There is no avoiding the fact that the very nature … of every writer, is revealed in his writing. What you are as a human being shows up in your work.
In February 1934—the heart of an angry Chicago winter in the midst of the Great Depression—one of those aspiring young writers loaded his bags into a secondhand Plymouth and began the long, punishing drive to Southern California. Carl Foreman was just nineteen and due to start his senior year at the University of Illinois. He told his parents he was taking a leave of absence, but in truth he had no intention of returning to school. Instead he was hoping to launch a career as a screenwriter, relying on the promises made to him by his mother’s sister Florence, who had married a prosperous furniture dealer and invited Carl to come stay with them in Hollywood, where she could help him meet influential people in the movie business. The car wasn’t his; he was supposed to shepherd it to an automobile dealer on the West Coast. He had signed on three passengers to help fund the journey but their impecuniosity turned out to exceed even his own. The car was not quite as advertised—it guzzled gas and oil and broke down with alarming regularity—and neither were Carl’s skills as a motorist. Heading south to escape the cold on pre-Interstate, narrow country roads, he hit a cow and overturned a lettuce truck near Joplin, Missouri. Two of the passengers quickly peeled off, and he and his sole remaining travel companion, a Greek fry cook named Nick, abandoned the vehicle, black smoke pouring ominously from the hood, outside Odessa, Texas. Carl bought a bus ticket with borrowed money and took a Greyhound to the West Coast with a small sack of clothes and a portable typewriter.
He arrived in Los Angeles with fifty-seven cents in his pocket, only to discover that Aunt Florence’s situation was also not quite as advertised. She had divorced the furniture dealer, married a doctor, and divorced him as well. Now she was broke, hungry, unemployed, and living in a friend’s apartment. There was, of course, no room for Carl.
He left his typewriter with her and wandered the streets looking for work. For a while he had a job as a janitor in a rooming house, eating peanuts from the shell for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because they were cheap and filling, and sleeping in public parks and in the hallway or on the roof of an apartment building managed by his cousin Lou. Then he got temporary work as a freelance public relations manager for a new musical and for nine evenings as a silent torch carrier in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. But he missed his family and his college girlfriend, Estelle. He never even got past the gates of a film studio, let alone got the chance to try to write for one. After a year of fairly consistent misery, he fled back to Chicago, bowed but not broken—a far different introduction to Hollywood than Gary Cooper had experienced eight years earlier.
It was an inauspicious beginning for an ambitious son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Carl’s father, Isidore, had come from the town of Chudnov in the Ukraine, while his mother, Fanny, was from the Crimea. They met in Chicago and got married in 1913. When Carl was born a year later, they were living in a long, chaotic railroad flat presided over by his maternal grandmother. His father worked long hours as a pants cutter at Hart Schaffner and Marx, while his mother worked at a millinery factory. When they saved up enough money they opened their own store on Division Street, the colorful thoroughfare connecting east and west Chicago and serving as a hub for immigrants. Foreman’s Millinery had a hopeful motto: “Exclusive But Not Expensive.”
His parents bounced from poverty to modest success to poverty again. For a while they opened several shops in different parts of Chicago, but the Depression forced them to sell all of the stores as well as the small, two-story house they had bought. With its heavy reliance on manufacturing, the city was one of the hardest hit in America. Unemployment peaked at nearly 50 percent, thousands of jobless workers staged frequent demonstrations, and bread lines of forlorn men, women, and children were regular sights. Even Al Capone opened a soup kitchen to feed the hungry. Evictions were so common “you couldn’t walk three doors without walking into people’s furniture,” a resident told Studs Terkel. Carl was so shaken by what he saw that later in life, according to his son, Jonathan, he kept small bank accounts in five or six countries as a hedge against another economic collapse.
While it wrecked the Foremans’ dreams of prosperity, the Depression also affirmed their radical politics. Isidore Foreman was a Zionist, socialist, and trade union activist, while Fanny and her older brother Joe both belonged to a Young Communists group.
Carl’s own earliest exposure to radicalism occurred at the corner of Division Street and Washtenaw Avenue near Humboldt Park when he was twelve or thirteen. A street-corner political meeting to protest the rising toll of joblessness and poverty was disrupted when two police wagons drove straight into the gathering crowd. The cops arrested the speakers, then turned their attention to the onlookers. One of them grabbed Carl, kicked him all the way across Division Street, and threatened to do much worse if he ever saw Carl again. Angered by the bullying tactics, Carl lingered for the neighborhood dance that followed. There were tea and biscuits and Russian folk songs, and a very pretty older girl who danced with him. “When I went home at two in the morning I was a Communist,” he recalled.
