Why does a man love his home country? Because the bread tastes better, the sky is higher, the air is spicier, voices ring out more clearly, the ground is softer to walk on.
BERTOLT BRECHT, THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE
A few months after Estelle and Kate Foreman joined Carl in London, the city was enveloped by one of the worst environmental disasters in its history. The Great Smog of December 1952 was caused by a thick layer of the soot from coal-fired furnaces and stoves that always blanketed the city during winter combined with a windless cold front that locked down the black cloud like an impenetrable dome. For five days, people could barely see out their windows and the smog penetrated flats and houses through doors and window frames, like the worst days of the American Dust Bowl twenty years earlier. The smog killed at least four thousand people—estimates put the final toll as high as twelve thousand—and sickened one hundred thousand more.
“Carl couldn’t get home from the office because the smog was so thick you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face,” Estelle recalled. “I don’t know how he got home but he finally did … And I remember when I got undressed that night, I was wearing a white slip and threw it on a chair. And when I woke up the next morning, there were black streaks on it from all the oily smog that came through the window.”
“There wasn’t any central heating in this so-called flat,” she added, “and I came down with a godawful something or other.”
While the smog lifted after a few days, the mood of anxiety and despair that Estelle felt did not. She was in a strange city with a five-year-old daughter and an angry, depressed husband suffering from writer’s block.
“Carl was kind of a different man when I got there. He was not the husband who had left. He was angry now, all the time. He tried to sit at a typewriter and write (but) he was too angry.”
Oscar night was a terrible ordeal. Not only did Carl not win best screenplay, his name was not even mentioned by the other High Noon winners. Gary Cooper wasn’t at the ceremony, and the others—Elmo Williams, Harry Gerstad, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Ned Washington—neglected to thank the writer who was the true father of the film. “They tried not to mention him at all,” says Jonathan Foreman, Carl’s son. “It was like this weird Stalinism—he didn’t exist, there wasn’t a writer. It must have been agony for him. It’s a cowardly business, Hollywood. Full of desperate and selfish cowards.”
At least he had enough money, thanks to the severance deal with the Kramer Company. Carl rented a place for himself, Estelle, and Kate just off Kensington High Street, then a more comfortable flat at nearby Duchess of Bedford’s Walk. It was important to maintain a high and visible profile so that visiting Americans and members of the British film industry would not forget he was there. He played cards with William Wyler, Sam Spiegel, and other Hollywood notables when they passed through London. And he indulged in high-stakes gambling, one of his biggest weaknesses. He recalled one night of gin rummy at film director Anatole Litvak’s hotel room at Claridge’s. At one point, Carl calculates, he was three thousand pounds ahead—a huge sum in those days. By the end of the night he had lost it all back.
“I felt it was important to project the image of a normal, red-blooded American who liked to play cards and who could stand the smell of cigar smoke,” Carl recalled.
He was drinking too much as well and occasionally sleeping with other women. “Carl changed completely,” Estelle recalled. “… Perhaps it isn’t true, but I think he felt at that time that nothing was any use any more, including loyalty to one’s spouse. So he began leading a completely different life. We had a very happy marriage until then; it was quite the reverse afterwards.”
He befriended several influential Brits, including film director Terence Young and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, who worked for the Rank Organisation, an entertainment conglomerate that not only made pictures but owned movie theaters and studio complexes. Havelock-Allan helped Carl land a ten-thousand-pound-per-year deal there as a writer-producer.
It didn’t last long. Earl St. John, a Rank executive, told Carl that he had met with Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, the joint heads of United Artists, Rank’s American business partners, at a board of directors’ meeting. St. John informed them proudly that he had in hand two excellent scripts that had been worked on by their old friend Carl Foreman, whose High Noon had helped rescue UA from insolvency. To his surprise, the two men strenuously objected. Even if Carl used a pseudonym, they warned, they could not touch his work because it would be impossible to keep its provenance a secret. An FBI memo from around this time also mentioned Carl’s new role at Rank. Someone knowledgeable was telling the bureau everything.
Carl’s deal was canceled. “It was obvious that I had no future at the Rank Organisation,” he recalled.
