I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (39 page)

S
uddenly, Sheila Nevins asked Joey to produce a documentary directed by Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill. I was kicked upstairs to executive producer.

It was called
Baghdad ER
, an unsparing, groundbreaking exploration of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. Jon and Matt filmed American servicemen and Iraqi men who had been devastatingly wounded, from the point of impact, by bomb or bullet, through the attempts our medics made to save these young men. The heroes included Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, who placed themselves alongside the doctors and the medics in the helicopters that transported the wounded to hospitals in Germany and the States and stationed themselves in the emergency rooms at the operating tables.

Sheila asked me to take on one role.

One of the soldiers Matt and Jon filmed breathed his last breath surrounded by three fellow Marines from his company and a loving young priest. Sheila asked Matt and me to travel to Poughkeepsie, where the soldier’s parents still lived in a small house. The mother had been an operating room nurse. Matt and I were to tell her we had
footage of her son when he was wounded, during the operation, and of his last breath in the company of the priest.

She and her husband said they wanted to view the film and make up their minds about its inclusion in the documentary.

Sheila was at her best. As a mother herself, she was totally sensitive to this woman.

The parents, Sheila, Matt, and I watched the footage together at a screening room at HBO.

It was too damn real. They said, “Yes, put it in the film.”

I am a Chekhov person. The human condition is what I know, the surprises, the pain, the small sweetnesses, an occasional triumph.

A “stranger in my own time” was Thomas Benton Reed’s quote as he watched the first plane fly in the air. I was a stranger in my own time in that film. Matt and Jon could take the assault of blood and bone, horror, helplessness, but that’s not a world I have the heart or bravery to enter. Patrick McMahon was the editor of the film. He edited out the unwatchable. But he watched the unwatchable before he edited it. The burden he carried watching hour after hour of carnage five days a week, for months, wore on him. The documentary was screened at the Pentagon and went on to win four Emmys. What is it Conrad wrote? The horror, the horror.

A
n odd postscript to the blacklist period.

I’d cut out an item from
Daily Variety
on December 20, 2011.
WGA ADDS BLACKLISTED SCRIBE TO
ROMAN HOLIDAY
. Translation: Blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo was given credit for cowriting a hit movie script sixty years after the fact. The item mentions that this credit was accomplished due to the efforts of Dalton’s son, Chris Trumbo.

Chris was a very beautiful young man, who died two years ago in Ojai, California, after bringing a play using his father’s letters to him as a boy to the off-Broadway scene. Very successfully. Chris made his father a big hit after Dalton’s too-early death, and as is mentioned in
Variety
, he sought and achieved acknowledgment of Dalton’s credits. Six of the films that never carried Dalton’s name, including
He Ran All the Way
and
The Brave One
, titles strangely appropriate to a blacklisted writer’s life and history.

The Writers Guild, the article said, had revised writers’ credits on ninety-five films, which says something about artists’ fights for
survival, producers getting great writers cheaply, but having their hearts in the right place, too.

Also credited with writing
Roman Holiday
was Ian McLellan Hunter.

Ian’s son, Tim, and Dalton’s son, Chris, met when their families fled to Mexico in the fifties. They were children who bonded over the persecution of their fathers, became fast friends, and took it as their mission to redeem their fathers’ work, worth, and reputation.

All of those children had their lives blasted, in a way. Still fighting their fathers’, and some mothers’, wars.

There were war wounds for families like ours, boys who were raised to be silent about their parents’ politics outside the 444 Central Park West fortress. Tommy retreated inside to his music for relief and consolation.

We were all damaged. We were pariahs in our land for more than a decade, a lifetime for children.

So, last night I was working on this piece and watching
Jeopardy!
, Monday, January 2, 2012. I asked Roberta, my friend, to find the
Variety
item on Dalton. As she was looking for it, the last question was asked by Alex Trebek.

“What writer refused to answer questions in front of HUAC, was accused of being Communist, and wrote an antiwar book?”

Of course none of the contestants knew it was Dalton Trumbo. Alex intoned in his deep voice, “Dalton Trumbo, and the book was
Johnny Got His Gun
.” Spooky, huh?

•   •   •

I
think I may have been the only blacklisted actor to climb back up to the position I’d had when I’d started out and become even more visible on television and film, if not in theater. Just young enough to
absorb those twelve years and start over. But my stepsons, Tommy and Mikey, were affected.

When I walked out that apartment door, for the boys it was abandonment. Their father fell into their protective arms, apoplectic and purple with a rage I’d never seen before, inchoate, weak-kneed with the rage I’d always felt afraid I’d see if I said or did the wrong thing.

