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own purposes. Not listed in the schedule of speakers for that day (or any other day), she was called upon ad hoc, primarily to discredit Mayer’s testimony. Her function was to demonstrate that in making Song of Russia MGM had, in fact, engaged in Communist propaganda. Had Mayer not taken what the committee considered an evasive stance, Rand would not have been called as a witness. She remained on hand throughout ten days of hearings, encouraged by Chairman Thomas to believe that, from one day to the next, she would be allowed to complete her statement. When she wasn’t called, she remembered having a “violent scene” with the chairman in his office. He tried to placate her with promises of a “whole [new] special hearing devoted to nothing but ideology,” where she could bring out “all the facts.” She told him that, if she came back to testify at all, it would be on her terms. “What terms?” he asked, visibly nervous. Why, philosophical terms, of course, she answered. Relieved, he said, “Oh, I thought you meant money.” “That gave me an insight into [his] psychology,” she later told a friend, adding, “You know, in Washington, if you talk about terms, it’s not philosophy.” She was quite right. The following August, Thomas was convicted of taking kickbacks for favors and sent to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr., two of the Hollywood Ten, were also jailed. Cole and Lardner would sometimes pass ex-chairman Thomas in the prison yard, where inmates tended chickens. “Still handling the chicken shit, I see,” Cole is said to have remarked to him.

The HUAC hearings ended abruptly ten days after they began. Thomas told the press that there were rumors of planned Communist street demonstrations and that he wanted to thwart them. The real reason seems to have been that press coverage had turned negative.

In order to deliver a fresh scandal on the final day, the committee arranged for provocative testimony about, of all people, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Chairman Thomas called to the stand a HUAC investigator who claimed that, five years earlier, in 1942, the physicist had been approached by an American Communist agent seeking atomic secrets; this had taken place, the investigator said, with the help of a prominent Hollywood hostess, who had extended hospitality both to the alleged agent—a colleague of Oppenheimer’s named Haakon Chevalier—and to two members of the Hollywood Ten, albeit on entirely different occasions. “The connection with the motion-picture industry was little more than incidental,” The New York Times mildly observed. As for the motion-picture industry itself, studio flacks hailed the curtailment of the hearings as an exoneration of Hollywood. But the inquiries would go on.

For Rand, HUAC was “nothing but disappointments,” she said. It was also a publicity disaster. Liberal newspapers mocked her and her novels and treated her as a certified member of the right-wing “nightshirt fringe” and as someone whose opinions on politics and social issues could not be taken seriously. For the next fifty years, almost every book written about Hollywood and HUAC, including Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, presented her as a semihysterical reactionary who condemned Song of Russia strictly because it pictured Russians smiling. Unjust as this was, it made her fair game in the political as well as the literary press. Moreover, it was reported that she had annoyed Louis B. Mayer by contradicting him about the issue of Communist influence at MGM and irked Jack Warner with her initial intention of criticizing not only Song of Russia but also Mission to Moscow, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Hellman’s Little Foxes.

Although she later admitted that the hearings were “a disgusting spectacle,” she never changed her mind about their legitimacy. Far from conceding that a U.S. government agency had no business investigating citizens’ political affiliations in the absence of a crime, she insisted that belonging to the Communist Party was a crime; that is, to be a member of a closed, secret, though legal