I was convinced of Foreman’s loyalty, Americanism, and ability as a picture maker.
It took nearly a month for Sidney Cohn to work out a severance package for Carl Foreman. Their opening demand was for four years’ pay, based on the company’s projected profits and the value of Carl’s shares. Stanley’s lawyers first offered $18,000 but quickly raised it to $55,000. Carl’s forfeiture of credit as associate producer of High Noon was part of the bargaining from the beginning. The film’s opening credits began with “Stanley Kramer Presents,” but no producer was listed.
The final agreement, dated October 22, 1951, cited “differences of opinion” between the production company and Carl “with respect to the rights and obligations of the parties in connection with the completion of the product of said motion picture photoplay, and with respect to other matters.” He was relieved of his duties and would be paid his entire compensation for High Noon as previously agreed to. In return Carl waived his credit as producer or associate producer but retained the screenplay credit. No dollar amount was stipulated, but Carl and Cohn later put the final figure at roughly $150,000—the equivalent of $1.4 million in 2016 dollars, and far more than any other blacklisted screenwriter had received for an early termination of a contract (most got nothing). Once it leaked out, the reported amount of the final settlement engendered jealousy and astonishment among Carl’s colleagues and former comrades and was no doubt one of the reasons some of them later accused him of secretly selling out to the committee.
When the day came for the signing, all of the documents were laid out on a large table in Sam Zagon’s law office at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. At three P.M., Carl passed by Stanley, George Glass, and Sam Katz in the hallway without speaking. Sidney Cohn led him into the conference room, where Carl signed all of the papers, and Cohn suggested he go somewhere nearby while Sidney stayed behind to witness the signing by the others. The door was slamming shut on one of the most creative partnerships in Hollywood.
Carl walked to the Brown Derby just a block down Vine Street and ordered a drink at the bar. Peering into the darkness he noticed two men sitting at a nearby table. It was Bill Wheeler, HUAC’s Hollywood investigator, and Lloyd Bridges. Wheeler, always affable, gave Carl a grin, while Lloyd waved weakly. Carl walked over. He told Wheeler what a coincidence this was because he had just come from signing a settlement agreement ending his relationship with the Stanley Kramer Company—a process that had been set in motion when Wheeler had handed him a subpoena five months earlier. “And what are you doing here, Bud?” Carl asked Bridges, using Lloyd’s nickname.
Bridges looked embarrassed. He launched into a tangled explanation of his brief involvement with the Communist Party: he hadn’t known what he was joining, and he had been in it only for a few weeks and had left without knowing what it was all about, and now Wheeler was helping him get out of the mess he found himself in. Wheeler nodded and explained to Carl that Lloyd would be testifying in a closed session and everything would be all right.
Carl nodded but didn’t say anything; he just got up and left.
As it turned out, Lloyd Bridges didn’t get off the hook so lightly. Unlike Carl, he hired Martin Gang and gave testimony in executive session to Wheeler in which he confessed his past membership in the party and named a half dozen other members. Still, he hadn’t passed the test. For a year after High Noon came out, he had problems finding work. Film producer Frank King told Gang that Bridges’s name was on studio lists as politically unacceptable. Gang wrote letters on his client’s behalf, only to learn that Roy Brewer, now serving as chairman of the board of the Motion Picture Alliance, had tagged Bridges as an unrepentant Red.
There’s no indication that Gang’s letters did any good; Bridges still had trouble getting parts. Looking back forty years later, Bridges was careful to deny he had ever been involved with the Communist Party. “I felt after I did High Noon that my future would be pretty rosy, but anyone who was sort of liberal in those days or wanting to do anything about improving humanity kind of suffered,” he recalled. “And I was part of an organization called the Actors’ Lab and there apparently were quite a few Communists in that organization, so I suppose that was one of the reasons I was put on the list. Didn’t work for several years.” Bridges eventually got the starring role in Sea Hunt, a television program that revived his career. But it was a syndicated show, not a national network program, presumably because the networks were more cautious about hiring people whose names were on someone’s list.
