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lots of research and interviews, but a combination of unfortunate circumstances led to most of what I wrote remaining unpublished.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
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.
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| Telegram from "Room Service" playwright John Murray. A few days later, Offner received his HUAC subpoena. |
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. |
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 |
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.
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" |
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.
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 |
"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.
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 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.
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| 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."
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| 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 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."
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| This is my favorite photo of Deborah Offner, partly because I see Buffy in it, too |
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’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."
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."
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."
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| Tony Kahn |
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."
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?"
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| Jean and Hugo Butler, circa 1960. Blacklisted in the U.S., Butler wrote for Bunuel in Mexico and for European films. |
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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.
