The Troubled Air (50 page)

The room was very quiet. Kramer mopped his forehead and went on earnestly. “Boys and girls,” he said, “I’m going to tell you frankly right here in this public meeting just what I tell to my clients in the privacy of my own office. Something practical. What I tell them is simple, ‘Son,’ I tell them, ‘you go through your books and you find out what organizations you ever belonged to, all the way back to the Pontiac Athletic and Social Club when you were ten years old, and you sit down and write a letter and keep a copy and have it registered and send in your resignation. And if the organization folded up twenty years ago, that makes no difference. Write that letter. And if anybody asks you to join any new organization, run like a thief. And that goes for the YMCA or Young Republicans for Taft or anything that has the word Freedom in the title and I don’t care who’s the president or on the board of directors, Eisenhower or Winston Churchill or anybody. A lot of people aren’t working today because they sent twenty bucks somewhere because Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, that great American, wrote them a letter ten years ago and asked them for a contribution. It doesn’t make any difference to that feller in Long Island City with a pocketful of nickels whether a five-star general or an ambassador to England sat next to you on the platform that night. He’s out to get your job and he knows how to do it and he’s doing it. Face the facts. You’re an artist. Leave politics to the politicians or you’ll fry. And if they put a piece of paper in front of your nose and you have to swear you’re not a Communist and you hate the Communists worse, than polio, you sign it, and sign it ten times a day, if that’s what they want.”

Kramer was sweating profusely now and his face was an alarming high-blood-pressure scarlet. “That’s what I tell my clients,” he said, “in the privacy of my own office because I want to keep them alive and I want to keep myself alive. And I’m going to tell you something else. If they don’t agree to do what I say, no matter how big they are, and how much I like them personally, I shake their hands and I say, ‘Get yourself another boy from now on, son. I don’t handle you any more.’ ” He nodded soberly at the gathering. “Boys and girls,” he said earnestly, pleading for purity and ten percent, “I know the public pulse and I love you all, even the ones who make fun of me and call me a bloodsucker and a parasite. I love everyone who gets up on a stage or in front of a mike and reads a line or sings a song and makes people laugh or cry. I know it sounds corny, but it’s the truth, and I don’t want to see you murdered. So remember what I said. Resign, disaffiliate, quit. Entertain. Let the Supreme Court worry about the Bill of Rights. Thank you.” Kramer bowed stiffly and walked briskly, in short, nervous steps, on his shoes with the built-up heels, over to his chair, and sat down.

After a while, there was a slow, dispirited scattering of applause. Most of the audience merely sat pensively, staring down at their hands.

Even if you agreed with him, Archer thought, Kramer had hardly voiced a doctrine that could be greeted with wild enthusiasm. Resign, Disaffiliate, Quit, Entertain. Archer remembered photographs taken outside Tripoli during the war. Pictures of shell-torn buildings of Italian colonists on whose walls Mussolini had painted another slogan.
Credere, Ubbidire, Combattere.
Believe, Obey, Fight. The Italian had said nothing about entertaining. He had missed out on an interesting modern imperative, probably because he was new at the game and hadn’t had time to work his philosophy out fully.

Burke was walking thoughtfully up to the lectern as the applause died down.

“Clem …” Kramer leaned across an empty chair toward Archer, the color in his face slowly receding. “Clem,” he asked anxiously, “how did you like it?”

Archer thought for a moment. “Joe,” he said gently, “I feel like crying.”

“Didn’t you like it?” Kramer asked, hurt.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I just said I feel like crying.”

“Thank you, Joe Kramer,” his client was saying over the lectern, “for being good enough to come here and give us your views.”

The audience sat sullenly, not thankful for Joe Kramer’s tweedy views. They moved uneasily, thinking, no doubt, of all of the organizations they had ever belonged to and the difficulty of resigning from them.

“Now,” Burke said, “we are going to hear from a man who has spent a good many years directing radio shows and who is most active in the Radio Directors’ Guild, on whose board of directors he has served for some time. Mr. Marvin Lewis.”

