The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (20 page)

Individuals who were blacklisted had no idea how long their exile might last, nor could they guess the extent to which a HUAC subpoena would destroy their careers.
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While there was no official list of names, several organizations cropped up offering Hollywood and Congress their “assistance” in rooting out the enemy. With America’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950 and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s declaration that 205 communists were currently working in the State Department, the scourge of communism weighed heavily on Americans’ hearts and minds.

By 1950, the talent guilds had suspended any remaining objections to the existence of the blacklist, and the guilds’ leaders were fully cooperating with HUAC’s agenda. The blustery air of the Cold War became the new reality, not just in Hollywood but throughout the country. The talent guilds began to insist that all members provide a statement of non-communist affiliation.
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The SWG agreed that studios could, without awaiting trial, remove any blacklisted writer’s name from the credits of a film. Writers had worked tirelessly in the previous decade to secure the power to determine their credits in films but now relinquished this right without much resistance. Even having one’s
name attached to a project that was retroactively deemed suspect—most notably, films such as
Mission to Moscow
and
Crossfire
—could end a career. Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted during the 1950s, explains the significance of a writer’s reputation: “It was all about your name. . . . They wanted your name. When they were asking you to give the names of people who were in the Communist Party, they already had all those names, they didn’t need it from you particularly. They wanted to be able to say, look he gave his name to us. Essentially, you were collaborating. And they could say, look [Elia] Kazan is one of us. Budd Schulberg is one of us. They cooperated.”
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It was now a liability for a writer even to be in the membership ranks of a suspect labor organization.

Having one’s name exposed and ending up on the blacklist was a cataclysmic event in people’s lives. In an interview with historian Howard Suber, Joan Scott sadly recalled what it felt like to work in Hollywood during this time: “This is a subpoena commanding me to appear before the Committee. It’s pink and still gives me chills to look at it. When Adrian and I were married, we talked about having our subpoenas framed. We grew up in a time when a very appropriate wedding gift was his and hers bath towels and we thought that we’d have our subpoenas framed side by side saying his and hers. Unfortunately, we were never in that kind of freewheeling position to do that.”
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Adrian and Joan Scott would otherwise have been at the prime of their careers—a young, talented couple, newly married—but instead struggled to make a life for themselves and worked under pseudonyms (both wrote a number of episodes of
Lassie
). Some writers, like Schulberg and Kazan, felt it was their patriotic duty to expose others. Schulberg concluded that he had no choice: “It’s not easy to do. My own feeling was that while I didn’t like the Committee being so right-wing, I didn’t think it was healthy having a secret organization trying to control the Writers Guild. I felt it was wrong and undermining [to] democracy.”
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Schulberg, like Gibney, felt that leftist partisans within the Guild were destroying their community and, on a larger level, jeopardizing America’s democracy.

There was another incentive to name names. Guild members who acknowledged previous communist affiliation and gave the Committee the names of other writers were permitted by HUAC to continue to work. In 1952, soon after his success with
A Streetcar Named Desire
, director Elia Kazan, a previous member of the American Communist Party in New York, identified Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Clifford Odets (a playwright and
screenwriter of
Sweet Smell of Success
), and others to the Committee. Hammett had already served time in federal prison for contempt of court in connection with his leadership of a “subversive” civil rights organization; he testified about his own activities before HUAC in 1953 but refused to cooperate with his interrogators and was blacklisted. Hammett never published again. Hellman, a celebrated playwright and screenwriter, refused to testify before HUAC in 1952, declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” It took her eight years to resurrect her career; she returned to writing plays, but never again wrote for film.

The list of celebrated writers who were censured is staggering. Sidney Buchman, who wrote
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
with conservative anticommunist writer Lewis R. Foster, was cited for contempt of Congress after he refused to supply HUAC with names of communists. The Committee fined him $150 and gave him a year’s suspended sentence, and he found his career halted by the blacklist for ten years. In 1952, Gibney was removed from his office and blacklisted for suspected subversive writing.
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Some members of the SWG, like Borden Chase, who scripted
Red River
and
Winchester ’73
, called on the Guild board to demand that individuals who agreed to testify before HUAC be cleared from all past deeds.
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Nevertheless, access to the industry was blocked for all blacklisted employees, and it would remain so for over a decade.

