Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole    

Foreword

In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) cited ten Hollywood writers and directors for contempt of Congress. The leading organs of the daily press were outspoken and unhesitating in their criticism of the Committee's purposes and methods. Those of us who had been cited were heartened by the popular support.

About a week later, a cold-war Congress voted overwhelmingly to uphold the contempt citations. A short time after that, the Motion Picture Producers Association met in New York City and produced what became known as the Waldorf Astoria Decision. This document was a "white paper" formally instituting the blacklist in Hollywood. Somehow the mood had changed very rapidly. The recently indignant defenders of the First Amendment made no editorial comment on these latter developments. The news was merely "objectively" reported.

The first book to tell what actually happened at the HUAC hearings was titled Hollywood on Trial (Boni and Gaer, New York, 1948). It told who supported us, and who opposed us; it spelled out the consequences for both sides. The author was Gordon Kahn, a film writer and journalist who was one of the nineteen men originally subpoenaed by HUAC (although he was never actually brought to the stand). Kahn's book closed the subject, as far as we ten were concerned, for eight years. Then in 1956, a two-volume Report on Blacklisting appeared. Volume I covered the movies, volume II radio and television. The author was John Cogley, executive editor of Commonweal, and the book was sponsored by the Fund for the Republic. The back-cover blurb says that Cogley was commissioned to prepare a factual report on the situation. He did — selectively and with discretion. To my knowledge, none of us was consulted about the facts as we knew them.

Over the next twenty-five years, about a dozen more books appeared. At first the authors, if they examined us at all, looked upon us as creatures somewhere between villains and fools — or more generously just as freaks and misfits. Later on, for reasons which will be discussed in the text, we became subjects for more serious young scholars. But they, too, had prejudices and preferences; their political biases also showed, sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously. While some of the writing has been accurate and well crafted, all of these works have been written from the outside. As a result, the political dimensions of the Hollywood Ten have never been personally penetrated. The books have been neither personal nor political.

This story will be personal and political. In the writer's opinion, there can be no separation. Those "on the outside," the historians and investigative reporters whose works com­prise most of the literature on the Hollywood Ten, could not have known (although some pretend to) the feelings and thoughts of those who were cited for contempt, fought the convictions all the way to the Supreme Court, and went to prison after a three-year struggle. Outsiders could not convey to the reader the conflicts we experienced — with others, with our families, and within ourselves — as we held fast to principle and firmly held convictions, only partly aware at the time of the pain, humiliation, heartache and punishment that lay ahead.

What were those convictions that I so deeply cherished?........

Comic Contradictions

It was March of 1932 and the country was fast approaching the bottom of the deepest depression ever known. And, suddenly, ironically, I was about to become rich and, for those times, very rich. Ten million bewildered men and women — as yet too stunned to be angry — found themselves without work. The hungry, starving with their children, were forming endless breadlines in cities and towns all over the land; hundreds of thousands were being thrown on the streets because of their inability to pay rent. I had not yet fallen into that seemingly bottomless black pit, but I was dangerously close to the rim when the unexpected change came.

My good luck called for a celebration and a farewell party before I left for Hollywood. I bought bottles of the very best bootleg gin, cooked pots full of spaghetti — for this occasion with meat and mushrooms in the sauce! — and shortly after noon good friends and well-wishers began to gather at my scrubby little Manhattan flat at Fifty-first Street and Lexington Avenue.

Gathered to congratulate me and wish me luck were friends from my earliest theater days, one or two from childhood, as well as more recent friends, men and women I had come to know during the last two years. I had met my newest friends while working as a freelance story reader in and out of the editorial departments of Fox, Paramount, RKO, and Universal film companies.

Most of the theater people were out of work, and the play readers were making from three to six dollars a day — when they could get the work. For such sums we read a play, gave a judgment on its suitability for a film, and wrote a fairly detailed synopsis. Five dollars was the pay for novels, and six if they ran over five hundred pages. Some of us were experienced in theater, others had college degrees, and all were hovering on the poverty precipice.

