Timebends (70 page)

Sitting on one cheek like an awkward circus bear, he kept sliding off the couch cushion as with his rather adolescently charming hoarseness he touched on the illnesses and deaths of mutual Hollywood friends, problems with his Rye estate, and developments in his daughter's life. Marilyn was charmed and happy as emotion alone could make her happy, almost without regard for its hostile or benevolent significance, for only in emotion was there truth. Incredibly now he began pleading with her to renounce her own company and return to the studio, something that had been settled by contract almost a year before, but she understood the diversion—he had come with something difficult for him to say, and this roundabout way of getting down to business, absurd as it was, showed a certain respectful deference that moved her to listen and react as though he were talking about something real.

“Hones'-to-Gah-dahlin', I worry about you personally. I can't help what some of those people out there doin' to you these years,
I'm not Twentieth, I'm only the president. I speakin' to you from my heart, I promise you gonna be happy again with Twentieth. I'm absolutely serious, Mahlin dahlin', you make such a mistake, come back with us we are your own family, you fadder and mudder.” On he went, like certain fish who spray an alkali before laying their eggs in acidic waters. Now he talked of his cathedral, which he had built in Los Angeles for the Greek Orthodox Church, the pride of his life. You could hate Spyros, but you had to like him, if only for the naiveté of his disregard for truth, which was at least not surgical and dry but had a certain ardor; he always meant what he said while he was saying it.

Out of the blue, he took Marilyn's hand, and with an envelopment of privacy between them he asked, “You in love, switthar'?”

She seemed to fill up, caught a breath, and nodded that she was.

“You sure?”

Not without guilt she confronted him eye to eye, he who knew her story, and nodded again.

“Gah-bless-you-won'erful,” he said, patting her hand with fatherly benediction; if it was really love and marriage, especially the latter, then God had entered the case and the fooling around was over. Skouras sat there nodding in active calculation as he studied his short black shoe on the carpet. Turning to me, he said, “Gah-bless-you-Artr-won'erful. I know you fine man, you goin' take good care this girl, she's like my own daughter, hones'-to-Gah.”

Now that he had to believe we were not merely shacking up, the Company was inevitably and menacingly involved. With two pictures still owing them before she was totally free, her marrying at all was bad enough for her image of sexy availability, but to marry me in my situation was disaster.

He sighed. “Artr, I hopin' very much you not goin' to make some terrible mistake with the Committee.”

I had every reason to think he would carry back to the Committee whatever I said, so I could only shrug and mutter something about doing what I thought was right.

He came wide awake now, watching for my reaction. “I know these congressmen very well, Artr, we are good friends. They are not bad men, they can be reasonable. I believe personally, Artr, that in your case they would take you privately in executive session, you understand? No necessity to be in the public at all. I can arrange this if you tell me.”

In the code of the hour this meant that in exchange for “clearing” myself by naming names and engaging in the formulas of
obeisance to the Committee, such as publicly thanking the members for helping me to find my way back to America, I would be questioned
in camera,
spared an open hearing.

“I'm against the Committee, Spyros. How can I come out and thank them for anything?”

Mixed into my response I heard “Socrates,” and when I finished he said, “You must read this man's book.”

“Socrates! Spyros, Socrates was condemned by the same kind of committee …”

“Yes, but he had the courage to say what he thinks, Artr.”

For a moment this had me puzzled, until I realized that he meant I should use the hearing to declare my differences with the left and the liberals, an “attack” on my part that would take the sting out of my caving in to the Committee. It was more or less what Odets had been beguiled into doing, and something he never ceased regretting to the last day of his life.

“I don't need a congressional committee to give me a platform to attack the left, Spyros, I can do that on my own time.” Privately I thanked my stars that I worked in the theatre, where there was no blacklist; as a film writer, I would now be kissing my career goodbye.

Getting up with his finger pointed to the ceiling, he tried to seem propelled by burning conviction, but repetition, I judged, had emptied his speech of real feeling. “Stalin,” he began, “crucified the Grik pipple, Artr. I know what I'm talkin' about! The Grik Communist Party made civil war, torture, and shootin' pipple …” And he poured out a knowledgeable capsulized history of the postwar Greek political catastrophe between the right and the left, naturally with all the blame on the latter and all the good with the former. But even had I known or been able to acknowledge the truth of the left's brutalities at the time, it would not have changed what I saw as the issue in 1956, and that was the manifestly antidemocratic contempt for basic American rights on the part of the Committee, something impossible to support.

“It's out of the question, Spyros, I can't do it. I don't like those people.”

How the rage hit me or what exactly triggered it I never could recall later, but in his persistence I felt myself cornered; it was as though he was trying to exercise control over my work, and it was intolerable. I got off only a sentence or two, but he quickly caught the idea and held up both his hands and went to his coat, which was lying over the back of a chair, and incredibly enough, I was
sure I heard him mutter, “You are a Socrates.” He embraced Marilyn again, but now with a real sadness, and I walked him out to the elevator. By the time it arrived he was his earlier sleepy self, and his last glance toward me as he disappeared behind the closing door was forgetful, as though I were a complete stranger he had met in the building corridor, for he was not a man to waste emotions.

Marilyn was sipping a scotch when I got back, in a mood of uncertainty; I felt he had moved her, not by his argument but by his feeling, for in some crazy way he did care abQut her. A few years later, Skouras would invite her to sit at the main table when Nikita Khrushchev visited the studio, presenting her to him as a great star. The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness. Spyros then declaimed, for the thousandth time, the epic story of how he and his brothers had arrived in America with a few carpets on their backs as their only capital and now he was president of Twentieth Century Fox, such was the reality of opportunity in America. Khrushchev got up and countered that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the head man of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out.

