So it was Laughton, the great blubbering baby, famous for driving other directors to fury with his self-indulgent fits of temperament, who, having become involved with someone even more temperamental than he, now had to play the unfamiliar role of diplomat and conciliator. To everyone’s pleased surprise, he did. He guided and soothed and encouraged, and all this on the troupe’s top salary of forty dollars per week, yet the prospect of his first opening night in more than a decade terrified him. He resorted to the peculiar satisfactions of narcolepsy. “Not catnaps but deep, heavy slumber,” Houseman recalled, “into which he would sink at strange and unexpected moments—in the midst of making up, while going over lines and sometimes even between scenes—and from which it became increasingly difficult for our stage managers to arouse him.”
Then there came that inevitable moment when he exploded. It happened, as usual, on the pettiest pretext. Ruth Berlau, the Danish actress, translator, collaborator, mistress, who had accompanied Brecht and his family all the way across Russia, now considered herself a photographer, so she was flitting about in the balcony of the Coronet Theater, photographing the last rehearsals for some vague publicity purpose. Click, click, click. Suddenly something in Laughton snapped. “Laughton broke off in the middle of a scene,” Houseman recalled, “and came slowly down to the edge of the stage. He glared up at the balcony, his face twisted into a strange grimace that made him look as though he were about to burst into tears. Then he started to howl at her. He accused her of violating him as an artist, of trying to ruin his performance and to destroy him as a man. The more he raged, the wilder he became: he threatened to smash her camera; he said he would kill her if he ever saw her again in the theatre. He was still yelling long after she had fled into La Cienega Boulevard.”
Galileo finally opened in the middle of a July heat wave so intense that electric fans had to be installed on both sides of the stage, with buckets of ice in front of them. Though the reviews were “mixed,” every seat had already been sold for the four-week run, and Laughton was determined to move the production on to New York. The American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) offered a limited engagement opening December 7. Maybe, then, there would be more Brecht productions, perhaps even movie sales. By now, however, Brecht was also hearing siren calls from Europe. The Soviet occupation authorities in Berlin were interested in his returning to stage some of his works there. Brecht was characteristically wary, but he began applying for visas to visit Switzerland.
On September 19, just a month after Galileo had ended its run in Los Angeles, a seedy and slightly tipsy man appeared at the door of Brecht’s house in Santa Monica and handed him a folded pink document that began with the words “By authority of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America . . .” It went on to summon Brecht to “appear before the Un-American Activities Committee . . . in their chamber in the city of Washington . . . and there testify touching matters of inquiry committed to the said Committee. . . . Herein fail not.”
The process server was hardly worthy of such lofty language. He rather resembled a character out of Brecht’s plays. Helli Weigel offered him some coffee and he sat there complaining about the hardships of his job, the way people tried to evade him, the way his feet hurt. He seemed to appreciate the Brechts’ hospitality. He confided to them that the government paid expenses and per diem compensation for witnesses summoned to Washington, and that if Brecht went by train but claimed reimbursement for auto mileage, he could make a profit on the trip. Brecht was pleased by such revelations. The Good Soldier Schweyk was alive and at work in Hollywood.
Brecht was not much worried, apparently, for the House committee was summoning witnesses all over Hollywood. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter published lists (not entirely accurate) of more than forty people who had received subpoenas: Clifford Odets, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole. . . . A veteran screenwriter whose credits ranged from a Charlie Chan picture to The House of Seven Gables, Cole was getting a haircut in the M-G-M barbershop when the phone rang and he found himself talking to Eddie Mannix.
“Lester?” the studio manager said. “In my outside office there’s a U.S. marshal with a subpoena for you. You want to duck while I hold him?”
“Duck?” Cole echoed. “Where to? Tell him I’m in the third seat in the barbershop.”
More notable than this clutch of leftist screenwriters were the conservative eminences whom the committee was inviting to testify about the Communist threat: Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner and Walt Disney, Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and Ronald Reagan. It promised to be a great show.
Although the HUAC investigations of the movie business have acquired the status of a national legend, Hollywood was never really more than an entertaining diversion in the committee’s zigzagging crusade. Martin Dies’ Story, the memoirs of the committee’s founding chairman, never even mentioned Dies’s forays into show business in the late 1930’s. His targets were primarily President Roosevelt and the labor unions, secondarily liberals, foreigners, and anyone else who aroused his ire. When Dies retired because of bad health in 1944, his powers devolved onto John Rankin of Mississippi, who hopefully announced that an investigation of Hollywood would reveal “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States” and perhaps even “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government.” Rankin was apparently inspired to these views by the prominence of Jews in Hollywood, but he imagined Jewish threats everywhere. He once denounced Walter Winchell as “a little slime-mongering kike,” and he even baited a congressional colleague, Emanuel Celler, by referring to him as “the Jewish gentleman from New York.” When Celler protested, the courtly Mississippian asked, “Does the member from New York object to being called a Jew or does he object to being called a gentleman?”