He was also depressed to discover that after his departure from Hollywood, four of his old screenwriting buddies, Melvin Levy, Stanley Roberts, Sol Shor, and David Lang, had named him in testimony before HUAC. Even worse was when he read that Bob Rossen had reversed course and named fifty-seven people to the committee.
“I felt terribly guilty about it, because I remember seeing him on the dock [at New York harbor] as I left, [a] very forlorn figure,” Carl recalled. Rossen was drinking too much. He had to work. He needed money. He felt he had to testify. Carl was certain that Rossen’s spirit had been damaged. His work suffered, although he went on to make one more great picture, The Hustler (1961), which he directed, produced, and co-wrote. Rossen died in 1966 at age fifty-seven, and Carl was certain the blacklist was responsible. “He couldn’t live with the fact that he had destroyed his own image of himself as an uncompromising fighter whom nobody could push around.”
Tony Havelock-Allan had a heart-to-heart with Carl, raising the toughest and most sensitive questions. How will you ever find fulfillment if you can’t work in Hollywood? Why not go home, name a few names, and get back to work? “He was a very lucid and articulate man,” Carl would recall, “and certainly he put his finger on all the latest and latent fears that I had, and I went through a night of absolute despair and fear and desolation. There seemed to be no hope of any kind.”
Kirk Douglas recalls seeing Carl in London around this time. His friend was like a caged animal, anxious and depressed and feeling like a pariah. “I was a big star then and I’m talking to Carl,” says Douglas. “Suddenly he says to me, ‘Well, Kirk, if you don’t want to have lunch with me I’ll understand.’ I said ‘Carl, I’m your friend,’ and we had lunch, but that remark showed me just how sensitive he was. I thought, Jesus, this is what happens to a guy who thinks all his friends have turned on him.”
London, a longtime haven for political dissidents ranging from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie, and nine governments-in-exile during World War Two, was a clearinghouse and rendezvous point for many of Hollywood’s political outcasts. Some of them gathered on weekends at the north London home of blacklisted screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and his radical journalist wife, Ella Winter, widow of the muckraking author Lincoln Steffens. The champagne was warm and flat and the food famously bad, but the art was fabulous—the walls were lined with drawings by Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian, and Klee—and so were some of the visitors from abroad, including Charlie Chaplin, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, and James Thurber. And the conversation was often relentlessly political.
Nora Sayre, a young American writer living in London who spent weekends at the house, said it was hard for locals to grasp the sense of loss that these American expats felt. “The English assumed that the exiles were overjoyed to have left the repulsive country which had abused them,” writes Sayre. “But few of the English acquaintances understood that these Americans missed their own culture—or that they sometimes felt like amputated limbs.”
Carl tended to avoid the Stewart-Winter house. He wanted to be supportive of his blacklisted friends, but he did not want to wallow in their victimhood or his own. He especially did not want to fall into the trap of becoming a predictable critic of the United States feeding the cherished predispositions of the anti-American faction of the British left. “I didn’t want to be part of the political émigré group,” he said, “because I felt that was incestuous and bad and we’d always be talking about it. And I wanted to work.”
He worked hard to meet and mix with a wide range of British society. Members of Parliament from both the left and right, writers, journalists, performers, and visiting royalty from Hollywood were all part of his social circle. “He handled himself magnificently in England,” said Sidney Cohn, his lawyer and friend. Even after High Noon became a stunning success, Cohn recalled, “never once did he publicly or privately take any pot shots at the United States … Whenever he spoke about the American film industry … he didn’t glorify it but objectively praised the good things about it … Never once did he sell out or do the expedient thing.”
Things eventually began to look up. Alexander Korda, the London-based owner of an independent film production company, hired Carl to help him deal with the various scripts that came his way. Korda had no patience or attention span to read such things, and he relied on Carl to vet them and doctor the ones Korda decided to buy.
When his friend Joseph Losey showed up in London in January 1953, Carl met him at the airport. Losey was a talented but prickly filmmaker who had fled the United States and a three-picture deal with the Stanley Kramer Company in 1951 to avoid a HUAC subpoena. Carl “was extraordinarily warm and generous,” Losey would recall, “and he made the arrival in England possible because I was without family, without work, and I was pretty bleakly alone. I remember it was a Sunday, and we walked at length in Hyde Park and talked about the situation.”
