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  • In Focus:Children of the Blacklist, an Extended Family
  • Joanna E. Rapf (bio)

In the late 1940s, the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War era led to blacklisting in many areas of American life. Anyone who had fought against the rise of Franco in Spain, supported Soviet ideals in the 1930s, been active in a union, or even associated with a person whose leanings were to the left was suspect. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), under the chairmanship of Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, formally began its hearings in October 1947 on alleged communist infiltration of the movie business, presumably a likely site for the spreading of left-wing propaganda as well as an obvious forum for publicity.

The story of the HUAC hearings is well known, along with the names of many of the participants, both the so-called friendly witnesses, who cooperated with the committee, and the unfriendly, including the famous Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for contempt of Congress for refusing "to name names." Most of the adult participants in this dark story of American history are no longer with us, but their legacy lives on in the books they wrote, the movies they made, and their children. This In Focus is about some of their lives.

My father, Maurice Rapf (1914–2003), was among those blacklisted in 1947 during the first wave of hearings. A screenwriter, he was named as a Communist by a conservative newspaperman and was subsequently unable to work in either the movie or television industry.1 He was the son of one of the founders of MGM, Harry Rapf, who was still a powerful studio executive there at the time. For years, I never knew whether or not my father had actually been a member of the Communist Party. It was something we were scared to talk about.

It was only within the last ten or fifteen years of my father's life that he would talk openly about his involvement in the party, but to the day he died, he would never mention the names of anyone else who was involved. The same was true of David Eliscu's father, lyricist Eddie Eliscu. As he says in his essay here, in interviewing his father for Tender Comrades, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle's invaluable book of interviews with blacklistees, David Eliscu had hoped "more open disclosure could provide valuable insight for future readers," but the principled men and women who refused to name names condemned informing for the rest of their lives, and most never forgave those who did not take a similar stand. Tim Hunter, son of screenwriter Ian Hunter, writes about the "antipathy toward the stool pigeons" in his household, and both Eliscu and Hunter specifically cite incidents when their parents encountered Robert Rossen (1908–66), initially an unfriendly witness who later named names. [End Page 75]

In reading these essays, it is important to know who the parents are. Michael Butler's parents, Jean Rouverol (b. 1916) and Hugo Butler (1914–1968), were both active in the Communist Party in Hollywood.2 Jean Rouverol started her career as a teenage actress in such films as It's a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934) and Mississippi (A. Edward Sutherland, 1935), both with W. C. Fields, and Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937). She was introduced to Hugo Butler by screenwriter Waldo Salt (1914–87), who was later blacklisted as well. Waldo Salt's daughter, Jennifer, was originally to have contributed to this issue, but a writing assignment for the television program Nip/Tuck prevented her from doing so. Hugo was the son of screenwriter Frank Butler (who often wrote for Leo McCarey), and before the blacklist worked mostly at MGM, where his credits included A Christmas Carol (Edwin Marin, 1938), Huckleberry Finn (Richard Thorpe, 1939), Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943), The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945), and other films.

David Eliscu's father, Edward (1902–98), and Daniel Gorney's father, Jay (1896–1990), were both best known as musicians. Eliscu collaborated in 1939 with Gorney and Henry Meyers to create the musical revue Meet the People, which ran for a year in Hollywood before moving...

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