Trusting, to the end

In ways large and small, Robert Lees strove to live by his principles. One of them may have cost him his life.

He believed in civil liberties and personal loyalty. In April 1951, near the peak of the nation’s anti-communist hysteria, Lees was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to name names. He did not, and was blacklisted -- a status that abruptly ended his life of wealth and privilege as a Hollywood screenwriter best remembered for films such as “Holiday in Havana,” and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

He believed in fairness and generosity. In recent years, Lees and his longtime companion, Helen Colton, regularly ate at a Santa Monica coffee shop. Both were light eaters, so they customarily ordered a single dinner, but he would leave a tip appropriate for two full meals.

He also believed in giving trust, rather than having people earn it. Lees was adamant about leaving his car, even his house, unlocked. “He was very trusting of people,” said Colton, 86, his girlfriend of 22 years, “some thought naively trusting.”

In the predawn hours of June 13, a transient who worked as a deli meat-cutter during the recent grocery store strike appears to have randomly selected Lees’ home, nestled on a tree-lined street in a well-to-do Hollywood neighborhood. Police aren’t sure whether their suspect, Kevin Lee Graff, a 27-year-old suspected methamphetamine user, walked in with any particular motive or whether entry was gained through the front or back door. But what is almost certain is that both doors were unlocked.

The next afternoon the body of 91-year-old Lees was found decapitated under a pile of blankets and comforters in his bedroom. The murder ended a remarkable life that had its share of pain, but one lightened by an off-beat sense of humor that always seemed to surface in times of despair and tragedy.

“I’ve thought about what Bob would have made of his death,” said Colton, who discovered his body. “I think he would have said to that man, ‘You’re not worth losing my head over.’ That’s the kind of man he was.”

His legacy

Lees played a noteworthy part in old Hollywood, early television and indeed the nation’s history. “Robert was a genius and an important Hollywood talent who was too modest to say so,” said Paul Buhle, coauthor of the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist.” “I can only imagine how he might have shaped comedy in TV’s golden age if not, of course, for McCarthyism.”

Lees’ Hollywood career began in the early 1930s with a comic flourish -- in this particular case, entirely accidental -- of the kind he would later become famous for concocting as a top-notch comedy writer. He’d dropped out of UCLA because of the Depression and started taking bit parts in movies and was auditioning for a dancing part in the Fred Astaire and Joan Crawford film “Dancing Lady.”

Under 5 feet, 10 inches, Lees was worried he was too short for the role, so he stuffed toilet paper in his shoes. When it was his turn to perform the required steps, one of his shoes flew off, and the toilet paper “came out like a serpentine roll,” he told Buhle in one of half a dozen personal interviews. Lees’ dancing career was over, but his foot was in Hollywood’s door. The film’s dance director liked the kid’s moxie and helped get him a bit part in the picture as a chorus boy.

In the following years, Lees teamed up with Fred Rinaldo writing shorts at MGM, a stint that eventually produced 50 films and two Academy Awards. Their tenure in short films took the young writers to New York City for several months to work with humorist Robert Benchley, a member of the Algonquin Round Table. By the early 1940s, their careers continued to rise and the two men known for their clever, often dry wit and inventive plot devices began collaborating on full-length motion pictures.

Lees -- who was a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild of America, which later became the Writers Guild of America -- often recounted what he and Rinaldo did while waiting for a meeting with a studio vice president. Impatient after half an hour, they asked the secretary for a box of paper clips and a piece of paper. They quickly fashioned a miniature net from the paper clips, and a ball from the paper.

“There, to the delight of the other supplicants waiting for appointments, they started up a smashing game of ‘handminton’ I guess you’d call it,” said Richard Lees, 59, recounting the story he’d heard his father tell many times. “They were like that, they could be loony.”

For Lees and many comedy writers of that era, the humor masked a serious political mind disturbed by the social and financial inequities in America. The Depression radicalized many left-wingers including Lees who “romantically” believed -- as his son, Richard, puts it today -- that the communist system could usher in a more just and fair society.

By the end of the Depression, Lees had joined the Communist Party and began opening up his home as social gathering place for progressive causes. In spite of this affiliation, Lees ardently supported -- and voted repeatedly for -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“It was a different time in America, there was rising fascism,” said Colton, who met Robert and Jean Lees for the first time at a party at his house just after World War II. “We had many, many starving people, homeless, the social conditions were such that to be a Communist didn’t carry a stigma.”

Neither Lees nor Colton knew it at the time -- both were married then -- but after her divorce and his loss of his wife to colon cancer they would become a couple themselves some 40 years later.

“When people would accuse Bob of wanting to overthrow the U.S. government at this time,” continued Colton, who noted the Leeses had after the war hired off the street a Japanese American family interned at Manzanar. “He would say, ‘Why would I want to do that? I’m earning $1,000 a week, driving a convertible Buick and have [a live-in staff of three].’ ”

Lees’ political views put him at sharp odds with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. His decision to take the protection of the 5th Amendment, which guards against self-incrimination, instead of naming his writing partner as a Communist changed his life forever. “As dad used to say,” said Richard, noting his father’s wry wit, “The play before the committee opened and closed in one afternoon, and Lees and Rinaldo would never work together again.”

