Children of the Blacklist

 Feared and ignored for decades, the Hollywood Blacklist of the late 1940s to the 1960s was finally being acknowledged in the mid-1970s.  Both a documentary feature (Hollywood on Trial) and a feature film (The Front) were being made in 1975, and I covered both of them--particularly the documentary, since I was in daily contact with the filmmakers, and saw every foot of film they shot.  As I learned more about the Blacklist, I developed a special interest--the children of those who had been blacklisted, many of them of my generation.  I did lots of research and interviews, but a combination of unfortunate circumstances led to most of what I wrote remaining unpublished.  So here, for the historical record, is what I first wrote then, augmented by some later information.

Growing Up Blacklisted

On a lovely spring day in 1953, five year old Buffy Offner met the strangest looking woman she had ever seen. Buffy's father, Mortimer Offner, had taken her to a matinee of Room Service, a play he was directing on Broadway. It starred a new young actor in his first big role, named Jack Lemmon. The strange woman---the bony giant wearing a man's suit, who had the most peculiar, exciting voice---was Katharine Hepburn. Mortimer Offner had co-written four of her movies and she was probably congratulating him on the play's success.

That golden afternoon was never to be repeated, for Morty Offner or for either of his daughters. A month later he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to name names. He never worked in the theatre or the movies or any entertainment medium again.

It didn’t surprise Arnie Reisman, writer for the 1976 Blacklist documentary Hollywood on Trial, that it wasn't actual children of the blacklisted who made a documentary about it. "I can spot them in a room," he observed. "They're the most apolitical people there. They went to politically active schools but they weren't political. I mean, I can understand their point of view---look what politics gets you. It's a lesson that has to affect you even if you're five years old…"

"My own children were adopted after this period," blacklisted director Martin Ritt had told me, "but I had blacklisted friends whose kids came home from school and asked them, 'why do you hate this country?' It was very hard on kids. You had to have some real conviction to take the static, but they were too young to understand."

So it isn’t unusual at all that the two daughters of Mortimer Offner hadn’t spoken before about their father and the Blacklist. The following account comes from their interview filmed for the 1976 Blacklist documentary Hollywood On Trial (though not used in the final cut) and my later conversations with each of them. I’ve included some important additional details about Mortimer Offner not available to me in the 1970s, from Patrick McGilligan’s 1991 biography of director George Cukor, A Double Life. Cukor and Offner were friends from before high school.

Theatre and show business had been Morty Offner's life from childhood, when he dragged his good friend, George Cukor, into school musicals. Together they would play hooky and wait by the stage door to catch a glimpse of Isadora Duncan. They bought the cheapest tickets to see plays, sometimes two and three times if they liked it, so they could memorize the lines. Cukor spent more time at Offner's home than he did at his own.  Years later, Offner would write on a string of Hollywood films and George Cukor would become a famous director.  They worked together on "Sylvia Scarlett," Katharine Hepburn's second starring role.

Telegram from "Room Service" playwright John Murray.
A few days later, Offner received his HUAC subpoena.

But Buffy and her younger sister Debbie grew up wondering why their father's busy, glittering life in television, theatre and film changed overnight to the strange quietude of a restless insurance agent---why his infectious sense of humor could only be exercised at home, and why they couldn't mention his show business successes to his new friends. To them the Blacklist is more than a relic of the 1950s: it is the unseen, amorphous but omnipresent nemesis of their childhood.

All Buffy and Debbie Offner know about their father's show business career is the little they remember from their childhood, and what they've learned from his memorabilia. Their interview for Hollywood on Trial resulted from a series of accidents---probably the only way it could have happened. Mortimer Offner wasn't well known outside the show business world, and because he wasn't called until 1953, his refusal to testify wasn't even newsworthy. Perhaps his one dubious distinction is that he was so totally blacklisted-- out of film, television and the theatre (though New York theatre famously was not supposed to have a blacklist) one after the other, on both coasts. Like so many others caught in this American Inquisition, he came and went without attracting much notice. Which is precisely why his story is important.

Ethel Barrymore. Photo by Mortimer Offner

The Offner sisters were interviewed in Debbie's upper West Side apartment, which is also the apartment where they grew up. Their dresses in shades of green blending softly with the leaves of houseplants behind them, the sunlight through the window illuminating their hair, they sifted through what their father left: pictures he'd taken as a young portrait photographer of stars such as Sylvia Sidney and Tallulah Bankhead (he was Ethel Barrymore's favorite photographer, and the famous profile of her in the Barrymore Theatre is by Offner). 

Clippings from his first Broadway hit ("Meet the People," with Jack Gilford). An ecstatic letter from the sponsor of his hit television series, "A Date with Judy," from 1951. Reviews of the Broadway revival of "Room Service" he directed (generally lauded and faulted only for its freneticism, with applause for the new actor he introduced, Jack Lemmon). A congratulatory telegram to Offner at the Playhouse Theatre, dated April 6, 1953, from John Murray, the play's author: "BRAVO YOU HAVE DONE A SPLENDID JOB AND MAY THIS BE THE FIRST STEP IN A BRILLIANT CAREER LONG OVERDUE.

And the HUAC subpoena, which, through several layers of absurd irony, is pink. He is to report to Room 110 of the Federal Building in New York at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, May 4, 1953. "Herein fail not," it says, "and make return of this summons."

Buffy was old enough to remember when his life changed. "He loved working in TV," she said. "He used to talk about it a lot. That was one year. The next year he had nothing."

Buffy Offner, in costume for a student film by John
Semper in the mid-1970s.

Offner didn't talk to his daughters about what was happening to him. "We were very young," Buffy explains. "He kept it to himself. It hurt him very much...But he kept all this for us."

More: the painstaking draft of a letter to George Cukor, his boyhood friend and then a famous director, asking for money. A copy of a letter to "Lee" (probably Lee Grant), describing hearings in April 1953 (the month before Offner was to appear) in heartbreaking detail.

