Ronnie and Nancy (38 page)

Jack Warner was the first to testify. “Ideological termites have bur-rowed into many American industries,” he declared in a prepared opening statement. “Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund. We are willing to establish such a fund to ship to Russia the people who don’t like our American system of government and prefer the Communistic system to ours.”78 Mayer, who came next, also read an opening statement designed to please his inquisitors, asserting that he had personally “maintained a relentless vigilance against un-American influences” at MGM and calling for “legislation establishing a national policy regulating employment of Communists in private industry. . . . It is my belief they should be denied the sanctuary of the freedom they seek to destroy.”79

The tough-talking studio chiefs were thrown off balance, however, when pressed to name names. When Warner hesitated, Stripling read out the list of sixteen screenwriters the mogul had so willingly fingered in May. Mayer coughed up Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, and Donald Ogden Stewart as MGM writers he had heard
might
be Communists. Asked why they hadn’t fired such employees, Warner waffled, and Mayer blamed his lawyers. Congressman Nixon asked Warner why his studio had made so many anti-Nazi movies but no anti-Communist ones, and both bosses were stunned to find themselves defending the pro-Russian films they had 2 1 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House produced during the war. Warner, who would later brag in his memoir that he had made
Mission to Moscow
at the personal behest of FDR, claimed he wasn’t quite sure where the idea had come from. Mayer was reduced to insisting that
Song of Russia
was just another boy-meets-girl picture, which, “except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland.”80 As Representative Emanuel Celler of New York later commented, “If Chairman Thomas sought to strike terror into the minds of the movie magnates, he succeeded. They were white-livered.”81

To make matters worse, Mayer’s shilly-shallying was directly contradicted by the next witness: Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré author of the 1943 best-seller
The Fountainhead
, which would soon be made into a movie starring Gary Cooper. Rand was the intellectual star of the Alliance, and her scene-by-scene analysis of
Song of Russia
left little doubt that MGM had put a positive gloss on conditions in the Soviet Union. “Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda. Am I not correct?” she argued, adding that she believed such was the case even if it had been done for the sake of Allied unity.82

The parade of Alliance witnesses who followed Rand lacked her rhetorical finesse. Sam Wood asserted that if you pulled down the pants of Communists “you would find the hammer and sickle on their rear ends,”83 and he accused four fellow directors of trying “to steer us into the red river.”84

Walt Disney mistakenly included the League of Women Voters on his list of Communist front organizations and had to issue a public apology.85 “This may sound biased,” said matinee idol and Reagan’s pal Robert Taylor.

“However, if I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I am afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists do.”86

The message that came through—from both the committee’s loaded questions and the friendly witnesses’ loaded answers—was persistent and threatening: Hollywood was riddled with Reds, and the studios were doing nothing about it. Adolphe Menjou reprised the Hollywood strikes of 1945 and 1946, labeling CSU boss Herbert Sorrell a card-carrying Communist and praising Reagan for “the magnificent job” he had done in trying “to settle this strike in every way possible.”87 He carried guilt by association to new extremes in a prize exchange with Congressman Nixon:
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Mr. Nixon: Have you any other test which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?

Mr. Menjou: Well, I think attending any meetings at which Mr.

Paul Robeson appeared, and applauding or listening to his Communist songs in America. I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind.88

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It was against this backdrop of hype and hysteria that Reagan testified, on the fourth day. If the press covered the hearings like a spectacle, Reagan seemed to approach his appearance like a performance. He had observed the proceedings of the previous afternoon from the spectators’ section and had rehearsed his testimony in his hotel room with Stripling.89 “There was a long drawn-out ‘ooooh’ from the jam-packed, predominantly feminine audience,”
The New York Times
reported, as Reagan strode to the witness table the following morning, dressed for the part of youthful white knight in a tan gabardine suit, white shirt, and navy knit tie.90 Lest he come across as too glamorous or lightweight, he carefully put on his glasses as he began his testimony. One could say that this was the moment when Ronald Reagan perfected the public persona he had been developing since he took to the speaking circuit at the end of the war—a finely calibrated mixture of small-town friendliness, movie star shine, and political gravitas. His testimony was balanced, sober, clear, and forceful.

“As president of the Screen Actors Guild,” Stripling asked, “have you at any time observed or noted within the organization a clique of either Communists or Fascists who were attempting to exert influence or pressure on the guild?”

“Well, sir, my testimony must be very similar to that of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Montgomery,” Reagan replied, referring to the former SAG presidents whose testimony had just been heard. “There has been a small group within the Screen Actors Guild which has consistently opposed the policy of the guild board and officers of the guild, as evidenced by the vote on various issues. That small clique referred to has been suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party.”

