A Fateful Decision, Damaging Fallout

The Kazan Controversy, Part II: In recent weeks Hollywood has heatedly debated the decision to give director Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar, despite his 1952 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he informed on a group of his old friends. Monday’s Calendar examined the war of words over the academy’s decision. Today’s installment chronicles the events that brought Kazan before HUAC--and his view of the costs of his actions.

If Elia Kazan were directing a film of his Oscar night return to Hollywood, it would surely include a flashback sequence to one of the most dramatic days of his life: March 10, 1952. That night, exactly one month before he became an informer, Kazan was seated in the celebrity-studded audience as a best director nominee for “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

As he looked around the Pantages Theater, he saw old friends everywhere. Humphrey Bogart and Montgomery Clift were there. So was 20th Century Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, who’d made “Gentleman’s Agreement,” the film that earned Kazan his first best director Oscar. Also on hand was a young actress who’d slept with Kazan at the Bel-Air Hotel the night before: Marilyn Monroe.

“Streetcar” won three Oscars that night, even though the movie lost the best picture award to “An American in Paris,” and Kazan lost as best director to George Stevens. But even if Kazan had won, he was in no mood for celebration. Unbeknownst to the Hollywood elite on hand, he was facing the most wrenching decision of his artistic life.

That afternoon, Kazan had driven to the Fox lot, where he’d had lunch with Zanuck, according to Kazan’s 1988 memoir, “A Life.” Afterward, the men retired to Zanuck’s office, where the conversation focused on an item that had run a day earlier in Mike Connelly’s “Rambling Reporter” column in the Hollywood Reporter. It read: “Elia Kazan, subpoenaed for a HUAC session, confessed Commie membership, but refused to supply any new evidence on his old pals from the Group Theater days.”

Kazan says in his memoir that he was furious. He’d gone before the committee in private session after being given assurances that his testimony would remain secret. He’d admitted to being a onetime party member, but had refused to name his friends. Now HUAC was leaking his secret testimony to right-wing columnists. Zanuck had called Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson, who told him that HUAC planned to call Kazan before a public hearing.

The studio chief was worried, according to Kazan and others involved in the real-life drama. Kazan was about to make a film at Fox. But if he was linked to the Red Scare, all bets were off. When screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. had refused to testify at an earlier HUAC hearing, Zanuck had been forced to fire him.

“Name the names, for chrissake,” Zanuck urged him, Kazan wrote. “Who the hell are you going to jail for? You’ll be sitting there and someone else will sure as hell name those people. Who are you saving?”

In “A Life,” Kazan says he reminded Zanuck that the men he was being asked to name were once good friends. Zanuck was unmoved. He told Kazan that he’d spent a considerable amount of time in Washington. “The idea there,” he said firmly, “is not to be right, but to win.”

After the Oscars, Kazan returned to New York. Tortured over what to do, he asked Arthur Miller to come see him at Kazan’s home in Connecticut. The two old friends, who had collaborated on the fabled “Death of a Salesman,” went for a walk in the woods. Kazan says he told Miller that he didn’t feel he should give up his career “to defend a secrecy I didn’t think right and to defend people who’d already been named or soon would be by someone else.” Kazan says Miller replied, “Whatever you do is OK with me, because I know your heart is in the right place.”

Kazan, Miller Differ in Accounts of Meeting

But according to Miller’s account in his memoirs, he was terribly worried: “Unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of party writers years ago and made a speech at one of them.” Miller says he was angry not so much at Kazan, but at America.

“I was experiencing a bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before, a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom,” he wrote.

The two men returned together to Kazan’s home, but they were already fast moving in opposite directions. Kazan was edging toward cooperation with HUAC. Having heard Kazan out, Miller got into his car to drive farther north, to his original destination: Salem, Mass. He was doing research for a new play of his. Called “The Crucible,” it was his way of comparing the horrors of the Red Scare to a similar form of hysteria: the Salem witch trials.

When Miller told Kazan’s first wife, Molly, that he was on his way to Salem, Miller wrote, “She instantly understood what my destination meant, and her eyes widened in sudden apprehension: ‘You’re not going to equate witches with this!’ ”

Several weeks later, Kazan went before HUAC and informed on his friends. Many of them, including Miller, didn’t speak to him for years. Since then Kazan has rarely discussed that painful time. But in a series of early ‘70s interviews with writer-director Jeff Young, “Kazan: The Master Discusses His Films,” which are being published this month by Newmarket Press, Kazan spoke candidly about his feelings.

“Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting,” he says. “It doesn’t sit well on anyone’s conscience. . . . But what I did was the better of two mean alternatives. The only other option was to remain silent and pretend I didn’t know better when people said there’s no Communist conspiracy. Nonsense. There was a conspiracy.”

As for the costs of his testifying, Kazan says: “I knew that I’d lose Arthur Miller’s plays. I knew a lot of guys would turn against me. But in some ways the whole experience made a man out of me because it changed me from being a guy who was everybody’s darling and always living for people’s approval to a fellow who could stand on his own. It toughened me up a lot.”

But to many, Kazan is seen as an affront to an industry that has long supported liberal causes and creative freedom. In recent years, Hollywood has honored its blacklisted writers, who are viewed as heroes for defying HUAC, not dupes for having been loyal communists. It is Kazan, who broke with the party, who is seen as the villain. He represents a thorny contradiction: Even after cooperating with the forces of anti-communist hysteria, he continued to make socially conscious films, dramatizing mob tyranny in “On the Waterfront” while exposing the insidious influence of mass media exploitation in “A Face in the Crowd.”

“He drove the left crazy,” says Michael Collins, a writer-producer whose parents were on opposite sides of the issue. His father, screenwriter Richard Collins, gave names to HUAC while his mother, actress Dorothy Comingore, was blacklisted after she refused to do so. “Here was a guy who continued to believe in the issues they believed in, but without being tied to a dogmatic Communist Party.”

Blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, who was working on a script with Kazan at the time that he testified, believes otherwise. “I remember taking him to see Blackie Myers, who was a communist and an official of the American Maritime Union,” Bernstein says. “And when we came away, Kazan kept telling me, ‘These are the people I want to be with. This is the side I want to be on.’

“And the next month, he testified, saying how awful communism was. So I never believed he acted on principle.”

The debate over Kazan comes down to a simple question: Do we judge artists by their work or by the way they live their lives? It’s a debate that has special resonance in America today, which has just emerged from a yearlong constitutional crisis over a similar issue.

“If you think about the impeachment debate, isn’t it incredibly similar to the argument over Kazan?” says author Neal Gabler. “What’s more important, people ask, Bill Clinton’s public conduct or his private behavior? Conservatives say that you can’t separate the two things, which is exactly what liberals have been saying about Kazan.”

Which goes to the heart of why a 47-year-old debate has become the hottest issue in Hollywood.

“It’s impossible not to be torn by Kazan,” says film producer Sean Daniel, whose father was a blacklisted writer. “I know his testimony, but he also inspired me to work in the movie business. One doesn’t cancel out the other. I’ve found myself defending a president who is brilliant in his public life and flawed in his private life. And isn’t that what the academy is doing? Kazan has his flaws, but he’s earned his place through his art, and it shouldn’t be denied him.”