Buffy and Debbie knew the Blacklist only as something silent and terrible that happened to their father and also to the parents of many of their playmates, for after the Offners moved into the upper West Side building, other show people who later were blacklisted came to live there, including Waldo Salt and Lee Grant. "My memories of the Blacklist really are of this building," Debbie said. "The Blacklist was something that happened not just to my father but to the parents of kids I played with here."  One of their friends was Lee Grant's daughter Dinah, later known as the actress Dinah Manoff.

Debbie remembers asking who Joe McCarthy was, and being told, "he's a man who tells lies." So she envisioned McCarthy as a man who stationed himself on their back porch, waiting for her to stray out there alone so he could grab her, put her on his lap and tell her lies, one after another.

As a teenager in 1913, Morty Offner lived on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York. "The Offners were an especially cultivated family," Cukor biographer McGilligan writes, "up-to-date on trends in fashion, photography, art, literature, theater, and motion pictures." His mother subscribed to movie magazines and knew all about the latest films. Morty's older brother Richard was an expert on Florentine art, and was writing a book on pre-Renaissance Italian painting. Mortie's sister Olga was a schoolteacher. Mortie was "a slender, handsome youth with a shock of dark blond hair" and wanted to become a photographer.

Isadora Duncan

Mortie attended De Witt Clinton high school at Fifty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue, which graduated many distinguished New Yorkers, including Neil Simon, James Baldwin, Richard Rodgers, Richard Avedon and Fats Waller. One of his classmates and best friends was George Cukor. 

Cukor, Offner and Mortie's cousin Stella Bloch, were inseparable companions, sharing enthusiasms for the arts, particularly the performing arts. "Beginning with his teenage years," McGilligan writes, Cukor "said with candor more than once, they influenced him far more than his own family." 

The three shared a special passion for Isadora Duncan, but their tastes were unpredictable: they loved a Brazilian piano prodigy, and Vaudeville shows at the Palace, plays with Ethel Barrymore, and the films of D.W. Griffith.

In their senior year, Cukor and Offner got jobs as extras for the Metropolitan Opera, where they could listen to Caruso from the wings. Together with Stella Bloch, they put together a skit and performed it at the Temple Beth-El, with Cukor directing. While Cukor wrote many intimate and playfully sexual letters to Stella Bloch, his real interest may have been Mortie. "Cukor's lifelong affection for Offner was to be a 'totally frustrating experience' for the film director, according to Bloch...Bloch had a feeling Cukor was more fervent about Offner than vice versa. For one thing, Offner, witty and striking, was a magnet to women, 'totally interested in women, and such a thing as a homosexual relationship would have been unthinkable to him," in Bloch's words.

As a Columbia University student in the 1920s, Offner hung out in the Village when it was "a hotbed of political, artistic and sexual radicalism," as editor Louise Bernikow described it. "If ever we had a Bloomsbury in this country, (this) was it." Offner continued his friendship with Cukor, co-hosting a New Year's Eve party in 1925 that also celebrated Cukor's first Broadway play. By the time Offner followed Cukor to Hollywood in the early 1930s, he had a considerable reputation as a show business photographer.

After doing portraits of Katharine Hepburn and Irene Selznick (wife of mogul David Selznick), Offner began contributing to scripts, both credited and uncredited, for Hepburn and for Cukor: "The Little Minister," "Little Women," "Alice Adams," "Sylvia Scarlett", and "Quality Street." By 1937 he was busy enough to have two of his films open within a day of each other, both to good reviews.  He wrote historical dramas and romances, a musical comedy ("Radio City Revels") and a mystery ("The Saint in New York.")  In addition to Cukor, Offner worked with directors George Stevens and John Ford.

Hollywood in the thirties was a lively place, artistically and politically. Unionizing began in the studios against stiff resistance. As Blacklist historian Stephan Kanfer wrote, "Given the absolute rule of the studio chieftans, given the global and local conditions of the thirties, it is astonishing not that so many were Marxists but that so few were political at all."

from "The Informer"

Despite the discord and violence, films with a political impact were being made. In 1935 John Ford's "The Informer" won the New York Film Critics Award. About this tale of Irish revolutionaries, New York Times critic Andre Sendwald wrote, "...it makes you understand why 'informer' is the ugliest word in an Irishman's vocabulary." Frank Capra's mildly socialistic "Mr Deeds Goes to Town" was a critical and popular success in 1936. In 1937, the Academy Award and critics award went to "The Life of Emile Zola," which concentrated mostly on the Dreyfus trial, about anti-Semitism.

Offner went into the Army Special Services for the duration of World War II, working in service theatre (and rooming with future director and producer Stanley Kramer.) He worked on Let There Be Light, a highly praised documentary on what has since become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, directed by John Huston. Because of graphic content it was not seen as intended until a restored version in 2012, but a film on the subject with actors reenacting some of its scenes was released in 1947 as Shades of Gray, with Offner credited as writer.

He returned to Hollywood after the war, but Hollywood was a different place. Among things suddenly forbidden were interest in the Soviet Union (quite recently a U.S. ally) and such radical organizations as the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee. HUAC showed up in 1947, the Hollywood Ten were indicted, and the writing was on all four walls.

After the birth of Elizabeth (Buffy), his first daughter, Offner returned to New York and managed to work in television and theatre for five more years until the Blacklist finally closed in. He must have seen the eleven-page, single-spaced letter describing the HUAC hearing of April 1953 before his in May. The letter was addressed to Lee (possibly Lee Grant), and signed Rosie. Debbie Offner read from it for the Hollywood on Trial camera, her older sister's protective arm behind her.

Rosie begins by saying that the "atmosphere of the hearings just completed was altogether different from the hearings in October, and it seems one must be more heroic with each succeeding bunch."

