I am not going to hang anybody that doesn’t deserve it.
The walls were closing in on Carl Foreman, or so it must have felt. He was in the middle of the High Noon film shoot, while starting preliminary work on The Happy Time and The Member of the Wedding, the two pictures he would be dealing with once High Noon was completed. And of course he had to prepare for his own special performance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The morning after his meeting with Stanley Kramer, Carl decided to stay home from the film set to get some sleep because he knew he wouldn’t be needed. At around ten, Carl flipped on the television to KTTV, the local station owned by the Los Angeles Times, to catch the opening of the hearings, which the station was broadcasting live. There was a fellow screenwriter, a slightly familiar-looking man in glasses, marching forward to the witness table.
From the moment he swept into crammed and claustrophobic Room 518 of the Federal Building in Los Angeles with his wife, Kathleen, and his legendary Washington lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, by his side, Martin Berkeley took command of the committee’s hearings like a professional actor storming into an amateur production of Witness for the Prosecution.
First came a touch of melodrama. Williams, who was also counsel for the Red-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy, announced that his client had received three phone calls over the previous week threatening his life and that of his wife if he testified. The latest had come two days earlier from a man who had warned, “If you name any names that have not already been named you will be sorry.”
Nonetheless, here he was, Martin Berkeley, defying death to bring the truth to the committee and the American people.
Then, a touch of contrition. After being sworn in, Berkeley told the committee that his previous telegram denying he had ever been a Communist had been “very silly.”
“I did it in a moment of panic,” he explained, “and was a damn fool.”
And now the true story supposedly could begin. Berkeley said he had first gone to Communist Party meetings in New York in 1936 and had joined the party later that year. When he got to Hollywood the following year, one of his friends sent him to meet screenwriter Guy Endore, who introduced him to fellow screenwriter Frank Tuttle, and he went to Frank and Sonia Tuttle’s home, where he heard V. J. Jerome give a lecture on the evils of Trotskyism. Jerome had been briefly assigned as West Coast commissar, dispatched by national party headquarters in New York to put together the infrastructure and raise money to launch the new Hollywood branch. “His job was so good that we are all here today because of it,” said Berkeley, venturing a teaspoonful of irony.
Then a solemn caveat. “I will not mention a name unless I am dead certain that this person was a member … ” Berkeley insisted, “because I am not going to hang anybody that doesn’t deserve it.” But apparently dozens and dozens of people did deserve it. Berkeley spent the next hour serving up name after name, mopping the sweat off his shiny brow with a large white handkerchief as he proceeded. By the time he finished, he had named more than 150 people—close to half the total number of film-industry Communists—a never-to-be-broken HUAC Hollywood record.
“My dad was not cruel or difficult, so for him to do what he did seemed a fair amount out of character,” says his son Bill, a teenager at the time. “To me, it was the act of somebody who was just desperately trying to survive. But because of him, a lot of people lost their livelihood.”
According to Martin Berkeley, Jerome and his comrades had several objectives, including organizing the Screen Writers Guild, forming the Directors Guild, expanding the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and forging the Motion Picture Democratic Committee to support FDR’s reelection campaign. The first local party meeting had been held at Berkeley’s house in June 1937 because he had a large living room and ample space for parking. He rattled off the list of distinguished attendees, including Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and “that very excellent playwright, Lillian Hellman.”
Jerome worked closely with John Howard Lawson, a founder and first president of the Screen Writers Guild, whom Berkeley labeled “the grand Poo-Bah of the Communist movement from that day, I promise, until this. He speaks with the voice of Stalin and the bells of the Kremlin.” The two commissars had assigned Berkeley to infiltrate the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees trade union coalition and help get rid of its corrupt leadership.
Then he sprinkled some more names into his tale, including actress Virginia Farmer and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Arnold Manoff.
And then Carl Foreman: “That is spelled F-O-R-E-M-A-N. I believe he wrote the screenplay of Cyrano de Bergerac and Champion and other very fine pictures.”
Committee attorney Frank Tavenner asked whether Carl held a position at the Screen Writers Guild. “I am glad you asked me that, sir, because that is very important,” Berkeley replied. “There is on the Guild today only one man I know who was ever a Communist. This man has never, to my knowledge, disavowed his Communism. His name is Carl Foreman.”
He added, “I hope he appears here, sir, and clears himself, because it will help me clear the guild and that is a job I want to do.”
Watching at home, Carl was stunned. He’d only met the guy once or twice, so far as he could recall, and never at a Communist Party event.
Berkeley denied that party members wielded much influence over the content of the films they worked on. He described how actor Lionel Stander had once boasted that he had managed to whistle four bars of the “Internationale,” the Communist workers’ anthem, in the 1938 film No Time to Marry in a scene where he was waiting for an elevator. “But that was about the extent of what the Communists were able to do,” Berkeley said. “A picture goes through too many hands. It is controlled by too many minds for any single writer or producer or actor to affect its content.”
The main goals of the Communist Party in Hollywood, he added, were prestige and money. He recalled how members had launched various groups to collect funds for Democratic candidates. “That money never got where it was going, I’m sorry to say. It went, organizationally, I am convinced, to the Communist Party.”