Early on he wanted to be a lawyer, modeling himself after Clarence Darrow, the legendary Chicago defender of the underdog. At age ten he memorized big chunks of Darrow’s passionate and successful twelve-hour appeal to the court to spare the lives of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the coldly calculating young killers of a local schoolboy in what was then the trial of the century. “I am pleading for the future,” young Carl would proclaim to his parents’ dinner guests, tears streaming down his face. “I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of man, when we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.” The performance was a cleverly calculated marriage of idealism and melodrama—a forerunner of Carl’s career as a screenwriter.
The movies were another source of melodrama and fantasy. Carl’s parents opened a drapery shop on Lawrence Avenue, where there were three movie theaters within a six-block radius. He was smitten by the beautiful women he watched on the screen—Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, Madeleine Carroll, Eleanor Powell, Gladys Swarthout, Maureen O’Sullivan—and by Estelle Barr, a pretty, brown-haired girl he met at Theodore Roosevelt High School during his sophomore year. He loved dramas and musicals, and most especially Westerns, particularly those of William S. Hart, the first great cowboy movie hero, who always played the outsider: the noble outlaw, or the cowhand who got framed and took justice into his own hands, or the sheriff under attack by narrow-minded citizens for doing his job without fear nor favor—“in short,” as Carl later put it, “the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment.” Hart’s characters lived by a personal code; they treated women with respect, were kind to animals and small children, always kept their word, and fought their enemies honorably—they never drew first. Carl was less enamored of the gentleman cowboys who replaced Hart in popularity as the silent era came to a close. Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and Tim McCoy had no inner conflicts and no complexity—they were just handsome, heavily powdered leading men in dry-cleaned, well-pressed costumes. Carl longed for grit and authenticity.
He was a string bean in those days, five foot ten and underfed, with dark brown hair, bottle-thick glasses over warm blue eyes, and pale, pitted skin that gave him the countenance of a Russian Jewish intellectual who spent too much time in basement coffee shops. Later on, even as his hair thinned and his waistline thickened, he never lost that nerdy, intelligent look nor the sardonic and intuitive skepticism that went with it.
He graduated high school early and at age seventeen headed to the University of Illinois, where he majored in English, minored in journalism, and wrote for several student publications. Storytelling quickly emerged as his special gift. And he was immediately drawn to Hollywood, the promised land for storytellers. “The movies are the great mass art of our times, the people’s art … a theater that knows no boundaries,” he passionately declared. Still, after the debacle of his first trip to the West Coast, he was wary of venturing there again.
For a time he managed the Nickelodeon in downtown Chicago, then ran the John Hicks Show on State Street at the tawdry southern end of the Loop. There were all-women wrestling matches and dancing girls and faked prize fights. The lead attraction was Michaeline of the Waters—“The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” She and her friend Marie would dance seductively in their bathing suits and wrestle each other while the male customers cheered. He made forty dollars a week, took a room downtown, and went home early Sunday mornings to sleep in and see his parents.
Around 1937 he hooked up with a traveling carnival, playing the West Coast: Vancouver, Washington, and Oregon. He served as the barker, enticing people to enter the tent—good experience, no doubt, for a future career in Hollywood. Carnival life was an endless mix of adventures and temptations—drinking, gambling, and women. The rummy and poker games went on all afternoon, then by six he’d open up the show; he would talk himself hoarse until one or two A.M., and then seek out a woman to take to his cot. He’d exhaust himself to the point where he needed Benzedrine to stay awake and alcohol to go to sleep. There’d be times during the evening when he couldn’t sit down for fear of not being able to get up again.
Carl loved the rude, grotesque intimacy of the freaks: the human pincushion who sewed buttons on his naked chest and had an icepick implanted in his cheeks; Beasy and Billy, the pinhead twins from Africa whose skulls came to a point; the frog-faced boy; and the beautiful black woman who could pick silver dollars off a table with her vagina.
But he still dreamed of Hollywood—and of Estelle. In early October 1938 he made his inglorious return to Los Angeles in a circus train loaded with elephants. The beasts stood tightly packed in freight cars all day, noisily eating, moaning, urinating, and defecating in vast quantities, and the smell was beyond suffocating. “The second coming of Foreman to Hollywood was with the elephants,” he would later boast. A few weeks later Estelle joined him there and they were married.
