In the late summer of 1945, Darryl Zanuck asked Otto Preminger to take over the movie version of Forever Amber, a mildly lascivious bestseller that Fox had purchased with high commercial hopes. Otto, in turn, brought me into the project.
Otto was extremely bright and curious about almost everything. He was also very good company, and when we worked together, we tended to spend as much time talking about the world in general as we did about the movie at hand. In his native Vienna, Otto had been a theatrical prodigy, invited at seventeen to join the Josefstadt Theater under the illustrious Max Reinhardt, and, at twenty-six, to succeed him as artistic director. The main thing he had gained from his early years as an actor, it sometimes seemed, was complete scorn for the profession. Young performers, in particular, saw Otto at his most terrifying. On a crowded set, he would abruptly discontinue a take to tell an actor that he was doing it all wrong; then, in a louder and angrier voice, that he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what the scene was about; and finally, in a furious rant, that he was trying to sabotage the picture. My name for this cycle of mounting rage was “Otto-intoxication.” The first time I mentioned it to him, Otto was offended. Later he decided to be amused.
Fresh off the success of Laura, Otto was grateful for my covert contributions to that picture, which had put him in Fox’s good graces after an earlier association that had led Zanuck to declare that Otto would never direct for the studio again. On Forever Amber, a script had already been completed by Philip Dunne, who, among his other credits, had written one of the most distinguished movies of the 1940s, How Green Was My Valley. (With that picture, he had pulled off the remarkable feat of getting Zanuck and Fox to tell a story that made a powerful case for labor unions.) I was now supposed to collaborate with Phil on a rewrite—a touchy situation, or, rather, it would have been if he had been any less of an exemplar of graciousness and professionalism. As it was, the three of us, Otto, Phil, and I, established a strong bond based, in part, on a fervent common desire to be working on almost any property other than the one Zanuck had foisted on us.
Notwithstanding these sentiments, we hammered together a script that led Zanuck to once again offer me a long-term contract. The starting salary was $2000 a week—high pay for a young screenwriter in those days. I signed, however, less for the money than for the protection a studio deal might provide against the political trouble I saw coming. In fact, Fox seemed less fearful than the other studios, and Zanuck, despite his fondness for polo and big-game hunting, had a weakness for movies dealing with difficult social issues; it was this lone non-Jew among the moguls who tackled anti-Semitism when Sam Goldwyn wouldn’t; from that topic, he moved on to racism with Pinky, and fired his old friend John Ford after the first rushes convinced him of the need for a director who was more advanced in his thinking. (“Ford’s Negroes were like Aunt Jemima,” Zanuck said later. “Caricatures.”) He hired Elia Kazan to direct the picture instead.
For my first screenplay as a Fox contract writer, I selected a novel about the British upper class called Brittania Mews. (The studio gave the movie a different title, The Forbidden Street.) I was working on final revisions when the subpoena came.
The Committee had chosen nineteen of us as personifications of the threat it was out to expose. The Hollywood Reporter dubbed us “the unfriendly nineteen,” to distinguish us from the “friendly” witnesses who had appeared at closed hearings the previous spring and would now simply be repeating their testimony in public. One of the nineteen, the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht, had been under supervision as an enemy alien during the war, and the invitation to appear before H.U.A.C. merely reinforced his desire to leave America as soon as possible. With that object in mind, Brecht obtained separate counsel and opted not to join the rest of us in a series of meetings where we plotted legal strategy.
The big question facing us was how to respond to the inevitable “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Some of the group wanted to affirm their membership, while a few were eager to declare for all the world that they had never been Party members. But Trumbo and I, who had considered the problem in detail, argued that the only satisfactory answer was no answer. If you had been a Communist and said so, the next demand would be for the names of other party members, and you had less of a constitutional case for refusing to discuss others’ political activities than your own. If you weren’t a Communist, saying so conceded the Committee’s right to ask the question in the first place. We talked about the possibility of invoking Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination; but that, we decided, would be tantamount to admitting that party membership was a crime. (The government itself had not yet alleged that it was. Prosecutions of party leaders under the Smith Act began a year later.)
Trumbo and I wanted to make a First Amendment issue of the committee’s right to inquire into our beliefs and associations. Taking such a stand meant risking prosecution for Contempt of Congress, a little-known and rarely enforced “statutory” misdemeanor, which carried a maximum sentence of a year in prison. But there was reason to believe that the judiciary might be sympathetic to our position. In several earlier cases, the Supreme Court had indicated that since movies came under the freedom of the press clause, Congress had no right to legislate their content, and where it could not legislate, it had no right to investigate. Declining to answer on First Amendment grounds seemed to hold an additional advantage: If we won in the courts, the Committee might soon be out of business.
