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  The studios were sent lists of people, many under contract to them, whom the Committee deemed questionable. Instead of a black mark, they were given a red one. As one Committee hearing closed and another and still another was held, these lists became lengthy, including those who had been unfriendly witnesses, those named and those who were on what was referred to as a graylist—those whose circle of friends and acquaintances were suspect and/or their scripts had a liberal leaning to them. The moguls who ran the studios, fearful of a backlash and drop in ticket sales if they hired anyone on any of the lists, closed the gates of the studios to them, no matter how great an artist or long a contributor to their studio’s critically acclaimed and largest grossing films. Desperately needing writers and directors to replace the artists they had fired, the studio moguls reached out to their young and growing rival—television, just as they once had taken actors from the theater with the advent of talking films, leaving the majority of silent movie actors abruptly without jobs.

  These were scary times in Hollywood. People turned their backs on longtime friends and coworkers, panic stricken that they would “catch the virus.” My uncle, Dave Chasen, owned a famous restaurant beloved by the Hollywood glitterati. It was a clubby sort of place. Everyone knew each other and mingled, table hopping from one group to another. Then abruptly, that stopped. Guests kept their heads down, eyes averted when a person thought to be on one list or another was being led to a table, or passing by to leave. Someone who had been a frequent guest at one’s dinner table and shared holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries—whose children had playdates with your children—were suddenly cut, telephone calls unanswered, notes ignored.

  I felt disgust when I heard these stories. It brought images of Hitler’s youth movement and the start of the ferreting out and persecution of Jews in the early years of Nazi Germany. A good percentage of the Hollywood film industry, especially the creative artists, were Jewish (as were the moguls themselves). “It can’t happen here!” I kept telling myself. But, in truth, I was not 100 percent sure. After all, the moguls were giving in to the political pressures just as the rich and powerful Jews had in Germany—and look where it got them.

  Still, this was not Germany. This was the US of A. I loved it dearly. It was the only home I ever knew. My childhood had been a scattered one—here for some time, there for another, constantly moving on to another house, apartment, city, state. Yet, I retained a sense of security, of family with my homeland, for my country seemed the parents of us all. I was (and remain) tremendously proud to be an American. We stood for everything good, didn’t we? (Well, every family had their bad moments, their truants, their buried secrets, and those they wished they could bury.) I was a history buff and knew very well that we had suffered some pretty dark times, unthinkable regresses. But there were always those among us who fought and struggled and overcame with amazing grace and strength. I believed that despite the current disease of McCarthyism that had gripped our country, those infected by its virus loved our land as much as I did—each in their own and very personal way.

  Those who were blacklisted or graylisted, and could, left for Europe (or hid out in Mexico hoping it would blow over) before their passports were confiscated. They were cinema artists concerned in their occupations with stories frequently dealing with human suffering. Even comedy, more often than not, is born out of tragic situations (and still is). Screenwriters took story ideas from the headlines and from the breadlines. In its early incarnation the American Communist Party (a very small minority when the dark wind of McCarthyism swept in) seemed far less threatening than the Tea Party appeared to liberal groups in more recent times. A great many Hollywood members had left the Communist Party by the time of World War II, disappointed that it was not what they had believed it to be. By then, the great motivation was to bring Hitler down and save the world from his terrorizing despotism. European artists—actors, writers, directors, composers—who had been able to escape Der Fuhrer’s murderous madness by immigrating to the States for a chance to continue their careers in Hollywood—formed a new group of film intelligentsia. The pendulum swung in another direction. Still, McCarthyism continued. A new wave, in which I was caught, hit hard in 1951–1952 and continued through to 1958, despite the senator’s death in 1957 (said to be caused by acute alcoholism).

  The endless harassment and outrage of individuals over strongly held left and right diverging opinions continues to the present time. In those years when I was young, I was filled with a kind of desperate hope, an all-encompassing faith, that left and right could one day manage to join hands in a bold effort for the better good of all people, especially those in my homeland. I don’t think I was alone in my thinking.

  The writer Arthur Laurents once told me, “The informers were not evil because they informed, and not informers because they were evil.” I believed that then and I believe that now. Dalton Trumbo (one of the Hollywood Ten) famously added, “Everyone [who came up before the Committee during those years] was a victim.” I believed that, too. Still, when the phone rang on that sweaty, hot August morning, my children’s happy voices rising in the background, a cold-blooded snake of fear slithered down my back. This happened whenever the telephone rang, for there was usually a call from someone—agent, lawyer, still-employed studio friend—to warn you that a pink subpoena slip might be heading your way or that you had been upgraded to the flashing red-zone list.

  This was my state of mind at the time of my current contretemps. I was scared. You can believe that. But I was a feisty kind of lady. I refused to let the bullies get me. Most of all I had kept my sense of humor (which I value above almost every other human trait). I believed I had what was well worth fighting for. Not only was I an American, I was a woman with two terrific kids, a measure of talent, and an active libido that even the dread polio could not stifle.

