The Berlin Wall is dust, the Doomsday Machine
dismantled, the Soviet Union dismembered. And Sunday night, in the midst of the
interminable orgy of showbiz self-congratulation known as Oscar Night, a
wizened little guy with a big nose— still hale at 89 if a bit dazed by the
commotion— is scheduled to finally receive his lifetime achievement award.
Another Cold War relic will be laid to rest. Or will it?
There’s a tumult in Tinseltown, but, as befits a hall
of mirrors, the reality of this uproar will be constructed in the control
booth. Depending on the politics of the telecast director (or maybe on the
politics of the director’s parents), either the camera will focus on those
members of the audience who, organized by a committee of elderly screenwriters,
stonily sit on their hands, or, more likely, the telecast will make it appear
that Elia Kazan is receiving the greatest ovation in the history of the Motion
Picture Academy.
Oldtime lefties like Abraham Polonsky and Bert
Gordon— both of whom were hauled before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) and subsequently blacklisted in Hollywood— consider Kazan
anathema: He named names. In April 1952, at the pinnacle of his success, Elia
Kazan went voluntarily before HUAC to become the most distinguished American
artist who saved his Hollywood career by informing on onetime Communist
associates.
It may that for the vast majority of the viewing
audience, Kazan is a virtual unknown. His credits, however, should be familiar.
He won his first Oscar for directing Gentleman’s Agreement in 1948 and his
second, seven tumultuous years later, for directing On the Waterfront. In
between, Kazan helped run the Actors Studio and directed the original Broadway
productions of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, effectively
putting their authors on the cultural map. Kazan was likely the most
influential and brilliant director of actors in postwar America— the man who
popularized the Stanislavsky technique known as the Method, who made Marlon
Brando a star, who brought James Dean to Hollywood, and who staged the most
famous brother scene in movie history.
Ancient history. That Kazan directed his swan song,
The Last Tycoon, as recently as 1976 was something of a fluke. The director had
struggled on, but his Hollywood career was largely over by the time Andrew
Sarris consigned him to the “Less Than Meets the Eye” dustbin in his 1968
auteurist taxonomy, The American Cinema. As a director, Kazan was “more
mannered than meaningful,” Sarris had decided. “There is an edge of hysteria
even to his pauses and silences,” the critic added, without even bothering to
mention the director’s most memorable performance— singing for HUAC.
On one hand, feting Kazan is within the Oscar
tradition of decorating a battle-scarred survivor, if not a cast-off has-been.
In 1972, Charles Chaplin was brought back from a 20-year exile to receive his
lifetime achievement award. (Chaplin, a “dangerous” alien with alleged
Stalinist sympathies, had been banished from the U.S. six months after Kazan’s
HUAC testimony.) Orson Welles, who also suffered for his politics during the
Cold War, died before he could be properly rehabilitated. (Does anyone remember
the days when Steven Spielberg could proudly shell out $60,000 for the prop
sled from Citizen Kane but refuse to help Welles fund his last projects?)
It’s pleasant to show old clips and dangle the golden
watch. But, on the other hand, honoring Kazan shines the klieg light on another
aspect of Hollywood hypocrisy— the wholesale firing and non-hiring of the movie
industry’s actual and suspected Communists (as well as other politically
incorrect types) from the late 1940s into the 1960s.
Elia Kazan was first named as a Communist during the
October 1947 HUAC hearings by no less an authority than studio boss Jack
Warner, who was trying to convince the Committee that FDR rather than Warner
Bros. was responsible for the Stalin-celebratory wartime propaganda film,
Mission to Moscow.
Kazan, who had in fact been a member of the
then-legal Communist Party for 19 months in the mid 1930s while acting with the
Group Theatre in New York, was at that point a Hollywood liberal. He would sign
a telegram in solidarity with the Hollywood Ten, who were HUAC’s first, most
celebrated targets, and support their legal defense until the spring of 1950.
