Lisa Gilford’s Blog

A little history about the blacklist

In Blacklist on April 3, 2009 at 11:54 pm

The Hollywood Blacklist was a list of professionals who were not allowed to participate in the entertainment industry due to their suspected or confirmed political beliefs. As you might imagine, the Hollywood Blacklist had a profound and far-reaching impact on the entertainment history in the middle of the 20th century, and it continues to be a topic of discussion and debate. Sadly for many of the people included on the Hollywood Blacklist, this largely unofficial blacklist ended the careers of many entertainment professionals, and seriously damaged the reputations of many more.

It would be more accurate to term the Hollywood Blacklist the “entertainment industry blacklist,” because it didn’t just have an impact on Hollywood, although the home of the American film industry was certainly hard hit. The roots of the Blacklist can be found in the 1930s, when a fear of communism began to arise in America, and the government responded. In 1947, the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), which was charged with finding and dealing with communists in the United States, summoned several entertainment professionals to testify.

The “Hollywood 10,” as they came to be known, refused to testify, igniting the American government and leading to an official statement from the film industry which came to be known as the Waldorf Statement. The signatories of the statement announced that they were firing the Hollywood 10, and indicated a desire to eliminate subversives from the entertainment industry, bringing about the Hollywood Blacklist, which would dominate the industry for over a decade.

Many people think of high profile performers like Charlie Chaplin when they visualize the Hollywood Blacklist. However, it also affected screenwriters, technicians, authors, musicians, lesser actors, and an assortment of other entertainers. To be listed on the Hollywood Blacklist was to see the potential end of one’s career, often on the basis of questionable and unverifiable information.

Many people on the Hollywood Blacklist were suspected communists or communist sympathizers. A large number of them were official members of the American Communist Party, making them easy targets, but others were blacklisted merely on the basis of association with known communists or public statements. Others were blacklisted for their involvement in liberal causes, ranging from the animal rights movement to humanitarian organizations.

The names on the Hollywood Blacklist were not made explicit, and it was intermittently enforced, but it attracted a great deal of public attention at the time and continues to do so. A number of famous and high profile people were blacklisted, much to the interest of their biographers, and some people have also been intrigued by the cases of lesser individuals on the Blacklist, looking at their fates once their careers were destroyed. The collapse of the Hollywood Blacklist started on television in the late 1950s, when blacklisted individuals were hired by sympathetic people like Alfred Hitchcock and Betty Hutton, and from there it snowballed, rapidly becoming untenable.

