Silvia and I saw each other daily at the studio that first year, and after we became friends, she confessed that when Selznick first revealed his intention to hire me, she took him to be referring to my brother John. Silvia had met John while working for RKO in New York, and she assured Selznick that I was a charming and talented fellow with acting as well as writing potential. It was her endorsement, evidently, that planted the idea of a screen test in his head.
While Budd and I were doing rewrites on A Star Is Born and turning them in to Silvia, she and I began a love affair that led to a decision to get married. When we shared this idea with our coworkers, everyone seemed pleased—everyone except David, who felt that I had somehow been entrapped and communicated his worry to Swope, who passed it on to my mother. Soon she arrived, accompanied by Jim, ostensibly to attend the wedding but actually to size up the situation. Concluding that we knew what we were doing, they joined our other witnesses at the ceremony in February 1937: Budd; his new bride, Virginia; his father, B. P. Schulberg; and, muting whatever disapproval they may still have harbored toward “mixed marriages,” David and Irene Selznick.
Irene, in addition to being Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, was a powerful force for order in her husband’s chaotic life, packing him off to work in the morning and calling the office periodically to remind the paid help about obligations and engagements that David, left to his own devices, might have forgotten. He also benefited from her shrewd aesthetic sense. Even by movie-mogul standards, however, David was an avid skirt-chaser, and despite his strongly-expressed convictions about the importance of marrying in the faith, he eventually joined a small caravan of studio bosses in exchanging their original Jewish wives for younger gentile ones—in his case, for the actress Jennifer Jones, to whose comparatively modest talents he dedicated the last, least distinguished fifteen years or so of his movie career. Irene, meanwhile, went on to become a successful Broadway producer, commencing with Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
On the eve of my wedding, Budd gave me a bachelor party in his father’s baronial mansion, where he and his wife were nominal guests. Like David’s father, B. P. Schulberg had been a high-flier in the silent-picture era. Now, owing more money than he could ever conceivably repay, he felt compelled to maintain the old standard of living lest his many creditors, sensing weakness, pounce at once. The party evolved into a poker game, and the more B. P. kept losing, the higher he raised the stakes. Jim and I won over a thousand dollars between us, something of an unexpected wedding present.
Jim stayed on in Hollywood for a week after our mother went home, and we spent hours talking about the world situation, especially the Spanish Civil War. Though I was a year younger, I prided myself on having some influence over him in matters political. So in the midst of my grief over his death the following year, these—our last—conversations came back to haunt me. I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that I had encouraged him in his decision to join a war that, by then, was already lost. For a long time afterward, I was plagued by a recurring nightmare in which I had murdered someone. Sometimes the identity of the victim was fuzzy; at other times, it was inescapably Jim.
For about five years, Silvia and I had a reasonably happy marriage. During that time, we produced two fine children, Peter and Ann. Silvia quit her job and collaborated on a novel about a character based on Selznick, and I became a successful screenwriter, winning my first Academy Award. The book, which Silvia wrote with a friend, Jane Shore, was called I Lost My Girlish Laughter. It infuriated Selznick, who suspected that her real collaborator was me. When Orson Welles announced a dramatization of the work on his radio show, the Mercury Theater of the Air, David exerted all the pressure he could mobilize—which was considerable—to get Welles to call it off. But to no avail.
Fortunately, I had moved on to Warner Brothers, where the cinematic ambitions and amenities were more modest (in contrast to the other studio commissaries, which served three meals a day, Warners offered only one), but where a young screenwriter had a reasonable chance of seeing his work on film someday. At Warners, I was introduced to Bryan Foy and the methods by which he turned out a new B-movie every two weeks, none costing more than a miniscule two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. On the floor behind his desk were stacks of screenplays representing pictures produced in past years. The most distant stack was the most recent, with the screenplay for his latest release inserted at the bottom. The nearest stack was the oldest, its top script invariably from a picture that his unit had made a number of years before. Foy would pick up that script, glance at it to refresh his memory and hand it to the writer facing him. “Here,” he would say, “This one was about speedboat racing. This time, let’s do it about motorcycles.”
I had barely gotten started on one venture of this kind when, to my considerable relief, one of the A-picture producers on the lot made a request for my services. He wanted me to collaborate with an imported British writer who didn’t understand American ways well enough to handle parts of the story he had been assigned. It turned out to be quite an interesting project, and our work was going rather well when I managed to incur the wrath of Jack Warner, the brother who actually ran the studio, through two activities he was still fuming about a decade later when he testified before the Thomas committee. My first transgression was to organize a protest against a studio visit by Vittorio Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator’s son, who had publicly boasted about the thrill of dropping bombs on Ethiopian towns. Along with a number of other writers, I left the premises and joined a picket line outside the studio gates, while Mussolini the younger was inside as an invited guest. The other complaint against me involved a campaign to raise money to buy ambulances for the elected government of Spain. John Huston and I functioned as a two-man committee, wheedling contributions out of James Cagney, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, among others. John, I must say, was a good deal more persuasive than I was. My job was mainly to goad him into doing his spiel.
I don’t know whether my political endeavors had anything to do with the fact that my A-picture efforts never reached the screen, but from Jack Warner’s own testimony before H.U.A.C., they explain the studio’s failure to renew my contract the next year. My reputation as a union activist apparently also made me persona non grata at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Shortly after I left Warner, I collaborated with an Austrian writer on a story that we sold to M.G.M. We drove a soft bargain on the story, settling for the nominal sum of $5,000 in return for the studio’s agreement to give us what seemed more important—a deal to write the script, at $250 a week apiece for a minimum of six weeks. To our unhappy surprise, however, M.G.M. chose to pay us off and placed the project in other hands. William Fadiman (brother of the critic Clifton Fadiman) was the story editor at Metro, and I was later told that he had vowed not to let me in the door because of my involvement with the Screen Writers Guild and its successful effort to win a representation election over the company union called the Screen Playwrights.
