When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  On March 9, 1947, Dunne addressed a union meeting at the Olympic Auditorium. Sorrell had been kidnapped several days before—stopped by men dressed as policemen, handcuffed, put in a car where he was badly beaten, and then left in the desert. (His kidnappers were never apprehended.) Sorrell had just been released from the hospital, and this gathering was a kind of welcome home. Dunne told the assembled crowd about his meeting with Reagan and the others from SAG, and he made concrete proposals to settle the strike—calling not only for an agreement by both sides to abide by the decision of an arbitrator, but for major concessions, in advance, from the CSU. A day or so later, the CSU accepted the proposals; the IATSE and the producers never responded to Dunne’s telegrams. The Screen Writers Guild took out a full-page newspaper ad, stating that “Father Dunne’s proposals and their acceptance by the CSU mean that the current dispute, which is daily disgracing our industry and bringing misery to thousands of rank and file workers, could be settled by negotiations begun here and now. . . . The producers’ silence indicates to us that they are unwilling to make an honest try for labor peace in Hollywood. We are forced to this conclusion: A lock-out exists in our industry.” Nearly two weeks after Dunne had appeared at the Olympic Auditorium, The Tidings (an organ of the archdiocese) published a report that had been prepared for Archbishop John Cantwell by two men, his film industry representative and a professor of labor relations. They concluded that the strike could be settled if all parties were determined to do so, but that the producers “have taken a most negative attitude by doing little to settle the dispute”; and they said, further, “the strike issues cannot be beclouded with cries of Communism and radicalism if a settlement is to be accomplished.”

  Five months later, in mid-August 1947, with the strike nearly a year old, hearings were conducted in Los Angeles by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor, chaired by Representative Carroll Kearns. The greatest revelations came only near the close of this set of hearings, in the beginning of September, when Kearns learned of the existence of notes of meetings held between the producers, their agents, and Roy Brewer in the days leading up to the September 1946 lockout of CSU. How Kearns learned of these notes was a mystery at the time; but, in any event, he ordered them produced. As Dunne would later write, the production of these notes threw “a bombshell into the smug ranks of the producers and their battery of lawyers. Those who were present the day [the] minutes were introduced will not have forgotten the signs of consternation and the flurry of activity . . . [or] the squirming of Roy Brewer when recalled to the stand and confronted with the record of the part he had played in formulating producer strategy, a record which flatly contradicted his previous testimony.” The minutes certainly seemed to bear out what both Dunne and Sorrell had long believed, but been unable to prove: that the CSU’s ongoing troubles were rooted not in a bona fide jurisdictional dispute but in a conspiracy between the producers and the IATSE to destroy the CSU. According to the notes, Brewer assured the producers that he would supply IA men to take the jobs of CSU workers; that if his men hesitated to cross the picket lines he would “use the full power of the IATSE to force them to”; and that, in order to spark the crisis, they should “put IA men on sets so carpenters and painters will quit.”

  Damning as the minutes seemed, they were only an incomplete paper record. Confronted with them, Brewer said he didn’t recall having made the statements, or that they meant something different from what they seemed to mean, or that he didn’t recall having been at a meeting at all; and other participants in these meetings were similarly aphasic. The hearings, therefore, continued their somewhat desultory course, reconvening in February 1948. At that time, they offered another glimpse of the backdrop of this struggle, when the role of Joseph Tuohy was examined. Until recently, Tuohy had been the head of Teamsters Local 399, the powerful studio transportation drivers union; he was from Chicago, where he was said to be well connected to the Outfit, and he had been a longtime friend of Bioff’s. Tuohy and Sorrell had been at loggerheads for years. In 1940, when California Governor Culbert Olson was presented with extradition papers to send Bioff back to Chicago to face charges there, Tuohy had spent a week in Sacramento, pleading on Bioff’s behalf; Sorrell had also gone to see the governor, arguing that he sign the papers; and Bioff had been sent.

