Blacklist

Welcome (if that's the word) to Blacklist

This is a personal attempt to gather information about the Hollywood blacklist, from all possible sources. It may seem to be all about Dalton Trumbo and his family, but that's only until you provide information on your own experience—which I'll be happy to post here.

Walter Bernstein: Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter dies at 101

Via The Guardian: Walter Bernstein: blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter dies at 101. Excerpt:

Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, among the last survivors of Hollywood’s anti-communist blacklist, whose Oscar-nominated script for The Front drew upon his years of being unable to work under his own name, has died, aged 101. 

HIs wife, the literary agent Gloria Loomis, said he died of pneumonia. 

A second world war correspondent for the military who also had been published in The New Yorker, Bernstein was at the start of what seemed a promising film career when the cold war and anti-communist paranoia led to his being blacklisted in 1950, a fate which ruined the lives of many of his peers and led some to suicide.  

“I was starting to look around when I left my house, looking over my shoulder when I walked down the street, bracing myself for the inevitable encounter,” he wrote in his memoir Inside Out, published in 1996. 

“Even expecting it, I was startled when it came, and there would be the sudden sour taste of fear for a moment and then a shaming wave of anger, not at them but at myself for being afraid. I could never really get angry at them. They were only doing their job, like delivering milk.”  

Unwilling to provide the House Un-American Activities Committee names of suspected communists, the way director Elia Kazan and others had been spared from banishment, Bernstein found employment through the use of “fronts,” people willing to lend their names for scripts he had written. 

While many were blacklisted just for supporting left-wing causes, Bernstein actually was a member of the American Communist party and remained so until 1956. Bernstein would remember his decision with “relief” over no longer abiding Soviet dogma and “sadness” for the people who were fellow idealists.  

“I had left the party, but not the idea of socialism,” he wrote in his memoir, “the possibility that there could be a system not based on inequality and exploitation.” 

The blacklist began to weaken in the late 1950s and ended for Bernstein in 1959 with That Kind of Woman, starring Sophia Loren. He was soon working on The Magnificent Seven, the Hollywood adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, and Marilyn Monroe’s last film that never finished, Something’s Gotta Give.  

In the 1970s, Bernstein was able to use his own story for what became his most acclaimed project, The Front, starring Woody Allen as a stand-in for blacklisted writers and featuring Bernstein’s friend Zero Mostel, who also had been ostracised in the 50s. 

Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination in 1977 and a Writers Guild of America prize for best screen drama. Around the same time, Allen gave him an acting cameo in the Oscar-winning Annie Hall. 

His other writing credits included the Burt Reynolds football comedy Semi-Tough and films by such old friends as Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet . Bernstein himself directed Little Miss Marker, a 1980 release based on the Damon Runyon short story.  

In 1994, he received a lifetime achievement award from the the Screen Writers’ Guild. Into his 90s, he taught screenwriting at New York University and was an adviser to the film school at the Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford.

David Maraniss on his book about his blacklisted father

Via New York magazine's "Intelligencer," an interview: David Maraniss On His Book About His Blacklisted Father. Excerpt:

Over the course of 11 books, including biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Washington Post editor David Maraniss has mastered the craft of tracking political and intellectual history through private lives. In his latest, A Good American Family, the author turns to the story of his own father: Elliott Maraniss, longtime editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, and onetime card-carrying Communist, who died in 2004. When David was a small child, Elliott was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee about his involvement in the Communist Party and subsequently blacklisted from newspapers. Maraniss pieces together his father’s radical past in the context of the Depression, the labor movement, and the McCarthy era. 

Intelligencer spoke recently with Maraniss about Elliott’s legacy, his political influences, the abiding patriotism of both father and son, and the era when the Midwest was rife with communists and government spies.  

The book centers on your father’s hearing before the House committee in Detroit in 1952. You tell readers to think of the hearing as the hub of a wheel, and the other events like spokes. What do you mean? 

I meant that it’s not a traditional memoir or biography of my father. I was trying to put his experience into the context of those times, through the stories of many of the people who were in the hearing room that day, including members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, his lawyer, and the FBI informants who named him. I wanted to explore what it means to be American through all of those stories — not just my dad’s.  

What happened earlier in his life that led him to that room? 

My father was born in Boston, but he grew up mostly in Brooklyn, a couple blocks from the Coney Island beach. He was a student at Abraham Lincoln High School in the early 1930s. He was taught by fairly progressive teachers, including a principal who carried a pocket edition of Emerson in his back pocket. At that time, between the wars, there was a peace movement going on in high schools and on college campuses around the country.

