I Am Spartacus!

by Kirk Douglas

  . . . in view of the troubled state of current world affairs I find myself in the presence of an even greater duty and that is . . . to make it perfectly clear that I am not now nor was at the time of the hearings . . . a member of the Communist Party . . . and that I recognize the United States of America as the only country to which I owe allegiance and loyalty.

  Despite renouncing his views, he wasn’t released until December. Eddie Dmytryk returned to California a chastened man. He had been a Communist once, but he had no use for them anymore. Eddie’s attorney was Bartley Crum, a liberal Republican who later committed suicide because he, too, became tainted as a Commie sympathizer. Even Republicans weren’t safe from this guilt-by-association madness.

  Crum believed that the best way to get Dmytryk off the blacklist was by returning him to the scene of his “crime.” So on April 25, 1951, Eddie Dmytryk once again testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This time he identified twenty-six people as having been members of the Communist Party.

  One of those he named was a writer named Arnold Manoff, whose wife, a twenty-three-year-old actress named Lee Grant, had made her film debut a month earlier in a picture called Detective Story. I was the lead. She had a small part; she played a shoplifter.

  Lee was only a kid, a beautiful young girl with extraordinary talent and a big future. You could see it. She was so good that she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her very first film role.

  But because Eddie Dmytryk named her husband, Lee Grant was blacklisted before her film career even had a chance to begin. Of course, she refused to testify about the man to whom she was married, and it took years before anyone would hire her for another picture.

  One day, Charlie Feldman—the top man at Famous Artists Agency—called and asked me for a favor. This was a first for me. Before I hit it big with Champion, Charlie often kept me waiting for hours when we had an appointment. I’d be told he was too busy—come back another time.

  So when your agent calls and asks you for a favor, it’s one of those moments when you look at the phone in your hand like you’ve never seen it before. You think to yourself, How did it come to this?

  “Kirk, I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Name it, Charlie.”

  “You know that director Eddie Dmytryk? He’s a client of ours and I’m trying to put a deal together for him with Harry Cohn at Columbia. It’s not going to be easy . . . I’m pulling a lot of strings. I think we can get it for him, but it’s gonna take some time.”

  I was silent. I had played a fighter. I could see a punch coming.

  Feldman threw it. “Can you help him find something, Kirk? He needs work now. He’s got a new wife and a young family. His ex-wife took him for everything in the divorce and this whole Commie thing . . .”

  “Done. Have him call me.”

  “You mean it?!”

  “Of course I mean it. I’ve got a lot of scripts that need reading. I can use the help.”

  Charlie exhaled. “Thanks, Kirk. But you know . . . ”

  “Know what?”

  “There are a lot of people still pissed off at him. I wouldn’t want you to get caught up in any of that.”

  “Charlie, I’m a big boy. You’ve already sold me the car—now stop kicking the tires. Have him call me.”

  Eddie Dmytryk came to work for me. He helped me with scripts. I took him out to dinner, to football games, to social gatherings. I wasn’t afraid to be seen with him in public.

  Eventually, he got a movie and then Stanley Kramer signed him to a multipicture deal. (Yes, the same Stanley Kramer who bailed out on Carl Foreman. Maybe he was feeling guilty.)

  After that I never heard from Eddie. Not even a postcard.

  Fast-forward to 1953. I’m in Israel making The Juggler for . . . Stanley Kramer. He can’t wait for me to meet our director. Yeah, you guessed it. His name was Eddie.

  The funny part is that Dmytryk never told Stanley that we’d met before. The job, the dinners, the games—all that had apparently slipped his mind in only a few years. So who was I to bring it up?

  That was sixty years ago. If I knew then that he had named names, I’m not sure I would have given Eddie Dmytryk anything more than a swift kick in the ass. It’s one thing to protect your family, or even yourself. That I can understand. But ruining other people’s lives just to get your old job back?

  Orson Welles put it best: “Friend informed on friend not to save their lives, but to save their swimming pools.”

