In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Theory and Practice 98 Lawson’s commitment came with a steep financial price. His initial “blacklisting ” came in the 1930s with the organizing of the Screen Writers Guild, though the intervention of courageous producers like Walter Wanger and conditions at that point that were not favorable to ostracizing of leftwingers precluded his being totally banished. When he returned to Hollywood in 1936, he was—according to his longtime comrade and fellow screenwriter Lester Cole—a “very different man.” “Always brilliant, with the keenest intellect,” he had returned with an even sharper intellect, having “devoted himself to a study of Marxism, challenged, he told me, by Mike Gold.”1 Lawson’s interest in the literature of revolution had not dulled his taste for the good life. Thus, as his son Jeffrey recalls it, life in Hollywood in the mid-1930s was magical, akin to a fairy tale. During the Christmas holidays, the Lawsons would “visit well-off left-wing friends in their beautiful homes.” This list included the family of Albert Lewin, a “small man with a sweet manner” whom they usually visited in the afternoon on Christmas Day. He had “started his career as a schoolteacher but through some important connection with Irving Thalberg, he ended up a very successful and important producer at MGM.” He “owned a huge modern mansion that had been designed by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright in the early ’30s.”The “setting was luxurious, one suited to a sophisticated wealthy household of the time: deep, comfortable couches, displays of expensive glassware, the latest radio and record-playing equipment, fine wines and liquors.” Lawson was Jewish but of the secular type: “Though surrounded as a child by Jewish people, I never participated in a celebration of a Jewish holiday in anyone ’s home,” his son recalled. Lawson was also a Communist, but for his son,“at school, the question of being from a Communist family never came up.”2 Lewin was something of a radical himself; he was “named for Albert Parsons, the eloquent anarchist martyr of the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886, and grew up in an anarchist colony.”3 Lawson often could be found on sun-drenched tennis courts in the most stylish neighborhoods in Southern California. Philip Barber worked with Lawson at the studios then. “I looked him up and we played tennis,” he recalled later. “I liked Jack, but he had a limp, quite a decided limp. I never realized it hardly until he played tennis and then you’d see him limping as he would cover the court. But he was pretty good,” making up in energy what he lacked in mobility.4 Party membership was not then the issue that it was to become. In any case, Lawson was not exactly shouting from the rooftops about this affiliation—and for good reason. “My only contact with the Communist Party in Los Angeles,” he declared, referring to the mid-1930s, “was through a man who called on me at the studio. He wore dark glasses and gave an assumed name, he asked me for money and he returned each week for another donation.” This was not a precursor of film noir. Nor was it an “affectation,” said Lawson. “The Communist Party was condemned to an underground existence in Los Angeles: its legality was almost as tenuous as it was in the Deep South. Its meetings were broken up, its members were harassed and beaten.” When Lawson and his wife “went with Sam and Sadie Ornitz to a meeting advertised in a downtown hall,” they “found the building guarded by police who ordered people to disperse.”5 The studios were akin to company towns, with the moguls in the role of omnipotent overlords. Unsurprisingly, Lawson’s audacity in organizing writers, and then actors, was viewed as akin to a rebellion of peasants with pitchforks. The moguls’ skittishness reached a frantic pitch when Lawson’s fellow writer and colleague Upton Sinclair made a serious challenge for the governorship of California in 1934. The moguls had reason to believe that Sinclair’s campaign to “end poverty” in California might make a dent in their own wealth. Thus, with no apologies or embarrassment they knocked on the door of Lawson—and others—and asked for “voluntary contributions ” to combat this menace. “The element of duress was present in all cases,” Lawson remarked, and “a definite threat was implied.” He was irate at their brazenness. “I consider myself a writer and...

Share