City of Nets (67 page)

Alvah Bessie, whose screenwriting credits involved nothing more distinguished than some Errol Flynn epics,
Northern Pursuit
and
Objective Burma,
also arrived with a statement. The committee asked him to read just “the first couple of paragraphs,” letting the rest be entered silently into the record. Asked, then, whether he was a Communist, Bessie archly pointed out that General Dwight Eisenhower, who was being courted by both Democrats and Republicans as a presidential candidate, had refused to divulge which party he belonged to, if any. “What is good enough for General Eisenhower is good enough for me,” Bessie said. After each of these evasive witnesses had been heard, the committee called on one of its investigators to read aloud all the documentary evidence that had been discovered, ranging from the number of the witness's Communist Party card to his signature on various public appeals and petitions.

Samuel Ornitz, a paunchy man already in his late fifties, and already afflicted with cancer, blamed his summons on anti-Semitism. “I wish to address this committee as a Jew . . .” he announced, in the opening statement that he was not allowed to read. “It may be redundant to repeat that anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were the number one poison weapon used by Hitler—but still terribly relevant, lest we forget.”

Herbert Biberman engaged Thomas in another shouting match:

 

BIBERMAN:
It has become very clear to me that the real purpose of this investigation—

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: That is not an answer to the question—

BIBERMAN:
—is to drive a wedge—

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: That is not the question
(pounding gavel).

BIBERMAN:
—into the component parts—

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: Not the question—

BIBERMAN:
—of the motion picture industry.

THOMAS
(pounding gavel)
: Ask him the next question.

 

Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, who had attracted considerable attention by directing and producing
Crossfire,
one of Hollywood's first movies on anti-Semitism, did their best to lecture the committee on civil liberties. Ring Lardner, Jr., by contrast, tried to introduce a characteristic touch of humor. Asked the inevitable question, he started by saying, “I could answer exactly the way you want, Mr. Chairman—”

 

THOMAS:
It is not a question of our wanting you to answer that. It is a very simple question. Anybody would be proud to answer it—any real American. . . .

LARDNER:
It depends on the circumstances. I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.

THOMAS:
Leave the witness chair.

 

The last of the Hollywood Ten, Lester Cole, proved as evasive and abusive as all the others. “This committee is waging a cold war on democracy,” he declared in the statement he was not allowed to read. Then Lardner and Cole, like the others, were cited for contempt of Congress. And then the committee summoned the man who turned out to be its last witness, the eleventh of the Hollywood Ten. “Mr. Brecht,” said Stripling, “will you please state your full name and present address for the record, please? Speak into the microphone.”

“My name is Bertolt Brecht . . .” said Bertolt Brecht. He was wearing a neat dark suit that had been given to him five years earlier by a Los Angeles tailor named Samuel Bernstein, who had encountered him at a reading of Yiddish poetry (including Yiddish translations of Brecht), and, not realizing that the poet's worn clothes expressed his deliberate efforts to make himself look proletarian, had sent Brecht in the mail his own wedding suit, even offering to make any necessary alterations, at no charge. (Bernstein duly received Brecht's letter of thanks, saying that the suit fit him perfectly.) Brecht always looked a bit like a raccoon, or a fox, sharp-eyed, wary, quick, but never more so than now. He also smoked one of his cheap cigars. “I was born in Augsburg, Germany, February 10, 1898,” he said.

The committee seemed strangely unready for him. “What was that date again?” Thomas asked, as though he had missed something important.

“Would you give that date again?” asked Stripling. The date was repeated. Representative John McDowell echoed it: “1898?” Brecht repeated it: “1898.” The committee then offered Brecht an interpreter, David Baumgardt, a consultant in philosophy at the Library of Congress, and Stripling resumed his interrogation: “You were born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany, on February 10, 1888, is that correct?” Brecht docilely agreed to the misstatement. One of the attorneys, Bartley Crum, intervened to say that it was 1898. Brecht agreed again. “Is it '88 or '98?” Stripling asked once more. “Ninety-eight,” Brecht said.