If his first trip to Hollywood had been an unmitigated disaster, this one didn’t start out much better. He enrolled in the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program, which paid him eighty-five dollars per month to write guidebooks (he was, by his own reckoning, terrible at it), while Estelle worked weekends at a shoe store downtown. Her parents, who thought Carl was a dubious match for their attractive and talented daughter, pleaded with the newlyweds to return to Chicago, but they resisted. They got a one-room apartment on Gregory Way with a tiny kitchenette and a pull-down bed for thirty dollars a month on the ground floor next to the parking lot. “You could hear the cars as they pulled in and the impetuous fellow who kept hitting the side of the building,” Carl would recall.
There were no film schools in those days where an aspiring screenwriter could study and hone his craft. But the League of American Writers, a professional writers’ organization founded by the Communist Party in 1935, set up a night school for writers in Hollywood. Students could study screenwriting with such respected luminaries as Paul Jarrico, John Howard Lawson, Irwin Shaw, and Donald Ogden Stewart, the league’s president and author of The Philadelphia Story’s Oscar-winning screenplay. Carl got a scholarship to attend. He took a screenwriting course with Lester Cole and Robert Rossen, both of them—like Stewart—members of Hollywood’s small but hyperactive branch of the party. His next course was with Dore Schary, a New Jersey–born former actor in the New York theater circuit who was establishing himself as a top screenwriter and producer at MGM.
Schary’s first homework assignment was to write a synopsis for a story to be workshopped in class. Two sessions after Carl turned in his treatment, Schary asked the class, “Now which of you is Carl Foreman?” Carl raised his hand with trepidation. Schary told him, “Mr. Foreman, you’re a writer.” Carl was stunned and ecstatic. It was the first time that anyone of stature had taken notice of his work.
After that, Schary kept an eye out for him. When Carl failed to qualify for another eighteen-dollar scholarship to continue his studies, Schary paid the tuition out of his own pocket. “He was one of the most important people in my life,” Carl would recall. “He was my father out here when I needed a father.”
The League of American Writers combined professional development and left-wing politics at a time when communists, socialists, and liberals mixed somewhat uneasily in a broad “Popular Front” coalition that shared a commitment to social justice and an abhorrence of Fascism. Schary was a liberal who believed that movies could combine hard-hitting social relevance and entertainment. But he also had a robust skepticism about Communism and its acolytes. He had no use for Carl’s radicalism, but their disagreement was largely good-natured. When the younger man gave Schary a large salami that his father had sent from Chicago wrapped in a copy of a Communist newspaper, Schary thanked him, saying, “I ate the salami and I read the baloney.”
The professional writers who flocked to the West Coast studios during the golden age of the studio system brought along their politics as well as their typewriters, as did the writer-émigrés who fled the growing chaos and dangers of Europe in the 1930s and set up shop in Hollywood. A disproportionate number of these newcomers were Jews, eager for the fresh start and egalitarian opportunities that Hollywood seemed to promise those with the talent and skills to compete. Like Carl and Estelle Foreman, many of their tribal and cultural loyalties were on the left: families, friends, neighbors, teachers, and instincts all skewed to liberalism, socialism, or beyond, just as Gary Cooper’s in Montana had naturally skewed to the conservative right.
For its first few decades, Hollywood was a monopoly-capitalist’s dream. The large studios owned everything from the offices where the producers and screenwriters gave birth to movie ideas, to the soundstages where those ideas became pictures, to the theaters where they were exhibited. The studio bosses also owned the people who populated every step of the process. They created a tame company union in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to encompass producers, directors, actors, writers, and other professionals. There were fledgling unions for skilled and semiskilled craftsmen, technicians, decorators, and manual laborers who built and tore down film sets and moved equipment, but no independent guilds for the artisans, whether performers, directors, or writers. Nothing about Hollywood seemed like it would be fertile ground for preaching class struggle. But by the time Carl first arrived, the landscape was rapidly changing.
The first attempt to organize artisans was launched in 1933 with the founding of the Screen Writers Guild. In January of that year Paramount and RKO declared their lucrative theater chains bankrupt. Ticket sales were down and economic control of the industry was rapidly migrating from its original entrepreneurial owners to the East Coast bankers and investors who financed them. On March 8, most of the studios announced they were unable to meet their payrolls. The next day—the same day that Franklin Roosevelt declared a bank moratorium—the major studios collectively imposed a wage cut of 50 percent for all employees for a two-month “emergency” period. The move brought home to thousands of artisans their utter powerlessness before the men who owned the companies they worked for.
