Bess Taffel, 85; Screenwriter Was Blacklisted in ‘50s

Bess Taffel, a screenwriter blacklisted in Hollywood after refusing to answer to the House Un-American Activities Committee, has died.

Taffel died July 21 of a stroke at UCLA Medical Center, her husband, the movie production designer Robert Boyle, reported last week. She was 85.

Born in New York City, Taffel was a child actress in the Yiddish theater there before coming to Southern California in the late 1930s to pursue graduate degrees in speech and literature at USC.

She became involved in the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a progressive company that sought to reflect society at the end of the Depression. Through it she met a number of socially conscious writers, including Ben Barzman, who wrote such films as “Back to Bataan” and “The Boy With Green Hair” and was also later blacklisted. Barzman encouraged Taffel to write.

In the book “Tender Comrades,” a history of the blacklist period by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Taffel said her political activities started when she joined the alliance.

“The people I was most respectful of were the leftist people. They had everything going for them, but they still were trying to make conditions better for all people. They were leftists, but to me they seemed very patriotic. I admired them enormously and felt this is a good way to be.”

She was working at a time when there were very few women writing in Hollywood, and Taffel recalled that some of her male counterparts at Paramount refused to work with her “because they couldn’t feel free to curse around a woman.” While she was at Fox, there was just one other woman at the table in the commissary reserved for writers.

Her longest run with a studio was a four-year stint at RKO. She wrote and rewrote comedies, westerns, melodramas and gangster movies. But RKO became inhospitable because of her activities as a studio representative for the Writers Guild.

Taffel’s career, which included credits for the films “Badman’s Territory,” “A Likely Story” and “Elopement,” declined after she refused to answer questions in a brief appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Sept. 18, 1951. In “Tender Comrades,” she readily admitted to being a Communist Party member and allowed that she would have had no problem in telling the committee that fact. However, she was unwilling to name names or answer questions that might have revealed the political activities of friends and colleagues.

“I was a member of the CP and very eager to be among them,” she said. “They were the only ones who cared anything about Spain and other issues. I emphasize that the Communists were the most patriotic and that joining the CP was, I felt at the time, the most patriotic thing I’d ever done in my life.”

Her family suggests that donations in her name be made in support of the children’s book department, Los Angeles Public Library, 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071.