It took three years before the committee once again permitted Robinson to tell his tale. “I . . . repeated over and over again that I was not and had never been a member of the Communist Party,” he said later. “What the hell good was that . . . ? What they wanted me to say was that I was a dupe, a sucker, a fool, an idiot . . . that I was a tool, an unsuspecting agent of the Communist conspiracy. I didn’t say it because I didn’t believe it. The third time around, two years later, I said it. My defenses were down and I said it. My judgment was warped and I said it. My heart was sick and I said it.”
John Garfield faced a similar persecution and tried in much the same way to save himself. He had never been a Communist, but he had signed on for anything that sounded like a good cause. “You know, I wanted to join the Communist party,” he told a friend. “I really did . . . I tried. Hell, I’m a joiner. But they wouldn’t let me in. Can you imagine that? They thought I was too dumb. They said I couldn’t be trusted.”
Like Robinson, Garfield got fewer parts in the late 1940’s, but that was partly because he was choosy, and partly because the films he chose often failed to make money. We Were Strangers (1949) had seemed a promising project about Latin American revolutionaries, directed by John Huston and co-starring Jennifer Jones, but it fared badly at the box office. So did Under My Skin (Fox, 1950) and The Breaking Point (Warners, 1950). So did two worthy efforts to film Hemingway’s My Old Man and To Have and Have Not. The latter actually used Hemingway’s real characters and real plot, and failed as notably as Howard Hawks’s Bogart-Bacall travesty had succeeded. And then, while playing tennis in the midst of shooting Under My Skin, Garfield suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized. He was determined to keep his illness secret, and to do his best to ignore it.
He returned to New York to star in Clifford Odets’s new play, The Big Knife, which was all about Hollywood’s commercial pressures on the free spirit. Garfield played an idealistic young movie star much like himself. J. Edward Bromberg played a wicked old producer much like Louis B. Mayer. The Big Knife opened in February of 1949 but lasted only three months, and all its principal figures came to bad ends. The ailing Bromberg was summoned by congressional investigators and took the Fifth Amendment, then went to London to appear in Dalton Trumbo’s new play, The Biggest Thief in Town, then suddenly died of a heart attack. “I, for one, would like to suggest . . . a possible verdict of ‘death by political misadventure,’ ” Odets said in his funeral eulogy for Bromberg. “Men are growing somehow smaller, and life becomes a wearisome and sickening bore when such unnatural deaths become a commonplace of the day now that citizens of our world are hounded out of home, honor, livelihood and painfully accreted career by the tricks and twists of shameless shabby politicians banded into yapping packs.” Well said, in its illiterate fashion, but less than a year later Odets would teach the shameless shabby politicians a lesson in shameless shabbiness. When he testified before HUAC, one of the names he named to clear himself was that of the late Joe Bromberg.
Garfield tried to keep up a brave front. When a former FBI undercover man named John J. Huber claimed that Garfield was among the top ten “drawing cards” used by Communist organizations, the actor answered that the FBI had cleared him for his entertainment tours of military bases during the war. “If they want to string up a man for being liberal,” he added, “let them bring on their ropes.” But only liberals thought that anybody wanted to string up liberals. The process didn’t work that way. As Garfield himself said to the producer Jerry Wald, who had once requested him for a specific part but now had doubts, the whole situation was “like I was a member of your baseball team and you knew I was going to get traded.”
Garfield kept pursuing the route to high-minded professional failure. He bought the screen rights to Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm even though he knew that the Production Code forbade movies about drug addiction. He went back on stage to play Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with the predictable consequences. When he finally got his subpoena from HUAC in March of 1951, he eagerly hoped to disavow any connection with communism and to escape the naming-names trap by professing complete ignorance of everything around him. “They’re out to fuck me,” he was heard to say just before taking the stand, “but I’m not going to let them.”
“I have always hated communism,” Garfield had recently told the New York Times, and now he reaffirmed it on the witness stand. “It is a tyranny which threatens our country and the peace of the world. . . . I have never been a member of the Communist Party or a sympathizer with any of its doctrines.” The interrogators pressed for details. “It appears,” said Frank Tavenner, “that you sponsored a dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on February 4, 1945, under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, for the purpose of raising funds.”
“I have no knowledge of being a member of that organization,” Garfield said, “and I don’t have any recollection of sponsoring that dinner.”
“Let me ask you,” Tavenner persisted, “if you recall at such a meeting that you introduced Paul Robeson?”
“I don’t have any recollection,” Garfield said.
And so on. Donald Jackson, who had replaced the new Senator Nixon as the Los Angeles representative on the committee, was dissatisfied. “I am still not convinced of the entire accuracy you are giving this committee,” he said. “It is your contention that you did not know, during all the . . . years you were in Hollywood . . . a single member of the Communist Party?”
“That is absolutely correct,” Garfield said, “because I was not a party member or associated in any shape, way or form.”
Garfield thought he had won, but nobody really believed his testimony. HUAC leaked word that it was considering charges of perjury. On the other hand, Garfield’s liberal friends (and his assertive wife) criticized him for testifying at all. Garfield found himself in that nebulous world where nothing could be proved or disproved because nothing had been officially charged. He heard that one Hollywood studio was looking for “a John Garfield type,” but when he offered himself, his agent was told that “we need a Garfield type but we can’t use Garfield.”
