BLACKLIST

“Children of the Blacklist,” by Jack Mathews (Oct. 15), took me on a time-machine ride and set me firmly down in the perpetually golden, end of summer, afternoon haze of my Hollywood adolescence. How well I remember the extraordinary times spent in the amiable disarray of the household of Mike Kilian and Pauline Vinson and their children. Kathy, Pauline’s daughter, was my good friend. Pauline and Mike were blacklisted radio and television writers, and although Mike had for a time lived and worked in Mexico City, he and Pauline had chosen by the mid-1950s to work pseudonymously in Hollywood. The air in their bungalow was as thick with talk of literature, politics and social issues as it was with the aromas of Pauline’s cooking and the smoke that curled from the bowl of Mike’s pipe. In retrospect, it is clear to me that the Hollywood witch hunt created this artistic political salon and, I am sure, many others like it. It was one of the many rooms in which I learned to think, to question, to decide for myself what is and what is not acceptable.

I learned immutably that it is wrong to deprive anyone of his livelihood as a penalty for what he thinks. I learned that ours is a pluralistic society characterized by space, space for a multitude of beliefs, space for criticism of the establishment. I learned that if we lose that space, all is lost. In defense of this idea, the Hollywood 10 went to prison.

Pauline’s and Mike’s kids grew up and went off to colleges and universities and marriages. Kathy and I kept in touch. Her hair darkened, lost its Southern California, sun-bleached, honeyed glow; mine, once black, turned silver. Pauline is elderly now, and Mike is dead. The last time I saw them must be more than 15 years ago. They were living amid memories and souvenirs in a modest, cluttered apartment near a park in North Hollywood. The aromas of Pauline’s cooking and Mike’s pipe smoke lingered, but the salon--evanescent, chimerical--was gone.

SUSAN KLENNER, Woodland Hills