Despite the long and wearying hours of this drudgery, I somehow had managed — a combination of will and inspiration (well, maybe just desperation) — to write my second play. It sold under the most auspicious circumstances with such a splash of publicity that I instantly went from a young has-been to a writer wanted by three of the film companies for whom I was at that very time working as a freelance, three-dollar reader. I accepted the Paramount offer: two hundred fifty dollars a week, with six-month increases of fifty dollars, for five years. Of course, there were six-month options that it was their privilege to take, not mine to refuse. But I knew nothing about such inequities at the time.

The play had been completed less than a week, submitted but a few days before, when Frieda Fishbein, my agent sold an option to Rosalie Stewart, probably the most prestigious independent producer then on Broadway. For years she had presented the plays of George Kelly, twice Pulitzer Prize winner with The Showoff and Craig's Wife. His last two plays were poorly received by critics and audiences alike, and that winter, disgusted or disheartened, he announced he would write no more plays. Brooks Atkinson, the prestigious drama critic, had just interviewed Rosalie Stewart on the drama page of the New York Times. When asked what her plans were, she replied with finality, "Not to produce again until I find another George Kelly."

When, six or seven weeks later, she announced the purchase of my play—for which she would seek the services of Helen Hayes and Jean Dixon—the memory of her statement was still very fresh. I was suddenly catapulted from three­dollars-per-synopsis obscurity into theatrical headlines and a Hollywood contract. I was on my way to fame

The Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago left Grand Central around 6:00 P.M. My friends poured me on the train with embraces and kisses. I assured them that I despised movies. The theater was my only love, and I would be back for the opening of my play, to write another, and another, and —

The conductor warned the most sober amongst us that the train was about to leave. In went my bag, and somehow I followed. The next thing I knew it was daylight, and I was dazedly peering out of the window of the drawing room. There was Lake Erie, and a knock on the door told me we would soon be in Chicago. I missed breakfast, but I managed to get a cup of coffee which I finished as we rolled into the terminal. I changed train stations, and by this time I was clear-headed enough to look around.

I was standing beside the sleek Santa Fe Chief—ten or twelve long, shiny, streamlined cars. The deserted platform made me uneasy. It was only fifteen minutes before departure time, but there weren't any passengers to be seen. Could this be the right train? I asked the conductor, and he assured me it was. "Then where are the passengers?" I wanted to know.

"They're already aboard. Both of them." He paused. "You're the rest." A porter took my bag and I went up the steps.

This train, the pride of the country, would travel two thousand miles with three passengers. The bottom had certainly fallen out, and I knew that the three of us on this train weren't the only cross-country travelers in the United States at that time.

Hundreds of thousands were hitting the roads and rails with bundles of clothes and only the most necessary possessions, leaving from where they had neither food nor heat nor shelter to take their chances elsewhere. Homeless men, women and children were wandering from nowhere to nowhere, begging and stealing to stay alive. And here I was, in a first-class compartment, deluxe.

The porter put my bag down and I suddenly felt ashamed, guilty, as if my good fortune were a caprice of fate that was separating me from all I belonged to, making it unreal. "Buddy." I heard myself saying to the porter, "I'm a working stiff just like you. Me being in here is some kind of joke. So tell me, what does a real high-class guy with a private room like this usually tip you?"

He was obviously uneasy. "Whatever he wants to, sit!"

That made me furious. "None of that 'sir' crap," I said, and handed him a dollar. He started to reach in his pocket for change. "No, keep it." I don't know what came over me, but I quickly reached for my wallet and took out a couple of more bills. "And these are for the high-class guys who never got on board to tip you today. Okay?"

I could see that his eyes were studying me to discover just what kind of a nut or drunk he had here, but slowly he smiled and nodded. "Okay, mister. Gonna see you have a good ride out. Two nights and most of three days. You need some booze?"

