by Anne Edwards
Leaving Home
Books by Anne Edwards
Biographies
Judy Garland: A Biography
Vivien Leigh: A Biography
Sonya: The Life of Sonya Tolstoy
Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor
Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell
A Remarkable Woman: The Life of Katharine Hepburn
Early Reagan: The Rise to Power
Shirley Temple: American Princess
The DeMilles: An American Family
Royal Sisters: Elizabeth and Margaret
The Grimaldis of Monaco: Centuries of Scandal/Years of Grace
Throne of Gold: The Lives of the Aga Khans
Streisand
Ever After: Diana and the Life She Led
Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography
The Reagans: Portrait of a Marriage
Novels
The Survivors
Shadow of a Lion
Miklos Alexandrovitch Is Missing
Haunted Summer
The Hesitant Heart
Child of Night
La Divina
Wallis: The Novel
Memoirs
The Inn and Us (cowritten with Stephen Citron)
Scarlett and Me
Leaving Home
A Hollywood Blacklisted Writer’s Years Abroad
Anne Edwards
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2012
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.scarecrowpress.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Distributed by National Book Network
Copyright © 2012 by Anne Edwards
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edwards, Anne, 1927–
Leaving home : a Hollywood blacklisted writer’s years abroad / Anne Edwards.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8199-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8200-3 (ebook)
1. Edwards, Anne, 1927- 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 4. Expatriate authors—England—London—Biography. 5. Blacklisting of authors—United States. I. Title.
PS3555.D87Z46 2012
813'.54—dc23
[B] 2011043169
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Catherine and Michael
The two of we three
Without you I would never have been complete
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Setting the Scene
Chapter 1: Departure
Chapter 2: An American in a Queen’s Land
Chapter 3: In a London Kind of Fog
Chapter 4: A Dream Is Born
Chapter 5: Gentlemen Don’t Always Prefer Blondes
Chapter 6: My Kid Seems to Like Your Kid
Chapter 7: Everything in Life Is a Gamble
Chapter 8: A Time for Dreams—and Norman Mailer
Chapter 9: Love and Other Emotions
Chapter 10: Funny Girl
Chapter 11: Hollywood Calling
Chapter 12: A Question of Adultery
Chapter 13: The End of an Affair
Chapter 14: Judy, Judy, Judy!
Chapter 15: The Emerald City of Madrid
Chapter 16: Swiss Interlude
Chapter 17: On the Riviera
Chapter 18: Going Home
Chapter 19: Last Call!
About the Author
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt gratitude to my children, Michael Dean Edwards and Catherine Edwards Sadler Grill, who relived and shared with me their memories of the times of our lives chronicled in this book. My pride in them as man and woman has grown steadily through the years. I have always believed I am the luckiest mother I have known. In recounting my life during their childhood and youth, I now know that to be true.
There have been others who shared those times with me, some who were fond friends, others who were the progeny of those who are now sadly gone—I give to them my deepest gratitude. Their personal reflections and the filling in of so many details have contributed greatly to a fuller and more accurate portrait of our “expat” years.
I have been extremely fortunate in having Stephen Ryan as an editor for he has, from the beginning, shown his belief in this very personal book at a time that has not been easy in the publishing world. I also want to extend my appreciation to others who have assisted so well in the final making of Leaving Home: production editor Jessica McCleary; the fine copyeditor, April Lehoullier; the proofreader, Annette Van Deusen; and my good friend George Djordjevic, who navigated me through the high-tech seas of the twenty-first century.
Last, but certainly not least, my loving appreciation goes to my husband, Stephen Citron, who came into my life only after I had returned “home,” and who has never lessened his support of me or my writing.
Setting the Scene
The day that would change my life and that of my two children, Michael, almost seven, and Catherine, almost three, is indelibly carved into my memory. A hot California sun burned through the large, arched front windows of my small Spanish bungalow, blinding the familiar view beyond—palm trees towering over like houses on the fringe edge of Beverly Hills, where more expansive, pricey dwellings were the usual, many occupied by movie stars and other well-known denizens of the film industry. This was a fiery day in August 1954. Summer would soon pass and time was running out for “we three.” A divorced mother in my midtwenties, my ex-husband gone—no one knew quite where—I had no job (I was an “independent” neophyte screen and television writer), do-piddling in the bank, with only six weeks remaining on an eviction notice to vacate our home.