Lewis stood up portentously, ignoring the applause. He had a surly, handsome, aggrieved face, and was known to use a heavy, sarcastic tongue on actors who displeased him. He was bulky and healthy and careless about his clothes, as befitted an artist. He walked slowly over to the lectern, staring pugnaciously down at the notes in his hand. He put the cards down on the lectern and took a heavy pair of glasses out of his pocket and held them in his hand like a weapon, while the room settled uneasily into silence. The door opened at the back and a woman came in hesitantly. Silently accusing her for her tardiness, Lewis waited until she had seated herself in the last row. Archer blinked his eyes as he realized that it was Kitty, slow-moving and clumsy, looking very large in front in the coat. Now, he wondered, why did she have to come here tonight?

“I’m going to warn you people,” Lewis said, without preliminary, his voice loud and threatening, “that I am not going to be polite. The time is past for politeness.” He jammed his glasses on his head, as though he were pulling down the visor of a helmet before battle. “I’m not interested in good manners and if anybody here is touchy, I advise him to leave now.”

He glared around the room, waiting for the touchy members of the audience to file out. Everyone sat very still.

“We’re here to accomplish something tonight,” Lewis said loudly, “and the only way we’ll do it is by coming out with the truth. The truth is, I don’t like what I’ve heard on this platform tonight and I don’t like the people who are sitting up here with me.”

The room was absolutely still and Archer could feel the embarrassment coming up from the audience toward the platform. An ingenious opening, he thought professionally, calculated to hold the audience and create suspense.

“We are all in this together,” Lewis said, whipping off his glasses and shaking them threateningly, “and our only chance is if we all pull together and what I’ve heard up here is divisive and inflammatory propaganda and weak-kneed invitations to surrender completely to the enemy. If the other side had selected the speakers themselves, they couldn’t have picked more useful specimens.” He slammed on his glasses again, glaring disdainfully out across the room. “First you’ve heard a gentleman declare that he was not a Communist and that he opposed the Communists. And this from a man who by his own admission was the first sufferer for his so-called liberal activities. Who asked him for this indecent incantation? What purpose does he think he is serving by it? Does he think that he is defending the right of free speech this way, or the right of holding private political beliefs, or the right of artists to express opposing points of view to the public? Or does he think he can save his skin by sacrificing others and forcing others to join the diseased scramble to announce a timid and frightened loyalty? And loyalty to what? To the Constitution of the United States, to the concepts of individual conscience and the right to disagree or to the narrow and intolerant doctrine of hatred and fear which is sweeping the country today and which will lead us all into war and total silence? And does he really think he can save his skin by this shameful abnegation? Does he think that because of his confession on the rack tonight, his illustrious agent will be received with open arms tomorrow and told that his client will be taken back, at an increase in price, as a high priest of the true faith? You know and I know, even if he and his agent don’t, that he hasn’t got a chance. He has been disposed of because he dared to offend by dishing out a little mild pablum about individual liberty a year ago, and he will remain disposed of until there is such a sweeping, furious movement of revulsion against the reactionary masters of the industry that they have to take him back along with all the others. And if there is not this mass, sweeping revulsion, I say that the time will come, and damn soon at that, when Woodrow Burke will find himself in a concentration camp side by side with just the people he is so ready to sacrifice tonight. And he can say he is opposed to the Communists seven nights a week, and no one will listen to him and no one will care and he won’t get out one minute sooner.”

Archer glanced over at Burke. The commentator was sitting on the edge of his chair, hunched over, his mouth open as though he were on the point of shouting, his fists opening and closing slowly.

“And if anyone is thinking that this prophecy is the result of my disordered imagination,” Lewis was saying, “with no basis in fact, let him remember the fate of people like Woodrow Burke, the fine, self-serving, liberal gentlemen, just a few years ago in a country called Germany. Let Mr. Burke reflect for a moment on what happened to the gentlemen of his stripe there who made professions like his, who fought the Nazis’ battles for them on the pages of newspapers and on the air, who destroyed the unity of the forces opposing Hitler in 1931 and 32.”

Germany, Germany, Archer thought, everybody uses Germany to prove everything.

