DOBBS: (Vainly searching for the corpse) Curtin! Curtin! Curtin! Where are you? Curtin! I gotta get a hold of myself. Mustn’t lose my head. There’s one thing certain; he ain’t here. I got it! The tiger. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. The tiger must have dragged him off to his lair, that’s what. Yeah, pretty soon not even the bones will be left to tell the story. Done as if by order.
Long after the film ends, notes historian Ted Sennett, the audience recalls Dobbs and Curtin shaking hands as they form a partnership, with Howard watching them with the sharp, amused eyes of experience; Curtin and Dobbs sitting in the darkness, guarding their hoard of nuggets and fighting sleep; the cat-and-mouse play of the bandits with Dobbs before they slay him with machetes: “The beaming smile of Gold Hat somehow expresses a primitive, terrifying evil.”
At the start, Jack Warner had not been high on John Huston’s latest project. When he saw the edited version he did an enthusiastic U-turn, cabling the studio’s New York sales manager: THIS IS DEFINITELY THE GREATEST MOTION PICTURE WE HAVE EVER MADE. A few seasons back, he went on, THIS ONE PICTURE WOULD VIRTUALLY PUT OVER A WHOLE SEASON. Unfortunately for him and many others in Hollywood, this was not a few seasons back. This was the fall of 1947, and unforeseen historical forces were at work.
Warner, like most studio moguls, considered himself and his town to be outside of politics. There had been the nonsense with Martin Dies seven years ago, but that investigation had dried up and blown away. Now a new one had begun, run by some motormouthed New Jersey congressman named J. Parnell Thomas. It would be more of the same, Humphrey confided to a friend, a lot of noise and then a turn-tail retreat by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). If the gasbags in Washington ever investigate Hollywood, they’ll find a spectrum of political opinions not very different from those in St. Louis or Indianapolis. Take Louis Bromfield for example. He’s a conservative Republican. John Howard Lawson is a lefty. So they sign petitions. So they put their name on letterheads. So what? It’s the credits on celluloid that count, not the names on paper.
But this was not wartime America, and J. Parnell Thomas was not Martin Dies. The Soviet Union was no longer an ally. As the postwar euphoria melted away, the USSR stood revealed as an implacable and ruthless enemy, hell-bent on acquiring the atomic bomb and threatening the very existence of the United States. America was gripped by the arms race and the nuclear jitters. Albert Einstein had spoken on the radio, warning that annihilation beckoned. The unelected president, Harry Truman, having replaced the fallen and beloved FDR, faced a hostile Republican Congress. As the Soviet Union advanced in Eastern Europe, Greece, and Turkey, senators and congressmen painted the administration as soft on Communism abroad and domestically. The chief executive responded with the Truman Doctrine, providing aid and money to needy nations overseas in order to confront and halt the progress of Communism. At home, he instituted a federal loyalty oath.
HUAC’s ambitious new chairman seized the moment. Born John Feeney, he had taken his mother’s maiden name upon his father’s death (speaking of himself in the third person, he informed a judge that “your petitioner … believes he can get recognition and business under the name of Thomas that he could not get under the name of Feeney”). En route to the House of Representatives, Thomas also changed his religion from Roman Catholic to Baptist. He had advanced as planned, selling investment securities for a living while he made his presence felt in local politics. Thomas escalated quickly from mayor of Allendale, New Jersey, to state legislator, to congressman. He had been on HUAC since its inception in 1938; the seniority system gave him the chair early in 1947. At fifty-seven, the bald, assertive official had the full attention of the press, something he had craved for decades. One of his first public statements had to do with Hollywood: “Hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”
This was nonsense and he knew it. There was no solid evidence that more than a score of people in the film capital were Party members, and none of them held influential positions. Yet all Thomas had to do in 1947 was imply that it was otherwise and the West Coast cringed. He flew out to Hollywood in May to provoke headlines and interrogate witnesses. At his side was Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator. In a suite at the Biltmore Hotel they conducted what were alleged to be private interviews, but after each session word was leaked to reporters. Thomas informed them, for example, that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists.” Among all the people he interviewed, he found only fourteen to be “friendly.” One, Robert Taylor, testified that MGM wouldn’t allow him to enlist in the navy until he finished Song of Russia. Representative Thomas had seen the film; he called it “Communist propaganda that favored its ideologies, its institutions and its way of life over the same things in America.” Leila Rogers, better known as Ginger Rogers’s mother than as an acting teacher, informed Stripling that her daughter would not say a line in Tender Comrade because of its Red tint: “Share and share alike—that’s democracy.”
