We don’t like political blacklists in England.
On August 8, 1956, at three P.M. Carl Foreman entered Room 226 of the House Office Building on Capitol Hill accompanied by Sidney Cohn, his lawyer. In the transcript—the details of which have never been published before—the session is described as an official meeting of the committee, but the only HUAC members present were Chairman Francis Walter and staff director Richard Arens.
Carl went over his testimony from 1951, claiming he had testified as freely as possible at the time, but adding, “I had and have strong convictions regarding the naming of anyone that I might have known during the time when I was a member of the Communist Party.” It remained “a matter of personal conviction for me.”
But this time, unlike in 1951, he openly admitted he had been a party member and he tried to explain why. During the years of the Great Depression the party had led the fight for the unemployed, for civil liberties, and against Nazism. But the party’s submissive attitude toward the German-Soviet pact of 1939 had deeply disturbed him. His time away from the party after he joined the Army had allowed him to think things over, and he had decided to make a break.
Still, Carl remained a reluctant and diffident witness. He couldn’t recall when he had first come into contact with the party, nor who had recruited him to join, nor any of the particular activities he had undertaken while a member. “I was a very unimportant little fellow who came to meetings and listened and was very much impressed sometimes,” he testified.
He described his membership in passive terms of “drifting in” and “drifting out” of the party. After the war all his time had been soaked up by the new film production company he had joined. He had been working up to sixteen hours a day. “The company became the only important thing in my life,” he said.
His language as he testified was stilted and tenuous. “I entered the party with the best of motives and I left when I came to the inescapable conclusion that the party was not the place for those motives to become effective.”
Arens asked if Carl would be willing to name people “if the chairman gives you his solemn promise that this record will be protected as an executive record and will not be made public.” According to the official transcript, Carl gave a one-word answer: “No.”
Walter intervened. “I do not think that is important, because the thing that is important here now is the opportunity that Mr. Foreman has sought to try to let the world know what a phony, if that is the word, Communism is and the deception that was practiced … [in] the hope as he expressed to me that he may make a contribution toward keeping people out of this movement.”
Carl grasped the opening. “I would like to place myself on record, as I would like to have done years ago, as being against this institution which has trapped a lot of people into betraying themselves and in the worst possible way, and accepting evils which are absolutely unspeakable … It was wrong and harmful.”
So there it was, at last: Carl Foreman’s denunciation of the Communist Party. It was given placidly and with no great enthusiasm, and he didn’t explain why he couldn’t have done so “years ago.” But it was now on the record.
Carl went on to bemoan America’s image overseas, saying it had suffered because of the Red Scare and McCarthyism. “There have been times in the last four years in Europe … when it has just been embarrassing to be an American and defend our basis of civil liberties … I find myself in the position of apologizing for and explaining America overseas.”
He cited the official hounding of Paul Robeson and the denial of his passport as a public relations disaster for the United States. Arens interrupted to allege that Robeson was “a hard-core member of the Communist conspiracy.” Carl came back sharply: “That is beside the point, if I may say so. In the Far East they consider themselves colored people. As far as they are concerned, Robeson is just another colored man and he is being discriminated against.”
“As Americans, we should be tickled to death that he goes to the Soviet Union or he goes to England and gives a concert … What is America afraid of?” Carl’s defense of Robeson sounded more passionate than his renunciation of Communism.
Arens picked up on this. He asked Carl if his break with Communism was complete. “I have no sympathy, admiration, regard, or anything like that for the Communist Party in any way,” Carl replied.
“They have a lot of people hoodwinked in terms of confusing the Communist Party with liberalism. It is not liberalism … It is an absolute menace to everything liberal here in this country.” The party “has nothing to offer the American people, it has no place in American life … It has revealed itself as being hopelessly tied to another party in another country.”
Carl conceded he had never publicly denounced Communism. And his praise for HUAC was muted. When Walter asked if the work of the committee had hindered the party, Carl replied, “Yes it has. I thought it was self-evident.”
More than two hours had passed. Carl had stuck to his principles. He had acceded to Walter’s demand that he denounce the Communist Party, but he had given no names, and had even lectured the committee on America’s image in the world. Walter, saying he spoke for “the entire committee”—although no other congressmen were there—pronounced himself satisfied. “I am sure you have made a contribution toward the objective that we have all been striving for, namely to make the unmistaken and unwary mindful of the fact that they can be used without too much difficulty.”
But the committee wasn’t quite finished with Carl. A week after his appearance, Sidney Cohn got a phone call from Arens saying that the testimony wasn’t good enough. The chairman was being pressured—Arens didn’t say by whom—and Carl would have to go back in and name a few names. “That’s impossible,” Cohn told Arens.
Columbia Pictures needed some public acknowledgment from the committee that Carl had appeared as a cooperative witness before it felt comfortable signing him to a contract. Several months went by but no such statement was forthcoming. But eventually Cohn received a transcript of the hearing and sent it to Columbia, which took Walter’s “thank you” at the end of the session as sufficient.
