“ONLY VICTIMS”
I live in the Hollywood Hills in a Spanish house once occupied by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Built in 1929—for Los Angeles, the early Paleolithic Age—it is not as grand as its legendary past suggests, but it does have a nice canyon view and some beautiful old Mexican tile. I bought the house in 1989, at the height of my movie career, not because of the Joe and Marilyn connection, but because I liked the place. It projected the right image for my lifestyle: a child of the Sixties turned upper bohemian lord of the Hollywood Left.
That was then. I’m not sure that person even exists any longer. I still like the house, but I no longer have that image. Indeed, I’ve shifted positions to such an extent that I often think I’ve undergone the ideological equivalent of a sex change operation.
Hence this book, which is an attempt to find out what happened—to discover how the idealistic young man who came to Hollywood fresh off the civil rights movement; created the hippie detective Moses Wine; trafficked with Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers, Tim Leary, and the SLA; was recruited by the KGB, and wrote (or didn’t) screenplays for such paragons of the Hollywood Left as Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand, ended up voting for George W. Bush and being publicly reviled as a neocon. How did that man come to be favorably profiled by both Mother Jones and National Review in a single lifetime? (Talk about sex change operations.)
I hope to understand it better by writing this memoir, a memoir I am typing in the very room Joe and Marilyn shared during their brief marriage. That marriage ended after only 274 days when Monroe filed for divorce for “mental cruelty” in 1954, at the height of the Hollywood black list.
Ironically, it was that famous list that cast an ambiguous shadow over my arrival in Los Angeles back in the late Sixties. In a sense, I was a wannabe black listed screenwriter myself—a young man with left-wing political street cred, but without sufficient funds to live the upper middle class lifestyle of my parents. I was radical chic from the start, or aspiring to be. But it was hard to be chic in my first LA residence, a Nathanael Westian motel-ish affair on Franklin known as the “Coral Palms.” Now ploughed under to make way for a mall, it was a far cry from the “Marilyn House” and composed of a dozen or so dingy, shag-carpeted one-bedrooms surrounding a cracked concrete patio and a tiny over-chlorinated pool. I lived there with my then-wife and former Yale Drama classmate Dyanne Asimow and soon our infant son Raphael. Our immediate neighbors were an unemployed actor and his Playboy bunny girlfriend on one side, and, on the other, Jill Bogart, Humphrey’s seventy-year-old alcoholic sister.
I would sit by that pool, reading Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories and Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?—the latter with its vivid portrayal of the Hollywood Left during the birth of the screenwriter’s union—wondering where I fit in all this. While at Yale, I had been an anti-war demonstrator and civil rights worker. Soon enough, I was a member of the very Writers Guild described by Schulberg, an organization still operating under the ghost of the blacklist in those days. I eagerly got to know some of the formerly blacklisted writers; they were especially welcoming to me when I first joined, making sure I was invited to the necessary events—fundraisers and socials in old union meeting halls in East LA, more Workman’s Circle than show biz. My left-wing reputation had preceded me.
This romance with the blacklist was cemented when, as a debutante Guild member, I went to the WGA’s annual awards banquet in 1970. Indeed, I was so new that I went without realizing that this ceremony was for the most part disdained by the membership and attended only by nominees and a few Guild officers. As luck would have it, this particular awards ceremony was one of the most interesting such evenings, before or since. It has found a place in film lore because it was there that Dalton Trumbo, the most renowned of the Hollywood Ten, delivered his famous speech of blacklist-era reconciliation, “Only Victims.”
Seated at a back table with my wife Dyanne and our friends the husband-and-wife screenwriter team Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, I was excited by the drama of the occasion, but increasingly disappointed by the speech. Why was the author of Johnny Got His Gun, of all people, preaching forgiveness for the horrid censorship and McCarthyist blackballing of writers by the right wing? Of course, Trumbo had seen those events up close and personal. I knew them only from books and documentaries, or from those few fleeting moments when, as a six year old, I glimpsed “Tailgunner Joe” on my parents’ four-inch black and white Dumont television, during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. My parents despised him and therefore so did I.
I can remember arguing with the Huycks that night, staking out, as I so frequently did, my position to the left of what I considered the weakwilled Hollywood mainstream. I relished my image as an actual Sixties activist, a reputation my agents used to my advantage, and could not so easily forgive as one of the blacklist principals himself. In fact, after that day, many of his blacklist peers criticized Trumbo and deemed him a sellout. I also felt let down by Trumbo, and judged him an old man desperate to get his career back—nothing the hardcore leftist blacklistees, such as ex-longshoreman Alvah Bessie. Of course, Bessie never had much of a career in the first place, and I didn’t want to be like him. So I was caught in a bit of a quandary. I wanted to be like Trumbo, but a Trumbo who had kept the faith.
I doubted that my friends the Huycks would keep any kind of political faith, and they probably knew it. Willard’s father had been a Republican state representative, of all things, and Gloria’s Beverly Hills parentage was de facto suspect, unlike my Scarsdale, New York background. I assumed they were in it—the movie business—for the “main chance” and lacked the requisite ideological purity of the era. Needless to say, all of us were as ambitious as could be, regardless of our political beliefs. When Gloria and Willard achieved enormous Hollywood success only a few years later, writing the screenplay of American Graffiti and the bar scene from Star Wars—not only reaching “A-list” status but also making themselves financially independent for life while still in their twenties—I wasn’t the only one who was wildly envious of them.
On the night of the “Only Victims” speech, however, I was the one whose career was in ascendancy. My first novel, Heir, had just been made into a film called Jennifer on My Mind, with a screenplay by Erich Segal of Love Story fame. The movie stank and only remotely resembled my book, but the novel—inspired by the true story of a wealthy Dartmouth College classmate of mine who accidentally overdosed his girlfriend with heroin—had opened a lot of doors for me, including the chance to work for Charles K. Feldman. I was the last screenwriter hired by the famous agent-producer, who had been involved with The Seven Year Itch (this was long before I came to live in the Marilyn House or even dreamed of such a thing), not to mention the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elia Kazan. I sat in his living room surrounded by Bonnards and Modiglianis, watching his then-wife Capucine walk in and out while he fielded phone calls from Billy Wilder, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell I was doing there. Frankly, not much. Unbeknownst to me, the man was dying of cancer, and I suspect I was really there to help him fill his time, pretending he would produce yet one more movie—a film version of Calder Willingham’s Eternal Fire.
I worked on the screenplay in Feldman’s Beverly Hills office at a mahogany desk, beneath a Degas I can only assume was real. Once a week I’d drive up Coldwater Canyon to his home when, depending on the hour, tea or cognac would be served by the staff. The aging producer, an elegant man with silver hair and tailored shirts, would put his feet up on a divan and dial Warren Beatty, telling the young actor that he had a script in the works that would be perfect for Warren and “his girl,” then Julie Christie. I would come to know Beatty later in a rather different, more politically fraught way. But at that point I was peripherally involved in the glamorous atmosphere of the Old Hollywood that was even then fading fast. I was lucky to have seen it.
Feldman was, as they almost all were in those days, a liberal of sorts, and he was fascinated by me, a live specimen of the New Left. It wasn’t that he expected