The three years that followed were so shaky from a career and financial standpoint that my mother kept urging me to give up the idea of Hollywood and return to New York, where Silvia’s aunt, a successful business-woman, had a job waiting for me. Instead, I teamed up with Ian Hunter, who had miraculously surfaced as a junior writer at M.G.M.
He got his job through the good offices of Ben Hecht, who was a friend of his sister’s. Nothing much happened for Ian at M.G.M., though, and before long he went to work with me on a couple of low-budget pictures about a saint of a small-town medical man played, in the movies as on radio, by the actor Jean Hersholt, (later known for the good-works Oscar bearing his name). The titles, Meet Dr. Christian and The Courageous Dr. Christian, tell you everything you need to know about our contributions to this deservedly forgotten cycle of B-movies. But at least the pictures got made— with our scripts and our names on the screen.
The producer of the Dr. Christian pictures, Bernard Vorhaus, liked our work, and after an uncomfortable spell of unemployment, he made a deal with a minor studio, Republic Pictures, and hired us to adapt a book called False Witness into a movie retitled Arkansas Judge. But the work he found for us was far from steady, and it didn’t pay much. So we had to remain receptive to other offers for our services, whether joint or individual. In 1941, Ian got a job collaborating with the lyricist Johnny Mercer on a picture called Second Chorus, and I got the break of my life when my friend Paul Jarrico introduced me to Garson Kanin.
Gar was a prodigy—a high-school dropout from Rochester, New York, who had served a brief apprenticeship on Broadway before directing a couple of well-regarded comedies at RKO. He and Paul had just worked together as director and writer of the Ginger Rogers comedy Tom, Dick and Harry. Now Gar had an idea for Katharine Hepburn: a movie in which she would play a newspaper columnist loosely based on Dorothy Thompson, who was virtually the only female permitted to express her views in print on important political and world affairs in those days. Gar had decided that he needed a writer conversant with the New York newspaper world to work on the script, and Paul had volunteered me. To further complicate matters, Gar had just been drafted into the Army, so we talked out a story line in the couple of days before he went off to training camp, leaving his share of the project to his brother Mike.
Our collaboration went splendidly. After we had fleshed out the story, Mike and I set it down in the form of an eighty-page novella, entitled “The Thing About Women.” One of the big difficulties of selling a movie idea, I had decided, was getting people to read it. Most screenplays didn’t read well, and the same was true of “treatments,” the present-tense, outline-like format in which movie proposals were commonly submitted to the studios. To get around this obstacle, Mike and I dressed up our tale as a piece of fiction that just happened to be ready-made for the movies. It was told in the past tense by the sportswriter as he reacted to the intellectual snobbery, physical charms, and bewildering contradictions of a woman operating with serene assurance in a male-dominated world. We sent our story to Kate in Connecticut, and when she responded with enthusiasm, we knew we were in.
A year or two earlier, her backing would not have meant so much. Hepburn had made a number of movies at R.K.O., most of them of superior quality but unsuccessful at the box office. The National Organization of Motion Picture Exhibitors had gone as far as to name her in a diatribe against stars whose movies consistently lost money. (Garbo and Dietrich were also cited.) The theater owners denounced the studios for continuing to employ these proven audience-alienators, and R.K.O. responded by letting Hepburn’s contract lapse.
Her response to this setback was to go back east and announce her unavailability for any movie part except that of Scarlett O’Hara in the impending Gone with the Wind. She was also on the lookout, though, for the right starring role on the stage, and she found it in Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story. In a bidding war for the play, M.G.M. won, and with Cary Grant and James Stewart as her co-stars and George Cukor directing, the movie made Kate a box-office star once and for all.
From a Hollywood outcast, in fact, she had become powerful enough to insist that she, not the studio, pick her next vehicle. Having selected our story, Kate flew to California and, dispensing with the services of an agent either for herself or the script, took it to M.G.M. personally. She was also good enough to conspire with Mike and me to remove our names from the story before she handed it to Louis B. Mayer. This was a hedge, in the first place, against the possibility of further union-related animus against me; but it was also, in the second place, a ploy intended to extract more money from the studio than it would normally be expected to pay for the work of two unknowns. Mayer was accordingly encouraged to believe that he was reading the work of a prominent writer or writers who had chosen at that stage to remain anonymous; and, on that assumption, he agreed to Hepburn’s price: one hundred thousand for her, the same amount for the story and still-unwritten screenplay, ten thousand for her agent, and a thousand for her round trip from Connecticut—$211,000 in all. There would be no bargaining, Kate decreed, and there was none. The money the studio reluctantly paid us when our names were revealed was the largest sum yet bestowed on the authors of an original screenplay. (Relieved of the obligation to pay an agents’ commission, we spent some of our bounty on a new Ford—a gift to Kate as a replacement for the beat-up convertible passed on to her by her ex-lover, the wealthy aviator Howard Hughes.)
M.G.M. was the most prestigious and star-studded of the studios as well as the biggest, and the barrel-chested Mayer, who had left Russia with his parents at the age of three and grown up in poverty, was the most powerful man in Hollywood and the world’s best-paid employee, having broken the million-dollar-a-year barrier in the depths of the Depression. Somewhere deep inside the man there must have been a cool, calculating business executive, but the emotional creature that you met in person was too real to be entirely an act. Mayer could break into tears or violent rages, sink to his knees to beg a favor or rush from behind his desk to knock to the floor with one punch a highly-paid actor who had described his own mother as a whore. His patriotism and his exaltation of womankind were equally extreme. Billy Wilder once saw him grab Mickey Rooney by the lapel and rebuke him loudly for conduct unbecoming the character he played in a long-running and hugely popular series of pictures about small-town America: “You’re Andy Hardy! You’re the United States! You’re the Stars and Stripes! Behave yourself! You’re a symbol!”