"Got some."

"Whatever you want, just buzz."

"Thanks."

He nodded and left.

Two nights and three days, then Los Angeles. I tried to think ahead. Archie Leach had invited me to stay with him until I found a place. He was an old friend, once a juvenile in Shubert musical road shows, now called Cary Grant at Paramount. He was sharing a house with Randolph Scott, the western movie star, somewhere out in Westwood, and I'd accepted the very kind offer.

But thoughts of pleasures and luxuries of the future were mixed with memories of the past. It was my father's voice I thought I could hear. I hadn't seen him in ten or twelve years, but I could hear him both congratulating and warning me now. His words would have been like this, as if a reminder of my working-class background: "Remember, son, a royal flush comes once in maybe ten million hands, but for workers there's almost never even a pair of deuces. So don't forget, however much they pay you, you will have earned more. That's what profit is — the part of your labor the boss keeps for himself." It was as if it were not twenty years ago, but last Sunday that I stood listening to him talking Marxism to his friends from the bench in Claremont Park.

My mother had a gloomier vision — and it was far from my thoughts right now. She somehow took my success as a sign of her defeat. She had predicted, over a twenty-year period of conflict at close quarters, that without a college education I'd end up digging ditches, organizing trade unions, and spending my life on a soapbox preaching socialism "just like my father." She went on insisting that my current success was just a temporary stroke of luck, and I'd land back on earth, a loudmouth working stiff like my father. Without an education I'd get nowhere and would always come back to her for help. All she hoped was that someday I'd be man enough to admit my mistake.

I had quit school in 1920, following years of quarrels. We had been moving from one city to another as that ambitious little steel spring of a woman sought to make the fortune my father couldn't or wouldn't. All the while, my love for the theater was intensifying, and I was determined to overcome all obstacles on the crooked road to reach my goal. When I finally got my chance, it came in an odd way.

My mother had opened one of her countless business ventures — she'd had at least half a dozen since divorcing my father when I was ten — and this one was another lunchroom in New York on Twenty-seventh Street between Third and Lexington Avenues. I was again out of work — as she always predicted when a job ended for one reason or another — and I helped her put the place together and advertise it. I handed out leaflets on Lexington Avenue, came back in time to serve lunch, and then washed the dishes. My mother was the cook; and I was the rest of the staff.

One afternoon a few days after we'd opened the lunchroom. my sister returned from school and hurried excitedly into the kitchen where I was doing the dishes. "Do you know about Butler Davenport's Theater?" she asked.

"No," I answered, "what is it?"

"A theater, two blocks away, right on Twenty-ninth, the other side of Lexington. I'm coming home, just off the El, and as I'm passing an old guy comes out — boy, you could spot him as a ham the minute you looked at him. You know, handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve and —"

I interrupted. "So what happened?"

"Well, he stops me, and says he's putting on a play and needs some young people, boys and girls, in one scene, and would I care to play in it."

"How much?" 1 asked.

"Nothing. I said my mother wouldn't let me out nights alone, but I had an older brother, and if he were in the show she might. He said to bring him over. Come on!"

We ran. The theater was a converted four-story brownstone. not unlike the one that housed our lunchroom, with kitchen and bedrooms behind. But Davenport had converted the first and second stories into the theater and stage, with perhaps one hundred ninety-nine seats, or whatever was under the required Equity minimum. We hurried through the lobby, were promptly "engaged" and ordered to rehearsal the next afternoon.

Butler Davenport was a dandy: haughty, evidently wealthy. The actors in his company were Broadway professionals, out of work and also out of funds. He supplied them with no cash. In payment he let them use their dressing rooms for sleeping quarters and supplied a cook to prepare their meals. The understanding was that when they found a paying job on Broadway, they could leave with a week's notice.

