Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Dion was allowed home for the summer. He was fifteen, and Barbara forced Bob to sit in on the family decision about the boy’s future. “She gave me the lecture of my life,” Dion would recall. Before she sent Dion back to the Culver Military Academy, he would claim that his mother saw to it that he was deflowered by a professional. On a sweaty Saturday night, Uncle Buck took him to Hollywood. “Uncle Buck explained that Mother had paid for the high-priced call girl to teach me the facts of life. Soon after this incident I got a call from Uncle Buck, and asked him if I could come home. He told me to forget it, to forget that Barbara Stanwyck was my mother. He said, ‘She wants nothing to do with you.’”

  Barbara’s attitude toward her sisters and their families was somewhat more caring if no less aloof. She paid for college for Mabel’s son, Eugene Vaslett, but made sure he didn’t go to school too close by. Gene was sent to Indiana like Dion, to graduate from the University of Notre Dame. Maud and Mildred were still in New York. While Barbara helped her brother, Byron, after he married and made a career as a movie extra, she saw Millie only a couple of times during her infrequent East Coast visits.

  Imperceptibly at first, the golden era was ending. Movie attendance was slipping—down to 62 million—from 80 million in 1946. MGM had no pictures for Bob. Barbara, however, was the most booked-up actress in Hollywood.

  The studio against which all the other film factories measured themselves began a round of cost cutting. Twenty-five percent of MGM’s workforce was furloughed. From the lofty New York headquarters of Metro’s corporate parent, Loews Inc., came orders that Mayer better find another Irving Thalberg to ride herd on production. A year later, Louis B. persuaded Dore Schary—the studio boss at RKO until running afoul of Howard Hughes—to become Metro’s production chief. Stanwyck was committed to do four pictures for Warners and four for Hal Wallis. She was also tentatively set to do four for Enterprise Pictures.

  Independent filmmaking was the wave of the future. Although theater owners complained as loudly as New York critics that the output was too bland, the studio bosses failed to see that the slipping movie attendance was a protest vote.

  Barbara sensed that the screen fare the film factories put out reflected larger misgivings. The optimism of V-J Day was giving way to a vague defensiveness, to xenophobic and anticommunist hostility. When President Truman needed not only spiritual but tactical backing for the “devil” theory of communism, he sought the advice of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Vandenberg’s counsel was famous: “Scare the hell out of the country, Harry.” The president set the course with the creation of his Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty in November 1946. Under the new law 2.5 million federal employees were to be checked by loyalty review boards. As a guide, Attorney General Tom Clark prepared a list of organizations he considered “subversive.” Truman was to regret the excesses four years later when the anticommunist hysteria came to a head with Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism.

  Communism had been a big issue in the 1946 congressional elections. In California, the Republican Committee of One Hundred asked soon-to-be-demobilized navy lieutenant commander Richard Nixon to run, all campaign costs paid, against Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, who had been an effective member of Congress for many years and was the sponsor of the National School Lunch Act. Bob and Barbara were registered Republicans. Nixon had their endorsement as well as the backing of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. With never-proven charges that Voorhis was “the candidate of the Kremlin,” Nixon won the election.

  During the winter of 1946-47, the loyalty question was an irresistible grandstand for members of Congress. Not to be outdone by the president, the House Committee on Un-American Activities remembered Hollywood’s prewar radical chic, its rallies for Spain, near-under-ground organizing of the Screen Writers Guild, the Federal Theatre and Federal Writers Project, which HUAC chairman Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey termed “sheer propaganda for communism or the New Deal.”

  Probing artists with a penchant for speaking up was nothing new. In 1938, when the House panel was called the Dies Committee after its chairman, Representative Martin Dies, its investigation of the Federal Theatre helped kill that New Deal project.