It was then, soon after Senator Joseph McCarthy made his stunning debut as
America’s witchfinder general, that the Ten lost their legal appeals and went
to jail for the crime of having refused to tell Congress if they were (or had
ever been) members of the Communist Party.
By summer there was war in Korea and even liberals
were on the defensive. People were losing work; marriages and friendships were
breaking up. Hollywood was rife with informers. Ronald Reagan was one,
reporting to the FBI on the membership he represented as president of the
Screen Actors Guild; at the Screen Directors Guild, a vociferous minority led
by Cecil B. DeMille were trying to oust liberal president Joseph Mankiewicz,
who had declined to have members sign loyalty oaths. Kazan ducked out of the
October 22, 1950, SDG meeting described by one participant as the “most
tumultuous evening” in Hollywood history, telling the Mankiewicz faction (John
Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler) that DeMille knew of Kazan’s CP past and
would use it against them.
The next spring, HUAC returned to Hollywood with a
vengeance and, among many others, subpoenaed Kazan’s Group Theatre comrades.
Most took refuge in the Fifth Amendment and refused to discuss their past
political associations. The exception was John Garfield. The Bronx street kid
who was Hollywood’s pre-Brando Brando blandly told the Committee that no one in
Hollywood had ever discussed the CP with him. HUAC was not satisfied. Garfield
was blacklisted along with the rest.
HUAC was then out to snare a Red movie star. Edward
G. Robinson, Larry Parks, Sterling Hayden, José Ferrer, and Judy Holliday were
also candidates. But Garfield remained the prime target. Kazan, who worked with
Garfield both at the Group and in Hollywood, was sure to be subpoenaed. Arthur
Miller, who was then collaborating with Kazan on a never-produced script about
labor-racketeering on the Brooklyn waterfront, would recall the director’s
telling him he was afraid of being blacklisted. To complicate Kazan’s
situation, he had just finished Viva Zapata! for 20th Century Fox— directing
Brando as a Mexican revolutionary in a project originally brainstormed by
Hollywood Ten member Lester Cole.
Kazan’s subpoena arrived in early 1952, along with
one for playwright Clifford Odets. In his autobiography, the director maintains
that up until then he had posed as a “left- oriented liberal.” Screenwriter
Walter Bernstein first met Kazan when the director was researching his
waterfront project; Kazan asked Bernstein to introduce him to the Communist
leader of the National Maritime Union. Bernstein set up a meeting and recalls
that afterward Kazan told him “how much he admired [him] and how that was the
side he was on.” Miller has written that Kazan “identified himself with the
idealism of the left... . Like Odets, [Kazan] wore the fading colors of the
thirties into the forties and fifties, the resonances of the culture of
antifascism that had once united artists everywhere.” Was it not the young
Kazan who, in the original Group production of Odets’s Waiting for Lefty,
incited a stunned opening-night audience to yell “Strike!” and moved New Masses
to dub him “Proletariat Thunderbolt”?
Summoned before HUAC, Kazan confessed in closed
session his own long-ago Communist past, but declined to name former comrades.
This would not do. Although Kazan has always denied that Fox studio boss Spyros
Skouras gave him an ultimatum to cooperate, it is known that, in his anxiety
regarding Viva Zapata!, Skouras requested everyone connected with the movie to
provide written accounts of their political views and that these were forwarded
to gossip columnist George Sokolsky at The Hollywood Reporter. Before long, the
Reporter received the secret transcript of Kazan’s “uncooperative” testimony
and made public the story that although the director had “confessed Commie
membership,” he “refused to supply any new evidence on his old pals from the
Group Theatre days, among them John Garfield.”
Kazan was trapped. In April, he returned to HUAC at his
own behest and named Odets as a Communist, plus the seven Group actors who had
been in his cell— Lewis Leverett, J. Edward Bromberg (who had already suffered
a fatal heart attack after his unfriendly testimony), Phoebe Brand and her
husband Morris Carnovsky, his old roommate Tony Kraber (soon to lose his job at
CBS), Paula Miller Strasberg, and Art Smith. Kazan supplemented his testimony
with an annotated résumé explaining, in servile detail, why every play or movie
he had ever directed was already anti-Communist.
