THE BLACKLIST LEGACY : <i> A New Generation in Hollywood Takes Political Sides Again, but Remembers the Red Witchhunt</i>

There was excitement in the air outside the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills as people gathered for the premiere screening of the PBS documentary “Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist.”

It was a curious mix of emotions: nostalgia, sadness, delight. This, after all, was a commemoration. Forty years ago the House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee began its investigation into alleged subversion in the entertainment industry. On the audience’s mind was the “Hollywood Ten” and the hearings that produced shock waves of division and distrust, that prompted job blacklists and so-called graylists, that set off a second wave of hearings in 1951 which changed hundreds of lives.

Here were the survivors and their friends from both sets of hearings. Families of the Ten were meeting and reminiscing. A former blacklisted writer like Frank Tarloff, alias David Adler, his nom de plume on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” ran into that show’s head writer, director Carl Reiner. The time has long since passed when the blacklisted--those who were barred from movie sets and television and radio programs here and in New York--have been welcomed back, and indeed have achieved a certain folk-hero status.

At the same time, those who “named names” before the committee informing on the alleged political affiliations of their colleagues are now almost like pariahs, hoping people will forget.

The passing of time has brought major changes in Hollywood’s outlook. Where once the post-hearing reaction was fear and withdrawal, today’s mood is more open and outspoken.

The buzz on this night of the screening, for instance, was also about Judge Robert H. Bork--a triumph of sorts for a good number in the Hollywood community who have openly opposed his confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Only hours earlier in Washington, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 9-5 to reject the Supreme Court nominee President Reagan called “one of the most qualified . . . ever.”

Forty years after the Oct. 20, 1947, opening of the hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood, the legacy of that era is uncertain. Directly under the surface of today’s political openness, some see a lingering effect of the hearings. Some members of the younger, liberal generation wonder what impact their politics might have on their careers even though they have no direct memory of those times.

Actor Rob Lowe, who went to Capitol Hill to oppose Bork and is active in a variety of organizations, says: “You have to be careful. It’s a very fine line. I don’t know the answers. Jane Fonda paid a price. . . .”

Yet some Hollywood people remain politically engaged. A major film company executive, who heretofore had taken a very active role, attended a fund-raiser opposing the Bork nomination. “But I haven’t come out in support of any candidate because I promised my partners I’d be in movies and not politics.” He added that he didn’t want to be quoted by name.

Forty years ago, the immediate fallout was that Hollywood removed itself from political activity. In the late ‘40s, the ‘50s and even into the ‘60s, actors and others in movies and television who were interviewed gave the standard disclaimer that they did not discuss politics. Now politics, on Hollywood’s liberal, progressive side, is all over the lot--from the war in Nicaragua to issues involving America’s homeless. This season it’s Bork.

“There are certain issues like this, like Bork, that unite the Old Left and the new liberal left,” said Barbara Corday, president of Columbia Pictures Television, just before the “Blacklist” documentary was screened. “How ridiculous for us to think Bork would never roll back these civil liberties that have been hard won over the years. Seeing this movie, particularly during Bork, will remind people things like this can happen.”

Corday is one of the organizers of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, a political action committee formed three years ago by leading women in the entertainment industry to raise money for the 1984 Democratic presidential ticket--and as a reaction against President Reagan, who bragged that year that Hollywood was his town.

The Liberal List

Besides the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, which raised money for Norman Lear’s People for the American Way anti-Bork ads, what remains on the entertainment community’s progressive side?

Everything from Jane Fonda and Assemblyman Tom Hayden’s 2-year-old Network--or a phone list of 500-or-so peers and brat-packers who meet every so often at the couple’s Santa Monica home--to the even-newer Young Artists United, which seeks to raise artistic consciousness and to combat teen-pregnancy, teen-suicide and drugs. They say they want to find a better way to reach their younger brothers and sisters than Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” The organization claims that it is nonpolitical.

