The New Confessions (67 page)

The other pressing question was to do with the identity of the informer. Who? Why? I knew who my enemies were, but I found it hard to credit them with something so thoroughgoing. There was a fanatic diligence about this plan that seemed to speak of vast resources of perversity—all committed to bring me down. Faithfull? Druce?… It seemed farfetched.

I sighed, contemplating once more the ruin of
The Confessions
. How many scripts had been written, how many false starts and premature conclusions had there been? The concept, the work, seemed almost alive, animallike in its capacity to live on, evolve and adapt itself to the multitude of obstacles the century placed in its way.
The Confessions
had a life of sorts, that was true. It had been born, grown up, suffered setbacks, struggled on, changed, adapted itself.… I felt urgently that I needed to round it off, let it mature and die. I had hoped that
Father of Liberty
would have been that final hybrid. How long would I have to wait? Sit it out, Eddie had said. Be patient.

I got up, planning to wander along the beach and tell Karl-Heinz the bad news. Nora Lee came over. I saw she was a tall girl wearing flat shoes like dancing pumps. I thought suddenly, painfully, of Doon.

“Do you want to come upstairs for a moment, John? We kept some things of Mom’s. Maybe you’d like to have something, like a sort of souvenir. No, I don’t mean that. What’s the word?”

“Memento.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like that.”

We went upstairs to the apartment. I chose Lori’s Turkish-English dictionary.

I sat it out for five years. For four years I waited for things to blow over. It may sound strange to you, it may even sound unlikely, but it was during those years that I missed my children the most. I have not spoken to them, but I had not forgotten them. I missed them keenly, desperately—or rather, I missed a private fanciful version of them. I used to think about them often—Vincent and the twins, a young man and two young women now, total strangers to me and vice versa. I had corresponded with them, dutifully, desultorily, but their letters were banal and disappointing—and I daresay mine were too. It was the change
of surname that distressed and distanced me: this Vincent Devize didn’t seem to be my son anymore (it can happen so easily, believe me). At times I was wracked with the loss of Hereford. Hereford, dead all these years, was closer and more real to me than my three children living. I had an ideal platonic love for them of sorts, but its concrete manifestations were mere tokens, mutual obligations halfheartedly and effortfully fulfilled. My life bottomed out, as they say, until 1953—when it got worse. But let me take you through this unsatisfactory interlude.

The Hollywood Ten were not so lucky either. They had pleaded the First Amendment—the constitutional right to freedom of thought and opinion—and had been cited for contempt of Congress. This had been foreseen and planned for. In the Supreme Court there was a majority of liberal judges who, it was calculated, would overturn the verdict. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1949 two of the judges died and were replaced by hardline reactionaries. The Ten went to prison and the HUAC hearings on Hollywood subversives resumed with new spiteful vigor in 1951.

That was a fretful year of genuine worry for me. I felt sure that Brayfield and his subcommittee would release their findings or the dossier itself. But nothing happened. Slowly, I began to relax. Perhaps the dossier had been a crude trick to try and panic an admission out of me? Perhaps it had never existed? Sometimes I saw the open sessions in Washington on television and I would contemplate Brayfield’s fat sweaty face among the others on the committee with a mixture of loathing and acute trepidation. But I seemed to have been forgotten. Others were subpoenaed, took the Fifth and were blacklisted, or named names and were cleared. Then I noticed that I was forgotten because the damage had already been done. I was graylisted. I approached other studios for work—but as Eddie had predicted, the damage had been done.

In 1950 I was dropped from the Legion’s list, but
Red Connections
and AMPOPAWL never left me out. Briefly in 1952 I appeared on the MPAPAI list and got a call from a man in Alert Inc. offering to get my name cleared for a cost of one thousand dollars. I didn’t have the money then so I asked him to call back, but he never did. As I hadn’t made a film since 1944, I assumed that Alert Inc. had concluded that it was hardly worth clearing someone so evidently unemployable as me.

