In the fifteen years since HUAC had invaded the movie business, the victims of its accusations had become older, sicker, poorer, stressed out of their careers, marriages, and lives. The world had changed. I still couldn’t get off the Blacklist. It seemed like the only people who couldn’t get official sanction were Morris Carnovsky and me.
One day, Max Kampelman called. He had been at lunch with the head of the Committee. The man asked Max to do him a political favor. Max said to him, “I’ll do it if you let Lee Grant go.”
The committee man said “Okay,” and that was it.
The world ends with a whimper, not with a bang. It was 1964. I’d been twenty-four when I was blacklisted. I was now thirty-six.
A couple of days later I received an official letter on government stationery. In the vaguest of terms, it said I was a “good citizen.” And that was that. I sent it to my agent and had offers almost immediately for TV shows in New York.
In those days most TV was still shot in New York. There was a big studio in Queens. And there were many, many decent producers waiting in line to employ me—David Susskind, Herb Brodkin. I did an episode of The Doctors and the Nurses directed by David Brooks, which no one today could get permission to do with his concept. It was about a woman who checks into a hotel and wants to commit suicide. He shot all day long, no breaks, and all night long, so that the character would enter that state of exhaustion and vulnerability. Then I went right into E. G. Marshall’s The Defenders. Stu Rosenberg directed that one. It was about a prostitute who sues her client for rape. After that there was a drama starring George C. Scott. I put my salary checks in my bureau drawer, then couldn’t find them. I called my agent, Phyllis Raab.
“Did you send my checks?”
“Yes, two weeks ago.”
“Oh.”
They had piled up amid my underthings and slipped down into the bureau. What a wonderful problem to have.