by Anne Edwards
The evening before our return flight to London, we three had dinner with the Rossens. The hostility between Bob and Sue was tangible. Bob was in an extramarital relationship with a young female assistant, Elise, at least half his age. Sue was determined to keep their marriage intact. These were tough times for the Rossens. Old friends, still loyal to their beliefs, turned their backs on them. Bob was able to work and had formed his own production company. Most of his projects had to be made in Europe and Sue seldom accompanied him. He was in New York during a break in his shooting schedule.
“Look, kid,” he said to me privately after dinner. “I need a reader, a scout, someone with story sense and good taste. You’re determined to go back to England with the kids—okay, check out what’s being published there for me. Maybe, you’ll find a good story. I’ll put you on the payroll, fifty bucks a week. It’s only a part-time job and you can do it on your own time. It shouldn’t interfere with any writing you may be doing and it’ll come in steady. Deal?”
He was sitting on the edge of a desk, looking down at me, his gaze penetrating, his forehead furrowed, concentrating entirely on what I was about to say. I could easily imagine him in the same pose making a deal with an actor he wanted to hire. Although short and stocky, Bob’s piercing blue/gray eyes, his attitude, the use of his hands (quick jabs for emphasis, thumbs-up fist when he knew he had scored a point), and his carefully measured speech—most times low and personal, his breath seeming the only barrier between himself and the listener—were mesmerizing. Bob possessed a powerful presence and he knew it.
“This is a professional offer, not a family handout?” I asked.
“Strictly.”
“Deal,” I replied.
We shook hands (dry palms, hard grasp).
“You’re doing a great job with the kids,” he added. “Ever hear from that sonofabitch nephew of mine?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You’re better off. I washed my hands. I did what I could to straighten him out. His mother’s my sister. Blood counts with me. I always treated him like a son. But a man doesn’t take care of his kids—he’s shit.”
On arriving back in London we three stayed for two weeks at the moderately priced Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. The place was like a setting for an Agatha Christie novel. Built in 1910, it appeared untouched by time. The guests were mostly frugal, English country folk in the city for a week’s holiday and shopping. Afternoon tea (served in a mahogany-paneled room with paintings of sporting dogs on the walls) contained the only edible food their kitchen served. The toast at breakfast was presented burnt and wrapped in a white linen napkin. The eggs were overcooked, the coffee bitter. Yet, I loved the very stodginess of the building, the narrow, winding corridors, and the windows of tinted amber glass. I could write a good mystery here, I thought!
I found an apartment for us in a small building on Elvaston Place, just off Gloucester Road, and enrolled the children in the American School to insure a continuity of the studies they had been having at PS 6 in New York. The school (actually two branches—lower school for Cathy, upper for Michael) was across town near St. John’s Wood, where they were taken to and collected from by private transportation. Without the additional two hundred dollars a month I was regularly (and gratefully) receiving from Bob, I would have had to squeeze things to handle the school fees and transport. At the same time, I was enjoying the task he had given me, and had made contact with numerous publishing houses. Books and manuscripts arrived so regularly, I no longer found time to listen to A Book before Bedtime.
Our new home was on the top floor of a small, four-story building. Each of the lower floors were divided into two flats, whereas ours occupied the entire top floor (however, I am not sure one could call it a penthouse!). A narrow lift with room for two (if on lean daily diets) was situated in the small lobby. By clasping the children close to me, we three could ride to the top together. Once there, it seemed well worth the cramped (and sometimes halting) ride. Windows on all sides afforded some light even on the gloomiest of days. The children each had their own bedroom and mine connected with a dressing room large enough for me to use as an office. The living room was divided by an archway to a dining room that led into—great wonder of wonders—a large kitchen with American appliances that worked on transformers (left behind by the previous tenant, said to have been an employee of the American embassy).
The first thing I did was go out to Hammersmith (a ten-minute tube ride from the Gloucester station near us) to collect the things I had left behind in storage. The apartment was comfortably furnished but the small knickknacks, paintings, photos, art deco ware, kitchen equipment, and our personal treasures (all items on English current, plus toys, books, and files) that I brought back in a taxi (amazingly stackable in the great old black English vehicle) made the place our home. The area was not as fashionable as Markham Street, but I loved the ethnicity of the food stores and small restaurants on Gloucester Road. There was a public library and a post office (the latter in a paper shop) within walking distance, and Kensington Gardens was at the top of the road (with Kensington Palace close by in case one should want to drop in for tea).
Next, I rang up Hannah and Sidney, who both seemed hopeful that there would be work for me. Sidney Buchman was a wonderful guide and mentor. Before the blacklist, he had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and considered “the golden boy” of Columbia Studios. Many people compared him to the late Irving Thalberg who had been equally revered at MGM in the 1930s. He was both a brilliant screenwriter and an impeccable filmmaker with the ability, sensitivity, and intelligence to deftly handle drama and comedy (often blending the two). A list of just a few of his screenplays reveals the caliber of his talent: Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, Lost Horizon, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and a particular favorite of mine, Holiday, the delightful Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn comedy (with strong anticonformist overtones). In addition, for over ten years, he had overseen the production of most major Columbia films as vice president of the studio.
