Dupes Page 23

  Molly and Elia Kazan tried to warn the duped because they did “know better”; Elia Kazan once had been a member of the Communist Party.43 He and his wife were liberal anti-Communists who understood the horrors of Communism, recognized the Communist love of the lie, and said so with intelligence and nuance. They were ultimately crucified for their good sense and willingness to speak out.44 Like Saturn, the Left eats its own children; it has devoured Elia Kazan, who even today is roundly booed by Hollywood's illiberal liberals.

  The Angry and the Gullible

  Molly Kazan's frank assessment reflects the reality of Hollywood Communists in the 1940s, though this reality has typically been obscured by historians.

  Led by a hardcore group of writers and mansion Marxists whom Communist Party members knew as the “first team”—Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Paul Jarrico, Howard Fast, Lester Cole, and Albert Maltz—Hollywood Communists could be an angry, discontented group. The great F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had worked on a 1939 script with Budd Schulberg, remarked on their viciousness: “The important thing is that you should not argue with them. Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.”45

  Hollywood's Communists had the faith without the hope and the charity. They looked for dupes everywhere—among friends, relatives, associates, and especially actors, the perceived dummies who mouthed words that they, the ventriloquists, penned. They looked to the likes of Planned Parenthood progressives, such as celebrated actress Katharine Hepburn, who had been nurtured by the teachings of racial eugenicist Margaret Sanger,46 and whom Communist screenwriters could count on to read a script or speech of their doing.47 In one sorry incident, Hepburn was the opening speaker at a May 19, 1947, Progressive Party Rally at Hollywood Legion Stadium, where, draped in a long, flame-red dress, the liberal New Englander read a speech scripted by Trumbo—a speech so admired by People's Daily World that the Los Angeles–based Party organ reprinted the entire text.48

  The comrades sought out whomever they could. We now know, courtesy of declassified FBI files, about the case of Lucille Ball, famed comedienne of I Love Lucy. Ball joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. She claimed that she did so simply because she wanted to “shut up” her overbearing grandfather, the radical “Red” Fred Hunt.49 By the 1950s she had left the party and was voting for Eisenhower. In between, however, her proletarian pursuers in Hollywood were unrelenting, seeking not only to have her involved but even (reportedly) to use her home as a meeting place.50

  Many of Hollywood's finest liberals were victimized by sustained manipulation. It is interesting that while many liberals have been concerned about the reputation of Communists, those same Communists had no qualms about tarnishing the reputations of the liberals they preyed upon—even when the liberals were friends and relatives.

  “I was duped and used,” said the celebrated actor Edward G. Robinson. “I was lied to.” He had “acted from good motives,” but was exploited nonetheless. “The Reds,” lamented Robinson, “made a sucker out of me.”51

  The same could be said for a sad swath of liberals like Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, Danny Kaye, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, John Garfield, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and many more. Each is a story in itself.

  Gene Kelly, for instance, was misled in large part by his wife, Betsy Blair, a Red—or, as Louis B. Mayer called her, Kelly's “commie wife.”52 Kelly was a sizable dupe, a pleasant, likable, patriotic American counted on and rolled by the Reds, tasked to stand in front of a giant backdrop of the American flag and lead the Pledge of Allegiance or exhort a rally of “progressives” in reverential renditions of “America.”53 In one particularly sad display, the all-American boy was cast to provide the introduction at the initial meeting of the Communist front Progressive Citizens of America, held at the Embassy Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 11, 1947. The theme for the evening was established before Kelly spoke, as a large screen flashed photographs of Hiroshima before and after Harry Truman dropped the bomb, with rolling footage of the dead and maimed and overflowing hospitals. On the ballot for the election of the executive board members of Progressive Citizens that evening were closet hard-line Communists like John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, as well as (among others) non-Communist liberals like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, and Melvyn Douglas.54

  As in the case of Gene Kelly, Melvyn Douglas's politics were closely linked to those of his wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas, an actress who later became a Democratic senator from California, where she became known as the “Pink Lady” for her far-left views. Badly burned by front groups, Melvyn Douglas would later urge his fellow liberals to “not allow themselves to be confused or cajoled into joining hands with the Communists.”55

  Way too many Hollywood liberals were cajoled.

  Confused Cagney, Crazily Confused Chaplin, and More

  The categories of Hollywood duped and nonduped, of liberals and Communists, were never perfectly tight. They resist broad-brush characterizations, as life does.

  Take the case of actor James Cagney, who in the 1930s was totally duped to the point of possibly having been a misled Communist, but certainly was not a Communist in the end.56 At one point in the process, Cagney expressed interest in meeting with Theodore Dreiser and Lincoln Steffens, the latter the resident Potemkin Progressive at The New Republic. Communist screenwriter John Bright, who had taken Mr. Yankee Doodle Dandy under his wing, brokered a dinner for the men in San Francisco.57 But the Hearst press—which Hollywood's Reds always hated—caught wind of the meeting. When studio head Jack Warner read the Hearst story, he called Cagney and Bright into his office and reprimanded them for being “Communist dupes.”58

  Cagney learned a lesson. For whatever reasons, whether public relations or sincerity, he backed away. One who did not was Charlie Chaplin.