In March 1957 Columbia issued a press release announcing that it had signed Carl to produce four pictures for the studio over the next three years. The artfully worded statement said while he had invoked the Fifth Amendment in his original 1951 testimony, he had been “granted an opportunity to appear again before the Committee in executive session and had testified without recourse to the Fifth Amendment.” Columbia marked the announcement by throwing Carl a glittering party at Claridge’s, with special guests such as actors Alec Guinness and Diana Dors and director Carol Reed.
Back home, the anti-Communist lobby went on high alert. Hollywood Reporter columnist Mike Connelly reported that HUAC was planning to hold another executive session “to probe a report that one of its members received money to clear a show-business personality of suspicions of being a Red.” It’s clear from the timing that Connelly was referring to Francis Walter, but there’s no record that an investigation was ever conducted.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars on April 1, 1957, in Guardpost for Freedom, its semimonthly publication, said it had queried Walter, who told them—falsely—that there had been no formal hearing, just a “staff consultation,” and that it was “unfortunate” that Columbia claimed Carl had been cleared. The VFW declared: “It is clear from the chairman’s reply that as far as the Committee is concerned, Foreman stands today just where he stood in 1951 when, as an uncooperative witness, he invoked the Fifth Amendment.”
The VFW went on to accuse Columbia of breaking the 1947 Waldorf Statement by signing Carl. “By doing so, it has encouraged those who may be called as witnesses in the future not to cooperate. If Foreman can get away with it, these people will reason, then they, too, may be able to protect Communists and still continue to make big money in the industry.”
Two weeks later, the Red-baiting newsletter Aware jumped in, chiding the committee for “setting a lower standard for Foreman than for the hundreds of others in like positions who have appeared before you.”
Soon the executive committee of the American Legion passed a resolution demanding that Columbia honor the Waldorf Statement by canceling its deal with Foreman “until he testifies freely and completely.”
The pressure on Walter grew to the point where he issued his own statement on June 12 saying that Carl had appeared under oath for what he characterized as a “staff inquiry … not a formal hearing.” He added that the committee had never characterized Carl as a “cooperative witness” nor did it ever grant “clearances.”
Walter also insisted he had not given Carl special treatment. “I wasn’t interested in getting names from Foreman of people who had already been identified as Communists,” he told reporters. “I wanted someone who could get up and tell what a sucker he’d been. I thought Foreman was the kind of important man we needed for this, and I think he did a service to the country in his testimony.”
Columbia Pictures refused to back down. As far as they were concerned, Carl Foreman was now cleared.
The studio received surprising support from Hearst Newspapers columnist Louella Parsons, who declared, “Nobody in the world so thoroughly dislikes leftists more than I, but right is right, and when the United States Government clears a man, that’s good enough for me.”
Many of Carl’s former comrades were not so trusting. Some suspected either that he had secretly named names or that Columbia had paid off Francis Walter, or perhaps both. “Foreman’s success was [an] indication to some people that maybe there had been a little hanky-panky,” wrote blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein. “His movies had been highly profitable for Columbia Pictures and it wanted to keep him working. Possibly money had changed hands. There was no proof of this, only supposition.”
Joe Losey, who says he read a transcript of Carl’s executive testimony, confirmed that Carl had not named names. Nonetheless, “he made statements that would have stuck in my throat,” said Losey. “I never understood how he could do that. I’m reasonably sure he didn’t believe what he said, and I charged him with this privately. But he said, ‘Well, you don’t appear before people like that if you aren’t prepared to give them something. What did you want me to do?’”
When Carl visited Los Angeles, he agreed to meet with two dozen blacklisted screenwriters at Michael Wilson’s house to answer questions. At a late-night session, Carl insisted he had made no deal with the committee, that his lawyer had only made a deal with Columbia. Dalton Trumbo, one of those who attended, decided to believe Carl, if for no other reason than his clearance had revealed a chink in the blacklist that others might exploit. “Obviously there was corruption somewhere,” Trumbo later told Victor Navasky, “but as long as a man didn’t inform, if he had been fucked by a corrupt system and could take advantage of that corruption without harming anyone else, possibly without harming himself … I see no harm in it. It seems a mild sin, a venial one. And with a few exceptions forgiveness can be granted. I don’t admire it, but then I’m not called upon to admire it.”
The truth was that many of the comrades simply did not trust Carl. They had not liked his embrace of Sidney Cohn’s original strategy of pleading the “diminished” Fifth Amendment, nor did they see Carl as a genuine comrade. He seemed too committed to his own career and too ready to jettison others. Some perhaps were jealous of the fact that he had received a large payout from the Kramer Company when he lost his job, that he had lived well in London, and that he always seemed to come out ahead financially. His old friend Hy Kraft, another blacklisted screenwriter, lumped him with Elia Kazan and Abe Burrows—both of whom had named names before the committee—as someone who’d had a convenient change of heart.
