The so-called “liberals” were stunned by my revelations … It shocked them to their superficial little souls. “What does this man Berkeley mean,” they shrilled in their emasculated voices, “turning our secure little world into a battleground?”
Of the twenty-three people whom former Communist Richard J. Collins named as party members in his testimony on April 12, 1951, one of the most obscure was a fellow screenwriter named Martin Berkeley. Collins said he had been a member of a group that met regularly at Berkeley’s ranch house on White Oaks Avenue in Encino in the late 1930s or early ’40s, although he believed Berkeley had subsequently fallen out with the party. Within hours of Collins’s testimony, a telegram arrived for committee attorney Frank Tavenner from Berkeley angrily accusing Collins of lying. I AM NOT NOW NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY, the telegram declared, and he urged Tavenner to invite him to Washington TO LAY MY ANTI-COMMUNIST POSITION BEFORE YOU. IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED I HAVE FOUGHT COMMUNISM CONSISTENTLY INSIDE MY GUILD AND OUT. Berkeley also sent a telegram to his son, Bill, then a freshman at Yale, warning him not to believe what he would read on the front page of the next day’s New York Times.
The wire to HUAC was partially true: Berkeley had indeed become an active Red hunter in recent years, supporting the anti-Communist purge inside the Screen Writers Guild. But the first sentence was a blatant lie. Not only had Berkeley been a full-fledged member of the American Communist Party, but the first meeting of the Hollywood branch of the party had been held at his house in June 1937. He’d been among the most loyal of members when Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Berkeley was one of those comrades who turned on a dime from a staunch enemy of Fascism to an ardent advocate for “peace.” He wrote an article passionately making the case why America should stay neutral in the war between Britain and Nazi Germany, condemning “the reckless bigwigs” who were “determined to alter the course of neutrality, where all our hard won gains will be lost.”
Soon he would be displaying that same depth of passion in going after his former comrades.
Born in Brooklyn in 1904, Martin Alton Berkeley—the family name was originally Berkowitz—had been a theater actor and a playwright for a decade before moving to Hollywood in 1937. He worked for five years for MGM, then five more at Twentieth Century-Fox. His output was reliably steady and steeped in melodramatic clichés.
The Sparks Fly Upward, his play about Abraham Lincoln’s childhood, features a climactic death scene in which Abe’s mother, Nancy, tells her young son, “Be kind to your sister and your Pappy … Live always like I taught you to live … Stand firm for what you believe like your Pappy does—stand firm for the truth—and keep your head high.”
In Berkeley’s play Obsession: A Love Story Joyce tells Gordon, her star-crossed lover: “It’s been so empty without you … Trying to keep the old chin up … It was a living hell.”
Gordon replies, “I thought I could forget you.”
Berkeley’s screenplay, Will James’ Sand, a B Western released in 1949, is set in “Desert Country, fit for neither man nor beast.” The great horse Jubilee escapes a train fire by “racing like the wind.” Berkeley was often assigned to work on animal pictures, including polishing work on My Friend Flicka (1943), which led Ring Lardner Jr. of the Hollywood Ten to the observation that Berkeley was unable to write dialogue for humans.
There’s a strong tone of vituperation mixed with condescension when Berkeley’s former comrades recall everything from his appearance to his writing to his politics. Much of this is colored by post-facto anger over his betrayal of them. But Berkeley clearly felt alienated and isolated from his fellow screenwriters: they were Hollywood’s cool kids and he was the class clown. Fellow playwright Allen Boretz, who had a big Broadway hit with the comedy farce Room Service (later made into a Marx Brothers’ movie), first met Berkeley in his agent’s office in New York. Boretz was struck that a Brooklyn Jew had such bland German-like features: “rather weakly handsome, I would say—tall, blond, blue eyes, with a kind of Teutonic face,” he recalled.
Berkeley became Boretz’s eager understudy. “He became my toady. He followed me around wherever I went. He talked to me constantly, wanting to understand who I was, and what I was, and how I had come to write like that.”
In Hollywood, where clichéd writing was no impediment to employment, Berkeley found steady work for a decade. But Boretz said Berkeley came to him one day in a panic because MGM had assigned him to a Laurel and Hardy picture and he was afraid he would be fired because he knew nothing about writing comedy. Boretz took pity and whipped out the screenplay for him. When Berkeley turned it in his producer suspected it’d been written by someone else, but still used it.
Boretz said Berkeley had gradually lost faith in himself because he lacked the skills of a top screenwriter like Dalton Trumbo. “He had some talent but no great talent. He was no Trumbo, let us say. He was not even a … me.”