I had some savings, profits from
The Equalizer
, some money I’d inherited from my father, and I was soon reduced to living off my capital. I did three versions of the Jesse James script for Eddie, until I realized
he had no intentions of making the film and it was merely a way of giving me money. Eventually I told him I wouldn’t go on. So I wrote another script, a story of adolescent love loosely based on my own entanglement with Donald Verulam and Faye Hobhouse. I embellished my experiences in World War II with Two Dogs Running and produced a war adventure called
Alpha Beach, St.-Tropez
. Eddie paid me for them out of charity.

I sublet the ground floor of my house. I rented a room to Nora Lee Madrazon and the rest to an Austrian couple, the Linds, friends of the Coopers. When funds ran lower still, I took up teaching again, some maths but increasingly English lessons, mainly to Japanese immigrants and some Filipino relatives of Nora Lee. Ends met with some difficulty.

When I told Karl-Heinz what had happened, he seemed more concerned for me than for his own prospects. Curiously, from that point on his own career advanced. He acted under the name K. H. Cornfield and he soon had a steady supply of small roles—usually playing shady or dandified foreigners—in films and on television. He never moved from his two-room apartment in the Hotel Cythera on the seafront. The hotel became another 129B Stralauer Allee: its unpretentious decrepitude was the sort of environment he flourished in, and besides, as he put it, the beach was so very handy. He would reassure me when, in my low moments, I used to bemoan my wretched luck. “Don’t worry, Johnny,” he would say. “I know we’ll finish
The Confessions.
” He saw something talismanic in our encounter in Weilburg in 1918. Over thirty years ago, he would remind me. Who could have guessed then that the two of us would be living in Los Angeles? There had to be some reason for it. I wished I could have shared his confidence.

Outbreaks of war always affected my life in surprising ways. At the end of June 1950, the day after the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel, my affair with Nora Lee Madrazon began. She came upstairs with a cousin to arrange an English lesson for him and stayed on for a coffee after he had left. Lori, though hefty, had had a pretty face. Nora Lee had inherited this, modified somewhat by her half-Filipino blood. She looked Eastern—dark skin, slanted eyes, straight black hair—but she was in fact unregenerate American. It was this juxtaposition that particularly attracted me. I admit that the fact she was nineteen years old had something to do with it as well. She had a slim brown body with perfectly round, almost black nipples. She was tired of boys, she
said; that’s why she liked me. She had been renting the room from me for almost a year before we became lovers and couldn’t understand what had taken me so long.

“Chauncy and Hall figure we’ve been balling since I moved in.”

“They do?” I didn’t go to the diner very often, but that explained the leering familiarity with which they greeted me. “Don’t they mind?”

“Why should they? They know about you and Mom. You’re practically one of the family.”

And so my life progressed on this somewhat reduced level. I still had my small circle of friends—Karl-Heinz, the Gasts, the Coopers, the Hitzigs and Monika. Monika’s career too had taken a leap forward. Now that she conceded she was a mature woman she began to get more work, particularly on television. She urged me to try the television and then the radio companies, which I did, only to find that the graylist made me if anything even more of a pariah. As long as I appeared on lists I would get no work. I thought vaguely about paying to have my name “cleared,” but when I rang Alert Inc. they told me it would now cost between five and ten thousand dollars. The longer I left it, the harder it became.

I had plenty of time on my hands. One bonus of my new leisure was that I discovered California north of Los Angeles. Karl-Heinz and I spent two long holidays near Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula in ’51 and ’52. I liked the coast up there. It reminded me vaguely of Scotland—the pines, the cliffs, the small beaches in coves—and of holidays I had taken as a child with Oonagh, Donald, Thompson and my father.

However, it was on that second trip in ’52 that I noticed the surveillance had begun again. I spotted a maroon Dodge behind us on the highway from Ventura to San Luis Obispo, where we stopped for lunch. I saw it again two days later when we made a trip to the hot springs at Tassajara. I didn’t tell Karl-Heinz because I didn’t want to spoil his vacation. I wasn’t that perturbed. Since the day I had been called before the Brayfield Subcommittee I knew I had been watched. As Eddie had predicted, my phone was tapped for two years. My mail was intercepted regularly (everything from Britain was opened). I was often aware of being followed, though I could never identify the men doing it. Once or twice I had seen a figure in the crowd that looked oddly familiar. He reminded me of the man I had seen jump into his car the day I was subpoenaed. I never saw his face. It was something about his posture
that nagged at me: the set of his shoulders, the rake of his hat … I couldn’t place it.

