With director Sam Wood leading the charge, Walt Disney, John Wayne, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Charles Coburn, Ward Bond, and Hedda Hopper, among others, pledged themselves “to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.”
William Randolph Hearst seemed to be behind the effort, if not igniting this torch for liberty then at least blowing the flames. No sooner had the Motion Picture Alliance been announced than an editorial in Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner boosted the organization, condemning the “patriotic majority in the motion picture industry” for being “slow to organize and to assert its principles and exercise its influence.”Consequently, the subversive minority in the industry has connived and contrived to produce a long succession of insidious and evil motion pictures to the discredit of the industry and to the detriment of the country....
It has made pictures glorifying Communistic Russia, ignoring the oppressive and tyrannical character of Bolshevism and inventing virtues for it that have never existed.
The “red-baiters” never did single out a film, or even a line of dialogue, that could clearly be considered anti-American, pro-Communist propaganda. (The closest they got were Mission to Moscow and Goldwyn’s The North Star, both of which had been made at the President’s urging.)
The time was ripe for an anti-Communist takeover of America. The country’s spiritual leader for most of a generation was dead, and the reins of power were up for grabs. A labor force in turmoil was looking for scapegoats. The Congress found itself with a new crop of young anti-Communists alongside a number of veteran Republicans, glad at last to have the chance to turn the political tide. Many of them referred to “liberal” Roosevelt-like thinking as “pink,” or, worse, “red.”
In 1938, Congressman Martin Dies of Texas had chaired a temporary Special Committee of the House of Representatives on Un-American Activities. Seven years later, his colleague John Rankin of Mississippi moved to make it a permanent standing committee. The motion carried, and the gavel passed to Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. His most eager colleague was freshman representative Richard M. Nixon of California. Each of the committee members had his own hidden agenda in Congress, recognizing the committee as an opportunity to enhance his financial or political fortunes. “There was no doubt in my mind,” said Rabbi Edgar Magnin, “that the committee was out to get Jews.” Those Americans who blamed Jews for “creating the war” now wanted their pound of flesh. “Anti-Communism” may have been on their tongues, but anti-Semitism was on many of their minds. To give impetus to their cause, they turned not to that industry most riddled with Communists but to one almost exclusively dominated by Jews, one guaranteed to draw headlines.
In May 1947, the House committee (dubbed HUAC) and Sam Wood’s Motion Picture Alliance joined hands. Representatives Parnell Thomas and John McDowell convened special sessions of their committee in Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel. Such well-known faces as Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou testified before them in secret. “Volunteers of information,” Thomas called them—“friendly witnesses.” Inevitably, parts of their testimony leaked to the press. Variety reported former Eminent Author Rupert Hughes had testified that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists today.” Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, was rumored to have testified that her daughter had refused to speak the line “Share and share alike” in one picture. The MPA pasted a “red label” on such all-American goods as Margie and The Best Years of Our Lives.
The congressmen returned to the Capitol and kept quiet for weeks. Their ominous silence bred more rumors. By summer’s end, it was announced that HUAC would open hearings on the “Hollywood situation” on September 23, 1947, in Washington. “This is the big show the Honorable J. Parnell Thomas and Company have been whipping into shape for the past several months,” read an editorial in the September number of the Screen Writers Guild’s official magazine; “... we must prepare ourselves for it, and we must fight it.”
Over forty members of the Hollywood community were subpoenaed to appear before the committee—mostly actors, writers, and directors. Half were members of the Motion Picture Alliance; most of the remaining nineteen were Jews who were well known for their leftward leanings. A few industry giants—famous Americans whose presence would lend gravity to the proceedings—were also called. Samuel Goldwyn received his subpoena on September 25.
The public hearing did not get under way until the third week of October. By that time, Chairman Thomas and his cohorts had assembled all the players they needed for their passion play. They also decided to keep the program of events a secret, so nobody knew from one day to the next who was scheduled to appear. This allowed the committee to make any last-minute substitutions they wished for dramatic effect.
The committee’s first witness signaled the tenor of the hearings that would follow. Instead of Eric Johnston, whose moderate views the committee well knew, Chairman Thomas called the blustery Jack Warner. Without even being asked, he offered information about his own “Americanism” and the names of a dozen “Communists” he insisted he had fired the moment he learned of their politics. To follow Warner with RKO’s liberal Dore Schary or even Louis B. Mayer—who loved his country but loathed this committee—might have indicated a broad-minded investigation of sedition in the United States.
Chairman Thomas turned instead to the chorus of “friendly witnesses,” the membership of the Motion Picture Alliance. Several writers and directors were glamorously supported by Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, and George Murphy. Within a week, the committee had few to hear from except those targeted as “unfriendly,” whom the committee intended to slaughter or make squeal. All the producers on the list of potential witnesses released to the press eventually got called—except Goldwyn. He was supposed to leave the country for the Royal Command performance of The Bishop’s Wife; but his House orders forbade his departure. He went to New York, where he could leave for Washington or London at a moment’s notice.
