Jack Gilford wasn't blacklisted
In 1956 he told the House un-American activities subcommittee that he was "blacklisted” in the entertainment field because his name once was listed in "Red Channels’’
He was not a communist but refused to say whether he had resigned from the party specifically to be able to sign an affidavit of non-membership in the party.
Gilford invoked the Fifth Amendment in reply to questions on whether he had ever been a member of the party however.
1959-1961
Play of the Week (TV
Series)
- Waiting for Godot
(1961)
- World of Sholom
Aleichem (1959) ... Bontsche Shveig / Angel
1959
The World of Sholom
Aleichem (TV Movie)
Look After Lulu (Mar
03, 1959 - Apr 04, 1959)
Play
1958
Drink to Me Only (Oct
08, 1958 - Dec 13, 1958)
Play
Romanoff and Juliet
(Oct 10, 1957 - Sep 13, 1958)
Play
1956
The Edge of Night (TV
Series)
The Diary of Anne Frank
(Oct 05, 1955 - Jun 22, 1957)
Play
1953
Main Street to Broadway
1951
All Star Revue (TV
Series)
The Billy Rose Show (TV
Series)
1950
Musical Comedy Time (TV
Series)
- Hit the Deck (1950)
Star Time (TV Series)
1949-1950 Actor's Studio (TV
Series)
- Screwball
- Here Comes Spring
Alive and Kicking (Jan
17, 1950 - Feb 25, 1950)
Musical Revue
The Live Wire (Aug 17,
1950 - Sep 09, 1950)
Play
Agent Unlce Walt
Walt Disney started reporting on the Hollywood crowd to the FBI 1941, and continued reporting to them until his death. How much Walt could have told them is debatable since all of Hollywood knew him to be a member of the Alt-right. The Bureau made him an honorary agent in the 1960s.
Death of a Defector: Ion Mihai Pacepa,
Ion Mihai Pacepa was never totally free. He was a wanted
man, hunted by the Romanian government.
By Paul G. Kengor
Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American
Spectator.
On February 14, 2021, the world quietly lost one of the most
intriguing, enduring figures of the Cold War. He was Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa,
the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc official ever to defect to the United States.
Throughout the 1970s, Pacepa had been arguably the top
official in communist Romania, behind only the insane and vicious dictator
Nicolae Ceaușescu. He served Ceaușescu in numerous capacities, including as
intelligence chief and liaison between the brutal Securitate and the KGB. He
knew where bodies were buried.
After yet another request by Romanian goons to bloody his
hands, Pacepa had enough. One day in the summer of 1978, he slipped into the
U.S. embassy in West Berlin while on routine business for the Romanian madman
who was his boss. He said he wanted to defect. He was hustled out in a
late-night flight to the United States — a country he came to love.
“It was noon when the U.S. military plane bringing me to
freedom landed at the U.S. presidential airport inside Andrews Air Force Base
outside Washington, D.C.,” he later told our mutual friend David Kupelian. “It
was a glorious, sunny day outside…. I had an overwhelming desire to dance
around in a jig all by myself. I was a free man! I was in America! The joy of
finally becoming part of this magnanimous land of liberty, where nothing was
impossible, was surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive.” He continued,
“On that memorable day of July 28, 1978, when I became a free man, I fell to my
knees and I prayed out loud for the first time in more than a quarter of a
century. It took me a while. It was not easy to find the right words to express
my great joy and thanks to the good Lord. In the end, all that I asked for was
forgiveness for my past, freedom for my daughter and strength for my new life.”
Forgiveness and freedom. And yet, Pacepa was never totally
free. He was a wanted man, hunted by the Romanian government.
Once in the United States, Pacepa lived in undisclosed
locations, dodging a $2 million bounty placed on his head by his homeland.
Communists officials were enraged when Pacepa in 1987 published (via Regnery)
his shocking memoir of the Ceausescu era: Red Horizons: The True Story of
Nicolae & Elena Ceausescu’s Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption. (The book
was reviewed with highest praise by Michael Ledeen in the April 1988 issue of
The American Spectator.) Hit squads were dispatched to assassinate him. They
never found him. And ironically, Pacepa’s grisly account of Nicolae and his
equally cruel and crazy wife Elena would be used as evidence for their
conviction and execution by a firing squad of Romanian citizens on Christmas
Day 1989.
Pacepa long outlived the Ceaușescu menace. Now, over four
decades after the brutal regime began targeting him, Pacepa’s life has ended.
He died at the age of 92, a victim of COVID-19.
I never had the pleasure of directly meeting Pacepa, given
that he was always in hiding, though we emailed frequently for years. He went
by the name “Mike,” the Anglicized version of “Mihai.” He had at least two
aliases that would pop up sometimes when I got emails from him. His email
address was cryptic, starting with an upper-case letter and followed by seven
numbers and then @aol.com. I’m tempted to share the email address here
publicly, but doing so would offer no great value. Besides, I never had
permission from him to share his email address publicly.
I often got his emails in response to my articles here at
The American Spectator, of which he was an avid reader. He and I even
co-authored a piece, “Obama’s Sword and Shield,” for The American Spectator in
May 2013 (he also did a piece for this magazine in June 2009). Pacepa was a fan
of this publication.
I believe Pacepa first reached out to me in 2010, when I
published my Cold War tome, Dupes. Pacepa was cited a number of times, particularly
for his disturbing insights into how easily communist officials were able to
manipulate gullible progressives in the West. That was a subject that troubled
and perplexed Pacepa; it fascinated him but also nagged at him. He had seen it
from the Truman years through Vietnam and still into the 21st century.
“They were like putty in our hands,” said Pacepa of the
ability of Western liberals to be duped by communists, from the “strong leftist
movements [in Western Europe] that we secretly financed” to the vast amounts of
disinformation cooked up and spoon-fed to Western liberals who gobbled it up.
Consider Vietnam: “During the Vietnam War,” said Pacepa, “we
spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents
sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random,
taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and
razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales.” (Recall a
young John Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony.) They were lies. Nonetheless, said
Pacepa, millions of Americans “ended up being convinced their own president,
not communism, was the enemy.”
According to Pacepa, it was the odious Yuri Andropov, then
head of the KGB, who conceived this dezinformatsiya campaign — that is,
disinformation campaign — against the United States. The Soviets devoted
exorbitant spending to that cause. “Vietnam,” Andropov told Pacepa, had been
“our most significant success.”
Pacepa read my book and was very pleased to see that I had focused
upon what he judged one of the most significant but underreported and least
understood phenomena of our times: the cynical but remarkable power of
disinformation.
In fact, it turned out that he was writing a book on
precisely that subject and by that very name: Disinformation. He and co-author
Ron Rychlak published the book in 2013 through WND Press, and they asked me to
write the foreword (former CIA director James Woolsey wrote the introduction).
It was a landmark book that everyone ought to read. It will indelibly impact
the way you view history and current affairs.
That groundbreaking book exposed the KGB disinformation
schemes against figures like Pope Pius XII (the smearing of Pius XII as
“Hitler’s Pope” was begun as a mass Soviet disinformation campaign launched by
a Radio Moscow broadcast in 1945) and Cardinals Stepinac and Mindszenty and
Wyszyński, as well as the duplicity of groups like the World Peace Council and
World Council of Churches. The material on the Soviet promulgation of the insidious
Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy is an awakening. The authors
chronicled Andropov’s anti-Zionism campaign, support of Islamic terrorism, and
promotion of virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism among Middle East
Arabs. By 1978, the Soviet bloc planted some 4,000 agents of influence in the
Islamic world, armed with hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion (and military weapons). Militant atheistic communism sought
a handmaiden in militant jihadist Islam, with extremist Muslims exploited by
Soviet manipulators. They promulgated not only acts of terrorism but egregious
acts of “diplomacy” like the infamous UN Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism a
form of racism.
Pacepa revealed how many vicious myths created by communists
have been unwittingly adopted by mainstream historians and journalists. He said
the very handbook on Soviet/communist dezinformatsiya opened with this in
capital letters: “IF YOU ARE GOOD AT DISINFORMATION, YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH
ANYTHING.”
Pacepa would see these patterns in modern American
“journalism,” though it wasn’t always clear if duped American journalists were
wittingly or unwittingly spreading disinformation (or “fake news,” to use a
modern term). Often, they simply believed what they wanted to believe — just as
the Kremlin knew they would.