  “Thank God for Communism!” Chaplin told the appreciative atheists at the Daily Worker. “They say Communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?”59 The comedian wasn't joking.

  Chaplin, whom author Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley described as “not a conventional Party member,” declined to do a movie about Napoleon because he said he “didn't like dictators.” When a wag asked the silent-film star whether he considered Stalin a dictator, Chaplin demurred: “it hasn't been settled what that word means.”60

  At the same time, it must be noted that Hollywood had many strong anti-Communists: Robert Taylor, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy Stewart, Clare Boothe Luce, Edward Arnold, George Murphy, Robert Montgomery, Adolphe Menjou, Ginger Rogers, Bob Hope, and William Holden, to name only a few. Menjou's denunciations of Communism were scathing. Taylor's were bold and unflinching. Luce, who wrote screenplays and for the stage, in addition to being a journalist, was eloquent in her informed criticisms of Communism.61

  And, of course, some celebrities once fell into the category of dupe but wised up. De Havilland, a dedicated Democrat, is an example of someone who was duped once, but not again. As we will see, too, an actor friend of hers transformed from dupe into anti-Communist—arguably the greatest anti-Communist of them all.

  Mission to Moscow

  Communist infiltration of Hollywood, and the accompanying duping, reached a crisis point after World War II, but it actually began as early as the 1930s. By the time war erupted, the Communists, and more importantly their dupes, were able to pull off a startling work of pro-Soviet propaganda.

  The film was Mission to Moscow, released in 1943 by Warner Brothers. The movie was based on the 1941 memoir of the same name by Joseph Davies, former U.S. ambassador to the USSR. In 1936 Davies had replaced William C. Bullitt as FDR's ambassador, a coup for the closet comrades in the Roosevelt administration. It was as if the Bolshevik demon exorcised from Bullitt's body had leapt into Davies. The good amba
ssador was an extraordinary dupe and a notorious enabler of the “Uncle Joe,” “noble ally” party line.

  Not surprisingly, Davies's book, published by Simon & Schuster, was extremely pro-Soviet. The former ambassador portrayed a host of nefarious Bolshevik figures—including Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Molotov—in the best possible light. Davies failed to mention forced famine, the Great Purge, or anything else that would reflect poorly on Stalin and his thugs. He even defended the horrible miscarriage of justice that was the Moscow show trials, concluding that the accused had been guilty of “plotting” against Stalin.

  The book was a smash hit, selling upwards of 700,000 copies. Between the copies sold and the buzz on radio and in newspapers, Davies's memoir duped a lot of Americans of its own accord. Actually, the duping did not stop at the water's edge: translated into at least a dozen languages, it misled countless others around the world. It was an insult to the real victims of Moscow's repression, from Finland to Poland, from the kulak farmer to the Ukrainian casualty to the show-trial victim.62

  Bad as it was, Davies's book did not quite scale the Himalayan heights of hyperbole achieved by the screen version. The film was made in the authoritative style of a documentary, but in fact the purpose of the film was to rally American wartime support for the nation's new ally in the fight against Hitler: Stalin's Russia.

  And Davies did not exactly repudiate the cinematic version. Quite the contrary—he oversaw and made it worse. Hollywood's mavens gave Davies veto power over any scenes that made him uncomfortable. He even recorded an introduction to the film.63 In that introduction, in which he spoke while seated in an armchair, Davies set the tone for the 124 minutes of nonsense that followed. He began: “No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government during those critical years between the two world wars.”

  This was a stunning remark. In point of fact, at that time in history no leaders of a nation had maimed and murdered so many people in such a brief period. But Davies's words carried weight because he had served as America's ambassador to the USSR. From the outset, this major motion picture, which had the deliberate goal of molding public perception on Stalin's Soviet Union, was duping its viewers.

  Incredibly, the movie got even worse. It advanced the myth that the USSR was leading the way to a new dawn of peace for all of humanity. This is no exaggeration; the film said such things almost verbatim. It portrayed Stalin as a grandfatherly, pipe-smoking, unerringly calm wise man. The movie needs to be seen to be believed; to lay out the full litany of its outrages is beyond the space limitations of this book.64

  The screenplay was written by Howard Koch, who was chosen on the basis of someone's (it is not clear whose) recommendation that he was “nonpolitical.” In truth, Koch was at the least a fellow traveler, and had probably been a Communist Party member for a time in the 1930s. Some of his correspondents actually addressed him as “Comrade Koch.”65

  During the making of this masterpiece of manipulation, Koch seemed to relish every dig at the “fascists” who he knew would be uncomfortable with certain audacious scenes. As he watched the opening introduction by Davies, for instance, Koch shook his fist with righteous indignation and said, “Let the Soviet haters scream!”66

