THE HUAC ROAD SHOW by Kit Bix and Nora Helfand 1 CHARACTERS: Lillian Hellman Bertolt Brecht Ayn Rand Gerda Lerner Larry Parks Ring Lardner, Jr. Paul Robeson COMPANY of actors who play the following roles: Stephanie Tony Carl Conrad J. Edward Bromberg Kate Lardner Sam Tom Julie Garfield John Garfield Gene Dennis Sarah Rankin Ronald Reagan Elia Kazan Martin Dies J. Parnell Thomas Mary Joseph P. Frey Philip Murray Fritz Kuhn Bruce Ben Jim Rep. Francis E. Walters Richard Nixon Arthur Garfield Hayes Alvah Bessie Lawson Herbert Biberman Stripling Mr. Baumgardt Mr. Tavenner Mr. Potter Kearney 2 Mr. Woods Doyle Michael Velde Sterling Hayden Lee J. Cobb Barbara Sherwood Reporter Dr. Frances Matthiessen George Orwell Arens Sherer Jackie Robinson Sullivan Arthur Miller William Sherwood Grandson 3 (Lights come up on adult children of HUAC, the “HUAC diaper babies.”) STEPHANIE My mother was a peace and civil rights activist and feminist who was red-listed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. She was one of over 12,000 university professors, public school teachers, civil service workers, journalists, labor union leaders, civil rights activists, as well as Hollywood screenwriters, actors, and directors who lost their jobs as a result of the Committee’s investigations between the years 1938 and 1975. ... Which story are we telling? TONY It won’t be one. But we’re starting with the children. CARL If you are a kid, you’re trying to connect the dots, to make sense of thing. It didn’t make any sense to me that my parents were being called in, because as far as I could see, they weren’t accused of committing any crime. They were accused of thinking or believing certain things. I was seven. I was worried I might be arrested for thinking certain things. I was scared, because I didn’t know what things I wasn’t supposed to think about. CONRAD My father had been a successful actor in the film industry. He was terrified of being called up. He had heart disease. His doctor was afraid it would be too much, so he wrote a note to the Committee. He was able to avoid being subpoenaed for two years, but he was blacklisted anyway. We had enough money to live on. But my father had a weakness. BROMBERG My whole life has been acting. CONRAD He could not— He just refused to accept that it was over. He got no more work in Hollywood, but he kept us there in the lion’s den for over two more years. I have mixed feelings about that. KATE My father was the writer Ring Lardner, Jr. He was called before HUAC in 1947 and refused to testify. He was one of what came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. CARL It was miserable. They called us “dirty commies” at school. Everyone was shunning us. CONRAD 4 He could have done something else. But he had this pride. He had been a Somebody. So, he took a job—an acting gig—at a theater in the Midwest. They said that if he was well enough to go to Michigan and work, he was well enough to testify. He was brought in to testify under compulsion and against doctor’s orders. The stress was too much for him. He died within the year. KATE We lived in this big beautiful house with glass doors that led out into the swimming pool from the kitchen. And one day these two men—they were wearing big black shoes— they walked in through the glass doors, and they gave my dad a package. Later that day, I asked my mom what was going on, and she said that my dad had got a subpoena. I was six. I didn’t know what that was. I thought it had something to do with a penis. TONY From then on, my parent’s conversation would stop when you entered the room. SAM Years later, I managed to get my father’s FBI dossier through the Freedom of Information Act. It said that my dad “had a facial resemblance to Lenin.” TOM My dad saw it for what it was. He was blacklisted. We moved to New Jersey, and he went into the carpentry business. You know he made pennies compared to what he made before, and we moved to a smaller house. But you got used to it. I think some people were just better at being blacklisted than others. JULIE My father was the international movie star John Garfield. He always played the tough guy. He once played a boxer in a movie. (JOHN in boxing gloves and boxing shorts appears on stage jabbing in the background.) JULIE (CONT’D) They subpoenaed him in 1947. He was one of the first ones. They