Back in Los Angeles, William Wyler, John Huston, and writer Philip Dunne felt that all the razzle-dazzle of the hearings was diverting the public’s attention from the most important issue. They formed the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization committed to the freedoms of speech and assembly, the individual’s right, said Wyler, “to keep his political beliefs to himself.” At Ira Gershwin’s house, they gathered most of the liberals in town, including Judy Garland, Edward G. Robinson, and Billy Wilder. They proposed that a petition be sent to Washington, holding that the hearings were “morally wrong” because:Any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy;
Any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.
Five hundred people signed it. Huston, Dunne, Ira Gershwin, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Paul Henreid, John Garfield, June Havoc, Evelyn Keyes, Jane Wyatt, Sterling Hayden, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and a few others delivered it.
John Howard Lawson—one of the writers on Goldwyn’s They Shall Have Music—was the first “unfriendly witness” called to the stand. He had hoped to read an introductory statement, a courtesy afforded the friendly witnesses, but he was refused. The committee wanted only one question answered: “Mr. Lawson, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” Between the constant poundings of Chairman Thomas’s gavel, he tried to have his say. After a dozen interruptions, Thomas ordered guards to remove Lawson from the premises.
When Eric Johnston was asked to testify, he admonished the committee for their tactics, then astonished the very motion picture community he was representing when he advocated the exposure of Communists. The hearings became a free-for-all.
From that moment on, the only unity among witnesses cam
e from the most hostile of those called, ten who banded together and refused to testify. Scrutiny of their screenwriting, in fact, would reveal neither a trace of Communist propaganda nor even any great influence in town. As Billy Wilder noted, “of the Unfriendly Ten, only two had any talent, the other eight were just unfriendly.”
While the fates of the “Hollywood Ten” were being sealed, Sam Goldwyn paced his tenth-floor suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, impatient at not being called. Lillian Hellman later suggested that he posed a threat to the committee just then, because he was “too much of a wild card. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth, and he probably wouldn’t have gone along with the committee’s script.” While dressing for the theater on October 29, he talked to a reporter from the New York Times, “I was subpoenaed some time ago and I have been here awaiting their pleasure,” Goldwyn said. “But so far they have not called me and in the meantime I am tied up by the subpoena.” He explained that all his business was being thrown into disarray. “What is the matter?” Goldwyn asked. “Are they afraid to call me?”
The next day, Goldwyn was ready to testify, whether the committee was or not. With the help of George Slaff, Goldwyn’s general counsel, ghostwriter, and most trusted adviser, he released his own statement to the press, and got national coverage:As an American, I have been astounded and outraged at the manner in which the committee has permitted our industry to be vilified by gossip, innuendo and hearsay. I had hoped that a Committee of Congress would be sufficiently aware of the traditions and background of American democracy so that it would not permit itself to be used as a sounding board for a smear campaign intended to destroy public confidence in the integrity of an industry which so many of us have spent the best years of our lives in building up.
The most un-American activity which I have observed in connection with the hearings has been the activity of the Committee itself. The purpose of these hearings seems to have been to try to dictate and control what goes on the screens of America. I resent and abhor censorship of thought. I assure you that as long as I live no one will ever be able to dictate what I put on the screen so long as I continue to honor and obey the laws of our country.
Ruth Capps had been hurt by the recent Life profile of her father because, for all its detail, it made no mention of her existence; but she was impressed enough with his recent statement to put her feelings aside and commend him for making “a very courageous and just evaluation of the whole thing. I only wish the other producers,” she wrote, “had taken their cue from you instead of being stampeded by this ridiculous and shocking committee.”
On November 14, Goldwyn met President Truman and told him, “There never has been, and there never will be, any Communism in our pictures.” He said the “Thomas Committee has been un-American in the way it has handled this,” and that “Thomas is seeing this through pink-colored glasses.”
So were many religious, educational, and veterans’ groups. Theaters running films with “unfriendly” supporters faced boycotts. The manager of the Orpheum Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, forwarded to Goldwyn a letter he had received from an irate patron who had walked out on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; the moviegoer said he and his three companions “heartily disapprove of the actions of this man [Danny Kaye] at the hearing recently held in Washington, D.C., and we will certainly not go to see any shows in which he appears or any of the other nine or ten people.” Goldwyn took the trouble to reply, insisting that “Danny Kaye is a fine American, who, after being rejected by the Army on grounds of physical disability, travelled many thousands of miles in the war zones entertaining our troops overseas. In going to Washington recently as he did, he was exercising an old-fashioned and fundamental American right of expressing his opinion to the elected representatives of the people. This right was prized so highly by the founders of our nation that they embodied it in our Constitution.” Independent Sam Goldwyn could afford to make such statements. Most of the other producers of motion pictures in America had to answer to board chairmen and stockholders.
