West of Eden

by Jean Stein

  Nobody in the movie industry wants anybody telling them what to do, including the producers, so there was no struggle with the producers over this protest. But after that first meeting in Washington, which was a fiasco for everybody, Harry Truman sent a general out here to talk to a lot of big-shot producers, the ones who owned the studios. He said, “Call these dogs back. They’re your dogs, get them in here, and tell them we don’t want the Committee for the First Amendment to keep going.” I went to the second meeting at Ira Gershwin’s house, and nobody was there. Humphrey Bogart was walking around yelling, “Where’s everybody?” He had already taken an anti-communist stand himself in Chicago, so anti-communism was in the air and part of American policy. Between the first meeting at Ira Gershwin’s house and the second one, the pressure had come from Washington to end it. People were chased out. They had no choice: the studios controlled their contracts.

  Later, I was in France when I found out from a friend of mine who was living in my house that people had been around to serve me with a subpoena. My wife said, “Let’s stay in Europe. All you will do is get blacklisted when you go home.” I said, in my general romantic way, “They can’t tell me where I can go! If I want to go home, I’ll go home. Let them serve me with a subpoena.” Stupid attitude, but that was mine. So we went home, I got a job at 20th Century–Fox, and a couple of weeks later I got served with a subpoena.

  At my hearing Congressman Velde said to me, “You were in the OSS. Can you give me the names of the people you worked with? They may have been communists.” I said, “No, I can’t give ’em to you.” He said, “I can hold you in contempt!” I didn’t stand on the Fifth Amendment or anything, I just said, “You’re not supposed to know their names, and therefore I’m not going to give them.” These guys were agents: if you give their names, you kill them. These guys are in some foreign country, what do you think they’re doing there, learning to play the kazoo? But he kept insisting, and I kept saying no. This stupid thing kept going on until a guy from the CIA went up to the chairman, spoke to him, and they stopped Velde asking questions. He got very mad at me and said, “You are a very dangerous citizen.” That was the headline in the paper. When I got home my wife said, “I never expected a very dangerous citizen would call on me.”

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  ARTHUR MILLER: I’ve always been on the left, just sentimentally; everybody I knew was. Around 1950 I had gone to two meetings of communist writers in New York. They were party people, twenty writers, playwrights mostly, some novelists, and it was a purely literary discussion. I knew a lot of the people there. One or two I knew from when I had written for radio in the forties. That was my involvement. But obviously they must have had some informer there, who told the Un-American Activities Committee. The committee never bothered me all through those years. It was only after I married Marilyn in 1956 that they got interested, because they saw pay dirt. They were already starting to fade: the committee was really losing ground. They were not on the front page anymore, but with me and Marilyn, they thought they would really get back on the front. To show you what the motive was, when I got to Washington, Congressman Walter, the chairman, offered Joe Rauh, my lawyer, that if he could take a picture with Marilyn, he’d call off the hearing. That is how seriously they were involved. A picture of just the two of them, and that would be the end of the whole hearing. The inanity is still hard to take in. Marilyn thought it was an absurdity, too. She wondered, “What kind of people are these?” But she took it much more seriously than the rest of us did. She thought the United States government had to have some kind of validity, compared to Hollywood, which had no validity. She learned fast what this really was. They got elected that way. It was hard to convince people; it would have been hard to convince me.

  At some point one of the committeemen, Congressman Scherer, actually asked me, “Would you advocate the right of a poet to write a poem which demanded the destruction of the United States government?” “Yeah,” I said, “I think a person has a right to write a poem about anything.” At which point he threw up his hands and turned to his fellow committee members and said, “What more do we need to ask this guy?” You see, we have all the makings of a real beautiful dictatorship. And what is holding it back is a tradition stemming out of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. That’s it. And if that center doesn’t hold, you will find the sweetest dictatorship you will ever want to look for. Many of them are men of goodwill, and they do not understand the delicacy of liberty, how easily it can be destroyed.

  The other questions were very boring. Mainly it was, “Did you sign this petition?” They had a pile of petitions: there must have been fifty of them. Of course I had signed everything. I’d written a musical about HUAC called Listen My Children. When I was called to testify, about twenty foreign journalists showed up at the press table. Well, this never happened, and it threw them off—they hadn’t expected that. It rattled them a little bit. So they were dumb enough to begin reading from this musical. The scene they picked was that the Un-American Activities Committee takes a writer, binds his hands and feet, puts a gag on his mouth, then drips water on his head. Now he asked, “Did you write that?” I said, “Yeah, I think I did.” Of course, the newspaper guys like I. F. Stone were rolling around, guffawing, and the committee guys were looking over wondering why they were laughing. That is how dumb it all was!