Mr. Stripling: You have no knowledge yourself as to whether or not any of them are members of the Communist Party?

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Mr. Reagan: No, sir, I have no investigative force, or anything, and I do not know.

Mr. Stripling: Mr. Reagan, what is your feeling about what steps should be taken to rid the motion-picture industry of any Communist influences?

Mr. Reagan: Well, sir, ninety-nine percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think, within the bounds of our democratic rights and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority. In opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake. Whether the Party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the Government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent a hundred and seventy years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the Government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter. I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work; I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.

When Reagan finished, Thomas spoke up, hoping to seize the high ground that the actor had claimed so gracefully with his short soliloquy on the nature of democracy. “There is one thing that you said that interests me very much,” Thomas said. “That was the quotation from Jefferson.

That is just why this Committee was created by the House of Representatives: to acquaint the American people with the facts. Once the American
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people are acquainted with the facts there is no question but that the American people will do the kind of job that they want done: that is, to make America just as pure as we can possibly make it. We want to thank you very much for coming here today.”

But Reagan was not about to let the New Jersey congressman hijack Jefferson for his own purposes. “Sir,” he rejoined, “if I might, in regard to that, say that what I was trying to express, and didn’t do very well, was also this other fear. I detest, I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest.

But at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.”91

Reagan’s performance impressed a wide range of observers, from Nixon on the right to ADA executive secretary James Loeb on the left. Loeb, whom Reagan met with before leaving Washington, thought his testimony was “by all odds, the most honest and forthright from a decent liberal point of view” and called him “the hero” of the hearings.92 The press was also adu-latory:
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
,
Life
, and
Motion Picture
Daily
singled him out for his credibility and refusal to name names. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,”

wrote Quentin Reynolds in
Collier’s
magazine. “Reagan, it was obvious, had done a good deal of thinking on the subject in question.”93 Even the recently installed Communist government of Rumania paid him the compliment of being the only star among the friendly witnesses whose movies were not banned by its Ministry of Information Censorship Division.94

Eleven of the Unfriendly 19 were called to testify the following week.

When asked the fateful question—“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”—ten refused to give a direct answer, choosing instead to lecture the committee on the Bill of Rights, compare its members to Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, and otherwise make themselves look, in John Huston’s phrase, like “belligerent buffoons.”95 In doing so, the Hollywood 10, as they would be known from then on, played right into the hands of Parnell Thomas, who pounded his gavel and charged them with contempt of Congress.

“I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This Committee is on trial here before the American people. Let’s get that straight,” shouted John Howard Lawson in a typical outburst.96 After ordering police officers to remove the 2 1 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House screenwriter from the stand, Thomas had Stripling read a nine-page memorandum detailing Lawson’s long and extensive involvement with Communist activities in Hollywood.97 A second investigator produced a copy of Lawson’s 1944 Communist Party registration card. Dalton Trumbo wouldn’t even say whether or not he was a member of the Screen Writers Guild. Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., and Lester Cole gave equally truculent performances before the hearings were abruptly suspended by Thomas on October 30, some say because of the negative publicity, others because by then he had realized his goal of instilling the fear of God into the studio moguls. Only Bertolt Brecht, who as a resident alien felt his position was especially precarious, had outrightly—and probably falsely—denied Party membership and escaped a contempt citation.

“It was a sorry performance,” wrote John Huston in his 1980 memoir,
An Open Book
. “You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I disapproved of what was being done to the Ten, but I also disapproved of their response. They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle. . . .

Before this spectacle, the attitude of the press had been extremely sympathetic. Now it changed.”98 Huston and two dozen other luminaries from the Committee for the First Amendment, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, and Danny Kaye, had flown to Washington the day before the unfriendly witnesses began testifying.99

The First Amendment group also produced an anti-HUAC radio show, titled
Hollywood Fights Back
, which was broadcast nationwide on ABC the day they flew to Washington. The half-hour program featured brief remarks by four U.S. senators as well as a slew of film personalities, beginning with Myrna Loy announcing, “We question the right of Congress to ask any man what he thinks on political issues,” and ending with Judy Garland urging listeners to write their congressmen to protest the inquiry.100 But as Huston and his colleagues sat in the back-row seats that Thomas had assigned them, watching the men they were there to support sink to the chairman’s level, they felt increasingly let down and hopeless. President Truman decided not to have them to lunch after all,
Life
magazine mocked them as “lost liberals,” and the right-wing Hearst papers began a campaign to portray Huston as “the brains of the Communist Party in the West.”101 On his way back to Los Angeles, Bogart told a Chicago columnist that the Washington trip had been “ill-advised, even foolish,” and not long after that he called himself a