1952
It’s right there on the front page. MOULIN ROUGE PICKETED BY LEGION MEN.
The continuation on page nine isn’t as leading as that headline. There were only a handful of picketers at the premiere, largely unnoticed by the swanky crowd and the hundreds of fans waiting for autographs. John Huston didn’t give them a second thought. The pictures make it look awful, though. Placards with John’s name, and Jose Ferrer’s. Words like “ban” and “Communist.” Louise feels sick to her stomach.
“More coffee?” the diner waitress asks, but Louise waves her away. When her hash and toast arrives, she can’t eat it. She reads the rest of the paper, but keeps coming back to those photos.
The waitress looks over Louise’s shoulder when she comes to clear the table. “Nasty, ain’t it?”
Louise pushes the plate of uneaten hash away. “It is. To step out of your car on premiere night, already nervous about the critics, and to encounter this.” She stabs a finger at the newspaper. “Poor John,” she says, mostly to herself. “Poor Jose! He looks positively bewildered here.”
The waitress is staring over her coffeepot. “I meant those actors. Nasty Reds, parading around like they’re real Americans.” She picks up Louise’s mug, accidentally sloshing coffee onto the newspaper. “It ain’t right.”
Though she’s never done it before, Louise neglects to leave a tip.
It was nine months ago when Arnie first got wind that he’d been named.
Louise had been in the kitchen, frying up a mess of steak and potatoes for Arnie, when the doorbell rang. Maybe it was Pauline with a pie or the paperboy collecting. They weren’t expecting anyone, not this close to supper.
It was neither. When she came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, it was to Arnie and a Western Union boy on the front porch. Arnie was chuckling over a telegram and ignoring the messenger, who was all but holding his hand out for the anticipated tip. Louise picked up her handbag and fished out a nickel.
“Oh, this one is worth a dime.” Arnie handed over the telegram, and retrieved another five cents from her change purse.
It was from Charlie, but addressed to Arnie.
WE SHOULD GET TOGETHER BEFORE YOU HEAD OUT OF TOWN. LUNCH WITH R. KENNY?
“Did he spoil the surprise?” Louise asked. It was two weeks until their anniversary. “Where are we going?”
“This is the kind of surprise that needs spoiling,” Arnie said, and she knew it wasn’t a weekend in Palm Springs or anything nice like that. “Sorry, kiddo. It’s just Charlie being clever. Sending me codes through the telegraph.”
Charlie had never sent her a thing in code. “So secret lunches with my agent and whoever ‘R. Kenny’ is. A girl might get jealous.”
Arnie stopped his chuckling. On the front walk, the Western Union boy was very slowly pocketing his two nickels. And Louise realized suddenly that the code wasn’t as secret as all that.
“R. Kenny. Robert Kenny. One of the lawyers for the Hollywood Ten.” She lowered her voice, suddenly sick. “Oh, Arn. What did you do?”
The messenger took his delivery log out of his bag. Next door, Pauline waved over the top of her watering can. Arnie took Louise’s hand and pulled her into the house.
“I was going to tell you at some point,” he said, shutting the door, “honestly I was, Lou. I mean, I figured I’d be named at some point….”
“ ‘Named’…” she whispered. She sank against the cool of the door.
“Listen.” He put his hands on her shoulders, held her against the closed front door. “I fronted for Sid. That script about the girl in the peach orchard? He wrote it, passed it to me, and I put my name on it. Charlie was letting me know that I’ve been found out. HUAC has my name. Charlie’s message, about Robert Kenny and being out of town, he was warning me to take it on the lam. A subpoena’s coming my way.”
If Arnie hadn’t been holding her, Louise would’ve slid down to the floor.
“Lou? Did you hear what I said?” He let go of her shoulder and touched the side of her face. “Talk to me.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I can’t.”
“Please.”
She smelled onions. “Dinner is burning.” She ducked from under his arms.
It was—the potatoes and onions were in a charred heap on the bottom of the pan—but really she just needed to retreat. She needed to lean over the sink and catch her breath, run cold water over her hands, look at something other than Arnie’s eyes.