Perhaps he had already realized by now that these interrogators would not be difficult to outwit. One of Brecht's friends later remarked that the whole session resembled a zoologist being cross-examined by apes. But if the apes were notable for their blundering ignorance, the zoologist was no less notable for his dissembling, his mixture of lies and equivocations, his pretense of not understanding English combined with a pretense of desiring to please. Thus:

 

STRIPLING:
Have you attended any Communist Party meetings?

BRECHT:
No, I don't think so. . . .

THOMAS:
Well, aren't you certain?

BRECHT:
No—I am certain, yes.

THOMAS:
You are certain you have never been to Communist Party meetings?

BRECHT:
Yes, I think so. . . .

THOMAS:
You are certain?

BRECHT:
I think I am certain.

THOMAS:
You think you are certain?

BRECHT:
Yes, I have not attended such meetings, in my opinion.

 

And so on. If Brecht was disingenuous on such simple matters as party meetings, he was Byzantine on the matter of his own works. For some reason, perhaps his interest in the Eislers, Stripling was particularly curious about
The Measures Taken,
an indisputably Communist play that attempted to justify the murder of a party worker who had failed to carry out his assignment. Brecht began by saying that what he had written was just “the adaptation of an old religious Japanese play . . . which shows the devotion for an idea until death.” Stripling insisted on what he considered the basic question: “Mr. Brecht, may I interrupt you? Would you consider the play to be pro-Communist or anti-Communist, or would it take a neutral position regarding Communists?” Brecht sidestepped: “No, I would say—you see, literature has the right and the duty to give the public the ideas of the time. Now, in this play—of course, I wrote about twenty plays—but in this play I tried to express the feelings and the ideas of the German workers who then fought against Hitler. I also formulated in an artistic—”

 

STRIPLING:
Fighting against Hitler, did you say?

BRECHT
: Yes.

 

In the midst of this esoteric discussion of the meaning of a play that none of Brecht's interrogators had read, Brecht adopted the bizarre tactic of deliberately confusing
The Measures Taken
with
The Yea-Sayer,
a slightly earlier and considerably less authoritarian version of a similar story. Asked about the plot of one play, he answered by describing the other, reasonably confident that the committee wouldn't know the difference. Rightly so, for Stripling soon veered off into the question of how many times Brecht had been to Moscow. J. Parnell Thomas was beginning to weary of it all. “Mr. Stripling, can we hurry this along?” he said. “We have a very heavy schedule this afternoon.”

But Stripling kept floundering. He had found in
The People
a song by Brecht and Eisler that struck him as subversive: “You must be ready to take over; men on the dole, learn it; men in the prisons, learn it; women in the kitchen, learn it. . . .” Brecht challenged the translation, and the interpreter supported him.
Führung
was the word, and the interpreter claimed that it meant not “you must take over” but “you must take the lead.” J. Parnell Thomas was beginning to lose his temper at all these thick Germanic quibblings in thick Germanic accents. “I cannot understand the interpreter any more than I can the witness,” he complained.

Brecht's admirers have claimed that the poet defeated the committee by outfoxing it, by leading it into obscure byways and escaping every attempt to trap him. But the fact is that he escaped only by denying himself. Was he a member of the Communist Party? Brecht answered Stripling's inevitable question by saying that he had heard his Hollywood “colleagues” declare such questions “not proper,” but he, Brecht, was “a guest in this country,” and so he would answer as fully as he could: “I was not a member, or am not a member, of any Communist Party.” Maybe that was true, but when Stripling went on to ask Brecht whether his plays had been “based on the philosophy of Marx and Lenin,” Brecht denied much of what he had thought and written and argued for at least twenty years. “No, I don't think that is quite correct,” he said. He acknowledged only that as a playwright concerned with history, he “had to study Marx's ideas about history.” Stripling made one last try: “Have you ever made application to join the Communist Party?” Brecht's denial was worthy of Saint Peter: “No, no, no, no, no, never.”

