City of Nets (65 page)

And so on. Morrie Ryskind, who had helped write some of the great Marx Brothers comedies, like
Animal Crackers
and
A Night at the Opera,
said of another writer that “if he isn't a Communist, I don't think Mahatma Gandhi is an Indian.” Still another writer, Fred Niblo, Jr., offered similar testimony: “I can't prove that he is a Communist any more than Custer could prove that the people who were massacring him were Indians.” Leo McCarey, who had become rich by producing and directing
Going My Way
(1944), in which Bing Crosby demonstrated that a Catholic priest could play boogie-woogie (and still richer by demonstrating in
The Bells of St. Mary's
that not even a nun's starched wimple could detract from the beauty of Ingrid Bergman), testified that his films had not earned any money in the Soviet Union.

“What is the trouble?” asked Stripling.

“Well, I think I have a character in there they do not like,” said McCarey.

“Bing Crosby?” Stripling suggested.

“No, God,” said McCarey.

Then there were the actors. Adolphe Menjou, a minor player in various costume dramas, testified that he had read many books about communism and regarded it as “an Oriental tyranny, a Kremlin-dominated conspiracy.” Robert Taylor (née Spangler Arlington Brugh) swore to his patriotic reluctance to make
Song of Russia
and then went on to declare that he would never take part in any movie with a Communist. “I would not even have to know that he was a Communist,” Taylor said. “This may sound biased. However, if I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I am afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists do.”

Gary Cooper was equally opposed to any involvement with Communists, but he couldn't quite remember when any such involvement had actually threatened him.

“I have turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with Communistic ideas,” Cooper said.

“Can you name any of those scripts?” asked Smith, the committee investigator.

“No, I can't recall any of those scripts to mind,” Cooper said.

“Just a minute,” Chairman Thomas intervened. “Mr. Cooper, you haven't got that bad a memory.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” said Cooper.

“You must be able to remember some of those scripts you turned down because you thought they were Communist scripts,” Thomas said.

“Well, I can't actually give you a title to any of them . . .” Cooper said. “Most of the scripts I read at night, and if they don't look good to me, I don't finish them, or if I do finish them I send them back as soon as possible to their author. . . . I could never take any of this pinko mouthing very seriously, because I didn't feel it was on the level.”

Ronald Reagan was, by comparison, quite eloquent, almost presidential. Speaking as head of the Screen Actors Guild, he said the union had been afflicted by a “small clique” that he described as “suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party.” He said he had “no investigative force” to ascertain whether these people actually were Communists, and the committee did not press him to name them.

Reagan's testimony could hardly have surprised the committee, for he apparently told all he knew to the FBI the previous April. According to FBI documents made public in a freedom-of-information request by the
San Jose Mercury-News
in 1985, Reagan was an informant listed by the agency as “T-10.” The FBI documents reported that both Reagan and Jane Wyman identified various members of the Screen Actors Guild as pro-Communist, though the FBI deleted all mention of the suspects' names. When Reagan's activity as an FBI informant about his own union membership was made public in 1985, a White House spokesman named Rusty Brashear said that Reagan's role was really “very minor.” “I'm not sure that this reference to confidential informant is quite what it sounds like,” Brashear said.

Reagan ended his testimony—as befitted his role, or his sense of his role—on a note of windy statesmanship. “Sir, I detest, I abhor their philosophy,” he said, “but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.”

This first week of hearings, in which the committee had presumably put forward its strongest evidence on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, ended with the case far from proven. The press was notably unconvinced. “We do not think the Committee is conducting a fair investigation,” said a reasonably typical editorial in the
New York Times.
“We think the course on which it is embarked threatens to lead to greater dangers than those with which it is presently concerned.” And Hollywood's liberals still boasted considerable firepower. That Sunday night, October 26, the Committee for the First Amendment broadcast a nationwide radio program entitled “Hollywood Fights Back,” in which various celebrities cried defiance at the congressional inquisitors. One of the most important was Thomas Mann, who professed to see analogies between the congressional hearings and the first oppressive measures undertaken by Hitler. Unlike many Hollywood liberals, who coupled their criticisms of the committee with denunciations of communism, Mann insisted on a solemn defense of Marx and Marxism too. “The ignorant and superstitious persecution of the believers in a political and economic doctrine which is, after all, the creation of great minds and great thinkers—I testify that this persecution is not only degrading for the persecutors themselves but also very harmful to the cultural reputation of this country,” Mann declared. “As an American of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency' . . . that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism, and what followed fascism was war.”

Over the bugged telephone lines from Washington, the nineteen witnesses and their lawyers pleaded with friends in Hollywood for an even more public demonstration of support. In what was after all a publicity battle, a confrontation between conflicting sets of images and reputations, the witnesses in Washington asked for a planeload of Hollywood supporters to come and provide a celebrity audience for the next week's hearings. “I became very emotional about it,” Lauren Bacall recalled of a meeting of First Amendment stalwarts at the home of William Wyler. “I was up in arms—fervent. I said to Bogie, ‘We must go.' He felt strongly about it too. . . . So it was decided that a group of us would fly to Washington—John Huston, Phil Dunne, Ira Gershwin, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Paul Henreid, John Garfield, June Havoc, Evelyn Keyes. . . .”
*

Huston was dining at the Brown Derby when he got a telephone call from Howard Hughes, who, despite his perpetual inaccessibility, always seemed to know what was going on. “John, I understand you are planning a trip to Washington, and I just want you to know that you can use one of my airplanes,” the head of TWA told Huston. “Not for nothing, because, by law, I have to charge you something, but you can have it for the minimum rate allowable . . . and it will be all to yourselves.”