Her account was of a chaos of "friendly witnesses" (she called them "stool pigeons") exchanging oily compliments with the inquisitors, and a few stern and steadfast refusers like Jody Gilbert, who refused to answer on the basis of the Fifth Commandment. "Yes, I said Commandment. The one that reads, honor thy father and thy mother. And I take this to mean thy forefathers also. I cannot dishonor them by doing anything other than protecting the rights they gave us. Therefore, I stand on the Fifth. And I am not hiding behind it, I am standing in front of it, to protect it."

Between these were several obviously tortured souls, including a number of college professors. And there was human comedy to go with the tragedy, like the writer Rosie knew as a client when she had worked at an agency. "...we never sold one script of his, but all of a sudden he's a fine writer (according to him) who was thrown out of the industry because he quit the Communist Party! He named 27 people and talked so much even the Committee tired of him, and suggested several times that "we get on with it."

A woman, "dignified, calm, with a beautiful voice...told them, 'Christ said we cannot live by bread alone, and I hope this will be of some comfort to me now that I will no longer be able to feed my two sons.' They got her off fast." Another witness referred to the Committee as the "Unemployment Agency."

Ned Young

Screenwriter Ned Young attacked the committee, shouting at the chairman, "do you really think you can ground truth into dust with that gavel?" When told he had been named as a Communist, he thundered, ' By whom, by whom? I dare you to confront me with the person whom you say named me.' They wouldn't tell him. 'I invoke and defend the Constitution with all conscience by refusing to answer your questions. You are leading America down the road to fascism." At this chairman Jackson shouted back, "I would rather go towards fascism than be a slave." When Ned confronted him with this he tried to deny it. 'Let the reporter read the record back!' Ned challenged him, and the audience applauded. After his testimony he asked his wife, "How'd I do, baby?"  

"God, when they do the movie about this period of history," Rosie writes, "this is a day that must not be omitted."  But some time later, Ned Young's wife committed suicide.

Eventually, however, Nedrick Young would get some measure of triumph. Writing under the name of "Nathan Douglas," Young co-wrote the hit movie The Defiant Ones, that looked like a frontrunner for the 1958 Academy Award. It would be the third year in a row, beginning with Dalton Trumbo's triumph in 1956, that a blacklisted writer took the Oscar, despite the Academy's official rule that no person who had refused to give evidence before a congressional committee was eligible for an Academy Award. When The Defiant Ones won the New York Film Critics award, the Academy headed off more embarrassment and rescinded the rule. It was as close to an official end to the Blacklist as there would ever be. The Defiant Ones did win, and Ned Young---not Nathan Douglas-got the Oscar.

Rosie's letter goes on. Libby Burke, a dancer, "was so calm and so intelligent that the committee let her talk and talk. She said many wonderful things, pointing out to them that change is fundamental and eternal. Something that was considered radical at one time in history is now considered conservative. She also said, 'I may not agree with your opinions but I at least confer upon you the privilege of having those opinions. I feel you should show me the same consideration.' She explained to them the meaning of American and un-American as she saw it. She said you are taking from me my most basic right, the right to work."

"When she off the stand, the woman in front of me got up and began to shout, 'Dance for Molotov. Go ahead. Dance for Molotov. Who wants to see you dance here. Go dance for Molotov.' She followed Libby to the ladies room, shouting all the way. Nobody stopped her. When Libby was on the stand, [they] made her give her address several times. This resulted in a rock being thrown through her window that midnight."

And scrawled in handwriting at the end of the letter, perhaps a message to Offner: "It's most important to have as many of your friends as possible on hand."

Offner testified--or refused to testify-- on May 4, 1953. The only record he left behind of his hearing was a wire service photo of him from a Cleveland newspaper, with the story: Mortimer Offner, television and theatrical director...refused to say whether he had been a Communist. He denounced Leo Townsend, a previous witness, who said that Offner was a sectional financial director of the Communist Party in 1947 and 1948. 

Formally, Broadway theatre had no blacklist.  Nevertheless, two days after Offner's hearing, his Broadway show, "Room Service," closed. Except for a dinner theatre production in 1955, it would be his last moment in theatre or any aspect of show business or the arts.

Offner had probably already been feeling the effects of the Blacklist before his hearing date. He had first been named on September 19, 1951 by Leo Townsend. After producing some 60 TV shows in a year and a half, Offner hadn't worked much in 1952.

 

Just two years before, his TV hit

But the Blacklist wasn't the only element of change. The movie and TV industries were changing as well in the mid fifties: TV shows were moving to LA, movie studios were retrenching because of TV. But in late 1952 Offner still had hopes---maybe the Patti Page Show at NBC, maybe a play he had acquired and was trying to raise money to produce. It was in December that he wrote his letter to Cukor, asking for the loan of $2500.

The draft he left behind is handwritten on yellow paper. It changes to white paper when he shifts from money to family news. He was writing on December 23, so he notes: "Buffy and Debbie's presents have arrived. The children of course do not know about them yet, so their parents loud thanks will have to do for now. I wish you could see the kids. They are really fine-totally different personalities---Buffy keen, spare, ever alert. Debbie soft, sure of herself, ever smiling."

When a reply hadn't arrived, he wrote a short follow-up on January 12, 1953. "Did you get my letter? Situation urgent. Will you be able to help? Anxiously awaiting word from you."

George Cukor and Kate Hepburn

A telegram came the next day. DEAR MORTIE FORGIVE MY DELAY DESPITE SINCERE EFFORTS ON MY PART I AM SORRY TO SAY I AM IN NO POSITION TO MANAGE YOUR REQUEST. I WISH IT COULD BE OTHERWISE. AFFECTIONATE REGARDS=George.