Ten prominent screenwriters had gotten together at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel a few weeks earlier to discuss forming a guild. Now they decided to seek an alliance with other organizations of authors, playwrights, and journalists throughout the country to demand a share of the profits from their work. More than two hundred writers left the Motion Picture Academy in April to join the Screen Writers Guild and elected John Howard Lawson, a former New York playwright and proud, prickly, self-acknowledged Communist, as their president. Over the next two years, the directors, cameramen, and actors formed similar organizations.
The studio bosses, frightened by the specter of independent unions for their most skilled workers, vehemently resisted. Irving Thalberg, the genteel head of production for MGM and perhaps the most respected of the studio executives, declared that “unions are for laborers, not dignified people like writers.” William Randolph Hearst’s rabidly right-wing Los Angeles Examiner denounced the guild as “a device of Communist radicals.”
For a time, the studios supported a breakaway organization of conservative writers who called themselves the Screen Playwrights Inc. But in June 1938 the Guild won a commanding victory of 267 to 57 in a federally supervised election, and two months later the National Labor Relations Board formally certified the Guild as the sole representative of Hollywood’s screenwriters. Still, it took three more years for the Guild and the studios to forge their first contract. Under the threat of a writers’ strike, negotiating committees for the two sides finally got together one evening at the Brown Derby restaurant. The Guild left its fire-breathing radicals like Lawson and sharp-tongued columnist Dorothy Parker at home, sending over milder-mannered liberals like Charles Brackett, Sheridan Gibney, and Carl’s good friend Dore Schary. After dinner and drinks the writers made a proposal for a temporary minimum wage and recognition of the Guild as the sole bargaining agent for all screenwriters and final arbiter of writers’ credits.
“Is that all you want?” Harry Warner of Warner Bros. asked mildly.
Schary wondered if they’d sold themselves too cheaply. But then Warner exploded.
“That’s all you want, you goddamned Communist bastards? You dirty sons of bitches. All you’ll get from me is shit!”
Warner stormed out of the room. The writers eventually got their contract on their terms. But the depth of anger and bitterness among Hollywood’s old guard was clear. Red-baiting, even of liberal anti-Communists like Schary, from now on would be an accepted weapon in the arsenal of the producers and their allies.
Communist organizers came to Hollywood for the same reason that their enemies in the House Un-American Activities Committee ventured there later—for the prestige and the publicity, and to make their mark on an industry that had become the effective overseer of American popular culture. The party wanted to attract celebrities and intellectuals and raise money. It also wanted to get at least a toehold in the craft unions whose work was essential to the industry. The Hollywood branch reported direct to national headquarters at 235 West Twenty-Third Street in New York City. Its members were treated with kid gloves by the national party because of their prestige, wealth, and ability to draw crowds to large public events and causes. Its numbers were small: at the zenith there were probably no more than 350 active party members in Hollywood in an industry that employed nearly thirty thousand. Screenwriters were estimated to make up nearly half of that small number. There were “fractions” in which artisans in the same field—writers, directors, performers—gathered to discuss the issues of the day, talk strategy, and organize. And there were study groups in which the gospel of Karl Marx, as seen through the special lens of Joseph Stalin, was preached and practiced.
Despite its egalitarian ideology, the party was riddled with gender and class divisions. “The men were always working in a group in the Beverly Hills area, and the wives were sent out to the San Fernando Valley with the dentists’ and doctors’ wives,” recalled screenwriter Jean Rouverol Butler, a party member married to fellow writer Hugo Butler. “Within the studios, the most important writers were in the elite group, and the rest of us were in a hodgepodge with all the nonprofessionals, the script readers and so forth.”
Carl and Estelle Foreman had arrived in Hollywood around the time of the Munich Pact in September 1938, when the Western powers acquiesced to Hitler’s territorial amputation of Czechoslovakia in a vain effort to prevent another world war. Many of their early friends in Los Angeles were party members. While the Foremans admired Franklin Roosevelt and voted mostly as Democrats, they saw the Communist Party as the only political organization wholeheartedly committed to supporting the cause of anti-Fascism and the rights of blacks, Jews, immigrants, and trade unionists, and they saw the Great Depression as the ultimate judgment of capitalism’s failure. For them the party clearly seemed to be the most courageous political organization in the country. “The people we met were very bright,” Carl would recall, “… alive and friendly and warm, and in no time at all … I was so imbued with the idea of joining in what seemed to me to be a crusade for a better America that I went to my friend X and literally pleaded to be allowed to join.”