“We have all been put in this boat together by our enemies,” Lewis said with grim triumph, “whether we like it or not. Now we either row together or we go on the rocks. It is as simple as that. As for our commercial friend here …” Lewis bowed ironically in the direction of Kramer, who was sweating and looking unpopular. “I don’t think in a gathering like this it is necessary to spend too much time examining his arguments. Mr. Kramer, by his own proud admission, is interested only in the dollar …”

“Now, Marvin, honey,” Kramer whispered faintly, using his handkerchief on his forehead.

“Mr. Kramer,” Lewis went on, ignoring the agent, “will do anything for the dollar and in the privacy of his office advises his clients to do anything for the dollar—resign from everything, maintain total silence, shout the war cries obediently when they are called for, give up all the rights and opinions of American citizens. For his ten percent, Mr. Kramer would have all artists, whom he professes to love so dearly, eagerly enlist in a new disenfranchised slave class. If anyone here shares these feudal views on the function of the artist, I advise him to go home now. Nothing I have to say here will be of any interest to him.”

Nobody in the audience moved, presumably because they were not concerned with money at all.

“As for the other speaker on this platform,” Lewis went on, taking his glasses off again, “Mr. Clement Archer …”

He speaks my name, Archer noted, almost amused, as if I were a newly discovered minor disease.

“I asked to be allowed to address you,” Lewis said, without looking at Archer, “after he had spoken, but for reasons best known to the chairman of this meeting Mr. Archer was scheduled as the last speaker. Without mincing words, I have to say that I regard it as unfortunate, to put it politely, that Mr. Archer is here tonight and I invite him publicly, right now, to put on his hat and coat and leave this meeting, which he has clearly demonstrated he has not earned the right to address.”

That man, Archer thought calmly, has by now invited a great number of people to leave in the interests of unity. Then he blinked. After a moment of hesitation, applause was breaking out in various portions of the room, heavy, disciplined, ominous-sounding. They decided, Archer realized painfully, they decided in advance to do this to me. He stared out across the room stubbornly, trying to distinguish and remember the people who were applauding. Why did Kitty come? he thought, why did she have to be here for this?

Lewis put up his hand and the applause stopped dead. Archer rubbed the top of his head and made himself keep his eyes up.

“No doubt,” Lewis was saying, “you have all read the excellent series of articles by that brilliant columnist, Mr. J. F. Roberts, on the subject of Mr. Clement Archer and I shall not go into the propriety of having as a speaker at a meeting like this a gentleman who, using the power of his position, has picked on Negro and Jewish artists as the first objects of his discrimination and who has been largely responsible for the suicide of a man of talent who was a friend of many in this room.”

What I should do, Archer thought, making himself sit completely immobile, is get up and try to kill him with my bare hands.

“I regret that these things had to be said tonight,” Lewis said severely and righteously, “but the ground had to be cleared and the issues had to be exposed before we could begin to do anything constructive. Now,” he said, lapsing gratefully into the jargon of political oratory, “we have to decide what must be done to defend ourselves, to defend the traditions of our crafts, and the traditions of our country. Whatever his private reasons for advancing it, Woodrow Burke’s plan, as far as it goes, has some solid merit to it.”

Archer tried to recall what Burke’s plan had been and couldn’t remember. He felt fuzzy and was sorry he had drunk so much that day.

“I think,” Lewis said, self-confidently, “that the idea of getting the various guilds to contribute to a war chest and hire investigators to find out just what sinister influences are behind the editors of
Blueprint
is an excellent one.”

What happens, Archer thought stubbornly, if the investigators find nothing? Or find that all the influences behind the magazine are innocent, patriotic, above suspicion? Do we get our money back?

“But that’s only part of what must be done,” Lewis went on. “And only a small part. We must conduct a triple campaign. By all means let us expose the forces lined up against us for what they are. But at the same time, let us present our case to the public, the case of free citizens and free artists who are fighting for everyone’s freedom. Let us take out full-page advertisements in the newspapers, let us turn out millions of pamphlets, let us buy radio time ourselves showing what the danger is, who the real enemies are, what the opposition against us consists of. And, practically, let us all call emergency meetings of our guilds and get the membership to announce that so long as any agency or network is guilty of using a blacklist, no writer or actor or director or musician or engineer will take the job of any person who has been dropped because of his political beliefs.”