Others were even less forgiving. Nearly sixty years later, Norma Barzman, who spent nearly three decades in Europe in exile with her husband, fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman, and wrote a lively and evocative memoir about it, still refuses to discuss Carl. Asked why, she replies, “Because he stooled.”
One of Carl’s largest paydays in London was also one of his most frustrating experiences. In 1954 he discovered in a catalog of new books notice of a World War Two novel by French author Pierre Boulle about British prisoners of war in Thailand forced to build a strategic railroad bridge by their brutal Japanese overseers. Carl had felt hamstrung as a writer in the United Kingdom because he felt uncomfortable writing critically about his British hosts. But The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which focused on the Japanese colonel in charge of the POW camp and the British colonel commanding the prisoners, suited him well. “It was a Frenchman’s cold, detached, sardonic view of the English and the Japanese,” said Carl. “… They were both island races and both were much preoccupied with race … and the two colonels … were both obsessed, both somewhat ridiculous, and both potentially dangerous in their obsessions.” Within days he bought a six-month option for three hundred British pounds.
Sidney Cohn introduced Carl to independent producer Sam Spiegel, one of Hollywood’s great improvisational operators, who had made The African Queen (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), and Spiegel bought the film rights and commissioned Carl to write the screenplay for noted British director David Lean. It was a brief and brutal partnership. Carl and Lean fought intensely, especially over the ending. In the novel, British saboteurs try and fail to blow up the completed bridge, which suffers only minor damage. But in the film, the British colonel who has dedicated himself and his men to completing the project suddenly recognizes his folly and falls on the detonator, causing a spectacular explosion and the bridge’s total destruction. “To me, the ending is confusing; I hate the awkward last-second realization, and the dialogue doesn’t fit,” Carl complained. He and Lean parted ways in June 1956. When Spiegel went to Carl for advice about hiring a new writer, he suggested fellow blacklist exile Michael Wilson.
Wilson, a thoughtful and unrepentant Marxist, had won an Academy Award for best screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951). He had been subpoenaed by HUAC in June 1951 and fired by Twentieth Century-Fox three days later. He had been a defiant and uncooperative witness when he testified in September, four days before Carl. “The consequence of these hearings,” Wilson declared in a prepared statement he wasn’t allowed to read to the committee, “will be appalling pictures, more pictures glorifying racism, war, and brutality, perversion and violence. I do not think any honest pictures will be written by frightened writers and I know they will not be written by informers.”
Along with fellow blacklisted filmmakers, Wilson became involved in making Salt of the Earth (1954), the story of a strike by Mexican-American mine workers in New Mexico. The independent production was harassed by anti-Communist forces and the film boycotted and suppressed, although it has received critical recognition over the decades and has been preserved by the Library of Congress on the National Film Registry. Afterward, Wilson moved his family aboard—they lived in France for eight years—and he continued to work and write under a pseudonym.
David Lean claimed he simply trashed Carl’s script and rewrote the screenplay himself, with some polish and tightening from Wilson. “It was really Mike’s and my script,” Lean told Kevin Brownlow, his biographer.
But neither Foreman nor Wilson nor Lean got the screen credit, which went to novelist Boulle, who spoke little English and had not written a word of the screenplay. When the movie premiered in London in October 1957 and went on to become an international box-office hit, Spiegel gave sole credit to Boulle and denied that Carl had been involved at all. The novelist did not attend the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1958 where Kwai won seven Oscars, including best screenplay for Boulle. After the ceremony, when reporters asked Lean who had really written the screenplay, he replied, to Spiegel’s embarrassment, “Now that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, and as you have not got sixty-four thousand dollars I’m not prepared to tell you.” The next day Carl announced to the United Press in London that it was he who had written the script along with “some contributions by David Lean.” He said his authorship could be authenticated by the fact that three characters in the film were named Weaver, Grogan, and Baker—friends of Carl’s whose names appeared in all of his screenplays. Somehow Carl neglected to mention Michael Wilson.
Wilson had already embarrassed the Motion Picture Academy in 1956, the year that Friendly Persuasion, starring Gary Cooper, was made from a script Wilson had written before he was blacklisted. When the film was released, there was no listed credit for screenwriting, although everyone in Hollywood knew Wilson had written it. A week before the Oscar nominations were announced, the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors passed a resolution declaring that any nominee who was blacklisted was ineligible for a prize. Still, Friendly Persuasion was nominated for best adapted screenplay and Wilson was duly eliminated from the list of those eligible. Ironically, the winner that year for best original screenplay was “Robert Rich,” the pseudonym of another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, for The Brave One. On Oscar night no one came forward to accept the award, and Trumbo spent the next two years gleefully refusing to confirm or deny he had written the script.
The subsequent Oscar victory in 1958 of Pierre Boulle proved, in the words of blacklisted screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., that the Motion Picture Academy “had added a new trick to its repertoire: It could close its eyes firmly when its leg was pulled.” Soon after, the academy repealed its ban on blacklisted writers and performers.