Still, Berkeley was proud of his success. He bragged to his son Bill, “I’ve never written a great movie, but I’ve never written a movie that lost money.”
Berkeley’s irate telegram to HUAC prompted Richard Collins to offer many more telling details about his former comrade. The branch meetings at Berkeley’s Encino home had been held in a playroom separated from the main house by a driveway, Collins recalled. Berkeley often wore blue denim trousers and a jacket to the meetings, and smoked a pipe stuffed with Revelation tobacco. He and his second wife, former actress Kathleen Kincaid, had eventually moved to Tarzana around 1941 to a larger house on a hilltop with horse stables behind it. Collins recalled a meeting he attended there after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By 1942 or 1943, Collins said, Berkeley’s obnoxious behavior had alienated many of his comrades and some feared he had turned into an FBI informer. In short, Collins seemed to know all about Martin Berkeley.
To make things worse, the committee had obtained the details of Berkeley’s party membership cards for 1943 and 1944. The committee also learned from Jason Joy, director of public relations at Twentieth Century-Fox, that the studio had dropped Berkeley from working on the script for Behind the Iron Curtain, an anti-Communist picture, after the FBI “put the finger on him” for his alleged Communist ties.
A month after Collins’s testimony and Berkeley’s telegram, the two men met for lunch. “Berkeley had asked Collins if the committee really had in its possession authentic Communist Party cards, or if they were phonies,” read a HUAC memo afterward. “Collins stated that he told Berkeley the cards were authentic.”
Based on that piece of intelligence, Martin Berkeley decided it was time to come clean. He confessed to Bill Wheeler, the committee’s chief Hollywood investigator, that he had indeed been a party member from 1936 to 1943 and confirmed that he had hosted several party meetings at his house. “The Committee has some pretty strong evidence against Berkeley and he knows it,” Tavenner told the lawmakers.
Bill Berkeley, Martin’s son from his first marriage, recalls arriving at his father’s home in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley in the summer of 1951 to find Wheeler had been staying there for several days while interviewing his father. During these sessions, Berkeley gushed names like a newly drilled oil well. Not a dozen names, like Larry Parks, nor two dozen, like Richard Collins, but 150 names, including seventy-five names of people who had not previously been identified as party members. “It is my opinion that he is the most important witness to date,” Wheeler wrote to Tavenner. “The hearing in Hollywood is shaping up very well if Berkeley testifies here.”
Wheeler went on to list the names of a dozen or so new targets for whom “dossiers, exhibits, and questions should be prepared.”
By June 1951 Carl was deeply immersed drafting the High Noon screenplay, with occasional input from Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer. Carl’s script became sharper as the climate of fear and loathing worsened around him. Old friends were no longer talking and people were crossing the street to avoid each other. FBI agents were paying visits to people’s homes. Party members like screenwriter Abe Polonsky knew their phones were wiretapped. Meanwhile, many were whispering about poor Larry Parks, whose agonizing performance on the witness stand in March had crystallized everyone’s deepest anxieties. An air of panic had set in. A Life magazine reporter wired her editor that people were anticipating the next set of committee hearings like “a group of marooned sailors on a flat desert island watching the approach of a tidal wave.” This gathering sense of dread became the emotional core of Carl’s story.
Because Carl was writing about the death of Hollywood, he decided to begin the screenplay with a flashback and a dissolve: scenes of an empty, desolate Hadleyville, looking like a ghost town while the opening credits rolled, followed by a dissolve to the town as it had been before its destruction, on the day that Gil Jordan and his men came back to town. At the conclusion of the movie, after Doane and Amy depart, Carl intended to dissolve back to the ghost town.
It was a misfire: too gimmicky, too obvious, and lacking the immediacy that was the central driving force of the screenplay. It undermined the whole concept of a story unfolding in real time. “I honestly don’t remember why I dropped it,” Carl would recall. “Maybe Stanley or Fred didn’t like it.”
If so, their objections indicate what a collaborative project High Noon truly was. Even a writer as sure-handed and experienced as Carl needed smart, critical readers. Most of all, he needed to embrace his own concept. Using constant shots of clocks to show real time passing would give the film a sense of urgency. What would make High Noon thrilling and frightening was its internal momentum driving the story inexorably toward a final confrontation not just between good guys and bad guys but between courage and fear.
Suddenly the beginning became obvious to him: he would start with the gunmen, the precipitators of the crisis to come, gathering on a rocky copse of trees while the film’s credits unroll.