Carl helped Losey get some small jobs for cash with British television shows, and then helped him line up his first British director’s gig. Carl and an American businessman named Robert Goldstein bought the rights to a novel called The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and arranged for Alexander Knox, Alexis Smith, and Dirk Bogarde to play the lead roles. Carl and fellow blacklisted writer Harold Buchman wrote the script under the pseudonym “Derek Frye,” and hired Losey to direct it under the name “Victor Hanbury.” Sidney Cohn helped finance the project. The film, a twisted and intriguing crime thriller, was a mild success critically and financially. It enabled Losey to obtain a British work permit, residency, and union membership, and he was grateful for Carl’s help. “That kept me alive,” Losey recalled, “so I owe him a great deal for that.”
But working in England was always fraught in those first years. When Alexis Smith arrived in England from Hollywood to do Tiger, she was unaware that her director was on the blacklist. She and Losey were having dinner that first night at a local hotel when Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers and one of the more hysterical members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, walked through the door. Losey and Smith fled through the kitchen to avoid being seen together. During the film shoot, Dirk Bogarde smuggled Losey from the studio in the trunk of his car to avoid running into Ginger. Losey also recalled meeting up with John Barrymore Jr., an actor whom he had worked with in Hollywood, only to discover later that Barrymore had been pressured to report to the FBI during his trip to London.
Losey quickly grew to understand the cynical game that he was being compelled to play: “The English market wanted to employ me because first, they knew that I knew my job; second, they got me very cheaply; third, they thought I would make pictures for the American market; fourth, they thought I would attract American stars; and fifth, in some strange way they thought they could keep it all secret.”
Carl went on to secretly work on screenplays for the David Lean comedy Hobson’s Choice (1954), The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955), and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), according to Sid Cohn. The Man Who Loved Redheads, a comedy based on a Terence Rattigan play, later turned out to be one of the favorite films of Francis Walter, who became chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Walter, of course, had no idea that an unrepentant former Communist had worked on it.
The worst was yet to come. On the Fourth of July 1953—an ironic date, as he couldn’t help but note—Carl and Estelle received a special-delivery letter from the U.S. Embassy ordering him to report the next day and take along their passports. Carl went in as ordered, but he left the passports at home. The officer on duty told him the documents were no longer valid. If Carl and Estelle tried to use them to travel anywhere except back to the United States, they would be breaking the law.
Carl and Estelle were among thousands of alleged radicals who were either denied passports or had their travel documents confiscated during the Red Scare era. Announcing the policy in May 1952, then Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that the department had decided to deny a passport to anyone whom there was “reason to believe” was in the Communist Party, or anyone whose “conduct abroad is likely to be contrary to the best interest of the United States,” or anyone who would be “going abroad to engage in activities which will advance the Communist movement.” It was a sweeping laundry list of “anyone who’s” that included teachers, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, writers, and performers, ranging from historian W. E. B. Du Bois to singer Paul Robeson to novelist Howard Fast to members of the Hollywood Ten. A Board of Passport Appeals was established to hear cases but only if the applicant first signed an affidavit denying past or present membership in the Communist Party. The panel relied on confidential information from the FBI and other sources that it routinely refused to disclose to the applicant.
In Carl and Estelle’s case, the department formally ruled against them in September 1954 and the appeals board upheld the decision four months later. “Other than their uncorroborated statements, there is no evidence of their having severed their connection with the Party,” read the State Department’s ruling. Even if their membership had been terminated, “the evidence of record does not indicate that it was terminated under such circumstances as to warrant the conclusion that they ceased to act in furtherance of the interests and under the discipline of the Communist Party.” In other words, the claim was that Carl and Estelle had not really resigned from the party or, if they had, that they were still acting under party discipline, or that they could not prove otherwise. Needless to add, the State Department presented no evidence or witnesses to support this Orwellian allegation.