  Bob and Barbara were swept up in the turmoil of political correctness that turned friends and coworkers against each other, Bob to become an informer, Barbara a superpatriot. Barbara denounced communists, and Bob hunted down subversives. Without saying who Stanwyck personally rebuked, Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote in the vernacular of the day that Barbara “blasted Hollywood Reds to their faces” and turned down a highly profitable proposition “entirely on grounds of patriotism.”

  Together with Ward Bond, Bob denounced suspect communists and fellow travelers. Hedda Hopper spent the summer of 1947 traveling across the country urging members of women’s clubs to boycott films that featured “communist” actors.

  Christian values were now seen as a cornerstone in America’s ramparts against heathen Marxism. Ruby Stevens dreamed of being a missionary; Barbara Stanwyck never went to church. In her prewar custody battles with Frank Fay, she condemned her former husband’s Catholic showboating, but at a Helen Ferguson party attended by Adela, Bob and Barbara, Dorothy Manners, and celebrity photographer Paul Hess, Barbara spoke passionately about the need for a vital, living Christianity and accused politicians of failing to guide people toward Christian enlightenment.

  The Alliance met once a month at the American Legion auditorium on Highland Avenue, where its members listened to inspirational speeches from anticommunist crusaders like Louis Budenz, the former managing editor of the Daily Worker who had found God and sought to expiate his former sins. In radio speeches he denounced an all-powerful agent who, he claimed, traveled the country as the Kremlin’s secret representative. Ayn Rand wrote in Alliance news releases that the purpose of Hollywood’s communists was “to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting nonpolitical movies—in introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic principles of collectivism by indirection and implication.”

  Representative Thomas came to Los Angeles in May 1947 on an initial fishing expedition. With his assistant Robert E. Stripling, a former FBI agent, the congressman held a series of “interviews” in his hotel suite at the downtown Biltmore Hotel. The interviews were held in camera, but after each session Thomas and Stripling told reporters what they unearthed. One example, Thomas said, was the discovery that in 1943 the Roosevelt administration had “wielded the iron fist in order to get companies to put on certain communist propaganda.” When asked for specifics, the U.S. representative said Robert Taylor had told him how government officials delayed his navy commission so he could complete Song of Russia.

  The pressure, Bob had testified, had come right from the White House, from “Roosevelt aides.” The charge was sensational.

  HEDDA HOPPER, BOB AND BARBARA’S FELLOW MEMBER OF THE Alliance, devoted a column to the Taylors and applauded Bob’s testimony at the Biltmore hearings. “I admire Bob’s courage in testifying in the investigation of communism in the film industry,” she wrote. She quoted him as saying, “It’s getting so that if a person is not a communist he’s called a fascist.”

  Not everybody was ready to be branded communist or fascist. Dore Schary, the new production chief at MGM, called the Alliance members a bunch of “Yahoos.” Hopper went after him and almost got herself fired for writing that the Schary appointment meant “the studio will be known as Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow.” A threat of a lawsuit brought abject apologies from the columnist and, to smooth things out, a personal call on Schary by Los Angeles Times owner and publisher Norman Chandler.

  Hysteria and guilt besieged the film industry. By midsummer, Bertolt Brecht and eighteen others were publicly accused of being agents of un-American propaganda. Larry Parks was an actor, and John Howard Lawson the first president of the Screen Writer
s Guild. Fellow writers were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maitz, Samuel Ornitz, Waldo Salt, and Dalton Trumbo. Adrian Scott was a writer-producer, Robert Rossen a writer-director, and Edward Dmytryk, Lewis Milestone, and Irving Pichel directors. When only Bessie, Biberman, Cole, Dmytryk, Lardner, Lawson, Maitz, Ornitz, Scott, and Trumbo were subpoenaed to testify, along with Brecht, they became known as the Hollywood Ten.