As much as half the party’s membership consisted of Jews. This was partly for reasons of culture and ideology: as with Carl’s family, many of the Jews who came from Russia and Eastern Europe brought their socialist politics along with their baggage, and passed on those beliefs to their children. But it was also a matter of identity. The passage to America was not just a physical transition but an emotional and psychological one as well. Many who came retained their traditional beliefs and their Jewish heritage, but others sought to trade those vestiges of the Old World for a modern new identity in the new one. It’s too simple to say they gave up being Jews to become Communists, although some did exactly that. For many more—including Carl and Estelle—these identities coexisted in complicated ways. As Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers, his landmark study of the coming of Eastern European Jews to America, “The greatest contribution of the left-wing immigrant Jews to the Communist movement was, finally, neither their time, nor money, nor minds; it was their children.”
Carl and Estelle joined the Communist Party at the height of the Popular Front era. The party, which early on had preached world revolution, had toned down its rhetoric and its tactics by the mid-thirties, and repackaged itself as a Jeffersonian force for progressivism and nonviolent social change. Communism, declared its moderate new general secretary, Earl Browder, “is the Americanism of the twentieth century.”
The party’s official policy was to join forces with other progressive groups to form organizations like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, and the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. These groups often consisted of liberal Democrats, a sprinkling of socialists and Communists, and even some moderate Republicans. Liberals like Dore Schary, Edward G. Robinson, Melvyn Douglas, and Fredric March joined forces with conservative Republicans like Bruce Cabot, Joan Bennett, John Ford, and Dick Powell in the Anti-Nazi League to organize massive rallies against Hitler’s alarming success in Germany and growing attacks on Jews and other minorities. Communist Party members often played the role of good partners in these groups, sharing their expertise and their commitment.
“The activities I was engaged in until the time I left were not disloyal to the United States,” recalled screenwriter Richard J. Collins, one of the most active party members, who later turned informer. “They may have been misguided, but disloyal they were not … In other words, the people who became Communists, at least in my time, didn’t join because the Communists were going to overthrow our form of government by force and violence.”
Collins recalled an atmosphere of idealism and mutual support among his fellow Communists. “When I joined the party, I was handed ready-made friends, a cause, a faith, and a viewpoint on all phenomena.”
“The Communist Party was for years the best social club in Hollywood,” recalled screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky, one of the most committed intellectuals among party members. “You’d meet a lot of interesting people, there were parties, and it created a nice social atmosphere.”
Screenwriter Philip Dunne, a dedicated liberal who was president of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, said one of his favorite young colleagues at Twentieth Century-Fox told him she had joined the party “because she was new in Hollywood and hadn’t been able to make many friends. To her, the Communist Party was a sort of glamorous Lonely Hearts Club.”
For Norma Barzman, a writer who joined the party after marrying her fellow screenwriter Ben, the party became part of the fabric of their commitment to each other. “It sounds silly and maybe that’s why no one mentions it,” she writes in her memoir. “Hollywood Communist couples had a romantic notion of themselves as the ideal young man and young woman surging forward with the Red flag, the logo of Artkino [Soviet films] … To be together in this enterprise of making the world better brought with it a chest-bursting pride, a heady elation, a belief in the gloriousness of life.”
In its earliest days, the party’s artists and performers had focused on appealing to a limited audience of fellow radicals. But as time went on, according to historian Michael Kazin, the growth of mass culture, coupled with the more general shift in public opinion to the left, created opportunities for left-wing artists to reach a much broader cross-section of the population. The party’s influence stretched far beyond its small membership. Party members were responsible for songs like “Strange Fruit,” and “This Land Is Your Land,” novels like Native Son, plays like The Little Foxes, and films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Fellow travelers with leftist sympathies created Citizen Kane, Death of a Salesman, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yertle the Turtle, the screenplay for Casablanca, and the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz.
“We knew who we were,” said Dorothy Healey, one of the most respected leaders of the California party. “We weren’t subject to any doubts or hesitations. Not only would we triumph, we would triumph soon.”
There were two serious and lingering problems, however, that made many liberals anxious about working with Communists. For one thing, the party was a clandestine organization that did not hold open meetings nor make public its membership, and while some members were open about their involvement, most adhered to a strict code of secrecy. All were subject to party discipline, and many were prepared to lie about their involvement. Party leaders argued that the secrecy was necessary to protect members from harassment by the FBI and local “Red Squads” such as the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division. But it gave the party a conspiratorial aura that severely limited its ability to attract a larger following and gain the trust of non-party members.
