by Jean Stein
I think the family felt pretty secure, as most Jews did once they were in America. But it’s a Jewish tradition: you have to be ready to grab your children and what few possessions you have and get out the back door when the Cossacks come in the front door. They have history. This went on over and over. My god, daughters were grabbed and raped, the sons were put into the army in labor battalions where they’d all be killed. This was not based on fear alone but on experience.
When I think of my father’s testimony, though, I don’t see fear as much as I see humiliation. It was dreadful what happened to people who got named. They had no chance to refute it. It was a time you couldn’t really think straight, just a time of hysteria.
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BETTY WARNER SHEINBAUM: I don’t know what role my dad played in the HUAC hearings. Jack used to talk to my father about what he thought was the correct thing to do. We were so afraid of HUAC. All our friends were being accused of writing propaganda and being communist and running cells. It was terrifying. The purpose was censorship. If you looked at what HUAC really wanted, they wanted control over the media. So you had to fight them. My dad understood a lot of that, but I don’t think Jack did. Jack was not a political person. I think he did what he thought was the politically correct thing to do. They just didn’t know what the heck HUAC was about. They always termed it “anti-Semitic.” That was always their explanation for anything that happened: it wasn’t political, it was anti-Semitic. There was probably some truth in that, too.
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JOY ORR: Mr. Warner was frightened by it all; he didn’t want to have anything to do with card carriers. The government was after them, so you had to be careful. I don’t know whether he thought they could be put in jail or just never allowed to work again. It was a terrible period for a lot of people. But I only knew how serious it was when I saw the newsreel of Mr. Warner. They were scared to death.
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BARBARA WARNER HOWARD: I was sent to Europe to get a little culture. I went to a boarding school in Geneva called the International School. When my father found out the name, he pulled me out because he was convinced it was a communist school. It wasn’t at all—it was a school with diplomats’ children—but my father had a rabid fear of anything or anyone communist. It was the worst thing a person could be. Someone could have been a drug addict, and I don’t think my father would have cared as much. He labeled them commies, Reds, or “moody Russians.”
I continued to live in Europe for more than twenty years, and I heard about blacklisting, of course, but I didn’t realize how tragic it was. The first time I felt it directly was in New York in the mid-seventies. I was at the photographer Milton Greene’s house, and he was showing old videotapes of “Life” Goes to the Movies. Suddenly my father was on the screen, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, attacking all the supposed communists in Hollywood saying that he and his brothers would send all the communists back to Russia and would happily subscribe to a pest-removal fund to get rid of those termites. I had never seen this videotape, and I was terribly embarrassed. My father was so grateful to have done well as an American citizen that he would have done anything for the government, including things he shouldn’t have. Depriving people of their livelihood in that way was the worst thing my father could have done.
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ARTHUR MILLER: The only movies at that time with a social conscience were Warner Brothers pictures. They were sentimental and inaccurate, but they were pictures of social consciousness. And that is why Jack Warner had to be so vicious. He felt defensive and had to come out and denounce all these left-wingers that he was going to fire tomorrow morning. Of course he knew damn well who they had been the whole time. But they were making usable movies for him. And just as he was saying this he was trying to sign Kazan up to a deal. In fact, Warner Brothers wanted to buy Death of a Salesman, right after it opened.
When Kazan went before the committee it was terrible. It was god-awful. I was shocked to the bone. But I felt for him. Kazan, like a lot of other people, was totally dependent upon the studio. As I think I wrote in my autobiography, they had told him that he was not going to work making films in America unless he did what the Un-American Activities Committee wanted him to do, period. Now that was a pretty heavy thing to be hanging over your head. It would have meant the end of his film career. He is still the best director I have ever run into for a certain kind of play, realistic work. And you can’t take that away from him. I’m sure he didn’t want to be put in the position that he was finally put into, a position of cultural leadership. From the little I’ve observed, he didn’t want any kind of power like that. He was probably the most talented of them all as a director, so therefore he became the leader. But he never made a speech as far as I am aware of. He had no political life that I ever heard of after or even during the thirties. So it wasn’t as though he wanted that kind of power. But people looked to him nevertheless. There seemed to be no way out for him at that time.
I didn’t work with him for quite a while after that. The next play that I did was The Crucible—he couldn’t very well direct The Crucible! And then I did A View from the Bridge, which also was about an informer. Marty Ritt and I were casting A View from the Bridge. Marty, who was very militantly anti-Kazan, because he had adored Kazan—Kazan had been his model—and he felt terribly betrayed by him. I said, “Who would be the best man that we know of to play Eddie Carbone?” And, of course, it was Lee J. Cobb, who had done the same thing as Kazan in front of the Un-American Activities Committee. Nobody paid much attention to it. I said, “Why don’t we offer it to him? I don’t want to have a blacklist.” So we did. Called him up. Lee should have played that part; he would have been marvelous. But he wired back that he couldn’t because the American Legion would object. That is how far it had gone. They would have objected to his being in my play.
