High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel

Author:Glenn Frankel [Frankel, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620409503
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

12.

“Bombshells”

I am not going to hang anybody that doesn’t deserve it.

MARTIN BERKELEY

The walls were closing in on Carl Foreman, or so it must have felt. He was in the middle of the High Noon film shoot, while starting preliminary work on The Happy Time and The Member of the Wedding, the two pictures he would be dealing with once High Noon was completed. And of course he had to prepare for his own special performance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The morning after his meeting with Stanley Kramer, Carl decided to stay home from the film set to get some sleep because he knew he wouldn’t be needed. At around ten, Carl flipped on the television to KTTV, the local station owned by the Los Angeles Times, to catch the opening of the hearings, which the station was broadcasting live. There was a fellow screenwriter, a slightly familiar-looking man in glasses, marching forward to the witness table.

From the moment he swept into crammed and claustrophobic Room 518 of the Federal Building in Los Angeles with his wife, Kathleen, and his legendary Washington lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, by his side, Martin Berkeley took command of the committee’s hearings like a professional actor storming into an amateur production of Witness for the Prosecution.

First came a touch of melodrama. Williams, who was also counsel for the Red-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy, announced that his client had received three phone calls over the previous week threatening his life and that of his wife if he testified. The latest had come two days earlier from a man who had warned, “If you name any names that have not already been named you will be sorry.”

Nonetheless, here he was, Martin Berkeley, defying death to bring the truth to the committee and the American people.

Then, a touch of contrition. After being sworn in, Berkeley told the committee that his previous telegram denying he had ever been a Communist had been “very silly.”

“I did it in a moment of panic,” he explained, “and was a damn fool.”

And now the true story supposedly could begin. Berkeley said he had first gone to Communist Party meetings in New York in 1936 and had joined the party later that year. When he got to Hollywood the following year, one of his friends sent him to meet screenwriter Guy Endore, who introduced him to fellow screenwriter Frank Tuttle, and he went to Frank and Sonia Tuttle’s home, where he heard V. J. Jerome give a lecture on the evils of Trotskyism. Jerome had been briefly assigned as West Coast commissar, dispatched by national party headquarters in New York to put together the infrastructure and raise money to launch the new Hollywood branch. “His job was so good that we are all here today because of it,” said Berkeley, venturing a teaspoonful of irony.

Then a solemn caveat. “I will not mention a name unless I am dead certain that this person was a member … ” Berkeley insisted, “because I am not going to hang anybody that doesn’t deserve it.

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