Wilson went on to spend fifteen months working on a Lawrence of Arabia screenplay for David Lean before the two men had an epic falling out that mirrored Lean’s bitter break with Carl. Lean and a new screenwriter, British playwright Robert Bolt, denied that Wilson had played any role in writing Lawrence, which became another international hit in 1962. (In 1963 the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain recognized Wilson’s role in writing it, adding his name to Bolt’s, but in the United States the writing credits were not revised until 1995.) Topping off a stellar career, Wilson later co-wrote the screenplay for Planet of the Apes (1968) with Rod Serling. He died in 1978.
A few years earlier, after both Foreman and Wilson had returned to Hollywood, Carl presented Wilson with the Writers Guild Laurel Award for lifetime achievement. In introducing Wilson, Carl joked that “our bloody Oscar has been sitting in Pierre Boulle’s living room, and I suppose that by now he’s given up wondering how the hell it ever got there.” Maybe they could work out “a custody arrangement,” he joked. It seemed funny at the time, but the anger and frustration that both Foreman and Wilson had felt in 1957 had been deep and intense.
While he was denied proper credit for Kwai, Carl at least had the solace of a major paycheck. According to Brownlow, Sid Cohn had arranged for Carl to receive a 22-percent profit participation deal that paid him $250,000 in the first four years of Kwai’s release. By contrast, Michael Wilson’s payment for his work on Kwai was ten thousand dollars.
Robert Goldstein, the businessman who had helped Carl with The Sleeping Tiger, also arranged one of the more bizarre meetings of Carl’s time in London: a one-on-one session with Hedda Hopper at her suite in the Dorchester Hotel. It started off stiffly, as had Carl’s meeting with John Wayne in Hollywood several years earlier. Then Hopper brought out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s she’d smuggled in from the States and ordered a bucket of ice. Carl started talking about what had happened to him with High Noon and found, to his surprise, that Hopper shared his intense dislike for Stanley Kramer.
It took them three hours to polish off the bottle. Hopper was sixty years old, but in the dimming late afternoon light, aided by a serious quantity of Tennessee whiskey, she began to look thirty years younger. Suddenly Carl felt the urge to have sex with her, and he could see that she felt the same. Nothing happened, and Carl staggered home drunk. After that an unspoken truce took effect between them; there were warm, affectionate, newsy letters from him to her, and supportive mentions of him in her columns. Bygones were bygones. It was another bizarre step on Carl’s road back to respectability.
John Wayne was a different matter. He had been less strident than Hopper in condemning former Communists to eternal damnation in the blacklist days, but as he grew older Wayne’s views became more dogmatic and self-righteous and his memory more selective. In a wide-ranging Playboy magazine interview in May 1971 in which he attacked liberals, blacks, civil rights and anti-war demonstrators, and Native Americans, Wayne singled out for special abuse Carl Foreman and the late Robert Rossen. The makers of High Noon and All the King’s Men had created films “that were detrimental to our way of life,” Wayne insisted. High Noon, he went on, was “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” and he would never regret “having helped run Foreman out of the country.”
In response, Carl fired off an angry letter to a British film magazine saying it would be pointless to try to refute “Wayne’s silly and somewhat senile maunderings.” But he added, “It was disgusting of Wayne … as well as cowardly, to attack a dead man—Robert Rossen, a very talented writer and director who was in fact killed by the American blacklist and so cannot defend himself against the dashing hero of so many Westerns.”
When Wayne went to London in the summer of 1974 to film one of his last movies, Brannigan, a third-rate detective story (co-written by Christopher Trumbo, Dalton’s son), he appeared on Michael Parkinson’s celebrity interview TV program to discuss his career and politics. He again branded High Noon as un-American, although his memory of its pivotal scenes was as faulty as his reasoning. “Here’s this church,” said Wayne, “supposed to be an American church, and all the women are sitting on one side of the aisle, and all the men on the other. What kind of an American church is that? And all the women are telling the men to get out there and fight those killers, and all the men are afraid, what kind of a Western town is that? And then at the end, there’s this sheriff, he takes off his badge and he steps on it and grinds it into the ground … I think those things are just a little bit un-American.”
Wayne also claimed that the only blacklist in Hollywood had been one enforced by Communists and fellow travelers against Americanists like screenwriter Morrie Ryskind. When Parkinson brought up the ordeal of Larry Parks, Wayne said that Parks hadn’t worked much before he was called by HUAC to testify, and that he had gotten plenty of work once he had denounced Communism.
Both statements were blatantly false.
Carl had tried to keep a low public profile in London when it came to the blacklist, but Wayne’s remarks enraged him. He wrote a scathing rejoinder that appeared in Punch magazine. “A week or so ago,” it began, “I was in the counting house, fondling the paltry residue of all that good old Moscow gold we used to get so regularly from Comrade Beria, back in those marvelous subversive Hollywood days (it would come in bullion, wrapped in back issues of the Daily Worker … when the children rushed in screaming hysterically, ‘Daddy, Daddy, come quick! John Wayne is on the telly and he’s saying ever such nice things about you!’”