In fact, Bridges was one of a half dozen or so people involved with High Noon who were either outright blacklisted or deemed politically tainted. Carl had hired two of them—supporting actors Howland Chamberlin and Virginia Farmer—knowing full well that they were about to be called to testify and would soon be blacklisted. “I did this because, as far as I was concerned, this would be their last job and they would certainly need the money,” Carl later recalled. He did not care that his “former friends at the company would say that son of a bitch, right down to the last he was taking care of his Communist friends.” Chamberlin got $750 for one week of work.
Both Chamberlin and Farmer had been named by Rena Vale, a former Communist Party member turned star witness for the California legislature’s Red-hunting Tenney Committee in the early 1940s—testimony that was readily available to HUAC’s investigators. Vale described several meetings of party members working in the arts that had been held at Farmer’s house in Santa Monica; Chamberlin, who was a member and organizer of the party’s cultural unit, had been an occasional participant, Vale said, as had Chamberlin’s wife, actress Leona McGenty.
Chamberlin, with his slicked-back hair, pencil mustache, and eternally cynical expression, played many an unprincipled stool pigeon in his career as an actor. In High Noon he played the sneeringly sardonic hotel clerk who takes pleasure in explaining to newly married Amy Kane the reasons for his deep personal dislike of her husband. But on the witness stand before HUAC, Chamberlin was a defiant man of principle. “My present occupation is an actor, and I find it deeply repugnant and profoundly un-American to be smeared, blacklisted, and strangled economically by my presence before this committee,” he declared.
Chairman Wood immediately objected: “Just a moment, just a moment will you, please … Will you please cease just a moment when I interrupt you? … Will you please spare us your opinion as to the standing, intelligence, veracity, moral character of members of this committee and its staff, and answer the questions that are directed to you, because we are not concerned at all about your opinions of us.”
Chamberlin had spent most of his acting career on the stage. His first motion picture was The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, and he’d had nearly a dozen small movie roles since then. Citing director William Wyler’s claim that he couldn’t have made the picture five years later because of the atmosphere of fear, Chamberlin added, “I charge that this committee is responsible in helping create this kind of an atmosphere which features censorship.” The committee couldn’t wait to dismiss him from the witness table.
Farmer’s appearance was even briefer. She tried to read a statement invoking the principles of her Pilgrim ancestors in explaining her opposition to the committee, but Wood cut her off. Farmer’s statement concluded, “Never have I felt … so deservedly the daughter of my fathers and mothers as I do in taking the stand that I take today, upon the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution before this committee.”
Actor Jeff Corey also took the fifth when called. Corey had played the psychiatrist in Home of the Brave and was one of Stanley Kramer’s favorite character actors. He told the committee he had been graylisted in April 1951 after fellow actor Marc Lawrence named him as a former party member. “Hitherto I had been quite busy as an actor, but my professional fortunes have waned considerably, coincident with the mentioning of my name.”
Chairman Wood cut Corey off when he sought to explain why he was invoking the Fifth Amendment, saying he wanted no further speeches. “I seem to have worn you gentlemen out successfully,” Corey replied—and soon left the witness table.
Corey became a speech therapist, coached drama students, and did construction work. He didn’t get another professional acting job until 1961.
“All I had to do was drop the two required names in the basket, and I would have been permitted to work,” he said. “I didn’t choose to. I thought it degrading, and a man has to live with himself.”
High Noon cameraman Floyd Crosby never got his day in front of the committee. Crosby didn’t find out he was blacklisted until the following year when Fred Zinnemann tried to hire him to work as a second-unit cameraman on From Here to Eternity at Columbia Pictures. Fred met with resistance, and when he pushed for a reason, someone at the studio explained, “Well, he’s on the list.” Crosby said he had belonged to a group that wanted to make left-wing films. “I don’t know if it was a blacklist, but a graylist, anyway,” he said. He wound up signing a statement saying he had never been a Communist and sent one copy to the cameraman’s union and the other to Columbia. He got the job on Eternity, but other mainstream studios were reluctant to employ him, even though he was considered one of the best in the business. He finally got hired by independent filmmaker Roger Corman. Crosby helped Corman churn out discount B-style pictures such as Attack of the Crab Monsters, Machine Gun Kelly, and Teenage Caveman, followed by a series of Edgar Allan Poe films that became cult classics, including The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, and The Raven. Connoisseurs of great camera work discerned and admired his distinctive touch in these films, but Crosby seldom got to practice it in high-profile mainstream movies.
