City of Nets (66 page)

 

STRIPLING:
Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?

LAWSON:
The raising of any question here in regard to membership, political beliefs or affiliation—

STRIPLING:
Mr. Chairman—

LAWSON:
—is absolutely beyond the powers of this Committee.

STRIPLING:
Mr. Chairman—

LAWSON
: But—

(
The Chairman pounding gavel.
)

LAWSON:
It is a matter of public record that I am a member of the Screen Writers Guild.

STRIPLING
: I ask—

(
Applause
)

THOMAS:
I want to caution the people in the audience. . . . I do not care for any applause or any demonstrations of one kind or another.

STRIPLING:
Now Mr. Chairman, I am going to request that you instruct the witness to be responsive to the questions.

THOMAS:
I think the witness will be more responsive to the questions.

LAWSON:
Mr. Chairman, you permitted—

THOMAS
(pounding gavel):
Never mind—

LAWSON:
—witnesses in this room to make answers of three or four or five hundred words to questions here.

THOMAS:
Mr. Lawson, will you please be responsive to these questions and not continue to try to disrupt these hearings?

LAWSON:
I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This Committee is on trial here before the American people. Let us get that straight.

 

And so on. Thomas, like any congressional committee chairman, felt strongly his right to have his way. Lawson defiantly, almost insolently, refused to accept that right. “The Chair will determine what is in the purview of this Committee,” Thomas declared at one point. “My rights as an American citizen are no less than the responsibilities of this Committee of Congress,” Lawson fired back. Whenever sufficiently provoked, Thomas resorted to banging his gavel. Thus, after Thomas threatened Lawson with a citation for contempt, the transcript rather inadequately reported:

 

LAWSON:
I am glad you have made it perfectly clear that you are going to threaten and intimidate the witnesses, Mr. Chairman.

(The Chairman pounding gavel.)

LAWSON:
I am an American and I am not at all easy to intimidate, and don't think I am.

(The Chairman pounding gavel.)

STRIPLING:
Mr. Lawson, I repeat the question. . . .

 

Since Stripling could not get Lawson either to answer or refuse to answer—since that was the mysterious strategy the witnesses had agreed on—Thomas finally intervened in full force.

 

THOMAS
(pounding gavel):
We are going to get the answer to that question if we have to stay here for a week. Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

LAWSON:
It is unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this Committee the basic principles of American—

THOMAS
(pounding gavel):
That is not the question. That is not the question. The question is: Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

LAWSON:
. . . I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, affiliations and everything else to the American public, and they will know where I stand.

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: Excuse the witness—

LAWSON:
As they do from what I have written.

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: Stand away from the stand—

LAWSON:
. . . I shall continue to fight for the Bill of Rights, which you are trying to destroy.

THOMAS:
Officers, take this man away from the stand.

(Applause and boos.)

THOMAS
(pounding gavel):
There will be no demonstrations.

 

After a squad of police escorted Lawson from the stand, Stripling swore in one of his investigators to testify that Lawson held Communist Party card number 47275. Stripling then began reading into the record a nine-page listing of Lawson's political activities, from advocating the reelection of President Roosevelt to writing articles in the
Daily Worker.

It was rather an anticlimax when Eric Johnston finally came to testify that afternoon, and yet he was to play an important role in the crisis. As head of the Motion Picture Producers Association, Johnston believed it was his function to defend the industry as a whole, and so he began with a bristling attack on “sensational testimony about Hollywood . . . scare-head stuff which is grossly unfair to a great American industry.” Johnston spoke warmly about the importance of free speech. “You can't make good and honest motion pictures in an atmosphere of fear,” he said. “I don't propose that Government shall tell the motion picture industry, directly or by coercion, what kind of pictures it ought to make.”

The committee did not appreciate these pronouncements. Stripling rather tartly accused Johnston of “attempting to run” the committee's investigation. To show him what the committee's own investigators could do, Stripling darkly inquired whether Johnston knew that one of his own staff members, Edward Cheyfitz, had been a Communist. Johnston responded by reading testimonials to Cheyfitz's good character. “Knowing Mr. Stripling,” Johnston said, to explain the fact that he had the testimonials with him, “I prepared for anything.”

Though Johnston seemed to cry defiance at the committee, however, he warmly encouraged its self-proclaimed purpose, the “exposing” of Hollywood's Communists. “I'm heart and soul for it,” he said. “An exposed Communist is an unarmed Communist. Expose them, but expose them in the traditional American manner.” He did not explain what that traditional manner might be, but he seemed to mean only that the exposing should be limited to authentic party members. “Expose Communism, but don't put any American who isn't a Communist in a concentration camp of suspicion,” he said. Johnston seemed to see no contradiction between advocating free speech and limiting that freedom to non-Communists, but this was becoming a popular view, not only among former presidents of the chamber of commerce but among a good number of liberals as well. Johnston would soon help to make it Hollywood's official policy.

The kind of man Johnston wanted to silence appeared on the stand the next day in the dapper form of Dalton Trumbo, who had written a lot of successful scripts—
Kitty Foyle
(1940),
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
(1944),
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
(1945)—and who was now being paid four thousand dollars a week by M-G-M. He ostentatiously brought with him a large box containing twenty of his scripts and even several cans filled with prints of his films. He also brought a statement, which Thomas refused to let him read. Having experienced the tornado of John Howard Lawson, Stripling told Trumbo that the committee wanted its main questions answered with a yes or no. “I shall answer in my own words,” Trumbo retorted. “Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes' or ‘No' only by a moron or a slave.”

Trumbo insisted on this kind of posturing. He offered up all his scripts for study, challenging Thomas to point out anything subversive. Thomas declined. “Too many pages,” he said. The committee only wanted to know whether Trumbo was a member of the Screen Writers Guild, which, of course, it knew he was. Trumbo declared that such questioning could destroy “the rights of American labor to inviolably secret membership.”