After discussion, the eighteen of us who were U.S. citizens agreed to take this common approach. Then one of our lawyers, with the best of intentions, threw a monkey wrench into our plans. “If we end up in the courts, I wouldn’t trust most of our Federal judges,” was the gist of his advice. “I would ask for a jury trial because I believe an American jury would want to acquit you if they had grounds for doing so. But they’d have to accept all the Constitutional doctrine in the judge’s instructions, and the grounds would have to be an issue of fact. So I want you not to refuse to answer a question but say you’re trying to answer it in your own way.” The lawyer in question, Robert Kenny, was a former Attorney General of California, and the rest of our legal team made the grave mistake of going along with his ploy, which accomplished nothing in the end except to make us seem weaselly and abrasive in the eyes of some liberals who supported our position but not our way of expressing it. Many of them said at the time what most of us later concluded ourselves: If the idea was to challenge the Committee’s right to ask such questions, a simple and straightforward refusal would have been a more dignified and effective way to make the point.
The Committee devoted the first week of its hearings to the “friendly” witnesses. The Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand, whose book The Fountain-head was already a right-wing favorite in this country, testified that she had never once seen a smiling child in the Soviet Union from the time of the Revolution in 1917 until her departure in 1926. The others focused on the enormity of the Red menace in Hollywood. Gary Cooper said he had turned down a number of scripts that were “tinged with Communist ideas.” In a similar vein, Jack Warner recalled his tireless efforts, as vice president in charge of production at Warner Brothers, to keep writers from sneaking what he called “stuff” into the studio product. As an example, he cited a line of dialogue he had eliminated from Clifford Odets’s script for a movie called Humoresque. Except for his vigilance, Warner testified, the American people might have been subjected to the experience of listening to John Garfield tell Joan Crawford: “Your father is a banker. My father lives over a grocery store.”
In the thirties, Warners had been known for the gritty realism of movies like I Was a Prisoner on a Chain Gang. In the rash of strikes that broke out after the war, however, Warner operatives had directed tear gas bombs and high-pressure fire hoses at picketing workers, and Jack Warner had publicly declared that he was through with pictures about “the little man.” Nevertheless, as he told the committee, he had qualms about firing writers merely on the basis of their reported political affiliations or activities. The studios, he suggested, would be sitting ducks, legally, if they followed such a course.
Louis B. Mayer, who testified later, was also nervous about a private blacklist; precisely because the studios might be breaking the law by organizing a purge on their own, though, Mayer entreated Congress to do the job for them. He called for “legislation establishing a national policy regulating employment of Communists in private industry.” In adopting such a policy, he suggested, America would merely be denying them “the sanctuary of the freedom they seek to destroy.”
When the “unfriendlies’” turn came, Trumbo, the most commercially successful of us, lugged a stack of scripts to the witness stand with him and demanded that the Committee point to a single instance of Communist propaganda. Ginger Rogers’s mother Lela had actually made such an accusation against Trumbo, citing a line he had written for her daughter in a wartime tearjerker called Tender Comrade: “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.” Chairman Thomas, however, declined to pursue that line of inquiry, insisting that he and his colleagues had no interest in anything as un-American as censorship. Just the previous week, the president of the Association of Motion Pictures Producers, Eric Johnston, had assured our lawyers that his organization would never contemplate anything as un-American as a blacklist.
Ten of us had been given definite appearance dates in the subpoenas; eight, of whom I was one, had been instructed to wait at home until dates were assigned. In a show of solidarity, however, we decided to travel together, making public appeals for support en route and in Washington; and after a photo of Frances and me sitting in the audience appeared prominently in a newspaper, I was abruptly called to the stand on what turned out to be the last day of the hearings, replacing my friend Waldo Salt. Ironically, our inability to plead self-incrimination led the ten of us to become convicts. When the Committee got around to holding its next round of Hollywood hearings, in 1951, none of the witnesses had to suffer that fate. By then, the leaders of the American Communist Party were in prison, convicted under the Smith Act of advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Thus Waldo and many other witnesses could escape criminal charges by taking the Fifth. But that didn’t stop M.G.M. from firing Waldo the minute the hearings ended. For the later witnesses, as for us, there was no way to avoid the blacklist except to admit you had been a Communist and then to dramatize your repentance by naming all the other party members you could think of.
Bertolt Brecht, soon to depart for what was now East Germany, also appeared on that final day of the 1947 hearings. “Looking back at my experiences as a playwright and poet in the Europe of the last two decades,” he testified, “I wish to say that the great American people would lose much and risk much if they allowed anybody to restrict free competition of ideas in cultural fields, or to interfere with art which must be free to be art.” As a “guest in this country,” however, he offered to tell the Committee anything it wanted to know about him personally. He had never been a Communist, he said, and had deliberately avoided all forms of political activity during his time in the U.S. As for the “revolutionary” works cited by the Committee counsel, Robert Stripling, Brecht gently reminded the Committee that they had been written as part of “the fight against Hitler,” whose government was the only one he had ever sought to overthrow. For Stripling, however, and for at least a few of the Committee members as well, even anti-Nazi activity was now suspect. It was a sign of just how far the political mood had shifted since the end of the war.
