The Jews in America Trilogy (170 page)

Hollywood had foreseen the committee hearings. As early as 1947, a meeting of studio heads had convened in New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. With not at all the best intentions in the world, but hoping to purge itself of leftist undersirables before Washington stepped in to tell it what to do, this group of movie men had compiled a “Hollywood Black List,” composed of the names of some three hundred men and women known or suspected to have Communist sympathies. The effects of the blacklist were immediate and dire. The list spread from Hollywood to Broadway, from television studios to Madison Avenue advertising agencies, as those listed were dismissed from their jobs in film, radio, television, and the theater. A chill swept through the entertainment world, as old friends and associates eyed each other cautiously, never certain who would or would not name names of other leftists in order to save a career. The quality of television programming and film content suffered.

Once named, those blacklisted had either to work pseudonymously, to change their names, or to work at a fraction of their former worth. In
Scoundrel Time
, Lillian Hellman wrote that, after she was blacklisted, her annual income plummeted from $140,000 to $10,000 and that, after it dropped even lower, she was forced to work part-time in a department store to make ends meet. One of her un-American “crimes,” it seemed, had been to write an anti-Nazi play,
Watch on the Rhine
. In Hollywood, the director Irving Pichel was blacklisted for his “un-American” film
A Medal for Benny
, which depicted Mexican-Americans in a sympathetic light.

Although the number of people implicated amounted to only
one-half of one percent of the total number employed in the entertainment industry, the repercussions were enormous. Some people changed their occupations, some emigrated, and a few took their own lives. Even those not blacklisted were affected. The director Lewis Milestone, born in Russia, was not on the blacklist, but had had the temerity to hire Ring Lardner, Jr.—one of the so-called Hollywood Ten who refused to tell the committee whether they were Communists or not—to write one of his films. This created guilt by association, and Hedda Hopper wrote in her column, “Let's take a look at Lardner's new boss. He was born in Russia and came to this country years ago.… He has a beautiful home in which he holds leftist rallies, is married to an American and has a fortune here. But still his heart seems to yearn for Russia. Wonder if Joe [Stalin] would take him back?” Milestone was out of a job for the next eleven years.

Looking back, some of the testimony heard soberly at the HUAC hearings seems so absurd that one wonders why it was not laughed out of court. But by then no one was laughing. Dalton Trumbo, who, in fact, had joined the Communist party in 1943, was another of the Hollywood Ten—all of whom would draw prison sentences—and the committee heard Ginger Rogers's tearful mother, Lela Rogers, tell of how her daughter had been forced to utter the “Communist line” in Trumbo's film
Tender Comrade:
“Share and share alike—that's democracy.” The fact that the romantic comedy had the word
comrade
in its title did not go unnoted.

During the dark years of the HUAC hearings, it seemed to matter not how one testified. Whether one denied vigorously that he had ever been a Communist; whether one refused to testify; whether one came forward as a “friendly witness”; whether one admitted to having once been a Communist, but had since seen the error of one's ways; whether one confessed that one was still a Communist; or whether one sought the protection of the First and Fifth amendments—the results were the same. The very fact that one had been summoned before the committee at all was enough to make one an unemployable pariah in the entertainment industry.

The case of the actor Howard Da Silva was typical. Born Howard Silverblatt, he had made over forty films between 1939 and 1951, and had worked for every major studio. But when,
at the Hollywood HUAC hearings, actor Robert Taylor in the role of a friendly witness testified that Da Silva “always had something to say at the wrong time” at meetings of the Screen Actors Guild, that seemingly petty and innocuous remark was enough to finish Da Silva's career in Hollywood. He had just finished filming
Slaughter Trail
for RKO. After Taylor's testimony, the film's producer announced that Da Silva's part would be cut from the film, and that it would be reshot with another actor. Da Silva moved to New York and tried to work in radio, but American Legion posts all over the country assailed his sponsors with so much hostile mail that he was dropped. He was out of work for more than a dozen years, and did not find a major role until 1976, when he was cast in the Broadway musical
1776
—ironically, in the part of the American patriot Benjamin Franklin.

