Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [122]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spring they gave up, and started the separate, anti-Communist Hollywood Chapter No. 2.19
“Our highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual for therein lies the highest dignity of man,” Reagan told Hedda Hopper in an interview published in May. “Tyranny is tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left, or center, it’s evil. Right now the liberal movement in this country is taking the brunt of the Communist attack. The Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all of our people their cause is lost here. So they seek to infiltrate liberal organizations just to smear and discredit them.”20 Hopper, the avenging angel of the Hollywood right, was obviously taken by Reagan, despite his defense of liberalism, and told her readers that he “commanded the respect of his most bitter opponents.”21
That same month, HUAC came to town. The committee was now chaired by New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, a former insurance salesman whose office featured a picture of the American flag with the slogan “These colors do not run.”22 But the committee’s driving force was a reactionary Mississippi Democrat named John Rankin, who terrified the larger part of Hollywood because of his tendency to conflate Communism and Judaism.
On May 8 and 9, Thomas and two other committee members held closed hearings at the Biltmore Hotel on Communist influence in the movie industry, and then Thomas announced to the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”23
Nearly all of the fourteen “frank and cooperative” witnesses—including screenwriters James Kevin McGuinness, Howard Emmett Rogers, and Rupert Hughes, an uncle of Howard Hughes’s—were from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which itself had an anti-Semitic taint. Alliance stalwart Robert Taylor told the congressmen that the Roosevelt administration had delayed his entry into the Navy in 1943 so that he could finish shooting Song of Russia, a film he considered pro-Soviet propaganda. Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, testified that her daughter had insisted on cutting the Marxist line “Share and share alike—that’s democracy” from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for Tender Comrade.24 Veteran character actor Adolphe Menjou swore that if the Communists took over Hollywood, which he thought was close to happening, “I would move to the state of Texas . . . because I think that Texans would kill them on sight.”25
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Jack Warner was the only studio chief to testify, and he did so secretly, one week later. Some said that he was still fuming over the CSU siege of Warner Bros. during the 1945 strike, others that he was eager to clear his name as the head of the studio that had invented the liberal-message movie. The other moguls, led by Mayer, hoped that if they ignored the committee it would go away. But Warner told the inquisitors what they wanted to hear, and in doing so assured that they would be back. There was, he testified, a conspiracy to slip anti-capitalist, un-American propaganda into Hollywood films, and it was led by the screenwriters. “They en-deavor to inject it,” he said. “Whatever I could do about it—I took out.”
Stretching the truth, he added, “Anyone I thought was a Communist or read in the papers that he was, I dismissed at the expiration of his contract.”
He then listed sixteen suspect writers, including Lawson, Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., Irwin Shaw, and Clifford Odets, many of whom were still typing away in studio bungalows in Burbank.26
Like the moguls, the anti-Communist liberals of ADA, including Reagan, didn’t pay too much mind to HUAC’s Hollywood foray. But four nights after Jack Warner testified, PCA held a rally for