Is this film un-American?

Thanks to Tim Hunter for sending this item from 1951:

Even amid the red scare, 1950s LA was a wonderland without fences for young people

Via Los Angeles Magazine, Erik Tarloff writes: Even Amid the Red Scare, 1950s L.A. Was a Wonderland Without Fences for Young People. This really reminds me of 1940s North Hollywood and the LA we returned to from Mexico late in 1954. Excerpt:

It was an oddly idyllic time and place in which to grow up. Los Angeles has become a world city in the intervening years, a gigantic, fast-paced, complex megalopolis, but in the 1950s, while undeniably huge in area, it was still largely a sprawling collection of self-contained neighborhoods with lots of undeveloped spaces in between waiting to be filled. There were vacant tracts so vast that, from a position amid the untamed trees and shrubbery occupying the center, you had no sense of the city streets beyond. There were bare hills, and on side streets, old wooden shacks resembling something out of a cowboy movie, many still occupied. No high-rises anywhere; there was so much land, people built out rather than up. 

There was a downtown, of course, a busy commercial downtown like the downtowns of other big cities, with office buildings and traffic, and men in suits and ties, and women in hats and gloves. But no one I knew ever went there. The only trip downtown I can remember from my early childhood was taking a streetcar with my grandmother to visit my grandfather, who worked at something called the L.A. Nut House. I’m told I startled a fellow passenger, a sweet older lady who wanted to engage a small boy by asking him where he was headed, when I answered that I was on my way to visit my grandfather at the “nuthouse.” She apparently misunderstood. She didn’t realize it was a retail establishment that sold nuts. 

My family moved into half of a dinky duplex in a working-class neighborhood in the Hollywood flatlands at the end of summer 1952, just weeks after my fourth birthday. Prior to that, we’d been reasonably prosperous; my father was a staff writer on a hit TV sitcom, I Married Joan. We’d lived in the San Fernando Valley for a couple of years, and then in a large old house in the Miracle Mile district, not far from where the then-nonexistent LACMA is now located. But with the House Un-American Activities Committee breathing down my father’s neck, the prospect of imminent poverty required some major economies. 

We’d spent the summer before the move on the top floor of a rustic cottage near Green Valley Lake; my sister, Julie, and I had been told we were going on an adventurous vacation, but I later learned the real reason for this adventure: My father wanted to forestall for as long as possible receipt of that looming subpoena. He knew the ax was going to fall, and fall soon, and he knew that once it happened, he would be unemployable and his writing career would be over, perhaps forever. The longer he could put off the inevitable, and the more frugally we could live in the meantime, the more savings he could salt away against the impending catastrophe.

Lillian Ross on the early days of the Hollywood blacklist

Lillian Ross, a great writer for The New Yorker, has died at the age of 99. The magazine has posted links to some of her finest articles, including this 1948 skewering of Hollywood soon after the Hollywood 10: Come In, Lassie! Excerpt:

Some groups play it safe at parties by refusing to engage in any conversation at all. They just sit on the floor and listen to anyone who goes by with a late rumor. There are all sorts of rumors in Hollywood right now. One late rumor is that the newest black-market commodity in town is the labor of the ten writers, who are reported to be secretly turning out scripts for all the major studios. Another is that one producer is founding a film company and will have all ten of the blacklisted men on his staff. 

Rumors that the F.B.I. is going to take over casting operations at the studios are discounted by those who have lived in Hollywood for more than fifteen years. The casting director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a fidgety, cynical, sharply dressed, red-cheeked man named Billy Grady, Sr., who has worked in Hollywood for nearly twenty years, thinks that it would serve J. Edgar Hoover right if the casting of actors were handed over to the F.B.I. 

“Hoover thinks he’s got worries!” Grady shouted at me in a Hollywood restaurant. “What does a G-man do? A G-man sends guys to Alcatraz! Ha! I’d like to see a G-man find a script about Abraham Lincoln’s doctor in which we could work in a part for Lassie. What do you find inside of Alcatraz? Picture stars? Directors? Cameramen? No! The goddam place is full of doctor, lawyers, and politicians. This is the fourth biggest industry in the country, and only three men in this industry ever went to jail. 

"There are fifty thousand people in this industry, and all they want is the right to take up hobbies. Spencer Tracy takes up painting. Clark Gable takes up Idaho. Dalton Trumbo, who got the sack, takes up deep thinking. Take away their hobbies and they’re unhappy. When they’re unhappy, I’m unhappy. For God’s sake, Tracy doesn’t paint when he’s acting. Gable doesn’t shoot ducks. Trumbo doesn’t think when he’s writing for pictures. I say let them keep their goddam hobbies. They’re all a bunch of capitalists anyway.”