  • 1 •

  Departure

  The electricity off, I stood by the window in my bedroom looking out onto a darkened middle-of-the night street. The previous August day in 1954 had been blistering hot and humid. The coming dawn promised little change. My Spanish-style bungalow was on the fringe edge of Beverly Hills, an area that never appeared on the tourist maps designating stars’ homes that were hawked on the corners of the upper reaches of Sunset Boulevard. The house, which I was within weeks of losing, had been my home for the past two years, the down payment made with the money I had received from the sale of an original story my agent had sold to a major studio. It was my first real home, purchased with the hope that owning even such a minuscule piece of God’s earth would somehow stabilize my life and that of my two young children, Michael and Catherine, both asleep in their beds, with no knowledge of the fragility of our finances.

  A small gleam of light from the corner streetlamp filtered through the partially closed Venetian blinds. The surrounding quiet held me tightly in its grip. There were hard decisions I must make and I felt incapable of making them. It is curious how one can remember with much acuity the silences in one’s life. I recall that during one of her many separations from my father, my mother’s brother advised her to divorce my father (for numerous good reasons), and her replying: “Maybe that is so. But will you be there when I wake up alone at three o’clock in the morning?” She never did leave him, but they were more often apart than together.

  I had no such reservations about having dissolved my own marriage. My husband, I had come to accept, was a compulsive, addicted gambler who, only days before, I had locked out of the house, his personal possessions boxed and left on the front porch for him to collect when I learned that without my knowledge he had signed over the deed of the house (forging my name) to casino owners to cover losses he could not pay and obviously had been in fear of reprisal and possible bodily harm. I understood his dilemma when it came to light. He felt caught between my expected wrath and the gambling syndicate’s long arm. But this was after years of difficult times and failed attempts to secure help for him (family intervention an
d an analyst). I now had only six weeks (given to me out of compassion, I had been told) in which to come up with the money (an astronomical $20,000) or forfeit my home. Unbeknownst to them I had the option of reporting the fraud to the police. (I had dismissed this route as my husband was, after all, the father of my children.) The scenario grew darker when deepened by the other problems current in my life.

  Was I stressed out? You bet your ass! And I do not scare easily. A Southern lady once had told me that I had “gumption.” I was impressed by this as her grandparents had been born into slavery, and although well educated and successful in her field, she had endured racism at her place of business and in everyday life—as did her children. I like to think that she was right, that I am a fighter, a survivor. After all, we have only one life, no returns or second chances. I had been given some low blows in my short time on earth; I was twenty-six at this time, currently recovering from a year’s battle with polio and was also in political hot water, steamy enough to end my career as it was just beginning to take off. But there had been great times, too: unique experiences, loving presences, what I thought had been sexual gratification served up with love, and yes, plenty of laughter. Laughter, I believe, is the best-kept beauty secret in the world.

  During my physical therapy treatments to help me walk again (which I now did, albeit with the aid of my hated “sticks”) I was taught to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going. That was the only course I knew to follow. Writing was all I ever wanted to do. I wasn’t sure how I was going to write myself out of my current situation as I was presently on the studio’s “graylist”—considered politically far left due to the themes of my writings and the groups I had supported (the farmworkers in California who were pitifully underpaid, for one, and for whom I had signed a petition for fairer earnings) and in danger of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (more often referred to simply as HUAC) in their manic search for writers who might have once belonged to the Communist Party to bring before their body.

  I had never been a member, nor can I recall ever having been approached to become one. I knew that made little difference and that just to have been called before the Committee would have made me unemployable in the industry. This was the sinister period of McCarthyism in our country. Led by a thirst for power, Senator McCarthy and the Committee, formed by strong right-wing members of Congress, were out to prove that Communist Russia was engaged in a conspiracy to undermine and eventually take over the country through messages being delivered subversively in motion pictures. A deadly chess game was being played, and I stood a chance of becoming one of their pawns, not because I was famous (which I certainly was not) but because I had close ties to “suspected” members of the Hollywood movie industry who were.

  When I was a youngster, the Depression a dark chasm filled with failing banks, unemployment, hunger, and great migrations, Hollywood was a Tinker Bell of hope to families with children (who were a popular commodity in films at that time). I had been one of Hollywood’s thousand-some performing children (ages three to ten, “in-betweens” eleven to fourteen seeming to possess the mark of Cain and unhireable). I never was picked up by the movies but I appeared on stage in “kiddie groups” (then popular attractions) where my birth name Anne Louise Josephson had been shortened to Anne Louise in the Meglin Kiddies and then changed to Anne Edwards when I joined Gus Edwards’s troupe. At ten, I tap-danced on a radio program hosted by comedian Ken Murray (listeners obviously did not think that curious). My dream was never to be a star (or even a supporting player) but to write. I devoured what books I could get at the library. At night I would go to sleep with a small notebook and pencil beneath my pillow and in near darkness sneak-write stories I made up in my head. Even though my scribbles were nearly illegible in the morning light, the stories had been birthed.