  While I was in Tel Aviv shooting The Juggler for the now-employable Eddie Dmytryk, Dalton Trumbo was still living in Mexico City. He was part of a colony of other blacklisted writers that included Ring Lardner Jr. and Albert Maltz.

  Trumbo was reduced to writing stories for women’s magazines under his wife’s maiden name. One editor wrote back, impressed, saying that “she” had real talent and should consider writing as a career. Years later, Dalton could finally joke with me about that story.

  You need to understand one essential truth about Dalton Trumbo: he needed to write. It was as integral to his nature as breathing, maybe more. This is a man who exercised by walking around his pool while chain-smoking.

  Even while on the blacklist, Dalton continued to smoke, drink, and churn out stories and screenplays at an astonishing rate. None of them, however, could safely bear the name “Trumbo.” So he invented as many as a dozen other names for his work, which was then “fronted” for him by sympathetic friends.

  One of those friends, the writer Ian McLellan Hunter, shopped around an original story of Trumbo’s, a romantic comedy about a princess who falls in love with a reporter. I still didn’t know Trumbo at this point, but I’d just finished shooting Detective Story with William Wyler who told me that this script—the title was Roman Holiday—had come to him after Frank Capra passed on directing it.

  “Why did Capra pass?” I asked Willy. “It sounds like a great story and you’d get to shoot it in Rome.”

  I had never been to Europe, but my close friend and business adviser, Sam Norton, was encouraging me to make movies out of the country. There were apparently tax breaks you could get by living abroad for long stretches.

  Wyler had heard this too, but business wasn’t what was on his mind. It was politics.

  “Capra passed because he smelled a Red,” replied Willy. “He thinks this story was written by some guy on the blacklist and he wants no part of it.” He ran his hand through his thick black hair and stared off into the middle distance. Finally, he spoke again; his tone had turned pensive.

  “It’s starting up again, Kirk. You saw what happened with Eddie Dmytryk.”

  Wyler was one of the most successful, respected directors in the history of the business. He’d been one of the founders of the Committee for the First Amendment. He wasn’t afraid of anybody. Yet here he was thinking about whether doing a picture about a princess and a reporter might get him into trouble with the United States Congress.

  This was insanity. Before I could say that, Wyler sent a chill up my spine, “I hear that Gadg might cooperate too.”

  “Gadg” was Elia Kazan. The following year Kazan named eight names, including the playwright Clifford Odets. Wyler was on a plane to Rome almost immediately after that, having concluded that there was more to be gained by leaving the country during this new round of inquisitions.

  A few months later, I began my own odyssey abroad. I did The Juggler in Israel, Act of Love in Paris, and Ulysses in Rome. Sam Norton was wrong. There were no tax benefits from working abroad, but I didn’t know that then. Nor would I have cared.

  I was head over heels in love with a twenty-year-old Italian actress named Pier Angeli. Or so I thought. We got engaged soon after we met.

  She was all that I thought about, morning, noon, and night. (Only later did I discover that while Pier might have been thinking about me in the morning, she was also thinking about several other men in the afternoon and evening.)

  Who was i
t who said that life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans?

  I did meet the love of my life in Europe. But it wasn’t Pier Angeli.

  Her name was Anne Buydens. She was born in Germany and grew up in Belgium and Switzerland. We met in Paris while I was shooting Act of Love, and we were married in the United States on May 29, 1954. I have never loved anyone more than I do Anne. In fact, she is my life. She’s saved it in more ways than I can count and continues to do so every day.

  When Anne and I returned to the United States, the political climate was starting to shift back from the near hysteria that had gripped the country when I’d left. Senator Joe McCarthy’s wild accusations of Communist infiltration had begun to backfire. He took on the United States Army in nationally televised hearings, which finally revealed him for the vicious demagogue that he was.

