The Red and the Blacklist

[struggle4progress]

Over here and out there
Saturday January 14, 2006
The Guardian

The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate
by Norma Barzman
429pp, Friction Books, £14.99

On a hot, early evening in the autumn of 1947, Norma and Ben Barzman were sitting out on their front lawn in Hollywood drinking cocktails, when their neighbour Groucho Marx walked by. The comic suddenly stopped and murmured into the air: "Yes, it's hot enough for me, my mother and grandmother." In a familiar gesture Groucho raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes. "Of course, it's doubly hot for you. Don't ask me for anything more than ice cubes, which is as far as my sympathies go." In his own roundabout way the Marx brother was telling the scriptwriting husband and wife to watch out - their names were about to be added to the Hollywood blacklist and, if they wanted to avoid the choice of being blacklisted or informing on their communist friends and colleagues, they needed to make the decision now. The Barzmans understood the warning and within three months they had fled America.

America's blacklisted generation and even fewer that have been written about the exile that more than 500 Americans undertook to escape from political persecution during the McCarthy era. More than one emigrant has observed that, hard as it was for any man to face exile, it was doubly hard for the woman, who had to hold spirits up and keep the family ship from sinking. Yet it would be a disservice to say that Norma Barzman's memoir is dispiriting or that she uses it merely for political point-scoring. Her book is more of a bacchanal than a Bolshevik tract, with its tone being set by her friend John Barry: "It's hell," the communist director said of exile. "I live in Paris, meet beautiful women and go out to dinner with Jean-Paul Sartre."
For her part, once she had arrived in Paris Norma was determined to live a full life. And there, in turn, she was received with an embrace. "We are the same - exiles," Picasso pointed out to her. Undoubtedly, due to the fear of being informed upon and named as communists to the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), mutual trust and solidarity were essential for blacklisted Americans. "From 1951 through 1956," Barzman tells us, "we were frightened most of the time, felt that our country was spying on us, and never knew if our next job was our last."

Barzman's fears were justified. In America her phone was tapped, while abroad both her and her husband's movements were tracked by FBI representatives at the US embassy, or what Ben Barzman called the "so-called 'cultural attachés'" who followed the couple around Parisian cafés and film studios. Surrounded by her ever-expanding family Barzman strived to keep up her morale but many close colleagues lapsed - albeit understandably - into paranoia and almost into insanity. Joe Losey, who directed several of Ben Barzman's scripts in England, screamed at a fellow exile: "We're being followed. Christ! Can't you see we're being followed." And Bernard Vorhaus, who joined the Barzmans in Europe after being named to HUAC by his Hollywood Air Corps colleague Ronald Reagan, told his children: "The walls have ears" ...

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/artsandentertainment/0,6121,1686041,00.html

[Bjornsdotter]

1. Sounds good

I'll have to read it, it seems like it would be fascinating and timely.

Cheers!

[sasha031]

2. The great communicator

HUAC by his Hollywood Air Corps colleague Ronald Reagan

what a piece of work Reagan was