Once the 1946 elections had brought the Republicans to power in Congress, the challenge of investigating Hollywood fell to the new HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. It was a little hard, at the start, for Hollywood to take this pudgy, jowly figure very seriously. The son of a Jersey City police commissioner, Thomas had been born John Parnell Feeney, Jr., but after his father’s death, he decided to adopt his mother’s maiden name. It is probably unfair to accuse anyone who calls himself J. Parnell of trying to hide his Irish origins; on the other hand, the future congressman was quite candid about why the name Thomas seemed preferable to Feeney. “Your petitioner . . .” he told the court, “believes that he can get recognition and business under the name of Thomas that he could not get under the name of Feeney.”
Recognition and business, those were the goals to achieve. Feeney/Thomas went to the Wharton School of Finance for a time, then left to join the army in World War I, rose to be a captain, worked as a bond salesman in New York, and began thinking about a career in politics. Since Catholicism might prove as much a hindrance as the name Feeney, he changed not only his name but his religion. He made a point of attending the Baptist church, but occasionally told interviewers he was an Episcopalian, and a Mason as well. He was elected mayor of Allendale, New Jersey, in 1931, and then a state assemblyman in 1935. In the legislature, he had an experience that he later said had changed his life. The governor of New Jersey had proposed a sales tax to raise money for the relief of the unemployed, and some of these people on relief invaded the Assembly to lobby for the bill. They ate and slept there, played mandolins, and generally dismayed people like J. Parnell Thomas. He began what he called a “quiet” investigation of these troublemakers and discovered that one of them had once been a Communist Party candidate for governor of Ohio. That was enough for Thomas to demand that the authorities expel the demonstrators as dangerous revolutionaries. “Or if they are to be treated as guests of the state,” he added, “let’s do the job properly. Feed them caviar. Feed them chocolate eclairs.”
These local controversies were still unresolved when Thomas saw a greater opportunity, in 1936, in
the death of the congressman for the Seventh District. Thomas ran for the seat and won. He had a talent for gestures. One of the first bills that he proposed called for the public hanging of kidnappers. He saw possibilities in the creation of a committee on un-American activities. He asked for and won appointment as one of the founding members in 1938. The seniority system inexorably brought him to the chairmanship, and by May of 1947, he was able to announce to the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”
Like the new Senator McCarthy’s subsequent announcement that he had a list of 205 card-carrying Communists in the State Department, Thomas’s talk of “hundreds” of prominent Hollywood Communists was pure fantasy. They didn’t exist. The total of Communist Party members in the movie business was never large. After years of interrogations, supported by all the evidence accumulated by the FBI and the movie studios, the House committee issued a list in 1952 of everyone in Hollywood who had ever been identified as (not proved to be) a past or present Communist, and the grand total came to 324 employees or wives of employees of the movie industry. This in a work force of more than thirty thousand.* And even if the term “important” be extended to encompass second-rate directors and mediocre screenwriters, scarcely two or three dozen Communists could be said to have any importance whatsoever. Near the start of the congressional hearings, in fact, when the studio heads held a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club to discuss the Communist problem, Louis B. Mayer named the young son of a well-known producer as a ringleader of Hollywood radicals. Sam Goldwyn responded with commendable sang-froid. “If that snot-nosed baby is the Red boss in Hollywood, then, gentlemen, we’ve got nothing to fear,” Goldwyn said. “Let’s go home.”
What, then, was the House committee trying to accomplish? The least plausible answer, which nonetheless deserves a moment’s consideration, is that the congressmen were genuinely concerned about the possibility of Communist domination of a major medium of information. Recent revelations of Soviet spying were in the air, and the committee was struggling with its first actual piece of legislation, a bill drafted by Rankin to punish by ten years in jail any attempt “in any course of instruction or teaching in any public or private school, college or university to advocate or to express or convey the impression of sympathy with or approval of, Communism or Communist ideology.” This was a bit strong even for the Un-American Activities Committee. A majority of the committee members could not bring themselves to recommend Rankin’s measure to the full House, but they went on considering various proposals to outlaw communism.
The second least plausible explanation, which both the Hollywood producers and the dissenting radicals professed to believe, was that the House committee sought to dominate the movie industry, to tell the producers what movies to make. Jack Warner was reasonably typical, once the HUAC hearings got under way, in decrying government interference in Hollywood. “We can’t fight dictatorships by borrowing dictatorial methods,” he said, in a prepared statement that sounded like someone else’s handiwork. “Nor can we defend freedom by curtailing liberties, but we can attack with a free press and a free screen.” John Howard Lawson, the Communist screenwriter who was to play the role of chief demon at these same hearings, sounded equally pious in testifying about the need for a “free screen.” “J. Parnell Thomas and the Un-American interests he serves . . . are afraid of the American people,” Lawson declared in a statement that Thomas refused to let him read. “They don’t want to muzzle me. They want to muzzle public opinion. They want to muzzle the great Voice of democracy. . . .”
