Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [130]
On September 19, U.S. marshals began serving bright pink subpoenas on more than forty Hollywood figures, including Reagan, commanding them to appear before HUAC in Washington the following month for hearings on “Communist Infiltration of the Motion-Picture Industry.” Since the committee’s visit to Hollywood in May, its chief investigator, Robert E.
Stripling, abetted by the right-wingers of the Motion Picture Alliance, as well as the Los Angeles office of the FBI, had been compiling lists of suspected subversives. As Stripling later wrote in The Red Plot Against America, “We obtained enough preliminary testimony to make a public hearing imperative.”63 In Stripling’s opinion, Hollywood was the headquarters of a plot to “communize the country” and its films were saturated with sublim-Divorce: 1947–1948
2 1 1
inal propaganda: “The rich were grasping, greedy exploiters of the poor, who were always honest and down-trodden. Bankers were generally despotic; landlords cruel, and tenants noble. Judges and political figures were either crooked or fatuous fools.”64
A large number of those subpoenaed were Alliance members, including Sam Wood, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, and Adolphe Menjou. These so-called friendly witnesses couldn’t wait to get to Washington and publicly point fingers at those they had already named in secret. A second group, dubbed “the unfriendly nineteen” by the Hollywood Reporter, included eleven screenwriters, six directors, the actor Larry Parks, and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had been living in exile in Los Angeles since 1940. Occupying the middle ground, sort of, were a handful of industry leaders, including Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, as well as the former SAG presidents George Murphy and Robert Montgomery.
Reagan apparently owed his place among them to Warner, who had told J. Parnell Thomas that he would make an effective public witness.65
HUAC’s newest member, Richard Nixon, apparently also had a hand in Reagan’s selection. According to Irwin Gellman in The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952, the freshman congressman had been impressed by the SAG president when they crossed paths for the first time in California that spring, and he thought that Reagan should be called to testify in Washington, since he was, in Nixon’s words, “classified as a liberal and as such would not be accused of simply being a red-baiting reactionary.”66
Most of Hollywood reacted to HUAC’s summonses with outrage. The Unfriendly 19 gathered at the house of director Lewis Milestone—the director of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the only one in the group who had definitely never been a Party member67—with a team of five lawyers to plot a legal strategy. A few days later, John Huston, fellow director William Wyler, and the screenwriter Philip Dunne founded the Committee for the First Amendment “to protest the procedures of the House Committee and to head off [a] blacklist and censorship.”68 The first meeting was held at Ira Gershwin’s house. “You could not get into the place,” one attendee recalled.
“The excitement was intense. The town was full of enthusiasm because they all felt they were going to win. Every star was there.”69
“In my estimation, Communism was as nothing compared to the evil done by the witch-hunters. They were the real enemies of this country,” declared John Huston.70 The younger Huston was realistic about the political 2 1 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House sympathies of the unfriendly witnesses. “They were mostly all Communists,” he later said, “well-intentioned boobs, men mostly from poor backgrounds, and out in Hollywood they sort of felt guilt at living the good life.”71 But for Huston the issue was bedrock civil liberties: Parnell Thomas and company were infringing on the rights of free speech and free assembly, and therefore must be stopped. The Committee