asked him to testify against his friends, even his wife—my mother. He refused and was blacklisted. He took it hard. TONY I realized, I think by the time I was seventeen, that most people would do just about anything to save their own skin. That didn’t bother me so much as knowing that they would never, ever acknowledge that. JULIE 5 It wasn’t just the blacklisting. My father had a weak heart from having had scarlet fever when he was a kid. Now the FBI hounded him. They wouldn’t leave him alone. The pressure was just overwhelming. Then the Committee subpoenaed him to testify again. He was terrified. He was smoking a lot, and someone said he hadn’t slept for 3 days. The night before he was to testify, his heart gave out. He died. GENE Well, my Dad was a real Communist. He was a leader in the American Communist Party, and he was arrested and went to jail for espionage. And I didn’t know at the time, but he was really spying for the Soviet Union. My parents were hard-liners, at a time when Stalin was murdering millions, and I have a lot of trouble with that. They did wrong. My mother actually went to Moscow and witnessed the show trials, the purges— she knew. But she was one of those true believers who rationalized brutality. But that’s not the story we’re telling, right? TONY Not tonight. GENE But here’s what I remember about that time, after they took him to prison. I went to see a movie, and then there was a bonus second feature. And the second feature was— EVERYONE The Red Menace. (KATE LARDNER poses.) GENE That was an Anti-Communist film. It was propaganda, and it featured newsreels of the trials and hearings. I felt tremendous anxiety, but I thought, I’ll just wait it out. But then I looked up at the screen, and there was a big shot of my father. I was terrified. JULIE You can’t imagine the fear. GENE I was alone in a dark movie house, and I realized that everyone in this country hated my father. I was glad it was dark. SARAH One thing I’ll say about growing up under the red list. You don’t get to go through the usual family drama. TOM It was so sudden. 6 SARAH You couldn’t indulge in those internal family conflicts—those resentments and fits of anger—because you were—all of a sudden—characters in this huge national drama. TONY All the casualness of our lives was gone. Like that. SARAH Like that, we were pariahs. Everyone shunned us. How can you get angry with your parents when the whole world is against them? TONY We were together in a struggle with the outside world. JULIE I watched the films. The one I hated the most— He loved to ridicule foreign-sounding names. Jewish names especially. My father was the international movie star John Garfield. Rankin addressed him as: RANKIN Jacob Julius Garfinkle. JULIE He said it like it was funny-sounding. He relished saying it. TOM I wanted to give him back his dignity. You did a lot of things to compensate for what was done to them. I made up reasons for asking my dad for advice. Like when I was doing homework, I used to dumb down and ask him for his advice. It could be about anything. I tried to make him feel like a big shot again. An expert, anything to get him off that sofa. To make him feel like a person again. KATE So this thing, a subpoena, I later figured out, was not a penis. (Transition. LILLIAN HELLMAN and BRECHT walk onstage. LILLIAN HELLMAN calls to someone in the wings.) LILLIAN Mic. (Someone in the wings throws her a mic. She throws the mic to BRECHT. He stares at it a moment. LILIAN points her finger to downstage. He moves downstage.) BRECHT I am, um, Bertolt Brecht, and tonight we will be performing a farce. 7 LILLIAN A tragedy. BRECHT A tragi-farcical... Thing... Dialectic. (AYN RAND walks onstage. LILLIAN snaps.) BRECHT Okay, zo. On the left we have— RAND “Saint” Lillian Hellman. Playwright, fabricator of false memoirs, lifelong Stalinist apologist. Scary. BRECHT (to the audience) I would not want to get on the wrong side of Lillian Hellman. (LILLIAN glares at him and stands.) LILLIAN On the right we have ruthless, “Let the workers be damned,” laissez-faire, hyper- capitalist Ayn— BRECHT Ze terrible— LILLIAN —Rand, who during her lifetime scorned everything that decent empathetic human beings prize but— (to BRECHT) I’m feeling generous tonight. BRECHT Ladies, please! Here we have peace activist, labor activist, and feminist Gerda Lerner.