If actress Karen Morley was
blacklisted at all, it was largely because she insisted on tweaking the noses
of the studio bosses, publicly announcing her widely unpopular political
opinions and poor career choices. But mostly she fell victim to the greatest
Hollywood career killer of them all, age.
For the most part, Morley’s film
career peaked in the early 1930s and crashed landed by the end of the
decade. She made ten films in 1931, nine
in1932 and 16 more between 1933 and 1939.
In 1932, she married director
King Vidor, a marriage that didn’t go over well with the studio bosses. She
answered by leaving MGM studios. After that, she was reduced to much smaller
parts in films.
In 1940 she became an active
member of the Hollywood branch of the American Communist Party. "I was
what you'd call a 'pillow red.' I became a communist because I fell in love
with a man (Actor Lloyd Gough) who was a
red and entered the Army to take care of the fascists, and I knew it would
please him if I became one."
She divorced Vidor in 1942 and
took up with Gough and followed him through Army training in North Carolina
during World War II, organizing the local tobacco workers while she waited for
Gough’s training to end.
At the end of the war, she became
active in the Screen Actors Guild, becoming one of its few radicals, demanding
action on wage and fairness issues.
"The Actors Guild had been held to a 10-year no-strike agreement,”
she said “and when that 10 were up, the progressives in the Screen Actors Guild
made all these forward-looking proposals, most of them written on my dining
room table, I was blacklisted because of
this activity... From that time on, I always had the studios on my neck."
From 1940 through 1949, she was
in only six films and went uncredited in one of those six films. She turned 42 years old in 1951 when she had
a small role in the film “M”. In 1953, when she was 44, she had one last film
role in “Born in the Saddle.” The question
is, how many roles were available in Hollywood in the 1950s for a woman over
age 45?
In 1952 (Not 1947 as her
biography often says) , she was called before the House Un-American Activities
Committee (She successfully ducked their
subpoena for a year) and refused to confirm or deny that she was an active
member of the Communist Party or to confirm or deny that she had high pressured
actor Sterling Hayden to return to the Communist party after he had resigned
from it.
Afterward, she continued publicly touting
left-wing politics to the public, who, apparently, didn’t like it. To further
dig her own public relations grave, in 1954, she ran for Lieutenant Governor of
New York on the American Labor Party ticket.
She appeared in two television
shows in 1973 and one in 1975.