But Kate’s influence with him at this juncture seemed almost limitless. Having convinced him to pay her price, she proceeded to reject all of M.G.M.’s contract directors in favor of George Stevens, who had directed her in Alice Adams. She also took charge of the search for a co-star, choosing Spencer Tracy, whom she had never met. At first, he seemed unattainable, for he had just started shooting a movie version of the book The Yearling. By a stroke of luck, however, the studio brass didn’t like the rushes coming in from the location in Florida; so they suspended production, later to begin anew with a different script, director, and star, Gregory Peck. That left M.G.M. with Tracy on salary and no immediate use for him.
Kate and Spencer met for the first time in the office of the producer, Joe Mankiewicz. “Mr. Tracy, I think you’re too short for me,” she commented.
“Don’t worry,” Mankiewicz said with a laugh. “He’ll cut you down to size.”
She was thirty-four and he was forty-one. For a number of years, Kate had been in love with John Ford, regarded by many as America’s preeminent movie director. Ford was Catholic and had a wife. When it became clear to Kate that he was not about to get a divorce, she began a highly publicized affair with Howard Hughes, who proposed marriage and dedicated his record-breaking flight around the world to her. Kate was tempted by his proposal until a visit to the Hepburn family home made their incompatibility apparent to both of them. Ford’s reaction to losing her through his indecisiveness was to make, in swift succession, a body of work that included Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, Tobacco Road, and How Green Was My Valley.
What Kate didn’t seem to need at this point in her life was another relationship with a married Catholic and father of two children. But her career, in jeopardy a couple of years before, was rebounding; co-starring with Tracy could only help since he was one of a small group of Hollywood superstars whose every picture was a major event. By mutual consent, his name would always precede hers in the billing.
Mike Kanin and I were frequent visitors to the set, and what we saw happening there was the final blessing on the venture. When you write a love story, you hope that the actors will make it seem convincing, but you scarcely expect them to actually fall for each other. A familiar sight on a movie set comes when the director calls “Cut!” and the two lovers withdraw abruptly from a tight embrace, briskly heading off in separate directions as if to emphasize the nothing-personal aspect of their physical contact. Kate and Spence wanted to be together off camera as well as on. They lasted as a team for the rest of his life. Like Ford, he stuck to his Catholic marriage, but in name only.
For all the honors bestowed on it, Woman of the Year suffered a depressing switch late in the game. Shooting was over. Mike and I had left New York on vacation, after attending a successful preview before an appreciative audience. We had been lucky, we felt, to get one of the best directors in the business, and Stevens had contributed a number of touches that helped define our characters and intensify the conflict and the comedy. He had not, however, had anything to do with casting the leads, defining the theme of the story, or choosing the location or content of any scene, and if a line or a piece of business didn’t work, either Mike or I had been available to alter it. But the industry was even then beginning, in a very tentative way, to embrace the myth of the all-powerful, all-important director. Posters described our movie as “A George Stevens Production,” in letters precisely fourteen times as large as the all but invisible line, “An original screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Michael Kanin.” Still, the advertising copy was of no great concern to us.
What happened next was. In our absence, the studio decided to change the ending. Mayer, Mankiewicz, and Stevens all professed to have detected, in the reaction of a preview audience, a desire to see the Hepburn character get her comeuppance for trying to be an equal in a male-dominated world. We suspected that it was Mayer, Mankiewicz, and Stevens who felt this urge most deeply. Mayer, in particular, was renowned for his old-fashioned thinking about such matters. The mothers in M.G.M. movies “never had a thought in their heads except their children,” Mary Astor complained after playing a few of them. Both Mankiewicz and Stevens were, we felt, fairly unreconstructed male chauvinists. But, in any case, the decision was made, and with the two writers conveniently absent, the studio engaged one of the most reactionary screenwriters in Hollywood, John Lee Mahin, who was incidentally the former president of the company union that had lost out to the Screen Writers Guild. (He was also, I have to say, a pretty good writer.) Mahin dutifully composed a scene in which a repentant Kate struggles to prepare breakfast for Tracy, and, reduced to tears by her incompetence in the kitchen, lets him dictate the balance of power in their marriage-to-come. Mike and I were permitted to rewrite some of the worst lines in this travesty before it was shot, but we weren’t allowed to tamper with the basic transformation.
I can’t say to what extent Kate shared our feelings. Given her place in the M.G.M. pantheon at the time, she probably could have found a way to resist. On the other hand, thinking about women’s rights was much less advanced sixty years ago, and she may have been persuaded that the new ending would receive wider audience acceptance. If that was the case, she later regretted it. In the mid-1990s, while working on her autobiography, she called me. We had been out of touch for years. Nevertheless, her opening words were a brisk “Ring? Kate Hepburn. What was the original ending of Woman of the Year?” I recalled that it took place at ringside during a world heavyweight boxing championship, with her character attempting to fill in for Tracy, who had gone off on a bat. She remembered it fondly.
Like many other flawed scenes in which they acted together, though, it played better than it deserved to, and the reaction to the movie as a whole—the first, I believe, ever to enjoy a three-week run at Radio City Music Hall—sent Mike and me vaulting into the top ranks of our profession. The Academy Award we won in 1942 for best original screenplay only confirmed our status. Signed to new M.G.M. contracts, we wrote two scripts together before going our separate ways.