The other problem was the party’s close ties to Moscow. The Communist International, or Comintern, set up by Lenin in 1919, became the clearinghouse and overseer of organizations abroad, including the American party. The gradual release of secret files following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s has revealed the extent to which the Comintern transmitted orders on policies and practices from the Kremlin to the American party’s New York headquarters and to which those orders were strictly obeyed. The first loyalty of the party’s leadership clearly belonged to the world’s one Communist nation—“the motherland,” as playwright Lillian Hellman once solemnly called the Soviet Union. At a time when capitalism seemed to be collapsing across the globe, members saw socialist Russia as a lonely beacon of hope and idealism. Many members believed in the infallibility of Joseph Stalin with the same certitude with which staunch Catholics believed in the pope. Dissent was condemned as deviationism. Trotskyism became a hated epithet. Philosopher John Dewey’s investigation of the Moscow show trials in 1936–37 was publicly denounced by loyal Communists. The trials’ defendants had “resorted to duplicity and conspiracy and allied themselves with longstanding enemies of the Soviet Union,” read a chillingly delusional statement in New Masses, the Communist weekly, signed by such luminaries as movie star John Garfield and authors Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy Parker.
As historian Kazin points out, the Moscow connection gave American Communists influence and impact. They weren’t just members of a tiny radical splinter group but were part of a worldwide movement. But it was also a fatal flaw. How could a political organization that claimed to believe in the ideals of human rights, economic justice, racial tolerance, and world peace justify taking orders from one of the most bloodstained, repressive, and antidemocratic regimes in history? People could claim not to have known in earlier days about the crimes against humanity of Lenin and Stalin, but by the late 1930s there was little doubt or moral justification for the blind loyalty of American Communists to the Soviet Union.
“The Party tried very hard to present Communist or Socialist ideas as an advance in America’s development that was in fact rooted in American traditions,” recalled film director Jules Dassin, a loyal party member. “Well, they failed in this. The American people couldn’t buy it. The association with the Soviet Union was too powerful.”
Steve Nelson, a Spanish Civil War veteran and senior party organizer, conceded ruefully in his memoirs that “We treated the Soviet Union as the single pivot in the world around which everything else was centered. Nothing else mattered … We had the mentality that the Soviet Union was always right and that its interests were paramount.”
Occasionally word of dissent within the party would leak through its shell of secrecy—as when local party leader Lawson sought to rein in young Budd Schulberg, whose Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, was deemed anti-Semitic by the party elders because of its acidic portrait of the studio heads, their morals, and their lackeys. One of Schulberg’s younger friends within the party, Charles Glenn, wrote a glowing review of the book for the Daily Worker and Daily People’s World, calling it “the best work done on Hollywood.” Lawson then summoned Glenn to his office for a dressing down. When Glenn suggested that Lawson write a letter to the editor criticizing the review and launching a dialogue, Lawson told him that no such dialogue was necessary, that Glenn just needed to write a new review retracting his earlier one. Thoroughly bullied, Glenn did what he was told, and said later he had always regretted it. Furious at what he saw as the party’s hidebound orthodoxy, Schulberg quit and later named names of party members in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Similarly, when New Masses published “What Shall We Ask of Writers?,” a thoughtful piece by screenwriter Albert Maltz arguing that artists should be free to pursue their creative instincts outside the boundaries of orthodox Communist ideology, he was hounded, excoriated, and humiliated until he felt compelled to retract his apostasy in print.
The question of the party’s honesty and true loyalties came to a sudden head on August 24, 1939, when Moscow and Berlin announced the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Overnight, the party’s position on war and peace swiveled 180 degrees from relentlessly promoting the fight against Fascism to denouncing the corporate warmongers who were purportedly pushing the United States into another world war. The pact caused thousands of members to drop out of the party and shattered any sense of trust between liberals and Communists. Without taking a vote of its membership, the leaders of the Anti-Nazi League changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. Its New Year’s card for 1940 denounced “the war to lead America to war.” Its new motto: “The Yanks are not coming.” Many of the organizations that had comprised the Popular Front simply collapsed, marking the end of that phase of left-wing and liberal solidarity.
Rueful liberals got the message. More former sympathizers were shocked and disgusted when the Soviets invaded Poland at the same time as the Nazis. Melvyn Douglas and Philip Dunne resigned from the Motion Picture Democratic Committee after it refused to consider a motion condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland and instead passed a resolution demanding that the United States remain neutral in the war between Nazi Germany and Britain and France. Control of other Popular Front organizations was seized “in similar fashion by the same wrecking crew, as all over town the industrious Communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog,” recalled Dunne.
