“I thought the Unfriendly Ten all took the Fifth Amendment.”
“That wouldn’t have made them guilty. But even so, they didn’t. Ironically, if they had, they wouldn’t have gone to prison. But they felt they weren’t guilty of anything and therefore shouldn’t hide behind it. They pled the First Amendment, believing that freedom of speech included the freedom not to speak, and that the committee had no right to force them.”
“Is that a legal argument or wishful thinking?” I responded.
“Word has it that if two liberal Supreme Court justices hadn’t died before the case got put in front of the Court, they would probably have won.”
I whistled through my teeth at the vicissitudes of luck and history.
We followed Wilson’s car back over Laurel Canyon to Beverly Hills. It pulled up in front of a large fur shop on Wilshire Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Flyer Furriers and Fur Storage said the neon sign. A moment later a Pontiac woody station wagon pulled up right behind, its Indian-head hood ornament aglow, then a Chevy panel truck. “Left-wing Jews don’t buy Fords,” David whispered. One man got out of each and they conferred quietly under a street light.
“Do any of them look familiar?” I asked David. He nodded. “Yes. They’ve all been in the paper. That is Wilson,” he said, indicating the man we’d followed. He was tall, forties with prematurely white hair. “The others are Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico. Biberman’s a director. Jarrico’s a writer-producer. They’re blacklisted, too.” Biberman was barrel-chested and intense in his mannerisms. Jarrico was shorter, dumpy looking, and spectacled.
The men got back in their cars, turned the corner and into the parking lot behind the store. We waited a moment, then followed on foot.
By the time we got to the back of the building, a double door was open and the men were apparently inside. We crouched down in the dark. After a moment Jarrico came out carrying a cardboard carton, about twelve by eighteen inches. I swallowed hard and whispered to David, “Isn’t that what they call a transfer file?” He nodded. “Yes, the studios use them to store scripts.” It wasn’t scripts I was worried about, but body parts.
Jarrico slid the box into the van. The others followed, each carrying another similarly shaped carton. I pictured three dead wives lying in pieces in the furrier’s refrigerator. They loaded the boxes into the vehicles and went back inside the building, then came back again with more cartons and put them in the cars.
I decided I was being silly. Obviously they weren’t body parts; they were fur coats. “Have we caught three blacklisted Hollywood men robbing a fur store?” I whispered to David.
“Would furs be stored in cartons like that?”
“No, I guess not,” I said. “What could they have in there?”
As if on cue, Biberman slipped, dropping the box he was holding, and several disc-shaped round cans, about an inch thick and twelve inches in diameter, rolled out of it and across the blacktop.
David stifled a laugh. “Those are film cans,” he whispered. “They’ve been using the furrier’s refrigerator to store their film.”
“Why?” I asked, as the men finished loading their vehicles, and David and I, crouched down, ran back to his car.
“They made an independent movie,” he whispered. “It’s called Salt of the Earth. Wilson wrote it, Jarrico produced it, and Biberman directed. They all worked for free and raised the budget from private investors. It’s a dramatized documentary about a union strike by poor Mexican-American mineworkers in New Mexico. I read the script. It’s wonderful, sort of Italian neo-realism, like Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thief.
“The studios, and some congressmen, and Howard Hughes, all tried like mad to keep them from making it. There were demonstrations against the film. The cast and crew were thrown out of their hotel in New Mexico. Before they were finished shooting, the State Department deported their Mexican leading lady for no reason. And two of the buildings they were using were burned down.”
I couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“The union, the IATSE, tried to keep every crew person in Hollywood from working on it. And to keep every laboratory in the country from processing the film. They must have been hiding the work print in the furrier’s refrigerator so it wouldn’t get set afire by some patriotic citizen.”
“Jesus,” I sighed. “I thought this was America.”
“Apparently it is except when it’s under stress,” he said with a sigh.
We followed the caravan at a safe distance to an old dilapidated bungalow on the outskirts of L.A., where they unloaded the cans. Through one of the small windows, we saw a five-foot-high Rube Goldberg-like apparatus full of wheels and levers, and a little four-by-six-inch screen. David told me was a Moviola, a film-editing machine. “This must be their secret editing room,” David whispered.
Suddenly, I felt a presence behind me. I whirled around and saw the tall, white-haired man coming up the driveway, only two feet away, with a large flashlight in hand. He shined it in my eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”
Oh, shit, I’d blown it. “Uh, hi,” I said. “I’m Naomi Weinstein. I guess I’m a little early for breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s.”
“Oh, Christ,” he sighed. “We’ve blown it,” he shouted to the others, who were still inside.
“Shit,” shouted Biberman. Jarrico threw up his hands.
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m not going to tell anybody. And I’m sure my friend isn’t either.”
“Then why did you follow us here?” Wilson demanded.
“I was only hired to find out one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Who wrote The Brave One? Who deserves the Academy Award?”
Wilson laughed. “And Trumbo sent you to me?”
I nodded.
He doubled over laughing some more. He told the others through the window and they laughed, too.
Finally it became quiet enough for me to ask, “Why is that funny?”
“Trumbo wrote The Brave One,” said Wilson. “He’s just trying to get extra publicity over it by confusing everyone.”
“Are you sure?”
He shook his head. “I can’t be sure. That’s Trumbo’s master plan. He’s trying to shame Hollywood into ending the blacklist without exposing the people who buy our work.”
I did have breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s, the New York-style deli in the middle of Beverly Hills. But with David instead of Wilson. During which David pointed out to me that neither Wilson nor Trumbo was Jewish, so my theory about everyone in Hollywood being so must be wrong.
I wrote up my report on David’s Smith-Corona standard-mentioning nothing about the Wilson-Jarrico-Biberman odyssey-and handed it to Norman Chandler in person in his palatial office at the L.A. Times. He was an imposing man, reminded me of Franklin Roosevelt. He read it. “There’s not one actual admission in here. Trumbo says Wilson. Wilson says Trumbo. It’s all a farce,” he said.
“I think that was the idea,” I added.
“That fucking Trumbo, pardon my French,” he muttered, handing me a generous check for my services and expenses. Still, I had a feeling he wasn’t about to give me a glowing reference.
David dropped me off at the train and kissed me goodbye almost as if he meant it.
I read two Agatha Christies and a Raymond Chandler as the train took me back across the country. I guess it hadn’t been my shining hour. Or my country’s.
Note
Except for Naomi’s involvement, all of the events of the story are true, although I’ve tampered slightly with the timeline.
When Salt of the Earth was finally, against all odds, completed, it was blocked from distribution in the United States by the studios and the IATSE-which forbade all the union projectionists in every movie theater in the country from running it-while it went on to win the French equivalent of the Oscar as Best Motion Picture of the Year.