On a Sunday morning already seared by heat, a man waits on the outskirts of a small Western town. A lone rider appears, waves briefly, and approaches him. Then a third rider gallops toward them. A church bell tolls in the distance. Although it’s only mid-morning, the three men look sweaty and grimy from their ride. The third man takes out his pocket watch, checks the time, and snaps it shut. He nods to the others and they begin a slow, deliberate canter into town. The men ride with brazen ease, their rifles and handguns in plain view. They pass a church where congregants are filing in for the morning service and turn down the main street past a firehouse, grain store, and barbershop, passing townsfolk who watch them with growing concern. As they approach the marshal’s office, one of the men rears his horse.
“You in a hurry?” the leader of the group asks angrily.
“I sure am,” the younger man replies.
“You’re a fool!” the older man exclaims.
As they ride off, the camera cuts to the interior of the courtroom next to the marshal’s office where a judge is presiding over the wedding of Will Doane and Amy Fowler amid a small group of the town’s most upstanding citizens. Then the camera cuts back to the three men riding past a saloon. “Did you see what I saw?” a man loafing outside says to his companions. “Open ’er up, Joe! We’re going to have a big day today.”
The riders end their procession at the train station, where they dismount and demand of the stationmaster whether the noon train is on time.
So begins Carl Foreman’s screenplay of High Noon. In a series of small, deft strokes, he introduces major elements of his frontier drama: the gunmen who constitute an ominous menace, the community in various states of unease, the ticking clock moving slowly toward the moment of reckoning.
Next, the camera takes us back to the marshal’s office and a brief ceremony: Will Doane removes his badge and pins it to his holster, which he leaves hung on the wall. But as he and his new bride prepare to leave, the stationmaster bursts in with a telegram announcing that the authorities have pardoned Guy Jordan (the chief villain has a new first name), and he adds that three of Jordan’s men are waiting for their boss to arrive on the noon train. The marshal glances at the clock on the wall: it’s ten forty A.M. Noon is just eighty minutes away. His friends quickly usher Doane and Amy out the door and onto an old buckboard. A hesitant Doane climbs aboard and heads out of town with his new bride.
But when they reach the parched prairie, Doane suddenly pulls up. He sits silently for a moment, frowning with thought as Amy stares at him.
“It’s no good, I’ve got to go back,” he tells her. “They’re making me run. I’ve never run from anybody before.”
Amy doesn’t understand what he’s thinking nor why, but he says he doesn’t have time to explain it to her. Despite her plea to keep going, he turns the buckboard around and heads back to town.
When they get back to the marshal’s office, Will explains to her that Jordan is coming back to town to kill him. Running away won’t help: Jordan and his three henchmen can easily overtake their wagon on the open prairie. Better to stay in town, he tells her, gather his deputies and his friends, and confront Jordan and his men here. Still, Amy pleads for them to leave immediately. “You don’t have to be a hero—not for me!” she tells him.
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” he replies angrily. “If you think I like this, you’re crazy!”
But Amy resists. As she sees it, Will is reneging on his promise to start a new life with her. “You’re asking me to wait an hour to find out if I’m going to be a wife or a widow,” she tells him. “… If you won’t go with me now—I’ll be on that train when it leaves here.”
“I’ve got to stay, Amy,” he replies. She walks out the door.
As Carl must have known, the scene is particularly resonant because Cooper is repeating the same sentiments his character expressed more than two decades earlier in The Virginian, his first major starring role. Back then, the young and virile hero spoke with the confidence of youth. But now the protagonist is older and far less self-assured. Like his younger self, he knows he has no choice but to confront his enemy, but he is more aware of the mortal danger he faces and less certain of the outcome.
The heart of High Noon follows: a series of scenes in which Will Doane seeks in vain to enlist help from his friends and neighbors, all of whom find reasons to turn him away. It begins with Percy Mettrick, the judge who has just presided over the wedding, who makes clear he has no intention of standing alongside the marshal in his hour of need. As he hurriedly packs his law books, papers, and gavel, Mettrick gives Will a cynical civics lesson, relating how the citizens of Athens in the fifth century B.C. deposed and banished a tyrant. When the tyrant returned with an army of mercenaries the residents welcomed him back and stood by while he slaughtered members of the legal government. Mettrick says he himself had escaped a similar fate in a small town eight years earlier. “Will, why must you be such a fool?” asks Mettrick, as he folds and packs up his American flag. “Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he’s done to people?”
Mettrick, whose soul is calibrated only for survival, cannot understand Will’s stand. “Look, this is just a dirty little village in the middle of nowhere. Nothing that happens here is really important … Get out!”