Soon after the first show closed, Davenport asked me to stay on as his stage manager. He promised to teach me what to do. And he did. He knew theater. I not only operated the curtain and the lights from his small switchboard, but also handled props, worked as a stagehand and did anything else he needed. The actors helped change the scenery.

Davenport's theater was forced to do plays in the public domain because he couldn't afford playwrights' royalties; his theater enjoyed considerable status with Broadway people. As a result, there was a delightful bonus for us; courtesy tickets were available to us for all the Broadway theaters that were not sold out on our night off. Cook and dishwasher from eleven to three, stagehand at night, and Broadway theatergoer once a week. Life was full.

My career with Davenport ended abruptly one night after the performance of a play titled The Polish Jew, an obscure drama written in the nineteenth century. As stage manager, I had the curtain, the lights and, in this play, much more to keep me busy. There was a carefully contrived scene in which the leading man, Davenport of course, was driving through a snowstorm. Above the proscenium we rigged a tightly webbed basket filled with white confetti which, when I jiggled a rope, off-scene, would gently sprinkle down and create the illusion of falling snow. At the same time, while one hand was thus employed, I held the "reins" of his sleigh in my other. The sleigh's gliders were on small wheels, so the "horse" off-stage had little trouble pulling him from center stage into the wings.

Nothing to it. But this one night, for some reason, the rope attached to the basket of confetti got stuck somewhere up above, and the snow didn't fall. I slowed down pulling him; he declaimed about the snowstorm, but it wasn't snowing; his speech would soon be over and I was desperate. I gave an extra hard tug on the confetti rope and succeeded — alas, too well. Something up there tore, and the equivalent of a sackful of confetti poured down on his head.

The audience howled, of course, and I quickly pulled the curtain. Davenport strode off stage, controlling his rage and humiliation. He shook himself free of most of the confetti, ordered me to clean it up quickly, and stepped out in front of the curtain to apologize to the audience.

In the most nonchalant, airy tone, he said, "An unexpected blizzard. (Laughter) It will cause only the briefest delay in communications. As soon as we sweep up, the show will go on." They applauded. We did go on, but after the final curtain fell and the cast had responded with applause, he almost ran to me, quivering. "Get out! Idiot!" I left depressed. Could my career in the theater have ended on Twenty-seventh Street and Third Avenue?

In the "Help Wanted" advertisements in the newspaper the very next morning was an offer for a swimming counselor at a boys' camp in Maine. Woods, lakes, fishing, rivers. How marvelous! The job paid a hundred fifty dollars for seven weeks, with room and board. I would be rich! I instantly applied. lying about having two years of college education. I also enclosed proof that I had been a lifeguard the previous summer at Far Rockaway Beach and had given swimming instruction. I was accepted.

"Luck, always luck!" My mother said it with disgust. "If it wasn't for luck — and me giving you a roof over your head — you'd be in the gutter, a Bowery bum. A ditch digger."

On board the train to Maine with me and eighty to a hundred youngsters was a man a few years older than myself,

Abe Finkel, the dramatic counselor. When he learned of my interest in the theater, of my experience with Butler Davenport, of my ambitions, it instantly bound us together. Finkel had been Finkelstein, and he was related to the famous Yiddish theater Thomashevskys, rivals of the Adlers and Maurice Schwartz, the big three "Belascoes" of the Yiddish Broadway, which was on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street. Abe's sister was married—or soon would be—to Muni Weisenfreund, later to become the film star Paul Muni, but then just a well-liked talented juvenile on the Yiddish stage.

At camp Abe, who had never learned to swim, wanted me to teach him, and of course I did. In return he lent me many of his books on stagecraft, and as he trained and rehearsed the boys for the Saturday night campfire shows I spent as much free time as I had watching and learning from him.

Like myself, Abe had little formal schooling, but he had been in the Yiddish theater since childhood. At the end of summer, he was to start his first job on Broadway as an assistant stage manager for Morris Gest's super-spectacle, The Miracle. The play was an importation from Germany, directed by Max Reinhardt, the recognized European theater genius of that time.