Carl wrote that “old Duke suffers from the Foreman–High Noon syndrome, a nervous disease causing anger, truculence and visible discomfort.” He pointed out that Wayne’s description of the church scene in the film was wildly distorted, as was his claim that Will Kane had stepped on his marshal’s badge and ground it into the dirt at the film’s conclusion (in fact, Kane takes off his badge and drops it to the ground, but no stepping on or grinding occurs). He also accused Wayne of more “selective lapses of memory.” For example, “Ask him if there was ever a political blacklist in Hollywood, and he will look you in the eye and say, oh, dear me, no, never—Ask him if he was a leading member of that scurvy gang of character assassins calling themselves the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which together with the House Un-American Activities Committee and a gaggle of frightened studio bosses persecuted and hounded hundreds of innocent people out of the American film industry, and he will tell you that to the best of his memory, it was a fine group of patriotic Americans devoted to celebrating national holidays.”
Carl went on to say it was “indecent, if not to say vicious” for Wayne to lie about what had happened to Larry Parks. Finally, as his outrage peaked, Carl listed the “suicides and broken homes and heart attacks and people dying long before their time, like John Garfield and Joe Bromberg and Robert Rossen and others.”
It was a telling moment. For all his success in London—the pictures and the money and the contract with Columbia—Carl Foreman’s blacklist wounds remained deep and unhealed.
One of the casualties was his marriage to Estelle, which never recovered from the damage caused by the move to London. After a decade of struggle and heartbreak they separated, and Estelle took Kate and moved back to Los Angeles. She hoped, but didn’t really believe, that it would be a temporary split. “He decided we should move back to L.A. and he would join us in a few months. And it didn’t sound right,” she recalled. “So anyhow we went and … that was really the end of the marriage. It was 1963.”
By this time, Carl was deeply involved with a twenty-four-year-old film production secretary named Eve Smith. She found him difficult, yet fascinating. “He was very acerbic and short-tempered,” Eve recalls. “And he was very angry—it was like someone had cut his arms off.” Why did she stick with him? “He was somebody very strong. I’d lost my father and I think I found another very strong person. But he was also quite needy, and I was good with needy people.”
They were married in 1965, soon after he and Estelle were divorced. They had two children: Jonathan in 1965 and Amanda in 1968. “I am indeed very happy,” Carl wrote to a friend, “perhaps for the first time.”
Suddenly life was good. Carl became president of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, a governor of the British Film Institute, and a member of an official commission to establish a national film school—honors that no American had ever received before. He bought a thirty-foot cabin cruiser he christened Lady Eve. On weekends, they haunted London’s art museums and theaters and the National Film Theatre, or roamed Hyde Park with the kids, hanging out often at Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch in the northeast corner of the park. He loved the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey where Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Johnson, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Dickens, Kipling, Hardy, and Tennyson are buried or memorialized. “That’s London,” he said. “It’s a writer’s town devoted to small neurotic lonely sensitive insecure idiots like me. It’s mama saying, ‘All right, sonny, so go ahead and be a writer, don’t be afraid.’”
When he had arrived in London, Carl recalled, “I was in a highly emotional state of great anger and some self-pity … It took me a long, long time to get over it, and I am very grateful to this country. England has been an inspiration.”
Still, there was a feeling of loss that Carl never quite overcame. “He recovered but the damage had been done and it is so catastrophic because it happened at what should have been the height of his career,” says his son, Jonathan. “All those false starts and he’d finally made it, and they’d taken it away. He called it economic capital punishment.”
Lionel Chetwynd, a young Canadian intrigued by filmmaking, met Carl in 1968 when Chetwynd got an assistant managing director’s job at the London office of Columbia Pictures. He was drawn to Carl’s intelligence and honesty, but he also saw the sadness. “He was a mordant man, there was a glumness about him, even when he smiled,” Chetwynd recalls. “Victor Hugo spoke about melancholy as the happiness of being sad. Carl understood things in terms of honor and dishonor. It was the code he lived by. The people I most admire stood up for something and got beaten up for it. And that was Carl.”
By now he was openly back at work, this time with his own production company, which he called Highroad. The first picture he wrote and produced under his own name was The Key (1958), starring William Holden and Sophia Loren. It was the story of a rescue boat captain during World War Two who inherits an apartment and the beautiful woman who lives there from a fellow seaman who is killed on a mission. The captain falls in love with the woman but fears he will not survive his next mission, and he arranges for her to be passed on to yet another seaman. He manages to survive, but she feels he has betrayed her and she flees to London leaving him behind. “To me it was the opposite side of High Noon,” said Carl. “In High Noon, the main character conquered his fear and lived. The Key was about a man who gave into despair, a kind of fear, and lost everything.”
The Key came and went with little notice, but Highroad’s next production, The Mouse That Roared (1959), was a pleasant surprise, a whacky Cold War satire that introduced British comedian Peter Sellers to international audiences. Carl followed it with The Guns of Navarone (1961), starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn, a spirited adventure film set in the Greek islands during World War Two, in which a British commando team sets out to find and destroy a massive German gun emplacement. The action scenes were thrilling and the picture became an international hit. “On a technical level, at least, my script was the best I had written since High Noon,” Carl would recall. “What emerged was a kind of tour de force of pure cinema in the genre of adventure.”