As Mettrick pulls out, Harvey Pell arrives. Doane is visibly relieved to see his principal deputy, until Pell makes clear that he has one nonnegotiable condition for helping take on Jordan and his gang: Doane’s support for Pell to become the next marshal. But Doane won’t submit to Harvey’s blackmail. When Pell asks why not, Doane replies, “If you don’t know, there’s no use me telling you.”
Pell is too narcissistic and immature to begin to understand. He believes Doane is angry with him because he’s been sleeping with Helen Ramirez, Doane’s ex-lover. Pell storms out. Doane loses not just a deputy but also someone he considered a friend. The clock on the wall reads two minutes after eleven.
Next up is Herb Baker, one of Will’s former deputies. Baker (named after one of Carl Foreman’s closest friends, as are Weaver and Grogan in subsequent scenes; Carl put their names in every one of his screenplays) tells Will that he can count on him for support and firepower. “Why, you cleaned this town up—you made it fit for women and children to live in…”
“I was hoping people’d feel that way,” says Doane.
“What other way is there?”
Baker sounds slightly perturbed when Doane says he has no other men lined up yet, but pledges to return in ten minutes “loaded for bear.”
Doane’s next visit is to the hotel suite of Helen Ramirez. She is surprised and angry to see her former lover and she assumes he has come to plead for her to intervene with Jordan to spare his life. When he explains that he has merely come to warn her of Jordan’s return, she calms down. “I’m not afraid of him,” she says.
“I know you’re not,” says Doane, “but you know how he is.”
“I know how he is…”
These vague references to Jordan’s brutal past behavior are far more effective than a graphic account of his crimes would be. Those acts are left instead to our imagination. Similarly, we must accept Will’s inability to articulate the personal code that requires him to stay and take on the Jordan gang. Carl Foreman is challenging us to draw our own conclusions about the morals and motives of the characters.
Helen tells Will she’s decided to leave town, adding, “If you’re smart, you’ll get out yourself.”
“I can’t,” he replies.
“I know,” she says. Although they are estranged, these two characters understand and sympathize with each other more deeply than anyone else in High Noon. As Doane heads down the hotel stairs, the clock on the landing reads 11:11.
The marshal heads next to the saloon, where we discover that there are people in town who are happy Jordan is coming back. “You must be crazy, coming in here to raise a posse,” Gillis the bartender tells Doane. “Guy’s got friends in this room—you ought to know that!” Doane leaves the bar empty-handed.
Still, the most painful rejection is yet to come. Mart Howe, the retired town sheriff, is Doane’s mentor and friend, and the lawman has always believed in Howe as a leader and role model. “You’ve been my friend all my life,” Will tells him. “You got me this job. You made them send for me … From the time I was a kid I wanted to be like you.”
But Howe is locked inside his own sense of grievance and resentment. He believes his life as a lawman has been wasted. “You risk your skin catching killers and the juries let them go so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest, you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone in a dirty street. For what? For nothing. A tin star…”
As for the people of Hadleyville whom Will is defending, Howe speaks a bitter truth: “They really don’t care.”
The room goes quiet as the two men look at each other. Displaying a vulnerability he would never show to others, Will begs Howe for guidance. “What should I do, Mart?”
But Howe has an answer that Will cannot accept. “They’re coming to kill you,” he tells Doane. “Get out, Will! Get out!”
Will makes one more plea. “Will you come down to that station with me?”
Howe says no. He says he is too arthritic and would be of no help to Will. In fact, Will might well get himself killed trying to protect him. “You know how I feel about you, but I won’t go with you.”
Howe’s excuses are hollow, but Doane doesn’t waste his breath refuting them. He heads next to the home Sam Fuller, a town selectman, who hides in the bedroom but orders his wife to lie and tell Doane that he’s gone off to church. Will doesn’t even bother to act surprised.
Meanwhile, the interaction between Harvey and Helen grows hot-tempered. She seems to take pleasure in telling Harvey the truth about his shortcomings, especially when compared to Doane. “You’re a nice looking boy, you have big wide shoulders. But … it takes more than big wide shoulders to make a man, Harvey. And you’ve got a long way to go.”
“You know something?” she adds cruelly. “I don’t think you’ll ever make it.”
When Pell reaches for her, she slaps him hard.
Doane’s next stop is the church, where he disrupts the morning service to plead for volunteers. The minister at first dismisses Doane’s appearance, noting that the lawman seldom attended services and had chosen to get married that morning not in church but in a civil ceremony. The preacher softens his tone when Doane explains why he has come, but can offer no practical guidance to his flock as to their moral obligation to the marshal. “The Commandments say: Thou shalt not kill … but we hire men to do it for us,” he tells the congregation. “… The right and the wrong seem pretty clear here, but if you’re asking me to tell my people to go out and kill and maybe get themselves killed—I’m sorry—I don’t know what to say.”