Beyond Disinformation, Pacepa wrote a number of fascinating
works, including a remarkable 2007 book on the Kennedy assassination, titled
Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy
Assassination. Pacepa believed that the Soviets were involved in early steps
leading toward or helping to precipitate the assassination. He argued that
Oswald had been recruited by the KGB when he first entered the Soviet Union.
Over the next two years, however, several things complicated the picture. By
1962, once Oswald was settled in Texas, Khrushchev (allegedly) changed his mind
about killing Kennedy. Consequently, claims Pacepa, “the KGB tried to turn
Oswald off.” It was too late.
For the record, this theory of Soviet involvement is
disputed by Kennedy assassination investigators and by the Warren Commission,
but this much we do know: Moscow did its damnedest to direct eyes of suspicion
elsewhere. The Kremlin blamed the Kennedy shooting on (as Pacepa put it)
“racists, the Ku Klux Klan, and Birchists.” Pacepa confirmed that the KGB had a
thorough, ongoing disinformation campaign to blame the Kennedy assassination on
domestic elements in the United States. He reported that on November 26, 1963,
Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky landed unannounced in Bucharest and met
with Pacepa and other high-level members of Romanian intelligence and
leadership. This was his first stop in a “blitz” tour of KGB “sister” services
in the Communist Bloc. “From him,” recalled Pacepa, “we in the DIE [Romanian
intelligence] learned that the KGB had already launched a worldwide
disinformation operation aimed at diverting public attention away from Moscow
in respect to the Kennedy assassination, and at framing the CIA as the culprit.”
Nikita Khrushchev himself, said Sakharovsky, wanted it made clear to the sister
services that “this was by far our first and most important task.” They
circulated rumors that “the CIA was responsible for the crime” and that Lyndon
Johnson and the “military-industrial complex” had been involved.
The effort would be called Operation Dragon. It became, said
Pacepa, one of the most successful disinformation operations in contemporary
history. Pacepa pointed to Hollywood film director Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie,
“JFK,” which blamed the Kennedy assassination on a cabal that included the CIA,
Lyndon Johnson, and the military-industrial complex. It was nominated for eight
Academy Awards.
There are so many intriguing items like this from this
intriguing figure that was Ion Mihai Pacepa. I could go on and on. One more
item of interest to readers here:
The scourge that is Liberation Theology has rotten roots.
Those roots go back not only to twisted Jesuit theologians in Latin America in
the 1970s but, according to Pacepa, to the KGB. Pacepa went so far as to claim
that Liberation Theology was created by the KGB. “The movement was born in the
KGB,” stated Pacepa unequivocally, “and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation
Theology.” He said that “the birth of Liberation Theology” came from a 1960
“super-secret Party-State Dezinformatsiya [Disinformation] Program” approved by
Aleksandr Shelepin, then-chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey
Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. The
program “demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of
Churches,” which was based in Geneva, and use it “as cover for converting
Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool.”
Again, I could go on. The late Lt. Gen. Pacepa knew a lot.
Ion Mihai Pacepa died on February 14. Fittingly, he passed
away at an undisclosed hospital in an undisclosed location somewhere in the
United States. There was no official announcement.
The loss of Mike Pacepa is a loss for many, especially his
beloved wife and family. It is also a loss for history and contemporary
understanding of certain events. He shared with us gems of information and even
disinformation. Perhaps most helpful of all, he warned us not only about what
to believe but what not to believe.
Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and chief
academic fellow of the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College.
His latest book (April 2017) is A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald
Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century. He is also the
author of 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative. His other books include The
Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and
Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
The Hollywood blacklist is back,
The Hollywood blacklist is back, baby. Actress Gina Carano lost her role this week as a co-star of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian.” Her crime? Ill-considered social-media posts, including one that compared hatred of conservatives to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Online mobs had previously targeted her for outré comments on mask wearing, the “preferred pronoun” fad, and fraud in the 2020 election. #FireGinaCarano trended and Lucasfilm Ltd., the Disney subsidiary that produces the “Star Wars” spinoff, predictably obliged. In the now-standard model of scorched-earth personal destruction, the United Talent Agency dumped Ms. Carano as well.