In
Naming Names
, Victor Navasky assessed the wider damage: “Ultimately it was the informer’s contribution to spoil the possibility of trust and thereby the sense of community. People in Hollywood lost not only their myths (of the happy ending, among others), their careers, possessions, place, status, and space, but also their sense of self. . . . And for many the trauma came as much in reaction to being disconnected from a familiar network of unspoken understandings as from any job or other loss suffered directly as a result of being called a Communist or being up on a list.”
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This period of inquisition, stigmatization, and exile devastated Hollywood artisans, craftspeople, and their families’ sense of trust in the industry and in their community. The collective memory of the industry, the guilds, and their members would be forever scarred by the choices people made during these years.

Beyond the blacklist, so-called graylists captured the names of another three hundred individuals, who were smeared in publications and pamphlets like
Red Channels, Alert
, and
Counterattack. Red Channels
was a privately distributed pamphlet that focused on suspected communists within American broadcasting. Larry Markes, who later wrote for
The Dean Martin Comedy Hour
,
explained why some Americans found the idea of communist-affiliated radio and television writers more insidious than film writers with checkered pasts: “The networks were very pure and upstanding guys who said, ‘Look, it’s one thing to have a commie write a movie because you don’t have to go and see that movie. . . . But we’re coming into these people’s houses with these communistic viewpoints and that’s why they were blacklisted, because we’re coming right into their living rooms, we’re mind-washing the children.’
”
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The adoption of signed anticommunist oaths became the industry standard not only in film but also in the newly devised television contracts. Producers would deny screen credit to all subpoened writers who refused to testify before HUAC, or to any writer who falsely signed an oath denying communist affiliations. And, in keeping with the decisions of other talent guilds’ leadership, the SWG board authorized its president to disclose private union records to HUAC.
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In 1952, Ring Lardner Jr. resigned his membership after what he called the Jarrico Resolution, when the SWG board agreed to permit the staunchly rightwing Howard Hughes to remove Paul Jarrico’s name from the film
The Las Vegas Story
. Mary McCall Jr., then president of the SWG, tried to prevent the erasure and consequently endured an admonishment by HUAC herself. Lardner accused the board of assisting in the blacklisting of writers. Consequently, he declared, the SWG no longer represented him, and he had no reason to pay dues. Though he continued writing under various pseudonyms and ultimately under his own name again, Lardner did not rejoin the Guild until the early 1960s.
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By 1954, when HUAC finally ceased its long inquiry into the entertainment industry, more than 320 film and television professionals had been censured. Many writers who had been blacklisted resigned from the SWG or were removed from Guild membership for nonpayment of dues. A vast number of other writers just kept their heads down and tried to stay out of the crossfire. Many of them years later said in interviews that they wished they had done more—or even done something at all.

Writing Under the Blacklist

The public is not to be protected from my work, however beguiling and subversive it may be. The public is only to be protected from my name.

—Paul Jarrico, quoted in Dick Vosburgh, “Paul Jarrico: Obituary,”
The Independent
[UK], 5 November 1997

By the early 1950s, the entire American film industry was undergoing a radical metamorphosis. The studio system was dying. On a global scale, currency freezes in all of the major European markets (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) locked up American finances, and the studios had to search for new ways not only to make money internationally but also to spend it. On a national scale, the Supreme Court’s Paramount Consent Decree forced the studios to divest their theater chains; consequently, they were no longer assured distribution for all the films they produced. At the same time, the staggering success of early commercial television was keeping more viewers at home.