Blacklisted in the early 1950s, Zero Mostel denied that he had ever been a Communist, though he had lent his name to such causes as the National Negro Congress and the Spanish Refugee Appeal of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. His denials did no good, and his acting career was aborted. He turned to painting. He did not attain stardom until 1964, when he portrayed the legendary Tevye in Broadway's
Fiddler on the Roof
. Even more pathetic was the case of John Garfield. Born in the Bronx, he had sweet-tough good looks and a streetwise manner that had made him a major film star in tough-guy roles. By all accounts, Garfield was not very bright, and in his HUAC appearance his behavior was neither tough nor heroic. Meekly pleading that he had never been a Communist, and could therefore name no names of party cell members, he nonetheless tried to ingratiate himself with the committee by thanking it for the good work it was doing protecting innocent citizens from the “Red Menace.” His denials cut no ice with the Hollywood establishment. Blacklisted, he could find no one who would hire him. He turned to Broadway, and worked for as little as a hundred dollars a week. But HUAC was not through with him. He was called before the committee again in connection with some canceled checks supposedly written by him to the Communist party. Though this evidence was never presented, Garfield decided on the mea-culpa approach and hired a public-relations expert to try to clear his name. A confessional article for
Look
magazine was ghosted for him,
called “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” in which he took the position that he had been unwittingly duped into joining leftist causes. Before it was printed, John Garfield died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine.

The most tragic case was that of the actor Phillip Loeb. By 1948, “The Goldbergs,” starring Gertrude Berg, had become radio's longest-running daytime serial. It had been on the air since 1929. In 1949, “The Goldbergs” moved from radio onto the television screen, and became one of television's earliest hits. Phillip Loeb had played Molly Goldberg's husband from almost the beginning, and by 1950 he was making thirty thousand dollars a year and had been voted by the Boys' Clubs of America “Television's Father of the Year.” But that same year his name appeared seventeen times in
Red Channels
, a listing of alleged Communists employed in the television industry that was published by an independent group of professional Red hunters.

Phillip Loeb had been a veteran of World War I, and had served in Europe with the U.S. Army Medical Corps. His most political activity had been, as an actor, in his union, Actors Equity. But in 1940 the Dies Committee had charged that Equity was run by Communists, to which Loeb had responded, “I am not a Communist, Communist sympathizer, or fellow traveler, and I have nothing to fear from an impartial inquiry.”

“The Goldbergs” struggled through the 1950–1951 season, but was under heavy pressure from its sponsor, General Foods, to drop Loeb from the cast. Gertrude Berg, without whom there would have been no show, talked with her co-star and came away persuaded of his innocence. Together, they decided to fight back. But in 1951, General Foods fulfilled its threats and withdrew its sponsorship, and the show was dropped by CBS. David Sarnoff, certain that both the show and Phillip Loeb's career were salvageable, quickly picked it up for NBC, but by then no other sponsors could be found. Reluctantly, Gertrude Berg decided that it was better to fire one actor from her show than to close it entirely, and put some forty other actors out of work, and offered Loeb eighty-five thousand dollars for the balance of his contract. Loeb refused the money, but agreed to leave the show. In 1952, “The Goldbergs” returned to the air with another actor, Harold Stone, in the role of Jake Goldberg. But the old chemistry of the two actors was not the same. The
ratings declined, and the show went off the air in 1955.

Phillip Loeb, meanwhile, could have used the money. A schizophrenic son in a private mental hospital was costing him twelve thousand dollars a year, and now not only HUAC but the Internal Revenue Service was after him, investigating possible tax delinquencies. His troubles were also costing him a sizable amount in legal fees. Loeb removed his son from the private sanitarium, and placed him in a Veterans Administration hospital. He could find no work. For a while, he moved in with his old friends Kate and Zero Mostel. Deeply depressed, he began talking about yearning for some “long peace.” On September 1, 1955, he checked into the seedy old Taft Hotel on Broadway under the alias of Fred Lange of Philadelphia—a name that could be roughly translated as “long peace.” There he swallowed a lethal dose of sleeping pills.

