City of Nets (76 page)

One of the oddities of the still unacknowledged but increasingly official blacklist was that virtually no top stars were permanently barred. Harassed and intimidated but not banished. People like Howard Da Silva and Gale Sondergaard were blacklisted, along with a number of successful writers and directors, but none of the most glamorous celebrities. One reason was that the studios had to protect their investments in these stars; another was that the stars who found themselves in jeopardy would do almost anything to save their careers.

One of the most notable of these victims was Edward G. Robinson, whom the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities denounced in 1949 as “frequently involved in Communist fronts and causes.” This committee provided a fairly typical list of what had once seemed worthy ventures: “Affiliated with American Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born, a Communist front. Sponsor, American Committee for Yugoslav Relief, a C.P. front. . . . Cited as a supporter, who praised American Youth for Democracy, a Communist youth front. . . . Initiating sponsor, National Congress on Civil Rights. . . . Attended meeting of Communist front, Committee for First Amendment.” And so on.

Robinson freely admitted all these activities, but denied ever knowing that the criticized groups were Communist fronts, or denied that they were fronts at all. He then began to experience a certain chill that he vividly described in a series of statements that he attributed to his agent: “Phase 1: ‘Hell, Eddie, I've read a lot of scripts submitted for you, and there isn't one that's right for you. Nothing but the best for you, Eddie, baby. You know that.' Phase 2: ‘Business in lots of trouble, Eddie, baby. Postwar adjustment and all that crap. I've got something really hot cooking. Believe me, baby.' Phase 3: ‘Eddie, it's not so easy at your age. Character parts, you know. After all, you're not exactly a baby, are you, Eddie?' Phase 4: ‘There seems to be some opposition to you, Eddie. I'm looking into it. Whatever it is, we'll fight it with every penny we've got. You know that.' Phase 5 (coming from the agent's secretary): ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Robinson, but Mr. B. is out of town. I'll give him your message. He'll certainly call you at his earliest convenience.' ”

Robinson was not exactly blacklisted. He starred in
All My Sons
for Universal,
Key Largo
for Warners, and
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
for Paramount (1948);
House of Strangers
for Fox and
It's a Great Feeling
for Warners (1949). But the parts offered him were fewer and smaller, and there were other aggravations. Hearst's
Chicago Herald-American
invited him to speak at a ceremony granting citizenship to five hundred new Americans, and then the invitation was withdrawn on the ground that Robinson was “not acceptable.” Robinson protested to Hearst himself and got a telegram from an underling, apologizing and reinviting him. Dalton Trumbo asked for a loan for his family, so Robinson sent a check for $2,500, and that somehow became public knowledge and brought scoldings from right-wing Hearst columnists like George Sokolsky and Victor Riesel. Robinson and his accountants drew up an elaborate list of all the contributions he had made to liberal organizations, and he sent the whole bundle to J. Edgar Hoover, who had once sent Robinson praises for his portrayals of FBI agents. Hoover's office sent a form letter of acknowledgment.

“Hear me! Somebody!” Robinson cried out in his recollection of these years. “God in heaven, to whom do I turn? Call me as a witness. Probe me. Ask me questions. Swear me in. I will testify under oath. The House Committee on Un-American Activities refused to call me. There were no accusations against me.”

Robinson persisted in his efforts to swear loyalty. With the support of Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, he got a chance to appear before HUAC late in 1947, and there he spewed forth his views. “I may not have been as good a husband or father or friend as I should have been,” he said, “but I know my Americanism is unblemished and fine and wonderful, and I am proud of it.” The committee listened politely and nodded and did nothing. Since the committee had not accused Robinson of anything, what was there for it to do? But the criticisms kept appearing in the press, and the job offers kept declining, and Robinson appealed again to HUAC as what he called “the only tribunal we have in the United States where an American citizen can come and ask for this kind of relief.”

