treatment. His grave condition merited permanent residence at St. Vincent’s Hospital. One afternoon in January of 1937, he seemed to be improving enough that his doctor allowed him to join die family for dinner at Windsor Boulevard. To join him, Big Harry made the now rare and exhausting trip downstairs for the last meal the brothers ever shared.
The younger Harry, dreamer or not, now had to bear die somber adult responsibility of medical decisions, which Margaret deferred. On top of that, a record frost threatened the orange grove, and he dutifully stayed up night after night during the worst of it, burning smudge pots to protect the new growth. He was so exhausted that his birthday, normally celebrated with faithful lavishness by Margaret, passed unnoticed.
One afternoon Harry was called to St. Vincent’s because his uncle’s condition had worsened. Gangrene had set into his legs, and his lungs, crippled by pneumonia, required an oxygen tent. The nurse told Harry there was no chance of improvement, and that the supports that had been Bob’s best hope for a time now prolonged his excruciating death. She recommended that he allow his uncle to die naturally, which meant disconnecting the oxygen. The 25-year-old stood by the bedside, watching the old man’s agony at every breath. After an eternity, he consented to disconnect, watched the nurse carry out the procedure, and held his uncle as he died. He drove his father’s car a few blocks away from the hospital, wept, and then went home to tell his parents.
Harry’s responsibilities extended to shipping the body to Hollister, where many of the Hays were buried. Harry drove up into the San Benito Mountains with his old spinster aunt Alice and was greeted by the entire Hay clan. Harry’s bedridden father was the only member absent. This was the third time all the Hays had assembled in fifty years, each time for a funeral, which so fascinated Harry that he wrote a funeral story he called “Flight of Quail,” referring to those birds that shun formation and scatter in different directions when taking flight. He admired the “golden apple handsomeness” of his clan and observed the accompanying aloofness: “To look at them you would think they were attending a lecture ... no head hung, no shoulders twitched.”
Harry returned home restless. No plays were on the horizon, and he was tiring of the uncredited and underpaying writing work he had done for Oppenheimer, Hal and LeBorg. At the end of May, he arranged to live on his grandfather’s ranch at Hernandez. Harry decided to study and collect the folksongs of the area, a high-minded purpose that masked his need for the refuge that ranch life represented. He intended to live there for several years, which suggests that his urban life, with its urgent activities and social circles, had become unsatisfying.
One summer was all he stayed at the ranch, but he packed it full of adventures. One Saturday, his relatives went to a large Fourth of July rodeo some fifty miles away, leaving Harry alone at the ranch to care for the animals and to do other chores. He had begun to bring in the newly mown hay from the fields to the barn when, while unloading his first wagonful, he heard the chattering noise of a rattlesnake. He had known since his youth that rattlers sometimes hid in shocks of sun-warmed hay and could be unwittingly harvested. Now it had happened. “I was standing hip-deep in hay, and looked around for the snake, when suddenly I knew exactly where it was! It was hanging from my jeans, its fangs all the way into the flesh at mid-leg.” The snake let go and Harry watched dumbfounded as it slithered away.
Since his arrival in Los Angeles, Margaret had had him carry a small vial of permanganate of potash, a chemical used for snakebite. For the first time, he used it, pouring a small handful into the open wound he made with his knife, and tearing up his underwear to make a tourniquet. That, however, was only a stopgap. He was thirty miles from the nearest ranch, sixty miles from town, and far from anyone he knew: His situation was as perilous as the climax of a Technicolor western. He hastily fed the animals, mounted a horse, and rode all night to the nearest ranch. The next day, when he was taken to the doctor’s in Hollister, his leg was bluish-black and swollen twice its normal size. The wound took an extra week to heal, because Harry had applied a handful of potash where a few grains would have sufficed, and inflicted severe chemical burns.