As for his own break with the party, Berkeley said he had first gotten into trouble when he was assigned at MGM to write a screenplay with a prominent right-wing writer. His comrades pressured him to quit the assignment, but he refused. He also had been shaken by the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. He had become convinced that the party was stealing money donated to the anti-Fascist cause: “My belief was that these men were essentially thieves.” He had also been upset when loyal comrades Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins had tried to load Song of Russia with pro-Soviet propaganda.
He had left the party in 1943 in a burst of antagonism, aligned himself with the anti-Communist faction of the Screen Writers Guild, and helped form a committee “whose sole purpose was to get control of the guild board away from the Reds and return it to the membership.” It had worked, he claimed, with his usual lack of modesty. “We got rid of the rats … and Hollywood is a better place in which to live, let me tell you.
“Since then, I have devoted every moment that I could to fight the party.
“I am not a reactionary, I am not a Fascist … I am a liberal, middle-of-the-roader who says that the liberal movement in this country was destroyed by the Communists.”
Of course there was a terrible price to pay for his high-minded idealism. Berkeley said he had been largely unemployed since he had walked away from the party. His former comrades were conspiring against him. His own agent, George Willner, had deliberately sabotaged his career by turning down potential screenwriting assignments. “A writer employed for ten straight years, writing commercial success after commercial success, suddenly for nineteen months finds he can’t get a job,” complained Berkeley, who didn’t allow the fact he was under oath to constrain his admiration for his own work.
Representative Potter asked him if he believed that party members were dedicated to defending the Soviet Union “over and above their citizenship responsibility to defending the United States of America.”
Berkeley’s reply: “Mr. Potter, I believe that anyone who was then a member of the party or joined the party since 1945 and who retains his membership today is a traitor.” This became a definition that the committee readily embraced and adopted for its own.
The congressmen thanked him profusely, not just in the name of the committee but, as Chairman Wood put it, on behalf of “every liberty-loving American citizen.”
Then they swept him into an executive session where he named a dozen more names, after which the tributes continued to flow. “What you have done is probably as valuable as calling up the National Guard for the whole state,” gushed Representative Walter.
Berkeley returned the compliment. “I think this committee has done a great deal to break the backbone of the party,” he replied. He then suggested that Congress double HUAC’s appropriation, and threw in some praise for Bill Wheeler as well. “I have never seen a man work as hard as that boy over there does.”
Even as he testified that afternoon, the Los Angeles Herald & Examiner hit the streets with the front-page headline: DEFIES DEATH THREAT TO ACCUSE ‘BIG SHOTS’ and a photo of an anxious-looking Berkeley mopping his brow. “Death threats today failed to stop former Broadway Playwright Martin Berkeley, now a Hollywood film writer, from creating the biggest sensations to date in the Los Angeles hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” Berkeley, the Herald reported, “dropped one bombshell after another” and “electrified the committee.”
The next morning’s Los Angeles Times featured a banner headline over the nameplate: COMMUNIST QUIZ GOES ON DESPITE THREATS. The lead paragraph was Berkeley’s claim that “uncounted millions of dollars have been siphoned from Hollywood into the coffers of the Kremlin.” An inside story listed all 152 names; but not one of them had been contacted for a response, although the paper did report that an actress named Patricia Segar Miller had contacted the Times to make clear she was not the Patricia Miller cited on Berkeley’s list. The Times was a feudal kingdom of conservative purity but its rules on coverage were not all that unusual: none of the major newspapers bothered to contact the people named as Communists in the hearings. Legally, it was not required; all testimony given to a congressional hearing, no matter how libelous or unsupported by evidence, could be reported without fear of legal consequence, and therefore no newspaper seemed to bother with it.
The same front page further reflected the circumstances fueling the anti-Communist fever. The lead headline proclaimed REDS ASK NEW TRUCE TALKS, while an accompanying piece reported that Allied and North Korean troops were “locked in a swaying death grapple” in the mountains of eastern Korea. Yet another article reported the latest Defense Department figures that 83,257 American soldiers had been killed or wounded or were missing in the fifteen-month-long conflict. The numbers were mounting, and so was the sense that America was again under siege.
Shaken and sickened by what he’d seen and heard on TV, Carl decided he had to go to the Columbia Ranch that afternoon to let the cast and crew know what had happened before they read it in the evening papers. He told them when he got there about Berkeley’s testimony and the fact that he himself would soon have to testify. He said he might be away from the set for several days, but he didn’t want any of these matters to affect the film, and he expected everyone to continue their hard work for Fred.
Like many Hollywood film sets in those troubled times, the cast and crew of High Noon were deeply divided and on edge over politics, with suspicions high and some people avoiding each other. But they had worked together closely and professionally on the set. People seemed shocked by what Carl told them, but they generally smiled and offered their support. As Carl walked back to the parking lot, he heard Cooper call after him. “Uncle, that’s the best speech I ever heard,” said Cooper. He choked up and put his arm around Carl.
“Do what you have to do,” Gary Cooper told him. “But kid, don’t let them put you in jail.”