Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [135]
The First Amendment group also produced an anti-HUAC radio show, titled Hollywood Fights Back, which was broadcast nationwide on ABC the day they flew to Washington. The half-hour program featured brief remarks by four U.S. senators as well as a slew of film personalities, beginning with Myrna Loy announcing, “We question the right of Congress to ask any man what he thinks on political issues,” and ending with Judy Garland urging listeners to write their congressmen to protest the inquiry.100 But as Huston and his colleagues sat in the back-row seats that Thomas had assigned them, watching the men they were there to support sink to the chairman’s level, they felt increasingly let down and hopeless. President Truman decided not to have them to lunch after all, Life magazine mocked them as “lost liberals,” and the right-wing Hearst papers began a campaign to portray Huston as “the brains of the Communist Party in the West.”101 On his way back to Los Angeles, Bogart told a Chicago columnist that the Washington trip had been “ill-advised, even foolish,” and not long after that he called himself a
“dope” in a Photoplay article titled “I’m No Communist.”102 Reagan, it Divorce: 1947–1948
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seemed, had been wise to avoid the Committee for the First Amendment from the beginning. He would later write that “it was for suckers only.”103
New York Governor Herbert Lehman, Broadway’s George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, publishing executives Bennett Cerf and Clifton Fadiman, and composer Leonard Bernstein lent their voices to a second Hollywood Fights Back broadcast in early November, all to no avail. The American Legion threatened to organize a boycott of movies on which the Hollywood 10
worked, and a Gallup Poll showed that Americans favored punishing the uncooperative witnesses by a margin of 46 to 29 percent (though only 30
percent approved of the way the investigation had been handled).104 On November 24, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to uphold the contempt citations against the Hollywood 10.105
The next day a conclave of film industry chieftains, including Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Joseph Schenck of 20th Century Fox, Barney Balaban of Paramount, and Harry Cohn of Columbia, met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and unanimously agreed to dismiss the ten without compensation. “We do not desire to prejudge their legal rights,” the studio heads maintained in a press release that came to be known as the Waldorf Declaration, “but their actions have been a disservice to their employ-ers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”106
The moguls didn’t stop with the Hollywood 10. Prodded by Eric Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association, who had sworn at the hearings that the industry would never institute a blacklist, they now put the beginnings of one in place. “On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood,” the producers’
statement continued, “our members are likewise prepared to take positive action. We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”107
The New York Times called the producers’ decision “an action unprecedented in American industrial fields.”108 RKO fired Scott and Dmytryk the next day, Fox let Lardner go the day after that, and Trumbo and Cole were banished from MGM the following week; the other five were not under contract to a studio. All ten were subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury, tried, convicted of contempt, and, after the Supreme Court refused to take up their case in April 1950, imprisoned for up to one year.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
“Hollywood is going to clear up its back yard,” Mayer announced upon his return from New York.109 At two meetings, in late