  In September, William Wyler and John Huston invited a few people to meet at Lucy’s Restaurant on Melrose Avenue. Wyler, who was born in Mulhouse when Alsace was German and who, with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, had become a French citizen, was appalled that other foreign-borns—Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, and even Frank Capra—wrapped themselves in the righteous mantle of superpatriots, Capra apparently at the advice of members of the Alliance. By the end of the evening, Wyler, Huston, screenwriter Philip Dunne, and actor Alexander Knox had formed the Committee for the First Amendment—an organization soon listed by the California Un-American Activities as a communist front. “We tried to defend not so much the Ten as a person’s right to keep his political beliefs to himself, that no one would have to disclose whether he was a communist,” Wyler would remember.

  The committee gathered an imposing collection of supporters, from Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Groucho Marx, and Myrna Loy to literary heavyweights like George S. Kaufman and Archibald MacLeish, and a few producers, including Jerry Wald. Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, Marsha Hunt, Ira Gershwin, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Conte, Paul Henreid, Robert Presnell, and others followed. Besides Bogart, Stanwyck had worked with many of them.

  BOB RECEIVED A SUBPOENA DATED SEPTEMBER 25, 1947, DEMAND-ing that he appear before the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives October 18. Barbara couldn’t come with him to Washington since she was to start B. F/s Daughter a week later. Bob traveled with Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, and his two predecessors in that office, George Murphy and Robert Montgomery, and with Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela—all to be “friendly” witnesses.

  Thomas brought his committee to order in the caucus room on the second floor of the Old House Office Building in Washington. The room was large enough to accommodate the press and give HUAC what it needed most—publicity. Nine newsreel cameras and broadcasting equipment lined the walls, and the press table held ninety-four reporters.

  The first witnesses were Jack Warner, Walter Disney, Louis B. Mayer, and Sam Wood. “Ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries,” Warner read from an opening statement. “Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to contribute 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 communist system to ours.” He stressed his belief that screenwriters were “injecting communist stuff” into scripts. When asked how many employees this involved, he replied six, but named sixteen, including eight not identified before: Clifford Odets, Guy Endore, John Wexley, Julius and Philip Epstein, Sheridan Gibney, Emmet Lavery, and Irwin Shaw.

  Of the “named,” Barbara had worked with six. She had starred in Odets’s Golden Boy. Dalton Trumbo was the author of the You Belong to Me story, Philip Epstein was the writer of The Bride Walks Out and The Mad Miss Mantón, Rossen of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Milestone. Pichel directed her in The Bride Wore Boots, and Albert Maitz, who in a 1946 New Masses article said art was not so much the Marxist-Leninist weapon in the class struggle as a strait-jacket, was the rewrite man on the Mildred Pierce script she had wanted to play.

  Mayer’s testimony amounted to damage control on the Song of Russia charge. The nattily dressed studio chief was anxious to “clear up a misunderstanding—how Robert Taylor had been ‘forced’” into playing an American sympathetic to the Soviet Union in Song of Russia.

  “I thought Robert Taylor ideal for the male role, but he did not like the story,” Mayer testified. “At the time, Taylor mentioned his pending commission in the Navy, so I telephoned the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and told him of the situation, recalled the good that had been accomplished with Mrs. Miniver and other pictures released during the war period. The Secretary called back and said he thought Taylor could be given time to make the film before being called to the service.”

  Ayn Rand tore into Song of Russia. Although she had last seen Moscow in 1926, she scornfully described MGM’s Moscow as a city of “big, prosperous-looking, clean buildings, with something like swans or sailboats in the background.” And Robert Taylor mingled with “happy peasants … children with operetta costumes … manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women coming home from work singing.”

  John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican, wondered if nobody smiled in Russia anymore.

  Rand was relentless. “Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.”

  “They don’t smile?” McDowell came back.

  “Not quite that way, no.”

  Wood denounced John Cromwell, one of Stanwyck’s favorite directors, as an agent of a foreign power and testified that the film industry group to be watched most carefully was the writers. When Stripling asked if the director would care to name any he knew to be communists, he named Trumbo, Stewart, and Lawson. Why them? Because when the Hollywood Reporter asked them, “Are you a communist?” they had refused to answer. When asked to give an example of how communist writers worked, he said they portrayed bankers and senators as “heavies.”

