I can tell in five minutes if a person is a Communist. I’m never wrong.
While Carl Foreman was driven from the Promised Land of Hollywood, his celebrated accuser was embraced. Martin Berkeley was quickly recruited to become an important cog in the intricate machinery of the blacklist.
It was a multilayered process. The Motion Picture Industry Council presided over the official version, sending its members—the studios, unions, and talent guilds—lists of names of those like Carl who had been called to appear before HUAC and had refused to cooperate, as well as those named as Communists by so-called “friendly” witnesses. These suspected subversives were purged from the employment rolls. Until they repented and cooperated with the committee, they were banned from working in Hollywood.
But the studios had pledged to go even farther. The 1947 Waldorf Statement committed them to firing anyone who was in the Communist Party whether they had been called to testify or not. In practice this extended well beyond party members to anyone who had ever supported an organization identified as a Communist front by HUAC, the Tenney Committee, the FBI, or citizens’ groups like the American Legion, as well as Alert, Counterattack, and Red Channels, the Red-baiting publications that listed such fronts and their members.
This was a vast undertaking. Rather than simply working off lists of names compiled from these various sources, the process quickly evolved into something far more elaborate: the “graylisting” of anyone who failed to sign a loyalty statement. Each major studio assigned a top-ranking official to be responsible for vetting employees and “keeping Communists and suspected Communists off the payroll,” as studio executive Y. Frank Freeman of Paramount put it. Freeman, a regular informant for the FBI, told the bureau that at Paramount, “no talent whatever is hired without being as thoroughly screened as it is possible for the studio to do … The same situation exists at such studios as Universal-International, Warner Brothers Pictures, and Columbia Pictures.”
The graylist sounded less sinister than the blacklist, but as former Hollywood Ten member Edward Dmytryk pointed out, it was in many ways worse. “I was blacklisted, I knew why I was blacklisted, and when I so desired, I knew how to get off the blacklist,” he recalled. “The graylisted, on the other hand, although generally left-wingers, were almost never Communists and usually had no knowledge of their transgressions or even that they had transgressed. They knew they weren’t working, but they didn’t know why.”
It was a diffuse, often haphazard system, subject to the whims and failings of those who ran it and the so-called experts—ex-Communists, former FBI investigators, amateur right-wing ideologues—who fed it. Roy Brewer, the union leader who became chairman of the Motion Picture Alliance, was its de facto ruler. The American Legion played an important role. In March 1952 its leaders met in Washington, D.C., with Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, and representatives of the eight major Hollywood studios. The Legion expressed sympathy with the efforts of the studios to purge themselves of all Communists and sympathizers. At the same time, they warned that if they weren’t satisfied with the studios’ efforts, local Legion posts around the country would be free to organize boycotts of particular movies and the studios that made them. The Legion followed up the meeting with a letter to the eight studios, naming some three hundred people it considered suspect. All of them were required to sign loyalty oaths and denounce past transgressions if they wanted to continue to work in movies.
The system was financially corrupt: those seeking clearance had to hire well-connected lawyers or else employ former FBI or HUAC agents who formed the “smear-and-clear” organizations that published lists of alleged subversives and then helped people clear their names for a fee. But its moral corruption was equally striking. When actress Gale Sondergaard pleaded with the Screen Actors Guild to support her legal effort to oppose the blacklist, the guild board, led by Ronald Reagan, declared it would fight any blacklist, but added: “On the other hand, if any actor by his own actions outside of union activities has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employer to hire him.” Using this twisted reasoning, Reagan, Brewer, John Wayne, Hedda Hopper, and other enforcers of the blacklist could deny it existed.
The Motion Picture Alliance played a key role in the clearance process. In its October 1951 newsletter, the Alliance issued an invitation to those who felt they had been wrongly accused or who were ready to recant their previous involvement with Communism. “If there be any such,” read the invitation, “the Motion Picture Alliance hereby offers its cooperation to help them clear their names or their consciences.”
But a bitter divide opened up within the Alliance over the question of just how to deal with reformed Communists. The hard-line faction, led by Hopper, argued that ex-Communists should receive no help in returning to work. Just as she had scorned Larry Parks’s tearful anti-Communist testimony in March 1951, she now questioned the sincerity of Eddie Dmytryk’s repentance because he apparently hadn’t demonstrated a suitable level of remorse for his past radicalism. In a column, Hopper endorsed the view of Albert Maltz, a Hollywood Ten member who had once been one of Dmytryk’s closest friends. “I think Maltz hit the nail on the head,” wrote Hopper, “when he wrote: ‘Dmytryk has not now made a peace with his conscience. He has made it with his pocketbook and his career.’”
