Marcus looked at her like a wounded dog. “He works for Hoover.”
“Who deported him to Zanzibar. Look, Marcus, I’m thirty-nine and this is only the second time love has come along for me. The first one was married, so it’s not like my track record is anything to write home about.”
“You talk about it as though he’s your last chance.”
A part of Kathryn realized maybe Marcus was right. After all, everyone knew that turning forty led to a long, steep slide into middle age. But that was something to think about at another time. For right now, she felt like Marcus was slipping from her grip and she needed to change tack.
“If you stop and think about it, you can see everything that’s been going on—the Pinkos, the Commies, Reds in the Beds, the Committee for the First Amendment, the HUAC—it’s all about trust, isn’t it? Me trusting you and you trusting me, Hollywood people trusting each other, and even Americans trusting their government, or rather knowing when not to. The point being, if we don’t have people in our lives who we can trust, it all comes down.”
“It is all coming down!” Marcus snarled.
“Exactly my point!” Kathryn wanted to reach out and grab Marcus by the hand, or maybe the arm. She wanted to feel connected to him, but couldn’t be sure that it was the right strategy, so she just angled her body toward him.
“These are all just circumstances,” she said soothingly. “We’ve both been around long enough to know this whole Pinko scare will blow over sooner or later. Hollywood’s not going anywhere—there’s too much money to be made. And when this whole Red thing crumbles away, we’ll still be here. You, me, Gwennie, Oliver . . . maybe Nelson, if I can track him down. And if I do, all I want is for you to be happy for me, Marcus, as I was for you when Oliver came along.”
“Oliver and I is a whole different situation,” Marcus said.
Kathryn felt like her back foot was teetering on the edge of a cliff. She didn’t want her friendship with the most precious person in her life to tumble over the brink, but she couldn’t let him get away with a statement like that.
“It’s not, you know,” she said. “It’s exactly the same.”
“The hell it is.”
She took a deep breath. “For you screenwriters, the Breen Office and its antiquated rules are the enemy. I may have kissed my enemy once or twice, but you’ve been sleeping with yours for how long now?”
“That’s unfair and you know it.”
“No, Marcus, I don’t. We’re both guilty of falling for the enemy, so you’d think we’d both understand how the other feels. But we can’t if one of us is being a hypocrite.”
“What did you just call me?” Marcus exploded.
She gripped the hand rest. “You heard right.”
“Our circumstances are completely different!”
“How?”
“Because Oliver intentionally went to work for the Breen Office to change it from the inside. Your Nelson Hoyt joined the FBI through some misguided attempt to uphold patriotic ideals—”
“MISGUIDED? Oh, come on, you’re assuming an awful lot.”
“—to uphold patriotic ideals that Hoover regards as a temporary obstacle between him and his ambitions. When Oliver does his job, a couple of sex scenes and a joke about the clergy get taken out of some crummy movie nobody will remember a month later. When Hoyt does his job, lives are destroyed, careers are threatened, and reputations are ruined. It’s hardly the same thing at all.”
“It is the same thing,” Kathryn insisted. “It just comes down to a matter of degrees.”
“I’m about to get on a train and go to Washington, where I’ll have to sit before the HUAC with the whole country listening. Meanwhile, you’re tracking down some G-man because you think he’s your last stop before Spinsterville. How is that the same thing?”
It took all the willpower Kathryn could summon not to take his bait.
“You need to trust me on this, Marcus. Nelson might be FBI, but he’s a hell of a decent guy.”
“That’s a laugh and a half. You know, with everything that’s been going on, I thought I could at least trust you!”
She felt as though the edge of that cliff was collapsing under her heel. “Of course you can!”
“Apparently not.”
“Don’t say that, Marcus, honey. Please, let’s not fight—”
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out of my car.”
But you stood up in front of that crowd tonight, she wanted to say. You came to my defense with such loyalty that I nearly cried. We’ve been there for each other for twenty years. Please tell me this just a hiccup along the way and not where it all ends.
“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY CAR BEFORE I PUSH YOU OUT!”
Half-blinded by panic and trembling with fear of the unknown, Kathryn opened the passenger door and stepped onto the deserted sidewalk, and watched through tears as Marcus roared off without so much as a sideways glance.
CHAPTER 44
When they called his name, Marcus ran his hand down the purple necktie knotted at his throat. Touching it felt like stroking a rabbit’s foot. He’d always considered it his lucky tie, and if he’d ever needed luck on his side, it was today. The uniformed page opened the door into the main chamber where the HUAC hearings were taking place. A barrage of noise engulfed him: clicking cameras, murmuring politicians, chattering audience.
He had given no thought to the heat accumulated by hundreds of bodies crammed into a room designed to take half that number. As he squeezed through the labyrinth of desks, microphones, wires, and newsreel cameras, he wished he’d worn a lighter suit. Washington’s October weather was chilly and damp, so his wool jacket had been an obvious choice. But this room was a sauna, and sweating men look like liars.