Furthermore, Lillian Hellman later suggested, most of the studios’ founding fathers who were still active were then in their fifties and early sixties; they had grown “older and wearier” and less inclined to tackle the mailbags of protest letters they were receiving. “Threats that might once have been laughed about over a gin rummy game,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time, “now seemed dangerous to their fortunes. Movie producers knew full well that the Communists of Hollywood had never made a single Communist picture.... But they told themselves the voice of America was speaking, and to some extent it was.”
The industry’s leading executives announced a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for November 24, 1947. Corporate sentiment was swaying them toward the endorsement of measures that were punitive and preventative: The Hollywood Ten must be fired; and no known Communists must be hired. The day before the conference, Sam Goldwyn (at sixty-eight, one of the oldest people in the room) formulated a policy statement he thought his colleagues should adopt:The men just cited by the Congress will have their day in court. The question of their rights will be taken to the Supreme Court of the United States. After the Supreme Court has spoken, we will know definitely whether they were within their rights or not, in acting as they did. Until then we are reserving judgment and suspending action....
Eric Johnston, like most of the conferees, did not think that was any kind of action at all. After patriotic speeches by several studio heads, only one man, as Dore Schary remembered it, “was bold enough to suggest that there was an air of panic in the room.”Goldwyn, ramrod straight, bald headed, and with a slightly Oriental slant to his eyes, spoke sarcastically and irritated Johnston, who responded with an angry speech concluding with the cliché question asking us whether we were mice or men. He insisted that if the motion-picture business wanted to earn the respect of the American public, the ten men who had appeared plus any known, or believed to be, communists had to be discharged.
Schary protested that such punishment outweighed what had not yet been determined a crime. Goldwyn said he “would not be allied to any such nonsense.” He and Schary and Walter Wanger were the only producers in the room who protested. Lillian Hellman contended that Goldwyn’s dissension was not “a vote for freedom,” more “that he always voted against any group decision.” The producer’s consistent behavior in the line of fire, however, suggested greater conviction than that.
The consensus of the room was that the longer the hearings dragged on, the longer the Committee would encroach on the business of Hollywood. It was agreed that a committee of its own should draft a resolution that would assure the country that Hollywood would police itself.
The result was an eight-paragraph statement that effectively blacklisted the Hollywood Ten and any “Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” Loyalty oaths became standard means for smoking out more Communists.
In 1951, HUAC resumed its investigation of Hollywood under new leadership. Representative John Wood had replaced J. Parnell Thomas, who had been found guilty of financial malfeasance while in office. The Hydra-headed committee was no longer fooling around. It wanted names. Some people tried to save face, some their skin. The committee managed to char the careers of scores of actors and writers (the latter had the small advantage of pseudonymity) throughout the fifties and beyond. Lillian Hellman was willing to talk about herself under oath, but when it came to informing on others, she said, “I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” That cost her employment in Hollywood for more than a decade. Because of the untimely deaths of two Supreme Court justices, the new, more conservative high bench refused to hear the cases of the Hollywood Ten, who all served prison sentences. In looking back on that dark time, the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo said, “it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; t
here were only victims.” The only suggestion of justice Ring Lardner and his jailmate Lester Cole saw upon their arrival at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut, was that J. Parnell Thomas was already an inmate there.
After a year of the most devastating havoc ever to hit Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn set out to prove that he had not been afflicted with what he called “the Academy Award disease”—the paralysis that seized David Selznick for four years after the release of Rebecca. (Sam had also recently chided his debt-ridden friend for committing the worst mistake of his life—selling his interest in Gone With the Wind for not even $500,000. “David,” Goldwyn told Sammy, “hasn’t got his head on the ground.”) Goldwyn had not put a single project into production in the nine months since the rewards of Best Years had come pouring in—his longest hiatus in production since leaving United Artists. On Sammy’s next visit home from abroad he found his father depressed, “strange and moody.” Goldwyn was having trouble falling asleep at night, and he talked about death routinely. He wanted Sammy near him, but the young man instinctively felt it was best to keep his distance, returning only one month a year. Sammy felt he could always cheer up his father by talking about the Best Picture Oscar—until the day when Goldwyn yelled, “Don’t mention that goddamned award! It’s nothing but trouble to me.”
The strains at home increased as Sam tried to regain his confidence by milking all the extra publicity for Best Years that he could—including credit for its creation. His gains in self-esteem were Frances’s losses. Unacknowledged for her role in conceiving the project, Frances tussled with her own secret feelings of worthlessness. Ironically, they surfaced at what should have been the most secure moment in her life: Hitler was dead; her son was grown; and her husband was making more money than she had ever counted on—enough to ensure her family’s comfort for the rest of their days. Feeling unneeded, Frances at last surrendered to the curse of her forefathers, the behavior she had resisted for so long. She began to drink alcoholically.
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