‘People’s lives were tak­en away from them’: The real­i­ty of life on the Blacklist

In 1951, Lee Grant was a promis­ing young Hol­ly­wood actress with a glit­ter­ing future. She had just earned rave reviews on Broad­way for her per­for­mance in ​‘Detec­tive Sto­ry’, and an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for her debut screen role in the film ver­sion, in which she starred along­side Kirk Dou­glas. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any bet­ter for the 23-year-old, how­ev­er, they got a lot worse. Weeks before her nom­i­na­tion, Grant found her­self on the Hol­ly­wood Black­list, cost­ing her 12 prime years of her career.

“It was war,” Lee recalls in a voice still full of right­eous anger despite her 87 years. ​“It was war, and which side were you on? There was cer­tain­ly no choice in my mind over who were the real­ly stu­pid bad guys and who were the good guys.” The Black­list was intro­duced in 1947 by the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee, in coop­er­a­tion with the major Hol­ly­wood stu­dios, in order to counter what was seen as a grow­ing Com­mu­nist threat in Amer­i­ca. The first vic­tims became col­lec­tive­ly known as The Hol­ly­wood Ten, an ostracised group that includ­ed leg­endary screen­writer Dal­ton Trum­bo, who is the sub­ject of a new biopic, Trum­bo, star­ring Bryan Cranston.

Grant admits she may have been, ​“mis­tak­en for a Com­mu­nist because I was mar­ried to a Com­mu­nist,” but it’s clear that to her Trum­bo and co were the good guys. Despite nev­er know­ing Dal­ton per­son­al­ly, she was cer­tain­ly aware of his larg­er-than-life per­son­al­i­ty: ​“All of the men who were of that peri­od – Ring Lard­ner and Zero Mos­tel – all of the musi­cians and actors, were so extra­or­di­nary and I had nev­er ever met peo­ple like that. I mean, I was in a hit play and I knew Kazan and Stras­berg, but they were not on the lev­el of what these peo­ple were.”

Grant had noth­ing but respect for her con­tem­po­raries, but that turned to pity in 1956 when politi­cian Niki­ta Khrushchev revealed the truth about Stalin’s régime in the Sovi­et Union. Stal­in had ordered the exe­cu­tion of rough­ly a mil­lion Sovi­et cit­i­zens dur­ing his ​‘Great Purge’ of 1936 – 38, a fact hid­den from the rest of the world. ​“That was such a blow,” says Lee with a heavy sigh. ​“A blow to their whole belief sys­tem; it was trag­ic in a way. That whole group were involved social­ly with what they felt were the impor­tant things, the good things in life, and they were mis­led on what was being done.” In con­trast to the atroc­i­ties of the Sovi­et Union, Grant describes the com­mu­ni­ty of Black­lis­tees as hav­ing a kind of ​“Bernie Sanders good guy [feel] about them all.” More than any­thing, she says, ​“they didn’t have a sense of what Stal­in was doing to artists like them, you know? So the irony was so…bizarre.”

Many of those who found them­selves black­list­ed may have had their belief sys­tems shat­tered, but Grant’s suf­fer­ing was more per­son­al than most. She was asked to tes­ti­fy against her then hus­band, Arnold Manoff, in front of the HUAC and, in refus­ing, she devel­oped a men­tal block. ​“After that after­noon with the com­mit­tee I nev­er remem­bered the names of any of my friends. That stayed with me for the rest of my life.” It was only when writ­ing her recent mem­oir, ​‘I Said Yes to Every­thing’, that Grant was able to come to terms with what had hap­pened dur­ing the Black­list era. ​“It was very hard, and a huge fac­ing of myself and every­thing, but writ­ing the book real­ly released me from a lot of things because I just told the truth for the first time in my life.”

Though the Black­list years were unde­ni­ably tough, Grant and her col­leagues sur­vived by pulling togeth­er. Her hus­band Manoff brought in what mon­ey he could, work­ing as a screen­writer under an alias like Trum­bo, while Grant her­self returned to the the­atre where the actors’ union Equi­ty struck a deal which ensured there would be no Black­list. She describes it as, ​“like danc­ing on the head of a pin, because most of us were liv­ing in the same apart­ment house – I had my daugh­ter Dinah in that apart­ment building.”