(According to his biographer, Cukor was frightened of the Blacklist and said little about it. But he was also being affected by changes in movies and the studio system, and though he was one of the better paid directors in Hollywood, his income had likely been reduced. This is not to make a judgment on his refusal, one way or the other. )

So now with two young daughters and his wife ill with cancer, Offner made the decision to begin a different life. A friend who was an insurance counselor got him into the business. He took courses and got a job selling insurance, though as Buffy remembers, it was mostly paperwork that he did at home.

He was good at it, too.  In 1955--just four years after his letter of praise about his TV hit and two years after his Broadway triumph, he got a letter of commendation for being the leading producer of an insurance product, and a bonus free subscription to the industry magazine, "The Insurance Salesman."

And it was a different life. The man whose forte was humor and emotion, who taught his young daughters how to mug and do double-takes, had to play the colorless role of an insurance man. He did it so well that at his memorial service in 1965, his insurance friends were amazed to learn he had ever been in show business.

"He took us to dinner at an insurance friend's house," Buffy recalled. "They were very nice people, but they were kind of dull, compared to his theatre friends. I'm sure he felt that way. We noticed it. But we weren't supposed to say anything to his new friends about any of his past."

He hadn't entirely given up either of his passions: entertainment or politics. He encouraged his daughters in their artistic interests (Debbie in acting, Buffy in dancing), he coached a few actor friends and did comedy routines for his children at home. But he gave up working in theatre altogether, afraid to call attention to the fact he was blacklisted which would endanger his insurance job. Even years later, when his daughters coaxed him to get back into theatre, he refused.

" He was older then, and perhaps by then he didn't like theatre people all that well," Buffy said. He also maintained a serious interest in politics but "it was a super-secret activity until the end," even with his children. He was in great pain, they realized, though he didn't say much about it at the time. At the very end, he said finally, "tell my daughters I was a Marxist." If they hadn't known that, they did know, as Buffy put it, "he believed and hoped for a better world."

This is my favorite photo of Deborah Offner, partly
because I see Buffy in it, too

Debbie Offner has herself acted in New York theatre-Variety called her recent performance in a new play "superb." Because her father was so private about what happened to him, she says, "when I found my voice about the Blacklist, I was scared. But then a kind of pride came out of it.”

Though her father's life gives her more of a sense of strength and heritage than fear of a similar fate, the scars are nevertheless there. "If it's left me with anything, it's left me with the feeling that I don't want to have political opinions I don't understand. I went to demonstrations when I was very young, but I was never serious about it, I didn't do the reading or anything. I guess I feel guilty about that. I find it difficult to be as political as I thought I would be when I was little."

Debbie feels there is much for her to understand about the period. "I just feel bad for everybody involved. I don't understand it and I want to understand it. I don't feel it's good guys and bad guys at any gut level, as I think Buffy does. I don't feel angry."

Debbie is proud of what her father did in refusing to testify and feels she would do the same, but she recoils from what politics did to his career. "When I think of what my father had to give up, I feel pain---but maybe I feel pain from knowing what he gave up, maybe that's the source of my pain. I feel very strongly about my art. I'm not going to let anything interfere with it."

Buffy, who left New York after her father's death and spent the anti-war years in the art-and-acid haven of Franconia College in New Hampshire, doesn't concern herself with politics. She rates it along with sports as simply uninteresting to her. But she remembers her father's hatred for stool pigeons, and now she sometimes judges people in terms of whether they might be the kind who would give names.

As the older of the two, Buffy remembers more of what her mother went through. She is conscientious, articulate and objective, with deep, unstated feelings that come to the surface quickly but infrequently. "People who are straightforward and honest are rare," she said in a quiet voice. "Not many people really stand up for what they believe. They just don't."

II Sins of the Fathers

The toll of the Blacklist on the children of the blacklisted may well have gone beyond their childhoods and its residual effects on their lives. There is at least one documented case of the son of a Blacklist victim himself being essentially blacklisted, not for anything he had done, but because of his father.

Gordon Kahn

Gordon Kahn was a screenwriter, and the first of the "unfriendly nineteen" witnesses to announce his non-cooperation with HUAC in 1947. With a HUAC subpoena being served at the front door, Gordon Kahn escaped to Mexico literally out the back door. Nearly thirty years later his older son, Dr. James Kahn, found himself being pursued by the same bloodless hounds of inquisition, awakening new nightmares and changing the course of his medical career.

(Gordon’s younger son, Tony Kahn, was later a friend of Arnie Reisman, and his memories prompted Arnie’s interest in the Blacklist. But in the following account, the present day Kahn being quoted is the older son, James.)

Gordon Kahn wound up in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1947, where his family joined him, along with the families of other blacklisted writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler. It was an American community of political exiles that included "premature anti-fascists" (that is, people who opposed Franco, Mussolini and Hitler too soon) and veterans of the Spanish Civil War.

When the Kahns returned to the U.S. in 1956 there was still no work for Gordon in Hollywood, so they went to Mrs. Kahn's hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire. The Blacklist followed them. Barbara Kahn couldn't get a teaching job in the city's school system and eventually taught in another. While Gordon wrote for magazines (under pseudonyms) he was subjected to another investigation, spearheaded by the state attorney general. James Kahn later discovered the extent of that investigation: the Kahns had been wiretapped, their mail opened and police surveillance of their activities maintained.

"The state government decided to get in the act with its own Un-American Activities Committee," Jim Kahn said. "We were really harassed then. The police watched our house---my brother and I saw them on our way home from school. We sort of harassed them back. We were kids so we could get away with it, but my father encouraged us. They went around asking our neighbors about us, which naturally made living there pretty strange. We were the neighborhood Commies."

When Jim Kahn got to Harvard he kept clear of politics. "I didn't participate in any political groups and certainly didn't sign any petitions," he said. "Somewhere in the back of my mind I was terrified," he said. But by the time he was a senior at Harvard, Vietnam was forcing itself into everyone's consciousness. Jim responded by declaring in an editorial for the yearbook that he would refuse induction into the army because of the war.