The opposing faction, led by Brewer, argued that redemption should be possible and helped Dmytryk find work. Brewer and actor Ward Bond, one of John Wayne’s best friends, formed an informal committee to coordinate and rule on the acceptability of letters submitted to the studios by employees seeking clearance. They recruited right-wing newspaper columnist George Sokolsky and American Legion national commander James F. O’Neil to the group. But since none of these men nor anyone else in the Alliance had first-hand knowledge of so-called Communist activity, they called upon Martin Berkeley, their favorite ex-Communist, for advice. Happy to be in the middle of the action, Berkeley met regularly with Brewer and Bond to go over the letters and “determine whether the letter writer is telling the truth, is hedging or is deliberately falsifying his or her explanation.”
Brewer also got together frequently with Ronald Reagan to clear performers. “Reagan and I spent countless hours helping to rehabilitate those who wanted to make a clean break from the party and get their lives back,” Brewer recalled. Reagan, who was beginning to make his personal transition from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, met his future wife, actress Nancy Davis, at a lunch where she complained that she was being confused for an actress with a similar name who was on the American Legion’s blacklist. Reagan helped her clear her name, and then married her.
All told, according to historian Larry Ceplair, more than five hundred people from the entertainment industry were blacklisted or graylisted. Sokolsky testified to HUAC that he personally had helped “rehabilitate” three hundred people and allowed them to get back to work.
In August 1952—six weeks after Carl Foreman landed in England—Berkeley reported he was working again as a screenwriter, speaking regularly before groups like the American Legion, and writing newspaper columns and magazine pieces that managed to blend ultra-Americanism with naked self-promotion. “Our work will never finish,” he vowed in one column. “The forces of democracy need us and we need them. You can count on us.”
Berkeley kept in regular contact with Hopper, paying homage to her power and patriotism while casting her as his savior and benefactor. Sometimes Hopper played along, as when she promised to intercede with her friends at the big studios to get him more screenplay work. “I am back on Freedom Road again and people like yourself made it possible,” he writes to her, in one of a steady stream of letters and notes. His tone is submissive and pandering. In another letter he reports he’ll be speaking before the national convention of Roy Brewer’s IATSE trade union. “Believe me I’ll tell them how people like you and Roy and Ward [Bond] and Bob Arthur and all the rest came to my side while the white-livered ‘liberals’ sulked in their tents.”
If Hopper responded to any of these letters, there’s no record of it in her papers at the Motion Picture Academy archives.
Berkeley was working both ends of the process, feeding new names into the system while at the same time clearing repentant ex-Communists to return to work. In November 1951 he met again with HUAC’s Bill Wheeler and gave him a list of twenty-one more names of alleged party members that he and fellow informant Richard Collins had come up with. Berkeley also told Wheeler that the party leadership had issued a directive back in 1938 identifying a select group of elite members who were to be set aside and placed in a special category so that they could swear under oath that they weren’t members. Berkeley said Sam Ornitz, a screenwriter and party member, had told Berkeley’s wife, Kate, that Dore Schary was one of those receiving this special status.
It was the perfect kind of smear—someone told someone else who then told Berkeley who then told Wheeler—unprovable yet also irrefutable. It never would have held up in a court of law, but it was perfect for the court of public opinion that was HUAC’s preferred forum.
In a marathon closed session in January 1952, Berkeley gave HUAC another twenty names of current or former Reds. He began with a rundown of his latest speeches, four of them before American Legion groups. He had received a standing ovation at each one, he boasted. “And it would do your hearts good to have seen the way they have reacted to my testimony … [and] to know how highly these individuals on this present committee are regarded by the Legion and by the public in general.”
But he quickly shifted into complaint mode. Other than four weeks of writing on a “charity job” arranged by Robert Arthur, a Motion Picture Alliance leader who worked as a producer at Universal Pictures, “I cannot get a job and none of the rest of us can get jobs, and none of us are going to get jobs unless something is done. I worked for ten straight years without a day’s layoff with an average of forty thousand to fifty-five thousand dollars a year … I have as fine commercial credits as any writer in the business, and suddenly there isn’t any work. I know there is a blacklist.”