As antidote to the Moral Majority, there is now the Musical Majority, consisting of about 100 managers and agents combatting a record-rating plan, as in the movies. Majority’s Danny Goldberg, president of Gold Mountain Records and the newly named chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, also helped stage three Countdown ’87 concerts nationally. Countdown was created to stop further aid to the contras.

“Norman Lear is a real role model,” noted Goldberg, 36. “He uses the entertainment industry as a platform to express his political ideas,” said Goldberg, who recalled that his own parents were friends with actor Howard Da Silva, blacklisted from 1951-1963. “I learned early how dangerous these things were.”

Once the rallying symbol of the New Left, Tom Hayden now calls such terms as Left “obsolete. What is a Left view of AIDS?” he asked. “We’re a clearing house,” he says of Network. “We put you (artists) in touch with causes and candidates. You figure out what you want.”

And the same faces keep popping up at different organizations. Fonda is on HWPC’s letterhead. So is Morgan Fairchild, who last weekend stood with Hayden when he decried pollution in Santa Monica Bay. Actress Alexandra Paul, 24 (“American Flyers,” “Eight Million Ways to Die”), who helped found Young Artists United, is part of the Hayden-Fonda Network.

Recently Paul and a half dozen or so of her industry friends returned from a trip to Nicaragua, which they coordinated with Operation California, the private, nonprofit relief organization. Today, another group of more than a dozen young artists including Judd Nelson (“Breakfast Club,” “St. Elmo’s Fire”), Esai Morales (“La Bamba”) and Mary Stuart Masterson (“Gardens of Stone”) are in the Soviet Union filming a 30-minute documentary for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).

In a merging of real and reel Hollywood, many of the creative people involved in the 1973 movie “The Way We Were,” which involved the blacklist, are involved in politics today. One of its themes was the disintegration of a marriage between activist Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) and make-no-waves screenwriter Hubbell Gardner (Robert Redford).

In the summer of 1986, Streisand raised a stunning $1.5 million through the Hollywood Women’s PAC with a concert at her Malibu home for Democratic senatorial candidates. Redford has spearheaded Hollywood’s participation in environmental causes.

Lyrics for “The Way We Were’s” title song were co-written by Marilyn Bergman, one of HWPC’s founders. The movie was directed by Sydney Pollack, at whose home Hollywood raised $100,000 for the ad campaign against Bork--the campaign that Leonard Garment, Washington lawyer and Bork confidante, said on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” was “mounted by Norman Lear, by Hollywood and by special-interest groups.”

On the day the Judiciary Committee voted against Bork, Patrick Lippert, who works out of the Hayden Committee and serves as the liaison for Network, accompanied half a dozen artists--including Oscar-winning Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God”), Sarah Jessica Parker (NBC’s “A Year in the Life”) and Rob Lowe (“About Last Night,” “St. Elmo’s Fire”)--around Capitol Hill.

Their last stop, after a heady, unexpected visit to the Judiciary Committee, was to California Republican Sen. Pete Wilson, who is pro-Bork. The young actors presented Wilson with an eight-foot poster-petition containing about 750 names of those who had signed postcards against Bork to three committee undecideds and to Wilson. Lowe, 23, remarked afterwards that he said to Wilson, “ ‘Look here, we came to tell you that young Hollywood and old Hollywood and Americans who are your constituents don’t support the way you feel on this issue..’ ”

Wilson told them he would stick with Bork.

Forty years after HUAC’s hearings on Capitol Hill, when some in Hollywood were summoned East, it’s now routine that Washington politicians come West--for money and star power.

At Jesse Jackson’s “pre-announcement” birthday party at the Hollywood Roosevelt Oct. 8, Ann F. Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee and a consultant to the Jackson campaign, pointed to the arc of TV lights and said: “Count the cameras, count the reporters. At this stage of a campaign, candidates look for that electronic billboard in the hopes of getting their message across. Hollywood is one of the best places to find that billboard.”