The film and television industry has come a long way on the subject of blacklists. During the McCarthy era, the director Elia Kazan gave the House Un-American Activities Committee the names of show-business colleagues he knew to be members of the Communist Party. Others, who refused to name names, were blacklisted by the studios and denied work.
For decades, the Hollywood bien-pensant viewed the blacklist as an unforgivable stain on the industry. In 1999 some of the biggest stars in the business sat on their hands when Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar. “Trumbo” director Jay Roach lamented in 2015 that those who’d been blacklisted “were somehow seen as traitors because they had different political views.”
In his review of “Guilty By Suspicion,” a 1991 film about the blacklist starring Robert De Niro, Roger Ebert wrote: “History has vindicated those who refused to betray their principles, but how would any of us have responded at the time—when to defy [HUAC] meant virtual unemployment in show business.
Good question. I’m not defending Gina Carano’s posts, although they are probably defensible. I’m defending the principle. If it’s wrong for someone to lose his job because he’s a Communist, it’s wrong for someone to lose her job because she’s a conservative.
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
Marsha Hunt wasn't blacklisted
In 1945, Marsha Hunt was on the
board of the Screen Actors Guild. Two years later she joined the Committee for
the First Amendment, a group, which was generally composed of non-Communist New
Deal liberal Democrats, was hurt when it was subsequently revealed that
Sterling Hayden had been a Communist Party member. Humphrey Bogart, who had
been assured that the Committee membership had been vetted, and there were no
Communists among its membership, was incensed by the revelation that Hayden was
a Communist. There was a great deal of naïveté among Committee members such as
Bogart, who did not know that Hollywood 10 members such as Alvah Bessie, John
Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo were known to be Communist Party members.
Lauren Bacall later said that she, Bogart, and other Committee members had been
duped by the Communists. "We didn't realize until much later that we were
being used to some degree by the Unfriendly 10", she said.
On October 26, Hunt took part in
Hollywood Fights Back, a star-studded radio program co-written by her husband
protesting the activities of HUAC. Hunt recalled: We made our speeches and did
a radio program called Hollywood Fights Back and came home thinking we'd been
patriots and had defended our profession. If there were some communists among
us that was their business and not ours.
The next day, Hunt flew with a
group of about 30 actors, directors, writers, and filmmakers (including John
Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Danny Kaye) to Washington to
protest the actions of HUAC.
In 1950, Hunt was named as a
potential Communist or Communist sympathizer by Red Channels. According to popular
opinion, her career fell apart because she was blacklisted. But the facts show
that the 1950s were the busiest decade of her career.
1959
Grand Jury (TV Series)
Laramie (TV Series)
She played in a total of 14
episodes
1958
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV
Series)
1957-1958
Climax! (TV Series)
Matinee Theatre (TV Series)
Panic! (TV Series)
1957
Bombers B-52 Film
The O. Henry Playhouse (TV
Series)
The 20th Century-Fox Hour (TV
Series)
1955
A Word to the Wives... (Short)
1954With This Ring (Short)
1954
Diplomatic Passport
1953
The Ford Television Theatre (TV
Series)
1952
The Happy Time film
1951
Cosmopolitan Theatre (TV Series)
1950-1951
Sure As Fate (TV Series)
Danger (TV Series)
Stage work
The Tunnel of Love (Feb 13, 1957
- Feb 22, 1958)
Isolde Poole - Replacement (Jan
10, 1958 - ?)
Legend of Sarah (Oct 11, 1950 -
Nov 04, 1950)
Borned in Texas (Aug 21, 1950 -
Aug 26, 1950)
The Devil's Disciple (Feb 21,
1950 - May 27, 1950)
Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101
Walter Bernstein, Celebrated
Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101
His movies included “Fail
Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own
experience of being blacklisted.
By John Anderson
- Jan. 23, 2021
Walter Bernstein, whose career as a top
film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist,
and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films,
“The Front,” died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.
His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause
was pneumonia.
Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as
a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating
screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in
development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he
was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch
School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he
told Variety.
Mr.
Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a
leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.
“Fail-Safe”
(1964), the story of an accidental nuclear crisis starring Henry Fonda in an
adaptation of the Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler novel, was a bold rejoinder
to the Cold War arms race. “Paris Blues” (1961), which Mr. Bernstein wrote for
the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator,
starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians
and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires”
(1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of
19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and
’70s.