As soon as he was ambulatory, he helped plan a dance for the locals, the first in years. Harry collected his first songs as he played the piano for the crowd. In the following weeks, taking advantage of the quietude of the ranch, he poured forth half a dozen short stories, some about recent experiences, some of earlier times. In an ambitious list of story sketches of which many were completed, Harry outlined a search for himself. One set of nine tales was to be called Stories of Hernandez; another set was titled The Dempster Cycle, using Harry’s code name for the Hay family.
At the beginning of August, something arrived in the mail, a letter from the long-departed Stanley Haggart. Harry had waited a year and a half. The letter read: “Harry, you win. I have learned my lesson. May I write? I have so much to say. There is a chance of my returning soon.” Those five lines made Harry abandon his new home on the Hernandez ranch. He wrote Stanley a stream of encouraging letters and went back to Los Angeles.
He returned to a home immersed in a new crisis: Big Harry had suffered a second stroke that paralyzed his other side and revoked all the function he had recovered. Completely confined to bed, he was unable to bathe or shave himself and required steady nursing care. His deterioration was not only physical: After twenty-six years of marriage, he was suddenly obsessed with the idea that Margaret was trying to poison him, and he would not let her feed or touch him. A male nurse was hired to perform most personal duties, but the old man allowed only Harry to shave and groom him.
This was emotionally very taxing. As Big Harry conceded to despair, he seemed, in his misery, to be reaching out to the son he had so completely rejected. But the suggestions of trust and love he now displayed were too late to transcend the old barriers. During the days, Harry waited on his father and quietly worried about Stanley, who had not answered his letters. To get through the nights, he went to a makeshift bar on Western Avenue. The Twin Barrels, as the place was known, was run out of a first-floor flat and served beer. A musician friend of Harry’s often played Helen Morgan torch songs like “More Than You Know,” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” or Noel Coward’s lyric “Mad About the Boy” (which, the temperamental crowd gossiped, the Englishman had penned for his Hollywood matinee idol lover). Sometimes, when it was late and the offendable (straight) patrons were all gone, Harry would sing along at the piano.
After months of silence, thick letters from Stanley began arriving at the rate of nearly one a day. Stanley poured his heart out in this vivid and rapturous correspondence, a testament to an ultimately tragic affair. On October 23, from the honeymoon shipboard of his arranged marriage, Stanley wrote:
“You know me well enough to know that I will go to any lengths if I feel I am right—if I feel I have something to do. A few weeks ago my latest effort was to marry Phyllis Ward. Does that shock you to know this—and that I am now crossing the Atlantic with her—married to her? My awakening has been horrible and the agony had been almost more than I can bear. To go back a bit, I got your letter 2 days before the ceremony. Your letter has struck deep down into the very depths of me—has cut through all pretenses ... To think it had to take a marriage with its wedding night experience to show me where my real affinity lies. Every cell in me screamed out in protest at my desecration of my body. At that time I knew that I belonged to you and you to me. ... I need your help in straightening this mess out. And it is a mess—frightful. Phyllis loves me terribly and is such a fine girl. I told her yesterday of my feelings for you and she realizes from my behavior that a part of me which she had wanted for herself belonged to you. Our marriage was and is a perfect set-up... wrong in every way. The reason is that I belong with you, and you with me. Neither of us seems able to help it. Goodness knows I have done everything possible to keep us apart. Why? I don’t know. But I’m trembling now over the thought of being with you soon.”
Stanley explained that the marriage had been encouraged by a doctor in England who counseled the couple. “He wanted to know whether I was homosexual through birth or if it was acquired. Phyllis (not her fault) made him decide that I could be ‘normal’ and he urged our marriage. Just because of this lack of truth, this mess has come about.” He fretted over Phyllis’s future, and her need to get away from her restrictive family in England. He also worried about his and Harry’s prospects as a couple. “I know the difficulties in our way if we go onwards together. I will have none of my present life to back me up—all will desert me. My life with you would have to be enough so that I would not care—would willingly abandon everything for you. But my darling I have that sweet certainty that if we were close enough together nothing else would count.” In closing, Stanley warned Harry to be discreet. “News travels fast and I want to have our times together unbothered.”