  At seventeen, having written a high school play, I was “discovered” by a studio talent scout and hired as a junior writer for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (only two miles from my home). Between interrupted college years, my marriage, and divorce, I had sold two original screenplays (after probably ten or more rejects) and my most recent work, a script for live television which had been aired just hours before my current nocturnal turmoil. I had “family connections” as well. My uncle, Dave Chasen, owned the restaurant Chasen’s, perhaps the most famous of all movietown eateries in the 1930s through the 1980s. My early years were softened when my mother and I lived with him and his first wife, my aunt Theo, in a crowded bungalow (I slept in the “dinette,” an L-shaped area off the kitchen, my cot in the corner, folding shutters in the archway for privacy) that would eventually back the original restaurant when it was built.

  My extended family were the nobs of filmtown’s elites, who were Uncle Dave’s close friends. To me they were just Uncle Claude (W. C. Fields), Ruby (Keeler), Mr. Baritone (John Barrymore), Jimmy (James Stewart), and Uncle Frank (Capra) and so on down (or up) the list of famous Hollywood players of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, my wedding reception (a gala affair) was held at Chasen’s. My husband (tall, slim, dazzling green eyes, a movie idol Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin, bright, no hero, but a veteran of the gritty war in the Pacific) was the nephew of Robert Rossen, the brilliant writer-director-producer presently blacklisted after refusing to betray his colleagues by giving HUAC their names as possible “sympathizers of Communist philosophy.” Later, he would sadly go back before the Committee and reel off a long list of names that allowed him to work again. Although able to contribute memorable films, among the liberal population of the industry, he would—like Elia Kazan—be treated as a pariah. But during the time of his reticence to give names, he had little other recourse than to leave the country in order to continue to work. During that difficult period, my husband and I had moved into his and his wife Sue’s home in tony Bel Air to oversee the care of my son, Michael (Cathy still to come), along with the Rossens’ three children while their parents were abroad.

  The telephone call I feared receiving that day did come. My agent, Mitchell Gertz, had rung to inform me that a pink subpoena with my name on it commanding me to appear before the Committee was heading my way. An insider had warned him that it was only a matter of short weeks. My close association with the Rossens (Bob having yet to recant his testimony) and their friends as well as my “subversive” script, Riot Down Main Street, sold to the great director King Vidor at 20th Century-Fox (to be permanently shelved), were said to be the source of my “suspicious status.” My screenplay was based on the true story of an American soldier of Mexican ancestry recently killed in the Korean War after an act of great bravery, whose body, when it was returned to his south Texas birth town, was refused burial at the local funeral home and cemetery which were designated “white only.”

  The good news was that an original teleplay of mine had just been on view (although attributed to Al Edwards—the first name composed of the initials of my first and middle name—Anne Louise). The story centered on a young man who joins a kibbutz in Israel and is discovered to have been a member of a Nazi Youth gang in Germany during World War II. The members of the kibbutz (including the girl with whom he is now in love) turn on him. In a key scene the Jews have suddenly become the racists. There was one short, violent scene when they attack him, then, realizing what has happened, pull back. The young man tearfully explains that he had changed his name and used a forged passport to get into Israel—not to harm anyone but, in some small manner, to do penance. The girl is unable to forgive and forget and he leaves the kibbutz alone. As one can see, I clearly chose to make a statement: racism is a two-way road.

  I have no idea what HUAC might have thought about the last scenario. But as I watched the show with great wonderment earlier that evening, I found it amazing to see people I had created come to life before my eyes and speak the words I had written. Still, I expected little from the telecast other than the pittance I had been paid (and gratefully received) for its purchase. When I finally crawled into bed I had no
idea of what I should, or could, do next. The following day, the summer sun blazing high but my head still in a fog, Mitchell Gertz called again. Raymond Stross, an English producer, was currently in Hollywood scouting stories and writers. He had seen the TV show and wanted to meet me the following afternoon in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I assumed he was interested in the kibbutz story and could see that it might work well abroad in large-screen format. I agreed enthusiastically to meeting the English filmmaker.

  I was not prepared for Raymond Stross. Short (about 5'5") and squarely built, he walked like a bantam cock and was dressed (coiffed and costumed, really) to play Brutus in some new-wave-theater camp production—hair swept over his forehead, heavy gold chains around his neck, the top two or three buttons of his shirt opened to display them. He had a noticeable stutter and his cheeks flushed red when the words he wanted to say did not slip out smoothly.

  Upon introductions, he stared at me with great alarm. He had thought, not unnaturally, that Al Edwards was a man. He said something to Mitchell to that effect and added, “You sssee, I pr-pr-produce X-rated movies!” He had no interest in buying the kibbutz story but, as the script contained some shocking scenes and showed a marked style, he thought the writer might be the sort he was looking for. He was—and not very slyly—implying that a woman (especially the one standing before him on two canes and weighing maybe one hundred pounds dripping wet) could not be up to writing an X-rated movie script.

  My dander was raised. “What does X-rated mean in England?” I asked brusquely.