It’s easy to forget that, once upon a time, joining
the Communist Party might have been a career move. In his testimony, Kazan
admitted bringing Brand into the CP and Kraber would maintain that gung-ho
Kazan had recruited him as well. Back then the Party was happening. There were
secret meetings where the Group’s Red fraction plotted to make Odets’s Awake
and Sing! their next production— and screw director Lee Strasberg’s opposition.
(One of the more bizarre aspects of this backstage intrigue was that Strasberg’s
wife was a member of this supposedly clandestine cell.)
Kazan drew the line, he told HUAC, when he refused to
support a CP directive that the actors take over the Group and transform it
into a collective. The Party took him to task for this, importing a Detroit
labor organizer who branded Kazan an opportunistic “foreman type.” Rather than
accept this criticism, Kazan explained that he chose to resign (although not
perhaps right away). Located in a chapter of his autobiography that begins with
a tribute to an “inspiring” former comrade, Kazan’s account of his HUAC
testimony is a startling example of crablike motion and profound ambivalence.
The director covers his tracks and doubles back to make new ones. Then, like
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, he pumps himself up for a declaration of war. The
memory of his Party trial makes him so angry that he decides to name everybody—
although he calls a few of them up to get their permission first.
Phoebe Brand would later maintain that Kazan had
testified selectively, naming his enemies but not his friends. Certainly, he
could have done more damage— he might have volunteered the name of his old
Theatre of Action comrade Nicholas Ray, for example, and thus denied the world
Ray’s Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause. He could surely have provided
additional information on Garfield, whom he knew to be the Committee’s main
interest. Garfield, like Bromberg, became a HUAC fatality. He suffered a
massive heart attack at 39 while under increasing pressure to give friendly
testimony. Kazan was made of tougher stuff.
By his own account, Kazan thrived on alternating
secrecy and disclosure, rebellion and compliance. Born to subterfuge, he
characterizes his early relationship with his mother as conspiratorial and he
succeeded in recreating that atmosphere throughout his life. Arthur Miller
described rehearsing with Kazan as “a conspiracy not only against the existing
theatre but society, capitalism— in fact, everybody who was not a part of the
production.” Throughout his memoirs, Kazan complains that he’s perceived as a
betrayer of trust but even more frequently cites his “gift of dissembling.”
Dissembling or acting? According to theater historian
Mel Gordon, Kazan’s HUAC testimony was unique for its emotional intensity: “Stanislavsky’s
name had appeared in both the California and Federal HUAC hearings as some
mysterious Russian influence in Hollywood, but only Kazan actually hooked into
the Method by re-living some sensational hidden memory.” For Kazan, this dark
memory was the 1936 Party meeting at which, in his words, he felt expected to “grovel,
make excuses” and, as before HUAC, “confess [his] errors.” Gordon points out
that Kazan’s testimony and subsequent statements are “right out of an Affective
Memory exercise. All the other friendly witnesses had to be prompted to answer
questions, only Kazan emotionally connected.” (And only Kazan took out a
self-serving, self-righteous ad in The New York Times that, projecting Korean
War rhetoric back to 1936, condemned Communist thought-control and seconded
HUAC’s assertion that the Party was a “dangerous and alien conspiracy.”)
There is no doubt that, once he threw himself into
the role, testifying gave Kazan a rush— the director is not alone in pointing
out that he did his best work coming off his HUAC performance. After making the
requisite anti-Communist melodrama Man on a Tightrope (a movie that also served
to “clear” the too- liberal Fredric March), Kazan directed the six features on
which his reputation rests: On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll, A Face
in the Crowd, Wild River, and Splendor in the Grass. All are films about
betrayal. By the time he wrapped the last one in 1961, the blacklist had been
broken.