Garfield heard that Arnold Forster, general counsel to the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, knew how to serve as a mediator between people who were not accused and people who were not accusing them. Forster arranged for Look magazine to commission a confessional article by Garfield, which the editors proposed to entitle, in honor of Garfield’s roles as a prizefighter in Body and Soul and Golden Boy, “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook.” Garfield, by now in deep trouble with his wife, moved into a suite at the Warwick Hotel in New York and began to write his confessions. There he heard about Canada Lee.
Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata was his real name, but ringside announcers describing his fights as a middleweight boxer found that too complicated, and so he became Canada Lee. He was a man of various talents. “All my life, I’ve been on the verge of being something,” he once said. “I’m almost becoming a concert violinist and I run away to the races. I’m almost a good jockey and I go overweight. I’m almost a champion prizefighter and my eyes go bad.”
So he became an actor, a passionate actor at a time when blacks were supposed to be amusing. Some of us remember him reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, and some saw him as Banquo in Orson Welles’s all-black Macbeth, and some of us saw him in whiteface in The Duchess of Malfi, and nobody ever forgot seeing him as the punch-drunk fighter in Garfield’s Body and Soul. Shortly after that, his name appeared in the mass of hearsay flushed out of the FBI files in the course of the spy trial of Judith Coplon. “The drivel that has come from the so-called secret files of the FBI,” Lee called it at a press conference in 1949. “I am not a Communist. . . . I shall continue to speak my mind, I shall continue to help my people gain their rightful place in America.”
That’s what they all said. The next time Canada Lee came up for a TV role, he was barred by the sponsor, the
American Tobacco Company. Over the next three years, he was barred from about forty shows. “How long, how long can a man take this kind of unfair treatment?” he asked the editors of Variety. A few months after that, still unemployed and now penniless, he finally attested his patriotism by publicly participating in a denunciation of Paul Robeson. Perhaps as a consequence—who can ever tell?—he was given a role in the filming of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. It was only a temporary reprieve, and the curtain came down again. “I can’t take it any more,” Lee told Walter White of the NAACP after a few more months of unemployment. “I’m going to get a shoeshine box and sit outside the Astor Theater. My picture is playing to capacity audiences and, my God, I can’t get one day’s work.” White counseled caution and patience, and Lee, all full of rage and desperation, accepted that counsel. A few months later, he was dead, of high blood pressure, at forty-five.
And John Garfield went on writing his confessions for Look. He wrote sixteen pages, then began calling friends, trying to find somebody to talk to. He went to a baseball game with Howard Lindsay, the playwright, and then made a date to come to Lindsay’s house for an evening of poker. Oscar Levant was there, and Lindsay’s collaborator, Russel Crouse. Garfield drank a lot and lost a lot of money. They talked about Odets’s HUAC testimony. Garfield wandered off into the night. He didn’t eat or sleep that day or the next.
Hildegard Knef, the young German actress who was returning home after the second of her unsuccessful encounters with Hollywood, accidentally met Garfield in the lobby of her New York hotel, the Plaza. She recalled him as “a chain smoker with a suit like an unmade bed.”
“Name’s Garfield,” he muttered, as she remembered it. “Saw you in Decision before Dawn. Liked it.” And then, inevitably: “You doing anything? I’d like to talk. Haven’t worked for a while. Feel alone.”
Miss Knef said that she had to go to a party that Spyros Skouras was giving in her honor at the “21” Club. “He rubbed his stubbled chin,” she noted. “ ‘You’re on the way up, eh? How long you have to listen to his bullshit?’ ”
She invited him to come to Skouras’s party, but he demurred. “Me?” he said. “I’d love to see their faces.” They agreed to reach each other by telephone—she was scheduled to fly home to Germany the following morning—but when he called her and they brought the telephone to her table, the ceremonies were still going on.
“Can you get away?” Garfield asked. “I feel like the ceiling is coming down around my ears.”
Miss Knef said the festivities would go on for another hour or two. Garfield said he would call again. Skouras urged her to invite her friend to join the party, but she only shrugged.
At 1 A.M. Garfield called again, and his voice was thick from liquor. “I have to see you,” he said, “gotta talk, walk, speak. Hurry it up.”
“Another hour,” she said. But when she called him at the end of another hour, there was no answer, and so she boarded the early morning plane for Frankfurt.
Garfield had gone to see a new friend, Iris Whitney, who had an apartment on Gramercy Park. They went out to dinner. They sat in the park. Garfield said he felt sick. Miss Whitney took him home and put him to bed. There later were entirely unsubstantiated rumors that he died in the midst of wild fornications. Perhaps. But the official version is, for once, more plausible—that after three days of anxiety, drinking, sleeplessness, and wandering through the wreckage of his life, John Garfield simply collapsed. Miss Whitney put him to bed with a glass of orange juice on his night table. When she woke up the next morning, she found the orange juice untouched and Garfield dead.