The year turned, my fifty-fourth birthday came around, and for the first time I began contemplating giving it all up. One evening with Karl-Heinz, drinking Scotch in his rooms at the Cythera, he began talking about the five months he’d spent at Drumlarish with Mungo Dale—old Sir Hector had passed away in ’39. (In fact Karl-Heinz talked very fondly of Mungo and from time to time prurient speculations flitted across my mind.…) Anyway, I felt a sudden urge to abandon everything, to go back home to Scotland and settle down. I confided this to Karl-Heinz. He laughed at me. “You’d go mad,” he said. “Wait till you’re sixty, and besides we have to finish
The Confessions.
” I was moved by his faith. It was much stronger than mine. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this crazy witch-hunt can’t last forever.”

He was wrong. A few weeks later I was round at Ernest Cooper’s house having Sunday lunch when a U.S. marshal knocked on his door and served him with the dreaded pink subpoena. Ernest looked as if he had been shot. I tried to calm him down.

“They can’t do anything to you, Ernest. It’s not like it was in Germany. They can’t lock you up. Just plead the Fifth like I did.”

“Then they blacklist you. You haven’t worked for three years.”

“Well, not properly, that’s true. But … why don’t you lie? Look at Bertolt.”

I could make no headway. He was terrified.

The next day Monika Alt phoned me. She had been subpoenaed too. Werner Hitzig as well.

“Have you been subpoenaed?” she asked.

“No. Why? I was subpoenaed in ’48.”

“Well, why are they calling us and not you? They’ve been watching you for years, you said.”

I didn’t like the implication in her tone of voice.

“It’s got nothing to do with me, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny. No, it’s just that I’m worried. Everything’s going so well for me now. I got a film at Fox. Eddie promised me something at Lone Star. I can’t go on those filthy lists, I just can’t.”

“They call masses of people. Hundreds. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

I saw Monika’s appearance on television. It looked like an enormous press conference: microphones, TV cameras, lights, a crowd of about
four hundred people. Monika looked marvelous. She denied everything and seemed to have an easy time. Ernest admitted that he had been in the Communist party in Germany before World War II but insisted that since then he had utterly repudiated everything it stood for and was now staunchly and proudly American. Werner Hitzig took the Fifth.

Two days later I was lugging groceries from a supermarket to my car when I heard a hoarse stage whisper.

“
Mr. Todd.
”

I looked round. It was Page Farrier, crouched behind a Chrysler. He pointed at an open-air hot dog stand a couple of hundred yards away.

“
See you there. Ten minutes.
”

Page arrived eventually, with a caution that would have done credit to a commando behind enemy lines. I had seen him regularly over the intervening years. He picked up my scripts for Eddie and delivered payment in cash. I knew him well. He sat down. I had ordered him a Dr Pepper and a chili dog. I knew he liked them.

“Ah, no thanks, Mr. Todd. Really, I can’t eat.”

“How’s Brooke [his wife]? Rockwell and Stockyard [his children]?”

“Stockard. Fine, fine. Yes. Fine, all fine.”

“Good. What’s up?”

“You’ve been named. In executive session.”

“
What?
Who by, for Christ’s sake?”

“Some people called Monika Alt and Ernest Cooper.”

“What did they say?”

He opened a notebook. “That you were a member of a revolutionary Communist cell in Berlin in the twenties. That you were a member of the Santa Monica chapter of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the thirties. That you consorted with subversives in Mexico in 1939.” Page looked shocked. “This is much worse than last time,” he said. “They’re going to subpoena you again. This time it will be Washington, the full committee, open session. The works.”

“God.” I felt very tired. “What should I do?”

Page cleared his throat. “Well, with the open session you’ve got three choices. Plead the First and go to prison for contempt. Plead the Fifth and effectively admit your guilt. And you get on the MPAA blacklist. Or, three, name names. Tell them all the Communists and ex-Communists you know. You get cleared and you can work.” He paused, and popped a gherkin from his plate into his mouth. “You see,” he said
munching, “the ultimate test of a witness is not whether he lies or whether he tells the truth. It’s the extent to which he cooperates with the committee. And the only way to do that is inform.”