The aftermath

The impact on Lees and his family was swift and severe. Writing assignments immediately stopped. He would never be a paid screenwriter again. A swastika was burned into the frontyard of their home, the children were harassed and ridiculed at school -- sometimes by teachers, Richard said. The family realized it was time to leave Los Angeles.

Other blacklisted writers had fled to Mexico or Europe, but the Lees through a family connection moved to Tucson, Ariz., where he became a maitre d’ at a hotel restaurant making $2 an hour. It was uninspired work, but Lees kept writing -- a still unpublished autobiography recounting his blacklisting experience and always his personal journal, which he faithfully maintained until his death.

“It was pretty awful,” remembered Richard, who has an older sister. “We couldn’t say a word about what our father did [in Hollywood] under any circumstances. We were always looking over our shoulder. The guy knocking on the door could be the mailman or the FBI with another subpoena.”

The menial labor would serve Lees’ writing well in the years to come. “He once told me,” Richard said, “that on some level he probably would have had a more miserable life if he hadn’t been blacklisted. That once out of the cocoon of being a famous Hollywood writer and being forced into the real world seasoned him in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”

After about a year, the family left Tucson. Lees returned to Los Angeles and, with wife Jean, opened a succession of small retail shops specializing in clothes and travel. The Lees were able to earn a modest living again, but nothing like the days before being blacklisted. Lees’ inability to provide for his family ate at him, Colton said. And, she added, the pain of being blacklisted never left him. (Lees became disenchanted with communism in the mid-1950s after details emerged from the Soviet Union about the atrocities committed under Stalin, he told Buhle in “Tender Comrades.”)

“He thought about suicide so his family would have enough money to live,” Colton said. “His plan was to drive to the beach, listen to music and put a hose in the car.”

But the thought of leaving his family, particularly his two young children, prevented him from going through with it, Colton added.

Gradually, the cloud of blacklisting over his profession began to lift. With the explosive growth of television in the late 1950s and ‘60s, there was an increasing demand for good scripts, and through several pseudonyms he was able to get work again. His favorite name was J.E. Selby, in honor of a beloved uncle -- and for years residual checks would come to his home under his real and fake names. Lees quietly and secretly built a new career for himself writing episodes for “Lassie,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Flipper,” to name a few.

In his last public political act connected to the blacklisting, Lees actively campaigned against awarding a lifetime achievement Oscar to filmmaker Elia Kazan in 1999. While admiring Kazan’s skill as an artist, Lees and other critics fervently opposed recognizing an individual who had cooperated with the HUAC, as Kazan had done in 1952. Like many, he urged friends to sit silently during the award presentation to Kazan.

But even as Lees disdained the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for recognizing Kazan, he was still active in the academy’s many programs, especially those meant to foster new talent. In fact, the day of his slaying, he and Colton -- who would have married long ago if not for her personal stand against marriage -- were due at an academy banquet for student filmmakers.

That day, Colton who lived across the street from Lees, “peeled” the Sunday paper as she always did. She would leave Lees the main news section, Opinion, the comics, Sports and TV Times and take the rest of the paper home.

Colton, who’d left Lees and his son to finish up a weekend painting project around 10 p.m. the previous night, called Robert a couple of times on Sunday but got no answer. She didn’t think much of it because his hearing was getting worse and he sometimes didn’t know the phone was ringing.

Her hair done, her makeup on, Colton was ready early for the engagement and decided to go over to Lees’. She stepped up on his porch and noticed the newspaper was untouched.

“I started to shake,” she said. Then, she tried the front door.

It was locked. “I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong then,” she added.

Colton went around back to a glass door that opened into the master bedroom. The door was ajar, the shade over the door’s window twisted like a pretzel. She walked into what case-hardened detectives have described as one of the most grisly crime scenes they’ve ever seen.

The room was in chaos. Chest drawers and their contents were strewn everywhere. A mural of happy family photos pinned to a corkboard had been ripped off the wall of another room, dragged into the bedroom and lay on the floor splattered with blood. Lees’ body was under a heap of blankets and drawers, with only his pajama-covered legs sticking out.

“This isn’t real,” she thought to herself. “This is a horror movie. Am I seeing a body without a head?”

Police said sometime in the midmorning Graff had carried the head with him, jumped a back fence and fatally stabbed a nearby neighbor, Morley Engelson.

Graff’s arrest came moments after Police Chief William J. Bratton appealed for help during a hastily called press conference.

“Dad had a premonition from his youth that he would die violently,” said Richard, who left his father’s house only a couple of hours before the time the killer entered, according to police. “I think when you have a sensitive child like Dad and put him in a universe of murder and wars and the rest of it, you internalize the worst of it and start to think why am I any better than that guy who got shot at Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Bulge or in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq? He was a dear fellow, a sweet man, who was like everybody else trying to make it through this business we call living.”