Bentley was in poor spirits that February afternoon. She had quit her teaching position thinking she would be needed back east for the Remington libel trial. But just days after returning to New York, she found out there would be no trial. She was furious when she heard about the possibility of an out-of-court settlement, concerned about what it would do to her credibility, and very worried about money. At lunch, she told Brunini that she was broke and couldn’t even afford to pay her hotel bill. The government was reimbursing her for travel expenses when she was called to testify at hearings and trials, but she had no real income. It was an old story. Bentley seemed perpetually to be in financial crisis, whether employed or not. When she had an income, she spent it all on hotel and bar bills, and on restaurants and vacations. She had not learned—and at forty-two it was not likely that she ever would—to pay close attention to her personal finances, to keep a budget, to save.
Brunini listened sympathetically. He didn’t know Elizabeth Bentley personally, but he had heard her testify and, like millions of others, he had read about her in the papers. He knew she had lived an unusual life, to say the least. She had a story to tell. Why not get paid to tell it? Why not, Brunini suggested, write a book about her experiences? Bentley had considered this idea before—there was even some thought that Nelson Frank, the New York World Telegram reporter might help her—but nothing had come of it. She was no writer, she told Brunini, and she knew nothing about the world of publishing. Besides, she needed money right away, not months or years later. She couldn’t wait for a book to be published, assuming she could write one in the first place.
But Brunini knew better. He was a writer himself, and he understood the publishing business. You wouldn’t have to wait until the book was published to get money, he told her. You can get an advance for the project. Of course, she would need to put together an outline for the book and write a sample chapter, but Brunini could help her with that, he said. He knew a publisher who might be interested. He’d do some checking. And so, the two worked together that spring sketching in the outlines of the book, with Brunini helping her to begin to transform her experiences into salable prose.
A few months later, their lives intersected in another way when Brunini’s grand jury—at his persistent urging—reconvened after a long recess to focus its attention on William Remington. Elizabeth Bentley would be the government’s star witness. That same month, May 1950, Brunini brought Bentley to the East 26th Street offices of the Devin-Adair Company, a publisher interested in supporting the anticommunist cause. The company would later publish McCarthyism: The Fight for America, which featured Senator Joseph McCarthy’s answers to questions posed by “friend and foe alike.” At Devin-Adair, Brunini and Bentley met with Devin Garrity, the president.
“This is Elizabeth Bentley, who is going to do a book for us,” Garrity told his publicity director. “And this is John Brunini who is helping her do it.”
A contract was drawn up with both their names, giving Brunini a share in the profits of the book. But it was never signed. Or it may have been signed and later discarded when Tom Donegan, who was handling the case for the government at the Remington grand jury, learned about Brunini’s involvement with Bentley’s book. A new contract was drawn up without Brunini’s name, and on June 2, six days before the grand jury indicted William Remington, Bentley signed the document.
The publishing house clearly believed in the book, offering her a $3,000 advance (close to a year’s wages) and covering her living expenses during the months it would take to write it. Devin Garrity arranged for her to stay at the Westport, Connecticut, home of some friends of his while she wrote that summer and fall. In mid-June, she gave up her room at the Hotel Commodore, moved to the country, and began the task of committing her life to paper. She had told the details of her life as a communist many times—to the FBI, to the press, to congressional committees, to grand juries—but she had never told the story, the narrative of her life.
The book would serve two immediate purposes. It would be a much-needed source of income, and it would continue her public work, giving her yet another forum in which to warn others of the evils of communism. But writing about herself also served—or had the potential to serve—another, deeper, more personal function. It provided Bentley an opportunity for self-reflection and self-assessment, a time to delve into her own psyche, a chance to make sense of her life. Writing the book gradually became, more than anything else, an exercise in Elizabeth Bentley explaining Elizabeth Bentley to herself. And as the manuscript grew, it became apparent that there were things she just didn’t want to know.
Donegan may have warned Brunini to stay away from the project, but it seems he continued to help Bentley after she signed the contract. The collaboration was not always a smooth one. Bentley had a writer’s temperament without having a writer’s eye. She was, said Brunini, “reluctant to write one day, willing the next,” sometimes overcome with emotion as she forced herself to relive her time with Golos in order to write about it. Brunini likened her to a pregnant woman both eager to have the baby and dreading the confinement. Variously credited as a collaborator, an editor, and a ghostwriter, Brunini eventually became, as he put it, “the doctor who must perform a caesarian.” Devin-Adair also assigned one of its own editors, Thomas Sloane, to the project. But later in the summer, Bentley came to New York and stormed into Devin Garrity’s office, announcing that she refused to work with Mr. Sloane because he had a friend who was a communist. Mr. Sloane, she said, was under the influence of this friend and was trying to ruin her book. It was unfortunate. She needed all the editorial help she could get.
The product of her five-month writing stint was a melodramatic memoir, full of details but empty of insight, simultaneously heavy-handed and lightweight, both overwrought and underrealized. Like most memoirs, it was an account of what she chose to remember and how she chose to remember it. And like most memoirs, it was interesting both for what it said and for what it didn’t say.