He followed a succession of pages directing him toward the witness stand until he arrived at a wooden desk in front of the panel. He recognized all six of them from the newspapers: Mundt from South Dakota, Wood from Georgia, McDowell from Pennsylvania, Nixon from California, Rankin from Mississippi, and the HUAC chairman. J. Parnell Thomas—a man with a bowling-ball head, lipless mouth, deer-in-headlight eyes, and a chin that pleated when he looked down at his notes.
As Marcus took his seat, Thomas threaded his fingers together and waited for the press photographers to get their shots. When they were done, he said, “Please state your full name and current occupation.”
Blinded by the flash bulbs, Marcus leaned into the five microphones lining the edge of the desk. “My name is Marcus James Adler, and I am currently employed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”
“In what capacity?”
A cruel case of cottonmouth left Marcus dry. The nearest person was a serious young man with stacks of filled notebooks piled in front of him. “Is there any way I could get some water?” The guy nodded. Marcus faced the panel again. “I head up the writing department at MGM, overseeing the screenplays for all MGM motion pictures.”
“Mr. Adler,” the man’s tone had turned a shade brusque, “I’m now going to ask you the same question we are asking every witness, and I remind you that you are currently under oath. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Where is that water? “No, I am not, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party.”
His statement stirred a restless wave through the press corps.
“I’d like to ask you about a specific film,” the chairman continued. “I’m referring to Free Leningrad!”
Before he left for Washington, a panel of MGM’s lawyers had prepared Marcus for the types of questions he was likely to encounter. “Uniformity of response is crucial,” they said. “To wit: You have never knowingly encountered Communists in MGM’s writing department, nor have you identified the infiltration of the Communist message into any MGM screenplay under your jurisdiction. You have never knowingly worked with Communists at MGM in any capacity. You neither support nor endorse the guiding principle of the
Communist Party. You’re being called as a friendly witness,” they told him. “You’re simply there to support and reinforce Mayer’s statement. Nothing more.”
Mayer had been one of the first witnesses called to the stand on the first day of hearings. He read out a prepared statement condemning all things Communist, then sat through a lengthy session of questions from the panel. The same thing happened with the next three witnesses: Jack Warner, Ayn Rand, and Ronald Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild.
None of the MGM lawyers had warned him the committee might veer off into particulars. Marcus pressed his eyes closed to regain his poise.
“Is it correct,” Nixon pressed, “that you authored the screenplay of Free Leningrad!?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us, please, how you came to write it?”
Already thrown off kilter by this line of question, Marcus’ mind grew foggy. “That was a while ago.”
Nixon shook his head. “I must caution you against developing selective amnesia.” Laughter rippled through the huge room. “Free Leningrad! came out only a couple of years ago. Surely you can recall its genesis.”
Where is that water?
Groping around the back blocks of his mind, Marcus stumbled on the memory of a conference in Mayer’s office.
“I was called to a meeting with Mr. Mayer and Mr. Mannix. They said we needed a new pro-Allies story. Song of Russia had already been released, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was about to come out, but they saw the need for something else.”
“So Free Leningrad! was your idea?” Thomas asked.
“I guess you could say that, yes.”
“You could say it, Mr. Adler, or you do say it?”
A middle-aged blonde in an unadorned gray suit approached the witness stand with a pitcher of water and a glass. She set them on the table but made no attempt to pour any for him. She withdrew from his peripheral vision, slinking backwards like a slave girl in some Maria Montez melodrama.
Marcus poured the water himself and took a long sip.
“I’d had an idea for a picture about neighbors living on the same street, and how they each dealt with the war. I conceived it taking place on Main Street, USA, but Mayer and Mannix said they needed something international, so I reset the story during the siege of Leningrad.”
“So you changed an American story into one that depicted Russians sympathetically?” The slope-nosed Nixon looked at him with a snicker in his eyes.
“The siege had just ended, so I saw it as a story of triumph over oppression.”
“You wrote a film about the triumph of the Russian people?”
Nixon’s question sounded more like a statement. Restlessness rolled through the audience gallery. Marcus searched it for a familiar face, but found only strangers. Where’s the Committee for the First Amendment?
Much had been made in the press about the arrival in Washington of the CFA, who’d come to protest what they saw as a travesty of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Many of the people who’d been in Ira Gershwin’s living room that night arrived on a TWA airplane chartered by Howard Hughes. Marcus could see none of them.
He eyed the panel. “Was that a question?”
“I have one.” This declaration came from John Rankin, the gaunt-faced representative from Mississippi. “Have you ever boarded a Soviet ship?”
The full impact of what was going on hit Marcus like a Joe Louis left hook. In two and a half days of testimonials, nobody had named names or admitted affiliation with the Communist Party. They need to start playing rough, otherwise the public will lose interest and all their grandstanding will blow up in their faces. I’m being thrown to the goddamned lions. He raked the gallery again for a specific face: Kathryn’s. It was a moment before the memory of that fight in his car jabbed his chest.
“Mr. Adler, do you need me to repeat the question?”
He felt a ring of sweat circling his neck. “Yes, I have. It was a Russian battleship.”
Another swell of anticipation throbbed through the Romans, their eyes fixed on the luckless Christian.
