At the same time, there was still a kind of begrudging admiration for the Jewish criminal in the Jewish community at large. For one thing, he competed physically, and successfully, with the non-Jewish enemy, showing the hostile and violent anti-Semite that he could be beaten at his own game. When the Jews of Europe were under threat of annihilation, the gangster offered American Jews a secret and vicarious sense of satisfaction and pride.
The fact was that the gangsters provided a real social service to the Jewish community, as protectors and defenders of their own people. At a time when America was awash with anti-Semitism coming from high places—Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund—the Jewish community appreciated anyone who would come to its defense, regardless of the means. Meyer Lansky’s men had helped break up Bund rallies in New York and New Jersey. In Detroit, Jewish mobsters had saved Jewish peddlers and store owners from having to pay protection money to Polish and Italian hoodlums. In Chicago, more than five thousand Jews had turned out for the funeral of the Lansky-connected gangster Samuel “Nails” Morton to express their gratitude for his helping to protect poorer neighborhoods against raids by anti-Semitic and Jew-baiting Irish and Italians. In a sense, men like Morton were community servants, and in a sense, they were good Americans. And their children would be even better.
This was certainly the attitude of Meyer Lansky. Lansky liked to recall how, as a boy, he had watched in bewilderment as the older Jews in his Delancey Street neighborhood shuffled past—in their yarmulkes and prayer shawls, with beards and side curls—on their daily rounds of worship at the synagogues and yeshivas. “Where are they going, I asked myself? Where were they getting in the new world? They had simply carried the old world across the ocean with them. They had gone nowhere. They were going nowhere. They were at a dead end.”
Lansky, who had gone far, was determined that his children would go much farther. He was devastated when his first son, Bernard, suffered a birth trauma that resulted in a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, and Lansky was told that Buddy, as he was called, would be severely handicapped for the rest of his life. But his second son, Paul, was born normal and healthy, to Lansky’s great relief, and it was on Paul that he centered his ambitions. He doted, meanwhile, on his daughter, Sandra, who was called Sally. But the children were soon a cause of dissension between Lansky and his wife.
For one thing, Anna Lansky accused her husband of blaming her for Buddy’s pathetic disability. She also accused him of spoiling Sally with too many expensive toys and gifts. And, as for Paul, Anna Lansky wanted her son to be a rabbi. Lansky had quite a different plan for Paul. He wanted to send his healthy son to West Point, and have him become an American army officer. These disagreements ended, in 1947, with the Lanskys’ divorce. The following year he married Thelma Scheer Schwartz, a pretty blond divorcée who had been his manicurist in the barbershop of the Embassy Hotel in Miami Beach. “Teddy” Lansky was five years younger and several inches taller than her new husband, but these discrepancies seemed to bother the newlyweds not at all, and theirs would be a long and singularly happy marriage.
Of his three children, the only one he would permit to work for his organization was the crippled Buddy, and Lansky saw to it that Buddy was employed only in licit businesses—in one of the hotels Lansky operated legally in Florida, Nevada, or Cuba, where Buddy worked as a switchboard operator. Of course, it would be darkly suggested that its switchboard was a hotel’s nerve center, and that Buddy’s real assignment was to tap and monitor calls between underworld figures and other important guests. Lansky himself ridiculed this suggestion, pointing out that a simple, sedentary job as a telephone operator was probably the only sort of work poor Buddy would ever be able to perform in life. Even at that chore, Buddy was frustratingly slow.
Sally Lansky was sent to the exclusive Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, where she earned very good grades. After graduating, she delighted Lansky with her marriage to a Jewish boy named Marvin Rappaport. The Rappaports were old family friends from Prohibition days, and were now legitimately and respectably in the liquor business.
Meanwhile, Lansky moved forward with his plan to have Paul appointed to the United States Military Academy.
A gangster’s son at West Point! It seemed an idea right out of a Hollywood movie. It seemed an impossible dream. But Lanksy wanted Paul to be shaped into a true American, and in the service of his country. (This unswerving patriotism was rather typical of Jewish gangsters, despite the fact that they had gotten rich by bending America’s laws.) And the dream came true, as most things in Meyer Lansky’s life had a way of doing. Despite a deep undercurrent of anti-Semitism at West Point, Paul Lansky received his appointment. (Like many sons of immigrants, Paul was taller, huskier, and handsomer than his father.) How had Lansky done it? Naturally there were mutterings that he knew and dealt with a number of important Washington politicians, many of whom were bribable. Meyer Lansky would always hotly deny that any bribery or arm-twisting was involved in getting Paul his appointment; he had got it on his own academic and athletic merits—and, indeed, that appeared to be the case.
At West Point, Paul Lansky comported himself admirably. One of his roommates was the son of Colonel Monroe E. Freeman, an aide to General Eisenhower. After graduating in 1954, Paul became a captain in the air force, and an ace pilot in the Korean War. Following that, he toured American college and university campuses as a lecturer and recruiter. In the latter capacity, he was considered one of the finest in the military—a salesman of American ideals in war and in peace.