Still, while Navarone earned him a small fortune and another Oscar nomination for best screenplay, he was strangely disappointed in the film’s reception. He had set out to write a script that would depict the waste of human life even as it told a rousing war story, but critics and audiences mostly failed to notice the subtle characterizations and profound meanings. “It is galling to me that most of my ironies were swamped in the heroics, and sometimes appeared as little more than pauses for portentous and pretentious dialogue,” recalled Carl, “and that there are undoubtedly some people who believe I deliberately made a film glorifying war for the sake of money.”
One person who loved The Guns of Navarone was Winston Churchill, and it occurred to the former prime minister, now nearing eighty-eight, that Carl was the perfect choice to make a movie based on My Early Life, Churchill’s coming-of-age book recounting his childhood and military adventures as a young cavalry officer in India and the Sudan and war correspondent during the Boer War in South Africa. The two men met at the statesman’s office, and in the interest of full disclosure, Carl informed Churchill that he had been blacklisted in Hollywood for his former Communist connections. “Oh, I know all about you,” Churchill replied. “But we don’t like political blacklists in England. And speaking for myself, I don’t care what a man believed in when he was a boy. My concern is whether or not he can do the job.” The meeting became the basis for a deal that led eventually to the making of Young Winston (1972).
Carl had come to realize that the balance of creative power in filmmaking was shifting from producers to directors and stars, and that if he was going to make a movie that expressed his horror and hatred of war, he would have to direct it himself. Given his streak of success, Columbia allowed him total control over his next project, The Victors (1963), a nearly three-hour epic that Carl produced, wrote, and directed. It follows a small unit of American soldiers throughout the war in Europe and its aftermath. More than any other film, this one reflected his “personal vision,” he declared. It was “a backward look at what we, the allies and the winners, won and lost, seventeen years ago, and raises the question of what we may win or lose in the future.”
A series of grim vignettes, The Victors bombed both critically and financially. His old friend Bosley Crowther savaged the film as “specious, sentimental, and false … Mr. Foreman’s direction is generally artless, highly romanticized, and there really is not one good performance—one strong characterization—in the whole film.”
While Carl was deeply disappointed, he bounced back two years later with Born Free (1965), labeled “A Carl Foreman Presentation,” an utter crowd-pleaser about a lion cub raised in captivity by game warden George Adamson and his wife, Joy, in Kenya and then set free. Helped by a stirring theme song that topped the charts for months—the same musical marketing strategy that had helped propel High Noon to success—it captivated children and parents alike and made big profits for Columbia and for Carl.
It also proved a major breakthrough for Lester Cole, one of the Hollywood Ten, whom Carl hired to write the screenplay. When the head of Columbia found out, Cole recalled, he ordered Carl to find a different writer. Carl refused, saying he would rather quit than fire Cole. “Carl laid his own job on the line,” Cole recalled. Columbia backed down, but refused to allow Cole to use his own name. The screenplay is credited to “Gerald L. C. Copley.” When the picture was finished, Carl invited Cole to go to Los Angeles for the studio preview. “Carl brought me down for a purpose,” says Cole. “It was his determined way of subtly attempting to bring me out of the producer’s closet.”
After Born Free, Carl’s filmmaking career began to head downhill. He wrote and produced Mackenna’s Gold (1969), a star-studded Western, and Young Winston, the historical epic about Churchill, both of which failed critically and financially. Vincent Canby, Crowther’s successor as the New York Times chief film critic, mocked Mackenna’s Gold as “a Western of truly stunning absurdity.” He wasn’t much kinder to Young Winston, which he called “a big, balsa-wood monument to the Winston Churchill of pre-history” that lumbers “in that peculiar flatfooted gait peculiar to movies equipped with so much foresight.”
Still, Carl was nominated for another screenwriting Oscar for Young Winston, but lost again—making five times he had been nominated without a win. The only screenplay that had won, ironically, was his script for Kwai, a movie for which he got no official recognition.
He had never intended to live in the United States again, even after he was cleared and had resumed working under his own name. But by the mid-1970s the British film industry was reeling from high costs, foreign competition, and confiscatory-level taxes from the new Labour government. When Universal offered him a three-picture deal, Carl felt he had no choice but to return to Hollywood.
He had always wanted to help aspiring young filmmakers get the training opportunities he himself had hungered for when he first arrived in Hollywood in the 1930s. Once he returned to the States, he gave lectures at the American Film Institute and also helped fund fellowships for film students at the University of Southern California. One program involved internships for four talented students to work on Mackenna’s Gold. Each of the four worked on the set and each produced a short film about the making of the movie. Future director Michael Ritchie handled his project with aplomb, deftly turning out an accomplished piece of work that Carl admired for its professionalism. But another more cerebral and rebellious student immediately clashed with Carl.
