Life on the List

The following is excerpted from “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist,” by Walter Bernstein, to be published next month by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. A television and film writer (“Fail Safe,” “The Front,” “Semi-Tough,” “Yanks”), Bernstein in 1950 found his name beginning to appear on lists of alleged communists and communist sympathizers that were circulating in the entertainment industry. For 10 years, the FBI shadowed him, and the writing jobs he could get had to be credited to others. In this portion of the book, he describes episodes from those years.

*

I needed money and had no skill besides writing, unless an encyclopedic memory for old movies could be called a skill. It was certainly not a marketable one. I briefly considered doing what John Maynard Keynes had done: Get up early, loll in bed while doping out the stock market, make some money with a phone call and then go off to my real work.

A friend of mine was actually doing this and he said it was a snap. The requirements were simple. They were the same as being a movie director. You had to be normally intelligent and you had to do a little homework. Given that, you could beat the odds. It sounded great, certainly easier than writing a script. My qualifications were obvious: I was reasonably intelligent, an expert loller, hated homework but could do it if cornered, and I got up early. I couldn’t wait to get started. Unfortunately I soon discovered that you had to have money to make money. That took care of the stock market.

I invested in other kinds of lotteries: The Irish Sweepstakes seemed promising, but my horse ran next to last. For a while I believed there was not a raffle I would not win. I bought raffle tickets for cookies, mink coats, trips to Florida and automobiles. I figured if I won something I didn’t need, I could sell it and then have money to play the stock market.

I lived each day in a manic, totally unreal hope. Every time the phone rang, I thought it was either my winning ticket or the FBI. The times were pushing me off center. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would go out and wander around the city, much as I had done as an adolescent. Unconsciously I longed for a time of promise and safety.

Some nights I would ride the subway out to Coney Island and walk along the deserted boardwalk and look out at the dark, quiet sea, where, on Tuesday nights through my childhood summers, brilliant soaring fireworks were shot off from a barge while thousands of people packed the sands to watch and I sat high above them, awe-struck, on my father’s shoulders.

Then I found a front, by accident. I was visiting my reluctant agent when one of his working clients came into the room. His name was Paul Monash, and he was an established writer of television dramas. The agent, eager to be of assistance so long as he was not involved, told Monash about my predicament and Monash immediately offered to help. We had not known each other before. He did not know me even as much as Russell had when he stuck his neck out for me. [Producer Charles Russell hired Bernstein to write for the CBS television show “Danger” under a false name.] Monash was taking this big risk for a total stranger.

I had no idea of his politics, whether we agreed or disagreed, or anything else about him except that he was a good writer. Now I knew that he had courage and class. I was very grateful. I wrote a “Danger” show for Russell and it was shown under Monash’s name. It turned out that he had a show of his own on another program that same night, but no one noticed any difference in styles, only how prolific he was.

But Monash had his own work to do and could front only this one time. He could not seem prolific to the point of suspicion. I had to find someone else. It was like trying to find an apartment. I asked everyone I knew. No one seemed willing or qualified. I bought more lottery tickets. Then a musician I knew suggested his girlfriend. He said she had always wanted to be a writer and he had often seen her reading books. The woman’s name was Rita and my friend said she was smart and articulate and crazy enough to do this. Lunacy was not high on my list of qualifications, but I agreed to meet her at his apartment.

*

Rita turned out to be a tall, skinny blond woman with a mind of her own. She did not like to be contradicted. She was sensitive to slights. She had an interesting way of showing this. My friend lived on the 10th floor and, when piqued, Rita would open a window and climb out on a ledge and sit there until unpiqued, legs dangling over the side, blond hair flying in the wind. The first time this happened, I reached to pull her back, but my friend restrained me. He said it was best to leave her alone. He was confident no harm would come to her. He had a theory that people as batty as Rita only destroyed others.

Rita agreed to front for me. She saw it as a chance to break into the writing game. She asked for 20% of whatever I got and was annoyed when I told her it wouldn’t be what I normally got. Payment was based on credits and she had none. Rita, the unknown writer, would be starting at minimum. She was ready to go out on the ledge again at that one but was persuaded to stay in the room when I offered 25. I told Russell, who was pleased although he thought 25% steep just for a name. I told him what agents always told me when I complained about what they took, that 25% of something is better than 100% of nothing. She was doing me a big favor.

I wrote a “Danger” script that Russell bought under Rita’s name. He told CBS it was one of the many unsolicited manuscripts he received. No one questioned this. Rita cashed the check that came in her name and mailed 75% of it to me.