Gary Hart captured more than billboards during his Democratic presidential bid. Hayden wrote speeches for Hart and in Warren Beatty, Hart found a best friend. With Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) gone from the race too, the entertainment industry is mostly sitting back, waiting.

Despite such major players as Charlton Heston, Bob Hope and Clint Eastwood, Reagan’s Hollywood support (and that of other GOP candidates) is more individual than organizational. “I can’t claim we’re winning in the entertainment industry,” noted Fred Karger, executive vice president of the Dolphin Group in Westwood, political consultants handling a range of GOP candidates and issues (including the pro-Bork effort). “But we’re sure gaining.”

The Lingering Legacy

Forty years later, the faces of the Ten, as seen in black-and-white newsreel footage, appear to blend together. What linger are the words of their families.

Today, only two of the Ten survive: Ring Lardner Jr., 72, screenwriter son of the noted humorist, co-author of the Oscar-winning “Woman of the Year” (1942), and Edward Dmytryk, 79, whose movies include “Hitler’s Children” (1943), “Till the End of Time” (1946) and “Crossfire” (1947), Hollywood’s first strong statement against anti-Semitism. Dmytryk, who teaches a course for graduate film students at USC, was the only member of the Ten who later recanted his testimony and named names.

The Ten included seven writers, two directors (Dmytryk and Herbert Biberman) and one producer (Adrian Scott, “Crossfire”). And they were all connected to the Communist Party.

John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screenwriters Guild, who wrote the World War II movies “Action in the North Atlantic” (1942) and “Sahara” (1943), headed the Hollywood branch of the party. And most of the Ten, with varying degrees of commitment, were members of the party when the hearings opened.

As Victor Navasky wrote in his book “Naming Names” (1980), the HUAC witnesses “had no atomic secrets to steal, no vital war materials to leave unloaded on the docks. . . .” Although Hollywood might have seemed an ideal forum for propaganda, “the collective nature of work in the Hollywood studio system and on the broadcast networks,” as Navasky noted, “precluded individual attempts at agitprop.”

Besides, their movies were available for all to see. Dalton Trumbo--”Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944)--brought 20 scripts into the hearing room, but the congressmen didn’t appear interested.

HUAC’s hearings came in the midst of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. They were fueled by anti-labor attitudes, Hollywood having gone through an immediate postwar era of bruising strikes. Taft-Hartley, designed to improve management’s position in collective bargaining and strikes, had just become law. And Hollywood beckoned as a showcase for the committee.

Indeed, a decade before the Hollywood Ten, one of the committee’s first targets was the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project. “Practically every play presented under the auspices of the Project,” said Rep. J. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.), who later became HUAC’s chairman, “is sheer propaganda for communism or the New Deal.”

In 1947, Rep. Richard Nixon (R-Calif.) was there, asking lead-off witness Jack L. Warner “whether or not Warner Bros. has made, or is making at the present time, any pictures pointing out the methods and the evils of totalitarian communism, as you so effectively have pointed out the evils of totalitarian Nazis.”

Congress had gone Republican in 1946, and committee chairman Thomas kept pressing Warner whether “Mission to Moscow” (1943), written at the height of the wartime friendship between the two great powers, had been forced on the studio by the late President Roosevelt. Warner denied pressure from Roosevelt but conceded that the movie “portrayed Russia and communism in an entirely different light from what it actually was.” (Howard Koch, who wrote “Mission” and shared credit on “Casablanca,” was part of the original 19 “unfriendly witnesses” scheduled but never called up. He took an ad in the Hollywood Reporter saying he was not a Communist. Eventually, his phone stopped ringing, and he went to Europe in search of work, returning in 1956.)

The hearings lasted less than two weeks. The “friendlies,” as they were dubbed, came first: Gary Cooper said he never read Karl Marx and didn’t know the basis of communism “beyond what I’ve picked up from hearsay. From what I’ve heard, I don’t like it.”