So much for the ability of organized religion to guide and shape the public conscience.
Several congregants are ready to support Doane, but others resist. Then Jonas Henderson, the marshal’s old friend and ally, rises to stand beside him. “What this town owes Will Doane here, you could never pay him with money, and don’t ever forget it,” he begins. Doane listens gratefully. But as Henderson continues, his oration turns from support to betrayal. “Now, there’s people up north who’ve been thinking about this town, and thinking mighty hard. They’ve been thinking about sending money down here—to put up stores, build factories.” But a violent shootout on the streets would lead them to change their minds, “and everything we worked for is going to be wiped out in one day.”
Henderson concludes by telling Doane to get out of town immediately. “It’s better for you—and better for us.” Both religion and commerce—the twin pillars of American capitalism—have rejected the lawman and abandoned him to his fate. A stunned Doane leaves the church empty-handed.
He makes his way down the empty streets to the livery stable and eyes a fast horse. Just then Harvey Pell enters. He’s been drinking heavily at the saloon, and he tries clumsily to force Doane to saddle up and leave town. The two men end up in a brutal fist fight that the marshal eventually wins. He stumbles to the local barbershop, where he gets a clean towel to wipe the blood and dirt from his face. The barber also happens to be the local undertaker, and Doane can hear a carpenter in the next room hurriedly hammering together coffins for the showdown to come. The barber glances at the clock on the wall: 11:53.
Meanwhile, Amy Fowler, waiting for the noon train, has gone upstairs at the hotel to meet Helen Ramirez. She pleads with Helen to relinquish her hold on Doane, but Helen explains that Doane’s refusal to leave town has nothing to do with her. When a surprised Amy asks why Will won’t leave, Helen replies, echoing Doane’s own words. “If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.”
Helen lashes out at Amy. “What kind of woman are you? How can you leave him like this?” Amy explains that her father and brother had both been killed in a gun battle and that’s when she became a Quaker. “I don’t care who’s right or wrong! There’s got to be some better way for people to live!”
Doane returns to the marshal’s office, where Herb Baker is waiting. But when he learns that Doane has not been able to recruit other deputies, he backs out and abandons the marshal to his fate.
After Herb leaves, Doane sits at his desk, overwhelmed by his anger and helplessness and almost in tears. The clock reads two minutes to twelve. He stares at his gun, as if weighing suicide. But he pulls himself together. Then he hears the train whistle: noon has arrived. He writes a brief last will and testament and heads out the door. The street is deserted. A buckboard passes him with Amy and Helen heading toward the station. They ride past silently.
Will Doane knows now he is totally alone. He slowly moves forward to meet his fate.
Even before Martin Berkeley fingered him, Carl Foreman was on at least one list of subversives. He’d been named as a Communist sympathizer by the Tenney Committee in Sacramento. But Carl’s 1950 stand against the loyalty oath as a member of the board of the Screen Writers Guild had singled him out as well to the FBI and HUAC. Adele Buffington, a right-wing screenwriter, was feeding reports to both the bureau and the committee in her campaign to rid the guild of leftists.
The subpoena arrived on June 13, just as Carl was in the process of finishing the High Noon script. Bill Wheeler delivered it by hand. He was a pleasant young man in a gray suit, with pomaded black curly hair, rosy cheeks, and the stocky build of a former high school football player beginning to go to seed. He told Carl he was truly sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, but if he could help in any way he’d be happy to meet. He handed Carl his card and invited him to call any time.
Carl broke off work and went straight home. Four-year-old Kate was delighted her daddy had come home so early and she jumped into his arms. But Estelle was stunned to learn the reason why. She and Carl agreed to keep it quiet for the time being. He needed time to ponder what to do and how exactly to do it. Someone involved with the party must have squealed. “Who do you suppose the son of a bitch was who did this to us?” he asked angrily.
Carl knew his options were limited. He couldn’t take refuge in the First Amendment; the courts in the case of the Hollywood Ten had already ruled against that strategy. It was a sure path to a prison sentence and public ostracism. But to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify was to suggest one had something to hide. It was the act of a guilty person, and the only thing Carl was guilty of was being a former Communist.
The only sure way out was to name names. After all, he was no longer a party member. He owed his former comrades nothing; none of them were good friends, although some of them had been in the past. Why should he stick his neck out for a cause he no longer believed in? Still, he couldn’t stomach becoming an informer. It was a violation of the code he had grown up with in Chicago. No one in his old neighborhood had ever cooperated with the cops or stooled on his friends. “No hero me, and no saint, believe me, but way too much to pay,” he later recalled.