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  SETH ROSENFELD: Just as the Red Scare was heating up, as HUAC was about to descend on Hollywood, one night in 1946 there was a knock on the door of Reagan’s house overlooking Sunset Boulevard. Reagan answered, and some men from the FBI asked if they could speak with him. Reagan invited them in, made them coffee, and they told him that they had information that communists were infiltrating some of the liberal groups that he was involved in. And not only that, but they were saying bad things about him personally. Reagan’s response, as he put it in his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?: “I must confess they opened my eyes to a good many things.” In his second memoir, An American Life, he recounted the scene a little bit differently: “They [the FBI agents] asked if they could meet with me periodically to discuss some of the things that were going on in Hollywood. I said of course they could.” FBI records show that he then became active as an informer in Hollywood and that he informed on fellow actors and actresses, sometimes on the scantest of evidence. Some of these people were his opponents within the Screen Actors Guild, such as Karen Morley, Anne Revere, and Alexander Knox. Reagan was not only reporting people whom he said he suspected of being communist, he was reporting on his adversaries.

  In the years right after that meeting in his home, Reagan met several times with FBI agents and gave them information about fellow actors and actresses who he suspected were Communist Party members, or who were somehow subversive. In one instance an FBI agent asked Reagan if he could help him identify an actor who was involved with the Progressive Citizens of America, which was a broad-based political organization that supported Henry Wallace for president, and which had a nonexclusionary policy, so you could be a Democrat, you could be a Republican, you could be a Communist, it didn’t matter. If you wanted to support them, they were open. One of the FBI reports describes how Reagan listened to the agent’s description of this actor and said, “I think I know who that is,” and he went and got a copy of a movie magazine and showed him a photograph in it of Richard Conte, who later became a film noir star.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: The strike was eventually broken, and the union was very angry. We had guards at the house after that. I was always told that was why a guard had to drive me to school and pick me up. I was never really allowed out and about as a little kid.

  As a young girl, I’d go to all the sneak previews with my father. They were always held halfway out of town and you could never tell anyone where they were going to take place. Climbing into those black cars, we were like gangsters going to rob a bank. We’d usually stop at a steak house for dinner, where everyone would eat th
e same thing because we were always late—usually a shrimp cocktail and a steak. And my father would have one drink, a Jack Daniel’s, I think. If it was really ultrasecret, he’d drive himself. When we’d stop at a gas station on the way he’d tell the attendants, “You have to go and see….” and of course he’d name a Warner Brothers movie.

  Almost every night my father would bring the dailies home. The editor, the director, and my father’s secretary would be there. One night when I was eleven, they were running San Antonio, which was a Western with Errol Flynn. I saw it two nights in a row, and the second night I noticed that the cattle were stampeding left to right instead of right to left—the two sections of film didn’t match. I said, “Daddy, they’re going the wrong way!” “Please be quiet, Barbara. We’re trying to concentrate….But the kid’s right!” Two months later, I was sent to Switzerland. They must have had the idea of sending me away before, but my outspokenness clinched it.

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  HARRY JOE “COCO” BROWN, JR.: Ann Warner was sort of mysterious; she would come and go. She was always off in another wing, it seemed. She and Jack Warner had a very torrid love affair that ended in marriage. I think he once even shut the gates so she couldn’t get back in, and she was banging on them—like a scene out of Dallas.

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  JEAN HOWARD: I think I was Ann’s closest friend. She certainly was mine. When I met her, she looked like she did for most of her life: a small woman with lovely, great big green eyes and nice skin. She was a simple woman, and she was very shy, actually, especially when Jack was around. I think she was madly in love with him when she married him, and she was very happy for maybe five years before she even thought of anybody else. Ann was emotional, but she was a brilliant woman, in her way. She didn’t really like to go to lunch. She didn’t play cards. She was someone who didn’t like to go out; she liked people to come to her. She didn’t have much in common with the other women, because they hadn’t read the books she liked—Robinson Jeffers and other poets. She also read up on the occult, which I didn’t really want to know about.

  At some point in the early forties, Jack caught Ann with a Warner Brothers actor. She was really stuck on him—he was bright, unlike most Hollywood people in those days. Ann had rented a little house up in the Hollywood Hills, and one day Jack walked in on her there with him. Ann put herself in the hospital and called me, weeping. And then slowly they made up. The actor was blackballed at Warner Brothers and he didn’t work in Hollywood for a long time. Jack had that kind of power.

  There was also a rumor around town in that period that Ann and I were having a romance. When she got bored at parties, she’d get hold of me, and I’d sit down with her, because she was more amusing than anybody else there. And in the summers, after dinner at the Warners’, the men would start playing cards, and the women would go swimming in the pool. There was always this wonderful Hawaiian music, white gardenias floating by, and rum drinks. Boys were mixed up with it, too: a lot of them fey or gay or whatever. Not undressed—we’d have our bathing suits on. It was all innocent fun. But it was better fun than most wives were having.

  Then all this stuff blew up about Ann’s affair with the actor, and a few months later Harry Warner walks into his brother’s office and says, “Listen, I know how you feel, that you caught Jean and Ann in bed together.” Jack Warner, bless his heart, stood up and socked his brother. “You son of a bitch! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was always such drama in this town.

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  GORE VIDAL: It was a totally lesbian scene. Yeah. They were all raging. And I was just a kid who was around. The girls were always off in a corner whispering together. There’s a famous story of Salka Viertel. She was coming with Garbo to a party, with Hepburn. And then, suddenly, Dietrich. The four make their entrance. And Dietrich is the only one wearing slacks. And I think it was Garbo who said—she always called her “Ms. Dietrissssh”—and she would hiss the name. “Look at Ms. Dietrissssh giving the game away again.”

