I Am Spartacus!

by Kirk Douglas

  When their closed-door meetings were over, these great and powerful men issued what came to be known as the “Waldorf Statement.” This was the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist. Its key provision declared:

  Members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers deplore the action of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives. We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.

  Wow. I need to take a moment here and come up for some air. As I look back on these words more than sixty years later, I feel anger, revulsion, and a deep sadness.

  Of the Unfriendly Ten, six were Jewish. I’m sorry to say that most of the men who issued the Waldorf Statement were also Jewish.

  How could Jews, who themselves had been the victims of thousands of years of persecution, including the most horrific example of fear and genocide the world has ever known—the Holocaust in Europe—justify perpetuating a similar climate of fear in America?

  The answer is found in the question itself. Fear breeds fear. These men—people like Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn—were terrified their great power would be taken away from them in a heartbeat if their loyalty to America was ever called into question.

  So they became superpatriots. And to prove themselves right-minded, they were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others, even their fellow Jews. They were like the Vichy government in France, collaborators who held on to their influence and position at the expense of their fellow countrymen.

  Hollywood had gone crazy. The witch hunts that Adolphe Menjou had stupidly encouraged were spreading like raging wildfires all across the country. Like most Americans, I watched it happening and felt helpless to stop it.

  Fredric March, speaking on the national radio broadcast “Hollywood Fights Back,” saw the handwriting on the wall:

  Who do you think they’re really after? Who’s next? Is it your minister who will be told what he can say in his pulpit? Is it your children’s school teacher who will be told what she can say in classrooms? Is it your children themselves? Is it you, who will have to look around nervously before you can say what is on your minds? Who are they after? They’re after more than Hollywood. This reaches into every American city and town.

  Freddie March got it right. He could see the storm coming. Maybe that’s why I chose him to play the president of the United States when I produced Seven Days in May.

  In the years that followed those hearings, thousands of lives were ruined. Careers were ended with the stroke of a pen, and not just in Hollywood.

  Almost three years after the HUAC hearings, in 1950, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeals of Dalton Trumbo and the other Unfriendly Ten. Their convictions for contempt of Congress were allowed to stand. Dalton began serving ten months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky. His wife and three young children were left without a husband or father to provide for them.

  At the same time, in a twist that no screenwriter would have dared to invent, that pompous ass Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas was convicted of padding his payroll with phony jobs. He then pocketed the money himself. His defense was essentially that “everybody did it.”

  That didn’t fly with the judge, who sent the now-former Chairman to a federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut. It was also the place where two members of the Unfriendly Ten, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr., were serving their sentences for contempt of Congress. Ironically, they found themselves in prison with the same man who’d put them there.

  I often wonder what they said to the once-mighty congressman when they passed him in the prison cafeteria—“Pass the gavel, please”?

  Justice may be blind, but sometimes she has a terrific sense of humor.

  An obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, quickly thrust himself into the vacuum left by the imprisonment of J. Parnell Thomas. He began by lying about how he had numerous “lists” of Communists who had infiltrated all walks of American life.

  More and more people I knew, including my friend Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, were caught up in a situation that continued to grow uglier and more threatening. We started to call it “McCarthyism”—a new word that the language didn’t need.

  Like me, Carl was also the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was a brilliant writer. Carl wrote the scripts for two of the pictures that really established me as an actor, Champion and Young Man with a Horn. (His daughter, Amanda Foreman, is also a tremendous writer. I wish he could have lived to see her success.)

  The film for which Carl is most remembered now is High Noon. He not only wrote the original screenplay, but coproduced it as well.

  In 1951, right in the middle of shooting High Noon, Carl was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. His refusal to name names meant that his career in America was effectively over. He fled to England before he could suffer the same fate as Trumbo and the others. He made it out of the country just before the State Department revoked his passport.

  Hedda Hopper, the hate-mongering gossip maven, viciously attacked Carl Foreman, writing in her column that she hoped “he would never be hired here again.”

  Even the liberal producer Stanley Kramer, one of Carl’s closest friends and his business partner, removed Carl’s coproducer credit from High Noon. He was afraid of what their continued association might cost him in the future.

  A few years later, I looked up Carl when I was in London.

  We talked for a few minutes, but I sensed something was wrong.

  Finally, he said, “It’s okay, Kirk.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “What’s okay, Carl?”

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to have lunch with me. I understand.”

  Jesus, I thought. This is what happens to a guy who thinks all his friends have turned on him.

  “Carl, it’s me. Kirk. Cut the bullshit. Where do you want to go to lunch?”

  I’ve never forgotten that brief encounter with Carl Foreman. It still reminds me of all the pain caused by the blacklist. Friends turned on friends. Marriages fell apart. Carl’s did. He became a man without a country.