When Paul had married and Meyer Lansky’s first grandson was born, Paul informed his father that the baby was to be named Meyer Lansky II. Lansky was appalled, and begged his son not to do this. So much ill fame had gathered around the name of Meyer Lansky, he argued, that it seemed unfair to ask this child to bear the same burden for the rest of his life. But Paul was adamant. He was proud of his father, and wanted to honor him this way. Lansky was deeply touched.
When Eisenhower was elected President in 1952, Meyer Lansky was rather surprised to receive, through Colonel Freeman, an invitation to the inaugural and ball. Feeling that it would be inappropriate for someone of his tarnished reputation to attend the inauguration ceremonies of a United States President, Lansky demurred. Colonel Freeman wrote back, “Don’t you know that in our clubs we play the same slot machines that you’ve got in your casinos, and that we used to drink your bootleg whiskey?”
Lansky was touched by this sentiment as well. But, ever the gentleman, always the believer in seemliness and propriety, Meyer Lansky nonetheless wired back his regrets.
*He never took out American citizenship papers, however, in the faint hope that the Canadian honors might still someday be forthcoming.
*In 1959, for example, Robert Sarnoff predicted that “for home use the 1969 set will replace the present picture tube with a thin, flat screen that can be hung on the wall like a painting.”
17
WITCH-HUNTING
The 1950s were troubled times for the entertainment industry. With the war over, but with wartime energies still at a peak, America once again turned, with superpatriotic zeal, to the task of rooting out enemies, real or imagined, at home. It was the same kind of sentiment that had gripped the country after the first war, and that had brought Rose Pastor Stokes to trial for sedition. Soviet Russia had been America’s ally in the second war, but that no longer mattered, and Russia was now America’s archenemy again. Communists and Communist sympathizers were suspected of lurking in high places, and the target of the Red hunt became show business, and particularly that “pervasive shaper of American thought,” the motion picture industry.
The Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s were not motivated by anti-Semitism exactly—at least, no one on the House Un-American Activities Committee had the courage to come right out and say so. But, since the movie business was heavily Jewish, and most of HUAC’s targets in Hollywood we
re Jews, the effect was the same. And, though the cause of Russian-Jewish radicalism—in Hollywood and elsewhere—had been quiescent for at least a dozen years, as American Communists had become disillusioned with the party in the wake of news of Stalin’s excesses in the 1930s, the phrase “Jewish radical” still had an inflammatory ring. The idea that Jewish radicals pervaded the film industry was an easy one for the committee to sell to the public, which had been whipped into a frenzy of fear that Russia was about to conquer the world. And, of course, Hollywood, with all its connotations of wealth, glamour, and excess, made an obviously tempting target for HUAC. The subpoenaing of movie stars to testify as to their political leanings assured the committee that its abundance of anti-Communist zeal would be well publicized.
Hollywood had foreseen the committee hearings. As early as 1947, a meeting of studio heads had convened in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. With not at all the best intentions in the world, but hoping to purge itself of leftist undersirables before Washington stepped in to tell it what to do, this group of movie men had compiled a “Hollywood Black List,” composed of the names of some three hundred men and women known or suspected to have Communist sympathies. The effects of the blacklist were immediate and dire. The list spread from Hollywood to Broadway, from television studios to Madison Avenue advertising agencies, as those listed were dismissed from their jobs in film, radio, television, and the theater. A chill swept through the entertainment world, as old friends and associates eyed each other cautiously, never certain who would or would not name names of other leftists in order to save a career. The quality of television programming and film content suffered.
Once named, those blacklisted had either to work pseudonymously, to change their names, or to work at a fraction of their former worth. In Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman wrote that, after she was blacklisted, her annual income plummeted from $140,000 to $10,000 and that, after it dropped even lower, she was forced to work part-time in a department store to make ends meet. One of her un-American “crimes,” it seemed, had been to write an anti-Nazi play, Watch on the Rhine. In Hollywood, the director Irving Pichel was blacklisted for his “un-American” film A Medal for Benny, which depicted Mexican-Americans in a sympathetic light.
Although the number of people implicated amounted to only one-half of one percent of the total number employed in the entertainment industry, the repercussions were enormous. Some people changed their occupations, some emigrated, and a few took their own lives. Even those not blacklisted were affected. The director Lewis Milestone, born in Russia, was not on the blacklist, but had had the temerity to hire Ring Lardner, Jr.—one of the so-called Hollywood Ten who refused to tell the committee whether they were Communists or not—to write one of his films. This created guilt by association, and Hedda Hopper wrote in her column, “Let’s take a look at Lardner’s new boss. He was born in Russia and came to this country years ago.… He has a beautiful home in which he holds leftist rallies, is married to an American and has a fortune here. But still his heart seems to yearn for Russia. Wonder if Joe [Stalin] would take him back?” Milestone was out of a job for the next eleven years.
