Setting the Scene

The day that would change my life and that of my two children, Michael, almost seven, and Catherine, almost three, is indelibly carved into my memory. A hot California sun burned through the large, arched front windows of my small Spanish bungalow, blinding the familiar view beyond—palm trees towering over like houses on the fringe edge of Beverly Hills, where more expansive, pricey dwellings were the usual, many occupied by movie stars and other well-known denizens of the film industry. This was a fiery day in August 1954. Summer would soon pass and time was running out for “we three.” A divorced mother in my midtwenties, my ex-husband gone—no one knew quite where—I had no job (I was an “independent” neophyte screen and television writer), do-piddling in the bank, with only six weeks remaining on an eviction notice to vacate our home.

I had been nineteen in 1947, when I married my husband, who was twenty-one and a seasoned veteran of World War II, having served in Guam. We had been divorced for the past year. In the intervening months I had fought my own war after being attacked by poliomyelitis at a time when the virus that paralyzed and killed was rampant (mostly among young people, although our President Franklin D. Roosevelt had also survived polio, and managed, just dandy, thank you, to get us through the Depression and World War II) and the vaccine not yet available. Oh, yes! I have not mentioned that I was also in danger of momentarily receiving the dreaded pink subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, already apparently having been found “guilty by suspicion and association” of having tangible connections to Communist ideas and their supposed supporters—Hollywood writers mainly—who were being accused of disseminating Russian political propaganda through their screenplays.

A mushroom cloud of fear had hovered over my beloved United States for a number of years, since the fall of 1947, in fact, settling over Hollywood and directing its lethal rays on the movie industry. Its chief instigator was US senator Joseph McCarthy, rabid for power at any cost to his nation and devastation to hundreds (make that thousands) of people, a huge majority of whom were innocent of any crime or malfeasance to their country. (His surname, many damaged lives later, would give birth to the word “McCarthyism,” defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as: “The practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence [and] the use of unfair investigatory methods in order to suppress opposition.”) McCarthy, his cohorts, and his disciples, believed, or pretended it to be so, that Communist Russia was trying to undermine, and eventually take over, the United States through a conspiracy of Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and directors. The attacked moviemakers (excluding the studio moguls whom the Committee appeared to consider blameless) were the creators of stories dealing with the greed of the rich and the oppression of the poor.

What better show trial and media blitz could be had than one that paraded on television (the country’s newest diversion) before the Committee some of Hollywood’s most famous moviemakers, stars, writers, directors, and producers—as both friendly and unfriendly witnesses; the former siding with the “Committee.” One member, congressman, future vice president and president, Richard M. Nixon, made a public statement that he was seriously concerned about John Steinbeck’s great 1930s Depression opus about migrant farm workers, The Grapes of Wrath (screenplay by Nunnally Johnson) being shown in Yugoslavia. No reason was given as to why our nation might be concerned about how the movie (originally released in the States in 1940) might affect a mid-European country that had broken with the Soviet Bloc in 1948 and at this time enjoyed a varying degree of freedom in the arts. Then, along came Jack Tenney, the inquisitorial state senator from California (and friendly witness), who testified that Frank Sinatra was abetting Communism by appearing in films filled with Communist propaganda. The movies were not listed, but it is difficult to comprehend how Sinatra’s appearances in musical films such as Ships Ahoy!, Anchors Aweigh, and It Happened in Brooklyn—all good-feeling, shallow stories—could convey a political agenda.

The first Hollywood hearings began on October 20, 1947. They were produced like a gala Hollywood premiere. (There were jokes about “walking down the Red carpet” but it was too real to laugh at—except perhaps with a wry “he-haw.”) Despite what the men who had been called before the Committee expected (no women were called in to this first inquisition), they were not prepared for what met their eyes. A battery of television newsreel cameramen stood side by side, their cameras whirring as the witnesses entered and were led to their seats. Photographers broke ranks and dashed toward them, bunching up, crouching for angle shots, their flash cameras raised like artillery, bursting into blinding light in the men’s faces.

Spectators crowded into a bank of seats to one side. Across the front of the room was a platform where the Committee sat, brass plates before them to identify who they were for the cameras. Below the platform was the witness table and flanking it to the right and left, tremendous tables set up to accommodate the press. The room was windowed but sunlight was deflected by the massive broadcasting equipment and rows of control panels. In every corner of the room were loudspeakers for the public address system. Microphones were stationed on both the Committee and witness tables. One of the first of the nineteen accused witnesses to be called (labeled by the press as “the Hollywood Nineteen”) was writer, director, and producer Robert Rossen who later told me that his immediate reaction was to search the room for a sign of an American flag as any American court of law displayed. There was none. At the time, Rossen was one of Warner Bros. leading scriptwriters with such dramatic, socially conscious, and critically acclaimed classics to his credit as Marked Woman, They Won’t Forget, Dust Be My Destiny, The Roaring Twenties, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, The Sea Wolf, A Walk in the Sun, and (although uncredited as it was released when he appeared as an unfriendly witness before the Committee—the credit therefore given to the film’s director, John Huston) The Treasure of Sierra Madre, which won the Academy Award that year for screen adaptation.