Robert Taylor said, “If I had my way they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.” Adolphe Menjou said he’d move to Texas “if it ever came here because I think the Texans would kill them on sight.” Ginger Rogers’ mother, Lela Rogers, said she had stopped her daughter from appearing in pictures like “Sister Carrie,” based on the Dreiser novel, because it was “open propaganda.”

As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan testified Oct. 23. His presentation was judicious. Under questioning, Reagan said that while communists have “attempted to be a disruptive influence” in the guild, “we have been eminently successful in preventing them from . . . trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority.

“I believe that as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts, they will never make a mistake,” Reagan continued. “Whether that party should be outlawed, I agree with (actor and later Sen. George Murphy) that that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology.”

Taking the ‘First’

The strategy of the “unfriendlies,” whose testimony began Oct. 27, was to take the free-speech First Amendment. They wanted to make statements but not answer questions about their political ideology or about Communist Party membership. They decided against taking the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, for cosmetic reasons and because the Supreme Court had never expressly ruled that the Fifth could be used in legislative hearings.

Screenwriter Lawson, called first, was not allowed to read his prepared statement. That served as a pattern for other witnesses. The session degenerated into shouts and gavel-pounding. “The chair will determine what is in the purview of this committee,” Thomas said at one point. “My rights as an American citizen are no less important . . .,” Lawson shot back, declining to answer if he were a member of the party.

The hearings ended abruptly Oct. 30. On Nov. 24, studio heads were meeting secretly at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, preparing what became known as the Waldorf Statement. They went public soon enough. While their statement acknowledged the “danger of hurting innocent people” and “creating an atmosphere of fear,” precedent for the blacklist was set: “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”

The same day, chairman Thomas asked Congress to cite the Ten for contempt. Nixon made a key speech in support, and the House voted in favor, 347-17.

By the end of the year the liberal Committee for the First Amendment, whose roster also included Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, fizzled. “It’s simply not true we caved in,” says director/writer and committee organizer Philip Dunne today. “Bogie and Bacall were under the gun. . . . When your own employers agreed to a blacklist there was no field on which to fight our battle.”

At first, the actors’ and writers’ guilds stayed neutral. In January, 1948, the Screen Actors Guild and its president, Reagan, voted to require non-Communist affidavits of its members. That, wrote Lou Cannon in “Reagan,” “signaled that the guild would not oppose the studios for firing actors who refused to say whether or not they were Communists.”

All along, the Ten figured to stay out of jail with the help of the Roosevelt Supreme Court. But in 1949, two liberal justices died. Their replacements, nominated by President Truman, were Atty. Gen. Tom Clark, who had directed the relocation of Japanese-American during the war and in 1947 had helped prepare a subversives list, and Sherman Minton, a former senator from Indiana and presidential assistant. In April, 1950, with Hugo Black and William O. Douglas dissenting, the court denied review. The one-year jail sentences--Dmytryk and Herbert Biberman got six months--and $1,000 fines stood.

Bagels and Bork

Sept. 26, 1987: Outside of City Restaurant on La Brea, a crowd gathers. Orthodox Jewish grade-schoolers mingle with paparazzi waiting for a glimpse of those inside. Inside and spilling onto the patio are stars and would-be stars.

At first glance, it looks like a mid-afternoon mixer. Waiters with punk hairdos serve Tex-Mex snacks to battalions of the miniskirted. But the crowd is at work, writing postcards to four key senators to vote against Robert Bork.

A very-pregnant Bess Armstrong (“Nothing in Common”) walks out on the arm of her producer husband. “People are more involved now,” Armstrong says.

People for the American Way brochures are on the table. Leslie Bracker, 24, president of Young Artists United and an assistant to director Roland Joffe, is there with a lot of her board members; she insists it’s not a YAU event. Network’s Lippert is there too. So is Josh Grode, 22, a UCLA student with political aspirations, who is the one who takes credit for helping organize the impromptu event. (His mother is entertainment lawyer Susan Grode, who helped found the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee.)