  Even newlyweds like Anne and me watched on TV. We sat mesmerized when, on June 9, 1954, the army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, looked straight at McCarthy and asked him: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

  Finally, the American people realized that he did not. For the first time that summer, a majority told the Gallup poll they disapproved of the senator from Wisconsin. His colleagues, now free of the fear that one of them could be his next target, voted overwhelmingly to condemn him in December. He remained in the Senate, a broken man.

  President Eisenhower coined the term “McCarthy-wasm” to describe the long-awaited end of this evil man’s crusade of terror and intimidation. But the blacklist survived—Hollywood hell-bent on persecuting itself.

  January 1, 1955. The New Year dawned with great promise. After spending most of the last two years traveling the world, I was finally back in the United States. I woke up that morning with my beautiful new wife at my side. We had bought a home on San Ysidro Drive in Beverly Hills—a small place, more like a bachelor pad, with barely enough room for Michael and Joel when they came from New York. Anne and I would quickly start looking for a bigger place, with an eye to expanding our family in the near future.

  We didn’t have long to wait. Anne soon told me that we’d be expecting our first child in November.

  My family was starting to grow. The country was coming to its senses.

  I decided to take a chance on something that I’d been wanting to do for a long time. I would finally become my own boss.

  The studio system was weakening. Independent producers like Stanley Kramer and the Mirisch brothers were developing pictures and then getting studios like United Artists to finance them. Now some actors were doing the same thing, cutting out the middlemen and developing their own projects. Before I had much time to consider the risks, I was one of them.

  My friend Burt Lancaster paved the way, with his partner Harold Hecht. By a stroke of luck, Hecht-Lancaster hired a television writer named Paddy Chayevsky to write a small picture about a lonely, unattractive butcher named Marty. It won an Oscar for Ernie Borgnine and was named the Best Picture of 1955. Before he knew it, Burt was no longer just a movie star—he was making other people into stars.

  I made my decision. I started my own production company. The name was easy. I called it “Bryna,” my mother’s original Russian name.

  When she heard what the company would be called, Ma, who could barely read or write a word of English, wrote me this note (almost certainly with the help of one of my sisters):

  God bless you my son. Mother.

  I will leave that note to my grandchildren. It will help them understand the miracles that this simple woman witnessed in her lifetime.

  I interviewed a lot of people to come work for me at my new company. The first one I hired was a young producer named Eddie Lewis. He made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse: “Kirk, I want this job. I’ll work for you for free.”

  The first Bryna production was a western called Indian Fighter. I would star in it, along with a new film actor named Walter Matthau. Matthau was a trained stage actor, very successful on Broadway.

  We got on well. Like me, Walter was the son of Russian immigrants. There we were, two Jewish cowboys from New York riding horses together on a wilderness trail in Oregon.

  This is how good an actor Walter was. His first two pictures were westerns and he hated horses. He was afraid of them. Every time Walter got up on a horse, he’d start cursing . . . in Yiddish: “Goddamn, mamzer! You worthless piece of drek, you should be in a glue factory!”

  But on film, he was as convincing as Tom Mix. Brilliant actor, funny guy.

  We were shooting the picture on location in Oregon. I’d already cast my ex-wife, Diana, for an important supporting role. But we still needed an exotic beauty for the part of the Indian maiden, my character’s romantic interest.

  While my staff was scrambling to find just the right girl, Anne was at home looking through Vogue. She saw a picture of a model, a beautiful young Italian girl named Elsa Martinelli. Anne showed me the magazine. “Don’t you think she would make a fantastic Indian girl?”

  I tracked down Elsa in New York City. She could barely speak English and, more to the point, she didn’t believe it was me on the phone.

  In order to convince her that I was me, she insisted that I sing her the song from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. She had seen the picture that afternoon.