“Can you recall this ship’s name?”
“No, sir, I cannot.”
“Would it refresh your memory if I were to remind you that also present were Charlie Chaplin, Lewis Milestone, John Garfield, and their wives?”
“I know the evening you are referring to, but I cannot recall the name of the ship.”
“And the reason you were there?”
“I’m invited to many social gatherings,” Marcus said. “This particular one came from Konstantin Simonov. In the course of the evening, it became apparent that I was invited so that he could pitch a movie idea, a biopic on the life of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova.”
“Another Russian?” Nixon asked. Before Marcus could respond, he interjected, “Do you consider yourself a friend of Charlie Chaplin?”
At a New York press conference held the day after the premiere of his new movie, Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin was asked if he was a Communist. Things did not go Chaplin’s way, nor had they ever since.
“Not especially,” Marcus said.
Rankin picked up a photograph, handed it to a bailiff, and pointed in Marcus’ direction. Marcus knew what photograph it was—the one taken aboard ship that night.
But he was wrong.
It was definitely him and Chaplin, but Marcus couldn’t place it.
“Please identify this photograph, Mr. Adler,” Thomas said.
“I—er—need a moment . . .”
Something in the background jostled Marcus’ memory. It was taken at the premiere of William Tell. Chaplin had come over to greet Alla Nazimova, and when Alla told Chaplin that Marcus wrote the movie, he insisted the photograph be taken in front of a huge painting of Napoleon Bonaparte on horseback in the foyer of the Carthay Circle Theatre.
Realizing he’d been painted into a corner, Marcus identified the time and place of the photograph in his hand.
“I’d like to circle back to this Free Leningrad! picture, if I may.” This came from Mundt.
Big surprise. You’re all in this together.
“The portrayal of the Russian family in that motion picture, how would you categorize it?”
Unusable words like “sympathetic” and “brave” and “relatable” Ping-Ponged around Marcus’ mind. He was still trying to come up with one that didn’t sink him even deeper into this cesspool when Mundt said,
“You portrayed Russians as good, honest, hardworking people. Isn’t that accurate?”
DAMN YOU! SCREW YOU! FUCK YOU!
Marcus took in the deepest breath he could muster.
“With all due respect, I am staggered that this committee appears to be incapable of recognizing that the sands of international allegiances are ever shifting. We were united with the Russians against the Axis. Hollywood’s hand in maintaining this country’s morale was to paint sympathetic portraits of the Allies—including Russia. You cannot hold me responsible for something I did when Russia was on our side any more than you can hold me to account for the fact that the US and Russia now find themselves on opposing sides of the ideological divide.”
A dozen people in the gallery’s back row broke into fervent applause. Marcus could make out Bogie and Bacall, Paul Heinrich and Ira Gershwin. A flash of guilt over his assumption they’d deserted him transmuted into a surge of confidence.
Thomas grabbed up his gavel and banged it several times.
“Mr. Adler, we would ask you to confine yourself to our questions instead of playing to the press.” Chairman Thomas shuffled the papers in front of him and fixed Marcus with an unyielding stare. “Are you the son of Roland Adler, the current mayor of McKeesport, Pennsylvania?”
The question sucked the breath from Marcus’ lungs.
“Please answer the question.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you aware that in 1895, your father joined the Communist Party?”
While the details of hi
s mother’s face had started to fray with the passage of time, he could still call to mind the thick black hair pomaded severely back from a round face with an aquiline nose that gave it edges it shouldn’t have, scowling, thick eyebrows, and a downward sloping mouth. But more than that, Marcus could recall the uncompromisingly strict standpoint from which his father approached everything he did, everything he believed, and everything he was. Marcus could think of nobody less likely to be a Communist.
“That’s a lie!” he shouted into the microphones.
Thomas held up a document for Marcus—and the press—to see. “I am in possession of a photograph of a Communist Party membership card dated 1895. It is made out to a Roland Adler, whose stated profession is coal miner. Mr. Adler, are you aware that your family came from Russia?”
From . . . Russia??? Forming words was beyond him.
“Are you aware that your ancestors migrated to America from the resort town of Adler on the Black Sea?” Thomas held up a map of Eastern Europe, from the western coast of Greece to the far side of the Caspian Sea. He used a pencil to pinpoint a dot he’d circled in black.
It’s not far from Yalta, where Alla was born. Marcus wondered if that was why the two of them had such a close connection. We were both Russian and never knew it.
“Would the witness please answer the question?”
Marcus cleared his throat. “My father never talked about his family background. I know nothing of where his ancestors came from.”
“Given the revelations unearthed in this line of questioning,” Thomas said, “I feel we need to ask you again, Mr. Adler: Are you currently now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
I’m screwed nine ways to Sunday. Leilah O’Roarke’s most popular whore on her busiest day of the year has never come close to being as screwed as this. “You’re being called as a friendly witness,” they said. “Just reinforce Mayer’s statement.” Nobody mentioned anything about a sacrificial lamb being led to slaughter.
Reds in the Beds Page 30