One thing he knew for certain: he had to tell Stanley right away that he’d been subpoenaed. Stanley was out of town, so Carl phoned him. He took the news well. They’d been through a lot of difficulties in the past and licked them, he assured Carl, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t do the same this time. They would work it out.
When Stanley got back to L.A., they met in his office, just he and Carl. If things get bad, Stanley told him, then Carl could work from home for a while, still on salary but with a lower profile. Surely it would all blow over after a year or so. Carl felt relieved. Despite their growing estrangement over the company, when it came to the crunch Stanley was on his side. They were brothers.
The warm feelings didn’t last long. When Stanley told George Glass and Sam Katz about Carl’s subpoena, they both expressed alarm. The Columbia deal was just getting started. The studio and its mercurial boss, Harry Cohn, had been signatories to the Waldorf Statement, agreeing that they would fire anyone named as a Communist, and Cohn would be furious to learn he was going into business with a former Communist facing a HUAC subpoena. Then Glass revealed that he, too, had been subpoenaed by HUAC. At first Glass insisted he would not cooperate. But then he agreed to meet with Martin Gang, Sterling Hayden’s old lawyer, who set up a session between Glass and Bill Wheeler. Glass’s conciliatory attitude impressed Stanley. If George was willing to cooperate for the sake of the company, why couldn’t Carl? So far as Stanley was concerned, this was not a political or moral issue but rather a question of personal loyalty to Stanley and the company. He was beginning to have doubts about Carl’s.
During all of this time, Carl was putting the finishing touches on the dialogue in the High Noon script. He found himself inserting words that he was hearing from his so-called friends, especially in the church meeting scene. There was a heavy whiff of betrayal in the air.
“It was now happening to me rather than to friends of mine and it was all falling into line,” he would recall. “… A lot of the dialogue was almost the dialogue that I was hearing from people and even in the company … You could walk down the street and see friends of yours recognize you, turn, and walk the other way.”
Carl was careful not to tell anyone that the script was taking on an anti-blacklist shading. No one was feeling brave enough to take on HUAC and he knew that divulging to Stanley and the others what he was up to would only heighten their anxieties and cause them to either kill the project or pull him off it. While he trusted Fred Zinnemann, he felt Fred didn’t need to have this particular knowledge added to the burden of preparing for the film shoot. Still, Carl felt it was time to tell Fred and Gary Cooper about the subpoena. He was being called to testify right around the time when the film shoot was scheduled to begin. Later, his appearance date was postponed until September 24—almost exactly in the middle of the shoot. Both men deserved the opportunity to walk away from the picture if they felt Carl was too radioactive to work with.
Fred was marvelous about it. Don’t worry about me, he told Carl, just do whatever you have to.
Carl was anticipating more resistance from Cooper. After all, he was a member of the executive board of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—the group that had invited HUAC to investigate Hollywood in the first place—and he had been a friendly witness during the committee’s first round of Hollywood hearings in 1947. They met in Cooper’s most discreet rendezvous spot—his silver Jaguar convertible—near Cooper’s Brentwood home, and Carl told him the whole story.
Cooper asked questions: How does Kramer feel about this? What about Zinnemann? Carl answered him, and then offered Cooper his out. “If you want to leave the picture, now’s the time to do it,” Carl told him. “No hard feelings.”
Cooper refused. It’s going to be a good picture, he told Carl. He said he had always figured that both Stanley and Carl were left-wingers, but he liked the script. You know how I feel about Communism, he added, but you’re not a Communist now and anyway I like you, I think you’re an honest man, and I think you should do what you think is right. “I’m not leaving the picture,” said Cooper, “so that’s it.”
Carl was deeply moved. The conversation seemed to cement their partnership. From then on, Carl felt, he and Cooper were not just colleagues on a film project but allies. Cooper said he would explain the situation to Bruce Church, who, like Cooper, was a conservative Republican. Later on, he even volunteered to speak to the committee and tell them what a patriotic American Carl was—a suggestion that was vetoed by Cooper’s lawyer, I. H. Prinzmetal, and by Carl himself.
But things were hardening with Stanley and the other partners. Sam Katz called Carl for a meeting and Carl went to his office at Columbia. Katz said he understood and respected Carl’s position, but perhaps there were options Carl hadn’t considered. Do you have a lawyer? When Carl said no, Katz said he knew a man who could help.