After arriving in America, Stanley wrote again, this time from his brother’s house in Lawrence, Kansas. Stanley planned to visit a doctor in Kansas City at the insistence of his mother, who would soon arrive from England to find her scheme unraveling. His brother Robert suggested the doctor appointment. “He would like a diagnosis of me, feeling that backed up by a medical doctor, a psychologist—the battle will be easier with my family. I will tell him my history if necessary, and my love for you, and that will serve to convince him. I know within myself and am seeking ways to help others to understand.”
He reported that the doctor seemed understanding:
“After two hours of cross-questioning, he said, You know yourself what the answer is. Without the slightest doubt, you are an innate homosexual. If you had acquired it, there might be some hope of change but... being as you are, your marriage is absolutely impossible.’... He pointed out three alternatives: (1) A married life as at present—with an outward appearance of unity; (2) A life of complete homosexuality; 0) Complete abstinence of sex. He said that the solution was really up to me... All this I knew without asking, but I did it for the others’ sake.”
But when Stanley told this to his wife Phyllis, she crumpled. “She sobs for hours and last night and tonight I have given her sleeping pills. It is a horrible sight to see such suffering. I must be careful, for I may ruin her life by an unwise move,” he feared. “I talked to my brother Robert today and he told us both in his simple, loving way that he felt our marriage was wrong... he thought we should go separate.”
A few days later, a note announced that loving brother Robert had reversed his position. “Sweetheart—I left Lawrence yesterday and am halfway across Kansas—on my way to you. Society has already begun to collect its price for our love. I was forced to break with my brother and his wife and the hurt of it sends me to you with tears in my eyes. I’m crossing my bridges to you my beloved—and my eyes are steadily on you—my heart is with you.” More letters followed, mixing anxiety, hope, and poetic devotion. “Some of my thoughts today went into song—and lifted an untrained voice up to that level where one exists when inspired. For I love you, Harry.”
In another letter, he wrote, “I gasp with expectancy over the thoughts of our being together in a home—forever. That’s what I want. Every nook and cranny of the rooms will be inspired. The walls will burst and surge with the vibrations of our merging.”
As Stanley made his way across the country, Harry began his own trek into a new set of political contacts and circumstances. He reconnected with the film industry progressives to whom his late friend Edie Huntsman had introduced him. Among these, Lillian Hatvanyi, a successful vocal coach, became enamored of Harry’s good breeding and sharp, progressive mind, and put him on the guest list for her continual weekend open house. She mixed social occasions with politics, and Harry played piano, badminton, and the social network.
“There were a lot of good-looking, well-appointed fellows with various Hollywood ambitions at those affairs,” he recalled. Most of them “would joke and play, among themselves, but their eyes were on the prize, so they were not interested in developing a relationship with anyone who hadn’t any money.” Harry knew by now that he was the romantic type and such climbing “was beginning to curdle my blood a little too much. Progressive or not, everyone was peddling someone at those parties, and always themselves.”
While charting Stanley’s progress, Harry met a Brazilian man named Gilberto. “He was slim and cute and wrote publicity releases for the Brazilian press. We were attracted on more than a political level and went out for a drive on several occasions,” Harry recalled. “But once, while we were kissing, Gilberto said to me, ‘You really don’t want to know me. I’m an awful person, and can’t be trusted.’ I knew instantly that he meant he had been an informant. ‘Will you turn me in to the FBI?’ I asked. ‘No—but sometimes I get very hungry and I need to sell a story.’ My eyes filled a little, and he saw that. ‘I’m not as bad as I make myself out,’ he said, ‘but I got caught once and I have had to pay ever since.’” As well as a romantic disappointment, this incident may have symbolized for Harry the fate of a temperamental radical. He had witnessed such plights before, and would see gay men blackmailed again and again.