I had been nineteen in 1947, when I married my husband, who was twenty-one and a seasoned veteran of World War II, having served in Guam. We had been divorced for the past year. In the intervening months I had fought my own war after being attacked by poliomyelitis at a time when the virus that paralyzed and killed was rampant (mostly among young people, although our President Franklin D. Roosevelt had also survived polio, and managed, just dandy, thank you, to get us through the Depression and World War II) and the vaccine not yet available. Oh, yes! I have not mentioned that I was also in danger of momentarily receiving the dreaded pink subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, already apparently having been found “guilty by suspicion and association” of having tangible connections to Communist ideas and their supposed supporters—Hollywood writers mainly—who were being accused of disseminating Russian political propaganda through their screenplays.
A mushroom cloud of fear had hovered over my beloved United States for a number of years, since the fall of 1947, in fact, settling over Hollywood and directing its lethal rays on the movie industry. Its chief instigator was US senator Joseph McCarthy, rabid for power at any cost to his nation and devastation to hundreds (make that thousands) of p
eople, a huge majority of whom were innocent of any crime or malfeasance to their country. (His surname, many damaged lives later, would give birth to the word “McCarthyism,” defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as: “The practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence [and] the use of unfair investigatory methods in order to suppress opposition.”) McCarthy, his cohorts, and his disciples, believed, or pretended it to be so, that Communist Russia was trying to undermine, and eventually take over, the United States through a conspiracy of Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and directors. The attacked moviemakers (excluding the studio moguls whom the Committee appeared to consider blameless) were the creators of stories dealing with the greed of the rich and the oppression of the poor.
What better show trial and media blitz could be had than one that paraded on television (the country’s newest diversion) before the Committee some of Hollywood’s most famous moviemakers, stars, writers, directors, and producers—as both friendly and unfriendly witnesses; the former siding with the “Committee.” One member, congressman, future vice president and president, Richard M. Nixon, made a public statement that he was seriously concerned about John Steinbeck’s great 1930s Depression opus about migrant farm workers, The Grapes of Wrath (screenplay by Nunnally Johnson) being shown in Yugoslavia. No reason was given as to why our nation might be concerned about how the movie (originally released in the States in 1940) might affect a mid-European country that had broken with the Soviet Bloc in 1948 and at this time enjoyed a varying degree of freedom in the arts. Then, along came Jack Tenney, the inquisitorial state senator from California (and friendly witness), who testified that Frank Sinatra was abetting Communism by appearing in films filled with Communist propaganda. The movies were not listed, but it is difficult to comprehend how Sinatra’s appearances in musical films such as Ships Ahoy!, Anchors Aweigh, and It Happened in Brooklyn—all good-feeling, shallow stories—could convey a political agenda.
The first Hollywood hearings began on October 20, 1947. They were produced like a gala Hollywood premiere. (There were jokes about “walking down the Red carpet” but it was too real to laugh at—except perhaps with a wry “he-haw.”) Despite what the men who had been called before the Committee expected (no women were called in to this first inquisition), they were not prepared for what met their eyes. A battery of television newsreel cameramen stood side by side, their cameras whirring as the witnesses entered and were led to their seats. Photographers broke ranks and dashed toward them, bunching up, crouching for angle shots, their flash cameras raised like artillery, bursting into blinding light in the men’s faces.
Spectators crowded into a bank of seats to one side. Across the front of the room was a platform where the Committee sat, brass plates before them to identify who they were for the cameras. Below the platform was the witness table and flanking it to the right and left, tremendous tables set up to accommodate the press. The room was windowed but sunlight was deflected by the massive broadcasting equipment and rows of control panels. In every corner of the room were loudspeakers for the public address system. Microphones were stationed on both the Committee and witness tables. One of the first of the nineteen accused witnesses to be called (labeled by the press as “the Hollywood Nineteen”) was writer, director, and producer Robert Rossen who later told me that his immediate reaction was to search the room for a sign of an American flag as any American court of law displayed. There was none. At the time, Rossen was one of Warner Bros. leading scriptwriters with such dramatic, socially conscious, and critically acclaimed classics to his credit as Marked Woman, They Won’t Forget, Dust Be My Destiny, The Roaring Twenties, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, The Sea Wolf, A Walk in the Sun, and (although uncredited as it was released when he appeared as an unfriendly witness before the Committee—the credit therefore given to the film’s director, John Huston) The Treasure of Sierra Madre, which won the Academy Award that year for screen adaptation.
