Fair Game

...So in 1957 Dies, the unhonored prophet, went back home to Lufkin, Texas, and devoted himself thereafter to making patriotic speeches around the state...

...Evidently I am not alone...

...Most of the Committeemen descended speedily to the obscurity they had earned...

...Similarly, some of the friendly witnesses, like Elia Kazan and Jerome Robbins and Abe Burrows, did very well for themselves, though others—the self-pitying, truly pitiable Larry Parks, for example—never recovered from their appearance...

...The exception, of course, the one member who went on to great things, was the young Richard Nixon—for which we must all thank Alger Hiss...

...Good Drama, Weak Play The hearings, unjustified and cruel though they were, possessed the stuff of drama in abundance...

...Martin Dies, a Right-wing Populist who gained fame as a seeker after Communists in the New Deal, exercised a certain power before the War in his negative way...

...He left the House in 1944, and when he returned in 1953, Red-hunting was very much the thing...

...Among the characters uttering, through the lips of actors, the words they originally spoke in appearances before the Committee were Ring Lardner Jr., Larry Parks, Sterling Hayden, Abe Burrows, Elia Kazan, Jerome Rob-bins, Lillian Hellman, Lionel Stand-er, Zero Mostel, and Paul Robeson...

...The activities of the Hollywood Communists and fellow-travellers in the '30s and '40s were harmless if ludicrous...

...Martin Dies was in his way as irrepressible an actor as Zero Mostel...

...Through some of the testimony, one could glimpse enough of the quality of what passed as Communist cells in the heyday of Hollywood to regret that Eric Bentley did not permit himself to tell us more...

...Never was the unhealthy relationship among the Committee, the press, the public, and many of the witnesses so well lighted...

...The glamour lingers, attracting new historians to the old extravaganzas...

...First, the hearings should never have been undertaken...

...And there was something more...

...their careers have never been at a higher point...

...Mostel, taking the sidewalk outside the theater for his stage, delivered a funny if somewhat incoherent harangue, whose main point seemed to be that in addition to being feeble theater, the play failed to capture the truth of the time and could only hurt again those who had already been so severely injured...

...Part of Bentley's problem as second-hand creator is his integrity...

...Unpoetic Justice Any effort to turn the show-business investigations into workable drama must run into the vagaries of real-life justice...

...Perhaps in show business talent brings its own justice...

...Second, the blacklisting of performers, writers and directors induced by the hearings stands as the most shameful scene in the entertainment industry's long history of kowtowing to the same public whose emotional and intellectual limitations it continuously exploits...

...For the actors to try to deepen them would have been a form of distortion in a play of this sort...

...The somnolent John S. Wood of Georgia and the irascible Harold Velde of Illinois, thoroughgoing nonentities both, found that the huac chairmanship did not advance their political lives by a jot...

...The documentary play, for want of a better phrase, had to do with "the Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958...

...Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, the single House member of stature to take the post, found that it only detracted from his reputation...

...Two of Bentley's more likable characters, Zero Mostel and Ring Lardner Jr., attended the opening and came away displeased...

...It would have been better all around if he had chosen to show off behind the footlights instead of beneath the klieg lights...

...he was full of hope but discovered that nobody wanted to have anything to do with him...

...The chief movers of Actors Equity declared: "This Council believes that all participants in the international Communist party conspiracy against our nation should be exposed for what they are-—enemies of our country and our form of government...

...His effort fails as theater, lacking dramatic structure and movement and leaving one in doubt as to what he had in mind, why he chose just those passages, why he put them in just that order...

...Lardner, the one of the Hollywood Ten who showed unfailing humor and grace throughout the ordeal, remarked quietly that the work was neither drama nor history...

...It would have been better, let us agree, if the Committee that once bore his name had expired long before him—but it lives on, and as long as it continues to exist, I seem fated to watch its operations and reflect on its past with appalled fascination...

...The evening had its amusing and mildly stirring moments, yet there was an arbitrary quality to the whole exercise...

...Bentley's treatment scarcely distinguishes one Congressman from another—an omission that did not add to the evening's interest...

...That, I suppose, is what prompted Eric Bentley to put the testimony into play form...

...So the passing a few weeks ago of Martin Dies, the Committee's creator, was an event in my life...

...He is too honest to turn the show into the kind of agitprop that one of the Hollywood Ten would likely have made it—transforming witnesses into saints and villains, depending on their adherence to the line of the time...

...the producers were even less enlightened and more frightened...

...I attend its hearings now and then, keep track of who's running the show as well as who's being run after or over, and look for news on the condition of those who used to run it...

...Whatever the psychic and emotional damage inflicted by the persecutions of the 1950s, some of the unfriendly witnesses, including Mostel and Lardner, later attained great success...

...In addition to Bentley's work, Robert Vaughn has lately published Only Victims, "a study of show business blacklisting," and two other books in the general area are promised for publishing seasons soon to come...

...Mostel seemed offended by having his own, strangely treasured experience taken away from him in this way, distorted and cheapened—or so it appeared to him—to no purpose whatever...

...A few days before Dies' death, I attended the opening at the New Haven Repertory of Eric Bentley's Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, a stale work drawn from Bentley's recent book, Thirty Years of Treason, which in turn was drawn from transcripts of huac hearings...

...The Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan presiding, announced its opposition to any secret blacklist, but added: "If any actor by his own actions outside of union activities has so offended public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employers to hire him...

...Those were the unions...

...Others who suffered along with them, however, were never able to come back...

...Featured players from both companies suffered from the same ailment, exhibitionism in a virulent form—an ailment not rare in the performing arts...

...If there is any lesson in all of this, it may be simply that politicians are better at show business than show people are at politics...

...On a couple of elementary points regarding the show-business investigations, liberal-minded observers have no difficulty in passing judgment...

...We find a neater pattern in the careers of the Committee chairmen who achieved their hour of stardom by hounding the actors and writers...

...To be sure, a man can be courageous and vulgar and boring all at the same time but, since Bentley did not permit himself to stray from the text, the witnesses' characters were not plumbed very deeply...

...While availing themselves of the Fifth Amendment, both did stand up to their inquisitors...

...Just as huac's opponents failed to get the Committee abolished, its friends were unable to remove the stigma that clung to it...

...they were wrecking expeditions, aimed at the professional and private lives of people whom the Committee found obnoxious, and they stunk of censorship...

...The heroes of Bentley's evening turn out to be Lionel Stander and Paul Robeson, whose words show the former to be a blowhard and the latter a bore, each filled to overflowing with admiration for his own courage and righteousness...

...The performers' own organizations betrayed them...

...Like many another actor, he played his part until the show closed and then had trouble finding a role suited to his particular talents...

...the activities of the Congressional investigators were ludicrous and harmful...

...It was the presence and vulnerability of such big-name personalities from Hollywood and Broadway, as well as the inherent glamour of show business—guaranteeing a rapt audience of millions—that drew the Congressional investigators to the entertainment industry in the first place and kept them coming back for a decade...

...J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, who started the Hollywood Ten on their way to jail, capped his career by going to prison for stealing Federal funds...