Kirk Douglas spent most of his career
after 1960 telling anyone who would listen that he ended the supposed blacklist
by hiring a known communist, Dalton Trumbo, as the screenwriter for the film
Spartacus. In 1991, Hollywood’s Writers Guild of America, frantic to keep the
blacklist myth alive, gave the actor a
special award for "a singular act
of courage." Myth supporters, the
Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, Turner Classic Movies and Bill
Maher, couldn’t praise Douglas enough.
Douglas loved it of course. It
soothed his enormous ego and made him look like one of the fearless hero’s he
portrayed in film. History had rewritten the facts. By then, the supposed
Hollywood blacklist had taken on a mythical status and those who were supposed
to have been blacklisted are now cultural heroes, martyrs for the cause of
civil liberties.
However, after Spartacus, according
to Trumbo, Douglas couldn’t get far enough away from the writer. When Trumbo
wanted credit for re-writing Douglas's next picture, Town Without Pity, Douglas
said he didn’t want to become association to closely with Trumbo because it
could harm his career. Trumbo was not given credit for the work.
At the same time, Douglas used his
considerable clout in Hollywood to continue the myth that he and he alone had
ended the supposed blacklisting era.
Edward Lewis said that Douglas
repeatedly tried to get him to go along with the tale and that when he refused,
Douglas threatened him professionally. Douglas also clamped down on Trumbo and
later on his family to push his narrative.
If the award for defying the studios
should go to anyone, it should be director Cecil B. de Mille, an
arch-conservative, who hired and credited the otherwise unemployable actor
Edward G. Robinson and composer Elmer Bernstein for his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments.
Douglas also liked to point out that
he employed other talents who were known communist, neglecting to add that he
paid them a fraction of what they would have earned had they not on the
studio’s don’t-hire list. Douglas also paid Dalton Trumbo a fraction of what he
was used to making on a big budget film like Spartacus.
The supposed blacklist was, according
to the then influential Time magazine, over by 1959. The studio went back to
hiring communists to make their pictures for them.
"They're all working now, all
these Fifth Amendment communists, and I don't think that anything I say about
it will make much difference. We've lost the fight and it's as simple as
that." Leading anticommunist actor Ward Bond in 1959.
With that in mind, Douglas arrived
very late to the scene, in 1960, when it didn’t really matter who he hired.
Besides, it was producer Ed Lewis who hired Trumbo and not Douglas and Douglas
consented only after the studio, Universal-International, conducted polls that
showed if Trumbo’s name was on a film or not. It’s also important to point out
that director Otto Preminger announced in January 1960 that he was hiring and
would give writing credits to Trumbo for his film, Exodus. No one seemed to
care one way or the other. Nine months later, Douglas announced that he too was
hiring Trumbo for Spartacus.