On August 1, Abe received a long-distance phone call. The schedule for pre-rehearsals had been set ahead; an enormous cathedral setting designed by Norman Bel Geddes was being erected in the theater, and he was needed at once. Abe explained to the camp management. They were unsympathetic. He had a contract with them, and they expected him to fulfill it. But he told them—to my astonishment—that I was equally if not more experienced in the American theater than he, having just finished a successful season with the prestigious Davenport Theater in New York. He insisted that I could easily handle the balance of the program that he would outline for me, and they reluctantly agreed. He was damned lucky they knew nothing of the New York theater!

To my astonishment, and with not a little pride, I actually did well, staging the final, lone one-act play Abe had selected from Harvard University's 47 Workshop, then under Professor George P. Baker.

During rehearsals Abe wrote me, expressing his confidence, and making me promise to visit him when I returned to New York at the end of August to tell him all about it. When the final play was a success, the camp management offered me a job for the next season, either again as swimming counseler or in Abe's job if he were not available. I felt very good indeed; I had a skill that could get me somewhere, somewhere I wanted very much to go.

Back in New York, I immediately looked up Abe at the Century Theater. He took me backstage, and it was a moment of breathless awe. The theater was being converted into a huge cathedral. and even in the early stages of construction the genius of Norman Bel Geddes was apparent. But I had little time to admire it then. Abe introduced me to Langdon West, the stage manager. The casting had begun, and Abe told West he would like to have me hired as an extra, maybe even play the small part of the executioner, since my physique was excellent. West nodded; no question about being an extra, but to get the part of executioner he would have to take me to the director. I couldn't find enough words of gratitude for Abe, but he good-naturedly shut me up, saying I'd done him a great favor that summer. West brought me into the easy presence of Max Reinhardt, who then ordered me to take off my shirt and show my muscles. Reinhardt nodded approval, asked my name again, shook my hand, and wished me good luck. I thanked him and all but floated away.

The role of executioner was something less than a feature role requiring any particular histrionics. But it did require muscles. In one of the later scenes, it was my job to pick up the sinful nun, throw her over my naked shoulder — I wore only a loin cloth — and rush her off to her execution. That meant carrying her while the orchestra played a screeching crescendo, from the stage down a long aisle through the theater, out a door behind the last row in the orchestra before I set her down. When not doing that I was one of the crowd, at times reaching more than a hundred fifty costumed people on the stage. For this I received two dollars a performance, sixteen dollars a week.

At last I felt myself started; the humiliating experience with Butler Davenport was all but forgotten. Now I was working with Max Reinhardt, a man considered one of the world's finest directors, and associating — however distantly — with such famous people as Lady Diana Manners, who played the Madonna and alternated as the nun, with Iris Tree, daughter of the famous British actor, Sir Beerbohm Tree; and there was Germany's most prestigious actor, Werner Krauss; a lively young German, Fritz Feld, a little older than myself, who understudied Krauss; Schuyler Ladd, a prestigious American performer; and Rosamond Pinchot, a lovely young woman who was the daughter or niece of the Governor of Pennsylvania. I felt myself touching the famous, the world-renowned; it was fame by association.

As rehearsals progressed, the stage manager needed more assistance. Abe suggested me. That brought a weekly increase of four dollars and I had, among other new assignments, the job of starting the crowds down the aisles on cue, of announcing to the stars and principal players their calls for appearance on stage. I'd knock on their dressing room doors and call, "Half hour," "Fifteen minutes!", "Five minutes to Curtain!" I was helping run this great show! I still cherish a lovely photograph of Iris Tree, who played the Wayward Nun. Her photograph is inscribed: "To Lester, who so often swept me off my feet."

It was a time when there was little happening for me in the outside world that wasn't theater. Life was the Century Theater; theater was my life.

Copyright © 1981, 2005 Estate of Lester Cole