With the marketplace for cinema shrinking, the blacklist became a means for the studios to downsize. Jon Lewis argues that the blacklist bailed out the studios at a moment of crisis:

The blacklist was a first step in a larger transformation of the film industry from its roots in entrepreneurial capital to a more corporatist, conglomerate mode. Impending deregulation—and what can only be characterized as industry-wide panic in response—prompted change that the Red Scare made not only possible but easy. In the final analysis, the blacklist did not save America from films promoting Communism, liberalism, or humanitarianism. Instead, it encouraged studio owners to develop and adopt a corporate model more suited to a future new Hollywood, one in which, despite market deregulation and stricter self-regulation of film content, studio owners would maintain profitability and control.
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The swiftness with which the studios accepted and incorporated the blacklist into the industry’s new modus operandi is, in retrospect, quite striking. That so little pushback occurred or is documented among studio heads seems to affirm Lewis’s argument. The studios’ collusion with HUAC provided an easy means to terminate a number of longstanding employees’ contracts, to phase out the first-generation Jewish studio moguls, to attack the unions, and to move toward a more corporatized, conglomerate model.

Writers bore the brunt of the blacklist in Hollywood, especially at the beginning. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz explains, the censorship of writers was taking place on two fronts.
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First came the stifling of creativity through Hollywood’s Production Code and criticism from national and local organizations and media outlets on the watch for subversion. Second, self-censorship for career preservation became the norm: writers chose lighter, less
controversial topics to avoid questions about their political leanings. As the number of blacklisted writers grew through the early 1950s, other types of creative and craft workers suffered as well. But unlike other industry employees, writers could work anonymously. That writers never stepped on the set was suddenly a saving grace, and they devised tactics to avoid being seen at all by the individuals signing their paychecks.

Two expedients enabled blacklisted writers to get and keep work: using pseudonyms and asking another writer to serve as a front (signing his or her name to a script written by a blacklisted writer). Starting in 1948, the SWG allowed members to work under pseudonyms unless they were contractually obligated to use their real names. However, the Guild demanded registration of pseudonyms to ensure payment and to preclude the use of offensive names.
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Blacklisted writers were not allowed to use pseudonyms, but many disregarded the rule. Television was a slightly safer place for blacklisted writers to work: producers were desperate for content, and many new writers were getting a chance to write for series, even if they had little experience. Thus, unknown names (and the writers behind them) had a good shot of getting work, especially if someone on the set was willing to vouch for them.

While blacklisted, Walter Bernstein, Abraham Polonsky, and Arnold Manoff (who previously scripted
Man from Frisco
) wrote under pseudonyms for the CBS series
You Are There
, with the sympathetic Sidney Lumet directing their episodes. They wrote about heroic rebellions against angry vigilantes, the Salem witch trials, and persecuted heroes like Socrates, Galileo, and Joan of Arc. Polonsky recalled: “This was a very good show on television and it was probably the only place where any guerrilla warfare was conducted against McCarthy in a public medium. . . . Every once in a while the pseudonym would be revealed, so we would just use another one, because they would blacklist even a non-existent writer.”
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Joan Scott remembered, “We did a lot of
Lassies
. . . . I fronted for [her husband, Adrian] on the TV show from 1955 on until 1961. I wrote some and he wrote some, but they were all under my pen name—Joanne Court. I got to be known as ‘the woman who writes like a man.’
”
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The fight to get blacklisted creatives and craft workers back to work, and for them to use their real names again, was long and hard. In 1952, Trumbo and Cole sued MGM for $350,000 in unpaid wages and canceled contracts.
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Lardner sued Twentieth Century–Fox, and Adrian and Joan Scott filed suit against RKO. Altogether, the Hollywood Ten sued the studios for $61 million in back pay.
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They were not alone in demanding compensation for the lost the
opportunity to work. In 1960, Nedrick Young, who wrote
Jailhouse Rock
, became a plaintiff in a twelve-person class action lawsuit that claimed the MPAA had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in its authorization of the blacklist. Young testified, “We’ve counted our losses, waited, and fought for the day when we would have not only jobs but names.”
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In a supporting affidavit John Howard Lawson explained to the court the significance of a writer’s name: “A writer’s name is his most cherished possession. It is the basis of his economic life, and the ‘trademark’ which establishes his competence and craftsmanship. It is more than the means by which he earns his bread. It is his creative personality, the symbol of the whole body of his ideas and experience.”
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