The first of these projects was an adaptation of an interesting book called Marriage Is a Private Affair. Our immediate supervisor had formerly been in charge of all production at another studio. He expressed warm approval of our script and made a few suggestions so minor that we happily incorporated them. Then he submitted our work to his supervisor and reported back to us that he had rarely been met with such an enthusiastic reception from so eminent a source. Persuaded by this overwhelming evidence of our talent, the studio now wished to sign us to a long-term contract at substantially higher pay. As for the particular project on which we had been working, however, there had been a small hitch: Purely on the basis of the title and a synopsis that had been prepared for him, Louis B. Mayer had abruptly decided that the book was ideal for Lana Turner. Did that mean, we wanted to know, that he had not bothered to read our screenplay? “Why should he waste the time?” our producer responded. Since the subtleties in our script were beyond the capacities of that particular actress, there had to be a whole new approach to the material—a general process of, to use the producer’s precise word, “cheapening” it. Whether we wanted to perform this essential function ourselves or move on to more respectable efforts, he left entirely up to us. We chose the latter alternative, and Ms. Turner did indeed appear in a movie that retained the title but little else of the book or our screenplay.
Our second effort was a rewrite job that eventually emerged as a movie called The Cross of Lorraine about the underground in Nazi-occupied France. We considered it an acceptable attempt to deal with current history for American audiences, but were appalled to learn that it was sent over to France after the liberation to be seen by people who had actually lived through what we had only speculated about.
• • •
Besides marriage, children, and career, my principal activities in the years before the United States entered World War II involved left-wing politics, mostly of the Communist Party kind. By the time Budd and I began working together on A Star Is Born, he had already joined the party’s recently-organized Hollywood branch. After I wrote a letter to Time magazine, using Selznick International stationery to express a Stalinist view of the Stalin-Trotsky conflict, Budd was reproached for not having reported so likely a candidate and instructed to recruit me—a task that took all of five minutes. I thus became one of about two dozen party members in Hollywood. (Five years later, the count was well over two hundred.) About half of us were screenwriters, the rest actors, directors, script readers, and office workers.
Being a Communist was time-consuming. I attended events of one sort or another for four or five nights a week. There were separate organizational and educational gatherings of my branch, and “fraction” meetings of Communists and close sympathizers within the Screen Writers Guild. Meanwhile, as a representative of the younger writers, I had been elected to the guild’s executive board, which had all-too-frequent meetings of its own. In addition, there were the various Guild committees and similar groups like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Artists Committee for Spanish Democracy and, during the war years, the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and Russian War Relief. Silvia practically had to join the Party so that we could see each other. Luckily, without any organized study, she had reached some pretty negative conclusions about the capitalist system and the inequities of American life. She was not a difficult convert.
Communists, like everybody else in the prewar years, had a lot to say about what was happening in Europe. But the subject matter of our official get-togethers was mostly local, centering on the organizational mechanics of the three “talent guilds”—writers, actors and directors—and our attempts to unionize such co-workers as readers, publicists, and secretaries. While there was room for a certain amount of playful banter (“If the comrade means me by that Bolshevist criticism, I’ll ask him to step outside”), our discussions tended to be boring and repetitious. It might have been interesting to be part of a foreign-financed conspiracy to undermine American institutions and steal precious American secrets for the Russians, but we never seemed to get around to anything like that.
As for the Soviet Union, while we viewed it sympathetically as an experiment, no one I knew wanted to see the same formula applied in our own country—not the dictatorship, or the repression of dissidents, or the phony elections, or the subordination of the arts to propaganda. America, we were convinced, would become socialist with all its freedoms intact, which Russia never had. With such a vision, the Hollywood Party grew until we qualified to become what was known as a “section.” That called for a membership meeting to elect a governing body (a section committee) with a full-time functionary (the section organizer) and to divide the members into a new set of branches, each with its own organizer, educational director, and secretary-treasurer.
Where to hold such a meeting was a problem, for it was assumed even then that to be publicly identified as a Party member could mean the end of one’s career in the movie business. Fortunately, a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley, who specialized in animal films (I have always maintained that he couldn’t write human dialogue), stepped into the breach. Berkeley’s house, which he offered to the Party, was located in a sparsely settled canyon and yet equipped with a large living room and ample parking space. Our host either kept notes or had an outstanding memory. When he turned out to be an informer and testified fifteen years later before H.U.A.C., he named a record total of one hundred sixty-one people as either having been present that day or having joined the Party afterward. His list was accurate on the whole, but in naming those at the meeting, he added Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, who were not there. I was and knew them well. They were clearly sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the Party, but whether they joined or not, I never knew.
That was because the Hollywood section had a special policy for celebrities. We always faced the likelihood that there was at least one informer in our midst, and what greater triumph could an informer experience than turning over a famous name or two? So the few of them who were recruited met separately in a small group with a couple of our most steadfast section leaders. Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell had joined, I knew, because Budd had recruited them and I had been privy to the process. But I never saw either of them at what was strictly a Party gathering.
With the intensification of the Spanish Civil War and the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany, the Party in Hollywood gained in numbers and influence. Relations between Party members and those who called themselves liberals or progressives were harmonious for the simple reason that we took the same positions on the major issues of the day. Our arguments, mostly friendly in those years, were over minor points. One cause on which there was general agreement was the rebellion against the legally elected government in Spain. During the final year of that conflict, I grew emotionally even closer to the anti-fascist cause as a result of my brother Jim’s part in it. In Hollywood as in the rest of the country, the left-liberal amity lasted up until August 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and the outbreak of World War II split the coalition down the middle. From that moment until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union two years later, to remain a Communist you had to believe the following:
I had subscribed to and articulated all these positions; and my liberal friends had listened respectfully, as had I, to their counter-arguments. Now, however, the question was whether to support or oppose the war, and the debate was not so amicable. More people left the Party than joined it during these embattled years, yet the new recruits included my friend Dalton Trumbo, author of the stirring antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbo had resisted my previous recruitment efforts because of his strong pacifist sentiments; it was the Party’s antiwar stand that won him over. Subsequently, the events of 1941—the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. and the attack on Pearl Harbor—were so flagrant he found his pacifism no longer tenable.