It took three years before the committee once again permitted Robinson to tell his tale. “I . . . repeated over and over again that I was not and had never been a member of the Communist Party,” he said later. “What the hell good was that . . . ? What they wanted me to say was that I was a dupe, a sucker, a fool, an idiot . . . that I was a tool, an unsuspecting agent of the Communist conspiracy. I didn't say it because I didn't believe it. The third time around, two years later, I said it. My defenses were down and I said it. My judgment was warped and I said it. My heart was sick and I said it.”

John Garfield faced a similar persecution and tried in much the same way to save himself. He had never been a Communist, but he had signed on for anything that sounded like a good cause. “You know, I
wanted
to join the Communist party,” he told a friend. “I really did . . . I tried. Hell, I'm a
joiner.
But they wouldn't let me in. Can you imagine that? They thought I was too dumb. They said I couldn't be trusted.”

Like Robinson, Garfield got fewer parts in the late 1940's, but that was partly because he was choosy, and partly because the films he chose often failed to make money.
We Were Strangers
(1949) had seemed a promising project about Latin American revolutionaries, directed by John Huston and co-starring Jennifer Jones, but it fared badly at the box office. So did
Under My Skin
(Fox, 1950) and
The Breaking Point
(Warners, 1950). So did two worthy efforts to film Hemingway's
My Old Man
and
To Have and Have Not.
The latter actually used Hemingway's real characters and real plot, and failed as notably as Howard Hawks's Bogart-Bacall travesty had succeeded. And then, while playing tennis in the midst of shooting
Under My Skin,
Garfield suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized. He was determined to keep his illness secret, and to do his best to ignore it.

He returned to New York to star in Clifford Odets's new play,
The Big Knife,
which was all about Hollywood's commercial pressures on the free spirit. Garfield played an idealistic young movie star much like himself. J. Edward Bromberg played a wicked old producer much like Louis B. Mayer.
The Big Knife
opened in February of 1949 but lasted only three months, and all its principal figures came to bad ends. The ailing Bromberg was summoned by congressional investigators and took the Fifth Amendment, then went to London to appear in Dalton Trumbo's new play,
The Biggest Thief in Town,
then suddenly died of a heart attack. “I, for one, would like to suggest . . . a possible verdict of ‘death by political misadventure,' ” Odets said in his funeral eulogy for Bromberg. “Men are growing somehow smaller, and life becomes a wearisome and sickening bore when such
unnatural
deaths become a commonplace of the day now that citizens of our world are hounded out of home, honor, livelihood and painfully accreted career by the tricks and twists of shameless shabby politicians banded into yapping packs.” Well said, in its illiterate fashion, but less than a year later Odets would teach the shameless shabby politicians a lesson in shameless shabbiness. When he testified before HUAC, one of the names he named to clear himself was that of the late Joe Bromberg.

Garfield tried to keep up a brave front. When a former FBI undercover man named John J. Huber claimed that Garfield was among the top ten “drawing cards” used by Communist organizations, the actor answered that the FBI had cleared him for his entertainment tours of military bases during the war. “If they want to string up a man for being liberal,” he added, “let them bring on their ropes.” But only liberals thought that anybody wanted to string up liberals. The process didn't work that way. As Garfield himself said to the producer Jerry Wald, who had once requested him for a specific part but now had doubts, the whole situation was “like I was a member of your baseball team and you knew I was going to get traded.”

Garfield kept pursuing the route to high-minded professional failure. He bought the screen rights to Nelson Algren's
The Man with the Golden Arm
even though he knew that the Production Code forbade movies about drug addiction. He went back on stage to play Ibsen's Peer Gynt, with the predictable consequences. When he finally got his subpoena from HUAC in March of 1951, he eagerly hoped to disavow any connection with communism and to escape the naming-names trap by professing complete ignorance of everything around him. “They're out to fuck me,” he was heard to say just before taking the stand, “but I'm not going to let them.”