The arrangement worked perfectly. I would rendezvous with Russell at some anonymous bar and give him the script with Rita’s name on it. We would have further clandestine meetings about rewrites. There was no need for Rita to appear, so long as everyone knew she was a real person and could be produced if necessary.

The sponsor, the advertising agency and the network all were pleased at discovering this new writer. Rita was pleased at seeing her name on the screen. By now I was used to seeing someone else’s name on my work. It no longer gave me a pang. Whatever grief or anger I may have felt was masked by the demands of survival. I took comfort from the fact that I was out-writing the bastards who were blacklisting me, that I was not being destroyed, that at least Russell and [Sidney] Lumet knew who wrote those scripts. I valued their appreciation.

After a couple of scripts Russell expressed his pleasure by raising Rita’s fee. She thought this was only fair. Her shows had been well received and she believed she deserved more money. She asked what would her friends think if they knew how little she was getting. Her friends were seeing her differently now, as a person of substance.

The only one who treated her the same was her boyfriend, who knew the truth. This rankled. She wanted more respect and she was getting it now from other men. She was thinking of dumping him but thought he might retaliate by telling everyone she was only a front. I assured her he was too honorable for that. But they were not getting along. She was spending too much time out on the ledge. For the first time she worried about falling off.

I thought that was a good sign. Maybe this all meant that she would take better care of herself. I was getting to like Rita and hated myself for the despicable, if fleeting, thought that if she did fall off, I would have to start looking for a front all over again.

Happily Rita did not fall, but she did call one day and asked if she could come to see me. She was in tears when she arrived. She said she could no longer be my front. Her analyst had said it was bad for her. She had a weak enough ego as it was and this was only making it worse. She had told him it was making her happy, but he said it was a false happiness and not to be trusted. If she wanted to get well, she would have to be herself all the time, however miserable.

Indeed, if she were not miserable, how could she know when she was getting well? He acknowledged that her fear now of going out on the ledge was a good sign, but, like all good signs, it was deceptive.

By the time she finished telling me this, her tears were gone and she was starting to get angry. She was not angry at the analyst. She was angry at me. I was the cause of her false happiness. I had taken her into the promised land only so that she could be kicked out. She had even lost her fearlessness on the ledge. What would her friends say? What could she tell them to explain her falling star? I offered suggestions.

The one she liked best was that she had suffered a mammoth writer’s block. Even the best writers got that. Her friends all knew she was in therapy and whatever was surfacing there had caused this unfortunate dysfunction. She didn’t know how long it would last. She was working on it, but her analyst had given no guarantees. Perhaps she would have to give up writing altogether as the price of mental health. Sometimes being an artist exacted too high a toll. Rita found this consoling; it appealed to her sense of drama. She thought of herself now as a tragic heroine.

*

I was back to beating the bushes. The only consolation was that I was not alone in this. The Un-American Activities Committee was in full swing across the country and the McCarthy Committee was not far behind. They claimed to be on a Red hunt, but the net was cast wider than that. They were really after the New Deal and the welfare state and pantywaist liberals and the civil rights movement and militant unions and the traitors in the State Department who had “lost” China to the Communists and anyone who did not support the cold war.

Those who did not cooperate with them lost their jobs. It was as simple as that. It was bipartisan. The Democrats had started this race with the Internal Security Act, calling for the registration of “communist organizations,” excluding from entry into the United States anyone affiliated with any organization advocating totalitarianism, and setting up detention camps for communists should there be an invasion, insurrection or just national emergency.

They then passed the baton to the happily accepting Republicans. With a few exceptions, the press performed their usual function of not questioning real power. Schools, school boards, professional organizations, corporations, even libraries all went along. “The Wizard of Oz” was taken off the shelves of a Minnesota public library because it was deemed a socialist tract. Actually it was a socialist tract. L. Frank Baum intended the Wizard to stand for William Jennings Bryan and the yellow brick road for the gold standard. “Huckleberry Finn” was also banned in some libraries. The bigot’s eye is unerring; it finds only the best.

Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted screenwriter, wrote a pamphlet calling this period the Time of the Toad. It was worse than that. It was the time of the adder.

The FBI had settled into regular visits. At first the agents came to my apartment, two different men each time, wearing neatly pressed dark suits and snap-brim hats. The clothing made them look both oddly alike and mismatched, as though they were unrelated but from the same orphanage. They would introduce themselves, show their badges and say they would like to talk to me. I would answer that I had nothing to say and close the door. They would go away. They never insisted, never threatened.