Gordon Kahn encouraged his son James to be a doctor, to build a career away from show business and the arts, "because he felt so vulnerable."

While a student at the Harvard Medical school Jim applied for a position with the Center for Disease Prevention of the U.S. Public Health Service, with particular interest in Central America. "It would be a good deal for me. I'd already worked in South America for six months during med school, and I liked it---it was exciting and challenging work. I had already decided I wanted to get involved in public health, and this was a way out of the draft, too."

Jim Kahn was judged to be the best in his class by the dean of the medical school. Thanks to his boyhood in Mexico and his travel and study in other Latin American countries, he was fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. By every measure he was the ideal candidate, and in the words of one of his teachers, exactly the kind of doctor the PHS wanted, and rarely got.

Kahn was commissioned in the Public Health Service during his fourth year at Harvard Med. His active duty was supposed to begin after a year's internship and a year's hospital residency. But just four months shy of his activation, Kahn got a call from the PHS personnel director requesting that he come to Washington. "Somehow I had the feeling right then that I knew what was going to happen. But I just didn't believe it. I asked him what it was about but he wouldn't tell me. Finally he admitted, unofficially, that it was a security check. My fears were coming true."

What happened next is very clear in Jim's mind, even though it happened in 1969. On a brilliant fall day in 1975, sitting on the sunporch of his new home in New Hampshire, in easy reach of his own actively perused files on the subject, he could recite from memory the day and the hour he went to Washington at the behest of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (as it was called then.) He remembers what airline he flew and what time it left Boston. He remembers the vague fears that were about to become reality.

He flew to Washington at 7 a.m. on February 5, 1969. Hoping that it was some minor snag, perhaps having to do with his Yearbook editorial, he decided to trust the service he was about to enter and go to the interview without a lawyer or even a tape recorder.

He wandered through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the HEW building to a small, bare room, furnished "in pure FBI décor---a desk, some chairs, an American flag, and a picture on the wall of J. Edgar Hoover." Though he was in the Health, Education and Welfare department, his two interrogators were ex-FBI, now employed by HEW security.

Immediately after the interview, Kahn sat in the HEW lobby and recorded his impressions. "The two investigators, Gulka and Sterbinsky, looked like two Eastern European freedom-fighter rejects. Gulka was about 4' 9", bald except for a tuft of hair where his frontal lobe should be. They were both too dumb to be personally malicious, just cogs in the security system. They didn't know what they were asking or why. They were truly monstrous in their stupidity."

They had a file marked "James Kahn" but there seemed to be nothing about James Kahn in it. There was however quite a lot about Gordon Kahn. The security men asked about Gordon Kahn's past political associations, his blacklisted friends and their present whereabouts. Jim answered one question about his father. Yes, he was dead. He died of a heart attack in 1962, shortly after he finally won his court case to prevent the New Hampshire Attorney-General from harassing him and his family.

After that, Jim refused to answer anything about his father or his father's associates, while making it clear he would answer questions about himself. The agents weren't interested.

Dr. James Kahn left the HEW Building still hoping that this had been a temporary aberration in procedure, that it would not affect his career. But his emotions, recorded at the time, told him differently. "I felt that my life was over."

Kahn's security status floating through the murky byways of government bureaucracy and it appears that it was never defined. The Harvard Medical School intervened on his behalf, but that was good enough only to get him stationed at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Kahn tried to get his case resolved for the next two years. He got a second security interview, but it turned out to be a replay of the first one (except this time he had a lawyer and a tape recorder with him.) It occurred a year later, almost to the day. He even faced the same two interrogators.

"They asked me if I was aware my father was a Communist in 1932. I told them that in 1932 I was ten years away from being born. They asked me if I knew Albert Maltz. I told them I knew him as the father of my playmates, Kathy and Peter. They asked me if I carried secret messages between my father and Maltz. I was nine years old."

The only difference about the second interview Kahn noted was that his file appeared to be an inch thicker. Still, the questions were about his father, not about him.

Kahn was passed over time and time again for assignments outside the United States, including short-term emergencies for which he was especially well suited. His superiors in Atlanta designated him as the best qualified of the available Public Health officers to go to Biafra, but he wasn't sent. He saw Latin American assignments go to doctors who couldn't speak Spanish, while doctors who requested duty in the United States were shipped out of the country. Kahn, who had been promised a foreign assignment when he joined, was never given one.

Meanwhile he began having nightmares."I dreamt that my father had come back to life. I screamed at him, 'Go away, Gordon! Leave me alone!'"

He initiated court cases, wrote to two Attorneys General, contacted Sam Ervin's Senate subcommittee on dossiers, all to no avail. Dr. James Kahn left the PHS in 1971. He went back to Boston for a few years to work at Beth-Israel and Massachusetts General hospitals, and to go into analysis to resolve his feelings about his father and himself. He now works in a small hospital in New Hampshire.

Dr. Kahn remembers the people in the Public Health Service who welcomed him effusively at first, and then retreated into a bureaucratic maze of avoidance. "They fawned all over me until the security problem arose. Then they were just...chickenshit."

Though he was a child at the time, "Any way you look at it, the Blacklist was the biggest thing that happened in my life."

It remains alive in his thoughts. "I'm still scared of it happening again. I feel strong enough and confident enough to handle it, but it could happen any day. If any of that kind of thing hits this country again, I know I'll be involved. Because I'm on file. So is my brother. And probably so is every kid of anybody who was blacklisted."

Tony Kahn

Jim Kahn's younger brother, Tony Kahn, also went into analysis to clear his mind of aspects of his father's legacy. Tony now lives in Cambridge, and makes his living writing and translating Russian. He also worked with Arnie Reisman, writing and performing for WGBH public television in Boston. Tony was six when his family went to Mexico, too young then to understand his parents' politics, but subject to the taunts of playmates. He remembers being called a Commie Jew Gringo in Mexico---and then a Commie Jew Mex back in Manchester.