“So that's what we did . . .” Huston reported. “Our plane stopped a couple of times en route to Washington, and we were met each time by sympathetic reporters. We got the feeling that the country was with us, that the national temper resembled ours—indignant and disapproving of what was going on.” Lauren Bacall made some of those airport speeches, as did Bogart, Huston, Kaye, and Kelly. “We were a serious group—reasonably well informed, bright, and we all cared . . .” Miss Bacall remembered. “The airport crowds were large and vociferous—cheers went up—God, it was exciting. I couldn't wait to get to Washington. Wouldn't it be incredible if we really could effect a change—if we could make that Committee stop?”

The First Amendment celebrities had planned a variety of political gestures. They brought with them a petition of protest “for redress of grievances.” They talked of staging a march to the Capitol to present their petition to House Speaker Joseph Martin. They hoped to bring it to President Truman. But after the long trip and all the speeches and press conferences, they had to concentrate on their main purpose, to present themselves before the newsreel cameras covering Monday morning's reconvening of the Un-American Activities Committee.

Chairman Thomas, the pudgy bond salesman from New Jersey, soon proved that he understood the publicity game better than all these famous movie stars. He started by ceding them a row of reserved seats at the back of his theater. Then he changed the program. Instead of the scheduled first witness, Eric Johnston, the silver-haired figurehead who represented the commercial respectability of Hollywood, Thomas called to the stand the most openly and noisily Communist of all the subpoenaed witnesses, John Howard Lawson.

Lawson, newly fifty-seven, had once seemed a paragon of radical enthusiasm. John Dos Passos, who had long ago sailed with him to France, where the two of them hoped to serve as volunteer ambulance drivers, remembered him as “an extraordinarily diverting fellow, recently out of Williams, with bright brown eyes, untidy hair and a great beak of a nose that made you think of Cyrano de Bergerac. . . . He was a voluble and comical talker. He had drastic ideas on every subject under the sun. . . . He was already writing plays.” Lawson's second Broadway production,
Processional
(1925), brought him success at the age of thirty. Subsequent titles tell a story:
Loud Speaker
(1927),
The International
(1928),
Success Story
(1932). Success lured him west, as it lured so many others, and the Hollywood titles began to tell a different story:
Dream of Love
(1928),
Our Blushing Brides
(1930),
Bachelor Apartment
(1931),
Success at Any Price
(1934), his own script from his own play
Success Story.
The idealist, in other words, had become the former idealist.

All these compromises made Lawson all the more active in Hollywood politics. He was the first president of the Screen Writers Guild, and he made no secret of his ideological views. Writing in
New Theatre
magazine in 1934, he announced that he had joined the Communist Party, and he added, “I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position.” There was something sad about Lawson's efforts to “present the Communist position” on the screen. In 1938, the same year in which he wrote
Algiers
to introduce Hedy Lamarr,
*
he also wrote
Blockade
, Walter Wanger's account of the Spanish civil war, which somehow failed to say which side was which. “This I accepted because it was the only way in which the picture could be undertaken,” Lawson said.

As the unofficial leader of Hollywood's Communists from about 1937 to 1950, Lawson was less accommodating to his comrades. When Albert Maltz wrote an article in
New Masses
in early 1946 on the question, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” he made the mistake of declaring that “the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straitjacket.” That was pure Browderism, and Browder had now been expelled from the party, and his ideas of coalition and compromises had been expelled with him. Maltz was summoned to a “discussion” where Lawson led the chorus that shouted accusations of revisionism, aestheticism, ivory towerism, and, as Michael Gold wrote in the
Daily Worker,
“the phony atmosphere of Hollywood.” At a second meeting, a week later, the sinner humbly recanted. “I had to retreat or be expelled . . .” Maltz said long afterward, “and expulsion over
this
matter was completely unacceptable to me. I felt the party was the best hope of mankind.” Lawson felt the same way; whatever the party said, Lawson said. “I'm sure,” said Paul Jarrico, who took over much of Lawson's authority after Lawson went to prison, “that if Jack were told by the Soviets to criticize them, without missing a beat he'd have said, ‘Well, you know, the way the Soviets treat dissidents is really criminal.' ”

But now, seated under the bright lights in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lawson savored his moment of glory, false glory. He announced that he wanted to read a statement. “Well, all right,” said Chairman Thomas, “let me see your statement.” Lawson handed the statement to Thomas, and the chairman began reading silently. “For a week, this Committee has conducted an illegal and indecent trial of American citizens, whom the Committee has selected to be publicly pilloried and smeared. I am not here to defend myself, or to answer the agglomeration of falsehoods that has been heaped upon me. . . .” At some point in the midst of all that rhetoric, Thomas stopped reading.

“I don't care to read any more of the statement,” he said. “The statement will not be read. I read the first line.”

“You have spent one week vilifying me before the American public—” Lawson began.

“Just a minute—” Thomas cried.

“And you refuse to allow me to make a statement on my rights as an American citizen,” Lawson went on.

The only record of these extraordinary confrontations is the official transcript, and whoever made that transcript could hardly do justice to the sound of two angry and arrogant men both talking loudly at the same time (actually three, since Thomas and Stripling alternated in interrogating Lawson; actually four, since Thomas's gavel also had a speaking part). Thus, after the customary stating of name and birth and occupation, the first substantive question dealt with Lawson's leadership of the writers' union. The result was bedlam.