The main thing about A Hole in the Head was that the Un-American Committee finally caught up with me. I’d been avoiding strange official-looking men, or pairs of men showing up in rehearsal halls, outside stage doors, even when I was pushing a baby carriage; now I was finally caught, served with a subpoena, and a date was set for me to go to Washington to appear before the Committee. Bob Whitehead was the producer, a gentleman from handsome head to polished boot. I told him I had to speak to him. We met in his office. I told him Leonard Boudin was representing me, I was taking the Fifth, and that I understood that he might need to replace me—to protect his show, his investment. Anyone who refused to answer questions in front of the committee was absolutely considered to be a Communist, a threat, and in the wider community, persona non grata. I certainly didn’t want to endanger the show or have American Legion groups harassing our actors because of me.
Bob said, and my throat closes as I write this, “You do whatever you have to do. When you come back, your part will be here waiting for you.”
My visit to Washington was like a visit to the dentist’s office. Is it gonna hurt? Are they gonna drill? I saw myself squirming in the dentist’s chair, mouth wide open, black like a cartoon.
“Ow! Ow! OOOOW! Stop!”
Pulling teeth, blood, spit, drilling, loud—all the crazy dentists shoving for a chance at my mouth.
• • •
I actually wasn’t sure whether I was a member of the Communist Party or not. As far as my husband was concerned I was a hapless bourgeois, unschooled in Marx, Lenin, or Hegel. He was a writer, an intellectual; I had my own ideas, and to him they were simplistic, unideological.
One afternoon, Arnie passed me in the foyer of our apartment.
“I think it would be a good idea for you to join the Party. It would make some of our friends more secure around you.”
I understood the truth of his logic.
“Okay,” I said on my way to the kitchen. By the time I turned on the faucet, I was a member of the Party, since Arnie to me was God, his suggestion a reality.
We went on our respective ways. I doubt my name was added to an official list. I was never given a card saying I was a member of the Communist Party. But I crossed an invisible line somewhere between the foyer and the kitchen. I was one of them. I liked it.
So I was surprised when I met with Leonard Boudin to find out that more steps had to be taken to become an actual Communist Party member, and I wasn’t one, he said.
I was being readied and prepared for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Fifth Amendment was my defense, Leonard told me.
My intellect was challenged. My emotions were my ally, part of my equipment as an actor, but Leonard told me feelings must be put away in a secret drawer and forgotten. They would only get me in trouble.
Leonard impressed on me strongly that if I answered any questions that involved the past, I could open myself up to answering questions about the beliefs of other people, my friends, my husband.
Leonard said, “Don’t engage in conversation; you’re not smart enough to sense a trap. They are professionals. That’s why I’m there. If you’re not sure, ask me. I’ll be sitting right next to you.”
I understood that if I made a mistake, had a slip of the tongue, got angry or silly, I could jeopardize myself, my family, even go to jail, as the Hollywood Ten had.
I still don’t understand the Fifth Amendment. “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.” It worked, when someone invoked it, but it made no sense. This was Wonderland and the penalty was: YOU CANNOT WORK FOREVER IN FILM OR TV.
But I was already not working forever.
All of us blacklisted actors understood that this was for the rest of our lives. This was what forever looked like in the fifties.
Change was inconceivable; that the fifties would eventually become the wild sixties nobody in their right mind would have ever believed.
I wasn’t scared, I was curious; I would see the monster in its lair. With Leonard Boudin to protect me and a hit Broadway play, A Hole in the Head, to return to.
• • •
Going to the committee was like being taken to the zoo by my dad when I was a little girl. I’d hide behind his legs when the lion roared, when the gorilla shook its cage.
Leonard was my dad. Instead of the real lion’s roar, these men reminded me of Mr. Forster, my fourth-grade history teacher, who sweated too much and kept touching the back of my neck.
They asked nothing about American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, where we were organized and at war.
The committee was incredibly, laughably ignorant about everything show business—television, theater, agents, and especially Communism.
Interestingly, looking back now, there was a similarity between the mind-set most Communist functionaries have and that of the Soviets and the HUAC. People who are accustomed to taking orders, whose minds are so closed, thinking restricted, limited. The writers deported to prison camps by Stalin, the fear of free thought, the preening and arrogance of the former KGB. Shocking, really, that these men investigating enemy activity in the entertainment industry, the infiltration of foreign spies, should not know anything about the shows on TV, that actors have agents who sell them in these shows. That they didn’t even know I was in a play on Broadway or the name of it. Who appointed these men who set the rules for the whole country?
“Talk! Talk!” they yelled. “Do you know a person by the name of Morris Carnovsky?” “You know a person by the name of Alan Manson? Lou Pollan? John Randolph?” “Name someone! Anyone!”
Well, my dear, I recommend the Fifth Amendment, and my attractive and mysterious lawyer, Leonard Boudin, who is no longer with us. I entered the chamber—why do I remember a kind of three-tiered stand?—and a fiftyish-year-old man sitting on the top tier said to me, “What’s a nice little girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Pleasantly I replied, “What are you doing in a place like this?”
I was seated behind a table with Leonard Boudin at my side. About eighteen men asked questions, but mostly one man. To most questions, Leonard said, “Take the Fifth. Say ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds of my Fifth Amendment rights.’”
This was curiouser and curiouser. My body could rise like a balloon over the proceedings. And what did they know? Nothing. It made my head shake from side to side in amazement.
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE COMMITTEE HEARING
Mr. Arens: Have you been engaged in the last few years in a play called Danger?
Miss Grant: It is a television show.
Mr. Arens: Was your employment in the production Danger procured for you by any person who, at any time, was known to you to have been a Communist?
(The idea was so funny, I laughed. Leonard nudged me.)
Mr. Boudin: The answer with respect to that, and generally, would have been the same, namely, that Miss Grant got the job through the routine way and is not prepared to say who were and were not members of the Communist Party.
Mr. Arens: Do you know a person by the name of Sidney Lumet?
Miss Grant: Yes.
Mr. Arens: Did he have anything to do with your appearances on Danger?
Miss Grant: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.
Mr. Arens: Do you know whether or not Sidney Lumet has ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Miss Grant: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.
Mr. Arens: Are you presently under Communist Party discipline?
Miss Grant: I am not a member of the Communist Party.
Mr. Arens: Are you presently under Communist Party discipline?
Miss Grant: I am not.
The Committee was so out of touch and awash in ignorance that I was thinking, Get a good director. This wouldn’t pass for a dangerous committee on TV. They’re really bad actors, not the least in touch with reality.
I left the chamber. The senator who thought I was a nice girl didn’t look at me. I now had the stamp of disapproval. Officially OUT. I went back to the play. Not a ripple; every day was the same as it had been.