VLVL re Hollywood blacklist reverberations

[pynchonoid]

To use Hector's lingo, They popped  Kazan's
cherry...and instead of blaming all-too-human K, who
is also a victim, I blame the individuals and the
system that forced him into that position -- as
Pynchon appears to do in Vineland re the people (
Frenesi & etc.) They have got by the short hairs.
-Doug


Oct. 3, 2003. 11:33 AM

Elia Kazan "a rat" forever


GEOFF PEVERE
Clifford Odets, Art Smith, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe
Brand, J. Edward Bromberg and Paula Miller. 

These six names, along with two others, were cited by
Elia Kazan in testimony before the communist-hunting
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in
Washington, D.C. in 1952. 

Former colleagues of the highly-celebrated director of
stage (Death Of A Salesman, The Skin Of Our Teeth, A
Streetcar Named Desire ) and film (A Tree Grows In
Brooklyn, Gentlemen's Agreement, A Streetcar Named
Desire) at the groundbreaking Group Theatre during the
1930s, they were identified by the 43-year-old Kazan
as former members of the Communist Party — which,
along with Kazan, they indeed once were. 

Immediately the careers and reputations of these eight
were placed in considerable jeopardy. 

Professionally and personally, none of these
individuals ever fully recovered.

To have one's name mentioned in association with
communism in 1952 was as damaging as being labelled a
child pornographer, or perhaps terrorist, is today.

The entertainment business, in which one's public
reputation is as good as currency, was an irresistible
target for the period's insidious official campaign of
patriotic paranoia: Apart from the Alger Hiss spy
scandal of the late 1940s, the main event of the
anti-communist purge had been the 1950 show trial of
The Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and
directors who went to jail after refusing to do what
Kazan subsequently would do. 

Movie stars, writers and directors were not only
suspicious because they tended to attract people of
perennially suspicious political inclinations —
intellectuals, playwrights, New Yorkers, Jews,
homosexuals — but because they were powerful. Bringing
them down not only reinforced Washington's power over
Hollywood, it made for excellent copy. 

The day after Elia Kazan named these names, news of
his testimony made the front page of The New York
Times. 

As he wryly noted of this verbatim appearance of his
testimony in his 1988 autobiography A Life: "The House
Committee on Un-American Activities was not publicity
shy."

Marlon Brando, meanwhile, was on the other side of the
country, on the set of Julius Caesar. 

Brando, Kazan's star of both the Broadway and
Hollywood productions of Tennessee Williams' A
Streetcar Named Desire, burst into tears upon learning
the news. When director Joseph L. Mankiewicz asked his
moody Marc Antony what was wrong, Brando sobbed:
"What'll I do when I see him? Do I bust him in the
nose or what?"

Back in New York, at Kazan's renowned Actor's Studio,
the director was met with cold stares and outright
snubs when he arrived for work.

He received anonymous letters "shattered by your
cowardice in the face of McCarthyism" and "thoroughly
sickened and and upset at your testimony." 

Students, proteges and now former friends crossed the
street when they saw him or pretended not to see him.
He had to change his phone number because of harassing
calls.

"I was notorious," Kazan wrote in his book. "An
`informer,' a `squealer,' a `rat.'" His deep
friendship with Arthur Miller was ruptured asunder,
and by his close friend Zero Mostel he was called
"Looselips" until the actor's death. 

Actress Maureen Stapleton tried to bring reason to the
tumult at the Actor's Studio in the days after the
news, when people were insisting Kazan be thrown out.
"It was just too sad," she recalled years later. "And
when everyone was ready to throw him out, I said,
`Wait a minute. We can't throw him out, he owns this
place. You don't throw him out; we get out.'" Then she
walked. 

It was to last for the next 50 years — until his
death, in fact, earlier this week. In 1999, when Elia
Kazan was offered a lifetime achievement Academy
Award, boos and hissing mingled with the applause — it
was easily Oscar night's most blatantly political
moment since the 1970s. While many stood for a
standing ovation when Kazan took the stage flanked by
Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, many others sat
stonily in their seats. 

Make no mistake, Elia Kazan's testimony before the
HUAC committee was a big deal. Not just because he
named names, though that was big enough.

It was a big deal because, if anyone had been in a
position to stand up against the Committee and come
away triumphant — front page triumphant — it would
have been Elia Kazan. That's why his testimony was on
the front page of The New York Times.

Then one of the most admired, influential and
well-known popular artists in America, Kazan — a
leading director of stage and screen, as well as a
figure at the forefront of the new "method" school of
American acting — was at the time he decided to
co-operate with the Committee in a position of esteem
comparable to a Martin Scorsese or Steven Soderbergh
today. 

In his book, in which he spends a few dozen pages
writhing to justify why he did what he did, he partly
accounts for his actions by suggesting that defying
the committee might have ended his movie career. 

"I began to measure the weight and the worth of what I
was giving up," he writes of his agonized decision in
A Life, "my career in films, which I was surrendering
for a cause I didn't believe in. What was I if not a
filmmaker?"

It's a hard, indeed painful, argument to swallow, when
you consider just how powerful the impact of Kazan's
refusal might have been: As many people have noted, no
one was in a better position to bring the whole black
circus to a halt as Elia Kazan.

What made the stain even darker was the fact that not
only was Kazan an indisputably great artist, but he
continued to get better after the testimony: On The
Waterfront followed the name-naming, as did East Of
Eden and the stage production of Cat On A Hot Tin
Roof. He didn't just survive the incident while others
perished, he flourished.

"What I'd done was correct," he claims in his
fascinating, tortured and frequently self-lacerating
book, "but was it right?"

That is not the kind of question likely to occur to
anyone who doubted the answer. The "no" is implied in
the asking. I think Kazan probably asked it of himself
daily, precisely because the answer never came out
quite the way he wanted it to. Kind of like the way
"art" and "rat" are always made up of the same
letters.

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