Called before HUAC in 1951, he had admitted a membership in the Communist Party twenty years earlier but refused to give names. The ten men who had preceded him on the witness stand had been found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to admit anything, and sentenced to a year in prison. Sidney duly expected the same penalty. Miraculously, he had been spared prison, fined $150 and given a year’s suspended sentence. Harry Cohn’s intervention on his behalf was believed to have been responsible for the “leniency” given him. Immediately blacklisted, he came to England in 1952 and would commute back and forth to a home he owned in Cannes (being one of the more affluent of his fellow expats and having had a French mistress, film star Simone Simon, for many years).
In his youth, Sidney had been a strikingly handsome man. Now, well into his fifties, he had retained a strong presence: well built, a perfectly carved profile, and possessing the most amazing china blue eyes. He walked with innate authority. There was an aura about Sidney that Scott Fitzgerald could have best described—for he seemed to carry with him a lost period in time. He was old world in his manners, a poet in his heart, and a ready captain when a project or a person needed one. In the twenty-five years I would count Sidney as a close friend (only his death would inactivate our friendship), I do not recall him ever using swear words (at least in my presence). He possessed a gentlemanly regard for women and a respect for their intelligence. He remained on good terms with his past lover and his divorced wife and loved and worried over his only daughter who lived in the States.
Sidney was happiest when working in collaboration with other writers. He enjoyed the give-and-take of ideas and the company of fertile minds. He never gave me the feeling that he felt anything of a sexual interest in me, and I regarded him with the fondness one might feel for a close relative. When in London, he was always on his own. We went to the theater together and discussed books, films, and the world condition. On one o
f his London trips, he asked me to read a Romain Gary book that he had optioned. He did not yet have a production company, nor did he know if he could find one that might commit to a film deal. But the story haunted him—and he was, above all, a story man. I worked on it with him for a time until we both finally concluded that it was better as a novel than a movie. (Titled Curtain at Dawn, it would be filmed in 1970 by Jules Dassin as Promise at Dawn.) His much-loved daughter lived in the States, and with her at such a distance, I suspect I became sort of a substitute, for his attitude toward me was quite paternal.
On the surface, Sidney could seem a cool, controlled man, always in command of a situation. But he also could be highly emotional. Once he sobbed openly when he began talking about his childhood. He had a younger brother, Harold, and a sister. They lived in a rural area outside Duluth, Minnesota, and his father enjoyed the sport of hunting. One day when the three children were alone, Sidney (eleven at the time) had taken down his father’s hunting rifle, which he had never been allowed to handle. The gun went off and killed his sister. Family life was never the same. He had left early and had always felt the weight of his childhood misaction and the tragedy he had caused.
With shocking duplicity, Sidney’s home studio, Columbia (who had fired not only Sidney but all employees who had tangled with the Committee, leaving many destitute) was the first Hollywood studio to make use of the tremendous talents of the expat population living in England and had sent over executives who had clean bills from HUAC to inaugurate foreign productions for film and television. Many in our community were hired to write scripts under assumed names (at a rate of pay often as little as one-twentieth of what Columbia would have had to pay their Hollywood staff). All such deals were done under the table and with the use of pseudonyms. Of course, it was not moral, but it was a living and a means of survival.
The commercial feature films being made for American production companies were in quite a different category from those being produced by British filmmakers. The English theater’s “kitchen sink realism” had led to the birth of “new wave cinema,” which dealt with formerly taboo subjects (still taboo stateside) like homosexuality and abortion. Working-class dramas had overtaken English country-house frolics. A new breed of young actors lit up their screens, many with regional accents that were incomprehensible to the American ear. The “wicked witch” on the censorship board had been ousted. The new rule seemed to be that no film, excluding those of politically controversial nature, could be too intimate, while in the States the proven box-office winners were epic movies like The Ten Commandments, teenage romps, or beach parties. Comedy was apparently not universal. Hollywood broke box-office records with the zany clowning of Jerry Lewis, later to also take France by storm, but never England. What caused laughter in Great Britain was of a subtler nature like the Alec Guinness comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, or the more ridiculously outrageous ones made by the Boulting brothers that pilloried national institutions (the forerunners of Monty Python).
Clearly, filmmakers in Britain and the States marched to different drummers. This was where the expats came in. Here, in London, was a large pool of American-trained film writers all desperately needing work. The system was corrupt, and yet it allowed writers to engage in what they did best while putting food on their family tables. Did any of us refuse to work under these inequitable conditions? Not any I know of. Were we also corrupting our ideals? My answer is: You can’t feed your kids ideals.