The real explanation of the committee’s objectives is probably the obvious one: partisan politics. Just as President Truman was more or less continuing Roosevelt’s New Deal, so Thomas was continuing to play the harassing role originally performed by Dies. Like Dies, Thomas represented the small-town worrier who couldn’t figure things out but suspected that many of his daily problems were the fault of dark forces in distant places, international cartels, giant labor unions, foreign radicals. Dies and Thomas and the committee all represented, in other words, the constituency of the bewildered and the resentful, all those people whom Nathanael West had described as “tired of oranges, even of avocado pears . . . [the] cheated and betrayed.”
And then there was the matter of publicity, not as an adjunct to politics but as the essence of it. To say that J. Parnell Thomas was a publicity seeker, which he was, misses the point that publicity is the blood of politics. There are no issues, really, except on rare occasions of war or disaster, only images and competing images. Even before television made this obvious, J. Parnell Thomas sensed that his essentially purposeless investigations of communism might bring him great rewards (what made Tom Dewey a presidential candidate, after all, if not his highly publicized investigations of New York gangsters?). One of Thomas’s committee members, young Dick Nixon, saw similar possibilities but had the shrewdness and the patience to bide his time until he encountered the great drama that would make him famous, the clash between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. The Un-American Activities Committee had long been tempted by Hollywood, and by the publicity that accompanied every suggestion of an investigation of the movies, but Dies’s probing tentacles had been rather harshly beaten back in 1941. And the committee had many other fields to explore. (When Congressman Dickstein had been asked back in the 1930’s exactly whom his proposed Un-American Activities Committee would be authorized to investigate, he had prophetically answered: “Everybody!”) So the committee began the year 1947 by inquiring into the United Auto Workers’ role in the continuing strike at Allis-Chalmers, and the United Electrical Workers’ role in a strike in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers’ role in a strike at the Reynolds Tobacco Company plant in Winston-Salem. Labor unions, as Hollywood would learn, were a matter of continuing interest to the Un-American Activities Committee.
In its more or less random explorations, the committee had inevitably been struck by the activities of Louis Budenz, a former managing editor of the Daily Worker, who had somehow found God and now sought only to condemn and expiate his former sins. He began making radio speeches to denounce the Evil One, an all-powerful agent who he claimed was traveling throughout the United States as the secret representative of the Kremlin. “This man never shows his face,” Budenz said. “Communist leaders never see him, but they follow his orders or suggestions implicitly.” The Un-American Activities Committee was thrilled. It summoned Budenz to come and tell all he knew about the worldwide Communist conspiracy, and Rankin welcomed him with a burst of his customary rhetoric. “Are you familiar,” he demanded, “with the rape of innocent women, the murder of innocent men, the plunder of the peasants and the robbery of the helpless people . . . by the Communist regime?”
Budenz eventually identified the Kremlin master agent, the man who never showed his face, as Gerhart Eisler, an obscure German operative who may quite possibly have been all that Budenz said he was. The committee had no difficulty in demonstrating that Eisler had repeatedly lied to U.S. immigration authorities, used several false names (Edwards, Brown, Berger, Liptzin), and traveled on a forged passport. This and more was detailed in the testimony of Eisler’s older sister, Elfriede, who now called herself Ruth Fischer and was writing a denunciation of German communism for the Harvard University Press. She described her brother, whom she had not spoken to for many years, as a Soviet police agent, a murderer, and a “terrorist.” She was not a great deal kinder to her other brother, Hanns, the Hollywood composer, whom she described as “a Communist in a philosophical sense.”
Gerhart Eisler was already in the custody of the Immigration Service, which wanted to deport him. Brought from Ellis Island to Capitol Hill by two Immigration Service agents, he proved to be a waspishly intractable witness. When the committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, asked him to take the stand, he said, “I am not going to take the stand.”
“Mr. Eisler, will you
raise your right hand?” said Stripling.
“No,” said Eisler.
“Mr. Eisler . . .” said Chairman Thomas, “you want to remember that you are a guest of this nation.”
“I am not treated as a guest . . .” said Eisler. “I am a political prisoner.”
The committee duly cited Eisler for contempt (the resolution to do so represented Congressman Nixon’s maiden speech) and moved on to Hanns Eisler, who also offered rich possibilities for the committee’s interrogators. When Eisler was trying to get a visa to the United States in 1940, his application was supported by such influential admirers as Dorothy Thompson, Malcolm Cowley, Clifford Odets, and—of all people the committee would like to embarrass—Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike his truculent brother, Hanns Eisler parried the committee’s questions with remarkably sassy wit. When Stripling described him as “the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical field,” Eisler said, “I would be flattered.”
“Mr. Eisler . . .” Stripling persisted, “haven’t you on a number of occasions said, in effect, that music is one of the most powerful weapons for the bringing about of the revolution?”
“Sure,” said Eisler. “Napoleon the First said—”
“Never mind Napoleon,” Thomas interrupted. “You tell us what you said.”
“I consider myself, in this matter, a pupil of Napoleon,” the completely unfazed Eisler retorted. “I think in music I can enlighten and help people in distress in their fight for their rights. In Germany we didn’t do so well. . . . The truth is, songs cannot destroy Fascism, but they are necessary. . . . It’s a matter of musical taste whether you like them. . . . If you don’t like them, I am sorry; you can listen to ‘Open the Door, Richard.’ ”
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