After his successful defense of Sterling Hayden at the HUAC hearings in April, Martin Gang quickly established a reputation as the go-to lawyer for those seeking to forge some kind of compromise with the committee in order to continue working. He represented screenwriter Richard Collins and script reader Meta Reis Rosenberg during their testimony in April when each of them expressed their deep remorse for having joined the Communist Party and named the names of former comrades.
Gang wound up representing more informers than any other Hollywood lawyer—by his own estimate, some twenty movie people and thirty more in other professions. His justification was simple: he was helping worthy but misguided people stay out of prison and keep their jobs. He would not represent anyone who took the Fifth Amendment, arguing that if they were former Communists, as all of his clients claimed to be, they had not broken any law and therefore did not need the amendment’s protection. He claimed that his clients never initiated naming anyone, but simply confirmed names that the committee already had obtained. His own duty, he solemnly declared, was to his clients.
Gang’s parents were Eastern European Jews who came to the United States in the 1890s, and he himself was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1901. After graduating from Harvard, he spent part of the 1920s in Weimar Germany, where he eventually earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Heidelberg. He watched the systematic destruction of the German middle class by runaway inflation and open street warfare between Fascists and Communists. It made him suspicious of extremists of both political stripes and determined to pursue compromises to appease the powers that be. When he returned to America, he wound up earning a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley and made connections that brought him to Los Angeles at a time when the big studios were making the transition from family-owned businesses to modern companies. He joined Loeb, Walker, Loeb, a Jewish-owned firm that exercised a virtual monopoly on entertainment law. “Even when the big studios were run by Jews,” he recalled, “they didn’t care what you were or who you were if you had talent.”
Gang eventually launched his own entertainment law firm, and his long list of celebrity clients included Bob Hope, George Burns, Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, Lucille Ball, and Myrna Loy. He put up with their tantrums and their quirks. “Movie people are like everybody else, only more so,” he liked to say.
He represented Olivia de Havilland in her landmark lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the early 1940s establishing the right of a performer to terminate his or her contract at the end of seven years, rather than have it extended at the sole discretion of the studio. He also handled financial matters for right-wing columnist Hedda Hopper and left-wing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who called Gang “the industry expert in frying producers.”
Starting with the Hayden case, Gang got to know committee staff members like Frank Tavenner and Bill Wheeler and boasted of his ability to work with them. “Like most of these people, they’re human beings and you can appeal to their decency,” he told Victor Navasky. “And Wheeler and Tavenner were very helpful where people were not members of the Communist Party—they wouldn’t be helpful if they thought they were still members of the Communist Party.”
“I think I helped educate the committee that they’d do better with honey rather than vinegar,” he added. “Over the years they learned.”
Wheeler, said Gang, was “a nice man. I got to be very fond of him, I think I educated him kind of because I used to take him to dinner with people who were on his list. A lot of people he was personally convinced were okay he never pursued it. He met with them and talked to them and made up his own mind.” Wheeler “was doing a job and what I tried to do was to help my clients by presenting the facts to him in such a way that my clients would not be unnecessarily hurt. And if that’s a crime, you can convict me.”
There was another component to Gang’s role as well. Gang was a pillar of the Jewish community in Los Angeles, and he served as a bridge between the gentiles of HUAC and the Jews of Hollywood, both the studio moguls and those on the left. He himself didn’t believe the committee was anti-Semitic, but there were plenty of irresponsible people on the right compiling lists and making allegations. He wanted to protect genuine liberals—but not Communists—from being blacklisted. “I didn’t like the committee but I worked with it, because I had a responsibility to my clients and their lives,” he recalled.
Members of the Communist Party and those who had left the party but retained a sense of loyalty to their former comrades felt contempt for Gang—a feeling Carl shared. Rumor had it that Gang and his law firm made large fees off their political clients. (In fact, Gang plausibly claimed that his partners were not happy with his taking on these controversial cases, saying they made more enemies than friends and cost the firm between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars in lost legal fees.)
Gang met Carl at Columbia executive B. B. Kahane’s office. He told Carl he believed he could help him, provided Carl was willing to cooperate. All Carl had to do was repeat a handful of names that the committee already knew.
But Carl was adamant he wouldn’t name names, not even of those like the Hollywood Ten who had already been identified as Communists by multiple witnesses. “It was such a cowardly thing to do,” Carl said, and besides it was not a practical means of escape “because once you started naming somebody, they wouldn’t let you go until you named some live ones.”