Walter Bernstein says that, HUAC testimony or not,
Kazan “continued to insist he was a man of the left.” Indeed, 25 years after
defending Viva Zapata! as an anti-Communist film, its director told one
interviewer that he was proud that his movie was an appeal to the “disgruntled
and rebellious people of the world.”
Similarly, Kazan’s resentment-ridden memoirs are
complicated by a persistent streak of sentimental leftism. Waiting for Lefty
still chokes him up. Kazan remained true to the Group’s values— its concern for
social significance and grandstanding histrionics, its militant middlebrowism
and ethical critique of the capitalist system. (In fact, it was another Group
graduate, Karl Malden, who pushed for Kazan’s lifetime Oscar.) And here lies
the rub.
In 1952, Kazan had enormous cultural authority. He
was Broadway’s leading director and an Oscar-winning filmmaker. If there was
any artist in America who could have resisted HUAC and made the blacklist
public it would have been he— not the least in his demonstrated capacity for
projecting self-justifying martyrdom. Kazan could have been a contender.
Instead, he chose to become the Lucifer of the Old Left— refusing the role
history had ordained for him and taking another. Some might hail his patriotic
exposure of the Group Theatre threat, but for others, he had allowed HUAC to
cast him as that most wretched of ‘30s creatures— the stool pigeon hired by the
bosses to undermine worker solidarity. (A police spy was, in fact, the villain
of Dimitroff, the anti-Nazi agitprop Kazan wrote with Art Smith in 1934.)
“It was disturbing to inform on my colleagues,” Kazan
would later tell Jeff Young, himself the nephew of a blacklisted screenwriter. “But
I never told one goddamn lie about it. Also, the guys I named were all known.
Everybody knew who they were, so it wasn’t a big deal.” Of course they were
known. The big deal was Kazan’s cooperation. He furnished no new information
(and few friendly witnesses did). Rather, he humiliated himself by submitting
to HUAC’s protocols. As Philip Roth concludes in his novel of the Red Scare, I
Married a Communist, it was the congressional Red-hunters who exploited “moral
disgrace as public entertainment.”
If Kazan’s HUAC appearance was essentially symbolic,
so is the whole story of the Hollywood blacklist. Although it has been
estimated by historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund that 90 percent of
those driven from the movie industry never returned, Hollywood’s significance
for America may be best understood in the way that sorry story of the wrecked
careers and purloined movie credits has come to encapsulate something far more
extensive— namely the Cold War purge of schools, government agencies, and trade
unions in which the thousands of past, present, and possible Communists who refused
to pull a Kazan were consequently fired from their jobs.
Kazan was only a featured player in the destruction
of an American left that— despite the monumental crimes of Soviet Stalinism—
was itself, throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, a powerful catalyst for social
reform and political change. Had it not been for this wider blacklist, the
subsequent development of American trade unionism, civil rights, and foreign
policy might have been quite different. Perhaps some day Hollywood will make a
movie about that.
A Jury of His Peers
1.
I felt my sympathy going toward him and at the
same time I was afraid of him ... As unbelievable as it seemed, I could still
be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of Party writers
years ago and had made a speech at one of them. — Arthur Miller
2.
Kazan is one of those for whom I had contempt,
because he carried down men much less capable of defending themselves than he...
. — Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter
3.
I’d rather not talk about [Kazan]. He was once
my friend, my teacher. I’ve never been able to look [him] in the eye, nor he
me. Because he knows that I know. — Martin Ritt, director
4.
You look for
forgiveness, you try to understand, [Accurate] but I can’t manage it with Kazan. What he did was diabolical.
And what he did afterward was diabolical— to try and reach and offer work to
blacklisted people. He tried to corrupt them by giving them work and by doing so making
them accept him. — Jules Dassin, director
5.
[Kazan] was the most seductive man I had ever
met. He made you feel wanted and cared for. He understood you and passed no
judgment. ... Once he talked eloquently to me of wanting to play Richard the
Third, knowing the evil uses of charm. He would have made a fascinating Iago. —
Walter Bernstein, screenwriter
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