He’d lied to her. All of those weeks when he’d been shut up in his office, “writing” that script. All of those weeks he’d been sneaking phone calls to Sidney Weller, freshly blacklisted, Hollywood poison. All of those weeks he spent pretending that they were still out of the HUAC’s reach.
Arnie had followed her into the kitchen. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said. “Lou, you have to believe me.”
She moved the pan off the stove.
“If you won’t talk about this now, when will you?”
“I could ask you the same question.” She attacked the burned potatoes with the edge of a spatula. “You clearly haven’t done much talking.” The potatoes stubbornly held on. “When were you going to tell me about Sid? When were you going to tell me that you were risking your career, and mine, to help a friend?”
“Lou, don’t be like that.”
She spun. “Like what? Angry that my husband kept me in the dark? Scared that he did such a risky, stupid thing?”
He gently took the spatula from her hand. “Lou.” She hadn’t even realized she’d still been holding it. “The less you knew, the safer you were.”
He moved the pan into the sink, turned on the tap, and left. By the time he returned with two large whiskeys, her hands had stopped shaking.
She accepted the drink, grateful to have something to hold on to. Her brief anger had abated, and she was suddenly exhausted. “Can we sit down?” she asked.
“I’ll turn off the stove.”
She sank onto the living room sofa and listened to him rattle around the kitchen, washing the pan, putting the steak back into the refrigerator, taking out the trash. She found his mahogany pipe hiding under the pile of mail. While she waited, she filled it with Old Holborn. A few minutes later he came out into the living room with two peanut butter sandwiches stacked on top of his glass. He hadn’t thought to bring plates.
He set to eating his sandwich right away, but she held hers balanced on her knee. She still wore her apron. There were too many questions, many without discernible answers, so she asked, softly, “Why, Arn?” It’s what she wanted to know most of all.
He didn’t answer right away. He finished his sandwich and stared into the swirl of whiskey in his glass. He wasn’t laughing anymore. Mostly he looked tired. “Sid’s having doors slammed in his face left and right. He can’t get a job writing a radio commercial, much less a screenplay. When he rang me up and asked if I’d front, he said he didn’t think I would, not in a thousand years. No one else would give him the time of day, a helping hand, a red cent. What could I say?” He took a swallow of his whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’d give me the boots from his feet if mine were bare. That’s what friends do.” He patted his front pockets for his pipe.
She passed it over to him. “I love Sid—you know I do—but he shouldn’t have asked you. He had to have known what would happen.”
“So did I. Lou, don’t think I haven’t been expecting this.” He set his glass down on the coffee table and picked up a matchbook from the ashtray. “Half the people I know are hiding out in Mexico. The other half are working as janitors or short-order cooks. And the other half are doing whatever it takes to keep doing what they love to do, even if it means they’re doing it from behind a front.”
“That’s too many halves,” she murmured, and the whiskey had done enough of its job so that they both almost smiled.
He lit his pipe. “I said yes, because I knew it would hit me at some point. I’d be named eventually. And if I can’t lift someone up on my way down, well then, what’s the point in letting myself fall?” He tossed the spent match into the ashtray. “If it’s dangerous to help a friend, what kind of world is this?”
“I don’t know. An awful one. A suspicious one.” She leaned back against the rust-colored throw pillow. “I read in the paper today that Communists have ‘infiltrated’ nursery schools. Arn, I’m scared.”
“I wouldn’t be.” He lifted her feet onto his lap. “Dr. Seuss is still working on that new edition of The Communist Manifesto. I hear there’s an aardvark.”
She kicked him. “You dope, I’m serious.”
He caught her feet. “So am I. Well, halfway.”
“We’re in a time when nursery teachers are suspect. What chance does a bright, opinionated screenwriter stand? One who maybe almost sort of went to a rally or two in his day.”
He put a finger to his lips. “Shh.”
“You took a leap fronting for Sid and now they’ve caught you out.” She drank, wishing she had an ice cube. “You’ve been named. You’ll be subpoenaed.”
“Yeah, but what are they going to ask me? There’s no proof. Sid and I were careful.”
“So say teenage girls in backseats everywhere.”
“Everyone knows it doesn’t happen the first time.”