Berkeley insisted that his Communist enemies were out to get him and every other cooperative witness. “Ask yourself how many non-Communists or anti-Communists were employed by Sidney Buchman and Carl Foreman … and Adrian Scott and Robert Rossen,” he said in a speech at the Masonic Temple in North Hollywood. “All these men were producers—all have been identified—every last one of them used the comrades almost exclusively.”
The notion that Carl had hired Communists “almost exclusively” for High Noon was ludicrous, as Gary Cooper could personally attest. But at this point no one was prepared to step forward publicly to contradict Martin Berkeley. Still, even Bill Wheeler, his main ally, understood that Berkeley was making these allegations of a blacklist of anti-Communists because he himself needed a job. “Berkeley is disgusted with the motion picture industry principally because he has not yet become employed,” Wheeler wrote to his boss, HUAC chief investigator Louis J. Russell.
Berkeley pleaded for the committee to issue a statement demanding that the studios hire the friendly witnesses. “I think that the committee has handled the producers with kid gloves long enough,” he wrote to Wheeler. A statement “would help build a fire under the companies and, unless something is done soon, we might as well be dead … Can you help us?”
“PS,” he added: “Have more information for you!”
Berkeley returned to HUAC when his son Bill was denied admission to the Navy’s officer training program after graduating from Yale. Berkeley asked Wheeler to find out if Bill was being singled out because of his father’s self-confessed former Communism. “If the Navy is eliminating this boy because of his father’s prior conduct I personally feel this course of action is uncalled for,” Wheeler told staff attorney Frank Tavenner. Bill says he was the only member of his class to be rejected and that the Navy cited phony medical reasons. Thus the son of one of the country’s most high-profile anti-Communists was effectively blacklisted as a result of his own father’s testimony.
Berkeley is generally credited as HUAC’s champion namer of names, at least when it comes to Hollywood, but his total numbers are usually underestimated. Beyond the 150 or so names he gave publicly in September 1951, he added six more in executive session that same day, plus twenty on January 29, 1952, and thirteen others in April 1953, for a grand total of at least 189.
When he wasn’t testifying, Berkeley kept up the Red-baiting drumbeat in print. He wrote articles for the American Mercury accusing four past or present congressmen of being Communists and claiming that the party was trying to seize control of radio and television. “The backbone of the Communist movement is crushed in Hollywood,” he declared. “But the Reds are fighting back.” Having lost control of the movie business, the Communists were now seeking to seize the airwaves—“right in your own living room!”
While the Red-hunters and self-styled Americanists were riding high, Hollywood’s liberals were in full retreat, led by the former leaders of the Committee for the First Amendment—which was now listed by HUAC as a Communist front organization. While William Wyler seethed, fellow director John Huston wrote an abject letter to his lawyer explaining how he’d been tricked into supporting the Hollywood Ten and how once he had learned their true motives for refusing to reveal their Communist affiliation, “I was shocked beyond words.” Screenwriter Philip Dunne, another former CFA leader, began collaborating with Roy Brewer, who offered to help clear anyone whose innocence Dunne could prove. “I then was faced with a moral dilemma,” Dunne recalled. “If I accepted his offer, would I be shaking hands with the devil by tacitly endorsing his right to sit in judgment on his fellow citizens?” Dunne decided to do so, but with one condition: the letters these folks wrote would be addressed to him and not to Brewer. Dunne estimated that he and Brewer helped clear fifteen people and get them back to work.
Dore Schary, Carl Foreman’s old mentor, had been one of the most defiant HUAC opponents in 1947, and the frequent object of Hedda Hopper’s withering scorn. When he returned to MGM as head of production in 1948, Hopper had declared that MGM should be renamed “Metro Goldwyn Moscow”—a remark that her syndicate had been forced to retract after Schary threatened a five-million-dollar libel suit.
But in a meeting with the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office in December 1950, Schary said he was prepared to cooperate, according to a memo to J. Edgar Hoover that the agent wrote afterward. Schary said MGM was “very concerned that they do not hire any members of the Communist Party or Communist sympathizers in connection with any film production.” He went on to describe how he had convinced actress Betsy Blair to sign a loyalty oath before hiring her for an MGM production, and to defend Danny Kaye, who Schary said “is no more political than the draperies hanging on the wall.” Before he left, Schary said he had recently submitted a script to assistant FBI Director Lou Nichols concerning a possible FBI movie.
Hoover remained skeptical. “I would view with some reservations Schary’s profession of anti-communism now,” he wrote at the bottom of the memo. “It is of course not popular nor profitable to be known as fellow travelers now but these ‘Johnnies come lately’ raise in me a question about their basic sincerity.”
