by William Boyd
The Hollywood Ten were not so lucky either. They had pleaded the First Amendment—the constitutional right to freedom of thought and opinion—and had been cited for contempt of Congress. This had been foreseen and planned for. In the Supreme Court there was a majority of liberal judges who, it was calculated, would overturn the verdict. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1949 two of the judges died and were replaced by hardline reactionaries. The Ten went to prison and the HUAC hearings on Hollywood subversives resumed with new spiteful vigor in 1951.
That was a fretful year of genuine worry for me. I felt sure that Brayfield and his subcommittee would release their findings or the dossier itself. But nothing happened. Slowly, I began to relax. Perhaps the dossier had been a crude trick to try and panic an admission out of me? Perhaps it had never existed? Sometimes I saw the open sessions in Washington on television and I would contemplate Brayfield’s fat sweaty face among the others on the committee with a mixture of loathing and acute trepidation. But I seemed to have been forgotten. Others were subpoenaed, took the Fifth and were blacklisted, or named names and were cleared. Then I noticed that I was forgotten because the damage had already been done. I was graylisted. I approached other studios for work—but as Eddie had predicted, the damage had been done.
In 1950 I was dropped from the Legion’s list, but Red Connections and AMPOPAWL never left me out. Briefly in 1952 I appeared on the MPAPAI list and got a call from a man in Alert Inc. offering to get my name cleared for a cost of one thousand dollars. I didn’t have the money then so I asked him to call back, but he never did. As I hadn’t made a film since 1944, I assumed that Alert Inc. had concluded that it was hardly worth clearing someone so evidently unemployable as me.
I had some savings, profits from The Equalizer, some money I’d inherited from my father, and I was soon reduced to living off my capital. I did three versions of the Jesse James script for Eddie, until I realized he had no intentions of making the film and it was merely a way of giving me money. Eventually I told him I wouldn’t go on. So I wrote another script, a story of adolescent love loosely based on my own entanglement with Donald Verulam and Faye Hobhouse. I embellished my experiences in World War II with Two Dogs Running and produced a war adventure called Alpha Beach, St.-Tropez. Eddie paid me for them out of charity.
I sublet the ground floor of my house. I rented a room to Nora Lee Madrazon and the rest to an Austrian couple, the Linds, friends of the Coopers. When funds ran lower still, I took up teaching again, some maths but increasingly English lessons, mainly to Japanese immigrants and some Filipino relatives of Nora Lee. Ends met with some difficulty.
When I told Karl-Heinz what had happened, he seemed more concerned for me than for his own prospects. Curiously, from that point on his own career advanced. He acted under the name K. H. Cornfield and he soon had a steady supply of small roles—usually playing shady or dandified foreigners—in films and on television. He never moved from his two-room apartment in the Hotel Cythera on the seafront. The hotel became another 129B Stralauer Allee: its unpretentious decrepitude was the sort of environment he flourished in, and besides, as he put it, the beach was so very handy. He would reassure me when, in my low moments, I used to bemoan my wretched luck. “Don’t worry, Johnny,” he would say. “I know we’ll finish The Confessions.” He saw something talismanic in our encounter in Weilburg in 1918. Over thirty years ago, he would remind me. Who could have guessed then that the two of us would be living in Los Angeles? There had to be some reason for it. I wished I could have shared his confidence.
Outbreaks of war always affected my life in surprising ways. At the end of June 1950, the day after the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel, my affair with Nora Lee Madrazon began. She came upstairs with a cousin to arrange an English lesson for him and stayed on for a coffee after he had left. Lori, though hefty, had had a pretty face. Nora Lee had inherited this, modified somewhat by her half-Filipino blood. She looked Eastern—dark skin, slanted eyes, straight black hair—but she was in fact unregenerate American. It was this juxtaposition that particularly attracted me. I admit that the fact she was nineteen years old had something to do with it as well. She had a slim brown body with perfectly round, almost black nipples. She was tired of boys, she said; that’s why she liked me. She had been renting the room from me for almost a year before we became lovers and couldn’t understand what had taken me so long.
“Chauncy and Hall figure we’ve been balling since I moved in.”
“They do?” I didn’t go to the diner very often, but that explained the leering familiarity with which they greeted me. “Don’t they mind?”
“Why should they? They know about you and Mom. You’re practically one of the family.”
And so my life progressed on this somewhat reduced level. I still had my small circle of friends—Karl-Heinz, the Gasts, the Coopers, the Hitzigs and Monika. Monika’s career too had taken a leap forward. Now that she conceded she was a mature woman she began to get more work, particularly on television. She urged me to try the television and then the radio companies, which I did, only to find that the graylist made me if anything even more of a pariah. As long as I appeared on lists I would get no work. I thought vaguely about paying to have my name “cleared,” but when I rang Alert Inc. they told me it would now cost between five and ten thousand dollars. The longer I left it, the harder it became.
I had plenty of time on my hands. One bonus of my new leisure was that I discovered California north of Los Angeles. Karl-Heinz and I spent two long holidays near Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula in ’51 and ’52. I liked the coast up there. It reminded me vaguely of Scotland—the pines, the cliffs, the small beaches in coves—and of holidays I had taken as a child with Oonagh, Donald, Thompson and my father.