Jim Kahn got into at least one monumental fistfight over such name-calling---Tony, who watched it, likens it to a classic movie western brawl, beginning in the back yard and ending up on the other side of the street. Jim sent his tormentor to the hospital. (The guy later turned out to be one of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra, Jr.) After the fight was over, their father, who had also been watching, came out with a cloth to treat Jim's cuts. "He encouraged us to fight back," Tony said.

At age six, Tony didn't know why he was in Mexico, why he had to leave the land of TV and the home of Superman comics. He didn't know why his mother was sad or would suddenly burst into tears. When he heard that his straight-laced New Englander aunt, also with them in Mexico, was called the Queen of the Reds by a Mexican newspaper, he assumed it meant she ran the "red zone," the strip of cantinas and whorehouses he walked through on his way to school.

Jim remembers a little more of what the adults were doing, about the incidences among his father's friends of alcohol and drug abuse, splintered families and suicides. "I saw people shattered, just shattered. One guy took his private plane out one day and just ditched in the ocean." Today former public health specialist Dr. James Kahn puts it this way: "The effects of the Blacklist on families was absolutely as uncontrollable as a disease."

Tony Kahn got into one political squabble in high school when the pro-HUAC film "Operation Abolition" (which characterized student demos against HUAC in San Francisco as Communist organized) was scheduled for a compulsory attendance assembly. Tony and a couple of friends proposed to the principal that either attendance be made voluntary or the opposing view be presented at another assembly. The principal responded by beginning a campaign to ferret out the Communist menace in Manchester High, as well as placing his version of the incident in their student records (along with, in Tony's case, the ever-present information about his father.) One of the students involved, a senior, didn't get into any of his chosen colleges as a result. Tony was a junior, and the furor had died by the next year.

At Harvard Tony rebelled against political ideology and involvement. "The only reason I'd done it before was because my father told me to." He began to feel that his father's politics had smothered his humanity as well as his career possibilities. "People said that he had an incredible sense of humor. But as a father, he was very much the Old Testament lawgiver, especially when it came to politics. He gave us precepts, but not their process. By the time I knew him, he didn't have a spontaneous bone in his body."

The Blacklist certainly smothered Gordon Kahn's career, and as a writer Tony is very aware of that. "Gordon had been a newspaperman in New York, a good friend of S.J. Perlman. It was an incredibly rich life. He went to Hollywood but later, after we came back to New Hampshire, he had real contempt for his work there. When any of his films came on television-always with his name blacked out of the credits---he literally held his nose in disdain." In fact, Gordon Kahn was highly and successfully prolific: wholly or partially, he wrote four movies released in 1939, four in 1942, three in 1944, two in 1946 and one or two most other years. Two were released in 1948, the year after he fled to Mexico. But pretty much all were minor genre pictures.

"But after the Blacklist he couldn't write at all," Tony continued, "except secretly, under another name. He wrote clever pieces on Hungarian food and Japanese movies for Holiday under the name of Hugh G. Foster. But he never had the right forum as a writer. He had a huge amount of general knowledge and a great style as an essayist. But because of the Blacklist, he never got a second chance."

Gordon Kahn had the second of a series of heart attacks in Mexico. He was seriously ill for the rest of his life. When he died in 1962 there was still one piece that he'd planned but never written. He wanted to call it, "How I Killed Hugh G. Foster."

Barbara Kahn, who retired from teaching last spring with a commencement address on the Blacklist, recalled the words she found in her husband's office after his death. Gordon Kahn had written, "I stood before the tribunal of my own mind." His sons admire that moral commitment, but aren't sure what it can mean today, or whether they can expect to see it in their generation. "I guess I don't expect to find that moral strength," Tony said. "I haven't seen anyone tested, really...Our moral issues seem much less significant, and much less clear-cut."

Gordon Kahn did try to pass on his politics, to define the enemy for his sons. "But I don't think it works any more for me, "Tony says. "I've learned not to line people up as good or bad guys, but deal with them as people."

His brother Jim feels the same way about the Hollywood people involved. "For awhile I was angry because Dalton and (Albert) Maltz went back and made their peace, but not now. I don't want to blame the people who had the situation forced on them, but the people who did the forcing."

"I'm not afraid of compromise any more, because I know my principles." Jim concluded, about his own life. "It takes a certain kind of person to recognize moral decision---something that's going to have long term effects on self. My father died not feeling guilty about anything he did."

III Legacy of Pain

Chris with his father Dalton Trumbo.  Probably 1970s

Some of the children the Kahns had known in Mexico gathered around Mrs. Jean Butler's dining room table to be interviewed for Hollywood on Trial. Present were Dalton Trumbo's son Chris, and Michael and Becky Butler, two of the children of Hugo and Jean Butler (both "graylisted" screenwriters, who were never subpoenaed but never worked. Hugo Butler died at age 53.) They all talked about their childhood.

Chris Trumbo was seven when his father was indicted for contempt of Congress and sent to jail. He remembers visiting his father in prison, and being impressed by the train ride and the tall prison tower with the machine gun. He saw his father in the visitor's area, and was so disappointed in not seeing his cell that he cried.

After his father's release their family joined the Butlers and Kahns in Mexico, and returned to California with the Butlers. Their re-entry into American society was not painless. Chris remembers experiencing his first "duck and cover" atomic bomb drill, a popular nightmare for kids of the fifties, in ninth grade. He had no idea what was going on, and it scared him thoroughly.

"All of a sudden everybody was climbing under their desks---even the teacher. I didn't know what was happening." Chris received other rude awakenings, including catcalls of Red, commie and Christ-killer. "I was the school commie," he said. "I also had a tough time explaining what my father did for a living. So it was very difficult to form friendships. Who do you trust?"