  Herbert K. Sorrell, head of the Conference of Studio Unions. Screen Actors Guild Archives

  Here in the strike, Tuohy’s efforts to aid the producers and the IA—and to subvert Sorrell’s CSU—had been far more successful than his attempt to aid Bioff. The Teamsters’ transporting busloads of strikebreakers through the picket lines had been absolutely vital to the studios’ ability to continue to run smoothly. It now emerged, however, that the members of Local 399 had voted overwhelmingly to observe the picket lines—but had nonetheless been ordered by Tuohy, backed by his superiors, including Teamsters head Dave Beck, to cross them. It was, really, not so surprising that the Teamsters officials would have done this, considering the coziness of their relationship with the producers and with the IA. But the producers, in any event, had not depended merely on goodwill. For in March 1946, months before the strike began, Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century-Fox (who had served time in prison for his role in the Bioff scheme) had offered Tuohy a job at the studio—one that, however, would not begin until the following January, after the strike was well underway. Tuohy, who had been making a salary of $175 a week in his Teamsters job, would make between $400 and $500 a week over the course of his seven-year contract with Twentieth Century. It was, of course, just another version of the kind of payoff presumably made to Petrillo, certainly to Bioff and Browne—and routinely being made to business agents of many unions across the country by the mid-forties. Even many who did not themselves take the payoffs—for example, the continuing board members of the IA who had presided along with Bioff and Browne but probably did not share in their profits—learned to avert their eyes so as not to make trouble.

  Herb Sorrell, however, specialized in making trouble. He was almost religious in his trade unionism, and its corruption enraged him. (During the hearings, he told one congressman who was cross-examining him, “I think you should pass legislation that labor leaders who accept bribes or gratuities from the employer should be shot.”) Since those whom he attacked (starting with Bioff, continuing with Walsh and Brewer) had long sought to discredit him by calling him a Communist, that issue became a leitmotif of these hearings—and, also, a small companion piece to what was about to transpire before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which would have such a terrible effect in Hollywood in the coming years.

  Dunne, predictably, was Sorrell’s defender. As he testified, “I have come to know Mr. Sorrell quite intimately. I am completely convinced in my mind Mr. Sorrell is not a Communist. . . . I know there are Communists, undoubtedly, in the CSU, as there are in the IATSE and almost every other group in the country. It is not a Communist group and not Communist led.” When he completed his direct testimony, Dunne was asked numerous questions prepared by IA attorney Michael Luddy. Luddy had been a lawyer for IATSE throughout the Bioff-Browne regime; he had represented Bioff at trial and would, in all likelihood, have consulted with Korshak, Bioff’s other counsel, during that period. And in the last few months, he had phoned Loyola to complain about Dunne’s statements, and most recently had attempted to exert pressure to prevent Dunne’s testifying at these hearings. Now, a number of Luddy’s questions were designed to expose what listeners might construe as Dunne’s Communist leanings. For example, the priest was asked about having spoken to a meeting of the strikers from the same platform as Vicente Toledano, the allegedly Communist leader of Mexican trade unions. Dunne said, “I learned Mr. Toledano was to speak at the meeting, so the question arose in my mind, ‘Should I appear at the meeting or should I stay away simply because he was there?’ I saw no reason then and I see no reason now for staying away. As a matter of principle, I am not afraid of Communists. I am no
t a Communist. I am not a Communist fellow-traveler. I sympathize with them . . . I sympathize with anybody that is intellectually confused. I subscribe to the doctrine that we cannot hate anybody . . . I maintain personal relations of the friendliest kind with Communists, or anybody else. That is part of my philosophy.” Another question from Luddy was whether Dunne had received money other than expenses for the trips he made in an effort to settle the strike. “I have received not a red penny from anyone,” Dunne responded, with some heat. “I should say this has cost me considerable, not in terms of money, but in terms of peace of mind and sleepless nights, and my reputation being seriously damaged in a smear campaign. I have gotten nothing out of it except the satisfaction of a clear conscience and awareness I was trying to do something for people that were deprived of their jobs for months.”