“I have always hated communism,” Garfield had recently told the
New York Times,
and now he reaffirmed it on the witness stand. “It is a tyranny which threatens our country and the peace of the world. . . . I have never been a member of the Communist Party or a sympathizer with any of its doctrines.” The interrogators pressed for details. “It appears,” said Frank Tavenner, “that you sponsored a dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on February 4, 1945, under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, for the purpose of raising funds.”

“I have no knowledge of being a member of that organization,” Garfield said, “and I don't have any recollection of sponsoring that dinner.”

“Let me ask you,” Tavenner persisted, “if you recall at such a meeting that you introduced Paul Robeson?”

“I don't have any recollection,” Garfield said.

And so on. Donald Jackson, who had replaced the new Senator Nixon as the Los Angeles representative on the committee, was dissatisfied. “I am still not convinced of the entire accuracy you are giving this committee,” he said. “It is your contention that you did not know, during all the . . . years you were in Hollywood . . . a single member of the Communist Party?”

“That is absolutely correct,” Garfield said, “because I was not a party member or associated in any shape, way or form.”

Garfield thought he had won, but nobody really believed his testimony. HUAC leaked word that it was considering charges of perjury. On the other hand, Garfield's liberal friends (and his assertive wife) criticized him for testifying at all. Garfield found himself in that nebulous world where nothing could be proved or disproved because nothing had been officially charged. He heard that one Hollywood studio was looking for “a John Garfield type,” but when he offered himself, his agent was told that “we need a Garfield
type
but we can't use Garfield.”

Garfield heard that Arnold Forster, general counsel to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, knew how to serve as a mediator between people who were not accused and people who were not accusing them. Forster arranged for
Look
magazine to commission a confessional article by Garfield, which the editors proposed to entitle, in honor of Garfield's roles as a prizefighter in
Body and Soul
and
Golden Boy,
“I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook.” Garfield, by now in deep trouble with his wife, moved into a suite at the Warwick Hotel in New York and began to write his confessions. There he heard about Canada Lee.

Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata was his real name, but ringside announcers describing his fights as a middleweight boxer found that too complicated, and so he became Canada Lee. He was a man of various talents. “All my life, I've been on the verge of being something,” he once said. “I'm almost becoming a concert violinist and I run away to the races. I'm almost a good jockey and I go overweight. I'm almost a champion prizefighter and my eyes go bad.”

So he became an actor, a passionate actor at a time when blacks were supposed to be amusing. Some of us remember him reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm in Alfred Hitchcock's
Lifeboat,
and some saw him as Banquo in Orson Welles's all-black
Macbeth,
and some of us saw him in whiteface in
The Duchess of Malfi,
and nobody ever forgot seeing him as the punch-drunk fighter in Garfield's
Body and Soul.
Shortly after that, his name appeared in the mass of hearsay flushed out of the FBI files in the course of the spy trial of Judith Coplon. “The drivel that has come from the so-called secret files of the FBI,” Lee called it at a press conference in 1949. “I am not a Communist. . . . I shall continue to speak my mind, I shall continue to help my people gain their rightful place in America.”

That's what they all said. The next time Canada Lee came up for a TV role, he was barred by the sponsor, the American Tobacco Company. Over the next three years, he was barred from about forty shows. “How long, how long can a man take this kind of unfair treatment?” he asked the editors of
Variety.
A few months after that, still unemployed and now penniless, he finally attested his patriotism by publicly participating in a denunciation of Paul Robeson. Perhaps as a consequence—who can ever tell?—he was given a role in the filming of Alan Paton's
Cry, the Beloved Country.
It was only a temporary reprieve, and the curtain came down again. “I can't take it any more,” Lee told Walter White of the NAACP after a few more months of unemployment. “I'm going to get a shoeshine box and sit outside the Astor Theater. My picture is playing to capacity audiences and, my God, I can't get one day's work.” White counseled caution and patience, and Lee, all full of rage and desperation, accepted that counsel. A few months later, he was dead, of high blood pressure, at forty-five.