Though he was a class leader and a football player, Chris remembers never being invited to his classmates' homes and narrowly missing a school award, only to find out later that the decision went against him because of his family. Michael Butler remembers some similar problems. "I wasn't really accepted until, strangely enough, I started dating. The general feel was that if I was a Red I had to be a homosexual."

Later in the conversation a debate began over the moral questions of the Blacklist period, with marked differences even within this compatible company-even between Michael and Chris, who grew up together and now occasionally collaborate on screenplays.

Curiously, it is Michael Butler, not Chris Trumbo, who agrees with Dalton Trumbo's belief that there were "only victims" of the Blacklist. "I'm not into blame," Michael says simply. "The blame has to do with cowardice," Chris insists. "What we are is an expression of what we do. The question is, is it admissible for one person to destroy another's life?"

Jean and Hugo Butler, circa 1960.  Blacklisted 
in the U.S., Butler wrote for Bunuel in Mexico
and for European films.

Becky Butler is only eighteen and has no real memories of the fifties, but she has heard her mother (whose point of view is close to Michael's) say that the Blacklist killed her father, and she has just recently seen the Eric Bentley play, with dialogue taken from HUAC testimony, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been." "I'm very resentful about the friendly witnesses," she said. "I feel very bitter, even though I didn't go through the period. When I saw what Larry Parks and (Elia) Kazan did, I wanted to shout, 'Why can't you be strong? Why can't you stand up for your principles?'"

The children of friendly witnesses have their own legacy to deal with, and they ask the same questions. One of them, Conrad Bromberg, son of J. Edgar Bromberg, staged a play condemning his father's informing. But at least one other child of a HUAC cooperator has recently come to different conclusions about his father's culpability.

He spoke to me on condition that he and his father not be named. His father, now dead, admitted to the Committee that he had been a Communist and gave several names of other putative members. (He testified in 1953, naming perhaps seven people.) I haven’t attempted to check the facts of the story his son tells (most of which apparently came from his mother), but his point of view is what is important. He spoke rapidly and forcefully, explaining that some of his anger was the result of his summing-up process on the verge of completing several years of psychiatric analysis. "My father was really pissed off at the Party for putting him in the position of either going to jail or being a squealer. When he joined the Party he thought the membership rolls would be made public, but instead they were secret. He felt double-crossed, as a result he was put in a double bind."

"At first he refused to testify, and his television show, which was the highest rated in the country, was cancelled. He didn't work for two years. I was five, so I didn't know anything, except that suddenly my father had an awful lot of free time to take us on trips." But later his father did testify; according to his mother, his father gave only names of people already named.

"He tried to ignore what he did," his son says. "He was a sad man after that, permanently wounded. If you look into any kind of torture, you understand that the rationale of torture is not to get information but to inflict guilt. My father knew that. He told me, 'all they wanted was to break people.' They succeeded with him."

He once derided his father, but now he's changed his mind. "At first I was really against him. I asked him once, 'why couldn't you be strong?' After he died I forgot about it, but I still blamed him. Now, in the last few months, when everybody's been talking about the Blacklist, I've been thinking about it. I don't blame him anymore. I had a healthy upbringing. He saw that I was taken care of, even in the lean times. At some point my father had to decide what was most important, his family or himself. You know, martyrdom can be egocentric. There are other people involved, after all---a family that was his responsibility. I think my father made his decision for his wife and kids. I think he did it for us."

He has turned his former bitterness away from his father, and pointed it towards his father's former friends who made him an enemy when he testified. "That hurt him the most. He couldn't believe that his closest friends didn't understand the human reasons why he did what he did. Why didn't they turn their hatred against Congress instead of attacking their friends? Hollywood became broken and bitter, when before it had a lot of creative love."

Postscript/Update

There was renewed interest in the Blacklist in 1999, when director Elia Kazan, who had informed on others to HUAC, was awarded a special Oscar. There were protests and counter-protests outside the hall, and prominent actors and directors inside who either refused to applaud or pointedly applauded.

Miller and Kazan

Playwright Arthur Miller had famously been questioned by HUAC and refused to name names, resulting in his brief blacklisting and other penalties, later overturned in federal court. Kazan’s collaboration strained but didn’t break their close friendship. The Kazan-Miller story was the topic of a PBS American Masters program in 2003. The documentary seemed largely though not entirely accurate in its facts. It honored complexity, fallibility and dilemma, to demonstrate that nobody had a corner on absolutely correct morality. True enough, but not the whole truth. All actions during the Blacklist are not morally equivalent, and to my mind this program skewed too far is saying they were. In particular, those who promoted and enabled the Blacklist bear moral responsibility. As my interviews showed, the consequences of the Blacklist were profound and continued to the next generation.

A different kind of revisionism was depicted in the 2001 Jim Carrey film, "The Majestic," in which the screenwriter hero makes a speech at his HUAC denouncing the Blacklist and leaves to the applause and support of all freedom-loving Americans. An otherwise intriguing film, on this score it is a travesty.  As if none of the highly articulate people summoned before the Committee tried to denounce it. Most were silenced by the Committee, its rules, its chairman and its sergeant-at-arms enforcers. Whenever they did speak with the kind of real eloquence noted in this article, it seldom made the newsreels or the newspapers. Nor was it applauded by the American public. The American people weren't showing much support for freedom of expression. They were either silent, or actively in favor of HUAC, Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover because they were responding to the Communist menace, and trampling on civil liberties was part of the price America had to pay. Sound familiar?

The Blacklist always seems to be relevant in one way or another. Dissent was squashed in the name of fighting terrorism in the early 2000s. The “cancel culture” of a more recent decade raises these uncomfortable issues. And now we face a period of deep peril with a government that ignores the rule of law, vows retribution on political dissenters, and generally disdains the Constitution and the freedoms it is supposed to protect. Those who faced moral tests, and their children and the next generation generally who reevaluated their own principles, demonstrate that the Blacklist continues to speak to us.