By 1952 Schary no longer felt strong enough to stand up against Hedda Hopper as well. “What about Communists?” Hopper demanded of him in an interview. “You once said that you would not fire a Red until it had been proved he was dedicated to the overthrow of our government by force and violence.”
“I’ve changed that viewpoint,” a contrite Schary replied, “simply because I’m now convinced they mean to overthrow the government by force and violence. I wouldn’t hire a Communist, and I would fire anybody I discovered to be one.”
To help make clear where he now stood, Schary and MGM produced a thirty-five-minute documentary called The Hoaxters. It branded Communism as “a bitter and cynical hope that appealed to bitter and cynical men,” and called Karl Marx the “fourth pitchman of the Apocalypse,” alongside Hitler, Mussolini, and the imperial militarists of Japan. Despite the fact he had died nearly seventy years earlier, Marx “still rides,” according to the narrator, “bringing with him the same old snake oil which has brought men to their knees and to their graves. The only difference is that his bottle has a different label, a red one.”
Schary’s film did carry a warning against repression. “In continuing to make Communism ineffective we must not betray our own values, for there are angry voices in the land, homegrown tyrants who play the reckless game of slander in order to achieve their ends.” Remember, it warns, “Hitler was an anti-Communist.” And beware of “the hoaxter trying to destroy America in the name of America.”
Schary defends The Hoaxters in his memoirs, saying its main intent was to equate Fascism and Communism and attack both the radical right and the radical left. Still, his last word on the blacklist was one of regret: “A heavy cost in courage was paid by the industry and a dreadful price was paid by those we could not protect.”
The Hoaxters was one of more than two dozen Hollywood films designed to meet HUAC’s demand that the studios atone for their past ideological sins. John Wayne led the way in helping create a subgenre of anti-Communist pictures in the early 1950s, most of which were not very good and none of which made money. Wayne’s personal contribution was Big Jim McLain, his paean to HUAC and its investigators. The Warner Bros. film, which came out in August 1952, one month after High Noon, begins in the hearing room with the real members of the committee grilling an uncooperative witness (played by an actor), who turns out to be a professor of economics at a local university. When asked by Chairman Wood which side he would support in a war between the United States and Soviet Union, the mealy-mouthed academic invokes the Fifth Amendment. “Anyone who continues to be a Communist after 1945 is guilty of high treason,” intones the narrator, echoing the standard articulated by Martin Berkeley in his landmark testimony.
But the real narrative of Big Jim McLean is the story of Operation Pineapple, the committee’s investigation of Communist influence in Hawaii. Wayne plays Big Jim, a committee investigator reportedly modeled on Bill Wheeler, and a strapping young James Arness (later to be Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon) plays fellow investigator Mel Baxter. Both men are square-jawed, two-fisted patriots who can’t stand Commies and devote their lives to exposing their nefarious schemes. Still, when he arrives in Honolulu, Big Jim at first seems more focused on romancing an attractive and compliant young doctor’s receptionist, played by Nancy Olson, who eventually helps him build a case against her boss, one of the island’s top Commies. The Reds themselves are sinister, dishonest, racist, and homicidal—sort of like the standard Warner Bros. bad guys but even more repugnant. They manage to capture and kill poor Mel, but Big Jim hunts them down and busts them. Still, the big fish get away on a legal technicality. “Sometimes I wonder why I stay in this job,” Jim complains, sounding more than a little like Will Kane.
Big Jim McLean is predictably silly nonsense, “a vaporous and reckless romance” wrote Bosley Crowther. “The over-all mixing of cheap fiction with a contemporary crisis in American life is irresponsible and unforgivable. No one deserves credit for this film.”
The other big anti-Communist film of 1952 was far more intriguing in its assumptions and obsessions. My Son John, directed by Leo McCarey (another charter member of the Motion Picture Alliance) and starring Robert Walker, Helen Hayes, Dean Jagger, and Van Heflin, was a domestic comedy turned nightmare with a hysterical mother, a half-crazed father, and a sinister son with something to hide. John Jefferson has neglected to come home from Washington in time to see his two younger brothers ship out to fight in the Korean War. When he does make it home, he mocks his father’s obsessive, simple-minded Americanism—Dad is a local American Legion commander—and religiosity. John swears on the Bible to his doting but doubtful mom that he’s not a Communist, but an FBI investigator who comes visiting raises her suspicions. And when she discovers that John has a key to the Washington apartment of a young woman who has been charged with espionage, her deepest fears are confirmed. Walker and Hayes are gifted actors who bring a sense of Oedipal dread to the relationship between John and his profoundly troubled mother. Poor remorseful John comes to realize the error of his ways, but before he can make amends he is gunned down outside the Lincoln Memorial by his former comrades. But his taped confession, in which he admits his perfidy and denounces Communism, is played as a posthumous commencement address at his alma mater. “I am a living lie, I am a traitor,” he tells the graduating seniors. “I am a native American Communist spy. And may God have mercy on my soul.”
