What Was It Like to Have a Blacklisted Father?
- What Was It Like to Have aBlacklisted Father?
I grew up in Westwood, then a small suburban town, in West Los Angeles. The ideal childhood environment was little impacted by my father's politics in Hollywood, although I do remember a strike of Walt Disney animators and of huddling with others on a cold night in a demonstration for the Hollywood Ten at the Los Angeles airport. I was aware that the shows, if not the films, my father helped write in Hollywood had social content. Meet the People (Mortimer Offner and Danny Dare, 1943–44) had just that. And the "they" in They Can't Get You Down (Offner and Dare, 1943) were the forces of repression, although I might not have been able to articulate that at the time. As a child, I had birthday parties on movie sets and autographed pictures of movie stars on my bedroom walls. But eventually, the effects of the blacklist hit home.
At age thirteen, in 1950, after a summer at camp in the idyllic Northern California Trinity Alps, the family squeezed into our pale-green 1948 Chevrolet convertible [End Page 85] coupe and set out for New York. The trip seemed like one long quarrel between my brother and me, but finally we arrived in the monstrous, filthy, noisy West Side of Manhattan, where we lived in various apartments for the next fifteen years. I eventually adjusted to all the changes, and made friends at Joan of Arc Junior High School, but discovered no one who had a similar political family background. When I transferred to a small private school in Greenwich Village, I found other children of the blacklist. In fact, most of the teachers had been its victims.
During this time, the early 1950s, my father secured successful employment as a writer in live-television drama. He adapted famous American plays, such as The Late Christopher Bean, Sinclair Lewis's Bethel Merriday, with stars like Helen Hayes, Jack Lemmon, and Barbara Bel Geddes, for the Schlitz Pulitzer Prize Playhouse and General Electric Television Theatre. But after two years, the boom was lowered. Red Channels had been in circulation for some time, and rumors that the blacklist was moving east came true. I remember my father telling me how Ad Schulberg, his agent, told him that if he didn't name names, the work would cease.1 "Don't worry," Ad said to him, "you can name people who've already been named—or dead people!" My father shuddered and left her office. But that marked the end of his career in television.
When I was in high school, I was warned that those clicking noises I heard on the telephone meant our telephone was probably being tapped. I remember hearing stories daily about people who were out of work, those who had named others, and friends and foes who were appearing before congressional committees. I remember attending Camp Woodland in the 1950s, One visiting day, my father appeared shaken. He told me how he had cold-shouldered another parent who had greeted him. He was referring to one-time neighbor Robert Rossen, who had named my father a short time before to HUAC and had attempted to greet him as if nothing had happened.2
Another incident stands out from this period. I had come home from school; my father was out, but my mother was home and went to answer the doorbell of our eighth-floor apartment. From behind her, I could see two men in business suits and trenchcoats. I knew they were from the FBI. They had a subpoena for my father. They asked if they could come in. My mother had been briefed and knew she did not have to let them in or accept the subpoena. She told them that my father was out, and they said that they would wait for him in the lobby. Then she and I devised a plan. I would go on a "shopping" trip and wait to intercept my father before he entered the building.
As I went through the lobby after descending from the elevator, the men were sitting there but didn't give...