Three years later, they lost their father. Ten years later, their mother, Margie, died when influenza hit New York one summer. Meanwhile, I was sailing into the blue seas of L.A., walking on red carpets, visible to anyone who had a TV or went to a movie. The only blacklisted woman to shoot to the sky with a big, visible career. That’s suspicious. Arnie must have shown the boys the telegram he sent me accusing me of naming him to get work.

I went to New York from California and stayed in a hotel on Central Park South. Tommy came into the room with great urgency. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. I don’t remember the words, but the gist of the warning was that Dinah was doomed to mental illness: he and Mikey were being given medication for depression, Daddy’s sisters were affected, one permanently in an institution, and Tommy warned me that Dinah had inherited the same genes, future diagnosis, and dysfunction. He was insistent; I was resistant and protective of my small daughter, who was being handed a legacy of mental illness. I pushed Tommy out of the hotel room.

“Not one more word,” I said. “No.”

“But I’m telling you for her own good.”

“No, no, no, Dinah is fine! Dinah will always be fine forever!” I shouted.

The alternative was unacceptable. But there was a divide between Tommy and me. He was a threat. I felt there was an almost vampirish
pleasure, an excitement in Tommy pulling Dinah over to the Manoff dark side.

•   •   •

T
ommy, in 2000, accused me of naming his father so I could work again. Walter Bernstein, Arnie’s best friend, telephoned me. We met at the diner at 90th and Broadway. He wanted to warn me that Tommy had been in touch with him and was intent on exposing me.

One of my employers was sent several e-mails from Tommy threatening to expose me. He was a music critic on NPR, and warned that he had the means to tell on-air what I’d done.

I waited for the accusations to come. Both Dinah and Walter felt it would be fuel on the fire for me to confront Tommy. “Don’t take the bait,” they said. My chest burned with resentment, with things unsaid, with how-could-yous.

A week passed, a month, a year went by, the threat dissolved, went out of my consciousness altogether.

•   •   •

M
ikey, at that time, lived a quiet life with his wife, both librarians in a Southern college town.

On February 3, 2012, Dinah called, very late. Mikey Manoff had killed himself. Put a bullet through his troubled head.

He’d tried downing pills three weeks before, but his wife, Mary, had rushed him to the hospital and his stomach was pumped.

From the time he’d hit adolescence, Mikey was battling demons. Tommy had rage; Mikey had anger, confusion, and desperation. He had been a needy sweet baby at four when Arnie had us all spend our first afternoon together on Riverside Drive near the docks overlooking the water.

Tommy furiously rode his tricycle, ignoring me. Mikey climbed
in my lap, me sitting cross-legged on the sweet grass, overlooking the Hudson, pointing out the boats to him. His hard, tiny boy’s body fit right in my lap. I was nineteen years older than Mikey, eighteen years older than Tommy. Fourteen years older than Eva, Arnie’s daughter from his second marriage, to Ruthie.

After we married, Arnie and I raised the boys. They were the lure, a family of my own. No longer the lengthened childhood in my parents’ home. I was instant head of my own home. Instant mother, cook, and dishwasher. A new and fascinating world to enter. With one big man, the Director-slash-Teacher-slash-Husband, and two little men who really needed me, as a mom, and their new maid, and housekeeper, learning how to live in this new life as it quickly replaced my old one and blocked it out.

When it came time to tell eight-year-old boys how babies were made, I couldn’t sidestep or avoid the subject any longer. I remembered my disgust with the Mae West and Hitler cartoon I’d found at their age, and my horror at my parents for doing exactly the same thing to each other. Tommy and Mikey, on the other hand, fell off the bed laughing, each one surfacing to gasp, “The penis goes in the vagina . . .” It started to sound pretty ridiculous to me, too. One night when Mikey got up to pee, half-asleep, he whispered, “A girl in my class has two baginas.”

In Lake Mohegan they went to day camp with the Kaplan kids, the Salt kids: “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

We all went to Mikey’s wedding in 1982, in the South somewhere. Tommy. Dinah. Eva and me. It was our first time all together since I’d left. Tommy showed up for the wedding, stout, bearded, overwhelming. He was a man I really didn’t recognize.

Mikey, now in his forties, and Mary, both librarians, and deeply, sweetly in love. They spun a web around themselves. Mikey was fragile; with Mary he was secure and safe. She was everything to him, everything that had been taken away and more.

When I spoke to Mary there were no tears, no sadness in her voice. He is her private Mikey.

One day she will take his ashes to her brothers’ farm in upstate New York. Her father’s ashes are buried there. “I’ll go with you if you want,” I told her. There was a silence. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

I hadn’t seen Mikey since the wedding twenty years ago, and we’d stopped calling each other.

I have a right to my memories of Mikey, that’s all.

They had been so close as children, inseparable. Tommy and Mikey.