  I cleared my throat and looked at Anne. She was grinning ear to ear, as if to say, “You’re the one who wanted to be a producer.” I stuck my tongue out at her and started auditioning, over the long-distance wire, for the part of myself:

  Got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lads

  A whale of a tale or two

  ’Bout the flapping fish and girls I’ve loved

  On nights like this with the moon above

  A whale of a tale and it’s all true,

  I swear by my tattoo.

  Apparently swearing by my tattoo convinced Elsa, because she got on the next plane to California. We gave her a screen test and put her under contract. Elsa Martinelli was now an Indian maiden and Anne had provided the feathers.

  What a woman. She was willing to let me go on location with my ex-wife to shoot a picture in the middle of the wilderness, and she also found the beautiful young actress to play my love interest.

  Wait a minute, that’s not all. Anne even stayed behind in Los Angeles to take care of eight-year-old Joel and ten-year-old Michael, because both their father and their mother were off making a movie.

  That’s why, when you see the end credits of Indian Fighter, the name Anne Buydens is listed as “Casting Supervisor.”

  Her actual screen credit should have read: “Saint.”

  When I got back from Oregon, Bryna was in full swing. We were developing a list of other properties. Sam Norton strongly encouraged me to make some pictures that I didn’t star in. He said that there were business benefits to be gained by doing so. Bryna put three films into production that had no parts for me. I was lucky to have a close friend who was always watching out for my best interests.

  The movie I really wanted to make—and star in—was based on Irving Stone’s novel about Vincent van Gogh. It was called Lust for Life. I tried to buy it and was hugely disappointed when I learned that MGM already owned the rights. It wouldn’t be a Bryna production. I didn’t care. I still intended to play that role, whether I produced it or not.

  There was one hitch—a big one. MGM told me I could have the part, but I’d have to sign a loyalty oath first.

  A what?! I was furious. John Houseman, the film’s producer, tried to calm me down.

  “Now, Kirk,” he said in the professorial manner that he would later make famous in The Paper Chase. “It’s just a formality.”

  “Formality, my ass!” Before I realized it, I was yelling.

  “Those bastards are questioning my patriotism! Tell Louis Mayer he can shove it!”

  Houseman was totally unaffected by my anger. He didn’t try to argue with me. He simply asked, “Kirk, do you want the pa
rt or not?”

  That stopped me. I was breathing hard, like a runner who had just pushed himself farther than he thought he could go.

  I suddenly realized that I might have gone too far.

  I wanted that part. I wanted it bad. So what was the problem? I had served in the navy. I was loyal to my country. It was only a piece of paper.

  I signed it. But I still felt like a fink.

  There was no time to think about it. I was quickly learning what my own life was going to be like now that I was “the boss.” Studios, lawyers, agents, even other actors . . . everybody wanted a piece of me. And they wanted it right now.

  Even my kids wanted more from me. I compensated by trying to think of fun things for us to do together as a family. Of course, most of them also involved my work.

  I’d made 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Walt Disney and had gotten to know him. Everyone, all over the country, got to know him not long after, in 1955, when he opened Disneyland. Walt’s passion for everything that moved wasn’t confined to the amusement park. He was in love with railroads and had a life-size system at his house. There were tracks and bridges, even a real engineer. “Uncle Walt” (as he liked to be called) invited me to bring my boys over to ride his trains. They had a great time.

  What surprised me was that Walt filmed the whole thing and then used it without telling me. A few weeks later, I saw my family on his TV program, then called “Disneyland.” It was all a big commercial for his new amusement park, starring me and my kids. Sam Norton insisted that I sue him, so I did. Then Anne said, “Are you crazy? Even if you win, you lose. Everybody loves Walt Disney.” I dropped the suit.

  Looking back, this incident shows me two important things about myself.

  The first is that Anne’s instincts about people are better than mine.

  The second, perhaps related to the first, is that I can get along with people whose political views are very different from mine. Walt Disney was a deeply conservative man. Some even say he was an anti-Semite. I never saw that, but I know he hated Communists. He enthusiastically cooperated with J. Parnell Thomas’ Hollywood witch hunts.