The hearings went on for three weeks during which time the nineteen men, one by one, refused to answer questions put to them regarding their political affiliations, religion, or the names of other members of the film colony, who belonged to some of the same organizations as they did, and whose silence lawyers rightly declared a given right of the Constitution. Of the nineteen men brought before the Committee, twelve were writers (including the playwright Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera), five directors, one producer (although Rossen was all three), and one actor, Larry Parks, who famously had just made a huge hit in—and for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination—The Jolson Story. Together, their contribution to what is often referred to as “the golden age of Hollywood” was considerable. Lester Cole and Alvah Bessie had cowritten Objective Burma; Ring Lardner Jr. the 1937 version of A Star Is Born, Woman of the Year, Cloak and Dagger, and Laura. Dalton Trumbo had been nominated for an Academy Award for Kitty Foyle; Howard Koch received the same honor for his stunning screenplay of The Letter and won it for Casablanca. The remaining screenwriters included in the Hollywood Nineteen—John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott, Richard Collins, Samuel Ornitz, Gordon Kahn, Herbert Biberman—and the directors Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, and Of Mice and Men for a start), Edward Dmytryk (Tender Comrade), and Irving Picket (The Moon Is Down) were no less talented, for each brought his special ability to his work. Ten of their number would face a prison sentence of one year for refusing to name others and would become known as the Hollywood Ten. All would have their careers and personal lives torn asunder as would the hundreds of Hollywood’s creative men and women who would be dragged up before the Committee or had been made to flee before being cited.
And so the deadly game began.
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” was the key question asked by the inquisitors, a public query not admissible in an American court of law that included a judge and a jury, neither present in these hearings. But the Committee had been set up as a congressional investigation and witnesses were given fewer rights. In fact, a large number of well-known film folk had been members of left-leaning organizations in the early 1930s—most of which had no connection whatsoever with the Communist Party or its agenda, for this was a time when our country was in the depths of the Great Depression and help was desperately needed by the millions of unemployed as government relief or health benefit measures were not available to the majority.
This was also during the Spanish Civil War, a fight for personal freedom against a dictator. Organizations were formed in Hollywood to raise funds to aid the rebel fighters. Numerous other Hollywood groups joined in to raise awareness of the armies of unemployed in our country and of the workers who were earning substandard wages and living in dire poverty.
World War II followed fast on the heels of the Depression. It was a lot for a country to take during those years and people grasped whatever they could to get through it. An artist’s currency has always been ideas. During the thirties, communism seemed a word that meant something like “share the wealth, help the needy.” There was a small membership in the American Communist Party, which during the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union gave it a boost in credibility, causing its membership to grow countrywide to something near fifty thousand. Fewer than one hundred were ever known to be members who had worked in Hollywood movies. Over half of those who were in the business of making motion pictures before the war had become disenchanted and quit the party well before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a decade before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) began its investigations. Shortly after the war’s end came reports of Soviet repression in Eastern and Central Europe. That was the start of the “Red Scare” in the States, which fueled the fire that drove McCarthy and the Committee to their own political agenda, thus creating a society in Hollywood that was split in two and then fragmented. The most evil persons i
n old gangster movies were most often not the criminals but the informers—stoolies, they were called, and loathed. Suddenly, being a stoolie was the only way in Hollywood to hold on to your job.
The televised Committee hearings were difficult to turn away from. One felt like a deer caught in the blaze of oncoming headlights, frozen with fear and awe at a speedily advancing vehicle. If the witness refused to answer, or stood on the Fifth Amendment not to (as was their right as an American citizen), they were in contempt and liable for a jail sentence. Despite this, the Hollywood Ten felt obliged to stand by their colleagues and not feed the Committee names. Others who followed into the witness box, their desperation for the survival of their career pressuring them, were bowed into submission. They believed their only out was to give names—people who they stated had been members of the Communist Party or had belonged to any organization that was suspected of having Communist members. Although they often did not know whether a colleague had been engaged in such activities, the routine was for the witness to identify others, whenever possible, who had already been named. It seemed not to matter if this was true, nor did it appear to cross their conscience that they were further digging a hole for these colleagues, thus ending his or her working days in Hollywood. The majority of the witnesses called before the Committee were into late midlife and had been plying their craft for decades. Few possessed other talents or were equipped with the ability or the means to make an otherwise equitable living for their families. Unemployment benefits were not applicable. Among the named, there were mental breakdowns, divorces, and suicide.
It has to be understood that writing a screenplay does not necessarily mean one so employed can write in other mediums as well. Films are a visual art; literature a narrative one; theater spoken but without the assistance of the great open vista of a camera lens, which in a matter of a single moment or two could eradicate the need for pages of dialogue, explanation, or description. Great novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner failed miserably in their attempts to write for the screen and only a minuscule number of screenwriters have made a successful crossover to publishing. They are quite different mediums, each requiring separate skills and training.