However, it was on that second trip in ’52 that I noticed the surveillance had begun again. I spotted a maroon Dodge behind us on the highway from Ventura to San Luis Obispo, where we stopped for lunch. I saw it again two days later when we made a trip to the hot springs at Tassajara. I didn’t tell Karl-Heinz because I didn’t want to spoil his vacation. I wasn’t that perturbed. Since the day I had been called before the Brayfield Subcommittee I knew I had been watched. As Eddie had predicted, my phone was tapped for two years. My mail was intercepted regularly (everything from Britain was opened). I was often aware of being followed, though I could never identify the men doing it. Once or twice I had seen a figure in the crowd that looked oddly familiar. He reminded me of the man I had seen jump into his car the day I was subpoenaed. I never saw his face. It was something about his posture that nagged at me: the set of his shoulders, the rake of his hat … I couldn’t place it.
The year turned, my fifty-fourth birthday came around, and for the first time I began contemplating giving it all up. One evening with Karl-Heinz, drinking Scotch in his rooms at the Cythera, he began talking about the five months he’d spent at Drumlarish with Mungo Dale—old Sir Hector had passed away in ’39. (In fact Karl-Heinz talked very fondly of Mungo and from time to time prurient speculations flitted across my mind.…) Anyway, I felt a sudden urge to abandon everything, to go back home to Scotland and settle down. I confided this to Karl-Heinz. He laughed at me. “You’d go mad,” he said. “Wait till you’re sixty, and besides we have to finish The Confessions.” I was moved by his faith. It was much stronger than mine. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this crazy witch-hunt can’t last forever.”
He was wrong. A few weeks later I was round at Ernest Cooper’s house having Sunday lunch when a U.S. marshal knocked on his door and served him with the dreaded pink subpoena. Ernest looked as if he had been shot. I tried to calm him down.
“They can’t do anything to you, Ernest. It’s not like it was in Germany. They can’t lock you up. Just plead the Fifth like I did.”
“Then they blacklist you. You haven’t worked for three years.”
“Well, not properly, that’s true. But … why don’t you lie? Look at Bertolt.”
I could
make no headway. He was terrified.
The next day Monika Alt phoned me. She had been subpoenaed too. Werner Hitzig as well.
“Have you been subpoenaed?” she asked.
“No. Why? I was subpoenaed in ’48.”
“Well, why are they calling us and not you? They’ve been watching you for years, you said.”
I didn’t like the implication in her tone of voice.
“It’s got nothing to do with me, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m sorry, Johnny. No, it’s just that I’m worried. Everything’s going so well for me now. I got a film at Fox. Eddie promised me something at Lone Star. I can’t go on those filthy lists, I just can’t.”
“They call masses of people. Hundreds. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
I saw Monika’s appearance on television. It looked like an enormous press conference: microphones, TV cameras, lights, a crowd of about four hundred people. Monika looked marvelous. She denied everything and seemed to have an easy time. Ernest admitted that he had been in the Communist party in Germany before World War II but insisted that since then he had utterly repudiated everything it stood for and was now staunchly and proudly American. Werner Hitzig took the Fifth.
Two days later I was lugging groceries from a supermarket to my car when I heard a hoarse stage whisper.
“Mr. Todd.”
I looked round. It was Page Farrier, crouched behind a Chrysler. He pointed at an open-air hot dog stand a couple of hundred yards away.
“See you there. Ten minutes.”
Page arrived eventually, with a caution that would have done credit to a commando behind enemy lines. I had seen him regularly over the intervening years. He picked up my scripts for Eddie and delivered payment in cash. I knew him well. He sat down. I had ordered him a Dr Pepper and a chili dog. I knew he liked them.
“Ah, no thanks, Mr. Todd. Really, I can’t eat.”
“How’s Brooke [his wife]? Rockwell and Stockyard [his children]?”
“Stockard. Fine, fine. Yes. Fine, all fine.”
“Good. What’s up?”
“You’ve been named. In executive session.”
“What? Who by, for Christ’s sake?”
“Some people called Monika Alt and Ernest Cooper.”
“What did they say?”
He opened a notebook. “That you were a member of a revolutionary Communist cell in Berlin in the twenties. That you were a member of the Santa Monica chapter of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the thirties. That you consorted with subversives in Mexico in 1939.” Page looked shocked. “This is much worse than last time,” he said. “They’re going to subpoena you again. This time it will be Washington, the full committee, open session. The works.”
“God.” I felt very tired. “What should I do?”
Page cleared his throat. “Well, with the open session you’ve got three choices. Plead the First and go to prison for contempt. Plead the Fifth and effectively admit your guilt. And you get on the MPAA blacklist. Or, three, name names. Tell them all the Communists and ex-Communists you know. You get cleared and you can work.” He paused, and popped a gherkin from his plate into his mouth. “You see,” he said munching, “the ultimate test of a witness is not whether he lies or whether he tells the truth. It’s the extent to which he cooperates with the committee. And the only way to do that is inform.”