The day ended with a “surprise” witness—a former F.B.I. agent named Louis Russell, who told an involved tale about how a professor named Haakon Chevalier had supposedly pumped his friend Robert Oppenheimer about the atomic bomb, with the intention, so Russell alleged, of passing it on to foreign agents. Chevalier wrote an entire book to demonstrate that this was nonsense, and, true or false, the story didn’t have much to do with the movie business, despite Russell’s attempts to establish such a connection by citing some minor social contacts between Chevalier and a couple of the unfriendly witnesses. So farfetched, indeed, did the idea of a link between Hollywood and Soviet spying and sabotage seem that most of the newspapers largely ignored the testimony. But one, the tabloid New York Daily News, took it seriously enough to run, next to large picture of me leaving the witness stand, this screaming headline:
RED QUIZ BARES
ATOM SPY PLOT
It was hardly the sort of publicity likely to reassure the studio bosses, to say nothing of respectable relatives on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. My mother herself respected my political beliefs, even if she didn’t agree with them, and she never suspected me of being a spy. Still grieving for two dead sons, however, she feared that I was in for a rough time.
So did I.
The press coverage of the hearings was massive, lending weight to our suspicion that it was the lure of publicity that had drawn the Committee’s attention to Hollywood in the first place. What with the array of movie star witnesses during the first week of hearings and the lineup of additional celebrities, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra, and Danny Kaye, who arrived the following week to condemn the investigation under the banner of a group called the Committee for the First Amendment, we made front pages across the country. But this was so early in the era of McCarthyism that Joe McCarthy himself had not yet discovered the virtues of witch-hunting. Columnists and editorial writers for some of the nation’s more respectable newspapers vocally disapproved of the Committee’s program and methods, and there was reason to think that the sudden suspension of the hearings, with a number of the unfriendly witnesses as yet uncalled, was designed to ward off more such adverse reaction. Nevertheless, I had an uneasy feeling that we were fighting a losing battle.
Because the producer was in a hurry for The Forbidden Street, I had promised to do the finishing touches on the Washington trip, during which I remained on salary. After I turned in the script, the studio had the contractual right to invoke a layoff period in which I would be off salary, or it could give me another assignment. Fox chose the latter course because Preminger had bought a book he wanted me to adapt.
A month after the hearings, Mr. Johnston’s M.P.P.A. met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. It was a gathering dominated by the more conservative banker types at the head of the parent organizations in the East rather than the Hollywood executives engaged in actual movie production. They passed a resolution declaring that they would no longer employ any of the Ten or anyone else who took a similar stand. Five of us were on studio payrolls at the time, Adrian Scott and I under long-term contract.
I was in the middle of a conference with Otto when his secretary came in to say that Mr. Lardner was to report to Mr. Zanuck’s office. “Only Mr. Lardner?” Otto asked, almost incredulous at the affront to his dignity as a producer-director. I reminded him that Zanuck might have something else on his mind besides our project. And I was right. My instructions were to proceed not to Zanuck’s inner sanctum but to the office of the studio manager, who told me to quit the premises immediately and not come back. Zanuck had said earlier that he wouldn’t fire anybody (by which he meant me, since I was the only member of the Ten at Fox) unless ordered to by his board of directors. The board had swiftly obliged him.
When I stopped in the writers’ building to collect my things, two of the studio’s most esteemed employees, my friend Phil Dunne and the writer-director George Seaton, offered to walk out with me in protest. I persuaded them that any effective countermove would have to be on a much grander scale. Phil was, like me, the son of a famous writer—Finley Peter Dunne— known for using the vernacular to humorous effect. We had become friends, and years later, in his autobiography, he recalled receiving pretty much the same advice from me that he got from Zanuck. “Don’t do anything foolish,” was what we both basically told him. In retrospect, Phil added, he wished he had defied us both.
Twelve years would pass before any of the major studios knowingly let me in the door again. (But R.K.O., unknowingly, sanctioned one visit. A producer who happened to be a Princeton alumnus decided to invite the entire Princeton Club of southern California to a showing of his latest picture. Membership in that chapter of the club encompassed everyone in the region who had put in any time at Princeton. The producer was startled, to say the least, when I showed up.)
Frances, the children, and I continued to live in our large new house as long as there was any hope of winning in the courts. After the House of Representatives as a whole cited the Ten for contempt, we were indicted by a Federal grand jury, and the first two of us, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, went on trial in Washington, were convicted, and received sentences of a year in prison. To avoid the expense of eight more trials, the rest of us had agreed to abide by the law established in these pilot cases. If Trumbo and Lawson won their appeal, we would all be free; if they lost, we faced nothing more than a perfunctory trial and sentencing.
During this limbo period, a number of independent producers continued to employ us anonymously. Some hoped to see us vindicated and restored to respectability; others merely relished the prospect of getting our services at reduced rates. Regardless of motivation, these jobs paid only a quarter to a third of our normal wages, and the hush-hush nature of the business dealings gave me a first taste of what it might actually have been like to be a spy. Among the sympathizers were actors Burgess Meredith and Franchot Tone, who engaged me to work on an adaptation of a John Steinbeck story called Shark Wicks. Although they never got the financial backing to make the picture, Franchot and I had a clandestine meeting at this bank where he handed me ten thousand dollars in cash.