“Floyd Crosby was certainly not a Communist, but during the fifties, some studios did not like him,” Corman recalled. “However, that meant nothing to me. I used him simply because he was a good cameraman.”
Two days after the separation agreement to leave the Kramer Company was signed, Carl Foreman announced that he was forming his own production company, with the financial support of Gary Cooper and others, including Robert L. Lippert, a wealthy California investor looking to launch a new film production company and a distribution network. Henry Rogers, a friend of Carl’s who was a leading figure in Hollywood in entertainment publicity, agreed to do PR for the new company. The announcement topped the next day’s Daily Variety.
Cooper said he, his wife, Rocky, and his father-in-law all wanted to be stockholders in the new company. “Use my name,” Cooper told Carl. “I mean it.” Then the actor went off to Idaho for a hunting and fishing trip with his pal Ernest Hemingway.
Carl was skeptical; he told I. H. Prinzmetal, Cooper’s lawyer, that a business relationship with Cooper was surely doomed because of politics. But Cooper refused to see any difficulty: Carl had testified truthfully, Cooper reckoned, and should now be allowed to go on with his life and career. Prinzmetal’s usual role was to protect his star client from bad decision-making. But Prinzmetal said Cooper in this case was capable of making his own decision. “It’s not a gesture,” Prinzmetal assured Carl. “He really feels that you’re going to be a very profitable operation.”
In standing up for Carl, Cooper was delivering an unsubtle blow to his friends and allies on the hard right and demonstrating moral courage and a newly refined sense of political right and wrong. Pat Neal encouraged him to do so. She felt Cooper, who had a deep aversion to personal conflict, had let her down by not pressing Warners for her to get the juicier female role in Bright Leaf (1950), the second film they did together (the part went to Lauren Bacall instead). Now she urged him to stand up for Carl. “You mustn’t let him down,” she told Cooper.
Within days, the unofficial guardians of Americanism in Hollywood mobilized to sabotage Carl’s plans. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons attacked Carl on her radio program, and I. E. Chadwick, head of Independent Motion Picture Producers Association, registered a protest with Lippert, who was one of his newest members. In addition, Steve Trilling, production executive at Warners, warned Prinzmetal that Cooper’s partnership with Carl could jeopardize the studio’s investment in future Cooper films. Even more troubling, Prinzmetal told Carl that Jack Warner had called him and threatened to invoke the morals clause to break Cooper’s contract.
Behind the scenes, John Wayne was also putting the heat on Cooper. “Was Wayne pressuring him? Oh yeah,” Maria Cooper Janis recalls. “I don’t know if he met with him personally, but I know very clearly from hearing the family talk, and my father at one point said Wayne’s bit was if you do this [with Foreman] you’ll never work in this town again. He was very ugly about it.”
The most virulent public opposition was conducted by Hedda Hopper, who didn’t hesitate to name and shame one of her favorite movie stars in her column. “I’m amazed to hear that Gary Cooper would become a stockholder in Carl Foreman Productions,” she wrote on October 30, six days after Carl’s announcement. “Foreman not only would not answer the $64 question but was an unfriendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
When he read Hopper’s column, Carl fired off a telegram, noting that he had told the committee he had voluntarily signed an oath in September 1950 stating that he was not a member of the Communist Party. “My only desire, Miss Hopper, is to go on making the kind of pictures that I have been associated with in the past and in that manner to make a positive contribution to the American way,” he wrote.
But Hopper was not remotely appeased. Two days later, she published Foreman’s telegram in her column and noted he had only answered part of her question. “No, Mr. Foreman, my reference was to the full $64 question—Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?
“Okay, Mr. Foreman, that is $32 worth of the $64 question, and I believe, knowing Mr. Gary Cooper’s Americanism and his contemplated association with you, he would be as interested as I am in the remainder of the answer.”