After "The Front" in 1976, Martin Ritt directed his most acclaimed film in 1979, "Norma Rae," which won the Oscar for Sally Field. He introduced Mary Steenbergen in the Jack Nicholson film "Cross Creek" in 1983. His last film was "Stanley and Iris" starring Jane Fonda and Robert DiNiro in 1990. He died that year.

Walter Bernstein's next film was "Semi-Tough." He wrote "The Betsy" (1978), "Yanks" (79) and several teleplays through 2000. He was interviewed on screen in the 2003 American Masters PBS program on Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and the Blacklist.

David Garfield acted in "The Rose" in 1979 and appeared in a few TV movies. His sister Julie Garfield appeared in Ritt's "Stanley and Iris," as well as "Good Fellas" and other movies and TV shows. She narrated "The John Garfield Story" in 2003.

I lost touch years ago with the Hollywood on Trial filmmakers. I knew them for several years afterwards, however. While working on "Hollywood On Trial" David Helpern and another mutual friend, Fred Barron, sold a story to director Joan Micklin Silver that became the feature film, "Between the Lines," famous for introducing a whole generation of actors: John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry and Bruno Kirby, among others. The story (Fred also wrote the screenplay) was based on an alternative newspaper like the one Fred and I had worked for at the same time. (The guy who punches a hole in the wall? I did that.)

Fred Barron

Then in 1979, David directed a feature film, "Something Short of Paradise" (aka "Perfect Love") starring Susan Sarandon and David Steinberg. It was a romantic comedy written by Fred Barron. I had a featured role in it. Well, I was an extra in several key scenes. Okay, so my back is in it for a second.

 Fred went on to write and produce successful sitcoms like "Kate and Allie" and "Caroline in the City," and executive produce "Seinfeld" and "The Larry Sanders Show." He got back into the movie business producing a little film called "Moulin Rouge!" I believe Fred was also on the set of "The Front" when I was, covering it for somebody. I remember that we drove back to Boston together. Last time I saw him was on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, way before his major Hollywood creds. Doubt if I'd get past the phalanx of superstars blocking the door now.

I last saw David Helpern in Los Angeles sometime in the mid 1980s, when I was staying with Buffy Offner in West Hollywood. He became an independent producer for movies and a studio executive, among other activities. He produced "Dead Heat" in 1988, and was executive producer of the "Leave it To Beaver" film in 1997. His father was the David Helpern of Joan and David shoes fame.

Arnie Reisman continued to be a successful writer as well as a performer for WGBH, public television in Boston. One of his partners in performance was Tony Kahn. Together with Nat Segaloff (who I also knew and worked with in Boston) and Dan Kinnel, Reisman wrote a script about the notorious Waldorf Conference, during which movie moguls essentially established the Blacklist. It became the basis of an L.A. Theatreworks audio theatre presentation starring Edward Asner. In his later years Arnie lived on Martha’ Vineyard where he became its poet laureate and wrote a popular newspaper column on local affairs. He died in 2021.

Tony Kahn became a familiar voice to public radio listeners, and viewers of PBS. He was a host of NPR's "Morning Edition" and special correspondent and alternate anchor for "The World" on BBC radio. He's written and produced as well as narrated at least fifty programs and series for television and radio. Notably, he produced a radio series on the Blacklist, and in 2024 published a graphic novel about his experiences entitled Fugitive: My Boyhood Under the Hollywood Blacklist.

Deborah Offner continues an acting career that has included feature films ( Joan Silver's "Crossing Delancey," among many others), television (“Orange is the New Black”and many others) and theatre. Her New York theatre credits include "Act One" at the Lincoln Center, and "The Three Sisters"," Don Juan", Merry Wives and "Rebel Women" for the New York Shakespeare Festival. In Los Angeles she's appeared in "The Normal Heart" and "Perestroika." In 1981 she appeared in "Ghost Story" with Fred Astaire and Ken Olin, who must have remembered her, because she had a role in "thirtysomething" in 1987---it looked like she would be a regular, except that the series was at its end.

 More recently, a reviewer called her performance in the San Jose Rep production of the Tony-winning play "Side Man" "powerful in a complex role." Her director was Michael Butler, another child of a Blacklist victim heard from in this article.

I'd met Buffy Offner when we lived in the same building in Cambridge for a year or two. Then I saw her a lot when she worked at the Orson Welles restaurant, and the Welles Complex was my second home. We maintained and strengthened our friendship after she moved to West Hollywood. I saw her as much as possible whenever I was out there, and we talked regularly on the phone when I wasn't. We collaborated on a film story and started a script. 

For awhile Buffy worked as a secretary at William Morris, and it was through her that I got my first and only Hollywood Agent Lunch. Later she became a sound editor, and worked on "The Woman In Red." (1984) She was engaged to director Michael Pressman.

Like her father, Elizabeth "Buffy" Offner was a terrific photographer. I used photos she took of David Helpern and other principals of "Hollywood On Trial" in my Washington Newsworks piece on the Blacklist.  She's one of the few photographers who ever took a decent picture of me. I used one on the back of the paperback edition of  my book, The Malling of America, which she took when I was working on our script---you can't see it in the cropped photo, but I'm at the typewriter at her apartment.

This story doesn't have a happy ending. I remember that I'd just bought a new answering machine, and came home to hear its first message. It was from a cousin of Buffy's who I didn't know, saying that after a sudden and very brief illness, Buffy had died. It was November 1985. She was several years shy of forty.

There were two memorials for her, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. I was asked to be one of the speakers at the New York memorial, which was attended mostly by her family. Except for Debbie, I'd never met any of them before. It was clear how loved she was, and that others knew what a beautiful and extraordinary person she was. I uttered the cliché that day that she would always live in our memories. But I meant it, and finally completing this project is one expression of that intent, and that fact.