Otto Preminger’s brother, Ingo, a theatrical agent, took me on as a client at this unpromising juncture. Like the other members of the Ten, I had been, in effect, fired by my representatives at the William Morris Agency, which was just one of a number of ancillary Hollywood institutions that might have resisted the blacklist but aided it instead. In 1949, Ingo put me in touch with Lazar Wechsler, a Swiss producer who was preparing to make an English-language pictured called Four Days Leave, starring Cornel Wilde. He was under contract to Fox, which had released The Forbidden Street with my name as sole screenplay author, and the brass now agreed to lend Wilde to Wechsler on the assurance that I would be writing “the English dialogues.” The indirect compliment didn’t quite compensate for my abrupt expulsion from the premises.
Since Wechsler was in a hurry, I flew from Santa Monica to Washington to arrange a passport. The man who took my application disappeared for an ominously long time. On his return, he informed me that “Mrs. Shipley”—this was Ruth Shipley, the then-director of the passport bureau and known as a conservative—“wants you to be aware, Mr. Lardner, that the State Department has no objection whatsoever to your travel wherever you wish to go.” Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk had already gotten permission to work abroad. But their passports, unlike mine, had been limited to England, France, and Switzerland—an omen of tighter travel restrictions to come.
The director of the movie, Leopold Lindtberg, was Austrian, and he needed a dialogue director to help two young French actresses, Josette Day and Simone Signoret, perform in English. I convinced Wechsler that Frances would be ideal for the job, and he arranged for her transportation to Geneva. Living up to my advance billing, she worked hard and became close with both actresses, Simone especially. Frances even played a bit part in the movie herself.
Trumbo and Lawson’s appeal was turned down, and in May 1950 the Supreme Court announced that it would not reexamine the decision. Four votes had been needed; only two were available. It was the kind of case, legal experts agreed, in which it might have been difficult for the Court to decide against us in view of past precedents. The experts also agreed that the Court sometimes ducked a controversial issue this way. Deciding a nearly identical case years later, the Warren Court seemed to say we had been right all along—small consolation for imprisonment and a fifteen-year blacklist.
By the time of the Court’s rebuff in 1950, the atmosphere around the country had become even more chilling. McCarthy had appeared clutching his invisible list of Communists in the State Department; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to the electric chair for stealing atomic secrets for the Soviets; and across the Pacific, in a country that few Americans had even heard of, the cold war was about to turn hot. While Lawson and Trumbo began to serve their sentences in 1950, the remainder of the Ten were given their ceremonial trials in pairs before two different judges. Albert Maltz and I appeared together. The judge listened to Martin Popper, our Washington lawyer, for a few minutes, then pronounced us guilty but postponed sentencing for a week.
It was a notable week: The Korean War broke out and Truman sent American troops into action. When we returned from some money-raising efforts in New York and Long Island, Maltz’s case came first, and Popper made a pre-sentencing speech about Albert’s civic contributions. The judge was impressed. He hadn’t realized what a distinguished citizen the defendant was, he said; now that he did, he felt all the more obliged to give him the maximum allowable sentence—one year—as a lesson to others. I whispered to Popper that he could skip any recital of my civic merits. But I, too, was sentenced to a year, as were the four others who appeared before that jurist. The directors Edward Dmytryk and Herbert Biberman were sentenced by a different judge who decided that their misconduct deserved only six months.
Samuel Ornitz, the oldest of the Ten, had a heart problem and went to the medical center for Federal prisoners, while Adrian Scott’s case was postponed for a short time because of illness. The other six of us began to serve our sentences, as Lawson and Trumbo had, at the District of Columbia Department of Corrections facility in downtown Washington—the D.C.D.C., as it was known—while awaiting assignment elsewhere. Bob Kenny, the best-connected of our lawyers, knew James Bennett, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Kenny put in a request to have us sent to an institution within visiting range of our families in Los Angeles. Bennett explained that no more than a couple of us could serve our time in the same place (the implication being that larger concentrations of Hollywood Communists might prove dangerous), and facilities in the West were ruled out because of the cost of transportation. The single concession he offered was to send me and another screenwriter, Lester Cole, to the Federal Correctional Institution (or F.C.I.) in Danbury, Connecticut, where both of us had mothers living nearby.
During the couple of weeks that we remained in Washington, the daily exercise hour gave us a chance to see and talk to one another. I had a number of conversations there with Eddie Dmytryk, whom I had not known before. He was a talented director and a likable man who often came up with an insider’s view of the big news of the day, as if he had a secret, highly placed contact whispering in his ear. After what most of the world took for an invasion of South Korea by North Korea, Eddie privately advised me that South Korea was the true attacker, acting at the instigation of John Foster Dulles, our then Secretary of State.
Lester and I went to Danbury by train, each handcuffed to a U.S. Marshal, neither of whom, it developed, had made the journey before. They had been instructed to change to a northbound train at Norwalk. As we approached the South Norwalk station, I told them that I knew the route well from my many trips to New Milford, where my mother lived, and that Norwalk and South Norwalk were one and the same. They were so skeptical of my information that we almost failed to get off the train in time. When we did, the marshals were equally reluctant to accept my advice about where to find the connecting train. In the end, however, I brought us successfully to Danbury, where we were met by a car from the F.C.I.