Trumbo, as almost everyone called him, was a tremendously appealing character, and I regarded it as a privilege to be his friend. Brought up in Grand Junction, Colorado, he had moved with his widowed mother to Los Angeles in the early years of the Depression. He worked in a bakery for a time, became a journalist, and published a novel (Eclipse) before breaking into the movie business as a reader and writer, and sixty dollars a week. Like Ben Hecht, he was renowned for his speed and had turned to the movies (and away from what he considered his more serious work as a novelist) in part to satisfy a large appetite for money; like Hecht too, he wrote some fine pictures, including Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (a war movie singularly free of the heroics and hokum that sometimes characterized the genre) and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, a story of farm life that, in its low-keyed simplicity, represented the direction in which many of us hoped to see Hollywood go after the war. By 1946, Trumbo’s salary was three thousand dollars a week or seventy-five thousand a script, whichever he chose. Either way, he spent every bit of it, largely on improvements and additions to a dilapidated house he had purchased in the remote and inaccessible wilds of Ventura County. When the blacklist hit, Trumbo was forced to sell the place, and he had to do masses of undercover work at vastly lower prices just to get by. When he returned to the top rank of Hollywood writers in the 1960s, he also returned to his grandiose spending habits.
The Party, the Screen Writers Guild, and the various Hollywood organizations devoted to the fight against fascism became the anchors of our social life in the prewar years; and when the guild won its battle against the Screen Playwrights, some of us served as missionaries or consultants to other categories of movie workers. I was assigned, for example, to advise a group at Warner Brothers who were trying to form a readers’ guild. That was how I met Alice Goldberg, the extremely bright and attractive daughter of a Russian-born photographer—and how she met Ian Hunter. He was still boarding with Silvia and me, having moved with us from an apartment on Vista Del Mar to a house on Franklin Avenue, formerly occupied by Bette Davis. The readers held a meeting there, and later we had Alice over for dinner. After that, her evening visits seemed to continue without further action on Silvia’s or my part, and soon we became used to having her under our roof in the morning as well. By a happy coincidence, Ian and Alice began to make plans for cohabitation and matrimony around the time of the birth of our son Peter. When Ian moved out, his room became Peter’s nursery.
By introducing Ian to Alice, I not only helped him land a wife but laid the groundwork for his entry into the Communist Party, of which she was already a member. I played a more direct role in recruiting Trumbo and his friend Hugo Butler, and the four of us and our wives gradually became fast friends who took each other’s hospitality for granted. When Ian and Alice acquired a home and some professional security, we learned that they were both exceptional cooks who seemed to think nothing of having a dozen of us over for something like suckling pig or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
Politics drew me closer to some friends, and away from others. In 1940, Budd Schulberg gave me the manuscript of his Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? He was worried that its harsh treatment of a Jewish producer on the make might be construed as anti-Semitic. I was one of three readers—Maurice Rapf and Scott Fitzgerald were the others—who reassured him on this score. But later on, Budd accepted an invitation to discuss the matter with two of the more notable ideologues in the Hollywood branch of the party, John Howard Lawson and V. J. Jerome, from whom he got a harsher reaction. When the novel was published the following year, the Daily Worker ran a favorable review and then, a few weeks later, a critical one by the same author, who had evidently been chastised by party functionaries. The second time around, he found a number of serious faults with the book, including its failure to adequately acknowledge the party’s role in building the Screen Writers Guild.
Heavy-handed criticism of this sort was fairly common in the party, and some people ignored it without suffering any harm. For Budd, however, the experience was apparently an epiphany, inspiring feelings of kinship with the Russian writers and artists persecuted under Stalin and leading him away from the movement into which he had recruited me just a few years earlier. A decade later, he testified before H.U.A.C. and, not content to clarify his own political thinking, heaped praise on the committee and named names, which had become the inevitable, unavoidable bottom line of all such attempts to establish one’s patriotic bona fides.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union put us Reds back in tune with the liberals. Mike and I were finishing the screenplay of Woman of the Year at the time, and the news had a salutary effect on my relations with Kate Hepburn. She was an able and dedicated proponent of the anti-Nazi cause, and our script conferences had often been preceded by arguments (respectful, in our case) about the latest developments in the war. On the day of the news that Germany had launched a massive attack on Soviet positions, we were pleased to discover that we suddenly saw the world the same way.
When Japan bombed out fleet and Germany declared war on America, the unity of purpose between Communists and liberals in the movie business solidified further. Together we forged the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, which put writers of war-related movies in touch with units of the armed forces or the administration in Washington, and coordinated the activities of writers volunteering to produce war propaganda. By then, the only obvious difference between us and the noncommunists was that we tended to devote more time and effort to the same causes.
With a wife and two children to support, I was in no danger of being drafted, but anxious to play a part in the war. So I was pleased to be invited to join the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, and to recommend other writers for its visual presentation unit. One of my nominees, Ian Hunter, was accepted. Just before out departure a telegram instructed me to await further word, while he was to come ahead. As it happened, a security check with the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the deranged leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, had found me listed as a “premature anti-Fascist”—the first time I or anyone I knew had heard of the term.
