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and the Hollywood Blacklist |
 Karen Morley with Tom Keene in King Vidor's 1934 'Our Daily Bread,' a film attacked as "pinko" by Hearst newspapers, but branded "capitalistic propaganda" by Soviet newspapers. Who do you believe? |
A long-forgotten star,
ruined by the blacklist
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
How ironic, I thought, when I read that the Screen Actors Guild is warning its members of a possible new era of blacklisting just days after the news services reported the death of Karen Morley, a renowned Hollywood star whose career was destroyed by the original Hollywood blacklist.
The new worries about a possible blacklist are motivated by the Bush administration's push to brand anti-war actors and entertainers like Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen and the Dixie Chicks as "disloyal" or "un-American" because they have spoken out against the president and his decision to involve Americans in a war with Iraq.
Karen Morley was blacklisted in 1947 after she refused to answer questions put to her by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about her possible membership in the American Communist Party. After she stood up to HUAC, Sen. Joseph McCarthy's "weapon of mass destruction" against left-wingers in Hollywood, Morley's career as a movie star effectively was over.
What happened to Karen Morley and hundreds of other creative artists in Hollywood movies and television should be a lesson to us today. She never was convicted of any crime, but doors slammed shut on her career all over Hollywood. The slammers were a handful of right-wing studio bosses who believed Morley subscribed to the idea of a violent overthrow of the American government--and a whole lot of cowardly executives who knew that wasn't true, but were afraid to stand up for their own convictions.
Morley was a political woman, all right. She espoused lots of the same ideas that someone like Susan Sarandon might advocate today--ideas that involve a strong belief in human rights, equality and the right to bargain collectively in an industry that still resents unionism as if it were something dreamed up by Karl Marx after a bad bout of indigestion. After the blacklist wrecked her career, Morley tried to go into politics and failed in a 1954 bid to become lieutenant governor of New York on the American Labor Party ticket.
Morley was 93 when she died of pneumonia at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, CA. She died on March 8, but she had been forgotten for so long that news of her death didn't surface for nearly two months. That, my friends, is what they mean when they say "died in obscurity."
When people today talk of acting careers wrecked by the Hollywood blacklist, they most often think of Larry Parks, who was one of Hollywood's hottest young stars after he played Al Jolson in the huge box office hits "The Jolson Story"(1946) and "Jolson Sings Again" (1949). He lost it all in 1951 when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and admitted he'd been a member of the Communist Party.
Parks certainly suffered from his public admission. He wasn't formally blacklisted because he cooperated with HUAC, but his studio, Columbia, dropped him anyway. He made only two movies after baring his soul to HUAC, He retired from films after playing a small part in John Huston's "Freud" in 1962. He "died in obscurity" at age 61 in 1975.
I never met Larry Parks, but I did meet Karen Morley, which is probably why her experience with McCarthyism has always symbolized the blacklist to me.
Morley was a very big star in the 1930s, especially at MGM, where she was under contract during the glory years when Irving Thalberg was head of production. Just look at some of the films in which she had star billing at MGM and other studios: "Dinner at Eight" (with both John and Lionel Barrymore), "Scarface" (with Paul Muni), "Pride and Prejudice" (with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier), "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (with Helen Hayes), "Mask of Fu Manchu" (with Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy), "Mata Hari" (with Greta Garbo) and "The Littlest Rebel" (with Shirley Temple). Morley always appeared to be a strong, intelligent woman on screen--in a Hollywood era that didn't exactly celebrate that sort of woman, on screen or off.
How I met Karen Morley is an interesting story because it was quite by accident--and certainly took her by surprise.
It was in the late 1960s. I'd become friendly with John Howard Lawson and Lester Cole, two screenwriters from the ranks of the notorious "Hollywood 10," a group of writers and directors who refused to testify before the witch-hunters of HUAC--and were sent to prison for "contempt of Congress."
Like many young Americans who reached adulthood in the 1950s, I was disgusted by the blacklist because it had purged Hollywood of some of its most creative and daring filmmakers and performers--not for being Soviet spies or anything truly sinister, but for having either joined the Communist Party or for associating with people who had espoused communism.
I knew that hordes of young men and women were attracted to collective philosophies like Socialism or Communism during the Great Depression of the 1930s. To many, it seemed a way out of America's economic collapse and, ultimately, a more just system because it equalized people and espoused brotherhood between races, creeds and religions. I thought it was outrageous to destroy the careers of people for the ideas they embraced in their youth--and may even have abandoned long ago.
Lawson and Cole independently assured me their persecution was for other reasons. Both were instrumental leaders in forming the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the union that now represents writers for movies and TV. Hollywood's righit-wing moguls hated unionism and fought bitterly to block the formation of any unions in Hollywood. Naturally, Lawson, who was the first WGA president, and fellow leader Cole were primary targets for their vengeance.