My first glimpse of my new home-away-from-home was from the bottom of a steep, winding driveway. At that angle, the square stone prison building seemed to overwhelm the hilltop; later I discovered a considerable tract of level acreage at its rear, every square foot devoted to some farming purpose—vegetable plots, fruit trees, a chicken yard, milk cows, pigs, rabbits, and other edible animals. Most of the food served at our meals came from this inmate-tended farm.
The D.C.D.C. had been interesting: It was the only penal institution in the country that housed both Federal prisoners and local offenders, including pickpockets and heavy-duty drunks who were rounded up in the streets and confined overnight. The Danbury clientele was more homogenous. The place served as a kind of halfway house for a handful of serious street criminals who were nearing release after serving long penitentiary terms; otherwise, almost all of us had been convicted of white-collar crimes, which included mail theft, crossing a state line with a stolen automobile, defrauding the military on wartime contracts, draft evasion (or, in some cases, conscientious objection on the part of young men lacking the proper religious credentials), bribery of Internal Revenue Service agents, and spying for the enemy during World War II.
A single inmate already there had been charged with our particular offense. Jacob Auslander, M.D., had fallen victim to H.U.A.C. in the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee case. The F.C.I. administration had assigned him to assist the prison’s civilian M.D., and it was he who gave me the physical required of every new prisoner. Jake completed his term soon after we began ours. Some months later, however, I overheard a young inmate telling a new arrival about the inmate doctor who had examined him.
“A real doctor?” replied his listener in disbelief. “What was he in for?”
“I don’t know—drugs, I guess.”
Feeling called upon to defend Jake’s reputation, I briefly explained the work of the Refugee Committee and the reasons for its refusal to turn over a list of the people it had helped get out of Franco’s Spain. My fellow inmates listened with what seemed like respectful attention. Then the veteran spoke in a polite tone: “Well, I guess it was some of that and drugs, too.”
There was a similar lack of understanding about the crime that had put Lester and me in Danbury, but it was assumed to have been some kind of refusal to talk to the cops, and for that we received general approval. As for the experience of being a jailbird, I have never gone so far as to actually recommend it. Prison does expand your social contacts, however. It is also possible to find behind bars the sort of serenity that T.E. Lawrence experienced as Aircraftman Shaw—the peace of mind that comes with freedom from responsibility. You can’t get it by some form of voluntary retreat, terminable at your option. The element of choice must be removed. But as soon as it’s clear that you can’t do anything about anything, you’re free to think about whatever comes into your mind. In Danbury, I was able to focus on a single line of thought with a concentration I have never been able to muster since.
Ever since my days as a convict, I have urged anyone considering a career as a law-breaker to stick to breaking Federal ones, since the accommodations are so measurably superior to those at state or local jails. Danbury offered edible if not elegant food, much of it farm-grown by prisoners like Lester Cole and J. Parnell Thomas, who enjoyed minimum-security status. (“Still handling the chicken shit, I see,” said the former, greeting the latter at the poultry yard where he performed his labors.)
The quantitative difference between a one-year sentence and a longer one carries with it a qualitative difference, as well. The shorter term seems but a temporary inconvenience. As you begin it, you are already counting the days until it will be over, so you don’t feel the frustration and self-pity that goes with a more sustained confinement.
Most of the housing at Danbury was in large dormitory rooms with individual cubicles containing a cot and a table with a couple of drawers. But there were a small number of individual cells for inmates whose jobs involved abnormal working hours. During my initial weeks in a dormitory setting, I was troubled with insomnia, so I applied for the single-cell housing on the grounds that I was falling asleep at my typewriter. Though most of my fellow prisoners didn’t like the cells because they were locked up at night, I found sleeping there easier and the rarely interrupted silence more congenial to reading and writing. One of the few interruptions I remember, beyond the regular prison count, was from an inmate who came to the bars of my cell and asked if I could please spare a moment to give him some advice. He was nearing release and had been told that I was from Hollywood. What he wanted to know was, “Do they go for the main line out there? I heard you can get a couple hundred dollars an ounce.”
I asked him how that compared with prices in New York.
“New York! Shit, man, nobody works New York no more! The laws they got there, you can get ten or fifteen years for a first sale.”
I had to tell him that I had no solid information about the market for heroin in my adopted hometown.
Those of us with one-year sentences were technically eligible for parole after eight months. While we didn’t expect it to be granted in that hysterical year, we went through the formality of asking our wives to solicit letters of support that could be filed with our parole applications. In my case, the letters included one from Kate Hepburn, sent by her directly to me in Danbury; I was especially appreciative, since Kate must have realized the attention that her name would arouse in the censorship process. When I saw her again for the first time thirteen years later, she waved off my thanks in characteristically brisk fashion. “I don’t think I ever did such a thing,” she insisted. “I’d remember it if I had.”
Frances was able to make only one cross-country trip to visit me in Danbury. Among other things, she reported that Joe, our six-year-old, had been asked by another first-grader why his Daddy was in jail. “My Daddy’s in jail,” he replied, “because some guy in Washington asked him a question that was none of their business, and my Daddy told him it was none of their business, and it is none of their business.”