Meg Ryan (“Innerspace,” “D.O.A.”) says she doesn’t know too much about what happened in the ‘40s, but allows that “it would be a disaster if Bork made it in. . . .”

Daphne Zuniga, (“Spaceballs,” “The Sure Thing”), who’s been to nuclear protests in Nevada and to Nicaragua, says she has not felt any repercussions. “I don’t think I’ve had a chance to be that outspoken yet.”

Charlie Stratton, formerly on the soap “Santa Barbara,” believes the group at City Restaurant is unusual. “Most groups of actors care about how you look and who you know. This group is very concerned--and very rare.”

Oct. 4: Outside Sydney Pollack’s house, a cocktail party is being held for the ad campaign. This is the first time the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee has conducted a fund-raiser for People for the American Way.

On his way in, producer Bud Yorkin grins broadly. “This may be the icing on the cake (of Bork’s defeat),” he says of the money about to be raised.

“There seems to be a broad cross-section of folks in the entertainment industry that are committed to seeing this nomination not go through,” says Jeff Berg, president of International Creative Management.

Asked to comment on the White House’s criticism of Gregory Peck for anti-Bork commercials that he made for People for the American Way, Walter Matthau said he thought Reagan should be “interested in more important things.

“I hope people aren’t intimidated,” he added. “That’s why our ancestors ran away from the other continent. We’re supposed to be able to speak our minds. I think (the legacy) is in every molecule, every facet, every atom that we have. . . . I think people learn from it. They learned it’s a constant struggle, a constant fight for freedom.”

In March, 1951, the HUAC hearings on Hollywood started up again and a mood of intimidation--of mutual suspicions within the entertainment community--prevailed. The Korean War was in full fury.

The experience of the late actor Larry Parks (“The Jolson Story”) set the pace. Unlike the Ten, he was willing to say that he joined the Communist Party in 1941 when he was 25 and left in 1945. But Parks did not want to point fingers at others in order to purge himself in the eyes of the committee. “Don’t present me with the choice of being either in contempt of this committee, and going to jail, or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.”

Parks believed that that was un-American, that it was “not the American way.” But the committee had its way. They met in executive session, then leaked that Parks had provided names. Parks didn’t want to go to prison; his wife, actress Betty Garrett, had just had her second son.

To this day, Garrett, putting a finer cast on it, insists: “They handed him a list and said, ‘Do you think they are (members),’ and he said, ‘You know more than I do. . . .’ ” So the choice was jail or the blacklist or naming.

SAG’s board had just sent a letter to actress Gale Sondergaard (wife of Herbert Biberman, one of the Ten) stating that “if any actor by his own actions outside of union activity has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office, the Guild cannot and would not want to force any employer to hire him.”

So everyone was on his or her own. Some named, some didn’t.

“The names I named were echoed before,” said Dmytryk, who in September, 1950, told the world that he had left the Party in 1945. “I’m glad the committee is dead. That was a lot of crap about propaganda (in the movies). They never found a single thing in there.”

The Nameless Writers

The blacklisted were not only without jobs, they were without names.

Becca Wilson, now a news producer at KCET and daughter of blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson, was in France during the ‘50s. Her father, who had shared an Oscar for writing “A Place in the Sun,” (1951), also co-wrote “The Bridge on the River Kwai” with another blacklisted writer, Carl Foreman. Wilson also wrote “Friendly Persuasion” (1956) and co-wrote “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962); he got credit later on.

In the “Legacy” documentary, Becca Wilson recalled watching “Kwai” in a movie house in France, “my sister and the whole family sitting there watching it.” Then the credits came up and the movie simply said it was based on the novel by Pierre Boulle--with no credit for screenwriter. She remembered “looking over at my father and seeing tears streaming down his face.”

