He’s Been There, Survived That

He knew Orson Welles before he made “Citizen Kane.” He watched T.S. Eliot read “The Wasteland” at New York’s 92nd Street Y, did the Lindy hop at the Cotton Club and saw Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” when it was first performed by the Group Theater.

In Hollywood, he butted heads with everyone from Harry Cohn and Darryl Zanuck to Robert Redford. In World War II, he went behind enemy lines as a member of the OSS. A decade later, after refusing to name any fellow Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was called the “most dangerous man in America” by Rep. Harold Velde and blacklisted from working in Hollywood.

At 88, Abraham Polonsky is a rare gem of Hollywood history--and one who can talk about it, often with an irreverent, acid wit. Although his career as a screenwriter and director was interrupted for almost 20 years by the blacklist, his body of work is impressive. In 1947 he wrote “Body and Soul,” the John Garfield-starring boxing picture that was nominated for an Oscar; a year later he wrote and directed Garfield in “Force of Evil,” a taut drama about the numbers racket that Martin Scorsese has called “a classic of the American cinema.” In 1969 he returned to direct “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” which co-starred Redford and Robert Blake.

To commemorate his work, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. has made Polonsky and screenwriter Julius Epstein co-winners of the group’s 1998 career achievement award. Polonsky will speak at the association’s award dinner today at the Bel-Age Hotel. Epstein, who won an Oscar in 1941 for co-writing “Casablanca,” wrote a number of illustrious films during a five-decade career, including “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “The Tender Trap” and “Reuben, Reuben,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 1983. Epstein, 89, is recovering from an illness and is not expected to attend the ceremony.

Feisty and opinionated, Polonsky still sees movies and teaches a philosophy class at USC Film School called “Consciousness and Content.” He’s a lion in winter whose claws are razor-sharp. When asked about his childhood friend, composer Bernard Herrmann, who disowned him during the blacklist, Polonsky barks: “He was a [expletive].”

He’s no fan either of director Elia Kazan, who informed on his friends to HUAC. (Last week the motion picture academy announced it would award Kazan with an honorary Oscar, about which Polonsky said: “You could say he deserves an award for his work--I just wouldn’t want to give it to him.”) If you defend one of his old foes, he responds with a cold-eyed stare: “I didn’t know you were such an ignoramus.”

But when he recalls his favorite times in movies, his humor and enthusiasm return, whether it’s recounting how Lanie Kazan showed him her breasts when he cast her in “Romance of a Horse Thief” or how he persuaded Garfield to play a high-brow lawyer in “Force of Evil” by buying him a Phi Beta Kappa key, pinning it on his jacket and saying, “Now you’re a lawyer!” As Polonsky once wrote: “For me, movies are irrevocably and richly rooted in kitsch, in childhood, in storytelling, in the rubbish of paperbacks and sitting under the street lights. . . . Nothing is better than making a movie; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies and dreaming.”

Polonsky spoke to The Times at his home in Beverly Hills. Although his stride has slowed with age, he keeps busy reading science and philosophy books and overseeing the publication of his film and TV scripts.

Question: What’s the biggest difference between Hollywood today and when you were working?

Answer: It’s just as hard to get anyone to make a decision, but now the people making decisions don’t have a complete financial interest in the picture. In the old days, you could talk directly to the studio head. I once went into Harry Cohn’s office and told him my idea for a film and he said, “I like that, but here’s the idea I want to do.” And I said, “OK, I’ll do yours and you’ll do mine,” and that was it.

The last time I saw him, he was in his office, shouting obscenities at Robert Rossen, who comes flying out the door, with Cohn still cursing him. And the minute Rossen left, Cohn smiled and pleasantly invited me into his office. It was like he was playing a scene--he could turn it on and off. I guess he liked me because whenever I’d come see him, he’d say, “So how’s my favorite [expletive] Communist doing today?”

Q: You’ve always said that of all the studio chiefs, the ones you respected the most were Zanuck and Lew Wasserman. Why?

A: Because if they said they’d do something, they’d do it. And if you wrote something, they’d read it themselves, not give it to their secretary. Lew didn’t tolerate any [expletive]. When I started shooting “Willie Boy,” Redford kept showing up late to work. So I called Lew, who was running Universal, and I told him, “I want to fire the SOB--he’s coming late.” Lew said, “Let me take care of it.” And the next day, Redford showed up on time and apologized. I don’t know what Lew said to him, but he was never late again.