  Pat Casey, who had only recently retired from his long-held post as the chairman of the labor committee of the Motion Picture Producers Association, a trade association made up of the major Hollywood studios, and who had employed Johnny Roselli for a time during the Bioff regime, was a less likely defender of Sorrell. But he, too, testified that he did not believe Sorrell to be a Communist. He had dealt with Sorrell for many years, he continued, and “I have considered him honest in the first place, which covers a multitude of sins. In the second place, I will take his word for anything he says in a deal. He has never broken it with me.” When Casey was asked, at another point, whether he believed there was anything in this jurisdictional dispute that had been Communist-inspired, he responded, “I don’t think so. My God, I have heard Communist, Communist, Communist. It gets down to where if you do not agree with somebody, you are a Communist.”

  On the subject of his putative Communism, however, Sorrell was probably his own best witness. He plainly saw this occasion as his opportunity to right the record, and his words came in a torrent, filling hundreds of pages of transcripts. As he said, “My name has been dragged in mud throughout these United States as a Communist, as a subversive element, and people who have known me all my life think that something is wrong and they do not understand it. People who have fought me have had access to the press. . . . They have a large staff of publicists. They get their word out much better than I do.” The self-portrait he now drew, however, was warts and all. He testified about arrests for participating in strikes, or fights, that the committee would probably not otherwise have known about. He described how in his early days working in the studios he had been prejudiced against foreigners who could not speak the language well, and against Jews, but then he had gotten to know these people and visited their homes and he realized that they were no different than he was, working hard to own a home and be able to put children through college, and he vowed he would do anything he could to benefit them. He even confessed that when he was really young he had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, where he had found the drills and regimentation impressive, and he had considered joining; but when he returned with a Catholic friend and learned Catholics were ineligible, he had rejected the idea. “I explain these things to you,” Sorrell declared, “because I want you to know that I am not holding back anything. If I joined the Communist Party, I could just as well tell you . . . [but] I tell you now, so that you will not be in any suspense, that I am not now nor ever have been a member of the Communist Party. I say that under oath.” Sorrell traced the history of the allegations that he was a Communist, beginning with Bioff and his supporters. “The minute Bioff stepped in, the cry of Communism came in. It has been that way, and continues to be.” In the present regime, he continued, “Exactly the same line is followed by Walsh and Brewer. They come in with the charge of Communism to protect themselves.”

  Anti-Communist as he declared himself to be, however, he was opposed to the growing move to deprive Communists of their rights. “I have no use for them . . . but I think they are a minority group, and if we allow ourselves to become so embittered against our enemies, who are minorities, pretty soon it moves from one thing to another. . . . It follows just like night follows the day, that when you eliminate any small minority it soon becomes a larger minority, and you and I know that right today when the move is on to eliminate Communists, the move is on to eliminate Jews. . . . The next thing is to eliminate labor unions. The next thing is to eliminate Catholics. . . . Look, that’s Hitler’s plan. You know what he did. And it always follows that way.”