Writer Bob Lees, who was blacklisted--his credits include a series of Abbott and Costello movies--said recently: “We were all young. We came out of the Depression and had all kinds of things in common. If you were in Hollywood and not on the Left, you didn’t have humanity at all. . . . I don’t really feel bitter except my children had to see psychiatrists and we had to move to Tucson. When we lived on Schumacher Drive, a swastika was burned on my lawn.”

In May, 1952, Lillian Hellman wrote a widely quoted letter to committee chairman James S. Wood (D-Ga.), two days before she took the Fifth before the committee because she did not want to name others. After pointing out that she did not like “subversion or disloyalty in any form”--indeed, if she had seen any she would have considered it “my duty to report it to the proper authorities”--she added: “But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions. . . .”

Many were not called before the committee at all. Their names simply appeared on lists.

There were lists and more lists: Red Channels, a directory purporting to expose Communists and their sympathizers in radio and TV; a news sheet called Aware (published by Aware Inc.); an ever-changing list kept by Lawrence A. Johnson of Syracuse, N.Y., the owner of a chain of supermarkets, who managed to funnel his names down to the networks and the major ad agencies in New York, and certain newspaper columnists of the era who aided and abetted the list makers.

Reagan met actress Nancy Davis, now the First Lady, when her name appeared on a subversives list in the old Hollywood Citizen News in 1951. Turned out she was confused with another actress named Nancy Davis, whom the Nation magazine recently interviewed. Davis works at a snack bar in Ventura and she said she was never a Communist either.

Writer Fay Kanin, former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, appeared on the “graylist.” So did actress Jane Wyatt. Neither Kanin nor Wyatt got called before the committee, but work stopped coming in. “The graylist as I understand it,” said Kanin, “is a list you were on, but never told you were on. You discovered it after the fact. . . . Almost every liberal writer was on the list.”

Kanin, as did many others, had to hire a lawyer to get off the lists.

Martin Ritt, who produced and directed the 1976 movie “The Front” about the effects of the blacklist, starring Woody Allen, was blacklisted in 1951 when he was in New York. “I had been listed in a couple of the rags at the time. I didn’t have any money, I was out of a job. I was never subpoenaed, never called before a committee. It was all guilt by association.”

The blacklist didn’t end for him until producer David Susskind insisted that he wanted Ritt to direct the 1957-released”Edge of the City.”

It ended for different people at different times. Dalton Trumbo wrote “The Brave One” in 1956 and won an Oscar as Robert Rich, one of his multiple pseudonyms. But who was Rich? In 1959, the Academy rescinded its ruling against giving Oscars to those who refused to cooperate with congressional committees. In 1960, Otto Preminger said Trumbo would receive credit for “Exodus” and Universal said he would be credited as the writer of “Spartacus.”

For producer Adrian Scott of the Hollywood Ten, it lasted 21 years, until 1970. “Adrian was hired by Universal Studios,” his wife Joan said in the “Legacy” documentary, but was upset by being “ordered around by men young enough to be his son” and “not given the kind of authority and creative ability that presumably they brought him back for.”

She said he started to withdraw after about a year “and became deeply depressed and then finally was diagnosed as having cancer and died in three months, and I’m convinced his emotional state, his despair, his disappointment after so long a struggle, was such a stress that he just decided to stop living.”

In 1975 shortly before his death Dalton Trumbo received the Oscar for “The Brave One,” an honor denied him for 19 years. In May, 1985, the Adademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences posthumously presented Oscars to the Wilson family and to Carl Foreman’s wife for “Bridge on the River Kwai.” In 1970, receiving a special award from the Writers Guild, Trumbo asserted that the blacklist was a “time of evil” and no one came through it untouched. “It will do no good to search for villains or heroes. . . . There were only victims.”

And that remark set off quite a controversy by itself.

Still Cautious After All These Years

Any fallout from the Hollywood blacklist today?