Farewell to Clancy Sigal

Via The New York Times, the obituary of a very fine writer: Clancy Sigal, Novelist Whose Life Was a Tale in Itself, Dies at 90. Excerpt:

The first time Clancy Sigal went to jail he was 5. His mother, a Socialist union organizer, had been arrested in Chattanooga, Tenn., for violating social and legal norms when she convened a meeting of black and white female textile workers. Hauled away to the jailhouse, she took Clancy with her. 

As an American Army sergeant in Germany, he plotted to assassinate Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. A victim of the movie industry’s Communist-baiting blacklist, he represented Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood agent (but improvidently rejected James Dean and Elvis Presley as clients).  

During a 30-year self-imposed exile in Britain as an antiwar radical, Mr. Sigal was the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing’s lover and flirted with suicide as a sometime patient of R. D. Laing, the iconoclastic psychiatrist. 

In short, in a mixed-bag life of almost a century, Mr. Sigal had enough rambunctious experiences to fill a novel — or, in his case, several of them. He drew on his escapades in critically acclaimed memoirs and autobiographical novels, developing a cult following, especially in Britain.

But when he died on July 16 in Los Angeles at 90, he had never quite equaled the fame and commercial success achieved in the United States by other stars in his literary constellation — none of whom burned more blisteringly.

Jean Rouverol dead: Blacklisted screenwriter was 100

Thanks to Diana Anhalt for sending the link to this report in The Hollywood Reporter: Jean Rouverol Dead: Blacklisted Screenwriter Was 100. Excerpt:

Jean Rouverol, who played W.C. Fields' daughter in It's a Gift and then became a screenwriter who was blacklisted in Hollywood and driven with her husband to self-exile in Mexico, has died. She was 100.  

Rouverol died Friday at the home of her caregiver in Wingdale, N.Y., Rick Lertzman, co-author of the 2015 book The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney, told The Hollywood Reporter.  

In recent years, Rouverol had been living with actor Cliff Carpenter, who also had been blacklisted, in Pawling, N.Y. He died in 2014 at age 98.  

Her mother was Aurania Rouverol, whose 1928 play Skidding introduced the character of Andy Hardy and served as the basis of the popular series of MGM films starring Mickey Rooney. And her late husband was Hugo Butler, a screenwriter behind such films as A Christmas Carol (1938), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) and The Prowler (1951). 

Rouverol in 1987 received the WGA's Morgan Cox Award to honor her "vital ideas, continuing efforts and personal sacrifice" to the guild. 

A native of St. Louis, Rouverol married Butler in 1940, and he joined the American Communist Party three years later. She then co-wrote the screenplay for So Young So Bad (1950), starring Paul Henreid. 

In 1951, agents for the House Un-American Activities Committee came looking for her husband, she recalled in a May 2000 interview with the Writers Guild Foundation. 

"The doorbell rang, it was a cold, dark January night," she said. "I looked through the [peephole] in the door and see two men in hats. They asked for Hugo, and I said he wasn't there. I knew I had to produce some sort of excuse for not being able to reach him, so I said, on the verge of tears, 'We had a little disagreement and I don't know where's he gone.' They looked at each other and said, 'We'll be back.' " 

Rather than risk being jailed — like their friends Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. had been — Rouverol and Butler took their four young children and fled to Mexico. They continued to write, often together, and used pseudonyms or fronts. (Their script for the 1956 Joan Crawford drama Autumn Leaves was credited to their friend, Jack Jevne; they were paid $5,500 and gave Jevne one-quarter of that, which was the "going rate for fronts in those days," she noted). Trumbo eventually joined them in Mexico. 

She and her husband also wrote Face in the Rain (1963), directed by Irvin Kershner, before finally returning to the U.S. in 1964.  

Rouverol received Daytime Emmy nominations in 1976 and 1978 for her work on CBS' The Guiding Light, wrote for other soap operas like Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns and provided the story for a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie.

See also this obituary in The Wrap. I have very fond memories of Jean. Somehow she kept her huge household (further increased by swarms of kids, especially for Saturday baseball games) on an even keel—even through the great earthquake of 1957. She took an active interest in everyone she met, and I owe her a lot for her encouraging me to pursue a writing career.

A plunge in Trumbo's pool

Thanks to Dan Bessie for sending this memoir:

A PLUNGE IN TRUMBO’S POOL AND ALL THAT

By Dan Bessie

Los Angeles, summer of 1946. My brother David and moved from Poughkeepsie, New York to the land of just one short freeway, clear blue skies and the fragrant odor of orange-blossoms. Our mother, ten years divorced from our father, Alvah, would follow two months later, and immediately start looking for work.