  In an interview with the American Film Institute years later, Carl wrote these poignant words:

  During the so-called McCarthy period . . . my problem was that I felt very alone. I wasn’t on anybody’s side. I was not a member of the Communist Party at that time, so I didn’t want to stand with them, but obviously it was unthinkable for me to be an informer. I knew I was dead; I just wanted to die well.

  Some did die.

  Philip Loeb was a drama instructor during my student days in New York. He was a fine teacher; I took several classes from him. Phil’s own career, in the new medium of television, was just getting started when they came after him.

  In June of 1950, a publication called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television listed Philip Loeb as a Communist. He strongly denied it, but his protest of innocence didn’t matter to General Foods, the sponsor of his television program. They insisted the network fire him. It did.

  He never got work in television again. Solely responsible for the care of his mentally troubled son, he could no longer support him. Phil sank into a deep depression. He overdosed on sleeping pills in 1955.

  One reader wrote to the New York Times declaring that “Philip Loeb died of a sickness called the blacklist.” Although the Times printed the letter, shortly after the editors made their own position crystal clear: “We would not knowingly employ a Communist party member in the news or editorial departments . . . because we would not trust his ability to report the news objectively or to comment on it honestly.”

  Ironically, the same month that Phil Loeb was first blacklisted—June 1950—similar events played out in the lives of two other men.


  They didn’t know each other, and I didn’t know either of them. Not yet.

  They were Dalton Trumbo and a novelist named Howard Fast.

  Howard Fast was one of the most successful historical novelists in America. His books included The Unvanquished, Citizen Tom Paine, and Freedom Road. At this point in his life, Fast was also an unapologetic Communist.

  Early in 1950, Fast was called to Washington, D.C., to testify before HUAC (now chaired by a Democrat, John Wood of Georgia). The issue was Fast’s past support for an anti-Franco group, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Wood and HUAC wanted the names of all their donors. Fast refused to give them up. (One of those he protected was Eleanor Roosevelt.)

  Like Dalton Trumbo, Fast was cited for contempt of Congress. He received a three-month sentence and was sent to a federal prison camp in West Virginia. He began serving his term on June 7, 1950.

  It was a tough place, but it had a library. And as he later wrote in his memoir Being Red, Fast used it:

  . . . there in prison I began to think of Spartacus, the slave . . . I read every scrap and thread of information that I could find in that small prison library. I read whatever there was about Rome—precious little . . . I found the story of Spartacus—and became convinced that there was a way to tell it so that it could at least approximate the truth.

  Only two hundred miles away from where Howard Fast was confined, Dalton Trumbo was serving his own contempt sentence in Ashland, Kentucky.

  His “name” became Federal Prisoner #7551.

  Trumbo never made any apologies for himself or for his actions. After his release he wrote this to a friend:

  . . . show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have earned before, and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray not just his friends but his country itself.

  What happened to Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast that summer set in motion a sequence of events that would profoundly change my life.

  But I didn’t know it then.

  Globe Photos

  My family was very lucky. I was never blacklisted.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Good luck, and may fortune smile upon . . . most of you.”

  —Peter Ustinov as Lentulus Batiatus

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1950, both Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast were languishing in dank prison cells, thousands of miles from their homes and families. Each man had to be wondering what the future had in store for him.

  The fear that caused their imprisonment was still on the rise. Another round of congressional hearings aimed at Hollywood was already being planned. But, looking back on it with some distance—and I’m almost ashamed to admit it—my own life couldn’t have been much better. I was untouched by the blacklist and, frankly, I wasn’t thinking a lot about it. The world was in turmoil—a hot war in Korea, a cold war with the Soviets, suspicion and division in America—yet I was lucky. None of that was affecting me.

  The big events happening in my life were all on the home front. I was thirty-three years old and married to a beautiful girl named Diana Dill, another of my classmates from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was so beautiful that she had appeared on the cover of Life. Somehow I got a hold of a copy of the magazine while I was in the navy. I showed it to my shipmates and told them I was going to marry her.

  I did and we had two wonderful boys, Michael and Joel. (Our marriage didn’t survive, but our family did. Diana and I remain good friends. My wife, Anne, calls her “our ex-wife.”)

  By 1950, believe it or not, I was a bona fide movie star. I had played everything from a boxer to a police detective to a trumpet player. Champion, my eighth film, had been released in 1949. It earned me my first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Even the tough New York Times critic Bosley Crowther had positive things to say about me: “Kirk Douglas does a good, aggressive job . . .”

  And the money! My God. I was making more money than I’d ever dreamed of. My six sisters and I grew up during the Depression era. Our family struggled every day for bread and borscht. My mother struggled every day with my father.