  In the end, the congressional investigation produced three volumes of testimony but did nothing to alter the ineluctable tide of events. The CSU was crushed, Sorrell faded into obscurity, and many of the roughly ten thousand workers he had represented did not recover from the financial losses they sustained. In an interview for an oral history in 1981, Dunne spoke at length about this epoch, and also divulged something that he had kept secret until then. During the hearings, Pat Casey had asked to meet with him privately. When they met at the Wilshire Country Club, Dunne recalled, Casey had led him to the veranda and chosen the table farthest away from the others. After eliciting Dunne’s promise that he would not reveal what he was about to hear, Casey told Dunne that what the minutes had seemed to substantiate was indeed true: “that the strike had been deliberately promoted, manipulated, by the producers, together with the IATSE leadership, in order to force the CSU out, and then keep them out, of the studios. He said this was a definite conspiracy on the part of the producers and the IATSE union, and he gave me facts in support of that, their secret meetings, and so on.” In the lengthy piece on the labor wars that Dunne had written in 1950, he had not divulged what Casey had told him; but now that Casey had been dead for decades, Dunne said he felt he could reveal it. He also said he was certain that it was Casey who had made Kearns aware of the existence of the incriminating minutes. Casey’s breaking rank, though, was all covert; on the witness stand, he had given no hint that he had any knowledge of conspiracy. Dunne speculated that Casey had been unwilling to testify truthfully about what he knew because he might have been afraid of jeopardizing his pension—or even his life, inasmuch as “this was a violent [situation]—when dealing with the Hollywood strike, you were dealing with Chicago gangsters.” It was their hired gunmen, Dunne asserted, who had kidnapped Sorrell.

  Not long after Dunne had testified at the hearings, he was transferred out of the Los Angeles diocese, and sent to Phoenix, Arizona. He was certain at the time that his expulsion was “the result of direct intervention by the Hollywood producers and their friends in the archbishop’s office.” The church, he said, likes to have good relations with those in the community who are wealthy and powerful. (“After all, when Archbishop Cantwell died, not long after I was expelled from the diocese, one of the honorary pallbearers at his funeral was Louis B. Mayer.”) And about two years after his expulsion, he was playing golf with another Jesuit in Phoenix, when he spotted Clark Gable with Eddie Mannix—Wasserman’s close cohort from MGM—who had been in the thick of the labor war. Mannix asked Dunne what he was doing in Phoenix, and Dunne replied, “I’m here thanks to you.” Dunne recalled that Mannix laughed, saying, “Well, you were getting under our feet over there in Hollywood, we had to do something to get you out of there.”

  The key players on the other side went on to enjoy close relationships with Hollywood’s powerful, and to prosper—Reagan, most of all. Although much attention would be paid by Reagan chroniclers to his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the fall of 1947, it was this strike that was really his political debut. It gave him the chance to insert himself aggressively into the center of the action. It marked his rightward shift (a threat from a striker to throw acid in his face was a defining moment in his political change, Reagan has said). And it presented him with the opportunity to address a crowd of several thousand, at a Screen Actors Guild mass meeting in October 1946 in Hollywood Legion Stadium—a performance that probably laid the groundwork for his election as president of SAG the following year. It was not an altogether popular speech—Reagan argu
ed that SAG had never involved itself in craft union disputes before, and should not now—and there was so much hissing and yelling that Reagan seemed glad a bunch of Teamsters were there at the end to get him to his car. But SAG members voted (many by mail because of fear of physical reprisal) overwhelmingly in favor of continued neutrality. And it established Reagan as a strong persona, with a talent for presentation.

  And that talent was one he would be able to display with some frequency as SAG’s president. Robert Gilbert, a labor lawyer who began practicing in Los Angeles in the late forties, recalled an experience he had had with Reagan during the 1949 consultations between SAG and AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) regarding who would represent performers in the new medium of television. Reagan, as head of the SAG delegation, had come to New York for a critical meeting, and Gilbert phoned him to schedule a briefing. “Brief me in the cab,” Reagan said. Gilbert protested that the cab ride would not allow nearly enough time and they should meet before that; but Reagan was adamant. “He said, ‘I’ve got to meet this lady and her daughter to give her my autograph.’

  “I said, ‘This is a very important meeting!’

  “He said, ‘Gilbert, you’re not an actor. When they stop asking for your autograph, that’s when you’re in trouble.’

  “So I briefed him in the cab,” Gilbert continued. “He made a two-hour speech based on a fifteen-minute briefing—and it was fabulous. This guy could absorb what he was told and regurgitate it. He was very glib and articulate—even if he didn’t understand it.”