At what point, in Mr. Hoover’s view, was anti-fascism not premature? Probably only at the moment we were at war. If the words were simply code for “communist,” what harm could a communist screenwriter do to wartime propaganda that included selling the American people on the virtues of our Russian ally? This was, after all, the period in which the Roosevelt administration persuaded Warners and M.G.M., two studios previously noted for the Red-baiting behavior of their bosses, to produce Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia respectively, in order to establish that Russians were human beings. It has only become clear in recent years that FDR, for all his strengths, was simply afraid to challenge the entrenched power of the fanatical Hoover.
In the following months, I was approached by someone in the Marine Corps to join a film unit in the Pacific and then a telegram from the Office of War Information asked how quickly I could join director William Wyler in Moscow to work on a movie about the war effort there. In both cases, the invitations were rescinded after security checks. Finally, early in 1943, still anxious to find a wartime role, I enlisted for a trial term of ninety days in the training film program of the Army Signal Corps. This time there was no rejection.
After a brief indoctrination session in Queens (where the Signal Corps had taken over one of the old Astoria studios), I was sent to Camp Hood in Texas to write a film about America’s new secret weapon, the tank destroyer. This large mobile gun was supposed to move so quickly and with such agility that it would decimate the tanks in Hitler’s vaunted panzer divisions. It was good movie material and what we shot had more visual interest than most training films. Unfortunately, just as the film was ready to be shown, tank destroyers were employed for the first time in combat in North Africa, and failed so miserably that both the weapon and the film had to be suppressed.
Next, I was sent to the Cooks and Bakers School at Camp Lee, Virginia to write a short film called Emergency Rations in the Combat Zone. I was engaged in a debate with a couple of officers about the best visual way to present an unappealing item called a C-ration when my wife phoned me from California to report that I was co-winner of an Academy Oscar for Woman of the Year. (In those days there wasn’t even national radio coverage of the event.) Amid the congratulations that followed, my point about how to depict the C-ration was conceded.
Just as my trial term with the Signal Corps was expiring, I received an offer to work with Otto Preminger at Twentieth-Century Fox on a movie based upon the published diary of former American Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and his daughter Martha’s book Through Embassy Eyes. To dramatize the rise of the Nazi Party and the Reichstag fire trial seemed to me potentially a far more significant contribution to the Allied cause than any training film I could possibly do, so I took the job on the spot.
I got along famously with Otto, a native of Austria whom old-time movie fans will remember as the prison camp commandant in Billy Wilder’s prisoner-of-war movie Stalag 17. Otto’s knowledge of matters Germanic enabled him to contribute a good deal to my research, which went speedily. What eventually threw the project behind schedule was his practice of shooting one movie while preparing another. Inevitably, problems with the current project took precedence over the future one, and he would draft the writer of the latter to help him out with the former—in this case, that early film noir Laura. His problem was that Clifton Webb disliked most of the dialogue his gossip-columnist character had been given. Otto persuaded me to redo a line here another line there, and finally to rewrite Webb’s entire part, all while receiving a salary for the Dodd story. I would run into this sort of thing with Otto again.
By the time I returned to and completed the screenplay about Nazism, it already had one count against it. Fox had just completed a costly film biography of Woodrow Wilson. Darryl Zanuck, who ran the studio at the time (and for many years to come), praised the movie to the skies after a screening; to underscore the extent of his admiration, in fact, he let it be known that if Wilson didn’t show a profit, he would never again make a movie about history or public affairs. Wilson was a box-office disaster and Zanuck stuck to his word. He went out of his way, however, to express his satisfaction with my script, circulating it among his producers as a model of superior screenwriting and even offering me a contract with a raise in salary, which I declined.
Instead, I accepted an offer to do a film version of the play Tomorrow the World by my friends James Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau. It wasn’t a particularly challenging job, since I was able to use whole segments of the original with only minor embellishments, but I felt that any way of helping spread a message about the horrors of Nazism was a wartime contribution. The play was about a twelve-year-old boy raised in the Nazi youth corps and then re-educated in democratic principles by an American uncle, portrayed in the movie by Frederic March.
My next assignment was equally on the nose. In 1945, which was also the year Silvia and I were divorced, and I was rejected by the armed services for an asthmatic condition that vanished almost immediately afterward, I was asked by the legendary but all too real studio head Samuel Goldwyn to read a novel called Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham. It was a love story, set in Montreal, about the effects of anti-Semitism on an upper-class young gentile woman and an upwardly mobile young Jew. Goldwyn had bought the property at the instigation of his non-Jewish wife, Frances. Her husband was, to say the least, ambivalent: while he wanted credit for making the first American movie on anti-Semitism, he belonged to the old guard of film moguls who were so sensitive about being Jewish that they scarcely allowed Jews or Jewishness to exist in their movies. Mike Kanin and I had run into this attitude during the making of Woman of the Year. We had written a scene in which the Hepburn character displayed her talents as a linguist: At a party with many foreign diplomats present, she was to speak to several different guests in their own languages, among them Yiddish. That’s what it said in the script. But Louis B. Mayer ruled from on high that Kate could speak Chinese, Arabic, anything we chose except Yiddish, and no amount of argument from anyone concerned could shake him from that edict. To the best of our ability to read his thoughts, Mayer apparently feared that an industry with a high percentage of Jews in its leadership might be accused of trying to make their culture acceptable by associating it with a glamorous star.