  A Friend in the White House

  Most troubling of all, responsibility for the film did not lie only with the former ambassador, the Hollywood screenwriter, and the studio. The chain of command ran directly into the Oval Office. The film was made at the request of the man who had appointed Davies in the first place—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  President Roosevelt was instrumental in ensuring that the book was converted into a major motion picture, as part of his ongoing effort to better the image of “Uncle Joe” in the United States.67 The book had been a crash project for the same reason, rushed into print only weeks after Pearl Harbor. So keen was FDR on the film that he and Davies met several times during its production to discuss progress before it was released in May 1943.68

  Though the president's decision to push the book and movie can be defended as an action taken to help win a terrible war, Mission to Moscow’s portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union was so shockingly inaccurate, so delusional, that it duped the American viewing public.

  Of course, to FDR's Office of Wartime Information (OWI)—which, as noted earlier, was heavily penetrated by Communists and loaded with dupes—Mission to Moscow was not inaccurate but rather was a “convincing means of helping Americans to understand their Russian allies.”69 According to OWI, the filmmakers had made “every effort” to “show that Russians and Americans are not so very different at all.” This applied to living standards: “The Russians are shown to eat well and live comfortably,” OWI noted approvingly. Here the Soviet Union was just five years removed from the Great Purge and facing starvation, rampant poverty, food lines, and five to ten million Ukrainian corpses—none of which was represented in the film.70 OWI's claim was at best ludicrously false, and at worst a deliberate fabrication.

  OWI also hailed Mission to Moscow for providing an accurate view of the Russian leadership. “One of the best services performed by this picture,” the government agency stated, “is the presentation of Russian leaders not as wild-eyed madmen, but as far-seeing, earnest, and responsible statesmen.” This was OWI's take on terrorists like Stalin, Molotov, and Lavrenti Beria, the last being the head of the Soviet secret police (and also a serial rapist). To the information agency, the film had wisely recognized that the Soviet leaders, just like U.S. leaders, “desire peace” and “possess a blunt honesty.”

  According to OWI, Mission to Moscow performed an invaluable service by fostering a necessary sense of “post-war cooperation.”71

  “An Expedient Lie”

  Not everyone was so taken with the movie. One of the harshest critics was, amazingly, the film's producer, Robert Buckner.

  Buckner was mortified by the movie, of which he had lost control. He felt little recourse but to attack his own film in a lengthy letter. He dubbed it “an expedient lie for political purposes.”

  He was especially livid about the scenes concerning the Moscow purge trials. Buckner said that he and Davies “had a rather violent argument” over these depictions. He was furious that the ambassador “insisted upon the guilt” of the wrongly accused. This outrage sent Buckner running to Jack and Harry Warner, the towering studio bosses who ran Warner Brothers. He warned them that “a great historic mistake” was being made.72

  Buckner also took umbrage at, as he put it, Davies's “insinuation that Finland was not actually invaded by the USSR.” He and Davies argued this point as well. When Buckner told the ambassador that the “opposite was true,” Davies countered that he had “privileged knowledge” of the conflict.73

  The producer instructed Davies that Jack Warner had already sunk a million dollars into the movie and would not tolerate such shabby work. At that point, according to Buckner, Davies pulled out his personal checkbook and said, “I will give you the million here and now, and will take over the negative of the film from you.” Davies had the money; like Corliss Lamont, like Fred Field, he had inherited a fortune built on the hard work of American entrepreneurs. Specifically, his wife was a wealthy heiress (who, incidentally, demanded face time in the film).74

  In the end, about the only sources who liked this piece of Stalinist agitprop, aside from Davies and FDR, were the Soviets and the New York Times. The longtime movie reviewer at the Times, Bosley Crowther, appreciated this “screen manifesto” and its “boldness unique in film ventures.” The film, wrote Crowther, “comes out sharply and frankly for an understanding of Russia's point of view,” and “says with a confident finality that Russia's leaders saw, when the leaders of other nations dawdled, that the Nazis were a menace to the world.”

  Stalin and crew, it turned out, were visionaries—prophets for peace.

  The “most absorbing” part of the film, Crowther said, was Davies's “whirlwind ef
forts to tell America the truth”—about the evil Nazis and the good Soviets—“before it is too late.” Crowther had some criticisms of the film artistically, but not politically. The movie “says quite clearly,” he noted without complaint, that “Russia, far from earlier suspicion, is a true and most reliable ally.” While acknowledging that Davies's film would “obviously prove offensive to those elements which have challenged his views,” Crowther seemed to feel that the depiction was dead-on—indeed, “a valuable influence to more clear-eyed and searching thought.”75

  Warner Brothers was the most unlikely of studios for this piece of pro-Soviet propaganda. Jack Warner was no dupe. He was a solid anti-Communist ever on the alert for cases of potential dupery among his studio's major stars. As the Jimmy Cagney episode demonstrates, he never hesitated to call a star into his office to warn about “hanging out with Reds.”