Cooper folded that same day. While his PR agent issued a statement in Hollywood, Cooper personally called Hopper from Idaho. “I was convinced of Foreman’s loyalty, Americanism, and ability as a picture maker,” he told Hopper, whose news story was published on the front page of the next morning’s L.A. Times. “My opinion of Foreman has not changed.” However, Hopper reported, “since the announcement Gary said he had received notice of considerable reaction and thinks it better for all concerned that he does not purchase any stock.”
“Gary said he will be back sometime next week, and meanwhile he plans to roam the hinterlands of Idaho in search of fish and game with several male companions.”
It had taken just a week from Carl’s announcement of Cooper’s support for one of Hollywood’s biggest stars to change his mind. Even Gary Cooper couldn’t stand up to the blacklist.
Foreman graciously said he had pleaded with Cooper to withdraw from the agreement because the pressure might harm Cooper’s career. If he felt let down by Cooper, Carl never said so.
“Gary Cooper is the finest kind of an American and one of the most decent men I have ever met,” said Carl in his written response to Cooper’s withdrawal. “I regret to lose him as a business associate and I hope to keep him always as a friend.”
Others were getting cold feet as well. José Ferrer’s agent shot down the prospect of Ferrer signing to do a film for Carl’s company. “I don’t care what Joe Ferrer says,” the agent, Kurt Frings, told Carl. “I will never allow him to work with you. He would only get in trouble.” Frings told Carl he had fled Europe when the Nazis came into power and feared something similar could be happening in the United States. He urged Carl to make his peace with HUAC or face the prospect of being sent to an internment camp once the backlash began. Carl also met with Bette Davis and her new husband, actor Gary Merrill. Davis urged him to buy a script she owned and cast her in the movie. Here too nothing happened.
The pressure continued to build. Henry Rogers, the PR man, was told by his business partner, Warren Cowan, that talent agents were threatening to pull their prestige clients like James Stewart, Fred MacMurray, and Rosalind Russell from the firm. Rogers told Carl that most of the pressure was coming from John Wayne. So Carl told Rogers to set up a meeting. He and Wayne met the following Saturday morning at a wood-paneled office in Beverly Hills. The two men were so tense that they agreed to go for coffee to settle their nerves. Then they returned to the office and got down to business.
John Wayne was Hollywood aristocracy, whereas Carl Foreman, for all his Oscar nominations, was just a writer. Still, the two men went toe to toe. Carl told Wayne that Henry Rogers was innocent of any Communist tarnish. Wayne said he believed him and that all Rogers had to do was terminate his contract with Carl’s company and Wayne and his pals would leave him alone. But Wayne’s real purpose was to convince Carl to go back to the committee and cooperate. Wayne said he was still angry with Gary Cooper for betraying the principles of the Motion Picture Alliance by backing Carl—after all, Cooper was an Alliance board member—and that Carl would be hurting Cooper further if he didn’t recant. As for Carl, Wayne warned, he would never work in film until he testified again.
Carl said he might just go to Europe and work there for a while until things settled down. What makes you think you’ll be able to leave? Wayne asked him. Carl took that as a threat. The meeting ended with Wayne still frustrated and Carl feeling scared. He resolved to obtain a passport straightaway.
Carl felt bullied by Wayne, who had dodged military service during World War Two and seemed to be trying to assuage his guilt by waging political and economic war against those deemed to be Communists. But even on this battlefront, Wayne arrived on the scene after the war already had been won and Hollywood’s small band of Communists were in full retreat. “His role,” in the acidic words of cultural historian Gary Wills, “was to emerge after the battle and shoot the wounded.”
Carl had one other bizarre meeting that winter, with Martin Berkeley, his chief accuser, arranged by Prinzmetal, Cooper’s lawyer. To Carl, Berkeley seemed strangely deflated—not at all the ebullient witness for the prosecution who had blown the whistle on his former comrades with such passionate enthusiasm. Things hadn’t quite worked out for Berkeley. His old friends on the left despised him for being a stool pigeon, while those on the right distrusted him for much the same reason, and both sides were repelled by his undisguised pleasure in the spotlight. Carl accused Berkeley of having lied about seeing Carl at Communist Party meetings. To be perfectly honest, Berkeley replied, he couldn’t recall exactly where or when he had seen Carl, but he was quite sure he had. Carl then recited for Berkeley chapter and verse of their two meetings over the years, neither of which had taken place at party events. Berkeley squirmed but insisted that he had testified correctly. In the end, Carl desperately wanted to sue Berkeley for perjury but Sidney Cohn convinced him it would be an utter waste of time. Any successful lawsuit would require Carl to testify fully about his party membership and name other members as well—something Carl would never do.