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: In the early forties, Mother wrote to Salvador Dalí in New York to ask him to do her portrait. He wrote back that a portrait with detail in the background would be six thousand dollars; without detail, it would be four thousand. My father circled the “four.” The painting of my mother took several months. She and Dalí became such good friends that he threw in the details anyway. I believe it was one of his favorite portraits, but I found it a little bit spooky. She’s wearing her cabochon emerald brooch and a hat with feathers that look like snakes—Medusa.

  Credit 2.3

  Portrait of Mrs. Jack Warner (Ann Warner), by Salvador Dalí, 1944.

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  JEAN STEIN: As a child I was really frightened of that portrait of Mrs. Warner. There was something menacing about it, and when I went over to play with Barbara I’d avoid looking at it, like the painting was possessed.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: Mother loved that portrait so much that she wanted him to do one of my father. Of course my father was very impatient and I doubt if he sat for it much. He sent photographs for Dalí to work from. At the time we had a giant schnauzer named Dragon, and the dog came out more lifelike in the portrait than my father. It is probably the worst thing Dalí ever did, terribly stiff. He must have cared very little about this painting. There was something wrong with my father’s hand, which was resting on the dog’s head, and my father made him repaint it. I think Dalí gave him a sixth finger. They finally gave away the painting; god knows where it is.

  Credit 2.4

  Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner, by Salvador Dalí, 1951.

  I was six or seven at the time, and I was much darker than I am now. While Dalí was staying with us, whenever I came into the room he’d say, “Here’s the little prune.”

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  JEAN HOWARD: Dalí was somebody you liked to watch because he was like a marionette jumping on a stick. For some reason he always painted rich women. Like Mona Harrison Williams, the Countess of Bismarck: in the painting, she’s beautifully dressed, but he painted her barefoot, like the country girl she had been. Gore Vidal suspected that she would have been a role model for Ann.

  In Ann’s portrait, the house is shown crumbling. She hated to see that. Oddly enough, she never realized that it would eventually crumble, that it was just a material thing. We all said the picture was terrific, and she kept it because she realized it represented something important. But I know in her heart she thought maybe someday she’d get Dalí to redo it.

  Credit 2.5

  From left to right: Ann Warner, Lili Damita, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Warner, and Errol Flynn, 1948.

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  BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I had a very complex relationship with my mother. I think she loved me very much, and it wasn’t that she wasn’t physically affectionate, she was. But as I got older there was a competitive edge to our relationship. When there was a man present, she wanted to be the one to whom attention was paid. I don’t know if she was like that with everyone, but she was with me.

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  ANNE TERRAIL: What I remember about my grandmother, from my real memories, not from things that I was told but real memories, is having her on the phone when I lived in France with my mother. It was always a big deal then to call overseas—“Okay, Anoushka is calling.” I used to have to call her “Gaga”—which I thought was really horrible. It was ridiculous. She was going to call at nine in the evening, so everybody was around waiting for this call. I remember for me it was strange because I had never met this woman and she would say all those nice things to me but it always seemed very remote, very far away. When I was around eight or nine she asked, “Do you love me?” and I said, “How can I love you, you have never seen me.” I don’t remember how she responded, but I think my mother was pretty happy that I’d said it. I remember that it seemed very weird that this woman would call and be very warm, you know—what does it mean?

  She was a mythical figure since I didn
’t meet her until I went to the States, when I was sixteen. I just knew this woman whose voice was very present. She was like some kind of ghost even. It was very strange. At the same time, she felt like a very strong woman who had power over my mother. But how could she be so strong if she could never show herself in real life, and hid behind those calls. As a child that is what I felt, not what I saw, but what I felt.

  Now, my grandfather, Jack Warner, was much more real, since I went to the South of France to his house every summer. I don’t know which age I started to go there, probably four or five. As a little child, I knew that he was very nice. He was funny. He would always make stupid jokes like putting a fork in his mouth and leave it there. I know that when I was very little he would let me drop leaves on his head for an hour and he wouldn’t say a thing. He was probably so happy to have some family thing somewhere, you know. In all the pictures that I have with him I am relaxed. He was fun. We never had talks really because when he was in the South of France he had a very big social life and there were people who were maybe not used to being with children or something. But I liked him. I thought he was a nice, warm man. He was put in that film made by the Coen Brothers, Jack Warner was.

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  BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: The first time Jack fired Jack Jr. from Warner Brothers, it was really instigated by Ann. She felt that Jackie was more loyal to his mother than he was to her—which, of course, he was. It also had to do with the fact that the Warner family didn’t accept her—she married into a family which had predetermined that it wasn’t going to like her, and she vowed vengeance. Jack Jr. just got caught in the middle of everything. He was the kindest person you could possibly meet. And he always wanted his father’s approval. At one point, Jack Sr. came to him pleading for money, claiming that his divorce from Irma had left him in financial trouble. So, without any hesitation, Jackie gave him back the million dollars that had been put in trust for him. Jack Sr. took it and ran.