“I haven’t bumped into any,” said Ritt, who is about to make a movie with Jane Fonda about women in a cake factory.

“I think it’s had an enormous impact on the conscience of the community,” said Norman Lear. “There exists a deep desire that nothing like this happen again. . . . We don’t see much political entertainment, in motion pictures or television. We’re certainly seeing the Vietnam War explored 15 years later. That’s important. Maybe it will teach us we can explore things closer to our time.”

Ed Asner said he didn’t think “the Israeli-Palestinian situation is as fully and openly discussed as it should be.” Producer Tony Bill suggested “maybe religion is too hot to handle.”

Screen Actors Guild president Patty Duke said that “a lot of it (the residue) depends on your sensitivity, a lot of it depends on your interpretation. I honestly must tell you I don’t feel it. I don’t doubt though that a lot of (negative) feeling still exists, and that it can have a healthy underground life.”

Asked if she thought the Reagan Administration meant to intimidate Hollywood about those Gregory Peck commercials on Bork, Duke replied: “It’s their response. If it intimidates, that wouldn’t upset them. Personally, I have to tell you I literally jumped for joy in my bedroom when I heard (Peck).” She said Peck “has been very judicious about what he speaks out on.”

“You have to trace the geneolgy carefully,” Tom Hayden said, talking about the legacy of the blacklist on young artists. “I’m not saying they remember. It’s the legacy of that period filtered down through the industry. There’ve been several meetings at our house, open-ended discussions about the role of the artist, and it always comes up. And then it’s dismissed. It’s interesting that it comes up.”

Someone like Alexandra Paul has no hestitation taking time out from classes at a Santa Barbara spa to talk about her trip to Nicaragua: “We went into the war zone in a Soviet helicopter to see the villages. The Sandinistas took us up. There were soldiers; they were just like us.”

And how did it feel riding in a Soviet helicopter? “They’re very well made,” Paul said without missing a beat. “Inside, the directions are in English.” Then she added that someday she might like to see a contra stronghold.

Someone like Doug Ross, a documentary film maker, has no hesitation discussing the movie he’s filming currently for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in the Soviet Union. “We’re scheduled to meet with Raisa Gorbachev,” he said before his trip. “We’re guests of the Soviet Peace Committee. . . . Certainly we’re going over realizing they’re not going to show us labor camps or let us talk to political dissidents. We’re going to see a skewed propagandistic view. . . . We hope to start stemming the tide against the Cold War mentality that’s really been flourishing in the Reagan era.”

Craig Zadan, who in 1986 helped organize the Proposition 65 caravan for the initiative designed to strengthen restrictions against toxic chemicals in drinking water, was talking about his movie “Footloose.” “I saw all this censorship and repression in this country and thought I could use dance as a metaphor for personal freedom. On the surface it’s a musical and underneath it’s about what’s happening with repression . . . taking books out of the library and burning them.”

Consider Esai Morales, now in Russia for the SANE film: “I was concerned at one point, then I made up my own mind. Wouldn’t actors be concerned that the government would be keeping files on you? Like on John Lennon. We as socially conscious people easily get identified as pinkos, Commie sympathizers, those terribly vague titles that come from so-called patriotic Americans. And the fact is we are very patriotically involved. . . . I’m not going to work out of fear. I’m not going to live with my head in the sand.”

THE SOURCES

Calendar intern Jane Lieberman contributed to this article with research and interviews. Interviews were conducted with more than 50 people. Reference sources included “Thirty Years of Treason,” edited by Eric Bentley; “Reagan” by Lou Cannon; “The Great Fear,” by David Caute; “The Inquisition in Hollywood,” by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund; “City of Nets,” by Otto Friedrich; “The Committee,” by Walter Goodman; “A Journal of the Plague Years,” by Stefan Kanfer; and “Naming Names,” by Victor S. Navasky. Also referred to was the PBS documentary by Judy Chaikin.