[Norman Mailer] was hoping to have
many of the most important people in Hollywood sign an amicus curiae—friend of
the court—brief, which could be presented with an appeal to the Supreme Court
before the Hollywood Ten were put in jail like common criminals by HUAC. His
speech was wonderful, and everyone in the room was shoving money at him.
Shelley [Winters] and I each gave him a check for $100 and ran to get the car
because we were late for dinner.
After an exhaustive campaign, Shelley
finally succeeded in getting George Stevens to give her a screen test for A
Place in the Sun. She called Norman the night before the test and asked if they
could have dinner. She desperately needed to pick his brains because she had
not done her homework. She had not read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, on which
the movie was based. Her justification for this laziness was that an important
American writer could give her insights she might overlook on her own. She went
to Norman’s house, and they spent the evening discussing the story and her
character. Whatever he told her must have helped, because she got the part. As
she was leaving Norman’s, he gave her back the checks we had written at the
Kellys’ and told her he had torn up the brief. He had wanted to get some
blockbuster names that evening, but she and I were the only ones who signed it.
He didn’t deposit our checks, either. Everyone else had donated cash.“— Farley Granger, Include Me Out.