Gang then lost patience. I’m a liberal, just like you, he told Carl, and I want you to come out of this okay. But these are terrible times, he went on. Carl should be aware that the government was preparing to reopen the concentration camp at Tule Lake, California, that had been built to detain Japanese Americans during World War Two. Only this time, Gang warned, the detainees would be leftists like Carl. “He had set out to frighten me, and he did,” Carl recalled. Still, Carl refused to budge.
Gang reported back to Sam Katz that Carl Foreman was being intransigent.
While Carl was secretly agonizing over what to do, fellow screenwriter (and director) Robert Rossen was also suffering. Rossen’s career should have been in high gear: in 1950 All the King’s Men had won three Academy Awards, including best picture. But Rossen was well known to be a former Communist Party member. He was one of the original nineteen men who had been subpoenaed by HUAC in 1947 and he often expressed disappointment that he hadn’t been called to testify. He seemed to have a taste for martyrdom.
Ever since that session the committee was on Rossen’s tail. Investigators had found 1943 party membership cards and numbers for him and his wife, Susan, and had developed a four-page typewritten single-spaced dossier on his Communist front connections and activities. An April 1951 memo named him as “one of the twelve most important Communists in the motion picture industry.”
Raised on the Lower East Side of New York, Rossen was known as a combative and difficult but highly talented writer. His screenplays for Warner Bros. in the 1930s and early forties helped set the studio’s trademark style of hard-bitten, fast-paced urban melodramas with gangsters, cops, and gunplay. He had gone on to become a leading director. His second film as a director was Body and Soul, the powerful 1947 boxing picture written by Abe Polonsky and starring John Garfield, both of whom were also prime HUAC targets.
Carl had first met Rossen in the late 1930s at the League of American Writers, where Rossen taught screenplay writing. Carl was not a big fan: he felt Rossen was more interested in telling stories of his many battles and principled stands against the studio bosses than in helping newcomers learn the trade. But he respected Rossen’s talent, and now he felt sorry for him as well.
By the summer of 1951, Rossen was drinking heavily. He would stop by the Foreman house almost every afternoon between four and five, ask Estelle for a drink, and wait for Carl to get home from the studio. Rossen was in agony: he felt squeezed by the HUAC investigators on the one hand and by his former comrades on the other. Carl, who was wrestling with the same dilemma, didn’t know what to say. “Now I had inherited Bob,” he would recall, with more than a touch of condescension. “Somehow, he was mine.”
Rossen did Carl one big favor: he introduced him to Sidney Cohn, a labor lawyer from New York. Besides Rossen, Cohn had several Hollywood clients who had been called by the committee, including screenwriters Leonardo Bercovici, Marguerite Roberts, and her husband, John Sanford. Cohn went to Sunday brunch at the Rossens’, and Bob and Sue invited Carl to stop by as well. Cohn agreed to meet with Carl afterward at his hotel, the Beverly Crest. Cohn listened quietly as Carl poured out his story. Afterward, Cohn asked two questions. Was Carl still a party member? And was he willing to become an informer and name names in order to salvage his career? Once Cohn was persuaded that the answer to both questions was a solid no, he agreed to represent Carl before the committee.
Carl told Cohn he was willing to go to jail for a year to defend the principle of not naming names. He said he believed that Stanley Kramer would hold his job for him and take care of Estelle and Kate while Carl was in jail. But Cohn said Carl would be crazy to accept any kind of prison sentence. You’re a screenwriter, not a labor leader, he told Carl. You have no leadership responsibilities, but you are responsible for your wife and daughter and any other members of your family who you help support. Why should you go to jail? The committee is morally corrupt and not worthy of your sacrifice. “You will beat them by not going to jail,” he told Carl.
Cohn said he favored a strategy that would keep Carl out of prison while preserving his honor. Cohn called it the “diminished Fifth.” A witness would assert he was not now a member of the Communist Party and had not been one at the time the subpoena was served. But when asked if he’d ever been a member, the witness would invoke the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination. There were two problems with this strategy. Legally, it was dubious: most lawyers argued that once a witness denied current membership, he waived his right to invoke the Fifth Amendment—it was all or nothing. And morally it was questionable: many of Carl’s friends on the left believed that answering any of the committee’s questions was a form of collaboration. But Carl was looking for an honorable position that he could live with, and Cohn’s idea suited him. Whether it would keep him off the blacklist was another matter. Carl was pretty sure it wouldn’t. “It’s the kind of situation in which you can’t win,” he later recalled, “but you feel you have to act in a certain way.”
Cohn was adamant that the committee was a collection of gangsters who deserved no respect. “Always bear in mind,” he told Carl, “that these people on the committee, they want to kill you. They would love you only if you turned whore for them … No matter what you say they are going to try and destroy you.”