After World War II was over, however, the decline at the box office of “message” movies finally persuaded the industry as a whole that it was poor business to persist in foisting off “messages” on to the public. It was a decision that combined one per cent of patriotism with ninety-nine per cent of public relations and avidity for profits. Battling communism has never been easy in a town where Sam Goldwyn once confessed: “I’d hire the devil himself as a writer if he gave me a good story.”
Dore Schary and Metro came to a parting of the ways over a “message” picture in 1943. He wanted to film a script called Storm in the West, which was to be a sort of Western, only the villains would be easily identifiable as Hitler and Mussolini. Metro’s executive committee wouldn’t swallow that, but Schary refused to yield, and Mayer released him pronto from his $2000 a week contract.
David Selznick immediately picked up Schary as a producer for David’s new Vanguard company. Then when Vanguard was put on ice, he farmed Dore out to RKO, later let him join that studio as its head of production. That job lasted until Howard Hughes, who had meantime bought RKO, criticized another movie, Battleground, that Schary badly wanted to do. So contract number three was torn up, and Schary was at liberty again.
This was now 1948, and the anti-Communist campaign in Hollywood was out in the wide, open newspaper spaces. The town had endured a strike sparked by Communists, which saw John Howard Lawson and his “progressives” marching in picket lines around Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. After one of these “peaceful demonstrations,” seven tons of broken bottles, rocks, chains, brickbats, and similar tokens of affection were cleaned up from streets in the area. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas steered his House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee to investigate our labor troubles, check into propaganda in our pictures, and make a name for himself in the headlines.
Forty-one people from the movie industry were called to Washington to testify before the House investigators. Nineteen of them announced in advance that they weren’t going to answer any questions as a matter of principle. So the Committee for the First Amendment blossomed overnight. That amendment to the Constitution, remember, guarantees freedom of religion, speech, of the press, and right of petition. The committee which was christened for it covered John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Evelyn Keyes, and a whole lot more.
They sashayed off to Washington the day Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was due to testify. The producers had been shouting “witch hunt.” They took full-page ads alleging that the industry was being persecuted. Bogey and Betty Bacall and the rest thought they’d lend their lustrous presence in the hearing room to support Johnston.
But Parnell Thomas pulled a fast one on them. The first witness put on the stand wasn’t Johnston but John Howard Lawson, who screamed abuse and yelled “Smear!” until the guards had to be called. In evidence against him there was a copy of his membership card in the Communist party. There were nine more cards on view, too, to identify the full complement of the group that came to be known as the “Hollywood Ten”: Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, and Alvah Bessie.
On their sorrowful way home from Washington, Bogey, Betty, John Huston, and Evelyn Keyes limped into my living room. I poured a drink or two, and we got to talking. They’d been had, and they knew it. I wanted to know from Bogey how they could have let themselves be suckered in. When Bogey started to answer, John Huston interrupted him.
It hadn’t been a good day for Bogey. He turned on John to get some of the steam out of his system. “Listen,” he snarled, “the First Amendment guarantees free speech. That’s how we got dragged into this thing. Now when I try to talk, you’re trying to deprive me of my rights. Well, the hell with you. I’ll have another drink.” And he talked. In fact, they all did.
One of the witnesses before the House committee was Dore Schary. He was called to Washington along with producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, who had worked for him on Crossfire. He made no bones about his admiration for their work. As for the “Hollywood Ten,” he believed—in the words of one reporter—that they “had a right to whatever they believed and did not necessarily deserve to be thrown to the dogs if it served the best interests of the producers.”