So it was a big step for Goldwyn to consider such a movie, even if he made a point—a repeated point—of telling me to emphasize the entertainment values of the story and avoid any suggestion of “propaganda.” Bearing those words in mind, I wrote a detailed outline, and he approved it before departing on a wartime mission to the Soviet Union—a trip connected, I believe, with the movie North Star, which Lillian Hellman had written for him. By the time he returned, I had a first draft screenplay ready to submit. Given my own sense of him, fortified by advice from old Goldwyn hands, I had made every effort to keep the tone of the scenes as light as possible and to avoid anything that looked or sounded faintly like a pro-tolerance message. But the raison d’être of the story was prejudice—there was no escaping that fact. There was no plot development that did not spring from it. It was the theme of the novel that Mr. Goldwyn had bought and was paying me to adapt.
When I was summoned to his office to discuss the script, his opening words were, to say the least, discouraging. “Lardner,” he began with an accusatory look, “you have defrauded and betrayed me.” Defrauded, he proceeded to explain, because my screenplay was not what I had promised in the treatment. The few examples he cited were enough for me to see the hopelessness of the situation. The impossible dream in his head was a story in which some people were badly treated but not by anybody in particular, and others spoke out against intolerance without offending anyone who believed in it. After demonstrating to my own satisfaction, if not his, that the screenplay followed the treatment closely enough so that the charge of fraud was absurd, I asked him about the second part of his accusation. How had I betrayed him?
In an aggrieved tone he replied that one of the reasons he had hired me for the job—just one of the reasons—was the fact that I was a gentile. “You have betrayed me,” he said grandly, “by writing like a Jew.”
(“How did you do the script?” my friend Gordon Kahn asked later. “From the righthand to the lefthand side of the page?”)
In the wake of this apparently definitive conference, I began to assemble my personal belongings and prepare to leave the studio for good. I was interrupted by a knock on my door. It was Frances Goldwyn, who explained, with great trepidation, that she had never before visited a writer’s office or in any way sought to interfere in Sam’s business. She wanted me to know, however, how important this picture was to her. Sam, she assured me, was so knotted up inside about it that he shouldn’t be held responsible for anything he might have said to me. By the time she left, I had agreed to continue working on the screenplay and, even more remarkably, to waive my salary voluntarily until I had persuaded Mr. Goldwyn that I could give him the kind of movie we all wanted but he was so nervous about.
It took another two weeks and several more highly-charged conversations with Goldwyn to make me concede that the goal would never be realized and abandon the project once and for all. At intervals over the next couple of years, however, I would see trade paper items about Goldwyn hiring yet another writer for Earth and High Heaven. I think there were seven in all, none of whom came up with an adaptation that satisfied him. His story editor told me that when Daryl Zanuck released Gentlemen’s Agreement, in which Gregory Peck pretends to be Jewish in order to write an exposé of anti-Semitism, Goldwyn was indignant. Zanuck, he complained, had stolen his idea.
Later that year, a new film company teamed me up with my brother John, who had spent the war as a correspondent in Europe and the Pacific, to write a movie about Willie and Joe, the G.I.s in cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s book Up Front. By the time we finished our first draft, the war was over and the producers backed off, claiming that no one could be sure what kind of movies would be popular in the postwar world. (A few years later, another company made a very different sort of movie from the same book.)
Tomorrow the World was released in the final summer of the war. Given the passions of the moment, its basic idea turned out to be controversial indeed. The Hollywood Writers Mobilization held a premiere for the movie and a “town meeting” to discuss it. In the film, as in the play, a Nazi-trained boy is reeducated to embrace American democratic principles. There is nothing inherently evil, the story makes clear, in the German or Japanese people—no biological predisposition to be racists or warmongers.
This may sound like an unobjectionable premise. But a great many people at that meeting did object, heatedly. Ruth McKenney, author of My Sister Eileen and well known for her leftist views, declared that the German people should be treated according to the principle of “an eye for an eye.” The boy in the movie, she insisted, was beyond redemption: “His soul has been poisoned forever,” she said. Her comments received a good deal of applause in a predominantly liberal audience. Clearly, America was not going to have an easy time getting over its own wartime hate propaganda.
The reason I had agreed to work on the movie was that I considered all theories about races or nations being superior or inferior, vicious and dangerous. When my turn to speak came, I recalled how all the countries now regarded as among the more civilized had, on certain past occasions, acted barbarously toward peoples they viewed as unworthy of respect: the British in East Africa and India, the Spanish in Latin America, the French in Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans toward their so-called Indians and their African captives.
I did one more war movie called Cloak and Dagger about a nuclear physicist who goes undercover for the O.S.S. in Italy to check up on the Nazi atomic-weapons program. The star, Gary Cooper, had an admirably detached perspective on his abilities. “Keep my dialogue simple,” he entreated me. “If I have to say any technical scientific stuff, nobody’s going to believe I’m real.”
By the time I came on the project, a script had already been completed by two other writers. But the director, Fritz Lang, didn’t like it one bit, so my job was to do a complete rewrite on the quick. Fritz was very respectful of writers in general, and I enjoyed working with him. But he had very exacting standards of professional morality. I remember mentioning a writer, John Wexley, who had worked with him on an earlier film.
“He is a dishonest man,” Fritz immediately declared. Although I wasn’t particularly fond of Wexley, I knew of nothing to call his integrity into question, so I asked Fritz what he meant. “He’s thoroughly dishonest,” he replied. “When we worked on the script for Hangmen Also Die, I told him it had to be shortened by twenty pages, and he came back with a script that was twenty pages shorter; but I found that only ten pages in actual length had been cut. The rest was by his instructing his secretary to put more lines on a page!” This was a fairly common writer’s offense and not exactly a crime. But Fritz was very indignant about it.