The hearings went on for three weeks during which time the nineteen men, one by one, refused to answer questions put to them regarding their political affiliations, religion, or the names of other members of the film colony, who belonged to some of the same organizations as they did, and whose silence lawyers rightly declared a given right of the Constitution. Of the nineteen men brought before the Committee, twelve were writers (including the playwright Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera), five directors, one producer (although Rossen was all three), and one actor, Larry Parks, who famously had just made a huge hit in—and for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination—The Jolson Story. Together, their contribution to what is often referred to as “the golden age of Hollywood” was considerable. Lester Cole and Alvah Bessie had cowritten Objective Burma; Ring Lardner Jr. the 1937 version of A Star Is Born, Woman of the Year, Cloak and Dagger, and Laura. Dalton Trumbo had been nominated for an Academy Award for Kitty Foyle; Howard Koch received the same honor for his stunning screenplay of The Letter and won it for Casablanca. The remaining screenwriters included in the Hollywood Nineteen—John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott, Richard Collins, Samuel Ornitz, Gordon Kahn, Herbert Biberman—and the directors Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, and Of Mice and Men for a start), Edward Dmytryk (Tender Comrade), and Irving Picket (The Moon Is Down) were no less talented, for each brought his special ability to his work. Ten of their number would face a prison sentence of one year for refusing to name others and would become known as the Hollywood Ten. All would have their careers and personal lives torn asunder as would the hundreds of Hollywood’s creative men and women who would be dragged up before the Committee or had been made to flee before being cited.

And so the deadly game began.

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” was the key question asked by the inquisitors, a public query not admissible in an American court of law that included a judge and a jury, neither present in these hearings. But the Committee had been set up as a congressional investigation and witnesses were given fewer rights. In fact, a large number of well-known film folk had been members of left-leaning organizations in the early 1930s—most of which had no connection whatsoever with the Communist Party or its agenda, for this was a time when our country was in the depths of the Great Depression and help was desperately needed by the millions of unemployed as government relief or health benefit measures were not available to the majority.

This was also during the Spanish Civil War, a fight for personal freedom against a dictator. Organizations were formed in Hollywood to raise funds to aid the rebel fighters. Numerous other Hollywood groups joined in to raise awareness of the armies of unemployed in our country and of the workers who were earning substandard wages and living in dire poverty.

World War II followed fast on the heels of the Depression. It was a lot for a country to take during those years and people grasped whatever they could to get through it. An artist’s currency has always been ideas. During the thirties, communism seemed a word that meant something like “share the wealth, help the needy.” There was a small membership in the American Communist Party, which during the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union gave it a boost in credibility, causing its membership to grow countrywide to something near fifty thousand. Fewer than one hundred were ever known to be members who had worked in Hollywood movies. Over half of those who were in the business of making motion pictures before the war had become disenchanted and quit the party well before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a decade before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) began its investigations. Shortly after the war’s end came reports of Soviet repression in Eastern and Central Europe. That was the start of the “Red Scare” in the States, which fueled the fire that drove McCarthy and the Committee to their own political agenda, thus creating a society in Hollywood that was split in two and then fragmented. The most evil persons in old gangster movies were most often not the criminals but the informers—stoolies, they were called, and loathed. Suddenly, being a stoolie was the only way in Hollywood to hold on to your job.

The televised Committee hearings were difficult to turn away from. One felt like a deer caught in the blaze of oncoming headlights, frozen with fear and awe at a speedily advancing vehicle. If the witness refused to answer, or stood on the Fifth Amendment not to (as was their right as an American citizen), they were in contempt and liable for a jail sentence. Despite this, the Hollywood Ten felt obliged to stand by their colleagues and not feed the Committee names. Others who followed into the witness box, their desperation for the survival of their career pressuring them, were bowed into submission. They believed their only out was to give names—people who they stated had been members of the Communist Party or had belonged to any organization that was suspected of having Communist members. Although they often did not know whether a colleague had been engaged in such activities, the routine was for the witness to identify others, whenever possible, who had already been named. It seemed not to matter if this was true, nor did it appear to cross their conscience that they were further digging a hole for these colleagues, thus ending his or her working days in Hollywood. The majority of the witnesses called before the Committee were into late midlife and had been plying their craft for decades. Few possessed other talents or were equipped with the ability or the means to make an otherwise equitable living for their families. Unemployment benefits were not applicable. Among the named, there were mental breakdowns, divorces, and suicide.

It has to be understood that writing a screenplay does not necessarily mean one so employed can write in other mediums as well. Films are a visual art; literature a narrative one; theater spoken but without the assistance of the great open vista of a camera lens, which in a matter of a single moment or two could eradicate the need for pages of dialogue, explanation, or description. Great novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner failed miserably in their attempts to write for the screen and only a minuscule number of screenwriters have made a successful crossover to publishing. They are quite different mediums, each requiring separate skills and training.