Now the Foremans were truly stuck in London; they couldn’t even return to the United States to visit relatives because their travel documents would be seized once they arrived home. The ruling forced Carl to turn down an offer to adapt War and Peace for Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis because he couldn’t travel to Rome where the film would be shot. Carl was cut off not only from work but from the benefits of U.S. citizenship. These were no longer the actions of an out-of-control congressional committee or a cowardly bunch of studio heads. It was the United States government—his government—effectively rendering him a man without a country. “That was when I really began to feel very sorry for myself and was full of both self-pity and rage,” Carl recalled.
As a resident alien in the United Kingdom, Carl was required to report regularly to his local police station to have his registration card validated. Now he went to the Home Office to inform them he no longer had a valid U.S. travel document. A civil servant listened carefully and without expression, then asked Carl to go home, write down everything in a letter, and submit it to the department. Although Britain was under the rule of a Conservative government with close ties to Washington, Carl and Estelle’s residency papers were renewed that year and each subsequent year that they lived in London. Whatever else might frighten it, Britain’s government was not afraid of American dissidents.
More help was on its way. By the time Sidney Cohn filed suit for Carl and Estelle in federal district court in Washington, American courts were beginning to question the State Department’s actions on constitutional grounds. In two pivotal cases in 1955, judges ruled that the department had to give applicants a hearing in which they could examine and challenge the evidence against them (although it took another nine years for the Supreme Court to rule definitively that the right to travel abroad was a fundamental one). Faced with the requirement that the government actually make a legally valid case for denial, the department backed down. A judge ruled in January 1956 that based on the recent court rulings the secretary of state did not have sufficient grounds to deny passports to Carl and Estelle. The department withdrew its opposition without explanation and cabled the London embassy to reissue passports to both of them.
But the passports weren’t all that Carl was after. Leo Jaffe, vice president of Columbia Pictures, met with Carl in London and told him that Columbia recognized the fine work he had done for the Stanley Kramer Company and was keen to hire him back. But the blacklist was still an issue. Jaffe proposed that Carl take the standard informant’s route—hire a well-connected lawyer, name a few already-known names to the committee, and get himself cleared. Carl insisted he wouldn’t consider it; but he added that he was ready to be more critical publicly of the Communist Party and its methods. He asked Sidney Cohn to approach the committee again.
“I think Sidney and I both took the position that Paris was worth a mass,” Carl later recalled. “That you could deal with the devil with a long pole and if you were lucky you could stay away from him and make him serve your purposes rather than the other way around.”
Cohn first reached out to Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington lawyer who had been instrumental in clearing several Hollywood clients, including Martin Berkeley. According to Cohn, Williams said he would charge fifty thousand dollars plus 10 percent of Carl’s fee for the first picture he did after being cleared. Cohn didn’t find the price outrageous—he figured Columbia would pay Williams anything he asked in order to get Carl back on the payroll—but he decided he himself could go to the committee.
Through the Motion Picture Association, Cohn set up a meeting with Francis Walter, the Pennsylvania Democrat who had recently become HUAC’s chairman. Cohn told Walter that the committee was inadvertently harming America’s image abroad with its support of the blacklist, that it was shameful that small-timers like Roy Brewer, Ward Bond, and George Sokolsky could dictate to the motion picture industry who could be hired and who could not. “These guys couldn’t get themselves elected dog catchers,” Cohn said.
The chairman had his own complaints. He told Cohn his daughter was attending Sarah Lawrence College, where she was unpopular because of his position on the committee while the daughters of Bob Rossen and Sidney Buchman were basking in sympathy because their fathers had been targeted. “In effect, why should his daughter have to be punished among her peers for [him] performing his duties at the House committee?” Cohn recalled Walter saying.
Cohn told Walter that Carl would be happy to testify and tell college students like those at Sarah Lawrence exactly what was wrong with the American Communist Party and why he had left it. “He’ll tell you all about it, but don’t ask him to name any names because he won’t do it.”
Walter had been on record five years earlier as doubting the need for witnesses like Larry Parks to name names. After all, the committee already had the names. It was more important, he had said then—and still believed—for witnesses to denounce Communism. On that basis, he now invited Carl to appear again.