Satisfied with the evidence he had uncovered, Thomas used the committee’s subpoena power, summoning a lineup of “subversive” directors and screenwriters. They would be compelled to testify at a public hearing in the nation’s capital. Nineteen of them consulted their lawyers and decided to fight back. The truth was that most of them had been Communists at one time or another; a few still retained their Party cards. In other cases involving the suspicion of Communism, witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify because the law protected them from self-incrimination. Here they planned to invoke the First Amendment, guaranteeing the right of free speech. Bearing in mind Thomas’s label of the friendly fourteen, the Hollywood Reporter came up with a name for the resisters: they were the “Unfriendly Nineteen.” It took less than a day for the waggish Billy Wilder to state that “only two of them have talent. The rest are just unfriendly.”
Despite the wisecracks and nose thumbing, nearly every actor, director, and producer felt threatened by this federal intrusion. If Hollywood could be trampled underfoot by HUAC witch-hunters, what American institution was safe? Among intellectuals and artists, whenever a menace arises there is always one predictable response: a committee is formed. This one was born at the house of Lenore and Ira Gershwin. In City of Nets, historian Otto Friedrich quotes an attendee: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. The town was full of enthusiasm because they all felt they were going to win. Every star was there.”
Rita Hayworth volunteered to serve on the team, now calling itself the Committee for the First Amendment. So did Myrna Loy, Groucho Marx, Gene Kelly, Paulette Goddard, and many others. By far the biggest name on the list was Humphrey Bogart. As the pressure increased, the Unfriendly Nineteen pleaded with friends and co-workers for a public show of support. Another meeting was called, this time at the home of director William Wyler. “I was up in arms—fervent,” recalled Lauren. “I said to Bogie, ‘We must go.’ He felt strongly about it, too.” John Huston chartered a plane from his friend Howard Hughes, then president of Trans World Airlines. The passenger list included the Bogarts, Gene Kelly, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, Paul Henreid, and John Huston and his wife, actress Evelyn Keyes. On the way to Washington, the plane set down in several cities, and at each stop the group was met with sympathetic reporters. Invigorated, the travelers went on to the HUAC hearings, confident that they were riding the tide of history.
The show folk had reckoned without Thomas’s gift for stage-managing. As they watched from a back row, the chairman summoned John Howard Lawson. He was the most self-righteous and dogmatic of the nineteen, and the least likely to attract independents to his cause. Lawson portrayed himself as the victim of rogue fascists, men who had seized control of the American government. In his view HUAC was conducting “an illegal and indecent trial of American citizens, whom the Committee has selected to be publicly pilloried and smeared. I am not here to defend myself, or to answer the agglomeration of falsehoods that has been heaped upon
me.” He refused to state whether or not he was a member of the Screen Writers Guild, even though it was on the public record. And of course he refused to state whether he was now, or ever had been, a member of the Communist Party, even though Thomas knew from back channels (including an FBI agent who had infiltrated the Hollywood cell) that he was. So, in fact, were many of the nineteen, including Dalton Trumbo. The next day that scenarist refused to answer questions about his Communist affiliations with one syllable because “very many questions can only be answered yes or no by a moron or a slave.” He, too, launched into a speech about the rights of labor and accused the chairman of trying to equate membership in a trade union with membership in the Party. Thomas shouted, “Excuse the witness!” As security guards closed in, Trumbo countered, “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp!” Writer Albert Maltz joined the attack, addressing Stripling as “Mr. Quisling,” a reference to the Norwegian leader Vidkun Quisling, who had collaborated with the Nazis.