The process of expulsion worked in a variety of ways, some political, some nonpolitical, some financial, some moralistic, some a mixture of things. Where, after all, are the dividing lines?
Consider the case of Orson Welles. If the House Un-American Activities Committee had really been trying to extirpate all manifestations of liberalism, as most Hollywood liberals devoutly believed, it would surely have subpoenaed Welles. He had campaigned ardently for Roosevelt, and his newspaper columns and radio shows made him one of Hollywood’s most audible supporters of the New Deal heritage, of civil rights for blacks, and peaceful relations with the Soviet Union. Welles had talked of running for Congress and may well have dreamed of bigger possibilities. Frank Fay, an alcoholic vaudevillian who had recently made a comeback in a play called Harvey, attracted attention in the fall of 1947 when he told an interviewer that Welles was “red as a firecracker.”
The HUAC investigators were not particularly interested in Welles, however. They preferred certifiable Communists who would noisily deny their communism and could then be prosecuted, or else certifiable ex-Communists who would grovel and plead for forgiveness. Welles’s complicated finances, on the other hand, seemed to be of considerable interest to the Internal Revenue Service. Welles had deducted as business expenses all the thousands of dollars that he had put into Around the World in Eighty Days, and the IRS now challenged those deductions. It is difficult to prove instances of the IRS acting for political reasons, but President Roosevelt had long since inaugurated a policy of asking the Treasury to investigate the taxes of anyone he felt like harassing, a list of victims that ranged from Father Coughlin to Mo Annenberg to the New York Times. President Truman’s concern for civil liberties was not notably superior to that of his predecessor, and it was remarkable how consistently the tax investigators concentrated their attentions on outspoken liberals. Welles might indeed have tried to evade some of his taxes, and so might Charlie Chaplin, and so might Ronald Reagan, who was then still regarded as a liberal, and so might such free spirits as Preston Sturges and William Saroyan, but while the IRS pursued all these, it seemed considerably less interested in the returns of conservative icons like Walt Disney or Cecil B. DeMille.
Welles did not leave Hollywood in order to escape his tax problems, though the IRS did eventually follow him to Europe and did file liens against all his earnings in the U.S. Nor is there any clear evidence that Hollywood ceased financing Welles’s films for political reasons. There were perfectly good business reasons why RKO went to court to claim all rights to It’s All True for Welles’s failure to repay a $200,000 loan, perfectly good reasons why Republic should be furious that Welles left Macbeth unfinished for more than a year after he had shot it. By then, by 1948, Europe was exerting its own attractions as a place to make movies. Hollywood producers had discovered that European film crews and locations could be hired cheaply, and European producers had money of their own to offer. Welles negotiated strenuously with Alexander Korda in London to make a film of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and another of Wilde’s Salome. He was less interested, but nonetheless interested, in a proposition from Gregory Ratoff, one of Zanuck’s retainers, to come to Rome and star in a film about the eighteenth-century alchemist, magician, and charlatan known as Count Cagliostro.
So although Welles was not literally driven out of Hollywood, and certainly not driven out for political reasons, it just so happened that a number of circumstances in the fall of 1947 made Europe seem considerably more attractive than Hollywood. And so, when William Wyler invited Welles to his home to join in establishing the Committee for the First Amendment in defense of the Hollywood Ten, Welles was wary. He would be happy to support the committee, Welles said, but he had commitments in Europe. His only real commitment was in Hollywood, where Macbeth still needed redubbing, not to mention the negotiations over a new score by Jacques Ibert, but Welles seems to have felt an acute need to get away. Since Korda was now being evasive about any specific agreements, Welles signed to play Cagliostro.
He flew off to Rome in such haste that he left behind several “health belts,” which were supposed to enable a fat man to sweat off his fat. He also left behind some special makeup and a lot of false noses designed for his performance as Cagliostro. Welles seems to have suffered from a lifelong anxiety about his nose, a feeling that it was too small, too upturned, too cute, not serious. On
e of his lieutenants wrote to the Excelsior Hotel in Rome that a shipment of false noses was on the way, and that “the noses can be used seven or eight times if Orson is careful in removing them.” The lieutenant also sent a shipment of Dexedrine and Proloid.
They were much needed. While Welles spent the first months of 1948 acting in Cagliostro, he also devoted his evenings in Rome to re-editing and redubbing Macbeth, plus negotiating with Korda on Cyrano, plus starting work on what really obsessed him, his own production of Othello. Welles had no producer behind him, and consequently no funds for another Shakespeare film. He planned to finance the project with whatever money he could earn as an actor.
Then to Welles’s hotel in Rome came a telegram from Rita Hayworth, asking him to come and see her on the Riviera as soon as possible. Their divorce would not become final until that November, and Miss Hayworth was quite openly having an affair with Aly Khan, but apparently she and Welles still cared for each other. “I couldn’t get any plane, so I went, stood up, in a cargo plane, to Antibes,” Welles said later. “There were candles and champagne ready—and Rita in a marvelous negligée. And the door closed, and she said, ‘Here I am.’ She . . . asked me to take her back. She said, ‘Marry me.’ ”
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