Bob Rossen urged Carl and Estelle to get passports in case Carl had to leave the country to find work. At first Carl resisted, but after his chilling meeting with John Wayne, he decided to follow Rossen’s advice. He and Estelle took the train to New York and applied for their passports far from the high-volume hysteria of Los Angeles, while they checked out the Broadway scene to see if there might be a place for him there as a writer. They saw twelve plays in fourteen days, but Carl was unimpressed with much of the work and came to the conclusion he desperately wanted to stay in films. After they picked up their new passports, Carl and Estelle boarded a train and returned to L.A.
Carl was a committed movie guy. He passionately believed in them as the most successful and popular art form ever invented. The golden age of movies might be over—Carl wasn’t exactly sure it had ever truly existed—but he was certain that the best, most creative work in popular culture was still being done in Hollywood. He had never really wanted to work anywhere else, and he still hoped he wouldn’t have to. He remained convinced that somehow, after the dust settled, he would be allowed to keep working.
But any hopes Carl still held for his new production company were soon shattered. By January 1952 he was hearing from friends that Roy Brewer had put out the word that anyone who worked on a movie with Carl would find himself blacklisted. Bob Lippert, the producer who had agreed to help finance Carl’s first three films, met with Carl to say that Brewer had threatened him directly. “Maybe you ought to go to England,” Lippert told Carl.
In the end, Carl had no choice but to agree. His dream of forming his own independent company had died, killed in the cradle by forces he could barely see, let alone fight against.
In retrospect, Carl had been either extraordinarily optimistic or extraordinarily naïve—perhaps both—to think that he could survive the blacklist with the help of loyal friends. Whatever their initial intentions, there was no way Stanley Kramer or Gary Cooper or anyone else could or would stand up against the repression.
“My partners, you know, saw their own futures and careers trembling in the balance, because of their guilt by association with me, and they behaved as a great many other people did,” said Carl.
Walter Bernstein, a Communist Party member who wrote screenplays and television dramas under various pseudonyms for a decade after he was blacklisted (and also wrote Inside Out, a compelling memoir of the era), is a stern critic of informers and all of the justifications for betrayal that people offered for naming names. But he agrees that liberals like Stanley Kramer stood no chance of protecting their colleagues on the left. “If they’d taken a stand they would have been canned,” says Bernstein. “Sure, it would have been great if [Kramer] had stood up and quit or been fired and gone on to something else. But it was the Cold War. No one was willing to do that.”
George Stevens Jr., whose father was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, agrees. “There’s no underestimating the sense of fear and vulnerability and ruthlessness of the studios,” he says. “People were worried about being put out of business. What could Stanley Kramer have done? Nothing.”
In late April, Carl booked a one-way passage on the French ocean liner Liberté, hopped a train at Union Station in Los Angeles, and returned to New York. Bob Rossen, now seeking work on Broadway, was there to greet him. Rossen went out with Carl almost every night. While he had been right to urge Carl to get a passport, it turned out that he had failed to secure a new one for himself. Rossen was trapped in the United States: he couldn’t leave the country but he couldn’t get work in the only field he knew and cared about. But there was nothing Carl could do to help him. “He was a very ambitious man and a talented man, and he couldn’t work,” Carl recalled. On May 6, 1952, the day the ship set off across the Atlantic, Rossen joined Sid Cohn in waving good-bye to Carl from the pier.