Lawson was quite old when I met him, but still had a crackling intellect. He was a summer guest lecturer at Stanford University when we met and he was anxious to talk with me once he learned my interest was in his work, not his politics. A writer of experimental theater in the 1920s, Lawson had written or co-written several films I greatly admired, among them "Treasure Island" with Wallace Beery and Mickey Rooney; "Algiers," the famous Charles Boyer "Casbah" drama; "Blockade," which plunged Henry Fonda into the Spanish Civil War; "Foreign Correspondent," the classic Hitchcock thriller; "Sahara," the gripping Humphrey Bogart film about an American tank crew "lost" in the Sahara desert during World War II; "Counter-Attack," a wartime drama about commandos behind German lines (featuring the pre-"Jolson" Larry Parks), and "Smash-Up," the harrowing drama about alcoholism that lifted Susan Hayward out of "B" movies and made her a star. One of his final writing credits was his adaptation of Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1951), one of the first films to ever speak out against South Africa's system of apartheid.
Many of Lawson's films
did have political content--"Sahara" was even adapted
from a Soviet film--but Lester Cole's had much less. Lawson was
the intellectual while Cole was the Hollywood pro who created
"B" genre films like "Charlie Chan's Greatest
Case," "The Invisible Man Returns" with Vincent
Price and "The Romance of Rosy Ridge," the Van Johnson
film that introduced Janet Leigh and was shot on location in
my hometown, Santa Cruz, Calif.
During the war years, Cole did several classic war films, including
"None Shall Escape," Errol Flynn's "Objective
Burma," "Night Plane From Chungking" and James
Cagney's "Blood on the Sun."
When I met Cole, he was living quietly in San Francisco and doing some college lecturing. He had been working on the screenplay for "Viva Zapata" when he was sent to prison. That job was taken away from him. Later, he wrote three films under false names: "Chain Lightning," the Bogart jet plane drama; "Operation Eichmann" and the huge box office hit "Born Free."
Cole was a very affable guy and I really enjoyed hearing his stories about Hollywood before the blacklist. He invited me to see a performance of a one-act anti-war play he had written many years earlier and was then being revived by the Manhattan Playhouse in East Palo Alto, a small and daring venue run by Russian emigre Judith Dresch and financed by her husband, a well-heeled Silicon Valley executive. It was an appropriate time to revive such a play since America then was deeply involved in a growing controversy over our involvement in the Vietnam war.
Because the play was short, Cole called upon some old pals to provide some additional entertainment for the crowd. Among them was a little-known Hollywood character actor named Lloyd Gough ("All My Sons," "Sunset Boulevard," "Storm Warning"), who played a concertina and sang a few old union songs. After the show, my wife and I milled around with Cole and his friends, shaking hands and paying compliments. That's when I noticed Gough's wife, clinging to his arm. It was Karen Morley.
Morley had put on weight and didn't look much like a movie star anymore, but it was her, all right. I introduced myself and asked if I might chat with her a bit about her career. Truthfully, she looked as if I'd just asked her to strip naked and dance for me. She looked absolutely terrified. She must have gathered the fact that Lester Cole had "vetted" me as an OK guy, but I don't think she could get by the fact that I was a newspaper journalist. As a result, she gave me monosyllabic answers and furtively kept looking around for someone to rescue her. I took the hint, complimented her on her work and withdrew.
The look on Karen Morley's face when I "cornered" her has haunted me ever since. I knew instinctively that she'd been so damaged by people like me in her past that she wasn't going to trust anyone in my profession ever again. Later, I was told she relished her anonymity and now guarded it jealously. I understood completely.
Looking back, I now realize that Karen Morley's rebellious nature was evident even before the blacklist. MGM didn't want her to marry her first husband, director Charles Vidor, and start a family at the peak of her popularity. She stood up to the studio, married Vidor anyway, and was fired. After MGM, she made her only strongly political film--King Vidor's 1934 "Our Daily Bread"--a depression-era drama about a communal farm battling big business, which was a box office bomb. It dimmed her box office appeal considerably.
After the blacklist, Morley got very little work in pictures or television. To my knowledge, her last feature film was Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of Fritz Lang's "M." It was a "little" film and made no comeback waves for her. From all I've heard, she gave up on Hollywood and considered her acting career a closed book.
In retrospect, there seems absolutely no merit to the decision to blacklist Karen Morley for her political views. Could it happen again to someone like Susan Sarandon? Of course, it could. What worries me is that it may be happening already in an industry that already has forgotten the Karen Morleys of the past and what the original blacklist did to them.
©2003 by Ron Miller.
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