The studios were sent lists of people, many under contract to them, whom the Committee deemed questionable. Instead of a black mark, they were given a red one. As one Committee hearing closed and another and still another was held, these lists became lengthy, including those who had been unfriendly witnesses, those named and those who were on what was referred to as a graylist—those whose circle of friends and acquaintances were suspect and/or their scripts had a liberal leaning to them. The moguls who ran the studios, fearful of a backlash and drop in ticket sales if they hired anyone on any of the lists, closed the gates of the studios to them, no matter how great an artist or long a contributor to their studio’s critically acclaimed and largest grossing films. Desperately needing writers and directors to replace the artists they had fired, the studio moguls reached out to their young and growing rival—television, just as they once had taken actors from the theater with the advent of talking films, leaving the majority of silent movie actors abruptly without jobs.

These were scary times in Hollywood. People turned their backs on longtime friends and coworkers, panic stricken that they would “catch the virus.” My uncle, Dave Chasen, owned a famous restaurant beloved by the Hollywood glitterati. It was a clubby sort of place. Everyone knew each other and mingled, table hopping from one group to another. Then abruptly, that stopped. Guests kept their heads down, eyes averted when a person thought to be on one list or another was being led to a table, or passing by to leave. Someone who had been a frequent guest at one’s dinner table and shared holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries—whose children had playdates with your children—were suddenly cut, telephone calls unanswered, notes ignored.

I felt disgust when I heard these stories. It brought images of Hitler’s youth movement and the start of the ferreting out and persecution of Jews in the early years of Nazi Germany. A good percentage of the Hollywood film industry, especially the creative artists, were Jewish (as were the moguls themselves). “It can’t happen here!” I kept telling myself. But, in truth, I was not 100 percent sure. After all, the moguls were giving in to the political pressures just as the rich and powerful Jews had in Germany—and look where it got them.

Still, this was not Germany. This was the US of A. I loved it dearly. It was the only home I ever knew. My childhood had been a scattered one—here for some time, there for another, constantly moving on to another house, apartment, city, state. Yet, I retained a sense of security, of family with my homeland, for my country seemed the parents of us all. I was (and remain) tremendously proud to be an American. We stood for everything good, didn’t we? (Well, every family had their bad moments, their truants, their buried secrets, and those they wished they could bury.) I was a history buff and knew very well that we had suffered some pretty dark times, unthinkable regresses. But there were always those among us who fought and struggled and overcame with amazing grace and strength. I believed that despite the current disease of McCarthyism that had gripped our country, those infected by its virus loved our land as much as I did—each in their own and very personal way.

Those who were blacklisted or graylisted, and could, left for Europe (or hid out in Mexico hoping it would blow over) before their passports were confiscated. They were cinema artists concerned in their occupations with stories frequently dealing with human suffering. Even comedy, more often than not, is born out of tragic situations (and still is). Screenwriters took story ideas from the headlines and from the breadlines. In its early incarnation the American Communist Party (a very small minority when the dark wind of McCarthyism swept in) seemed far less threatening than the Tea Party appeared to liberal groups in more recent times. A great many Hollywood members had left the Communist Party by the time of World War II, disappointed that it was not what they had believed it to be. By then, the great motivation was to bring Hitler down and save the world from his terrorizing despotism. European artists—actors, writers, directors, composers—who had been able to escape Der Fuhrer’s murderous madness by immigrating to the States for a chance to continue their careers in Hollywood—formed a new group of film intelligentsia. The pendulum swung in another direction. Still, McCarthyism continued. A new wave, in which I was caught, hit hard in 1951–1952 and continued through to 1958, despite the senator’s death in 1957 (said to be caused by acute alcoholism).

The endless harassment and outrage of individuals over strongly held left and right diverging opinions continues to the present time. In those years when I was young, I was filled with a kind of desperate hope, an all-encompassing faith, that left and right could one day manage to join hands in a bold effort for the better good of all people, especially those in my homeland. I don’t think I was alone in my thinking.

The writer Arthur Laurents once told me, “The informers were not evil because they informed, and not informers because they were evil.” I believed that then and I believe that now. Dalton Trumbo (one of the Hollywood Ten) famously added, “Everyone [who came up before the Committee during those years] was a victim.” I believed that, too. Still, when the phone rang on that sweaty, hot August morning, my children’s happy voices rising in the background, a cold-blooded snake of fear slithered down my back. This happened whenever the telephone rang, for there was usually a call from someone—agent, lawyer, still-employed studio friend—to warn you that a pink subpoena slip might be heading your way or that you had been upgraded to the flashing red-zone list.

This was my state of mind at the time of my current contretemps. I was scared. You can believe that. But I was a feisty kind of lady. I refused to let the bullies get me. Most of all I had kept my sense of humor (which I value above almost every other human trait). I believed I had what was well worth fighting for. Not only was I an American, I was a woman with two terrific kids, a measure of talent, and an active libido that even the dread polio could not stifle.