Q: How do you feel about Zanuck? On the one hand, he tried to save your job by having you write out of sight, at home after you testified before the HUAC. But when push came to shove, he ultimately fired you.

A: He did everything he could. The trade papers kept saying if I was blacklisted, why was I still under contract? So he finally told me, “We’re going to have to let you go.” Although he gave me the rest of my salary, which was nice. There was just too much pressure for anyone to fight it. My daughter would come home from private school and tell me, “All my friends are saying you’re going to jail.” So I told my wife, Sylvia, “Let’s go to New York. Everybody’s father is going to jail there.” And when my daughter went to private school there, her father was a hero.

Q: But as a Communist, weren’t you on the wrong side of history?

A: I was a Communist because I thought Marxism offered the best analysis of history and I still believe that. But it’s also true that communism doesn’t always work--you usually end up with a dictatorship. But I have no regrets. Fighting for lost causes is a perfectly proper activity for a human being. It’s one reason I’ve had such a helluva good life.

Q: You rarely sound bitter when you talk about the blacklist. Why?

A: The truth is that when I was blacklisted I made almost as much money as I did before. I sent my daughter to private school, didn’t I? In Hollywood, I made $2,000 a week at my peak. In New York, writing for [the TV show] “You Are There,” we got $1,200 for an hourlong script that took three weeks to write. But I also wrote novels, for the theater, for TV, for movies. I would give my front, Jeremy Daniel, 10% of what I made, and then I would pay the taxes on it. He was my neighbor on West End Avenue who offered to let me use his name. I didn’t even have to ask.

Q: Did you always want to be a writer?

A: When I was 10, our English teacher asked us to write an autobiography of an object. And so I wrote that I was Don Quixote’s helmet. My teacher was so impressed that she called up my parents and asked to visit our house. She came over for tea and my father, who ran a pharmacy, stayed home because he was sure I was in trouble. But my teacher turned to my father and said, “Your son is a natural-born writer. Don’t try to make him something else.” And my father, being a snot nose, told her, “Oh, we know that.”

Q: Just a week before you joined the OSS and went overseas, Paramount offered you a five-year contract, starting at $250 a week. How’d you keep it?

A: I needed the money, so I went to Gen. Wild Bill Donovan, who was running the OSS, and he said--great, it’ll make a good cover story. So he gave me a letter instructing Paramount to say I’d been hired to do a documentary on the bombing of England. When the Paramount executive kept me waiting, I started complaining and he got so mad at me that he tried to fire me, until I showed him the letter from Gen. Donovan. That shut him up and I got to keep my contract.

Q: The blacklist began to crumble in the early 1960s, but you had to write under a pseudonym until 1968. How did you finally break free?

A: Frank Rosenberg, who was a producer at Universal, tried to hire me to write a TV series about the OSS. I wasn’t interested. But he said, “If you do it, I’ll get your name off the list.” That got me interested. So he submitted my name to NBC and they promptly turned him down. Then Jennings Lang, who was a big shot at Universal, called NBC and told them to [expletive] themselves. And they backed down and I got to work again. That’s the secret. If you’re powerful enough to tell someone to go [expletive] themselves, you can get anything accomplished.

Q: Your movies often paint a dark view of relationships and morality. Why?

A: I look at it as reality. When I was a boy, thieves broke into my father’s pharmacy, which during the Depression was one of the few places where you could legally sell alcohol by prescription. The night after a new shipment of liquor arrived, someone stole all the alcohol and cocaine. My father was very upset because if he reported the robbery, he’d have to deal with the Treasury Department. But there were three old Italian men who hung around his shop, sitting and talking and taking their hats off when an Italian funeral passed by. They heard about my father’s troubles and several days later, when we opened up the store, miraculously all the liquor and drugs were back in their rightful place. They said that the person responsible for the theft wanted to come and personally apologize for causing any trouble. My father said, “That’s not necessary, but if he really wants to, I’m here all week.” And they said, very apologetically, “Actually you’ll have to wait till he gets out of the hospital.” [He laughs.] And that’s what introduced me to how politics and relationships really work in America.

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“I have no regrets. Fighting for lost causes is a perfectly proper activity for a human being. It’s one reason I’ve had such a helluva good life.”

ABRAHAM POLONSKY

screenwriter-director