Dore Schary was stunned when Lawson, a leader of the League of American Writers, submitted a petition condemning Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy in Latin America. Schary was advised to sign or at least keep quiet in order to avoid friction between the league’s factions. Instead, he quit.
“A Communist was no longer just a Communist …” said Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that had previously welcomed Communists to its ranks. From then on, “a Communist was an agent of the Soviet Union.”
Carl Foreman would later say that the American Communist Party effectively committed political suicide by supporting the Moscow-Berlin pact. But despite their gnawing doubts, he and Estelle hung on to their party membership. They accepted the leadership’s claim that Stalin had had no choice but to sign with the devil because of the cowardice and weakness of France and Britain in failing to oppose Hitler’s designs. Staying with the party, Carl later said, had been “an act of faith” on his and Estelle’s part, based upon wishful thinking rather than hard facts. Even so, their reservations were growing. The subsequent invasion of Finland was even harder to swallow. And the elitism of the Hollywood party, which Carl began to see was ruled by a clique of prestigious writers, began to eat at him.
Still, the party was the center of Carl and Estelle’s professional and social life. They had made friends with other young writers, attended the party’s writing workshops, drew on moral support and encouragement. “If you left the party you were leaving the friends you had,” he recalled.
For Carl and many other American Communists, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a blessing in disguise. While it put Russia in huge jeopardy, it helped to paper over the rifts on the left and revived the concept and spirit of the Popular Front. “It was one of the happiest nights of my life,” recalled Donald Ogden Stewart, with more than a little sense of irony.
Carl’s screenwriting career was proceeding in fits and starts. He learned from fellow writer Charles Marion that Monogram, one of the smaller “Poverty Row” studios, was looking for a script that would combine its two biggest attractions: the Bowery Boys and the aging Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi of Dracula fame. Charlie and Carl knocked out Spooks Run Wild in two feverish weeks, splitting the grand sum of $425. Carl was bitterly unhappy with the pay, and even more so with their second Bowery Boys assignment, which paid only three hundred. He could see that things were moving in exactly the wrong direction: pretty soon, he quipped, they’d be paying the studio for assignments.
Still, Carl would recall the sale of that first screenplay as “probably the most excruciatingly exciting thing that has ever happened to me,” although he understood just how low writers like himself stood on the ladder of importance. “I was a flunky, a hack, the lowest of the low, a joke, despised, barely tolerated, underestimated, undervalued, and underpaid,” he recalled. “My scripts, like those of every other writer—regardless of stature—were at the mercy of the whims, neuroses, foibles, ulcers, stupidities, and blind spots of the producers, directors, and actors who worked with them. I fought hard … and they fought back with confidence because they knew the truth … To make matters worse, I didn’t even have the comfort of believing that I was a good screenwriter in those days.”
It was only a slight improvement when they landed a gig as gag writers for the Charlie Ruggles radio program (entitled A Barrel of Fun because the sponsor was a brewery) at $250 each per show. Carl quickly graduated to writing jokes for Eddie Cantor’s radio show, a step up both in professionalism and pay. But it still was a long way from his dream of writing original film scripts. He went back to Dore Schary, his friend and mentor, and pleaded for a job. All Schary could offer him was a temporary spot at MGM as a script doctor for $150 a week—less than half what he was earning with Cantor. The pay didn’t matter; Carl eagerly grabbed the opportunity. Cantor was shocked to lose him. But Carl stayed at MGM for fourteen months until a bigger and more demanding employer came along: the United States Army.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany’s subsequent declaration of war on the United States definitively ended the bitter domestic debate over whether America should enter World War Two. It also unambiguously established the United States and the Soviet Union as allies in the war against Fascism. For now, at least, both countries were committed to military collaboration to defeat their common enemy.
Many of Hollywood’s most talented filmmakers enlisted in the war effort. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, became a colonel in the Army Signal Corps, while acclaimed director John Ford headed up the Navy’s newly formed Field Photo Unit. He and fellow directors William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens took their cameras into combat zones, putting themselves in harm’s way to create an enduring collection of memorable battlefield documentaries.