source: wisegeek.com

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Blacklist – The Early Years

In Blacklist on April 3, 2009 at 11:12 pm

Blacklist – the early years…

This is the “Comedy Tonight” part…if you don’t know what that means, you will. Stay tuned. Eventually you’ll see the allusion in print. I hope these blogs entertain, educate, entice and most importantly are not a waste of your time. I’ll try to write every day, that’s the discipline part and include interesting people for you to Google, books to read and sites you might not know about.
And please forgive me if these blogs are not in life’s chronological order. As Zero Mostel (yes, I knew him) said of my mother, Madeline. “With her, it’s all tributary, and never a fuckin’ river.” I’m afraid it’s in the DNA of all us Lederman women. But why apologize. Those fuckin’ tributaries are very, very interesting. To paraphrase Bette, ‘fasten your seatbelts and have a bumpy ride.’
I’ll just start in the middle.
My REAL life. After years of being asked ‘what’s Jack Gilford like in real life…what’s it like to meet all those stars in real life, how does it feel to see your father on TV?’ I never knew how to answer that. My real life assumes I had a fake one. I only had one, but with questions like this I figure my real life must’ve been different from other people and for this reason, interesting. Add to this the new interest in the Blacklist. We, the children of the Blacklist, even have our own label: Red Diaper Babies. Sounds glamorous. It wasn’t.
1957. Wasn’t everyone Blacklisted?
I was 10. There was no problem walking to school by myself. I just went straight down Bleeker Street, 14 blocks to Little Red School House. I assumed every kid had an FBI guy following her to school. In those days, we didn’t have the sensitivity, “don’t talk to strangers,” I don’t think. Not like when my kids were little, anyway. But in my house, we did have the daily instruction, “Don’t talk to that man following you to school.” Never occurred to me to ask ‘why.’ At home, watching ‘the boys’, my brothers Joe and Sam who were 4 and 2 respectively, the instructions were: “If a man comes to the door, open the door, with the chain on, and tell him ‘I am the babysitter,’ and close the door.” I knew how to do that because I’d watched my mother do it a number of times. Different men would come to our apartment door and ring the bell. We would run to the door, my mother rushing to get there first. “DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR,” she would hiss at us. Then she would slide the chain on the bar and open the door the tiny amount the chain would allow. “Madeline Lee?” the voice in the hall would say. “No, the babysitter,” my mother would answer in that staccato, sharp, ‘I’m in charge’ voice of hers. Then she would slam the door. Growing up in Greenwich Village I assumed other kids had the same real life. Of course I went to Little Red School House so lots of the kids did have the same life, their parents, also Blacklisted.
Summers we usually went to Fire Island, that tiny slip of a sandbar off Long Island, settling into the community of Ocean Beach with lots of other Blacklisted families to primarily escape the sweltering heat of New York City, but also to do what kids do in the summer. We played at the bay in the morning and the beach in the afternoon. We lived in rented, sandy bungalows with no TV, no radio and no phones. We loved it. You mean TV didn’t go off all over America during the summer? My mother stayed there with us most of the time. She couldn’t work then because she was blacklisted. Rarely she would get a job doing a voiceover for one of the soap operas on TV. Voiceover, off-stage because her face couldn’t be seen on TV because she was Blacklisted. She did baby cries. When she did have to leave, Lucille, our hefty, Black housekeeper from NYC would come out and stay with us. She always had a little, unlit butt between her lips and managed without ever dropping that butt to tell us we were very bad children and if we didn’t watch it, we would get a whooping with her belt. That’s another story.
Back to the baby cries. My mother did them into a pillow and if you closed your eyes, it sounded just like a baby. I’d ask her to do the baby cry every time she met someone new and there was a pillow—couch, chair, any kind of pillow. She did that cry into the pillow well into her 85th year, with just a tiny bit of prodding. And it always sounded just like a baby crying.
The ‘I’m the babysitter’ was actually my mother avoiding being served a subpoena to appear before HUAC (House UnAmericans Activity Committee). This I found out much later. But the ‘babysitter’ ploy worked for a few years except once and that was the last time she used it, on Fire Island. She was taking us home from the beach. I was on my tricycle, my mother was pulling the red wagon (there are no cars on Fire Island) with my brother, Joe, in the wagon with my brother, Sam. As we approached our bungalow, there was a huge, fat woman standing on the sidewalk, wearing shoes. That was a dead giveaway as no one on the island wore shoes. My mother had heard at the beach that a subpoena server named Delores Scotty had arrived earlier by ferry. She could’ve been looking for anyone on Ocean Beach but it was probably my mother, all her friends at the beach assumed. So seeing Delores Scotty blocking our path didn’t surprise my mother. “Madeline Lee,” she called to my mother. My mother responded with her usual, “I am not, I’m the babysitter,” line, as she took Sam out of the wagon, grabbed me, motioning for me to grab Joe and pushed past this big woman. What happened next might seem bizarre to anyone not familiar with how we lived, but to me, it was just what it was. Ms. Scotty followed us up the front steps, shouting, “I know who you are, you’re Madeline Lee.” Without a moment’s hesitation, my mother pushed Joe and me onto the porch and in one long motion swung Sam by his legs and hit Delores Scotty… with Sam. It made a squishy sound. Scotty was caught off guard. She stepped back, shouting and waving the folded paper, “I know you’re Madeline Lee and I am serving you.” My mother gave her a swift kick in the shins and with Sam back in her arms, another hard push that sent her reeling backwards. A friendly crowd had now gathered. “I am not Madeline Lee and you are trespassing on private property,” my mother shouted, playing directly to the angry mob. As the subpoena server stumbled backwards, she was engulfed in the barefoot crowd and shoved, pulled and pushed back down to the ferry gate, on to the ferry, back to Bayshore on the mainland, still waving that subpoena. Vodka and scotch all around for the friendly crowd when they returned to our bungalow.
My mother wasn’t served that summer, but they did finally get her that Fall in New York. I remember when she testified. Actually, I wasn’t there, but I remember a teacher showing me the headline the next day in the New York Post: “Blonde Bombshell Tells McCarthy Where to Go.” Didn’t everyone have this kind of mother? This kind of summer? My REAL life? As opposed to what, my fake life as a farm girl in Kansas?