Anything Your Little Heart Desires by Patricia Bosworth

Author:Patricia Bosworth [Bosworth, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4500-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

HE WAS STARTING TO keep a frantic pace; the pills and liquor fueled him. He was in and out of Hollywood a lot; he had attracted some new clients in Los Angeles, so he rented a small office near the Brown Derby. He told us he might have a movie deal for his book Behind the Silken Curtain—Edward G. Robinson might option the property and Dore Schary might produce it at RKO. But nothing ever materialized. In the meantime, he and Robert Kenny recruited new members for the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) and sponsored a series of seminars to air opposition to Truman’s loyalty programs. They were alarmed at the outcome of the closed hearings HUAC had organized at the Biltmore Hotel in May to investigate charges that Communists were infiltrating Hollywood.

Committee chair J. Parnell Thomas and committee member Richard Nixon had secretly been interviewing “friendly witnesses,” like Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, who had objected to her daughter having to say the line, “share and share alike, that’s democracy,” in a movie called Tender Comrade by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. And not only that, the FBI fed them raw file data on various “politically subversive” actors and writers. As a result, Reagan and Rogers could denounce dozens of their colleagues, calling them “un-American.”

Their testimony was leaked to the press along with the committee’s allegation that “flagrant Communist propaganda films had been produced during the war at the request of President Roosevelt.”

Some people thought the secret hearings were merely a ploy to grab headlines and get publicity for HUAC. The very name “Hollywood” conjured up images of loose living and wild politics.

But there was a growing fear among liberals like my father and Kenny that HUAC’s aim was ever more sinister, that their “nosing around,” as Daddy put it, could be the beginning of both thought control and censorship.

One of the names that kept surfacing as an “unfriendly witness” was that of the controversial German playwright Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera. He was in Hollywood at the time of the hearings, rehearsing his production of Galileo, starring Charles Laughton. The play was about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan and man’s responsibility to man; it was also about political intimidation.

Daddy got it into his head that my brother and I had to see this play; it was so important. He brought us down one weekend—Mama stayed behind in San Francisco.

I remember nothing about the production except that the theater, which was in Santa Monica, was as hot as an oven. Los Angeles was experiencing a deadly heat wave, so Bart and I were bathed in sweat as we watched Charles Laughton as the great scientist Galileo, confronted by a grand inquisition and then conceding to the powers that be in order to save his skin. Many in the audience, including my father, thought the play was a mirror image of the Hollywood hearings.

We went backstage after the performance to

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