  Home was Amsterdam, New York, a small city north of Albany. When I was growing up, it was known primarily for carpet making. If you didn’t have a job at one of the two big carpet companies—Bigelow-Sanford or Mohawk Mills—you had a hard time getting by. My father worked as a ragman, riding up and down the streets of Amsterdam collecting rags and scrap metal for resale. What money he did make often went to the saloons instead of to our family.

  Now I was earning more in one year—in one picture—than my father made in his entire life.

  In Kentucky, Dalton Trumbo was earning only prison wages.

  Just a few years earlier, he had been Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter at $75,000 a picture. Although he was no longer pitching projects to Howard Hawks or Victor Fleming, his eloquent voice was still being heard, at least by those who cared to listen.

  During his many months alone in that tiny cell, he wrote poignantly about his confinement. He was as candid as ever. This letter was sent to his wife, Cleo:

  Two days hence will be our thirteenth wedding anniversary and I have been lying here on my bunk, thinking about it . . . more and more I realize that when I emerge from here, I must make the choice of what kind of writer I want to be. I think it would be better for all of us if I returned to writing novels, with the occasional foray into theater. It will probably take years to recover from the blow dealt by the blacklist.

  Sadly, he was proven right.

  Howard Fast was released from prison on August 29, 1950. Never a heavy man, he was now twenty-eight pounds lighter. Like Dalton Trumbo, Fast had been thinking a lot about his writing career. But unlike Trumbo, never for an instant did he consider changing it.

  He had always been a novelist. He was determined to remain one.

  Fast spent the next nine months writing what he hoped would become his magnum opus—a novel he called Spartacus. Plunging himself into the research, he made an extensive study of slavery and the methods of imprisonment practiced in ancient Rome.

  He did this even as his own freedom as an American citizen was being systematically reduced and restricted. All in the name of keeping America “safe.”

  Even when Fast finished serving his sentence and was technically a “free man,” his political views still cost him. He was banned from speaking on college campuses. He was under constant surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in his activities—Fast’s FBI file grew to over eleven hundred pages.

  When he wanted to travel to Italy to do primary research on the life of Spartacus, Fast was denied a passport. It would be ten years until he was able to obtain one.

  Despite all these obstacles, Howard Fast finished Spartacus in June of 1951.

  Writing the book was the easy part. Selling it was not. The blacklist had found its way into the publishing business as well.

  Fast sent Spartacus to Little, Brown, the respected New England literary house that had published three of his previous books. After reading the manuscript, the editor was excited and eager to take it on, but a few weeks later, he called Fast back to say the house was passing. Fast soon found out why. As it happened, an FBI agent had been sent to Boston to meet with the president of Little, Brown. Privately, he had “advised” him not to publish anything written by Howard Fast. If he did, the agent went on to say, action would be taken against his company. These instructions, the Little, Brown executive was told, came directly from J. Edgar Hoover.

  Six more publishing houses turned Spartacus down. Fast was left with no alternative but to publish it himself. He and his wife turned their New York City basement into a shipping room and within four months they had printed and sold forty-eight thousand hardcover copies of Spartacus. Out of his basement!

  The “unbiased” critics ridiculed the book as poorly written,
even though Fast’s other books were highly praised and had sold millions of copies around the world. The New York Times writer couldn’t figure out why Fast even bothered to write it, since “every schoolboy knows by now that Roman civilization began to suffer from dry rot long before the advent of the Caesars.”

  Replying to that critic in Being Red many years after the fact, Fast wrote:

  It would be a safe bet to say that before the appearance of my book and the film that Kirk Douglas made from it ten years later, not one schoolboy in ten thousand had ever heard of Spartacus.

  While Howard Fast was shipping copies of Spartacus out of his basement, Dalton Trumbo was finally released from the federal penitentiary in Kentucky. Almost immediately he took Cleo and their three children and moved to Mexico.

  I heard about this in the same way we all did, in hushed tones and whispered conversations.

  “Did you hear about Dalton Trumbo?”

  “Yeah, Mexico, I think.”

  “That poor bastard.”

  “Those poor kids.”

  “I hear Eddie Dmytryk is cooperating now.”

  “Well, what would you do if you were him?”

  That was a question I didn’t have to answer, except for myself. No one was questioning my patriotism or keeping me from finding work. What would I have done if that had suddenly changed? Although Diana and I were, by this point, divorced, I was still responsible for two young children. Would I give up my career on principle? Go to jail?

  Eddie Dmytryk did. At least it started out that way.

  Like Dalton Trumbo, Dmytryk, an Oscar-nominated director whose nickname was “Mr. RKO,” was one of the original Unfriendly Ten. He had also refused to cooperate with HUAC. And he, too, was jailed for contempt of Congress in the same West Virginia penitentiary as Howard Fast.

  On September 9, 1950, five days after his forty-second birthday, and after having spent months in prison, Dmytryk finally had enough. The warden witnessed his statement: