City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

  In questioning Eisler about his various compositions, Stripling repeatedly asked him about his collaborations with Brecht. Had he written the music for Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken), Brecht’s radical play of 1930; for Kühle Wampe, the Berlin film of 1932; for Hangmen Also Die? Eisler cheerfully acknowledged them all (though he seemed to think he was protecting his friend by avoiding any mention of Brecht’s name). But he would not admit to being a Communist. “I would be a swindler if I called myself a Communist,” he said. “I have no right. The Communist underground workers in every country have proven that they are heroes. I am not a hero. I am a composer.”

  J. Parnell Thomas began his investigation of Hollywood in May of 1947 with a series of interrogations in his suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. These meetings were supposedly closed, private, but after each afternoon’s session, Thomas and Stripling told reporters about the wonders they were discovering. Their indirect targets, as usual, were the New Deal and the labor unions. Thomas declared that “the government” had “wielded the iron fist in order to get the companies to put on certain Communist propaganda,” and that the main vehicle for this propaganda, the Screen Writers Guild, was “lousy with Communists.” As evidence for these charges, Thomas reported that Robert Taylor had testified that government officials had delayed his entry into the navy in 1943 until he had finished filming M-G-M’s Song of Russia, which Thomas described as “Communist propaganda that favored its ideologies, its institutions and its way of life over the same things in America.” The committee’s most implausible witness, Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers, told the investigators that her daughter had bravely refused to speak a typical piece of Communist propaganda, “Share and share alike—that’s democracy,” which had appeared in Dalton Trumbo’s script for Tender Comrade.

  There were fourteen of what Thomas called “friendly witnesses,” and on the basis of their testimony, he announced his conclusions. White House pressure had forced the studios to produce “flagrant Communist propaganda films”; Washington intrigues had helped Communist union leaders to threaten the studios, and Communist writers were subtly infusing Moscow’s propaganda into the movies. After this verdict, the trial could begin. All these un-American maneuvers needed to be publicly exposed and publicly condemned and he, J. Parnell Thomas, proposed to do so. The pink subpoenas that circulated through Hollywood that September were proof that he was very much in earnest.

  Herbert Biberman, a rather pompous producer and director whose most recent films included Abilene Town and New Orleans, was one of the first to see the obvious pattern in the subpoenas and to do something about it. He got on the telephone and invited a group of the prospective witnesses to assemble at eight o’clock that same evening in the home of the director Lewis Milestone to discuss with some lawyers how they should defend themselves. The nineteen witnesses were mostly writers: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Waldo Salt. And Brecht. There were also a few who had graduated from writing into directing and producing: Edward Dmytryk, Irving Pichel, Adrian Scott, Robert Rossen. And one actor, Larry Parks. Most of them were or had recently been members of the Communist Party (as the authorities well knew, since the CP’s Los Angeles secretary was an FBI informer). Perhaps by coincidence, only one of the nineteen had done military service during the recent war. Perhaps by coincidence, at least ten were Jews; perhaps by coincidence, but more likely not. The Hollywood Reporter was apparently the first to call them “the unfriendly witnesses,” but they took pride in the term and applied it freely to themselves. It was left to the malicious Billy Wilder to say, “Only two of them have talent. The rest are just unfriendly.”

  Biberman had invited to the meeting four prominent defense lawyers, notably Robert Kenny, who, despite the handicap of a withered arm, had succeeded Earl Warren as state attorney general (and fully supported Warren’s activities in the incarceration of the Japanese). Almost equally well known was Bartley Crum, a corporation lawyer and a Republican. The other two were militant leftists, Ben Margolis and Charles Katz, charter members of the National Lawyers Guild.

  The lawyers reviewed the alternatives. The most extreme course would be a total refusal to answer any questions and a rejection of the committee’s right to question anyone about political beliefs. This appealed to some of the more aggressive among the nineteen, but it would prevent them from presenting their case to the public. Equally provocative would be a defiant acknowledgment and defense of Communist Party membership, but though that was theoretically legal, the largely unused Smith Act of 1940 now made it possible to prosecute Communists on charges of advocating the overthrow of the government. As a third possibility, the witnesses could simply deny their Communist Party membership, but that left them open to prosecution for perjury, punishable by five years in jail. The safest course, as subsequent witnesses soon discovered, was to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, but the nineteen disliked that because it seemed to imply that they had committed some crime.

  They finally decided, at the urging of Trumbo and Lardner, on the First Amendment, which proclaimed that Congress had no right to make any law restricting free speech or peaceable assembly, and therefore presumably had no right to investigate such matters. Supreme Court precedents seemed to support this defense. In an 1880 case known as Kilbourn v. Thompson, the court had ruled that the government could not compel a citizen to disclose his political views. In a 1943 decision rejecting compulsory salutes to the flag, Justice Robert Jackson had declared that the government could not make anyone profess his loyalty or punish him for refusing to do so.

  In retrospect, this decision to rely on the First Amendment still seems the right one. It is quite possible that if the Hollywood witnesses had politely declined to answer any questions and cited the First Amendment as their reason, they might have won their fight. But Kenny apparently convinced them that they would have a stronger case in court if instead of refusing to answer and citing the First Amendment, they evaded and parried all questions and yet denied that they were refusing to answer. When the Supreme Court finally ruled in their favor on any contempt charges, Kenny argued, a splendid constitutional principle would be strongly and very publicly upheld. “Before the Ten actually went off to the pokey, nobody believed anybody was going to jail,” Kenny told an interviewer nearly thirty years later. “Even the judges who handed out the sentences thought this was nothing more than a test case. Contempt of Congress—it’s just a high-grade misdemeanor anyway—a year and a thousand maximum. Nobody had served time on the charge since the 1920s. That was when Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil did thirty days for his behavior during the Congressional investigation of the Teapot Dome affair.”

  There was a good deal of arguing at Biberman’s meeting that night, and at later meetings as well. Bessie, who was a devout Communist and had fought bravely in Spain, wanted to adopt the tactic of proclaiming his party membership and saying he was proud of it. Koch, who was not a Communist, wanted to say so before the committee, but several others shouted him down. Kenny later claimed that the witnesses all decided their course on their own. “It was not a collective decision, though it came after inter-member deliberation,” he said. One of the witnesses, Edward Dmytryk, remembered the scene quite differently. He said that those present at the meeting had agreed “that all decisions be made only by unanimous consent, and, once made, must be strictly adhered to. . . . Larry Parks moved the rule (at the instigation, he later told me, of one of the Communist lawyers of the group) and I voted willingly for its adoption.”*

  The only one who balked at the planned strategy was Brecht. He apologized to the others but pointed out that he was not an American citizen. He had strong misgivings about whether the Bill of Rights’ protection of citizens applied to aliens like him. He had recently received the necessary papers to go to Switzerland, and he feared that if he resisted the committee, it might
prevent his departure. The others said they understood. “He seemed to have the uncomfortable feeling,” Trumbo wrote later, “based, perhaps, on earlier hassles over un-German activities, that all those doctors of humane letters who earned their bread by writing about his plays and describing his genius would forget, somehow, to set the alarm clock on the day he went to jail.”

  But the nineteen had no intention or expectation of going to jail. “We thought we were winners,” Lardner said. “We didn’t anticipate that our careers would be wrecked.” Nor did they feel isolated or helpless; nor was there much reason why they should. Not long after the subpoenas arrived, John Huston was having lunch at Lucey’s restaurant on Melrose Avenue with William Wyler, whose The Best Years of Our Lives had won that year’s Academy Award, and the writer Philip Dunne, son of Finley Peter Dunne, and the three of them decided to form a Committee for the First Amendment. They called on Ira Gershwin to open his home for the founding meeting, and according to one writer who was there that night, “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. The town was full of enthusiasm because they all felt they were going to win. Every star was there.”

  The committee gathered an impressive collection of supporters: Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Groucho Marx, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Paulette Goddard, Fredric March, plus a few literary figures like George S. Kaufman and Archibald MacLeish, and even a few of the big producers: Walter Wanger, William Goetz, Jerry Wald. (A certain amount of recruitment was presumably involved in the assembling of this army. Lester Cole later recalled that he had gone to Ronald Reagan’s house to ask him to join the First Amendment group. “It was early evening when I arrived and Jane Wyman, then his wife, came to the door. I introduced myself, asked to see him, and she became uneasy. Wyman told me Reagan was lying down, not feeling well, but she’d talk to him. She was back in moments, I thought seemingly embarrassed, asked me to tell Humphrey Bogart and Willie Wyler that he was not well, but was thinking seriously about joining them. He would let them know the next day. He didn’t. . . .”)

  No less important to the nineteen witnesses was the fact that the studio bosses appeared perfectly willing to keep them at work. Lardner, who had just bought a large house in Santa Monica that summer on the strength of a new contract at two thousand dollars per week with 20th Century–Fox, was soon asked to start another picture. Lester Cole, who had just negotiated a handsome M-G-M contract that would escalate over four years from $1,250 to $2,500 a week, feared that the studio might balk because of the subpoena, but Eddie Mannix summoned him the next day and gruffly asked him to sign. “No half-ass Congressman is going to tell M-G-M how to run its business,” Mannix said.

  The best technique for fighting a congressional committee had just been brilliantly demonstrated that summer by a man who deserved investigation far more than any Hollywood writer. In contrast to a Dalton Trumbo or a Lester Cole, who might or might not have slipped a few leftist tidbits past the watchful eye of Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hughes had undeniably persuaded the federal government to pay him some sixty million dollars to produce warplanes, which Hughes had then failed to produce. Such extravagance could easily be forgotten now that the war was over, but the same 1946 elections that awarded the Republicans the chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee also awarded them the chairmanship of a Senate group generally known as the War Investigating Committee. President Truman, once an obscure senator, had ridden to fame on this committee’s inquiries into various wartime financial scandals. Its new chairman was a dour figure from Maine, Senator Owen Brewster, who hungered just as strongly as J. Parnell Thomas to expose the wickednesses of the Roosevelt administration.

  Brewster had reasons of his own for concentrating on Hughes, and when committee investigators went to California to riffle through Hughes’s corporate papers, they discovered a treasure, the expense accounts of Johnny Meyer. Plump and affable, Meyer was an operator, a hand-shaker and connection-maker. He had started with CBS, then moved to the Cleveland Wheat Exchange, then come to Hollywood and worked for Warner Bros. as a press agent assigned to Errol Flynn. A press agent for Errol Flynn presumably had certain social skills that would also be useful to Hughes, so Hughes hired him. When the Senate investigators unearthed Meyer’s expense accounts, they discovered many savory details of Hughes’s courtship of Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, who had once been chief of the Mediterranean Allied Photo Reconnaissance Command and had then been sent on a tour of aircraft plants to search for a much-needed new reconnaissance plane. Roosevelt’s five-man search team had duly reached Los Angeles in August of 1943, and there they duly encountered Johnny Meyer, who, among other good deeds, introduced Roosevelt to a young actress, Faye Emerson. So now Meyer was brought to Washington in the summer of 1947 and made to testify about expense-account items like these: $1,000 worth of hotel accommodations, liquor, and racetrack tickets for the President’s son and his new friend, Miss Emerson, whom he was soon planning to marry; nylon stockings for Miss Emerson, $132; a “loan” to Roosevelt on the eve of his marriage to Miss Emerson, $1,000; wedding party, $850, including $220 worth of champagne; a honeymoon hotel bill at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $576.83.