  Times and dates of the appearance of witnesses were classified. Crowds increased for the October 22 hearing when word leaked out this was the day Robert Taylor would testify.

  Bob took his assigned seat at the witness table on schedule. Before investigator Stripling could ask any question, Bob started by backing down on the Song of Russia uproar. “In my own defense, lest I look a little silly by saying I was ever forced to do a picture,” he began, “I was not forced because nobody can force you to make any picture.” Elaborating on Mayer’s “misunderstanding,” he said the script had been written long before anyone in government could make suggestions.

  So the story of the Roosevelt White House dictating to Hollywood was just that—a one-edition sensation.

  Perhaps to make sure his testimony was not a total waste for the committee, Bob said he had been “looking for communists for a long time.” He agreed with Stripling that it was primarily among screenwriters that “red” infiltration occurred. With newsreel cameras whirring, he named one writer, Lester Cole (but hastened to say he didn’t know Cole personally), one character actor, Howard Da Silva, and the starlet Karen Morley.

  He said he would refuse to work with any actor merely under suspicion of being a communist: “I’m afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow-travelers and communists do.” Representative Richard Nixon congratulated Bob on his fearlessness in testifying. There was no mention of the fact that Cole was the screenwriter of The High Wall, the best script Bob had ever been offered.

  When Bob was dismissed and headed for the door, spectators clustered around him for autographs and followed him out of the building to his car. The New York Post’s coverage of Bob’s testimony was headlined: BOBBY SOXERS AND NATION CHEER ROBERT TAYLOR AS HE URGES BAN ON REDS, but the reaction of the establishment press was less approving. Responsible newspapers pointed out that attacking colleagues’ reputations and livelihoods did not quite agree with American ideals.

  26

  PREJUDICE

  STANWYCK HAD LITTLE TASTE FOR OPINIONS THAT COULD BE CALLED “controversial.” She was neither naive nor evasive. She was practical. Even if she, her husband, and their friends had no true understanding of the fierce ideological issues involved, the cold war favored right-wing sentiments. Americans were
shocked when they heard the Soviet Union had detonated an atom bomb, Mao Zedong’s communists were winning in China, and former State Department official Alger Hiss was accused of passing government documents to Whit-taker Chambers. Threats of picketing and boycotts by such right-wing groups as the American Legion frightened Hollywood. The actor in Bob enjoyed his offscreen cold-warrior notoriety. When he was spotted in restaurants, Tom Purvis would remember, people sent drinks over and lifted their glasses in toast to the “Commie hunter.”

  Barbara was careful not to make any public pronouncements. As Bob went into strategy sessions with Louis B. and Hedda Hopper, she sensed a backlash in the making when the Committee for the First Amendment mobilized against the friendly witnesses. The committee organized two national broadcasts, chartered a plane so Humphrey Bogart could lead a star-studded delegation to Washington, and saw itself grow into a national Committee of One Thousand that included Albert Einstein. Bob had his boss in his corner, but among fellow actors, he was now regarded as being intolerant as Ward Bond, John Wayne, and Adolphe Menjou. Barbara and he became charter members of the new Hollywood Republican Committee, formed to encourage the industry to back Republicans in the 1948 elections. The committee favored California governor Earl Warren for president.

  The “unfriendly” witnesses’ defense was organized in Lewis Milestone’s living room on Doheny Drive. Several top lawyers, including Robert Kenny, who had succeeded Earl Warren as California’s attorney general, were present. A 1943 Supreme Court decision rejecting compulsory salutes to the flag held that the government could not make anyone profess his loyalty or punish him for refusing to do so. Disastrously, as it turned out, Kenny suggested that instead of politely invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, the witnesses should evade and parry all questions and yet deny they were refusing to answer.