Looking back, some of the testimony heard soberly at the HUAC hearings seems so absurd that one wonders why it was not laughed out of court. But by then no one was laughing. Dalton Trumbo, who, in fact, had joined the Communist party in 1943, was another of the Hollywood Ten—all of whom would draw prison sentences—and the committee heard Ginger Rogers’s tearful mother, Lela Rogers, tell of how her daughter had been forced to utter the “Communist line” in Trumbo’s film Tender Comrade: “Share and share alike—that’s democracy.” The fact that the romantic comedy had the word comrade in its title did not go unnoted.
During the dark years of the HUAC hearings, it seemed to matter not how one testified. Whether one denied vigorously that he had ever been a Communist; whether one refused to testify; whether one came forward as a “friendly witness”; whether one admitted to having once been a Communist, but had since seen the error of one’s ways; whether one confessed that one was still a Communist; or whether one sought the protection of the First and Fifth amendments—the results were the same. The very fact that one had been summoned before the committee at all was enough to make one an unemployable pariah in the entertainment industry.
The case of the actor Howard Da Silva was typical. Born Howard Silverblatt, he had made over forty films between 1939 and 1951, and had worked for every major studio. But when, at the Hollywood HUAC hearings, actor Robert Taylor in the role of a friendly witness testified that Da Silva “always had something to say at the wrong time” at meetings of the Screen Actors Guild, that seemingly petty and innocuous remark was enough to finish Da Silva’s career in Hollywood. He had just finished filming Slaughter Trail for RKO. After Taylor’s testimony, the film’s producer announced that Da Silva’s part would be cut from the film, and that it would be reshot with another actor. Da Silva moved to New York and tried to work in radio, but American Legion posts all over the country assailed his sponsors with so much hostile mail that he was dropped. He was out of work for more than a dozen years, and did not find a major role until 1976, when he was cast in the Broadway musical 1776—ironically, in the part of the American patriot Benjamin Franklin.
Blacklisted in the early 1950s, Zero Mostel denied that he had ever been a Communist, though he had lent his name to such causes as the National Negro Congress and the Spanish Refugee Appeal of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. His denials did no good, and his acting career was aborted. He turned to painting. He did not attain stardom until 1964, when he portrayed the legendary Tevye in Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof. Even more pathetic was the case of John Garfield. Born in the Bronx, he had sweet-tough good looks and a streetwise manner that had made him a major film star in tough-guy roles. By all accounts, Garfield was not very bright, and in his HUAC appearance his behavior was neither tough nor heroic. Meekly pleading that he had never been a Communist, and could therefore name no names of party cell members, he nonetheless tried to ingratiate himself with the committee by thanking it for the good work it was doing protecting innocent citizens from the “Red Menace.” His denials cut no ice with the Hollywood establishment. Blacklisted, he could find no one who would hire him. He turned to Broadway, and worked for as little as a hundred dollars a week. But HUAC was not through with him. He was called before the committee again in connection with some canceled checks supposedly written by him to the Communist party. Though this evidence was never presented, Garfield decided on the mea-culpa approach and hired a public-relations expert to try to clear his name. A confessional article for Look magazine was ghosted for him, called “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” in which he took the position that he had been unwittingly duped into joining leftist causes. Before it was printed, John Garfield died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine.
The most tragic case was that of the actor Phillip Loeb. By 1948, “The Goldbergs,” starring Gertrude Berg, had become radio’s longest-running daytime serial. It had been on the air since 1929. In 1949, “The Goldbergs” moved from radio onto the television screen, and became one of television’s earliest hits. Phillip Loeb had played Molly Goldberg’s husband from almost the beginning, and by 1950 he was making thirty thousand dollars a year and had been voted by the Boys’ Clubs of America “Television’s Father of the Year.” But that same year his name appeared seventeen times in Red Channels, a listing of alleged Communists employed in the television industry that was published by an independent group of professional Red hunters.
Phillip Loeb had been a veteran of World War I, and had served in Europe with the U.S. Army Medical Corps. His most political activity had been, as an actor, in his union, Actors Equity. But in 1940 the Dies Committee had charged that Equity was run by Communists, to which Loeb had responded, “I am not a Communist, Communist sympathizer, or fellow traveler, and I have nothing to fear from an impartial inquiry.”
“The Goldbergs” stru
ggled through the 1950–1951 season, but was under heavy pressure from its sponsor, General Foods, to drop Loeb from the cast. Gertrude Berg, without whom there would have been no show, talked with her co-star and came away persuaded of his innocence. Together, they decided to fight back. But in 1951, General Foods fulfilled its threats and withdrew its sponsorship, and the show was dropped by CBS. David Sarnoff, certain that both the show and Phillip Loeb’s career were salvageable, quickly picked it up for NBC, but by then no other sponsors could be found. Reluctantly, Gertrude Berg decided that it was better to fire one actor from her show than to close it entirely, and put some forty other actors out of work, and offered Loeb eighty-five thousand dollars for the balance of his contract. Loeb refused the money, but agreed to leave the show. In 1952, “The Goldbergs” returned to the air with another actor, Harold Stone, in the role of Jake Goldberg. But the old chemistry of the two actors was not the same. The ratings declined, and the show went off the air in 1955.
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