My mother and Marilyn and I were sitting on a Penn Station bench waiting for the Washington train to be called. All I could think of was the waste my trip implied. It was all for absolutely nothing, except that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even after a great part of them were forgiven by my lawyers and friends at the Paul, Weiss, Wharton, Garrison office. Marilyn was gallantly trying not to seem unhappy, and since I was trying for her sake to maintain an even mood, neither of us could express anything we were really feeling, in particular about our failure to find an hour's peace since deciding to make a life together. Right now, I hated having brought her this trouble. My mother actually succeeded in pretending nothing ominous was happening and talked about Marilyn's clothes, which I thought made her seem insensitive in Marilyn's eyes. She had a complicated and fluctuating relation with older women, veering from sentimental idealization to black suspicions that they disapproved of her. She had been sentimentalizing my mother, but now there was a suggestion of an undertow in her feeling, a dark negative pull. Still, when I turned at the platform stairway and waved a final goodbye, they were arm
in arm and seemed a pair. Waving back, Marilyn had to keep one hand holding the collar of her mink against her cheek lest she be recognized and draw one of the sudden crowds her appearance usually generated. The gesture told something about the unreality of the two disjointed worlds in which we were trying to live—here she was being serious about a serious matter, but if she was recognized she would have to start laughing, the happy carefree blonde.

We were having a drink before dinner in the Rauhs' Washington living room when Joe was called to the phone in the foyer by his wife, Olie. Returning, he began to laugh even more boyishly than usual.

A giant of a fellow who somehow looks even broader and taller because of his bow ties, Joe Rauh is a combative lawyer, formerly head of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal pressure group whose adherents included men like Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson. Joe is anti-Communist for no other reason than his passionate love of democracy; he is uninterested in ideology or even philosophy except as they lead people to a respect or disdain for individual human rights. He is interested in American power abroad, but without the double standard of those who shut their eyes to the crimes of “our” dictators while hurling their thunderbolts at the ones who follow the Soviets' lead. He has an unswerving faith in the Bill of Rights as a guarantee of democratic life in America. In his public interest law firm he has made a fraction of what his ability would have earned him in business law.

Now he sat on one of the chintz-covered chairs and, solemnizing his expression, asked, “How would you like to
not
have to go into the hearing tomorrow?” And proceeded to report that he had just been talking to someone representing Representative Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Committee, who had proposed that the hearing could be canceled provided Marilyn agreed to be photographed shaking hands with him.

I burst out laughing. Why I was not even tempted I don't know. It certainly would have saved a lot of grief. We could only sit there shaking our heads at how fundamentally simple politics was—just as in show business, you kept your name in the paper no matter what.

My memories of the hearing itself are always scattered, like those that follow violence.

I remember the furled flag behind the tribunal where the members of the Committee sat looking down at me and Joe and co-counsel Lloyd Garrison, seated behind us, his patrician stare not unnoticed by Chairman Walter. Now the flag seemed reassuring rather than threatening, as it had in Nevada. In some places under other flags, I would have been facing a death sentence for exactly the same infractions I was being charged with today.

I remember the pile of papers on a table, from which the interrogator, Richard Arens, took one sheet and then another and another, reading off petitions I had signed so many, many years ago, almost in another country—protests, pleas to free some prisoner, appeals for friendship with Russia (which Joe insisted on seeing in order to read off some of the other names, among them Mrs. Roosevelt's)—and I remember wondering if he meant to go down the whole pile, asking with each one, “Did you sign this?” Yes, of course, I had signed everything, and after a dozen or so submissions I began answering yes before he had even identified the petition.

Some years later, I read that Arens had been fired from this job when it was reported that he was on retainer from a racist “foundation” as an adviser, pamphlet writer, and expert on the genetic inferiority of blacks. It didn't surprise me all that much; he was a short fellow with a shaved head and a square pug face, and he looked as though life had nastily disappointed him in every conceivable way. A bachelor, he was said to keep a beautiful flower garden in his Washington backyard.

I remember feeling, as I glanced at one after another of the protests he handed me for identification, how fatuous it had all been. I remember thinking that my influence on my own history had been nil. The simple truth was that I myself could barely recall a great many of the organizations or causes to which I had given my support. And perhaps the worst of it all was that while these were “facts” Arens was establishing about my life as a sympathizer, it would have been impossible under the circumstances to tell the larger truth even had I been given the freedom to do so. I had indeed at times believed with passionate moral certainty that in Marxism was the hope of mankind and of the survival of reason itself, only to come up against nagging demonstrations of human perversity, not least my own. How to explain that even if he had produced a Party card with my signature on it, I could only have said yes, I had probably felt that way then, had made up my mind that day or week that the only way to stand against fascism abroad and at home was to do what so many others of my generation also thought necessary. In the plays and novels about the heroism of the
Spanish Civil War and of the now long-forgotten German resistance to Hitlerism—in the whole left-wing liturgy—to be Red was to embrace hope, the hope that lies in action. So it had seemed for a time. But I have come to see an altogether different reality after traveling in the Soviet Union, particularly, and in Eastern Europe and China. Deep within Marxism, ironically enough, lies a despairing passivity before History, and indeed power is forbidden to the individual and rightfully belongs only to the collective. Thus the individual requires no rights, in the sense of protection from the state, any more than a pious person needs rights against the powers of his god. Passivity, before a revolution, derives from the belief in the Last Days whose coming no man can slow or stop; and after the revolution, from the New Law itself, which fundamentally absorbs the individual into the collective.