Southern California was the reprise of a dream; two years earlier Pop had paid for our tickets west on the Super Chief for a month-long vacation. Punctuated with a week at the beach, a tour of the Warner Brothers lot, a private screening of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, and shaking the hand of Bette Davis on the set of The Corn is Green, was what I imagine the magic promise of a day at Disneyland might fill any nine or eleven-year-old kid’s head with today.

In 1944 Alvah and next wife Helen Clare lived in the Valley, not far from Warners. By ’46 it was Beverly Hills, in a house on Olympic Boulevard (at the cheap end of Beverly Hills), rented from, like our Pop, another future blacklistee, director Edward Dmytryk. Though by now Pop was a year gone from Warners, having been canned for his and other screenwriter’s support of striking craftsmen in the big strike of 1945—the same year in which his original story for the celebrated WWII film, Objective Burma, received an Oscar nomination.

And yes, we got to splash around in the Trumbo family pool at their far from cheap Beverly Hills home. Dalton, in his bathrobe and pajamas—he wrote at night, in the bathtub, so Pop told us, with a stream of hot water running in slowly to maintain an even temperature— greeted my brother and me warmly, sat by the pool drinking an enormous cup of coffee and chatted with Alvah as David and I, along with the older kids, Nicola and Christopher, pretended to be porpoises in the California sunshine.

As most folks these days know, the magic of those years was permeated with stormy blacklist clouds, when our Pop, Dalton and the rest of their comrades were hauled before the witch-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Even so, there were things to be proud of through those years—from the time of their original subpoenas in the fall of  '47 until Alvah got out of jail in Texas after serving a year for contempt of Congress. There was my pride in defending him to high school classmates who had far fewer clues than even I did in terms of what it was all about; the support from several (somewhat frightened) teachers; attending rallies at Hollywood’s Gilmore Stadium, where “our team” (the Hollywood Ten) marched onto the field to enormous applause. And hearing the fund appeal announce that “Charlie Chaplin gives $1000.”

Years later I got to work a bit with Dalton when he wrote the screenplay for the JFK assassination film, Executive Action (Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer). By then I had become involved in film, and was responsible for bringing the Edward Lewis production to a TV production studio with which I was associated, and became one of the co-producers of the film.

All in all an exciting, enervating and often unnerving time. But always topped, I suppose, by those age-15 memories of cavorting in the Trumbo pool.

 

 

Jim Lardner: The Dalton Trumbo I Knew

In The New Republic, Jim Lardner writes: The Dalton Trumbo I Knew. Excerpt from a beautifully written and perceptive article:

Before I knew anything of his filmography or biography, Dalton Trumbo was a large figure in my childhood—a verbal swordsman with a crackly voice and a courtly manner who made his speeches pleasing to the ear. His visits would keep me up past my bedtime; I would sneak out of my room to eavesdrop on whatever-the-crazy-hell he was saying around the corner in the living room. 

It was big news in our family when, in January 1960, Otto Preminger announced that Trumbo would have his name on the screen as the writer of Exodus. Kirk Douglas claims he had already resolved to give Trumbo credit for Spartacus, and thus deserves to be remembered as the producer who broke the blacklist. I don’t buy it. That kind of decision doesn’t count until you go public, as Preminger did while Douglas and his partners were still debating the question. 

But Spartacus was a resounding statement in itself—a widescreen eye-opener, with all of human history folded into a piece of ancient history as reimagined by Trumbo and Howard Fast, the author of the book the movie was based on (and another ex-communist, it so happens). Trumbo had tied the civil rights and civil liberties struggles of his own time—resistance to McCarthyism and the blacklist included—to a fight that went back two thousand years. 

“The enemies of the state are known,” the new dictator Crassus tells the old populist Gracchus after the defeat of Spartacus and his slave army. “Arrests are in progress. The prisons begin to fill. In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been filed.”

Spartacus is also a rich display of Trumbo’s craftsmanship and screenwriting chutzpah. I’m thinking, for example, of Varinia encountering Spartacus on the cross, and, within the sightlines of an absent-minded Roman soldier, hoisting their infant son into the air, telling Spartacus the child will grow up free, and pleading with him to hurry up and die. That is an insanely great scene.

A Letter From Dalton Trumbo

Thanks to Mitzi Trumbo for posting A Letter From Dalton Trumbo on YouTube. Very much worth watching!