Through all this, interestingly enough, the kingpins of the entertainment business—the Sam Goldwyns, the L. B. Mayers, the David Sarnoffs—never had their loyalty questioned, were never accused of being Reds, and were never blacklisted, though they were all as Russian-born as Lewis Milestone. It was only the underlings who were singled out for persecution—the writers, directors, actors, who took their orders from above. This was odd because it could be inferred that HUAC assumed that the big motion picture and television producers were unaware of the kind of pro-Red propaganda they were turning out, that the studio heads and television presidents had been subverted by those lower down the corporate ladder—on the face of it an unlikely possibility. There was the fact, of course, that the original blacklist had been drawn up by the studio heads themselves. This meant that they were policing their organizations against undesirables and disloyal elements, and that their own loyalties to the flag could therefore not be questioned.

But there is another fact, more subtle, to be taken into consideration in examining why the tycoons of the entertainment industry escaped having to account for their politics before groups such as HUAC, while the punishment was passed along to their salaried employees. The fact is that most of the industry leaders had crossed the invisible borderline that separated “Jew” from “American,” which, in turn, meant Christian. During the HUAC era, and the McCarthy period that followed closely on
its tail, it was better to be Christian than Jewish. At the hearings, the Christian Savior was frequently invoked. It was as though the soldiers of Christ marched under an American banner, while Russia was the anti-Christ. Hedda Hopper, albeit no doubt unwittingly, expressed this sentiment when she referred to Lewis Milestone as a “Russian,” and his wife as an “American.” On the surface, it was a ridiculous distinction. Lewis Milestone was an American citizen in as good standing as Miss Hopper. But Milestone had not been
born
an American. It was a case of native versus foreigner.

But then why was Lewis Milestone more a foreigner than, say, the Russian-born Louis B. Mayer or Samuel Goldwyn? For one thing, both Mayer and Goldwyn had gone a step farther. They had not only married native-born Americans, but they had married non-Jewish Americans. That meant that they were trying harder to be
real
Americans, didn't it? Their hearts, and their loyalties, had to be in the right places, while others, like Lewis Milestone, were just using their token Americanism as a cover-up for nefarious and alien thoughts and ideologies and deeds. Their citizenship didn't matter. They were in America, Miss Hopper suggested, only on some trumped-up pretext that was probably subversive, and only on borrowed time. If they can't think and behave like the rest of us, she seemed to say, better to get rid of the lot of them. In her little gossip-column item, which destroyed Milestone's career, she was absentmindedly writing a sort of WASP obituary for America's Russian Jews who had not assimilated sufficiently.

By the same token, no one in the 1950s would have questioned the Russian-born Irving Berlin's American loyalties, and this had little to do with the blithely patriotic nature of some of Berlin's most popular songs. He, too, had proved himself by marrying an American, and Christian, woman. She was a young
New Yorker
writer named Ellin Mackay, but there was more to her story than that. She was a granddaughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant named John William Mackay, who, in the 1840s, had struck it rich in the Comstock Lode, and found himself a two-fifths owner of the richest gold and silver mine in the world. His son, Clarence Mackay, Ellin's father, had gone sailing into the American upper crust, had married the aristocratic Katherine Alexander Duer, and had settled down
to a life of moneyed leisure at Harbor Point, his estate on Long Island's North Shore, where, in 1924, the Mackays had given a memorable private dinner and ball for the visiting Prince of Wales.

A year after the ball, in an article for the
New Yorker
called “The Declining Function,” Ellin Mackay had written, “Modern girls are conscious of the importance of their own identity, and they marry whom they choose, satisfied to satisfy themselves. They are not so keenly aware, as were their parents, of the vast difference between a brilliant match and a
mésalliance.”

A year after those prophetic words were published, and to the much-publicized consternation of her Roman Catholic parents, she proved she meant what she was saying when she made her mesalliance with the young Russian-Jewish composer. The Berlin-Mackay nuptials created even more stir in the press than the Stokes-Pastor marriage of two decades earlier. But the Berlins' would prove a lasting union.