“You plan on doing this again?”
“Well, when the right guy asks…”
“Think of your reputation.”
The banter died. Because that was exactly what was at stake.
She finished her drink but did not refill it. “Why are we cracking jokes?”
“You heard Gene Kelly. All the world loves a clown.”
“This is serious stuff.”
“The world is full of serious stuff,” he said. “War. Smog. Republicans. We can’t write them out of the script, but we can write around them. Laugh at them. Make the dialogue sizzle with disdain.”
The telegram sat on the coffee table. Arnie had set his glass right on the center of it.
“So, Lou,” he asked, “what should I do?”
As though she had all the answers. As though she had any of them. “Let me freshen up our drinks.”
It was a stalling tactic. She even went all the way to the kitchen for ice. She wanted time to think.
Arnie was stubborn. He was Tom Joad. He’d stick to his principles, consequences be damned. She didn’t ask what he’d do because she knew. He wouldn’t go to see Robert Kenny. He’d dodge the subpoena or stand before the committee and plead the Fifth before he’d offer up a single name. He’d never give in.
So he’d asked her. He already knew how he’d answer.
She took her time arranging the ice cubes just so and mixing up two whiskey and waters. Arnie was leaning back on the sofa with his glasses off and his eyes closed. The mail was spread out on the coffee table. Mostly bills. A letter from Dad. The Los Angeles Times folded over a story about CARE for Korea packages delivered to troops in Pusan. On the telegram from Charlie, his glass had left a damp ring around the words “HEAD OUT OF TOWN.”
She knew how to keep him safe from rumors, from HUAC, from everything here. He had old editors and old favors he could call up. He wouldn’t say no to her.
When she sat back down, he opened his eyes.
“You need to do something wildly patriotic,” she said. “Something that not even the Committee on Un-American Activities can argue with.”
“Like what?”
“Like doing your part in the fight against communism.” She handed him the glass. “Like going to Korea.”
Louise tries calling Arnie every time she stops. And there are a lot of stops. Gas stations. Diners. The five-and-ten at the edge of Pennsylvania, where she desperately buys a pair of earmuffs. Outside of the Midwest, the road is frustratingly hilly and she’s cold. By the afternoon she’s drunk more cups of coffee than she ever does on set. But still, with all of those stops, with all of those calls to Los Angeles, Arnie doesn’t answer.
All of this time in the car, all of this time doing nothing but watching the snow through the windshield and thinking, she misses him. She wants to hear his voice. She wants to say that she’s sorry.
It’s an apology months unspoken. It’s guilt that’s been building since the telegram that he’d been injured far away in Korea. It’s eating away at her.
That unsaid apology, that unacknowledged guilt, it’s why she counts to ten. Why she takes a breath and smiles before opening the front door. Why she doesn’t nag and why she just keeps buying the tins of saltines. Arnie’s in a wheelchair and he’s miserable and she knows it’s her fault.
Back when he’d gotten that telegram from Charlie, back when they’d stretched on the sofa with whiskeys and nervous jokes, she was terrified. So terrified of the dangers at home that she disregarded the very real dangers in Korea. “Stay safe,” she’d said. “Go to war.”
Remembering it now, she flushes. And then is instantly furious at her flushes, at her cradled guilt, at her laziness. She’s had months to apologize. She’s had months to ask Arnie’s forgiveness. She hits the steering wheel. The horn sounds. Though it was an accident, something about the blare fits her mood, and she pushes it again and again. A passing motorist slows and stares out of his window, but her frustration has abated. She waves at him to say that everything is all right. Maybe it is.
At the next town, she stops for another cup of coffee and a slice of shoofly pie. She places her millionth call to Los Angeles, but nobody answers. She finishes her pie and places another call, this time to Western Union. “I’d like to send a telegram to Mr. Arnold Bates, Beverly Hills, California. ‘Strength is when we’re together. I’m sorry we were ever apart. Lou.’ ”
“Is that a Santagram?” asks the clerk on the phone.
“What?”
“Any holiday greetings?”
“ ‘Merry Christmas, Arn,’ ” she says. “ ‘I love you.’ ”