With his six-month sentence, Eddie Dmytryk was not eligible for parole, but he got a month off for good behavior. Then, in mid-November, we read a newspaper story about a statement he had made on his release, declaring that he had left the Party some years back. The event that had turned him into an anti-Communist, he said, was the unwarranted and vicious attack by the North Koreans on their peace-loving neighbors to the south. He had refrained from announcing his conversion in prison lest it be taken as a subterfuge to reduce his jail time. Now he could reveal himself as a true American and hope to be able to resume his life’s work in the movies.
The news of his transformation reminded me, of course, of Eddie’s discourse on the origins of the Korean War while in the D.C.D.C. I also recalled another observation that he had made during our legal battle. “You know,” he had in effect said, “it’s really more remarkable for me to have stuck with this thing this long than for you writers who can work under the table, which a director can’t do. I’ve never directed anything on the stage. I’ve never done anything but movies, first as a cutter and then as a director.”
Another interruption of my peace in that single cell occurred shortly before my release at the beginning of April 1951. An inmate I knew only casually came to my door in a whirl of excitement. “Hey, they’re talking about you on the radio!” he exclaimed. I followed him to the common room, where a news broadcast was in progress, little noticed by the other prisoners in earshot. H.U.A.C., now under a new chairman, was once again investigating Communist infiltration of the movie business. The witness on the stand, reciting a long list of names of his former comrades, including me, was my old friend Richard Collins. A long parade of witnesses testified in a series of public sessions that year, and hundreds of men and women were added to the blacklist. Some had been named and had failed to clear themselves to the Committee’s satisfaction. Others, the first witnesses to be guided by our experience and the Smith Act convictions, invoked the Fifth Amendment. It kept them out of prison but, from a career standpoint, was no better than the First.
Collins was only the first of many cooperative witnesses to claim that he had been careful not to cause any personal harm with his testimony. His rule of thumb, he explained, was to identify only those who had already been named as Communists; and those who had left the Party so long ago that, he reasoned, no one would hold their membership against them. Among this last group, however, was my old friend Budd Schulberg, who, seeing his former political activities discussed on the front page of the New York Times, was understandably concerned. Although Budd was not working in Hollywood at the time (he had just completed a novel, The Disen-chanted, about a writer modeled on Scott Fitzgerald), he felt an urgent need to “clear” himself. His method of doing so was an appearance before the committee in which he saluted its work, went on at some length about the domestic as well as global communist menace, and named some names of his own.
Budd, too, had a theory about just which of his old friends were beyond further harm. So did the director Elia Kazan, another volunteer-witness who insisted on testifying after demonstrating his ability to make a living in a field (the legitimate theatre) where his employment was not in jeopardy. And yet, as Victor Navasky has pointed out in his book on the blacklist (Naming Names), being fingered once wasn’t necessarily as bad for someone’s career as having it happen three times or six times; in any case, Schulberg and Kazan (and this, too, was a recurring pattern) didn’t quite manage to adhere to their own guidelines. Both added fresh names to the public record despite their insistence that they hadn’t.
Although I was not permitted to use a prison typewriter for my own work, I was free to write with a pencil and pad, and I began work on a novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. I had persuaded my custodians that with the movie business closed to me, my best professional prospects lay in fiction. I also felt free to confide the subject matter of the book I was writing: It was to be about a Roman Catholic marriage. (I saw no point in adding that my intentions were satirical.) For this commendable purpose, the prison authorities let Frances send me packages of handwritten notes and several books on Roman Catholic doctrine.
The clerk in charge of me was a devout Catholic, as it happened. Impressed by the official Church imprimatur on these shipments, he advised the Catholic chaplain that one of the Red-hots was showing signs of going their way. The result was an invitation to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, which I accepted. I did so not only because it seemed politic but because I was planning a midnight mass scene in the book. A few days later, the clerk brought me to a meeting with the chaplain for the purpose, it soon became clear, of satisfying my obvious desire to join their faith. Luckily, I had anticipated this. Were I to feel ready to make such a drastic switch, I replied, doing so under conditions of duress might be construed as a trick to gain sympathy and possible parole. It was essentially the same argument Dmytryk had used a few weeks before.
The idea for the book had come from my curiosity about the ways in which a few Catholic acquaintances had bypassed official doctrine on matters like virginity, contraception, divorce, abortion, and mandatory devotions. Born into Catholic families and baptized by the Church, they regarded themselves as part of that faith for life and knew that no matter how far they strayed from its rules and rituals, they could always get a blanket absolution from a priest administering last rites. What, I wondered, if I matched such a nominal Catholic with an idealistic and utterly sincere convert?