The book opens with Elizabeth Bentley leaning against the deck rail of the SS Vulcania as it steams into New York Harbor. It is the summer of 1934. She is twenty-six and just returning from a year of study in Italy. She is glad to be back home, but as she looks wistfully at the skyline, she wonders what exactly she is coming home to. She has no job, no place to live, no family. She feels “alone and frightened.” And so she establishes herself, in the opening paragraph of the first chapter, as a forlorn figure, solitary and disconnected, a woman vulnerable to the forces of history.
She writes nothing of her time in Italy—except that she was appalled by fascism. There is no hint of her European adventures, her travels, her independent life, her lovers. This is not the picture she wants to paint of herself. And there is almost nothing about the quarter-century that preceded that trip. Her parents, her childhood, her girlhood, her college years—all are mentioned only in passing, as if they had little to do with the woman who finds herself looking wistfully at the skyline. It may be that she wanted to shield her family—not her mother and father, who were long dead, but aunts and uncles and cousins—from the publicity that would ensue after the book was published. But it is more likely that she had neither the wisdom nor the literary wherewithal to examine her life like this. Instead, she wrote the book from a distance, chronicling the years she was, as she now chose to perceive it, enslaved by communism as if the experience had happened to someone else, someone she had observed and knew only slightly. She titled the book, meaningfully, Out of Bondage.
The scenes she re-creates seem both flat and overinflated. Her emotions seem canned. When she first realizes that Golos intends to take her underground, she feels “as if someone hit me in the pit of my stomach.” She hears his voice “as though from a long way off” and “waves of dizziness” swirl around her. One hundred and nineteen pages later, when Golos dies, the room again swirls around her. But with an effort, she steadies herself.
“Yasha was dead, I said to myself numbly. Never aga
in would I hear his voice—never again would I come home to find him waiting for me. I gripped the arms of the chair and fought back a rising hysteria.”
For those looking not to understand Bentley but to learn some of the details of her spy activities, the book basically recounts what she told the FBI in 1945 and testified to at hearings and trials: the clandestine rendezvous, the encounters with her many sources, the tense meetings with her Soviet contacts, the battle over the control of her networks, her conversion to staunch anticommunist. For those who had followed her testimony, who had read the front-page stories, there was nothing much new here—except the tantalizing fact that the man who had taught her tradecraft was also her lover. For those who were learning of her life as a spy for the first time, the chronicle of events was almost, but not quite, compelling, a fault not of the material but of the writer.
In the end, it is clear that Bentley wrote the book not to try to understand herself or make herself transparent to others but rather to defend herself, to justify first her embrace of communism, then her life underground, and finally, dramatically, her conversion to patriotic informer. The book ends with her sitting in the HUAC hearings room in the summer of 1948 listening as her erstwhile sources testify. “They slid and slithered around the questions,” she writes. They looked old and worn, bewildered and disillusioned. She pitied them, feeling first “a terrible sadness” and then “a great cleansing anger.”
“And now I looked again at these people before me in the Committee Room,” she writes in the final paragraph of Out of Bondage. “They are spiritually dead, I thought with sudden and final release. But I am alive and speak for them…. Telling their story and mine, I will let the decent people of the world know what a monstrous thing Communism is.”
By late 1950, Out of Bondage was completed, and Devin-Adair began production of the book. Meanwhile, the manuscript was submitted to McCall’s magazine in hopes of selling the prepublication serial rights. There could be no better advance publicity for the book than having the story serialized in one of the largest-circulation women’s magazines in the country. It would be tremendous exposure for Bentley and the book and would mean a considerable chunk of money for the author. A sale seemed likely. The editor of McCall’s had reviewed the manuscript and deemed it “one of the most fascinating documents” he had ever read. The book, he thought, was destined to be a “surefire success.” But some weeks later, McCall’s got cold feet. As word spread through the New York publishing world that the magazine was considering running excerpts, someone cautioned the editor to go slow because “Elizabeth Bentley was on the verge of being discredited.”
Toward the end of January 1951, the magazine’s Washington representative paid a visit to FBI headquarters to have a chat with one of Hoover’s assistants, a man named Tolson. Her editor loved the manuscript, she told Tolson, but what was all this about Bentley’s precarious credibility? Of course, the FBI could not give her any advice about whether to publish the story, Tolson told her. But, he added meaningfully, “would it not be logical to assume that if Miss Bentley was vulnerable and if she could be discredited, would this not have occurred long before now?” The Bureau, he said, had “a great deal of respect for the veracity of Elizabeth Bentley.”
That was enough. The magazine purchased the first serial rights, most likely paying Bentley three or four times what she made from the book advance. The magazine treated the series as a major publishing event, sending out a press release in mid-April that hailed Bentley’s story as “a human document of tremendous interest and significance.” A few days later, just as the May issue of the magazine was about to hit the newsstands, McCall’s staged a press conference for Bentley at the Carlton Hotel in Manhattan. There she read a prepared statement—she hoped the series would be read “by as many people as possible” and that these readers “will see what communism really is like and avoid getting entangled in it”—and fielded questions from her mostly female audience. One veteran reporter was particularly unsympathetic.