My Son John, wrote a dismayed Bosley Crowther, “is a picture so strongly dedicated to the purpose of the American anti-Communist purge that it seethes with the sort of emotionalism and illogic that is characteristic of so much thinking these days.”
Crowther listed the elements in My Son John “that may cause a thoughtful person to feel a shudder of apprehension at the militancy and dogmatism it reveals—its snide attitude toward intellectuals, its obvious pitch for religious conformity, and its eventual whole-hearted endorsement of its Legionnaire’s stubborn bigotry. And to make this concern more considerable, there is the fact that the picture is played with remarkable skill at illusion by almost everyone.”
Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota—a HUAC alumnus now risen, like Richard Nixon, to the ranks of the U.S. Senate—applauded My Son John as “undoubtedly the greatest and most stirring pro-American motion picture of the past decade … It should be seen by the people of every American home.” But audiences shied away. My Son John drew less than one million dollars in ticket sales and failed to make Variety’s Top Ninety pictures for 1952.
Despite these efforts at cinematic contrition, Hollywood was still suspect. In the December 1951 issue of the American Legion Magazine, journalist J. B. Matthews, a former HUAC investigator, asked “Did the Movies Really Clean House?” His conclusion: “The answer is no … Although times have changed for the better, the complete house-cleaning job in Hollywood remains to be done.” Matthews wrote that the three hundred or so members of the Communist Party, added to the hundreds more fellow travelers and liberals who had been involved in purported Communist front organizations, meant “we have a story of Communist penetration of the film industry which is truly shocking.”
Matthews singled out High Noon as one of the pictures in which Communists and “Communist-collaborators” were still involved. He named not just Carl Foreman but bit-part actors Howland Chamberlin and Virginia Farmer, Stanley Kramer—presumably because of the course he had taught at the People’s Education Center in 1947—and even Fred Zinnemann, who had signed the amicus curiae brief for the Hollywood Ten’s appeal to the Supreme Court. All of them, apparently, deserved to be purged.
Hedda Hopper agreed. She called Matthews’s article “sickeningly accurate.”
At the Stanley Kramer Company, Sam Katz and George Glass were the people in charge of ensuring that no Communists or Communist sympathizers were on the payroll, as Marsha Hunt found out in 1952. A talented and attractive actress, Hunt was signed for a major role in the Kramer production of The Happy Time, a cheerful comedy about a teenaged boy’s coming of age in the 1920s. Hunt had signed a notarized statement the previous year denying she had ever been a Communist after her name appeared in Red Channels, a blacklist newsletter, citing her participation in purported Communist front groups like the Committee for the First Amendment. Her agent sent a copy of the statement to Katz, who called her soon after and pleaded with her to sign a new one, which he composed and sent over to her. “You’ll never work in films again if you don’t sign it,” Katz warned. “It will kill you in the industry.”
Hunt refused to sign because she didn’t care for a paragraph that said she had been guilty of bad judgment and was sorry. She crossed it out and wrote instead, “If any of these activities furthered the cause of Communism, I regret having done them.”
This proved insufficient. The executives at Columbia, the Kramer Company’s new overseers, feared that The Happy Time would be picketed, George Glass told Hunt. He pleaded with her to take out an ad saying she was not a Communist and regretted having belonged to Communist front groups. Hunt says she refused; Glass kept calling.
Finally, after the film shoot ended, she went to see him. “They want it now,” Glass told her. “This is a time for expediency, not integrity.” Afterward she met twice with Roy Brewer and had a three-hour meeting with Katz. “If you don’t [sign], you will be hurting the only company that has employed you,” Katz told her. “You are making it so no company will hire any of you liberals.” She told him that the company could itself take out the ad, but she wouldn’t. As a result of her principled intransigence, she was graylisted for more than a decade. Hunt had made some fifty pictures in her previous seventeen years in the business; she made only eight more in the twenty years that followed.