From a professional-rehabilitation standpoint, I had made an unfortunate choice of subject matter. Two years after my release from prison, I began to submit the completed manuscript to publishers. In England, I had swift success, landing a deal with the eminent firm of Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Feeling it prudent to prepare them for the dark suspicions that my name was likely to arouse in my native land, I sent them a cautionary letter. The reply, from Mr. Cape himself, dismissed the H.U.A.C. investigation as a “curious affair” that might be a useful publicity angle. That, alas, was not how American publishers seemed to view it. The manuscript drew gratifying reactions from editors at several major houses, only to be rejected in the end by their superiors. Undoubtedly, the fact that this was the zenith moment of what has come to be called the McCarthy Era had its effect. One editor told me in confidence, however, that what killed the book at his firm was fear of the Catholic Church and the possibility of losing the parochial-school market for the firm’s textbooks. In the end, I had to settle for Cameron and Kahn, a left-wing publishing house headed by Angus Cameron, who had himself run afoul of H.U.A.C., losing his job at Little, Brown. His new outfit occupied a marginal place in the publishing world, and most of the major newspapers and magazines simply ignored the book until a new edition appeared, under more mainstream auspices, some fifteen years later. Still more recently, in 1997, I had the gratification of seeing it republished in a “Literary Classics” series along with works by Twain, Chekhov, Hawthorne, and Aristophanes. But at the time, the reception made it apparent that book-writing was not going to be the road back to solvency or professional security.
It was a panic-stricken Hollywood to which nine of the Hollywood Ten, released from prison that spring of 1951, returned. Even for Dmytryk, the way was not entirely clear. He wanted to re-establish himself in a dignified manner by speaking only of his own political views, but when he tried that in one Committee appearance, he found he still couldn’t get a job. Then, overcoming any last, vestigial scruples, he named a long list of fellow Party members, including a couple of directors who had arrived in Hollywood after the date he gave for leaving the Party himself.
For the rest of us, the under-the-table script market had all but vanished. Many people were afraid even to speak to us, although I managed to land one job, working for the director Joseph Losey on The Big Night, his last American picture before he exiled himself to England for the rest of his life. He had already hired Frances as dialogue director and our friend Hugo Butler had started to rewrite the script while it was being shot. When Hugo heard that a subpoena was out for him, he moved to Mexico with his large family, and Joe asked me to take over, paying me a modest wage out of his own pocket. It was my last American movie job for eight years.
Within a year of our release, the Butlers were joined in Mexico by the Trumbos, the Maltzes, the Kahns, the Hunters, the Peppers, and the Lardners. For most of us, Mexico was just a way-station while we came to terms with the blacklist. But Hugo and George Pepper remained there for much of the next two decades and became active in the Mexican movie industry, forming a production partnership with the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel—also banished for political reasons from his native land.
Frances had a little money left from David’s life insurance, and we lived on that while I worked on Owen Muir. Silvia, establishing herself in the construction business in Orange County, California, voluntarily waived all legal claims stemming from our divorce settlement, and supported Peter and Ann herself until I was making enough money to help in their college years. Even so, we didn’t have the wherewithal to subsidize the long process of writing a book. After a pleasant six months in Mexico, we moved in on my mother in Connecticut, and Frances, fortunately, was able to find work in New York.
Mother’s house was only about fifteen miles from the Danbury F.C.I., where she had come to see me as often as was permissible. On those trips to the prison visiting room, it had been difficult to tell how my situation affected her. She never said a word on the subject. The day I was released, she came with her chauffeur-gardener-handyman, and they drove me to my older brother’s apartment in New York. That night, at home in New Milford, she suffered a stroke, which was followed by another less than a year later. Yet another year had now passed, and her doctor thought she might benefit from the presence of family in the house. Of course, three children, ages nine, eight, and three, probably wasn’t what he had in mind. Still, it was the kids and her feeling of obligation not to inflict her sense of doom on them that began to restore her to something more like her former good spirits. After dinner, she would retire upstairs, and Katie, Joe, and eventually Jim would sometimes spend their last hour before going to their beds sprawled on hers, drawing stories from her about her girlhood in Indiana at the turn of the century.
In New Milford, while I finished my novel, Frances went looking for work in the theater and television. We needed the money as much as she needed the stimulation and sense of self-fulfillment, and things went well for her at first. Television, live from New York, was in what has since become known as its “golden age,” and many of the people making it happen were men and women with whom Frances had worked during her highly successful years in radio. A couple of months after we returned, she was cast in a leading role on one of the most prestigious shows on the air, the Philco TV Playhouse. After her appearance in Holiday Song, a teleplay by Paddy Chayevsky timed for the Jewish high holidays, the producer, Fred Coe, enclosed a note with her paycheck: “You are now an official member of the Philco Playhouse.” Soon she learned that Chayevsky was writing another script with a similar—but bigger—part for her.
That second show was called Marty. Everyone involved except Coe himself told Frances she was set for the role, and her agent secured an oral commitment from the business office for a fifty percent raise. Then, abruptly, she heard that Coe had cast another actress. He had done so without consulting anyone else in the organization, and when Frances asked for an appointment, she was informed that Coe was unable to see her. She and her agent reluctantly accepted this version of events until they began to find doors closed elsewhere in the television world. Though her own political activities, if known, might have resulted in blacklisting, her name had not appeared in Red Channels, the infamous publication purporting to expose communists in broadcasting; nor had she been named in anyone’s Committee testimony. She had, it seemed, acquired unemployability by marriage.