It was a cloud that never went away. It was terrible. It destroyed a lot of people, more than anybody is ever going to know. It killed them, even when they weren’t dead. It struck fear into the hearts of all kinds of people. Lee Cobb was as much of a menace to the United States as a vacuum cleaner is. It was utterly idiotic to connect him with any such plot. The Group Theatre was probably going through a paroxysm of radicalism: everybody was running around going to stop Hitler, or some damn thing, and so they were joining the Communist Party. They would forget about it in six months, but their names were on some roster. That was the size of it. It was unconscionable. It was just brutal and fake from beginning to end.
FROM THE TESTIMONY OF JACK L. WARNER AT THE HEARINGS REGARDING THE COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY, OCTOBER 20, 1947:
Ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries, organizations, and societies. Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund. We are willing to establish such a fund to ship to Russia the people who don’t like our American system of government and prefer the communistic system to ours….Subversive germs breed in dark corners. Let’s get light into those corners. That, I believe, is the purpose of this hearing.
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RING LARDNER, JR.: We saw Jack Warner at the hearings in 1947 when he spoke about having “termites” in the studio and that he knew several of them. He was quite vehement on the subject. He had to defend Mission to Moscow, which he said was a mistake.
All nineteen of us who were subpoenaed attended all of the hearings. I was finally called on the last day. Bertolt Brecht was a witness that day, too. He was great, although afterwards he came to the hotel where we all had a meeting room and apologized because he was asked the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a communist?” and he had said no. We knew his status was special, that he was anxious to get back to Germany, and if he was indicted for contempt he would have to stay in this country. So we forgave him.
Dalton Trumbo and I decided that the only sensible thing to do was not to answer th
e questions and to try to get the case into the courts. We thought we would probably be cited for contempt but have a fair chance of winning a case. There had been enough Supreme Court decisions about people’s rights to their beliefs, so we thought that by challenging the committee’s right to ask the question we would get it into the courts. If we had taken the Fifth Amendment, it wouldn’t get into the courts at all and there would be no chance of winning the case. Additionally, we didn’t want to take the Fifth Amendment because we would be saying it’s a crime to be a communist. But the court just decided not to hear the case when it got up there.
Sam Goldwyn was against the whole idea of the blacklists and the hearings. He wasn’t the only one. I was under contract to 20th Century–Fox, then run by Darryl Zanuck. When the major producers met in the Waldorf Astoria just after the hearings and decided to blacklist the ten of us and fire the five of us who were then working, Zanuck said he was not going to fire anybody unless his board of directors insisted he do it. His board of directors obliged. They instructed him to fire me. I was sitting in an office with Otto Preminger when a call came from Zanuck’s office wanting to “see Mr. Lardner immediately.” Otto rather indignantly said, “What, just Mr. Lardner, not me?” He thought it had to do with the script and that Zanuck was interfering. It turned out it wasn’t that. Nevertheless, from 1947 to 1950, we were able to get underground jobs in Hollywood. People were not scared. But when we got out of prison in 1951, nobody would touch us.
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PHILIP DUNNE: When they started the blacklist, Ring was the first to go. It was dramatic. When I heard about it on the morning news, I got in the car and went roaring into the studio. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I was furious. I was met at the studio at the gate by the cop who said, “Mr. Zanuck wants to see you right away, and Mr. Lardner wants you to call him right away.” Now, this was nine o’clock in the morning, and Zanuck never came in until noon. So he apparently knew where the trouble was going to be, because I went in and he started to scream, “I didn’t want to do it. I was forced to do it. I was ordered to do it. I was told it was my share by the money people from New York!” I took him at his word. Ring said to me, “Don’t do anything silly because I have legal recourse,” but I don’t know what good it did him. George Seaton and I were trying to see if we could organize a strike among the writers and directors as a protest. Nobody wanted to play, including people who later were blacklisted. It was frightening to them.
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NAOMI KLEIN: My grandfather never recovered from his experience with Disney. It was a crushing event. After he was fired, after the strike—he was blacklisted, came back to New Jersey, where he grew up, and worked in the shipyards. He worked in advertising, too, but never as an artist again. He loved working at Disney and they had an amazing community. He loved working as an animator, then for the rest of his life had to just work for money. The strike was not a victory. My grandfather’s best friend, David Hilberman, his response to getting fired was to do more radical work. But when my grandfather had to leave L.A., he left that side of him behind and did his art on the side, making sculptures in his spare time. We all have some of his work and it is very, very un-Disney: abstract and antithetical. Huge pieces. They’re for outdoors and they rust.
One of my grandfather’s responsibilities at Disney was Donald Duck continuity. So, when we were little, he used to draw pictures of Donald Duck. He could do one in eight strokes. I always thought it was funny that one of his jobs was to make sure Donald Duck never changed. He worked on Fantasia, too, on the dancing hippopotamus scene. And Dumbo was in production when they went on strike. It was a love-hate relationship for us all. I grew up with these stories of evil Walt Disney and what he did to my grandfather. But at the same time, I told all my friends that my grandfather drew Donald Duck, and he would draw for all of us. And we went to Disneyland. My grandfather didn’t come. It was my father and his brother, Henry, just the two of them and their kids. I was probably six or seven. Growing up, a favorite family story was how my father, at about three years old during the strike, would scream, “Scab!”