“So what do you suggest I do?”
“Well … name names. Everyone’s doing it. Look, even your friends have named you.” He gave a puzzled smiled. “I tell you, people are naming their family, their friends, their colleagues. Anything to get off the list.” He looked at me worriedly. “But in your case, Mr. Todd …”
“Take the Fifth?”
“Yes.”
“What do I risk?”
“They might deport you. But I doubt it, because you’re British.”
I sat in silence for a while. Page began to nibble at his chili dog.
“Terrible times we live in, Mr. Todd,” he said. “I know there’s going to be a nuclear war—an atomic bomb war—for sure. In the next two, three years. There has to be.”
“Surely not.”
“Yes. Oh yes. Without any doubt. I’m absolutely certain.”
“But you can’t be worrying about that?”
“But what about these camps they’ve got ready for subversives? They’re getting ready for a war.”
“Nonsense.”
“No. The McCarran Act. All subversives are going to be held in concentration camps. Why pass the act if nothing’s going to happen?”
“Me included, no doubt. Relax, Page, for God’s sake. Do yourself a favor. And listen, you don’t need to come with me to Washington. I can plead the Fifth on my own.” I stood up. “Send me your bill.” I held out my hand. “See you soon, Page.”
“Don’t shake my hand. Don’t. Just sorta wave casually.…” He gave me a wry smile.
I waved casually and left.
BRAYFIELD: Todd, you got your nose against the penitentiary gates! I warn you!
TODD: The Fifth Amendment allows—
BRAYFIELD: This is a Communist party card issued to John James Todd in Berlin, Germany, 1926—
TODD: It is a patent forgery.
BRAYFIELD: The next time you refuse I’m going to call a marshal and have you sent to jail!
CHAIRMAN: Representative Brayfield, please.
BRAYFIELD: I apologize.… I put it to you, Mr. Todd, that your last film, The Equalizer, was un-American.
TODD: It’s pro-American.
BRAYFIELD: You denigrate one of America’s folk heroes, Billy the Kid.
TODD: Billy the Kid was a thief and a murderer. The hero of my film is a law enforcer, like Mr. Hoover, Sherriff Pat Garrett. [Muttering among the representatives.]
TODD: May I ask if Representative Brayfield has seen the film?
BRAYFIELD: No, I have not.… I don’t need to see pornography to know what it is. What nationality are you, Mr. Todd?
TODD: I’m British.
BRAYFIELD: How long have you lived in the United States?
TODD: Since 1937, off and on. I made two visits to Europe. One in World War II when I was a war correspondent for America—
BRAYFIELD: Why have you never applied for citizenship? You were married to an American, were you not?
TODD: Yes, but I’m British. There was no need—
BRAYFIELD: Well, Mr. Todd, I’m going to do everything in my power to get you sent back there!
The klieg lights for the TV cameras made Brayfield sweat more than ever. On the desk in front of me were seven microphones. Three TV cameras were ranged to survey the scene. From time to time flashbulbs flared from the press gallery. We were in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building, Washington, D.C. It could seat four hundred people. Today it was almost empty. I noticed Investigators Seager and Bonty up at the back. Bonty gave me a wave. It had to be said that the interrogation of John James Todd did not draw the crowds. I was no star. Brayfield was no Torquemada.
I had been before the committee for forty minutes. Ninety percent of the questions had come from Brayfield. I had stonewalled with blunt persistence, taking the Fifth Amendment whenever I felt like it. We paused now, while Brayfield blew his nose with his customary ferocity, as if he were trying to make his eyeballs bounce onto the desk in front of him. True to form, he scrutinized his handkerchief for bits of expressed brain. The other representatives on the committee (I forget their names, an undistinguished bunch of second-rate opportunists eager for the limelight) looked at each other with evident distaste. I had felt nervous, but now I was possessed by an angry calm. Brayfield was astonishingly well informed about me, and this—paradoxically—abated my concern. I was not a “subversive,” I was the victim of a vengeful and elaborate plot, and Brayfield, I was sure, was in it up to his neck.
REPRESENTATIVE EAMES: Mr. Todd, ah … do you know the names of any members of the Communist party, and if so are you
prepared to, would you volunteer them to this committee? In executive session, of course.
TODD: Well, I volunteer to name one dangerous fanatic who is desperately trying to pervert the course of justice and undermine the U.S. Constitution. And I’m prepared to name him in open court.
EAMES: I don’t think we—
CHAIRMAN: Really? And who is that?
TODD: Representative Byron Brayfield! That man is waging a personal vendetta against me!
Uproar. Brayfield swore vilely at me. I was fined five hundred dollars for contempt. The session resumed after a recess. Brayfield was armed with more questions of astonishing accuracy.
BRAYFIELD: Did you attend a meeting of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League on the night of November 14, 1940, in the home of Stefan Dressier?
TODD: I decline to answer that question on the grounds—
BRAYFIELD: You lived in Rincón, Mexico, for a period during 1939.
TODD: Yes.
BRAYFIELD: And at that time you were friendly with Hanns Eisler, who appeared before this committee last year, were you not?