Reading from a script by screenwriter Jerome Lawrence, Humphrey went on the radio to decry what had just occurred. “We saw the gavel of the committee chairman cutting off the words of free Americans. The sound of that gavel, Mr. Thomas, rings across America! Because every time your gavel struck, Mr. Thomas, it hit the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”
Thomas ignored the objections of Humphrey and the rest of the First Amendment Committee. Scenes like the ones played by Lawson, Maltz, and Trumbo were exactly what HUAC had hoped for. The unfriendly witnesses said they would expose Thomas as a loud and pompous opportunist; instead they descended to his level, grandstanding, playing to the galleries, yapping away with red faces and outlandish forecasts. By the time Thomas closed the hearings, ten of the nineteen had been cited for contempt of court. In the process, the accused lost their most important sympathizers.
Huston was to condemn the mini-drama as “a sorry performance. You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. Before this spectacle, the attitude of the press had been extremely sympathetic. Now it changed.” The director was not alone. As the hearings went on, Humphrey and a number of other movie people withdrew, buying one-way tickets back to Hollywood and washing their hands of the whole First Amendment business. But the press kept the story alive, running features and pictures, asking provocative questions. Hearst columnist George Sokolsky cornered the Bogarts and demanded to know why they had joined this pinko campaign in the first place. According to Lauren, Sokolsky suggested that her husband “issue a statement saying that he was not a Communist and had no sympathy for Communists, and denouncing the unfriendly witnesses. This he refused to do.”
But Humphrey did go out of his way to dissociate himself from what the papers called “the Hollywood Ten.” First he gave an interview to the press. In it, as Paul Henreid said resentfully, “he attempted to retract what he had said and done. ‘I didn’t know the people I was with were fellow travelers,’ he told the reporters. I felt Bogart’s statement was a form of betrayal, and it was the end of our friendship.” Actually the betrayal was a two-way street. More than half of the hostile witnesses had lied to their own lawyers about their Communist past or present, and presented themselves to the Committee for the First Amendment as innocent victims framed by the government. Humphrey had this in mind when he attended a follow-up meeting, again at the Gershwins’ house. Writer-director Abraham Polonsky, who would be blacklisted for seventeen years after refusing to testify before HUAC, remembered that “Bogart was furious. He was shouting at Danny Kaye, ‘You fuckers sold me out’ and he left.” Alistair Cooke, then a correspondent for the Guardian, remarked afterward that “Bogart was aghast to discover” how many of the protesters “were down-the-line Communists coolly exploiting the protection of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. He had thought they were just freewheeling anarchists, like himself.” Yet he could not bear to go over to the other side. With considerable rue, he predicted that HUAC would “nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.”
It was not a time Humphrey cared to remember in later years, but he was not alone in scurrying for cover. Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Producers Association, originally spoke out against sensational testimony about Hollywood—“Scare-head stuff which is grossly unfair to a great American industry.” As the pressure was raised, he backtracked, encouraging the committee to go about its business, because “an exposed Communist is an unarmed Communist.” But, he pleaded, “don’t put any American who isn’t a Communist in a concentration camp of suspicion.” Johnston then went about building just such a camp, working on a policy that would result in an industry-wide blacklist, not only of present and former Party members, but of those who appeared to have leftist sympathies that could range from out-and-out Stalinism to endorsing a group advocating the racial integration of major league baseball.