My grandfather never changed his politics. For him, religion was the opiate of the masses. When I was married, he wouldn’t say “God” at the ceremony. He was a hardcore Marxist and that didn’t fade. But it wasn’t like he acted on it. It was just his belief. He grew up with it, got fired for it, then just believed in it. It was his identity and his culture. In the acknowledgments of my first book, No Logo, I said that he was the person who taught me to always look behind the logo. Growing up in the shadow of Disney, with utter fascination and pride that my own grandfather had worked for the ultimate kids’ icon, gave me a double sense. I had a personal connection to the characters my friends were obsessed with. But I also knew that Disney had this sinister side, and that the sides could coexist: we could want to go to Disneyland and love Donald Duck but hate Walt Disney. This influenced the way I wrote No Logo and the way I write about pop culture, which is being critical but leaving space to understand the appeal.
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MARSHA HUNT: Hollywood Fights Back, a radio network special, stands in history as an epochal event. Never before or since has that number of the very top gifted people in an artistic medium spoken as one. Not only as artists, but as citizens. Our field had suddenly been attacked, and we were outraged. Every newspaper, every newsreel, was obsessed with the story of Hollywood being riddled with Reds, with the screen being subverted with coded messages of communism. It swept the land like a terrible blight, and we felt that something had to be done.
The idea for the show blew up overnight and had to be done very quickly. Lew Wasserman at MCA said, “Listen, we close the office at seven P.M., and the place is yours after that. We’ll leave the lights on and the door unlocked. Make free with our typewriters and phones, anything you need.” Norman Corwin, Millard Lampell, and my husband, Robert Presnell, Jr., did the writing, and I was conscripted to get the scripts out to the artists. I was the carrier pigeon. I would tear it off the typewriter and drive it to specific stars’ homes. A single segment was no longer than a minute, and each one had a different point to make. We wanted as many voices as possible to be heard from and accounted for, all equally outraged and protesting what was happening in Washington. They wrote it all in no more than two nights at breakneck speed.
It was Willie Wyler, John Huston, and Philip Dunne’s idea to fly to Washington to counter the headlines across the nation and to defend the industry, free speech, and the right to advocacy and assembly. Those of us who flew to Washington prerecorded our radio spots, with the rest done live. As we were flying across the country to Washington it went on the air, and we were invited into the cockpit, as many of us could crowd in, to listen to ourselves as the nation below us was hearing it. It was one of the most chilling, thrilling times of our lives, to realize that our message—those three words, “Hollywood Fights Back”—was going the length and breadth of the land. It was a dazzling array of the movies’ top citizens renouncing the mischief and terrible behavior of this handful of congressmen who called themselves the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Bogie and Bacall were there, but they proved our tragedy. They repented. They ended the entire protest movement, and we never met again. We were the Committee for the First Amendment, we were an expression of outrage and protest throughout the industry, we were the spokespeople that went on the flight and did that broadcast to support the Hollywood Nineteen. And the climate changed while we were in Washington. I think the brothers Warner got to the Bogarts, because within days of our return, they published a statement that the trip had been ill advised and even foolish. It knocked the wind out of everything. Bogie did some article for a fan magazine called “I’m No Communist.” Nobody said he was! It was a tragedy for us because he had been the most vociferous of all of us on the flight.
I was there, a political innocent advocating nothing but free speech, and it got me blacklisted. It ended my care
er, especially my refusal to repent. That combination did it. But because my husband went right on working, I think because of the scarcity of good writers, 20th Century–Fox gave him a loyalty oath to sign, listing movements he might have joined. Whimsical Robert checked all of them—adding at the bottom, “I guess I’m just a joiner.” So of course they had to throw it all out, this entire piece of nonsense. He had no fear but was never, in any way that I know of, passed over. It was the weirdest thing, but very lucky, because we did keep eating.
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ABRAHAM POLONSKY: I was blacklisted for almost seventeen years, maybe the longest of anybody. So I know why you’re here: I’m the only one left.
In Hollywood, they’re in business to make money, they’re not in business to make works of art or express this or that idea. The wonderful effect of the communists and the liberals was that they introduced social themes into their works and tried to make moderately successful something that was significant. And a great deal of it was. They also wrote for ordinary politicians because you can affect them by writing their speeches. Of course, being writers they were very independent of party control. There was a constant struggle between them and the New York City party. New York City might say that the most important thing now was “to carry on a struggle.” And the Hollywood party would think, Who the hell gives a shit about that? There were endless problems with one group wanting to control the intellectual content and the social content of things. Writers won’t put up with that. The Communist Party in Hollywood had the brightest people, the best writers, the nicest people. They had parties every week, with dances in their houses. They had a hell of a time. But the blacklists killed that.
The Committee for the First Amendment was founded by John Huston, Philip Dunne, and a few others when HUAC first started putting the pressure on Hollywood. I went to Ira Gershwin’s house, and everybody in Hollywood was there. They wanted to get a plane and go to Washington with them and protest against what was happening.