During the war, it seemed appropriate to most American Communists when the National Committee, led by Earl Browder, announced the “dissolution” of the party and the formation of a broader, more democratic Communist Political Association (C.P.A.). The change seemed only to bring the nomenclature in line with reality: Our political activities, by then, were virtually identical to those of our liberal friends. To me it had a special significance. It seemed to fit with a growing good feeling I was beginning to experience as an Allied victory appeared inevitable. That victory had been won by the two great powers in the world, one democratic, one Communist, who had found a way of working together for shared ideals, and who both realized—or so I believed—that the introduction of atomic weapons made future wars unthinkable. For all the problems that remained in the world, the defeat of fascism, with its outdated racist and nationalist myths, was the defeat of unreason. In ten or twenty years, maybe thirty at the outside, I imagined, it would be unthinkable for one people to assault another because of their national origin, for any human to regard another human as belonging to an inferior race, or for anyone of moderate intelligence and a smattering of education to question evolution or believe that God created the world a few millennia ago.
The C.P.A. had a short life. Before the end of the war, a dissenting minority in the Party, led by William Z. Foster, was fortified into a majority by a letter from Jacques Duclos, a French Communist leader, denouncing Browder’s move and its theoretical foundations. Anti-Communists interpreted this as an order—we, as a strong suggestion—from the Communist International to the American Party to shape up. The hostility toward the Soviet Union already surfacing in the highest reaches of the American government made Browder’s appraisal look shaky, in any case. Roosevelt had died, and Truman’s record did not make him a promising successor. When Germany invaded Russia, he had publicly expressed the hope that they destroy each other. Now he was flaunting the atomic bomb as an American secret and taking his foreign policy cues from former wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose own electorate had recently repudiated him in favor of the Labor Party.
Almost no one had anticipated how quickly the tide would turn to rightist reaction and a cold war. In 1946, there was a series of major strikes to which corporate America responded with equal or greater militancy. Elections that year produced the first Republican Congress since 1928. There was a Truman Doctrine to guard southeastern Europe from the Russians, a Truman loyalty program, and the conversion of H.U.A.C. from a temporary to a permanent body featuring (in addition to Chairman Thomas) John Rankin of Mississippi, a ranting white supremacist and anti-Semite, and Richard Nixon, his smoother California counterpart, who was careful to express his race prejudices only in private.
I was losing what remained of my illusions about Stalin and his “socialist state,” yet it still seemed to me then that the Soviet leaders were more serious than ours about wanting peaceful relations. Ideological considerations aside, they had a persuasive, practical reason to be afraid of a war in which the other side had a monopoly on nuclear weapons; whereas a number of people in the West, in America in particular, thought we should threaten or actually bomb them into submission while we had the superior power to do so.
As for the party to which I belonged, the question of converting America to socialism wasn’t exactly on the agenda. In my own mind, the need to avoid another war and abolish nuclear weapons—to preserve the planet— had become more important than the particular political or economic systems we embraced. Yet I shared a growing awareness that American Communists and the left generally were going to be under attack. Already, leaders of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee were facing prison sentences for Contempt of Congress because they had refused to turn over their records to H.U.A.C. In Hollywood, political differences were sharpened by an acrimonious labor dispute which began as a jurisdictional quarrel between the reactionary International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.) and the progressive Conference of Studio Unions (C.S.U.), both of which belonged to the American Federation of Labor. When A.F.L. President William Green decided the issue in favor of the C.S.U., the I.A.T.S.E. and the movie studios ignored him, forcing the C.S.U. into what turned out to be a suicidal strike.
Communists and liberals who supported the strike were also in the main members of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (with its hard-to-swallow acronym H.I.C.C.A.S.P.), which ended up backing Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party against both Truman and Dewey in the 1948 election. In the Screen Actors Guild, the most conspicuous sympathizers with the strikers were Katharine Hepburn, Edward G. Robinson, Alexander Knox, Howard da Silva, John Garfield, Karen Morley, Paul Henreid, and Franchot Tone. The militants on the other side also had their political arm, called the Motion Picture Artists for the Preservation of American Ideals. Among the leaders of that organization were Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou, Roy Brewer of I.A.T.S.E., and the directors Sam Wood, Victor Fleming, and King Vidor. The Screen Writers Guild was split on the strike, and in 1947 progressives suffered a serious setback in Guild elections, the main question at stake being whether to require executive board members to sign “loyalty” affidavits swearing they were not Communists.
During the final year of the war in Europe, when my brother David was killed in Germany, I went to New York out of concern for my mother, who had just suffered her third tragic loss in eleven years. But I was also worried about David’s wife, Frances, and their two babies. I was making a good deal of money and wanted to contribute what I could to their support. I discovered, however, that Frances was quite capable of combining motherhood with two regular radio shows and occasional theater jobs. I also found that she shared my political views and was starting to actively promote them as a way of continuing the struggle David had been writing about. Silvia and I were already leading quite separate lives. Over the next two years I made several trips to New York, and, in between, Frances and I developed a relationship by mail that became personal. In September 1946, she boarded a transcontinental train with Katie Joe. As one of them put it, “We’re going to Canyonfornia to marry Uncle Bill.”
While we were on our honeymoon, I spoke by phone to a friend who warned me that a California version of H.U.A.C. had begun issuing subpoenas. I managed to duck that invitation by prolonging our trip. But soon enough, the main body in Washington announced its intention to investigate the movie business, commencing with a set of closed hearings in Los Angeles in the spring of 1947. Frances and I had just found a new home in Santa Monica, with a tennis court out back. We were getting ready to move out of a rented house nearby when a deputy United States marshal appeared at the door, and handed me a bright pink document bearing J. Parnell Thomas’s signature: “By authority of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America,” it said, I was “commanded to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee . . . in their chamber in the city of Washington . . . and not to depart without leave of such committee. Herein fail not . . . ”