Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [132]
The tough-talking studio chiefs were thrown off balance, however, when pressed to name names. When Warner hesitated, Stripling read out the list of sixteen screenwriters the mogul had so willingly fingered in May. Mayer coughed up Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, and Donald Ogden Stewart as MGM writers he had heard might be Communists. Asked why they hadn’t fired such employees, Warner waffled, and Mayer blamed his lawyers. Congressman Nixon asked Warner why his studio had made so many anti-Nazi movies but no anti-Communist ones, and both bosses were stunned to find themselves defending the pro-Russian films they had 2 1 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House produced during the war. Warner, who would later brag in his memoir that he had made Mission to Moscow at the personal behest of FDR, claimed he wasn’t quite sure where the idea had come from. Mayer was reduced to insisting that Song of Russia was just another boy-meets-girl picture, which, “except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland.”80 As Representative Emanuel Celler of New York later commented, “If Chairman Thomas sought to strike terror into the minds of the movie magnates, he succeeded. They were white-livered.”81
To make matters worse, Mayer’s shilly-shallying was directly contradicted by the next witness: Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré author of the 1943 best-seller The Fountainhead, which would soon be made into a movie starring Gary Cooper. Rand was the intellectual star of the Alliance, and her scene-by-scene analysis of Song of Russia left little doubt that MGM had put a positive gloss on conditions in the Soviet Union. “Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda. Am I not correct?” she argued, adding that she believed such was the case even if it had been done for the sake of Allied unity.82
The parade of Alliance witnesses who followed Rand lacked her rhetorical finesse. Sam Wood asserted that if you pulled down the pants of Communists “you would find the hammer and sickle on their rear ends,”83 and he accused four fellow directors of trying “to steer us into the red river.”84
Walt Disney mistakenly included the League of Women Voters on his list of Communist front organizations and had to issue a public apology.85 “This may sound biased,” said matinee idol and Reagan’s pal Robert Taylor.
“However, if I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I am afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is a little too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists do.”86
The message that came through—from both the committee’s loaded questions and the friendly witnesses’ loaded answers—was persistent and threatening: Hollywood was riddled with Reds, and the studios were doing nothing about it. Adolphe Menjou reprised the Hollywood strikes of 1945 and 1946, labeling CSU boss Herbert Sorrell a card-carrying Communist and praising Reagan for “the magnificent job” he had done in trying “to settle this strike in every way possible.”87 He carried guilt by association to new extremes in a prize exchange with Congressman Nixon: Divorce: 1947–1948
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Mr. Nixon: Have you any other test which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?
Mr. Menjou: Well, I think attending any meetings at which Mr.
Paul Robeson appeared, and applauding or listening to his Communist songs in America. I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind.88
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It was against this backdrop of hype and hysteria that Reagan testified, on the fourth day. If the press covered the hearings like a spectacle, Reagan seemed to approach his appearance like a performance. He had observed the proceedings of the previous afternoon from the spectators’ section and had rehearsed his testimony in his hotel room with Stripling.89 “There was a long drawn-out ‘ooooh’ from the jam-packed,