Then so was I, close to them as children, I was their mother in another life.

As a grown man, Mikey’s neediness overwhelmed me. And Tommy’s accusations and threats frightened and alienated me. He was Margie’s boy. Her son.

Yes, the demons still abound, affecting our children, who are still protecting their parents, still fighting for their lives and reputations.

So, as Chris Trumbo fought to keep his father, Dalton, alive, so in his own way was Tommy Manoff, in focusing on me, in threatening to expose me, protecting Arnie forever.

The Night of Apology

It started out as a great night in October 1997. All of the unions and guilds gathered for a Night of Apology, televised for all of America to see. AFTRA joined with the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild in a groundbreaking and stunning revelation. The union heads offered deep apologies for the actions of their predecessors who led the unions in the fifties. For not protecting their actors, writers, and directors, and in AFTRA’s case, for actively blacklisting members themselves.

Well-known actors David Hyde Pierce, Kevin Spacey, John Lithgow, Alfre Woodard, and Kathy Baker read statements of testimony made by the blacklisted who stood up to McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee while fighting for their careers in the fifties.

Three of the honorees in attendance were Marsha Hunt, Ring Lardner Jr., and Paul Jarrico.

Billy Crystal spoke the words of Larry Parks, who was the very first Hollywood actor called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Larry was a big musical comedy star in Hollywood in the 1950s when musical comedy was huge—Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland. They asked him to name his friends in the Party. Larry Parks answered:

I will answer any question that you would like to put to me about myself. I would prefer, if you will allow me, not to mention other people’s names. . . . The people at that time as I knew them—this is my opinion of them. This is my honest opinion: That these are people who did nothing wrong, people like myself. . . . And it seems to me that this is not the American way of doing things to force a man who is under oath and who has opened himself as wide as possible to this committee—and it hasn’t been easy to do this—to force a man to do this is not American justice.

The studio threatened him. He caved in and gave the committee his friends’ names. One of them was Joe Bromberg. Larry Parks’s career was over.

His studio, Columbia Pictures, dropped him.

I met him and his wife, Betty Garrett, at somebody’s house in L.A. His eyes, when they met mine, were so full of pain as we shook hands that I yearned to comfort him. I still do.

Larry died of a heart attack in 1975 at sixty.

Arnie’s heart failed at fifty.

Joe Bromberg had a heart attack at forty-seven in London in 1951.

In 1952 Canada Lee, the esteemed black actor, suffered a heart attack just before his appearance in front of the committee. He was forty-five.

Phil Loeb, at sixty-four, committed suicide in a midtown hotel after being fired from his hit TV show
The Goldbergs
.

Don Hollenbeck, newscaster with Edward R. Murrow, succumbed to gas fumes at forty-nine in 1954.

John Garfield had his fatal heart attack at thirty-nine, in 1952.

I wish all of them had lived long enough to attend the Night of Apology. Paul Jarrico was eighty-two that night. He, Ring Lardner Jr., and Marsha Hunt, all in their eighties, received a standing ovation as survivors of the witch hunt and heroes to their peers. After the ceremony, while driving home in his car on the Pacific Coast Highway, Paul Jarrico hit a tree head-on and died that same night, October 28, 1997.

NEWS

Writer Dies After Long-Awaited Triumph

October 30, 1997 | Patrick Goldstein and Fred Alvarez, Special to the Times
For Paul Jarrico, Monday night was the culmination of a five-decade crusade to gain justice for screenwriters like himself who were blacklisted during Hollywood’s “Red Scare” era.

On both sides, the children of the blacklist still mourn.

•   •   •

I
write not anticipating what I’ll say. Sandy Meisner said, “Don’t anticipate, surprise yourself.”

I’ve just reread for the first time what I wrote about the documentaries I made with Kirk Douglas, with Sidney Poitier, with Mia. I realized that I had gone back to my first movie,
Detective Story
with Kirk, my first television hit after the Blacklist,
Peyton Place
with Mia, and my first post-blacklist film,
In the Heat of the Night
with Sidney Poitier. Back to the beginning.

I seem to have gone back to the good places, to the people who made an imprint, in a new way, starting out, and making a comeback. When I make a doc, I tell their story, not mine.

When I began acting, when I was sixteen, I found my family. I was safe. Safe to do the most dangerous things. My dream was never to be famous, a star; I don’t think any real actor’s dream is. My dream was to be in a repertory company for life, like the Group Theatre, and play different parts, week after week, grow with friends I loved and admired growing with me. Play the small part one week, the lead the next.

I realize that I morphed that dream and accomplished it, actually, when I began making documentaries. I created a family to make films, or Joey did; the films worked or didn’t, but the repertory family moved on to the next project. And the next, and the next.