Although eminently gifted, by the mid to late fifties, several of our community had risen to heights they might not have achieved had HUAC never existed. Jules Dassin, whose work as writer/director/actor evoked a European spirit, had made the right decision in settling in France where he was well received and able to work under his own name (later in Greece, as well). Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes), a prototypical caper movie, was a huge success in its American release (for the US version Dassin had to use the pseudonym Perlo Vita). He won the Best Director Award at Cannes, and Rififi at the time became the most profitable film ever made in France. With the Cannes Award his new career as a writer/director of foreign films took flight. Cannes also ended his marriage to Bea, as it was at Cannes that year that he met and fell in love with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he would later marry. That merger eventually produced the internationally successful film, Never on Sunday.
Joseph Losey, the Harvard-educated, blacklisted American director, now living in London, had never become an integrated member of the expat community. His distancing of himself from his peers was replicated in his films where it produced a Brechtian alienation—“a deliberate denial of audience involvement, intended to make spectators think rather than feel”—surely a more European than American approach to film. He had paid his dues. One of Losey’s first films made in the UK was The Sleeping Tiger. The credit was given to the English producer Victor Hanbury. For a time he assumed the name of Joseph Walton. But by 1957, he was credited under his own name (the brilliant films The Servant and Accident would later be among his best work).
The expat who was on his way to achieving the greatest financial success and power in London was Carl Foreman. This had not yet happened when I returned from New York but soon would. He had been something of a golden boy before leaving Hollywood, having received an Academy Award nomination for his script of the Kirk Douglas film Champion. His original screenplay, High Noon, on which he was also the associate producer, was in midproduction when he was called before the Committee. Once blacklisted, he and his wife, Estelle, came to London where for the next six years Carl worked without credit. Recently, he and Michael Wilson (a fellow blacklisted writer) had cowritten the adapted screenplay for the acclaimed The Bridge on the River Kwai. The screen credit was given to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel, who had contributed very little to his book’s adaptation. River Kwai was the turning point for Carl. A feisty Jewish guy who grew up in a Chicago working-class family, he began to fight for his life and his career.
Estelle, blunt and often militant, was not an easy woman to be with. But she was a friend of Sue Rossen’s and had called me several times to join them and their young daughter Katy for dinner. Carl looked a bit professorial behind his large, horn-rimmed glasses but was, in fact, fiercely ambitious and a bit of a rough diamond. As a young man he had worked as a circus barker. I could see that was entirely possible. He liked to talk and was good at it. Any subject, you name it, he had something to introduce, add, or contradict. Sometime late in ’57, he had returned to Washington to meet behind closed doors with members of the Committee. There would always be speculation in the community about what happened in that room when, a short time later, he inaugurated Open Road Productions where he would write, direct, and produce under his own name (rumors circulated that he had made a deal and had secretly named names—an accusation never proved). Despite his ability to work unencumbered, those expats he hired to work for him could not use their name and were paid far below established minimum wage, an action that did not endear Carl to me, nor have I ever been able to excuse it.
I remember Carl once saying to me, “You’re no one in the film industry unless you are a hyphenate: writer-director, writer-producer. But when you are a triple hyphenate—writer-director-producer—then, and only then, do you have real power.” Carl was making sure he had it. In contradiction to this, Sidney had told me, “Any filmmaker who wears three hats—writer/producer/director—is a three-headed monster. Sometimes lines have to be cut. If they are your lines, you might not do it. And sometimes if you are the director, an entire scene needs to be scrapped, and if you feel it contains something you like, you might [foolishly] retain it.”
Delayed by casting problems, filming had finally begun on A Question of Adultery starring the American singer and actress Julie London. The movie also had a distinguished English cast that included her British costar, Anthony Steel, and fine supporting actors Basil Sydney, Donald Houston, Anton Diffring (actually German), and And
rew Cruickshank. Since censorship had been eased, the sequences that Raymond had originally wanted were returned to the script with added melodramatic flourishes not writ by my hand. Nonetheless, it was being made and as it was now an English production my name would be up there on the screen.
Raymond wanted me on the set, although I don’t know why because hardly a word from the screenplay they were shooting was changed during production, except perhaps Julie’s husky moans and sighs as the muscular Tony Steel made love to her. Handsome as Tony was, he lacked sexual chemistry on-screen and off, but was a “jolly good fellow” liked by all his coworkers. Julie and I hit it off. She was open, frank, caring, and down to earth. The last few years had been difficult. Her divorce from Dragnet actor Jack Webb, worse than bitter. She needed to talk about it and I was a willing and sympathetic ear. She claimed he was often violent, and that even separated by so many thousands of miles, she found herself looking over her shoulder, fearful he would appear. We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together (turkey and ham—no goose!). She had two young girls, one who was having emotional problems. Friendships during the filming of a movie are tentative at best. Yet, they can be more intense than outside friendships. A film company is like an island unto itself. The members spend fourteen hours a day together. They share experiences and secrets. Then the movie is in the can. Most go on to make other movies, join with other crews, and might never see a colleague from a past endeavor again. Julie and I exchanged Christmas cards for a few years. I was pleased when she remarried the musician Bobby Troup. But our lives never again crossed.