“Are you answering the question or are you making another speech?” Thomas inquired. “Can't you answer . . . by saying ‘Yes' or ‘No' or ‘I think so' or ‘Maybe' or something like that?”

Trumbo started another speech, accusing the committee of trying to equate Guild membership with communism.

“Excuse the witness,” Thomas shouted, banging his gavel once more.

“This is the beginning,” Trumbo shouted back as he departed, “of the American concentration camp!”

Blinded by ideology, or perhaps simply by egotism, these truculent witnesses seemed to think that they were devastating Thomas and his committee with their wit, their defiance, and their devotion to humanitarian principles. The reality was quite different. In their shouting and blustering, they provided their audience, both in the hearing room and beyond, with a rather unappetizing spectacle. By wrangling with Thomas, they put themselves on the same level, and lost many of their trusting supporters. “It was a sorry performance,” said John Huston, who had helped to found the Committee for the First Amendment and brought his planeload of supporters to the row of reserved seats at the back of the committee room. “You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I disapproved of what was being done to the Ten, but I also disapproved of their response. They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle. . . . Before this spectacle, the attitude of the press had been extremely sympathetic. Now it changed. . . .”

Paul Henreid recalled a general scattering. He said that Huston summoned all his followers to a meeting in his hotel suite at eleven o'clock at night. He announced, among other things, that there was no prospect of a lunch with President Truman. “I think our mission here is finished,” he said. “You all have your return tickets, and you can get back any way you want.” So get back any way they did, with the hounds of the right-wing press already baying after them. George Sokolsky, a Hearst columnist, was particularly interested in Bogart, demanding in print why he had joined this misguided crusade. “It was suggested to Bogie,” Miss Bacall somewhat guardedly recalled, “that he issue a statement saying he was not a Communist and had no sympathy for Communists, and denouncing the unfriendly witnesses. This he refused to do. . . .” Paul Henreid was more blunt: “Bogart gave an interview to the press in which he attempted to retract what he had said and done. ‘I didn't know the people I was with were fellow travelers,' he told the reporters. . . . I felt Bogart's statement was a form of betrayal, and it was the end of our friendship.” But Bogart also felt betrayed. When the Hollywood celebrities returned home from Washington, there was another meeting at Ira Gershwin's house, and according to a leftist screenwriter named Abe Polonsky, “Bogart was furious. He was shouting at Danny Kaye, ‘You fuckers sold me out,' and he left.” A few months later,
Photoplay
magazine published under Bogart's byline an article titled “I'm No Communist.” Bogart said he had simply been a “dope.”

Others went home in other ways. Ronald Reagan, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, returned to Hollywood to discover that his wife wanted no more of him. “I arrived home from the Washington hearing to be told I was leaving,” as Reagan rather oddly put it in his memoirs. “I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn't been so busy, but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced. . . .” Reagan's account is admirably restrained. Miss Wyman, to her credit, has been even more reticent about her separation from the future President. But there had indeed been “warning signs.”
Ann Sheridan liked both the Reagans, but she sometimes found Ronnie's self-preoccupation a trial. “Ronnie had heard a baseball game and he gave us a play-by-play account,” she said about one dinner at the Reagans' home. “After the fourth inning, Jane said, ‘Ronnie, please stop, Annie doesn't care about baseball.' But he went on for all nine innings.” If a baseball game could so captivate Reagan, one can imagine the amount of talk that the Actors Guild president devoted to union politics. “Don't ask Ronnie what time it is,” June Allyson remembered Miss Wyman saying, “because he will tell you how a watch is made.”

“I always thought Jane and Ronnie Reagan were one of the best-balanced, merriest, feet-on-the-ground couples around town,” Hedda Hopper gushed in
Modern Screen.
“There are some differences in their temperament, of course. Ronnie's easygoing; Jane's high-strung. But only lately have these things mattered. . . . Last June, Jane's baby was born, three months too soon. She didn't live. Jane should never have started work on any picture as soon as she did after her family tragedy. In
Johnny Belinda,
Jane tackled a job that would test a Bernhardt. . . . By the time she wobbled off the last scene, she looked like a ghost, her eyes large in their sockets.”

The implication was that Miss Wyman should have stayed in bed, but her performance as a deaf-mute in
Johnny Belinda
was superb. It also won her an Oscar, which was not overwhelmingly important
sub specie aeternitatis
but had its inevitable effect on a Hollywood household. “ ‘If this comes to a divorce,' sighed Ronnie, with bitter humor,” according to Mrs. Hopper, “ ‘I think I'll name
Johnny Belinda
co-respondent.' ”

Back at the Washington hearings, the Hollywood writers talked on. Albert Maltz, who had worked on
This Gun for Hire, Destination Tokyo,
and
Pride of the Marines,
arrived with a prepared statement, and Thomas, as usual, insisted on reading it in advance. Maltz responded by asking whether Thomas had asked to read a statement by Gerald L. K. Smith, the notorious anti-Semite, before letting him read it. Thomas equivocated, then, surprisingly, let Maltz read. “I am an American,” Maltz recited, “and I believe there is no more proud word in the vocabulary of man.” And so on. “I would rather die,” he concluded, “than be a shabby American, groveling before men whose names are Thomas and Rankin, but who now carry out activities in America like those carried out in Germany by Goebbels and Himmler. The American people are going to have to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Thomas Committee. They cannot have both.” When Stripling finally got a chance to ask whether Maltz belonged to the Screen Writers Guild, Maltz answered by saying, “Next you are going to ask me what religious group I belong to.” Instead, Thomas next said, “Excuse the witness. No more questions. Typical Communist line.”