The “morals clause” was made a part of standard contracts during the 1930s. Its aim was to protect studios from being embarrassed by an employee’s sexual misbehavior. (Fatty Arbuckle’s rape charge and Charlie Chaplin’s seduction of teenaged girls were examples that caused moguls many a sleepless night.) Thereafter, scandals were kept to a minimum because workers, from makeup artists to superstars, knew they could be summarily fired for misconduct. But now the clause was employed in a way the lawyers had not anticipated. A handful of executives took exception to this new policy, among them Sam Goldwyn, Dore Schary, and Walter Wanger; the other producers outvoted them. An official statement was handed to journalists: “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States.… We are frank to recognize that such a policy involves dangers and risks. There is the danger of hurting innocent people. There is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”
Immediately afterward came a ratcheting up of that danger, that risk, that fear. A blacklist spread across the industry. Motion picture directors, actors, even technicians, found themselves out of work because of current or bygone political activities. The only way for the listees to become rehabilitated was to furnish HUAC with names of similarly stigmatized friends, or to play the naïf before committee members. Humphrey was one of many who attempted to turn things around. The former screenwriter Dore Schary was called upon to explain the new studio policy. “We do not ask you to condone this,” he said with a show of melancholy. Journalist Murray Kempton remarked that on the way out, Schary paused to put his hand on Dalton Trumbo’s shoulder and commiserate for a moment. “A little later Trumbo went to prison and Dore Schary went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as executive producer.” John Garfield would arrange to place an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” only to die of heart failure before the piece could run. Eventually Edward G. Robinson would confess that “the Reds made a sucker out of me,” and director Elia Kazan would run a full-page ad in the New York Times rationalizing the act of naming names.
During this tense period some directors fled to Europe, where they found intermittent work. Some of the more skilled screenwriters fled to Mexico and submitted their scripts under pseudonyms. Actors were less fortunate; they could not perform under other faces. A few of them went east, where the Broadway and off-Broadway theaters maintained a stubborn resistance to political pressure. In their Bogart biography, A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax report that Helen Hayes urged Humphrey to return to New York rather than capitulate to the current Hollywood conditions. “ ‘My God,’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t do that!’ He had been away too long; the confidence was gone.”
He was in his late forties, balding, with a young wife and a career that was marking time. Doctors advised Humphrey that if he wanted children he would need to take hormone shots. These caused more of his hair to fall out, and his temper to be less than equable. Dark Passage was released in late 1947, at exactly the wrong time. The box office results were disa
ppointing, and the studio blamed it on the political climate. New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan urged Humphrey to do some damage control. “I know you’re OK,” he pointed out. “So do your close friends. But the public is beginning to think you’re a Red! Get that through your skull, Bogie.”
Two instances of rehabilitation happened without any effort on Bogie’s part. The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an article headlined CAVALCADE OF HOLLYWOOD HEROES. Frank S. Nugent, a former Times movie reviewer, examined the trends in leading men from the silent days to the present. At first there was the “shy, bucolic, gangling youth, who never set foot in the house without kissing his mother, patting the dog and running his finger through the icing on the homemade cake on the kitchen table.” He was followed, in time, by the man’s man, who “cut a fumbling figure in the front parlor and was no match romantically for the mustached city slicker.” Then came World War I, when “virility gained a bit of dash. Our hero learned to use the proper forks, smoke cigarettes and even wear a dinner jacket. His romantic image was improving.” In the sound era the sophisticated bon vivant and the Latin Lover took over for a while, but they were not built for durability. In the 1930s they were supplanted by something unprecedented: the attractive but unyielding Tough Guy. “Nonchalance was his forte. He won and lost fortunes—or a month’s pay—with a laugh. He worked hard, but not for mere gain and certainly not to make any down payments on any vine-covered cottage. He had nothing against dames as such. It was what they represented that annoyed him.” And twenty years later, he was still in command. Nugent chose as his archetype the Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep. In that character Humphrey was a neat composite of all that had gone before. “He is the Tough Guy (without his joy in living), the Great Lover (except that he usually is preoccupied and suffering from lack of sleep), the Sophisticate (but post-depression and enjoying a hangover) and the Dashing virile type (slowed down to a purposeful walk).”
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