  And more: bills for other Air Corps officers who were friends of Colonel Roosevelt, and for girls who were friends of these friends. The total, Meyer said, came to $5,083.79. Rich stuff, this, rich evidence of wartime sacrifices. Elliott Roosevelt angrily insisted on testifying in his own defense: “I deny with all my heart and soul that Johnny Meyer ever got me a girl!” He even demanded of Meyer: “Were any of these girls there specifically to entertain me?” Meyer parried adroitly: “That is hard to say, because you were quite busy with Miss Emerson.”

  “Are you stating?” Roosevelt pursued, in defense of his fellow officers, “that those girls were there to entertain them?” Meyer was perfectly willing to explain how these things worked: “They sat around with us and had drinks with us and went to dinner with us, and the girls were probably not with anyone, they just danced with anyone who asked them to.”

  Roosevelt insisted, however, that he and his team had inspected and admired Hughes’s plane, and despite the criticisms of other Air Force officers (who were quite correct, as it turned out, in their predictions that Hughes’s plane wouldn’t work), they had recommended it on its merits. More generally, Roosevelt swore that Brewster and other Republican leaders had “spent a good portion of their time since my father died trying to smear him.” Confronted with Meyer’s expense accounts, Roosevelt could only answer that Meyer had falsified them, padded them, lied about them; confronted with Roosevelt’s charges, Meyer resorted to ducking and weaving and smiling, always smiling. Hughes was more combative. “They’re lying about me, and they’re not going to get away with it,” he said, according to one account, as he kicked a zebra-skin chair across Cary Grant’s living room.

  Hughes had good reason to be suspicious. Quite apart from the Republican-run committee’s desire to blacken the name of Roosevelt, Senator Brewster was well known to be friendly, as they say, to Pan American Airways, and Pan Am’s president, Juan Trippe, was well known to be furious at Hughes’s triumph in getting Washington’s approval for his TWA to compete with Pan Am on the lucrative transatlantic air routes to Europe. Now Hughes declared in a statement to the press that Brewster’s investigation of Hughes’s airplane deals was all part of a conspiracy: “I charge specifically that at a lunch in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., last February, Senator Brewster in so many words told me that the hearings need not go on if I agreed to merge the TWA airline with Pan American Airways.”

  To deal with this charge, Brewster formed a subcommittee headed by Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, a silver-haired former judge. The first witness in the crowded and floodlit Senate Caucus Room was, of course, Hughes. He looked, according to one contemporary account, like “an enormously rich Huckleberry Finn, tieless and hatless, in a soiled shirt and a rumpled sports jacket borrowed
from his butler-valet, his long, thin wrists protruding from sleeves that were inches too short.” Repeating his charge against Brewster, Hughes said, “I think Senator Brewster should take the stand. Allow me to cross-examine him and bring in witnesses.” Ferguson said he would think about that later, but Brewster responded with senatorial bluster: “It would be inconceivable to anyone that a man so long in the public eye as I have been—in the Maine legislature, governor of Maine, member of the United States House of Representatives and now a United States Senator—could have made so bald a proposition as he describes. It sounds a little more like Hollywood than Washington. No one of any competence or experience could make such a proposition, and I never did.” He further charged that Hughes was trying to intimidate him, and “if chairmen of committees are to be intimidated, then Senate investigations may as well cease.”

  “Do you have any questions?” Ferguson asked Hughes.

  “Between two hundred and five hundred questions, just about,” Hughes answered. He stayed up all that night, writing out questions for Brewster, and then returned to the committee room in a new gray suit to resume his attack. He called Brewster “one of the greatest trick-shot artists in Washington.” Ferguson countercharged that Hughes was “trying to discredit this committee.” And then: “The integrity of the United States Senate is at stake.” Hughes insisted that Brewster was being evasive. “Senator Brewster’s story is a pack of lies,” he said, “and I can tear it apart if given the opportunity.” The crowd of onlookers burst into applause.