“Miss Bentley,” she asked, “do you think this exposé of yours will help your country as much as your spying hurt it?”
Bentley deflected the implied criticism rather neatly. “That’s for the government to decide, I suppose,” she responded.
A few minutes later, in response to questions about why she was drawn into the communist movement, Bentley talked about the Depression and how it seemed at the time that the American system had failed and that the communists could make a better world. The veteran newswoman’s hand shot up.
“A lot of us went through the Depression, too,” she lectured Bentley, “and we didn’t turn communist.”
When the May issue of McCall’s appeared on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes the next day, the readers of the magazine may have been taken aback. On the cover, just above a picture of a cherubic toddler in a frilly yellow dress playing with an identically clothed doll—“Your Children Will Love To Play With Betsy McCall,” ran the blurb—was a pink banner announcing the featured story within: MY LIFE AS A SPY…BY EX-COMMUNIST ELIZABETH BENTLEY. Inside the magazine, the excerpt was introduced as a “strange…exciting…tragic” story and framed for the magazine’s readers as a woman’s tale of love, surrender, and redemption. The introduction read: “How could an American girl with a New England upbringing and a Vassar education become a communist spy?” The editors placed this first installment of Bentley’s story between an illustrated feature on Hawaiian casseroles and a fashion piece on summer suits, thus within a few pages commingling the two most resonant—and seemingly contradictory—themes of the 1950s: contented domesticity and communist paranoia.
In June, Greta Garbo was on the magazine’s cover, her eyes closed under exquisitely arched brows, the slightest suggestion of a smile on her lips. Under the sweep of her chin ran the blurb: “I Joined The Red Underground With The Man I Loved.” In July—a model in a bathing suit adorned the cover—the installment was titled “How I Was Used By The Red Spy Ring,” Inside, the editors, showing more insight about Bentley than she had about herself, introduced the piece with this explanation: “Loneliness and disillusion drew New England–bred Elizabeth Bentley into the Communist Party during the mid-30s. The Party filled the emptiness of her existence. It gave her, she thought, a chance to bring about a better world. And, more important, it gave her a lover.” For the July installment, McCall’s had sent a photographer out with Bentley to revisit “the scenes of her communist activity in New York.” There was a picture of Bentley posing in Sheridan Park, where she and Golos used to meet, one of her standing in front of the building that had housed USS&S, and another taken in front of her Barrow Street apartment. She looked uncomfortable in the camera’s gaze, as if not knowing what was expected of her. Should she smile? Look contrite? Stoic? She couldn’t decide. Mostly, she looked tired. The last installment appeared in August under the title “I Meet With Tragedy and Disillusion,” thus completing the tale of, as McCall’s put it, “the timid, vacillating young woman” who became “the disciplined, obedient Bolshevik.”
But even as women were reading about her life, Bentley was busy adding new chapters. Soon after McCall’s published the fourth installment, Bentley was called once again to testify in the capital, this time before the Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), the Senate’s answer to HUAC. Pat McCarran from Nevada, the subcommittee chairman, was one of the most vocal anticommunists in the Senate. The year before, he had authored, sponsored, and then pushed through over Truman’s veto the Internal Security Act of 1950, which, among other things, allowed for the internment of American communists during national emergencies. Homer Ferguson, head of the committee that had first pursued William Remington, was one of McCarran’s committee colleagues. In mid-August of 1951, the subcommittee directed its attention to the Institute of Pacific Relations, a privately financed research organization that the senators believed had profoundly influenced American public opinion and foreign policy on the Far East and was a tool of So
viet Russia.
The Institute (known as the IPR) was indeed a significant entity, with councils in ten countries, an international program of research and publication, generous support from both the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, and a number of prominent New Dealers in its ranks. Bentley was called in to provide testimony that would directly link the Institute and the Communist Party, which she willingly gave. The IPR, she told the senators, had been controlled by the party through Earl Browder who relayed the party line to the Institute’s secretary. She called the IPR a communist front organization and testified that she and Golos had mined sources like Duncan Lee from its ranks. Bentley quoted Golos as saying that the IPR was “as red as a rose.” As for Institute members with ties to both the party and the federal government, Bentley named the late Harry Dexter White, former Roosevelt aide Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss, and several others. The senators couldn’t have been more pleased with Bentley’s testimony. It was hard for them to let her go. Like other congressional committees following a particular investigative path, this one could not resist veering off on side trails, with the senators quizzing Bentley about how the spy apparatus worked and, in executive session, questioning her about Canadian communists.
Bentley was barely out of the congressional spotlight when the publication of Out of Bondage early that fall again made her the center of critical attention. The book, on sale nationally for $3.50 a copy, was not the success the editor of McCall’s had predicted. Sales were sluggish, and it is doubtful that Bentley made any more money from the book itself beyond the advance she had already been given. But if readers didn’t flock to Out of Bondage, reviewers certainly did. The book was reviewed by just about every important newspaper and magazine in the country. The New York Herald Tribune called it “an illuminating book,” the Chicago Tribune lauded it as a “fascinating and exciting account,” and The Atlantic considered it “an interesting and instructive picture of a Communist secret agent.”
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