The subject of “The Front” (1976), also
directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an
Academy Award nomination, was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a
“front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted.
(Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance that same year in Mr. Allen’s “Annie
Hall.”)
Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were
political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill
Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned
the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST. “Yanks,” starring
Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and
cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during
World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy,
“Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that
starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.
A Hollywood Education
Walter Bernstein was born in Brooklyn
on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European
immigrants. His parents were “not really affected by the Depression,” Mr.
Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his
father, a schoolteacher, was protected by Civil Service employment rules.
Walter attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded, the
students were split into three shifts — a boon for the film-loving Walter. When
he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the
Astor Theater, where daytime admission was a dime.
On
graduation, Mr. Bernstein accepted what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from
his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of
Grenoble in France. His father, who knew a French family Walter could stay
with, “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding,
“If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”
But he went, and the experience
broadened him, thrusting him into the midst of young, often Communist
intellectuals living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the
currency of conversation.
Returning to the United States, he
attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic for the campus
newspaper The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local
cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “was that there were no
screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the
movie.”
“I found this no real impediment,” he
added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism.
Doing it this way made it art.”
He also contributed to The New Yorker,
and would continue to do so during and after World War II before becoming a
staff writer for the magazine.
First,
however, there was the war to get through. Shortly after graduating from
Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during
the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show
titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he
recalled, “but it was a show.”)
“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from
The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for
Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7,
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not
going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”
Making Wartime News
While contributing military-themed
articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of
sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for the Army journal Yank, a
job that lasted throughout the war. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that
would give him his first taste of fame.
“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors
Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr.
Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into Yugoslavia by
anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz,
known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav
republic until his death in 1980.
“I was the first Western correspondent
to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a
couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to
delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans
wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”
Although
his interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article
made it world news.
“I had an aunt who was a charter member
of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something
like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And
when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist
functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about
Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”
“I didn’t join the party until after
the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the
Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the
Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they
were doing something.”
In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker
experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep
Your Head Down”) on bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr.
Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the
writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited
work on “All the King’s Men.”
He ended up staying in Hollywood for
six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific
production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for
twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”
That
led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime
drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist
was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political
sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated..
Suddenly Untouchable
“I was still in Hollywood in 1947,
during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of
writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American
Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist
affiliations. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was
the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very
upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”
No one took the hearings seriously at
first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in
Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name
had appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by
the right-wing journal Counterattack.
“I
was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were
about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for
the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported
Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.
Mr. Bernstein and other blacklisted
writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like
Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s
on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted
great moments in history.
It
was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the
writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their
anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a
ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie
starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been
blacklisted.)
“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved
for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in
“Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”
It was the now largely forgotten “That
Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s
“official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein
under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the
employable.
In the years following the blacklist,
Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in
New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country”
(1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The
Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip”
(1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’
Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which
Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for
the live broadcast of “Fail-Safe” in 2000.
In addition to his wife, a literary
agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son,
Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in
divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to
Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his
stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a
sister, Marilyn Seide.
Six decades after the fact, Mr.
Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that
has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.
“I
don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look
back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships
and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a
dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”
Paul McGrath, a
Paul McGrath, actor: McGrath was identified as a communist by Red
Channels but it had no effect on his busy career.
Evidence found on the Maryland farm of Whittaker Chambers,
"Washington: Evidence found on the Maryland farm of Whittaker Chambers, forging a new link in the chain of spy data, is examined by Congressman Nixon and Chief Investigator Stribling of the House Un-American Activities Caommittee. The film may answer a lot of questions the country is asking." - Nixon looks at microfilm, the so-called pumpkin papers, Chambers says "Hiss is lying", pictures of pumpkin patch (no sound) (partial newsreel).
Alexander Knox was blacklisted?
"Knox was never blacklisted, but suffered instead from the equally adverse practice of "greylisting" that ended his career in Hollywood. So he returned to England in the early 1950s, where he continued to work in film and as a playwright and novelist." The Encyclopedia of Canada
The fact is Knox...a Canadian....had a career that lasted nearly 50 years and was never interuprted.
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