Just as Trum­bo depicts the absurd sit­u­a­tion where black­list­ed screen­writ­ers were still work­ing and even win­ning Oscars, hear­ing Grant’s reflec­tions rais­es var­i­ous con­tra­dic­tions. ​“You found your­self in the most inter­est­ing com­mu­ni­ty you ever want­ed to be in,” she rem­i­nisces, ​“because these were fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple and you were fight­ing for your life in a way. You were in the most charm­ing war that could pos­si­bly be fought, but peo­ple were dying.” At this point Grant’s voice becomes more som­bre, reit­er­at­ing the harsh real­i­ty of life on the Black­list. ​“I don’t know whether Trum­bo, or any film, can reflect that kind of inten­si­ty and nor­mal­i­ty at the same time.”

One of the first vic­tims of the Black­list to affect Grant was an actor named Joe Bromberg, and it was her deci­sion to speak out at his funer­al in 1951 that land­ed her on the Black­list. Bromberg had already refused to tes­ti­fy once in June that year, and Grant recalls how, ​“Joe had said to me that the com­mit­tee was call­ing him again and that he had a bad heart and didn’t think he could sur­vive it. So I sim­ply said what he had told me, and two days lat­er I was Black­list­ed for the next 12 years.”

Grant was banned from work­ing in Hol­ly­wood from the age of 23 to 36, which she refers to as her ​“ingénue years”. It was a heavy blow and, Hol­ly­wood being Hol­ly­wood, in order for Grant to resume her career she was forced to ​“hide the fact that I was 36.” She had her first facelift aged 31 and cred­its it with not just mak­ing her look younger but feel hap­pi­er. Her return to the lime­light was imme­di­ate, begin­ning with a role on hit TV show Pey­ton Place, for which she won her first of two Emmys.

From then on Grant’s act­ing tal­ent con­tin­ued to shine through, and in 1971 she earned her sec­ond of four Oscar nom­i­na­tions, final­ly win­ning in 1975 for her role as a politician’s wife in Hal Ashby’s Sham­poo. She went on to appear in Air­port ​’77 and lat­er Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, but it was her direct­ing career that real­ly took off – in 1987 she received the Oscar for Best Doc­u­men­tary for reces­sion-era exposé Down and Out in Amer­i­ca.

When the con­ver­sa­tion returns to the Black­list years, I ask whether those who named names were viewed as trai­tors. Grant takes a moment to answer: ​“Yeah.” She describes the deci­sion of her husband’s friends and co-work­ers to turn their friends in, in order to work again, as ​“heart-break­ing.” She tells me the sto­ry of Lar­ry Parks, a huge star at the time and one of the first peo­ple to go in front of the com­mit­tee, who begged not to tes­ti­fy but was promised ​“his next big movie” in return. After giv­ing HUAC the names they want­ed, he wound up being despised by both sides. He nev­er worked in Hol­ly­wood again.

Parks’ sto­ry is indica­tive of how the Black­list turned peo­ple against each oth­er. Grants tells me with great sad­ness how so many of her peers at the time died before they were 60, in part due to the pres­sures and stress of the Black­list and every­thing it brought with it.

It seems crazy today to think that the stu­dios ever agreed to the Black­list in the first place, but the col­lec­tive might of the major stu­dios far out­weighed that of indi­vid­ual actors and writ­ers. Sure­ly the stu­dios could have resist­ed the gov­ern­ment? Accord­ing to Grant, it wasn’t that easy. ​“They were Jew­ish-Amer­i­cans. [The stu­dios] were Jew­ish-Amer­i­can, and the war had just been fought over how the Jews should be elim­i­nat­ed and exter­mi­nat­ed from the world, okay? And so, you think that those Jews that ran the stu­dios weren’t sen­si­tive to the fact that they had to prove how Amer­i­can they were?” It all makes per­fect sense when you look at it like that, but the real­i­ty that this mis­guid­ed sense of patri­o­tism led to the destruc­tion of so many lives is a des­per­ate­ly sad fact.

Although the careers of most of the Black­lis­tees were destroyed, Grant reserves much of her sym­pa­thy for their chil­dren. ​“They had their lives tak­en away from them. Even after the courage of their par­ents, their whole lives were spent defend­ing them – Chris Trum­bo spent the rest of his life get­ting Dalton’s cred­its back. Chris died young. He wrote a play about his father – and it was very suc­cess­ful­ly done – but his life was Dal­ton. So many of the children’s lives were just extin­guished by the need to pro­tect their par­ents. That’s some­thing that peo­ple real­ly don’t realise and talk about.”