After Pearl Harbor, Carl tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy but his nearsightedness was so bad he was rejected. He was eventually drafted by the Army, and he applied to and was accepted by the Army Signal Corps’s film unit, under the command of Frank Capra. The legendary movie director was compiling an impressive collection of producers, writers, and editors to create a series of indoctrination films called Why We Fight that attempted to explain to newly minted American soldiers the context and meaning of the war against the Axis powers. Carl almost lost the assignment. The Army had a dossier from the FBI that recorded his attendance at Communist Party events in Hollywood, and Capra was inclined to shun anyone who might be considered a security risk. But screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass, a close friend of Dore Schary, intervened on Carl’s behalf.
He worked for nine months as a writer and researcher on a twenty-minute documentary called Know Your Enemy: Japan, under the supervision of a Dutch-born socialist filmmaker named Joris Ivens. Capra’s superiors eventually scrapped the film as too radical, then assigned Carl and Irving Wallace, the future bestselling novelist, to write an entirely new version.
Carl’s next assignment took him to New York—it was his first trip on an airplane—where he reported to Anatole Litvak. The Ukrainian-born film director had been promoted to major and put in charge of a movie, reportedly a personal pet project of President Roosevelt, explaining and extolling Russian-American cooperation in the fight against Hitler. Litvak was an annoying boss—Carl found him pompous, demanding, and lazy—and nothing ever seemed to get done. After Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 the Army quickly shelved the project.
Beyond contributing some of its finest filmmakers to create military documentaries, Hollywood made dozens of films that were designed to support the war effort. They ranged from gung-ho combat movies like Wake Island and Back to Bataan to entertaining fantasies like Casablanca. And with the encouragement of the Roosevelt administration, the studios also made several pictures that were designed to convince audiences that the Soviet Union was a worthy ally. Samuel Goldwyn produced and RKO distributed The North Star (1943), written by Lillian Hellman, who had been a Communist Party member in the late 1930s, which celebrated the heroic resistance of Ukrainian partisans against Nazi invaders. MGM, under Louis B. Mayer, a conservative Republican, produced Song of Russia (1944), in which the dashing Robert Taylor plays an American orchestra conductor who falls in love with a beautiful young Russian pianist and tractor driver. The film was written by Richard J. Collins and Paul Jarrico, two of Hollywood’s most successful and influential Communist Party members.
But the most blatant and disturbing ode to the Kremlin was Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch and directed by Michael Curtiz, two non-Communist Hollywood veterans, for Warners. The movie was based on the bestselling memoir of Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to Moscow, and chronicles his gradual conversion from skeptic to passionate advocate for Joseph Stalin’s regime. “No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government,” intones Davies himself in a filmed preface to the story. The picture defends the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, depicts the defendants in the Moscow show trials as pro-Nazi fifth columnists, and celebrates their subsequent conviction and execution. “Based on twenty years as a trial lawyer, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions,” declares the Davies character, played by Walter Huston, oblivious to the torture that Stalin’s thugs had used to extract those admissions.
Jack Warner later defended the picture before the House Un-American Activities Committee, saying his studio had made the movie out of patriotic duty. “That picture was made when our country was fighting for its existence,” he told the committee. “… If making Mission to Moscow in 1942 was a subversive activity, then the American Liberty ships which carried food and guns to Russian allies and the American naval vessels which convoyed them were likewise engaged in subversive activities. The picture was made only to help a desperate war effort and not for posterity.”
Although Carl Foreman felt suffocated by the slow and super-cautious Army bureaucracy, he was acquiring valuable experience during his time in New York. Working out of the Astoria film studio just across the East River from Manhattan, he was exposed for the first time to the craft of modern filmmaking—lighting, camera work, film editing, film-set construction. He met a wide range of filmmakers and writers, including playwright Herbert Baker, who became a lifelong friend; screenwriter Theodor Geisel, who later gained fame as author of the Dr. Seuss children’s books; and Ukrainian-born composer Dimitri Tiomkin. And one evening at the Manhattan apartment of Dore Schary’s sister Lillian, he met an intense young film editor named Stanley Kramer.
Stanley was just a year older than Carl, but he had toiled for almost a decade in a variety of frustrating, low-paying jobs at several film companies, and he seemed keenly knowledgeable about the way things worked in Hollywood. Now he was a lieutenant working out of the Astoria studio. Carl generally didn’t trust officers, but Stanley’s charismatic intensity and his withering critique of the studio establishment impressed Carl. They talked late into the evening, took the subway home together, and began to see each other regularly, comparing notes and venting their frustrations. “He had a brooding aura of fighting injustice about him …” Carl would recall of his new friend. “I liked him a lot.”