Carl was in cabin class and was certain he would be shunned by any Hollywood folks on board. Right away he ran into one of the biggest stars, Clark Gable, who was traveling with producer Cy Howard, an acquaintance of Carl’s. Both men were booked in first class, of course. Carl didn’t want to embarrass them or himself, but Howard insisted he join them for dinner. Carl wore his dinner jacket, which men of stature tended to pack wherever they went. Like Gary Cooper, Gable was a supporter of the Motion Picture Alliance and a staunch anti-Communist, but Howard said Carl would like him—“he’s really a nice guy.” At dinner that evening Gable told Carl he vehemently opposed Communism but respected Carl’s decision not to rat on his friends.
When the Liberté pulled into Southampton port six days later, Carl felt a sense of liberation that could not be deflated even after the British immigration officer granted him only a thirty-day stay. It was a beautiful day, and Carl took the train to London and checked into the swank Savoy Hotel. Then he walked the streets of Westminster, past Westminster Palace, Ten Downing Street, and St. James’s Park, comforted somehow to see these monuments to British civilization and parliamentary democracy at a time when he felt betrayed by his own country. He was surprised to learn that people knew and respected his work and were puzzled and indignant over the blacklist and the Red scare. “It seems as if I can write my own ticket here if I want to,” he wrote to Fred Zinnemann in a cheerful “Hi Freddie” letter a few weeks after he arrived.
Early on he went to see James Carreras, a business associate of Bob Lippert, the film distributor Carl had hoped to work with back in Los Angeles. Carreras was charming and friendly but told Carl frankly, “Lippert should never have sent you over to me. I make terrible pictures … I just make pictures to make money … but this is not what you want to do.” The funding fell through almost immediately on a picture Carl had hoped to make with Marlene Dietrich. He traveled to Paris, Rome, and Berlin, and he met fellow exiled screenwriters like Ben and Norma Barzman. Everyone was cordial and supportive, and various film studios offered him assignments under the table at very low rates of pay. But Carl had his settlement money from the Kramer Company and his pride; he resolved to himself not to take anything just for the sake of working.
Almost immediately he discovered he was suffering from the worst writer’s block of his life. He couldn’t even write a short letter to Estelle. He tried working on a screenplay, but “every page was agony, and every page was lifeless and dull.”
“At that time I had it very bad,” he would recall. “When I sat down to the typewriter, instead of writing ‘Fade in’ or ‘Scene One,’ I would find myself writing, in effect, a letter to the editor, any editor! ‘Dear sir. Do you know what they’re doing to me?’ You see, I was full of rage and self-pity.”
Most of those letters ended up in the trash. But Carl sent the longest and angriest—an eleven-page dissection—to his friend Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic whose rave review of High Noon would help propel it to success. He started off by declaring how “tremendously pleased and proud” he was of the film. But then he launched into a “completely and unequivocally off the record” account of the genesis of and making of the film and his bitter falling out with Stanley Kramer: the Columbia deal, the purchase of the rights to “The Tin Star,” how Stanley had stepped away and left him and Fred to work on High Noon on their own, how he had written it as an allegory for the blacklist, how Stanley, Sam Katz, and George Glass had sought to bully him into cooperating with the committee and tried to fire him from the picture when he refused, how Cooper and Zinnemann and Church had forced Stanley to back down, and how Carl had decided to go to London for a while because “I finally got tired of watching the darkness settle in on Hollywood, tired of watching people being hammered and pressured until they crumbled, tired of being offered black market deals and all the rest.”
He mentioned the prospect of a writer-producer contract with the prestigious Rank Organisation, Britain’s leading entertainment company. “On the whole, I think I’d like to work here,” he told Crowther. “Certainly it’s nice to be wanted.” The problem, “between you and me,” he added, “is that all I know or really care about is America and the American scene. I don’t know if I could do an honest job on an English picture, or a French or Italian one—at least until I’d lived in those places for quite a while.” Time would tell, Carl concluded.
Estelle finally reached him on the phone. “I thought you were only going for three weeks,” she told him. “What’s happening? You haven’t written. Are you coming home?” The answer was no. A few weeks later, Estelle and Kate left for London.
They arrived to a husband and father who seemed lost in many ways, untethered from the place he loved and the work he felt he had been born to do. “The whole fabric of one’s existence was torn in many respects forever,” he would later write, and “it created in almost all the writers I know a feeling of vast unease and depression and loss of confidence.”