George Lucas had no interest in mainstream commercial movies—he saw himself either as a documentarian or creator of avant-garde underground films—and he proposed making his short film about the desert where much of Mackenna’s Gold was filmed. “Carl had a fit, he got so angry with me,” Lucas would later recall. “And he said ‘you can’t do one about the desert, you’re supposed to do it about the movie’…
“So we kind of butted heads … I just thought of him as some big Hollywood producer, you know, had tons of money and had connections … one of the establishment.”
In the end, they worked it out. Carl recognized the powerful drive and talent in his young student and encouraged him to go his own way. “I still have very fond feelings for Carl,” said Lucas in a 2001 interview, “and he was a very important significant person in my life as I was growing up because he was one of the first people who, from the professional community, took an interest in me.”
Ultimately, what Lucas and Carl shared was an almost savage commitment to succeed as a filmmaker, no matter the cost. To another group of film students, Carl once described it this way: “Your whole life will change. You will neglect your wife, your children, and your friends. You’ll go to bed at night numb and wake up exhausted. To make your film you will have to fight, beg, grovel, cajole, persuade, and fight again … And with it all, you may fail, because hard work and dedication and high purpose are no guarantee of successful films. But however it comes out, your film will have your hallmark, your signature. It will be yours.”
While Carl Foreman was reconstructing his life and career in London, Gary Cooper was also undergoing a self-imposed exile from the United States, but for much different reasons. After bowing to political pressure and cutting ties with Carl’s attempt to become an independent film producer, Cooper had been welcomed back into the conservative fold. He’d even joined Hedda Hopper and other Hollywood establishment figures in attending the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago. But films were increasingly being made overseas to save on labor costs and taxes, and movie stars inevitably followed the cameras and the tax breaks. Cooper made four consecutive movies abroad, starting with Return to Paradise (1953) in Samoa, and Blowing Wild (1953), Garden of Evil (1954), and Vera Cruz (1954), all of which were filmed in Mexico. Legally separated from his wife Rocky since May 1951 and estranged from his passionate mistress Patricia Neal, he romanced beautiful young actresses such as Lorraine Chanel, a San Antonio–born model whom he met in Mexico, and Gisèle Pascal, a French starlet. By 1954, however, he and Rocky had reconciled and he moved back home, although stories of his love affairs—including a brief fling with Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg—always trailed close behind him.
The surprising success of High Noon made him a highly bankable asset again and he took full advantage, making eight Westerns in the 1950s of widely varying quality. A few were mildly entertaining, such as Vera Cruz, in which he and Burt Lancaster teamed up as soldiers of fortune caught up in the Mexican revolution, with Cooper’s fundamentally decent former Confederate army officer triumphing over Lancaster’s avaricious gunslinger. Others, like They Came to Cordura (1959), written and directed by Robert Rossen, were more or less dreadful. What Cooper brought to all of these films, good or bad, was his personal authenticity. He was now playing the same role over and over again with dignity and stoicism. His body continued to visibly age and his mobility grew more and more restricted, but his power on the screen remained undiminished, even in films, such as Man of the West (1958) and Cordura, in which his characters were physically humiliated by younger, cruder men.
Throughout this period, he and Carl Foreman kept in close touch. “Carl absolutely adored Cooper,” recalls Carl’s widow, Eve, “and after he went to Europe, every screenplay he wrote he sent it first to Cooper.”
“You know how much I have wanted to do another picture with you,” Carl wrote to Cooper from London in June 1957. “I hope this will still be possible. I have some very exciting things coming up after [The Key], and it would be my dearest wish that one of them should be the means of our reunion.”
“They really liked each other a hell of a lot and they really did want to work together again,” says Cooper’s daughter, Maria.
Cooper had two major operations in 1960, just five weeks apart. “When the carving was over,” he told an interviewer for McCall’s magazine, he had a lot of time in his hands while recuperating. “I took stock of myself.”
He didn’t much care for what he found. “I’ve been in the motion-picture business a long time … Yet nothing I’ve done lately, the past eight years or so, has been especially worthwhile. I’ve been coasting along. Some of the pictures I’ve made recently I’m genuinely sorry about. Either I did a sloppy job in them, or the story wasn’t right … When I get talked into a project I don’t believe in, I’m the one who’s wrong.
“Lying there in bed or out on my terrace at home,” Cooper added, “I began to feel much as I used to when I was just starting out in movies. Like a fraud.”
Cooper wasn’t finished with his critical self-assessment. He’d never really wanted to be an actor, he went on, and even now he rated himself as “barely adequate.” Truth was, he said, “I am uncomfortable so much of the time when I am acting, that I find it hard to concentrate on doing what I am supposed to be doing.” He recognized and appreciated good acting: he expressed the highest regard for younger performers like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Eva Marie Saint. They gave realistic performances, he said, “because they believe in what they are doing.” Cooper added, “I wish I had studied acting, now that I’ve spent so many years fumbling around in it.”