Late in 1937, Viola Brothers Shore, a progressive screenwriter, invited Harry to a Marxist discussion group held at the home of the popular film director Frank Tuttle. The group was active in a popular campaign to recall the corrupt Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw, who ultimately left office for Las Vegas. As a result of that effort, Harry was invited to a deeper level of study in Marxism offered by the Party. Known as the Beginners’ Course, it was attended largely by film industry workers. The course was based on new translations and refinements of Marx and Engels that made the complexities easier for Harry’s theory-oriented mind to grasp.
He had a revelation. “Suddenly it all made wonderful sense. I began to understand. I was turning on right and left.” (This sort of enlightenment was not unique. Writer Arthur Koestler described a similar breakthrough with Marxist theory: “The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull.”) Not only did the structure of Marxism and the Communist Party make sense, in contrast to the difficulty he had in classes four years earlier, but the underlying ties between his various political experiences began to come together. To Harry, this was “wildly exciting,” and his excitement was strengthened when he joined a Hollywood writers’ discussion group, which included people he had known from the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other campaigns. If his emotional experience in the General Strike at San Francisco made him become a Communist, this all-encompassing conversion of mind and spirit pushed him the next step, and kept him a Communist through a long and difficult period.
In November, Stanley returned to Los Angeles and a passionate reunion with Harry. Phyllis remained in Kansas, but in early 1938 she came to Los Angeles and Stanley found lodgings for her with a family of Oxford Group followers. “Harry let me know that his true love was coming back and he was all excited,” remembered Helen Johnson. “Phyllis, it turned out, didn’t have a clue about what was going on—with Stanley and Harry or with much of life. All she wore was gray stockings, which meant she was very provincial.”
Between Harry and Stanley arose the old bugaboo of political incompatibility. While Stanley did go to a few Party meetings, Harry discovered that “in attitudes towards struggle and revolution, he just wasn’t there.” And after a few weeks Harry saw another problem. “Stanley had not made it clear to Phyllis that he wanted a separation ... which meant he hadn’t told his mother.” Exasperated, Harry took the matter into his own hands. He told Phyllis that Stanley had not outgrown his homosexuality or their passionate involvement with one another. Since Stanley was not willing to face reality, Harry abruptly ended the affair himself. “I just stopped taking his calls. The maid would come outside to where I was on the tennis court and announce that Mr. Haggart had called again. I didn’t answer.” Though Harry insisted that it was Haggart who was acting dishonorably, Helen Johnson called Harry “ruthless” in his abandonment of Stanley. Stanley, she said, felt the same way. “Stan was like a big wounded bear, in just terrible pain. I was also on the rebound from a broken relationship with a man, and we commiserated together and made friends ... Harry’s life and Stanley’s didn’t touch after that second breakup, but Stanley was always keenly interested in what Harry was up to over the years. He always asked if I had heard anything at all. Despite a new lover, which was a life-match, he always carried a bit of a torch for Harry.”
Walter Keller also felt discarded and so hurt he needed “years to get over what Harry did.” For Harry’s part, he anguished that two possible life partnerships were not going to work out. “I was caught up in the Marxist notion that ‘man makes himself.’ The simple involvements of domesticity, which both Walter and Stanley insisted upon, were simply not good enough! On this point, all of my lovers and I (except for Will Geer and three others I would meet in the future) were at loggerheads. Perhaps I was insisting on the impossible, but I kept on insisting.”
The twilight world of the temperamental people could seem flimsy next to clear-cut political urgencies. Toward the end of the year, it was apparent that Franco’s Fascist forces were going to triumph in Spain. “We had lost,” Harry said, “and Czechoslovakia was next.” The urgency of the world situation, and his increasing grasp of the power of Marxism, weighed upon his conscience.
For Christmas that year, Harry carved a lineoleum block from which he printed holiday cards. It showed a handsome, strong-jawed man in profile, reaching with fingers that radiate light toward a Star of David. Large letters spell the name hay, 1937. Graphically and politically, Harry allied himself with enlightenment. But in the stormy, mysterious, war-brewing future, light and dark would trade places.
1. For more on this, see Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, New York: Crown Publishers, 1988.