But then they began accosting me on the street or outside a store or a theater when the performance was over, or on a subway platform or even once when I got off a bus. They would do this about once or twice a month. the object was to let me know that they always knew where I was. It seemed a great waste of the taxpayer’s money. I knew they knew, just as I knew they were tapping my phone. That is, I didn’t really know, but I took it for granted.

I did know that they inspected my garbage, because the janitor told me. He was the younger brother of a well-known actor and our landlord had given him the ground-floor apartment rent-free in return for custodial duties. He was an agreeable young man still trying to make up his mind what he wanted to be when he grew up. Being a janitor in a small building with non-demanding tenants was a congenial way station. But he loved his brother and all other actors and considered me part of the fraternity.

He said the FBI was interested in the letters I received and the magazines I read. The agents also asked him to describe the people who visited me. I wondered what they could glean from the descriptions. My friends looked as harmless as rabbits. At best, they had a wary, hangdog look. But in a paranoid age even rabbits were not above suspicion. There was danger in being excessively harmless, like being prematurely anti-fascist.

*

As usual, movies provided succor. I even started going in the afternoon and felt again the guilty pleasure of coming out of a movie into daylight.

The new movies were different. They were becoming glossies. They were also becoming emptier. Psychology was in, social criticism was out (unless it was criticism of communism, but that was not so much social as religious). People were bad because they were bad. Occasionally they were bad because their parents had not loved them enough, although they could also turn rotten if their parents had loved them too much.

Sexual betrayal was still a big theme, as it had always been, but now, if a woman betrayed a man, she might be doing it for the Russians. The studios embraced anti-communism with the same calculated fervor they had recently reserved for Stalin. Hot or cold, a war was a war. There were good guys and bad guys. All the studios needed was to be told who was who. The government told them that.

None of these movies was successful. They had all the moralizing of the World War II movies, but none of their skill. They had titles like “The Iron Curtain,” “The Red Menace,” “The Red Nightmare,” “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” “I Married a Communist.” They presented a gullible America on the verge of being taken over by ruthless communists even though most of these seemed to be either seriously stupid or alarmingly out of shape.

My life seemed to move in ever-decreasing circles. Few of my friends dropped away, but the list of acquaintances diminished. I appeared contaminated and they did not want to risk infection. They avoided me, not calling as they had in the past, not responding to my calls, being nervously distant if we met in public places.

No one was overtly insulting. I had become armored against this early on, but I worried about the effect on my two small children. I saw them on weekends and one Sunday I took my 7-year-old daughter to the Rockefeller Center skating rink. I was lacing on her skates when a producer I knew passed by with his daughter. I opened by mouth to say hello, but he hurried past, averting his eyes. My daughter looked puzzled; he had been to our house and she knew both him and his child. But she handled it her own way. She skated swiftly out onto the ice, took a few practice turns and then skated back to where I watched from the railing flanked by other parents.

“Daddy!” she called out in her loudest voice. “Do you believe in God?”

Conversations stopped. Heads turned. Even a few skaters braked to a stop and turned to us. The tinny waltz over the loudspeaker system seemed suddenly muted. The silence was enormous.

“Well?” she demanded.

It was not exactly the question I had expected. It was worse. Being a communist in America was bad enough but being an atheist as well was excessive. She knew perfectly well she was putting me on a spot. But what she wanted to know was crucial.

She had not been told about the blacklist. Her weekend life with me had remained the same. She took for granted that I was around the house a lot while other fathers went off to work. She had asked me once what I did and seemed satisfied with the answer. But now she wanted an answer to a different kind of question.

I was unsure what to tell her. It was easy enough to say no, I didn’t believe in God. That would only risk the disapproval of all the other parents. That didn’t bother me; I was at home with disapproval. But I felt the question was not really about God. It was about me. She was asking me every child’s question: Who are you?

She knew something was wrong and I realized in that moment that I had been wrong in not telling her what was happening to me. My excuse was that she was too young, it would only frighten and confuse her. But what was frightening and confusing was not being told. She had sensed there was trouble but had been abandoned to uncertainty. She was left where it was scariest, in the dark. It did not matter now whether her question was about God or the producer or anything else. She wanted to know where I stood. God now, the blacklist later.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

She nodded firmly. “Laura’s daddy doesn’t, either,” she said, and skated off.

Parents sidled away from me, throwing me looks. I watched my daughter skate, blond hair flying in the wind, more secure than I on the slippery ice.

*

From the book “Inside Out” by Walter Bernstein.

Copyright Copyright 1996 by Walter Bernstein.

Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.