Although he acknowledged he had done a wide range of film parts, “The roles I feel most comfortable in are those in which I get up on a horse and, sooner or later, do some shooting.” But Westerns too had become disappointing. He mocked the lack of realism in TV Westerns where everyone wears a six-shooter and men take to the streets “looking like a walking arsenal.”
Even High Noon did not escape his critical eye. “I hate to disappoint a lot of customers, but High Noon wasn’t new or especially genuine,” he said. “There was nothing especially Western about it. It was a story about a phase of life, more current today, I suspect, than years ago—namely, how tough it is for a man to buck the apathy of the crowd even when he is trying to do something for their own protection … I suppose incidents like that happened in real life, but it’s hard to believe that any man in the West was ever so completely alone as the marshal was in High Noon.”
All in all, it was a stunning critique for a man who had risen to the pinnacle of the movie business and stayed there for nearly three decades, but he was keenly aware of its shortcomings and his own. The McCall’s article, published in January 1961, was his last public reckoning of his own career, and it was a sad one.
He seemed not to appreciate his own qualities as an actor. Perhaps it had all been a conjurer’s trick—some kind of cheap celluloid magic—but if so it had been a very good one. “I had worked with actors who were magnificent on the set, but somehow unsatisfactory when you saw the results in the projection room,” writes screenwriter Philip Dunne, who worked with Cooper on Ten North Frederick (1958), one of his last films. “Gary Cooper was exactly the opposite. When you printed a take you wondered if the scene was really there, then you ran the dailies, it was perfection. Cooper had mastered the art of acting to the camera’s lens, rather than to an audience.”
In truth, he was only partly to blame for what had gone wrong. The collapse of the studio system meant limited choices and mediocre screenplays, and the best actors, writers, and directors were going out on their own. Under such circumstances, the market for aging stars was rapidly shrinking. It wasn’t just Cooper. Bogart, Gable, Hepburn (Katharine, not Audrey), and Stanwyck were all being pushed aside. By the end of 1960, Bogart, Gable, Tyrone Power, and Errol Flynn were all dead from heart disease or cancer; none of them made it to age sixty.
When Cooper was in London that year to film The Naked Edge (1961), his last feature film, he stopped by Carl Foreman’s office on Jermyn Street to see his old friend. Carl offered Cooper the lead role in The Guns of Navarone; Cooper said he loved the part but was too ill to consider it. It was the last time the two men ever met. Fred Zinnemann also maintained close personal ties with Cooper. Despite his growing illness, Cooper and Rocky helped arrange for Fred and his wife, Rene, to be remarried in a Catholic ceremony in Los Angeles in early April 1961 with Cooper serving as best man.
He never left the house again. He hadn’t told McCall’s, but those two operations he had undergone were because he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Despite the surgery, the malignancy rapidly spread. Later that same month he was to receive a third, honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but he was too sick to attend the ceremony, and his friend James Stewart broke down and wept as he spoke on Cooper’s behalf.
Gary Cooper died at home on May 13, 1961, six days after turning sixty. Hundreds of movie stars and studio executives attended the funeral to mourn the fallen prince. From London, Carl hailed him as “one of the bravest men I have ever known.” He compared Cooper to Abraham Lincoln, praising his “quiet nobility and steadfast integrity … He put his entire career on the block in the face of the McCarthyite witch-hunters who were terrorizing Hollywood at the time.”
Cooper’s last film was The Real West, a black-and-white television documentary shot in December 1960 for which he delivers the narration on camera. It begins with evocative photographs of frail old buildings decaying in a deserted frontier town. Then Cooper ambles onto a stage set. First you see just his laced-up boots and long thin legs. He’s wearing an open-collar shirt, well-trimmed flannel jacket, and broad-brimmed tan hat. “This could be Elkhorn, Montana, just a few miles from where I was born and raised,” he begins, and then rattles off a dozen more names of abandoned Western towns.
“The names don’t matter, they’re just epitaphs for places that died, ghost towns. And they’re all part of the Old West that’s been dead and gone for going on sixty years.”
The narration is low-key but expressive. Cooper chuckles, raises his eyebrows, and occasionally suppresses a grin. He is playing himself playing a man of the Old West. Watching it now, you realize he’s giving his own eulogy.
“They did what they set out to do,” he says of the pioneers. “They made it a fit country to raise kids in, and when they did that the West was over.”
There are images of settlers, families, gunslingers, cavalrymen, Native Americans, mounds of buffalo carcasses. Cooper narrates from diaries and from the speeches of vanquished Indian leaders. “I am tired of fighting,” he quotes one as saying. “Our chiefs are all killed … the little children are freezing to death … I want to have time to look for my children. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.”
Then the camera shifts back to Cooper himself, sitting on the edge of the small stage. “The Real West: it lasted only forty years and then it was finished. If it’s a good land and grows good people it’s because it’s been irrigated by a lot of spit and sweat and blood.”
Then he gets up and, like Will Kane in High Noon, Gary Cooper walks away.