Suspicion became certainty when Philco revived Holiday Song for the Jewish holidays the following fall. The other members of the original cast were so shocked to see Frances replaced that they threatened to strike on her behalf. Coe persuaded them it would accomplish nothing but the loss of their own jobs. Not long after that, he finally gave Frances an appointment and told her the truth, which obviously distressed him. He had tried to fight the same issue over another actor—a better-known one—and had found the network unshakable. Though she managed to land jobs in the theater, and served as an understudy for Maureen Stapleton, Claudette Colbert, and Kim Stanley, a whole decade passed before she could work in television again.
In 1954, after we had stayed with my mother for two years, a widowed younger sister of hers moved in to help take care of her and we found an apartment in New York. The following year, having finished my book, I needed work that was more immediately and predictably remunerative, and a producer named Hannah Weinstein came through for me, as she did for many others. Hannah, the former executive secretary of the leftish Independent Citizen Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions was living in England and running a TV production company. Her first project was a series starring Boris Karloff and written by the blacklisted team of Abraham Polonsky and Walter Bernstein; only moderately successful, it was not renewed for a second year. Now she had another venture in mind, for which she approached me and Ian Hunter.
Named first by Martin Berkeley and later by the director Robert Rossen, Ian had followed the same path from Hollywood to Mexico to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where a substantial cross-industry community of blacklist victims eventually congregated. Ian and Alice, along with Zero and Kate Mostel, wound up in the same building, the Belnord, at Eight-Sixth and Broadway. We found an apartment a few blocks uptown, at Eighty-ninth and West End.
In 1953, Ian had won an Oscar for Roman Holiday, the last picture he worked on before the blacklist got him. Winning that award was far from an unalloyed pleasure. Ian got involved only by agreeing to front for the already-blacklisted Trumbo. It was he who had come up with the idea of a movie about a reporter and a princess on the loose in Rome. Paramount paid $50,000 for what it assumed to be Ian’s (but was really Trumbo’s) first draft, and hired him to do a rewrite. After Ian, too, became unemployable, several more writers were put to work on it. The result, much to Ian’s (and Trumbo’s) surprise, was a wonderful movie, starring Gregory Peck and the unknown Audrey Hepburn. But when Ian’s name was called at the Oscar ceremonies, it was not for the screenplay, on which he shared credit with John Dighton, but for the story, which was all Trumbo’s.
Now, a year later, he seemed to have left the movie business far behind him. Since his move to New York, he had been doing public relations work for the newly formed Diners Club—it was the only job he could get. Like me, therefore, Ian was grateful to have a writing job of any kind. We were grateful, as well, to find that Hannah had chosen, for our maiden effort in the new medium, a literary property filled with stimulating possibilities. Set in medieval England and filmed largely in and around Hannah’s appropriately historic estate, Foxwarren, outside London, The Adventures of Robin Hood gave us plenty of opportunities for oblique social comment on the issues and institutions of Eisenhower-era America. And the series was a great success. Using our pilot script and a preview of episodes to come, Hannah sold the package to networks on both sides of the Atlantic; with Richard Greene in the title role, Robin Hood ran for four years, generating profits for everyone concerned and perhaps, in some small way, setting the stage for the 1960s by subverting a whole new generation of young Americans. Meanwhile, Ian and I wrote two more pilots leading to network sales, Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers, maintaining the demand not only for our own work but for that of a dozen other blacklistees whom we enlisted in our growing enterprise.
Everything was open between Hannah and us. But because the books of her company, Dilipa (named for her daughters, Dina, Lisa, and Paula), could be inspected by others, we received our payments under false names. We could open savings accounts under those names, we learned, since banks were less fussy about them than checking accounts. Then we would transfer the money to checking accounts in our real names. (Social security regulations allow for aliases as long as you use your proper S.S. number.) Our record of three pilots written, three series sold to networks, was as good as anybody’s in the business, and Hannah would have been happy to help us build new, pseudonymous reputations that might have helped us land jobs with U.S. networks and series producers. But the code of the blacklist made that impossible. While the same name could be used over and over again for banking purposes, our scriptwriting identities had to change constantly. Hannah’s young story editor, Albert Ruben, was kept busy generating new names for us precisely in order to avoid the situation in which, seeing the same writer on more than one or two scripts, the network people in New York might ask to meet one of us as a prospect for other work.
From time to time, Hannah would invite us to London for face-to-face discussions. Ian, whose political activities had not resulted in a criminal prosecution or any special publicity, managed to secure a passport, and he made a couple of trips before moving his family to England in 1958. At first, I was not so lucky. The new head of the Passport Bureau, Frances Kilpatrick, deemed my travel abroad to be “not in the best interests of the United States.” That same year, though, in the case of the artist Rockwell Kent, the Supreme Court ruled that no one could be denied a passport for political reasons. On hearing this news, I went to a photographer who advertised passport pictures and asked if I could have one immediately. It was the pre-Polaroid era, and he responded scornfully. If I really couldn’t wait, I could use a coin-operated photo machine, he said. But if I did, he added gravely, “You’ll end up looking like a Communist.”