J. Parnell Thomas thanked Brecht as “a good example,” and so the hearings adjourned, and Brecht was reprieved. And he felt, once again, ashamed. “In the cab, returning to the hotel,” Lester Cole recalled, “Brecht grieved; he wondered whether any of us would ever understand and forgive him. Alone in this country, a foreigner, they could hold him, as they did Gerhart Eisler, under one of the Alien Registration Acts in prison for how long—? He wanted to go home. . . . I put an arm around him. Little comfort. At the hotel he explained. The others did understand.”

Brecht also understood that he had not only lied but been a coward, not only been a coward but lied. That was what
The Measures Taken
had been about: what makes a man fail his comrades, and what must be done about it. As a playwright, Brecht had been stern; as a witness, he pleaded for understanding and forgiveness. This was what
Galileo
was about, too. What should a man do when, as Galileo put it, “they showed me the instruments?” They had not even shown Brecht the instruments—in fact, there had not really been any instruments to show—but Brecht had recanted anyway, and confessed whatever needed to be confessed. No, no, no, no, no, never.

Brecht's main concern now was to get out of America. Despite all his willingness to oblige the authorities, he still felt threatened, and besides, he had already bought his tickets. The day of his testimony, he fled from Washington to New York with Joseph Losey and T. Edward Hambleton, who were much involved with the prospective New York production of
Galileo,
but what did Brecht care about that now? On October 31, 1947, his last day in America, Brecht met Laughton, who had grown a beard for his role. Should a Brechtian actor playing the role of a bearded man wear a real beard? Probably not, but the main question on Laughton's mind was whether Brecht's testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee would make it dangerous for Laughton to play Brecht's
Galileo.
Brecht's fawning testimony apparently made it all right. Laughton was relieved. Brecht only wanted to get out. In the evening of October 31, he climbed aboard an Air France plane bound for Paris.

 

When J. Parnell Thomas adjourned his hearings that Friday afternoon, he wanted to make it clear that the adjournment was not indefinite, that the committee would “resume hearings as soon as possible.” Earlier that week, Thomas had declared that his committee had “not been swayed, intimidated or influenced by either Hollywood glamour, pressure groups, threats, ridicule or high-pressure tactics on the part of high-paid puppets and apologists for the motion picture industry.” Now he wanted to proclaim that he knew of seventy-nine “prominent” Hollywood figures who were Communists or “had records of Communist affiliations.” The committee had heard eleven, but “there are sixty-eight to go.” For some mysterious reason, though, the hearings stopped. Waldo Salt, who was scheduled to be the next witness after Brecht, did not testify until 1951.

The leftist witnesses returned to Hollywood in a state of considerable euphoria. Some five hundred cheering supporters welcomed them at the Los Angeles airport, where Lardner made a brief speech saying that the fight must go on. The leaders of the Committee for the First Amendment announced ten more national radio broadcasts. And since the studios took no action against any of the ten hostile witnesses, they considered themselves secure, well protected. As a first step in their defense, they expected a leftist victory in the imminent elections at the Screen Writers Guild. One of the major issues was the Taft-Hartley Act, which had taken effect that summer and required all union officers to file a non-Communist affidavit. The leftists in the SWG promised to fight against the Taft-Hartley requirements. To their surprise, they were soundly defeated in the guild elections of November 20. Two of the unfriendly witnesses, Lester Cole and Gordon Kahn, lost their places on the executive board.

On the day of the SWG elections, Eric Johnston denounced the hostile witnesses in
The Hollywood Reporter.
He said they had done a “tremendous disservice” to the film industry, and he urged the industry itself to “take positive steps to meet this problem.” Johnston himself was already organizing those steps. On November 24, J. Parnell Thomas asked Congress to cite the Ten for contempt, Nixon made one of the main speeches in support of the move, and Congress voted in favor by a lopsided 347 to 17. That same day, Johnston presided over a meeting of about fifty of Hollywood's chief executives and producers in one of the public rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. They were all there, Mayer and both the Schenck brothers, the Warner brothers, the Cohn brothers, Y. Frank Freeman and Barney Balaban of Paramount, Peter Rathvon of RKO, Sam Goldwyn and Walter Wanger, and, as the industry's new legal adviser, there was the former secretary of state and former Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes.