“Fifty of us. All the top executives. I was there. We said, we agreed, that no Communists or subversives would knowingly be employed in the film industry.”
“So?”
“You heard Brayfield. He thinks you’re a subversive, he thinks Father of Liberty is a subversive film. We’ve had calls from the Legion, the Catholic War Veterans, Red Connections, ODCAD — you name it. They think you and Rousseau are a couple of foreign Bolsheviks.”
“You’re not going to worry about what that arsehole Brayfield says?”
“John … I’m party to the MPAA decision. Don’t you see? I can’t afford not to.”
It was at this moment that any residual humor — of the black ironical variety — left the discussion.
“So what are you saying?”
“The film’s off. Until this blows over.”
“Wonderful.” I felt the tears squeeze into my eyes. “Well, I’ll do Jesse James then, fill in some time.”
“I’m sorry, John.”
“Come on.”
“I’m going to have to let you go. I have to be seen to fire you. You’re graylisted now.”
“Looks pretty black to me.”
He leaned forward. “I’ve just signed a fifteen-million-dollar, twenty-picture deal with Loews. I can’t jeopardize the company for you and Father of Liberty. What would you do in my place? The same, I know. I’ve got to distance myself from you. But I’ll stick by you, John. You won’t go without.”
“Fuck you.”
“All I ask from you is your discretion. Just don’t name me. Don’t ever mention what you mentioned the other day.”
“Well, after all you’re doing for me, how can I refuse?”
“For the sake of our friendship. You’ll be all right.”
“I can go somewhere else.”
“You can try.… But they’ve got you, John. They’ve got us. By the balls. Sit it out.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
“Don’t be cynical, John. It doesn’t suit you.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Don’t call me at the office or at home, whatever you do. I’ll keep in touch through Page.”
“Why not?”
“Your phone is probably tapped.”
“Christ!..”
He leaned over and kissed me on both cheeks, the Armenian in him surfacing briefly, and then said something like “Cesaretini toplamak” I found this phrase later in Lori’s Turkish-English dictionary. It meant “Take courage.”
I sat on alone in the diner for a while after Page and Eddie had left. I felt a kind of draining of my spirit, as when a runner knows he’s used up his last reserves of stamina. I felt like sobbing with self-pity and frustration, but two competing trains of thought prevented a wholehearted surrender. First, I marveled at Eddie’s utterly decent ruthlessness. I suppose it was the same attitude that had got Duric Lodokian through pogroms and revolutions and now it was coming to the aid of his son. I wanted to rail at him and accuse him of treachery and disloyalty, but I could not fault his logic.… I even rather respected him for it.
The other pressing question was to do with the identity of the informer. Who? Why? I knew who my enemies were, but I found it hard to credit them with something so thoroughgoing. There was a fanatic diligence about this plan that seemed to speak of vast resources of perversity — all committed to bring me down. Faithfull? Druce?… It seemed farfetched.
I sighed, contemplating once more the ruin of The Confessions. How many scripts had been written, how many false starts and premature conclusions had there been? The concept, the work, seemed almost alive, animallike in its capacity to live on, evolve and adapt itself to the multitude of obstacles the century placed in its way. The Confessions had a life of sorts, that was true. It had been born, grown up, suffered setbacks, struggled on, changed, adapted itself.… I felt urgently that I needed to round it off, let it mature and die. I had hoped that Father of Liberty would have been that final hybrid. How long would I have to wait? Sit it out, Eddie had said. Be patient.
I got up, planning to wander along the beach and tell Karl-Heinz the bad news. Nora Lee came over. I saw she was a tall girl wearing flat shoes like dancing pumps. I thought suddenly, painfully, of Doon.
“Do you want to come upstairs for a moment, John? We kept some things of Mom’s. Maybe you’d like to have something, like a sort of souvenir. No, I don’t mean that. What’s the word?”
“Memento.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like that.”
We went upstairs to the apartment. I chose Lori’s Turkish-English dictionary.
I sat it out for five years. For four years I waited for things to blow over. It may sound strange to you, it may even sound unlikely, but it was during those years that I missed my children the most. I have not spoken to them, but I had not forgotten them. I missed them keenly, desperately — or rather, I missed a private fanciful version of them. I used to think about them often — Vincent and the twins, a young man and two young women now, total strangers to me and vice versa. I had corresponded with them, dutifully, desultorily, but their letters were banal and disappointing — and I daresay mine were too. It was the change of surname that distressed and distanced me: this Vincent Devize didn’t seem to be my son anymore (it can happen so easily, believe me). At times I was wracked with the loss of Hereford. Hereford, dead all these years, was closer and more real to me than my three children living. I had an ideal platonic love for them of sorts, but its concrete manifestations were mere tokens, mutual obligations halfheartedly and effortfully fulfilled. My life bottomed out, as they say, until 1953—when it got worse. But let me take you through this unsatisfactory interlude.
The Hollywood Ten were not so lucky either. They had pleaded the First Amendment — the constitutional right to freedom of thought and opinion — and had been cited for contempt of Congress. This had been foreseen and planned for. In the Supreme Court there was a majority of liberal judges who, it was calculated, would overturn the verdict. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1949 two of the judges died and were replaced by hardline reactionaries. The Ten went to prison and the HUAC hearings on Hollywood subversives resumed with new spiteful vigor in 1951.
That was a fretful year of genuine worry for me. I felt sure that Brayfield and his subcommittee would release their findings or the dossier itself. But nothing happened. Slowly, I began to relax. Perhaps the dossier had been a crude trick to try and panic an admission out of me? Perhaps it had never existed? Sometimes I saw the open sessions in Washington on television and I would contemplate Brayfield’s fat sweaty face among the others on the committee with a mixture of loathing and acute trepidation. But I seemed to have been forgotten. Others were subpoenaed, took the Fifth and were blacklisted, or named names and were cleared. Then I noticed that I was forgotten because the damage had already been done. I was graylisted. I approached other studios for work — but as Eddie had predicted, the damage had been done.
In 1950 I was dropped from the Legion’s list, but Red Connections and AMPOPAWL never left me out. Briefly in 1952 I appeared on the MPAPAI list and got a call from a man in Alert Inc. offering to get my name cleared for a cost of one thousand dollars. I didn’t have the money then so I asked him to call back, but he never did. As I hadn’t made a film since 1944, I assumed that Alert Inc. had concluded that it was hardly worth clearing someone so evidently unemployable as me.
I had some savings, profits from The Equalizer, some money I’d inherited from my father, and I was soon reduced to living off my capital. I did three versions of the Jesse James script for Eddie, until I realized he had no intentions of making the film and it was merely a way of giving me money. Eventually I told him I wouldn’t go on. So I wrote another script, a story of adolescent love loosely based on my own entanglement with Donald Verulam and Faye Hobhouse. I embellished my experiences in World War II with Two Dogs Running and produced a war adventure called Alpha Beach, St.-Tropez. Eddie paid me for them out of charity.